It is the music in our conscience, the dance in our spirit that makes all the
puritanical litanies, all the philistinism and moral sermons sound so dissonant.
(BGE 216)
It has been perceptively argued that ‘Kant tried to resolve the tension between law and love that runs through early modern moral philosophy’ by ‘distinguishing morality into a domain of right and a domain of virtue’.2 Yet while Kant may be said to have succeeded in reducing the tension between law and love in modern moral philosophy, it would be overstating the case to see him as achieving a resolution of this tension. Kant’s effort to accommodate law and love through a structural division between the realms of right and of virtue allows him to stress the moral significance of both self-respect and respect for others, and to make room for the love of others that develops from the (wide) duty to promote their happiness, yet he adopts a highly critical stance towards self-love throughout his moral philosophy. Self-love—conceived in a distinctly modern sense as the stance of psychological egoism expressed in acting on maxims oriented to the pursuit of one’s own happiness—is opposed to morality as a threat, a challenge, a danger; an opposition whose stakes are intensified by Kant’s acknowledgement that self-love is an ineliminable feature of finite desiring (hence happiness-seeking) creatures such as human beings and, consequently, that one can never be sure that actions complying with one’s moral duties are solely motivated by respect for the moral law.
This modern distinction between morality and egoism expressed by Kant in terms of the opposition of the moral law and self-love is mischievously exploited by Nietzsche for its rhetorical shock value in Daybreak when he presents his project of re-evaluation as, in part, oriented to the following task: ‘we shall restore to men their goodwill towards the actions decried as egoistic and restore to these actions their value—we shall deprive them of their bad conscience!’ (D 148). A slightly contrasting and rather more diagnostic stance on this topic is adopted in the opening essay of On the Genealogy of Morality in which Nietzsche argues that it is only with the decline of aristocratic value-judgments that ‘this whole antithesis between “egoistic” and “unegoistic” forces itself more and more on man’s conscience’ and ‘even then’ he remarks:
it takes long enough for this instinct to become sufficiently dominant for the valuation of moral values to become enmeshed and embedded in the antithesis (as is the case with contemporary Europe, for example: the prejudice which takes ‘moral’, ‘unegoistic’ and ‘desinteresse’ as equivalent terms already rules with the power of a ‘fixed idea’ and mental illness). (GM I 2)
What is clear from both of these remarks is that Nietzsche has an objection, whose nature we will be concerned to determine, to the modern framing of ethics in terms of the opposition of morality and egoism—and at least part of his re-evaluation of moral values is to involve recasting ethics in a way that avoids this opposition by reopening the debate on law and love that Kant had sought to conclude. To situate this discussion, however, it will be worthwhile to begin with some brief reflections on Aristotle and Kant in relationship to the topics of self-love and self-respect.
In Book IX of the Nichomachean Ethics, Aristotle offers two discussions of self-love, the first of which aligns self-love with his discussion of virtue (or character) friendship and the second of which distinguishes ‘true’ self-love from ‘pseudo’ self-love. For the purposes of this chapter, it will be appropriate to begin with the second of these before turning to the first.
Acknowledging that the description of someone as a lover of self is popularly taken as a mark of criticism, Aristotle stresses that those ‘who use the term as one of reproach ascribe self-love to people who assign themselves the greater share of wealth, honours, and bodily pleasures; for these are what most people desire, and busy themselves about as though they were the best of all things’ and notes that ‘those who are grasping with regard to these things gratify their appetites and in general their feelings and the irrational element of the soul’ (NE IX.8). In this regard, Aristotle endorses the critical stance of the popular view. However, his argument proceeds to distinguish such ‘apparent’ or ‘pseudo’ self-love from the true self-love which is manifest when a man ‘assigns to himself the things that are noblest and best, and gratifies the most authoritative element in himself and in all things obeys this’ (NE IX.8). Thus, in the context of Aristotle’s broader account of eudaemonia, true self-love is to be seen as an acquired relation to self that consists in appropriating to oneself (committing oneself to the service of) what is noblest by submitting to the rule of reason and, hence, identifying one’s well-being with living a virtuous life. True self-love, thus, consists in the disposition to love what is noble; the contrasting state to such true self-love is the pseudo self-love exhibited in the self-interested pursuit of pleasure, that is, the identification of happiness with the satisfaction of one’s (irrational) appetites. In sum: true self-love is the natural disposition of the virtuous man in the sense both that acting virtuously promotes the disposition of true self-love (since acting virtuously is acting on reasons which express the virtues, that is, what is noblest and best) and that the disposition of true self-love promotes virtuous action (since it is the disposition to act on reasons which express the virtues).
Aristotle’s other discussion of self-love advances the argument that self-love is the basis of friendship since those features that define friendship such as valuing one’s friend for his own sake, identifying with his interests and well-being and, hence, grieving and rejoicing with him are also true of the good man’s relationship to himself:
For his opinions are harmonious, and he desires the same things with all his soul; and therefore he wishes for himself what is good and what seems so, and does it (for it is characteristic of the good man to work out the good), and does so for his own sake (for he does it for the sake of the intellectual element in him, which is thought to be the man himself); and he wishes himself to live and be preserved, and especially the element by virtue of what he thinks. (NE IX.4)
By contrast, ‘the bad man does not seem to be amicably disposed even to himself, because there is nothing in him to love’ (NE IX.4). From the context, it seems clear that Aristotle is focusing on what he will shortly specify as true self-love and on that (highest) species of friendship, namely, virtue or character friendship. The three central claims for our purposes are thus (a) that true self-love is the basis of character friendship, (b) that true self-love is structurally analogous to character-friendship and (c) that this structural analogy is constituted by the presence in both self-love and character-friendship of a reason-governed concern for the well-being of the self or other for its own sake. It is no doubt the case that for modern sensibilities, as Nietzsche acutely diagnosed, to be concerned for one’s own well-being for one’s own sake sounds suspiciously egoistic, however, be that as it may, the helpfulness of Aristotle’s analogy is that it clarifies certain features of true self-love by directing our attention to the nature of the self ’s relationship to itself exhibited in true self-love as one in which one acts as a character-friend to oneself. The salience of this analogy is given by considering two points. First, that to stand as a character-friend to another is to value the other in virtue of their disposition to love and pursue what is noble. This helps to explain why Aristotle sees self-love as the basis of character-friendship in that character-friendship is characterized by valuing the disposition to love what is noble in another and, hence, is predicated on valuing the disposition to love what is noble, and valuing the disposition to love what is noble is to manifest true self-love. Second, a character-friend is in a privileged position with respect to their friend in that they are entitled—indeed, when appropriate, compelled—to act as a critical interlocutor, that is, a conscience, to their friend when the friend threatens to stray, or does depart, from conduct that is noble. Other things being equal, the friend who overlooks your lapses and occasional viciousness is not acting as a character-friend. In this respect, we might distinguish between the true and pseudo character-friendship in a way that parallels the distinction between true and pseudo self-love. The former, precisely in being concerned for your well-being for its own sake, will be prepared to act as a conscience for you in a way that the indulgence extended by the latter signally fails to do. To exhibit true self-love thus necessarily requires that one stand in a critical relationship to oneself, make demands of oneself with respect to the character of one’s conduct and hold oneself to account in respect of one’s success or failure to meet such demands, not least in terms of appropriately experiencing the emotions of pride or shame that attend one’s successes and one’s failures. By contrast, pseudo self-love is a state of indulgent pleasure-seeking that leads, fatefully, to a condition in which considerations of ethical evaluation have no grip on the agent at all, the condition of shamelessness.
In these brief comments on Aristotle, I have stressed the distinction between true and pseudo varieties of self-love not least because, despite what I take to be the intuitive plausibility of such a distinction, Kant will deny it any place in his moral philosophy. His stance is stated succinctly in the section on ‘Egoism’ in Anthropology from a pragmatic point of view:
. . . the moral egoist limits all purposes to himself; as a eudaemonist, he concentrates the highest motives of his will merely on profit and his own happiness, but not on the concept of duty. Because every other person has a different concept of what he counts as happiness, it is exactly egoism which causes him to have no touchstone of a genuine concept of duty which truly must be a universally valid principle. All eudaemonists are consequently egoists. (AP Bk I 2)
Kant spells out the reasons for adopting this stance in his Critique of Practical Reason by, first, specifying his view of the character of self-love and, second, its relationship to the moral law. Thus:
All the inclinations together (which can be brought into a tolerable system and the satisfaction of which is then called one’s own happiness) constitute regard for oneself (solipsismus). This is either the self-regard of love for oneself, a predominant benevolence toward oneself (Philautia) or that of satisfaction with oneself (Arrogantia). The former is called, in particular, self-love; the latter, self-conceit. (CPR 5:73)
The relationship between self-love and self-conceit, as well as their relationship to the moral law, is then explained thus:
This propensity to make oneself as having subjective determining grounds of choice into the objective determining grounds of the will in general can be called self-love; and if self-love makes itself lawgiving and the unconditional practical principle, it can be called self-conceit. Now the moral law, which alone is truly objective (namely, objective in every respect), excludes altogether the influence of self-love on the supreme practical principle and infringes without end upon self-conceit, which prescribes as laws the subjective conditions of self-love. (CPR 5: 74)
Thus, Kant argues that, in contrast to the moral law, self-love cannot provide an objective basis for morality. It might be objected that at this stage that Kant simply identifies self-love per se with what, for Aristotle, would count as pseudo self-love—and there is no doubt that Kant does tend to see self-love in this way. However, the underlying reason for Kant’s rejection of the distinction between true and pseudo self-love as a way of distinguishing the moral and non-moral agent is not that he denies that there can be individuals with a settled and effective disposition to, say, beneficence. It is, rather, that he denies that actions solely based on the inclination to beneficence have moral worth as the following example from the Groundwork makes clear:
To be beneficent where one can is a duty, and besides there are many souls so sympathetically attuned that, without any other motive of vanity or self-interest they find an inner satisfaction in spreading joy around them and can take delight in the satisfaction of others so far as it is their own work. But I assert that in such a case an action of this kind, however it may conform with duty and however amiable it may be, has nevertheless no true moral worth but is on the same footing with other inclinations, for example, the inclination to honour, which, if it fortunately lights upon what is in fact in the common interest and in conformity with duty and hence honourable, deserves praise and encouragement but no esteem; for the maxim lacks moral content, namely that of doing such actions not from inclination but from duty. (G 4: 398)
Illuminatingly Kant continues:
Suppose, then, that the mind of this philanthropist were overclouded by his own grief, which extinguished all sympathy with the fate of others, and that while he still had the means to benefit others in distress their troubles did not move him because he had enough to do with his own; and suppose that now, when no longer incited to do it by any inclination, he nevertheless tears himself out of their deadly insensibility and does the action without any inclination, simply from duty; then the action first has its genuine moral worth. (4: 398)
These passages suggest a general point concerning the opposition of inclination (roughly, motives for actions that pertain to our sensuous bodily nature) and duty (roughly, motives for action that pertain to our rational nature) in Kant’s moral psychology. It is this: acting according to inclination is both (a) dependent on the contingent circumstances that inform our propensity to be characterized by the presence or absence of particular inclinations and (b) orients us to the effects of our willing, to seeing our will as good in relation to ‘its fitness to attain some proposed end’, whereas acting according to duty identifies the goodness of a good will as relating to the activity of willing in and of itself, that is to the form of volition expressed in agency independent of either the contingent inclinations of the agent at the time of acting or the effects of such agency. Another way of putting this point, and understanding Kant’s motivation for adopting it, is to see Kant as arguing that since acting according to inclination is both a product of luck (our current empirical constitution) and exposed to luck (not least in respect of both the action of events in the world on our empirical constitution and on the outcomes of our actions), it cannot be conceived of as an objective (in all the relevant senses) basis for the ascription of moral worth. By contrast, acting according to duty can be conceived as an objective basis for the ascription of moral worth and, hence, respect in that it is immune from luck since the will is determined by nothing other than ‘the conformity of actions as such with universal law, which alone is to serve the will as its principle, that is, I ought never to act except in such a way that I could also will that my maxim should become a universal law’ (G 4: 402). Respect for the moral law, exemplified in acting according to duty, is thus the basis of the disposition of self-respect (as well as that of respect for others) that characterizes the morally autonomous agent.3
These considerations concerning Kant’s arguments on the foundation of morality should not be taken to imply that he rejects all forms of self-concern. On the contrary, Kant’s stress on the (wide) duty to achieve one’s own perfection indicates the centrality of an orientation to the cultivation of oneself as a moral agent within his moral philosophy (cf. MM 6: 393). However, it remains the case that in the contrast between Aristotle’s account of the virtuous man characterized by the disposition of true self-love and Kant’s account of the morally autonomous agent characterized by the disposition of self-respect, we can see vividly the tension between the perspectives of love and of law that inform the tradition of European moral philosophy. The thesis advanced in the remainder of this chapter is that Nietzsche’s ethics is an attempt to dissolve this tension. The argument for this claim proceeds by focusing, first, on Nietzsche’s account of autonomy and self-respect and, second, on the relationship of this account to his understanding of self-love.
To begin reflecting on Nietzsche’s account of ethical autonomy and self-respect, I’ll focus on his account of the figure of the sovereign individual in the second essay of On the Genealogy of Morals. In certain respects, this is a controversial decision since it has recently been argued that the account of the sovereign individual does not represent Nietzsche’s own account of ethical agency. Consequently, in setting out an analysis of Nietzsche’s discussion of this figure, I will also respond to such criticisms and demonstrate how my analysis of Nietzsche’s account of the sovereign individual is fully compatible with his later—and explicitly endorsed—account of freedom in Twilight of the Idols.
The second essay of the Genealogy begins with Nietzsche considering the conditions under which human beings become capable of making and holding to promises (read: commitments). His starting point is to note that the ability to make commitments presupposes a variety of capacities:
To think in terms of causality, to see and anticipate from afar, to posit ends and means with certainty, to be able above all to reckon and calculate! For that to be the case, how much man himself must have become calculable, regular, necessary, even to his own mind, so that finally he would be able to vouch for himself as future, in the way that someone making a promise does! (GM II 1)
Thus the question becomes that of how the task of ‘making man to a certain extent necessary, uniform, an equal among equals, regular and consequently calculable’ (GM II 2) is accomplished? Nietzsche’s hypothesis is that this is achieved in the prehistory of humanity ‘by means of the morality of custom and the social strait-jacket’ (GM II 2). By this, Nietzsche means simply that it was through the morality of custom and the social strait-jacket that human beings became creatures about whom one could legitimately have normative expectations concerning their activity since they have acquired the capacity not only for second-order desires but also for second-order volitions. When Nietzsche speaks of the development of ‘a real memory of the will’ as ‘an ongoing willing of what was once willed [ … ] so that between the original “I will”, “I shall do”, and the actual realization of the will, its enactment, a world of new and strange things, circumstances, even other acts of will may safely intervene, with causing this long chain of will to break’ (GM II 1), he is stressing the centrality of second-order volitions to personhood. At the end of this process
where society and its morality of custom finally reveal the end to which they were merely a means: there we find as the ripest fruit on their tree the sovereign individual, the individual who resembles no one but himself, who has once again broken away from the morality of custom, the autonomous supra-moral individual (since ‘autonomous’ and ‘moral’ are mutually exclusive)—in short, the man with his own independent, enduring will, whose prerogative it is to promise. (GMII2)4
In this initial introduction of the figure of the sovereign individual, Nietzsche presents an image of maturity (‘the ripest fruit’) articulated in terms of individuality (‘the individual who resembles no one but himself’), where such individuality is linked to autonomy, that is, being able to impose binding norms on oneself (‘the man with his own independent, enduring will, whose prerogative it is to promise’). This figure represents, it seems, the concept of the autonomous individual who is not bound by moral rules as customary constraints, but as the freely endorsed commitments through which he gives expression to his own character. However, to specify this image of maturity further and to address the issue of whether Nietzsche may be said to endorse it requires that we attend more closely to Nietzsche’s further delineation of the figure of the sovereign individual as one who exhibits ‘a proud consciousness, tense in every muscle, of what has been finally achieved here, of what has become incarnate in him—a special consciousness of power and freedom, a feeling of the ultimate completion of man’ (GM II 2). Nietzsche continues:
This liberated man who has the prerogative to promise, this master of free will, this sovereign—how should he not be aware of his superiority over everything which cannot promise and vouch for itself? How should he not be aware of how much trust, how much fear, how much respect he arouses—he ‘deserves’ all three—and how much mastery over circumstances, over nature, and over all less reliable creatures with less enduring wills is necessarily given into his hands along with this self-mastery. (GM II 2)
Given this consciousness, Nietzsche concludes this passage by drawing attention to the criteria of evaluation of persons deployed by the sovereign individual:
The ‘free’ man—the owner of an enduring indestructible will—possesses also in the property his measure of value: looking out at others from his own vantage point, he bestows respect or contempt. Necessarily, he respects those who are like himself—the strong and reliable (those with the prerogative to promise), that is, anyone who promises like a sovereign [ … ] who is sparing with his trust, who confers distinction when he trusts, who gives his word as something which can be relied on, because he knows himself strong enough to uphold it even against accidents, even ‘against fate’. Even so, he will keep the toe of his boot poised for the cowering dogs who promise without that prerogative, and hold his stick at the ready for the liar who breaks his word the moment he utters it. The proud knowledge of this extraordinary privilege of responsibility, the consciousness of this rare freedom, this power over oneself and over fate has sunk down into his innermost depths and has become an instinct, a dominant instinct—what will he call it, this dominant instinct, assuming he needs a name for it? About that there can be no doubt: this sovereign man calls it his conscience . . . . (GMII2)
One initial concern raised by Hatab5 and echoed by Acampora6 in relationship to the argument that the sovereign individual represents Nietzsche’s account of ethical maturity is that Nietzsche seems to align the sovereign individual with ‘free will’—and yet we know that Nietzsche was himself highly critical of the doctrine of freedom of will ‘in the superlative metaphysical sense’ on the grounds that it requires appeal to the idea of the agent as causa sui. Moreover, as Hatab and Acampora both argue, this alignment of the sovereign individual with free will seems to imply a commitment to moral accountability, responsibility and retribution that Nietzsche can be said to have opposed.7 Now it is certainly true that if it were the case that the sovereign individual must be construed in terms of ‘freedom of the will’ and ‘moral responsibility’ in the superlative metaphysical sense that Nietzsche dismisses as fantasy (BGE 21), this would undermine the claim that the sovereign individual represents Nietzsche’s own account of ethical maturity. However, this conclusion only follows if one fails to distinguish between two analytically distinct ways of reflecting on the topic of free will which Ken Gemes has termed ‘deserts free will’ and ‘agency free will’.8Deserts free will is oriented to the issue of justified blame and is represented in the form of debates over free will and determinism. Agency free will is oriented to the question of what distinguishes mere doings from actions and is represented in the form of debates over the conditions which must be met for one to be an agent, for one’s doings to be deeds. Nietzsche’s rejection of deserts free will (and indeed of the whole free will/determinism debate) does not imply a rejection of concern with the topic of agency free will; on the contrary, Nietzsche exhibits a continuous concern with the question of the conditions under which doings (events) are deeds (action), a central element of his critique of the slave revolt in morality being that it articulates the conceptual resources for, and motivates, a systematically distorted understanding of ethical agency.9
Of course, once it is recognized that Nietzsche’s discussion of the sovereign individual is a discussion of agency free will and, hence, that his description of the sovereign individual as a ‘master of free will’ entails that this discussion is offering an account of the conditions of ethical agency, it can also be seen that Nietzsche is indeed endorsing an account of responsibility that is tied to autonomy. But isn’t Nietzsche, as Hatab insists,10 highly critical of the Kantian ideal of moral autonomy and its correspondingly moralized account of responsibility? This is certainly true. Yet it does not follow from rejection of the Kantian ideal of moral autonomy and the blame-focused account of responsibility that is tied to it that Nietzsche also rejects the idea of ethical autonomy exemplified by the figure of the sovereign individual; on the contrary, everything here hangs on the nature of the condition that the sovereign individual exemplifies—the topic to which we now turn.
In one respect, the evaluative contrast drawn in Nietzsche’s discussion of the sovereign individual is between those who are entitled to represent themselves ‘to others as holding certain beliefs or attitudes’ or commitments and those who ‘do not have the same right to speak in this way on their own behalf’.11 As Lovibond puts it:
Only on condition that I have, for example, sufficient self-control (or courage or energy) to carry out some declared intention of mine can I credibly give myself out as someone who is going to act that way (‘Don’t worry, I won’t get into an argument about …’); if the condition is not met, others will do better to disregard my words in favour of whatever locally relevant knowledge they may have of my involvement in the ‘realm of law’ (say, the number of drinks, hours or minutes of dinner party, or whatever that it usually takes to crack my thin veneer of cool).12
The sovereign individual, as the positive pole of Nietzsche’s contrast, refers to ‘the condition of “self-mastery” or full competence to represent oneself to the rest of the world.’13 At the negative pole of Nietzsche’s contrast, it seems, stands ‘the liar who breaks his word the moment he utters it’, that is, in contemporary philosophical parlance: the wanton.14 There is, I think, little doubt that Nietzsche draws this contrast in such extreme terms in order to heighten our attraction to the figure of the sovereign individual and our repulsion from the figure of the wanton, but in doing so he raises a puzzle to which Ridley has drawn attention, namely, what is distinctive about the sovereign individual’s promise-making?15 Since it is the case that the vast majority of socialized individuals are not wantons, that is, are capable of making and, ceteris paribus, keeping promises and since Nietzsche, as we have seen, spends some time in this essay explaining how this comes to be the case, what is it that distinguishes the sovereign individual?
In the first essay of the Genealogy (and elsewhere), Nietzsche ascribes to noble morality, and himself endorses, an account of agency in which one’s deeds are seen as criterial of one’s intentions, beliefs, desires, etc.16 On this view, as Ridley points out, ‘if it is essential to a promise’s being made in good faith that the agent intend to act on it, it is essential, too, that—ceteris paribus—he does indeed so act.’17 If, however, the figure of sovereign individual represents a self-conscious condition of self-mastery, this entails a specific kind of understanding of the ceteris paribus clause, that is, one in which the range of elaboratives to which one can have recourse is limited to reasons that are compatible with the presumption of self-mastery. There are thus two main types of excuse that could justify the failure to maintain a commitment which relate to conditions of causal and normative necessity respectively. The first is that honouring one’s commitment is causally impossible due to circumstances beyond one’s control; hence, one cannot physically do what is required (say, fly from London to New York today to be best man at a wedding since all flights are cancelled due to a terrorist attack). The second is that keeping one’s promises is normatively impossible due to circumstances beyond one’s control; hence, one must not ethically do what is required (say, ignore the drowning child in order to fulfil the obligation to meet a friend for a quiet drink and chat). Notice that a further implication of this self-understanding is that, even in circumstances where the reasons for breach of one’s commitment are exculpatory, the sovereign individual acknowledges their accountability to the addressee of their commitment and, thus, an acknowledgment of the damage that may have resulted. This claim is supported by Nietzsche’s characterization of the sovereign individual as ‘anyone who promises like a sovereign [ . . .] who is sparing with his trust, who confers distinction when he trusts, who gives his word as something which can be relied on, because he knows himself strong enough to uphold it even against accidents, even “against fate”’. The point here is not per impossible that the sovereign individual has (or is committed to) mastery over fate in general—a fantasy of which Nietzsche would be entirely dismissive—but that the sovereign individual is characterized by a degree of prudence in their commitment-making activity (that is, a serious effort to consider, as far as possible, the types of circumstance in which the commitment is to be honoured and the range of costs that may arise in fulfilment of the commitment as well as its prospects for conflicting with existing commitments), where this prudence is engendered precisely by an acknowledgment of one’s responsibility as extending to those occasions on which the commitment cannot or must not be honoured in the form of an acknowledgement of the moral remainders that result from one’s justified inability to keep one’s word. Upholding one’s word ‘even “against fate”’ does not mean fantastically committing oneself to the incoherent goal of doing what is causally or ethically impossible for one to do, it means willingly acknowledging one’s relationship to the damage incurred when one’s commitment cannot or must not be kept. This is a stance which acknowledges and affirms the fatality of one’s agency rather than seeking to avoid or deny it.
In relation to this first aspect of the distinctiveness of the sovereign individual, Nietzsche’s position may be aligned with a point that Bernard Williams was wont to press against ‘the morality system’ whose standpoint he describes as granting no special significance to the thought I did it and hence, as turning ‘our attention away from an important dimension of ethical experience, which lies in the distinction between what one has and what one has not done’, a distinction that ‘can be as important as the distinction between the voluntary and the non-voluntary’.18 Williams’ illustrates this point with the example of Ajax following his goddess-deranged slaughter of a flock of sheep:
Ajax then wakes up and shows that he has recovered his mind. There is a passionate lyric outburst of despair and, above all, shame: he has made himself, apart from anything else, utterly absurd. It becomes increasingly clear to himself that he can only kill himself. He knows that he cannot change his ethos, his character, and he knows that after what he has done, this grotesque humiliation, he cannot lead the only kind of life his ethos demands. … Being what he is, he could not live as a man who had done these things; it would be merely impossible, in virtue of the relations between what he expects of the world and what the world expects of a man who expects that of it.19
Williams’ point is not that we should endorse Ajax’s suicide but that we should acknowledge the ethical intelligibility of Ajax’s response and, hence, the weight that I did it can play in our ethical lives. For our immediate concerns, the point is this: the sovereign individual is one for whom the thought I did it has ethical purchase and salience.
There is, however, another dimension of the sovereign individual’s promise-making that is distinctive. This second dimension also hangs on the expressive account of agency to which Nietzsche is committed and can be drawn out by contrasting promises whose success conditions (i.e., the conditions that entitle one to say that the promise has been kept) can and cannot be specified externally (i.e., in advance and independent of the execution of the accomplishment). If I promise to meet you today for lunch in the pub, the success conditions can be specified externally: I have kept my promise if I turn up at the pub in order to eat with you within the relevant time frame. By contrast, if I promise to love and honour you until death us do part, then what counts as keeping this promise cannot be fully specified in advance and independently of a particular way of keeping it. In the former case, keeping my promise simply confirms the presence of my intention; in the latter case, the nature of my intention is revealed in the way that I keep it. What is distinctive about the sovereign individual in this respect is that his most characteristic form of promise-making is of the latter type; indeed, it is precisely the sovereign individual’s self-mastery that grants him the prerogative to engage in this kind of promise-making.20 Another way of drawing the distinction between the two kinds of promise-making invoked here is to specify them in terms of commitments whose character is fully determined by the letter of the law and commitments whose character can only be fully determined by reference to both the letter and spirit of the law.21 As Ridley comments, using the example of marriage:
It is true that there are some independently specifiable success-conditions here (although they are defeasible). Respect is presumably necessary, for example, as are caring for the other person’s interest and not betraying them, say. But what exactly might count as betrayal, or what caring for the other person’s interests might look like in this case—or even whether these things are what is at issue—cannot be specified independently of the particular marriage that it is, of the circumstances, history, and personalities peculiar to it, and of how those things unfold or develop over time. It is, in other words, perfectly possible that everything I do is, as it were, strictly speaking respectful, considerate and loyal, and yet that I fail to be any good as a husband—I am true to the letter but miss the spirit, as we might say.22
This second aspect of the distinctiveness of the sovereign individual helps to illuminate three further points with respect to Nietzsche’s argument.
First, it draws out the sense in which the sovereign individual can be represented by Nietzsche as the ethical telos of the process of socialization, which he is exploring in the second essay of the Genealogy since the freedom enjoyed and exemplified by the sovereign individual is only available to persons who are, in Ridley’s phrase, ‘socialized … all the way down’, that is, individuals who have mastered the norms constitutive of the social practices and institutions in and through which they act (in this case, that of marriage).
Second, it offers an obvious line of response to a slightly curious argument by Acampora that occurs in the course of her rejection of the claim that the sovereign individual represents Nietzsche’s account of ethical maturity. She writes:
I can see how such an interpretation can be rendered consistent with Nietzsche’s preoccupation with drawing distinctions between the herd and those who somehow escape it, but how could it be that the Nietzsche who so emphasizes becoming, and who is suspicious of the concept of the subject (as the ‘doer behind the deed’), think it desirable—let alone possible—that a person could ensure his or her word in the future? How could one promise to do something, to stand security for something, that cannot be predicted and for which one is, in a sense, no longer the one who could be responsible for it?23
At first glance, this argument seems to verge on utter absurdity since some minimal capacity for making and, ceteris paribus, keeping commitments is a condition of being able to speak intelligibly of ethical agency at all. Perhaps though Davis Acampora is struggling with a slightly different issue, namely, how to square Nietzsche’s stress on the process of becoming with standing surety for one’s word given that the latter, on her view, would have to imply that one takes oneself to be identical to the person who promised at the time that he or she promised? The mistake here is to fail to see that not only is promising compatible with becoming what one is, it is actually essential to it in two respects. First, it is not least in and through standing surety for one’s commitments that one constitutes oneself as a self, as a being whose identity is characterized by continuity through time (note that this obviously need not imply some core identity that persists since it can equally be characterized by the image of a rope comprised of numerous overlapping threads of varying lengths or, indeed, of Theseus’s ship in which all the parts are gradually replaced). Second, it is only through commitments characterized by internal success conditions that one discovers what one’s intentions are or, put another way, acquires self-knowledge concerning what one is, what is necessary to oneself and what is not. In so far as the process of becoming what one is requires self-knowledge concerning what one is, then one’s commitments and the issues that arise in the practical lived working out of what one has committed oneself to in making these commitments is of fundamental importance to this process.
The third point to note is that this second dimension of distinctiveness enables us to see once again that Nietzsche is articulating a view of ethical autonomy that contrasts sharply with the ideal of moral autonomy expressed in Kant and which Nietzsche takes to be representative of ‘morality’. This is so because it directs attention to the fact that the central role of the categorical imperative in Kantian morality entails that if
I find that the maxim of my action cannot be universalized without contradiction, I have identified an absolute prohibition, an unconditional ‘I will not’. I have, in other words, stopped short at a formulable instruction that might be fully obeyed by anyone. … The spirit … has gone missing without trace.24
We can put the point like this: ‘Morality’ in the sense exemplified by Kant may have liberated itself from the morality of custom as regards to content but it has not done so with regard to form. Moral freedom for Kant, Nietzsche charges, can be articulated in terms of compliance with a list of ‘I will not’s that can be specified in advance and independently of the way in which commitment to them is executed. In this respect, Kant’s philosophy exhibits the characteristic errors of ‘morality’, namely, a failure to acknowledge the expressive character of human agency combined with a stress on the unconditional character of moral imperatives, and does so in a way that leaves it blind to the nature and experience of human freedom as an unformulable process of self-legislation.
It would, however, be a mistake to view Nietzsche’s account of ethical autonomy purely and simply in terms of the picture of the sovereign individual since this picture addresses itself only to the issue of one’s relationship to one’s commitments as ends that are given and not as ends that are themselves open to reflective ethical scrutiny and assessment. As Robert Guay has cogently argued, for Nietzsche, freedom requires that we engage in critically distanced reflection on our current self-understanding. Nietzsche’s point is that freedom demands ‘the ability to take one’s virtues and oneself as objects of reflection, assessment and possible transformation, so that one can determine who one is’:
As Nietzsche pointed out ‘whoever reaches his ideal in doing so transcends it’. To take ourselves as potentially free requires that we are not merely bearers of good qualities but self-determining beings capable of distanced reflection. So to attain one’s ideal is always that and also to attain a new standpoint, from which one can look beyond it to how to live one’s life in the future.25
We can link these two aspects of freedom by noting how they fit naturally in Nietzsche’s view of ethical education and self-transformation as a process of relating to and moving beyond exemplars conceived as concrete ideals, that is, individuals who have given a certain style to their characters and thus become able to serve as models, not for imitation, but for following.
What Nietzsche’s position does share with Kant’s moral philosophy is a view of autonomy as the ground of self-respect. Recall: ‘The “free” man … possesses also in the property [the prerogative to promise] his measure of value: looking out at others from his own vantage point, he bestows respect or contempt. Necessarily, he respects those who are like himself—the strong and reliable (those with the prerogative to promise), that is, anyone who promises like a sovereign . . .’ As an exemplification of a key part of Nietzsche’s account of ethical maturity, the sovereign individual marks out conditions of application of the concepts ‘respect’ and ‘contempt’ and their first person forms, namely, ‘self-esteem (or pride)’ and ‘self-contempt (or shame)’.
We can add further support for the interpretation here advanced and give a final twist to it by attending to Nietzsche’s discussion of freedom in Twilight of the Idols:
My conception of freedom.—The value of a thing sometimes lies not in what one attains with it, but in what one pays for it—what it costs us. [ . . .] For what is freedom? That one has the will to self-responsibility. That one preserves the distance that divides us. That one has become more indifferent to hardship, toil, privation, even to life. That one is ready to sacrifice men to one’s cause, oneself not excepted. Freedom means that the manly instincts that delight in war and victory have gained mastery over the other instincts—for example, over the instinct for ‘happiness’. … The free man is a warrior.—How is freedom measured in individuals as in nations? By the resistance which has to be overcome, by the effort it costs to stay aloft. One would have to look for the highest type of free human beings wherever the highest resistance is constantly being overcome.… (TI Expeditions 38)
There are two arguments in this passage concerning the concept of freedom and the value of freedom respectively. The former endorses the view expressed in Nietzsche’s remarks on the sovereign individual in identifying freedom with standing surety for oneself. The latter though draws attention to an issue that I have thus far left aside which is this: while the sovereign individual represents a condition of self-mastery, this condition cannot be seen, given Nietzsche’s stress on our exposure to chance and necessity (i.e., luck), as a condition which can be fully and finally achieved. On the contrary, the condition of self-mastery must be construed as an ongoing achievement or, to put it another way, a continual process of struggle engaged with both the material of oneself and the circumstances of one’s agency. Nietzsche is making two related psychological points on this latter issue. The first is that the degree to which one values freedom is likely to be dependent on the nature and extent of the obstacles that one has had to confront and overcome in standing surety for oneself. The second is that to the extent that one values freedom one will seek to test and extend one’s powers. Taking these points together, it is clear that Nietzsche sees the sovereign individual, the ethically autonomous person, as one who is engaged in a process of struggle which continues through the course of one’s life.
What, though, has any of this to do with self-love? Thus far it is has been established that Nietzsche is committed to an account of ethical autonomy understood in terms of binding one self to unformulable laws and that ethical autonomy is the ground of self-respect. In these respects, Nietzsche would seem, despite his criticisms of Kant, to be situated firmly with the party of law in the contest between love and law in European philosophy. To move beyond this impression of Nietzsche’s position, we need to turn to the question of how his reflections on autonomy and self-respect are related to his account of self-love.
A starting point for discussion of Nietzsche and self-love is provided by section 334 of The Gay Science:
One must learn to love.—This happens to us in music: first one must learn to hear a figure and a melody at all, to detect and distinguish it, to isolate and delimit it as a life in itself; then one needs effort and good will to stand it despite its strangeness; patience with its appearance and expression, kindheartedness about its oddity. Finally comes a moment when we are used to it; when we expect it; when we sense that we’d miss it if it were missing; and now it continues relentlessly to compel and enchant us until we have become its humble and enraptured lovers, who no longer want anything better from the world than it and it again. But this happens to us not only in music: it is in this way that we have learned to love everything that we now love. We are always rewarded in the end for our good will, our patience, our fair-mindedness and gentleness with what is strange, as it gradually casts off its veil and presents itself as a new and indescribable beauty. That is its thanks for our hospitality. Even he who loves himself will have learned it this way—there is no other way. Love, too, must be learned.
As this passage makes clear, Nietzsche, like Aristotle, takes self-love to be an acquired disposition. It is also the case that Nietzsche takes self-love to the natural disposition of the virtuous man; for example, he writes: ‘The noble soul reveres itself’ (BGE 287). But if, as this remark suggests, Nietzsche follows Aristotle in formally identifying true self-love with the disposition to value what is noble, this immediately raises the question of the content of Nietzsche’s conception of nobility. Two elements of Nietzsche’s philosophy present themselves for reflection at this point. The first is the idea of amor fati offered in GS 276:
I want to learn more and more how to see what is necessary in things as what is beautiful in them. Amor fati: let that be my love from now on! I do not want to wage war against ugliness. I do not want to accuse; I do not even want to accuse the accusers. Let looking away be my only negation! And, all in all and on the whole: some day I want only to be a Yes-sayer!
Learning to love oneself is thus to be construed as learning to love the piece of fate that one is by coming to see what is necessary in and to oneself as ‘a new and indescribable beauty’. The second is the doctrine of eternal recurrence set out in GS 341 according to which learning to love oneself is to be construed as coming to experience ‘a tremendous moment’ in which one is sufficiently well-disposed to oneself and to life to respond joyously to the demon’s raising of the prospect of the eternal recurrence of one’s life exactly as it has happened, that is, as a lover of one’s life ‘who no longer want anything better from the world than it and it again’ (GS 334).26 Nietzsche himself appears to take these elements as compatible in the sense of holding that being characterized by the disposition of amor fati is a sufficient condition for responding joyously to the prospect of eternal recurrence and vice versa. I am unsure that the two doctrines are compatible in the way that Nietzsche seems to envisage but, for the purposes of this essay, will set aside this issue by focusing on valuing the disposition of amor fati as the salient expression of Nietzsche’s conception of true self-love.
We can begin exploring this thought by noting that GS 334 presents learning to love as a work of interpretation in which we attend to the object of love such as to come gradually to see it—or what is necessary in it—as a ‘new and indescribable beauty’. In the case of self-love, this entails that learning to love one’s self is to engage in an artistic work of interpretation on oneself. Thus, an initial point to note is that Nietzsche’s presentation of the acquisition of self-love as a form of artistic interpretation through which one comes to see oneself as a ‘new and indescribable beauty’ in GS 334 refers us both forward to the following section of The Gay Science in which Nietzsche exhorts us to the ethical work needed to ‘become what we are—human beings who are new, unique, incomparable, who give themselves laws, who create themselves!’ (GS 335) and backward to GS 290 in which the achievement of self-love is linked to that of giving style to one’s character. Working through the relationship of Nietzsche’s reflections on learning to love to these passages will provide us with the basis for understanding self-love as valuing the disposition of amor fati.
The pertinent remarks in the section 290 ‘One thing is needful’ read as follows:
To ‘give style’ to one’s character—a great and rare art! It is practised by those who survey all the strengths and weaknesses that their nature has to offer and then fit them into an artistic plan until each appears as art and reason and even weaknesses delight the eye. Here a great mass of second nature has been added; there a piece of first nature removed—both times through long practice and daily work at it. Here the ugly that could not be removed is concealed; there it is reinterpreted into sublimity. Much that is vague and resisted shaping has been saved and employed for distant views—it is supposed to beckon towards the remote and immense. In the end, when the work is complete, it becomes clear how it was the force of a single taste that ruled and shaped everything great and small—whether the taste was good or bad means less than one may think; it’s enough that it was one taste! It will be the strong and domineering nature who experience their most exquisite pleasure under such coercion, in being bound by but also perfected under their own law; … Conversely, it is the weak characters with no power over themselves who hate the constraint of style: they feel if this bitterly evil compulsion were to be imposed on them, they would have to become commonplace under it—they become slaves as soon as they serve; they hate to serve. (GS 290)
Before turning to the main issues arising from this passage, it is worth noting—and hence warding off—a potential misunderstanding. The misunderstanding would consist of taking the opening of this passage to encourage the thought that giving style to one’s character is accomplished by identifying the materials, devising a blueprint and then simply executing the plan. The misunderstanding here is to mistake the appeal to an ‘artistic plan’ as if the movement from plan to work was simply the prescriptive activity of applying a rule given in advance rather than—as, say, the image of movement from preliminary sketch to actual painting suggests—the expressive activity of giving a rule in and through the performance. It is for this reason that it is only when the work is complete that the operation of a single taste can be discerned since the taste is constituted as the singular taste that it is in and through the performance.
It is clear then that Nietzsche is describing a process of self-creation (or, perhaps better, self-formation) characterized by the activity of submitting to what Nietzsche refers to, under the aesthetic aspect, as ‘one’s taste’ and, under the ethical aspect, as one’s ‘own law’. But what constitutes one’s taste or one’s own law? What is one submitting to here? Is one submitting in any intelligible sense at all? This last question arises because on one understanding of the ideas of one’s taste or one’s own law, these are simply whatever one chooses, one’s inclinations, at any given moment and hence the idea of submission loses intelligible application. On such a view, the distinction—crucial to Nietzsche—between strong and weak collapses. To distinguish Nietzsche’s position from this view—and thereby clarify what it is to possess, exercise, and submit to one’s taste—it is helpful to recall the interpretive point made above (and stressed throughout this essay) that Nietzsche is committed to an expressive view of agency exemplified by the relation of the artist to his work, a relation that he characterizes thus:
Every artist knows how far from any feeling of letting himself go his most ‘natural’ state is—the free ordering, placing, disposing, giving form in the moment of ‘inspiration’—and how strictly and subtly he obeys thousandfold laws precisely then, laws that precisely on account of their hardness and determination defy all formulation through concepts.… (BGE 188).
The salient point for Nietzsche, as Aaron Ridley notes, is that artistic activity
is law-like, in the sense that it is possible to go wrong, to make mistakes. Yet the laws against which these mistakes offend often declare themselves only in the moment at which they are breached, indeed in the breaching of them. And this is why getting something right feels like—is—getting what one was after all along, even when one could not have said in advance precisely what that was. In this way, successful artistry is also a form of self-discovery—it is the discovery, in the lawfulness of one’s actions, of the innermost character of one’s intentions: . . .27
To submit to one’s taste or one’s own law is, thus, to be bound by constraints or, more precisely, to bind oneself to constraints that, at least in advance, ‘defy all formulation through concepts’—and this is to affirm such constraints as the conditions of one’s agency. But what generates these constraints that the artist affirms as the conditions of his agency? The answer here—and hence the response to the question of what comprises one’s taste or one’s own law—is the intentions of the artist which, in the case of self-artistry, are comprised of one’s evaluative commitments.28 Thus far, then, Nietzsche may be read as offering a re-description of the sovereign individual from an aesthetic standpoint. A preliminary view concerning the relationship between self-love and self-respect would thus be that valuing the disposition of amor fati broadly equates to valuing the will to self-responsibility (i.e., ethical autonomy) and, hence, that self-love consists in valuing self-respect. This is, I think, broadly the right view but we have not yet uncovered the whole story.
We can move forward by recalling that one’s intentions are only discovered through the work on oneself and taking up the necessary correlate of this point, namely, that the expression of these intentions (and hence what they are) is not independent of the medium of expression, the material through which the artist seeks to realize his intentions, and hence of the constraints imposed by this material. In the case of self-artistry, this medium is the human material—nature and second nature—comprising oneself (‘Here a great mass of second nature has been added; there a piece of first nature removed—[ … ]. Here the ugly that could not be removed is concealed; there it is reinterpreted into sublimity. Much that is vague and resisted shaping has been saved and employed for distant views [ … ].’) Recognizing the salience of the issue of the medium of self-artistry helps not only to explain why Nietzsche’s remarks on giving style to one’s character begin by stressing that those who engage in this art ‘survey all the strengths and weaknesses that their nature has to offer’, but also provides the link between the concluding reference to self-love in GS 334 and the discussion of intellectual conscience that immediately follows in the section ‘Long live physics!’. In GS 335, Nietzsche sets out an account of intellectual conscience in terms of a commitment to truthfulness (Redlichkeit) oriented to becoming ‘the best students and discoverers of everything lawful and necessary in the world’ and, specifically, what is necessary in us as nature and, more particularly, as second nature. The role of intellectual conscience is precisely to seek to determine what is necessary and what is not in us, that is, to work out what are the constraints that necessarily attend expression through the medium of human material in general and of oneself in particular; its role is to free us from both the illusion of false necessities (as produced by, for example, morality) and an idealism that fails to acknowledge necessary constraints on our agency.
The exercise of intellectual conscience is, thus, integral to the process of self-artistry and this fact has particular significance for establishing the relationship between the process of self-artistry described in GS 290 and the account of amor fati offered in GS 276. Recall that in GS 290 Nietzsche distinguishes between non-necessary weaknesses that can be removed or overcome and necessary weakness that are to be concealed or reinterpreted and made sublime. These two features of the process of self-artistry are directly connected to the statement of amor fati in GS 276. As Ridley comments:
The connection comes to this: becoming what you are requires that you distinguish between what is and what is not necessary in things, including yourself (a job for the intellectual conscience). What is not necessary, and is weak or ugly, should be removed. What is necessary should, if weak or ugly, either be concealed (‘Looking away shall be my only negation’ (GS 276)) or else ‘reinterpreted’, so that one learns how to see it as beautiful, as a strength.29
The implication of this point for my argument is clear: true self-love as valuing the disposition of amor fati entails engaging in the process of self-artistry that Nietzsche describes in GS 290—a conclusion that explains the title of that aphorism: ‘One thing is needful’. But if this is the case, it provides us with a way of understanding the relationship between self-respect and self-love in Nietzsche’s ethics that is closely related to the issue of the relationship of truthfulness and artistry in his philosophy as a whole.
Consider that a necessary condition of the self-mastery exemplified by the sovereign individual is the exercise of intellectual conscience and, hence, truthfulness (Redlichkeit) with respect to what one is, what one is committed to and the requirements of these commitments. At its limit, this is an unflinchingly honest and realistic appraisal of oneself and the circumstances of one’s agency; it is the type of appraisal that Nietzsche so admired in Thucydides’ account of the Peloponnesian War and in Machiavelli’s reflections on the circumstances of political agency in Renaissance Italy. However, Nietzsche is well aware of the difficulty of exhibiting or sustaining such an unflinching stance (hence his acknowledgment that how much truth you can bear is a measure of strength). More generally, Nietzsche acknowledges that the potentially ruthless truthfulness of intellectual conscience requires a counterforce if it is not to lead to nausea and suicide, where this counterforce is ‘art, as the good will to appearance’ (GS 107). Nietzsche comments: ‘As an aesthetic phenomenon, existence is still bearable to us, and art furnishes us with the eye and the hand and above all the good conscience to be able to make such a phenomenon of ourselves’ (GS 107). Hence, while the ethical autonomy that grounds self-respect requires that one exhibit the virtue of truthfulness, a condition of being able to maintain the kind of courageous commitment to engagement in the world exemplified by the sovereign individual is that one has recourse to art when it is necessary.
Consider the case of Nietzsche himself as an illustration of this point. In The Antichrist, Nietzsche remarks of the service of truth to which he has committed himself:
Truth has to be fought for every step of the way, almost everything else dear to our hearts, on which our love and trust in life depend, has had to be sacrificed to it. Greatness of soul is needed for it: the service of truth is the hardest service.—For what does it mean to be honest in intellectual things? That one is stern towards one’s heart, that one despises ‘fine feelings’, that one makes every Yes and No a question of conscience! (A 50)
A clear illustration of the recourse to art that may be necessary to maintaining this overall commitment to truth is provided by Nietzsche’s remarkable reflections on himself in the 1886 Preface to Human, All Too Human:
My writings have been called a schooling in suspicion, even more in contempt, but fortunately also in courage, indeed in audacity. And in fact I myself do not believe that anyone else has ever looked into the world with an equally profound degree of suspicion [ … ] and anyone who could divine something of the consequences that lie in that profound suspiciousness, something of the fears and frost of isolation to which that unconditional disparity of view condemns him who is infected with it, will also understand how often, in an effort to recover from myself, as it were to induce a temporary self-forgetting, I have sought shelter in this or that—in some piece of admiration or enmity or scientificality or frivolity or stupidity; and why, where I could not find what I needed, I had artificially to enforce, falsify and invent a suitable fiction for myself (—and what else have poets ever done? and to what end does art exist in the world at all?). What I again and again needed most for my cure and self-restoration, however, was the belief that I was not thus isolated, not alone in seeing as I did—an enchanted surmising of relatedness and identity in eye and desires, a reposing in a trust of friendship, a blindness in concert with another without suspicion or question-marks, [ … ] Perhaps in this regard I might be reproached with having employed a certain amount of ‘art’, a certain amount of false-coinage: for example, that I knowingly-willingly closed my eyes before Schopenhauer’s blind will to morality at a time when I was already sufficiently clear-sighted about morality; likewise that I deceived myself over Richard Wagner’s incurable romanticism, as though it were a beginning and not an end; likewise over the Greeks, likewise over the Germans and their future—and perhaps a whole long list could be made of such likewises?—Supposing, however, that all this were true and that I was reproached with it with good reason, what do you know, what could you know, of how much cunning in self-preservation, how much reason and higher safeguarding, is contained in such self-deception—or of how much falsity I shall require if I am to continue to permit myself the luxury of my truthfulness? (HAH P 1)
This is an astonishing passage not least as an exercise of intellectual conscience that acknowledges that Nietzsche’s own global commitment to truth has necessitated local falsifications, projections, rationalizations, and illusions. For our current purposes though its central significance is that it serves as an exemplification of Nietzsche’s understanding of self-love conceived as valuing the disposition of amor fati; it shows that valuing this disposition is not only a matter of valuing truthfulness as the good will to reality, but also, and crucially, of valuing artistry as the good will to appearance in so far as it is necessary to supporting one’s active immersion in life, to maintaining the will to self-responsibility in and through which one affirms the fatality of one’s agency.30
The upshot of our discussion is thus that Nietzsche seeks to dissolve the tension between self-respect and self-love by presenting the latter as the disposition to value the former. This returns us to the question of the nature of Nietzsche’s objection to the distinction between morality and egoism in modern moral philosophy, but before addressing this point, let us briefly situate Nietzsche’s position in relation to Aristotle and Kant. First, he joins both Aristotle and Kant in rejecting the life of pleasurable inclinations, of pseudo self-love. I haven’t stressed this point but it is obviously apparent from the discussion of freedom in TI Expeditions 38 (see also 39 and 41) and the contrast between strong and weak drawn in GS 290. Second, he adopts Aristotle’s formal notion of true self-love as valuing what is noble. Third, he offers an account of nobility that aligns him with Kant (and Hegel) in stressing the centrality of autonomy as the principle of modern ethics. Fourth, his account of autonomy makes appeal not to universal moral rules but to the exercise of virtues. What light does this shed on Nietzsche’s objection to the modern morality/egoism distinction at least as it is exemplified in Kant’s moral philosophy?
At an initial level, Nietzsche’s objection is simply that Kant’s framing of this distinction rules out self-love as the general orientation to eudaemonia (whether conceived in Aristotelian or Nietzschean terms) and, hence, fails to acknowledge the centrality of self-love to the achievement and maintenance of the disposition of amor fati (Nietzsche’s version of eudaemonia). Of course, this failure on Kant’s part has, in Nietzsche’s view, deep roots in the ascetic ideal, but, for our purposes, a fairly economical way of making clear what motivates Nietzsche’s assertion of the significance of self-love is to recall that Kant’s rejection of self-love is bound up with his effort to immunize morality from luck and to note that Nietzsche cannot possibly endorse this project. First, Nietzsche’s commitment to naturalism in ethics is understood by him to entail acceptance of the claim that our exposure to chance and necessity goes all the way down—and hence that the project of seeking to immunize morality from luck is a non-starter. Second, Nietzsche holds that the illusion of intelligibility that characterizes this project is dependent on a metaphysical version of the appearance/reality distinction that is incoherent and betrays a hostility to the conditions of human life. Third, the project requires an erroneous understanding of the idea of the moral law as necessarily universal that is predicated on abstracting from the agent and the circumstances of their agency to an imaginary idealized and de-contextualized agent in a way that undermines and obscures the character of ethical autonomy. Hence, Nietzsche’s strategy is exactly the opposite of Kant’s; it is to build an acknowledgment and affirmation of our exposure to luck into our understanding of ethics and ethical autonomy. This strategy embraces self-love as necessary to the task of developing and maintaining an orientation to, and engagement with, the world that consists in leading our lives and not simply existing through the course of their duration.
If the argument offered in this essay is cogent, perhaps its most striking finding is that it would appear that Nietzsche has a rather greater claim than Kant to have resolved the tension between love and law that is characteristic of European moral philosophy. At the same time, though, this finding is dependent on my arguments for two further highly controversial theses, namely, that Nietzsche is committed to ethical autonomy as the basic principle of modern ethics and that there is a fundamental connection between ethical autonomy and the disposition of amor fati. Not the least of the consequences that follow if these arguments are compelling is that Nietzsche may have rather more to contribute to debates in contemporary ethics between neoKantians and neoAristotelians than either party may currently wish to admit.31
Aristotle |
|
NE |
Nichomachean Ethics, trans. D. Ross, revised J. L. Ackrill & J.O. Urmson (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1980) |
Kant |
|
AP |
Anthropology from a Pragmatic Point of View, trans. V.L. Dowdell (Carbondale: Southern Illinois University Press, 1978). |
CPR |
Critique of Practical Reason, trans. M. J. Gregor, in Immanuel Kant: Practical Philosophy (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press), 133–271. |
G |
Groundwork of the Metaphysics of Morals, trans. M. J. Gregor, in Immanuel Kant: Practical Philosophy (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press), 37–108. |
MM |
The Metaphysics of Morals, trans. M. J. Gregor, in Immanuel Kant: Practical Philosophy (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press), 353–603. |
The Antichrist, trans. R. J. Hollingdale (Harmondsworth, Penguin, 1968).
Beyond Good and Evil, ed. R-P. Horstmann and J. Norman (Cambridge, Cambridge University Press, 2002).
Daybreak, ed. M. Clark and B. Leiter, trans. R. J. Hollingdale (Cambridge, Cambridge University Press, 1997).
On the Genealogy of Morals, trans. D. Smith (Oxford, Oxford University Press, 1996).
The Gay Science, ed. B. Williams, trans. Josephine Nauckhoff and Adrian del Caro Cambridge, (Cambridge University Press, 2001).
Human, All Too Human, ed. E. Heller, trans. R. J. Hollingdale (Cambridge, Cambridge University Press, 1986).
Twilight of the Idols, trans. D. Large (Oxford, Oxford University Press, 1998).
Acampora, Christa Davis (2006). ‘On Sovereignty and Overhumanity: Why it matters how we read Nietzsche Genealogy II: 2’, in Christa Davis Acampora (ed.), Nietzsche’s Genealogy of Morals: Critical Essays (Lahnam: Rowman & Littlefield), 147–62.
Frankfurt, Harry (1988). The Importance of What We Care About (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press).
Gemes, Ken (2009). ‘Nietzsche on Free Will, Autonomy, and the Sovereign Individual’ (this volume).
Guay, Robert (2002). ‘Nietzsche on Freedom’, European Journal of Philosophy 10: 302–27.
Hatab, Lawrence (1995). A Nietzschean Defense of Democracy (Chicago, Ill: Open Court).
Lovibond, Sabina (2002). Ethical Formation (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press).
Owen, David (2007). Nietzsche’s Genealogy of Morality (Stockfield: Acumen Press).
Pippin, Robert (2004). ‘Lightning and Flash, Agent and Deed (GM I: 6–17)’ in O.Höffe (ed.), Friedrich Nietzsche, Genealogie der Moral (Berlin: Academie Verlag), 47–63.
Ridley, Aaron (2005). ‘Introduction’, in Aaron Ridley and Judith Norman (eds.), The Anti-Christ, Ecce Homo, Twilight of the Idols and other writings (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press).
——(2006). ‘Nietzsche on Art and Freedom’, European Journal of Philosophy 15: 2, 204–24.
——(2009). ‘Nietzsche’s Intention: What the Sovereign Individual Promises’ (this volume).
Schneewind, J.B. (1998). The Invention of Autonomy (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press).
Williams, Bernard (1985). Ethics and the Limits of Philosophy (London: Fontana Books).
—— (1993). Shame and Necessity (Berkeley: University of California Press).