Nietzsche on Freedom and Self-Creation

Scholars of Nietzsche have long struggled to reconcile the apparent paradoxical coexistence of ‘fatalism’ and the possibility of ‘self-creation,’ the ultimate manifestation of the ‘will to power,’ within Nietzsche’s writings. I will analyze this inconsistency as the inevitable result of: (a) Nietzsche’s rejection of substantive notions of the self; (b) Nietzsche’s genealogical goals versus his metaphysical claims; and (c) Nietzsche’s confused conception of creation. 

Firstly, I will summarize the apparent Nietzschean paradox regarding the question of ‘free will.’ Nietzsche is famous for seemingly calling upon and inspiring his readers to exercise their capacity to ‘self-create.’ He writes of man’s goals: “We, however, want to become who we are—human beings who are new, unique, incomparable, who give themselves laws, who create themselves!” (GS 335, 189). Such ‘self-creation’ not only entails man’s autonomous conquering of his own drives, but also man’s ability to establish and impose value within and upon the material world. Nietzsche laudes the “creative spirit” of certain men who possess “compelling strength” such as Goethe and the “sovereign individual” as man’s ultimate ethical ideal (GM II: 24, 76; GM II: 2, 41;  TI 49, 222-3;  Anderson, 22-3). Nietzsche also explicitly proposes a naturalist theory of life which is founded on the doctrine of the ‘will to power.’ He reduces all “efficacious force”   (i.e.: all talk of causation) in the world to this ‘will to power,’ which he defines as the “basic form of will” responsible for the organization and growth of our drives, and thus, life (BGE 36, 36). Nietzsche proposes that “everything which happens in the organic world is part of a process of overpowering [and] mastering,” which he labels this ‘will to power’ (GM II: 12, 57-8).  The ‘will to power’ essentially is the causal force responsible for all biological, naturalistic, and psychological evolution.  

 While Nietzsche’s naturalism is rooted in the doctrine of the ‘will to power,’ and his philosophy of man lauds the achievements of the man who is able to exercise his “creative spirit” upon the world, at the same time Nietzsche denies the ordinary person of ‘agency’ in the traditional sense. He argues that a man’s ‘will’ is not the source of conscious autonomous action, despite what the Judeo-Christian doctrine of ‘moral responsibility’ would have us believe (Leiter, 292). For example, in his Ecce Homo when Nietzsche seeks to answer the autobiographical question ‘How did you become what you are?’, he responds that his intellectual instinct “manifested itself so strongly that I had absolutely no idea what was growing inside me,—and then one day all my capabilities suddenly leapt out, ripened to ultimate perfection….To ‘will’ anything, to ‘strive’ after anything, to have a ‘goal’, a ‘wish’ in mind — I have never experienced this.” (EH, ‘Why I am so clever’: 9, 97). Leiter summarizes Nietzsche’s statement with the following analogy: “Nietzsche wrote such wise and clever books for the same reason the tomato plant grows tomatoes: because it must, because it could not have done otherwise.” (Leiter, 286). Leiter describes this position as fatalistic because a person simply becomes what he is according to the natural facts of his existence, and not according to any conscious assertion of agency.  

So how must we understand Nietzsche? On the one hand, it is man’s ultimate goal and his ethical duty to ‘self-create’ by essentially imposing his creative spirit upon the world. On the other hand, man, not unlike a tomato, is fatalistically bound to the summation of his ‘natural facts’ and is unconscious of the operations of his will, which functions more like a battle of internal drives than as a singular oasis of rationality. Some scholars have tried to explain away this paradox by portraying Nietzsche as a ‘compatibilist,’ while others have argued in favor of either his fatalistic position or autonomous position (See Anderson). I have no interest in trying to interpret the intention behind Nietzsche’s writings, but rather I will expose the philosophical reasons for his conclusions and why these reasons may breed such incoherence. 

 The central reason for Nietzsche’s interestingly paradoxical portrayal of human agency is that he finds the traditional question of ‘free will’ to be a false problem. In Beyond Good and Evil, Nietzsche rejects the problem of ‘free will’ in the entirety of its “superlative metaphysical sense.” In other words, he denies both sides of the debate, those who propose positive ‘free will’ and those who propose positive ‘unfree will,’ as misconceived mythologies (BGE 21, 21). Let us explore the arguments adopted by Nietzsche for eschewing this traditional formulation, and the framework he provides for a potential revaluation in order to assess whether his doctrine makes sense according to nontraditional criteria. 

 Nietzsche first and foremost dismisses the ordinary idea of ‘agency’ as incoherent because he postulates that there is no substantive underlying ‘self’ with which an agent may be identified. He rejects both the Kantian notion of the transcendental unity of the ‘I’ and the Aristotelian notion that there is ‘substance’ or ‘essence’ inherent to man. Nietzsche writes:  

 It is, therefore, a falsification of the facts to say that the subject “I” is the condition of the predicate “think.” It thinks: but to say the “it” is just that famous old “I” — well that is just an assumption or opinion, to put it mildly, and by no means an “immediate certainty.” In fact, there is already too much packed into the “it thinks”: even the “it” contains an interpretation of the process, and does not belong to the process itself. 

(BGE 17, 17)

 In lieu of this knowable existent ‘I,’ Nietzsche proposes a Humean understanding of this phenomenon of selfhood: he views the self as a multiplicity of drives, as a “mirror” of unconscious facts which appear to him with sameness and unity (BGE 231, 123;  BGE 207, 97-8). As one can see in the final sentence of the above quotation, Nietzsche attributes our mistaken notion of ‘I’ to our mistaken conception of causality. He finds the notion of the self as causa sui, i.e., the self as the uncaused cause of itself, to be “thoroughly absurd” (Janaway, 62;  BGE 15, 16). He equates the futile search for an agent beyond the action to the futile search for a cause beyond the effect. “But no such substratum exists,” Nietzsche writes, “there is no ‘being’ behind doing, acting, becoming; ‘the doer’ is merely a fiction imposed on the doing—the doing itself is everything.” (GM I: 13, 29). He does not deny here the existence of causality, but, as Bittner notes, rather he is denying the existence of substantive things which act as causes “in themselves” (Bittner, 35, 37). Just as the cause cannot be identified independently of its effect, the agent cannot be identified independent of its action—L’effet c’est moi (BGE 19, 19).

 Thus, the notion of agency apart from action is incoherent for Nietzsche because of his rejection of substantive notions and his skepticism of causal essences. The mythological ‘free will’ problem is a direct result of these metaphysical presuppositions which, Nietzsche argues, are creatures of the Judeo-Christian evaluative framework. In the Genealogy, Nietzsche argues that this notion of the self as ‘responsible agent’ is a direct result of the slave revolt in morality. He posits that the slaves conceived of ‘moral responsibility’ as a means of attaching blame to the masters and virtue to themselves. He writes that “popular morality distinguishes strength from expressions of strength, as if behind the strong individual there were an indifferent substratum which was at liberty to express or not to express strength.” (GM I: 13, 29). Such a supposition of moral responsibility is inherently deceptive because it rests on (a) vague and misleading conceptions about a unified soul; and (b) modal metaphysical postulations which exist independent of facts of reality; i.e., what could have been done. The goal of the genealogy is to identify the historico-cultural events which have given rise to such giant evaluative frameworks; the Christian metaphysically existent, accountable ‘soul’ is nothing more than the result of building resentment among the masses. As Janaway summarizes, Nietzsche’s genealogical project is not to assert his own metaphysical claims but rather to “unearth” the metaphysical systems brought into existence by historical actors and events that have been made available to us by psychological conditioning (Janaway, 63). Nietzsche argues that man’s idea of himself as free is “a very changeable thing, tied to the evolution of morality and culture and perhaps present in only a relatively brief span of world-history” (HAH 39, 35).

 It seems that Nietzsche’s genealogical goal of radical revaluation of our given philosophical framework, containing his anti-Kantian view of unidentifiable selfhood, precludes him from providing any coherent sense of willed action within his philosophy. On the contrary, Nietzsche does posit the existence of certain individuals who can act autonomously. He famously writes of such a “sovereign individual” as: 

 The individual who resembles no one but himself, who has once again broken away from the morality of custom, the autonomous supramoral individual….he knows himself strong enough to uphold it even against accidents, even ‘against fate.’ 

(GM II: 2, 41)

While the “sovereign individual” certainly is an “ideal type,” Nietzsche does not hesitate to cite the existence of such persons in reality; such as in the person of Goethe (Janaway, 60;  TI 49, 222-3. ). It seems that such persons who exhibit this maximum freedom are able to break free from man’s naturally “passive stance” in a way that allows them to actively, creatively engage with the world around them (Gemes, 45). In order to reconcile this belief with Nietzsche’s dismissal of ordinary agency, Leiter labels Nietzsche a ‘fatalist’ while arguing that he upholds the ethical ideal of antiquity of achieving “harmony of soul” (Leiter, 23-4). This is the manifestation of Nietzschean strength; subsuming and ordering one’s various drives and desires. Anderson, who did not see Nietzsche as a ‘fatalist,’ similarly argues that Nietzschean autonomy is a “self-relation” of governance. It is through applying the law to one’s desires and drives that one is able to self-create (Anderson, 8). Anderson maintains that such autonomy is really a manifestation of psychological strength according to Nietzsche. This would make sense, considering that Nietzsche takes the existence of ‘strong’ versus ‘weak’ wills to be true of reality before he embarks on his genealogical mission (Gemes, 43). But the question still remains how gradation of strength-of-will alone allows man to break free from his chains of moral custom into this vaguely available realm of autonomy.  

 I maintain that the paradox is irreconcilable when Nietzsche’s idea of ‘creation’ is properly considered. Leiter argues that ‘self-creation’ is causally connected to the creation of our values (Leiter, 316). Nietzsche writes of man’s creative powers: “Whatever has value in the present world has it not in itself, according to its nature— nature is always value-less—but has rather been given, granted value, and we were the givers and granters!” (GS 301, 171). It seems that Leiter’s theory of causal connection between value-imposition and self-creation maintains here. But Nietzsche seems to extend ‘self-creation’ beyond the bounds of value imposition; he explicitly writes: “It is we, the thinking-sensing ones, who really and continually make something that is not yet there: the whole perpetually growing world of valuations, colours, weights, perspectives, scales, affirmations, and negations.” (Ibid). As Bittner notes, Nietzsche seems to attribute to humans the power of divine creation. We do not just create from what is given to us, or else it would not be our created world (Bittner, 43). Our creativity is an instantiation of God’s creativity, of the ultimate creativity of Nature. It seems logically invalid at least and intuitively ridiculous at most to establish a relation of equality between (a) the ability to create from the beginning of time and (b) man’s ability to create within spatio-temporal bounds. But if we take Nietzsche’s understanding of man’s creative power to be true, then man’s “creative spirit” to will newness within and upon the world is an act of godliness or a manifestation of divine power. To me, Nietzsche’s portrait of ‘self-creation’ when adequately considered seems more mystical than naturalistic. If we take my view to be true, then the Nietzschean paradox of autonomy versus fatalism dissolves, or makes sense, considering there is a certain level of divine attainment which must be accessed or engaged with in order to move from lack-of-agency to self-creating-autonomy. 

 I have summarized the paradox at the heart of Nietzsche’s writings on ‘free will’ and have attributed this paradox to Nietzsche’s denial of the traditional ‘free will’ problem. He argues his position on the grounds of his genealogical method, the task of which is to reveal the metaphysical baggage of the Judeo-Christian value system. His critique entails a rejection of the Christian conception of the soul; he argues instead for an anti-substantive and anti-unity view of the self as a relation which exists among unconscious desires, drives, and perceptions. His critique also entails a rejection of causal arguments for moral responsibility on the grounds that there is no agent acting as causa sui behind any given action. This critique of the modern ‘free will’ problem is thus ultimately a question of genealogical discovery rather than metaphysical postulation (Gemes, 39). However, Nietzsche does postulate the ability for certain powerful wills to ascribe metaphysical value and create ontological existence within reality. Considering his views on agency and the nonexistence of the self, I hold that Nietzsche’s view of ‘self-creation’ can only be understood as an uncommon, perhaps divine, accessing of the “basic will” or supreme creative power of Nature. 

Bibliography

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