* I'm taking a class on Friedrich Nietzsche and we do a 2-page essay on our weekly readings. This is one of my essays. (Skips from 4 to 6 since there was no essay for week 5)
· Describe Nietzsche’s view of the self in sections 19-23 [Beyond Good and Evil] and its relation to free will.
Nietzsche is committed to examining the human person from a “physio-psychological” view that takes seriously the naturalistic, non-teleological origins of humanity. He speaks of an “evolutionary theory of the will to power.” By this he refers to ingrained drives from our evolutionary past that move us to seek life and the release of power in the expanding pursuit of life. For Nietzsche, it is important to recognize that the human psyche is a bundle of drives that are always multiple in number. Nietzsche refers to the “many souls” of the human person. This is key, since he seemingly denies a substantial, cohering self. Thus, Nietzsche refers to this unified self as the “synthetic concept of ‘I’.”
From this conception of the human person Nietzsche understands the notion of the “freedom of the will” to be a “complicated” affair rather than something that everyone (including philosophers) thinks as self-evident. Nietzsche notes three aspects of “every act of willing.” First, there are a “multiplicity of feelings.” These include various feelings of moving toward or away from something. Second, “thinking” is involved in the act of willing. This thinking is experienced as a “commanding thought.” Nietzsche is quick to point out that there is no willing apart from thought. The third element of the act of willing is “emotion.” As Nietzsche states, “What is called ‘freedom of the will’ is essentially the emotions of superiority felt towards the one who must obey.” Here Nietzsche makes a fascinating move. He speaks not only of the self as commanding but also obeying. The person is commanding “a Something in himself” but is also simultaneously one who “both command[s] and obey[s].” This multiplication of the self as one who both commands and receives the act of commanding is a direct result and implication of Nietzsche’s denial of a substantial, stable self as mentioned above.
From this set of beliefs it is clear that Nietzsche denies any notion of “libertarian freedom.” He thinks such a conception is an example of the internal contradiction causa sui—cause of itself. Nietzsche spares no rhetorical device to castigate such a notion of the will, calling it “a kind of logical freak or outrage,” “nonsense,” and an example of “cloddish simplicity.” With this denial of “free will” in its libertarian sense, one would think that Nietzsche is some sort of physical determinist but he makes an interesting philosophical move. He asks the reader to take another step and “likewise eliminate from his head the opposite of the non-concept ‘free will’: I mean the unfree will amounts to a misuse of cause and effect.” In order to accomplish this Nietzsche has to relativize the concepts of “cause” and “effect” to the order of mere “conventional fictions” which do not explain but merely describe what we observe. Since humans have merely invented the notion of “cause” (along with law, freedom, reason, and purpose) both the concepts of “free will” and “unfree will” are “mythology”—“it is only a matter of strong and weak wills.
Nietzsche adds one more psychological claim as to why people are prone to either affirm free will or deny it. For those who want to affirm free will, it manifests a desire to maintain their personal responsibility. For those who which to deny free will in a physically deterministic sense, this is a result of wanting “to be responsible for nothing, guilty of nothing.”
