Nietzsche and Kantian Ethics 9781474275958, 9781474275989, 9781474275972

Table of contents :
Cover
Half Title
Series
Title
Copyright
Contents
Notes on Contributors
Editors
Contributors
Acknowledgements
Abbreviations and References for Nietzsche and Kant
Abbreviations of Nietzsche’s Writings
Abbreviations of Nietzsche’s Writings in German
Abbreviations of Nietzsche’s Writings in English
Abbreviations of Kant’s Writings
Abbreviations of Kant’s Writings with Indicationof the Corresponding AA Volume
References
Nietzsche’s writings
Kant’s writings
Translations of Nietzsche’s and Kant’s Writings
Nietzsche
Kant
Introduction
Contributions
Notes
References
1 The Problem of Normative Authority in Kant, Hegel and Nietzsche
1. Kant on the problem of normative authority
2. Hegel on the problem of normative authority
2.1 Hegel’s objection to Kant
2.2 Hegel’s alternative to the Kantian strategy
3. The relationship between the Nietzschean, Kantian and Hegelian theories of normative authority
3.1 Nietzsche agrees that freedom places determinate constraints on what can be willed
3.2 How Hegelian could Nietzsche’s theory be?
3.3 A theory that is both Kantian and Hegelian?
4. Nietzsche’s solution to the problem of normative authority
4.1 What is will to power?
4.2 Will to power as a claim about the essential nature of willing
4.3 Why does freedom require revaluation in terms of power?
4.4 The structure of Nietzsche’s theory
5. Conclusion
Notes
References
2 Normativity and Moral Psychology: Nietzsche’s Critique of Kantian Universality
1. Scene setting
2. Kant’s derivation
3. Nietzsche’s basic challenge
3.1 Nietzsche and normativity?
3.2 Nietzschean self-.legislation
3.3 Two objections
4. Nietzsche versus Kant on moral psychology
5. Concluding remarks
Notes
References
3 Kant, Nietzsche and the Discursive Availability of Action
1. Kant and the discursive availability of action
2. Nietzsche and the discursive availability of action
3. Differences between Kant and Nietzsche
4. Conclusion
Notes
References
4 Kant’s ‘Respect for the Law’ as the ‘Feeling of Power’: On (the Illusion of) Sovereignty
1. Kant on the motives of pure practical reason (KpV chapter III)
Interlude: An attenuated version of Kant’s account of Achtung
2. Nietzsche on remembering and forgetting
3. Nietzsche’s physiology of freedom
4. Conclusion
Notes
References
5 Freedom as Independence: Kant and Nietzsche on Non-Domination, Self-Love and the Rivalrous Emotions
1. Kant on freedom, self-love and maturity
2. Nietzsche on freedom and ethical pathologies
3. Nietzsche’s criticism of Kant
4. Conclusion
Notes
References
6 Autonomy, Spiritual Illness and Theodicy in Kant and Nietzsche
1. Conceptions of justice and autonomy
2. Genealogy and theodicy
3. Spiritual illness and the bad conscience
4. The redemptive potential of spiritual illness
5. Coda: Justifying nature
Notes
References
7 Phantom Duty? Nietzsche versus Königsbergian Chinadom
1. The origin of duty?
2. Nietzschean duties
Notes
References
8 Spontaneity and Sovereignty: Nietzsche’s Concepts and Kant’s Philosophy
1. Early neo-.Kantianism and the inadequacy of Kant’s psychology
2. Nietzsche’s uses of ‘spontaneity’
3. Spontaneity in the Nachlass of Daybreak
4. Nietzsche, Goethe and Schopenhauer on Kant’s ‘radical evil’
5. Nietzsche’s anti-Kantian ‘categorical imperative’ and the autonomy of the sovereign individual
Notes
References
9 Contra Kant: Experimental Ethics in Guyau and Nietzsche
1. Introduction
2.
3.
4.
5.
Notes
References
10 Question or Answer?: Kant, Nietzsche and the Practical Commitment of Philosophy
1. From answer to question (BGE 11, KSA 5.24–6)
2. A philosophy summarized in questions (GS 343–6, KSA 5.573–81)
3. Friendship and nihilism
3.1 Nihilism
3.2 Friendship and philosophy
3.3 Kant on friendship
3.4 Nietzsche’s inverted idealism
4. The practical commitment of Nietzsche’s philosophy
Notes
References
Complete Bibliography
Index

Citation preview

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Nietzsche and Kantian Ethics

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Nietzsche’s Engagements with Kant and the Kantian Legacy Edited by Marco Brusotti, Herman Siemens, João Constâncio, Tom Bailey Nietzsche has often been considered a thinker independent of the philosophy of his time and radically opposed to the concerns and concepts of modern and contemporary philosophy. But there is an increasing awareness of his sophisticated engagements with his contemporaries and of his philosophy’s rich potential for debates with modern and contemporary thinkers. Nietzsche’s Engagements with Kant and the Kantian Legacy explores a significant field for such engagements, Kant and Kantianism. Bringing together an international team of established Nietzsche-​scholars who have done extensive work in Kant, contributors include both senior scholars and young, upcoming researchers from a broad range of countries and traditions. Working from the basis that Nietzsche is better understood as thinking ‘with and against’ Kant and the Kantian legacy, they examine Nietzsche’s explicit and implicit treatments of Kant, Kantians, and Kantian concepts, as well as the philosophical issues that they raise for both Nietzschean and Kantian philosophy. Volume I: Nietzsche, Kant and the Problem of Metaphysics Edited by Marco Brusotti and Herman Siemens Volume II: Nietzsche and Kantian Ethics Edited by João Constâncio and Tom Bailey Volume III: Nietzsche and Kant on Aesthetics and Anthropology Edited by Maria João Mayer Branco and Katia Hay

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Nietzsche’s Engagements with Kant and the Kantian Legacy Volume II Nietzsche and Kantian Ethics Edited by João Constâncio and Tom Bailey

Bloomsbury Academic An imprint of Bloomsbury Publishing Plc

LON DON • OX F O R D • N E W YO R K • N E W D E L H I • SY DN EY

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Bloomsbury Academic An imprint of Bloomsbury Publishing Plc 50 Bedford Square 1385 Broadway London New York WC1B 3DP NY 10018 UK USA www.bloomsbury.com BLOOMSBURY and the Diana logo are trademarks of Bloomsbury Publishing Plc First published 2017 © João Constâncio, Tom Bailey and Contributors, 2017 João Constâncio and Tom Bailey have asserted their right under the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act, 1988, to be identified as the Editors of this work. All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced or transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic or mechanical, including photocopying, recording, or any information storage or retrieval system, without prior permission in writing from the publishers. No responsibility for loss caused to any individual or organization acting on or refraining from action as a result of the material in this publication can be accepted by Bloomsbury or the editors. British Library Cataloguing-​in-​Publication Data A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library. ISBN: Pack: 978-1-4742-7603-0 HB: 978-​1-​4742-​7595-​8 ePDF: 978-1-3500-3557-7 ePub: 978-1-3500-3558-4 Library of Congress Cataloging-​in-​Publication Data A catalog record for this book is available from the Library of Congress. Names: Brusotti, Marco, editor. Title: Nietzsche’s engagements with Kant and the Kantian legacy / edited by Marco Brusotti, Herman Siemens, João Constâncio, Tom Bailey. Description: New York: Bloomsbury Academic, 2017 – | Includes bibliographical references and index. Contents: Volume 1. Nietzsche, Kant, and the problemof metaphysics / edited by Marco Brusotti and Herman Siemens – Volume 2. Nietzsche and Kantian ethics / edited by João Constâncio and Tom Bailey – Volume 3. Nietzsche and Kant on aesthetics and anthropology / edited by Maria Branco and Katia Hay. Identifiers: LCCN 2016040856 | ISBN 9781474274777 (volume 1: hb) | ISBN 9781474274791 (volume 1: epdf) Subjects: LCSH: Nietzsche, Friedrich Wilhelm, 1844–1900. | Kant, Immanuel, 1724–1804. Classification: LCC B3317 .N5424 2017 | DDC 193–dc23 LC record available at https://lccn.loc.gov/2016040856 Cover design: Catherine Wood Cover image © Getty Images Typeset by Newgen Knowledge Works (P) Ltd., Chennai, India

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Contents Notes on Contributors Acknowledgements Abbreviations and References for Nietzsche and Kant Translations of Nietzsche’s and Kant’s Writings Introduction  João Constâncio and Tom Bailey 1 2 3 4 5 6 7 8 9

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The Problem of Normative Authority in Kant, Hegel and Nietzsche  Paul Katsafanas

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Normativity and Moral Psychology: Nietzsche’s Critique of Kantian Universality  Simon Robertson

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Kant, Nietzsche and the Discursive Availability of Action  Robert Guay

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Kant’s ‘Respect for the Law’ as the ‘Feeling of Power’: On (the Illusion of) Sovereignty  Herman Siemens

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Freedom as Independence: Kant and Nietzsche on Non-Domination, Self-​Love and the Rivalrous Emotions  David Owen

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Autonomy, Spiritual Illness and Theodicy in Kant and Nietzsche  Frederick Neuhouser

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Phantom Duty? Nietzsche versus Königsbergian Chinadom  Robert B. Louden

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Spontaneity and Sovereignty: Nietzsche’s Concepts and Kant’s Philosophy  Marco Brusotti

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Contra Kant: Experimental Ethics in Guyau and Nietzsche  Keith Ansell-​Pearson and Michael Ure

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10 Question or Answer? Kant, Nietzsche and the Practical Commitment of Philosophy  Paul van Tongeren Complete Bibliography Index

291 313 325

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Notes on Contributors Editors Tom Bailey is associate professor of philosophy at John Cabot University in Rome. He works in moral and political philosophy, and his research on Nietzsche has focused on Nietzsche’s relations to Kant and Kantian themes. His recent publications include ‘Nietzsche’s Modest Theory of Agency’, in P.  Katsafanas (ed.), Routledge Philosophy Minds: Nietzsche (Routledge, 2017); ‘Nietzsche the Kantian?’, in K. Gemes and J. Richardson (eds), The Oxford Handbook of Nietzsche (Oxford University Press, 2013); and ‘Vulnerabilities of Agency: Kant and Nietzsche on Political Community’, in M.  J. Branco and J.  Constâncio (eds), As the Spider Spins: Essays on Nietzsche’s Critique and Use of Language (De Gruyter, 2012). João Constâncio is associate professor of philosophy at Nova University of Lisbon (UNL/​FCSH). He earned his PhD there with a dissertation on Plato. He also does research at IFILNOVA/​FCSH, where he directs the research group, ‘Nietzsche International Lab’ (NIL) and co-​directs a research group in aesthetics. He is the author of Arte e niilismo: Nietzsche e o enigma do mundo (2013) and co-​editor of four books on Nietzsche, including Nietzsche and the Problem of Subjectivity (De Gruyter, 2015). He has also published many articles on Nietzsche, including ‘On Consciousness:  Nietzsche’s Departure from Schopenhauer’, in Nietzsche-​Studien 40 (2011).

Contributors Keith Ansell-​Pearson holds a personal chair in philosophy at the University of Warwick, a position he has held since 1998. He is the author and editor of books on Nietzsche, Bergson and Deleuze. He is the founder of the Friedrich Nietzsche Society (UK) and serves on the editorial boards of the Journal of Nietzsche Studies and Nietzsche-​Studien. He is currently researching a book on Nietzsche and Foucault on the Care of the Self. With Daniel W. Conway, he is the

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Notes on Contributors

editor of the new series ‘The Edinburgh Guides to Nietzsche’ to be launched by Edinburgh University Press in 2018. Marco Brusotti is professor of history of philosophy at the University of Salento (Lecce, Italy) and lecturer in philosophy at the Technische Universität, Berlin. He is president of the Nietzsche-​Gesellschaft, a member of the academic board of the Friedrich-​Nietzsche-​Stiftung, the director of the section of the ‘Colli Montinari’ Center for Nietzsche Studies in Lecce and a member of the editorial board of the database Nietzsche Online (De Gruyter). He has published widely on Nietzsche and Wittgenstein and is the author of Die Leidenschaft der Erkenntnis. Philosophie und ästhetische Lebensgestaltung von Morgenröthe bis Also sprach Zarathustra (De Gruyter, 1997). He has also edited, with R. Reschke, ‘Einige werden posthum geboren.’ Friedrich Nietzsches Wirkungen (De Gruyter, 2012) and, with H. Heit and G. Abel, Nietzsches Wissenschaftsphilosophie: Hinte rgründe, Wirkungen und Aktualität (De Gruyter, 2011). Robert Guay is associate professor of philosophy at Binghamton University, State University of New York, where he has taught since 2006. He works primarily on nineteenth-​century European philosophy, especially as it relates to issues of agency, history and ethics. His work has appeared in the Oxford Handbook of Nietzsche, the Journal of Nietzsche Studies, the Edinburgh Critical History of Nineteenth Century Philosophy and many other venues. He is currently working on a book on Nietzsche’s ethical thought and on an edited collection on Dostoevsky’s Crime and Punishment. Paul Katsafanas is associate professor of philosophy at Boston University. He works on Kant and post-​Kantian philosophy, and particularly on issues in ethics and the philosophy of mind. He is the author of Agency and the Foundations of Ethics:  Nietzschean Constitutivism (Oxford University Press, 2013)  and The Nietzschean Self:  Moral Psychology, Agency, and the Unconscious (Oxford University Press, 2016), as well as of various articles on Nietzsche and on Nietzsche’s relation to Kant. Robert B.  Louden is distinguished professor of philosophy at the University of Southern Maine. His publications include Kant’s Human Being (Oxford University Press, 2011), The World We Want (Oxford University Press, 2007), Kant’s Impure Ethics (Oxford University Press, 2000)  and Morality and Moral Theory (Oxford University Press, 1992). A  former president of the North

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Notes on Contributors

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American Kant Society (NAKS), Louden is also co-​editor and translator of two volumes in The Cambridge Edition of the Works of Immanuel Kant. Frederick Neuhouser is professor of philosophy at Barnard College, Columbia University (New York), specializing in German idealism and social and political philosophy. He is the author of four books: Rousseau’s Critique of Inequality (Cambridge, 2014), Rousseau’s Theodicy of Self-​Love (Oxford, 2008), Foundations of Hegel’s Social Theory (Harvard University Press, 2000) and Fichte’s Theory of Subjectivity (Cambridge, 1990). His recent work has focused on recognition and amour-​propre, but he is currently working on social pathology in eighteenth-​, nineteenth-​and twentieth-​century thought. Other interests include psychoanalysis and film. David Owen is professor of social and political philosophy at the University of Southampton. His research focuses on Nietzsche and post-​Kantian critical theory and on contemporary political philosophy. His books include Nietzsche’s Genealogy of Morality (Acumen, 2007), Nietzsche, Politics and Modernity (Sage, 1995)  and Maturity and Modernity:  Nietzsche, Weber, Foucault, and the Ambivalence of Reason (Routledge, 1994). He is a founder member of the Friedrich Nietzsche Society and a past editor of the Journal of Nietzsche Studies. He is currently working on book manuscripts on Nietzsche for the ‘Founders of Social and Political Thought’ series at Oxford University Press and the ‘Modernity and Political Theory’ series at Rowman and Littlefield. Simon Robertson is lecturer in philosophy at Cardiff University. His recent work specializes mainly in ethics and in Nietzsche. As well as publishing various articles in these fields, he has edited two collections: Spheres of Reason (Oxford University Press, 2009)  and Nietzsche, Naturalism, and Normativity (with C. Janaway, Oxford University Press, 2012). He is currently completing a monograph entitled Nietzsche and Contemporary Ethics. Herman Siemens is associate professor of modern philosophy at Leiden University, adjunct professor at the Universidad Diego Portales (Chile) and research associate of the University of Pretoria (South Africa) and the Universidade de Lisboa (Portugal). He is president of the Friedrich Nietzsche Society, and, with P. van Tongeren, director of the Nietzsche-​Wörterbuch (De Gruyter). He specializes in Nietzsche and post-​Nietzschean philosophy, political philosophy and aesthetics, and has published widely in these areas, including

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the book, co-​edited, with V.  Roodt, Nietzsche, Power and Politics:  Rethinking Nietzsche’s Legacy for Political Thought (De Gruyter, 2008). He currently leads a research programme on Nietzsche and Kant as ancestors of contemporary agonistic and deliberative theories of democracy. Michael Ure is a senior lecturer in politics at Monash University. He is the author of Nietzsche’s Therapy: Self-​Cultivation in the Middle Works (Lexington, 2008) and many articles and book chapters on Nietzsche. He is currently writing a CUP guidebook to The Gay Science and he is also the chief investigator of the Australian Research Council Discovery Grant, ‘Philosophy as a Way of Life’ and co-​editor of a Bloomsbury Press book series of the same title. Paul van Tongeren is professor emeritus of Radboud University, Nijmegen, and KU Leuven, associate researcher of the University of Pretoria, and, with H. Siemens, director of the Nietzsche-​Wörterbuch. He is the author of numerous books and articles on Nietzsche, including Reinterpreting Modern Culture: An Introduction to Friedrich Nietzsche’s Philosophy (Purdue University Press, 2000). His recent Dutch book on nihilism (Het Europese nihilisme. Fr. Nietzsche over een dreiging die niemand schijnt te deren (Vantilt, 2012)) will soon be published in English. Further information is available at www.paulvantongeren.nl.

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Acknowledgements Paul Katsafanas’s chapter incorporates material drawn from ­chapter  9 of The Nietzschean Self: Agency, Moral Psychology, and the Unconscious (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2016). Reproduced by permission of Oxford University Press. Fredrick Neuhouser’s chapter incorporates material drawn from his paper published in the Journal of Nietzsche Studies, Vol. 45, No. 3, 2014, pages 293–​314. Reproduced by permission of The Pennsylvania State University Press. Paul van Tongeren’s chapter incorporates material drawn from his paper published in Kriterion  –​Revista de Filosofia. Reproduced by permission of Kriterion –​Revista de Filosofia.

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Abbreviations and References for Nietzsche and Kant Abbreviations of Nietzsche’s Writings All mentions of Nietzsche’s writings refer to the following editions: BAW Nietzsche, F. (1933–40), Historisch-kritische Gesamtausgabe, Hans Joachim Mette/Carl Koch/Karl Schlechta (eds), Munich:  C.H. Beck’sche Verlagsbuchhandlung. Reprinted as:  Frühe Schriften 1854–1869, Munich: DTV 1994. KGB Nietzsche, F.  (1975–), Briefwechsel. Kritische Gesamtausgabe, established by Giorgio Colli and Mazzino Montinari, continued by Norbert Miller and Annemarie Pieper, Berlin/New  York:  De Gruyter. KGW Nietzsche, F. (1967–), Werke Kritische Gesamtausgabe, established by Giorgio Colli and Mazzino Montinari, continued by Wolfgang Müller-Lauter and Karl Pestalozzi (eds), Berlin/New  York:  De Gruyter. KSA Nietzsche, F.  (1980), Sämtliche Werke. Kritische Studienausgabe in 15 Bänden, Giorgio Colli/Mazzino Montinari (eds), Munich/ Berlin/New York: DTV/De Gruyter. KSB Nietzsche, F. (1986), Sämtliche Briefe. Kritische Studienausgabe in 8 Bänden, Giorgio Colli/Mazzino Montinari (eds), Munich/Berlin/ New York: DTV/De Gruyter.

Abbreviations of Nietzsche’s Writings in German AC CV 1 CV 5 EH FW

Der Antichrist. Fluch auf das Christenthum Ueber das Pathos der Wahrheit Homer’s Wettkampf Ecce homo. Wie man wird, was man ist Die fröhliche Wissenschaft

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GD GM GT JGB M MA NL UB VM WB WS Z

Abbreviations and References for Nietzsche and Kant

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Götzen-Dämmerung oder Wie man mit dem Hammer philosophirt Zur Genealogie der Moral. Eine Streitschrift Die Geburt der Tragödie Jenseits von Gut und Böse. Vorspiel einer Philosophie der Zukunft Morgenröthe. Gedanken über die moralischen Vorurtheile Menschliches, Allzumenschliches. Ein Buch für freie Geister Nachgelassene Fragmente/Notate/Aufzeichnungen Nietzsches Unzeitgemässe Betrachtungen (MA II) Vermischte Meinungen und Sprüche Richard Wagner in Bayreuth Der Wanderer und sein Schatten Also Sprach Zarathustra. Ein Buch für Alle und Keinen

Abbreviations of Nietzsche’s Writings in English A AOM BGE

The Antichrist (HH II) Assorted Opinions and Maxims Beyond Good and Evil. Prelude to a Philosophy of the Future BT The Birth of Tragedy D Daybreak DS (UM I) David Strauss EH Ecce Homo. How One Becomes What One Is   EH Books Why I Write Such Good Books   EH Clever Why I Am So Clever   EH Destiny Warum I Am a Destiny   EH Wise Why I Am So Wise GM On the Genealogy of Morals. A Polemic GS The Gay Science HC Homer’s Contest/ Homer on Competition HH Human, All Too Human HL (UM II) On the Use and Disadvantage of History for Life NB Nietzsche’s Library/Nietzsche-Bibliothek NL Nietzsche’s Posthumous Notebooks

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Abbreviations and References for Nietzsche and Kant

PT PTAG SE TI   TI Arrows   TI Errors   TI Fable   TI ‘Improving’   TI Morality   TI Reason   TI Skirmishes UM WB WS Z

On the Pathos of Truth Philosophy in the Tragic Age of the Greeks (UM III) Schopenhauer as Educator Twilight of the Idols. How to Philosophize with a Hammer Arrows and Epigrams The Four Great Errors How the ‘True World’ Finally Became a Fable ‘Improving Humanity’ Morality as Anti-Nature ‘Reason’ in Philosophy Skirmishes of an Untimely Man Untimely Meditations (UM IV) Richard Wagner in Bayreuth (HH II) The Wanderer and His Shadow Thus Spoke Zarathustra

Abbreviations of Kant’s Writings All mentions of Kant’s writings refer to the Akademie Ausgabe: AA Kant, I.  (1900–), Gesammelte Schriften, ed. the Royal Prussian (later German, then Berlin-Brandenburg), Academy of Sciences, Berlin:  Reimer, later De Gruyter, 29 vols.

Abbreviations of Kant’s Writings with Indication of the Corresponding AA Volume Anth Br GMS HN IaG

Anthropologie in pragmatischer Hinsicht/Anthropology from a Pragmatic Point of View (AA 07) Briefe/Correspondence (AA 10–13) Grundlegung zur Metaphysik der Sitten/Groundwork of the Metaphysics of Morals (AA 04) Handschriftlicher Nachlass/Unpublished Notes (AA 14–23) Idee zu einer allgemeinen Geschichte in weltbürgerlicher Absicht/Idea for a Universal History with a Cosmopolitan Aim (AA 08)

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Abbreviations and References for Nietzsche and Kant

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KpV

Kritik der praktischen Vernunft/Critique of Practical Reason (AA 05) KrV Kritik der reinen Vernunft/Critique of Pure Reason KU Kritik der Urteilskraft/Critique of the Power of Judgement (AA 05) Log Logik/Logic (AA 09) MAM Muthmaßlicher Anfang der Menschengeschichte/Conjectural Beginning of Human History (AA 08) MS Die Metaphysik der Sitten/The Metaphysics of Morals (AA 06) OP Opus Postumum (AA 21 u. 22) Prol Prolegomena zu einer jeden künftigen Metaphysik/Prolegomena to Any Future Metaphysics (AA 04) Refl Reflexion (AA 14–19) RGV Die Religion innerhalb der Grenzen der bloßen Vernunft/Religion within the Boundaries of Mere Reason (AA 06) TP Über den Gemeinspruch:  Das mag in der Theorie richtig sein, taugt aber nicht für die Praxis/On the Common Saying: That May be Correct in Theory, But It Is of No Use in Practice (AA 08) V- Immanuel Kant:  Vorlesung zur Moralphilosophie/Lectures on Moral Philosophy WA Beantwortung der Frage:  Was ist Aufklärung?/An Answer to the Question: What Is Enlightenment? (AA 08) WDO Was heißt sich im Denken orientiren?/What Does It Mean to Orient Oneself in Thinking? (AA 08) Additional abbreviations are provided by the authors.

References Nietzsche’s writings Emphases in Nietzsche’s writings:  normal emphases (= ‘gesperrt’ in KSA) are rendered in italics. Further emphases (‘halbfett’ in KSA for the Nachlass) are rendered in bold italics. Interventions/omissions: any interventions in citations by the author, including insertions of original German words, are indicated by square brackets: []. Any omissions by the author are also inserted in square brackets […] in order to distinguish them from Nietzsche’s own ellipses.

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Abbreviations and References for Nietzsche and Kant

References to Nietzsche’s published/titled texts: follow the standard abbreviations given in Nietzsche-Studien under ‘Siglen’ and are listed here. Authors have used either German or English abbreviations, followed by the section/aphorism number (e.g. JGB 12 or BGE 12, M 54 or D 54, GM I 13). For sections/chapters that are not numbered but named, the abbreviations from Nietzsche-Studien have been used or otherwise devised for easy identification when necessary, for example: Twilight of the Idols, ‘What the Germans Lack’, section 3 = TI Germans 3 Thus Spoke Zarathustra, Book I, ‘On the Three Transformations’  =  Z I Transformations. Page references, where given, are to the relevant passage in the Kritische Studienausgabe (KSA), not to any translations used. The format is as follows: BGE 12, KSA 5.76 (= Beyond Good and Evil, aphorism 12, KSA volume 5, page 76); M 95, KSA 3.86–7 (Morgenröthe, aphorism 95, KSA volume 3, pages 86 and 87). References to the Nachlass: follow the notation in KSA, followed by volume and page and preceded by NL and the year, for example: NL 1883 15[44], KSA 10.491 = note 15[71] in KSA volume 10, page 491. NL 1885-86 2[15], KSA 12.74 = note 2[15] in KSA volume 12, page 74. References to the Nachlass material in Kaufmann’s The Will to Power (=WP) are given as references to the equivalent notes in KSA. References to Nietzsche’s letters:  include addressee, date, volume and page number in KSB (Sämtliche Briefe. Kritische Studienausgabe) or KGB (Nietzsche Briefwechsel. Kritische Gesamtausgabe).

Kant’s writings Emphases and interventions/omissions are rendered as earlier. References to Kant’s texts: follow the standard German abbreviations given in Kant-Studien; these are listed here. The abbreviations are followed by the page number(s) in the ‘Akademie Ausgabe’ (AA), for example, KU 238 (= AA vol. 5, p. 238), Anth 315–16 (= AA vol. 7, pp. 315–16). The relevant volume of the AA for each work is given in the list of abbreviations. Where relevant, the standard A and/or B version for first and second editions of Kant’s works are given, for example, KrV B150, KrV A743/B771. References to numbered sections/paragraphs are also sometimes given by the author, for example, KrV §25 B157, KU §1 204 (= AA vol. V, p. 204).

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Translations of Nietzsche’s and Kant’s Writings Next to their own translations, authors and editors have drawn on a broad range of available translations of Nietzsche’s and Kant’s writings, modifying and combining them as they considered appropriate. Translations used:

Nietzsche The Antichrist, trans. W.  Kaufmann, New  York:  Viking (1954); Thus Spoke Zarathustra, trans. W.  Kaufmann, New  York:  Viking (1954); Twilight of the Idols, trans. W.  Kaufmann, New  York:  Viking (1954); Beyond Good and Evil, trans. W.  Kaufmann, New  York:  Modern Library (1968); Ecce Homo, trans. W. Kaufmann, New York: Modern Library (1968); On the Genealogy of Morals, trans. W.  Kaufmann, New  York:  Modern Library (1968); The Will to Power, trans. Walter Kaufmann and R. J. Hollingdale. New York: Vintage (1968); Thus Spoke Zarathustra, trans. R. J. Hollingdale, London: Penguin Books (1969); The Gay Science, trans. Walter Kaufmann, New York: Vintage (1974); Daybreak, ed. and trans. R.  J. Hollingdale, Cambridge:  Cambridge University Press (1982); Human, All Too Human, trans. M.  Faber and S.  Lehmann, London:  Penguin Books (1984); Human, All Too Human, ed. and trans. R.  J. Hollingdale, Cambridge:  Cambridge University Press (1986); Untimely Meditations, trans. R.  J. Hollingdale, Cambridge/​London/​New  York/​New Rochelle/​Melbourne/​ Sydney:  Cambridge University Press (1983); Human, All Too Human, trans. M.  Faber and S.  Lehmann, London:  Penguin Books (1984); Human, All Too Human, trans. R.  J. Hollingdale, Cambridge:  Cambridge University Press (1986); Twilight of the Idols, trans. R. J. Hollingdale, London: Penguin Books (1990); Beyond Good and Evil, trans. R.  J. Hollingdale, London:  Penguin Books (1990); The Antichrist, trans. R.  J. Hollingdale, London:  Penguin Books (1990); The Antichrist, trans. R.  J. Hollingdale, London:  Penguin Books (1990); On the Genealogy of Morality, ed. K.  Ansell Pearson, trans. C.  Diethe, Cambridge:  Cambridge University Press (1994); The Greek State, in F. Nietzsche, On the Genealogy of Morality, 176–​86, ed. K. Ansell Pearson, trans. C.  Diethe, Cambridge:  Cambridge University Press (1994); Dawn,

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Translations of Nietzsche’s and Kant’s Writings

trans. B. Smith, Stanford: Stanford University Press (1995); On the Genealogy of Morals, trans. D. Smith, Oxford: Oxford University Press (1996); Untimely Meditations, trans. R. J. Hollingdale, ed. D. Breazeale, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press (1997); Daybreak, eds Maudemarie Clark and Brian Leiter, trans. R.  J. Hollingdale, Cambridge:  Cambridge University Press (1997); On the Genealogy of Morality, trans. Maudemarie Clark and Alan J.  Swensen, Indianapolis:  Hackett Publishing Company (1998); Beyond Good and Evil, trans. Marion Faber, Oxford:  Oxford University Press (1998); Twilight of the Idols, trans. Duncan Large, Oxford: Oxford University Press (1998); The Gay Science, ed. B. Williams, trans. J. Nauckhoff, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press (2001); Beyond Good and Evil, ed. Horstmann, R.-​P., and J. Norman, trans. J.  Norman, Cambridge:  Cambridge University Press (2002); Writings from the Late Notebooks, ed. R. Bittner, trans. Kate Sturge, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press (2003); Thus Spoke Zarathustra, eds A. Del Caro and R. Pippin, trans. A. Del Caro, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press (2006); Ecce Homo, trans. D. Large, Oxford: Oxford University Press (2007).

Kant Most authors have cited from The Cambridge Edition of the Works of Immanuel Kant, general editors: Paul Guyer and Allen W. Wood, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 16 vols. (1992–​); Kant’s Introduction to Logic, trans. Thomas Kingsmill Abbott, London:  Longmans, Green & Co (1885); Groundwork of the Metaphysics of Morals, trans. H.  J. Paton as The Moral Law:  Groundwork of the Metaphysics of Morals, London: Routledge (1948); Prolegomena to Any Future Metaphysics, trans. Paul Carus, Chicago/​London:  The Open Court Publishing Company (1949); Groundwork of the Metaphysics of Morals, trans. H. J. Paton, New York: Harper and Row (1964); The Doctrine of Virtue: Part II of the Metaphysics of Morals, trans. Mary J. Gregor, New York: Harper and Row (1964); ‘Idea for a Universal History with a Cosmopolitan Purpose’, in Political Writings, ed. H. S. Reiss, 41–​53, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press (1970); ‘Lecture on Friendship’, in Michael Pakaluk (ed.), Other Selves. Philosophers on Friendship, 208–​17, Indianapolis/​Cambridge:  Hackett (1991); Groundwork of the Metaphysics of Morals, ed. M.  Gregor, Cambridge:  Cambridge University Press (1998); Critique of Pure Reason, ed. and trans. Paul Guyer and Allen Wood, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press (1998); Opus postumum, trans. Eckart

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Förster and Michael Rosen, Cambridge:  Cambridge University Press (1993); Critique of Practical Reason, trans. Werner S.  Pluhar. Indianapolis:  Hackett Publishing Company (2002); Anthropology from a Pragmatic Point of View, trans. and ed. Robert B.  Louden, Cambridge University Press, Cambridge (2006).

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Introduction João Constâncio and Tom Bailey

Kantian ethics is the articulation of autonomy.1 It holds that practical reasoning ‘self-​legislates’ the basic principles of ethical goodness in abstraction from anything beyond it –​thus, in abstraction not only from divine commands and metaphysical values, but also from social conventions and rewards, from considerations of human nature, happiness and perfection, and from individuals’ own desires and preferences. In the terms of Kant’s famous formulas, the ‘will’ is to be considered an ‘end in itself ’, of such value that it may not be used merely as a ‘thing’ or as a ‘means’ to other ends; it achieves ‘autonomy’ by acting for reasons provided by itself, rather than for other, contingent reasons; and its reasons are thus ‘universal laws’, binding on all wills as if they were the laws of a ‘kingdom of ends’. In light of this basic conception, Kant proceeds to articulate autonomy in a sophisticated system of more specific ethical ideas: a principle of equal political freedoms or rights; a notion of the ‘virtues’ of perfection and beneficence; the postulation of God as the cause of deserved happiness, or the ‘highest good’; a notion of the obscure grounds of ‘evil’; and a hope that humans’ ‘unsociable sociability’ will lead, gradually and unintentionally, to social progress. Invoking his idealist metaphysics, he also claims that autonomy reveals a freedom and dignity that transcend nature. For in acting according to ‘self-​legislated’ principles, he argues, the will must be conceived of as causing actions in a way other than that of antecedent natural causes, and therefore as something more than a natural object. Kant’s articulation of autonomy is perhaps the single most influential theory in philosophical ethics. His immediate idealist and romantic successors –​ such as Hegel and Fichte, Schiller and Schopenhauer –​provided sophisticated critical revisions and developments of it, while the later ‘neo-​Kantians’ –​such as Friedrich Lange and Kuno Fischer  –​further promoted and elaborated his concerns. Kantian themes also remain extremely influential in contemporary ethics:  emphasizing practical reasoning and normativity, respect for autonomous choices and agency, the significance of universality and equality, and the

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‘deontological’ independence of principles from consequences or flourishing, the Kantian approach competes forcefully with Humean, Aristotelian, Hegelian and other alternatives. Indeed, these concerns have also motivated sophisticated new Kantian theories that undertake to ‘construct’ moral principles out of a conception of rationality (think of John Rawls or Onora O’Neill), agency (Christine Korsgaard) or deliberation (Jürgen Habermas). Much recent commentary on Friedrich Nietzsche’s ethics has been driven by the concerns of the history of philosophy and contemporary ethics, and Kantian ethics was as influential in his time as it is in ours. But surprisingly little attention has been given to Nietzsche’s critical relations to Kantian ethics.2 This perhaps reflects his own, rather contemptuous dismissals of Kantian ethics. In The Gay Science, for example, he insists against Kant that ‘it is selfish to consider one’s own judgement a universal law, and this selfishness is blind, petty, and simple’. Rather than engage in such moral judgements, he suggests, we should ‘want to become who we are,  –​the new, the unique, the incomparable, those who give themselves laws, those who create themselves!’ In this passage he also alleges that by appealing to a transcendent reality –​in the form of ‘ “God”, “soul”, “freedom”, “immortality” ’  –​despite his own strictures on metaphysics, Kant acted ‘like a fox who strays back into his cage. Yet it had been his strength and cleverness that had broken open the cage!’ (GS 335, KSA 3.562). In Beyond Good and Evil, Nietzsche similarly mocks ‘the stiff yet demure tartuffery used by the old Kant to lure us along the clandestine, dialectical path that leads the way (or rather: astray) to his “categorical imperative” –​this spectacle provides no small amusement for discriminating spectators like us, who keep a close eye on the cunning tricks of the old moralists and preachers of morals’ (BGE 5, KSA 3.19). And in The Anti-​Christ, he writes of Kant that ‘ “[v]‌irtue”, “duty”, “goodness in itself ”, goodness stamped with the character of the impersonal and universally valid –​these are fantasies and manifestations of decline, of the final exhaustion of life [. . .]. The most basic laws of preservation and growth require the opposite: that everyone should invent his own virtues, his own categorical imperatives’ (A 11, KSA 6.177; cf. GM II 6, KSA 5.300, and A 10, KSA 6.176–​7). However, while such passages clearly express Nietzsche’s opposition to Kantian ethics, exactly what he objects to is not entirely clear. He accuses Kantian ethics of a variety of failings: petty self-​centredness and indifference to individuality, obsession with moral motivation and insensitive abstraction, harmfulness to ‘life’ and hostility to creativity. His objections also seem to rest on uncharitable interpretations of the Kantian sense of universality –​as either an overly weak requirement that a moral reason hold for all in the same circumstances or an

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overly strong requirement that needs and wants be entirely excluded from moral consideration –​as well as on a neglect of Kant’s own appreciation of the obscurities of moral motivation and the illegitimacy of metaphysical speculation. The ‘life’, creativity and virtues of one’s ‘own’ that Nietzsche opposes to Kantian ethics also appear quite extraneous to the Kantian concern with autonomy. Nonetheless, closer inspection suggests that beneath such dismissals and misrepresentations –​which, of course, also mark his engagements with other important ­ figures  –​Nietzsche’s ethics offers a sustained engagement with Kantian themes. One main theme is precisely that of autonomy:  at least in a few important passages (most notably, GS 335, KSA 3.560–​4 and GM II 2, KSA 5.293–​4), Nietzsche seems to conceive of freedom as autonomy and to affirm such autonomy as strongly as Kant does. Admittedly, this affirmation of autonomy has been subject to much exegetical and philosophical controversy, particularly in relation to Nietzsche’s criticism of morality, his positive ideals and his naturalism. Some have simply dismissed it as insincere or unfounded, and many have distanced it from the Kantian conception by interpreting it in individualist terms –​that is, as expressing an ideal of an individual’s acting according to his or her particular drives or qualities or creativity.3 But, however far Nietzsche diverges from the Kantian conception and however difficult it may be to square with other elements of his philosophy, it is hard to deny that he endorses key elements of the Kantian conception in these and other passages. In particular, Nietzsche’s sense of autonomy invokes self-​assessment and self-​determination in ways that echo Kant’s own sense of the ‘self-​legislation’ by which an agent determines her action by her ‘own’ considerations, rather than ‘external’, ‘heteronomous’ ones. Kant himself emphasizes that the literal sense of ‘autonomy’ is ‘giving oneself one’s own law’ or, simply, ‘self-​legislation’, and he conceives of autonomy as a process of assessing the rationality of possible principles, so as to determine for oneself which principles should guide one’s action, rather than being determined to action by any pregiven influences or principles. Albeit in his own terminology of ‘values’ and ‘revaluation of values’, Nietzsche conceives of autonomy in a similar way. For example, in On the Genealogy of Morality, he describes the ‘sovereign individual’ as free ‘from the morality of custom’ –​that is, from blind obedience to the values given by society –​because he sets and acts according to ‘his own standard of value’. Indeed, Nietzsche emphasizes that, in becoming free or autonomous, the sovereign individual also becomes ‘supramoral’ (literally, ‘beyond custom’, übersittlich): he writes that the sovereign individual is ‘autonomous and supramoral’ because ‘ “autonomous” and “moral” are mutually exclusive’ (GM II 2, KSA 5.293). Furthermore, in The Gay Science,

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Nietzsche explicitly formulates his views on value and revaluation in terms of ‘autonomy’: those who ‘create themselves’ and ‘become who they are’, he writes, are only able to do so because they ‘give themselves laws’, or give themselves ‘tables of what is good that are new and all [their] own’ (GS 335, KSA 3.563, cf. GS 290, 382, KSA 3.530–​1, 635–​7). At the same time, however, these passages also indicate that Nietzsche diverges significantly from the Kantian conception of autonomy. Most obviously, he denies that autonomous values are universal or unconditional. Rather than ‘laws’ valid for all, in The Gay Science he describes autonomous values as the ‘ideals’ of ‘the new, the unique, the incomparable’ (GS 335, KSA 3.563), and in the Genealogy he describes the ‘sovereign individual’ as creating a ‘standard of value’ that marks his ‘superiority’ over others (GM II 2, KSA 5.294). Similarly, when he writes in The Anti-​Christ that ‘everyone should invent his own virtues, his own categorical imperatives’, he opposes such virtues and imperatives to their ‘impersonal and universally valid’ Kantian counterparts (A 11, KSA 6.177). By emphasizing the individual, and even individualizing, nature of autonomous values, these remarks might seem to support some commentators’ suspicion that Nietzsche simply replaces the Kantian conception of autonomy with an anti-​Kantian, individualist one. It is arguable, however, that Nietzsche rather radicalizes the Kantian conception. For his insistence on ‘self-​legislation’ suggests that he does not reject that conception outright, but instead envisions a more thoroughgoing exclusion of ‘external’, ‘heteronomous’ considerations than the Kantian conception does. In support of this suggestion, consider two other aspects of his affirmation of autonomy:  its emphasis on responsibility and its concern with intersubjective respect. The first aspect has been explored by Volker Gerhardt, who claims that Nietzsche radicalizes a sense of individual responsibility which is already implicit in Kant’s conception of autonomy.4 On Gerhardt’s account, the formal emptiness of Kant’s categorical imperative means that an agent must always work out for herself –​that is, autonomously and individually –​which duty she is supposed to obey in a particular situation. Thus, for Kant too, autonomy individuates. There is no external law or authority, no custom or habit, no ‘natural’ instinct or tendency that an agent who exercises genuine self-​assessment and self-​determination can consider as responsible for her action. The responsibility is wholly hers, as an individual. Gerhardt’s interpretation of Kant here is controversial, but it arguably captures a crucial aspect of Nietzsche’s engagement with the Kantian sense of autonomy. For Nietzsche often presents figures such as the ‘sovereign individual’, the

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‘free spirit’ and the ‘higher type’ as establishing their own values in processes of self-​assessment and self-​determination which distinguish them from the ‘herd’ (e.g. D 9, 14, 16, GS 2, 116, KSA 3.21–​2, 26–​8, 29, 373–​4, 474–​5; GM II 2, KSA 5.293–​4, TI Skirmishes 38, KSA 6.139–​40). His claim that the sovereign individual must be ‘supramoral’ (GM II 2, KSA 5.293) can also be read in this way, insofar as it implies that the sovereign individual takes responsibility for his actions without passively, ‘heteronomously’ accepting the moral customs of his society. Indeed, in that passage Nietzsche even describes this autonomy in terms of ‘free will’ and ‘conscience’ (GM II 2, KSA 5.294). While others follow the ‘morality of custom’ (D 9, KSA 3.21–​2; GM II 2, KSA 5.293–​4) and live as ‘functions of the herd’ (GS 116, KSA 3.475), then, the autonomous individual ‘invents’ his or her own values –​he or she becomes ‘supramoral’ by creating his or her own ‘standard of value’ beyond the values of society. That this understanding of the autonomous individual represents a radicalization of the sense of individual responsibility involved in Kantian autonomy –​ and not a simple rejection of it –​is further suggested by the fact that Nietzsche criticizes the Kantian conception of moral duty on the grounds of autonomy. For him, moral duties that purport to be universal are in fact relative and conditioned, for they are always embedded in social and historical practices and institutions. As he puts it in Daybreak, ‘morality is nothing other (therefore no more!) than obedience to customs’ (D 9, KSA 3.21–​2). For Nietzsche, even if an agent might seem to derive her moral duty by a Kantian process of self-​assessment and self-​determination, such reasoning is still internal to and motivated by an instinctual obedience to existing, pregiven customs, and only custom gives content to the assumptions from which any duty is ‘derived’.5 His criticism of the Kantian conception of moral duty thus rests on a radicalized sense of autonomy –​as he puts it in the Genealogy, ‘ “autonomous” and “moral” are mutually exclusive’. In this respect, his criticism of Kantian ethics is itself Kantian. For Nietzsche, then, Kantian autonomy is not yet true autonomy:  stricter requirements than the ones envisioned by Kant have to be met for a person to genuinely ‘self-​legislate’, or ‘give herself her own law’. Truly autonomous individuals reshape their own goals by breaking away from customs, revaluing the values embedded in them and creating new ones. Like the philosophers described in Beyond Good and Evil, they are ‘commanders and legislators’: ‘they say “That is how it should be!”, they are the ones who first determine the “where to?” and “what for?” of people’ (BGE 211, KSA 5.145). If a person ‘creates’ or self-​legislates in this radical way, then she is indeed ‘supramoral’ and, most importantly, only then can she be said to be fully responsible for her values, her

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practical judgements and her actions. In this sense, for Nietzsche, only responsibility makes an individual autonomous, and only autonomy makes an individual responsible. The second aspect of Nietzsche’s sense of autonomy that suggests its Kantian, rather than individualist, nature is his emphasis on respect for others’ agency. Nietzsche claims that a sovereign individual has ‘reverence’ or ‘respect’ (Ehrfurcht) for his ‘equals’ in autonomy, extending his own ‘self-​affirmation’ to the affirmation of other agents (GM II 2, 3, KSA 5.293–​7).6 Of course, this extension is also at the heart of Kant’s conception of autonomy: for Kant, a will cannot consistently –​that is, rationally –​consider itself an ‘end in itself ’, not to be treated as a ‘thing’ or a ‘means’, without also considering every other will as an ‘end in itself ’ too (see GMS 428–​33). Thus, for both Nietzsche and Kant, Kantian autonomy entails respect for agency as such, in oneself and in others. Where, again, Nietzsche diverges from Kant is in not holding that autonomy either presupposes or implies universal ‘laws’ in Kant’s sense. This appears to reflect the fact that, unlike Kant, Nietzsche holds that agents can possess agency to varying degrees.7 For he describes autonomy as a sovereign individual’s ‘privilege’, and he writes that, while respecting his ‘equals’, a sovereign individual will also ‘despise’ those who are not as autonomous as he is (GM II 2, KSA 5.294). This sense of the variability of agency explains why, whereas for Kant rights and duties hold equally for all agents, Nietzsche emphasizes the need to ‘measure’ agents’ agency itself and to determine rights and duties accordingly. In Daybreak, for instance, he claims that rights and duties are determined by relative ‘spheres of power’, symmetrical and asymmetrical, such that ‘my rights –​are that part of my power which others have not merely conceded me, but which they want me to preserve’ (D 112, KSA 3.100–​1). Indeed, Nietzsche’s sweeping critique of moral equality can be understood to rest, at least in part, on this combination of Kantian respect for agency with an un-​Kantian sense of agency’s variability. Another indication of this combination can be found in Nietzsche’s sense of ethical ‘community’. Kant claims that an attitude of respect for agency implies the concept of ‘a kingdom of ends’, or ‘a systematic association of various rational beings through common laws’ (GMS 433; see also GMS 436). His brief discussion indicates that this concept is intended to show that, given a plurality of agents, the attitude of respect for agency must not concern merely the agency of an agent or some agents, to the exclusion of others, but rather be an attitude of respect for the agency of every agent. Similarly, and despite requiring freedom from the ‘herd’, Nietzsche’s conception of autonomy involves a ‘community of equals’ whose members recognize and respect each other as equals

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in agency –​their interactions are marked by ‘mutually refraining from injury, violence, and exploitation, [and] placing [one’s] will on a par with the other’s’ (BGE 259, KSA 5.207; cf. e.g. BGE 259, 260, GM I 10, GM II 2, KSA 5.207–​12, 273, 294).8 Unlike Kant, Nietzsche typically conceives of this community in terms of ‘power-​relations’ and ‘equilibria’ of ‘recognized and guaranteed degrees of power’ (WS 22, KSA 2.555–​7; D 112, KSA 3.100–​2). Still, rather than brute force among atomized individuals, he presents degrees of agency as ‘recognized and guaranteed’ in a multiplicity of symbolically mediated forms, including rights, duties and other norms.9 And rather than conceiving them in terms of social power or hierarchy, he envisions these forms as primarily spiritual or cultural in nature: the ‘equal’ members of such a community ‘measure’ each other’s achievements or ‘greatness’ in terms of their own spiritual or cultural standards.10 Thus while this community is certainly agonistic –​its members are moved by a drive to excel as individuals and engage in reciprocal relations of competition among themselves –​it is regulated by relations of mutual respect and shared standards of achievement. Indeed, Nietzsche points out that agonism can foster respect, reverence, friendship and social ties, rather than undermining them –​he even writes that respect for one’s enemy can be ‘a bridge to love’ (GM I 10). Moreover, his description of a sovereign individual’s freedom suggests that such freedom depends precisely on these social affects within a social space of agonism.11 Rather than simply dismissing Kantian ethics, then, Nietzsche engages critically with it, sustaining its emphasis on autonomy, responsibility and respect while also challenging and revising its egalitarianism. Arguably, it is in this light that one should consider another challenge that Nietzsche poses to Kantian ethics –​and, indeed, another possible reason for doubting his affinity with it –​ namely, his rejection of the ‘nihilistic’ metaphysics to which Kant appeals. When objecting to Kantian ethics for its metaphysical appeals to ‘freedom’ and ‘God’, Nietzsche’s ultimate concern is often with what he calls the ‘death of God’ and the need to engage in a ‘struggle against nihilism’ (NL 1886 5[50], KSA 12.201–​204, NL 1886 7[31], KSA 12.306). Thus, in the passage of The Anti-​Christ in which he associates Kantian morality with ‘the final exhaustion of life’, Nietzsche calls Kant a ‘nihilist with the intestines of a Christian dogmatist’ (A 11, KSA 6.177). In the preceding section, he identifies this nihilism in Kant’s appeal to a transcendent reality: with Kant, he writes, ‘the concept of a “true world”, the concept of morality as the essence of the world (–​the two most vicious errors in existence!) were once again (thanks to an exceedingly canny scepticism), if not provable, then at least no longer refutable’ (A 10, KSA 6.176). Similarly, in Twilight of the Idols, he accuses Kant of making transcendent reality ‘unattainable, unprovable,

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unpromisable’ while making the ‘mere thought’ of it ‘a consolation, an obligation, an imperative’ (TI Fable, KSA 6.80–​1; cf. TI Reason 6, KSA 6.78–​9). For Nietzsche, then, Kant’s metaphysical division between the ‘apparent’ world in which we live and the ‘true’, transcendent one in which our true freedom and dignity reside expresses a nihilistic denial of life, while also protecting that morality and nihilism against criticism (cf. D Preface 3, KSA 3.12–​15).12 This poses a challenge not only to Kantian metaphysics, but also for the interpretation of Nietzsche’s own ethical ‘naturalism’. It is generally supposed that his ethics is ‘naturalist’ in that it treats ethical norms and agency in ways that are consistent with the understanding of nature, and thus without appeal to ‘supernatural’, metaphysical entities. However, interpretations of his understanding of ‘nature’ range from the reductive to the permissive, and its implications for the character, grounds and authority of normative claims are equally controversial.13 In particular, the meaning, implications and success of his naturalistic explanations of ‘moral’ phenomena such as duty, conscience and free will are debatable. So too are the form, scope and authority of his own ethical judgements: there is little consensus over whether they provide reasons for action or simply normative evaluations, which moral psychology of reasoning, feeling and willing they presuppose, and how objective or universal they are.14 Exploring how Nietzsche upholds a Kantian conception of autonomy while rejecting Kantian metaphysics and, in particular, how he explains and criticizes Kantian conceptions of reasoning and duties, universality and equality, freedom and responsibility therefore promises also to illuminate his naturalism and to test it against Kantian alternatives.

Contributions The contributions to this volume elaborate and evaluate Nietzsche’s critical response to Kantian ethics, and undertake to illuminate both Kantian and Nietzschean ethics in doing so. Their focus is on the issues of autonomy and naturalism that we have introduced, and on both the nature of Nietzsche’s ‘Kantianism’ and the doubts that can be raised about it. The first chapter, Paul Katsafanas’s ‘The Problem of Normative Authority in Kant, Hegel and Nietzsche’, argues that Nietzsche provides a persuasive solution to the debate between Kantians and Hegelians over the autonomous grounds of normative claims. For Katsafanas, Nietzsche shares with Kantians and Hegelians the fundamental idea that normative claims are binding or

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authoritative only insofar as they are self-​imposed or autonomous. Katsafanas argues that Nietzsche agrees with Hegel that to attempt to derive norms from a formal procedure, as Kant does, is fruitless; norms can be assessed, not derived, and they can be assessed only if they are embodied in society. Yet Katsafanas claims that Nietzsche nonetheless agrees with Kant that a normative principle can be derived from the formal principle of autonomy. On Katsafanas’s reading, for Nietzsche this normative principle is ‘will to power’, understood as a criterion of freedom to be used in assessing the values and norms embodied in our social institutions and practices. Thus, Katsafanas maintains, Nietzsche’s sense of ‘will to power’ succeeds in upholding the fundamental Kantian concern for normative autonomy while accepting the standard Hegelian objection to Kant’s own account. In the following chapter, ‘Normativity and Moral Psychology:  Nietzsche’s Critique of Kantian Universality’, Simon Robertson pursues Nietzsche’s criticism of Kantian universality in terms of a more individualist sense of Nietzschean autonomy. On Robertson’s account, a Nietzschean higher type sets, pursues and realizes great projects in the light of his or her own motives and capacities and independently of others, and thus also achieves a particularly high degree of psychological and practical integrity. Crucially, Robertson argues that such projects and the more specific ends that constitute them are ‘laws’ that are ‘self-​ legislated’, and yet are not universal  –​that is, they systematically regulate the relevant agent’s conduct and involve practical commitments and necessity, but their scope is limited to the relevant agent. Robertson points out that this autonomy serves to show only that some normative requirements are not universal, not that, pace Kant, no such requirements are universal. To support the stronger claim Robertson turns to Kant’s attempt to justify the universal moral ‘law’ and argues that it is undermined by Nietzsche’s ‘sentimentalist’ moral psychology, according to which no practical deliberation or evaluation is ‘pure’ in Kant’s sense since it is inevitably shaped by our motivations. Robertson concludes by considering how this moral psychology might tell even against contemporary Kantians’ ‘first-​personal’, or ‘practical’, attempts to derive universal principles from a ‘pure’ conception of agency without requiring its theoretical truth. Robert Guay’s chapter, ‘Kant, Nietzsche and the Discursive Availability of Action’, undertakes to show that Nietzsche’s account of action aligns more closely with some other elements of the Kantian account. In particular, Guay argues that a distinctive feature of Nietzsche’s account is the Kantian idea that the phenomenon of action is only ‘discursively available’. This idea is found not in Kant’s conceptions of deliberation and causality, but in his treatment of agency as rational

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and thus principled, and the description of actions as therefore internal to what actions are. Guay attributes a similar view to Nietzsche on the basis of his treatment of (responsible) agency as somehow ‘necessary’ or ‘bound’ in relation to grounds and his characterization of psychological elements such as ‘wills’ and ‘drives’. Guay shows how the resulting position thus confutes a Humean position according to which the explanation of action depends on identifying motivational elements that fall outside of any discursive standpoint. He concludes by considering the implications of this account of action for the understanding of ethical considerations. Herman Siemens’s chapter, ‘Kant’s “Respect for the Law” as “Feeling of Power”: On (the Illusion of) Sovereignty’, further explores the motives of autonomous action as conceived by Kant and Nietzsche. Siemens begins with Kant’s attempt to demonstrate that pure reason can determine the will immediately and exclusively by appeal to a certain ‘Achtung’ (reverence or respect) for the law which, since it has its source in reason rather than feeling, is supposed to motivate without contaminating reason with sensible inclinations. Siemens argues that this presents a temporal and motivational incongruity: if, as Kant claims, Achtung comes after the successful motivation of the will by the moral law, as its effect, then it comes too late to do any motivational work. In this regard, Siemens argues that Nietzsche’s account of the ‘sovereign individual’ in the Genealogy is more persuasive. For the ‘memory of will’ on which such an individual’s ability to promise is based indicates the natural conditions and capacities needed to sustain Kantian Achtung over time, while the active ‘forgetting’ involved explains how consciousness can be cleared in acting in order to allow reason to determine the will freely. Siemens also shows how the comparison with Kantian Achtung throws light on Nietzsche’s account of the ‘Stolz’ (pride) involved in promising. For just as Achtung derives from the moral law’s overcoming our inclinations’ resistance, so Stolz derives from promising-​keeping’s overcoming resistances both within and without. Nonetheless, Siemens concludes by casting doubt on the sincerity of Nietzsche’s account of the ‘sovereign individual’. Siemens’s suspicion is that precisely because they treat freedom as advanced through the overcoming of resistances, Nietzsche must consider both Kantian Achtung and the sovereign individual’s ‘consciousness of power and freedom’ as involving a misunderstanding of the body, a form of self-​deception. For some of Nietzsche’s Nachlass notes on physiology suggest that the overcoming of resistances is illusory, and that the naturalist question of freedom must rather concern how the feeling of freedom or power ‘can be made ever more substantial and not illusory’ (NL 1880 4[216], KSA 9.154).

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David Owen’s chapter, ‘Freedom as Independence:  Kant and Nietzsche on Non-​domination, Self-​Love and the Rivalrous Emotions’, proposes that Nietzsche’s critical reformulation of Kantian autonomy and his understanding of the obstacles to it are best understood in different terms, those of the political contrast between freedom and servitude. Owen begins by drawing out Kant’s and Nietzsche’s respective conceptions of such freedom as independence, with particular reference to Kant’s Metaphysics of Morals and his essays on enlightenment and to Nietzsche’s account of ‘noble’ ethics. Owen proceeds to argue that Nietzsche’s conception succeeds in identifying and superseding a critical weakness in Kant’s –​namely, that Kant fails to distinguish and integrate independence understood as a legal status and independence conceived as an ethical status, a practical relationship to oneself. In particular, for Owen, Nietzsche effectively charges Kant with failing to acknowledge and resolve the problem that legal independence may be accompanied by ethical domination. Owen examines this charge as it is expressed in Nietzsche’s account of the ‘slave revolt’ in the Genealogy, and supports it with reference to Kant’s own claims. He concludes by considering Nietzsche’s treatment of the agon as an attempt to integrate both the legal and the ethical dimensions of freedom as independence. The following chapter, ‘Autonomy, Spiritual Illness and Theodicy in Kant and Nietzsche’ by Frederick Neuhouser, further explores Nietzsche’s concern with the realization of autonomy. In particular, Neuhouser claims that in the second essay of the Genealogy Nietzsche treats ‘bad conscience’ as a ‘spiritual illness’ that itself makes possible the spiritual health of autonomy. For, Neuhouser argues, if ‘life’ for Nietzsche is the increase of power through the imposition of order, then bad conscience makes life ‘spiritual’ by introducing the internal division, or reflexivity, that constitutes self-​legislation  –​along with the self-​ consciousness, use of concepts and language, normative evaluation and orientation to an overarching ‘ideal’ that self-​legislation requires. Moreover, while bad conscience clearly obstructs the healthy increase of power by imposing deceptions and sufferings on agents, Neuhouser suggests that the contrast with it is also necessary to envision the self-​consciousness and self-​affirmation of autonomy. Thus, Neuhouser argues, Nietzsche’s account of bad conscience constitutes a theodicy comparable to that offered by Kant in ‘Idea for a Universal History with a Cosmopolitan Purpose’. For just as Kant considers human beings’ ‘unsociable sociability’ to be justified by its making peaceful coexistence possible, so Nietzsche considers the bad conscience to be ‘justified’ by its making autonomy possible. Similarly to Owen, however, Neuhouser emphasizes that Nietzsche nonetheless differs from Kant in considering this development to be a matter

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not only of ‘external’ regulations, but also of ethics –​a difference that Neuhouser brings out by emphasizing Nietzsche’s sense of an ‘inner’ virtue of justice that is associated with autonomy and reflects the spiritual evolution involved. Robert B.  Louden undertakes a systematic defence of Kant’s conception of autonomy against such Nietzschean criticisms in the following chapter, ‘Phantom Duty? Nietzsche versus Königsbergian Chinadom’. Louden begins with the Kantian sense of unconditional and universal duty and the sceptical genealogy that Nietzsche’s account of ‘bad conscience’ provides of it. He argues that the contractual terms of the relationship between creditor and debtor that Nietzsche’s genealogy employs are inadequate not only because they presuppose the promise-​keeping that more readily explains contractual duties, but also because they neglect other relationships that might better explain the development of the sense of duty. Louden further argues that, as a role-​based duty, the duty to repay a debt can explain neither the unconditionality nor the qualifications of moral obligations and that, as a perfect positive obligation to others, it also cannot explain imperfect and negative obligations or obligations to oneself. Louden then turns to the sense of autonomy that Nietzsche proposes in opposition to the Kantian, ‘moral’ sense. Here Louden objects that to make ethical obligations conditional on ‘life-​enhancement’ and to limit their scope to one’s ‘equals’ would make the coordination of social life impossible in various ways, and would be inconsistent with Nietzsche’s own emphasis on the ‘creation’ of values. For Louden, then, not only does Nietzsche’s naturalistic scepticism about Kant’s account of autonomy miss its mark, revealing the greater sophistication of Kant’s account, but Nietzsche’s own conception of autonomy is an incoherent combination of individualism, ‘life’-​affirmation and creativity. The following chapter, Marco Brusotti’s ‘Spontaneity and Sovereignty: Nietzsche’s Concepts and Kant’s Philosophy’, raises further doubts about the plausibility of a Nietzschean conception of autonomy to rival Kant’s. Brusotti focuses on the metaphysical concept of spontaneity, crucial to Kant’s conception of the autonomous will, and he begins by showing that, in reaction to German idealism and in the wake of positivism, in the 1860s this concept had become problematic even for the early neo-​Kantians. He argues that, in this context, it is not surprising that Nietzsche too criticizes the ‘absolute’ or ‘free’ spontaneity invoked by the metaphysical tradition as well as by Kant. Brusotti proceeds to employ this context to consider the use of Kantian terms such as ‘responsibility’, ‘autonomy’ and ‘free will’ in Nietzsche’s description of the ‘sovereign individual’ in the Genealogy, and to consider whether this passage should be read as affirming, radicalizing or criticizing the Kantian conception. In particular,

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Brusotti argues that since the ‘freedom’ which the sovereign individual ascribes to himself and to his peers is not absolute spontaneity, this self-​ascription cannot have the same function as Kant’s postulate of absolute freedom. Rather, Brusotti claims, Nietzsche’s description of the sovereign individual is an implicit rejection of both Max Stirner’s and Eduard von Hartmann’s views about individuality and sovereignty, and the use of Kantian terms in the passage is an example of Nietzsche’s ability to use ‘a moral formula in a supramoral sense’ (BGE 257, KSA 5.205). Moreover, Brusotti argues, after the Genealogy Nietzsche seems to have abandoned even the ‘non-​metaphysical’ or ‘relative’ conception of spontaneity that he had developed from the early 1880s onwards, on the basis of his readings of anti-​Kantian authors such as Alexander Bain and Johann Julius Baumann. Thus, according to Brusotti, the sovereign individual’s ‘freedom’ is not really ‘freedom’ at all, but rather a form of self-​affirmation, and the main expression of a sovereign individual’s ‘pathos of distance’. Keith Ansell Pearson and Michael Ure’s chapter, ‘Contra Kant: Experimental Ethics in Guyau and Nietzsche’, pursues these doubts about Nietzsche’s Kantianism by arguing that he opposes Kantian ethics with a distinctively ‘experimental’ form of ethics. Ansell Pearson and Ure focus on Nietzsche’s critical treatment of Kant’s ethics in Daybreak and on his later response to the similarly critical treatment provided by the French moral philosopher Jean-​Marie Guyau. In particular, they argue that in rejecting Kant’s ethics for its universalism, asceticism and metaphysics, Nietzsche proposes an ethics of natural experiments to determine and promote the plural goods of individuals and the species. While sympathetic to this project, however, Ansell Pearson and Ure argue that in also rejecting Schopenhauer’s ethics of other-​regardingness, Nietzsche tends to conceive of these experiments and these goods in terms of an asocial, incommunicable individuality. This, Ansell Pearson and Ure claim, reflects a failure to appreciate that ethical experimentation requires an openness to others. In this respect, they consider Nietzsche’s ambivalent later response to Guyau to be significant. For although Guyau echoes much of Nietzsche’s critical treatment of Kant and his experimental alternative –​something that Nietzsche welcomes –​ he nonetheless conceives of experiments as promoting individuals’ sociability and the good of society  –​which Nietzsche criticizes. Ansell Pearson and Ure consequently propose that Nietzsche’s denial of this other-​regarding aspect can be remedied by the social aspect of Guyau’s account. In the final chapter, ‘Question or Answer? Kant, Nietzsche and the Practical Commitment of Philosophy’, Paul van Tongeren raises further doubts about the coherence of Nietzsche’s criticism of Kantian ethics by turning to Kant’s

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and Nietzsche’s respective conceptions of philosophical ethics. Van Tongeren proposes that although Kant and Nietzsche share the belief that philosophy is ultimately concerned with the question, ‘how to live?’, Nietzsche reformulates the question as ‘how to live under nihilism?’. For van Tongeren, this implies a fundamentally different approach to ethics and traditional moral concepts, according to which Kant’s ‘dream’ of an a priori solution to the problems of philosophy –​and especially that of morality –​is merely a ‘protective structure that was built to hide the absurdity of life and world’. Yet, crucially, van Tongeren insists that Nietzsche is aware of the fact that his attempted ‘revaluation of values’ itself presupposes such structures as its own point of departure, such that his attempt to escape nihilism is tortuously entangled with nihilism itself. Van Tongeren undertakes to demonstrate this in three ways, most extensively by exploring Kant’s and Nietzsche’s accounts of friendship and showing how Nietzsche’s critique of friendship inevitably reinstates the nihilistic structures evident in Kant’s own account.

Notes 1 The order of names here and on the cover of this volume is intended to indicate seniority, and not the editors’ relative contributions. 2 The most extensive discussions of Nietzsche’s relation to Kantian ethics are provided by Gerhardt (1992; 2011), Hill (2003), Anderson (2012) and Katsafanas (2013). Aspects of the relation are treated in parts of Knobe and Leiter (2007), Risse (2007), Gardner (2009), Gemes (2009), Janaway (2009), Owen (2009), Constâncio (2012), Bailey (2013) and Anderson (2013). Janaway (2007) and Clark and Dudrick (2012) also provide some relevant discussion. Kantian themes in Nietzsche’s politics are referred to in Ansell Pearson (1994; 2008), Owen (1995; 2008), Shaw (2007) and Allsobrook (2008). 3 For example, Acampora (2006) and Leiter (2011) argue that GM II 2 should not be taken as expressing Nietzsche’s own considered position and Owen (1995; 1999; 2009), Hill (2003), Ridley (1998; 2009), Janaway (2007; 2009) and Anderson (2012) interpret Nietzsche’s sense of freedom in individualist terms. 4 See Gerhardt (1992; 2011) and also Stegmaier (1994: 131–​138). 5 On Nietzsche’s critique of moral duty, see the chapters by Louden and Katsafanas, and in particular Katsafanas’s account of Nietzsche’s ‘Hegelian’ critique of the Kantian idea of a ‘pure’ derivation of duties. 6 On this, see Bailey (2012; 2013).

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7 On this difference, see Bailey (2012; 2013) and Constâncio (2012). 8 On this aspect, see Constâncio (2015). 9 As Gerhardt (1988: 104) has argued, Nietzsche treats power relations as mediated by perceptions, perspectives, interpretations, conceptualizations, communication signs, norms, rights, duties and so on, such that the equilibrium of power in a society always depends on some sort of ‘symbolic understanding’ or ‘agreement’ among its members –​that is, on a kind of ‘social contract’ or ‘compact’ (HH 446, KSA 2.290). See also Constâncio (2015: 89–​90). Of course, this does not prevent Nietzsche from rejecting social contract theory (see BGE 257 and GM II 17, KSA 5.205–​6, 324–​5) for, among other reasons, its assumption of asocial (or pre-​social) ‘selves’ or ‘subjects’. See Owen (1995; 2008) and Siemens (2015). 10 Rather than the social ‘pathos of distance’ of an aristocracy, then, what Nietzsche calls ‘higher culture’ involves ‘that other, more mysterious pathos’ which is ‘a demand for new expansions of distance within the soul itself, the development of states that are increasingly high, rare, distant, tautly drawn and comprehensive’, the spiritual pathos which fosters ‘the enhancement of the type “man”, the constant “self-​overcoming of man” ’ (BGE 257). On this, see Branco and Constâncio (forthcoming). 11 For another example of this, see Paul van Tongeren’s discussion of friendship in this volume. 12 See Constâncio (2017) and, on the nihilism of the ‘ascetic ideal’, Constâncio (2016). 13 On Nietzsche’s ‘naturalism’, compare Leiter (2002; 2013) with Williams (1995). 14 See Janaway and Robertson (2012b), and also Robertson’s chapter in this volume.

References Acampora, C. (2006), ‘On Sovereignty and Overhumanity: Why It Matters How We Read Nietzsche’s Genealogy II:2’, in C. Acampora (ed.), Nietzsche’s On the Genealogy of Morals: Critical Essays, 147–​161, Oxford: Rowman and Littlefield. Allsobrook, C. (2008), ‘Contingent Criticism: Bridging Ideology Critique and Genealogy’, in H. W. Siemens and V. Roodt (eds), Nietzsche, Power and Politics, 697–​717, Berlin: De Gruyter. Anderson, R. L. (2012), ‘What Is a Nietzschean Self?’, in C. Janaway and S. Robertson (eds), Nietzsche, Naturalism and Normativity, 202–​235, Oxford: Oxford University Press. Anderson, R. L. (2013), ‘Nietzsche on Autonomy’, in K. Gemes and J. Richardson (eds), The Oxford Handbook of Nietzsche, 432–​460, Oxford: Oxford University Press.

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Ansell Pearson, K. (1994), Nietzsche as a Political Thinker, Cambridge, Cambridge University Press. Ansell Pearson, K. (2008), ‘“Holding on to the Sublime”: Nietzsche on Philosophy’s Perception and Search for Greatness’, in H. W. Siemens and V. Roodt (eds), Nietzsche, Power and Politics, 767–​799, Berlin/​New York: De Gruyter. Bailey, T. (2012), ‘Vulnerabilities of Agency: Kant and Nietzsche on Political Community’, in J. Constâncio and M. J. M. Branco (eds), As the Spider Spins: Essays on Nietzsche’s Critique and Use of Language, 107–​127, Berlin/​Boston: De Gruyter. Bailey, T. (2013), ‘Nietzsche the Kantian?’, in K. Gemes and J. Richardson (eds), The Oxford Handbook of Nietzsche, 134–​159, Oxford: Oxford University Press. Branco, M. J. M. and Constâncio, J. (forthcoming), ‘Philosophy as “Free-​ Spiritedness”: Philosophical Evaluative Judgments and Post-​Kantian Aesthetics in Nietzsche’s Beyond Good and Evil’, in P. Katsafanas (ed.), Routledge Philosophy Minds: Nietzsche, London/​New York: Routledge. Clark, M., and Dudrick, D. (2012), The Soul of Nietzsche’s Beyond Good and Evil, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Constâncio, J. (2012), ‘“A Sort of Schema of Ourselves”: On Nietzsche’s “Ideal” and “Concept” of Freedom’, Nietzsche-​Studien 41: 127–​162. Constâncio, J. (2015), ‘Hegel and Nietzsche on Recognition and Power’, in K. Hay and L. R. Santos (eds), Nietzsche, German Idealism and Its Critics, 66–​99, Berlin/​ Boston: De Gruyter. Constâncio, J. (2016a), ‘The Consequences of Kant’s First Critique: Nietzsche on Truth and the Thing-​in-​Itself ’, in M. Brusotti and H. W. Siemens (eds), Nietzsche, Kant, and the Problem of Metaphysics, 103–108, London: Bloomsbury. Constâncio, J. (2016b), ‘Nietzsche on Nihilism (eine unersättliche Diskussion?)’, in A. Bertino, E. Poljakova, A. Rupschus, and B. Alberts (Hrsg.), Zur Philosophie der Orientierung, 83–​100, Berlin: De Gruyter. Gardner, S. (2009), ‘Nietzsche, the Self, and the Disunity of Philosophical Reason’, in K. Gemes and S. May (eds), Nietzsche on Freedom and Autonomy, 1–​31, Oxford/​ New York: Oxford University Press. Gemes, K. (2009), ‘Nietzsche on Free Will, Autonomy, and the Sovereign Individual’, in K. Gemes and S. May (eds), Nietzsche on Freedom and Autonomy, 33–​49, Oxford/​ New York: Oxford University Press. Gerhardt, V.(1988), ‘Das “Prinzip des Gleichgewichts”. Zum Verhältnis von Recht und Macht bei Nietzsche’, in V. Gerhardt, Pathos und Distanz. Studien zur Philosophie Friedrich Nietzsches, 98–​132, Stuttgart: Reclam. Gerhardt, V. (1992), ‘Selbstbegründung. Nietzsches Moral der Individualität’, Nietzsche-​ Studien 21: 28–​49. Gerhardt, V. (2011), Die Funken des freien Geistes: Neuere Aufsätze zu Nietzsches Philosophie der Zukunft, edited by J.-​C. Heilinger and N. Loukidelis, Berlin/​ Boston: De Gruyter.

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Hill, R. K. (2003), Nietzsche’s Critiques: The Kantian Foundations of His Thought, Oxford: Oxford University Press. Janaway, C. (2007), Beyond Selflessness: Reading Nietzsche’s Genealogy, Oxford: Oxford University Press. Janaway, C. (2009), ‘Autonomy, Affect and the Self in Nietzsche’s Project of Genealogy’, in K. Gemes and S. May (eds), Nietzsche on Freedom and Autonomy, 51–​68, Oxford: Oxford University Press. Janaway, C., and Robertson, S. (2012b), ‘Introduction: Nietzsche on Naturalism and Normativity’, in C. Janaway and S. Robertson (eds), Nietzsche, Naturalism and Normativity, 1–​19, Oxford: Oxford University Press. Katsafanas, P. (2013), Agency and the Foundations of Ethics: Nietzschean Constitutivism, Oxford: Oxford University Press. Knobe, J., and Leiter, B. (2007), ‘The Case for Nietzschean Moral Psychology’, in B. Leiter and N. Sinhababu (eds), Nietzsche and Morality, 83–​109, Oxford: Oxford University Press. Leiter, B. (2002), Nietzsche on Morality, London: Routledge. Leiter, B. (2011), ‘Who Is the “Sovereign Individual”? Nietzsche on Freedom’, in S. May (ed.), Nietzsche’s On the Genealogy of Morality: A Critical Guide, 101–​119, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Leiter, B. (2013), ‘Nietzsche’s Naturalism Reconsidered’, in K. Gemes and J. Richardson (eds), The Oxford Handbook of Nietzsche, 576–​598, Oxford: Oxford University Press. Owen, D. (1995), Nietzsche, Politics and Modernity: A Critique of Liberal Reason, London: Sage. Owen, D. (1999), ‘Nietzsche, Enlightenment and the Problem of Noble Ethics’, in J. Lippitt (ed.), Nietzsche’s Futures, 3–​29, London: Macmillan. Owen, D. (2008), ‘Nietzsche, Ethical Agency and the Problem of Democracy’, in H. W. Siemens and V. Roodt (eds), Nietzsche, Power and Politics, 143–​167, Berlin/​ New York: De Gruyter. Owen, D. (2009), ‘Autonomy, Self-​Respect and Self-​Love: Nietzsche on Ethical Agency’, in K. Gemes and S. May (eds), Nietzsche on Freedom and Autonomy, 197–​221, Oxford: Oxford University Press. Ridley, A. (1998), Nietzsche’s Conscience: Six Character Studies from the ‘Genealogy’, London: Cornell University Press. Ridley, A. (2009), ‘Nietzsche’s Intentions: What the Sovereign Individual Promises’, in K. Gemes and S. May (eds), Nietzsche on Freedom and Autonomy, 181–​195, Oxford: Oxford University Press. Risse, M. (2007), ‘Nietzschean “Animal Psychology” versus Kantian Ethics’, in B. Leiter and N. Sinhababu (eds), Nietzsche and Morality, 57–​82, Oxford: Oxford University Press. Shaw, T. (2007), Nietzsche’s Political Skepticism, Princeton: Princeton University Press.

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Siemens, H. W. (2015), ‘Nietzsche’s Socio-​physiology of the Self ’, in J. Constâncio, M. J. M. Branco, and B. Ryan (eds), Nietzsche and the Problem of Subjectivity, 629–​653, Berlin/​Boston: De Gruyter. Stegmaier, W. (1994), Nietzsches ‘Genealogie der Moral’, Darmstadt: Wissenschaftliche Buchgesellschaft. Williams, B. (1995), ‘Nietzsche’s Minimalist Moral Psychology’, in Making Sense of Humanity, 65–​76, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.

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The Problem of Normative Authority in Kant, Hegel and Nietzsche Paul Katsafanas

In quite different ways, Kant and Hegel argue that normative claims are justified only if they are manifestations of freedom. That is, claims such as ‘murder is wrong’, ‘you have reason not to lie’ or ‘you should take the means to your ends’ have authority over us only if these claims issue from or are preconditions for autonomous agency. Beyond this point of agreement, however, the differences between Kant and Hegel may seem enormous. Kant argues that autonomous agency yields a commitment to acting on the Categorical Imperative, which in turn generates specific claims about which actions are permissible and which are forbidden. Hegel rejects this idea, arguing that claims about what there is reason to do are inextricably linked to the practices and institutions of our historical milieu and that, in order to be justified, these practices and institutions must themselves be realizations of freedom. Proponents of each theory levy critiques at the other. Hegelians charge Kantians with relying on an excessively formal and ultimately contentless conception of autonomy, which is too attenuated to generate substantive normative conclusions. Kantians charge Hegelians with relying on an excessively substantive, concrete theory, which is so mired in the particularities of our current evaluative framework that it cannot make space for a comprehensive critique of this framework. While Kantians and Hegelians have developed sophisticated responses to these charges, I contend that there is an element of truth in each of the critiques, and one goal of this essay is to sketch them. However, my primary goal is to demonstrate that we can overcome these difficulties by turning to an unexpected source:  the work of Nietzsche. I  argue that Nietzsche provides an account of normative authority1 that incorporates seemingly incompatible elements of the

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Kantian and Hegelian accounts. In so doing, his work reveals the potential structure of a fully satisfying account of normative authority. Thus, attending to the dispute between Kant and Hegel and to the solution that I argue is offered by Nietzsche enables us to make progress on a central topic in ethics: the relationship between freedom and normative authority. The essay comprises four sections. Section 1 offers a brief review of Kant’s attempt to explain normative authority in terms of autonomy. Section 2 reconstructs Hegel’s critique of Kant and introduces Hegel’s alternative theory. Section 3 turns to Nietzsche, arguing that Nietzsche accepts the most appealing elements of the Kantian and Hegelian accounts. Unfortunately, though, these elements seem to be incompatible with one another. Accordingly, Section 4 explains how Nietzsche’s theory of normative authority resolves the tensions between these elements of the Kantian and Hegelian accounts. In particular, I will show that Nietzsche agrees with Hegel that we cannot derive a substantive ethic from the formal idea of autonomy. However, pace Hegel and with Kant, Nietzsche argues that we can extract one normative principle from this formal idea. This principle, which Nietzsche labels ‘will to power’, can then be used to critique the values and norms embodied in our social institutions and practices. Unlike Kant, however, Nietzsche denies that this principle extracted from the notion of autonomy can by itself generate any determinate content; on the contrary, it generates substantive normative conclusions only when brought to bear on the norms that are present in our social institutions and practices. I argue that the resultant theory overcomes both the charges that Hegelians level at Kantians and those that Kantians levy at Hegelians. In so doing, it yields a new and fruitful solution to the problem of normative authority.

1.  Kant on the problem of normative authority Normative claims invite the question of why they should hold sway over us. Kant proposed to answer this question by tying the authority of norms to our own activity: norms hold sway over us because we impose them on ourselves. Thus, Kant claims that the will must view itself ‘as the author of its principles independently of alien influences’ (GMS 448). If we consider a normative principle –​or, as Kant puts it, a ‘law’ –​that constrains the will, then the will must give itself this law: Hence the will is not merely subject to the law, but subject to it in such a way that it must be regarded as also giving law to itself and just because of this as first subject to the law (of which it can regard itself as the author). (GMS 431)

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Anything less would render the will heteronomous, or unfree: If the will seeks the law that is to determine it [. . .] in the character of any of its objects –​the result is always heteronomy. In that case the will does not give itself the law, but the object does so in virtue of its relation to the will. (GMS 441)

Thus, according to Kant, no external authority binds me to normative principles; rather, I  bind myself to principles, and therein arises their claim to authority over me. But how, exactly, is an appeal to self-​imposition supposed to answer the normative problem? It might seem that if you impose a principle on yourself, then its authority will have been legitimated  –​because, after all, you impose it on yourself. However, it might equally well seem that if you impose a principle on yourself, then its authority disappears –​because, after all, you can remove it as easily as you imposed it. There is thus a tension here. A normative principle is something that can constrain one’s will. However, if we attempt to explain the constraining authority of principles in terms of the will’s own operations, then it seems that the alleged constraint disappears: if I bind myself by a principle, then I can also unbind myself, in which case I was never really bound at all. This is a point that occupied a central position in nineteenth-​century discussions of value. Consider a passage from Hegel’s Philosophy of Right, in which Hegel considers the view that normative authority arises from the agent’s own acts of will: This implies that objective goodness is merely something constructed by my conviction, sustained by me alone, and that I, as lord and master, can make it come and go. As soon as I relate myself to something objective, it ceases to exist for me, and so I am poised above an immense void, conjuring up shapes and destroying them. (PR 140A)

Hegel here argues that if normative authority arose from an agent’s acts of will, then norms would not appear to the agent as objective constraints. Rather, the norms would appear as empty, ephemeral shapes –​for the agent could rescind the normative principle’s authority as easily as she could bestow it. The idea that we ‘create’ normative authority has no content, if the norms cannot constrain us. In sum, Kant’s idea seems to be that if you make a norm for yourself, then of course it binds you, for you are its author. But Hegel argues for the opposite conclusion: if you make a norm for yourself, then of course it cannot bind you, for its alleged authority is dependent on you. To the extent that norms are genuinely self-​imposed, they lose any authority to constrain us; they constrain us no more than our desires and whims do. Thus, the attempt to explain normative authority

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in terms of self-​imposition runs the risk of collapsing the distinction between norm and whim. Kant is, of course, aware of this potential problem and has a way of trying to solve it. He claims that although the authority of norms is explained by the fact that we impose them on ourselves, the content of these norms is not up to us: the injunction ‘be autonomous!’ imposes determinate constraints on what can be willed. The core idea is that in order to impose norms on ourselves at all, there are certain standards to which we become inescapably committed. The general form of Kant’s argument is familiar: we are committed to acting autonomously. Acting autonomously requires acting on a law or principle. The law cannot be hypothetical, i.e., tied to the realization of some goal or the satisfaction of some inclination, because the will would then be determined to action by something external to itself (i.e. an inclination or goal). Instead, the law must be categorical; it must be unconditionally valid. Kant states the content of this law as follows: ‘act only in accordance with that maxim through which you can at the same time will that it become a universal law’ (GMS 421). He argues that this law –​the Categorical Imperative –​rules out certain actions, thereby yielding determinate constraints on permissible actions. So, the commitment to autonomy entails certain constraints on our actions. This is why Kant, if his argument were successful, would have the resources to respond to the Hegelian objection. We cannot simply bind and unbind ourselves with any norms we happen to fancy; rather, although we impose norms on ourselves, these norms constrain us in a way that is not up to us –​for which norms we impose on ourselves is not fully up to us.

2.  Hegel on the problem of normative authority 2.1  Hegel’s objection to Kant Hegel claims that Kant’s view operates with an exceedingly ‘formal’ or ‘abstract’ conception of autonomy, which renders the theory an ‘empty formalism’ (PR 135). There is some controversy over how Hegel’s formalism objection should be interpreted, but on the most common interpretation, Hegel is claiming that Kant’s universalization procedure does not yield any determinate conclusions.2 To see what Hegel has in mind, consider one of Kant’s applications of the Categorical Imperative in the Critique of Practical Reason. Kant asks us to consider a case in which I have been given some money to hold as a deposit, the

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individual making the deposit has died and no record of the deposit exists. I ask myself whether I can keep this money for myself rather than reporting it to the deceased’s heirs. Kant claims that we can apply the Categorical Imperative by asking whether the following principle could be willed as a universal law: ‘that everyone may deny a deposit of which no one can produce a proof ’. He claims that it cannot, for ‘I at once become aware that such a principle, viewed as a law, would annihilate itself, because the result would be that there would be no deposits’ (KpV 27–​28). In other words, this maxim fails the universalization test, because if it were universalized then the institution of making deposits would disappear, and it would therefore no longer be possible to act on the maxim. Hegel objects by arguing that [t]‌he absence of property contains in itself just as little contradiction as the non-​existence of this or that nation, family, etc., or the death of the whole human race. But if it is already established on other grounds and presupposed that property and human life are to exist and be respected, then indeed it is a contradiction to commit theft or murder; a contradiction must be a contradiction of something, i.e. of some content presupposed from the start as a fixed principle. (PR 135R)

Thus Hegel agrees with Kant that if the maxim of stealing deposits –​or, more generally, property  –​in order to enrich oneself were universalized, the institution of deposit-​making would disappear. However, Hegel claims that unless we presuppose, as a fixed principle, that deposits (or, more generally, property) should exist, this generates no contradiction at all. The general point is well put in the Phenomenology: It would be strange, too, if tautology, the principle of contradiction, which is admitted to be only a formal principle for the cognition of theoretical truth, i.e., something which is quite indifferent to truth and falsehood, were supposed to be more than this for the cognition of practical truth. (PhG 431)

In other words, no one thinks that a contradiction test can tell us which theoretical beliefs are true. The beliefs ‘it is raining here’ and ‘it is not raining here’ are contradictory, so we know that they cannot both be true; but we cannot conclude, from the mere fact that they are contradictory, which one is true. Hegel’s central point is that it is odd to think that things would be different in the practical realm. As the property case illustrates, certain maxims will generate contradictions with the institution of property; but this does not tell us whether the maxim is immoral or the institution of property is immoral. To make that judgment –​to move from the idea that two propositions are contradictory to the idea

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that one of them is correct –​we need to appeal to some independent grounds for determining what is moral.3

2.2  Hegel’s alternative to the Kantian strategy These criticisms notwithstanding, Hegel does not think that Kantian morality should be completely abandoned. Rather, he characteristically argues that the failures of Kantian morality point us towards a more encompassing understanding of normativity –​an understanding that resolves the problems to which Kantian morality succumbs. Specifically, although Hegel agrees with Kant that normative considerations are authoritative only if they can be viewed as products of freedom, Hegel interprets this requirement in a different way than does Kant.4 To bring out the differences between Kant and Hegel, let’s focus on two questions: 1. What is the object of assessment? 2. How is the assessment conducted? Kant’s answers to the two questions are clear:  the agent assesses her maxims, and the assessment consists in determining whether the maxim passes the Categorical Imperative test. For Hegel, however, the answers are considerably more complex. First, the individual does not assess maxims, but social institutions and practices. Second, the individual does not attempt to show that these institutions and practices are consistent with or derivable from some additional, external standard. Rather, she attempts to show that they are institutions or practices that make freedom possible on their own, immanent terms. Let me explain. With regard to the first point, Hegel famously argues that the agent’s freedom can be achieved only within and through certain social institutions and practices. Simply put, I realize my freedom by conforming to the ethical practices or laws of my society –​or, as Hegel puts it, ‘only that will which obeys the law is free’ (VG 115/​97). However, not just any set of institutions and practices will enable individuals to realize their freedom. Consider a simple example: if the laws and institutions of my society condemn me to a life of slavery, I will not be able fully to realize my freedom by conforming to those laws and institutions. Thus, Hegel claims that we can ask, of any set of social institutions or practices, whether they enable all individuals to realize their freedom. The institutions count as ‘rational’, in Hegel’s terminology, or ‘justified’, in ours, if they meet this condition, making it possible for all individuals to realize themselves as self-​determined entities.5 Moreover, the institutions and practices must be such that subjects are not

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only in fact free, but are also capable of recognizing their own freedom. That is, individuals must be able to view these institutions and practices as expressions of their own wills, so that participation in them is conceived as free activity.6 In The Philosophy of Right, Hegel argues that three modern social institutions –​ the family, civil society and the liberal state  –​jointly fulfill these conditions (PR 157ff.).7 So, this is the first difference between Kant and Hegel:  rather than assessing individual maxims, Hegel assesses our social institutions and practices, asking whether they are realizations of freedom. This brings us to the second question:  how, exactly, is this Hegelian assessment to be conducted? Unlike Kant, Hegel does not offer an independent criterion (such as the Categorical Imperative) by means of which we can assess institutions and practices. Rather, he offers an immanent critique of the institutions and practices. Such a critique proceeds by showing that institutions or practices are inadequate not in light of some independent standard, but in light of their own standards. But what are these standards? As noted above, Hegel argues that the underlying standard implicit in modern social institutions is freedom. In assessing these social institutions, then, we ask whether they enable all individuals to realize their capacity for freedom. Hegel’s idea is that many institutions and practices are internally inconsistent or unstable, to the extent that once these tensions are revealed the institutions or practices can no longer be maintained. A Hegelian critique proceeds by uncovering these tensions; it shows that there is a disparity between the current social institutions and the ideals that they strive to realize. In other words, a Hegelian critique shows that existing social institutions may be imperfect realizations of their own principles. Given Hegel’s claim that the internal ideal of modern social institutions is freedom, this critique takes the form of revealing tensions between extant social institutions and freedom.8 This sketch of Hegel’s ethical theory, although exceedingly brief, will be sufficient to bring out two important ways in which the Hegelian view differs from the Kantian view. First, there is the well-​known difference in the theories’ starting points: Kant begins with the isolated individual who considers whether he can universalize his maxims, whereas Hegel begins with a socially situated individual who reflects on the laws and institutions of her own society. Second, there is a difference that may be less obvious: normative assessment is carried out in strikingly distinct ways. The Kantian proposes maxims and considers whether they can be willed as universal laws. In this sense, Kantianism has a foundationalist structure:  Kantians attempt to derive all particular normative claims from one formal principle, the Categorical Imperative.9 The Hegelian does not

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attempt to derive normative claims from a formal principle; rather, she begins with a determinate set of contingent principles, embodied in the social institutions of her society, and asks whether these principles are realizations of freedom. (Given Hegel’s argument that modern social institutions are designed to realize freedom, the question of whether institutions realize their own principles and the question of whether they realize freedom turn out to be one and the same.) So while Kant’s theory attempts to derive norms from a formal procedure, Hegel’s theory uses a formal criterion (the idea of freedom) not to derive, but to assess norms that are embodied in the society. Asking whether the normative claims embodied in these institutions and practices are justified does not involve showing that they can be derived from anything at all. Rather, justifying the norms requires showing that, although they are historically contingent, they actualize our freedom. Accordingly, Hegel’s theory has a non-​foundationalist structure.

3.  The relationship between the Nietzschean, Kantian and Hegelian theories of normative authority With these results at hand, we can examine the relationship between the Nietzschean, Kantian and Hegelian theories of normative authority. In this section, I show that Nietzsche’s theory incorporates the most appealing features of the Kantian and Hegelian accounts and also rejects certain problematic aspects of these accounts.10 Unfortunately, Nietzsche’s resultant theory seems incoherent –​in trying to be both Kantian and Hegelian, it runs the risk of collapsing into unintelligibility. However, Section 4 argues that what looks like a problem is actually Nietzsche’s deepest insight: we can, in fact, reconcile the most promising aspects of the Kantian and Hegelian theories, and thereby produce a satisfying account of normative authority.

3.1  Nietzsche agrees that freedom places determinate constraints on what can be willed One of the most prominent themes in Nietzsche’s work is the idea that we must critically assess our values. He famously calls for a ‘revaluation of all values’, writing, ‘[W]‌e need a critique of moral values, for once the value of these values must itself be called into question’ (GM Preface 6, KSA 5.253). To revalue a value is

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to ask whether it merits the status that we accord to it. For example, to revalue egalitarianism would be to engage in a critical assessment of the value that we place on egalitarianism. We might begin by asking whether egalitarianism is really valuable, or whether our valuation of egalitarianism is justified, or whether everyone has reason to value egalitarianism. Interestingly, Nietzsche associates revaluation with the achievement of freedom. Nietzsche’s account of freedom has received increased attention in the past decade. Brian Leiter (2002) and other interpreters have argued convincingly that Nietzsche rejects certain conceptions of freedom, such as the libertarian conception. However, a number of interpreters have shown that Nietzsche has another conception of freedom, as self-​determination or autonomy.11 Thus, while Nietzsche inveighs against the idea of freedom as an uncaused cause (BGE 21, KSA 5.35–​6), he praises those who possess the ‘power of self-​determination’ (GS 347, KSA 3.583), and he regularly speaks of ‘evaluating on one’s own’, being ‘sovereign’ and being ‘autonomous’ (HH Preface 3, KSA 2.15 ff., GM II.1–​2, KSA 5.291–​4). He writes that the free individual ‘is obliged to have recourse to his own law-​giving’ (BGE 262, KSA 5.216) and that free individuals enjoy a ‘constraint and perfection under a law [Gesetz] of their own’ (GS 290, KSA 3.530). In a strikingly Kantian moment, he even claims that free individuals are those who ‘give themselves laws [Sich-​selber-​Gesetzgebenden]’ (GS 335, KSA 3.563; cf. D 104, KSA 3.92; GS 117, KSA 3.475–​6; A 54, KSA 6.236–​7).12 As these passages indicate, Nietzsche links freedom to revaluation. In fact, Nietzsche often treats as interchangeable the ‘will to self-​determination’, ‘evaluating on one’s own account’ and the ‘will to free will’ (HH I Preface 3, KSA 2.17). He argues that if an agent remains under the sway of values that have not been subjected to this process of critical revaluation, then the agent is unfree: The fettered spirit takes up his position, not for reasons, but out of habit; he is a Christian, for example, not because he has knowledge of the various religions and has chosen between them [.  . .] he encountered Christianity [.  . .] and adopted it without reasons, as a man born in a wine-​producing country becomes a wine drinker. (HH I 226, KSA 2.190)13

So it is clear that Nietzsche has a conception of freedom as self-​determination, according to which an agent counts as self-​determining or autonomous if she acts on values that have been subjected to the process of ‘revaluation’. But how exactly does Nietzsche conceive of the relationship between freedom and revaluation? Kant thought we could derive specific normative claims from the idea of freedom; Hegel argued that while we cannot do that, we can

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use freedom to assess extant normative claims. If Nietzsche adopted a view of either kind, the link between freedom and revaluation would be clear: revaluation would consist of determining whether particular values conflict with the demands of freedom. Might Nietzsche embrace a view according to which freedom generates constraints on legitimate norms? It is natural to think that the answer is ‘no’, as it is common to interpret Nietzsche as a radical subjectivist who argues that there are no constraints on our values and norms. But this interpretation does not withstand scrutiny. In a number of passages, Nietzsche directly asserts that certain values are incompatible with freedom. He quite bluntly states that autonomy is incompatible with the acceptance of traditional moral values, writing that ‘ “autonomous” and “moral” are mutually exclusive’ (GM II 2, KSA 5.293). This idea is present even in Nietzsche’s earlier works, where he claims that ‘what characterizes the free spirit is [. . .] that he has liberated himself from tradition’ (HH I 225, KSA 2.189). In these passages, Nietzsche makes it clear that the autonomous individual cannot accept the values of traditional morality.14 So the demand for autonomy rules out certain values. Aside from these textual problems with attributing subjectivism to Nietzsche, there is a deeper, philosophical problem. As I argued regarding Kant in the first section, if the demand for freedom did not impose any constraints on what could be valued, then the appeal to freedom could not explain normative authority. Rather than explaining the authority of norms, it would explain norms away: it would reduce norms to whims, for norms would constrain us no more than our whims do. This suggests that we should take Nietzsche’s claim at face value: freedom requires revaluation, and revaluation does indeed place constraints on what can be valued. How can we make sense of this claim? Nietzsche cannot be adopting Kant’s strategy, for he regards the Kantian arguments linking autonomy to the Categorical Imperative as highly dubious. He condemns the stiff and decorous Tartuffery of the old Kant as he lures on the dialectical bypaths that lead to his ‘categorical imperative’ –​really lead astray and seduce –​ this spectacle makes us smile, as we are fastidious and find it quite amusing to watch closely the subtle tricks of old moralists and preachers of morals. (BGE 5, KSA 5.19)

Here, Nietzsche openly rejects Kant’s argument for the Categorical Imperative. Why is this? In several passages, Nietzsche claims that the Categorical Imperative does not generate any content, but merely reiterates the provincial moral beliefs

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of Kant’s day (GS 335, KSA 3.563, A 12, KSA 6.178–​9). In other words, Nietzsche alleges that the CI simply enables post hoc rationalizations of existing moral beliefs (Hegel’s discussion of property is a perfect example: both the necessity and the abolition of property can be justified in terms of the CI). Moreover, Nietzsche criticizes the structure of the Kantian theory, denying that any moral theory could have the kind of foundationalist structure that Kant envisions.15 In this light, he writes that Kant and other moral philosophers ‘make one laugh’ with their quest for ‘a rational foundation for morality’. He claims that ‘seen clearly in the light of day’, their theories amount to nothing more than a ‘scholarly form of good faith in the dominant morality, a new way of expressing it’ (BGE 186, KSA 5.105–​6). Rather than attempting to derive morality from some foundational principle, Nietzsche suggests that any substantive moral inquiry will start with a deep scrutiny of the existing values and norms embodied implicitly or explicitly in our social institutions, philosophical theories and ways of life: One should, in all strictness, admit what will be needful here for a long time to come, what alone is provisionally justified here: assembly of material, conceptual comprehension and arrangement of a vast domain of delicate value-feelings and value-​distinctions which live, grow, beget and perish and perhaps attempts to display the more frequent and recurring forms of these living crystallizations as preparation of a typology of morals. To be sure: one has not been so modest hitherto. Philosophers one and all have, with a straightlaced seriousness that provokes laughter, demanded something much higher, more pretentious, more solemn of themselves as soon as they have concerned themselves with morality as a science: they wanted to furnish the rational ground of morality [. . .] How far from their clumsy pride was that apparently insignificant task left in dust and mildew, the task of description, although the most delicate hands and senses could hardly be delicate enough for it! (BGE 186, KSA 5.105–​6)

Mocking the (Kantian) project of furnishing a ‘rational ground’ for morality  –​a foundational principle from which we can derive a correct moral system  –​Nietzsche claims that the first task for philosophy is the collection of information about the system of value-​feelings and value-​distinctions that are present in society. I take it that part of what Nietzsche means to highlight, by using the unusual terms ‘value-​feelings and value-​distinction [Werthgefühle und Werthunterschiede]’ rather than ‘value’, is that our values are not simply manifest in our reflective, conscious judgments, but are ensconced in less reflective forms of relating to the world:  in our intuitive reactions, distinctions, ways of classifying or distinguishing actions, and indeed in our feelings. These unreflective

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manifestations of values, Nietzsche suggests, cannot simply be read off the surface of society, or discovered in armchair reflections about what is valuable; rather, Nietzsche claims, discovering our tacit normative commitments requires ‘the most delicate hands and senses’. The following sections of Beyond Good and Evil continue the discussion of this point and provide illustrations of it: BGE 189–​90, KSA 5.110–​11, for example, trace cultural norms and expectations to concealed, tacit evaluative judgments. BGE 212, KSA 5.145–​7, sums up this conception of evaluative inquiry; there, Nietzsche writes that philosophers’ task is to apply ‘the knife vivisectionally to the chest of the very virtues of their time’, revealing the hypocrisy, contradictions, hidden motives and defunct ideals at the heart of their society’s way of life. In these passages, then, we see that Nietzschean moral inquiry takes the form of an investigation of our cultural practices, expectations and institutions, bringing to light their implicit principles, motives and ideals. So Nietzsche rejects three core elements of the Kantian account: the argument linking autonomy to the Categorical Imperative, the claim that the Categorical Imperative generates determinate content and the foundationalist structure of Kant’s theory.16 Recall that in the second section I  established that Hegel objects to precisely these three aspects of Kant’s account. Is it possible, then, that Nietzsche endorses a Hegelian theory of normative authority? In the next section I argue that Nietzsche does, indeed, adopt certain elements of Hegel’s account. Yet Nietzsche’s theory is not fully Hegelian, since it departs from Hegel in two crucial ways.

3.2  How Hegelian could Nietzsche’s theory be? Hegel tells us that it is a mistake to think that we can derive a correct set of ethical norms from some formal principle, such as the Categorical Imperative. Rather, we must always begin with a historically situated set of norms. But rather than just accepting these norms as given, we must assess them to see whether they are conducive to the realization of freedom. They can fail by this criterion, and if they do, they must be modified or rejected. Nietzsche agrees with Hegel’s claim that we do not justify norms by deriving them from some formal principle. This is why he mocks the attempt to provide a ‘rational ground’ for morality (BGE 186, KSA 5.105). Moreover, Nietzsche’s critiques of our current values and practices often look quite similar to the Hegelian process of assessing extant norms and values to see whether they live up to their aspirations. To choose a simple example, Nietzsche repeatedly argues that our practice of compassion fails to live up to its own aims: while compassion

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aims to aid the object of the compassion, Nietzsche contends that attention to the psychology of compassion will reveal that it harms both the compassionate person and the object of her compassion.17 If this were correct, then we would have reason to reconsider the value placed on compassion. Many of Nietzsche’s critiques can profitably be read in this fashion, for they often proceed by bringing to light hidden contradictions and inconsistencies in our practices and our dominant values. In other words, many of Nietzsche’s critiques consist in showing, as he puts it, that ‘the motives of this morality stand opposed to its principle’ (GS 21, KSA 3.393). Nietzsche therefore seems to be in agreement with Hegel’s two departures from Kant: namely, Hegel’s claim that we assess norms embodied in social institutions and practices, and Hegel’s anti-​foundationalist method of critiquing norms. However, a closer examination reveals that Nietzsche and Hegel part company on the second point. Indeed, there are two important, and related, differences between them in this regard: Nietzsche and Hegel disagree on how far-​reaching the critique of modern norms will be, and they also disagree on whether the critique appeals to some principle that is external to the currently dominant set of norms.18 Let’s begin with the first difference. For Hegel, the critique is restricted to determining whether our social institutions and laws live up to their aspirations: while they aspire to be realizations of human freedom, they can fall short of that ideal, and therefore require modification. Nietzsche, however, pursues a far more radical critique: he wants to show that the very ideals to which these institutions aspire must be reassessed. As he puts it in the Genealogy, What if a symptom of regression were inherent in the ‘good’, likewise a danger, a seduction, a poison, a narcotic, through which the present was possibly living at the expense of the future? [. . .] So that precisely morality would be to blame if the highest power and splendor actually possible to the type man were never in fact attained? So that precisely morality were the danger of dangers? (GM Preface 6, KSA 5.253)

In his own work, Nietzsche critiques some of our most cherished values. To choose just a few examples: he complains that the effects of ‘liberal institutions’ are ‘known well enough: they undermine the will to power’ (TI Skirmishes 38, KSA 6.139); he writes, ‘well-​being as you understand it –​that is no goal, that seems to us an end, a state that soon makes man ridiculous and contemptible’ (BGE 225, KSA 5.161); what ‘has been called morality’, Nietzsche insists, will ‘deprive existence of its great character’ (EH Destiny 4, KSA 6.369); and he warns that ‘our weak,

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unmanly social concepts of good and evil and their tremendous ascendancy over body and soul have finally weakened all bodies and souls and snapped the self-​reliant, independent, unprejudiced men, the pillars of a strong civilization’ (D 163, KSA 3.146; cf. BGE 62, KSA 5.81–​83; A 5; KSA 6.171). Thus, Nietzsche clearly believes that modern values are fundamentally misguided. This brings us to the second difference. Hegel and Nietzsche’s disagreement on how extensive the critiques of modern norms will be reflects a deeper disagreement concerning the way in which the critique is conducted. Whereas Hegel engages in immanent critiques, showing that institutions fail to realize their own ideals, Nietzsche argues that in order to carry out an adequate critique of existing norms, we need to employ some evaluative standard external to the norms themselves. As Nietzsche puts it, ‘ “Thoughts about moral prejudices”, if they are not meant to be prejudices about prejudices, presuppose a position outside morality’ (GS 380, KSA 3.633). Unlike Hegel, Nietzsche thinks that we must do far more than simply locate the values to which our practices aspire, and assess their conformity to these values. We need to uncover a standard that can be used to evaluate the basic aspirations of these institutions.19 This marks a profound difference between the Hegelian and Nietzschean accounts of normative authority –​and it brings Nietzsche somewhat closer to the Kantian perspective.

3.3  A theory that is both Kantian and Hegelian? Just as Kant’s theory can seem too attenuated, too contentless, Hegel’s can seem too concrete, too anchored in the particularities of the current social situation. Whereas Hegel wants to show that the current set of social institutions is more or less correct, and strives towards an appropriate ideal, Nietzsche wants to levy a much more radical critique: he aims to show that the basic values informing these social institutions, the basic values that these institutions strive to realize, must be reassessed. And yet, like both Kant and Hegel, Nietzsche wants the authority of norms to be grounded in the fact that they are, in some sense, self-​imposed. So Nietzsche’s view seems to hover uneasily between Kant’s and Hegel’s, in that he endorses all of the following claims: 1. The demand for autonomy produces determinate constraints on what is to be valued. 2. However, we do not justify values by showing that they are derived from or entailed by the demand for autonomy.

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3. Rather, we use autonomy to assess our current values. 4. Yet autonomy somehow permits, and indeed requires, a radical critique of these current values. To recap: Kant and Hegel both endorse versions of (1). Kant denies (2), whereas Hegel accepts (2). Kant and Hegel both accept (3), but interpret the requirement in different ways. Kant and Hegel both deny (4). Is there a way of making sense of these claims, which might appear to be in conflict with one another? The next section argues that there is, and that Nietzsche himself shows us the way to it.

4.  Nietzsche’s solution to the problem of normative authority What looks like a problem is actually one of Nietzsche’s deepest insights:  the four claims mentioned above can be rendered consistent. The solution lies in recognizing that when Nietzsche speaks of revaluation and freedom, he often incorporates a third concept as well: ‘will to power [Wille zur Macht]’. This is the concept that enables Nietzsche to produce a novel account of normative authority, which reconciles the seemingly incompatible elements of the Kantian and Hegelian theories. Nietzsche draws two connections between will to power, autonomy and revaluation. First, he argues that our principle of assessment should be will to power. As he puts it, ‘[W]‌hat is good? Everything that heightens in human beings the feeling of power, the will to power, power itself ’ (A 2, KSA 6.170). Or again: the ‘principle of revaluation’ or the ‘standard by which the value of moral evaluation is to be determined’ is ‘will to power’ (NL 1885–​6 2[131], KSA 12.129–​32). In other words, revaluation is to be conducted in terms of will to power. Second, Nietzsche claims that we achieve freedom to the extent that we manifest will to power. For example, he identifies the ‘instinct for freedom’ with the ‘will to power’ (GM II 18, KSA 5.326), he claims that a free will is equivalent to a ‘strong’ will, i.e., a will that manifests will to power (BGE 21, KSA 5.35–​6)20 and, in a section entitled ‘my conception of freedom’, he claims that freedom is measured according to the degree of power expressed by an individual.21 Taking these claims into account, I  submit that the basic structure of Nietzsche’s theory is as follows: an agent is autonomous if she acts on values that

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have been ‘revalued’ or critically assessed; this critical assessment is conducted in terms of will to power; therefore, an agent is autonomous if she acts on values that are consistent with –​but not derived from –​will to power. This is what Nietzsche claims when he says that freedom should be understood in terms of will to power. The question, of course, is what all of this means. What is will to power? Why must revaluation be conducted in terms of will to power? The following sections address these two questions. This will enable us to see how Nietzsche’s theory manages to combine the most appealing features of the Kantian and Hegelian accounts of normative authority, while avoiding some of their potential problems.

4.1  What is will to power? To begin, we need to understand what Nietzsche means by will to power. It is important not to be misled by the surface connotations of the term ‘power [Macht]’. In ordinary discourse, the claim that people will power would suggest that they strive to dominate, tyrannize and subjugate others. But this is not what Nietzsche has in mind. Power is a term of art, for Nietzsche; he gives it a special sense. Nietzsche characterizes will to power in language that seems deliberately vague; he associates power with a family of terms, such as ‘giving form’, ‘expanding’, ‘imprinting’, ‘overcoming’, ‘mastering’ and ‘shaping’.22 He writes that will to power is ‘the will’s wanting to move forward and again and again become master over that which stands in its way’ (NL 1887–​8 11[75], KSA 13.37–​8/​WLN 213). Moreover, Nietzsche does not attribute a specific end to those who will power; he claims that the will to power is manifest in activities that are directed at disparate ends. For example, Nietzsche tells us that human beings will power by engaging in activities as diverse as pursuing knowledge, creating art, participating in athletic endeavors and writing novels (cf. GM II 17–​18, KSA 5.324–​7, et passim). In order to see exactly what will to power is, we will need to determine what these characterizations of will to power have in common. Although Nietzsche’s descriptions tend to be rather elliptical, he does repeatedly and insistently emphasize two points about will to power. First, he claims that will to power can be permanently satisfied, but instead involves perpetual striving. The wish to preserve oneself is the symptom of a condition of distress, of a limitation of the really fundamental instinct of life which aims at the expansion of

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power, and wishing for that frequently risks and even sacrifices self-​preservation. (GS 349, KSA 3.585–​6) A condition once achieved would seem to be obliged to preserve itself  –​ Spinoza’s law of ‘self-​preservation’ ought really to put a stop to change: but this law is false, the opposite is true. It can be shown most clearly that every living thing does everything it can not to preserve itself but to become more. (NL 1888 14[121], KSA 13.300-​1/​WLN 257)

In contrasting the desire to ‘preserve oneself ’ –​that is, the desire to abide in one’s current state –​with the will to power, Nietzsche emphasizes that will to power involves perpetual striving.23 Second, will to power manifests itself as a particular form of striving: striving for resistances or obstacles. Consider the following passages: The will to power can express itself only against resistances; therefore it seeks that which resists it. (NL 1887 9[151], KSA 12.424/​WLN 165) The will is never satisfied unless it has opponents and resistance. (NL 1887–​8 11[75], KSA 13.37–​8/​WLN 213)

When Nietzsche refers to ‘resistances’, he means impediments or challenges to one’s ends. The structure to which Nietzsche is drawing attention is clearest in the case of competitive or skillful endeavors, such as sports and games. Consider activities such as marathon running or chess playing. Part of the point of these activities is that they are challenging, introducing obstacles or difficulties that must be overcome. One tries to run twenty-​six miles, rather than twenty-​six feet, because the former is so difficult and the latter so easy; analogously, one plays chess (and other games) precisely because one wants to encounter a challenging task, which requires skill and ingenuity to complete successfully. In short, agents who choose to engage in marathon running and chess playing seem actively to seek obstacles or resistances, in order to surmount them. In the passages quoted above, Nietzsche makes it clear that willing power involves doing just this. Of course, one does not want these challenges or resistances to serve as permanent impediments to one’s ends; rather, one wants to overcome the impediments. As Nietzsche puts it, the agent seeks to ‘again and again [become] master over that which stands in its way’ (NL 1887–​8 11[75], KSA 13.37–​8/​WLN 213). For example, the marathoner does not want to confront the pain and difficulty of running twenty-​six miles, and find herself incapable of overcoming them, collapsing after five miles; rather, she wants to hold herself to the course of action despite the challenges involved in doing so. She wants to overcome these obstacles by completing the race. This is why the runner sets herself a goal that is

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achievable, albeit only with great difficulty. She does not set herself an impossible task such as running two hundred miles, nor does she set herself a less challenging task such as running five miles; she sets herself a challenging-​yet-​ achievable task. To return to the other example, chess players typically do the same thing: a typical chess player will seek to compete with players who are at similar or slightly superior levels of skill, rather than to play against opponents who are easily defeated or virtually undefeatable. In sum, Nietzsche seems to identify willing power with the activity of perpetually seeking and overcoming resistance to one’s ends. I therefore conclude that, as Bernard Reginster (2006: 127) puts it, ‘will to power, in the last analysis, is a will to the very activity of overcoming resistance’ (emphasis in the original).24 It is also important to notice that power is not a first-​order end; rather, an agent wills power in the course of pursuing some other, more determinate end, such as completing a race or finishing a game. We might express this point by saying that will to power is a higher-​order aim. In order to will power, one must aim at a determinate first-​order goal, such as running twenty-​six miles or checkmating one’s opponent. Will to power does not compete with these determinate goals; rather, it modifies the way in which these goals are pursued. As John Richardson (1996: 21) helpfully puts it, will to power is not a claim about what we will; it is a claim about how we will.

4.2  Will to power as a claim about the essential nature of willing Now we know what will to power is. But there is another central component to Nietzsche’s account, which we will need to understand in order to uncover the connection between will to power and freedom. This is Nietzsche’s claim that every action manifests will to power. He often expresses this point by claiming that will to power is the ‘essence [Wesen, Essenz]’ of willing or of life. There are a number of passages in the published works and unpublished notebooks that make this point. For example, Nietzsche argues that ‘the essence of life’ is simply ‘its will to power’ (GM II 12, KSA 5.314). He tells us that ‘life itself ’ is a striving for ‘power’ (A 6); ‘the will to power’ is ‘the will of life’ (BGE 259, KSA 5.207–​8); ‘life simply is will to power’ (BGE 259, KSA 5.208); ‘the genuinely basic drive of life [Lebens-​Grundtriebes] [. . .] aims at the expansion of power [. . .] the will to power [. . .] is just the will of life [Wille des Lebens]’ (GS 349, KSA 3.586). In Thus Spoke Zarathustra, he gives this a more imagistic expression: ‘where there is life is there also will: not will to life but –​thus I teach you –​will to power’ (Z II On Self-​Overcoming, KSA 4.149). The point is even clearer in the notebooks,

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where he writes: ‘All “purposes”, “goals”, “meanings” are only modes of expression and metamorphoses of the single will that is inherent in all events: the will to power. To have purposes, aims, intentions, willing in general, is the same thing as willing to be stronger, willing to grow –​and, in addition, willing the means to this’ (NL 1887–​8 11[96], KSA 13.44–​5/​WLN 217); ‘Everything that happens out of intentions can be reduced to the intention of increasing power’ (NL 1885–​6 2[88], KSA 12.105); ‘Striving is nothing other than striving after power’ (NL 1888 14[81], KSA 13.260–​1). In these quotations, Nietzsche suggests that every episode of willing, or every action, aims at power. As noted in the previous section, will to power is a higher-​order aim: an agent pursues power in the course of pursuing some other, more determinate end. So Nietzsche’s claim that every action aims at power amounts to this: whenever a person wills an end, this episode of willing has a certain structure. It consists not only in the aim of achieving some end, but also in the aim of encountering and overcoming resistance in the pursuit of that end.25 The notion that we strive to encounter and overcome resistance is most plausible in relation to competitive or skillful actions, but Nietzsche argues that this striving is a feature of all human actions. He has several arguments for this claim, but, given their complexity, I lack the space to reconstruct them here. For present purposes, it will be sufficient to note that one of Nietzsche’s arguments takes the following form. First, he argues that all human actions are motivated by a distinctive kind of psychological state, the ‘drive [Trieb]’. Drives differ from desires in that while many desires are dispositions to realize some determinate end, drives are dispositions to engage in characteristic forms of activity. The aggressive drive, for example, does not motivate us to achieve any particular goal, but merely to engage in aggressive activity. For this reason, Nietzsche argues that any action that is motivated by a drive will have a higher-​order aim of encountering and overcoming resistance: the drive motivates us to engage in characteristic patterns of activity, and manifesting these patterns of activity involves continual overcoming of the resistances to that activity.26 If Nietzsche is correct that all human activities are drive-​motivated –​obviously, no small claim –​then it follows that all human actions have a higher-​order aim of encountering and overcoming resistance. In Nietzsche’s terminology, this is equivalent to the claim that all human actions manifest will to power.27 The claim that all human actions manifest will to power is initially counterintuitive. Let me mention three important qualifications, which may render the view somewhat more plausible.28 First, Nietzsche argues that we can aim

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at X without realizing that we aim at X, indeed without the possibility of aiming at X ever entering our conscious reflection. So his claim that every action aims at power is not contradicted by the obvious fact that many individuals do not understand their actions as having this aim. Second, Nietzsche contends that many actions manifest the aim of power only in a half-​hearted, conflicted or distorted fashion. Third, Nietzsche is not claiming that will to power is our strongest aim, nor is he claiming that it is typically decisive in determining what we will do. On the contrary, will to power has only a minor influence on most of our actions. It is not, so to speak, the strength of this motive that renders it important; it is the motive’s omnipresence, which shapes our actions in a gradual and aggregative fashion. Even with these qualifications in place, Nietzsche’s claim that every action aims at power is highly controversial. However, our task here is not to assess this aspect of Nietzsche’s account, but to determine the structure of Nietzsche’s theory of normative authority. Thus, for present purposes, we can grant the claim and ask whether Nietzsche can use it to generate a compelling account of normative authority.

4.3  Why does freedom require revaluation in terms of power? Given the premise that every action aims at power, Nietzsche is able to show that revaluation must be conducted in terms of will to power. His argument can be reconstructed as follows: i.

An agent is self-​determining iff she acts on values whose authority has been critically assessed. ii. In order to critically assess a value, one must determine whether the value minimizes conflicts with will to power. Those values that minimize these conflicts are acceptable, whereas those that do not are to be rejected. iii. Therefore, if an agent is self-​determining, then she acts on values that minimize conflict with will to power. Premise (i) was defended in Section 3.1. Explicating and defending the crucial premise (ii) is the task of this section. As I  mentioned at the beginning of Section 4, Nietzsche’s commitment to premise (ii) is clear; he repeatedly emphasizes that will to power is the ‘standard by which the value of moral evaluation is to be determined’ (NL 1885–​6 2[131], KSA 129–​32); cf. A 2, A 6, KSA 6.170, 172; NL 1887–​8 11[83], KSA 13.39–​40).

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He suggests that any value that conflicts with will to power should be rejected, and that values that promote or maximize will to power should be affirmed. But how does Nietzsche argue for this claim? I submit that there are several steps. First, Nietzsche seems to rely on the assumption that aims are reason-​ providing. More precisely:  if you have an aim, you have a (pro tanto) reason to fulfill it.29 This is a relatively uncontroversial claim; even the most minimal accounts of practical reason, including most variants of the Humean account, accept this claim.30 Second, it follows that if an aim is present in every episode of action, then whenever an agent acts she will have a pro tanto reason to fulfill this aim. So, given Nietzsche’s claim that all actions aim at power, whenever a human being acts, she will have a reason to seek power. Third, notice that these will-​to-​power-​derived reasons will sometimes conflict with the reasons springing from our other aims and values. Take a simple example: suppose an individual values a form of complacency. This individual believes that it is valuable to be content with what one already has; one should not seek further accomplishments. This value clearly conflicts with will to power.31 As the prior sections argued, to will power is to aim at resistances and challenges. So we have a straightforward conflict: valuing complacency involves judging that there is reason not to confront challenges, but aiming at power commits us to the claim that there is reason to confront challenges. If an agent accepts the value of complacency, then he will be committed to contradictory propositions about how to act. What does this tell us about the value of complacency? It is clear enough that, in presenting will to power as the standard of revaluation, Nietzsche wants us to reject any value that conflicts with will to power in this way. In making this claim, Nietzsche relies on the inescapability of will to power. If he is correct in arguing that will to power is an essential feature of action, then this aim cannot be reassessed or altered; the fact that every action aims at power generates an inescapable, pro tanto reason to seek power. However, other aims and values can be reassessed and altered. For example, we could –​and many do –​regard complacency as not valuable, or even as disvaluable. So Nietzsche’s point is simple: when there is a conflict between the will to power and some other value or aim, the only way in which we can alleviate the conflict is by modifying the other value or aim.32 Let me mention a complication, though. On Nietzsche’s account every action aims at power. Thus, even an agent who values complacency will be aiming at power, albeit in a conflicted, distorted or half-​hearted manner. Part of what it is

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to become free, on Nietzsche’s theory, is to render this aim of power less conflicted and distorted; to do this, one minimizes conflicts among one’s aims.33 I submit that Nietzsche takes these points to establish (ii). Given (ii), the conclusion (iii) follows: if an agent is self-​determining, then she acts on values that minimize conflict with will to power. In short: freedom requires critical assessment of one’s values, and this critical assessment consists in revaluing one’s values in light of power.

4.4  The structure of Nietzsche’s theory I have only been able to sketch the structure of Nietzsche’s theory here. Suppose, though, that the theory is defensible. We can then ask what the consequences would be:  what kind of explanation of normative authority would the theory generate? We saw that Nietzsche’s theory incorporates four central claims, which I will repeat here: 1. The demand for autonomy produces determinate constraints on what is to be valued. 2. However, we do not justify values by showing that they are derived from or entailed by the demand for autonomy. 3. Rather, we use autonomy to assess our current values. 4. Yet autonomy somehow permits, and indeed requires, a radical critique of these current values. The interpretation that I have proposed does, in fact, reconcile these claims. First, notice that the demand for autonomy entails that we must revalue our values in light of will to power. So the demand for autonomy does generate a determinate constraint on permissible values:  we are to adopt those values that minimize or eliminate conflict with will to power. Thus, condition (1) is fulfilled. Second, on Nietzsche’s view, we do not justify the authority of a value by showing that it derives from or is entailed by autonomy. Nietzsche does argue that one normative principle can be derived from the features of autonomous willing: the claim that we have reason to will power. But it should be clear that we are not going to be able to derive much additional content from this claim. For example, there is no way of moving from the idea that we aim to encounter and overcome resistance to the idea that we should not lie, or that we should not murder. On the contrary, lying and murdering are ways –​possibly quite good ways –​of

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willing power. Fortunately, Nietzsche’s will to power doctrine is not meant to function as a foundational principle from which we derive all other normative claims. Rather, as the prior sections explained, will to power is intended to serve as a ‘principle of revaluation’. That is, the will to power generates a standard in terms of which we are to assess all other values. So Nietzsche grounds one normative principle in facts about our agential nature, and uses this principle not to derive, but to assess, the other values that we embrace. In this respect, Nietzsche’s theory looks more Hegelian than Kantian: rather than attempting to derive our values from a formal principle, we use a formal principle to assess our current, historically contingent set of values. The resultant theory does not have a foundationalist structure, of the sort that Nietzsche clearly denounces; but it does give one value a privileged status, and it uses that value as a criterion or principle of revaluation. Thus, conditions (2) and (3) are fulfilled. Finally, the fact that power has a privileged status enables us to mount a radical critique of our current set of values and social institutions –​a critique that may reveal them not merely to fall short of their own ideals, but to be deeply misguided in the ideals they strive to realize. Power’s privileged status gives us, as Nietzsche puts it, ‘a position outside morality’, in terms of which we can reassess even our most basic values (GS 380, KSA 3.632–​3). Thus, condition (4) is fulfilled. So my proposed interpretation of Nietzsche’s theory fulfills the four conditions. Nietzsche’s theory incorporates the most appealing features of the Kantian and Hegelian views: it is a non-​foundationalist ethic, which nevertheless explains normative authority through an appeal to autonomy, and allows for a radical critique of our current values. And the importance of this result extends beyond questions of Nietzsche interpretation: if the argument is correct, then we can ground normativity in an ineluctable aim, assess other norms and values for consistency with this aim and thereby generate a non-​foundationalist, autonomy-​based ethical theory. Of course, in this essay I  have only sketched the structure of this theory; I have not explored the particular normative results that the theory generates. Nietzsche claims that these results are far-​reaching: he treats his theory as serving to indict many of our most cherished values, such as equality, democracy, compassion and the condemnation of suffering. Determining the precise ways in which these values conflict with power is no easy task; it requires subtle investigations of their cultural and psychological effects, as well as examinations of the forms of life that they foster, the ideals that they embody and the pictures of the self on which they rely. I cannot address these complex topics here. My

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hope, though, is that this essay’s analysis of the structure of Nietzsche’s theory of normative authority puts us in a position to address these fascinating normative questions.34

5.  Conclusion I have argued that will to power is the red thread linking Nietzsche’s claims about revaluation and freedom. Appreciating this point enables us to see how Nietzsche can reconcile seemingly incompatible elements of the Kantian and Hegelian accounts of normative authority. Let me summarize the results. First, Kant, Hegel and Nietzsche share a common foundational idea: they believe that the authority of normative claims can be justified only by showing that these norms are, in some sense, self-​imposed or autonomous. In other words, no realist construal of norms would be satisfactory; any legitimate norm must have its source in us. However, this project gives rise to a problem: does the injunction ‘be autonomous!’ impose any substantive constraints on the content of norms? If not, we face the charge that Hegel levies against Kant: the injunction has no content, so nothing could count as not fulfilling the demand. Kant thinks he has a solution to this problem: he argues that autonomy yields commitment to the Categorical Imperative, and that the Categorical Imperative does, in fact, generate determinate normative content. Yet Hegel, and later Nietzsche, deny that Kant succeeds: they contend that the Categorical Imperative is just an empty formalism, which either merely reiterates the moral demands of Kant’s society, or generates no content whatsoever. This leads Hegel to his theory of Sittlichkeit, or ethical life. According to Hegel, we do not derive moral content from the formal idea of freedom. Rather, we use the idea of freedom to assess existing social institutions and practices, seeking to determine whether they are realizations of freedom. While there are many differences between Hegel and Nietzsche on this score, I have argued that Nietzsche’s theory incorporates the Hegelian claim that we use the idea of freedom to assess existing moral norms. However, unlike Hegel, Nietzsche believes that one norm can be extracted from the bare idea of freedom, independently of any facts about the particular system of values, practices and institutions that the individual inhabits. This norm is will to power. Its connection to freedom and its independence from

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extant social norms gives it a position outside of our current ethical norms, making possible a radical critique of these norms. Nietzsche’s theory therefore incorporates seemingly disparate elements of the Kantian and Hegelian accounts, generating a unique and, I believe, philosophically fruitful solution to the problem of normative authority. Indeed, if one can be forgiven for expressing it in Hegelian terms, Nietzsche’s larger project can be profitably viewed as an attempt to sublate the Kantian and Hegelian accounts of normative authority, showing that each is a partial and one-​sided truth that finds correct expression in Nietzsche’s own theory.35

Notes 1 I will use the phrase ‘account of normative authority’ to refer to an explanation of what makes normative claims legitimately binding for us. For example, ‘murder is wrong’ and ‘eating vegetables is wrong’ both purport to be claims according to which we should regulate our actions, but presumably the former is legitimate or justified in a way that the latter is not. A theory of normative authority explains why this is so. 2 Wood (1990) presents a helpful survey of several other possible readings. See also ‘Hegel’s Ethical Rationalism,’ in Pippin (1997). 3 Kantians argue that this objection is based on a misunderstanding: the contradiction does not depend on the idea that any particular institutions or practices should exist. Rather, it arises because the agent is attempting to act on a maxim that, once universalized, would no longer be efficacious for its intended purpose. For a reply of this kind, see Korsgaard (1996) and Wood (1990). 4 Hegel claims that the Philosophy of Right’s central task is to show how ‘the system of right is the realm of actualized freedom’ (PR 4). He emphasizes this point throughout the book, writing that ‘ethicality is the idea of freedom as the living good that has its knowing, willing, and, through its acting, its actuality, in self-​ consciousness’ (PR 142), and ‘the ethical is the system of these determinations of the idea; this is what constitutes its rationality. In this way it is freedom’ (PR 145). 5 Hegel writes, ‘Within the state, rationality consists concretely –​in terms of its content –​in the unity of objective freedom (i.e., of universal substantial willing) and subjective freedom (i.e., of the individual human’s knowing and willing, which seeks its particular ends)’ (PR 258). In several passages, he emphasizes that society must enable the freedom of all individuals. For example, he writes that society requires the ‘well-​being of all’ (PR 125; emphasis added), and he argues that it is necessary

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Paul Katsafanas that ‘every individual’s livelihood and well-​being be treated and actualized as rightful’ (PR 230). Thus, after writing, ‘only that will which obeys the law is free,’ Hegel continues, ‘for it obeys itself and is self-​sufficient and therefore free’ (VG 115/​97). Elsewhere, he puts the point as follows: ‘[T]‌he laws and powers of ethical substance are not something alien to the subject. Instead, the subject bears witness to them as to its own essence, within which it has its feelings of being a self, within which it lives as in its own element, an element it does not distinguish from itself ’ (PR 147; cf. PR 258). The full argument for these claims occupies PR 157–​360. See especially PR 157–​8, 181–​8 and 257–​9. Helpful secondary literature on these points includes Houlgate (1991), Neuhouser (2000), Pinkard (2002), Pippin (2008) and Wood (1990). Consider an example, which I will borrow from Frederick Neuhouser. Neuhouser (2000) asks us to consider the modern democratic system of electing political officials, wherein each citizen is given one vote. He writes, ‘The practice of “one person, one vote” embodies an ideal of political equality that is imperfectly realized so long as political campaigns are financed by the “donations” of a few wealthy individuals or corporations’ (258). In other words, we can see that the current practice of providing each adult citizen with one vote aspires to realize the ideal of political equality: each individual should have an equal say. However, we can also see that our social institutions do not fulfill this ideal perfectly, because wealthy individuals are able to exert more control over the political process than poor individuals. Thus, we can critique the current electoral system by showing that it is an imperfect realization of the ideal to which it aspires. This is an immanent critique, appealing not to some external standard, but to the standards internal to the practice itself. The term ‘foundationalist’ needs clarification. Typically, foundationalism is the view that there are two types of justified beliefs: mediately justified beliefs, whose justification depends on their relation to other beliefs; and immediately justified beliefs, whose justification does not depend on any other beliefs. A parallel version of foundationalism in ethics would be the view that certain ethical claims are immediately justified. Kant certainly is not a foundationalist in that sense; rather, the clearest examples of this type of ethical foundationalism would be ethical intuitionist accounts, such as that defended by W. D. Ross. However, there is a second sense of foundationalism. A philosopher counts as an ethical foundationalist in this second sense if he maintains both that there is one or more fundamental ethical principle from which all other, more specific ethical claims are derived, and that this fundamental ethical principle is not immediately justified. Kant is a foundationalist in this sense: the Categorical Imperative is the fundamental ethical principle, and it is justified by appeal to its connection to rationality or autonomy.

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(For a helpful discussion of ethical foundationalism, see Timmons (1987); my distinctions in this footnote largely follow his account.) 10 I do not aim to establish that Nietzsche self-​consciously envisioned his project as reconciling Kantian and Hegelian elements. Rather, my aim is simply to show that Nietzsche’s project does, in fact, reconcile these elements. However, my approach does invite a question: while it is well known that Nietzsche was deeply engaged with Kant, how thoroughly did he know Hegel’s works? There is evidence that he was familiar with Hegel’s work. In a letter of 1865, Nietzsche mentions that he is studying one of Hegel’s texts (he does not say which one), and in 1873 he reads Hegel’s Lectures on the Philosophy of History. Nietzsche also encountered extensive treatments of Hegel through secondary sources: he attended and thought highly of Jakob Burckhardt’s 1870 lectures, which discussed Hegel at length, and he studied F. A. Lange’s and Schopenhauer’s expositions of Hegel. Indeed, he had enough familiarity with Hegel to reject Schopenhauer’s reading, chiding Schopenhauer for his ‘unintelligent rage’ against Hegel (BGE 204, KSA 5.130), and in later works he praises Hegel, calling him a ‘genius’ and listing him as one of only three philosophers who produced a ‘great insight’ (BGE 252, KSA 5.195–​6, and GS 357, KSA 3.597 ff.). For discussions of Hegel’s influence on Nietzsche, see Brobjer (2008), Houlgate (2004) and Dudley (2007). For a very helpful discussion of Kant’s influence on Nietzsche, see Bailey (2013). 11 See Bailey (2003) and (2013), Gemes (2006), Guay (2002), Janaway (2006), Reginster (2003) and Richardson (2005). As Bailey (2013: 150) puts it, ‘Nietzsche’s account of the “sovereign individual” . . . echoes the Kantian conception of “autonomy” as an agent’s treating agency, or “will”, itself as the highest and unconditional value’. I address this topic in Katsafanas (2014). 12 In Thus Spoke Zarathustra, Nietzsche gives this an imagistic expression, claiming that the question of whether someone is free can be rephrased in the following way: ‘Can you give yourself your own evil and your own good and hang your own will over yourself as a law?’ (Z I On the Way of the Creator, KSA 4.80 ff.). 13 While this passage is from an early text, and therefore might be taken not to represent Nietzsche’s mature view, the passages from GS, GM and BGE quoted in the previous paragraph suggest the same claim: freedom requires revaluation. 14 See also GS 335, GS 347, KSA 3.560 ff., 581 ff.; A 9, A 54, KSA 6.175–​6, 236–​7 and the closing sections of the Genealogy. 15 For a discussion of the sense in which Kant is a foundationalist, see note 9, above. 16 This list is not exhaustive; Nietzsche objects to other aspects of Kant’s account as well. For example, Bailey (2013: 151) notes that Nietzsche also differs from Kant

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Paul Katsafanas in ‘admitting different degrees of agency and therefore moral significance among agents and thus substantially modifying the egalitarianism or universality standard required by Kantian moral judgment’. And, of course, Nietzsche rejects Kant’s account of agency; see Katsafanas (2014) for a discussion. For a helpful discussion of this point, see Reginster (2006, 186ff.). An additional and very significant difference between Hegel and Nietzsche –​a difference that I lack the space to investigate here –​lies in the importance, for Hegel, of mutual recognition. While this notion plays a crucial role in Hegel’s account of selfhood and normativity, Nietzsche rarely mentions it. One exception is his talk of mutual recognition among restricted groups, such as the ancient nobility. Thus, in BGE 211, KSA 144–​5, Nietzsche claims that Kant and Hegel merely adopt the dominant values of their times, and ‘identify them and reduce them to formulas’. He contrasts this with the work of ‘real philosophers’. Nietzsche argues that real philosophers must do more than simply accept and codify the dominant value; they must ‘apply the knife of vivisection to the virtues of their time’ (BGE 212, KSA 5.145) and create new values. The surrounding context makes it clear that Nietzsche’s talk of strong and weak wills should be understood in terms of will to power, for the two sections following this remark discuss his notion of will to power: BGE 22, KSA 5.37, introduces the notion of will to power; BGE 23, KSA 5.38–​9, claims that psychology is the ‘path to the fundamental problems’ and that psychology should be understood in terms of ‘the doctrine of the development of the will to power’. In this passage, Nietzsche claims that freedom is measured ‘according to the resistance which must be overcome’. Below, I will argue that Nietzsche associates will to power with overcoming resistance; accordingly, this passage associates freedom with degree of will to power. See GM II 18, KSA 5.325–​7; GS 349, KSA 3.585–​6; BGE 259, KSA 5.207–​8; Z II On Self-​Overcoming, KSA 4.1469; NL 1887–​8 11[75], KSA 13.37–​8. Compare Alexander Nehamas’s (1985: 79) claim that ‘willing as an activity does not have an aim that is distinct from it; if it can be said to aim at anything at all, that can only be its own continuation. Willing is an activity that tends to perpetuate itself, and this tendency to the perpetuation of activity . . . is what Nietzsche tries to describe by the obscure and often misleading term “will to power” ’. Heidegger (1979 vol. I: 37) concurs: ‘will to power is will to will’. Reginster (2006) argues for this characterization at length. My analysis of will to power is indebted to his work. This is why Nietzsche says that ‘all “purposes”, “goals”, “meanings” are only modes of expression and metamorphoses of one will that is inherent in all events: the will to power’ (NL 1887–​8 11[96], KSA 13.44–​5/​WLN 217; emphasis added). He

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is not claiming that every goal is a means to power; rather, he is claiming that whenever we will any goal at all, we express will to power by also willing resistance to that goal. 26 More precisely, Nietzsche argues that what it is for something to aim at power is for it to be drive-​motivated. Will to power is not an independent drive, but a description of the structure of drive-​motivated actions. 27 I defend my interpretation of Nietzsche on will to power in Katsafanas (2013). 28 I discuss these qualifications at length in Katsafanas (2013). 29 A pro tanto reason is a reason that has some weight, but nonetheless may be outweighed by other reasons. For example, if I aim to get to my office within ten minutes, and if doing so requires driving at ninety miles per hour, I have a pro tanto reason to drive at this speed. Nevertheless, this reason is outweighed by reasons provided by my other aims, such as my aims of driving safely and minimizing potential harm to others. 30 There is a complication: some philosophers, reluctant to count seemingly immoral aims as generating reasons, argue that we should express the relevant normative claim differently. It is not that aims provide us with reasons; rather, if we have an aim, then we have reason either to fulfill the aim or to give up the aim. For an example of such an account, see Broome (1999). This point does not affect the argument given above, so I ignore it in what follows. 31 There is a complication, though: the complacent actions will themselves be manifestations of will to power. I address this below. 32 Above, I speak of minimizing conflicts with will to power. Why not, instead, speak of maximizing the expression of power? This is a difficult topic, which I address in c­ hapter 7 of Katsafanas (2013). Briefly, I interpret Nietzsche as suggesting that conflicts between will to power and other values are pervasive and ineradicable; although different sets of values conflict to greater and lesser extents with the values arising from our agential nature, there is no set of values that would completely eliminate conflict. In order to manage this conflict, we ought to embrace the sets of values that conflict as little as possible with will to power. 33 There is an alternative explanation here. Drawing on ideas from Müller-​L auter (1971), we could distinguish between actions that manifest growth or expansion of will to power, and actions that instead only aim at a form of self-​preservation. The complacent actions, though manifesting will to power, would manifest only the degenerate form of will to power that aims at self-​preservation. Thus, rather than analysing the complacency case in terms of conflicting aims (as I suggest above), we could analyse it in terms of degenerate manifestations of will to power. I think these suggestions are in fact perfectly compatible, for we can understand a degenerate manifestation

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of power as a manifestation that fails to fulfill the aim of power completely, or fulfills it only to a minimal degree. 34 I discuss some of the normative consequences of Nietzsche’s view in c­ hapters 7–​8 of Katsafanas (2013). 35 Many thanks to Tom Bailey and João Constâncio for their insightful comments on this essay.

References Bailey, T. (2003), ‘Nietzsche’s Kantian Ethics’, International Studies in Philosophy 35 (3): 5–​27. Bailey, T. (2013), ‘Nietzsche the Kantian?’, in K. Gemes and J. Richardson (eds.), The Oxford Handbook of Nietzsche, 134–​59, Oxford: Oxford University Press. Brobjer, T. (2008), Nietzsche’s Philosophical Context, Urbana-​Champaign, IL: University of Illinois Press. Broome, J. (1999), ‘Normative Requirements’, Ratio 12 (4): 398–​419. Dudley, W. (2007), Hegel, Nietzsche, and Philosophy: Thinking Freedom, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Gemes, K. (2006), ‘Nietzsche on Free Will, Autonomy and the Sovereign Individual’, Aristotelian Society Supplementary Volume 80: 321–​38. Guay, R. (2002), ‘Nietzsche on Freedom’, European Journal of Philosophy 10 (3): 302–​27. Heidegger, M. (1979), Nietzsche, trans. D. F. Krell, New York: Harper and Row. Houlgate, S. (1991), Freedom, Truth and History: An Introduction to Hegel’s Philosophy, New York: Routledge. Houlgate, S. (2004), Nietzsche, Hegel, and the Criticism of Metaphysics, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Janaway, C. (2006), ‘Nietzsche on Free Will, Autonomy and the Sovereign Individual’, Aristotelian Society Supplementary Volume 80: 339–​57. Katsafanas, P. (2013), Agency and the Foundations of Ethics: Nietzschean Constitutivism, Oxford: Oxford University Press. Katsafanas, P. (2014), ‘Nietzsche and Kant on the Will: Two Models of Reflective Agency’, Philosophy and Phenomenological Research 89 (1): 185–​216. Korsgaard, C. (1996), Creating the Kingdom of Ends, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Leiter, B. (2002), Nietzsche on Morality, London: Routledge. Müller-​Lauter, W. (1971), Nietzsche. Seine Philosophie der Gegensätze und die Gegensätze seiner Philosophie, Berlin: De Gruyter. Nehamas, A. (1985), Nietzsche: Life as Literature, Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press. Neuhouser, F. (2000), Foundations of Hegel’s Social Theory, Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press. Pinkard, T. (2002), German Philosophy 1760–​1860: The Legacy of Idealism, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.

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Pippin, R. (1997), Idealism and Modernism, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Pippin, R. (2008), Hegel’s Practical Philosophy: Rational Agency as Ethical Life, New York: Cambridge University Press. Reginster, B. (2003), ‘What Is a Free Spirit? Nietzsche on Fanaticism’, Archiv für Geschichte der Philosophie 85: 51–​85. Reginster, B. (2006), The Affirmation of Life, Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press. Richardson, J. (1996), Nietzsche’s System, New York: Oxford University Press. Richardson, J. (2005), ‘Nietzschean and Kantian Freedoms’, International Studies in Philosophy 37: 149–​62. Timmons, M. (1987), ‘Foundationalism and the Structure of Ethical Justification’, Ethics 97 (3): 595–​609. Wood, A. (1990), Hegel’s Ethical Thought, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.

Translations of Kant’s works Kant, I. (1998), Critique of Pure Reason, ed. P. Guyer and A. Wood, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Kant, I. (1998), Groundwork of the Metaphysics of Morals, ed. M. Gregor, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Kant, I. (2002), Critique of Practical Reason, trans. W. Pluhar, Indianapolis/​ Cambridge: Hackett.

Translations and abbreviations of Hegel’s works PhG  Hegel, G. W. F. (1979), The Phenomenology of Spirit, trans. A. V. Miller, Oxford: Oxford University Press. VG  Hegel, G. W. F. (1994), Vorlesung über die Philosophy des Geistes 1827–​8, ed. B. Tuschling, Felix Meiner: Hamburg. PR  Hegel, G. W. F. (2002), The Philosophy of Right, trans. A. White, Newburyport, MA: Focus.

Translations and editions of Nietzsche’s works Kaufmann, W. (1968), Friedrich Nietzsche, The Will to Power, ed. Kaufmann, W., trans. W. Kaufmann and R. J. Hollingdale, New York: Random House. Nietzsche, F. (1954), The Antichrist, trans. W. Kaufmann, New York: Viking. Nietzsche, F. (1954), Thus Spoke Zarathustra, trans. W. Kaufmann, New York: Viking. Nietzsche, F. (1954), Twilight of the Idols, trans. W. Kaufmann, New York: Viking.

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Nietzsche, F. (1968), Beyond Good and Evil, trans. W. Kaufmann, New York: Modern Library. Nietzsche, F. (1968), Ecce Homo, trans. W. Kaufmann, New York: Modern Library. Nietzsche, F. (1968), On the Genealogy of Morals, trans. W. Kaufmann, New York: Modern Library. Nietzsche, F. (1974), The Gay Science, trans. W. Kaufmann, New York: Vintage. Nietzsche, F. (1982), Daybreak, ed. and trans. R. J. Hollingdale, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Nietzsche, F. (1986), Human, All Too Human, ed. and trans. R. J. Hollingdale, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Nietzsche, F. (2003), Writings from the Late Notebooks, ed. R. Bittner, trans. Kate Sturge, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press (quoted as WLN).

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Normativity and Moral Psychology Nietzsche’s Critique of Kantian Universality Simon Robertson

That Nietzsche opposes Kant’s vision of morality should hardly be news. Peculiarly, though, rather little has been done to systematically set out even the broad character of this contretemps, let  alone pinpoint and evaluate its finer details.1 This chapter begins to redress that neglect, by reconstructing Nietzsche’s critical engagement with Kant’s assumption that practical normative laws must be universal in scope. This assumption is pivotal to at least two arguments central to Kant’s entire moral philosophy: his derivation of the Categorical Imperative2 from the concept and motive of duty, and his justification of morality via rational autonomy. My aim is to show that Nietzsche puts serious critical pressure on both arguments and thus on one of Kant’s most important conclusions:  the conclusion, namely, that morality represents an objectively justified normative standpoint because the moral laws an autonomous agent gives herself are binding on all rational agents. My argument is cumulative. Given the topic’s comparative neglect, Section 1 situates Nietzsche’s opposition to Kant within the context of their respective ethical projects. Section 2 introduces Kant’s derivation of the Categorical Imperative. Section 3 presents the initial Nietzschean challenge to it. This amounts to a well-​motivated denial of Kant’s assumption that practical normative laws, including those implicating moral duties, have to be universal across agents. Nietzsche also wants to show that no such laws are necessarily universal in Kant’s sense, however. Section 4 therefore explores his rationales for this stronger thesis and his critique of Kant’s attempted justification of morality via autonomy. One key conclusion is that Nietzsche’s challenge retains bite against

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‘first-​personal’ readings of Kant according to which an autonomous agent’s own practical standpoint commits her to morality.

1.  Scene setting Nietzsche’s overarching ethical program is his envisaged ‘revaluation of all values’. This is a multifaceted project, both critical and positive, that we can structure as follows. Negatively, it involves a critique of prevailing ‘morality’, in turn comprising two elements: one substantive, in which Nietzsche calls into question the value of morality, on grounds that it is antagonistic to the highest forms of human flourishing and excellence; the other metaethical, by which he challenges various foundational, objectivist presuppositions holding morality in place. The positive project then advances a demoralized perfectionist ideal valorizing the highest forms of flourishing and excellence.3 Kant is a paradigmatic representative of the enterprise ‘morality’ Nietzsche attacks. Consonant with his more general revaluative ambitions, Nietzsche’s opposition to Kant’s conception of morality has three principal foci: the disvalue of the normative ideals it propagates; the conceptual apparatus via which Kant seeks to explicate and justify it as normatively authoritative; and the attending conceptions of free will and autonomy this justificatory endeavour rests on. To set the scene, it will be useful to briefly outline each. Morality’s disvalue. Nietzsche’s animating critical concern is a substantive, normative–​evaluative one. He thinks that morality is overall disvaluable because inimical to the highest forms of human flourishing and excellence –​ goods that at least some people, notably ‘free spirits’ or ‘higher types’, have reason to pursue and realize.4 Thus, he suggests, morality is ‘detrimental precisely to [those] higher men’ (BGE 228, KSA 5.165) representative of the ‘highest human type’ (GM Preface 6, KSA 5.253) –​to ‘men of great creativity, the really great men according to my understanding’ (NL 1885 37[8]‌, KSA 11.580–​3). Indeed, ‘nothing stands more malignantly in the way of their rise and evolution . . . than what in Europe is today called simply “morality” ’ (ibid.) (cf. BGE 62, KSA 5.81–​3; GM III 14, KSA 5.367–​72; A 5, 24, KSA 6.171, 191–​3; EH Destiny 4, KSA 6.367–​9). Although it is typically assumed that morality ‘promot[es] the progress of human existence’, Nietzsche asks:  ‘What . . . if the opposite were the case? . . . So that none other than morality itself would be the culprit if the highest power and splendour of the human type, in itself a possibility, were never to be reached? So that morality would constitute the danger of all

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dangers?’ (GM Preface 6, KSA 5.253). He is not desisting from the implicature here: he does think morality disvaluable.5 Regarding Kant specifically, he urges that both the content of Kantian morality and the theoretical apparatus Kant deploys in its service are ‘expressions of decline, of the final exhaustion of life’; indeed, they are antagonistic to the ‘profoundest laws of preservation and growth’ and ‘should have been felt as mortally dangerous’ (A 11, KSA 6.177–​8; cf. GM Preface 3, KSA 5.249–​50). The implication is clear:  Kant’s moralized vision of ethical life must be resisted.6 Morality’s authority. Importantly, Nietzsche also opposes various manifestations of morality’s claims to objectivity. This includes, in particular, a denial of morality’s normative authority. The notion of normative authority is notoriously complex. For present purposes, it can be characterized by saying that if morality is normatively authoritative, then one ought categorically to comply with it. Compliance can here be understood broadly to include doing whatever is required by, or appropriate in light of, moral considerations, norms, values, duties and ideals. And we can explicate categoricity thus: if one ought categorically to comply with morality, one ought to so comply irrespective of whether doing so serves or conflicts with one’s subjective motives (very roughly for now: one’s desires, aims, ends, interests, evaluative commitments and the like; I  offer a little more detail in Section 4). It would then follow that morality is universal in scope or jurisdiction in the sense, and to the extent, that one does not escape it merely if or because compliance isn’t ancillary to one’s motives. Denying morality’s authority is crucial to Nietzsche’s critique. For if, as he thinks, complying with morality can conflict with and be inimical to the highest forms of human excellence and flourishing, then those higher types whose excellence and flourishing morality systematically thwarts ought not to comply with it. Yet that would not be possible if morality were normatively authoritative. So he needs to deny that it is.7 And, indeed, many of Nietzsche’s discussions of Kant show that he does deny it. For Kant, moral duties are requirements of rationality. Such duties are both categorical and universal in scope: they specify actions one ought to perform irrespective of whether doing so serves one’s subjective motives; and, because these duties are demands of rationality, the ‘oughts’ they present are binding on any rational agent. Such requirements are revealed through, as the conclusions of, rational deliberation (or practical reasoning) that is pure: ‘pure’ in the sense that the content of one’s deliberative processes need neither start from, nor otherwise involve recourse to or be influenced by, one’s subjective motives. And, since any rational agent is capable of such deliberation, any rational agent

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is capable of recognizing the demands of morality. For Kant, then, morality is normatively authoritative because the categorical duties it presents are requirements of rationality binding on all rational agents. Nietzsche, though, denies a whole gamut of conceptual presuppositions underpinning Kant’s moral rationalism. He suggests that the good will, as ‘good in itself ’, along with the ‘impersonal and universal’ conception of ‘duty’ supposedly derived from it, are ‘phantoms’ (A 11, KSA 6.177–​8). A recurring theme is that moralities ‘are only a sign-​language of the emotions’ (BGE 187, KSA 5.107), neither the result of pure impersonal, rational deliberation, nor binding independent of one’s deep-​seated motives (I return to this in Section 4). Kant’s conception of morality and its supreme principle are thus disregarded as a ‘Moloch of abstraction’ (A 11, KSA 6.177) –​little more than an abstract representation of Kant’s own ‘innermost drives’ (BGE 6, KSA 5.20) –​which, Nietzsche thinks, should be discarded along with the entire range of synthetic (putatively) a priori judgements Kant aligns them with (BGE 11, KSA 5.24–​6). He often expresses this via resistance to the idea that ‘oughts’ and ‘ought’-​judgements are unconditioned by an individual’s or group’s drives and driving interests –​and hence resists the conclusion that ‘oughts’ are unconditionally binding because authorized by one’s purely rational nature or some higher external authority (GS 345, 347, KSA 3.577–​9, 581–​3; BGE 46, 199, KSA 5.66–​7, 119–​20). (He connects the supposed unconditionality of duty directly to categoricity at GS 5, KSA 3.377–​8, BGE 187, KSA 5.107 and EH Destiny 7, KSA 6.371–​3.) Thus, when he suggests that ‘each one of us should devise . . . his own Categorical Imperative’ (A 11, KSA 6.177–​8; cp. GM Preface 3, KSA 5.249–​50), the partly parodic phrasing conceals a more serious point. Although Nietzsche agrees with Kant that ‘oughts’ can be ‘self-​legislated’, he thinks that all normative judgements are shaped and influenced by the judger’s own psychological particularities, whereby neither the judgements themselves nor the normative verdicts they express are pure in Kant’s sense. Free will and autonomy. Nietzsche also objects on various grounds, metaphysical and ideological, to a range of conceptions of free will. Free will is of course especially important for Kant’s moral project. Ultimately, morality is justified only if we as rational agents possess a will that is not solely determined by natural causes (including our subjective motives) but that can freely determine itself as autonomous by setting its own laws and ends. One may not be able to decisively prove via canons of theoretical reason that we are free. However, Kant thinks that we cannot help but regard ourselves as free from a practical point of view. Indeed, agency itself, understood from

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a first-​personal perspective, is only possible under a presupposition of freedom, whereby free will is a necessary postulate for agency –​including the kinds of moral agency and practical reasoning implicated by Kant’s moral system. Much recent commentary has explored Nietzsche’s views of the will and freedom. Although considerable disagreement persists as to his decided position,8 it clearly opposes Kant’s. In this essay, though, I remain neutral over both the metaphysical status of the will as Nietzsche conceives of it and scholarly disputes concerning what sort of freedom (if any) this licenses. The strategy in Section 4 will instead be to show how Nietzsche presents a view of human psychology the veracity of which would serve not only to undermine Kant’s purist conception of autonomy from a theoretical standpoint, but also to destabilize the idea that conceiving of ourselves as autonomous self-​legislating agents thereby commits us to morality from a first-​personal perspective.9 First, though, we need to attend to an earlier stage in Kant’s argument, concerning the nature of moral duty as categorical and universal in scope.

2.  Kant’s derivation In Chapter I of the Groundwork, Kant argues that acting from the motive of duty guarantees doing one’s duty, since it involves acting in accordance with rational laws. In doing so, he presents an argument designed to derive the supreme principle of morality, the Categorical Imperative, from the motive and concept of duty. Let’s call this the ‘Derivation’. It proceeds as follows10: [D1] (a)  The concept of moral duty involves the idea of a rule or practical law –​such that (b) if there are moral duties, these instantiate laws specifying actions people can and ought to perform. (GMS 389, 400; see also 427) [D2] Laws apply to everyone: in particular, just as laws of nature apply to all objects, practical laws apply to everyone. (GMS 400–​2; see also 412)11 [D3] So, (a) the concept of moral duty involves the idea of a practical law that applies to everyone –​such that (b) if there are moral duties, these instantiate laws applying to everyone. (GMS 400–​2) [D4] Different people have different subjective motives for action, however. (GMS 397–​9) [D5] In which case, if there are moral duties (instantiating practical laws applying to everyone), they cannot hold in virtue of any particular person’s (subjective) motives. (GMS 399–​400)12

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From here Kant argues that this implies acting in accordance with the Categorical Imperative –​his first formulation of which is ‘I ought never to act except in such a way that I can also will that my maxim should become a universal law’ (GMS 402)  –​whereby acting from the motive of duty is acting in accordance with, and with reverence for, the moral–​rational law embodied in the Categorical Imperative (GMS 402–​3). Nietzsche straightforwardly accepts the empirical thesis D4. He may also accept each or any of D1, D3, D5 and D6, insofar as these are understood as conceptual theses rather than substantive truths –​theses, that is, about the concept of moral duty. However, he denies the consequents of D6 and D3b on substantive grounds –​and hence denies that there are moral duties, thus understood. He must also therefore deny D2.14 It is this assumption D2, concerning the claim that practical laws (including those implying moral duties) apply to everyone, which forms the primary focus here on in. Denying it may then allow Nietzsche to deny that there really are moral duties in the senses enumerated through each of D1, D3, D5 and D6 –​which, in turn, would put serious pressure on the conclusion D7 and hence Kant’s passage towards the Categorical Imperative. The intended conclusion of the Derivation (through D6 and on) is of course conditional: if there are moral duties, this is what they are like. Kant seeks to establish that there are moral duties later in the Groundwork through his discussion of rational autonomy. There, he again invokes D2 and something akin to D3. I return to these issues in Section 4. First, though, the focus is D2 as it figures in the Derivation, at this stage relatively unencumbered by Kant’s fuller rationalist garb.

3.  Nietzsche’s basic challenge Nietzsche seeks to reject Kant’s assumption that practical normative laws are universally binding. However, to be clear on the nature of this challenge, it is important to emphasize (as I will show in the rest of this section) that Nietzsche

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and Kant agree on each of the following points: first, agents can be governed by, and can govern themselves through, laws; second, such laws are or can be normative, in that they specify things agents ought (or ought not) to do; and, third, practical normative laws can be self-​legislated:  (at least some) agents legislate these laws to and for themselves, thereby governing themselves through laws they ‘give themselves’. As will become clear, though, Kant and Nietzsche have crucially different conceptions of self-​legislation. So, Nietzsche is not denying that there are or can be self-​legislated practical normative laws, concerning what one ought to do. His challenge instead focuses on the idea that such laws are universal in the sense that they must apply to everyone. Kant of course suggests in the Derivation that this just is part of the very concept of a law: just as laws of nature apply to all objects, part of what it is for something to be a practical law is that it applies to all human agents.15 In which case, Kant might maintain, if an ‘ought’ does not apply to all agents it does not instantiate a law. It is this assumption, however, that Nietzsche is challenging. This section examines why he thinks that a law does not have to be universal. To do so, it will be useful to break the discussion into three stages. First, we need to show that in opposing Kant’s vision of morality Nietzsche is nonetheless operating within a normative perspective (Section 3.1). Second, we need to show that he follows Kant by framing this perspective in terms of laws –​indeed, laws one gives oneself (Section 3.2). Third, we need to show how such laws, although not universal, can still be both normative and indeed laws (Section 3.3).

3.1  Nietzsche and normativity? My later argument assumes that Nietzschean laws have a legitimate claim to being normative. We can characterize the normative sphere as a region of thought and practice centred around the paradigmatically normative concepts ought and a reason. This is often contrasted to the evaluative realm, as picked out by more narrowly valoric concepts such as good and bad. The normative–​ evaluative distinction can be important –​and, for Nietzsche, I think it is.16 Some commentators deny, or at least doubt, that Nietzsche’s perfectionist ideal represents a normative standpoint, one involving claims appropriately couched in terms of what people ought or have reason to do.17 However, to suppose that Nietzsche jettisons normativity not only misconceives the nature of his own positive ideal but, in the present context, misrepresents his criticisms of Kant. So it is important to understand how these criticisms are embedded in a perfectionist ideal that is indeed normative. It is not clear what exactly motivates the

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suggestion that Nietzsche discards normativity. But I’ll show that two rationales which might inform that suggestion fail and then raise exegetical qualms about the suggestion itself. First, it may be argued, even though the conceptual vocabulary that survives Nietzsche’s revaluation of all values includes a range of narrowly valoric concepts such as good and bad (see GM I 17, KSA 5.288–​9), his positive ideal has no place for traditional deontic notions such as duty (and perhaps ought). For, the thought goes, these are merely remnants of the very conception of morality –​a ‘law-​conception’ inherited from an outmoded and otherwise faulty theistic worldview –​that Nietzsche opposes and from which he seeks to disinfect us. However, this suggestion rests on a non sequitur: even if Nietzsche were to desist from deploying deontic concepts such as duty (perhaps ought), this does not show that he thereby renounces normative thought or talk per se. For one thing, the concept of a normative reason is not in and of itself deontic. Indeed, many reasons fall on the evaluative side of traditional deontic–​evaluative distinctions, in that they are reasons to do things it would be good (best, etc.), but not obligatory, to do. Thus, even if Nietzsche were to desist from framing his positive ideal in deontic vocabulary, this would not commit him to jettisoning such value-​oriented normative reasons.18 Furthermore, if we understand ‘oughts’ as a function of reasons for and against actions, and if ‘oughts’ can be generated by value-​oriented reasons, the thought that Nietzsche jettisons normativity wrongly presupposes that ‘oughts’ cannot be value-​oriented. Perhaps the underlying doubt might be articulated a second way, though. Given that morality has come to dominate much of our normative topography in ways to which Nietzsche does indeed object, normative concepts such as ought have themselves acquired certain moralized and heavyweight connotations –​by specifying duties and prohibitions, often of great moral importance, which serve to regulate interpersonal relations and that apply to most people in most circumstances irrespective of their contingent motives and tastes –​whereby such concepts should be discarded entirely. The problem with this suggestion, however, is that we need not understand all normative concepts, nor even all oughts, in such moralized or heavyweight ways. For not all ‘oughts’ are moral in character or concern interpersonal relations; and some conceptions of ought do depend on agential motives and tastes. Indeed, my subsequent argument suggests that this is exactly how normativity works in Nietzsche’s positive ideal.19 Denying that Nietzsche makes normative claims also faces a serious interpretative problem:  he does quite often make them. Sometimes these are couched explicitly as ‘oughts’ and ‘shoulds’. In one often-​cited passage,

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as a rejoinder to some error theoretic claims in which he likens morality to alchemy, Nietzsche nonetheless tells us that he does ‘not deny [. . .] that many actions called immoral ought to be avoided and resisted, or that many called moral ought to be done and encouraged’; indeed, it’s just that ‘the one should be encouraged and the other avoided for other reasons than hitherto’ (D 103, KSA 3.91–​2; my emphases). To return to a passage already cited, he suggests that ‘[t]‌he profoundest laws of preservation and growth demand [.  . .] that each one of us should devise [. . .] his own categorical imperative’ (A 11, KSA 6. 6.177–​8; my emphases). Doing what one should is here presented as a way of satisfying a demand of law; and, since the Kantian conception of a categorical imperative to which Nietzsche alludes implicates ‘oughts’,20 the implication is that one should devise one’s own ‘oughts’. Furthermore, much of the time Nietzsche frames matters via the traditionally deontic vocabulary of thou shalts and duties (each of which, it is plausible to suppose, represent or entail oughts). To take just a small sample: [T]‌he free spirit knows which ‘thou shalt’ he has obeyed, and also now what he can do, what he only now is permitted to do. (HH Preface 6, KSA 2.27–​8) Signs of nobility: never to think of degrading our duties into duties for everybody; not to want to relinquish or share our own responsibilities; to count our privileges and the exercising of them among our duties. (BGE 272, KSA 5.227) When an exceptional human being handles the mediocre more gently than he does himself or his equals, this is not merely politeness of the heart –​it is simply his duty. (A 57, KSA 6.241–​4)

Finally, although Nietzsche does often present his positive ideal in terms of various valoric and virtue concepts, even if such concepts do not uniformly entail practical oughts or reasons, it would be surprising if he intended them to have no connection whatsoever to what (at least some) people ought and have reason to do. (For one thing, it would be very peculiar for Nietzsche to maintain that nobody ever has any reason to relinquish morality, or to do what it would be good for her to do, or to pursue excellence, etc.) On the assumption that he makes and endorses normative claims, I’ll now turn to his conception of law-​giving.

3.2  Nietzschean self-​legislation Nietzsche connects his normative claims to laws quite explicitly, saying, for example, that ‘there is no doubt that a “thou shalt” speaks to us too, that we too

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still obey a stern law’ (D Preface 4, KSA 3.16). Moreover, those free-​spirited higher types representative of his perfectionist ideal give themselves laws: It will be the strong and domineering natures that enjoy their finest gaiety in such constraint and perfection under a law of their own. (GS 290, KSA 3.530–​1) We, however, want to become those we are –​human beings who are new, unique, incomparable, who give themselves laws, who create themselves. (GS 335, KSA 3.560–​4)

He typically suggests that giving oneself laws, as opposed to merely following pre-​established mores, is something only some people do and perhaps can do; as these two passages suggest, it is, in particular, a hallmark of a free-​spirited higher type. Although he offers little by way of sustained explication as to what exactly such self-​legislation involves, we can piece together a number of otherwise disparate looking remarks that together shape up into a cohesive picture. Since free-​spirited higher types are Nietzsche’s example par excellence of people who give themselves laws, the discussion focuses on them. The first thing to do is briefly outline some things that are involved in being a Nietzschean free-​spirited higher type21; the rest of the subsection connects this back to giving oneself laws. Free-​spirited higher types play the central role in Nietzsche’s perfectionism:  only they represent the highest forms of human perfection. Nietzsche indicates two distinct forms of excellence such types embody (both of which, plausibly, are necessary constituents of being a fully fledged ideal type). On the one hand, free-​spirited higher types flourish22 to a high degree, where this involves achieving a high degree of psychological integration and acting in ways that effectively express who they are. On the other hand, they realize projects marking truly great or excellent external achievements (by producing great artworks, say, to take one of Nietzsche’s stock cases). These two facets, though distinct, are related in various ways. In particular, both require creative activity; and it is through creative activity that a free-​spirited higher type both realizes his potential by becoming who he is (thereby creating his own unique identity; GS 335, KSA 3.560–​4) and produces externally recognizable excellences. Before turning to the further details and their connection to self-​legislation, it will be useful to distinguish three levels of goal-​directed activity. Nietzsche implicitly separates long-​term overarching goals (one’s life or ground projects, say) from more proximal ends. I’ll use the term ‘project’ to denote overarching goals and reserve ‘end’ for more specific short-​term goals, where such ends may be coordinated with reference to, and either instrumental to or partially constitutive of, one’s overarching projects. (I’ll use ‘goals’

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unqualified when it doesn’t matter whether these are projects or ends.) And I’ll use ‘means’ somewhat narrowly to cover only means to one’s subsidiary ends (and not, therefore, to also include ends that are instrumental to one’s projects). So, for instance, you might set yourself the project of being an artist; you might then set yourself various subsidiary ends, such as producing artworks; and you might take relevant means to realizing those ends, such as acquiring paint. As ever, more fine-​grained distinctions can be drawn; but this threefold distinction will suffice for immediate purposes. Central to Nietzsche’s conception of a higher type is that such an agent sets, pursues and realizes his own projects and ends. Take these three goal-​directed elements in turn. How does a free-​spirited higher type set his own projects and ends? This is intimately bound up with becoming who one is, and involves two main (sets of) elements. First, a higher type engages in uncompromisingly honest self-​scrutiny (GS 335, KSA 3.560–​4; BGE 39, KSA 5.56–​7; A  50, KSA 6.229–​30):  veridical assessment of the kind of person one already is  –​‘surveying all the strengths and weakness of [his] nature’ (GS 290; cf. GS 335, KSA 3.530–​1, 560–​4) –​which in turn yields enhanced self-​understanding. For Nietzsche, a significant part of what constitutes a person, as the particular individual one is, is one’s drives and motives –​one’s desires, evaluative commitments, dispositions of character and so on. Different people also have different abilities, which they can possess to different degrees. Self-​understanding requires understanding the particularities of who one is, as embodied in one’s motives and abilities. For Nietzsche, though, self-​understanding is valuable not (or not just) for its own sake, but also because it connects to what one can become. Indeed, self-​understanding involves realistic appraisal of what one can make or create of oneself. This must be ‘realistic’ in that one’s assessment of what counts as a genuine practical possibility must be sensitive to facts about the person one already is, since those facts shape and constrain one’s potentialities and hence what one is able to become. It is in light of this veridical self-​assessment and the self-​understanding it yields that a free spirit sets himself the projects and ends he does  –​goals that represent real practical possibilities, given both the motives that partly constitute who he is and his abilities.23 Second, Nietzsche repeatedly emphasizes that free-​ spirited higher types are marked by great independence of thought and action. They think ‘otherwise than would be expected’ (HH 225, KSA 2.189–​90); they stand apart from the moral herd-​like majority (HH 225, KSA 2.189–​90; GS 55, KSA 3.417–​18; BGE 44, 212, 260, 274, 284, KSA 5.60–​3, 145–​7, 208–​12, 227–​ 8, 231–​2); and, rather than submitting to pre-​established externally legislated

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authorities (morality supposedly included24), they possess an independent self-​ determining will the exercise of which involves setting their own goals (HH 225, KSA 2.189–​90; GS 290, 335, 347, KSA 3.530–​1, 560–​4, 581–​3; Z ‘Of the Thousand and One Goals’, KSA 4.74–​6; BGE 29, 60, 187, 260, 272, KSA 5.47–​8, 79, 107, 208–​12, 227; A 11, KSA 6.177–​8).25 Since the goals a free-​spirited higher type sets himself in light of veridical self-​understanding reflect the particularities (including motives) of what makes him the particular individual he is, these are truly his own goals. Besides setting their own ends, free-​spirited higher types also pursue the goals they set themselves. Nietzsche says conspicuously little about which determinate projects and ends they do (or ought to) pursue, or therefore what exactly a great person’s life and activities involve. This reflects his emphasis on its being a self-​styled life (GS 290, KSA 3.530–​1) lived by individuals who think and feel ‘otherwise than would be expected’ (HH 225, KSA 2.189–​90). Nonetheless, he does offer more on the structure of such a life, when he likens it to the effective pursuit of an artist’s plan: ‘To “give style” to one’s character –​a great and rare art! It is practised by those who survey all the strengths and weaknesses of their nature and fit them into an artistic plan’  –​immediately adding that it is ‘the strong and domineering natures that enjoy their finest gaiety in such constraint and perfection under a law of their own’ (GS 290, KSA 3.530–​1). Developing the analogy, just as an artist creates a vision of his intended artwork and then sets about actualizing it, a person can forge a plan of (parts of) his life and set himself subsidiary ends whose achievement is instrumental to or constitutive of realizing that plan. The overall plan or project shapes and constrains the nature of the more specific activities. Nonetheless, both may be revised in light of changes to the other. (Realistically, one cannot fully determine how exactly to execute one’s life project in advance of actually pursuing it; see BGE 188, KSA 5.108–​10, for a further artistic analogy here.) Two further points can be made. First, fitting one’s life into an artistic plan in the ways needed to effectively pursue and realize one’s projects requires an ‘enduring will’ (GM II 2, KSA 5.293–​4): 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, without causing this long chain of the will to break’ (GM II 1, KSA 5.292). This, as Nietzsche intimates elsewhere, is not just the common ability to intend the means to one’s proximal ends, but an ability to do so on a grander scale. Indeed, he writes, a ‘great man [has] a long logic in all his activity . . . he has the ability to extend his will across great stretches of his life’ (NL 1885 34[96], KSA 11.451–​2). Second,

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creative higher types are characterized by a multiplicity of conflicting drives. Effectively pursuing and realizing their goals therefore requires self-​mastery –​ a capacity to order and direct these drives into an integrated whole (see esp. BGE 200, KSA 5.120–​1; TI, ‘Skirmishes’ 49, KSA 6.151–​2; NL 1884 27[59], KSA 11.289). Finally, it is constitutive of being a higher type that such a person actually realizes the goals he sets himself and pursues (GS 335, KSA 3.563). Given that a higher type realizes the highest excellences, this is an exceptionally demanding requirement, in at least three respects. First, realizing the highest excellences is intrinsically difficult and requires exceptional talent for one’s chosen project. Second, realizing the highest excellences requires a variety of self-​oriented qualities which Nietzsche frequently extols, but whose cultivation, to the degree needed to realize the highest excellences, is exceptionally difficult:  an independent, self-​determining will (BGE 29, 60, KSA 5. 47–​8, 79; GS 290, 347, KSA 3.530–​1, 581–​3); self-​sufficiency with which to execute one’s projects for oneself (GS 55, KSA 3.417–​18; BGE 44, 212, 260, 274, 284, KSA 5.60–​3, 145–​7, 208–​12, 227–​8, 231–​2); the self-​reverence and self-​assurance needed to persevere in the face of opposition to one’s (often novel and creative) projects (GS 287, 290, 334, KSA 3.528, 530–​1, 559–​60; BGE 212, 225, 260, 270, 287, KSA 5. 145–​7, 208–​ 12, 225–​6, 232–​3); and the self-​discipline needed to overcome the challenges one sets oneself and to endure whatever suffering that involves (BGE 212, 225, 260, 270, KSA 5.145–​7, 160–​1, 225–​6). Third, realizing Nietzschean excellence involves a near-​exclusive focus on, and commitment to, one’s goals, to which everything else is subordinated. Indeed, a higher type pursues his goal with a single-​mindedness un-​distracted by anything not conducive to its realization. When discussing how artists ‘obey thousandfold laws’, Nietzsche emphasizes that ‘[t]‌he essential thing [. . .] seems, to say it again, to be a protracted obedience in one direction’ (BGE 188, KSA 5.108–​10) –​or, as he puts it elsewhere, ‘a straight line, a goal’ (A 1, KSA 6.169–​70) (see also GS 290, KSA 3.530–​1; BGE 212, KSA 5.145–​6; GM II 2, KSA 5.293–​4; TI ‘Arrows’ 44, ‘Morality’ 2, ‘Skirmishes’ 49, KSA 6.66, 83–​5, 151–​2; A 2; EH Clever 9, KSA 6.293–​5). We now need to connect these ideas back to giving oneself laws. There are, I suggest, two types of Nietzschean law. First, the projects and ends a higher type sets himself function as laws. When he sets himself a project, such as a life project to be a great artist, this is a law he might express to himself in imperatival form thus: I will do what is needed (or most conducive) to achieving my artistic projects. Furthermore, insofar as he views and treats his projects and subsidiary ends as expressing an essential part

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of who he is, he may experience them as representing a certain form of ‘practical necessity’, which he may articulate in terms of the law-​like formulation I must do such and such. (Think of someone who says ‘I must do this  –​otherwise, I wouldn’t be being me’.)26 Such laws, as expressed by these ‘I will’ and ‘I must’ locutions, both govern and guide his activities. They are likely to be or become deeply internalized, given that they already reflect who he is and what he desires to become.27 Indeed, a higher type wholeheartedly commits himself to doing whatever is involved in realizing his projects and ends.28 Governing himself through these law-​like commitments, he remains un-​distracted by anything not conducive to their realization, including other activities and drives he may be tempted to indulge. He may therein require great self-​discipline and self-​mastery. Moreover, since life projects are indeed long-​term endeavours, to successfully execute them he requires an ‘enduring will’. Second, a higher type may give himself laws by imposing constraints on how he pursues his goals. The content of such constraints may be independent of the content of the projects and ends he pursues; yet they are also partly constitutive of his realizing those goals in good style (see again GS 290, KSA 3.530–​1). To take just one example, Nietzsche extols the virtue of self-​sufficiency. The more self-​sufficiently a higher type achieves his ends, without the help of others, say, or without using others as means, the more excellent he is. Perhaps, sometimes, he does need to use others as a means (see, e.g. BGE 273, KSA 5.227; Z II ‘The Pitiful’, KSA 4.113–​16; NL 1885 34[96], KSA 11.451–​2); but doing so stains his character by showing him as being suboptimally self-​sufficient and hence less excellent (it reveals him as ‘lacking power’ (GS 13, KSA 3.385). We can thus understand self-​sufficiency as a quality partially constitutive of what it is to be an excellent individual; and it is by imposing onto himself constraints of self-​ sufficiency that such an individual manifests an excellence. Self-​sufficiency thus functions as a (perhaps defeasible) law-​like constraint on how a higher type pursues his goal-​embodying laws. This, then, is the basic account of what Nietzsche might mean by ‘laws’ and ‘giving oneself laws’. They are ‘I wills’ that guide and constrain action, often across great stretches of life, which an agent imposes upon himself by committing himself to them. We now also have the beginnings of a case for thinking that such laws do not have to be universal across agents. Insofar as a law reflects the psychological particularities of the person who sets it (including the motivational particularities that form part of his identity as the person he is), and insofar as different people can have different psychological profiles (as Kant agrees they can –​see again D4), the laws different people set themselves can differ. In

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which case, at least some laws need not be universal across agents. However, before elaborating on this it is worth warding off two doubts about the account presented so far; responding to these will also serve to further clarify Nietzsche’s challenge.

3.3  Two objections First, it may be objected that there is little to suggest that Nietzschean laws, as connected to the projects and ends a higher type pursues, deliver genuinely normative (as opposed to merely descriptive) claims –​claims concerning what one ought to do, rather than just what some people do do. For anyone might set themselves goals, but that doesn’t show that the goals one sets oneself are goals one ought, or has any reason, to pursue. Indeed, it is entirely conceivable that one ought not pursue some goals one sets oneself.29 It is therefore not yet clear whether Nietzsche supplies an alternative model to Kant’s conception of giving oneself a normative law. If it does not, then Nietzsche has failed to show that either D2 or the consequent of D3b is false. In which case, Kant’s Derivation remains intact. There are two ways to respond. One would be to show that Nietzschean laws deliver true normative claims. That, of course, would be a large task  –​just as it would be a significant achievement to justify any normative standpoint.30 A  more modest approach is to show that there is a plausible sense in which Nietzschean laws at least deliver normative claims, in ways that go beyond the merely descriptive thesis that higher types set and pursue goals; and this we can indeed do. We have seen that a Nietzschean higher type realizes Nietzschean excellences. This is a constitutive thesis: part of what it is to be a fully fledged higher type just is to be someone who realizes Nietzschean excellence. Note, though, that there is also an implicit normativity here, relativized at least to what it is to meet the substantive requirements of Nietzsche’s perfectionism. The basic idea runs as follows: doing what is required of Nietzschean perfection requires realizing the highest values (i.e. Nietzschean excellences); higher types realize the highest values and therein do what is required of Nietzschean perfection; thus, higher types who realize the highest values do what they are required, or ought, to do in this respect –​relative, that is, to the requirements of Nietzschean perfectionism. Although such normativity is relativized to an evaluative perspective, Nietzsche thinks this is true of all normative claims (there is no Archimedean bird’s eye view on value). Whether or not one agrees with him on that, there is another

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important point: since, for Nietzsche, the excellences a higher type realizes represent the highest values and are therefore valuable, and since a higher type realizes these values by realizing the goals he sets himself, his realizing these goals is valuable. Thus, according to Nietzsche, higher types realize what actually is valuable and, in so doing, do what they ought. (This should obviate the worry that, if the goal one pursues is not valuable in any respect, then one ought not pursue that goal –​for the goals a higher type pursues are valuable, since they embody the highest excellences.) In which case, insofar as the ‘laws’ a higher type gives himself specify Nietzschean ‘oughts’ and ‘reasons’, they too can be understood as normative.31 Now for a second objection:  Kantians may instead suggest that these Nietzschean ‘laws’ are not really laws –​because, for instance, they do not represent universal requirements applicable to all agents –​and to suppose they are laws merely begs the question. As for the question-​begging charge, just assuming that laws do have to be universal returns the complement.32 In which case, we may have a stand-​off: Kant claims that part of what it is to be a law is for the ‘oughts’ it generates to apply universally across all agents, whereas Nietzsche denies this. This may seem to mark a terminological disagreement. However, it is not merely terminological: it also reveals a substantive dispute as to whether laws really do have to be universal across agents. The question, then, is whether the competing conception of a law Nietzsche presents is a legitimate conception of that concept. Here are three sets of reasons for thinking it is, each of which Kantians should agree with. First, Nietzschean laws can govern and constrain conduct in a systemic and systematic way. They are not momentary or fleeting whims or inclinations but structure the projects one pursues, and how one pursues them, across great stretches of one’s life. Second, these demands represent deep-​seated, whole-​hearted commitments. Higher types commit themselves to projects and ends; they do not eschew their goals or shirk from them when the going gets tough. From their own first-​ personal perspective, these goals, once committed to, are not readily escapable but must –​as a matter of personal honour –​be, well, honoured. In that respect, such commitments function as laws. Furthermore, as noted, one may experience the pull of one’s commitments with the force of practical necessity. Kant himself suggests that rational agents experience the demands of the moral law as practically necessary, since they comprise rational demands that rational agents recognize as such. The Nietzschean counterpart is that a higher type experiences

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his goals and laws as practically necessary, given that these are constitutive of his own identity as the agent he is and represent demands to perfect himself. Nonetheless, since the goals and laws a higher type experiences as practically necessary emerge from his own unique identity, such laws need have no universal character. Third, although Nietzschean laws are not universal across agents, they can be universal in another sense. There is nothing in the Nietzschean conception presented that precludes what is often labelled the universality or universalizability of ‘oughts’ (or ‘reasons’), such that: (U) If the fact that p makes it the case that A  ought to φ in circumstance C, then: for any agent x, if x were in C, that p would make it the case that x ought to φ.

Similarly: (L) If L is a law specifying that A ought to φ in C, then: for any x, if x were in C, L specifies that x ought to φ.33

(U) and (L) are purely formal theses. The domain of ‘x’ could be empty, or it could include just A, or it could include others too –​depending on how we specify ‘x’ and ‘C’. Plausibly, though, if being in C involves being in a position to φ, where few people are or could be in that position (because, say, φing involves realizing some project embodying excellence that few are able to realize), then, although such laws and ‘oughts’ are universal across the agents to whom they apply, they need not apply to all agents. In other words, there is nothing to preclude the form of Nietzschean laws being universal –​even if their scope or jurisdiction is restricted to higher types. As a result, Nietzsche need not deny the thesis that practical normative laws are universal in form –​a thesis Kant not only accepts but that he may conflate with (or erroneously take to entail) the rather different idea that such laws are universal in scope.34 So what they disagree on is how universal the domain of agents to whom practical normative laws apply actually is. I’ll explore this disagreement further in the next section. But let’s first take stock by summarizing the arguments of Section 3. We now have a case for thinking that there can be practical normative laws that do not have to be universal across all agents. Only higher types are capable of realizing the highest excellences. It is therefore only higher types who ought to realize the highest excellences (given an ‘ought implies can’ thesis). Higher types set their own goals. Pursuing these goals involves giving themselves laws. But the ‘oughts’ which these goals and laws specify, as connected to realizing the

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highest excellences, apply only to higher types. In which case, these laws are not universal across agents. This completes the initial Nietzschean case for thinking that practical normative laws do not have to be universal across all agents. The immediate implications are twofold. First, by denying D2 Nietzsche can block the arguments Kant supplies in his Derivation for the conclusion that all practical normative laws necessarily apply to (by entailing ‘oughts’ for) everyone.35 Second, granting that there can be non-​universal practical normative laws, the important question now arises as to whether any practical normative laws are universal across agents. Kant of course wants to say there are such laws –​and that these specify moral duties applying to all rational agents, including Nietzschean higher types, irrespective of their motives. So even if Nietzsche has shown that some practical normative laws are not universal across agents, he still needs a convincing argument for denying the further thesis that there are also some laws (specifying moral duties) which are universal across agents. This is the topic of Section 4.

4.  Nietzsche versus Kant on moral psychology We can separate two general lines of Kantian argument for the conclusion that moral duties are both categorical and universal across agents. The first general argument draws on what it is to be a rational agent. Moral duties, according to Kant, are requirements of rationality. Since it is constitutive of being a rational agent that any such agent is capable of recognizing the demands of rationality, any rational agent is capable of recognizing moral duties. Furthermore, rational agents are capable of recognizing moral duties whatever their contingent subjective motives. That is because requirements of rationality can be revealed through, as the conclusions of, rational deliberation (or practical reasoning) which is pure: the content of such deliberations does not depend on (it need neither start from, nor otherwise engage or be influenced by) one’s contingent subjective motives. Since it is constitutive of being a rational agent that any such agent is capable of recognizing rational–​moral requirements, any such agent must be capable of the kinds of (pure) rational deliberation this involves. In that case, if Nietzschean higher types are rational agents, they are capable of recognizing the demands of morality as demands and are therefore bound by them.

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Much more can be said about how precisely this line of thought might work. But one important point is that Nietzsche provides various resources that may help systematically block it. Consider two common approaches to filling it out. One approach (see, e.g. Korsgaard 1986) begins with Kant’s suggestion (e.g. GMS 401) that it is constitutive of being a rational agent that one reveres what is rational. It then claims that, since the Categorical Imperative is the supreme law of practical rationality, reverence for the Categorical Imperative is (necessarily) a motive every rational agent possesses. Hence, any rational agent is capable of recognizing and being moved by the Categorical Imperative –​which, for Kant at least, implies that every rational agent is capable of recognizing and being moved by morality’s demands. Nietzscheans, in response, might urge that this presupposes a very particular, substantive conception of rational agency –​one that cannot be merely assumed.36 They might argue that it is just one conception of rationality among others –​and then, perhaps drawing upon Nietzsche’s claim that ‘the noble soul has reverence for itself ’ (BGE 287, KSA 5.232–​3; cf. GS 287, 290, 334, KSA 3.528, 530–​1, 559–​60), urge that the rationality involved in being a higher type involves revering oneself as someone whose agency is effective in realizing the perfectionist goals constitutively bound up with the particular motives that represent his own individuality. In which case, Nietzscheans may conclude, the thesis that every ‘rational’ agent reveres the Categorical Imperative and/​or Kantian moral law is false. A  second approach (to filling in the first general Kantian argument) is to show that anyone capable of instrumentally rational deliberation is either capable of, or otherwise committed to, the sorts of deliberative process that yield the demands of morality –​because, for instance, instrumentally rational deliberation delivers conclusions one can recognize as normative only insofar as the ends it prescribes are normatively permissible by some independent criterion, that is, the Categorical Imperative (see Korsgaard 1997). The Nietzschean retort would again be to question why, even if instrumental rationality were to commit one to a wider non-​instrumental normative picture, that normative picture must be the Kantian moral one, rather than, say, a Nietzschean perfectionist one. Thus Nietzscheans can make structurally similar moves to the moves Kantians make when pressing the conception of rationality they do. The success of these strategies, both for and against the Kantian approach, will of course turn on the details of specific arguments. Such details are too wide-​ranging to address adequately here. So, in the remainder of the chapter I’ll instead focus on a second general Kantian line of argument that Nietzsche opposes: that concerning autonomy.

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In the second and third chapters of the Groundwork, Kant seeks to justify morality by showing that we are all committed to there being moral duties of the form assumed in the Derivation. I’ll call this Kant’s ‘Justification’. Similar claims to D2 and D3 feature in it, but they are now supported by a range of additional conceptual resources  –​concerning, most notably, what is involved in being a rationally autonomous agent: someone whose will ‘has the property [. . .] of being a law to itself ’ by giving itself laws. This Justification via rational autonomy can be partially reconstructed as follows (see esp. GMS 446–​8, also 440; and KpV 20–​50, 57–​66): [J1] (a) An autonomous agent is capable of freely willing how to act, such that (b) if A is autonomous, A is capable of freely willing how to act. [J2] All occurrences, acts included, are governed by laws. [J3] (a) A free act exemplifying autonomous agency must therefore be governed by laws  –​such that (b)  if there are free acts exemplifying autonomous agency, these are governed by laws. [J4] Acts governed by laws of nature are determined by causes prior, and external, to one’s will (for example, by one’s contingent subjective motives). [J5] So, free acts exemplifying autonomous agency must be governed, not by laws of nature, but by laws one gives oneself –​that is, by one’s own will, which is pure and stands apart from the natural order. [J6] Therefore, insofar as we are free we act on laws that we freely will –​and that we freely give ourselves, which is what autonomy consists in. [J7] Laws apply universally. [J8] So, a practical law must apply universally. [J9] A  universally applicable practical law applies to every rational agent capable of willing, by being a law that every rational agent could and ought to act in accordance with –​a law represented by the Categorical Imperative. [J10] Thus, the Categorical Imperative is a law we give to and legislate for ourselves, but a law which applies to every rational agent.37

Kant’s conclusion rests, ultimately, on the assumptions that as autonomous agents we are indeed free and that such freedom involves a capacity to determine ourselves by willing in ways that are not solely determined by natural causes. Theoretical reason may not be able to decisively prove that we are, or are not, free. It may therefore appear that morality rests on something we cannot definitively prove, at least from the third-​person perspective of theoretical reason. Nevertheless, if we are free then (given further theses about autonomy) morality is justified. Moreover, and crucially, from a first-​personal perspective we do implicitly regard ourselves as free –​and, qua agents, cannot

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but do so. Thus, from a practical point of view at least, morality follows (GMS 448). J8 and its particular application through J9 are corollaries to D2 and D3, respectively, but now set within the wider context of Kant’s conceptual system. Whereas the Nietzschean arguments of Section 3 may have purchase against the assumption represented through D2 and D3 that all practical normative laws are universal across agents, once these claims about autonomy are in place the Kantian project as represented now through J8 and J9 gathers additional muster. So Nietzsche needs to tackle these wider claims about autonomy. I won’t be able to show here that he does decisively dismiss the Kantian picture; but I’ll instead try to show, more modestly, how he opposes it, and thus where this battle between Kant and Nietzsche lies. To do so, I’ll turn to Nietzsche’s views in and about moral psychology. In short, Nietzsche denies that practical deliberation can be pure (which Kant thinks it must be if a person is to govern himself autonomously). He thereby denies Kant’s conception of autonomy and thus Kant’s path to the conclusion that autonomy involves giving or setting oneself a law that applies universally across all rational agents (i.e. the Categorical Imperative).38 Nietzsche’s opposition to the purity of reason is palpable. To cite just one passage, he writes: ‘Let us beware of the dangerous old conceptual fable which posited a “pure, will-​less, painless, knowing subject”, let us beware of the tentacles of such contradictory concepts as “pure reason” . . . to eliminate the will completely, to suspend the feelings altogether, even assuming that we could do so: what? Would this not amount to the castration of the intellect?’ (GM III 12, KSA 5.365). Here and elsewhere, Nietzsche suggests that reasoning and its conclusions (both practical and theoretical) cannot be pure, in part because reasoning itself depends on (among other things, and in various ways I’ll return to) our affects or feelings.39 In fact, he often suggests that what we label ‘the will’ is really just a composite of, and no more than, a range of affective and motivational items and the relations between them (see, e.g. D 109, KSA 3.96–​9; BGE 6, 12, 17, 19, 36, KSA 5.19–​21, 26–​7, 30–​4, 54–​5; TI ‘Reason in Philosophy’ 5, KSA 6.77–​8). Here, though, I am going to put to one side the many questions, interpretative and philosophical, that arise concerning the exact nature of ‘the will’ as Nietzsche conceives of it and its relation to the more particular psychological items that wholly or partly compose it.40 For the view I shall attribute to Nietzsche can run independently of these big metaphysical issues –​granting at least, as Nietzsche does, that there is no will separate from the natural order.

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The view I have in mind is that there is an intimate connection between the contents of a person’s normative–​evaluative judgements and his motives. Let’s start with some textual markers: In the philosopher, on the contrary, there is nothing impersonal; and above all, his morality bears decided testimony to who he is –​that is to say, to the order of rank the innermost drives of his nature stand in. (BGE 6, KSA 5.20) [M]‌ oralities too are only a sign-​ language of the emotions. (BGE 187, KSA 5.107) Exactly which group of sensations are awakened, begin to speak, issue commands most quickly within a soul, is decisive for the whole order of rank of its values and ultimately determines its table of desiderata. (BGE 268, KSA 5.221; my emphasis) Your judgement ‘this is right’ has a pre-​history in your instincts, likes, dislikes, experiences . . . Your understanding of the manner in which your moral judgements have originated would spoil these grand words for you. –​And don’t cite the categorical imperative, my friend. (GS 335, KSA 5.562) Passion is degraded . . . as if it were only in unseemly cases, and not necessarily and always, the motive force . . . The misunderstanding of passion and reason, as if the latter were an independent entity and not rather a system of relations between various passions and desires. (NL 1888 11[310], KSA 13.131; my emphases)

There are many questions concerning how exactly to interpret such passages.41 Nonetheless, taken together they mount a collective case for attributing to Nietzsche what we might call a ‘sentimentalist’ view about the ways in which our affective-​cum-​motivational repertoire antecedently shapes, constrains and influences our normative–​evaluative commitments and judgements (a view attributable to a range of British sentimentalists, including Hume, but also to Schopenhauer, whose anti-​Kantian moral psychology, it is plausible to maintain, deeply influenced Nietzsche). Thus stated, the view is rather inexact. But we can work it up into something a little more precise by way of three sets of points. First, Nietzsche invokes a wide range of items that contribute to a person’s affective-​cum-​motivational repertoire –​including what he variously labels ‘drives’ (Triebe), ‘affects’ (Affekte), ‘desires’ (Begierden), ‘instincts’ (Instinkte), ‘passions’ (Leidenschaften), ‘feelings’ (Gefühlen) and ‘tastes’ (Geschmäcker), all of which he thinks may be conscious or unconscious. For ease of exposition, I’ll use the blanket term ‘motive’ to cover all, or any, of these. A motive, thus construed, can be understood as any such psychological item that either motivates an agent or that could contribute to the agent’s being motivated to act. As well as the items already listed,

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these can include whatever aims, ends, interests and evaluative commitments the agent has –​including (a) occurrently motivating states; (b) background or standing motivations, that is, items that can motivate even if not doing so occurrently; and (c) any dispositions of character, evaluation and emotion that shape the kind of person one is and how one could be motivated to act.42 Second, according to the sentimentalist view the contents of the normative judgements we do make, and that we are able to make, are shaped, constrained and necessarily influenced by our existing motives. Third, since we are concerned with Kant let’s focus on the normative judgements we make as conclusions of practical deliberation or reasoning. We can here construe practical deliberation broadly to encompass deliberation about what to do and what one ought (or has reason) to do, and just assume that the outcome of practical deliberation, when it yields a definite action-​directed conclusion, is or involves some disposition to act. This could be a sincere normative judgement, pro-​attitude, intention or motivating state. According to the sentimentalist view, first-​personal practical deliberation –​those processes that constitutively aim at, or at least conclude in, a verdict about what to do or what one ought (or has reason) to do, where that conclusion-​state involves some disposition to act –​must either start from or otherwise engage something the agent already cares about, given his antecedent motives. The thought, roughly expressed, is that an agent’s normative judgements and motivations do not arise ex nihilo, but rather emerge from (what Kant would regard as) the agent’s (contingent, subjective) motives. The actions such conclusions recommend must speak to or serve the agent’s antecedent motives if they are to dispose him to act. In turn, the considerations an agent is able to recognize as reasons and be moved by are shaped and constrained by his (contingent, subjective) motives. One implication is that if A lacks any such motive that would be served by φing, A will be unable to recognize any reason to φ. As ever, there are complications, but they need not detain us here. We can summarize this sentimentalist thesis thus: (Sentimentalist Thesis) The contents of the normative conclusions A is able to reach and be motivated by are shaped, constrained and influenced by A’s antecedent motives –​such that: A is able to recognise that p gives him a reason (or makes it the case that he ought) to φ only if A has some motive which would be served by his φing for the reason that p.43

The immediate import of this Sentimentalist Thesis is twofold. First, it entails the denial of Kant’s moral psychological picture. For, if practical deliberation really is to conclude in something that could motivate us to act,

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its premises must start from or otherwise engage our (contingent, subjective) motives, i.e., they must speak to, and hence be influenced by, some antecedent disposition to so act. It follows that the conclusions of practical deliberation are not pure –​and that nobody is capable of the kind of autonomy upon which the Justification depends. Second, the Sentimentalist Thesis implies that who is able to recognize and be moved by the demands of morality will depend on who has suitably moral motives. For Kant, being able to recognize the demands of morality as demands is a necessary condition of having moral duties. Yet, according to the Sentimentalist Thesis, those lacking suitably moral motives –​Nietzsche’s higher types perhaps included –​will be unable to appreciate relevant moral considerations and will thereby fall outside the scope of the moral duties these supposedly generate. Thus, suppose (as Kant himself maintains) that an agent ought to do what he has a moral duty to do only if he is able to recognize that he ought to do it. Combining that thought with the Sentimentalist Thesis implies that moral duties are not categorical –​since one ought to do what morality demands only if one has some motive which would be served by so acting. Note, though, that we can say all this, and hence frame Nietzsche’s opposition to Kant, without having to first resolve ongoing interpretative (or attending philosophical) controversies regarding Nietzsche’s conception of the metaphysical status of either the self or free will. (For the Sentimentalist Thesis, as far as I see, is compatible with all the main readings of Nietzsche on both scores.) And that, I think, is a virtue of the account, given the perennial difficulties wrought by those wider issues. All this is of course conditional on the Sentimentalist Thesis itself being defensible. Here I  have only been teasing out some if its implications, rather than arguing for it.44 However, even if the Sentimentalist Thesis is plausible, Kantians may object to the way I’ve used it. For, they may observe, it provides a theoretical or third-​personal account of the way practical deliberation works. As such, it does not touch on the phenomenology of practical deliberation or agency more generally –​that is to say, the actual experience, from a first-​person perspective, of ourselves as agents. They may then insist that not only might the Sentimentalist Thesis ring false phenomenologically, it fails to address the important point that, qua agents, we cannot but help regard ourselves as capable of the sorts of willing constitutive of autonomy or freedom in Kant’s sense. And since it is from this first-​personal perspective that we are committed to morality, even if the Sentimentalist Thesis were true it does nothing to undermine our commitment to morality qua the kind of agents we are committed to viewing ourselves as.

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One line of response, drawing upon ideas Nietzsche himself indicates (e.g. D 109, 116, 119, KSA 3.96–​9, 108–​9, 111–​14; BGE 19, KSA 5.31–​34; TI Errors, KSA 6.88–​97), is to say that our experience of willing is not a reliable guide to what willing actually involves –​and, moreover, that conceiving of ourselves in the ways we do leads us to misunderstand ourselves as agents, where this misunderstanding is both caused by and perpetuates a range of the errors Nietzsche thinks are involved in morality. This, however, might just beg the question against the Kantian objection. For the claim that our experience of willing is an unreliable guide to what willing actually involves relies on a third-​person perspective as to what willing actually involves.45 There is, however, a dialectically less contentious strategy –​namely, to question whether we (or at least whether free-​spirited higher types), even if committed to regarding ourselves (or themselves) as free and autonomous (in some sense), are also therein committed to willing laws to which all agents are subject. Two thoughts are particularly salient. First, a free-​spirited higher type would regard himself as free –​but free to set the laws and goals he sets himself with no further commitment to thinking these are also laws or goals for others. In fact, many of Nietzsche’s descriptions of such types are couched within the first-​personal perspective of agents who do just this. To offer just two prime examples (note throughout the first-​and second-​personal conjugations): Signs of nobility: never to think of degrading our duties into duties for everybody; not to want to relinquish or share our own responsibilities; to count our privileges and the exercising of them among our duties. (BGE 272, KSA 5.227) For it is selfish to experience one’s own judgement as a universal law . . . it betrays that you have not yet discovered yourself nor created yourself an ideal of your own, your very own . . . Anyone who still judges ‘in this case everybody would have to act like this’ has not yet taken five steps towards self-​knowledge . . . Let us therefore limit ourselves to the purification of our opinions and valuations and to the creation of our new tables of what is good . . . We, however, want to become those we are –​human beings who are new, unique, incomparable, who give themselves laws, who create themselves. (GS 335, KSA 3.563)

Second, recall the notion of practical necessity, as conveyed by locutions like ‘I must’. In contrast to Kant’s conception (focused on the rational necessity of doing one’s moral duty), the Nietzschean counterpart springs from the particular motives constitutive of and essential to one’s identity as the specific individual one is. These ‘I musts’ represent identity-​conferring commitments, even laws. Indeed, the agent may experience them as laws in ways analogous to how Kant

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claims that rational agents experience the demands of morality as demands upon their rational agency as such, that is, in a first-​personal way. Yet, because these Nietzschean ‘I musts’ are inextricably bound up with the motives constitutive of and essential to one’s being the person one is, where such motives certainly need not be motives others have, there need be no hint of the kinds of universality Kant attributes to (experience of) the moral law.46 Indeed, it is precisely this form of practical necessity that I earlier suggested characterizes the activities of Nietzsche’s free-​spirited higher types. Putting these two points together puts serious pressure on the Kantian suggestion that free-​spirited higher types are committed to morality by dint of regarding themselves as autonomous agents. For they can and do regard themselves as agents, governed by laws they give themselves. Yet since the laws a free-​spirited higher type gives himself may be experienced by him as laws for himself and only himself, where these are in turn bound up with the motives he experiences as constitutive of his identity, experiencing himself as an agent in no way commits him to willing laws for all (or even for any other) agents. In short, then, according to the Nietzschean picture: experiencing oneself as an autonomous agent who gives oneself laws does not commit one to morality or to experiencing morality’s supposed laws as binding. If this Nietzschean picture is plausible, the thesis central to Kant’s first-​personal justification of morality  –​that regarding oneself as autonomous thereby commits one to morality –​ fails.

5.  Concluding remarks The main arguments of this chapter have been, firstly, that Nietzsche has a well-​ motivated case for denying that all practical normative laws are universal across agents (Section 3) and, secondly, that if he can deny the purity of practical reason then he has a strong case for denying that any practical normative laws are binding on all rationally autonomous beings (Section 4). This second conclusion is conditional. Nonetheless, I’ve shown how we can oppose Kantian purity without having to first resolve ongoing disputes concerning Nietzsche’s views about the metaphysical status of the will and freedom. Furthermore, I’ve shown that Nietzsche’s denial of Kantian purity can be defended without begging the question against first-​personal readings of Kant. By way of conclusion, I’ll briefly tease out one final implication.

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I’ve suggested that (1) a higher type sets his own goals, (2) he ought to pursue the goals he sets himself and (3) one’s normative judgements are necessarily shaped and constrained by one’s motives (the Sentimentalist Thesis). From these three theses we can deduce the following claim: that what a higher type ought to do is shaped and constrained by his motives –​such that a higher type ought (or has a reason) to φ only if he has some motive which would be served by his φing. This is an application of a view that in contemporary jargon is often labelled reasons internalism.47 And it sits rather nicely with a wide range of things Nietzsche wants to say: ll

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It opposes Kant’s (as well as any other) view according to which moral ‘oughts’ are categorical and universal, and hence normatively authoritative. It thereby allows Nietzsche to be an error theorist about any conception of morality committed to there being categorical universal moral duties, whilst also advancing positive normative claims of his own (namely, those satisfying the internalist condition). It suits his broadly naturalistic approach to normativity, as underpinned by the sentimentalist moral psychology. Insofar as (1)–​(3) apply to people generally and not just higher types, it accommodates interpersonal variation in reasons in accordance with variations in people’s motives. As a result, it licenses the idea that many people ought to comply with morality, insofar as they have suitably moral motives, even though higher types have rather different reasons. It also allows that those of Nietzsche’s readers unable to recognize the value of alternative ideals to morality will be unable, given the sentimentalist thesis, to appreciate any reason to do so and may therefore have no reason to engage in a process of revaluating their values.

Finally, and more positively, it sits nicely with various aspects of Nietzsche’s perfectionism: ll

ll

It offers a way to make sense of Nietzsche’s claim that ‘each one of us should devise his own categorical imperatives’ (A 11, KSA 6.177). Insofar as the ‘us’ is restricted in scope to those capable of doing so, it calls upon a higher type to determine and set his own goals in light of the kind of person he is as embodied in his motives. Furthermore, higher types, because not categorically required to comply with morality, are at liberty to pursue the projects embodying excellence they set themselves.

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And it is in virtue of having the excellence-​directed motives they do that higher types, who undertake the self-​assessments necessary for understanding themselves, may flourish by realizing the excellences they set themselves in light of their motives.

This, of course, is neither an argument for internalism nor a detailed argument for an internalist reading of Nietzsche.48 Nonetheless, in the context of Nietzsche’s engagement with Kant on the topic of normativity, it suggests a further and important point of contrast.49

Notes 1 Extant treatments, covering some points of contact, include Williams (1999), Hill (2003: ­chapter 7), Risse (2007), Owen (2009) and Katsafanas (2014). 2 Capitalizations pick out Kant’s supreme principle of morality; lower case variants denote oughts that are putatively categorical in a sense explained shortly. 3 For more detail on the structure and content of Nietzsche’s ethical revaluation, plus attending interpretative and philosophical issues, see Robertson (2009a). 4 Nietzsche has a number of epithets for his ‘ideal type’ (EH Books 1, KSA 6.300): ‘free spirit’ (e.g. HH Preface 2–​7, 225, KSA 2.15–​22; GS 347, KSA 3.581–​3; BGE c­ hapter 2, KSA 5.41–​63), ‘higher type’ (e.g. BGE 62, KSA 5.81–​3; A 4, KSA 6.172; EH Books 1, Destiny 4, KSA 6.298–​301, 367–​9), ‘noble’ person (GS 55, KSA 3.417–​18; BGE ­chapter 9, 287, KSA 5.205 ff., 232–​3), ‘great’ individual (BGE 72, 212, 269, KSA 5.86, 145–​6, 224), arguably also ‘Übermensch’ (Z Preface 3, KSA 4.14–​16; AC 4, KSA 6.172; EH Destiny 5, KSA 6.369–​70). It is unclear whether he uses these labels to represent one generic ideal type. However, any differences between them will not affect the arguments to follow; and I will just speak interchangeably of ‘free spirits’ and ‘higher types’. For further detail on higher types and normativity, see Sections 2–​4 and Robertson (2011a). Translations from the Nachlass (KSA) are partly my own, though I have consulted the translations in Kaufmann (1967) when these are available. 5 On how Nietzsche’s objection might run, see Leiter (2001); Robertson (2011b). 6 Nietzsche’s goal is ultimately practical: to liberate higher types from morality. Some commentators (e.g. Leiter 2001) suggest that his critical target is primarily, or even only, the moralized culture we actually inhabit, rather than moral theory as such. But this is misconceived. First, Nietzsche does explicitly target particular moral theories –​at least in part because he views these theories, Kant’s included, as attempts to systematize and justify the moral norms, values, duties and ideals we ordinarily take as givens in the moralized culture we

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inhabit. Second, if moral theory were to exonerate the ideals Nietzsche objects to –​by showing, for instance, that they do possess the value and justification traditionally claimed for them –​there would remain little vindication for the tirades he launches against morality or the cultural ethos it informs. Nietzsche must therefore engage with moral theory if his practical goal is to withstand critical scrutiny. For extended defence of this interpretative claim, see Robertson (2012). See the essays in Gemes and May (2009), and also Anderson (2012). Contemporary Kantians disagree over whether to prioritize the third- or firstperson perspective in Kant’s justification of morality. Those who prioritize the former see transcendental freedom as an indispensable commitment without which the justification of morality fails (as did Kant in the Critique of Practical Reason, as well, arguably, as in the Groundwork; see e.g. Allison 1996). Firstpersonal Kantians instead reconstruct Kant’s moral project without it (e.g. Hill 1985; Korsgaard, 1996, 1997, 2009; Brink 1997). My main target in Section 4 is ‘first-personal Kant’, in part to avoid wide-ranging issues about transcendental freedom (and Nietzsche’s denial of it), but also to engage with contemporary neo-Kantians who believe that morality can be justified without it. This focus is reflected in my presentation of the Derivation and Justification in Sections 2 and 4. (a) The many nuances lying beneath the argument as reconstructed here remain matters of interpretative dispute (cf. e.g. Allison 1996; Korsgaard 1996; Potter 1998; Wood 1999: 42–​59; Timmermann 2007: 25–​46). Nonetheless, the following should suffice for the dual purposes of outlining the overall shape of the Derivation and locating Nietzsche’s contention with it. (Note also that different commentators use ‘derivation’ to refer to different arguments Kant presents in GMS I and/​or II, including (though not only) the one outlined here.) (b) A similarly structured argument containing the same basic ingredients occurs in KpV (Book I, part I, chapter I: 19–​58: ‘The analytic of pure practical reason’), a work Nietzsche may have been more familiar with. I here refer to GMS, however, in part for the expository purpose of avoiding the dialectical complications introduced by the way the Critique embeds pure practical reason into the argument from the outset –​complications it will be easier to deal with separately (in Section 4). As Wiggins (1995: 298) notes, the term ‘apply’ is remarkably slippery. Here, to say that a practical normative law or duty applies to you implies that you ought to comply with it (e.g. by doing what it specifies). Kant’s fuller story here emerges from his ‘second proposition’ about the motive of duty, according to which an ‘action done from duty has its moral worth, not in the purpose to be attained by it, but in the maxim according to which it is decided

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upon’ (GMS 399). He argues: A good will is good in itself, not in virtue of the ends external to it at which it aims (GMS 393–​4; 397; 401); the good will must therefore be determined by some internal principle (GMS 400). The will acts on maxims (subjective principles) it gives itself (GMS 400). Acting from duty does not consist in acting on subjective motives but, rather, consists in acting on objective principles–​–i​ .e. laws. Maxims represent objective laws insofar as everyone could act on them (GMS 400n); and objective laws apply to all agents, irrespective of any particular agent’s subjective motives. 13 The fuller story: A rational agent acts on (is motivated by) a rational law; such a law is an object of reverence, since a rational agent reveres what is rational (GMS 400, 401); thus the motive of duty involves acting out of reverence for the law (this is Kant’s ‘third proposition’ about the motive of duty) (GMS 400). And a rational law is a law that could be rationally willed, i.e. without contradiction or otherwise undermining rational agency. 14 As noted in Section 1, Nietzsche must deny D2 in order to allow that free-​ spirited higher types whose excellence and flourishing morality thwarts ought not comply with morality. One way he sometimes denies it is by denying that there really are laws of nature (e.g. BGE 21, 22. KSA 5.35–​9; GS 109, KSA 3.467–​ 9). The argument I reconstruct, concerning practical normative laws, does not rely on this. 15 Or at least all rational beings. That practical laws apply to, and only to, rational agents is of course crucial in Kant’s moral theory. For the purposes of this section, however, I assume a rather more minimal conception of rational agency than Kant’s, to the effect that agents (free-​spirited higher types included) are (a) sensitive to a range of normatively significant features of their situations, and (b) instrumentally rational (this can go beyond a narrow means-​end satisfaction model). Since Kant would accept both conditions, this does not beg the question. Nonetheless, Kant (or at least some neo-​Kantians, e.g. Korsgaard 1997) thinks that anyone satisfying both conditions must be rational in a stronger sense, namely, that one is thereby capable of appreciating the demands of morality. I postpone discussion of these wider issues until Section 4, for the initial aim is to cast doubt on an earlier step in Kant’s Derivation (at which point, arguably, he cannot in GMS just assume this stronger notion of rationality): the presumption that all practical normative laws are universal. 16 I do not mean to siphon off the normative from the evaluative completely. There are many controversies about how they connect (see Robertson 2009b: 5–​12); but it is necessary to make some preliminary stipulations. First, I’ve introduced the normative realm via the normative concepts ought and a reason. I’ll be focusing mostly on ‘oughts’, though will sometimes have recourse to ‘reasons’. ‘Oughts’ can here be understood as specifying conclusive or overriding requirements on action,

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whereas ‘reasons’ (in the pro tanto sense) can favour actions to some (though not necessarily conclusive) degree. I’ll nonetheless assume that oughts entail reasons, such that ‘if A ought to φ, there is a reason for A to φ’. Second, value claims don’t uniformly entail (atomic, non-​counterfactual) practical normative claims: it does not follow from the fact that A’s φing would be good that A has any reason to φ. To take one Nietzschean thought: even if A’s φing would be extremely valuable in virtue of realizing some excellence, if A is incapable of φing, there may be no reason for A to φ. Nevertheless, and third, I do not rule out the possibility that ‘oughts’ and ‘reasons’ are partly value-​dependent (see below and Robertson forthcoming: ­chapter 11). 17 Versions of this doubt have been put to me in conversation by Chris Janaway, Alexander Nehamas and Henry Staten; see also Railton (2012). 18 It is contestable whether ‘a reason’, denoting a normative item, has an exact German equivalent –​which may tell against the idea that Nietzsche has a view about ‘reasons’. Perhaps the closest German expression is ‘Grunde’, which, like ‘reason’, exhibits considerable fluidity. Nonetheless, Nietzsche does employ a concept rather like that of a pro tanto normative reason. He agrees, for instance, that there can simultaneously be various ‘Fors’ and ‘Againsts’, and that one can have ‘one’s pros and contra in one’s power’ and impose a ‘rank ordering’ on them (HH Preface 6, KSA 2.20–​1; GM III 12, KSA 5.363–​5). So I see scant textual evidence to think that he would deny the currency of reasons, given that he appears to accept that a person can simultaneously have many reasons favouring different actions, not all of which need be conclusively favoured. 19 See again Robertson (2011a) for extended articulation and defence. 20 Kant himself claims that ‘all imperatives are expressed [or are at least expressible] by an “ought” ’ (GMS 413). It is a matter of dispute whether he thinks that hypothetical imperatives really are normative; but I’ll assume that, insofar as the ends they are directed to are ends worth realizing, they can be. 21 The following is only a partial sketch. I offer significantly more detail elsewhere: Robertson (2011b) focuses on external achievements embodying excellence, whereas Robertson (2011a) connects realizing one’s ends to Nietzsche’s conception of flourishing and becoming what one is. Robertson (forthcoming: ­chapters 10–​11) shows how the two connect: a higher type flourishes by realizing the goals embodying excellence he sets himself. 22 There are several German words aptly translated ‘flourishing’, including ‘Gedeihen’ and ‘Aufblühen’. Although Nietzsche uses these terms relatively sparingly in his published works (salient passages include WB 11, KSA 1.506–​10; GS 1, 347, KSA 3.369–​72; GM Preface 3, II 10, II 12, III 11, III 19, KSA 5.249–​50, 308–​9, 313–​16, 361–​3, 384–​7; EH Preface 2, Destiny 7, KSA 6.257–​8, 371–​3), his frequent discussions of health [Gesundheit] accord with what we may

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Simon Robertson more ordinarily think of as flourishing. For more detail, see Robertson (forthcoming: ­chapter 10). (a) This is important when it comes to giving oneself laws. Kantians may urge that the laws a Nietzschean higher type gives himself are in a sense arbitrary, since they depend on contingent elements in his psychological makeup rather than on features of rational agency as such. However, as Williams (e.g. 1981a) amongst others argues, insofar as our ground projects emerge from and serve deep psychological facts about ourselves (including those desires constitutive of our identity as the particular individuals we are), the ends we ought to pursue depend on facts about who we are (see also Section 3.3 and Section 4). And, because these facts form part of our very identity qua the particular persons we are, the project-​related ‘oughts’ we set in light of them can be rather less arbitrary than some Kantians sometimes allege. (b) Appealing to agential motives here does not beg the question against Kant. For, firstly, although Kant may think that one’s true self consists in a rational self aside from one’s subjective desires, he does accept that an individual is partly comprised by a range of desirous elements. Thus, someone who understands himself would understand the role these play in his own psychological economy. Plus, secondly, the discussion in this section is not denying that there could be laws given by a rational self common to all rational beings; rather, it is making a case for thinking there could be at least some laws not like this. At D 9 Nietzsche suggests that modern morality, even in its Kantian incarnation, is little more than a refined version of the ethic of custom (Sittlichkeit) that the herd-​ like continue to obey. See also BGE 187, KSA 5.107. Deploying a distinctively Kantian phrase in a distinctively non-​Kantian way, Nietzsche notoriously describes as ‘autonomous’ a person who (i) possesses ‘his own independent, enduring will’ and (ii) ‘resembles no one but himself ’ (GM II 2, KSA 5.293–​4).The passage this occurs in remains subject to intense scholarly dispute, so I don’t want to read too much into it here. What I say is consistent with the fairly minimal assumption that the autonomous ‘sovereign individual’ Nietzsche discusses at GM II 2, KSA 5.293–​4 need not represent his fully fledged view of agency, even if conditions (i) and (ii) represent two of its central (perhaps necessary) features. On practical necessity, see esp. Williams (1981c), (1993), and, in the context of Nietzsche, Clark (2001) and Owen (2007). David Owen has been pressing on me its significance for some time, and I return to it at several points later. The internalization of various laws or I wills plays a significant role in the naturalized accounts of moral formation Nietzsche gives in GM (e.g. Essay II 1, 3, KSA 5.291–​4). It also plays a central role in many contemporary deontological, consequentialist and Aristotelian views, according to which agents ought to cultivate relevant practical dispositions by internalizing salient motives, norms and/​ or virtues.

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28 On commitment in Nietzsche, see Ridley (2009); for a Kantian account of commitment to discretionary ends, see Reath (2009). 29 On these points, see, e.g. Korsgaard (1997); Broome (1999). 30 Note, nonetheless, that to just assume they are not true would beg the question against Nietzsche. Kant might himself suggest that one ought to pursue one’s ends only if those ends are at the same time sanctioned by the Categorical Imperative. There are two Nietzschean responses to this: first, since the Derivation is intended to derive the Categorical Imperative from the concept of duty as law, it would be dialectically illegitimate to appeal to the Categorical Imperative at this juncture; second, it is plausible to suppose that (at least some of) the goals a higher type pursues are permissible by morality’s lights. 31 This response of course assumes that the goals a higher type realizes are indeed valuable. Korsgaard (2009: ­chapters 3 and 7) argues that only formal principles for action are directly normative, whereby any substantive principles delivering normative truths must be derivable from formal principles (the Categorical Imperative being one of the principles they must be derivable from). One response to Korsgaard’s argument is to justify a substantive conception of value without recourse to the Categorical Imperative (I seek to do this in Robertson (forthcoming: ­chapter 10)). 32 Kantians might supplement their case by appealing to the analogy with laws of nature: just as these apply to all the objects they concern, practical laws apply to all the agents they concern. However, this is unconvincing. On the one hand, one of the issues just is which agents practical laws concern and apply to. On the other hand, two significant points put pressure on the Kantian analogy: first, the practical laws we are concerned with are normative, whereas laws of nature are not, so it remains an open question whether they function in relevantly similar ways; second, laws of nature are now commonly regarded as defeasible (and subject to a range of ceteris paribus conditions), whereas for Kant practical normative laws are not. 33 In both (U) and (L), occurrences of ‘A’ in ‘p’ and ‘C’ can be replaced by ‘x’ so to allow for agent-​relativity. 34 Korsgaard (1996: 99) observes a similar conflation to which Kant is subject. She has subsequently developed several arguments designed to show that every rational agent (e.g. every agent capable instrumentally rational deliberation) is committed to the Categorical Imperative (see her 1986, 1997, 2009). One of her most recent versions trades on the idea that it is partially constitutive of being an autonomous agent that one exemplifies diachronic unity with respect to one’s ends and that this commits one to some version of the Categorical Imperative (2009: ­chapter 4). Nietzscheans can agree with the claim about diachronic unity, though it is far from clear how this commits one to willing ends that others could (or ought to) act on. In that respect, it does not commit one to universality across agents or to Kant’s

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Simon Robertson Categorical Imperative and the moral law. (For Korsgaard’s most recent arguments for why we are also committed to morality, see Korsgaard (2009: ­chapter 9); for some generic doubts about Kantian strategies, see my Section 4.) What if a requirement of a Nietzschean law that a higher type sets himself conflicts with a verdict generated by the Categorical Imperative? Kantians will likely argue that the Categorical Imperative takes priority and/​or overrides apparently conflicting ‘oughts’. The arguments of Section 4 put critical pressure on that view (see also Brink (1997) for an argument that, even if Kant can justify morality’s normative authority, he fails to justify its overriding supremacy). Williams’s (1995: 37) laconic riposte to this Kantian suggestion is that ‘there has to be an argument for that conclusion. Someone who claims the constraints of morality are themselves built into the notion of what it is to be a rational deliberator cannot get that conclusion for nothing’. For attempts to deliver the relevant argument(s), see, e.g. Korsgaard (1989), (1996), (1997), (2009). The rest of the present section raises some general difficulties for such arguments. The Justification as presented here is a reconstruction that glosses over many of the intricacies underlying the moves Kant makes. Nonetheless, the key point is the uncontroversial one that Kantian autonomy rests on a conception of practical reason that is pure; it is this commitment to purity that Nietzsche objects to and via which he denies the move to universality. For sake of completeness, Nietzsche might accept J1 and J3 as formal theses; if so, he must reject the Kantian interpretation of freedom and autonomy given by J5 and J6. Although the language of GM III 12, KSA 5.363–​5, might seem to focus on theoretical reason, Nietzsche rejects any clear distinction between the operations of theoretical and practical reason. They might have different formal objects (belief and action, say); but both are essentially active with their contents guided ultimately by our practical interests and needs. Hence, what he says about the ‘will’ applies equally to its practical as to its theoretical operations. Although defending this interpretative claim requires more detail than is possible here, see BGE 4 and 11, KSA 5.18, 24–​6, plus the passages cited below regarding the ‘Sentimentalist Thesis’. Some (see esp. Leiter (2002: 91ff; and 2009)) attribute to Nietzsche the view that there is no will standing as the locus of volition –​and that conscious mental life, including the processes and contents of conscious evaluative reflection, is therefore not under the causal control of any such will, but is instead a series of type-​epiphenomenal events manifesting and controlled by deeper facts about our physiological and unconscious psychological makeup. Others afford Nietzsche a view according to which the will, although not entirely separable from the conscious and unconscious first-​order psychological states its obtaining depends on, does nonetheless possess some degree of unity over and above those states, in

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ways that license our having at least a modicum of volitional and reflective control over our decisions. This now seems the more common interpretative line and it would, I think, be more interesting for accounts of normativity if Nietzsche could be entitled to it. For a variety of (often competing) views on how it might be developed, see the essays by Clark and Dudrick, Gardner, Gemes, Janaway, Pippin, Poellner and Ridley, all in Gemes and May (2009), plus Anderson (2012). 41 See Robertson (2011a: 596–​9) for some further detail on how they may fit together. Other relevant passages include HH 39, 56, 57, KSA 2.62–​4, 75–​6; D 34, 99, 119, KSA 3.4389, 111–​14; GS 5, 57, 301, 347, KSA 3.377–​8, 421–​2, 539–​40, 581–​3; Z ‘Of the Sublime Men’, ‘Of the Thousand and One Goals’, KSA 4.150–​2, 74–​6; BGE 11, 186, KSA 5.24–​6, 105–​7; GM III 12, KSA 5.263–​5; NL 1885–​6 2[77], KSA 12.97–​8, NL 1885–​6 2[189–​190], KSA 12.160–​1, NL 1886–​7 7[60], KSA 12.315. 42 Many commentators attribute to Nietzsche a ‘drive psychology’ (e.g. Janaway 2007; Katsafanas 2013b and forthcoming). Although controversial how exactly to unpack the conceptual structure of a Nietzschean ‘drive’, it is uniformly treated as a psychological item (conscious or otherwise) that disposes to action; it is therefore a species of motive. 43 A full account and defence of this requires extensive analysis. But I take the following to represent the spirit of Nietzsche’s views: Normative judgements can be cognitive, i.e. express beliefs (e.g. HH 32, KSA 2.51–​2; D 103, KSA 91–​2; TI ‘Improving’ 1, KSA 6.98); and they can be true (e.g. D 103, KSA 3.91–​2). But a true normative judgement is not a representation of a world constituted by metaphysically robust normative properties, since there are no such properties (GS 301, KSA 3.539–​40; TI ‘Improving’ 1, KSA 6.98). Rather, normative judgements are essentially interpretative (GS 301, KSA 3.539–​40; BGE 108, KSA 5.92; see also HH 39, 40, 56, KSA 2.62–​4, 75; D 3, 119, KSA 3.19–​20, 111–​14; Z I ‘Of a thousand and one goals’, KSA 4.74–​6; GM P 3, KSA 5.249–​50; TI Errors 3, KSA 6.88–​97). Indeed, we interpret the world normatively, e.g. in terms of what there is reason to do in light of it; and we judge of certain features that they are, i.e. interpret them as, reason-​giving. How we do and are able to interpret things normatively is shaped and constrained by our affective-​cum-​motivational repertoire, as the Sentimentalist Thesis implies. (This can be a partly cognitive and reflective, rather than a purely hydraulic, process. As Katsafanas (2013a: ­chapter 5) articulates things, although our subjective motives incline us and although we can never suspend the influence of all our motives, this does not show that we are thereby determined by any particular motive.) Thus the features a person is sensitive to as reason-​giving depends on that person’s motives; and this may vary across persons. For excellent accounts of the relation between sentiment and judgement in Nietzsche, see Poellner (2007), Katsafanas (2013a: ­chapter 5).

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44 Katsafanas (2013a: 115–​32) deploys a combination of philosophical analysis and psychology data to argue against the Kantian idea that agents can suspend the influence of their motives, thereby motivating a view closely related to the Sentimentalist Thesis. For some further implications, see Robertson and Owen (2013) and Robertson (2011a). 45 A similar objection is pressed by Sieriol Morgan (‘Naturalism and the First-​ Personal Foundations of Kantian Ethics’, unpublished) in response to various Nietzschean critiques (e.g. Knobe and Leiter 2007; Risse 2007) that end up objecting on third-​personal grounds to first-​personal readings of Kant. It is difficult to know what to make of this first-​personal Kantian response dialectically. For Kantians agree that there can (and must) be some distance between how a person actually and ideally experiences herself as a willing agent; yet if that distance allows that we can be mistaken about what willing actually involves, part of the explanation for our being mistaken may itself come from third-​personal materials. At any rate, I agree that the first-​personal is important in Nietzsche; see also Pippin (2010). 46 Korsgaard (1996: ­chapter 4; 2009: ­chapter 9) attempts to show how rational agents committed to the Categorical Imperative are committed to ‘public reasons’ and hence to morality. Although I cannot go into the details here, I do find it unconvincing (relevant to this are GS 354, KSA 3.590–​3, and GM II, KSA 5.291 ff.). At any rate, the Nietzschean objection is designed to block an earlier stage in the progress towards those neo-​Kantian moves –​namely, the idea that a rational autonomous agent is committed to the kinds of universal law laid out by the Categorical Imperative. 47 Reasons internalism is a view again associated with Bernard Williams (e.g. 1981b, 1995), who was of course one of Nietzsche’s pioneering analytic readers. On how Nietzsche influenced Williams, see Clark (2001); Robertson and Owen (2013); the latter includes a case for thinking that Williams’s internalism was itself partly a product of his engagement with Nietzsche. 48 I develop a textual case for it in Robertson (2011a). 49 This chapter was originally written for a workshop, ‘Nietzsche the Kantian?’, hosted and funded by the Institute for Philosophy, Leiden University (February 2011), organized by Tom Bailey and Herman Siemens. I also presented it in research seminars at the University of Essex and Cardiff University. Many thanks to all three audiences for extremely useful discussion and comments –​particularly Matthew Bennett, João Constancio, Dharmender Dhillon, Fabian Freyenhagen, Béatrice Han-​Pile, Paul Katsafanas, David McNeill, Tom O’Shea, Markus Schlosser, Alessandra Tanesini and Jon Webber. Special thanks to the editors of this volume: to João for his support; and to Tom for his thorough comments on the penultimate version, which have helped me to improve the paper’s clarity and to avoid some mistakes.

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References Allison, H. E. (1996), ‘On the Presumed Gap in the Derivation of the Categorical Imperative’, reprinted in his Idealism and Freedom: Essays on Kant’s Theoretical and Practical Philosophy, 143–​4, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Anderson, L. (2012), ‘What Is a Nietzschean Self?’, in C. Janaway and S. Robertson (eds), Nietzsche, Naturalism and Normativity, 202–​35, Oxford: Oxford University Press. Brink, D. O. (1997), ‘Kantian Rationalism: Inescapability, Authority, and Supremacy’, in G. Cullity and B. Gaut (eds), Ethics and Practical Reason, Oxford: Oxford University Press. Broome, J. (1999), ‘Normative Requirements’, Ratio 12 (3): 398–​419. Clark, M. (2001), ‘On the Rejection of Morality: Bernard Williams’ Debt to Nietzsche’, in R. Schacht (ed.), Nietzsche’s Postmoralism, 100–​22, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Gemes, K., and May, S. (eds) (2009), Nietzsche on Freedom and Autonomy, Oxford: Oxford University Press. Hill, K. (2003), Nietzsche’s Critiques: The Kantian Foundations of His Thought, Oxford: Oxford University Press. Hill, T. E. Jnr (1985), ‘Kant’s Argument for the Rationality of Moral Conduct’, Pacific Philosophical Quarterly 66 (1–​2): 3–​23. Janaway, C. (2007), Beyond Selflessness. Reading Nietzsche’s Genealogy, Oxford: Oxford University Press. Katsafanas, P. (2013a), Agency and the Foundations of Ethics: Nietzschean Constitutivism, Oxford: Oxford University Press. Katsafanas, P. (2013b), ‘Nietzsche’s Philosophical Psychology’, in J. Richardson and K. Gemes (eds), The Oxford Handbook of Nietzsche, 727–​55, Oxford: Oxford University Press. Katsafanas, P. (2014), ‘Nietzsche and Kant on the Will: Two Models of Reflective Agency’, Philosophy and Phenomenological Research 89 (1): 185–​216. Kaufmann, W. (1967), Friedrich Nietzsche, The Will to Power, trans. Walter Kaufmann, New York: Vintage. Knobe, J., and Leiter, B. (2007), ‘The Case for Nietzschean Moral Psychology’, in B. Leiter and N. Sinhababu (eds), Nietzsche and Morality, 83–​109, Oxford: Clarendon Press. Korsgaard, C. M. (1986), ‘Skepticism about Practical Reason’, Journal of Philosophy 83 (1): 5–​25. Korsgaard, C. M. (1989), ‘Kant’s Analysis of Obligation: The Argument of Groundwork I’, The Monist 72 (3): 311–​39. Korsgaard, C M. (1996), The Sources of Normativity, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Korsgaard, C. M. (1997), ‘The Normativity of Instrumental Reasoning’, in G. Cullity and B. Gaut (eds), Ethics and Practical Reason, 215–​54, Oxford: Oxford University Press. Korsgaard, C. M. (2009), Self-​Constitution, Oxford: Oxford University Press.

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Leiter, B. (2001), ‘Nietzsche and the Morality Critics’, reprinted in J. Richardson and B. Leiter (eds), Nietzsche, 221–​54, Oxford: Oxford University Press. Leiter, B. (2002), Nietzsche on Morality, London: Routledge. Leiter, B. (2009), ‘Nietzsche’s Theory of the Will’, in K. Gemes and S. May (eds), Nietzsche on Freedom and Autonomy, 107–​26, Oxford: Oxford University Press. Owen, D. (2007), Nietzsche’s Genealogy of Morality, Stocksfield: Acumen Press. Owen, D. (2009), ‘Autonomy, Self-​Respect, and Self-​Love: Nietzsche on Ethical Agency’, in K. Gemes and S. May (eds), Nietzsche on Freedom and Autonomy, 197–​222, Oxford: Oxford University Press. Pippin, R. B. (2010), Nietzsche, Psychology, and First Philosophy, Chicago/​London: The University of Chicago Press. Poellner, P. (2007), ‘Affect, Value, and Objectivity’, in B. Leiter and N. Sinhababu (eds), Nietzsche and Morality, 227–​61, Oxford: Clarendon Press. Potter, N. (1998), ‘The Argument of Kant’s Groundwork, Chapter I’, in P. Guyer (ed.), Kant’s Groundwork of the Metaphysics of Morals: Critical Essays, 29–​50, Maryland: Rowman & Littlefield Publishers. Railton, P. (2012), ‘Nietzsche’s Normative Theory? –​The Art and Skill of Living Well’, in C. Janaway and S. Robertson (eds), Nietzsche, Naturalism and Normativity, 20–​51, Oxford University Press. Reath, A. (2009), ‘Setting Ends for Oneself Through Reason’, in S. Robertson (ed.), Spheres of Reason, 199–​220, Oxford: Oxford University Press. Ridley, A. (2009), ‘Nietzsche’s Intentions: What the Sovereign Individual Promises’, in K. Gemes and S. May (eds), Nietzsche on Freedom and Autonomy, 181–​96, Oxford: Oxford University Press. Risse, M. (2007), ‘Nietzschean “Animal Psychology” versus Kantian Ethics’, in B. Leiter and N. Sinhababu (eds), Nietzsche and Morality, 57–​82, Oxford: Clarendon Press. Robertson, S. (2009a), ‘Nietzsche’s Ethical Revaluation’, Journal of Nietzsche Studies 37 (Spring): 66–​90. Robertson, S. (2009b), ‘Introduction: Normativity, Reasons, Rationality’, in S. Robertson (ed.), Spheres of Reason, 1–​28, Oxford: Oxford University Press. Robertson, S. (2011a), ‘Normativity for Nietzschean Free Spirits’, Inquiry 54 (6): 591–​613. Robertson, S. (2011b), ‘A Nietzschean Critique of Obligation-​Centred Moral Theory’, International Journal of Philosophical Studies 19 (4): 563–​91. Robertson, S. (2012), ‘The Scope Problem –​Nietzsche, the Moral, Ethical, and Quasi-​Aesthetic’, in C. Janaway and S. Robertson (eds), Nietzsche, Naturalism and Normativity, 81–​110, Oxford: Oxford University Press. Robertson, S. (forthcoming), Nietzsche and Contemporary Ethics, Oxford: Oxford University Press. Robertson, S., and Owen, D. (2013), ‘Nietzsche’s Influence on Analytic Philosophy’, in K. Gemes and J. Richardson (eds), The Oxford Handbook of Nietzsche, 185–​206, Oxford: Oxford University Press.

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Timmermann, J. (2007), Kant’s Groundwork of the Metaphysics of Morals: A Commentary, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Wiggins, D. (1995), ‘Categorical Requirements: Hume and Kant on the Idea of Duty’, in R. Hursthouse, G. Lawrence and W Quinn (eds), Virtues and Reasons: Philippa Foot and Moral Theory, 297–​330, Oxford: Clarendon Press. Williams, B. (1981a), ‘Persons, Character and Morality’, reprinted in his Moral Luck, 1–​19, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Williams, B. (1981b), ‘Internal and External Reasons’, reprinted in his Moral Luck, 101–​13, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Williams, B. (1981c), ‘Practical Necessity’, reprinted in his Moral Luck, 124–​31, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Williams, B. (1993), Shame and Necessity, Berkely: University of California Press. Williams, B. (1995), ‘Internal Reasons and the Obscurity of Blame’, reprinted in his Making Sense of Humanity, 35–​45, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Williams, G. D. (1999), ‘Nietzsche’s Response to Kant’s Morality’, Philosophical Forum 30 (3): 201–​16. Wood, A. E. (1999), Kant’s Ethical Thought, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.

Translations of Nietzsche’s works The Antichrist, trans. R. J. Hollingdale, London: Penguin Books, 1990. Beyond Good and Evil, trans. R. J. Hollingdale, London: Penguin Books, 1990. Daybreak, trans. R. J. Hollingdale, ed. M. Clark and B. Leiter, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1997. Ecce Homo, trans. D. Large, Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2007. The Gay Science, trans. W. Kaufmann, New York: Vintage Books, 1974. Human, All-​Too Human, trans. M. Faber and S. Lehmann, London: Penguin Books, 1984. On the Genealogy of Morals, trans. D. Smith, Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1996. Richard Wagner in Bayreuth, in Untimely Meditations, trans. R. J. Hollingdale, ed. D. Breazeale, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1997. Thus Spoke Zarathustra, trans. R. J. Hollingdale, London: Penguin Books, 1969. Twilight of the Idols, trans. R. J. Hollingdale, London: Penguin Books, 1990.

Translations of Kant’s works Groundwork of the Metaphysics of Morals, trans. H. J. Paton as The Moral Law: Groundwork of the Metaphysics of Morals, London: Routledge, 1948. Critique of Practical Reason, trans. Mary J. Gregor, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1996.

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Kant, Nietzsche and the Discursive Availability of Action Robert Guay

Immanuel Kant and Friedrich Nietzsche are often thought to have polar opposite ways of thinking about agency. Kant, the story goes, thinks about agency in terms of the ‘metaphysics of transcendental idealism’,1 so that actions are precisely events that somehow, inexplicably, stand outside of the natural order of things. Nietzsche, by contrast, accords actions no special place in the order of causes and effects. Actions, for him, fit perhaps most properly in the sphere of the biological: they are the result of organic processes, and not distinctive occasions of originality or self-​governance. There is some truth to this story: the two make room for radically different forms of explanation, and locate the importance of the biological very differently. But to see them as opposites, metaphysics versus nature, is a superficial and short-​sighted way of thinking about their views on agency. At least I shall contend that their similarities are more important than their differences. Kant and Nietzsche, I shall argue, share the view that agency is only available discursively. That is, for both of them, to act only becomes possible through the ability to represent what one is doing discursively. This is not to say that acting is a process that begins by representing to oneself what one is going to do.2 Neither philosopher sees the mind in that way, as a container of inner representations, and neither one characterizes agency primarily in terms of its causal processes. Indeed, they have genuine and substantial differences on how to think about the causal mechanisms that underlie action. But even though action takes place within a causal background, neither of them takes this to be what makes an action what it is. What distinguishes agency as such, rather, is its relationship to language.3 One might say, then, that they have opposed views of causality, but share a conception of practical reason. It takes a lot of abstraction from

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particulars to see that they share the same conception, but for both of them practical reason involves relating to the proper description of what one is doing, and without any ability to sustain such a relationship there is no action per se. In the first section I  present Kant’s views, leaving aside most of the details about practical reason and causality to focus on the discursive availability of action. I  contrast that picture of action with some elements of Hume’s views. Then, in Section 2, I offer three sets of arguments for aligning Nietzsche’s views with Kant’s. First, I  argue that Nietzsche characterizes agency as historical, reflexive and goal-​oriented, and as ‘commanding’ in ways that require discursive abilities. Second, I analyse Nietzsche’s critique of free will. I argue that although this critique is usually taken to involve the replacement of a false metaphysical cause of action with an accurate naturalistic one, it actually involves distinguishing three separate elements and identifying action with telic descriptions rather than antecedent causes. Third, I argue that Nietzsche’s treatment of actions as somehow ‘necessary’ in relation to grounds and his characterization of psychological elements such as ‘will’ and ‘drives’ show that he treats agency as a discursive phenomenon. In Section 3 I  discuss some the differences between Kant’s and Nietzsche’s positions and their importance for ethical understanding.

1.  Kant and the discursive availability of action The reason why one might take Kant to have a fundamentally different picture of agency from Nietzsche is that Kant takes agency to be supersensible. That is, for Kant actions as such cannot be empirically determined: if they were empirically determined, then they would be passively determined by causes outside the will rather than being spontaneous acts. If it exists, then, agency must lie outside of natural laws. Furthermore, since our experience is limited to what we can perceive as falling under natural laws, agency lies outside the bounds of our experience. Agency as such does not fit with the conditions under which we gain our knowledge of the empirical world, so it must belong elsewhere. It requires a different, merely intelligible kind of causality that must remain inexplicable to us. Kant does not, however, offer a theory of supersensible agency that explains the non-​natural causes that induce actions. This aspect of Kant’s account functions rather as an empty placeholder to mark out the conceptual space for something that cannot be understood empirically, but cannot be understood in an alternative, non-​empirical way either. Rather than providing a substantive account of suprasensible causality, then, Kant is pointing out that even

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though his account of agency does not fit within his account of experience, we can nevertheless appeal to an understanding of agency in order to make sense of further things that are dependent on it  –​or at any rate our conception of ourselves as rational agents. So Kant does not make ontological claims and then derive the conception of agency from those; rather, he specifies his conception of agency and then leaves a blank space for its ontological status. As Henry Allison (1990:  45)  puts it, ‘[T]‌he transcendental idea of freedom, which provides the content to the otherwise empty thought of an intelligible character, has a merely regulative, explanatory function’. Kant is committed to some kind of metaphysical claim about human agency, but what is primary for him –​the way that it makes sense to us –​is in terms of how it functions in making sense of ourselves and our practical deliberations. Kant’s picture of agency proceeds, then, not from an unknowable metaphysics but from an analysis of what it would mean to act and, in particular, to act on a reason. What makes actions distinctive from other kinds of events is that they are done for reasons. Accordingly, they need to be accounted for not just from a standpoint external to the action, but in their very performance. One grasps the performance of an action, that is, by conceptualizing it in the agent’s own terms rather than in terms of movements that could be impersonally described; what one takes oneself to be doing is relevant to what sort of an action it is (cf. KpV 81). All this is complicated in Kant’s position by the unknowability of our ultimate grounds of acting. But the fundamental element is that discursive capacities are made effective in the performance of actions. In particular, Kant insists, ‘The will is thought as a faculty of determining oneself to acting according to the representation of certain laws’ (GMS 427). To act, then, requires not only that one’s activity must make sense in terms of articulable content  –​for Kant, the representation of laws –​but this discursive content even serves as the ground of action. From Nietzsche’s perspective, Kant commits himself to leaving a metaphysical space for freedom because he sees no other way to put his picture of agency into the world. That is, Kant posits a kind of ‘anti-​natural causality’ (A 25, KSA 6.194) because he takes that to be a requirement for fitting agency into a world of experience. Kant takes nature to be a ‘connection of appearances . . . according to necessary laws’ (KrV A216/​B263), so understanding actions as natural events requires treating them as ‘the relation of the subject of causality to the effect’ (KrV A205/​B250) in order to fit them into nature. What Nietzsche objects to, however, is the causal framework into which actions are fit rather than the picture of agency. Nietzsche sometimes conflates the framework of law-​governed

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causality and the distinctiveness of actions as grounded in agents’ reasons, for example, in his discussion of ‘mental causes’ (TI Four Great Errors 3, KSA 6.90–​ 1). However, it is important to see that the primary dispute with Kant is not about agency but in thinking that one has to accommodate agency into a ‘mythologically’ (BGE 21, KSA 5.36) derived picture of law-​like causal connection. Nietzsche’s disagreement, that is, is not just with the idea of fitting reasons into a causal picture, but with the very idea that nature is causally structured. He takes the idea of events following laws to be an unforgivable anthropomorphism, and in general he takes causality to be a projection of order that is convenient for the purposes of manipulating the world and discussing it with others, but that does not reflect how the world actually is. He writes, ‘One should not mistakenly reify “cause” and “effect”, as the natural scientists do [. . .]. One should make use of “cause” and “effect” only [. . .] as fictions for the purpose of designation, of communication, not of explanation’ (BGE 21, KSA 5.35–​6). In Nietzsche’s view, then, Kant’s conception of intelligible causality is just an artefact of a view about nature that Nietzsche rejects. Kant’s picture of agency does not stem from the view of nature that Nietzsche finds wrong-​headed, however, but from his conception of practical reason. The fundamental feature of agency, or ‘will’, involves self-​determination rather than letting oneself be passively determined by external factors. There are other elements of Kant’s account of agency: how the determinations of the will engage with motives and desires, for example. But the distinctiveness of action lies in its active and reflexive character, and what counts as active and reflexive is determination in accordance with reasons. When someone determines a course of action, she does so by representing a law to herself. That is, she takes a reason into consideration in the form of a representation of the appropriate principle. Furthermore, this representation serves as the determining ground of action; she acts on that basis. The distinguishing feature of agents is therefore that they act according to the reasons that they take up. For Kant, the only reasons that truly count as self-​determined are moral ones. Action in the fullest sense requires that one is determined by a law that one gives oneself, and only the moral law can play that role since only the moral law is unconditioned by any external incentives. The conditions for acting autonomously are the same as the conditions for acting morally; ‘a free will and a will under moral laws are one and the same’ (GMS 447), according to Kant. Of course, not all actions are moral actions, but for Kant that just provides insight as to why non-​moral action is defective. Action in general is a form of legislation made effective, articulating the principled ground of action and carrying it

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out. In failing to set ends morally, one takes up the task of legislation but fails at it, either by subordinating one’s will to laws borrowed from elsewhere or by neglecting one’s law-​giving capacities more profoundly by failing to adopt reasons at all. We can leave aside Kant’s insistence that freedom and moral autonomy are ‘reciprocal concepts’ (GMS 447), however, and still retain his account of actions as events that fall under a rational description. To understand an action, then, one has to understand it in terms of the reason for which it is done. Understanding a reason for an action, in turn, is a matter of considering the description on the basis of which it was adopted. All events can be described, but for actions the descriptions are internal to what they are. Helping someone in need is more than bringing it about that someone badly off becomes better off, and keeping a promise is not just the absence of another’s disappointment. There is no way to account for these kinds of performances except by seeing them under the appropriate descriptions. Seeing the why of an action is needed merely to identify what is being done in its performance. This, then, is the discursive availability of action. Most animals behave in various and complex ways, but only concept-​using creatures who are capable of responding to the world in discursively mediated ways can act. Agents must be able to represent reasons to themselves and to adopt some of these reasons. They must, furthermore, be able to make them effective in the world, in the sense of having reasons explain why an agent does something. This is not to say that every action starts from the conscious presence of a reason, or that particular inner states determine the course of action that they represent. The causal picture could be quite complex, and there is room for considerable dispute on what it means to have a reason. Agents, however, have abilities that are best characterized in discursive terms, and explanations of the exercise of these abilities appeal to the reasons that agents adopt. Action is only possible through discursive capacities because agency is an intrinsically discursive phenomenon. One can turn to Hume’s views on motivation and action for an illustration of a contrary view. For Hume (1992), actions, like all other events, follow from regularities in nature. Actions are distinct from other natural events only in that they stem from persons’ ‘motives’ and ‘tempers’ (400). Hume distinguishes sharply between representational perceptions of the mind and motivational ones, and keeps their roles entirely separate. Representational perceptions cannot by themselves result in action. Purely non-​representational impressions, that is, ‘passions’, are what do that work. Hume explains his conception of passion as follows:  ‘A passion is an original existence, or, if you will, modification of

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existence, and contains not any representative quality, which renders it a copy of any other existence or modification’ (415; emphasis added). Our reason employs ideas to show us how the world is, but passion moves to action without being about anything at all. This view of motivating perceptions threatens to render the connection between distinctively mental states and actions unintelligible. On this view, a desire for ice cream, a passion for gardening or joy at one’s good news has no real connection with its object. A desire for ice cream, for example, could just be a blind urge that happens to be satisfied in some way by ice cream, but that particular means of satisfaction is incidental to the desire itself. Even if we could make sense of desire, passion, emotion and so on as directionless urges in this way, it is hard to see how they could count as mental states. Indeed, Hume (1992: 415) suggests as much when he compares passions to being ‘more than five feet tall’, a state which is of course not about anything. Passions resemble other ‘modifications’ of body such as being pushed or heated more than they do representational states. The soundness of this view is not the topic of this chapter, however. My aim is to show that Nietzsche did not share this view, but rather agreed with Kant on the discursive availability of action.

2.  Nietzsche and the discursive availability of action At times it might seem as if Nietzsche rejects the Kantian view of the discursive availability of action. In particular, when he rejects ‘free will’, he seems to do so in favour of a Humean account in which the only explanantia of actions are non-​discursive mental states and processes. Nietzsche’s rejection of ‘the error of free will’ (HH 39, KSA 2.63) is in fact one of the few features of his thought that extends throughout his work, from early to late. In making this error one fails to recognize the necessary basis by which all events occur, and this basis might be better explained in terms of chemistry (HH 1, KSA 2.23) or physics (GS 335, KSA 3.563–​4). To be sure, Nietzsche’s thought changes over time, but in general it might seem as if he is committed to a form of naturalism in which there is no room for human beings’ discursive capacities to play a distinctive role. Of course such capacities would themselves have a causal explanation and they would interact with their environment, but they would do so in ways that could in turn be explained in deeper, non-​discursive naturalistic terms. Discursive capacities could be explained, but would do no explanatory work themselves.

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At the same time, however, Nietzsche makes a number of claims that seem to endorse the Kantian view of the discursive availability of agency. That is, Nietzsche does not explicitly endorse or even formulate a position on the discursive availability of agency, but in his typical discussions of agency he characterizes it in ways that have it depend on discursive abilities. There are four basic ways in which Nietzsche does this: he characterizes agency as involving the past and memory, as involving reflexive attitudes, as involving goals and as involving a form of commanding. First, Nietzsche frequently characterizes agency as historical. For example, he writes that ‘we need [history] for acting’ (HL Preface, KSA 1.245) and that acting requires ‘a real memory of the will’ (GM II 1, KSA 5.292). This suggests that the past influences human behaviour not merely causally, but as it were ‘ideologically’:  the possibility of agency depends on how one represents oneself in relation to the past, or on how the past is retained in memory. This, too, could perhaps be thought in causal terms. For example, memory might function to trigger a behaviour, or the prevalence of a historically given tradition might generate certain outcomes. However, this would still have to work through discursive representation: there cannot be historical memory without an articulation of the past. A purely causal picture would also have trouble accounting for the role that Nietzsche assigns to forgetting (HL 1, KSA 1.248 ff.; GM II 1, KSA 5.291 ff.). ‘Forgetting’, Nietzsche writes, ‘belongs to all acting’ (HL 1, KSA 1.250). Forgetting, that is, itself has a pervasive substantial role; it does not merely counteract the effects of memory, but changes the representation of acting. Nietzsche’s idea of history is not just of states of affairs that are no longer, or old causal antecedents, but a selectively remembered past that continues to furnish possibilities for the description of action. So insofar as agency requires historical memory, it requires discursive capacities. Second, agency involves reflexive abilities. There does not seem to be a specific or stable set of reflexive attitudes that Nietzsche associates with agency, but there are a lot of them. The simplest account appears in ‘On the Use and Abuse of History for Life’: ‘Every agent loves his deed infinitely more than it deserves to be loved’ (HL 1, KSA 1.254). The claim is universal, about all agents, and offers a primarily axiological point about actions. Nietzsche is not explicit, but he seems to be identifying a motivational requirement on acting, that it demands ‘love’ for what one is doing that is unmerited from an objective perspective. In any case, it requires the agent to love his deed, and for an agent to love his deed, he must at least be able to represent it to himself. Agency involves having available some description of what one is doing as one is doing it. Nietzsche does not, I think,

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make such a general claim elsewhere, but he frequently discusses activity in other reflexive terms, as maintaining a relationship to oneself in doing what one is doing. For example, he discusses self-​possession (HL 10, KSA 1.324 ff.), self-​ organization (HL 10, KSA 1.324 ff.), self-​liberation (WB 11, KSA 1.506 ff.), self-​ cultivation (D 560, KSA 3.296), self-​conquest (HH 55, KSA 2.74–​5; A 57, KSA 6.241–​4), self-​transformation (GS 291, KSA 3.531–​2), self-​overcoming (GM III 16, KSA 5.375–​7), self-​enhancement (BGE 262, KSA 5.214–​17) and self-​mastery (A 38, KSA 6.209–​11). Most if not all of these would require the agent to make use of her discursive capacities to represent herself and her activity to herself. Third, agency involves having goals, and having a goal seems to require having the discursive capacity to represent a desired state of affairs. This point is prominent in the third essay of the Genealogy, for example, where Nietzsche writes, ‘The fundamental fact of the human will [. . .] it needs a goal –​and it would rather will nothingness than not will’ (GM III 1, KSA 5.339). I  take Nietzsche’s use of ‘will’ here to mean what I am referring to as ‘agency’. It must mean something less like Arthur Schopenhauer’s notion of impersonal striving and more like Kant’s notion of practical reason giving ends to itself for the simple reason that ‘will’ involves goals. The story of the third essay is about the ends that human beings adopt, how those ends are taken to be valuable and how human beings come to see themselves in light of these ends; it is not about an impersonal force that underlies appearance. The will’s goals, furthermore, furnish discursive content. In the Genealogy, for example, the ascetic ideal, in providing a goal for the human will, offers ‘meaning’ (GM III 28, KSA 5.411) and an ‘interpretation’ (GM III 23, KSA 5.395–​6) of human existence. The fourth basic way in which Nietzsche characterizes agency as depending on discursive abilities is that it involves relationships of ‘commanding and obeying’ (BGE 19) among the agent’s psychic elements. Nietzsche writes, ‘[I]‌n every act of the will there is a ruling thought’ (BGE 19, KSA 5.32–​3), and elsewhere he attributes competition for authority to other psychic elements such as drives (D 109, KSA 3.96–​9) and affects (BGE 117, KSA 5.93). He has little to remark about the functioning of the process other than to say it is ‘something complicated’ (BGE 19, KSA 5.32), but it would seem to require discursive capacities. At any rate, commanding and obeying require commands and the recognition of those commands; ruling thoughts must be discursive in nature. Of course, these four ways in which Nietzsche characterizes agency as only discursively available could all be misleading. Nietzsche could be writing loosely, in ways that depart from his considered position; he could be employing metaphors that are not meant to be taken too literally; or he could be invoking

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processes and phenomena that are themselves to be explained by appeal to a deeper causal level. If we look at what Nietzsche rejects in the idea of ‘free will’ that he polemicizes against, however, then Nietzsche’s view on the discursive availability of action becomes clearer. A simplistic way of understanding Nietzsche’s critique of free will would be this. In the traditional picture, the agent forms intentions that are immediately available within consciousness, and these intentions are causally productive of actions independent of any other factors. But the traditional picture is wrong because something non-​rational, other than conscious intention, is productive of action. So the critique would consist in replacing a false causal factor with the actual one. That is not Nietzsche’s approach, however. Nietzsche takes the position that there are three things that are typically conflated, and understanding agency requires distinguishing them. Nietzsche’s terminology varies, and he is not always consistent in his conceptions of them, but these three things are the ‘driving force’ (GS 360, KSA 3.607), the ‘directing force’ (GS 360, KSA 3.607) and the ‘intention’ (BGE 32, KSA 5.51).4 The ‘driving’ force comes from the machinery of the body, as it were, that operates when actions are performed. So to discuss the driving force involves identifying the ‘antecedents of deeds’ (TI Four Great Errors 3, KSA 6.90–​1), what ‘prompts’ (GS 44, KSA 3.410) action and ‘how human action is brought about’ (D 116, KSA 3.108–​9). The ‘directing’ force pertains to ‘acting in such a way, in a particular direction’ (GS 360, KSA 3.607). That is to say, this relates to the character of the action as performed. Nietzsche is typically concerned to say that it does not fit into a larger story about natural regularities –​one’s purposiveness is not an element in an explanation of the machinery of the body –​and that it always differs from avowed motives. ‘Intention’, as Nietzsche conceives of it, is an object of immediate conscious awareness: it is a representation of a course of action that is ‘seen, known, “conscious” ’ (BGE 32, KSA 5.51). Nietzsche’s critique, then, is to deny that these three things coincide: there is no object of consciousness that is productive of actions in ways that match its discursive content. The critique is not meant to replace an immediately known cause that does not exist with an unknown one that does. Each of the three elements remains independently interesting to Nietzsche, and none of them is interesting solely or even primarily as it fits into a causal description. Both driving force and directing force are part of our ‘spiritual workings’ (GS 333, KSA 3.559) and thus are to be considered in psychological terms. Nietzsche certainly wants to distinguish the driving force from intention: ‘[T]‌hinking that the origin of every action lies within consciousness’ (TI Four Great Errors 7, KSA

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6.95–​6) is a fundamental mistake. The intention remains interesting, however, as a ‘sign and symptom’ that ‘betrays something’ (BGE 32, KSA 5.51); even ‘fictitious and fanciful motives’ (GS 44, KSA 3.410), although not to be taken at face value, reveal something about human action. Nietzsche also wants to distinguish the ‘origin’ of the action from acting itself.5 Actions are not self-​transparent in Nietzsche’s view: they are ‘never what they appear to be’ (D 116, KSA 3.109), and thus cannot be identified with what Nietzsche calls ‘intentions’. But they are still to be characterized in terms of goals and purposes, even if unconscious ones. For understanding action as such, then, what precedes the action is not primarily important, nor what occurs in consciousness, but the purposive character of the action performed. What occurs in consciousness bears only the loosest relationship to what one is doing, and although the causal story is closely related, Nietzsche insists that understanding agency in causal terms is a mistake. This is his point when he writes that ‘ “unfree will” is a mythology’ and ‘amounts to a misuse of cause and effect’ (BGE 21, KSA 5.35). Just as it is a mistake to think of agency as free will, and thus in terms of a peculiar kind of unconditioned causality, so it is also a mistake to think of it as causally conditioned unfree will. The common mistake is looking to the sequence of causes that lead up to an action rather than the acting itself, so any account of ‘will’ that locates action in antecedent events is mistaken. Nietzsche declares that he prefers to think in terms of ‘strong’ and ‘weak’ wills (BGE 21, KSA 5.36), that is, in terms of the effectiveness or ineffectiveness in pursuing ends rather than the causal conditions.6 Nietzsche’s critique of free will is compatible, then, with his endorsement of the Kantian view of the discursive availability of action. Nietzsche characterizes action primarily in terms of goals and aims rather than as the result of non-​ purposive, non-​discursive factors. There is no need to explain action in terms other than those that are internal to actions. Of course, there are cognitive ends that might be served by explaining action in terms of causal antecedents. It might help to anticipate the effect of an intervention or recognize the patterns in seemingly disconnected phenomena, for example. But having a causal story about action is different from understanding what actions are. Actions are best understood in terms of their purposiveness, as long as one does not conceive of purposes as causally effective objects of consciousness. This attention to purposiveness is why action is only discursively available for Nietzsche. Other animals lack language and discursive memory and thus, however sophisticated their behaviour, there is nothing for it to be about. Language and memory allow our behaviour to be about whatever might be thought and remembered. So rather than simply serving as responses to the

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immediate environment or as established dispositions, actions can, for example, reaffirm long-​standing commitments, manifest the character of an ongoing relationship or express the development of someone’s outlook on life. This in turn allows behaviour to count as selected rather than passively determined. Activity that is about something, by fitting into patterns of commitments and ends, can thereby meet the rational requirements of agents. Nietzsche’s account of action focuses on the character of activity itself, not what is temporally prior to activity or what predictably produces it. Activity takes on its distinctive character in relation to its point or purpose, and discursive abilities are what enable our behaviour to be goal-​directed and meaningful. This is further confirmed in Nietzsche’s discussions of drives and of grounds. Nietzsche’s most basic form of explanation is by appeal to drives. For him, psychological phenomena, if not all natural phenomena, can be explained as the product of various drives –​or sometimes ‘wills’ or ‘instincts’ –​competing with each other in particular environments; outcomes are expressions of this interaction. Although he seems less interested in the ontological claim, Nietzsche even insists that a ‘totality of drives’ is what ‘constitutes [one’s] being’ (D 119, KSA 3.111). Making sense of Nietzsche’s account requires distinguishing among separate drives, and what individuates a particular drive is its end. This is not a conscious end or even a personal one:  the drives move towards their ends regardless of whether anyone considers them or even whether they belong to anyone in particular. All the same, the drives have intentional content: a drive is distinguished by what it is directed to. They also stand in semantically complex relationships to each other. For example, Nietzsche writes about one drive ‘complaining about another’ (D 109, KSA 3.98; cf. GS 333, KSA 5.558–​9). One might think that these drives could be like Humean desires. That is, like Humean desires, they might just be directionless forces without intentional content, but capable of being characterized indirectly in terms of their objects, according to what happens to satisfy them. The idea of what satisfies or perhaps realizes a drive is, I think, more opaque than the idea of what satisfies a desire. But the more serious problem with trying to see drives as content-​less in this way is that in this case there is nothing else that could have content. The Humean view depends on a division of labour between content-​full representations that do not motivate and motivating perceptions that lack content. But Nietzsche cannot endorse such a split because representing, in his view, is inherently motivated, and because there is no non-​motivating mental entity to contrast with drives. The former point comes out when he writes of the ‘pathos of having truth’ (HH 633, KSA 2.359) or that ‘to eliminate the will altogether [. . .] would mean to

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castrate the intellect’ (GM III 12, KSA 5.365). The latter point comes out when, for example, Nietzsche writes, ‘The will to overcome an affect is ultimately only the will of another or several other affects’ (BGE 117, KSA 5.93). Nietzsche’s picture of agency cannot be that of representational thought interacting with non-​representational motives because there is no such dichotomy. There are not two separate kinds of mental things carrying out such a division of labour. Every element of the human psyche is discursively structured, and there is no split between what represents and what motivates. One other point at which to see that agency, for Nietzsche, is only discursively available is in his treatment of grounds and necessity. Nietzsche’s account of grounds is difficult to pick out from the texts, especially in translation: the German ‘Grund’ is sometimes rendered ‘ground’, sometimes ‘reason’ and sometimes even ‘foundation’. And Nietzsche sometimes discusses grounds as that which is ‘furnished’ (BGE 289, KSA 5.234) to try to prove or justify a claim to others, and sometimes reserves the term for the deeper basis of a claim or viewpoint. Nevertheless, grounds become an especially prominent topic when moral psychology meets history. Nietzsche’s story of Socratism and the ascetic ideal revolve around attempts to furnish grounds for ways of life. These attempts fail to provide ultimate or conclusive justifications for any ideal, but they have a psychological effect: ‘grounds relieve’ (GM III 20, KSA 5.389). In producing this effect, furthermore, they produce deeper transformations, by making human beings into the kinds of creatures who recognize grounds, have ‘abysmally deep’ (BGE 289, KSA 5.234) grounds and alter their relationship to their grounds and adopt novel grounds. Other animals have grounds in some sense, but as agents we are susceptible to the ‘bindingness of reason’ (D 453, KSA 3.274). Nietzsche accordingly accounts for this development in terms of the ‘prerogative of making promises’ (GM II 1, KSA 5.291). In making promises we take on discursive commitments and these commitments impose a kind of necessity that is not causal. These commitments can thereby come to serve as grounds for action. Kant’s discussion of this issue fits well here:  ‘Reason does not . . . follow the order of things as they exhibit themselves in appearance, but spontaneously makes for itself an order of its own . . . according to which it declares actions to be necessary, even though they have never taken place and perhaps never will take place’ (KrV A548/​B576). There is a distinct kind of necessity that is both practical and rational. For Nietzsche, ‘this is precisely the long story of how responsibility originated’ (GM II 2, KSA 5.293), while for Kant there is no story about this to be told –​our recognition of rational demands is simply a brute fact. But for both Kant and Nietzsche, the

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ability to make discursive commitments and thereby subject oneself to necessity allows a person to stand in a distinctive relationship to her behaviour. Through discursive commitments one can take on responsibility and become the agent of one’s deeds. For Nietzsche, to act is to make use of discursive capacities. This is not to say that actions begin with a monologue inside private mental space, or that he treats actions as an exemption from the normal causal order. Rather, action as such needs to be accounted for on its own goal-​directed terms; to act is to have reasons and to undertake commitments. The capacity to act is fully part of nature: it is the result of a historical process of development and embodied in drives and instincts. This natural capacity is nevertheless discursive.

3.  Differences between Kant and Nietzsche The many deep disagreements between Kant and Nietzsche about agency conceal the fundamental way in which Nietzsche adopts Kant’s approach. Although Nietzsche could have taken on a more mechanistic view of action, he treats agency as something available only to concept-​using creatures who set ends. This basis of agreement nevertheless allows Kant and Nietzsche to differ in innumerable ways, and attending to some of these differences can help show how they stem from a common basis. So in this section I  shall discuss three of the main disagreements between Kant and Nietzsche on agency:  on the nature of the discursivity that underwrites agency, on the connection between acting and “the inner” and on the nature of our self-​ knowledge as agents. The first main difference is the nature of the discursivity. For Kant there is a single general form of description under which all action falls. Actions take the form of conformity to a principle of volition and action in the fullest sense, freed from extrinsic interests, the form of a ‘bare conformity to law in general’ (GMS 420; cf. KpV 27). There are of course infinitely many ways for actions to fall under this description and thereby to satisfy the requirements of moral autonomy. This descriptive form is not only common to action as such, however, but also what makes it what it is. For Nietzsche, by contrast, the descriptions that constitute action as such are historically available. As historical, they come in a diversity of forms without a single underlying structure and are hermeneutically complex. For Kant the demands of autonomous action seem to be relatively unambiguous: the proper description of actions and the content of the

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moral law, once derived, are uncontroversial. But for Nietzsche the historicity of actions leaves deep questions about the basic terms by which we can make sense of our activity, about the meanings of those terms and about whether the vocabulary of our self-​descriptions is suitable to account for what we do. Nietzsche does not give a general account of the hermeneutic complexity of acting, but we can find elements of it if we recall his discussion of history and memory. Whereas for Kant our concepts gain their content through what is given in intuition, for Nietzsche our concepts gain their content through the social and historical phenomenon of language. Language retains a kind of memory of old practices so that one can act on descriptions that connect what one is doing in the present to the activities of the past. Nietzsche’s most elaborate example of this is the concept of punishment, which he claims contains ‘a whole synthesis of “meanings” ’ (GM II 13, KSA 5.317) so as to make it ‘impossible to say determinately why anyone is actually punished’ (GM II 13, KSA 5.317). And as Nietzsche points out, this kind of memory extends forward as well as backward. Just as promising allows one to ‘vouch for oneself as future’ (GM II 1, KSA 5.292), the meaning of present discourse depends on the extension of practices beyond what can now be foreseen. This dependence on memory is also what makes the discursive availability of action historically variable in Nietzsche’s case. The discursive resources available to a particular agent to make sense of her own action are different from those available to her or to others at different times. Nietzsche does not have a story about which standpoint to privilege in understanding an action; at least sometimes an agent only understands her actions retrospectively, and sometimes it takes an entirely separate point of view to understand what someone else has done. There might indeed be no stable privileged position on action. And even if there were a privileged standpoint, to make sense of it would require a historical understanding of the concepts it employs. The language of agency is ‘semiotically concentrated’ (GM II 13, KSA 5.317) in a way that takes history to engage with. Nietzsche’s famous example is the concept of punishment, but he intends his point generally. Our concepts synthesize ideas and processes that cannot be disentangled and articulated separately; our actions accordingly require a diachronic account to make sense of their meanings. The second main difference between Kant’s and Nietzsche’s discussions of agency is in how they characterize the relationship between acting and ‘the inner’. For Kant, the source of agency has to be internally represented principles: what counts is the ability to give a law to oneself. As such an internal law-​giving, it is not accessible to empirical understanding, and so can be deceived about the

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ground of our behaviour. But ‘the agent’s internal principle’ is what ‘determines the proper description of the action’ (Uleman 2010: 35). For Nietzsche, by contrast, there seems to be no clear sense in which action proceeds from inner to outer. That is, there is no independent inner content that subsequently becomes somehow externalized. Although action is characterized in terms of aims, goals and reasons, these are all features of actions as performed; there is no way to separate the discursive characteristics of actions from the ways that they manifest themselves. This difference in views on the inner does not depend on views about consciousness: neither of them take conscious awareness to play an important role in agency. For Kant, what we are aware of is mediated through our faculties of representation. Our conscious experience depends on forming judgements, so the scope of the mental extends beyond objects of inner awareness. Even in our thinking about our own thinking, we can only know how we appear to ourselves and not how we really are.7 For Nietzsche, however, there is not simply an epistemic issue about self-​awareness. There seems to be a radically diminished role for a unified subject: ‘there is no substratum; there is no “being” behind doing, effecting, becoming; the “doer” is merely poeticized after the fact’ (GM I 13, KSA 5.279).8 Nietzsche is not rejecting the subject altogether, but only the idea of the subject as a ‘neutral substratum’ (GM I 13, KSA 5.279) that supports a privileged inner space. He wants to exclude the idea that we understand actions by understanding something separate that takes place within agents. On the contrary, he insists that we understand agents, if at all, by considering actions. The third main difference concerns their conceptions of agents’ self-​ knowledge. Kant and Nietzsche share the idea that we are ‘unknown to ourselves’ (GM Preface 1, KSA 5.247) and that ‘the real morality of actions . . . remains entirely hidden from us’ (KrV A551/​B579; cf. GMS 406). But the reasons for their views are fundamentally different. For Kant, there is a determinate answer to what the ultimate ground and thus the merit of any of our actions is, but it remains permanently inaccessible to us because it falls outside the empirical conditions of our understanding. So there is something determinate about ourselves that we would like to know, but it transcends our cognitive powers. Nietzsche also concedes something analogous to Kant’s view, that ‘actions are never what they appear to us to be’ (D 116, KSA 3.109) because their source is inaccessible. But for Nietzsche this epistemic challenge is not the last word. For him, self-​knowledge is not a matter of gaining access to something hidden, but of finding oneself in what one has done. ‘Action pulls us away from ourselves’ (D 549, KSA 3.319), writes Nietzsche: it creates a difficulty in reconciling what one

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is with the public significance of the performed deed. However mysterious the source of action might be, this still leaves the hermeneutic and pragmatic challenge of making sense of actions in relation to the person who performs them. An agent’s self-​knowledge is primarily about what her actions mean. In any case, this reinforces Kant and Nietzsche’s view on the discursive availability of action. Their shared position on the inaccessibility of the ultimate source of action shows that neither one thought that such access was required for the ordinary ways that we make sense of agency. Deliberating, offering reasons, assigning responsibility, interpreting motives and so on can all be carried out without recourse to ultimate sources because these are all familiar discursive activities. To be sure, Kant and Nietzsche have different understandings of discourse and its place in nature and self-​knowledge, but they share the view that action is a fundamentally discursive phenomenon.

4.  Conclusion One of Kant’s great innovations was to provide a novel synthesis of two traditions in thinking about agency. For Kant, understanding action is both a question of understanding its source and understanding its rational and discursive character. But since the source is irremediably mysterious, it was the discursive character that was primary: principles are what make actions possible as such. Nietzsche was able to differ with Kant on so many different philosophical issues –​ nature, causality, language, philosophical method –​and still maintain a critical engagement with him because he appropriated this most basic element of Kant’s account of agency. To act involves having aims, goals and reasons; action is only discursively available. For Kant his own synthesis raises a metaphysical question about how it could be that rational, discursive content could serve as the determining ground of natural events. For Nietzsche, by contrast, the discursive availability of action raises social and historical questions about how the possibilities of agency have been established in human communities. But for both of them, the description of actions as such is internal to their possibility. For both Kant and Nietzsche, furthermore, understanding agency is central to ethical assessment. To understand an action’s merit requires having the proper description and understanding what it means. Kant takes this to be a relatively straightforward matter. To assess an action one does not need to

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know its outcome, but only situate it under a principle of will and that principle under the supreme law of morality. For Nietzsche, the hermeneutic demands are more acute. On the one hand, an individual action is open to description from countless different, endlessly revisable perspectives. On the other hand, the very authority of the language of agency is in doubt. Meaningful reasons for action and the ability to make sense of ourselves as responsible depend on a context and commitments that might be lost; nothing might count as agency anymore. Nietzsche’s interest in the ethical is not in a single dimension of morality, but in opening up meaningful possibilities of action and engaging in them.9

Notes 1 Strawson (2006: 38–​42 and part four). For an example of a reading of Nietzsche that sees him as retaining Kantian positions without the questionable metaphysics, see Clark (1990). For an example of a reading of Nietzsche that sees him as focusing his criticism on Kant’s model of agency, see Katsafanas (2012). 2 Nietzsche criticizes this idea specifically at WS 236 and WS 297, KSA 2.659 and 687, inter alia. 3 Kant prefers to discuss the conceptual as a mental phenomenon rather than language as such, but this makes no difference for thinking about the importance of discourse. 4 An example of Nietzsche’s terminological inconsistency is that ‘motive’ is sometimes equivalent to one of the first two, as in GS 44, KSA 3.410–​11, and sometimes to the third, as when it is ‘merely a surface phenomenon of consciousness’ (TI Four Great Errors 3, KSA 6.84–​5). 5 See Robert Pippin’s (2006: 134) treatment of this issue in terms of the ‘determinate factors . . . “behind” and “before” the deed’. 6 This association of agency with the notion of strength rather than causality is echoed in GM II 12, KSA 5.313–​16, where Nietzsche complains about the ‘modern misarchism’ which robs life of the ‘fundamental concept of acting’ in favour of the ‘mechanistic senselessness of all events’. 7 For discussions of the limits of self-​knowledge, see Keller (1999: 102) on the ‘idealist interpretation of self-​knowledge’ and Ameriks (1982: 257) on the ‘ideality of our self-​knowledge’. 8 For extended discussion of this point, see Pippin (2006). 9 I am greatly indebted to Tom Bailey, Jenn Dum, Randall Havas, Edgar Valdez and Melissa Zinkin for their valuable suggestions and criticisms.

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References Allison, H. E. (1990), Kant’s Theory of Freedom, New York: Cambridge University Press. Ameriks, K. (1982), Kant’s Theory of Mind, New York: Oxford University Press. Clark, M. (1990), Nietzsche on Truth and Philosophy, New York: Cambridge University Press. Hume, D. (1992), A Treatise of Human Nature, New York: Oxford University Press. Katsafanas, P. (2012), ‘Nietzsche on Agency and Self-​Ignorance’, Journal of Nietzsche Studies, 43 (1): 5–​17. Keller, P. (1999), Kant and the Demands of Self-​Consciousness, New York: Cambridge University Press. Pippin, R. B. (2006), ‘Lightning and Flash, Agent and Deed (GM I:6–​17)’, in C. D. Acampora (ed.), Nietzsche’s on the Genealogy of Morals, 131–​45, New York: Rowman and Littlefield. Strawson, P. F. (2006), The Bounds of Sense: An Essay on Kant’s Critique of Pure Reason, New York: Routledge. Uleman, J. K. (2010), An Introduction to Kant’s Moral Philosophy, New York: Cambridge University Press.

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Kant’s ‘Respect for the Law’ as the ‘Feeling of Power’ On (the Illusion of) Sovereignty Herman Siemens

This chapter revisits the figure of the ‘sovereign individual’ in GM II 2 and the controversy in Nietzsche scholarship surrounding its status  –​whether it describes Nietzsche’s ideal of autonomous agency, or the moral ideal of modernity against which his critique of morality in GM and elsewhere is ranged. The first interpretation invites a comparison with Kant’s ideal of moral autonomy, but raises the question of why Nietzsche should align himself with Kant’s morality here, when he is otherwise one of its fiercest critics. In avoiding this problem the second interpretation must, however, address Nietzsche’s emphatic use of moral vocabulary both here (‘sovereign’, ‘responsibility’, ‘conscience’) and throughout GM. Indeed, any interpretation of this figure must confront the question: What are we to make of Nietzsche’s emphatic, apparently affirmative use of moral terms in GM, given his call for a ‘critique of moral values’ (GM Preface 6, KSA 5.253) and his project to translate moral values back into their ‘natural “immorality” ’?1 This question will be approached through a comparative analysis of GM II 2 focused on ‘the sovereign individual’ and chapter III of Kant’s Critique of Practical Reason (KpV): ‘Of the Motives of Pure Practical Reason’. For obvious reasons, it is normal to interpret the sovereign individual in connection with the themes of autonomy, promising and commitment. Yet this leaves out a crucial question:  How to account for the act itself by which the sovereign individual finally redeems its promise? What is the motive or Triebfeder for this promised act to occur in the moment it does? In order to address this

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question, I begin (Section 1) with an analysis of ‘respect for the law’ (Achtung fürs Gesetz) as the motive for moral action in Kant’s KpV chapter III, arguing that there is a difficulty, a temporal knot, in his account. After sketching a possible solution (in the Interlude), I  then fill it out (Section 2) with reference to Nietzsche’s account of the sovereign individual in GM II 1–​2. My thesis is that the dynamics of memory and forgetting in Nietzsche’s account help to disentangle the temporal knot in Kant’s story, while on the other hand Kant’s account of Achtung helps to explain the motive for the redeeming act in Nietzsche’s story. The guiding intuition behind this comparative analysis is that Kantian Achtung and the sovereign individual’s ‘consciousness of power and freedom’ are both based on the same judgement: that freedom is advanced through the overcoming of resistances. In Nietzsche’s Nachlass notes on physiology, however, this judgement is exposed as a misunderstanding of the body, a form of self-​deception. Yet it does not follow that the concepts of freedom and will are emptied of value by Nietzsche. In the end, I argue, the question of freedom is naturalized by Nietzsche as the question: How to make the feeling of power more substantial and less illusory?

1.  Kant on the motives of pure practical reason (KpV chapter III) Most broadly, the problem faced by Kant in chapter III of KpV, ‘Of the Motives (Triebfeder) of Pure Practical Reason’, is how pure practical reason can be a motive for action at all. For Kant, the moral worth of actions requires that pure practical reason be the sole and immediate motive for action; for only if the moral law determines the will immediately can the will be said to be free (free of influence by other sensible motives). In concrete terms, it means that every action that is morally worthy is determined by the ‘universalisability test’, in which reason tests the ‘adaptability [Tauglichkeit] of our maxims to universal legislation’ (KpV 74); in this sense, every moral action is, in Geiger’s words, ‘a first’2 . This is problematic for at least two reasons. First, as the young Hegel already noted, we all know that it is the passions or inclinations that move us to act; practical reason, in its Kantian discursive purity stripped of all force or power (Kraft), simply cannot be practical (cf. Geiger 2007: 28). It is problematic, secondly, on the Kantian grounds that ‘we cannot know [. . .] the force [Kraft] of the pure

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practical law as motive’ (KpV 78), since we are in the realm of the noumenal. As Kant puts the problem: For as to how a law can be of itself and immediately a determining ground of the will (which is the essence of all morality), this is, for human reason, an insoluble problem and identical with the question: how a free will is possible. (KpV 72)

In a sense the first problem is a consequence of the all-​too-​sharp division or diremption (Entzweiung), as the young Hegel put it, between reason and the inclinations in Kant’s thought. In these terms, what Kant needs is a mediating third (analogous to the problem of schematism in KrV) that can make plausible his claim that pure reason can be practical by involving some kind of passionate element or feeling in the motivational story of moral action. Only, it must be very peculiar kind of feeling or passion, one that plays into the motivation of moral action as a sensible, passionate mobile without however impinging on or interfering in the immediate determination of the will by the moral law: a feeling that somehow ‘promotes [beförderlich ist] the influence of the law on the will’ (KpV 75) without preceding the law, without tainting the purity of practical reason or the freedom of the will with ‘sensible feeling’; without mediating the immediate relation between the law and the will. In short, it must be a motive for moral action, without really being a motive. The candidate chosen by Kant for this impossible task is, of course, the notion of respect for the law, ‘Achtung fürs Gesetz’. Unsurprisingly, Kant’s account of Achtung culminates in the claims that Achtung ‘is not a motive to morality’ (KpV 76), but also that it ‘serves as a motive to make it [the moral law] of itself a maxim’ (KpV 76). But this is too rough and ready to be fair to Kant, so we should see how he builds up his argument. Kant begins by reiterating two principles already established: (1) that ‘what is essential in the moral worth of actions is that the moral law should immediately determine the will’ (KpV 71) and (2) that ‘what is essential in every determination of the will by the moral law is that being a free will it is determined by the moral law alone [blos]’ (KpV 72). In order to secure the first principle, Kant resolves not to investigate ‘the ground whence the moral law of itself provides a motive’, lest the intellectual sources or ‘spirit of the law’ be compromised by a feeling for the law. Instead he will ask how the moral law can be a motive by focusing on the effect it produces on our faculty of desire, our disposition (Gemueth), our feelings (KpV 72). It will, in other words, be assumed that the moral law can motivate the will, and the investigation will begin ‘after the event’, so to speak. The second principle brings Kant face to face with the second, epistemological problem that we cannot have knowledge of free will. How then can

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the freedom of the will in its determination by the moral law alone be exhibited? Kant’s solution is to leave out cases where our sensible impulses might concur (einstimmen) and cooperate (mitwirken) with the moral law, and to consider only the effect of the moral law on feeling where it conflicts with our inclinations and sensible impulses (sinnliche Antriebe). This gives Kant his first result:  in cases where the determination of the will by the moral law requires rejecting (Abweisung) all sensible impulses, and ‘breaking’ or ‘checking’ (Abbruch) ‘all inclinations so far as they might be opposed to that law’ (KpV 72), the very real, ‘empirical’ effect on our feeling is negative: the pain of frustrated desires or inclinations. All feelings that precede the moral law are affected, whether natural (self-​love  –​ Selbstliebe) or not (self-​conceit  –​Eigendünkel):  self-​love is broken or interrupted (Abbruch) by being limited (eingeschraenkt) to rational self-​love (that is in agreement –​Einstimmung –​with the law); self-​conceit is struck down (niedergschlagen) (KpV 73). This move enables Kant to connect the moral law with feeling across the supersensible–​sensible divide in a compelling way –​we all are familiar with cases where our (perceived) duties conflict with our desires  –​without having to posit a feeling for the law that precedes it and fights on its behalf, so to speak.3 For, ‘the negative effect produced on feeling (by the check on the inclinations) is itself feeling’ (KpV 73). And although we cannot have knowledge of ‘the force of pure practical reason as a motive’, we certainly can know this negative feeling and by it, ‘the resistance’ the law offers ‘to motives of sensibility’.4 To the extent that we falsely identify our affective or ‘pathologically determinable self ’ with our entire self (KpV 74), this negative feeling is tantamount to humiliation (Demüthigung) or what Kant also calls intellectual (self-​)contempt (intellektuelle Verachtung) (KpV 75): Thus the moral law inevitably humiliates every man when he compares with it the sensible propensities [sinnlichen Hang] of his nature. (KpV 195)

On its own, however, this is unsatisfactory, since it gives the moral law a purely negative signature in our affective life. Enter respect or Achtung, the term Kant reserves for the positive feeling evoked by the moral law as motive: But as this law is something positive in itself, namely, the form of an intellectual causality, that is, of freedom, it must be an object of respect; for, by opposing the subjective antagonism [Widerspiele] of the inclinations, it weakens self-​conceit; and since it even breaks down [niederschlägt], that is,

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humiliates [demüthigt], this conceit, it is an object of the highest respect and, consequently, is the ground of a positive feeling which is not of empirical origin, but is known a priori. Therefore respect for the moral law is a feeling which is produced by an intellectual cause, and this feeling is the only one that we know quite a priori and the necessity of which we can perceive [einsehen]. (KpV 73)

I would like to draw attention to three things in this passage. It is important to note, first, that Achtung is real feeling; for only then can it be enlisted to strengthen Kant’s claim that pure reason can be practical.5 Kant thus writes that ‘the sensible feeling [das sinnliche Gefühl], which lies at the basis of all our inclinations, is indeed the condition [Bedingung] of that feeling [Empfindung] which we call respect’ (KpV 75). But a condition is not a cause, and Kant goes on: ‘But the cause that determines it lies in the pure practical reason; and this feeling [Empfindung] therefore, on account of its origin, must be called, not a pathological but practically-​effected [praktisch-​gewirkt]’ (KpV 75). It is important, secondly, that this positive feeling have an intellectual, and not an empirical source or cause, so that we need not posit a moral feeling for the law that precedes the law, jeopardizing its exclusive and immediate determination of the will. But how exactly are we to understand the intellectual source of this positive feeling, given that we cannot know the moral law or freedom, let alone feel them? In the passage cited above, Kant says that since the law, as the form of intellectual causality or freedom, is something positive, it must be the ground of a positive feeling; yet he also says, and must say, in order to secure this freedom from sensible influence, that ‘there is no feeling for this law’ (KpV 75). A clue is given in the above-​ cited passage, where it is important to note, thirdly, that the positive feeling of Achtung is bound up with the subjective antagonism of the inclinations and the prior negative feeling of humiliation or intellectual Verachtung. The feeling of Achtung for the law may be positive, but it seems to be predicated on or mediated by a negative feeling of Verachtung for our sensible nature. It is, Kant says, ‘an indirect effect’ of the moral law ‘on feeling, inasmuch as it [the moral law –​ HS] weakens the impeding influence of inclinations by humiliating self-​conceit’ (KpV 79; HS). Yet on its own, this tells us nothing about the intellectual source of Achtung. We come closer when we see that the positive feeling for freedom is tied to the resistance offered by the law to the antagonism of our inclinations. For this connection: freedom and resistance is a judgement or interpretation of reason. This is made clear at a number of points in Kant’s text6; I will consider one of them.

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After describing the negative effect of the moral law on feeling as humiliation or intellectual contempt (Verachtung), Kant writes: There is indeed no feeling for this law; but inasmuch as it removes the resistance out of the way, this removal of an obstacle is, in the judgement of reason, esteemed equivalent to a positive help to its causality.7

Here it is clear that the intellectual source of respect or Achtung is reason’s judgement that (1)  the painful feeling of self-​contempt or Verachtung is an effect of the motivational activity of the moral law on our will (against inclinations); (2) the success of the motivational activity of the moral law, signalled by Verachtung, is a sign that the moral law has overcome the resistance offered by our inclinations (our pathological self); and (3) the overcoming of this resistance or obstacle to the moral law as motive is equivalent to (gleichgeschaetzt), an advancement of the causality of freedom. Further on, Kant clarifies this third moment in reason’s judgement with reference to the quasi-​mechanistic principle: ‘Whatever reduces the obstacles to an activity advances this activity itself.’8 This principle, Kant argues, occasions a juxtaposition or transformation –​the text is not clear on this –​of feelings: the painful humiliation (Demüthigung) or feeling of contempt (Verachtung) for our sensible side, when judged by reason to be a sign that the resistance of our inclinations has been overcome by the motivational activity of the moral law (step 2), thereby advancing the causality or activity of freedom (step 3), gives rise to a positive9 feeling of elevation (Erhebung) in our esteem for the law on our intellectual side. This Erhebung is, in other words, Achtung fürs Gesetz. Yet it is clear that if we are to feel this Erhebung, a last step in the judgement of reason is needed, namely, (4) that we, who make the judgement of reason, are not just (or not at all) the sensible or pathological selves that feel humiliated by the moral law, but also (or rather) the intellectual selves or subjects of pure practical reason that feel elevated by the advancement of freedom. The very least one can say is that what Kant calls the judgement of reason (Urteile der Vernunft) is highly interpretative; or, to go one step further, that it should really be called the interpretation of reason or even a reinterpretation of the feeling of self-​contempt in the light of our consciousness of the moral law, a reinterpretation that reidentifies our self with the moral law over sensibility and so gives rise to a positive feeling of elevation or respect for the law in us. As the intellectual ground of the feeling of respect, this judgement or interpretation of reason is of crucial importance for Kant’s solution to the problem he is tackling in chapter III of the KpV. On the one hand, by producing a

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positive feeling or elevation or respect, it allows him to introduce a sensible, emotional dimension into his motivational story of morally worthy action, thereby lending greater strength to his claim that pure reason can be practical. Kant can therefore say that this ‘feeling [. . .] promotes the influence of the law on the will’ or even that ‘Achtung for the law is not a motive for morality, but it is morality itself, considered subjectively as motive [. . .]’ (KpV 75). On the other hand, as an intellectual source or ground of this feeling (itself the effect of a judgement or interpretation of reason), it leaves Kant’s key principle intact, that it is pure reason and reason alone that is the motive for morally worthy action. Since respect is the effect of a judgement of reason, not a prior feeling, it dispenses with the need to posit a moral feeling for the law that precedes it, as the ground of respect. And since respect is an effect of the motivational activity of the moral law, judged through the lense of reason, it does not meddle in the causal story of whence the moral law itself provides a motive, and so does not impinge on the key principle that ‘the moral law should immediately determine the will’ (KpV 71)  for our action to be morally worthy. However, we can ask whether this move, ingenious as it is, does not vitiate Kant’s solution, making the victory of the moral law no more than a Pyrrhic victory. Kant’s problem, we should recall, was ‘how a law can be of itself and immediately a determining ground of the will’ (KpV 72), yet his story simply assumes that the moral law can motivate the will, and begins ‘after the event’, as a story about the effect of the moral law’s action on the will. Here it is important to be clear about something that Kant himself –​perhaps not the best philosophical raconteur –​is not very clear on: the temporal sequence of events. The first ‘effect’ of the moral law’s determination of the will is the negative feeling of pain, self-​contempt or humiliation; this is then judged by reason, whose judgement or interpretation then gives rise to the positive feeling of respect or elevation. The very coherence of Kant’s account hinges on this sequence. It is only the painful feeling of Verachtung that prompts reason to interpret it as a victory achieved by the moral law over the resistance of our unruly selfish inclinations; and it is only this victory or successful overcoming that can be equated with the advancement of freedom, giving rise to the positive feeling of respect. But if the feeling of respect necessarily comes after the motivational success of the moral law in the face of resistance, it comes too late to be a motive and to address Kant’s problem of how pure reason can be practical. How then can respect be a motive? How can it do the work Kant wants it to do, namely: to ‘promote[.]‌the influence of the law on the will’ (KpV 75)?

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Interlude: An attenuated version of Kant’s account of Achtung There is perhaps one way to spin Kant’s story that unravels this temporal knot while remaining true to his key principles that (1) the moral law must determine the will exclusively and immediately, so as (2) to secure the freedom of the will. The problem is how the positive feeling of Achtung can possibly be a motive if it is a reaction (mediated by reason’s judgement) to the successful motivation of the will by the moral law, against the resistance of inclinations. Achtung must be genuinely motivational if it is to help address Kant’s problem of ‘how a law can be of itself and immediately a determining ground of the will’. But for this, it seems, we must violate Kant’s position that this feeling must not precede the law. Perhaps a clue lies in Kant’s formulation of the motivational force of Achtung, when he writes that it ‘promotes the influence of the law on the will’ (KpV 75). This formulation seems to abstract from individual actions and to attenuate or stretch the motivational force of Achtung out over time. My suggestion is that what Kant means here is not a specific feeling that motivates a specific action, but something more like a habituation over time, an enduring disposition to attend to the moral law. As an enduring disposition, Achtung would then precede any specific action and be genuinely motivational without, however, displacing the motivational work of pure reason and reason alone; for ‘promoting’ or ‘advancing’ (befördern, beförderlich sein) the influence of the law on the will is not the same as determining (bestimmen) the law or the will itself, and a disposition to attend to the law does not amount to determining the law, much less the will itself. This difference between disposition and determination suggests a way to address the problem raised by our violation of Kant’s ban on antecedent feelings; namely, how to ensure that the moral law will determine the will exclusively and immediately if it is preceded by a feeling? If the notion of a habitual disposition to attend to the law is strong enough to do some motivational work (in support of pure practical reason) but too weak to determine the law or the will itself, there is no reason to think that it will displace or even threaten the work of pure practical reason to exclusively and immediately determine the will, when a specific action is called for. In other words, this disposition leaves space for reason to perform the universalizability test in each and every case of action, ensuring that every action has been determined by a process of rational reflection and is in this sense a ‘first’, not a consequence of mere habituation.

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No doubt, Kant would squirm uncomfortably under this very un-​Kantian, all too Humean solution to the temporal knot of motivation in his account. In riding roughshod over the clean separation of the effects of the moral law on feeling from its causes, it falls far short of the guarantee he is after that the moral law determines the will without mediation or assistance from feeling. But perhaps, a more relaxed Kant might concede this much: ‘The very least I require is that you come up with some sort of switch, a way to at least explain how our disposition to attend to the law, once it has done its work and we are receptive to the moral law, can be switched off in the event that action is called for, so as to clear the way for pure practical reason to do its work directly and without interference.’

2.  Nietzsche on remembering and forgetting At this point in our unlikely conversation, we could turn to Nietzsche, and his human (not Humean), all-​too-​human account of the sovereign individual in the Genealogy of Morals. Putting aside –​for the time being –​the many un-​Kantian and anti-​Kantian things that need to be said about this passage, I would suggest that it has the ingredients to make the attenuated version of Kant’s motivational story work to the satisfaction of our relaxed Kant. The key ingredients, I would suggest, are memory and forgetting. The kind of Achtung fürs Gesetz that can ‘promote [beförderlich ist] the influence of the law on the will’ (KpV 75) must be strong enough to do sustained motivational work over time. It must, in specific, endure as a conscious feeling but with the practical force of a ‘long chain’ that withstands being broken by the ‘world of strange new things, circumstances and even acts of will’ that will intervene between one significant moral act and another. It must, in other words amount to a ‘mastery over oneself, and also a mastery over circumstance, [even] over nature’ in order to be ‘sustained in the face of mishaps, or even “in the face of fate” ’.10 What is required, in other words, is not just a passive or involuntary habit, ‘no mere passive incapacity to get rid of something’, but something supremely active, a ‘long, unbreakable will’, what Nietzsche calls a futural ‘memory of the will’: [. . .] an active not-​willing-​to-​let-​go-​again, a will to keep on willing that which has been willed once before, an actual memory of the will [. . .]11

The context for this notion is, of course, the much-​commented discussion of promising and the animal with the right to promise at the beginning of GM II. My suggestion is that there is an analogy between promising and

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the kind of Achtung that can do sustained motivational work over time, and that Nietzsche’s account of the futural memory of the will needed to keep one’s promise over time helps us understand better the natural conditions or capacity (Vermögen) needed to sustain an Achtung as a disposition over time. The discussion of promising in GM II 2 needs to be considered together with the preceding discussion of forgetting that opens GM II. Polemicizing again against reactive moral psychologists, Nietzsche insists that forgetting is no mere passive inability, inertia or inactivity, but an active Hemmungsvermögen, a ‘positive capacity to suppress’ sensory input and so regulate conscious experience. Active forgetting is introduced by Nietzsche as a necessity for human life, so that conscious experience can perform the interactional tasks needed for social life, and it is against this force (Kraft) that active memory –​the futural memory of the will –​must be cultivated ‘as a counter-​capacity [Gegenvermögen] [. . .] with whose help forgetting can be suspended for certain cases  –​namely for those cases where a promise ought to be made [dass versprochen werden soll]’ (GM II 1, KSA 5.292). From this it follows that the sovereign individual is characterized not just by promising, or the self-​given right to promise. Being a social animal, he is characterized by the counter-​capacities of forgetting and remembering, by the tension or conflict between these two active forces, and has the task of regulating this tension: What is the right balance between forgetting and remembering? What is the right time to forget, the right time to remember? Returning with this question to my attenuated version of Kant’s motivational story of moral action, I  propose that the right time to forget is Kant’s moment of action. For Kant, the moral law must determine the will exclusively and immediately for the ensuing action to be morally worthy. In our imaginary conversation with a relaxed Kant, he asked for an explanation of how Achtung, understood as disposition to attend to the law that precedes action, can be switched off so as to allow pure practical reason to determine the will without interference. The answer provided by Nietzsche’s text is that the switch is a moment of active forgetting that suppresses the emotional disposition to attend to the law, clearing the way for conscious rational reflection (Kant’s universalizability test). For if we ask: What is required for pure practical reason to determine the will? the Nietzschean answer is: suppression of all things physiological, including our emotional dispositions; a moment of ‘presence’ or presence of mind to take in the conditions under which we must act –​all functions of active forgetting. But what we need above all –​the supreme function of the capacity to forget –​ is:

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To shut the doors and windows of consciousness for a while; not to be bothered by the noise and struggle with which our underworld of serviceable organs work for and against one another; a bit of quiet, a bit of tabula rasa of consciousness, so that room is made again for something new, above all for the nobler functions and functionaries, for ruling, anticipating, pre-​determining [Regieren, Voraussehn, Vorausbestimmen]. (GM II 1, KSA 5.291)

For Kantian reason to do its work and determine (Bestimmen. Nietzsche: ‘pre-​ determine’: Vorausbestimmen) the will, what is needed above all is a moment of forgetting that allows the noble functions of ruling, anticipating, predetermining to do their work undisturbed. My suggestion, then, is that Nietzsche’s account of the sovereign individual, by thematizing and drawing out the dimension of time, and by introducing the dynamics of memory and forgetting, helps to make sense of Kant’s account of the motives for moral action: to disentangle the temporal knot in Kant’s story and to clarify from a naturalistic point of view the conditions or capacities that are required for the account to be credible. None of this is, however, to suggest that Nietzsche subscribes to Kant’s normative–​transcendental aims, to his Enlightenment concept of autonomous Reason as the ground of morally worthy action, to the universal law, or even –​ as we shall see –​to the will as such. Before turning to these substantive disagreements and dis-​analogies between them, I would like to pursue further the analogies between the two texts, starting with the hermeneutic objection that the analogy I have drawn is misplaced. Nietzsche’s text (GM II, 1 & 2) has, it seems, nothing to do with motives, let alone Kant’s account of the motives for moral action. If, as I have argued, Kant’s text (KpV Ch III) begins too late to be an account of the motives for action –​after the motivational success of the moral law in determining the will, and considering only its effects on feeling –​this goes even more so for Nietzsche’s text: his account of promising, it seems quite clear, begins with the ‘original “I will” “I will do” ’ –​skipping out its motives in the preceding act of promising –​and concerns the ‘long chain of the will’ that links the original ‘I will’ over time with the eventual ‘discharge of the will, its act’ that fulfils the promise. Promising is [. . .] an active not-​willing-​to-​let-​go-​again, a will to keep on willing that which has been willed once before, an actual memory of the will: so that between the original ‘I will’ ‘I will do’ and the actual discharge of the will, its act, a world of new strange things, circumstances, even acts of will may be placed without breaking the long chain of the will.12

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Nietzsche gives us a great deal in the way of socio-​anthropological prehistory and presuppositions for the sovereign individual’s right to promise, but the story itself takes place between the already motivated ‘I will’ and the act, and so tells us nothing about motives. But this story of the ‘long unbroken chain of the will’ is misleading if taken too literally. It is a kind of shorthand for a much more complex account, which Kant’s text can help us to reconstruct. One clue lies in the expression ‘Fort-​und Fortwollen des ein Mal Gewollten’ used by Nietzsche to describe the ‘long chain of the will’: literally, a ‘further and further-​willing of what was once willed’, it indicates not a static, iron-​bound link between two different events –​willing (as cause) and acting (as effect), but rather the active repeating of an original event. This means that the event that redeems the promise is not simply an ‘act’ that follows quasi-​mechanically as an effect (‘discharge’) from an original cause in ‘willing’ by way of an unbroken linkage between cause and effect, but rather that the event that redeems the promise requires a repetition of the original willing that can now discharge itself in an act. If so, this raises the question of the motives for this final willing, both in the moment of willing (What moves this final act of willing to discharge itself in action?) and in the preceding stretch of time (What enables the original promise to be sustained over time, so as to motivate the final act of willing to discharge itself in action?). With regard to this last question, I believe Kant’s Achtung fürs Gesetz, as that which ‘promotes the influence of the moral law on the will’ (KpV 75), can help us. Whatever the exact nature of the original promise, for it to motivate the final act of willing that redeems it, the promise must be respected over time, such that it outweighs the intervening multitude of drives, impulses and desires that conflict with it and seek to outweigh the promise in demanding satisfaction. What is needed, in other words, is a sustained disposition to attend to the original promise and so ‘promote the influence of the promise on the eventual act of willing that redeems it’ –​in the face of what Nietzsche variously calls ‘a world of new strange things, circumstances, even acts of will placed in between’ (unbedenklich eine Welt von neuen fremden Dingen, Umständen, selbst Willensakten dazwischengelegt), ‘even against mishaps, even “against fate” ’ (selbst gegen Unfälle, selbst ‘gegen das Schicksal’).13 This disposition is firmly rooted in ‘the will’ by Nietzsche –​whatever he means exactly by this –​as the ‘memory of the will’. And as an emotional or affective disposition to attend not to the universal moral law, but to a singular, freely made promise, it is described not as respect (Achtung), but as pride (Stolz):

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The proud knowledge of the extraordinary privilege of responsibility, the consciousness of this rare freedom, this power over oneself and over destiny has dug itself into his lowest depths and has become instinct, his dominant instinct [. . .]14

For Kant, Achtung derives from a judgement of reason that the moral law, in determining the will, has overcome the resistance of conflicting inclinations and thereby advanced the causality of freedom. What, then, about Nietzsche’s Stolz? What are its sources, and how far does the analogy with Kantian Achtung go? On the basis of the above passage, we can say: Nietzschean Stolz derives from a judgement that one’s promise, in determining the will in the act of redeeming it, has overpowered (‘Macht über’) resistances both within (‘über sich’: conflicting inclinations) and without (‘das Geschick’ or fate), thereby advancing a consciousness of one’s (unique) freedom. This formulation brings Nietzsche as close to Kant as the text allows. What is most striking is the connection or equivalence made by both between the overcoming of resistance, and the advancement of freedom. The overcoming or mastery over resistance is repeated several times in Nietzsche’s account of the sovereign individual, as is the connection between Stolz and freedom, as when he describes the sovereign individual as [. . .] the man of his own independent long will who is permitted to promise –​ and in him a proud consciousness, quivering in every muscle, of what has finally been achieved there and become body in him, an actual consciousness of power and freedom [eigentliches Macht-​und Freiheits-​Bewusstsein], a feeling that the human as such has reached completion.15

But what is the status of the ‘consciousness of this rare freedom’, this ‘power-​ and freedom-​consciousness’ for Nietzsche? How far does the analogy with Kant really go? For Kant, as we saw, the connection between the overcoming of resistance and freedom, giving rise to the feeling of elevation or respect (Erhebung, Achtung), is a judgement of reason. This is important for his transcendental–​normative aims in the KpV since, as an intellectual source or ground of this feeling, it leaves pure reason and reason alone to determine morally worthy action without interference from prior feelings. Nietzsche’s text, by contrast, is marked by a radical shift in its philosophical centre of gravity away from the transcendental–​normative to a socio-​physiological naturalism. In the above-​cited texts, this shift takes place when the ‘consciousness of freedom’ is described as an ‘instinct’, a ‘dominating instinct’, or as a bodily (leibhaft geworden) feeling, ‘quivering in every muscle’. In order to pursue this profound dis-​analogy with Kant, and to really grasp the status of

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the ‘consciousness of freedom and power’ from a physiological point of view, we need to move from the text to the subtexts in the Nachlass. In doing so, we are confronted with the problem of how to take Nietzsche’s physiological interpretations of the moral categories he employs in GM. Do they, as part of the project to ‘translate moral values back into their natural “immorality”’, serve not only to naturalize them, but to deflate their value, robbing them of normative power and credibility? Or does Nietzsche’s physiological turn leave the question of their value and normativity open? The status of Nietzsche’s emphatic, apparently affirmative use of moral terms in GM, and the figure of the sovereign individual itself, depends on how one responds to these questions.

3.  Nietzsche’s physiology of freedom I turn first to note NL 1884 27[24] (KSA 11.281), which I will then comment on paragraph by paragraph: Freedom and feeling of power. The feeling of play in the overcoming of great difficulties, e.g. of the virtuoso; self-​certainty that upon the will the precisely corresponding action follows –​a kind of affect of supremacy [hubris] is there, highest sovereignty of one who commands. There must also be the feeling of resistance, pressure. –​But with this goes a deception concerning the will: it is not the will that overcomes the resistance –​we make a synthesis between 2 simultaneous states and place a unity therein.   The will as poetization [or condensation: Erdichtung]. 1. one believes that it itself moves (while it is only a stimulus upon which a movement begins) 2.  one believes that it overcomes resistances 3. one believes that it is free and sovereign, because its origin remains concealed from us and because the affect of commanding accompanies it 4. because in by far the most cases one only wills when success can be expected, the ‘necessity’ of success is ascribed to the will as force16

Paragraph 1:  The reference to sovereignty here and in the second paragraph (‘Souveränität’, ‘souverän’) in relation to the consciousness or feeling of power (‘Machtgefühl’), of supremacy (‘Übermuth’) and a sense of control or command (‘Befehlenden’) connects clearly with Nietzsche’s use of  ‘sovereign’ in GM II 2. At the same time, sovereignty in this text also connects with Kant’s judgement of

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reason insofar as the consciousness of freedom and power is bound up with the overcoming of great difficulties (‘Überwindung großer Schwierigkeiten’) and the simultaneous feeling of resistance or pressure (‘Gefühl des Widerstandes, Druckes’). However, Nietzsche goes on to call this a ‘deception concerning the will’ (‘Täuschung über den Willen’) and argues that Kant’s judgement of reason is a misinterpretation of actual power relations, a misunderstanding of the physiology of agency. This argument instantiates an important feature of Nietzsche’s philosophy of power, which is the need to distinguish actual relations of power from our interpretations/​consciousness/​feelings of power. This distinction is needed for those cases, such as sovereignty, where there is a radical disjunction between them: for, as Patton, Saar and others have shown, the feeling of power is not always simply the consequence of greater power.17 What, then, according to Nietzsche, is the nature of the misinterpretation or illusion at play in sovereignty? When he writes that we make a ‘synthesis between 2 simultaneous states and place a unity therein’, we can take him to mean that a state of power, play, supremacy, commanding (Macht/​ Spiel/​Uebermuth/​Befehlen) on one side, and a state of resistance, pressure, difficulty (Schwierigkeiten/​Widerstand/​Druck) on the other are (falsely) synthesized into the unified concept of the will. Paragraph 2 helps to fill out this picture: When the two stimuli or feelings, that of power and command and that of resistance or pressure, are accompanied by movement (the beginning of action), this is (mis)interpreted by us as the will overcoming resistance to cause our action, which in turn is (mis)interpreted by us as the sovereignty or freedom of our will to cause action. In this last step we can recognize clearly the equivalence drawn by Kant’s judgement of reason between the overcoming of resistance and the advancement of the causality of freedom. Only it is judged by Nietzsche to be not the effect of the moral law motivating the will, but a deception or illusion, a misinterpretation of the physiological processes he describes here and elsewhere. Another note throws more light on these processes in a way that invokes and explains (away) the two key feelings linked by Kant’s judgement of reason: painful humiliation or self-​contempt (Demütigung, Verachtung) and elevation or respect (Erhebung, Achtung): All physiological processes are the same insofar as they are explosions of force, which, when they land in the sensorium commune, bring with them a certain heightening and strengthening:  these, measured against the oppressive, burdened states of constraint, are interpreted as a feeling of ‘freedom’.18

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Here Kant’s Erhebung is recast as a feeling of Erhöhung und Verstärkung that derives from all physiological processes, understood as discharges or explosions of force.19 Whereas in Kant’s account, Erhebung follows from reason’s judgement or interpretation that freedom is advanced, in Nietzsche’s version, the feeling of Erhebung or Erhöhung comes before the judgement or feeling of freedom. The feeling of freedom is a result or rather interpretation of the feeling of Erhöhung, when it is measured against states of pressure, constraint, restriction. In Kant’s terminology we might say: the painful feeling of humiliation that comes from the restriction of our inclinations, when juxtaposed with the feeling of Erhebung that accompanies all physiological processes, is (mis)interpreted by us as the-​ will-​overcoming-​resistance-​of-​the-​inclinations, giving rise to the feeling of freedom. Here the juxtaposition of painful Demütigung and positive Erhebung, so central to Kant’s account of Achtung, is redescribed physiologically in a way that makes nonsense of reason’s judgement. In Kant’s account, the feeling of painful humiliation is judged by reason to be the effect of the law motivating the will against conflicting inclinations. In Nietzsche’s account, the sources of the states of pressure, constraint, restriction are less clear, but we can assume they refer to the resistances intrinsic to all relations of power.20 In the next note I will consider, these states of constraint are identified with what Nietzsche called the ‘stimulus’ (Reiz) or ‘feeling of resistance and pressure’ (Widerstand, Druck) in the first note (NL 1884 27[24], KSA 11.281 ff.). The present note makes it clear that the feeling of freedom is the result of a physiological process that begins when one drive stimulates a feeling of pressure or constraint on another, provoking that other into an activity of mastering the first: The human has, in opposition to animal, nurtured a wealth of opposed drives and impulses: by virtue of this synthesis he has become master of the earth. –​ moralities are the expression of locally confined hierarchies in this multi-​faceted world of drives: so that the human does not go to ground because of its contradictions. So, one drive as master, its counter-​drive weakened, refined, as an impulse, which gives the stimulus for the activity of the main drive. The highest human would have the greatest multiplicity of drives, and also in the relatively greatest strength that can be endured. Indeed:  where the plant human shows itself to be strong one finds the instincts powerfully driving against one another (e.g. Shakespeare) but contained [lit. tamed].21

Clearly, we are squarely in the domain of Nietzsche’s homo natura as a multiplicity of competing drives –​and about as far as possible from Kant’s ghostly

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homo noumenon. The unified concept of the will is hereby dissolved and in these terms, the feeling of freedom is relativized to any drive that gains relative supremacy over others in an ongoing struggle of drives. The critical force of Nietzsche’s physiological discourse is to expose the key Kantian concepts of will and (the causality of) freedom as errors,22 illusions that condense or hypostasize infinitely complex, multiple processes and tensions into unities. Nietzsche’s physiological discourse does this through genealogies that seek to describe the physiological conditions under which concepts like these emerge, a discourse that undermines completely the transcendental-​normative aims of Kant’s moral philosophy. Yet, to displace homo noumenon with homo natura, to expose Kant’s key concepts of freedom and the will and as illusions, to expose the sovereign individual’s self-​understanding as sovereign, as a misunderstanding of the multiplicity of bodily struggles that he is, is not for Nietzsche to empty them of value. Pace those who accuse him of the genetic fallacy, Nietzsche is quite clear: Whoever has gained insight into the conditions under which a moral evaluation has arisen, has not thereby touched upon its value: there are many useful things, and also important insights that have been found in a faulty and unmethodical way; and every quality [Qualität] remains still unknown, even if one has understood under which conditions it arises.23

While Nietzsche’s physiological discourse certainly undermines the transcendental–​normative aims of Kant’s moral philosophy, it does not collapse the normative question driving Kant’s moral thought. As this note makes clear, it leaves the value, or more precisely the qualitative evaluation (cf. ‘Qualität’ above), of his key moral concepts or values –​freedom or sovereignty, the will  –​untouched. An indication of what Nietzsche means by ‘quality’ is given in the previous note (NL 1884 27[59], KSA 11.289), which suggests that the quality of human life is greatest (‘Der höchste Mensch’) where the conflictual multiplicity of drives that is the hallmark of homo natura is maximized in a way that can still be synthesized (‘Synthesis’) or contained (‘gebändigt’) within the bounds of a unified existence. And if the normative question is focused on the quality or worth (for Kant: moral worth) of actions, Nietzsche’s position is diametrically  –​not to say polemically  –​opposed to Kant’s. For Nietzsche locates the quality or value of actions not in the universalizability of their maxims, but in their capacity to individuate, to actualize the radical particularity of their agents –​where these are understood as unique multiplicities:

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The value of an action depends upon who performs it and whether it stems from their depths or from their surface: i.e. how deeply individual it is.24

As long as our moral values or concepts are bound up with such individuating actions  –​as their motives, or as part of the agent’s self-​understanding  –​they could be considered as ‘useful’ for qualitatively valuable agency and therefore as valuable, even if they falsify the physiology of action. Yet, illusions such as the Kantian concepts of the will and the causality of freedom are not without their dangers. In a series of posthumous notes from 1880 (notebook 4, KSA 9),  in which Nietzsche first reflects systematically on ‘the feeling of power’, the dangers of such illusory bubbles are very much in mind25: The bubble of imagined power bursts:  this is the cardinal event in life. The human then withdraws angrily or falls apart or becomes stupid. Death of the most beloved, collapse of a dynasty, infidelity of the friend, untenability of a philosophy, a party –​One then wants comfort, i.e. a new bubble.26

If the ‘untenability of a philosophy’ evokes the extreme rigours of Kant’s pure practical reason, this goes equally for the ‘extreme moralities’ discussed in another note that deals with the dangers of those illusions of power that mask actual impotence: These wars, these religions, the extreme moralities, these fanatic arts, this party-​ hatred –​that is the great melodrama of impotence that lies itself into a feeling of power and for once wants to signify power –​always with the relapse into pessimism and misery! What you lack is power over yourselves!27

In these culture-​critical comments, Nietzsche warns of the dangers of war-​ mongering and fanaticism pursued for the illusory feeling of power they create. But he also decries ‘untenable philosophies’ and ‘extreme moralities’ when they are used to create an illusion of power that masks an actual lack of power over oneself. No doubt Nietzsche has Schopenhauer in mind, but these expressions apply even more to Kantian morality, built as it is around an illusory consciousness of freedom and power. The danger comes when the illusory bubble of power, masking an actual lack of power, bursts –​with consequences in isolationism, pessimism, self-​denial28 or disintegration. In view of these dangers, the question becomes: How to strip the feeling of power of its illusory character? or as Nietzsche puts it: How can the feeling of power 1) be made ever more substantial and not illusory? 2) be stripped of its effects which injure, oppress, devalue etc.?29

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The response, one would think, lies in grounding the feeling of power in values or actions that are recognized as valuable by others and do not depend on denigrating, injuring or oppressing others for the feeling of power this gives us. Such values might be generally acknowledged virtues30 or Kantian moral law. This response is considered, but rejected by Nietzsche on the grounds that others are prey to the illusory feelings of power, no less than one is oneself: The cleverest thing to do is to restrict oneself to the things where we can acquire a feeling of power, [things] that are recognised [anerkannt] by others. But the lack of knowledge of themselves is so great: they are thrown by fear and reverence onto areas where they can only have a feeling of power through illusion [Illusion]. (NL 1880 4[195], KSA 9.148 ff.)

To seek the feeling of power from the recognition of others can only break the illusion of power on the assumption that they have self-​knowledge sufficient to see through their own illusions of power –​which Nietzsche denies: The value of an action can be determined if the human being itself can be known: which in general will have to be denied. (NL 1884 27[33], KSA 11.283)

For Nietzsche the greatest danger comes when the feeling of power is sought in recognition ‘from the outside’ (von außen her), because it cannot be derived ‘from within’ (von innen her) –​that is to say: when the feeling of power is sought from a position of impotence, fear, subjection31: To have your power demonstrated from the outside, while you do not believe in it yourself –​that is, through the fear of being subordinated under the judgement of the others –​a detour for vain people. (NL 1880 4[196], KSA 9.149)

In the end, for Nietzsche, the individual is thrown back on itself to ‘substantiate’ its feeling of power ‘from within’ through individuating actions that actualize its particularity (or unique multiplicity), a task that requires the virtually impossible self-​knowledge that he calls ‘die individuelle Wissenschaft’: Knowledge of one’s forces, the law of their order and discharge, the distribution [of forces] without using some too much, others too little, the sign of unpleasure as an unfailing hint that a mistake, an excess etc. has been committed –​all with a view towards one goal: how difficult this individual science [individuelle Wissenschaft] is! And in its absence, one reaches out for the folk-​superstition of morality: because here, the prescriptions are already prepared. But look at the results –​we are the victims of this superstitious medicine; it is not the individual, but the community that was supposed to remain preserved through its prescriptions! (NL 1880 4[118], KSA 9.130)

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4.  Conclusion In my closing remarks I  would like to return to the question of the status of the moral concepts used by Nietzsche in GM and especially the quasi-​Kantian language of freedom, autonomy and the will associated with the ‘sovereign individual’. What light do Nietzsche’s physiological and culture-​critical thoughts on freedom and the feeling of power from the Nachlass throw on his use of moral categories in GM? On the one hand, Nietzsche’s philosophical physiology clearly exposes the moral categories that inform our pre-​philosophical self-​understanding and have been taken up by the philosophical tradition as illusions, as crude misinterpretations of the infinitely complex physiology of agency. In this regard moral philosophy, including Kant’s, is situated squarely within Nietzsche’s grand narrative of the history of philosophy as a ‘misunderstanding of the body’, and it is hard not to read transcendental idealism between the lines when Nietzsche speaks of the ‘unconscious disguise [Verkleidung] of physiological needs under the mantle of the objective, ideal, purely spiritual’.32 From a perspective in Nietzsche’s physiology, however, illusion or error, being life-​enabling or ‘the father of living beings’33 is not an objection as such to beliefs or interpretations. But in the case of the feeling of freedom or power that is bound up with our belief in the erroneous moral concepts of the will and freedom, Nietzsche is acutely sensitive to the dangers these errors house. In order to strip the illusory feeling of power of its moral and political consequences in oppression, denigration and injury, he calls on us to revise our moral categories by asking how the feeling of freedom or power ‘can be made ever more substantial and not illusory’ (NL 1880 4[216], KSA 9.154). This shows clearly that Nietzsche’s physiology, and the kind of ‘naturalisation of morality’ (Vernatürlichung der Moral: NL 1887 9[8]‌, KSA 12.342) it intends, does not collapse the normative questions of the value of our agency or the moral values that subtend it. But it does transform the terms of these questions quite radically, as questions of ‘quality’ (Qualität: NL 1884 27[5], KSA 11.276); that is, the qualitative evaluation of our agency, our values and the forms of life they exhibit. And here, as we saw, Nietzsche takes the polemically anti-​Kantian position that the quality or value of actions lies, not in the universalizability of their maxims, but in their capacity to individuate, to actualize the radical particularity or unique multiplicity of their agent or ‘person’.34 While it is clear that Nietzsche gives no credence to recognition (Anerkennung) by others (NL 1880 4[195], KSA 9.148 ff. above), much less to a Kantian kingdom of ends, as ways

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to ‘substantiate’ the feeling of power, his particularism should not be taken to imply a privatistic isolationism. Nietzsche is a thoroughly relational thinker, and his moral particularism is no exception. The individual has deeply social origins for Nietzsche, and in the early 1880s he develops a ‘socio-​physiology’ to describe the formation of the individual through the internalization of social relations, mores and prohibitions, but also a naturalistic ideal of sovereignty that hinges on our treatment of others.35 The key to making the feeling of power ‘ever more substantial’ can only lie in ever better knowledge of our body and its energetic economy, the distribution, order and discharge of its forces, as well as those of others with whom we interact. These considerations give us a clue to Nietzsche’s use of moral vocabulary in GM. As noted at the end of Section 2, this text effects a shift towards a socio-​ physiological naturalism, as when, e.g. the ‘consciousness of freedom’ is described as an ‘instinct’. This is best understood as part of a sustained effort on Nietzsche’s part to ascribe new, unfamiliar meanings from the socio-​physiological register to established moral terms. In GM II 2, this is most striking when this consciousness-​of-​freedom-​as-​instinct is then dubbed ‘conscience’ (Gewissen) in the closing line, a move that gives the term ‘conscience’ an entirely new, physiological meaning. If, as I suggest, this move is repeated throughout the GM in a variety of forms, it can be seen as part of a sustained effort on Nietzsche’s part to reorient philosophical reflection on moral values from the autonomous domain claimed by morality and moral philosophy –​what he calls ‘ignorance of physics or in contradiction with it’ (GS 335, KSA 3.564), or simply ‘anti-​nature’ (Widernatur) –​towards their socio-​physiological conditions in the body (politic). Reinterpreting our moral vocabulary in physiological terms is clearly the precondition for making our feeling of freedom or power ‘more substantial’. At the same time, it also opens the possibility of a broader qualitative re-​evaluation of values and the forms of life they exhibit in naturalistic terms. On the other hand, Nietzsche is committed not just to a naturalization of morality, but also to a radical re-​evaluation or transvaluation (Umwertung) of all our values. As a complete transformation of morality, there is no reason to think that this does not require a rejection –​not just a physiological reinterpretation –​of our moral terms, in favour of new vocabularies of agency and qualitative evaluation. This, however, only raises the problem of how to formulate these transvalued values, how to communicate them and make them effective. As Nietzsche writes in Nachlass of JGB, even a transvaluation or reversal of values (Umkehrung der Werthe) cannot simply dispense with established moral terms:

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That a morality with such reversed intentions could only be taught and implanted by connecting it with the ruling moral law and under its words and pompous vocabulary, so that many transitional forms and deceptive must be found [. . .]36

In this case, however, the moral language of GM is to be understood not as an attempt to naturalize existing morality, but as essentially deceptive: ‘transitional and deceptive-​forms’ of expression that point towards something that cannot yet be given linguistic form. These, it seems to me, are our best clues for making sense of Nietzsche’s use of moral terms in GM. None of this, however, addresses the fundamental normative question of the standard by which to evaluate the quality of given acts, values and forms of life. While impressing upon us the need, indeed the urgency, of engaging in a differential evaluation of the quality of values and the forms of life they sustain, Nietzsche does not have any prepared rules or formulae to offer. To be sure, his naturalism, or better, anti-​antinaturalism, reorients the practice of evaluation towards a radically immanent standpoint in life as/​or Will to Power, and he himself makes numerous attempts to sketch (the conditions for) naturalistic ideals or desiderata. Whether these are best understood as naturalistic reinterpretations of traditional ideals, or as deceptive ‘transitional forms’ for a counter-​ morality that defies articulation, they cannot in either case be taken as any more than attempts (Versuche), as temptations (Versuchungen) or invitations to his ‘unknown friends’ (GM III 27, KSA 5.410) or readers to engage in this task. Taking the radicality of a ‘transvaluation of all values’ seriously means taking on its open-​endedness. The absence of a pregiven standard of evaluation does not, however, obviate the urgent need for us to engage in a qualitative evaluation of actions, values and forms of life; it requires instead that we bring to our evaluative practice a sustained reflection on the fundamental normative question: What standard of evaluation does physis, as the one and only reality, afford? This task, to my mind, is one of Nietzsche’s most important legacies to philosophy.

Notes 1 ‘[M]‌y task is to translate the apparently emancipated moral values that have become nature-​less back into their nature –​i.e., into their natural “immorality” ’ ([M]eine

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Aufgabe ist, die scheinbar emancipirten und naturlos gewordenen Moralwerthe in ihre Natur zurückzuübersetzen –​d.h. in ihre natürliche ‘Immoralität’: NL 1887 9[86], KSA 12.380). See Geiger (2007: ­chapter 2, esp. 36–​8). As Geiger makes clear, Hegel takes Kant to claim that ‘the only moral motive is reflective recognition of the formal university of law and that acting on our inclinations is never of true moral worth’ (10). ‘No special kind of feeling need be assumed for this under the name of a practical or moral feeling as antecedent to the moral law and serving as its foundation’ (KpV 75). ‘Since it is so far only a negative effect which, arising from the influence of pure practical reason, checks the activity of the subject, so far as it is determined by inclinations, and hence checks the opinion of his personal worth (which, in the absence of agreement with the moral law, is reduced to nothing); hence, the effect of this law on feeling is merely humiliation. We can, therefore, perceive [einsehen] this a priori, but cannot know by it the force of the pure practical law as a motive, but only the resistance to motives of the sensibility’ (KpV 78 ff.; HS). As ‘a feeling that promotes the influence of the law on the will’ (KpV 75). See also Kant’s quasi-​mechanistic or hydraulic metaphor for the impact of this judgement or interpretation of reason: ‘For by the fact that the representation of the moral law deprives self-​love of its influence, and self-​conceit of its illusion [Wahn], it reduces the obstacle [vermindert das Hindernis] to pure practical reason and produces the representation of the superiority of its objective law to the impulses of the sensibility; and thus, by removing the counterweight [Wegschaffung des Gegengewichts], it gives relatively greater weight to the law in the judgement of reason (in the case of a will affected by the aforesaid impulses)’ (KpV 75 ff.). Note the slippage from ‘reducing’ (vermindert) the obstacle to pure practical reason to ‘removing’ the counterweight to the moral law (should be: reducing), allowing Kant to draw the stronger conclusion that respect is morality: ‘Thus the respect for the law is not a motive to morality, but is morality itself subjectively considered as a motive [. . .]’ (KpV 75 ff.). This slippage, I would suggest, lends weight to the Nietzschean counterposition, as we will see, that this judgement or interpretation of reason is in fact a misinterpretation or illusion (Wahn). ‘[. . .] für welches Gesetz gar kein Gefühl stattfindet, sondern im Urtheile der Vernunft, indem es den Widerstand aus dem Wege schafft, die Wegräumung eines Hindernisses einer positiven Beförderung der Causalität gleichgeschätzt wird’ (KpV 75; HS). ‘Denn eine jede Verminderung der Hindernisse einer Thätigkeit ist Beförderung dieser Thätigkeit selbst’ (KpV 79). It is tempting to call it ‘pleasurable’ –​for what else could ‘positive feeling’ mean? –​ but Kant carefully avoids this term in his account, indeed denies and displaces it with the concept of interest: ‘If this feeling of respect were pathological, and therefore were a feeling of pleasure based on the inner sense, it would be in vain

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to try to discover a connection of it with any idea a priori. But [it] is a feeling that applies merely to what is practical, and depends on the conception of a law, simply as to its form, not on account of any object, and therefore cannot be reckoned either as pleasure or pain, and yet produces an interest in obedience to the law, which we call the moral interest, just as the capacity of taking such an interest in the law (or respect for the moral law itself) is properly the moral feeling’ (KpV 80). 10 The expressions quoted above are all drawn from GM II 2, KSA 5.294. 11 ‘[. . .] ein aktives Nicht-​wieder-​los-​werden-​wollen, ein Fort-​und Fortwollen des ein Mal Gewollten, ein eigentliches Gedächtniss des Willens [. . .]’ (GM II 1, KSA 5.292). 12 ‘[. . .] ein aktives Nicht-​wieder-​los-​werden-​wollen, ein Fort-​und Fortwollen des ein Mal Gewollten, ein eigentliches Gedächtniss des Willens: so dass zwischen das ursprüngliche “ich will” “ich werde thun” und die eigentliche Entladung des Willens, seinen Akt, unbedenklich eine Welt von neuen fremden Dingen, Umständen, selbst Willensakten dazwischengelegt werden darf, ohne dass diese lange Kette des Willens springt.’ (GM II 1, KSA 5.292). 13 GM II 2, KSA 5.292. 14 ‘Das stolze Wissen um das ausserordentliche Privilegium der Verantwortlichkeit, das Bewusstsein dieser seltenen Freiheit, dieser Macht über sich und das Geschick hat sich bei ihm bis in seine unterste Tiefe hinabgesenkt und ist zum Instinkt geworden, zum dominirenden Instinkt [. . .]’ (GM II 2, KSA 5.292). 15 ‘[. . .] den Menschen des eignen unabhängigen langen Willens, der versprechen darf –​und in ihm ein stolzes, in allen Muskeln zuckendes Bewusstsein davon, was da endlich errungen und in ihm leibhaft geworden ist, ein, ein Vollendungs-​Gefühl des Menschen überhaupt.’ (GM II 2, KSA 5.292). 16   ‘Freiheit und Machtgefühl. Das Gefühl des Spiels bei der Überwindung großer Schwierigkeiten, z.B. vom Virtuosen; Gewißheit seiner selber, daß auf den Willen die genau entsprechende Aktion folgt –​eine Art Affekt des Übermuthes ist dabei, höchste Souveränität des Befehlenden. Es muß das Gefühl des Widerstandes, Druckes dabei sein. –​Dabei ist aber eine Täuschung über den Willen: nicht der Wille überwindet den Widerstand –​wir machen eine Synthese zwischen 2 gleichzeitigen Zuständen und legen eine Einheit hinein.   Der Wille als Erdichtung. 1) man glaubt, daß er selber bewegt (während er nur ein Reiz ist, bei dessen Eintritt eine Bewegung beginnt 2) man glaubt, daß er Widerstände überwindet 3) man glaubt, daß er frei und souverän ist, weil sein Ursprung uns verborgen bleibt und weil der Affekt des Befehlenden ihn begleitet

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4) weil man in den allermeisten Fällen nur will, wenn der Erfolg erwartet werden kann, wird die ‘Nothwendigkeit’ des Erfolgs dem Willen als Kraft zugerechnet.’ (NL 1884 27[24], KSA 11.281f.) 17 See Patton (2008) and Saar (2008), both in Siemens and Roodt (2008). 18 ‘Alle physiologischen Vorgänge sind darin gleich, daß sie Kraftauslösungen sind, welche, wenn sie in das sensorium commune gelangen, eine gewisse Erhöhung und Verstärkung mit sich führen: diese, gemessen an drückenden, lastenden Zuständen des Zwangs, werden als Gefühl der “Freiheit” ausgedeutet’ (NL 1884 27[3]‌, KSA 11.275). 19 The concept of Auslösung is taken from Robert Mayer. In 1867 Mayer published a collection of papers with the title Mechanik der Wärme, which contains, among others, his groundbreaking book Bemerkungen über die Kräfte der unbelebten Natur from 1842 as well as a new article Über Auslösung. For a discussion of Mayer’s concept of discharge, see Mittasch (1952: 114 ff.), and Aydin (2003: 157–​63). 20 See e.g. NL 1881 11[303], KSA 9.558: ‘Das Widerstreben ist die Form der Kraft –​ im Frieden wie im Kriege, folglich müssen verschiedene Kräfte und nicht gleiche dasein, denn diese würden sich das Gleichgewicht halten!’ 21     ‘Der Mensch hat, im Gegensatz zum Thier, eine Fülle gegensätzlicher Triebe und Impulse in sich groß gezüchtet: vermöge dieser Synthesis ist er der Herr der Erde. –​ Moralen sind der Ausdruck lokal beschränkter Rangordnungen in dieser vielfachen Welt der Triebe: so daß an ihren Widersprüchen der Mensch nicht zu Grunde geht. Also ein Trieb als Herr, sein Gegentrieb geschwächt, verfeinert, als Impuls, der den Reiz für die Thätigkeit des Haupttriebes abgiebt.   Der höchste Mensch würde die größte Vielheit der Triebe haben, und auch in der relativ größten Stärke, die sich noch ertragen läßt. In der That: wo die Pflanze Mensch sich stark zeigt, findet man die mächtig gegen einander treibenden Instinkte (z.B. Shakespeare), aber gebändigt.’ (NL 1884 27[59], KSA 11.289). 22 See NL 1884 27[65], KSA 11.291: ‘Die gewöhnlichen Irrthümer: wir trauen dem Willen zu, was zahlreiche und complicirte eingeübte Bewegungen ermöglichen. Der Befehlende verwechselt sich mit seinen gehorsamen Werkzeugen (und deren Willen).’ 23     ‘Wer die Bedingungen eingesehn hat, unter denen eine moralische Schätzung entstanden ist, hat ihren Werth damit noch nicht berührt: es sind viele nützliche Dinge, und ebenso wichtige Einsichten auf fehlerhafte und unmethodische Weise gefunden worden; und jede Qualität ist noch unbekannt, auch wenn man begriffen hat, unter welchen Bedingungen sie entsteht.’ (NL 1884 27[5]‌, KSA 11.276).

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24     ‘Der Werth einer Handlung hängt davon ab, wer sie thut und ob sie aus seinem Grunde oder aus seiner Oberfläche stammt: d.h. wie tief sie individuell ist.’ (NL 1884 27[32], KSA 11.283). 25 The following discussion owes much to the fascinating analysis of Stolz and Eitelkeit in Kant, Schopenhauer and Nietzsche by Wolfgang Müller Lauter (1999): ‘Über Stolz und Eitelkeit bei Kant, Schopenhauer und Nietzsche’. 26     ‘Die Blase der eingebildeten Macht platzt: dies ist das Cardinalereigniß im Leben. Da zieht sich der Mensch böse zurück oder zerschmettert oder verdummt. Tod der Geliebtesten, Sturz einer Dynastie, Untreue des Freundes, Unhaltbarkeit einer Philosophie, einer Partei. –​Dann will man Trost d.h. eine neue Blase.’ (NL 1880 4[199], KSA 9.149). 27     ‘Diese Kriege, diese Religionen, die extremen Moralen, diese fanatischen Künste, dieser Parteihaß –​das ist die große Schauspielerei der Ohnmacht, die sich selber Machtgefühl anlügt und einmal Kraft bedeuten will –​immer mit dem Rückfall in den Pessimismus und den Jammer! Es fehlt euch an Macht über euch!’ (NL 1880 4[202], KSA 9.150). 28 ‘Wenn die Don Quixoterie unseres Gefühls von Macht einmal uns zum Bewußtsein kommt und wir aufwachen –​dann kriechen wir zu Kreuze wie Don Quixote, –​entsetzliches Ende! Die Menschheit ist immer bedroht von dieser schmählichen Sich-​selbst-​Verleugnung am Ende ihres Strebens.’ (NL 1880 4[222], KSA 9.156). 29     ‘Wie kann das Gefühl von Macht 1) immer mehr substantiell und nicht illusionär gemacht werden? 2) seiner Wirkungen, welche schädigen, unterdrücken, geringschätzen usw. entkleidet werden?’ (NL 1880 [216], KSA 9.154). 30 See, e.g. NL 1880 4[245], KSA 9.160: ‘Die großen Fürsten und Eroberer sprechen die pathetische Sprache der Tugend, zum Zeichen, daß diese vermöge des Gefühls von Macht, welches sie giebt, unter den Menschen anerkannt ist. Die Unehrlichkeit jeder Politik liegt darin, daß die großen Worte, welche jeder im Munde führen muß, um sich als im Besitz der M zu kennzeichnen, nicht sich mit den wahren Zuständen und Motiven decken können.’ 31 The most detailed analysis of the quest for the feeling of power from a position of weakness, and the dangers it houses, is of course to be found in the account of the slave-​revolt of morality in GM I 7–​10. 32 ‘Die unbewusste Verkleidung physiologischer Bedürfnisse unter die Mäntel des Objektiven, Ideellen, Rein-​Geistigen geht bis zum Erschrecken weit, –​und oft genug habe ich mich gefragt, ob nicht, im Grossen gerechnet, Philosophie bisher überhaupt nur eine Auslegung des Leibes und ein Missverständniss des

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Leibes gewesen ist. Hinter den höchsten Werthurtheilen, von denen bisher die Geschichte des Gedankens geleitet wurde, liegen Missverständnisse der leiblichen Beschaffenheit verborgen, sei es von Einzelnen, sei es von Ständen oder ganzen Rassen.’ (FW Vorrede 2, KSA 3.348). 33 ‘It is in the way the first organic forms [Bildungen] sensed stimuli and judged the outside that the life-​preserving principle must be sought: that belief prevailed, preserved itself, through which continued existence became possible; not the most true belief, but the most useful. “Subject” is the condition of life for organic existence, hence not “true”; rather, subject-​feeling [Subjekt-​Empfindung] can be essentially false, but as the only means of survival. Error [is] the father of living beings [. . .]’ (NL 1881–​2 11[270], KSA 9. 545; cf. NL 1881–​2 11[268], KSA 9. 543f.). 34 On Nietzsche’s concept of the ‘person’ (Person), as that which gives value to its actions, see Müller Lauter (1999: 166ff.). Also Siemens (2008: 247f., 258f.). 35 On this, see Siemens (2015a,b; and 2016). 36   ‘Daß eine Moral mit solchen umgekehrten Absichten nur in Anknüpfung an das beherrschende Sittengesetz und unter dessen Worten und Prunkworten gelehrt werden könne und angepflanzt werden könne, daß also viele Übergangs-​und Täuschungsformen zu erfinden sind [. . .]’ (NL 1885 34[176], KSA 11.479).

References Aydin, C. (2003), Zijn en Worden. Nietzsches omduiding van het substantiebegrip, Maastricht: Shaker. Geiger, I. (2007), The Founding Act of Modern Ethical Life: Hegel’s Critique of Kant’s Moral and Political Philosophy, Stanford: Stanford University Press. Mittasch, A. (1952), Nietzsche als Naturphilosoph, Stuttgart: Kröner Verlag. Müller Lauter, W. (1999), ‘Über Stolz und Eitelkeit bei Kant, Schopenhauer und Nietzsche’, in W. Müller Lauter, Über Werden und Wille zur Macht. Nietzsche-​ Interpretationen I, 141–​72, Berlin and New York: De Gruyter. Patton, P. (2008), ‘Nietzsche on Rights, Power and the Feeling of Power’, in H. W. Siemens and V. Roodt (eds), Nietzsche, Power and Politics. Rethinking Nietzsche’s Legacy for Political Thought, 471–​8 8, Berlin and New York: De Gruyter. Saar, M. (2008), ‘Forces and Powers in Nietzsche’s Genealogy of Morals’, in H. W. Siemens and V. Roodt (eds), Nietzsche, Power and Politics. Rethinking Nietzsche’s Legacy for Political Thought, 453–​69, Berlin and New York: De Gruyter. Siemens, H. W. (2008), ‘Yes, No, Maybe So . . . Nietzsche’s Equivocations on the Relation between Democracy and “Grosse Politik” ’, in H. W. Siemens and V. Roodt (eds),

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Nietzsche, Power and Politics. Rethinking Nietzsche’s Legacy for Political Thought, 231–​68, Berlin and New York: De Gruyter. Siemens, H. W (2015a), ‘ “Punishment by Fate” as a Cypher for Genealogy: Hegel and Nietzsche on Immanent Law’, in K. Hay and L. R. dos Santos (eds), Nietzsche, German Idealism and its Critics, 35–​65, Berlin and Boston: De Gruyter. Siemens, H. W (2015b), ‘Nietzsche’s Socio-​Physiology of the Self ’, in J. Constâncio, M. J. M. Branco and B. Ryan (eds), Nietzsche and the Problem of Subjectivity, 629–​53, Berlin and Boston: De Gruyter. Siemens, H. W. (2016), ‘Nietzsches Sozio-​Physiologie des Selbst und das Problem der Souveräntität’, in H. Heidt und S. Thorgeirsdottir (eds), Nietzsche als Kritiker und Denker der Transformation, 167–182, Berlin and Boston: De Gryuter. Siemens, H. W., and Roodt, V. (eds) (2008), Nietzsche, Power and Politics. Rethinking Nietzsche’s Legacy for Political Thought, Berlin and New York: De Gruyter.

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Freedom as Independence Kant and Nietzsche on Non-​Domination, Self-​Love and the Rivalrous Emotions David Owen

Both Immanuel Kant and Friedrich Nietzsche are centrally concerned with freedom as independence, where the contrasting term is that of servitude, and with working out the conditions that enable such freedom. But their respective approaches to this topic exhibit significant differences. One way of putting the contrast between them is that whereas Kant is focused on an ideal in which no one can legitimately exercise mastery over another, Nietzsche is focused on the forms of government that enable individuals to exercise mastery over themselves. Another is that whereas Kant is concerned with the effective suppression of rivalrous dispositions, Nietzsche is engaged in seeking to channel them. In this chapter, I reconstruct their accounts in order to draw out these differences. I conclude by considering the roots of these differences and, specifically, Nietzsche’s reasons for holding that Kant’s account offers an insufficient basis for securing conditions of freedom.

1.  Kant on freedom, self-​love and maturity Kant’s Universal Principle of Right declares that ‘an action is right if it can coexist with everyone’s freedom in accordance with a universal law, or if on its maxim the freedom of choice of each can coexist with everyone’s freedom in accordance with universal law’ (MS 230). In its individualized form this principle can be expressed as the one basic innate right of humanity: ‘Freedom (independence from being constrained by another’s choice), insofar as it can coexist with the

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freedom of every other in accordance with a universal law, is the only original right belonging to every human being by virtue of his humanity’ (MS 237). Kant’s concept of freedom is drawn from Roman Law and shaped by the distinction between master and slave which receives its most systematic legal expression in the opening discussion of Justinian’s Digest. Under the title, De statu hominis, we are told that slavery is ‘an institution of the ius gentium by which someone is, contrary to nature, subjected to the dominium of someone else’. As Quentin Skinner (2002: 313) notes, This [definition of slavery] in turn is said to yield a definition of individual liberty. If everyone in a civil association is either bond or free, then a civis or free subject must be someone who is not under the dominion of anyone else, but is sui iuris, capable of acting in their own right. It likewise follows that what it means for someone to lack the status of a free subject must be for that person not to be sui iuris but instead to be sub potestate, under the power or subject to the will of someone else.

It is crucial to note that the status of sevitus does not imply that a slave’s lack of liberty consists in being subject to coercion, but rather in the fact that while slaves ‘may as a matter of fact be able to act at will, they remain at all times in potestate domini, within the power of their masters’ (Skinner, 1998: 41). The crucial point for Kant, in the context of legal and political philosophy, is that persons are free insofar as they are sui iuris, entitled to set their own ends (purposiveness) using their own means (their body, property, etc.) subject only to the general and reciprocal laws that flow from the fact that other persons are equally so entitled. By contrast, a person is dominated, that is, in a condition of servitude, if their ends are, or may be, determined by another person. As Arthur Ripstein (2009: 36) has nicely put it, The right to be your own master is neither a right to have things go well for you nor a right to have a wide range of options. Instead it is explicitly contrastive and interpersonal: to be your own master is to have no other [emphasis in the original] master. . . . The right to equal freedom, then, is just the right that no person be the master of another.

Notice that, on this account, I do not dominate you if I buy the last copy of the book you were going to buy for your holiday, since here I have simply changed the environment in which your choices are made; I do dominate you, however, if I censor what you can read. In other words, while some purpose of yours may be frustrated by the effects of an action of mine, that does not compromise your freedom.1

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Kant’s conception of independence is the basis of his systematic working out of a legal order in which no right of mastery or duty of servitude can exist. Notice that this explains the place in Kant’s legal reflections of the duty of ‘rightful honor’, a duty to respect the innate right to freedom of humanity in your own person. Kant’s point here is that you have a legal duty not to, for example, sell yourself into slavery or debt bondage even if it seems advantageous for you to do so –​and consequently that any contract that you wrongly make that purports to place you in such a condition cannot generate a right on the part of the other party, where the notion of a right is something that can legitimately be legally enforced. Thus Kant’s legal philosophy and its development from private right to public right to international rights of states and finally cosmopolitan right can be understood as the systematic unfolding of the conditions needed for a legal order in which the basic right of persons to equal freedom is fully established. I  will not work through Kant’s development of this argument in the Doctrine of Right since, for current purposes, this is not required. But I do note, in passing, that this legal order is necessarily also an institutionalized structure of recognition such that Kant posits that persons situated within it will develop dispositions of rightful honour towards themselves and of (recognition) respect toward others as legal subjects. We can deepen our account of this ideal by attending to the dynamics that Kant presents as supporting its realization. Here we should distinguish two accounts that Kant offers. The first and most general account, sketched out most prominently in his essay ‘Universal History from a Cosmopolitan Point of View’ (IaG 15), pivots around the notion of ‘unsociable sociability’ as a basic feature of human beings. Central to this argument is Kant’s appropriation of Rousseau’s analysis of amour propre as a practical relationship to oneself that can support relations of inequality and domination, but that can also take a productive form. As Sankar Muthu (2014: 71) remarks, Kant’s analysis mirrors Rousseau’s argument that while amour propre routinely generates and sustains inequality and oppression, particularly in agrarian societies, it does not necessarily have such effects. . . . Moreover, it is precisely the fact that amour propre need not be exploitative that allows for the possibility that in the future, if humans are ever to overcome the injustices of civil societies and to foster conditions of equal freedom, it could be cultivated in the morally appropriate way  –​that is, in a way not inflamed by the desire for superiority over others.

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Thus, for example, in his reflections on religion, Kant makes the following remarks. The predispositions to humanity can be brought under the general title of a self-​ love that . . . involves comparison . . . that is, only in comparison with others does one judge oneself happy or unhappy. Out of this self-​love originates the inclination to gain worth in the opinion of others, originally, of course, merely equal worth: not allowing anyone superiority over oneself, bound up with the constant anxiety that others might be striving for ascendancy. (RGV 27, cited in Muthu 2014: 70)

Although it is not entirely clear why Kant thinks that ‘originally’ this self-​love was directed at ‘merely equal worth’, the key point is that his argument partially accommodates self-​love or, rather, it accommodates a form of self-​love that is subject to the discipline of practical reason. Such a form of rational self-​love, Kant argues, is generative of relations of equality, motivating people to develop and exhibit the disposition of rightful honour towards themselves and hence to resist forms of oppression that sustain relationships of dominion. What is central to the rational disciplining of self-​love is the suppression of the rivalrous emotions (for example, jealousy, envy and spite) such that the self-​love is focused solely on the assertion and protection of one’s own innate dignity and, hence, equality with others. The second, and more specific, account focuses on ways in which the disposition to freedom may itself be blocked and the requirements for overcoming this condition. This account is developed most notably in the essay, ‘Answering the Question: What is Enlightenment?’ (WA 35), which fundamentally concerns the issue of the disposition to freedom, or what Kant here calls ‘maturity’. Kant begins this essay by defining enlightenment as ‘man’s emergence from his self-​incurred immaturity (Unmündigkeit)’ (WA 35) where ‘self-​incurred immaturity’ refers to the fact that the Unmündige (immature ones) lack the resolution to rely on their own understanding and, thus, rely on a guardian (Vormund) to judge on their behalf.2 Although Kant initially refers to this immaturity as self-​incurred –​a product of laziness and cowardice: ‘It is so convenient to be immature! . . . I need not think, so long as I can pay; others will soon enough take the tiresome job over for me’ (WA 35) –​he quickly qualifies this judgement in specifying the mechanisms which obstruct the achievement of enlightenment: The guardians who have so kindly taken upon themselves the work of supervision will soon see to it that by far the largest part of mankind (including the entire fair sex) should consider the step towards maturity not only as difficult

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but also as highly dangerous. Having first infatuated their domesticated animals, and carefully prevented the docile creatures from daring to take a single step without the leading strings to which they are tied, they next show them the danger which threatens them if they try to walk unaided. Now this danger is not in fact so very great, for they could certainly learn to walk eventually after a few falls. But an example of this kind is intimidating, and usually frightens them off from further attempts. Thus it is very difficult for each separate individual to work his way out of the immaturity which has become almost second nature to him. He has even grown fond of it and is really incapable for the time being of using his own understanding, because he was never allowed to make the attempt. Dogmas and formulas, those mechanical instruments for rational use (or rather misuse) of his natural endowments, are the ball and chain of his permanent immaturity. (WA 35–​6)

This qualification is significant because it specifies two aspects of this ‘self-​ incurred’ immaturity. Kant’s claim is that the laziness and cowardice characteristic of the mass of humanity could be overcome if it were not reinforced by the deployment on the part of the guardians of both ‘dogmas and formulas’ and intimidating examples. The propagation of ‘dogmas and formulas’ reinforces the typical laziness of human beings by blocking the development and exercise of their capacity for freedom of thought. This point is clarified in the essay ‘What Is Orientation in Thinking’ (1786, WDO 133) where Kant writes that freedom of thought is also used to denote the opposite of that moral constraint whereby some citizens, without the use of external force, set themselves up as the guardians of others in religious matters, and succeed in outlawing all rational enquiry –​not by argument, but by prescribing articles of faith backed up by a nervous fear of the dangers of independent investigation, impressing these articles from an early age on the minds of those concerned. (WDO 145)

Thus, Kant’s argument is simply that the prescription of certain doctrines combined with an effective ban on rational reflection on these doctrines undermines the conditions of the exercise of (and thus the capacity for) freedom of thought. The use of intimidating examples reinforces the typical cowardice of human beings by heightening their sense of the dangerousness of attempting to stand security for themselves and, thus, deepening their willingness to rely on the ‘dogmas and formulas’ provided by the guardians (such as, for example, the common saying, ‘This may be true in theory, but it does not apply in practice’).

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What, then, is the mechanism by which enlightenment as the emergence from immaturity can be achieved? Although Kant deems it difficult for individuals to achieve maturity, that is, to assume the responsibility for speaking on their own behalf, he argues that [t]‌here is more chance of an entire public enlightening itself. This is indeed almost inevitable, if only the public concerned is left in freedom. For there will always be a few who think for themselves, even among those appointed as guardians of the common mass. Such guardians, once they have thrown off the yoke of immaturity, will disseminate the spirit of rational respect for personal value and for the duty of all to think for themselves. . . . For enlightenment of this kind, all that is needed is freedom. And the freedom in question is the most innocuous form of all –​freedom to make public use of one’s reason in all matters. (WA 36)

This is a difficult passage.3 However, a route into Kant’s argument is provided by the following remarks in ‘What Is Orientation in Thinking?’. Opposition to freedom of thought comes firstly from civil coercion. We do admittedly say that, whereas a higher authority may deprive us of freedom of speech or of writing, it cannot deprive us of freedom of thought. But how much and how accurately would we think if we did not think, so to speak, in community with others to whom we communicate our thoughts and who communicate their thoughts to us! We may therefore conclude that the same external constraint which deprives people of the freedom to communicate their thoughts in public also removes their freedom of thought, the one treasure which remains to us amidst all the burdens of civil life, and which alone offers us a means of overcoming all the evils of this condition. (WDO 144)

These comments suggest that the possibility of freedom of thought, which is a necessary condition of enlightenment, depends on the freedom to use one’s reason publicly. However, by itself, the freedom to use one’s reason publicly is not a sufficient condition for the development of enlightenment because it does not encourage –​let alone make ‘almost inevitable’ –​the overcoming of the laziness and cowardice which have almost become second nature under the aegis of the guardians. The additional condition required is the existence of some few mature individuals who ‘by cultivating their own minds, have succeeded in freeing themselves from immaturity and in continuing boldly on their way’ (WA 36).4 Such exceptional individuals play two significant roles. On the one hand, they act as critics who, having freed themselves from ‘dogmas and formulas’, seek to break the rule of such ‘mechanical instruments’ by disseminating ‘the spirit of rational respect for personal value and the duty of all men to think for

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themselves’ (WA 36). In this regard, such individuals both undermine the effectiveness of the guardian’s mechanism for reinforcing laziness and encourage the overcoming of natural inclinations to laziness. On the other hand, they acts as exemplars of maturity and, thus, of the possibility of walking unaided, to return to Kant’s metaphor. In this regard, such individuals act as counterexamples to the intimidating examples deployed by the guardians and, thus, encourage ‘the largest part of mankind’ to overcome their fear of attempting to stand  –​and walk –​on their own. Thus, Kant argues, freedom to make public use of one’s reason together with a few exemplars of enlightenment are sufficient conditions to secure public enlightenment. However, in ‘What Is Orientation in Thinking?’, Kant also points to a third threat to enlightenment as the exercise of freedom of thought, a threat distinct from ‘civil’ and ‘moral’ constraints: [F]‌reedom of thought also signifies the subjection of reason to no laws other than those which it imposes on itself; and its opposite is the maxim of the lawless use of reason . . . the inevitable result of self-​confessed lawlessness in thinking (i.e., of emancipation from the restrictions of reason) is this: freedom of thought is thereby ultimately forfeited and, since the fault lies not with misfortune, for example, but with genuine presumption, this freedom is in the true sense of the word thrown away. (WDO 145)5

Are the conditions of publicity and the exemplars of enlightenment sufficient to deal with this threat? We have good reason to believe that Kant holds them to be so with respect to the public. This becomes clear when we consider the relationship between Kant’s argument thus far and the three maxims requisite for the lawful use of reason which he specifies in the Critique of the Power of Judgement (1790): They are these: (1) to think for oneself; (2) to think from the standpoint of everyone else; (3) always to think consistently. The first is the maxim of unprejudiced thought, the second that of enlarged thought, the third that of consistent thought. (KU 294)

The first of these maxims is that principle of enlightenment which Kant argues is facilitated qua the public by the freedom to make public use of one’s reason and the example of a few exceptional enlightened men. However, precisely because thinking for oneself can only be achieved through the public use of reason, the capacity for thinking from the standpoint of others and, eventually, the capacity for consistent thought are also developed through that engagement in the public

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arena of argument and counterargument which is the condition of thinking for oneself. It is in this context that Kant specifies the relationship of his present to the conditions of the rule of reason: If it is asked whether we at present live in an enlightened age, the answer is: No, but we do live in an age of enlightenment. As things are at present, we still have a long way to go before men as a whole can be in a position (or can even be put in a position) of using their own understanding confidently and well in religious matters, without outside guidance. But we do have distinct indications that the way is now being cleared for them to work freely in this direction, and that the obstacles to universal enlightenment, to man’s emergence from his self-​incurred immaturity are gradually becoming fewer. In this respect our age is the age of enlightenment, the century of Frederick. (WA 40)

Precisely because Frederick the Great ‘is himself enlightened’ and ‘has at hand a well-​disciplined and numerous army to guarantee public security’, he is able to say ‘what no republic would dare to say’: ‘Argue as much as you like and about whatever you like, but obey!’ (WA 41).6 The restriction on civil freedom imposed by Frederick II is acceptable to Kant for two related reasons: first, because Frederick allows the most significant civil freedom (i.e. ‘intellectual freedom’: the freedom to make public use of one’s reason all matters); and, second, because it is important that the capacity and disposition to use reason lawfully be cultivated in the public before certain, strictly speaking, illegitimate constraints on civil freedom are relaxed, if the threat posed by civil freedom without maturity (i.e. the lawless use of reason) is to be minimized. As Kant puts it, A high degree of civil freedom seems advantageous to a people’s intellectual freedom, yet it also sets up insuperable barriers to it. Conversely, a lesser degree of civil freedom gives intellectual freedom enough room to expand to its fullest extent. Thus once the germ on which nature has lavished most care –​man’s inclination and vocation to think freely –​has developed within this hard shell, it gradually reacts upon the mentality of the people, who thus gradually become increasing able to act freely. Eventually, it even influences the principles of governments, which find that they can themselves profit by treating man, who is more than a machine, in a manner appropriate to his dignity. (WA 41–​2)

Thus, Kant concludes this essay by re-​emphasizing the relationship of enlightenment to maturity, as the disposition of freedom, and to the rightful condition, as explained in his legal philosophy.

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It is important that Kant’s account of freedom as independence not only sketches the legal conditions required to secure external freedom as the juridical status of being sui iuris, but also provides a general framework within which to understand the dynamics of human history as directed towards this end and a specific analysis of how his own present stands in relation to it. Kant thus demonstrates an awareness of human psychology and its salience for the cogency of his political ideal, and how central considerations of social theory are to his philosophical project. It is on this psychological ground that Nietzsche’s challenge to Kant most clearly emerges. Before we turn to that challenge, however, we need to elaborate Nietzsche’s own account of freedom as independence.

2.  Nietzsche on freedom and ethical pathologies The claim that Nietzsche is a psychologist centrally concerned with issues of power is not, perhaps, a surprising one. But in this section I will argue that reading Nietzsche in this light has implications that have often been overlooked by commentators. In particular, I  propose that Nietzsche is centrally concerned with the ways in which power relations structure ethical outlooks and the practical relationship to self that these engender.7 As a way into this topic, consider the following passage: As I  was wandering through the many subtle and crude moralities that have been dominant or that still dominate over the face of the earth, I found certain traits regularly recurring together and linked to each other. In the end, two basic types became apparent to me and a fundamental distinction leapt out. There is a master morality and a slave morality;  –​I  will immediately add that in all higher and more mixed cultures, attempts to negotiate between these moralities also appear, although more frequently the two are confused and there are mutual misunderstandings. . . . Moral value distinctions have arisen within either a dominating type that, with a feeling of well-​being, was conscious of the difference between itself and those who were dominated –​or alternatively, these distinctions arose among the dominated people themselves, the slaves and dependents of every rank. (BGE 260, KSA 5.208–​9)

Let me begin by noting three things about this passage. The first is the phrase ‘the dominated people themselves, the slaves and dependents of every rank’, which makes clear that by ‘dominated people’ Nietzsche is referring to those who are within the power of another in the sense of being subject to their

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legal dominion.8 The second is that in holding that it is the classical distinction between those who are free (masters) and those who are not (slaves and dependents of every rank) that is at stake, Nietzsche is claiming that these distinct statuses find expression in distinct ethical outlooks and forms of practical reasoning. The third, and most general, thing to note about this passage is that Nietzsche is proposing that distinct styles of ethical reasoning are shaped by the different types of relation of power in which persons stand. In light of these premises, I  will be concerned to address three aspects of Nietzsche’s concern with freedom and servitude. I begin with the moral psychology of freedom and servitude in contexts of legal dominion, before turning to Nietzsche’s treatment of asymmetric dependency more generally and, finally, to his focus on the role of the agon. Let me begin by offering a reading of the first essay of On the Genealogy of Morality from the standpoint of a concern with freedom. It is widely recognized that in this essay Nietzsche is offering an account of forms of ethical outlook that emerge under conditions structured by the relation of masters and slaves, each of whom is taken to be characterized by ‘the instinct of freedom’ or ‘will to power’, that is, the practical necessity of experiencing themselves as free agents. In the focus on master–​slave relations, Nietzsche’s attention is directed specifically at legal dominion and its effects. First consider the slave. What distinguishes Nietzsche’s treatment is not that he offers a distinct account of the slave as the classic exemplar of unfreedom, but rather that he develops this account in unexpected yet powerful ways. Consider that, on this account, the slave is, like the master, characterized by the will to experience himself as a free agent; but whereas the master straightforwardly enjoys this experience of free agency, the slave cannot do so within the legal and political condition that he inhabits. One outcome of this situation in slave-​owning societies –​and note that although Nietzsche has ancient Greece and Rome in mind, the point does appear to be generalizable, and thus to support his universal claim about the instinct for freedom –​is that they are characterized by exercises of resistance from the slaves, up to and including slave revolts. (The example of the revolt led by Spartacus is the best known, but there were numerous other examples.) But Nietzsche’s insight is to see that exactly the same interest in experiencing themselves as free agents is given expression through imaginary revolts in which the slaves redescribe the terms of ethical recognition and thus self-​understanding, precisely so as to experience themselves as free agents. Notably Nietzsche (re)constructs the scenario under which this redescription occurs with considerable precision. The re-​evaluation of noble values begins,

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Nietzsche tells us, ‘when ressentiment becomes creative and ordains values: the ressentiment of creatures to whom the real reaction, that of the deed, is denied and who find compensation in an imaginary revenge’ (GM I  10, KSA 5.270). Nietzsche’s claim is thus that it is under conditions of legal dominion in which there is no possibility of effective resistance to the rule to which they are subject that the slave’s natural sense of ressentiment ‘becomes creative and ordains values’. The creativity in question takes the form of constructing (from materials already conceptually available)9 a perspective in which two principles of judgement combine. The first is comprised of a picture of the subject as characterized by voluntarism, the ability to choose freely when and how to act: Bound to do so by his instinct for self-​preservation and self-​affirmation, an instinct that habitually sanctifies every lie, this kind of man discovered his faith in the indifferent, freely choosing ‘subject’. The subject (or, to adopt a more popular idiom, the soul) has, therefore, been perhaps the best article of faith on earth so far, since it enables the majority of mortals, the weak and down-​trodden of all sorts, to practise that sublime self-​deception –​the interpretation of weakness itself as freedom, of the way they simply are, as merit. (GM I 13, KSA 5.280–​1)

This picture allows the slave, on the one hand, to hold the nobles responsible for their actions on the grounds that they could have freely chosen not to act as they do and, on the other hand, to construe their own inability to act as the nobles act as the product of a free choice on their part. This picture thus allows the slaves to experience themselves as agents but also, crucially, to evaluate the nobles as evil for choosing to act as they do and, hence, to evaluate themselves as good for choosing not to act in this way.10 Consequently, the slaves are able to construct a second principle of judgement according to which it is the typical traits of the slave class that comprise the virtues and the typical traits of the noble class that are vices. Approached from this perspective, it is clear that what Nietzsche takes to be a form of ethical pathology –​the slave-​revolt in morals –​is a product of being subject to legal dominium.11 Nietzsche’s concern with relationships of radical dependency in which the subordinate partner is in a condition of servitude finds earlier expression in The Gay Science. A passage entitled ‘On the problem of the actor’ takes up the expanded dimension of this republican account of freedom, namely, the forms of radical asymmetric dependency that may obtain even between persons who are legally free in that they are not subject to the dominion of another or others. For our immediate purposes, the salient features of Nietzsche’s discussion of the

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figure of the actor are twofold. First, he argues that the features of the actor are cultivated under conditions of radical dependency: Such an instinct will have developed most easily in lower-​class families who had to survive under fluctuating pressures and coercions, in deep dependency; who had nimbly to cut their coats according to their cloth, always readapting to new circumstances, always having to act and pose differently until they slowly learned to turn their coats with every wind and thus almost turned into coats themselves. (GS 361, KSA 3.608)

Second, Nietzsche holds that becoming an actor in social life is exemplary of a failure of agency that consists in ‘the loss of any strong identification with particular values, motives or reasons for acting’ (Patton 2000: 181). The actor in social life, in other words, is one whose words do not express his mind but rather his view of what his audience wish to hear; his apparent commitments are not whole-​hearted but are simply the postures he strikes for the benefit of their effects on his audience. When in this passage Nietzsche argues that the position of Jews in Europe is ‘a veritable breading for actors’ (in the sense of stage actors) and that considering the history of women, one asks, ‘Mustn’t they be actresses first and foremost?’, his point is neither anti-​Semitic nor misogynist, but rather an acknowledgement of the fact that Jews in Europe and women throughout European history have been subject to conditions of radical asymmetric dependency even in the absence of the legal dominion of a master, and that this leads to their ‘always having to act and pose differently until they slowly learned to turn their coats with every wind and thus almost turned into coats themselves’. Nietzsche’s insight is that to live under conditions where one cannot simply speak one’s mind or act on one’s commitments without exposing oneself to the dominating power of another or others is itself likely to lead, as in the case of the slave, to a particular view of ethical agency in which a sharp distinction is posited between the inner and the outer such that one’s doings are precisely not seen as criterial or constitutive of one’s intentions, beliefs, values, etc; rather one’s intentions are seen as prior to, and causally responsible for, one’s actions. On the contrary, it is central to the ethical self-​understanding of one who is constrained to live their life as an actor that, unless they become their role (a possibility that Nietzsche considers), they distinguish between their true or real selves and the fictional or apparent selves disclosed in their actions. As in the case of the slave, Nietzsche’s purpose is not to blame or condemn the radically dependent, but rather to illustrate and explain how such forms of non-​legal dependency support an ethical pathology in which the expressive character of human agency

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is systematically obscured and values such as obedience and humility come to predominate over values such as boldness, courage and independence of mind. Thus far, what has emerged is that Nietzsche considers it to be a necessary condition of free agency that one is not within the power of another either in the legal sense of dominium or in the expanded sense of deep dependency, and, further, that he sees that ethical outlooks structured by significant inequalities of freedom will reflect (be distorted by) such inequalities in their conceptions of ethical agency and/​or their values. Furthermore, it seems clear from Nietzsche’s critique of modernity (see, e.g. TI Expeditions 39, KSA 6.140–​2) that he holds that not being within the power of another or others, while necessary, is not sufficient for the cultivation of free agency. This is so since this condition is compatible with decadence, that is, standing in a practical relationship to oneself of laisser aller in which all constraint is viewed as imposition (e.g. TI Expeditions 41, KSA 6.143). This is Nietzsche’s objection to the liberal view of freedom as non-​interference. In effect, Nietzsche’s claim is that while the legal and political institutions of a society can be arranged in such a way as to address the problem of domination, the issue of forming a free subject further requires an ethical culture that supports a certain kind of practical relation to self that embraces the will to be responsible for oneself, a practical relation to self that Nietzsche’s characterizes as ‘that other more mysterious pathos . . . that demand for new expansions of distance within the soul itself, the development of states that are increasingly high, rare, distant, tautly drawn and comprehensive’ (BGE 257, KSA 5.205). The cultivation of such a pathos requires, Nietzsche argues, an agonal culture. Nietzsche presents the ancient agon as a medial institution in and through which participants contest with each other and rework the standards of the practice. Think, for example, of the way that tragedians rework the standards of tragedy –​ from Aeschylus to Sophocles, for instance. An agonal culture such as ancient Athens, on Nietzsche’s account, cultivates just that will to self-​overcoming which is the disposition of freedom. Nietzsche takes certain passions –​in particular, desires for respect, honour and glory –​to be channelled by the agon in ways that serve culture, society and polity both by cultivating the appropriate practical relation to self in participants and by developing the excellences of practices (art, politics, etc.). To be more precise, the importance that the institution of the agon has, for Nietzsche, is that it cultivates will to power (the instinct for freedom) in such a way that the feeling of power (the feeling of effective agency) tracks power (effective agency) and, at the same time, supports a practical relationship to self

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in which the power to engage in the self-​directed development of one’s powers (and hence the dispositions of self-​responsibility and of self-​overcoming) is central to one’s ethical outlook. To see this relationship between will to power and the agon, it is worth recalling, as Bernard Reginster (2006) has cogently argued, that will to power involves overcoming resistances and, hence, that willing a goal means also willing resistance to achieving this goal. The appearance of paradox here is dissolved once we consider that such a view simply takes willing a goal to have the structure of taking up a challenge. Consider that it is of the nature of challenges that, first, they involve overcoming resistances (if there is no resistance, then there is no challenge); second, they must be realizable (if there is no practical possibility of you achieving X, then X is not a challenge for you); third, their value is at least partially related to their difficulty (given two relevantly similar challenges distinguished only by their degree of difficulty, the more challenging option is the more valuable); and, fourth, once a challenge is met, it is no longer valuable as a challenge. As the early essay Homer’s Contest makes vividly clear, it is precisely such a view of human agency as directed to taking up and overcoming challenges that is cultivated by the institution of the agon in which participants contest with one another to be the best at a given practice.12 However, for such an agonal culture to avoid precisely the problems that confronted the slave societies of antiquity, it must be characterized by a general condition of non-​domination, so as to avoid the distortions or pathologies of ethical outlooks that Nietzsche diagnoses as arising from relations of domination.13

3.  Nietzsche’s criticism of Kant Having elucidated Kant’s and Nietzsche’s respective accounts of freedom as independence, we are now in a position to address them in relation to one another. We can begin by reflecting on their respective relations to the issues of domination and of self-​love, which will help to then identify Nietzsche’s reasons for being sceptical of Kant’s account. Kant’s legal philosophy focuses on securing conditions in which all persons are free from dominion in the sense of a legal relationship of mastery, namely, the entitlement of another to set one’s ends. However, it is considerably less clear that Kant’s view is well-​suited to address the wider, economic and social forms of radical dependency to which Nietzsche draws attention. In a narrow construal, the issue here concerns the formal distinction that Kant draws between an agent

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choosing one’s ends and an agent changing the environment within which one chooses one’s own ends. The problem with this distinction is that it is not difficult to imagine circumstances in which A changes B’s environment such that any choice other than X has very high costs attached to it and, hence, de facto, A chooses B’s end. While it is true that, formally, B can still choose their own ends and hence is not subject to the dominion of A, there is little, if any, practical difference between A choosing B’s ends and A changing B’s environment in such circumstances. Nietzsche’s sensitivity to such forms of non-​legal domination leads him to the view that these forms of domination are threats to freedom as independence.14 Hence, he is sceptical of whether even a culture of enlightenment, in which a Kantian order of right is instituted as a legal structure of recognition, is sufficient to sustain each person’s sense of ‘rightful honour’ in the face of asymmetrical relationships of social, cultural or economic dependency that are liable to shape the ethical outlooks and dispositions of those so dominated. Turning from the issue of domination to that of self-​love, we can note that Kant acknowledges that self-​love is an ineliminable feature of such finite creatures as human beings are, and that he seeks to at once mobilize and discipline self-​love through what we may call a subordination and suppression strategy. With this, self-​love is subordinated to the demands of practical reason, being allowed expression only in the limited forms compatible with these demands, and the rivalrous emotions are suppressed. By contrast, Nietzsche pursues what we may refer to as a channelling strategy in which the desire for distinction is directed in ways that serve both individual and collective development. Nietzsche is clear that his project of re-​evaluation involves a re-​evaluation of self-​ love or, as he refers to it in his contemporary vocabulary, egoism. Thus, in Daybreak, 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, KSA 3.140). A rather more diagnostic stance on this topic is adopted in the first essay of the Genealogy, when Nietzsche argues that it is only with the decline of aristocratic value-​judgements that ‘this whole antithesis between “egoistic” and “unegoistic” forces itself more and more on man’s conscience’ (GM I 2, KSA 5.260). Here he is first concerned with articulating and defending an ethical outlook that is eudaemonistic in the sense that Kant condemns as a form of egoism.15 But Nietzsche’s revaluation of egoism goes beyond this in seeking also to revalue the ‘rivalrous emotions’ central to an agonal culture. In such agonistic cultures, rivalrous emotions may be viewed as virtuous or defective. Thus, in ancient Greek thought, the rivalrous emotions form a relatively distinct subset

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of emotional responses, demarcated from relationships of friendship and enmity and focusing on ‘the pain induced in us by the possession of good things by other people’ (Gill 2003: 34). The main emotions in question are ‘indignation (nemesis), envy (or being ‘grudging’) (phthonos) and emulation (zēlos)’, and Aristotle distinguishes them from each other broadly as follows: Indignation is pain at the undeserved possession of good things by other people. Envy (grudge) is the pain directed specifically at those who are our equals in status or character, and is centered on the fact that other people have good things rather than that we do not. Emulation is close to envy in other respects, but is centered on the fact that we do not have good things rather than that others do have them. (34)

Nietzsche’s view of these emotions appears to differ in certain respects from Aristotle’s. So, for example, commenting in Daybreak on the loss of the idea of innocent misfortune in Christianity, he notes that ‘[t]‌he Greeks have a word for indignation at another’s unhappiness:  this affect was inadmissible among Christian people and failed to develop, so they lack a name for this more manly brother of pity’ (D 78, KSA 3.77). The contrast between nemesis and mitleid drawn here is directed against what Nietzsche sees as the Christian identification of misfortune with guilt, but the salient point for us is that he clearly sees indignation as an emotional response also to the undeserved misfortune of another, and not simply to undeserved good fortune. We may also note that in his early essay ‘Homer’s Contest’, Nietzsche links a range of rivalrous emotions under the aegis of the ‘good’ Eris ‘who as jealousy, spite, envy, incites men to activity but not to the action of war to the knife but the action of competition’ (HC, KSA 1.785–​6). What motivates this concern with revaluing the very rivalrous emotions that Kant is concerned to denigrate and suppress?16 Nietzsche’s scepticism towards Kant’s subordination and suppression strategy reflects his more general scepticism towards Kant’s picture of the self as able to step back from or suspend any motive and evaluate it on the basis of reason alone. On Nietzsche’s own naturalistic account of the self in terms of drive psychology, Kant’s subordination and suppression strategy is unlikely to be effective because it fails to recognize that the drive to self-​love manifest in the rivalrous emotions actively seeks expression. The best available interpretation of this feature of Nietzsche’s argument explains it in the following way: A drive is a disposition that induces an evaluation orientation. Drives manifest themselves by structuring the agent’s perceptions, affects, and reflective thought. Moreover, drives do not simply arise in response to external stimuli: they actively seek opportunities for expression, sometimes distorting the agent’s perception

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of the environment in order to incline the agent to act in ways that give the drive expression. (Katsafanas 2013: 752)

The salience of this account is that it requires a recasting of our view of reflective agency: An agent who deliberates seems to enjoy a certain detachment from her motivational states. The deliberating agent experiences herself as capable of suspending the effects of her motivational states, and determining her action by choice. While it may be true that the agent who deliberates is not immediately compelled to act by her motivational states, her drives and other motives do continue to operate, in a subterranean fashion, even as the agent reflects on them. In many cases, the drives appear to decisively guide the agent’s reflective choice in ways that she does not recognize. (732)

On this view, the plausibility of Kant’s subordination strategy with respect to self-​ love and his suppression strategy with regard to the rivalrous emotions is dependent on inflating the claims of deliberative agency and failing to acknowledge the subterranean operation of the drives. A channeling strategy –​which necessarily requires a re-​evaluation of self-​love and the rivalrous emotions –​looks like a more realistic alternative. However, this raises a problem for Nietzsche’s account that Kant’s account of morality is designed to avoid. For both Kant and Nietzsche concur that teleological views of nature (including human nature) of the kind that grounded substantive eudaemonistic conceptions of the good life are no longer credible. How then can Nietzsche propose a project of re-​evaluation that reintroduces an eudaemonist view of ethics? An adequate response to this question is beyond the reach of this chapter, but it should be noted that Nietzsche, like Kant, sees the bindingness of norms as grounded in autonomy but, in contrast to Kant, takes the achievement of autonomy to be the ongoing achievement of standing in a relationship of self-​ responsibility and self-​overcoming to oneself, such that the practice of certain virtues is integral to developing and sustaining this relationship. These virtues include those cultivated by an agonal culture as integral to identifying, taking up and overcoming challenges, such as courage and independence of mind. This is, of course, only to indicate one possible route towards addressing this central issue.

4.  Conclusion My concern in this essay has been to address Kant and Nietzsche in terms of their understanding of freedom as independence. Although I  have been concerned to highlight the differences between their views, it is important to

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emphasize that Nietzsche can endorse Kant’s stress on the importance of a legal condition in which no one stands in a relationship of mastery (legal dominion) to another. But I  have tried to show that Nietzsche’s position is more radical than Kant’s in two respects. First, Nietzsche takes the condition of freedom as independence to be more demanding than Kant does in that it needs to address a range of forms of domination that extend beyond Kant’s focus on a person’s being able to determine one’s choices directly. Second, Nietzsche does not take freedom from domination to be sufficient to secure freedom as independence. Rather, on his account, freedom as independence also requires the practice of a practical relation to self composed of the disposition of self-​responsibility and self-​overcoming. Admittedly, Kant too holds that the mere fact of freedom from domination is not sufficient for freedom as independence –​he notes that one must also stand to oneself in a relation of ‘rightful honour’. But while Kant’s account goes beyond the specification of legal conditions that secure relations of non-​mastery to encompass psychological and social dimensions of human agency such as ‘unsociable sociability’, ‘maturity’ and institutionalized structures of recognition supporting the practical self-​relation of rightful honour, I have offered some reasons for Nietzsche’s scepticism towards Kant’s account both in terms of the sufficiency of the conditions that Kant proposes and in terms of the plausibility of Kant’s strategy for dealing with the drive to self-​love. I have also highlighted a challenge that confronts Nietzsche’s project. Without pretending to offer any definitive conclusions, I hope to have opened up a field of enquiry regarding Nietzsche’s relationship to Kant’s ethics that extends beyond the narrow focus on Kant’s conception of morality.17

Notes 1 As Ripstein (2009: 39) rightly puts it: ‘Kant’s account of independence does not aspire to isolate people from the effects of other people’s choices. Instead my independence of your choice must be understood in terms of my right that you do not choose for me.’ 2 As Green (1996: 292) notes: ‘The common root [of Vormund and Unmündig] –​ Mund (mouth) –​indicates that the underlying meaning of unmündig is being unable to speak on one’s own behalf. For that purpose one has need of a Vormund, a legally sanctioned “mouthpiece” to stand in front of (vor) him –​or her –​as official spokesman.’

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3 Not the least of the difficulties here is Kant’s clear implication that the mass of guardians are immature. I take his point to be that the ‘dogmas and formulas’ which enchain the common mass also enchain most of the guardians. The relation of this point to the discussion of the freedom to use one’s public reason which follows is made clear later in the essay, when Kant remarks that ‘a clergyman is bound to instruct his pupils and his congregation in accordance with the doctrines of the church he serves, for he was employed by it on that condition. . . . [However], as a scholar addressing the real public (i.e., the world at large) through his writings, the clergyman making public use of his reason enjoys unlimited freedom to use his own reason and to speak in his own person. For to maintain that the guardians of the people in spiritual matters should themselves be immature, is an absurdity which amounts to making absurdities permanent’ (WA 37). 4 We should note here that this reference to the few as ‘cultivating their own minds’ does not entail solitary activity but most probably membership of a secret society. As Kant notes: ‘Obedience without the spirit of freedom is the effective cause of all secret societies. For it is a natural vocation of man to communicate with his fellows, especially in matters affecting mankind as a whole. Thus secret societies would disappear if freedom of this kind were encouraged’ (TP 305). In this passage, the ‘spirit of freedom’ refers to the exercise of the freedom to use one’s public reason. 5 While the contemporary philosophical target of these remarks may be Johann Gottfried Herder, whose Ideas on the Philosophy of the History of Mankind had been reviewed with some hostility by Kant in the previous year (1795), this passage is also consonant with Kant’s long-​standing antagonism to self-​proclaimed visionaries such as Emanuel Swedenborg. 6 This claim was somewhat optimistic on Kant’s part. In the same year, Frederick stated that a ‘private person has no right to pass public and perhaps even disapproving judgement on the actions, procedures, laws, regulations, and ordinances of sovereigns and courts, their officials, assemblies, and courts of law, or to promulgate or publish in print pertinent reports which he manages to obtain. For a private person is not at all capable of making such a judgement, because he lacks complete knowledge of circumstances and motives’ (cited in Habermas 1989: 25). 7 This section draws from Owen (2005). 8 Note in particular that the reference to dependents ‘of every rank’ highlights the fact that in the ancient Greek and, particularly, Roman worlds the wives and children of citizens were subject to the legal dominion of the paterfamilias. 9 See GM II 10, KSA 5.270–​4, in which Nietzsche notes that as communities become more powerful, they come to isolate the criminal from his act. This separation provides the basic resources needed for the thought that agents and their acts can be taken as distinct which is, then, exploited by the slaves.

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10 Cf. GM I 11, KSA 5.274–​7. 11 It should also be noted, however, that the ethics of the masters also exhibits what Nietzsche takes to be a distorted form of valuing. While ‘master morality’ does not need to avail itself of a picture of moral agency that engages in fictitious double-​ counting, its own valuations are distorted by the asymmetries of freedom in which it is embedded. Thus Nietzsche notes that this morality combines a synthesis of the inhuman (monstrous) and the overhuman (GM I 13, KSA 5.278–​81). The fact that the ‘pathos of distance’ experienced by the masters is the condition required for their experience of that more mysterious pathos of inner distance that Nietzsche celebrates (BGE 257, KSA 5.205) does not prevent him from acknowledging that some of their values are barbaric and are so precisely because their formation is structured by the distinctions between the free man and the slave and between the citizen and the stranger –​where these distinctions are linked practically in that it is the conquest of strangers that produces slaves (GM II 17, KSA 5.324–​5). Notice further that the issue of freedom also structures relationships within the noble class, albeit here we shift from legal structures to political rule. Nietzsche’s account of the different moral psychologies of the priest and the knight is structured by the former’s collective political subordination to the latter. The moral outlook and values of the priest that come to articulation in the ascetic ideal begin in their experience of political servitude. 12 Note that it is also central to the functioning of the agon that no one wholly dominates the field of contest; should that occur, Nietzsche points in HC to ostracism as a mechanism for reinvigorating the agon. 13 Crucially, it is also the case for Nietzsche that the capacities for self-​discipline, self-​ surveillance and truthfulness developed under the aegis of the ascetic ideal entail that the pathos of inner distance no longer depends on the pathos of outer distance, that is, the relations of social and political hierarchy that gave birth to it. See Owen (1998) for a detailed argument for this point. 14 This worry was of course already a feature of classical reflection on servitude. Thus, for example, Sallust argues in his Bellum Catilinae that ‘ever since our republic submitted to the jurisdiction and control of a few powerful persons, the rest of us have been obnoxii, living in subservience to them’ (cited in Skinner 1998: 43). The point has been powerfully developed within the republican and radical traditions to highlight a range of forms of dependency –​economic, social, cultural –​that amount in practice to de facto servitude. 15 Kant’s view is stated succinctly in the section on ‘Egoism’ in Anthropology from a Pragmatic Point of View: ‘[T]‌he 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

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him to have no touchstone of a genuine concept of duty which truly must be a universally valid principle. All eudaemonists are consequently egoists’ (Anth 161). 16 For a clear account of Kant’s view, see Muthu (2014). 17 I am grateful to audiences in Rome, Leiden and Montreal for critical discussion and feedback on earlier drafts of this essay. I owe particular thanks to Tom Bailey for incisive editorial guidance and for much needed patience.

References Gill, C. (2003), ‘Is Rivalry a Virtue or a Vice?’ in D. Konstan and N. K. Rutter (eds) Envy, Spite and Jealousy, 29–​52, Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press. Green, G. (1996), ‘Modern Culture Comes of Age: Hamann versus Kant on the Root Metaphor of Enlightenment’, in J. Schmidt (ed.), What Is Enlightenment?, 368–​81, Berkeley and Los Angeles: University of California Press. Habermas, J. (1989), The Structural Transformation of the Public Sphere, Cambridge: Polity. Katsafanas, P. (2013), ‘Nietzsche’s Philosophical Psychology’, in K. Gemes and J. Richardson (eds), The Oxford Handbook of Nietzsche, 727–​55, Oxford: Oxford University Press. Muthu, S. (2014), ‘Productive Resistance in Kant’s Political Thought’, in K. Flikschuh and L. Ypi (eds), Kant and Colonialism, 68–​98, Oxford: Oxford University Press. Owen, D. (1998), ‘Nietzsche, Enlightenment and the Problem of the Noble Ideal’, in J. Lippitt (ed.), Nietzsche’s Futures, 3–​29, Basingstoke: MacMillan. Owen, D. (2005), ‘Failing to be Agents’, Philosophical Topics 33 (2): 139–​59. Patton, P. (2000) ‘Nietzsche and the Problem of the Actor’, in A. D. Schrift (ed.), Why Nietzsche Still?, 170–​83, Berkeley: University of California Press. Reginster, B. (2006), The Affirmation of Life, Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press. Ripstein, A. (2009), Force and Freedom, Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press. Skinner, Q. (1998), Liberty before Liberalism, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Skinner, Q. (2002), ‘Classical Liberty, Renaissance Translation and the English Civil War’ in Q. Skinner, Visions of Politics (volume II): Renaissance Virtues, 308–​43, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.

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Autonomy, Spiritual Illness and Theodicy in Kant and Nietzsche Frederick Neuhouser

If one wanted to locate the text of Kant’s that corresponded most closely to the Genealogy of Morals, one would not be too far off the mark in looking to his essay ‘Idea for a Universal History with a Cosmopolitan Purpose’.1 In that work Kant offers his own brand of a genealogy of morals –​a theodicy, really –​that purports to explain in naturalistic terms how two moral phenomena, justice and the capacity for autonomy, could have entered a world inhabited by human creatures in which those phenomena were previously absent. The story Kant tells bears striking resemblances to Nietzsche’s genealogy. In particular, it depicts how humans came to acquire capacities they originally lacked not through an awareness of the higher purposes those capacities might eventually serve, but through mundane struggles produced by the ‘unsocial’ aspect of human nature. The natural unsociability that Kant’s narrative depends on could even be seen as a species of will to power: the will to be exclusively one’s own master and to avoid subjection to others, and also to subjugate others if retaining one’s own sovereignty requires it.2 The individuals Kant describes as honing capacities in order to defend their sovereignty against their rivals are no more aware that they are creating the conditions that will make justice and morality possible than the slaves in Nietzsche’s account know in advance of the possibilities for spiritual greatness that their own deeds create. But the similarities between these works extend beyond the general idea that later generations can take over the legacy of earlier generations –​the development of new capacities –​and employ it in the service of ‘higher’ ends unimagined by those who created that legacy. For Nietzsche also provides genealogies of (close relatives of) the same phenomena as those explained by Kant. As is well known, the beginning of the Genealogy’s second essay characterizes its project

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in terms of showing how autonomy, reinterpreted as a ‘supramoral’ phenomenon, can be understood as having entered the world on the back of events and processes that in no way aimed at producing the results they did. It is less widely acknowledged that in section 11 of the same essay –​more or less the midpoint of the entire Genealogy –​Nietzsche reflects on the origins of justice, too, and, surprisingly perhaps, offers what can only be described as a paean to justice: in its highest manifestations justice ‘is a piece of perfection and supreme mastery on earth’ (GM II 11, KSA 5.311; throughout, translations are Walter Kaufmann’s). Even more surprisingly, Nietzsche’s genealogy, too –​and especially his account of the historical preconditions of autonomy –​retains traces of traditional theodicy. In this chapter I  will consider some aspects of Nietzsche’s treatments of autonomy and justice in the Genealogy of Morals that appear to respond to Kant’s accounts of the same topics in ‘Universal History’. While my main aim is to shed light on Nietzsche’s account of the preconditions of autonomy, situating that account in relation to Kant’s will help bring Nietzsche’s claims into better focus. In undertaking this project, one should bear in mind three dimensions along which the two genealogies can be compared. The first has to do with the content of the relevant concepts, for clearly the versions of autonomy and justice endorsed by Nietzsche are not identical to those defended by Kant. The second dimension concerns the respective roles that natural teleology plays in the two genealogies. Here, too, the two genealogies differ significantly, most notably because Kant’s relies heavily on the idea that justice and autonomy (or its preconditions) can be understood as moral ends that nature sets for the human species, the achievement of which is, if not strictly necessary, far from accidental. This issue has been widely discussed in the literature –​especially in comparisons of Nietzsche’s and Hegel’s ‘genealogies’ –​but I will argue that it is considerably more complex than is usually thought. The final dimension, not entirely separate from the second, concerns the respects in which Nietzsche’s and Kant’s genealogies can be read as theodicies, as well as how their theodicies differ. This is the dimension I will focus on most directly, and, of the three, it is the one that has received the least attention from commentators –​due in part no doubt to a reluctance to admit that Nietzsche might be engaged in anything so closely bound up with Christian theology. My discussion will proceed as follows:  after briefly discussing differences between Kant’s and Nietzsche’s conceptions of justice and autonomy, I will turn to the third dimension of comparison and attempt to clarify in what sense the two genealogies participate in the project of theodicy.

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1.  Conceptions of justice and autonomy It is easy to see that Kant and Nietzsche do not have precisely the same phenomena in mind when they refer to justice and autonomy, but it is more difficult to say precisely where the differences lie. One reason for this stems from a fundamental philosophical disagreement: whereas Kant operates with conceptions of justice and autonomy that he takes to be stable and universal, Nietzsche assumes that the content of our normative concepts changes over time, in response to more or less contingent historical events, such that it is impossible to specify what justice or autonomy ‘essentially’ is (as Kant does) or to understand the development of those concepts as a rational unfolding of their latent content (as Hegel does). For Nietzsche the history of our moral conceptions is instead ‘a continuous sign-​chain of ever new interpretations and adjustments whose causes . . . follow and replace one another according to mere chance’ (GM II 12, KSA 5.314). Or, as he also puts the point, ‘only what has no history can be defined’ (GM II 13, KSA 5.317). When Nietzsche speaks approvingly of justice in the Genealogy, his understanding of it has more in common with Kant’s conception of justice than do their accounts of autonomy. Both thinkers emphasize the importance of law to political justice, especially its role in ‘externally’ regulating individuals’ actions in accordance with some relatively formal criterion of what social members owe to one another. Although here, too, there are important differences, the version of political justice praised in the Genealogy is closer to Kant’s vision of justice than it is to those of, say, Rousseau, Hegel, Marx or Mill. Moreover, Nietzsche’s and Kant’s genealogies agree in regarding political justice as historically prior to autonomy, and for similar reasons: both see autonomy as depending on sophisticated subjective capacities whose development presupposes more complex historical processes than does the creation of a law-​governed state. More than this, however, the establishment of political justice (along with the practices of punishment that accompany it) plays for both a central role in explaining how the psychological capacities necessary for autonomy entered the world. Nietzsche’s view of justice nevertheless diverges from Kant’s in significant respects. Whereas for Kant justice is primarily a matter of establishing spheres of ‘external freedom’ for individuals within which they are able to act as they wish without interference from others, the core of justice3 for Nietzsche resides in some version of the primordial ‘establishing of equivalents’ (and discharging of debts) that is fundamental to human civilization and even to ‘thinking as

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such’ (GM II 8, KSA 5.306). That Nietzsche traces justice back to norms implicit in ancient practices of exchange makes his view closer to social contract theory than one might expect, but how he does so means that his conception of justice cannot ultimately be assimilated to Kant’s or to social contract theory more generally. For there remains a crucial difference between locating the core of justice in some version of a law of equivalents –​of which ‘an eye for an eye and a tooth for a tooth’ is a primitive e­ xample –​and thinking of it as about respecting (refraining from intervening in) other individuals’ external spheres of freedom. A more interesting difference between the treatments of justice in the Genealogy and ‘Universal History’ is that the former treats justice not only as an external political condition, realized in the laws of a state, but also as a virtue of the soul: a subjective attitude of ‘exalted, clear objectivity, as penetrating as it is mild’, which is capable of judging equitably –​without ‘malice driving blood into the eyes’ –​even when it is the judger himself who is the victim of injustice (GM II 11, KSA 5.311). It is this condition of the soul –​justice as a virtue (as a kind of impartiality) –​that Nietzsche calls ‘a piece of perfection and supreme mastery on earth’, and, as that praise implies, he takes it to be a much rarer occurrence than political justice, which is a more primitive phenomenon established whenever a stronger power imposes on weaker beings a condition of law that ‘elevates certain equivalents . . . into norms’ and declares what, ‘beneath its eyes, is to count as allowed and prohibited, as right and wrong’ (GM II 11, KSA 5.312). Although Nietzsche does not emphasize this fact, his genealogy of political justice cannot by itself explain where the virtue of justice comes from. For this virtue is internal to subjects (in their ‘souls’) and so requires a more complex explanation than can be found in the merely external imposition of order on the weaker by the physically more powerful. Since Nietzsche does not say more about where the virtue of justice comes from, it is tempting to conclude that his genealogy is incomplete, that he has drawn our attention to a subjective phenomenon that cannot belong ‘naturally’ to human animals without explaining how it could have come about. Once Nietzsche distinguishes justice as an external political condition from justice as a state of the soul, he owes us a genealogy not only of the earlier phenomenon –​an explanation of how states came to be –​ but also of the later and more complex phenomenon, justice as a virtue. Given that both autonomy and the virtue of justice are possible only for souls that possess a complex internal structure, it seems reasonable to expect that the missing genealogy of the virtue of justice might be contained in, or intimately bound up with, the genealogy of autonomy that Nietzsche announces as his task at the beginning of the second essay. While I  believe this must be right,

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the suggestion is less helpful than it might seem for the simple reason that it is far from clear how his genealogy of autonomy is to be understood. Although Nietzsche makes clear that the essay should be read as explaining where autonomy comes from –​it is described as the late ‘fruit’ of a ‘tremendous process’ in which ‘society and its morality of mores (Sittlichkeit der Sitte) finally reveal what they have [. . .] been the means to’ (GM II 2, KSA 5.293) –​he never explicitly returns to the topic, and by the end of that complex essay, it is unclear which of the many developments traced in it also play a role in his story of how autonomy might come into the world. I will have no more to say in this chapter about the genealogy of justice as a virtue, although, as I have suggested, the genealogy of autonomy I focus on below is surely relevant to reconstructing it. A more basic question, no less difficult to answer, is what the autonomy praised by Nietzsche in GM II 2, KSA 5.293-​4, consists in. Clearly, it is not moral autonomy of the Kantian sort. As is well known, Nietzsche rejected Kant’s vision of moral autonomy as a secular form of the ascetic ideal (GM III 5, KSA 5.262–​4) that is grounded in a repressed and especially virulent form of self-​directed cruelty (GM II 6, KSA 5.264–​6). Moreover, since ethical concepts evolve over time and are shaped by contingent circumstances, the conception of autonomy I will attribute to Nietzsche cannot be regarded as an account of what self-​determined agency ‘really’ is, sub specie aeternitatis. Rather, the conception of autonomy endorsed in GM II 2, KSA 5.293–​4, should be understood as Nietzsche’s attempt to articulate a specific form of self-​determined agency that he takes to be available to (some of) us at a particular juncture in history, after long sequences of events, possessing varying degrees of contingency, have shaped us into the beings we currently are (or were in Europe in the late nineteenth century). In the remainder of this chapter I  will use ‘autonomy’ when discussing Nietzsche’s position, to refer to the specific version of self-​determined agency that he regards as the most complete form of freedom –​and spiritual health –​available to humans in his own time. For Nietzsche, autonomy in this sense seems to be equated with having the right to make promises, which is said to be a defining characteristic of the ‘sovereign individual’, the person who has ‘his own independent protracted will’ (GM II 2, KSA 5.293) and is capable of following up his ‘I shall do this’ with the deed that fulfills the promise he has made (GM II 1, KSA 5.291–​2).4 (Once again, the differences between Kant and Nietzsche turn out to be less stark than one initially thinks: promise-​keeping, for example, is central to both of their accounts of autonomy.) If we stop at this description of the autonomous individual (as a person who can be depended on to keep his promises), it can seem as though

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Nietzsche’s account of how the long, harsh historical process associated with the morality of mores and the practice of punishment (and hence with justice in its political form) makes human beings ‘calculable’ and ‘regular’ might suffice to explain where autonomy comes from. However, that autonomy involves more than calculability and regularity is apparent both from Nietzsche’s text5 and from reflecting on the concept itself. If self-​given law is to designate a state of the soul rather than merely a political condition, then autonomy requires a soul that is sufficiently complex that one can distinguish within it a law-​giving part from a part that is subject to the laws it gives itself. Autonomy, in other words, requires an internally divided soul that cannot be explained by the morality of mores alone, and it is the origin of precisely such a soul that the second essay means to account for in showing how the bad conscience entered the world. That autonomy involves an internally divided soul is made clear by Nietzsche’s description of the sovereign individual as one for whom the obligation to fulfill one’s promises derives from and is enforced by some agency internal to the individual –​his ‘conscience’ –​rather than by the punishing power of an external authority such as the state. But this capacity of the autonomous soul –​its capacity for self-​enforcement –​does not exhaust its autonomy, which requires, in addition, that the law that is enforced be in some way self-​given. Nietzsche’s conception of autonomy interprets the idea of self-​legislation more loosely than Kant’s; what Nietzsche’s autonomous individual imposes on himself is not exactly a law, with the form of universality,6 but more like a supreme value. I take this to be Nietzsche’s point when he says that ‘the possessor of a protracted . . . will [i.e. the autonomous individual] also possesses his [own] measure of value’ (GM II 2, KSA 5.294). It is not immediately clear in what sense the autonomous individual’s measure of value is his own or on what kind of value his judgements rely. For reasons that will become clearer below, I believe Nietzsche means to offer relatively robust answers to both questions: the autonomous individual’s measure of value is his own in some sense that makes it count, in the words of German idealism, as a self-​posited value, and the value he posits for himself extends beyond merely affirming the goodness of keeping one’s promises or of being just in one’s external dealings with others. This means that Nietzsche’s ideal of autonomy is a more inclusive phenomenon than the virtue of justice (holding oneself to one’s impartial judgements as to what the principles of equivalence require of one), and for this reason his genealogy of the former cannot completely overlap with a genealogy of the latter. The virtue of justice may be part of autonomy, but it is not identical to it. For it operates in a narrower domain than autonomy –​only where principles of

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equivalence apply –​and it appears not to require the self-​positing of value that Nietzsche ascribes to full-​fledged autonomy. Before proceeding further, it is worth summarizing the already complex points I have made thus far in situating Nietzsche’s genealogy of justice and autonomy in relation to Kant’s. First, while ‘Universal History’ distinguishes political justice from moral autonomy, Nietzsche distinguishes three phenomena, political justice, the virtue of justice and ‘supramoral’ autonomy, which involves more than mere reliability as a promise keeper. Second, of these it is political justice and autonomy that are most prominent in Nietzsche’s genealogy; to the extent that he explains the origin of the virtue of justice, it must be reconstructed from his genealogy of autonomy, since that virtue seems to be part of, though not to exhaust, his conception of autonomy. Third, for both Nietzsche and Kant, political justice plays an important role in explaining how the more complex, internal phenomenon of autonomy becomes possible for humans. For Kant, it creates the conditions under which individuals make rules governing respect for other persons into genuine practical principles, obeyed not out of fear of punishment but because they are seen to be rational; for Nietzsche it is the source of the practices of punishment that, once enclosure within the walls of society is complete, bring about ‘the internalization of the human being’ and the creation of a ‘soul’ (GM II 16, KSA 5.322). Finally, full-​fledged autonomy for Nietzsche appears to include the following related but distinguishable phenomena: the ability actually to keep the promises one makes; an internally divided soul that makes self-​legislation and self-​enforcement –​or ‘conscience’ –​possible; and the possession of a single measure of value that is, in some robust sense, one’s own (or ‘self-​posited’); and the virtue of justice. In the rest of this chapter I will ignore Nietzsche’s account of the origins of both external justice and justice as a virtue, in order to concentrate on his genealogy of autonomy. Doing so will reveal at least one respect in which Nietzsche’s genealogy of autonomy improves on Kant’s. For Kant does a poor job of explaining how the external order imposed by political justice can give rise to the internal order required for moral autonomy; he fails to explain, in other words, how coercive external laws alone can form subjects in ways that make internal law-​giving and internal enforcement of laws possible. Kant might be read as acknowledging this point when he notes that political progress cannot by itself produce moral virtue but only establish conditions that make it more likely. But even this more modest claim is difficult to follow since, to use Nietzsche’s terms, political justice can make the behavior of individuals more calculable and regular but cannot by itself instill in them a conscience. In my view, then, Nietzsche’s

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account of what is required for the subjective formation of autonomous individuals is the most important genealogical advance his text makes with respect to Kant’s ‘Universal History’, and it is this that I will focus on in the rest of this chapter.

2.  Genealogy and theodicy Now that we have examined some differences between Kant’s and Nietzsche’s conceptions of justice and autonomy, it is time to ask how their genealogies incorporate elements of theodicy. That this is true of Kant’s ‘Universal History’ is hardly controversial. Its narrative can be seen as a form of theodicy insofar as one of its aims is to enable us to affirm an apparently senseless human history, replete with barbarism, misery and war –​the results of a tendency to conflict inscribed in human nature (our ‘unsocial sociability’) –​by showing how those evils create conditions that make a higher form of human existence possible. This higher existence includes the realization of both natural and moral ends:  in the first case, the full development of our natural faculties (including reason), and, in the second, conditions of political justice and even moral community.7 This account of the unintended consequences of our unsocial sociability enables those who accept it to look back on the course of history and to affirm it as good. Moreover, since both natural and spiritual ends are realized in a process that is driven by a natural force –​the unsocial sociability of human nature –​Kant’s genealogy makes our history appear to us as something a benevolent Creator, in designing nature, might have planned. The theodicy related in ‘Universal History’ not only enables us to affirm the basic conditions of human existence as good, thereby reconciling us to them; insofar as nature’s ends have not yet been fully achieved, it also provides rational grounding for hope in a redeeming future. Central to all of this is Kant’s hypothesis that nature, through its Creator’s design, not only sets ends for us but also provides its own mechanisms to ensure (or to make it probable) that those ends will be realized (or will come ever closer to being realized). Thus human history, which at first looks to be a cause for despair, shows itself instead to be the tool of both freedom and nature, the workshop within which human beings develop their natural capacities and at the same time prepare themselves to be politically and morally free.8

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As I have suggested, a good deal of light can be shed on Nietzsche’s account of the origins of autonomy by focusing on how he too offers a kind of theodicy, a genealogy that enables us to affirm, or ‘justify’ (GM II 2, KSA 5.293), a ‘monstrous’ history by showing how it creates the conditions that make it possible for spiritually higher phenomena to come into being, a possibility that Nietzsche does not hesitate to describe as a kind of redemption (GM II 24, KSA 5.336). In making this claim I do not mean to deny that there are important differences between Nietzsche’s genealogy and Christian (or Kantian or Hegelian) theodicy. Yet Nietzsche’s language in the following passage makes clear that his genealogy remains within the theodicean tradition: [T]‌he monstrous labor of what I have called ‘the morality of mores’ –​the labor performed by humans on themselves during the greater part of the existence of the human race . . . finds in this [the breeding of an animal with the right to make promises] its meaning, its great justification, despite the severity, tyranny, stupidity, and idiocy involved in it. (GM II 2, KSA 5.293)

That Nietzsche does not intend to ‘justify’ only the harsh practices of the morality of mores is indicated at the beginning of GM II 4, where he remarks that, besides punishment, there is ‘another somber thing –​the consciousness of guilt, the “bad conscience” ’ –​that must be brought into the picture to explain how the conditions that make autonomy possible entered the world. That this part of his account will also have a theodicean cast finds expression in Nietzsche’s later remark that the bad conscience is an illness of the sort that pregnancy is (GM II 19, KSA 5.327): an illness ‘full of a future’ (ein Zukunftsvolles) (GM II 16, KSA 5.323). Given the importance of an internally divided soul for autonomy (and the fact that Nietzsche even calls it ‘conscience’), it is not difficult to anticipate the general role the bad conscience will play in this theodicy, for it is precisely this –​the possibility of a ‘soul turned back against itself ’ (GM II 16, KSA 5.322-​ 3) –​that the bad conscience explains. Like Kant’s theodicy, Nietzsche’s aims to inspire both hope and reconciliation. In pointing out the potential for spiritual greatness that our current condition contains, the Genealogy gives its readers hope that the ills of that condition can be transformed into its opposite, spiritual greatness. It is this argument that justifies the unmistakably hopeful tone with which the second essay ends: after hinting at how the dangers inherent in contemporary culture also harbor a potential for redemption, Nietzsche admits his own inability actually to erect the new ideal that is required to restore human beings to health but nonetheless concludes with

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what can only be described as a hopeful faith: ‘this victor over [. . .] nothingness –​ he must come one day’ (GM II 24, KSA 5.336). Reconciliation, too, is an end of Nietzsche’s theodicy: to affirm the basic conditions of what initially appears to be a ‘monstrous’ existence is to be reconciled to it, where (as for Hegel, too) ‘reconciliation’ does not imply a cessation of practical engagement in the world but precisely its opposite: seeing the basic conditions of existence as accommodating rather than thwarting human freedom serves to incite activity, not to still it. Another similarity between Kant’s and Nietzsche’s theodicies concerns the perspective from which they are offered. In contrast to Hegel, neither philosopher claims that his theodicean claims constitute knowledge. For Kant, the project of ‘Universal History’ belongs neither to the domain of theoretical reason nor to that of practical reason. It is carried out, rather, from the perspective articulated in the third Critique, where reflection on how nature and the demands of freedom (or morality) might be synthesized into a coherent whole responds to the question, ‘What may we hope for?’, rather than ‘What can we know?’ or ‘What ought we to do?’ Nietzsche’s Genealogy –​or the aspects of it responsible for inspiring hope and reconciliation9  –​can be thought of as a work of neo-​ Kantianism insofar as it, too, is carried out from a perspective that does not aspire to provide knowledge of history in any straightforward sense, but derives its legitimacy from, as Hegel would say, our ‘speculative’ interest in finding our world coherent, affirmable and hope-​inspiring, rather than a cause for despair. While it is difficult to articulate precisely what this perspective consists in for Nietzsche –​let us call it the perspective of great spiritual health –​there should be no doubt that the Genealogy is told from a point of view that, like that of Kant’s ‘Universal History’, is self-​consciously informed by an ethical purpose bound up with an ideal of self-​determined agency, even if there remains a large distance between how the respective purposes are conceived more specifically: as great spiritual health, on the one hand, and as rationality and morality, on the other. Where, then, do the differences between the two theodicies lie? For reasons that will become clear below (when I  consider his conception of ‘life’), Nietzsche’s theodicy envisions a form of reconciliation that forgoes any ideal of a completed, fully satisfying end point of history, including even the Kantian version of that ideal, where the posited end point remains, in this life, an ideal to be approximated but not fully achieved. Not only is it impossible for Nietzsche to give a determinate sketch of what such an end point would look like in advance of our actual history, the very idea of satisfying completion is out of place once the underlying conditions of human existence –​the nature of ‘life’ itself –​are conceived of as they are by Nietzsche. The absence of even the concept of such

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an end point makes it impossible for him to speak, as Kant does, of history as proceeding according to a ‘plan’ of nature or Providence.10 To the extent that nature is the moving force behind a purposive human history for Nietzsche, it is not a nature that points beyond itself to an intelligence that designed it with a plan for human redemption in mind. However nature for Nietzsche is to be further characterized, it is not nature as delivered from the hands of a Creator but simply nature as it happens to be. Another (related) difference between the two theodicies concerns the degree of contingency that enters into each. Nietzsche’s genealogy clearly ascribes a large role to chance in its account of how we arrived at where we are today, such that when he claims to find redemptive possibilities in our current condition, he is asserting merely that such possibilities are in fact there, not that they must, or were likely to, have developed.11 The large role played by contingency in the Genealogy is connected to the fact that, unlike Kant’s theodicy, it does not posit a ‘mechanism’ of nature (such as that of unsocial sociability) that pushes our development in a certain direction, ensuring (or making probable) an affirmable outcome. For Nietzsche, stagnation, regression and even complete paralysis are possible courses of human history; like Schopenhauer, he takes seriously the possibility that ‘life’ could simply wear itself out and cease to stimulate further activity. Still, while it is tempting to say that the principal difference between the two theodicies is that Kant’s relies on a natural teleology, whereas Nietzsche’s does not, once again the point is more complex than it initially seems. Consider, for example, Nietzsche’s perplexing statement: ‘To breed an animal with the right to make promises [das versprechen darf] –​is not this precisely the paradoxical task that nature has set for itself in the case of the human being?’ (GM II 1, KSA 5.291; emphases modified). The suggestion that human autonomy can be regarded as a task that nature has set for itself must appear shocking to readers accustomed to hearing that Nietzsche eschews all traces of the teleology that Kant’s (and Hegel’s) philosophies of history rely on. What I have said here about the absence of a natural mechanism that pushes history in a specific direction makes it difficult to see how Nietzsche’s talk of a self-​set task of nature can be made sense of. Yet clearly Nietzsche intends with this claim to draw his genealogy closer than one would have thought possible to traditional theodicies, such as Kant’s, that aim to ‘justify’ not merely history but nature itself. I will put this puzzling issue aside for now and return to it at the end of this chapter, once we have examined in more detail Nietzsche’s conception of nature –​or, more precisely, his conception of ‘life’.

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Finally, Nietzsche’s comparison of the bad conscience with pregnancy and his characterization of the latter as an illness point to one important respect in which his theodicy works with categories different from those of Christian and Kantian theodicies. Although all these versions of theodicy attribute great importance to finding a meaning for suffering that enables us to affirm a world in which suffering is ubiquitous and ineliminable, there is for Nietzsche a further type of evil that plays a central role in his justification of existence, namely, illness –​or, more precisely, spiritual illness. (As I argue below, illness for Nietzsche typically includes suffering but cannot be reduced to it.) One might say that for Nietzsche spiritual illness plays the role that sin played in Christian theodicy, and in this respect he can be seen as endorsing Kierkegaard’s equation of sin, despair and sickness (the ‘sickness unto death’). What gives a theodicean cast to Nietzsche’s genealogy is the thought, inherited from Jean-​Jacques Rousseau, that spiritual illness introduces into the world the very conditions from which a cure for that illness can be drawn,12 conditions that, beyond merely restoring the diseased to a state of health, also have the potential for elevating human existence –​making it higher or nobler than it could have been if we had never fallen ill in the first place. Whatever exactly autonomy consists in for Nietzsche, it is surely part of the great spiritual health that he thinks may be available to us now as a result of the great spiritual illnesses we have endured. This raises two questions that will guide the rest of this chapter: what about the bad conscience makes it an illness? and which aspects of that illness play a redemptive role in the genealogy of autonomy? The latter question could also be formulated as: which aspects of our illness are, from the perspective of great spiritual health, potentially fruitful and therefore affirmable features of our collective history?13

3.  Spiritual illness and the bad conscience Why does Nietzsche regard the bad conscience as an illness and, more precisely, as an illness of the spirit? In answering this question I will first say something about the idea of illness in general and then ask what the qualification ‘spiritual’ adds to that idea. This requires a brief examination of Nietzsche’s concept of life, including what the health of a living organism consists in. Life, Nietzsche tells us, is a goal-​directed process, a series of activities that aims not at mere self-​reproduction, but at power –​ever ‘greater units of

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power’  –​and that pursues this aim through various kinds of forceful, pain-​ inducing activity: ‘injuring, violating, exploiting, destroying’ (GM II 11, KSA 5.312). Students of Kant and Hegel might conclude from this definition of vital activity that life is a teleological process, but having an aim is not the same as having a telos. If ‘teleological’ implies that the process in question has a determinate end at which it aims, the character of which determines the course the process takes and the achievement of which brings the process to a satisfying completion, then life for Nietzsche has an aim but no telos (GM II 12, KSA 5.313–​16) and hence no foreseeable end point at which the process is complete and ‘satisfaction’ is achieved. As I suggested above, this difference is crucial to distinguishing the kind of theodicy Nietzsche is engaged in from those of Kant and Hegel.14 Nietzsche’s claim that life seeks the creation of ever greater units of power is indeed meant to imply that Hegelian notions of completion and satisfaction are out of place in understanding vital processes and that those processes are open-​ended and undetermined in ways the acorn’s transformation into an oak is not. Moreover, the absence of a telos implies that in themselves the discrete activities of life lack the kind of meaning that can be ascribed to the stages in an oak’s development, where the specific features of each stage are explicable by the end towards which that development tends, an end that ‘determines’ how the development normally proceeds. In Nietzsche’s conception there is nothing about the aim of vital processes that determines the specific steps of those processes, which for that reason are not, strictly speaking, ‘developments’, but random, unorganized, intrinsically meaningless events, a ‘sequence of . . . more or less independent . . . processes’ (GM II 12, KSA 5.314). When Nietzsche says that life seeks ever greater units of power, it can sound like its aim is definable in purely quantitative terms. But life for Nietzsche seeks something beyond merely quantitative increases in power; it also has a qualitative aim in that it seeks to impose, retrospectively, a coherent order on what first are merely random, unrelated events. It is easy to overlook this aspect of Nietzsche’s conception of life, in part because it seems to anthropomorphize nature, ascribing to all living organisms the capacity to ‘interpret’ past events, to impose an order on occurrences that of themselves possess no such order. But it is clearly Nietzsche’s intention to ascribe an order-​imposing function of this kind to life itself, in all its forms: [E]‌very happening in the organic world is an overpowering, a mastering, and every overpowering and mastering is itself a re-​interpreting, a fitting into

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place (ein Zurechtmachen), in which previous ‘meaning’ and ‘purpose’ must be obscured or completely extinguished. (GM II 12, KSA 5.313–​14)

According to this passage, processes of life are acts of overpowering in which the assertion of power consists in changing the meaning, or purpose, of that which is overpowered. To change the meaning or purpose of something is to reinterpret it, which in its broadest sense refers to the ordering (Einordnung) of ‘something present  –​something that has somehow come to be’  –​‘into a system of purposes’ (GM II 12, KSA 5.313). To interpret –​to give something a meaning –​is to impose a function on what is at first merely ‘there’ by incorporating it into a system of purposeful activities with which it then cooperates in order to serve a purpose of the organism as a whole.15 Life strives, then, not merely for greater quantities of power but, more specifically, for increases in power that result from the imposition of organic order on a given material that acquires significance only after having been commandeered by a superior power and forced to play a certain function within that imposed order. Life is essentially interpretation because it assigns a meaning-​in-​relation-​to-​the-​whole to the intrinsically meaningless. Indeed, after Darwin, it is not difficult to see why life might be construed as essentially ‘interpretive’: if evolution is central to life, then living beings must be able to take up random variations in their constitution and employ them for their own vital purposes by assigning them new functions within an already established, but now ‘readjusted’,16 organic unity. It is for this reason that Nietzsche describes life as striving not only for increases in power but also for ‘perfection’ (Vollkommenheit) (GM II 12, KSA 5.315). With this claim he reintroduces into his conception of life a version of teleological organization that Kant regards as life’s constitutive feature. For ‘perfection’ refers to a kind of hierarchical organization, where higher, ‘nobler’ functions rule over (‘dominate’) lower functions (GM II 1, KSA 5.291–​2), making the living being into a purposefully ordered whole in which specialized functions work together to further its vital ends. Yet Nietzsche’s understanding of the purposeful order characteristic of life has two features that distinguish it from more familiar accounts. The first is that, as we have seen, the governing aim of the organism is not self-​ preservation or reproduction, but increasing power. The second is that teleological organization is not prescribed to the living being in advance, written into its DNA, as it were; instead, it is an organization the living being must actively produce and that, once produced, must continually be re-​produced, and not merely in the same form but in ever evolving, higher forms which are necessary if increasing power rather than static self-​maintenance is the aim to be realized.

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We are now in a position to describe, from what Nietzsche calls the ‘biological perspective’ (GM II 11, KSA 5.310), what health and illness consist in. If we restrict ourselves to individual organisms,17 then ‘health’ refers to an unimpeded carrying out of the life process: the animal’s ongoing imposition of organic order on itself in order to create ever greater units of power for the purpose of discharging ever greater quanta of energy through its activity. Biological health is equated with an organism’s vitality: a ‘flourishing, rich, self-​overflowing’ condition, manifested in ‘powerful physicality’ and in ‘strong, free, cheerful activity’ (GM I 7, KSA 5.266) that springs from ‘plenitude, force, the will of life’ (GM Preface 3, KSA 5.250). By the same logic, ‘illness’ refers to a disruption of the life process, including mere repetitions of it in which energy is expended and renewed but sluggishly and at more or less constant levels. Its characteristics are powerlessness, passivity, leadenness and, most important, the incapacity to impose order, or meaning, on newly encountered ‘facts’. It is important to see that the conception of illness articulated thus far, from the biological perspective, is insufficient to capture the distinctively human, or spiritual, illnesses that we must understand if Nietzsche’s genealogy of autonomy is to come into view. In order to comprehend what spiritual illness is, we need to take up a perspective beyond life that allows us to grasp spiritual, and not merely animal, phenomena. The sense in which the spiritual perspective is ‘beyond’ life must not, however, be misunderstood. ‘Beyond’ does not mean one abandons life and takes up a wholly different standpoint, that of spirit; instead, one supplements the standpoint of (mere) life so as to take account of the fundamental ways spiritual beings differ from mere animals. That is, one introduces into the perspective of life an understanding of what distinguishes spiritual phenomena from purely animal processes –​the most important difference is reflexivity, or internal division, the hallmarks of what I will call subjectivity18 –​and one arrives at the idea of spirit by merging the two concepts, life and subjectivity, into one. One asks, in other words, what life ‘turned back against itself ’ (GM II 16, KSA 5.322) would look like, and how life thus configured would amount to something more than (mere) life. Of course, whatever characteristics of subjectivity are introduced into life in order to yield spirit must themselves be continuous with life. What distinguishes spirit from mere life cannot be such that it divides the two into radically different orders of being, such as nature, on the one hand, and freedom, on the other. Instead, the distinguishing feature of subjectivity is but a more complex organization of the living that develops out of the processes of life themselves; the main event in Nietzsche’s naturalistic genealogy of spirit

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is the acquisition of a ‘soul’ whose chief characteristic is internal division, being ‘turned back against itself ’ (GM II 16, KSA 5.322). The central claim of the second essay of the Genealogy, then, is that the mark of spirituality is an internal organization that allows for a more-​than-​ animal form of life, a subjectivity or ‘taking sides against oneself ’ (GM II 16, KSA 5.322) the source of which is the instinct of cruelty that, in response to external restraints, has turned back on itself. It is important to distinguish the bare instinct of cruelty turned back against itself from the more concrete phenomenon that Nietzsche calls the ‘bad conscience’. The development of an instinct that is turned back on itself is crucial to explaining the origin of the bad conscience, but the two are not identical.19 The main difference is that the former is merely a drive or instinct, a physiological disposition to discharge built-​up energy of a certain type (cruelty) in a certain direction (against oneself). The bad conscience, in contrast, also involves an interpretive apparatus that ‘hooks onto’ this bare disposition and imbues it with meaning (GM III 20). The simplest example of interpretation joining with the disposition to inflict cruelty on oneself to yield the bad conscience is when that instinct latches onto an already present concept –​‘debt’ –​and uses it to give a specific meaning –​guilt –​to action that serves as an outlet for its pent-​up energy. The distinction between interpreted and un-​interpreted instincts points to a feature of human subjectivity that plays an important role in higher spirituality, the capacity for a kind of interpretation that goes beyond that of merely living beings. As I have indicated, Nietzsche regards interpretation in a broad sense as a basic activity of life in all its forms, both human and non-​human. In non-​human forms, I said that interpretation consists in imposing a function on something –​incorporating it into a larger system of purposeful activities that together serve an organism’s vital ends. It is not correct, then, to say that interpretation is distinctive to humans. But there is enough of a difference between human and non-​human interpretive activity to regard the former as distinctive to human subjectivity. Let me note three important differences without attempting to articulate how they are related: first, human interpretive activity is self-​ conscious (or potentially so); second, it is mediated by concepts (and hence by language); and finally, it is evaluative in that it assigns, measures and compares the values of things, employing some version of the concepts ‘good’ and ‘bad’. That the last of these is especially important is clear from the emphasis Nietzsche places on ‘the measuring of values, the thinking up of equivalences’ as fundamental to civilization, to human existence and to thought itself, going so far

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as to call the human being ‘the creature that measures values, that values and measures –​ das “abschätzende Tier an sich”’ (GM II 8). Taking note of the distinctive features of subjectivity, we can formulate a rough conception of spiritual illness: it is a state of the soul in which interpretation and reflexivity join together to produce effects that thwart rather than promote life’s defining aim –​that of creating ever greater units of power by imposing organic form on what is initially formless. A spiritually ill being has an internally divided soul where one part, making use of concepts that interpret and evaluate, ‘takes sides’ against the other in a way that impedes the external discharge of instinctual energy. A soul divided in this way –​between, roughly, consciousness and instinct –​qualifies as the bad conscience, that uniquely human illness that makes existence both interesting and dangerous. There are two directions in which this description of the bad conscience needs to be fleshed out, and which will bring into view two concepts I  have not yet discussed, namely, repression20 and affirmation. The first of these comes into view in thinking about why it is inaccurate to describe the two parts of the divided soul as consciousness, on the one hand, and instinct, on the other. What is misleading here is the implication that consciousness is something distinct from instinct, whereas Nietzsche understands consciousness as both fueled by instinct’s energy and shaped by its aims. Consciousness, far from being governed by its own principles and ends, is the human’s ‘weakest and most fallible organ’ (GM II 16, KSA 5.322), a servant of ends that come from foreign (instinctual) sources and that remain for the most part opaque to it. This aspect of Nietzsche’s view of human consciousness finds expression in his description of the bad conscience as originating in the instinct of freedom being ‘repressed, pushed back, imprisoned within’ until, having been ‘banished from sight and violently made latent’, it is compelled to ‘discharge and release itself on itself ’ (GM II 17, KSA 5.325), while the functions of consciousness accompanying these events remain ignorant of their instinctual underpinnings, including the instinctual ends they serve. Nietzsche’s assumption is that an instinct that finds no outward discharge and is compelled to turn inward is distorted in a way that makes it nearly impossible for the end it seeks to achieve to be recognized as such by the bearer of that instinct. It follows that the conditions under which the human soul develops and first acquires depth more or less guarantee that in most cases humans will be in the dark about the content of their own souls. This basic feature of human subjectivity accounts for part of what makes the bad conscience an illness, as well as for the ubiquity in the Genealogy of the theme of humans being necessarily foreign to themselves (GM Preface 1, KSA 5.247).

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The second concept needed to fill out Nietzsche’s picture is affirmation, which appears in two forms: affirmation of self and affirmation of life (GM Preface 5, KSA 5.252).21 This concept is relevant to understanding the reflexivity that plays a crucial role in spiritual illness and health. There can be no doubt that the inability to affirm both oneself and life more generally occupies a prominent place in Nietzsche’s description of the especially virulent form of sickness that he takes the bad conscience to have assumed in his own time. Whatever else great spiritual health consists in, a conscious affirmation of self and life is surely central to it. The claim that affirmation plays a key role in Nietzsche’s understanding of the reflexivity that is the hallmark of subjectivity (and hence of spirituality) may seem puzzling at first. For the Genealogy contains examples of humans –​ the nobles of the first essay –​who say ‘yes’ to themselves (if not also to life as a whole) spontaneously (GM I 10, KSA 5.270–​1) and so, presumably, without the reflexivity associated with spirituality. Insofar as affirmation plays a role in spirituality, it involves a subject ‘turning around’ and making itself the object of its own evaluative gaze. In making reflexive affirmation central to spirituality, Nietzsche might be seen as following Genesis, which locates God’s first reflexive deed in his turning around, after six days of Creation, to behold himself and his own goodness as exhibited in his worldly activity: ‘God looked over all he had made, and he saw that it was . . . good.’22 To step momentarily outside one’s practical engagement in the world, to look back at oneself and at what one has done, and to find what one encounters good –​these are the constitutive moments of spiritually affirming one’s own being. Nietzsche makes clear that affirmation in all its forms is a valuing activity that operates with evaluative concepts such as good and bad. In order for affirmation to be reflexive, however, it must take place from a position in which immediate self-​affirmation has been somehow disrupted. Reflexive affirmation involves stepping outside one’s immediate position in order to make oneself into the object of one’s own ‘value-​positing gaze’ (GM I 10, KSA 5.271), where ‘value-​positing’ seems to imply that in reflexive affirmation the values in terms of which one assesses oneself are in some sense the product of one’s own activity. At the very least, in reflexive evaluation a space is opened up between the subject and its values that makes the subject responsible for them (or able to become responsible for them) in a way that the immediately self-​affirming nobles are not. That affirmation in its higher forms is a reflexive phenomenon is suggested by the connection Nietzsche draws between it and the source of all reflexivity, the bad conscience: part of what the conscience of autonomous individuals consists in is ‘the right to say with pride Yes to oneself ’

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(GM II 2–​3, KSA 5.293–​5).23 And, similarly, when discussing the most dangerous form of spiritual illness that threatens to descend on late-​nineteenth-​ century Europe, Nietzsche uses strongly reflexive language to describe the incapacity for affirmation at the heart of that ‘final illness’: the will turns back against itself in a final act of nihilistic self-​denial (GM Preface 5, KSA 5.252). This reflexive denial of self is described as a valuation (Werthung) (GM III 11, KSA 5.362) of oneself and of life that is recognizable both as a form of bad conscience (where cruelty, informed by interpretation, is directed against itself) and as an illness. It is a condition of exhaustion, depression and disgust with life grounded in ‘the human’s shame at being human’ in which ‘the animal human [has learned] to be ashamed of all his instincts’ (GM II 7, KSA 5.302) and which produces a world of ‘disgruntled, arrogant, and repulsive creatures who cannot be rid of their deep disgust at themselves, at the earth, and at all of life and who, out of pleasure in inflicting pain (probably their only pleasure), inflict as much pain on themselves as they possibly can’ (GM III 11, KSA 5.362). I will now summarize the points made about spiritual illness by distinguishing four features of the bad conscience relevant to understanding it as an illness. In its ‘most horrifying’ form, the bad conscience incorporates all four of these features, but there are also less acute, though still pathological, versions of that phenomenon in which some features are present but not others. The first feature –​what could be called the ‘measureless’ (maßlose) drive to make oneself suffer –​is evident in the following description of the version of the bad conscience associated with Christianity: [The bearer] of the bad conscience has seized on the presupposition of religion so as to drive his self-​torture to its most horrible severity . . . Guilt before God: this thought becomes an instrument of torture for him. . . . This is a . . . cruelty of the soul without equal: the human will to find oneself guilty and reprehensible beyond atonement. (GM II 22, KSA 5.332)

It is more difficult than one might think to say why a ceaseless, unquenchable longing for pain should count as pathological for Nietzsche, since suffering –​ even self-​inflicted suffering –​is a normal part of life. It is tempting to think that what makes Christian suffering pathological is not that the sufferer is the source of his pain but that he actively seeks it out, and in ever greater quantities.24 But even this cannot be the full story since, as I understand the ideal of autonomy Nietzsche means to be pointing us towards, the person of great spiritual health also welcomes, even seeks out, his own suffering.25 It is

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important that the self-​inflicted suffering described in this passage is, like all real manifestations of the bad conscience, interpreted self-​inflicted suffering. This suggests that the extent to which an unending thirst for pain counts as illness depends on how that suffering is interpreted, which is to say, on what function that pain is made to serve in the sufferer’s life and in what relation it stands to the aims of life. Presumably, the aims implicit in the function one assigns to one’s suffering provide a measure for one’s suffering, that is, not merely an interpretation of what its point is but also a criterion for its appropriate limits. A second feature of the Christian form of the bad conscience is its mendaciousness, or dishonesty (Verlogenheit) (GM III 19, KSA 5.369). As I have discussed it here, mendaciousness consists in a self-​imposed self-​opacity –​ a motivated ignorance, achieved through repression, of the underlying instinctual motives of one’s deeds and attitudes. If it is correct to see mendaciousness as an aspect of spiritual illness, then one component of autonomous health will be conscious self-​transparency. It is important to be clear, however, about the status of this aspect of Nietzsche’s conception of spiritual health. Self-​opacity is never the most important part of what makes the various versions of the bad conscience illnesses. This is because repression, together with the ignorance of self that accompanies it, is often compatible with significant degrees of vitality, as defined by Nietzsche’s conception of life. Still, other things being equal, self-​transparency is, for a spiritual being endowed with consciousness, superior to self-​opacity. Or, to put the point in terms that make clear the proximity of Nietzsche’s view to philosophies for which alienation is a central category: self-​knowledge –​an undistorted awareness of who one is and what one wants –​is more appropriate to self-​ conscious beings than the necessary ‘foreignness to self ’ that Nietzsche attributes to ‘us knowers’ in the first paragraph of his inquiry into the origin of morality (GM Preface 1, KSA 5.247). The third feature of the bad conscience in its most acute form that is indicative of illness also concerns a spiritual trait of the human being, the capacity for self-​affirmation. A person who is spiritually ill in this respect says No to himself (and to life more generally), a No that expresses a ‘disgust with life’ grounded in a general ‘shame at being human’ (GM II 7, KSA 5.302). Self-​denial, then, is bound up with an inability to take pride in oneself as one is, undistorted by the mendacious gaze produced by repression. This may suffice to explain why self-​denial is an illness, but its perversity becomes even more glaring when one brings into the picture the more general denial of life that accompanies it. This

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can be seen in Nietzsche’s description of ‘the valuation of . . . life’ underlying the ascetic priest’s self-​denial: our life (along with what pertains to it: ‘nature’, ‘world’, the entire sphere of becoming and transience) is set [. . .] in relation to a wholly different mode of existence that it opposes and excludes unless it turn against itself, deny itself; in that case [. . .] life counts as a bridge to another existence. (GM III 11, KSA 5.362)

Another way of putting this point is to say that in self-​denial, what should be sought for its own sake (life activity in the only world we have) is valued only as a means to something outside it, existence in a ‘higher’ but purely illusory world. As such, self-​denial (as well as its opposite, the self-​affirmation of great health) is possible only for a reflexive being capable of taking up a perspective on itself and making itself into the object of its own evaluative gaze. One might infer from these descriptions of ascetic self-​denial that this configuration of measureless suffering, self-​opacity and denial of life is the most acute form of spiritual illness to be encountered among human beings. Nietzsche acknowledges the plausibility of this inference but immediately rejects it. For he takes the ubiquity of ascetic self-​denial throughout human history to indicate that it has a hidden life-​promoting function –​that even this life-​denying attitude par excellence must, in a highly paradoxical and dangerous manner, be able to be employed by life so as to serve, in however twisted a fashion, its own ends. Nietzsche’s thought is that for all the hostility to life expressed in its valuations, the ascetic ideal is still an ideal, and as such it is able to serve –​and for large portions of human history actually has served –​as a potent stimulus to forceful, world-​ordering activity. As he argues in the third essay, Christianity at the height of its power was capable of truly awesome world-​constituting activity, drawing not least on its ability to assign a meaning to suffering that allowed for an affirmation of self and world (even if, in the latter case, only as a bridge to a world beyond it) and motivated sustained, passionate activity in the very world it disvalued. Even if the values in the name of which Christianity acted are ultimately life-​denying, its ordering the world in accordance with those values was an expression of vitality. As Nietzsche famously puts it, to will nothingness is still to will (GM III 1, III 14, KSA 5.339, 367–​72). In addition to its measureless thirst for suffering, its self-​opacity and its denial of life, there is a final feature of the ascetic ideal that makes it an illness (and points to the possibility of an even more acute form of illness than Christianity represents). This feature is bound up with what Nietzsche calls its great danger, a danger revealed in the self-​undermining dynamic on which the ascetic

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ideal feeds. Midway into the third essay Nietzsche claims that there resides at the heart of the ascetic ideal an insatiable instinct and will to power (Machtwille) that wants to become master not over something in life but over life itself, over its [. . .] basic conditions; here an attempt is made to use force (Kraft) to stop up the wells of force. [. . .] We see here a being-​divided-​into-​two that wills itself as divided, that enjoys itself in this suffering and grows even more triumphant and certain of itself the more its own presupposition, the physiological capacity for life, decreases. (GM III 11, KSA 5.363)

In other words, even when the ascetic ideal functions as a stimulus to activity (and hence as a stimulus to life), the activity it stimulates ultimately results in a stopping up of the sources of its own vitality. In this form the ascetic ideal is a manifestation of vitality that, in expressing itself through action, undermines the conditions of all vitality. This self-​undermining dynamic represents the ascetic ideal’s greatest danger, as well as the most important respect in which Christianity at the height of its power is a spiritual illness. Moreover, this danger points to the possibility of an even graver condition that threatens to obtain once the ascetic ideal has exhausted the wells of its own energy. This extreme of spiritual sickness  –​nihilism in its most noxious form  –​may not have yet been reached by contemporary European culture, but Nietzsche senses it lurking on the horizon, the probable if not strictly necessary consequence of the final demise of the no longer credible beliefs of Christianity that made its unique vitality possible. For presumably that post-​Christian aftermath of the ascetic ideal, where the will ceases to will at all, is an even graver violation of life’s nature than the paradoxical but still vital will that, fueled by the ascetic ideal, wills nothingness.

4.  The redemptive potential of spiritual illness I now want to return to the question raised at the beginning of this chapter: how can spiritual illness be understood as introducing into the world conditions that, in making autonomy (and hence also the virtue of justice) possible, have the potential to ennoble human existence? What, in other words, lies behind Nietzsche’s suggestion that spiritual illness might be ‘full of a future’, bringing with it the ‘preconditions of higher spirituality’ (GM III 1, KSA 5.339)? This, it turns out, is a very difficult question, and what I offer here is only the beginning of an attempt to reconstruct Nietzsche’s answer to it.

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The place to begin is with the idea of conscience that Nietzsche associates with both ‘responsibility’ and ‘the right [. . .] to say with pride Yes to oneself ’ (GM II 3, KSA 5.294–​5). Clearly this form of conscience, a part of the higher spirituality Nietzsche sees as a possibility for us moderns, has some genealogical relation to the bad (and not yet autonomous) conscience and hence to spiritual illness. At the core of autonomous conscience is a self-​discipline that makes possible both self-​mastery and, as a response to that power-​enhancing trait, self-​affirmation. It is not difficult to imagine how the basic psychological configuration of the bad conscience, the instinct of cruelty turned inward, can be employed in the service of a self-​mastery that increases the power –​over self, circumstances, nature and others (GM II 2, KSA 5.293–​4) –​of the being that possesses it. Yet the instinct of cruelty turned back on itself is not the source only of self-​ discipline; it is the psychological precondition of spiritual reflexivity in all its forms. The defining feature of subjectivity in general, the ability to make oneself into one’s own object, requires precisely the kind of internal division –​between observer and observed, censor and censored, lawgiver and the subject of law –​ that the bad conscience introduces into the human soul. This ‘internalization of the human being’ (GM II 16, KSA 5.322) makes it possible to make oneself into the object not only of one’s consciousness and knowledge, but also of one’s own form-​imposing activity. Whatever possibilities humans acquire for self-​ consciousness, self-​knowledge, and self-​fashioning depend on the subject’s ability to take up a relation to itself that the internally divided bad conscience first makes possible.26 As suggested above, one form of relating-​to-​self that is especially important for autonomy is reflexive self-​affirmation, where one makes oneself into the object of one’s own ‘value-​positing gaze’ (GM I 10, KSA 5.271) and says Yes, or ‘this is good’, to what one finds there. It is not implausible to think that the ability to take up an evaluative perspective on oneself that is more than immediate self-​contentment requires as its precondition a state of ‘illness’ in which the innocent health of its purely spontaneous self-​affirmation has been disrupted. Yet the self-​affirmation intrinsic to full-​fledged autonomy consists in something more as well: the value in accordance with which the autonomous individual affirms himself is supposed to be self-​posited, a value that is ‘his own’ in some sense that goes beyond the mere fact that it is the value he happens to hold or to have inherited from his culture. Although it is not obvious precisely what Nietzsche has in mind here, it seems clear that his genealogy of the bad conscience means to uncover one historical source of that value-​positing capacity. For the Genealogy provides a stunning example

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of a creation of a new value-​positing perspective, namely, the slaves’ transformation of ‘good-​bad’ into ‘good-​evil’ by means of the repressed hatred and ressentiment that, as Nietzsche makes clear, belong to their illness (GM I 10–​ 11, KSA 5.270–​7). There must be some sense in which the autonomous individual’s act of positing values is meant to imitate, and to be made possible by, the very revaluation of values that helped make us ill. Given the importance of the ability to take up different perspectives for Nietzsche’s ideal of great spiritual health, it is reasonable to suspect that the capacity of illness to generate changes of perspective in those who are ill is part of what makes spiritual illness ‘full of a future’. The problem with this line of thought –​that healthy forms of conscience are made possible by unhealthy aspects of the bad conscience –​is not that it is incorrect but that it does not go far enough. The suggestions made thus far may help us to see how the bad conscience might make autonomy and the virtue of justice possible, but it does not explain how the most acute versions of the bad conscience –​those associated with Christianity and its aftermath –​ offer possibilities for great spiritual health that milder versions of the bad conscience do not. Of course, it may be that Nietzsche does not intend to make this claim for the sickest configurations of the bad conscience  –​perhaps Christianity is simply a regrettable part of history with no redeeming potential  –​but I  believe that Nietzsche does sense a potential, though by no means a guarantee, for great spiritual health even in the lowest depths of human illness. If this is so, the question to be asked is, what ‘preconditions of higher spirituality’ are brought about when the most extreme form of the bad conscience –​that consisting of ‘maximal guilt’ before ‘the maximal God’, where this guilt is also construed as irredeemable by anything humans could possibly do (GM II 20–​1, KSA 5.329–​31)27 –​is joined together with the ascetic ideal? This is the most challenging question regarding Nietzsche’s position on the positive potential of spiritual illness, and I  will offer only two suggestions as to how it might be answered. The first has to do with the kind of perspective Christianity trains us to take on things and on ourselves, as reflected in the fact that that perspective is informed by an ideal (the ascetic ideal). The term ‘ideal’ should be understood in the specific sense Nietzsche gives it when he claims that the ascetic ideal has been thus far the only ideal available to humans (GM III 28, KSA 5.411–​12), and two features are relevant to figuring out how the ascetic ideal, though an illness of extreme gravity, might also carry spiritual promise. The first is the normative structure of ideals, and the second is the totalizing

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character of the interpretive apparatus it employs in imposing meaning on the world. Both features appear in the following passage: The ascetic ideal has a goal –​a goal so universal that, measured by it, all other interests of human existence appear petty and narrow. It stubbornly interprets epochs, peoples, human beings in relation to this one goal; it permits no other interpretation, no other goal; it casts aside, denies, affirms, sanctions only in accordance with its interpretation . . . The ascetic ideal believes that there is nothing powerful on earth that has not first received from it a meaning, a right to exist, a value, as a tool to its work, as a path . . . to its . . . one goal. (GM III 23, KSA 5.395–​6)

What makes understanding Nietzsche’s position difficult is distinguishing what is specific to (and pathological in) the ascetic ideal from the more general characteristics of any ideal, including one that might serve as the basis for spiritual health. There are, of course, aspects of the ascetic ideal that Nietzsche wants to have nothing to do with, but this does not imply that he is against ideals in general. On the contrary, he takes the future prospects for great spiritual health to depend on the creation of a new ideal –​a combination of valuation and interpretation –​that measures and orders all subordinate values, and everything that is, according to a single, overriding28 ‘goal’ or, one could also say, a single fundamental value. For immediately following the passage cited above, Nietzsche goes on to ask, ‘Where is the counterpart to this closed system of will, goal, and interpretation? [. . .] Where is the other “one goal”?’ (GM III 23, KSA 5.396).29 What Nietzsche hopes to point the way towards, presumably, is an ideal –​a supreme value informed by the myths of eternal recurrence and the will to power30  –​ with the capacity to inspire in its adherents ‘the passion of a great faith’ (GM III 23, KSA 5.397), instilling in them a love, an ardor, even a thirst for suffering that rivals in intensity the passion of ascetic priests but functions so as to promote rather than undermine human vitality. Such an ideal, not unlike the great ‘machinery’ of Christian metaphysics, strives not to interpret bits and pieces of reality but to provide a meaning for the totality of what is –​for the world as a whole, for human existence in particular, and above all for the ubiquity of suffering. In other words, this revitalizing ideal must provide an alternative to the no longer credible tenets of Christianity by furnishing an equally compelling answer to the questions, ‘wozu leiden?’, ‘wozu Mensch überhaupt?’ (GM III 28, KSA 5.411) –​questions that, I take Nietzsche to be saying, need to find some answer if spiritualized animals like ourselves are to avoid depression, despair and meaninglessness  –​in short, nihilism. Christianity, with its version of the

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ascetic ideal and its value-​positing interpretation of all that is, has, besides having made us ill, trained us in the erecting of ideals and instilled in us a spiritual capacity that, once the ascetic ideal has been undermined, could in principle be employed to promote the great spiritual health that Nietzsche hopes may now be an option for us. My second suggestion as to how extreme illness might bear spiritual fruit that milder illnesses cannot is even more provisional than the first. It is based on a striking formal similarity in Nietzsche’s characterizations of the ascetic ideal at its severest, on the one hand, and of great spiritual health, on the other. The former, he says, is marked by a ‘being-​divided-​into-​two’ (eine Zwiespältigkeit) that ‘wills itself as divided, enjoys itself in this suffering’, and ‘in the most paradoxical manner’ ‘becomes more certain of itself and more triumphant’ the more it seeks out the suffering that comes from being internally divided –​or, more accurately, at war with oneself (GM III 11, KSA 5.363). A more concrete picture of what it is for a subject to will and take pleasure in its own self-​imposed internal division is suggested in Nietzsche’s description of ‘the most horrifying’ form of the bad conscience, where, in language reminiscent of Ludwig Feuerbach’s account of religious alienation, he portrays the Christian as driven by a ferocious, insatiable will to ‘apprehend in “God” the ultimate antithesis of his own real, ineliminable animal instincts’ and to ‘reinterpret these animal instincts as guilt before God’, thereby ‘stretching himself on the contradiction “God” and “devil” ’ and becoming ‘palpably certain of his own absolute unworthiness’ (GM II 22, KSA 5.332). The main respect in which Nietzsche’s account of Christian spirituality goes beyond Feuerbach’s is the decisive point here, namely, that the subject of religious alienation actively seeks out, enjoys, and feels himself confirmed in the absolute opposition he posits between himself and his own ideal, the ‘holy God’, and thus in the idea of a being shorn of all the properties he despises in himself, especially those bound up with his own creatureliness. That great spirituality is to be located in a subject’s dividing itself into two and then enduring the very contradiction it has created was maintained already by Hegel. It is clear, I believe, that Nietzsche means to incorporate this vision of the fundamental mark of subjectivity into his picture of great spiritual health, even if it is not so clear what that is supposed to look like. Rather than try to spell out how Nietzsche envisions this feature of great health, I must content myself with pointing out two passages where this intention is made clear. The first is the initially surprising remark made in relation to the opposing valuations ‘good-​bad’ and ‘good-​evil’ ‘that today there is perhaps no more decisive mark of a “higher nature”, a more spiritual nature, than that of being divided into two . . . and of

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being a genuine battleground of these opposed values’ (GM I 16, KSA 5.286). The second passage, located within a discussion of the various meanings the ascetic ideal can have, follows on the observation that ‘the opposition between chastity and sensuality’ need not be a tragic one: ‘At least this holds true for all well-​constituted, joyful mortals who are far from regarding their unstable equilibrium between “animal and angel” as necessarily an argument against existence –​the subtlest and brightest among them . . . have even found in it one more stimulus to life. It is precisely such “contradictions” that seduce one to existence’ (GM III 2, KSA 5.341). Exactly what it would mean to exist as a battleground for opposing values and self-​conceptions is an important question I  cannot say much about here. But these passages make clear that in the exaggerated forms of being-​split-​into-​ two that Christianity introduces into subjects Nietzsche senses the possibility of a great spiritual health, including an affirmation of self and world, that feeds on a love for self-​division that, far from being ‘natural’ to animal life, comes into the world only through an illness as extreme as the great, as yet indeterminate, forms of autonomous health it makes possible.

5.  Coda: Justifying nature It is time now to return to the issue I left unresolved above: that of how to make sense of Nietzsche’s perplexing claim that breeding an animal with the right to make promises can be regarded  –​from a perspective that corresponds roughly to Kant’s question ‘what may we hope for?’ –​as a task that nature sets for itself. It is noteworthy that Nietzsche speaks of nature as setting itself a task rather than an end. On a first hearing this choice of terms only increases our puzzlement, however. It is difficult enough to understand how nature could ‘set for itself ’ an end (or anything else, for that matter), but it is even more difficult to see what it could mean to ascribe to nature a ‘task’. Natural processes might be describable as aiming at certain ends (reproduction or self-​preservation) or as carrying out certain functions (the digestion of food), but nature is not normally thought to undertake tasks, where this term implies standing before a problem that is to be solved but for which no solution is yet given. It is odd to say, for example, that our digestive system undertakes the task of breaking down what we have consumed into nutrients that our bodies can make use of, whereas it is less strange to say that our digestive system performs this function or serves this

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end. Once processes of evolution have produced a functioning digestive system, there are functions for it to serve but no further ‘tasks’ to be faced, until, of course, environmental changes pose new problems for evolutionary forces to solve. To propose that nature sets itself the task of breeding an animal with the right to make promises implies, then, that there is no already given ‘mechanism’ in nature that can respond to this challenge and no guarantee that it will be successfully met. If we think of life, as Nietzsche does, as engaged not only in reproducing itself but also in evolving over time in response to environmental challenges, it seems less odd to describe it as facing tasks, or problems to which it must find a solution, if it is to accomplish even its narrowest of biological ends, reproduction. There is a straightforward sense in which environmental changes impose tasks on life, tasks that only life itself can meet (unconsciously, of course), by generating alterations internal to itself and then ‘interpreting’ its new characteristics by imposing on them a function and integrating them into its own re-​ordered constitution. Life not only reproduces itself; it also responds ‘creatively’ to new challenges that nature continually throws in its way. We have seen, however, that Nietzsche’s conception of life goes beyond this more or less Darwinian picture and ascribes to it, beyond the end of survival, the aim of creating ever ‘greater units of power’ by means of increasing complexity and order that it itself produces. When Nietzsche says that nature sets itself the task of breeding an animal with the right to make promises, he is thinking of nature as life that is constantly engaged in transforming and reordering itself in the service of its own increased power. This aspect of his conception of life is not, however, taken over from Darwin. To view the whole of life in this way is to regard it from a perspective that cannot be confirmed by natural science but that derives its legitimacy from our interest in spiritual health and its requirement that we find our world coherent, affirmable and capable of inspiring hope. It would not be going too far to say that this vision of life has the status of a self-​conscious myth (and belongs, as such, to what Nietzsche calls an ideal). A myth of this sort, while not contradicting natural science, imposes a meaning on the whole of a type that natural science cannot provide and that serves an interest other than that of theoretical reason. In ascribing meaning to the world in this manner Nietzsche is engaged in a highly spiritualized form of the activity he takes to be fundamental to life, interpretation. Understanding our history as a project, or task, that nature undertakes with the purpose of breeding an animal that possesses the right

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to make promises is Nietzsche’s attempt to interpret the whole of existence, not in order to know the world but to bestow on it a meaning such that it can serve as a stimulus to new, more powerful activities. Ascribing a task to nature that aims at the enhancement of life’s power is the answer Nietzsche proposes to the questions ‘wozu leiden?’, ‘wozu Mensch überhaupt?’. Since natural science cannot answer these questions, Nietzsche can be seen as engaging in his own version of Kant’s project of acknowledging the limits to our knowledge in order to make room for faith (or belief). Finally, a myth of this sort furnishes Nietzsche’s genealogical inquiries with a kind of regulative principle that might be formulated as the imperative:  ‘in the interest of great spiritual health, look at the world before you with an eye to discovering how, in the absence of human knowledge or foresight, the forces of nature might be understood as working to accomplish a single goal:  self-​ transformation and self-​ordering in the name of increasing power!’ The myth that undergirds this principle  –​what Nietzsche calls ‘the law of life’  –​could also be expressed as the view that all of nature is a striving for self-​overcoming (Selbstaufhebung or Selbstüberwindung) (GM III 27, KSA 5.410). Viewing nature as purposively oriented in this sense is distinct from positing, as Kant does (from the perspective of ‘reflective’ judgement), a determinate ‘mechanism’ internal to nature that makes the achievement of its specific aim necessary or probable. For Nietzsche, nature is more active and resourceful than is implied by Kant’s doctrine of unsocial sociability, which ascribes to human nature a determinate set of given passions, the working out of which pushes us in the direction of certain specifiable ends. Life, as Nietzsche conceives it, is not subject to a dynamic that has a determinable course or end-​point imposed on it by nature (or by nature’s Creator). Rather, to the extent that it is created, life creates itself. Its ‘nature’ cannot be captured by enumerating the various drives that move it, but only by thinking of it as continually facing a task –​to take what is given and interpret it so as to serve the end of increasing power –​and as possessing a nearly unlimited resourcefulness with which to accomplish that task.

Notes 1 I would like to thank Tom Bailey, João Constâncio, Scott Jenkins, Wayne Proudfoot, Herman Siemens and the participants at four conferences and meetings –​Nietzsche and Kantian Politics (John Cabot University, Rome), Nietzsche e o Idealismo Alemão (Universidade de Lisboa), Friedrich Nietzsche Society (Queen Mary,

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London), and the North American Nietzsche Society (Washington, D. C., APA) –​for helpful comments on earlier drafts of this chapter. I do not mean to suggest that for Nietzsche the will to power necessarily takes this form; it would qualify for him as a species of the will to power, but it is by no means the only, or even the most common, form the will to power can take. Presumably the claim that one can point to a (very general) ‘core’ of justice can be made compatible with my earlier claim that for Nietzsche our moral concepts have no fixed, determinate ‘essence.’ I believe that Nietzsche’s position depends on bringing together two ideas: first, the Hegelian claim that the ‘abstract essence’ of any concept, in the absence of historical attempts to realize it, remains highly indeterminate and gains determinacy only through such historical experience; and, second, the claim, articulated in GM II 12–​14, KSA 5.313–​20, according to which the larger significance, or ‘point,’ of any moral practice varies depending on the specific ‘purposes’ it is made to serve. In other words, I am claiming that Nietzsche is committed to there being a ‘relatively enduring’ core of justice as well as a much larger, ‘fluid’ element that changes over time and is subject to great variability. I would suggest, for example, that even ‘an eye for an eye and a tooth for a tooth’ is a more determinate version of justice’s core, the ‘establishing of equivalents’ (GM II 8, KSA 5.306). To be clear: my view is that Nietzsche equates autonomy with the ‘right to make promises’ but that he takes the latter to include much more than regularly following up one’s promises with the deeds that fulfill them. A careful reading of GM II 2, KSA 5.293–​4, confirms this. Nietzsche says explicitly that making humans regular and calculable, an achievement of the morality of mores, is a ‘preparatory task’ that is part of, but not the whole of, the historical process through which ‘responsible,’ autonomous humans who possess the right to promise are formed (GM II 2, KSA 5.293). This fact is obscured in Kaufmann’s translation, which omits a crucial dagegen (‘in contrast’) when moving (at the paragraph break, present only in the English) from the morality of mores to ‘the end of this tremendous process, where the tree at last brings forth fruit’. This dagegen makes clear that autonomy consists in something more than dependability and that its genealogy will need to include phenomena beyond the morality of mores. In other words, I take Nietzsche to be distinguishing the individual who can be relied on to keep his promises from ‘the ripest fruit’ of the historical process described in the second essay, the latter of which he equates with the sovereign, or autonomous, individual (and further describes in the last half of GM II 2, KSA 5.294). Though presumably universal principles will be involved here, too, for example, ‘Keep your promises’ and ‘Give to each his due’. Immanuel Kant, ‘Idea for a Universal History with a Cosmopolitan Purpose’. It might be thought that ‘Universal History’ makes no claims about the conditions of

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moral autonomy but only about those of external, political justice. Yet the Fourth Proposition speaks of ‘a pathologically enforced social union’ (eine pathologisch-​ abgedrungene Zusammenstimmung zu einer Gesellschaft) being transformed into ‘a moral whole’ (IaG 21), in which, presumably, its members follow practical principles for internal reasons, without the threat of external punishment. That moral maturity and not merely legal propriety is Kant’s concern can be seen also in the Seventh Proposition, which distinguishes among processes of cultivation, civilization and moralization and makes clear that ‘Universal History’ investigates the conditions of all three (IaG 24). (The use of the concept ‘moralization’ marks another notable similarity between Kant’s and Nietzsche’s genealogies (GM II 21, KSA 5.330).) Moreover, the historical processes described by Kant play an important role in developing humans’ capacity for rationality; in this respect, too, they secure an important condition of autonomy. It is worth noting that Kant does not take human happiness to be among nature’s ends; this is another respect in which he and Nietzsche agree, and diverge from Hegel. Other aspects, it seems to me, are supposed to be true in an ordinary sense, for example, Nietzsche’s thesis about the conditions under which the bad conscience is produced. Kant, ‘Idea for a Universal History with a Cosmopolitan Purpose’ (IaG 21). At the same time, there is less contingency –​and more ‘necessity’ –​in Nietzsche’s genealogy than commentators typically acknowledge. Many of the conditions that figure heavily in his explanations, while not strictly necessary developments, are far from being completely accidental. Consider, for example, the closing in of the ‘walls of society’ that plays a large role in explaining the instinct of cruelty’s turning back against itself (II.16). This aspect of Nietzsche’s genealogy reminds one of Civilization and Its Discontents (1961), where Freud appeals to the basic conditions of civilization in order to explain the origin of guilt. Rousseau (1997: 159). This suggests that Nietzsche arrives at his idea of which specific forms of health are available to us by a via negativa, that is, only after examining the specific forms of illness we have in fact contracted. Here, too, Nietzsche is closer to Kant than to Hegel since Kant’s theodicy does not presuppose that the aim to be achieved guides the development in question. ‘All purposes . . . are signs that a will to power has become master over something less powerful and impressed on it the meaning of a function’ (GM II 12, KSA 5.315). Hence Nietzsche’s claim that life activity is a Zurechtmachen, a ‘fitting into place,’ or ‘adjusting’ (GM II 12, KSA 5.314). Like Hegel and Darwin, Nietzsche regards the basic unit of life as the species, not living individuals (only the species, for example, evolves), but I abstract from this point here.

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18 One could also describe the hallmark of subjectivity as the presence of a distance within the soul (BGE 257, KSA 5.205), or as ‘depth’ in the soul’s ‘inner world’, a world that was ‘originally as thin as if it were stretched between two membranes’ but that has ‘expanded and extended itself ’ after ‘the internalization of the human being’ (GM II 16, KSA 5.322). 19 This may explain why Nietzsche refers here to the creation of an ‘animal soul’ (Thierseele) (GM II 16, KSA 5.323). At one point Nietzsche appears to equate the bad conscience with ‘cruelty turned backwards’, but he is careful to call this the animal bad conscience (GM III 20, KSA 5.329–​30). 20 For further discussion of this topic, see Reginster (1997: 289–​90). 21 ‘Affirmation of life’ means something like the affirmation of the totality of conditions of human existence, as opposed to an individual’s affirmation of her own life. Nietzsche is interested in both: Schopenhauer is said to have ‘said No to life and to himself ’ (GM Preface 5, KSA 5.252), and the individual who has the right to make promises is said ‘also to possess the right to say with pride Yes to oneself ’ (GM II 3, KSA 5.294–​5; see also GM II 22, KSA 5.331–​3). 22 Gen. 1.31, New Living Translation (2007). Or, as the more authoritative but (in this instance) less eloquent New Revised Standard Version (1989) puts it: ‘God saw everything that he had made, and indeed, it was very good.’ 23 And later the healthy being’s conscience is identified as the agency that ‘heartfully says Yes’ to its own animal instincts (GM II 6, KSA 5.301). 24 As emphasized in the claim: ‘soon one ceased to protest against the pain, one thirsted for it instead: “more pain! more pain!” ’ (GM III 20, KSA 5.390). 25 See Reginster (2006: 229–​35, 243–​4). 26 It is easy to see that the virtue of justice requires this ability, too. For it consists in holding oneself accountable to strict standards of equivalence that often require one to subordinate one’s immediate desires and interests to what those standards demand. This requires not merely the ability to take up a judging perspective on one’s own deeds but also a psychological force, derived from the instinct to cruelty, that makes the appropriate attitude of severity with oneself possible. 27 In other words, I am construing the most acute form of the bad conscience considered by Nietzsche as the ‘moralization’ of the idea of ‘maximal guilt’ before a ‘maximal God’ (GM II 20, KSA 5.330), where no human possibility of discharging this debt exists: ‘God as the only being who can redeem the human being from what has become unredeemable for the human being himself ’ (GM II 21, KSA 5.331). I am grateful to Wayne Proudfoot for discussion of this issue. 28 Is this ‘overriding’ goal also unconditional, in the sense that it is taken to be also the condition of all other values such that, for example, happiness would possess no value of its own unless it were made consistent with a person’s supreme value? If so, then the ‘one goal’ that defines an ideal would have a normative status similar

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to that which Kant accords to the good will (although presumably, unlike Kant, Nietzsche would not regard its unconditional status as universal, i.e., as valid for every rational being). 29 That redemption lies in the creation of a new ideal is suggested also in GM II 24, KSA 5.335–​7. 30 This suggestion was made to me by Maudemarie Clark.

References Freud, S. (1961), Civilization and Its Discontents, New York: W. W. Norton. Kant, I. (1970), ‘Idea for a Universal History with a Cosmopolitan Purpose’, in H. S. Reiss (ed.), Political Writings, 41–​53, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Reginster, B. (1997), ‘Nietzsche on Ressentiment and Valuation’, Philosophy and Phenomenological Research 57 (2): 289–​90. Reginster, B. (2006), The Affirmation of Life: Nietzsche on Overcoming Nihilism, Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press. Rousseau, J.-​J. (1997), The Social Contract and Other Later Political Writings, trans. Victor Gourevitch, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.

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Phantom Duty? Nietzsche versus Königsbergian Chinadom Robert B. Louden

One more word against Kant as moralist. A virtue must be our invention [unsre Erfindung], our most personal defense and necessity: in any other sense it is merely a danger. What does not condition [bedingt] our life harms it: a virtue merely from a feeling of respect for the concept ‘virtue’, as Kant wanted it, is harmful. ‘Virtue’, ‘duty’, ‘good in itself ’, good with the character of impersonality and universal validity –​phantoms [Hirngespinnste], expressions of decline, of the final exhaustion of life, of Königsbergian Chinadom. The profoundest laws of preservation and growth demand the reverse of this: that each person invent [erfinde] his own virtue, his own categorical imperative. A people perishes if it mistakes its own duty for the concept of duty in general. Nothing ruins more deeply, more internally, than every ‘impersonal’ duty, every sacrifice to the Moloch of abstraction. –​Kant’s categorical imperative should have been felt as mortally dangerous! Nietzsche, The Anti-​Christ 11, KSA 6.177 Readers of Nietzsche’s critique of morality face at least four formidable challenges. First, there is the issue of the target or specific scope of the critique. Is it aimed at all moralities, or only some? And if the latter, which ones exactly? Second, there is the related problem of determining the stance that Nietzsche advocates. Is he rejecting certain moralities while defending others, or does he seek to replace all moralities with a non-​moral evaluative system of some sort? Third, there is the task of locating and assessing the arguments and evidence presented in support of the critique. What are the arguments for the various components of the critique? Do they form a consistent and coherent whole? And how plausible are they? Finally, there is the further challenge posed by his

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particular way of writing. For readers used to arguments, definitions, distinctions, systematic discussion and so on, his style raises the question, ‘Why doesn’t Nietzsche write like a philosopher?’ (Clark and Dudrick 2012: 1). Because of the enormous complexity of, and continuing lack of consensus on, these matters,1 and in an attempt to make headway on at least some of the challenges Nietzsche poses in this area, in what follows I propose to focus on one particular part of his critique of morality, –​viz. his critique of the related moral notions of ‘ought’ and ‘duty’. What does Nietzsche say about the history, meaning, and value of these specific moral concepts? With what does he propose to replace them? Are there oughts and duties in Nietzsche’s ‘higher morality’,2 and if so, how do they differ from the traditional moral oughts and duties that are the focus of his critique? Are the proposed replacements better or worse than what they are replacing? (As Nietzsche would put it, what is ‘the value of these values?’)3 As a step towards assessing the challenge that Nietzsche’s critique poses to modern moral philosophy, I will also occasionally compare and contrast Kantian and Nietzschean genealogies of morality. How does Kant’s theory of moral ought and duty fare in light of Nietzsche’s critique? To what extent is Kant able to respond convincingly to Nietzsche’s challenge?

1.  The origin of duty? For Kant and many other moralists, obligation  –​understood as acting under rational constraint –​is the central phenomenological feature of human moral experience. In Kant’s case, the priority of the moral ought or must stems from his realistic appraisal of human nature. If we had greater cognitive powers and a different psychology (e.g. if we were less selfish), then our relationship to moral principles might be different.4 But humans are fallible, finite rational beings who are disposed to act from self-​interest, and thus their relationship to moral principles is necessarily always one of constraint. They need to bring themselves to do what is morally right and they must constantly be on guard against backsliding. At the same time, Kant (like many other moralists) also holds that human beings possess certain basic powers of agency that he believes are necessary for moral action: humans can reflect on their motives, act on the basis of reasons, control their desires and make free choices between different alternatives. While none of these capacities is perfectly developed in any human being (no human successfully controls all of her desires all of the time), he assumes that all normal adult humans possess these capacities to a sufficient degree to be held responsible

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for their voluntary actions. Thus in Kant’s own speculations on the genealogy of morality in his Conjectural Beginnings of Human History, it is primarily our distant ancestors’ first awareness of a faculty of choosing for themselves ‘a way of living and not being bound to a single one, as other animals are’ that marks the beginning of human morality (MAM 112). Our ancestors’ realization that they were not tied to a single way of life placed them on ‘the brink of an abyss’ from which it was ‘wholly impossible to turn back’ (MAM 112), and their descendants have been confronting this abyss ever since. Of the many differences between Kant and Nietzsche’s moral conceptions, the place of the ought is particularly noteworthy. For Kant, the ought is the primary and fundamental fact of human moral experience. For Nietzsche, it is secondary and appears on the scene fairly late in our species’ moral history. In Beyond Good and Evil he writes: ‘It is obvious that moral value-​designations were everywhere first applied to human beings, and only later and derivatively to actions’ (BGE 260, KSA 5.209).5 His title –​‘ “Good and Evil”, “Good and Bad” ’ –​and focus for the First Treatise in the Genealogy also reflect his conviction that ‘ought’ and ‘duty’ arrive late on the scene. And several contemporary philosophers and classicists, some writing under Nietzsche’s influence, have echoed his claim that we find aretaic but not deontic moral concepts in the ancient world.6 But we should still expect to hear something about the origins of duty in any genealogy of morals, even one written by someone who does not share Kant’s conviction about the primacy of duty in human moral experience.7 In keeping with his conviction that deontic judgements are secondary to aretaic judgements, in the First Treatise of the Genealogy Nietzsche presents his account of the origin of human judgements about moral traits and qualities of persons. It is not until the Second Treatise that ought, duty and obligation make an appearance in Nietzsche’s genealogy, and even here they are not his dominant focus. They are almost eclipsed by his concern to offer readers what he calls ‘the psychology of conscience’ (EH GM, KSA 6.352), a psychology in which consciousness of guilt is the primary phenomenon, along with a genealogical account of how it has ‘come into the world’ (GM II 4, KSA 5.297).8 Duty and related deontic concepts enter his discussion not because he believes that they are necessary presuppositions for guilt and the bad conscience, but rather because he believes that, historically speaking, they are vehicles that have helped bring about the development of guilt and the bad conscience.9 What does Nietzsche say about the origins of these concepts, particularly in the Genealogy and related late works? Nietzsche’s interest in them is clearly indicated in the famous opening sentence of the Second Treatise of the Genealogy,

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when he poses the following question: ‘To breed an animal that is able to make promises [das versprechen darf]10 –​isn’t this precisely the paradoxical task that nature has set itself with regard to man?’ (GM II 1, KSA 5.291). An animal that is able to make promises must first possess at least two other capacities: first, a developed faculty of memory (GM II 1, KSA 5.291–​2), since promisees must be able to remember who has promised what to them and promisers need to be able to remember to whom they have promised what; and, second, a certain regularity of behavior (‘Man must first of all have become calculable, regular, necessary, . . . if he is to vouch for himself as future, as one who promises does!’, GM II 1, KSA 5.292; cf. GM II 2, KSA 5.293–​4). In view of his commitments to both naturalism and determinism,11 one might think that Nietzsche would hold that human behavior –​like the behavior of everything else in the universe, at least according to determinists –​has always been ‘calculable, regular, necessary’. However, he attributes these features of human behavior not simply to natural causation but rather to ‘the morality of custom [Sittlichkeit der Sitte] and the social straightjacket’ (GM II 2, KSA 5.293), a type of proto-​morality in which ‘morality is nothing other (therefore nothing more!) than obedience to customs, of whatever kind they may be’ (D 9, KSA 3.21–​2; cf. D 14, 16, KSA 5.26–​8, 29), and which Nietzsche analyses at greater length in Daybreak. Regardless of whether Nietzsche has offered the most plausible explanation for human behavioral regularity, and regardless of whether he has succeeded in giving a complete set of necessary and sufficient conditions for promise-​ keeping,12 he is surely correct in asserting that at some point in the distant past our ancestors did become promise-​making animals, that the ability to make and honor promises does sharply distinguish humans from other animals and that this development marked a crucial turning point in the history of morality. For all voluntarily incurred moral duties and obligations13 presuppose the practice of promise-​keeping.14 Nietzsche’s main inquiry into the origins of the concept of moral duty in the Second Treatise involves his analysis of the creditor–​debtor relation, a discussion that follows the opening remarks about promise-​keeping. As he states in section 8: the feeling ‘of personal obligation [persönliche Verpflichtung] had its origin [Ursprung] . . . in the oldest and most primitive personal relationship there is, in the relationship between buyer and seller, creditor and debtor’. The creditor–​debtor relationship is a legal relationship backed up by sanctions  –​ debtors with overdue debts are subject to various penalties and punishments, some of which, as Nietzsche notes, have until fairly recently involved a great deal of cruelty and pain (see GM II 5, KSA 5.298–​300).15 It also presupposes the

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ability to make and keep promises –​debtors make promises to creditors to pay back their debts.16 After asserting that moral duty has its origin in the legal sphere of the creditor–​ debtor relationship, Nietzsche then hypothesizes, as David Owen notes, that this schema is gradually generalized ‘over two other forms of relationship’.17 First, in a quick nod to social contract theory, Nietzsche suggests that political communities are creditors to their individual members. As he writes in section 9: The community [das Gemeinwesen] also stands to its members in that important basic relationship, that of the creditor to his debtor. One lives in a community, one enjoys the advantages of a community . . . one lives protected, shielded in peace and trust, free from care with regard to certain injuries and hostilities18 to which the human outside, the ‘outlaw’ [der Friedlose –​literally, ‘the man without peace’], is exposed . . . since one has pledged and obligated [verpfändet und verpflichtet] oneself to the community precisely in view of these injuries and hostilities. What happens in the other case? The community [Die Gemeinschaft], the deceived creditor, will exact payment as best it can, one can count on that. (GM II 9, KSA 5.307)

The second generalization of the creditor–​ debtor relationship occurs, Nietzsche argues, between ancestors and the present generation. In section 19 he writes: The civil-​law relationship [das privatrechtliche Verhältniß] of the debtor to his creditor . . . was interpreted into . . . the relationship of those presently living to their ancestors. Within the original clan the living generation always acknowledges a juridical obligation [eine juristische Verpflichtung] to the earlier generation, and particularly to the earliest one which founded the clan . . . Here the conviction holds sway that it is only through the sacrifices and achievements of the ancestors that the clan exists at all –​and that one has to repay them through sacrifices and achievements. (GM II 19, KSA 5.327)

But a third development also occurs. The phenomenon of ancestor reverence eventually balloons into religious worship –​through a ‘crude [roh] kind of logic’ human forebears are transformed into gods: One thereby acknowledges a debt that is continually growing, since these ancestors, in their continued existence as powerful spirits, do not cease to use their strength to bestow on the clan new benefits and advances . . . Finally, through the imagination of growing fear the progenitors of the most powerful clans must have grown into enormous proportions and have been pushed back into the darkness of a divine uncanniness and unimaginability: –​in the end the progenitor is

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necessarily transfigured into a god. This may even be the origin of the gods, an origin, that is, out of fear! (GM II 19, KSA 5.327–​8)

At this point in humanity’s prehistory, the creditor–​debtor relationship, which has its beginnings in the legal sphere, and out of which, Nietzsche holds, all moral duties and oughts eventually emerge (see the opening of GM II 6, KSA 5.300, cited above) has also acquired fundamental political and religious dimensions. Specific individual debtors are conscious not only of their legal debts to human creditors, but all community members are also aware of their political debts to their communities and ‘of having debts to the deity’ (GM II 20, KSA 5.329). But even though Nietzsche has traced the concept of moral duty back to its pre-​moral roots in legal, political and above all ‘religious presuppositions’ (GM II 21, KSA 5.330), he also cautions that at this point duty has not yet been ‘moralized’19 –​duty has not yet been ‘pushed back into conscience’, into ‘the entanglement of bad conscience with the concept of god’ (GM II 21, KSA 5.330). For its eventual transformation into the purely moral ‘commands of a concept of unconditional duty with the “you ought” [Befehle eines absoluten Pflichtbegriff mit dem “du sollst”]’ (WS 44, KSA 2.57320 –​we know which philosopher Nietzsche has in mind here!),21 duty requires considerable help not only from law, politics and religion, but also from guilt and the bad conscience. How credible is Nietzsche’s claim that moral duty has its origin in the one specific legal relationship between creditor and debtor?22 I believe his account is problematic for several reasons. First, there is a failure to appreciate the implications of his own account. As we saw earlier, Nietzsche acknowledges that the creditor–​debtor relationship presupposes a capacity to make and keep promises. But when our ancestors became promise-​keeping animals, a moral ‘ought’ also came into being. (‘I ought to do x, because I  promised y that I  would do so.’)23 Nietzsche arguably has already found the origin of moral duty in the practice of promise-​keeping, a practice which itself precedes rather than follows the creditor–​debtor relationship. Why then does he insist that duty has its origin in the latter practice and not the former? The duty to repay one’s debts can be readily analysed as an instance of the duty to keep one’s promises.24 A second implausible feature in Nietzsche’s focus on the creditor–​debtor relationship and his hypothesis that we can generalize from it to an unconditional du sollst lies in its overreliance on social roles.25 The standard criticism of such accounts is that they beg the question with respect to moral justification. To assert, as Hegel does, that a man’s moral duty is simply to ‘do what is prescribed,

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expressly stated, and known to him in his relationships [was ihm in seinen Verhältnissen vorgezeichnet, ausgesprochen, und bekannt ist]’, or, as Bradley’s famous formulation would have it, to fulfill ‘my station and its duties’26 is poor advice, morally speaking. Yes, normally a father should protect his son. But if his son is a serial killer, no. Yes, normally a seaman should obey his captain’s orders. But if his captain is the tyrannical Ahab driven by a monomaniacal desire to kill Moby Dick, no. And likewise with individuals in Nietzsche’s creditor–​debtor relationship. Yes, normally debtors ought to repay creditors. But if, say, in the initial contract between debtor and creditor the creditor makes false statements that induce the creditor into the contract, or if the debtor enters the contract under duress or in a state of mental incapacitation, then no. No role-​relationship (Nietzsche’s creditor–​debtor relationship included) contains enough inherent normative force to generate an overriding moral ought. So, the sense that one is subject to a duty that is unconditional is not derivable from a role relationship, for there will always be cases where what one ought to do, morally speaking, is not adhere to one’s social role. And Nietzsche does not appear to acknowledge these limitations of social roles in his analysis of duty. A third weakness in Nietzsche’s account becomes apparent once we remind ourselves that most people occupy more than one social role. We are not just fathers or doctors, but sometimes both  –​in addition to being students, husbands, debtors, citizens, soldiers, jurymen and so on. Hegel’s allegedly concrete alternative of Sittlichkeit acknowledges this plurality of human roles, and its role-​pluralism is inherently more realistic and thus more plausible as an account of duty than is Nietzsche’s obsessive focus on the creditor–​debtor relationship. Why should we privilege this specific role-​relationship over all others? Granted, Nietzsche’s position is that over time the creditor–​debtor relationship has been generalized to other roles: it is the ‘genesis’ of all moral duties (GM II 6, KSA 5.300–​2). And granted too that in this relationship as in others ‘the form is fluid, the “meaning” [Sinn] even more so’ (GM II 12, KSA 5.315). But it is still not at all clear that the creditor–​debtor relationship can carry the heavy weight Nietzsche assigns to it. For each social role is different, and each one implies distinct obligations. The exclusivity implied in Nietzsche’s examination of only one particular role relationship points to a fourth weakness. Shakespeare’s advice, ‘Neither a borrower nor a lender be, /​For loan oft loses both itself and friend, /​And borrowing dulleth edge of husbandry’ is well-​taken but, alas, seldom taken.27 Do not enter into a creditor–​debtor relationship if you can avoid doing so –​here is a prudent du sollst, but it is only a hypothetical rather than a categorical imperative. And

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this particular role-​relationship is more easily avoidable than many others that Nietzsche passes over in silence in presenting his genealogy of duty (e.g. child–​ parent, young person–​old person, friend–​enemy). But precisely because the creditor–​debtor relationship is more avoidable than many other role relationships, it is also a very questionable candidate for the title of ‘genesis of duty’ –​ particularly if one is trying to explain the feeling of unconditional duty. A related fifth weakness is that the creditor–​debtor relationship is clearly not ‘the oldest [dem ältesten] and most primitive personal relationship there is’ (GM II 8, KSA 5.305). In the evolution of the human species there were certainly parents and children, young people and old people, and also friends and enemies long before moneylenders appeared on the scene. And the possibility that some of these more primeval personal relationships could also prove to be better candidates for examining the origins of duty than the creditor–​debtor relationship should also be examined in a genealogy of morality. Inexplicably, Nietzsche fails to do so. Finally, there are several fundamental types of duty that cannot be generated from the creditor–​debtor relationship. A debt owed to a creditor is a paradigm case of what is traditionally known as a perfect duty to others. A perfect duty to others implies that the other party has a correlative right in virtue of which they can demand performance of a specific act that is owed explicitly to them. As Nietzsche remarks elsewhere, ‘Our duties –​are the rights of others over us’ (D 112, KSA 3.100). The concept of a perfect duty to others is indeed indispensable (all duties of justice are located here), but no satisfactory moral code can be built on it alone. For nearly all human moral codes contain other fundamental kinds of duties as well. Some duties are ‘imperfect’: here there are no correlative rights, and what one is obligated to do is not to perform a specific act owed exclusively to well-​defined others, but rather to pursue a broad goal and then use one’s own judgement in applying it. A paradigm case here is the duty to help others. This duty does not tell us which others to help, nor does it tell us when, where or how much we must help. We must use our own judgement in deciding how best to fulfill this duty. But the duty to help others is a central duty in most human moral codes, and it is not explicable by means of the concept of a debt. A debt owed to creditors is also an example of a ‘positive’ rather than a ‘negative’ duty: It tells us what we ought to do, but not what we ought not to do. But negative duties (e.g. ‘do not harm others’) are also central to human morality. A negative duty does not appear to be derivable from, or explainable in terms of, a positive duty.

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Also, there is the self–​others distinction. The duty to repay one’s debts is an example of a duty to others, but we also have basic duties to ourselves, such as the duty to develop our own moral character. How can a duty to oneself be derived from a duty to others? Can one owe a debt to oneself? In such cases as in those of imperfect and negative duties, Nietzsche’s account clearly fails to achieve his goal of presenting ‘the actual [wirkliche] history of morality’ (GM Preface 7, KSA 5.254).28 For these reasons then, I find Nietzsche’s genealogy of moral duty implausible.29 There can be no doubt that a historical account of these core concepts must form a crucial component of any genealogy of morals, and Nietzsche performed pioneering work in this still underexplored territory. But his attempt to track all moral duties back to the creditor–​debtor relationship is a failure. This failure also points to a larger issue which I cannot pursue in detail here, that of whether Nietzschean genealogy, which demands that we trace the origins of moral concepts to their non-​moral roots, is itself plausible. Can we convincingly derive moral concepts from non-​moral ones, or is morality itself, as Kant argues in the second Critique, ‘a fact of reason because one cannot reason it out from antecedent data of reason’ (KpV 31); something, as Prichard holds, that is ‘absolutely underivative or immediate?’30 I myself tend to think the latter.

2.  Nietzschean duties Who would presume to call himself a philosopher, if he did not inculcate any lessons of duty? Cicero, De Officiis In the present section I wish to explore duty from the opposite side –​that is, not with an eye to its historical origin and development (‘duty drenched in guilt and bad conscience’, as Nietzsche puts it), but rather from the vantage point of an allegedly ‘new truth’ and ‘counter-​ideal [Gegen-​Ideal]’ (EH GM, KSA 6.353) that has managed to break free from this tragic narrative. In other words, what do Nietzschean duties look like? At first glance, one might think that the class of Nietzschean duties and oughts forms an empty set. For as one commentator notes, ‘[S]‌ome of Nietzsche’s harshest negative comments on morality have to do with the fact that its judgments

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are expressed as “oughts” ’ (Hunt 1991: 15). In Twilight of the Idols, for instance, he writes:  ‘[W]hat naiveté it is altogether to say:  “Man ought [sollte] to be such and such!” Reality shows us an enchanting wealth of types . . . And some wretched slouch of a moralist says concerning this: “No! Man ought [sollte] to be different!” (TI Morality as Anti-​Nature 6, KSA 6.86–​7).’ Part of Nietzsche’s point here is a simple corollary of his fatalism:  it does not make sense to tell individuals what they ought to be, because people cannot be other than they are. Each person’s life proceeds along a fixed path, as determined by natural facts –​hard ‘ises’ rather than idealistic ‘oughts’. As he writes in an 1888 entry in the Nachlaß:  ‘Today, when every “man ought [soll] to be thus and thus” is spoken with a grain of irony, when we are altogether convinced that, in spite of all, one will only become what one is (in spite of all: that means education, instruction, milieu, chance, and accident)’ (NL 1888 14[113], KSA 13.290); cf. GS 270, KSA 3.519, EH subtitle: ‘How One Becomes What One Is’, KSA 6. 255 ff. However, these passages speak only against one specific kind of ought, –​viz., physically impossible oughts that violate laws of natural causation. There are still plenty of other oughts remaining in the realm of physical possibility that fatalists can embrace without forfeiture of their core metaphysical commitments, and Nietzsche is no exception here. Nietzsche does explicitly acknowledge in many places that duty and ought are central concepts in his own system of values. For instance, in Beyond Good and Evil he writes: ‘We immoralists! . . . have been spun into a stern yarn and shirt of duties and cannot get out of it –​in this we are “men of duty” [Menschen der Pflicht], we too’ (BGE 226, KSA 5.162). As Clark notes, here Nietzsche ‘sees himself as motivated by duty’ and considers ‘himself a person of duty’.31 Nietzsche’s confession that he and his fellow immoralists ‘cannot get out of [können da nicht heraus]’ these stern duties is also noteworthy, for it implies that they are inescapable or non-​optional commands. Surprisingly, Nietzschean oughts share this core feature of inescapability with Kantian categorical imperatives, despite the fact that the categorical imperative is one of Nietzsche’s favorite targets of criticism.32 A second passage emphasizing the importance of Nietzschean oughts occurs in Twilight, where Nietzsche writes:  ‘[A]‌ll naturalism in morality, that is, all healthy morality, is dominated by an instinct of life –​some commandment of life is fulfilled through a certain canon of soll and soll nicht’ (TI Morality as Anti-​ Nature 4, KSA 6.85). Nietzsche’s brand of naturalistic ethics thus has its own distinct oughts and ought nots, although here he also implies that its duties are

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consequentialist (albeit non-​utilitarian).33 In his ‘healthy’ morality, duties and oughts are a function of life-​enhancement: one ought to do what enhances life.34 A third passage underscoring Nietzschean oughts occurs in the 1886 Preface to Daybreak in the context of a general attack on Kantian ethics, where, after informing readers that ‘in this book trust in morality is abandoned’, Nietzsche adds: ‘But there is no doubt that a “du sollst” still speaks to us too, that we too still obey a stern law [einem strengen Gesetze]  –​and this is the last morality [die letzte Moral] which still makes itself audible even to us’ (D Preface 4, KSA 3.15–​16). Here also (cf. BGE 226, KSA 5.162) the emphasis is on strong, non-​ optional oughts rather than on weak, hypothetical ones. Finally, in an important later section of Daybreak entitled ‘Toward a Natural History of Duty and Right’, Nietzsche begins by stating that ‘[o]‌ur duties –​are the rights of others over us’ (D 112, KSA 3.100). Nietzsche explicitly acknowledges here that he has duties to other human beings, and to the best of my knowledge he does not retract this statement in any of his later writings. But what exactly do Nietzschean duties look like? On what are they based, and to whom are they owed? As regards the latter question: as is well known, one of Nietzsche’s more provocative positions is his conviction that one has duties ‘only to one’s equals’. In Beyond Good and Evil, for instance, he defends the principle that one has duties only toward one’s equals [nur gegen Seinesgleichen]; that toward beings of a lower rank, toward everything foreign, one may act as one likes [nach Gutdünken . . . handeln dürfe] or ‘as the heart desires’ and in any case ‘beyond good and evil’ –​here pity and the like may [mag] belong. (BGE 260, KSA 5.210–​11)35

Any universal ethic that proclaims we have duties not just to our peers but to all human beings is morally wrong, Nietzsche holds, because it harms higher men. For example, in Beyond Good and Evil he asserts that any morality which addresses itself to everybody [an Jedermann wendet] sins not merely against taste:  it is a provocation to sins of omission, one more seduction under the mask of philanthropy  –​and precisely a seduction and injury for the higher, rarer, privileged [Schädigung der Höheren, Seltneren, Bevorrechteten]. One must force moralities to bow first of all before the order of rank [Rangordnung]; one must push their presumption into their conscience –​until they finally get things straight, that it is immoral [unmoralisch] to say: ‘what is right for one is fair for the other’. (BGE 221, KSA 5.156)

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But how and why does the fact that duties towards all constitute an ‘injury for the higher, rarer, privileged’ show that any ethics that includes such duties is unmoralisch? Granted, a nascent Goethe will have less time to work on his poetry if he is morally required to fulfill what Kant calls the ‘universal duty’ of each human being ‘to promote according to one’s means the happiness of others in need’ (MS 453; cf. GMS 398) than he will if he is released from such a duty. Granted, a budding Beethoven will have less time to compose music if he is morally obligated to express what Kant calls the duty of gratitude to all persons high and low who have rendered benefits to oneself (see MS 454–​6) than he will if he is released from such a duty. But the same is true for non-​geniuses as well. Everyone has less time for their personal projects once moral obligations become part of their lives. This is a necessary truth about duties, and to use it as an argument against there being duties is spurious. It is like saying you’re opposed to taxation because you do not like having to give some of your money to the government. This is just part of what ‘taxation’ means. But part of Nietzsche’s point is that higher men are injured by duties towards everyone in ways that the rest of us schlemiels are not, for their projects are inestimably more valuable than ours. No matter how much time we devote to our measly projects, we will never create anything that is remotely comparable to the artistic creations of a Goethe or a Beethoven. Nietzsche is no doubt right about this, but here we are talking about aesthetic rather than moral value. Why then does he claim that universal duties are unmoralisch? His remarks about higher men seem rather to be another example of what Philippa Foot calls Nietzsche’s defense of ‘a quasi-​aesthetic rather than a moral set of values’, or as Simon Robertson remarks in a more recent essay, of his ‘quasi-​aesthetic individualist perfectionism’.36 Nietzsche continues to use traditional deontic normative concepts of ‘duty’ and ‘ought’, but he is employing them in a demoralized form (cf. Janaway and Robertson 2012b: 8–​9). As regards the basis or ground of these duties, Nietzsche insists  –​contra Kant –​that all legitimate moral duties are conditional rather than unconditional. ‘The worst of all tastes’, he proclaims in Beyond Good and Evil, ‘is the taste for the unconditional [das Unbedingte]’ (BGE 31, KSA 5.49).37 Later in the same text he fumes yet again against moralities that ‘address themselves to “all” ’, calling them examples of ‘old-​woman wisdom’, ‘baroque and unreasonable’. But this time he also objects to their ‘speaking unconditionally [unbedingt redend] one and all, taking themselves for unconditional [sich unbedingt nehmend]’ (BGE 198, KSA 5.118). And at the end of an important section in The Gay Science entitled ‘Unconditional Duties [Unbedingte Pflichten]’, Nietzsche makes clear that Kant

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is his target when he states that those who ‘cling to the categorical imperative’ are ‘the mortal enemy of those who want to deprive duty of its unconditional character [unbedingte Charakter]’ (GS 5, KSA 3.377; cf. 335, KSA 3.560–​4). But what then conditions Nietzschean duties? On what are they based? He addresses this question in the section from The Antichrist that I have chosen as the epigraph for this essay: ‘what does not condition [bedingt] our life harms it’ (A 11, KSA 6.177). Duty, along with other core moral notions such as ‘virtue’ and ‘good’ must, Nietzsche holds, in any correct evaluative system, condition the agent’s life, viz., help bring it into the desired state, enhance it rather than detract from it. If an alleged duty doesn’t condition and enhance the agent’s life, then it is merely a phantom (ein Hirngespinst) –​and ditto with virtue and good as well (see A 11, KSA 6.177–​8). But if Nietzschean duties must condition and enhance the agent’s life, what then becomes of the non-​ optional Nietzschean oughts discussed earlier  –​ the ‘stern yarn and shirt of duties’ that he and his higher men ‘cannot get out of ’ (BGE 226, KSA 5.162)? Suddenly Nietzschean duties don’t look so stern. Granted, they are not completely arbitrary or capricious (if they enhance one’s life, then one must fulfill them), but they appear to be hypothetical rather than categorical: for if one doesn’t want to enhance one’s life, then one doesn’t need to fulfill them. So perhaps they can be gotten out of –​assuming one can choose whether to enhance one’s life or not. Could we really live with a system of obligation based on life-​enhancement? There are multiple problems with such an arrangement. First, it would allow agents to opt out of any and all alleged duties whenever they are not life-​ enhancing. (‘Sorry. I know that I promised to help you, but in thinking it over I realized that doing so wouldn’t enhance my own life.’) Are duties really this easy to get out of? Second, the life-​enhancement criterion would also enable agents to create new rights and duties on the spot, whenever they could show that an act is life-​enhancing for them. (‘Yes, ordinarily taking another person’s possessions is theft. But you’re an untalented dolt and I’m a higher man who is unfortunately very short on cash at present. So in this case, my taking your possessions will condition and enhance my life.’) Are rights and duties really this easy to create? A third problem lies in Nietzsche’s frequent reminder that what conditions or enhances one person’s life may well weaken or harm another’s. For instance, in Thus Spoke Zarathustra he writes: ‘chastity in some people is a virtue, but in many almost a vice’ (Z I On Chastity, KSA 4.69). Similarly, for some people humility is a virtue, but for others, –​viz., those who are ‘destined and made

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[bestimmt und gemacht] to command, self-​denial and modest withdrawal would not be a virtue but the waste of a virtue’ (BGE 221, KSA 5.156). ‘The question is always who he is and who the other is’ (BGE 221, KSA 5.156) –​viz. what type of person one is, as determined by psychological and physiological facts. And this is why he urges a radical change in the Stoic philosopher Ariston of Chios’s medical formulation of morality from ‘virtue is the health of the soul’ to ‘ “your virtue is the health of your soul”. For there is no health as such . . . there are innumerable healths of the body; and the more one allows the particular and incomparable to rear its head again, the more one unlearns the dogma of the “equality of men” ’ (GS 120, KSA 3.477). But the social coordination problems posed by such a code of conduct are enormous. Each agent, depending on ‘who he is’, will require his own distinct set of virtues and duties. And he will have no duties whatsoever towards those who are of a different type. If he is a higher man, he will have no duties towards a lower man, for this would be detrimental to the achievement of his own excellence. ‘To a being such as “we are” other beings must be subordinate by nature [von Natur unterthan sein müssen] and have to sacrifice themselves [sich . . . zu opfern haben]’ (BGE 265, KSA 5.220). Applying Nietzsche’s code will not be easy either, and this points to a fourth problem with duties based on life-​enhancement. For instance, does everyone really know ‘who he is?’ Suppose you’re a late bloomer: for many years society has pegged you a dimwit, and even you have half-​heartedly accepted this verdict. But finally in middle age your true genius begins to blossom. Accordingly, a new set of type-​appropriate obligations is now in order. You have numerous outstanding debts, contracts and promises that you owe to some bureaucratic blockheads, but now you are suddenly released from them all. Unfortunately, Nietzsche is also often prone to push his ‘different duties for different types of men’ theme to its outer subjectivist limit, and this leads to a fifth problem. For instance, in The Antichrist aphorism selected as an epigraph for this chapter, he claims that it is a law of preservation that ‘each person invent [Jeder. . . erfinde] his own virtue, his own categorical imperative’ (A 11, KSA 6.177). Not everyone is able to follow this difficult advice (and even those who do will certainly not end up with a categorical imperative), but Nietzsche’s higher men are defined, at least in part, precisely by their capacity to create values. We are told twice in Zarathustra that ‘the world revolves around the inventors [die Erfinder] of new values’ (Z I On the Flies of the Market Place,

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KSA 4.66; cf. Z II On Great Events, KSA 4167–​71). In Beyond Good and Evil the highest man is identified with the ‘genuine [wirklicher] philosopher’ (not to be confused with the mere philosophical laborer or man of science; i.e. the professor). The genuine philosopher is he who ‘creates values [Werthe schaffe]’ (BGE 211, KSA 5.144; cf. 260, KSA 5.209).38 But Nietzsche’s advice that each person create his own duties (see A  11, KSA 6.177–​8) is in tension with his position that duties are determined by the type of person one is. For it would seem that each individual is not truly free to create his or her own imperative. Rather, the appropriate imperative for each individual ‘is simply determined by the type-​facts about that person’ (Leiter 2002: 98) –​by how that person already is, irrespective of his or choices. In the end, Nietzsche’s strong commitment to what Danish author Georg Brandes called ‘aristocratic radicalism’  –​a label that Nietzsche himself deemed ‘very good’ and ‘the cleverest thing I have yet read about myself ’39 –​ may be the biggest impediment to the development of a coherent and plausible set of Nietzschean duties. For even aristocrats (at least the non-​radical, non-​Nietzschean kind) acknowledge that they have some duties to plebeians. Pegging duty merely to what enhances one’s life and improves one’s health is like trying to build a house on quicksand. Once one tries to shrink the sphere of duty to only one’s peers, the result is social chaos. And Nietzsche’s lack of concern with these fundamental social coordination problems is another sign that his own positive normative theory is very difficult to square with morality as traditionally understood. For morality is, at least in part, a social coordination scheme. The gap between Nietzscheans who hold that higher men have duties only to their equals and Kantians who subscribe to the equal worth of all persons (see GMS 429–​35) is likely as big a gap as exists anywhere in ethics, and there is no way to bridge it. But is ‘Königsbergian Chinadom’ (A 11, KSA 6.177; cf. BGE 210, KSA 5.144) really as easy to dismiss as Nietzsche claims? In an aphorism in The Gay Science entitled ‘Kant’s joke’ Nietzsche writes: ‘Kant wanted to prove, in a way that would dumbfound the “whole world” [“alle Welt”], that the “whole world” was right: that was the secret joke of this soul. He wrote against the scholars in favor of popular prejudice, but for scholars and not for the people’ (GS 193, KSA 3.504).40 But maybe the joke is on Nietzsche. Perhaps the whole world is right: we are all equal in dignity, even if Kant’s complicated effort to prove this popular modern conviction has dumbfounded many readers.41

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Notes 1 Despite the recent surge of writing devoted specifically to Nietzsche’s critique of morality, contemporary commentators still offer wildly different answers to each of these questions. For instance, according to Brain Leiter (2002: 74), ‘Nietzsche could not be a critic of all [emphasis in the original] morality’; while Maudmarie Clark (1994: 31, cf. 16) argues that ‘Nietzsche believed he was rejecting morality itself ’. Paul van Tongeren (Tongeren 2006: 389) even holds that Nietzsche’s critique of morality ‘is inspired and molded by the morality he criticizes’. 2 In Beyond Good and Evil Nietzsche writes: ‘Morality in Europe today is herd animal morality –​that is to say, as we understand the thing, merely one type of human morality beside which, before which, and after which many other types, above all higher moralities [höhere Moralen], are, or ought to be, possible’ (BGE 202, KSA 5.124). As Leiter (2002: 74) notes, the fact that Nietzsche ‘explicitly embraces the idea of a “higher morality” which would inform the lives of “higher men” ’ would seem to speak against his being ‘a critic of all [emphasis in the original] “morality” ’. However, there still remains the issue –​raised by Philippa Foot and others –​as to whether Nietzsche’s ‘higher morality’ should count as a morality. See Foot (1973: 156–​68; 1994: 3–​14). 3 Cf. GM Preface 6, KSA 5.253. 4 In the Groundwork, for instance, Kant briefly alludes to other (non-​human) types of rational beings and their different (non-​human) relationship to moral principles when he writes: ‘no imperatives hold for the divine will and in general for a holy will: the ought [das Sollen] is out of place here, because willing [das Wollen] already of itself necessarily agrees with the law’ (GMS 414). (When available, I use –​with occasional modifications –​the English translations in The Cambridge Edition of the Works of Immanuel Kant (general editors Paul Guyer and Allen W. Wood; Cambridge University Press, 1992–​), 16 vols. The traditional Academy volume and page numbers are reprinted in the margins of most recent editions and translations of Kant’s writings.) 5 This passage has often been used to attribute a virtue ethics to Nietzsche. Character judgements are primary in his moral scheme; ought and duty judgements about action are secondary. For discussion, see Hunt (1991: esp. 171) and Swanton (2006: 291–​303). 6 In moral philosophy, the most famous example is G. E. M. Anscombe, who suggests we ‘do ethics without . . . the notion “morally ought”, . . . as is shown by the example of Aristotle’ (Anscombe [1958] 1997: 33–​4) –​a statement which is often said to mark the beginning of the contemporary virtue ethics movement. Similarly, Bernard Williams (1993: 41; 1985: 16) holds that ‘duty in some abstract sense in largely unknown to the Greeks, in particular to archaic Greeks’, and that ‘there is no ancient

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Greek word for duty’, and Alasdair MacIntyre (1966: 84) claims that in ancient Greek ethics ‘the concepts of duty and responsibility in the modern sense appear only in germ or marginally; those of goodness, virtue, and prudence are central’. See also Adkins ([1960] 1975: 2–​3). However, there have also been some dissenting voices. See, e.g., ‘Aristotle’s Moral Ought’ in Louden (1992: 34–​9) and Korsgaard ([1996] 2008: 174–​206). 7 Cf. Lecky (1887: I: 5): ‘A theory of morals must explain not only what constitutes a duty, but also how we obtain the notion of there being such a thing as duty. It must tell us not merely what is the course of conduct we ought [emphasis in the original] to pursue, but also what is the meaning of this word “ought”, and from what source we derive the idea that it expresses.’ Like Nietzsche, Lecky too is inquiring into ‘the natural history of morals’ (I: 1). Leiter (2002: 197–​8) notes that ‘in the early 1880s, Nietzsche had been reading W. E. H. Lecky’s History of European Morals’, and according to Clark and Swensen, Nietzsche ([1887] 1998: 129n9) ‘had considerable praise’ for Lecky’s work. A copy of an 1879 German translation of Lecky’s book can be found in Nietzsche’s personal library (Benders and Oettermann 2000: 660). 8 It is plausible to think that the concepts of guilt and duty are only contingently connected to each other. Of course, we normally do feel guilty when we fail to fulfill a moral obligation and cannot justify the transgression. For instance, most people feel guilty when they violate a friend’s trust for no good reason. But when they successfully fulfill an obligation, they do not typically feel guilty as a result of having done so. And, some people may feel guilty when no moral duties are involved at all. For example, someone may feel guilty over her moral luck of having been born into a wealthy family in a prosperous country with a beautiful climate, even if she faithfully fulfills all of her moral obligations. This is an example of what Mathias Risse (2005: 46) calls ‘existential guilt’, or guilt ‘that shapes one’s whole existence’, but it is not necessarily an existential guilt that is tied to belief in the Christian God. Risse argues that Nietzsche is concerned only with existential guilt that requires the Christian God, but this is an overly restrictive reading. As Christopher Janaway (2007: 141n.27) notes, Nietzsche’s account of guilt ‘is best read as explaining the origins of locally reactive guilt in internalization and the debtor–​creditor relation, and the subsequent intensification of locally reactive guilt into existential guilt by means of the Christian metaphysical picture’. 9 However, they are not the only such vehicles: religion and belief in the Christian God also played a major role, although commentators disagree over whether their contribution is contingent or necessary. For discussion, see the exchange between Ridley (2005: 35–​45) and Risse (2005: 46–​53). Ridley argues that guilt comes before God; Risse, that God comes before guilt.

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10 In recent years a substantial amount of ink has been spilled over how best to render this phrase (especially the verb darf, from dürfen) into English. See, e.g., Clark and Swensen (Nietzsche 1998: 139 n.35), Acampora (2006a: 147–​8) and Owen (2007: 168 n.1). I agree with Clark and Swenson that nature’s task as Nietzsche conceives it is to breed a normative animal, ‘an animal that accepts and lives up to norms’ (Nietzsche 1998: 139), but I do not think their choice of ‘is permitted to’ is the best way to get this point across. At bottom, Nietzsche is talking about the historical development of a new kind of animal, one possessing new capacities. To my ears, ‘is able to’ better captures his point about the difficulty of acquiring these capacities. 11 Concerning naturalism, Nietzsche holds that we must ‘translate man back into nature’ and pay closer attention to ‘that eternal ground text [ewiger Grundtext] homo natura’ (BGE 230, KSA 5.169), and his commitment to determinism is evident when he states: ‘the causa sui is the best self-​contradiction that has been conceived thus far’ (BGE 21, KSA 5.35). For discussions of how best to interpret Nietzsche’s naturalism and determinism, see Acampora (2006b), Solomon (2006) and Pippin (2006). For recent challenges and qualifications to the naturalist reading, see Clark and Dudrick (2012) and Janaway and Robertson (2012b). 12 Additional capacities necessary for promise-​making which are not explicitly mentioned by Nietzsche, include the linguistic ability to articulate promises and communicate them to other animals, and the related cognitive ability to understand and evaluate promise-​claims made by others (‘What did this person say? Is he serious? Should I believe what he’s saying?’). 13 In the English language, the terms ‘duty’ and ‘obligation’ have sometimes been used in different senses. Obligations have been defined as voluntarily incurred, while duties are said to be a function of social roles or offices. See, e.g., the Oxford English Dictionary s.v. ‘duty’ (esp. fifth entry) and ‘obligation’ (first entry). For discussion, see Brandt (1964: esp. 387–​8). However, this distinction is not generally adhered to in contemporary moral philosophy, and in my own discussion I do not assume it. 14 Evolutionary biologists and primatologists are fond of emphasizing ‘continuity with animals even in the moral domain’, as Frans de Waal (2006: 14, 6) puts it (see also Darwin [1871] 1981: I: 71–​2, 97–​8). But Nietzsche’s naturalism –​a naturalism that emphasizes not only continuities but also sharp breaks between humans and other animals –​is surely the more accurate naturalism. Many contemporary primatologists and animal researchers also argue that non-​human animals transmit cultural traditions and habits across generations. See, e.g., Whiten et al. (1999), de Waal (2001) and McGrew (2004). When coupled with Nietzsche’s Daybreak conception of morality as ‘nothing other . . . than obedience to customs’ (9), this gives us a possible second argument (distinct from the ‘shared social instincts argument’) in defence of animal morality. However, Nietzsche rejects this simplistic

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definition of morality in later works such as the Genealogy of Morals. When he describes ‘the task of breeding an animal that is able to make promises’ (GM II 2, KSA 5.293) as a necessary stage in the birth of morality, he implies that he does not believe that non-​human animals are moral creatures, since they are unable to make promises. 15 Nietzsche explicitly acknowledges the legal setting of the creditor–​debtor relationship at the beginning of GM II 6, KSA 5.300, when he writes: ‘In this sphere, in legal obligations [Obligationen-​Rechte] that is, the moral conceptual world . . . “duty” [Pflicht], “sacredness of duty” has its genesis [Entstehungsheerd].’ 16 This is noted at the beginning of GM II 5, KSA 5.298, when he states regarding these ‘contract relationships [Vertragsverhältnisse]:’ . . . ‘precisely here promises are made.’ 17 Owen (2007: 95). I am indebted to Owen’s analysis in the following discussion of this two-​step generalization process. 18 Cf. Socrates’ imaginary discussion with the laws in Plato’s Crito: ‘Then what if the laws said: . . . “Did we not, first, bring you to birth? . . . And after you were born and nurtured and educated, could you, in the first place, deny that you are our offspring and servant, both you and your forefathers? If that is so, do you think that we are on an equal footing as regards the right [to dikaion]?”  ’ (50d–​e). 19 Kant and Nietzsche both use the term ‘moralization [Moralisirung]’ (Nietzsche less frequently than Kant), but they attach very different meanings to it. For Kant, Moralisirung is a positive development and refers to an internalization and diffusion among all peoples of the norms expressed in the different formulas of the categorical imperative. As he remarks tersely in the Lectures on Pedagogy, in order to achieve moralization the human being must ‘acquire the disposition to choose nothing but good ends. Good ends are those which are necessarily approved by everyone and which can be the simultaneous ends of everyone’ (Päd 450). For discussion and additional references, see Louden (2000: 21, 101–​2, 159, 164, 181). For Nietzsche, on the other hand, Moralisirung is a negative development, and refers to the idea, as Simon May (1999: 70–​1) puts it, ‘that one’s human nature is essentially and undischargeably guilty and hence defective’. 20 In this passage, from a section entitled ‘Stages of Morality [Stufen der Moral]’, Nietzsche is describing the fourth stage of morality. But he also envisions a fifth step coming later. Eventually, humans will learn ‘to place their feet on narrower, more delicate steps. Then comes a morality [eine Moral] of inclination, of taste, finally that of insight –​which is above and beyond all illusionary motive forces of morality [illusionären Motive der Moral] but has a clear realization of why for long ages mankind could possess no other’ (WS 44, KSA 2.573). This is one of many

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Nietzschean texts that suggest that his basic goal is to replace one kind of morality with another. English translators tend to render Nietzsche’s ‘du sollst’ as ‘thou shallt’. But insofar as his target is Kant, and insofar as contemporary English translators of Kant tend to render Kant’s ‘du sollst’ as ‘you ought’, the latter is a preferable translation. Perhaps it is merely one of what Daniel Dennett (1995: 242, 464) calls (with apologies to Rudyard Kipling) ‘Nietzsche’s Just So Stories’ –​that is, an explanation that we needn’t bother to test ‘because it is too good a story, presumably, not to be true’ –​‘a mixture of brilliant and crazy, sublime and ignoble, devastatingly acute history and untrammeled fantasy’? Like many others (e.g. Richardson 2004), Dennett (1995: 464) sees strong similarities between Darwin and Nietzsche: ‘Both came up with dangerous ideas.’ ‘But’, he continues, ‘whereas Darwin was ultra-​ conscious in his expression, Nietzsche indulged in prose so overheated that it no doubt serves him right that his legion of devotees has included a disreputable gaggle of unspeakable and uncomprehending Nazis and other such fans whose perversions of his memes make Spencer’s perversions of Darwin’s seem almost innocent’ (464). Whether the moral ought of promising is absolute and overrides all competing oughts (as Kant is often interpreted as holding) is of course more controversial. Here I side with W. D. Ross (1930: 8): there do exist ‘exceptional cases in which the consequences of fulfilling a promise . . . would be so disastrous to others that we judge it right not to do so . . . If I have promised to meet a friend at a particular time for some trivial purpose, I should certainly think myself justified in breaking my engagement if by doing so I could prevent a serious accident or bring relief to the victims of one’. See, e.g., Fried (1981). In this respect Nietzsche’s is very similar to Hegel-​inspired historical accounts of duty. MacIntyre (1966: 86; cf. 236), for instance, argues that when we look historically at the concept of duty, we see ‘a gradual attenuation . . . in which there is a progress from a notion of duty as consisting in the requirement to fulfill a specific role, the fulfillment of which serves a purpose which is entirely intelligible as the expression of normal human desires (consider the duties of a father, seaman, or doctor as examples); the next step is perhaps the concept of duty as something to be done by the individual whatever his private desires; finally we reach the concept of duty as divorced from desire altogether’. Hegel (1970: §150); Bradley (1962: 168, 173–​4). Hegel, Bradley and MacIntyre all argue that unless moral duty is anchored firmly in social roles, it becomes incomprehensible. For a discussion to which I am indebted, see Donagan (1977: 9–​18). William Shakespeare, Hamlet Prince of Denmark I, iii, 75.

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28 In this paragraph I am expanding on Risse’s (2008: 50) observation that Nietzsche’s account of duties can only accommodate ‘positive duties that respond to beneficial actions of others. Negative duties (that is, duties to refrain from certain actions) cannot be accommodated by this account’. 29 Given these multiple problems with his account, why then does Nietzsche focus so intently on the creditor–​debtor relationship in his genealogy of duty? One hypothesis is that his interest in (and, alas, advocacy of) cruelty draws him to it. For instance, a notorious passage in The Antichrist reads: ‘The weak and the failures ought to perish [Die Schwachen und Mißrathnen sollen zu grunde gehen]: first principle of our philanthropy. And one ought to help them too [man soll ihnen noch dazu helfen]’ (A 2, KSA 6.170). In GM II 5, KSA 5.299, Nietzsche cites the following remark from the Twelve Tables legislation of ancient Rome (c. 450 bc, a prime source of ancient written law): ‘si plus minusve secuerunt, ne fraude esto [if they have secured more or less, let that be no crime].’ As he notes, according to Roman law, ‘it was of no consequence how much or how little the creditors cut off ’ –​i.e., how much of a debtor’s limb could legally be cut off in cases of non-​ payment. But it should also be noted that many different legal rights and duties are described in the Twelve Tables. E.g., in table I, the duty to appear in court when issued a summons is discussed. In table VII, the right to remove a neighbour’s tree if it hangs over one’s property is described. In table X, we read that no one may ‘burn or bury a corpse in the city’. Legal duties between creditors and debtors are only a small part of the Twelve Tables story (see table III), but this is the only part of the story that Nietzsche is interested in. He is convinced that the beginnings of duty, ‘like the beginnings of everything great on earth, were thoroughly and for a long time drenched in blood’ and that ‘the categorical imperative smells of cruelty [Grausamkeit]’ (GM II 6, KSA 5.300). But is the alleged duty–​cruelty connection only a contingent by-​product of the fixation on the creditor–​debtor relationship as practiced in ancient Rome? 30 Prichard (1968: 7). I thank Pablo Muchnik for discussion on this topic. 31 Nietzsche (1998: xviii, xix). Contemporary Kant translators normally render ‘Menschen’ as ‘human beings’, but in the case of Nietzsche, ‘men’ is preferable. 32 ‘The categorical imperative smells of cruelty’ (GM II 6); ‘Kant’s categorical imperative should have been felt as mortally dangerous!’ (A 11, KSA 5.177; cf. BGE 5, KSA 5.18–​19). 33 ‘Man does not strive after happiness, only the Englishman does that’ (T I Maxims 12, KSA 6.61). 34 Leiter (2002: 125) writes: ‘such an account is too vague: what exactly does “life” refer to here?’. Leiter’s answer: ‘The life for which things are valuable or disvaluable must be the life (or lives) that manifest human excellence –​i.e., the lives of “higher men” ’ (126).

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35 Walter Kaufmann (1968: 396 n.6), in a note to his translation of the text, remarks that Nietzsche ‘contradicts outright’ the latter part of this principle when he states in The Antichrist: ‘When the exceptional human being handles the mediocre more gently than he does himself and his equals, this is not mere politeness of the heart –​it is simply his duty [seine Pflicht]’ (A 57, KSA 6.244). I agree that the two texts contradict each other. However, I take Nietzsche’s ‘duties only to one’s equals’ position to be his considered view, for the simple reason that he asserts it repeatedly. To my knowledge, his ‘duties to the mediocre’ position is asserted only once. A passage virtually identical to BGE 260, KSA 5.210–​11, can be found in the 1885 Nachlaß, where, in addressing the question ‘What is noble?’, Nietzsche writes: ‘[T]‌he conviction that one has duties only toward one’s equals [nur gegen Seines-​Gleichen], toward the others one behaves as one likes [nach Gutdünken verhält]’ (NL 1885 35[76], KSA 11.543). 36 Foot (1973: 166); Robertson (2012: 108). In The Birth of Tragedy, Nietzsche declares: ‘I am convinced that art [Kunst] represents the highest task and the truly metaphysical activity of this life’ (Preface to Richard Wagner; see also Attempt at a Self-​Criticism 5). Does he ever renounce this early conviction? 37 See Geuss (1999: 171–​3) for helpful analysis of this particular aspect of Nietzsche’s theory of obligation. May (1999: 22–​3, 92, 105, 151, ­chapter 9, passim) also discusses Nietzsche’s opposition to unconditional values. But his main concern is with Nietzsche’s critique of the claim that truth is an unconditional value. See also Himmelmann (2006: 21–​9), where she argues that Nietzsche’s commitment to opposites that are essential to life is one reason why he argues against absolute principles. 38 In Ecce Homo Nietzsche adds: ‘How I understand the philosopher, as a terrible explosive [ein furchtbarer Explosionsstoff], before whom everything is in danger, how my concept “philosopher” is miles and miles removed from a concept that would include even a Kant, not to speak of the academic “ruminants” [Wiederkäuer] and other professors of philosophy’ (EH Books UM 3, KSA 6.320). Or, as he puts it in Beyond Good and Evil, ‘even the great Chinaman of Königsberg was merely a great critic’ (BGE 210, KSA 5.144). 39 Nietzsche to Brandes, 2 December 1887; reprinted in Brandes (1914: 64). The first chapter of Brandes’s book is entitled ‘An Essay on Aristocratic Radicalism (1889)’. He also published an essay with the title ‘Aristocratischer Radikalismus: Eine Abhandlung über Friedrich Nietzsche’ (see Brandes 1890). Cf. Theodor Adorno (2000: 173): ‘in reality these norms [of Nietzsche’s] are all feudal values . . . [,]‌ attempts to recapture lost values, would-​be revivals, a Romantic ideal’. 40 MacIntyre (1966: 224) and, more recently, Joshua D. Greene (2007), both make use of this aphorism, albeit in ways that shed little light on either Kant or Nietzsche. Kant insists repeatedly that the principle of morality he defends is one

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that ‘common human reason [gemeine Menschenvernunft] . . . agrees completely with’ (GMS 402; see also 389, 403), and he criticizes the hubris of the moral theorist who sets out ‘to introduce a new principle of morality and, as it were, first invent it . . . as if, before him, the world had been ignorant of what duty is or in thoroughgoing error about it’ (KpV 8n). Nietzsche is certainly right on this point. For discussion, see ‘Gemeine Menschenvernunft and Ta Endoxa’, in Louden (1992: 116–​20). 41 An earlier version of this essay was presented as an invited lecture at a conference on ‘Nietzsche and Approaches to Ethics’, held at the University of Southampton in July 2009. I would like to thank Christopher Janaway and Simon Robertson for their invitation to participate in the conference, and Jason Read, Kathleen Wininger, Sandra L. Shapshay, Pablo Muchnik, Julian Wuerth and Beatrix Himmelmann for helpful comments on the earlier version of the essay. Thanks also to the Alexander von Humboldt Foundation for its financial support in June–​July of 2009, during which time a draft of the earlier version was written in Berlin. Finally, I am very grateful to Tom Bailey and João Constancio for their detailed and helpful comments on a later version of the essay.

References Acampora, C. D. (2006a), ‘On Sovereignty and Overhumanity: Why It Matters How We Read Nietzsche’s Genealogy II.2’, in C. Acampora (ed.), Nietzsche’s On the Genealogy of Morals: Critical Essays, Lanham, MD: Rowman & Littlefield. Acampora, C. D. (2006b), ‘Naturalism and Nietzsche’s Moral Psychology’, in K. A. Pearson (ed.), A Companion to Nietzsche, 314–​33, Malden, MA: Blackwell Publishing. Adkins, A. W. S. ([1960] 1975), Merit and Responsibility: A Study in Greek Values, Chicago: University of Chicago Press. Adorno, T. (2000), Problems of Moral Philosophy, ed. T. Schröder, trans. R. Livingstone, Stanford: Stanford University Press. Anscombe, G. E. M. ([1958] 1997), ‘Modern Moral Philosophy’, in R. Crisp and M. Slote (eds), Virtue Ethics, 26–​44, Oxford: Oxford University Press. Benders, R. J., and Oettermann, S. (eds.) (2000), Friedrich Nietzsche: Chronik in Bildern und Texten, Munich: Karl Hanser Verlag. Bradley, F. H. (1962), ‘My Station and Its Duties’, in F. H. Bradley, Ethical Studies, 160–​213, 2nd edn rev., with an Introduction by Richard Wollheim, Oxford: Oxford University Press. Brandes, G. (1890), ‘Aristocratischer Radikalismus: Eine Abhandlung über Friedrich Nietzsche’, Deutsche Rundschau 63: 52–​89.

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Brandes, G. (1914), Friedrich Nietzsche, trans. A. G. Chater, New York: Macmillan. Brandt, R. (1964), ‘The Concepts of Obligation and Duty’, Mind 73: 374–​93. Clark, M. (1994), ‘Nietzsche’s Immoralism and the Concept of Morality’, in R. Schacht (ed.), Nietzsche, Genealogy, Morality: Essays on Nietzsche’s Genealogy of Morals, 15–​34, Berkeley: University of California Press. Clark, M., and Dudrick, D. (2012), The Soul of Nietzsche’s Beyond Good and Evil, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Darwin, C. ([1871] 1981), The Descent of Man, and Selection in Relation to Sex, Princeton: Princeton University Press. De Waal, F. (2001), The Ape and the Sushi Master: Cultural Reflections of a Primatologist, New York: Basic Books. De Waal, F. (2006), Primates and Philosophers: How Morality Evolved, ed. S. Macedo and J. Oder, Princeton: Princeton University Press. Dennett, D. D. (1995), Darwin’s Dangerous Idea: Evolution and the Meaning of Life, New York: Simon & Schuster. Donagan, A. (1977), The Theory of Morality, Chicago: University of Chicago Press. Foot, P. (1973), ‘Nietzsche: The Revaluation of Values’, in R. Solomon (ed.), Nietzsche: A Collection of Essays, 156–​68, Garden City: Anchor Books. Foot, P. (1994), ‘Nietzsche’s Immoralism’, in R. Schacht (ed.), Nietzsche, Genealogy, Morality: Essays on Nietzsche’s Genealogy of Morals, 3–​14, Berkeley: University of California Press. Fried, C. (1981), Contract as Promise: A Theory of Contractual Obligation, Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press. Geuss, R. (1999), ‘Nietzsche and Morality’, in R. Geuss, Morality, Culture, and History: Essays on German Philosophy, 167–​97, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Greene, J. D. (2007), ‘The Secret Joke of Kant’s Soul’, in W. Sinnott-​Armstrong (ed.), Moral Psychology, vol. 3: The Neuroscience of Morality: Emotion, Disease and Development, 35–​79, Cambridge, MA: MIT Press. Hegel, G. W. F. (1970), Grundlinien der Philosophie des Rechts, in G. W.F. Hegel, Theorie-​ Werkausgabe, vol. 7, Frankfurt: Suhrkamp. Himmelmann, B. (2006), ‘Philosophie und Leben oder: Denken in Gegensätzen’, in B. Himmelmann, Nietzsche, 21–​9, Leipzig: Reclam. Hunt, L. H. (1991), Nietzsche and the Origins of Virtue, London: Routledge. Janaway, C. (2007), Beyond Selflessness: Reading Nietzsche’s Genealogy, Oxford: Oxford University Press. Janaway, C., and Robertson, S. (eds) (2012a), Nietzsche, Naturalism, and Normativity, Oxford: Oxford University Press. Janaway, C., and Robertson, S. (2012b), ‘Introduction: Nietzsche on Naturalism and Normativity’, in C. Janaway and S. Robertson (eds), Nietzsche, Naturalism, and Normativity, 1–​19, Oxford: Oxford University Press. Kaufmann, W. (ed.) (1968), Basic Writings of Nietzsche, New York: Modern Library.

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Korsgaard, C. M. ([1996] 2008), ‘From Duty and for the Sake of the Noble: Kant and Aristotle on Morally Good Action’, in C. M. Korsgaard, The Constitution of Agency: Essays on Practical Reason and Moral Psychology, 174–​206, Oxford: Oxford University Press. Lecky, W. E. H. (1887), History of European Morals from Augustus to Charlemagne, 3rd edn, New York: D. Appleton and Company. Leiter, B. (2002), Nietzsche on Morality, London: Routledge. Louden, R. B. (1992), Morality and Moral Theory: A Reappraisal and Reaffirmation, New York: Oxford University Press. Louden, R. B. (2000), Kant’s Impure Ethics: From Rational Beings to Human Beings, New York: Oxford University Press. MacIntyre, A. (1966), A Short History of Ethics, New York: Macmillan. May, S. (1999), Nietzsche’s Ethics and His War on ‘Morality’, Oxford: Clarendon Press. McGrew, W. C. (2004), The Cultured Chimpanzee, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Nietzsche, F. ([1887] 1998), On the Genealogy of Morals, trans. M. Clark and A. J. Swensen. Nietzsche, F. (2003), Writings from the Late Notebooks, ed. R. Bittner, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Owen, D. (2007), Nietzsche’s Genealogy of Morality, Montreal: McGill-​Queen’s University Press. Pippin, R. B. (2006), ‘Agent and Deed in Nietzsche’s Genealogy of Morals’, in A. K. Pearson (ed.), A Companion to Nietzsche, 371–​86, Malden, MA: Blackwell Publishing. Prichard, H. A. (1968), ‘Does Moral Philosophy Rest on a Mistake?’ in H. A. Prichard, Moral Obligation and Duty and Interest: Essays and Lectures, 1–​18, London: Oxford University Press. Richardson, J. (2004), Nietzsche’s New Darwinism, Oxford: Oxford University Press. Ridley, A. (2005), ‘Guilt before God or God before Guilt? The Second Essay of Nietzsche’s Genealogy’, Journal of Nietzsche Studies 29: 35–​45. Risse, M. (2005), ‘On God and Guilt: A Reply to Aaron Ripley’, Journal of Nietzsche Studies 29: 46–​53. Risse, M. (2008), ‘Nietzsche on Selfishness, Justice, and the Duties of the Higher Men’, in P. Bloomfield (ed.), Morality and Self-​Interest, 31–​50, Oxford: Oxford University Press. Robertson, S. (2012), ‘The Scope Problem –​Nietzsche, the Moral, Ethical, and Quasi-​ Aesthetic’, in C. Janaway and S. Robertson (eds), Nietzsche, Naturalism, and Normativity, 81–​110, Oxford: Oxford University Press. Ross, W. D. (1930), The Right and the Good, Oxford: Clarendon Press. Solomon, R. C. (2006), ‘Nietzsche’s Fatalism’, in A. K. Pearson (ed.), A Companion to Nietzsche, 419–​34, Malden, MA: Blackwell Publishing. Swanton, C. (2006), ‘Nietzschean Virtue Ethics’, in C. D. Acampora (ed.), Nietzsche’s On the Genealogy of Morals: Critical Essays, 291–​303, Lanham, MD: Rowman & Littlefield.

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van Tongeren, P. (2006), ‘Nietzsche and Ethics’, in K. A. Pearson (ed.), A Companion to Nietzsche, 389–​403, Malden, MA: Blackwell Publishing. Whiten, A., Goodall, J., McGrew, W. C., Nishida, T., Reynolds, V., Sugiyama, Y. et al. (1999), ‘Cultures in Chimpanzees’, Nature 399: 682–​5. Williams, B. (1985), Ethics and the Limits of Philosophy, Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press. Williams, B. (1993), Shame and Necessity, Berkeley: University of California Press.

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Spontaneity and Sovereignty Nietzsche’s Concepts and Kant’s Philosophy Marco Brusotti

In his Kants Theorie der Erfahrung (Kant’s Theory of Experience), Hermann Cohen (1871:  160f.) complains that Kant’s ‘distinction between receptive sensuality and spontaneous intellect’ has been ‘quite universally criticized’. Cohen, who wanted to react against this widespread tendency, is referring explicitly to Jürgen Bona Meyer, but he could have directed a similar criticism against his own mentor, Friedrich Albert Lange. Spontaneity, a core concept in Kant’s conception of thought and agency, had been of fundamental importance for German Idealism; and in 1871, a few decades after Hegel’s death, the concept plays again a central role in Cohen’s reading of Kant. But in the 1860s, in reaction to German Idealism and in the wake of positivism, spontaneity had become a problematic concept even for the first generation of the new ‘back to Kant movement’. The first section of this chapter deals with the particular significance of psychology in the early neo-​Kantians’ dismissal of Kant’s conception of the spontaneity of thought and will. Against this historical background, it is not surprising that Nietzsche rejects the idea of an ‘absolute’ or ‘free’ spontaneity of the will. In 1880, a new conception of life as ‘spontaneous activity’ emerges in his manuscripts. This naturalistic view, which he picks up from a philosopher of minor importance, Johann Julius Baumann, goes back to Alexander Bain’s theory of the ‘beginnings of the will’. The difference between Kant’s absolute spontaneity of representation and Bainian spontaneity of involuntary movements and activities is explained in detail (Section 2). The conception of ‘spontaneous activity’, which Nietzsche adopts before Daybreak, has an enormous influence on his further philosophical development, although his last writings seem to give up even this relative concept of spontaneity, which in the Genealogy is still of paramount

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importance (Section 3). In Daybreak, Nietzsche, who had already rejected Kant’s ‘radical evil’ in the 1870s, revises the issue in the light of his new conception of ‘spontaneous activity’: in the Genealogy, this explanation of one of two very different forms of ‘evil’ is developed into a new argument against the freedom of the will, an argument which is, however, related to Lichtenberg’s criticism of Kant (Section 4). By analysing the use of Kantian terms in the Genealogy, I show that this criticism of freedom squares well with the description of the ‘sovereign individual’ as ‘responsible’, ‘autonomous’ and ‘free’. I reconstruct the context of the description –​an implicit rejection of Eduard von Hartmann’s criticism of the ‘absolute sovereignty [. . .] of the individual’. Against Hartmann, Nietzsche employs a specific textual strategy, which consists in taking Kantian terms in an ‘anti-​Kantian’ sense and systematically cultivating the art of using ‘a moral formula in a supramoral sense’. The agent’s self-​ascription of absolute freedom belongs essentially to Kant’s concept of moral agency, and the self-​ascription of ‘freedom’ to Nietzsche’s sovereign individuality. But the ‘freedom’ the sovereign individual ascribes to itself and to its peers is not absolute spontaneity, which for Nietzsche is a self-​contradictory concept; and this self-​ascription of a rare freedom does not have the same function as the postulate of absolute freedom in Kant’s practical philosophy. It is, rather, the main way in which the sovereign individual’s ‘pathos of distance’ is expressed, and hence a form of self-​ affirmation (Section 5).

1.  Early neo-​Kantianism and the inadequacy of Kant’s psychology Fries and Herbart deny that Kant’s ‘transcendental psychology’ is compatible with empirical results. But, in fact, the issue is foreign to Kant: empirical data, anthropological or psychological, are irrelevant at a level where something valid for all rational beings endowed with space-​temporal sensibility has to be established. However, the early ‘back to Kant movement’ inherited from philosophers such as Fries and Herbart the question of whether the critique of pure reason has a sound psychological basis; and early neo-​Kantians such as Meyer and Lange came to reject Kant’s ‘transcendental psychology’ as essentially metaphysical. More recent readings have questioned that transcendental psychology is really essential to Kant’s critical project or, pace Kant, even that transcendental psychology is an issue at all.1 Other scholars intend to naturalize it and claim that

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the ‘spontaneity’, which is at its core, is not absolute, but only relative spontaneity.2 Other recent readings propose that the spontaneity of thought be construed by analogy with the spontaneity of the will. This proposal does not necessarily imply that the spontaneity of thought and the spontaneity of agency –​the spontaneity of the intellect and the spontaneity of the will –​are essentially one and the same.3 The comparison concerns their respective status. According to Kant, theoretical reason can establish that besides the causality of nature there can be a causality with freedom (causa noumenon), but it cannot decide if there really is such an ‘absolute spontaneity of cause, which of itself originates a series of appearances that proceeds according to natural laws’ (KrV A446/​B 474). The absolute spontaneity of the will is a mere postulate of practical reason, but belongs as such to the necessary self-​understanding of a rational agent. The controversial exegetic question is how far can the spontaneity of thought be construed as internal to the concept of a thinker without a metaphysical commitment to its theoretical truth.4 Such exegetic options were not available to early neo-​Kantians. Lange (1880, vol. 2:  191, n.  23)  firmly rejected the independence of transcendental from empirical psychology: ‘The greatest portion of all the obscurities of the Critique of pure reason flow from the single circumstance that Kant undertakes what is, on the whole, a psychological investigation without any special psychological presuppositions’ (cf. Lange 1875 vol. 2: 124). In a similar mood, and aware that Kant saw things wholly differently, the author of Kant’s Psychologie, J.  B. Meyer (1870: 205), claimed that Kant did not grasp the psychological nature of his own analysis of consciousness.5 Like Lange, he focused on psychology, seeing in the lack of an empirical basis the core problem of Kant’s conception, and hence demanding a psychological integration of Kant’s theory (206). But even in the early ‘back to Kant movement’ the issue was controversial: while Meyer and Lange saw in the empirical inadequacy one (if not: the) main shortcoming in Kant’s theoretical as well as in his practical philosophy, Kuno Fischer and Liebmann argued that they were asking false questions.6 One main issue was whether Kant was right when he claimed that spontaneity distinguishes the understanding (pure apperception) from intuition (sensibility), which in itself is purely receptive.7 Herbart, whose scientific psychology rejected Kant’s ‘psychology of faculties’, had seen in the spontaneity of the intellect a radical mistake.8 Meyer’s and Lange’s criticism took the same direction. Sensibility –​Meyer objected to Kant –​is not less active than the understanding. In the first edition of Lange’s History of Materialism (1866) the concept of ‘spontaneity’ does not even surface; and the second edition (1875) abounds

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in criticism: ‘Only on the artificially imported supposition that all spontaneity belongs to “thought”, all receptivity to the sense, can the synthesis of impressions to things be at all connected with the understanding’ (Lange 1880, vol. 2: 197, n. 26; cf. Lange 1875 vol. 2: 128, n. 26).9 Against a similar objection by Meyer, Cohen argues that for Kant the perception of objects is not simply receptive, it does not involve sensibility only, but also the intellect and its synthetic activity. Clearly Lange does not grasp the architecture of the first Critique, the role of the transcendental imagination and the doctrine of schematism. The influence of Cohen’s interpretation of Kant in the second edition results rather in Lange becoming more aware of the theoretical distance between himself and Kant. However, already in the first edition Lange had not really been interested in an exegesis of the first Critique, but went in a wholly different direction, looking for a naturalistic solution. With Helmholtz, he thought that contemporary Sinnesphysiologie confirmed central Kantian insights, but also showed that sensibility is not simply receptive; the result is that ‘the synthesis of impressions to things’ is not the essential function of thought –​on the contrary, it has nothing to do with the intellect. Hence the intellect, that is, thought, is not spontaneous in Kant’s sense. Moreover, Lange, who places ‘thinking’ in quotation marks, criticizes the fact that Kant ‘allowed to continue at all an understanding free from any influence of the senses’ (Lange 1880, vol. 2: 197; cf. Lange 1875, vol. 2:  32). Hence, Lange, in denying that all spontaneity belongs to thought and all receptivity to sensuality, does not merely operate a new partition of ‘spontaneity’ between the senses and the ‘intellect’; he changes the concept of spontaneity itself, and his conclusion is in its effect (if not in its form) more of a dismissal than an adaptation of the Kantian concept, which in Lange’s History of Materialism, even in the second edition, does not play any role. For Lange, Kant’s absolute spontaneity must be rejected as incompatible with a naturalistic standpoint. In spite of Lange’s many exegetical shortcomings his conclusion has not lost its force. From his ‘psychological’ standpoint Lange is equally dismissive of the spontaneity of the will. He acknowledges that Kant’s claim from a theoretical point of view is only that the distinction between causa phaenomenon and causa noumenon is a possible one. But Lange rejects as a mere sophism the idea that, from a practical standpoint, the same distinction is a real one.10 Nietzsche, who from early on basically agrees with Lange –​and with the positivists –​on the inadequacy of Kant’s psychology, will later see in Kant’s claim that causality with freedom (absolute spontaneity) is only a postulate of practical reason, a further sign of Kant’s ‘obscurantism’.11

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2.  Nietzsche’s uses of ‘spontaneity’ In Nietzsche’s texts we find two opposite uses of ‘spontaneity’. 1. When Nietzsche intends to criticize what he takes to be a metaphysical conception, he speaks of ‘free spontaneity’ (NL Autumn 1887 10[57], KSA 12.486) or of ‘absolute spontaneity’ (GM II 7, KSA 5.305). He ascribes this concept of free or absolute ‘spontaneity’ of the will to a broad metaphysical and religious tradition, not only and not specifically to Kant. 2. In other cases, Nietzsche usually intends to advance an alternative conception. Sometimes he simply uses ‘spontaneity’ (or ‘spontaneous’) without further qualifications, sometimes he employs words which introduce a graduation, a more or less of ‘spontaneity’, speaking, for instance, of ‘strong spontaneity’ (NL 1883 9[25], KSA 10.353) or of a ‘deep weakening of spontaneity’ (NL 1887 10[18], KSA 12.464). It is clearly impossible to square such a graduation with absolute spontaneity; and Nietzsche understands his suggestion as a non-​or anti-​metaphysical concept of spontaneity. Before 1880, the substantive ‘spontaneity’ and the corresponding adjective ‘spontaneous’ do not seem to belong to Nietzsche’s vocabulary, neither as technical terms nor as words of common usage. I have been able to retrace only an occurrence, though marginal, possibly the result of a dictation. In the summer semester 1865, as a student of philology and theology in Bonn, Nietzsche heard Karl Schaarschmidt’s lecture on General History of Philosophy: Schaarschmidt taught that according to Aristotle ethics has its source in ‘spontaneity’.12 In the third part of Audience and Popularity (Publikum und Popularität, 1878), Richard Wagner, disappointed with Human, All Too Human, polemicized against the ‘historical school’ influenced by Darwin, complaining that ‘the concept of the spontaneous, of spontaneity [emphases in the original] as such (. . .) has been excluded from the new system of knowledge of the world’.13 In his plea for ‘spontaneity’, Wagner connects it with the genius, a concept sharply criticized in Human, All Too Human; and this criticism was obviously one main point of disagreement between Nietzsche and Wagner. But Wagner may also be referring to Nietzsche’s adamant denial of free will and his refusal of Kant’s absolute spontaneity and Schopenhauer’s alternative solution.14 As one would expect from Wagner, he does not elucidate and still less define ‘the concept of the spontaneous’ in any way. But even if his idealistic conception of ‘spontaneity’ is muddled, he is not wrong when he remarks that the philosophy

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of Human, All Too Human does not involve any concept of ‘spontaneity’. In this book, Nietzsche does not even use the term. Nietzsche’s new conception of ‘spontaneity’ emerges only at the beginning of 1880, in the notes for Daybreak. The late appearance of the terms ‘spontaneity’/​’spontaneous’ enables a rather straightforward answer to the question of the sources and roots of Nietzsche’s conception. His immediate source is beyond any doubt J. J. Baumann’s Handbook of Morals.15 This minor philosopher introduces Nietzsche to Alexander Bain’s theory of the ‘Beginnings of the Will’, and thereby to an influent conception of spontaneity which is very different from, indeed opposed to, the Kantian. According to Baumann (1879), a theory of the will has the task of analysing the will in its components; and only scientific psychology enables us to do this adequately. From this naturalistic standpoint, Kant’s ‘formal conception of the will’ (70) is even less plausible than the theory shared by the philosophical tradition. The received view of the will considers representation and sentiment of value –​‘clarity of representation and force of the sentiment of value’ –​the only components of the ‘efficacious will [effectiven Willen]’ (3). Baumann’s objection is that this received view ignores the fundamental role of the unintentional movements, that is, as we shall see, of (Alexander Bain’s) spontaneous activity. In Baumann’s eyes, Kant, who shares the mistake of the received view, stands for an even more reductive approach. For Kant’s definition of the will eliminates even the sentiments of value.16 Of the three moments of the will Kant acknowledges only one, the formal moment, Baumann’s ‘representation’. Baumann’s criticism betrays how different his approach is from Kant’s, whose investigation of pure practical reason and its postulates ignores, as a matter of principle, empirical, anthropological and psychological aspects. Baumann’s rejection of Kant’s method goes in the same direction as Lange’s and Meyer’s objections to absolute spontaneity. Like them and like many of his contemporaries, Baumann is after an empirically well-​founded theory. His goal is a physiologically and psychologically corroborated conception of ‘efficacious will’ and of the (physiological and psychological) laws of its formation. This is the first step in his ethics. For Baumann, there is no absolute spontaneity of representations, hence no free will in an absolute sense. But there is an efficacious will, which depends on pregiven spontaneous movements and on exercise. This conception of the will is deeply influenced by Bain, even if for Baumann his teacher Lotze, as well as Herbart and Johannes Müller, one of Bain’s own main physiological references, are also relevant.

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Nietzsche read Bain directly,17 but neither of the two books which Baumann (1879: 6 ff.) mentions –​The Senses and the Intellect and The Emotions and the Will –​was available in German. Taken together, they make up one of the two classical British treatises on psychology in the mid-​century, the other being Herbert Spencer’s Principles of Psychology (1870–​72).18 Since I have already dealt with Nietzsche’s immediate reception of Baumann’s theory of the will elsewhere,19 here I will sacrifice much detail and, in order to give an idea of the broader context in which Nietzsche’s position can be situated, take Bain into account, even if his and Baumann’s theories are not identical. My aim is to show that Nietzsche’s view of spontaneity stands in a tradition which was very influent in the nineteenth century and very different from, indeed opposed to, the Kantian. Bain incorporated Müller’s motor theory into his own associationist psychology. Until then, associationist psychology had focused on sensation in the epistemological tradition of British empiricism. Bain’s new emphasis on movements, the priority of movement on sensation, was in diametrical opposition to this received approach. According to Bain, spontaneity appears before there is a will at all; the will has its origin in spontaneous movements, ‘spontaneous activities’, which do not need to be conscious. Bain (1855: 289) defines ‘spontaneous activity’ as the fact ‘that our various organs are liable to be moved by a stimulus proceeding from the nervous centers, in the absence of any impression from without, or any antecedent state of feeling whatsoever’. This ‘spontaneous activity’ is ‘an essential prelude to voluntary power’ (289). Bain insists on the novelty of his theories, claiming to have been the first to notice (1) ‘the existence of spontaneous actions’ in this sense of the word, and (2) ‘the essential connection’ of these ‘spontaneous actions’ with ‘voluntary actions’.20 Bain’s spontaneous actions, which are not yet voluntary, are the ‘prelude’ to ‘voluntary actions’ (289). Kant’s spontaneity of representation and Bain’s spontaneity of involuntary movements and activities are worlds apart. Kant’s absolute spontaneity is the hallmark of thought and a special form of mental (noumenal, not empirical) causation. For Bain (1859: 552), ‘[t]‌he spontaneous beginnings of movement are a result of the physical mechanism under the stimulus of nutrition’. The key points of difference are:  (a)  Bain decouples ‘spontaneity’ and the ‘will’:  there is spontaneity (movements, instincts) before there is a will; (b)  he decouples ‘spontaneity’ and ‘consciousness’: at the beginning, there is unconscious spontaneity, spontaneity without consciousness; (c)  he disjoins ‘spontaneity’ and ‘freedom’: the will is spontaneous, but not free –​spontaneity is real, freedom

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illusory; d) Bainian spontaneity is graduated:  there is weaker and stronger spontaneity. Given this background, Nietzsche’s use of words which imply a graduation becomes transparent, for instance, when he claims that a ‘strong spontaneity’ (NL 1883 9[25], KSA 10.353) is a requirement of moral actions.21 This ‘strong spontaneity’, which belongs to the ‘highest sort of organic functions’ (NL 1883 9[25], KSA 10.353), is Bainian spontaneity, which can be stronger or weaker, not Kantian spontaneity, which is postulated to be absolute.22

3.  Spontaneity in the Nachlass of Daybreak Baumann focused on what was really new in Bain’s psychology: on the centrality of activity, spontaneity, on ‘the great fact’ of our spontaneous energy with its degrees and varieties. In 1880, Nietzsche takes up the elements of Bain’s conception of ‘spontaneity’ emphasized in Baumann’s Handbook: Bain’s theory of the primacy of the biological urge to move and to be busy and of the amount of spontaneous ‘energy’ that is discharged in spontaneous ‘movements’. Nietzsche, who in his private notes usually approves or criticizes contemporary authors without feeling the necessity of going into the details of their theories, at first does not make this new conception of ‘spontaneity’ wholly explicit. However, he begins to use the term ‘spontaneity’ accordingly: animal life is movement, activity, an urge to move for the sake of moving, an inescapable need to act for the sake of acting. Every living being moves, this ‘activity’ (Thätigkeit) is life itself.23 ‘Spontaneous movements and actions’ are random movements without a goal or purpose. Pleasure is inherent in moving, without being the purpose of these movements.24 This ‘spontaneity’ of movement is ‘the most essential’ (1[126]) trait even of voluntary action.25 The challenge for this naturalistic theory is to tell a compelling story that gradually leads from random movements to full-​fledged voluntary action. Without a pregiven organic basis of unconscious and involuntary dispositions to move, without ‘spontaneous activity’, the other two components of the ‘will’, representations and feelings, would not have any effect. Hence, for Baumann (1879), there is no free will in an absolute sense (no absolute spontaneity of representations), but there is an ‘efficacious will’, which has two preconditions: ‘spontaneous’ activity and exercise. Slowly, through repetition and exercise, the random or toddling, groping movements  –​the ‘beginnings of spontaneous activity [Betätigung]’ (38) –​are selected and coordinated; this process involves a reversal

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of the original association: representations and feelings, which at first were mere accompaniments and by-​products of the involuntary movements, become able to unleash the associated movements. In 1880, Nietzsche basically follows the solution outlined in the Handbuch. He promptly begins to conceive the animal urge to move in ‘energetic’ terms: Very early in life, the internal energy of the organism, ‘the spontaneous mass of energy’ (NL 1880 6[252], KSA 9.263), the ‘spontaneous force’ (NL 1883 7[254], KSA 10.320), discharges itself in random movements. Baumann’s two preconditions of an efficacious will  –​these pregiven spontaneous movements and e­xercise  –​become in Nietzsche’s ‘energetic’ theory the ‘spontane Masse von Energie’ [spontaneous mass of energy] and ‘die eingeübten Bewegungen dieser Masse’ [exercised movements of this mass] (NL 1880 6[252], KSA 9.263). Similarly, in 1883 these preconditions of an efficacious will also explain why we feel free: our sense of freedom is a function of ‘spontaneous force’ and of ‘exercise’ (NL 1883 7[254], KSA 10.320). However, these are in fact preconditions of the efficacious will and not evidence of absolute freedom. As Baumann’s Bainian theory explains, the received view neglects the pre-​exercised movements and ascribes to the ‘will’ causal powers it does not have, being only a ‘stimulus’ that merely unlooses the spontaneous force and the ‘numerous and complicated exercised movements’ (NL 1884, 27[65], KSA 11.291). Hence, Nietzsche sees a fundamental difference between the ‘free will’, which is an illusion, and what Baumann calls ‘the efficacious will’, which can be real. Baumann’s Bainian conception of spontaneity drives Nietzsche’s attention towards the concept of ‘force’, leading him to new investigations. In 1881, he integrates Julius Robert Mayer’s concept of ‘unloosing’ (Auslösung) in his Bainian view of spontaneity and exercise, and thus he tries to develop the conception of a ‘will’ which is not a cause, but only a stimulus that releases or unlooses spontaneous force.26 The theory of ‘spontaneous activity’ which Nietzsche adopts before Daybreak has an enormous influence on his further philosophical development. In 1880, he already conceives the animal urge to move and to act in ‘energetic’ terms: as a necessity to discharge force; and he claims that ‘activity’ (Thätigkeit), spontaneous movement, is life itself (NL 1880 1[45], KSA 9.16). A few years later, in Beyond Good and Evil, he uses the same Bainian view in order to qualify life as will to power: ‘Above all, a living thing wants to discharge its strength: life itself is will to power’ (BGE 13, KSA 5.27). While in 1880 Nietzsche basically agrees with Baumann’s naturalistic approach and still conceives of ‘spontaneous activity’ according to the biophysical paradigm of his age, that is, by taking forces to

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be mechanical forces, in On the Genealogy of Morality he gives a new twist to his proposal by developing a critical view of the mechanistic or ‘reactive’ tendencies in contemporary physiology. The Genealogy argues that without the fundamental concept of (spontaneous) activity we misunderstand nothing less than the ‘essence of life’, its ‘will to power’ (GM II 12, KSA 5.316): today ‘physiology and biology’ have lost ‘their basic concept, that of actual activity [Aktivität]’ by overlooking the primacy of the ‘spontaneous [. . .] forces’ (GM II 12, KSA 5.315–​16). Nietzsche’s objection against the worldview in which the fundamental concept of ‘activity’ –​and with it the concept of ‘spontaneity’ –​has been ‘spirited away’ sounds similar to the severe criticism that Wagner (1878) had formulated against Nietzsche himself, although without naming either him or Human, All Too Human. As mentioned above, the disappointed composer attacked the ‘historical school’ and complained ‘that the concept of the spontaneous, of spontaneity as such (. . .) has been excluded from the new system of knowledge of the world’ (145). Wagner’s criticism in Audience and Popularity and Nietzsche’s argument in On the Genealogy of Morality not only sound similar, but really take aim at a similar target. Wagner considered the philosophy of Human, All Too Human to be an expression of mechanism. In the Genealogy Nietzsche himself, now far from his previous views, rejects mechanical approaches. Does his criticism of the worldview that ‘spirits away’ (spontaneous) ‘activity’ betray a metaphysical tendency? Even if his new conception of ‘spontaneity’, which emerges only in 1880, has little to do with Wagner’s unclear view, the similarity of the two arguments may raise suspicions. On the whole, the Genealogy is built on the opposition between ‘active’ and ‘reactive’, ‘activity’ and ‘reactivity’. In his Handbook Baumann often translates Bain’s ‘activity’ as ‘Aktivität’. In 1880 Nietzsche prefers the more usual ‘Tätigkeit’. The distinction tends to get lost in translation: ‘Tätigkeit’ is a term of common language with a whole range of meanings, whereas the technical term ‘Activität’ stands for the property of ‘being active’. In the Genealogy, Nietzsche follows Baumann’s insightful choice and adopts ‘Activität’ for the property of ‘being active’. But in the works published after the Genealogy this term disappears, more precisely:  the whole conceptual field ‘active’/​‘activity’ (aktiv, Aktivität, not: Tätigkeit) disappears. The same is true for ‘spontaneous’/​’spontaneity’. The Genealogy is the only published work in which the terms ‘spontaneity’/​‘spontaneous’ occur. Although the new conception of ‘spontaneous activity’ had emerged in posthumous notes at the beginning of 1880, in Daybreak itself, as well as in the immediately subsequent writings, the terms ‘spontaneity’/​‘spontaneous’ do not even appear. After the Genealogy they swiftly disappear again. Perhaps Nietzsche

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came to agree with those of his contemporaries who, like Charles Féré, rejected Bainian ‘spontaneity’ as a metaphysical conception. Although he continued to express similar criticisms, he seems to have given up the project of reforming physiology.27

4.  Nietzsche, Goethe and Schopenhauer on Kant’s ‘radical evil’ In autumn 1887, Nietzsche declares that he intends to make use of ‘Goethe’s passage on radical evil’ in order to ‘characterize’ Kant ‘as a moral fanatic’ (NL 1887, 10[118], KSA 12.525).28 Nietzsche does not quote the passage, but he is undoubtedly referring to a contemptuous statement written by Goethe in the same year (1793) in which Kant’s Religion within the Bounds of Mere Reason was published. According to Goethe Kant ‘wantonly tainted’ his own ‘philosophical mantle’ ‘with the shameful stain [Schandfleck] of radical evil, in order that even Christians might be attracted to kiss its hem’.29 In Religion within the Bounds of Mere Reason Kant had called radical evil the ‘putrid stain’ of the human race (‘den faulen Fleck unserer Gattung’). However, according to Goethe, it is not mankind that is stained, but Kant’s own philosophy –​and the stain is not radical evil, which does not exist, but the concept of radical evil, a superstitious sacrilege against philosophy. Goethe suggests that Kant introduced this concept in order to make his philosophy attractive to Christians, who would be glad if they could find in ‘radical evil’ the familiar concept of ‘original sin’. Goethe’s parody overstates the affinity between ‘radical evil’ and ‘original sin’. He is not interested in the conceptual differences between the two. Among Kant’s contemporaries, Goethe was not the only one who saw the concept of radical evil as continuous with a religious tradition dating from the middle ages. With his uncompromising attitude towards Christian ethics Goethe couldn’t be sympathetic with Kant’s attempt to distillate a rational core of religion. In this sense Goethe’s slating statement on ‘radical evil’ is a dismissal of Kant’s whole attempt. On another occasion, Nietzsche claims that the distinction between ‘phenomenon’ and ‘thing in itself ’ is ‘[t]‌he putrid stain [der faule Fleck] of Kantian criticism’ (NL 1886–​7 5[4], KSA 12.185). Here Nietzsche uses Kant’s term [fauler Fleck] and not Goethe’s [Schandfleck]. Is Nietzsche aware that he is turning Kant’s expression against Kant himself? Perhaps. But not necessarily. He might not even have noticed that Goethe’s text is a parody of Kant. In any case, Nietzsche agrees with Goethe and tends to assimilate Kant to Schopenhauer:  both, Kant too,

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have the idea of ‘sanctity in the background’ (NL 1887, 10[118], KSA 12.525). Nietzsche does not really explain how and why. But a good decade before he had already found the origin of both Schopenhauer’s ethics and Kant’s ‘radical evil’ in pessimistic religion: pessimistic religions invented the ‘metaphysical meaning’ of ‘radical evil’ (NL End 1876 –​Summer 1877 23[77], KSA 8.429).30 Here, Nietzsche’s jargon is a mélange of ‘metaphysical meaning’ (Schopenhauer) and ‘radical evil’ (Kant). What would Schopenhauer have thought of this strange synthesis? On the one hand, he himself may have suggested the assimilation of ‘radical evil’ to his view of the ‘will to life’. On the other hand, Schopenhauer denies Kant’s conception of ‘radical evil’ any true philosophical dignity:  the expression ‘radical evil’ satisfies only those ‘for whom a word can take the place of an explanation’; the real philosophical explanation of the corresponding facts is given only by Schopenhauer’s own concept of ‘will to life’.31 This notwithstanding, Nietzsche insists on the basic agreement, although less between Kant and Schopenhauer themselves than between both and the cultural background of pessimistic religion. In Nietzsche’s texts Goethe’s and Schopenhauer’s doubts, and not only theirs, resurface in a more radical form: Nietzsche sees in Kant’s conception of ‘radical evil’ a proof, perhaps the best one, of Kant’s ‘moral fanaticism’. However, even if Nietzsche is well acquainted with some of the common criticisms,32 his bold assimilation of Kant’s and Schopenhauer’s views suggests that he does not have a very exact idea of Kant’s conception of ‘radical evil’. It is even difficult to tell if he knows what it means, as he does not expose what it consists in. Does Nietzsche really use the word ‘radical’ in a Kantian sense –​that is, in the sense of ‘at the root’? Or does he understand it rather in the everyday sense of ‘extreme’? This would go against Kant’s clear distinction between ‘radical evil’ and a ‘devilish will’. Human beings do not have a ‘devilish will’, which would pursue evil for evil’s sake; ‘radical evil’ explains, rather, why man often acts against the moral law by adopting a maxim contrary to it even though he cannot avoid respecting the authority of the moral law.33 Nietzsche does not seem to have understood this point. Nietzsche reads Kant’s ‘radical evil’ symptomatically, seeking in this conception a definitive confirmation of his more general thesis of the continuity between Kant and the religious tradition. He is more interested in a diagnosis that traces the roots of Kant’s conception back to ‘pessimistic religion’ than in something like a sustained confutation. Nietzsche explicitly ascribes the concept ‘radical evil’ to Kant only in posthumous notes. The aphorism of Human, All Too Human, which foresees the ‘Victory of knowledge over radical evil’ (HH 56, KSA 2.75), does not even mention Kant.

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Here, the expression ‘radical evil’, which occurs only in the title, does not stand for a Kantian view, but simply for ‘the idea that man is fundamentally evil and corrupt’ (HH 56, KSA 2.75). Thus the ‘Victory of knowledge over radical evil’ has a twofold meaning. (1) Knowledge defeats a conception, the religious, moral and metaphysical view of evil. This is obviously a very un-​Kantian victory, as it implies the unreality of something like ‘evil’. (2) Knowledge defeats not merely a conception, but what according to religious tradition embodied evil, the violence and ‘wildness’ of the passions. The free spirit himself, as a form of life, stands for this victory. ‘He who desires little more of things than knowledge of them easily finds repose of soul’, he becomes ‘cool’ (HH 56, KSA 2.75). In tacit agreement with Schopenhauer, Nietzsche’s posthumous notes had proposed a reading of Kant’s ‘radical evil’ as affine to the phenomenology of Schopenhauer’s will to life. But a Schopenhauerian victory over ‘radical evil’ would be the negation of the will, and already the young Nietzsche saw in this negation an impossibility. In Human, All Too Human he does not claim that the drives can be suppressed, which is impossible, but that they can take on new, mitigated forms. Nevertheless, this conception of a victory over ‘radical evil’ as a ‘cooling down’ and a calming of the passions still owes a lot to Schopenhauer, and Nietzsche will abandon it after Human, All Too Human. Aphorism 103 of Human, All Too Human, ‘Das Harmlose an der Bosheit’, ‘The harmless element in evilness’ (HH 103, KSA 2.99–​100), intends to show that ‘evilness’ or ‘wickedness’ is ‘harmless’: ‘Even teasing demonstrates what pleasure it gives to vent our power on others and to produce in ourselves the pleasurable feeling of ascendancy’ (HH 103, KSA 2.99). In this sense, even evilness ‘does not have the suffering of another as such as its objective, but our own enjoyment’ (HH 103, KSA 2.100). Hence, evilness is ‘harmless’ not in the proper sense that it does not (or not intentionally) harm others, but only in a very restricted sense: it sees in the suffering of others only a means to an end. The final purpose is the ‘pleasure’ ‘to vent our power on others’. The harm to others, although intentional, is not a purpose in itself. In the later writings, the strive ‘to vent our power on others’ (HH 103, KSA 2.99) is even more important. In Daybreak, however, it does not denote ‘evilness’ as such, without further distinction, but only one of two very different sorts of evil. Nietzsche borrows the distinction between ‘evil of strength’ and ‘evil of weakness’ from Baumann, but he gives a new explanation of both. Now, the conception of evilness as ‘harmless’ reveals itself as too simple; the ‘evil of weakness’, which is close to ‘wickedness’, is not harmless, not even in the restricted sense of

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Human, All Too Human, for ‘the evil of weakness wants to harm others and to see the signs of the suffering it has caused’ (D 371, KSA 3.245).34 The explanation of the ‘evil of strength’ in Daybreak restates in a restricted form the earlier thesis that the last purpose of ‘evilness’ is the ‘pleasure’ ‘to vent our power on others [am Andern unsere Macht auszulassen]’ (HH 103, KSA 2.99). At the same time, the idea of an ‘evil of strength’ consisting in the urge of power to vent itself on others belongs together with Nietzsche’s new conception of ‘spontaneity’ and is a straightforward extension of Baumann’s and Bain’s insights into the primary urge to act and to move among animals and humans. ‘The evil of strength [. . .] has to discharge itself ’ or ‘must vent itself somehow’ (D 371, KSA 3.245).35 ‘When man possesses the feeling of power’, he has to ‘discharge his power’ or to ‘vent his power’ (D 189, KSA 3.162) on other people. Here, Daybreak somehow anticipates the well-​known idea from Beyond Good and Evil already mentioned above: ‘Above all, a living thing wants to discharge its strength: life itself is will to power’ (BGE 13, KSA 5.27). In the German original, these passages are even more similar than the English translations tend to suggest: The evil of strength ‘muss sich auslassen’ (M 371, KSA 3.245), the man who ‘possesses the feeling of power’ must ‘seine Macht auslassen’ (M 189 KSA 3.162), and what a living thing wants above all is ‘seine Kraft auslassen’ (JGB 13, KSA 5.27). Nietzsche agrees with Baumann’s Bainian view when he interprets the animal urge to move as a need to discharge force, but he departs from the Handbuch when he qualifies this need as will to power. The explanation of the ‘evil of strength’ in Daybreak had somehow anticipated this move. For Nietzsche, Baumann’s (and Bain’s) basic urge to act and to move is in the end an urge to master and submit; and the ‘evil of strength’ is simply the form this basic drive takes among the strong. Baumann, on the contrary, never thinks of explaining the drive to dominate, which corresponds to the ‘evil of strength’, with the primary urge to move. For him, only this urge is basic, not the drive to overwhelm and master. Nietzsche’s idea that, in the end, the two coincide is foreign to Baumann. In Daybreak, the fundamental need to discharge force, although a general characteristic of every human being, refers especially to the strong. It compels them to their particular form of evil. They cannot do otherwise. The ‘evil of strength’, even if it is far from being Nietzsche’s ideal, is judged mildly, almost positively. A few years later, in section 13 of the first essay of the Genealogy, Nietzsche reformulates the thesis concerning the ‘evil of strength’ as an argument against the freedom of will. ‘It is just as absurd to ask strength not to express itself as strength’ (GM I  13, KSA 5.279); it does not make sense to separate ‘strength

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from the manifestations of strength’; for ‘strength’ is only a name for these ‘manifestations’. Since these ‘manifestations’ are nothing else than what Daybreak called the ‘evil of strength’, the Genealogy just restates the previous thesis that the ‘evil of strength’ necessarily belongs to strength. The Genealogy tries to underpin this thesis with an analogy, boldly encompassing human and animal strength, as well as political power and ‘force’ in physics. For Nietzsche, ‘strength’ and the ‘force’ of physicists are liable to the same misunderstanding. We should not separate them from their ‘manifestations’, as if ‘force’ or ‘strength’ was something lying behind its ‘manifestations’. From Bain’s thesis of the urge to move and from Kirchhoff ’s and Mach’s thesis about the concept of force, Nietzsche draws, as a conclusion, his far less evident thesis of the ‘evil of strength’: ‘strength’ must ‘overthrow, crush, become master’ (cf. GM I 13, KSA 5.278–​81). Here, even more explicitly than in Daybreak, Nietzsche’s explanation ends up with a justification. This is not the only difference from Kant. According to GM I 13 (KSA 5.280), the ‘free subject’ and the ‘thing in itself ’ are related illusions. Human languages, especially Indo-​European languages (cf. BGE 20, KSA 5.34–​5), mislead philosophers (but not only philosophers) into reifying the grammatical subject and misreading it as a cause of actions. ‘The seduction of language (and of the fundamental errors of reason petrified within it)’ is responsible for the concepts of ‘force’ and ‘will’, for it ‘construes and misconstrues all actions as conditioned by agency, by a “subject” ’ (GM I 13, KSA 5.280). The metaphysical subject is a by-​ product of the grammatical subject. Aphorism 17 of Beyond Good and Evil claims that, instead of saying ‘I think’, we should rather say ‘it thinks’ (BGE 17, KSA 5.31). The argument is reminiscent of Lichtenberg, who probably takes the formula ‘it thinks’ from Kant himself. In the first Critique Kant lists as alternative ways of speaking: ‘this I or He or It (the Thing) which Thinks’ [‘dieses Ich, oder Er, oder Es (das Ding), welches denkt’] (KrV A 345 f.f/​B 404).36 Lichtenberg compares his ‘it thinks’ with an impersonal construction such as ‘it thunders’, in which a pronoun functions as grammatical subject: ‘Es denkt, sollte man sagen, so wie man sagt: es blitzt’ [‘It thinks, should we say, so as we say: lightning strikes/​there is lightning.’].37 According to GM I 13, the analogy, with which Lichtenberg tries to justify his ‘it thinks’, is misleading. In the Genealogy, the sentence ‘der Blitz leuchtet’ [the lightning flashes]38 takes the place of Lichtenberg’s ‘es blitzt’ [there is lightning]: ‘Basically, the common people double a deed; when they see lightning flash, they make a doing-​a-​deed out of it:  they posit the same event, first as cause and then as its effect’ (GM I 13, KSA 5.279); ‘[. . .] the common people separates lightning from its flash and takes the latter to

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be a deed, something performed by a subject, which is called lightning [. . .]’ (GM I 13, KSA 5.279). The same seduction, which is already present in the case of Lichtenberg’s ‘es blitzt’, is even more tantalizing when the grammatical subject is a substantive such as ‘lightning’. In both cases, the grammatical subject ‘reduplicates’ the ‘verb’ and is misinterpreted as a ‘substratum’:  as a ‘doer’ ‘behind the deed’ (GM I 13, KSA 5.279). It seems to follow from this that the sentence ‘es blitzt’ [there is lightning] misled Lichtenberg into making precisely the same mistake which his ‘es denkt’ [it thinks] still shares with Kant’s ‘I think’, that is, the presupposition that ‘thinking is an activity’ and that ‘every activity requires an agent’ (BGE 17, KSA 5.31). Aphorism BGE 17 begins by accepting Lichtenberg’s proposal:  instead of ‘I think’, we should rather say ‘it thinks’. But, in the end, Nietzsche dismisses even the ‘it’ in Lichtenberg’s ‘it thinks’ as a final metaphysical residuum: As far as the superstitions of the logicians are concerned: I will not stop emphasizing a tiny little fact that these superstitious men are loath to admit:  that a thought comes when ‘it’ wants, and not when ‘I’ want. 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. People are following grammatical habits here in drawing conclusions, reasoning that ‘thinking is an activity, behind every activity something is active, therefore –​.’ Following the same basic scheme, the older atomism looked behind every ‘force’ that produces effects for that little lump of matter in which the force resides, and out of which the effects are produced, which is to say: the atom. More rigorous minds finally learned how to make do without that bit of ‘residual earth,’ and perhaps one day even logicians will get used to making do without this little ‘it’ (into which the honest old I has disappeared). (BGE 17, KSA 5.30–​1)

The aphorism does not mention Lichtenberg –​or even Kant –​and its main target are contemporary ‘logicians’, who, when they do not stick to the ‘I think’, are still incapable to do without the ‘it’. (What Nietzsche writes about ‘condition’ or ‘immediate certainty’ suits some of these minor philosophers better than Kant.) In a sense Lichtenberg’s remark already implies the solution explicitly pointed out by Nietzsche. Lichtenberg implicitly compares the German ‘ich denke’ with the Latin ‘cogito’. Whereas in Latin one can simply say ‘cogito’ (instead of ‘ego cogito’), the German ‘ich denke’ (not unlike ‘I think’ in English –​or ‘je pense’ in French) necessarily involves the postulated ‘I’. Obviously this difference between

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languages does not correspond to the historical relation between Descartes’ ‘cogito’, which is a thinking thing, and Kant’s ‘I think’, which is not a substance. For Lichtenberg, however, philosophers are misled (1) by the first person (cogito) and (2) by the pronoun ‘I’ (‘I think’). The second is for Lichtenberg by far the main problem if we take his claim earnestly that replacing the Latin ‘cogito’ with the translation ‘Ich denke’ is ‘too much’. Now, if Lichtenberg finds cogito more acceptable than ‘I think’, should it not follow that ‘cogitat’ is preferable to ‘it thinks’? Should we not switch from the first to the third person without postulating something like an ‘it’? If this is Lichtenberg’s implicit suggestion, Nietzsche simply makes it explicit when he invites contemporary ‘logicians’ to do for once without the little word ‘it’ (‘das kleine Wörtchen “es” ’, JGB 17, KSA 5.31). This conclusion is rather a further development than a refutation of Lichtenberg’s remark.

5.  Nietzsche’s anti-​Kantian ‘categorical imperative’ and the autonomy of the sovereign individual In the preface of the Genealogy, Nietzsche ascribes to himself a ‘new, immoral, or at least immoralistic “a priori” ’ and an ‘oh-​so-​anti-​Kantian, so enigmatic “categorical imperative” ’ (GM Preface 3, KSA 5.249), which was what in the end led him to his critique of morality. This ‘a priori’ which speaks imperatively is an idiosyncratic tendency that appears early in Nietzsche’s life and causes his straightforward opposition to his social environment. Hence the preface plays with Kant’s terminology, using Kantian words, as Nietzsche says, in an ‘anti-​Kantian’ sense. The terms ‘a priori’ and ‘categorical imperative’ are both in quotation marks. In another passage, Nietzsche praises a ‘Philosophie der “Gänsefüßchen” ’ (NL 1885 37[5]‌, KSA 11.580), a philosophy of ‘quotation marks’, or ‘scare quotes’, and he nicely puts the expression ‘quotation marks’ itself in quotation marks. But in such a philosophy the quotation marks are not always literally there. The Genealogy employs a whole array of Kantian terms. Do they all belong to such a philosophy of ‘quotation marks’? Does Nietzsche put them in ‘scare quotes’ –​ even if these are not always literally there? While in the Preface Nietzsche attributes to himself an immoralistic ‘a priori’ and an anti-​Kantian ‘categorical imperative’, in the second chapter of the second essay he ascribes ‘responsibility’, ‘autonomy’ and ‘free will’ to the sovereign individual. In the Preface, Nietzsche clearly does not endorse Kant’s conception, but

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gives to ‘a priori’ and ‘categorical imperative’ a new, ‘immoralistic’ content. The second chapter of the second essay, even if it is not as clear a case of a parody as the Preface, displays the same subversive intention of giving Kantian terms a radically new meaning. One important point, which has been overseen in the debate, is that Nietzsche’s main opponent here, even if implicitly, is Eduard von Hartmann. In 1881 Nietzsche strives for ‘the everlasting dissimilarity and highest possible sovereignty of the individual [des Einzelnen]’ (NL 1881 11[40], KSA 9.455).39 Reading the Phenomenology of Ethical Consciousness, he is deeply irritated by Hartmann’s use of the formula: Hartmann attacks ‘the absolute sovereignty of the [. . .] individual’40; and Nietzsche complains that in Hartmann’s Phenomenology ‘the sovereignty of the individual [die Souveränität des Individuums] coincides [.  . .] with egoistic prudential considerations which restrict the arbitrary will’ (NL July 1882–​Winter 1883–​1884 7[10], KSA 10.241). Hartmann, who ontologizes ethics, holds that in metaphysical pluralism the individual is like an absolute sovereign, and if it is not always ruthless, then merely out of prudential considerations [egoistische Klugheitsrücksichten]; these egoistical considerations are the only restriction to the absolute arbitrariness of its will. (That these considerations do restrain the individual could be the reason why Nietzsche in his note does not excerpt ‘absolute’.) Here, Hartmann (1879: 768) is taking aim at the idea of the ‘sovereignty of the I’, whose theorist he sees in Max Stirner (the main practicians are the Russian nihilists). In this sense, one could say that Nietzsche, reinterpreting and transvaluing Kant’s moral terminology, aims to give an interpretation of individual sovereignty that is not only antithetical to Stirner’s, but also wholly at odds with Hartmann’s ethical views.41 Hence, the ‘sovereign individual’, which makes its only explicit appearance in this very much commented text, is neither Nietzsche’s ideal tout court nor does it stand for the quintessence of modern subjectivity Nietzsche intends to attack.42 Rather, the description of this ‘autonomous’, ‘free’ and ‘responsible’ man follows a specific textual strategy, systematically cultivating the art, ‘to use a moral formula in a supra-​moral sense’ (BGE 257, KSA 5.205). I will sketch the context only very briefly. The aim of the second essay is to show to what extent ‘the real problem of man’ was solved:  to what extent man became ‘the animal’ ‘das versprechen darf’ (GM II 1, KSA 5.291), that is, the animal ‘with the right to make promises’,43 the animal which is capable not only of making, but also of keeping promises. This capacity requires  –​according to the term Nietzsche borrowed from Baumann  –​a ‘memory of the will’

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(GM II 1, KSA 5.292), which should not be confounded with memory tout court. For ‘the will’s memory’ is ‘an active desire not to let go’ [ein aktives Nicht-​wieder-​los-​werden-​wollen] and as such –​according to one more distinction that Nietzsche owes to Baumann –​the opposite of ‘a passive inability to be rid of an impression’ [ein passivisches Nicht-​wieder-​los-​werden-​können] (GM II 1, KSA 5.292).44 This inability is an unpleasant consequence of memory, with which the active force of forgetfulness has to cope, whereas ‘the will’s memory’ is a positive ability, which makes possible ‘to keep on desiring what has been, on some occasion, desired’ [Fort-​und Fortwollen des ein Mal gewollten], so that the ‘long chain of the will’ (GM II 1, KSA 5.292) does not break. ‘How does this capability develop?’ is the problem Baumann’s Bainian theory was thought to solve. However, the second essay reformulates the question by giving a new answer. Hence, we should not jump to the conclusion that Nietzsche’s answer is Baumann’s Bainian will; but we can expect the ‘free will’, which is presented as the solution of this problem, not to be ‘free’ in the Kantian sense of absolute spontaneity. The sovereign individual is introduced as the late solution to this problem of man: it is the animal which has learned to make and keep promises. Before beginning to delve into the ‘long history and variety of forms’ of ‘the concept of “conscience” ’ (GM II 3), Nietzsche premises his own ‘supramoral’ concept of ‘conscience’, describing its ‘highest, almost disconcerting form’ (GM II 3, KSA 5.294). The second essay leaps directly to the ‘owner’ of this ‘conscience’, the ‘sovereign individual’, and the bold jump to this final accomplishment allows Nietzsche to do without a reconstruction of the whole genealogical process, thereby leaving it vague whether the ‘sovereign individual’ should be situated in a specific historical epoch and, if so, in which. There is an historical gap between the epoch of the ‘morality of mores’ and the ‘sovereign individual’. The ‘morality of mores’ has accomplished only ‘the preparatory task’ (GM II 2, KSA 5.293) of making man calculable, but has not yet achieved the ultimate goal of making man the animal that can make and keep promises. This ‘sovereign individual’ is the fruit of the whole ‘tremendous process’, which merely begins with the ‘morality of mores’ and its preparatory task. Nietzsche –​I think, intentionally –​does not assign the sovereign individual’ to a specific epoch. He avoids saying something about the length of that historical gap and to specify if the final accomplishment of the encompassing process, the ‘sovereign individual’, lies in the past, the present or the future.45 Nietzsche does not commit himself either to excluding that there have already been ‘sovereign individuals’, for instance, in ancient Greece or in the Italian Renaissance, or to

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the opposite idea that some (even if only very few) current humans already are ‘sovereign individuals’. However, that every (present, ‘modern’) human being is a sovereign individual is a view Nietzsche clearly excludes. The ‘sovereign individual’ is a rare achievement. What is clearly implied and indeed explicitly asserted is that it is not the rule; on the contrary, its ‘responsibility’ is an ‘exceptional privilege’, its ‘freedom’ is a ‘rare’ (GM II 2, KSA 294) one, and so it is also its autonomy: the ‘sovereign individual’ is ‘free’, ‘responsible’ and ‘autonomous’ in a sense in which most human beings are not. The sovereign individual, ‘[t]‌he “free” man’ (GM II 2, KSA 5.293) in scare quotes, was not ‘free’ from the beginning: he ‘has become free’, and is now finally the ‘master of a free will’ (GM II 2, KSA 5.293). Here Nietzsche does not interpret, contradict or even just name Kant, but simply adopts the terms and ‘rewrites’ the concepts. Having a full-​fledged ‘memory of the will’ (GM II 1, KSA 5.292), being ‘the possessor of a durable [langen], unbreakable will’ (GM II 2, KSA 5.292), is a necessary, but not a sufficient condition of individual sovereignty. For one must be able not only to keep promises, but first and foremost to make them autonomously. Let us place ourselves [. . .] at the end of this immense process [. . .]: we then find the sovereign individual as the ripest fruit on its tree, like only to itself, having freed itself from the morality of custom, the autonomous, supra-​ethical individual (because ‘autonomous’ and ‘ethical’ are mutually exclusive), in short, the man who has his own, independent, enduring will, whose prerogative it is to promise –​and in him a proud consciousness quivering in every muscle of what has at length been achieved and become flesh in him, an actual consciousness of power and freedom, a feeling that man in general has reached completion. This emancipated man, who actually has the prerogative to promise, this master of the free will, this sovereign –​how should he not be aware of his superiority over everybody who does not have the prerogative to promise or stand as their own guarantors, of how much trust, fear and respect he arouses –​he ‘merits’ all three –​and of how with his self-​mastery he has necessarily been given mastery over circumstances, over nature and over all creatures with a less enduring and reliable will? (GM II 2, KSA 5.293–​4)

Individual sovereignty is self-​legislation. And to be ‘autonomous’ means to be ‘supra-​ethical’ [übersittlich] because ‘autonomous’ and ‘ethical’ [sittlich] are ‘mutually exclusive’. With this, Nietzsche may intend to suggest that Kantian morality is the sort of thing which can only be foreign to the sovereign individual. But if to be ‘übersittlich’ meant just to be ‘beyond the customary’ in the

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sense of the ‘morality of mores’ [Sittlichkeit der Sitte], Nietzsche would then be missing his target, because, for Kant, making use of one’s own reason and merely following the customary are mutually exclusive. Kant’s conception of rational autonomy implies precisely the capacity to go beyond a merely conventional morality, and Nietzsche’s ‘morality of mores’ is conventional in a superlative sense. However, to be ‘übersittlich’ involves something more than having overcome such a hyper-​conventional morality; and, for Nietzsche, the fact that the modern subject is no longer constrained by it does not invalidate that even that subject is still constrained by a morality which consists in a set of universally valid prescriptions. The sovereign individual, by contrast, does not conceive its promises –​the individual ethical code it creates for itself –​as possible universal laws; an universalistic morality allegedly grounded in universal reason is not at issue. As a sovereign, the self-​legislating individual is constrained only by the promises it makes; and these are not likely to be less idiosyncratic than Nietzsche’s own ‘categorical imperative’. Nietzsche takes target not (only) at Kant, but at Hartmann, who squarely opposes the autonomous morality [autonome Sittlichkeit] that his Phenomenology intends to found to Stirner’s sovereignty of the individual: ‘the sovereign self-​will [der souveräne Eigenwille]’ (Hartmann 1879:  769; cf. 770)  that rebels against ‘the imposition to give up formally its sovereignty [gegen die Zumuthung des formellen Verzichtes auf seine Souveränität]’ (769) stands for radical evil and fights against autonomous morality. Nietzsche counteracts Hartmann’s description: he identifies ‘autonomous’ with ‘supra-​ethical’, dissolves the link between autonomy and ethics [Sittlichkeit], eliminates the opposition of autonomy and sovereignty and ascribes a supra-​moral autonomy to his sovereign individual. How does the ascription ‘of a free will’ (GM II 2, KSA 5.293) to the sovereign individual square with GM I 13 and with the thesis of Beyond Good and Evil that there is neither ‘free’ nor ‘unfree’ will? Very well indeed. In Beyond Good and Evil Nietzsche has definitely left behind the determinism he had endorsed in Human, All Too Human. According to aphorism 21 of BGE, the alternative between ‘free’ and ‘unfree will’ is flawed. There is no ‘free’ will because there is no special, ‘free’ causality, and there is no ‘unfree’ will because this concept too ‘leads to an abuse of cause and effect’ (BGE 21, KSA 5.35). Thus, Nietzsche points out, the whole issue depends on unwarranted conceptions of causality. The idea of ‘free will’ implies a superlative causality: there is no absolute spontaneity, and the will, as Nietzsche puts it, is not ‘causa sui’, a self-​ contradictory notion. On the other side, the advocates of the ‘unfree will’ ‘mistakenly reify “cause” and “effect” ’ (BGE 21, KSA 5.35). They misunderstand the

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function of causality in general, which is a conventional fiction allowing, at best, descriptions, not explanations.46 Both determinism and indeterminism involve, each in its own way, too strong, and indeed mythological, notions of causality. Both Nietzsche and Kant deny that the problem of free will has a theoretical solution. For Kant ‘freedom’ (and ‘responsibility’), a postulate of practical reason, is a necessary component of our identity as moral agents. Mechanic causality and ‘causality through freedom’ are compatible; determinism and freedom are no demonstrable philosophical theories, but both are coherent notions. This is exactly what Nietzsche denies: they are not simply indemonstrable, but rather nonsensical myths. Nietzsche disputes the sense of both alternatives and, thus, of the whole problem.47 ‘The unfree will’ is a myth: in real life, it’s merely a matter of strong and weak will’ (BGE 21, KSA 5.36). Nietzsche does not claim that there is a mental entity, the ‘will’, that, instead of being ‘free’ (or ‘unfree’), is ‘strong’ (or ‘weak’). He maintains only that the opposition between ‘weak’ and ‘strong’ describes differences which matter ‘in real life’. The metaphysical controversy ‘free will’ versus ‘unfree will’ concerns philosophical claims about human will as such: as free or unfree, as a faculty or a fiction. The metaphysical question is if promise-​keepers and promise-​breakers are both ‘free’ or ‘unfree’:  at issue is the way every human being and every human action is to be interpreted. By contrast, the everyday distinction between ‘weak’ and ‘strong’ presupposes only the practical ability to discriminate between different patterns of behavior: someone keeps her promises, others break them. Although ‘in real life it’s [. . .] a matter of strong and weak will’ (BGE 21, KSA 5.36), neither of the two, not even the ‘strong will’, needs to be a free will in any superlative sense –​or even a will at all. From the thesis that the will is no unit, a few posthumous notes conclude that there is actually no will, neither free nor unfree.48 Aphorism 19 of BGE refuses the simplicity and the unity of the will, but not directly its existence. The main thesis brings to mind Baumann’s very general methodological prescription that a theory of the will has the task of analysing it adequately into its components. ‘Willing strikes me as, above all, something complicated, something unified only in a word –​and this single word contains the popular prejudice that has overruled whatever minimal precautions philosophers might take’ (BGE 19, KSA 5.32). For Nietzsche, the ‘will’ is complicated in a twofold sense: (1) it has more than one ‘ingredient’ (feeling, thought, affect) and (2) it results from a plurality of drives, since every human being is a ‘society’ of ‘wills’ or ‘souls’. Nietzsche denies ‘that will and action are somehow one’ (BGE 19, KSA 5.32–​3). Willing is not only complicated, it has no ‘necessary effect’, as it

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is not ‘sufficient for action’ (BGE 19, KSA 5.33).49 Hence, the ‘will’ is not ‘free’ (or ‘unfree’). We should use ‘freedom of the will’ as a ‘word for’ (BGE 19, KSA 5.32) a complicated, and pleasurable, feeling of agency and power, without mistaking a mere complex of feelings for a special type of causality.50 Giving commands to oneself is part of what willing is, and a person who identifies herself with the ‘commander’ has a sentiment of power that is not imaginary, but one should not misunderstand this feeling of real power as one of absolute freedom. Aphorism 21 of BGE ends with what looks like a psychological analysis. Human beings may have a feeling of freedom or lack it. Many contemporary Europeans do not feel free; and this lack of the sense of one’s own freedom is rooted in their weak will. The contrary feeling of freedom may pertain to the strong will, but is not restricted to it: metaphysical freedom is a more general illusion. Nevertheless: to the sovereign individual Nietzsche ascribes a similar feeling of freedom, a consciousness of power, which it calls its ‘conscience’. Neither for Kant nor for Nietzsche the self-​ascription of freedom warrants a theory of freedom. For Kant, even if freedom is not a theoretical issue, a self-​ ascription of freedom and responsibility is internal to the self-​understanding of a moral agent: a moral agent simply is someone who acts as if she (and the other humans) were absolutely free and responsible. Nietzsche does not give a formal argument proving that a self-​ascription of ‘sovereignty’ is internal to ‘sovereignty’ and that the individual would not be ‘sovereign’ if it did not attribute sovereignty to itself. The Genealogy simply insists that the sovereign individual knows its freedom and is aware of its own sovereignty. In which exact sense it believes to be free is left open; however, the ‘freedom’ this individual is not wrong about is its capacity to keep promises, not its absolute spontaneity. The proud knowledge of the extraordinary privilege of responsibility, the consciousness of this rare freedom and power over oneself and over fate, has penetrated him to his lowest depths and become an instinct, his dominant instinct:  –​what will he call his dominant instinct, assuming that he needs a word for it? No doubt about the answer: this sovereign human being calls it his conscience. (GM II 2, KSA 5.294)

What has become the dominating instinct of the sovereign individual? What does it call its ‘conscience’? Taken literally, rather than ‘freedom’ and ‘responsibility’ itself, it is its ‘knowledge’ and ‘consciousness’ (GM II 2, KSA 5.294) of being ‘free’ and ‘responsible’. Rather than denying that the dominating instinct is the ‘free will’ itself, Nietzsche intends to point out that ‘pride’ belongs to ‘sovereignty’: the ‘conscience’ of the sovereign individual is ‘a proud consciousness’,

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a proud awareness, and to have such a ‘conscience’ means ‘[t]‌o possess the right to stand security for oneself and to do so with pride [my emphasis], and therefore to have the prerogative to say yes to oneself ’ (GM II 3, KSA 5.294–​5).51 This pride, which implies self-​affirmation, is the ‘pathos of distance’ of the first essay. For Nietzsche, this form of the pathos of distance is the last development in the history of ‘conscience’. However, he only claims that the sovereign individual may use the concept ‘conscience’. It is the sovereign individual itself who calls ‘conscience’ its self-​affirmative pride, ‘assuming that it needs a word for it’ (GM II 2, KSA 5.294). For the ‘word’ it may choose, if it chooses one at all, is less important than the very act of baptizing, which is one of the main ways in which the pathos of distance is expressed. The pathos of distance involves a characteristic way of looking at oneself and others: ‘noble morality grows out of a triumphant saying ‘yes’ to itself ’ (GM I 10, KSA 5.270); ‘the good’ ‘saw and judged themselves and their actions as good, I mean firstrate, in contrast to everything lowly, low-​minded, common and plebeian’ (GM I 2, KSA 5.259). ‘It was from this pathos of distance that they first claimed the right to create values and give these values names’ (GM I 2, KSA 5.259). The ‘good’ create the positive values by giving names to their own distinctive qualities. With these names they define themselves and their peers. Nietzsche describes the sovereign individual in just the same way: it says yes to itself and takes its distinctive achievement, the ‘free’ will, as its ‘measure of value’, which it applies to itself and to others: ‘The “free” man, the possessor of a protracted and unbreakable will, thus has his own standard of value:  in the possession of such a will: looking out upon others from himself, he honors or despises’ (GM II 2, KSA 5.294). Here, the viewer looks first at herself; only in a second moment does she look out upon others from herself. For the pathos of distance, the primary moment is self-​affirmation: the attribution of negative qualities to the opposite type is only a derivative expression of power. The first essay shows how ressentiment reverses this direction of the ‘evaluating glance’ (GM I 10, KSA 5.271) and begins not with self-​affirmation, but with the negation of others. This ‘essential orientation to the outside instead of back onto itself ’ (GM I 10, KSA 5.271) is typical of resentment: here, the primary moment is the attribution of negative qualities to the opposite type, whereas the attribution of positive qualities to itself is only secondary, derivative. The second chapter of the second essay, which begins by showing that the ‘free’, ‘autonomous’ and ‘responsible’ individual is ‘beyond morality’, concludes by dealing with its new ‘conscience’. But, as a new form of the pathos of distance, this ‘conscience’ is opposed to the now dominant morality of ressentiment. For

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this reason, the contradiction between GM I 13 and GM II 2 is merely apparent:  GM I  13 rejects the concept of absolute freedom which resentment uses as a tool; GM II 2 praises the noble ‘freedom’ one attributes to oneself out of one’s pathos of distance. Hence, the sovereign individual would really not be ‘sovereign’ if it did not attribute this sovereignty to itself. But the reason is not the same as for Kant: the proud self-​ascription of a ‘conscience’ and of ‘freedom’ is central in Nietzsche’s description of the sovereign individual because it is the main expression of its pathos of distance. Whereas Kant’s moral agent ascribes absolute spontaneity to every human, it belongs to the pathos of distance of Nietzsche’s sovereign individual that it is very restrictive in attributing this ‘sovereignty’ to others. The pathos of distance can employ different vocabularies, and the ‘good’ give themselves and their ‘virtues’ different names. There is only a difference of jargon between the ‘strong will’ of Beyond Good and Evil and the ‘free will’ of the sovereign individual. The conception of the will is basically the same even if Beyond Good and Evil breaks with traditional usage, whereas GM II 2 keeps the received vocabulary, putting it in scare quotes and giving it an ‘extra-​moral’ meaning. Why does the second essay of the Genealogy proceed so? In Hartmann’s (1879:  804)  Phenomenology, ‘Stirner’s absolutisation of the I [Stirner’s Verabsolutirung des Ich]’ –​‘the libertinage of the sovereign caprice of the individual who regards its life as the absolute life [die Libertinage der souveränen Laune des Individuums, dem sein Leben als das absolute Leben gilt]’ –​ stands for the impossibility of ethics. For Hartmann, individual sovereignty is a conception with an unsound ontological basis: if ontological pluralism were true, the individuals would indeed be sovereign and restrain their arbitrary will only through pragmatic considerations dictated by egoism. Ethics would evaporate. For Hartmann this does not happen, however, since ontological pluralism is false. For this reason, ‘the absolute sovereignty of the individual [die absolute Souveränität des Individuums]’ is not ‘the last word of practical philosophy [das letzte Wort der praktischen Philosophie]’ (776). In the Genealogy, the sovereign individual comes close to being just this final word. It appears as the culminating point of a millenary history of morals. This belongs to Nietzsche’s ironical reply to Hartmann. More essentially, the Genealogy appropriates the term used disparagingly by Hartmann, the ‘sovereignty of the individual’, connecting it with a wholly new conception. For Nietzsche is profoundly adverse to the Stirnerian view described in the Phenomenology as absolute sovereignty of the individual. He dislikes the petty uniformity of Stirner’s only apparently individual egos; and in Hartmann’s Phenomenology the

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sovereignty of the individual stands for an eliminative reduction of ethics to mere self-​interested prudence. Nietzsche was incensed by this reductive conception of individual sovereignty; and the second chapter of the second essay is an ironical answer to this provocation. This ironical relation to the Phenomenology throws light on some peculiarities of Nietzsche’s description, among them the exalted tone as well as the use and abuse of Kantian terms. Lexically, Nietzsche reverses the opposition of individual sovereignty and ‘autonomous morality [autonome Sittlichkeit]’ in the Phenomenology and ascribes a supra-​moral autonomy to his sovereign individual. More generally, the range of Kantian terms Nietzsche uses here should not be simply ascribed to him out of this polemical context. Rather than to stand for anything like Nietzsche’s general position, the specific use of Kantian terms in this passage is due to a polemical intention. Reinterpreting and transvaluing Kant’s moral terminology, Nietzsche aims to give an interpretation of individual sovereignty that is at the same time antithetical to Stirner’s and wholly at odds with Hartmann’s ethical views.

Notes 1 Cf. Strawson (1966). On Kant’s concept of spontaneity, cf. Heidemann (1956; 1958), Mittelstrass (1965), Finster (1982), Pippin (1987), Allison (1996a), Nakano (2011) and Klemme (2012). 2 Some scholars grant that Kant understands ‘spontaneity’ as absolute, but maintain that it is easily construable as relative. Among the naturalist readings which construe Kant’s intellectual spontaneity of thought as only relative, and thus see in Kant a predecessor of functionalism, the most influential are those of Wilfrid Sellars (1974) and Patricia Kitcher (1994). For criticism of these views, cf. Pippin (1987), Allison (1996a). 3 On the issue whether knowledge and will are expressive of one and the same spontaneity, cf. Klemme (2012: 215). 4 Cf. Allison (1996a: 133 ff.). 5 According to Klaus Christian Köhnke (1986: 159), J. B. Meyer is the author of the first ‘neo-​Kantian’ book (Zum Streit über Leib und Seele. Worte der Kritik. Sechs Vorlesungen [. . .], Hamburg, 1856; on Mayer, cf. also Beiser (2014: 328ff.)). Meyer, professor in Bonn since 1868, and Nietzsche, who began his studies there, were personally acquainted. The young student seems to have never had a high opinion of Meyer as a philosopher. Later, the main point of disagreement became Schopenhauer’s philosophy. The ‘Bonner Afterphilosoph Jürgen-​Bona Meyer [sic]’ (NL 1872–​3 19[201], KSA 7.481) was a sharp critic of Schopenhauer’s (and

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von Hartmann’s) pessimism. Hence, Nietzsche counts ‘Jürgen Bona-​Meyer [sic], Kuno Fischer, Lotze’ (NL 1872–​3 19[259], KSA 7.501) among the philosophers he wants to attack, seeing in ‘Jürgen Meyer in Bonn’ one of those German philosophy professors who wholeheartedly believe that ‘a political innovation’, the foundation of the new German state, ‘suffice[s]‌to turn men once and for all into contented inhabitants of the earth’ (UB 3, § 4, KSA 1.363). See Meyer’s (1870: 27 ff.) own summary in his Kant’s Psychologie; on Fischer’s and Liebmann’s doubts and more in generally on the ‘psychologism’ of neo-​Kantian thinkers in the 1860s, cf. Beiser (2014: 209ff.). ‘If we will call the receptivity of our mind to receive representations insofar as it is affected in some way sensibility, then on the contrary the faculty for bringing forth representations itself, or the spontaneity of cognition, is the understanding’ (KdrV A 51/​B 75). Cf. Johann Friedrich Herbart: Psychologie als Wissenschaft neu gegründet auf Erfahrung, Metaphysik und Mathematik, 2 vols, Königsberg 1824 (vol. 1), 1825 (vol. 2), vol. 2, § 118: 166ff. There is no proof that Nietzsche ever read this footnote. The first edition (1866) of Lange’s History of Materialism, which Nietzsche owned as a young man and donated to Romundt in the 1870s, does not contain footnotes. In the 1880s, Nietzsche uses the ‘wohlfeile Ausgabe’, the ‘cheap edition’ (ed. H. Cohen), which gives the text of the second edition, but without the footnotes –​among them, Lange’s praise of Nietzsche’s Birth of Tragedy. In 1884, Nietzsche quotes from the ‘wohlfeile Ausgabe’ of 1882 (NL 1884 25[318], KSA 11.94; cf. Jörg Salaquarda 1978: 240, n. 20); and the ‘wohlfeile Ausgabe’ of 1887, identical with that of 1882, is conserved in his personal library. Besides Salaquarda’s article, see also Brobjer (2008a: 32–​6); on Nietzsche’s reading of and about Kant, see Brobjer (2008a: 36–​40) as well as the introduction to the first volume (Brusotti and Siemens 2017). Cf. Lange (1875 vol. 2: 508). According to Nietzsche, Kant was a reactionary rather than a revolutionary. Cf., for example, TI, ‘Reason’ in Philosophy 6 (on Kant as ‘in the end, an underhanded Christian’), TI, Skirmishes of an Untimely Man 16 (on Kant’s ‘backdoor philosophy’) and AC 10 (on Kant’s success as ‘merely theologian-​success’). On Nietzsche’s polemical remarks on Kant’s ‘radical evil’, see Section 4, p. 229 ff. F. Nietzsche: Kollegnachschrift ‘Allgemeine Geschichte der Philosophie nach dem Vortrag des Prof. Schaarschmidt’, Bestand: Nietzsche Kollegnachschriften, GSA 71/​ 41, C II 1: 26: ‘Die Ethik entspringt [. . .] aus der Spontaneität’ [‘Ethics stems [. . .] from spontaneity’]. The lecture notes do not pursue the issue further. They are still unpublished and conserved in the Goethe-​Schiller-​Archiv (GSA) in Weimar (for a schematic outline of the manuscript, cf. Figl 1989: 458f.). In the Kollegs of the time, the professor usually dictated the notes. Hoyer (2002: 158 ff.) describes this general

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teaching practice. Cf. also Hoedl (2009: 303 ff.). At first, Schaarschmidt seems to have been the professor in Bonn to whom Nietzsche (and Deussen) had the closest personal relationship: Nietzsche had been recommended to him as gifted for philosophy –​and as a Platonist. Wagner (1878: 145): ‘Diese Mängel scheinen mir sich im Hauptpunkte darin zu zeigen, daß der Begriff des Spontanen, der Spontaneität überhaupt, mit einem sonderbar überstürzenden Eifer, und mindestens etwas zu früh, aus dem neuen Welterkennungs-​ System hinausgeworfen worden ist. (. . .).’ See above in this chapter (p. 228). On the concept of ‘intelligible character’ in Kant and Schopenhauer as well as on Nietzsche’s criticism of both positions in Human, All Too Human, cf. Müller-​Lauter (1999a: 29 ff.). Baumann (1879). On Nietzsche’s reading of Baumann’s Handbuch, cf. Brusotti (1997: 33 ff.). For more detail on Nietzsche’s sources, cf. also my Erläuterungen to the Nachbericht of Daybreak in the Kritische Gesamtausgabe (together with Frank Götz): KGW V 3/​1: 659 ff. According to Baumann (1879: 70 ff.), since Kant denied the role of ‘pleasure’ and introduced respect as an intellectual sentiment, he can do without the sentiments of value only in the definition of the will, not in his ethics. For a more sophisticated discussion of Kant’s problem of the motives of pure practical reason than Baumann’s, cf. Chapter 4 (Section I) by Herman Siemens in this volume. Nietzsche owned the German translations of Alexander Bain’s two publications in the ‘International Scientific Series’: Mind and Body (1872) and Education as a Science (1879). They appeared in the ‘Internationale Wissenschaftliche Bibliothek’ (Brockhaus) respectively in 1874 and in 1880: Geist und Körper. Die Theorien über ihre gegenseitigen Beziehungen (Leipzig (Brockhaus) 1874, BN); Erziehung als Wissenschaft (Leipzig (Brockhaus) 1880, BN; most pages uncut, some reading marks). Nietzsche probably read Geist und Körper in the 1970s, hence some years before Baumann’s Handbook. In the section on ‘The Will’, Mind and Body gives a brief illustration of the theory Nietzsche will take from Baumann (cf. Geist und Körper 91f.; the passage is quoted in Brobjer (2008b: 61)). But Bain’s theory seems to have really caught Nietzsche’s attention only when he studied Baumann at the beginning of 1880: the posthumous notes about ‘spontaneous activity’ are beyond any doubt excerpts from his Handbuch. Bain’s Erziehung als Wissenschaft came out in 1880, probably only after Nietzsche had read Baumann at the beginning of the year. On Nietzsche’s direct reading of Bain, without mention of Baumann, cf. Brobjer (2008b: 58–​61). Bain (1855; 1859). Both Bain and Spencer were philosophers, and their treatises had a philosophical scope –​like William James’s Principles of Psychology (1890), a handbook that appeared too late for Nietzsche to read it. By 1876, Bain had started and financed Mind, the philosophical journal, and the first editor, George

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Croom Robertson, whom Nietzsche met in Rosenlauibad in the summer of 1877, was a former pupil of Bain. (On this meeting, cf. Brobjer (2008b: 59 ff.)) Bain was an important reference for early pragmatists. In 1907, looking back at the origins of pragmatism in the Metaphysical Club at Cambridge, Massachusetts, Charles Sanders Peirce (1931ff.: 5.12) claimed that pragmatism was ‘scarce more than a corollary’ of Bain’s definition of belief as ‘that upon which a man is prepared to act’. On the question as to whether Bain really was ‘the grandfather of pragmatism’, cf. Fisch (1954). 19 Cf. Brusotti (1997: 33 ff.). 20 Bain (1855: 289): ‘Neither the existence of spontaneous actions, nor the essential connection of these with voluntary actions, has been, so far as I am aware, advanced as a doctrine by any writer on the human mind. . . .’ 21 ‘Vieles muß zu einer moralischen Handlung zusammenkommen 1. eine starke Spontaneität 2. die äußerste Spannung des Ich-​willens es ist die höchste Gattung organischer Funktionen’ (NL 1883 9[25], KSA 10.353). 22 However, naturalistic readings, according to which Kantian spontaneity is in fact relative spontaneity, ascribe to it the same gradual nature. 23 ‘Alles, was lebt, bewegt sich; diese Thätigkeit ist nicht um bestimmter Zwecke willen da, es ist eben das Leben selber’ (NL 1880 1[70], KSA 9.21). 24 ‘Man ist thätig, weil alles was lebt sich bewegen muß –​nicht um der Freude willen, also ohne Zweck: obschon Freude dabei ist. Diese Bewegung ist nicht Nachahmung der zweckmässigen Bewegungen, es ist anders’ (NL 1880 1[45], KSA 9.16). 25 ‘Wir vergessen immer das Wesentlichste, weil es am nächsten liegt z.B. beim Spielen die Spontaneität, das fortwährende Tasten und Tappen der Bewegung. (. . .)’ (NL 1880 1[126], KSA 9.32–​3). The source is Baumann’s (1879: 12) Handbook: ‘. . . es hat zunächst ein mannichfaches Tasten und Tappen statt, aus dem sich allmälich eine Art als die werthvollste oder als die in diesem Individuum bleibende absetzt’ (Nietzsche: ‘NB’). Cf. Brusotti (1997: 38) and KGW V 3/1: 732. 26 The concept of Auslösung (unloosing), which goes back to the German physician and physicist Julius Robert Mayer, refers to apparent exceptions to the principle ‘causa aequat effectum’ (cause equals effect): stimuli are often insignificant in comparison with the forces they discharge and so with the effects they unleash, or unloose. The importance of Mayer’s concept for Nietzsche is well known. Less well known is that Baumann, too, employs it, and that Nietzsche’s first uses of the term are due to Baumann, not to Mayer, whom Nietzsche had not yet read in 1880. Cf. Brusotti 1997: 56 ff. In 1881, Nietzsche easily integrates Mayer’s concept of Auslösung in his Bainian view of ‘spontaneity’. The following posthumous note, which would be difficult to understand for someone who ascribes to Nietzsche a Kantian conception of

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‘spontaneity’, is a straightforward application of Baumann’s Bainian conception of the relationship between spontaneous force and exercise. ‘[. . .] Wohin die Kraft sich wendet? sicher nach dem Gewohnten: also wohin die Reize leiten, dahin wird auch die spontane Auslösung sich bewegen. Die häufigeren Reize erziehen auch die Richtung der spontanen Auslösung’ (NL 1881 11[139], KSA 9.493). Here Nietzsche follows Baumann and calls the Auslösung ‘spontaneous’. Elsewhere he calls the ‘energy’ ‘spontaneous’. ‘Energy’ is ‘spontaneous’, even if it can be ‘unloosed’ by external stimuli; for it does not necessarily need them. The ‘Auslösung’ without an external stimulus is ‘spontaneous’. Gradually, so the story goes, the recurrent stimuli which frequently ‘unloose’ the ‘spontaneous energy’ give place to spontaneous ‘unloosements’ of this energy, which follow the same direction. Nietzsche also speaks of judgements (representations) which are or become spontaneous in a similar sense. At first they need stimuli in order to get in action (or act themselves as external stimuli), but, in a gradual process Nietzsche dubs ‘incorporation’, they can change their role until they no longer need external stimuli. ‘Wie unkräftig war bisher alle physiologische Erkenntniß! während die alten physiologischen Irrthümer spontane Kraft bekommen haben! Lange lange Zeit können wir die neuen Erkenntnisse nur als Reize verwenden –​um die spontanen Kräfte zu entladen’ (NL 1881 11[173], KSA 9.507). ‘Ich rede von Instinkt, wenn irgend ein Urtheil (Geschmack in seiner untersten Stufe) einverleibt ist, so daß es jetzt selber spontan sich regt und nicht mehr auf Reize zu warten braucht . . .’ (NL 1881 11[164], KSA 9.505). On the disappearance of ‘activity’ and ‘spontaneity’ in the works of 1888, cf. Brusotti (2012). On Féré’s criticism of Bain, cf. Brusotti (2012: 112, n. 14). ‘Beside Schopenhauer I want to characterize Kant (Goethe’s passage on radical evil): nothing Greek, absolutely anti-​historical (passage on the French Revolution) and moral fanatic. Even in him saintliness in the background . . . [. . .] I need a critique of the saint. . .’ (NL Autumn 1887 10[118], KSA 12.524–​5; cf. KGW IX/​ 6: 58). ‘Dagegen hat aber auch Kant seinen philosophischen Mantel, nachdem er ein langes Menschenleben gebraucht hat, ihn von mancherlei sudelhaften Vorurteilen zu reinigen, freventlich mit dem Schandfleck des radikalen Bösen beschlabbert, damit doch auch Christen herbeigelockt werden, den Saum zu küssen’ (Johann Wolfgang von Goethe to Johann Gottfried and Caroline Herder, 7 June 1793, in Goethe (1988, vol. 2: 166)). ‘. . . Dagegen die Forderung des unegoistischen unpersönlichen Handelns, worin man gewöhnlich den Ursprung der Moralität sieht, gehört den pessimistischen Religionen an, insofern diese von der Verwerflichkeit des ego, der Person ausgehen, also die metaphysische Bedeutung des “Radikal-​Bösen” vorher in den Menschen gelegt haben müssen. Von der pessimistischen Religion her hat Kant sowohl

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das Radikal-​Böse als den Glauben dass das Unegoistische das Kennzeichen des Moralischen sei[. . .]’ (NL End 1876 –​Summer 1877 23[77], KSA 8.429). On radical evil, cf. also NL July–​August 1879 42[65], KSA 8.607–​8; cf. NL August 1879 44[3]‌, KSA 8.611. Cf. A. Schopenhauer: Parerga und Paralipomena II, Kapitel 8, Zur Ethik, § 115, in Schopenhauer (1977, vol. 9: 234). Less biased accounts of Kant’s ‘radical evil’ than Goethe’s or Schopenhauer’s were available already to the young Nietzsche –​f. i. the chapter ‘Das radicale Böse in der Menschennatur’, in Fischer (1860, vol. 2: 384 ff.). But there is no clue that Nietzsche kept in mind all the important distinctions he might have read about there or elsewhere. Cf. Allison (1996b). On the evil of weakness, which cannot be dealt with here, as well as on the evil of strength, cf. Brusotti (1997: 71 ff.). D 371, KSA 3.245–​6: ‘The evil of strength. –​The act of violence as a consequence of passion, of anger for example, is to be understood physiologically as an attempt to prevent a threatening attack of suffocation. Countless acts of arrogance vented on other people have been diversions of a sudden rush of blood through a vigorous action of the muscles: and perhaps the whole phenomenon of the “evil of strength” belongs in this domain. (The evil of strength harms others without giving thought to it –​it has to discharge itself; the evil of weakness wants to harm others and to see the signs of the suffering it has caused.)’ Cf. Loukidelis (2013: 51). As Loukidelis shows, this aphorism is not simply (or mainly) a tacit criticism of Descartes, Kant and Lichtenberg, but targets a range of contemporary philosophers: the ‘logicians’ (BGE 17, KSA 5.30, 31), critically mentioned at the beginning and at the end of the aphorism, include Teichmüller, Drossbach, Widemann and Spir. Here, I do not take them into account and focus only on Kant and Lichtenberg. See Sudelbücher, Heft K [76], in Lichtenberg (1968–​1992, vol. 2: 412): ‘Wir werden uns gewisser Vorstellungen bewußt, die nicht von uns abhängen; andere glauben, wir wenigstens hingen von uns ab[[//​andere, glauben wir wenigstens, hingen von uns ab]]; wo ist die Grenze? Wir kennen nur allein die Existenz unserer Empfindungen, Vorstellungen und Gedanken. Es denkt, sollte man sagen, so wie man sagt: es blitzt. Zu sagen cogito, ist schon zu viel, sobald man es durch Ich denke übersetzt. Das Ich anzunehmen, zu postulieren, ist praktisches Bedürfnis.’ Besides Loukidelis’s commentary, cf. also Stingelin (1996: 25) and Gasser (1997: 692). Nietzsche owes this sentence, used in Trendelenburg’s Logical Investigations (cf. Albrecht 1979: 239), to Drossbach (1884). Cf. Orsucci (2001: 221). Leiter (2011: 108) claims that Nietzsche speaks of ‘sovereign individual’ and the like exclusively in GM II 2. The posthumous notes I quote in the text show that

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this is not the case. Nietzsche often uses the adjective ‘sovereign’ as attribute, for example, of drives and instincts (NL Summer 1887 8[1]‌, KSA 12.323), the will (NL Autumn 1887 9[178], KSA 12.440) or the ‘great passion’ (AC 54, KSA 6.236). A note criticizes the ‘will’ as a ‘poetical fiction’ [Erdichtung]: ‘one believes that it [the will; MB] is free and sovereign because its origin remains concealed from us and because the affect of commanding accompanies it’ (NL 1884 27[24], KSA 11.282). 40 ‘Ist der Pluralismus das letzte Wort der Metaphysik, so ist die absolute Souveränität des (gleichviel ob metaphysisch einfachen, oder atomistisch zusammengesetzten) Individuums das letzte Wort der praktischen Philosophie, und nur egoistische Klugheitsrücksichten können es sein, welche der Willkür dieser Souveränität eine Beschränkung auferlegen; dann ist also keine ächte Moral, sondern nur egoistische Pseudomoral möglich, und selbst die heteronomen Gebote objectiver Autoritäten können nur aus Selbstsucht Beachtung finden (wenn nämlich ihre Nichtbefolgung dem eigenen Wohl mehr Schaden und weniger Nutzen bringt als ihre “Befolgung”) (Hartmann 1879: 776). Obviously, for Hartmann pluralism is not ‘the last word of metaphysics’. Nietzsche’s note explicitly refers to this page (776) (NL July 1882–​ Winter 1883–​1884 7[10], KSA 10.241). 41 There is irony in the whole story. In the 1890s Hartmann himself would start a heated debate in which he accuses Nietzsche of plagiarizing Stirner, whose views, Hartmann alleges, Nietzsche learned from the very pages of Hartmann’s Philosophy of the Unconscious that he vehemently attacked in the second Untimely Meditation (cf. Rahden 1984: 485; Gerratana 1988: 398). Now, the Genealogy really refers implicitly to Stirner and does it, in fact, via Hartmann (even if not via the Philosophy of the Unconscious), without mentioning either of the two thinkers; but, rather than falling back to Stirner’s standpoint, Nietzsche implicitly maintains distance from it. 42 Acampora (2004) and Hatab (2008) reject the view of the majority of scholars, according to which the ‘sovereign individual’ is Nietzsche’s ideal. The first of two alternative ‘deflationary readings’ proposed by Leiter (2011: 103) goes even further: ‘the ‘sovereign individual’ is wholly ironic, a mocking of the petit bourgeois’, and ‘this whole passage is little more than a parody of the contemporary bourgeois’ (108). But this reading does not find any support in the text: the ‘sovereign individual’ is not a parody in this sense, Nietzsche’s emphatic description aims to replace conceptions of this sovereignty to which Nietzsche is profoundly hostile (Hartmann, Stirner and possibly even Mill).Even if the ‘sovereign individual’ is meant earnestly, it is not Nietzsche’s ideal tout court: neither the ‘new philosophers’ of BGE nor the ‘sovereign individual’ of GM are ‘overmen’, and the ‘overman’ of Thus spoke Zarathustra is not what Nietzsche calls ‘overman’ in his last writings. It is wrong to speak as if there were one single Nietzschean ideal.Is a parodic aspect then wholly absent? Not at all. Nietzsche’s self-​description in the Preface involves

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a straightforward parody of Kant and of his terminology, and the description of the sovereign individual displays the same subversive intention, even if, giving Kantian terms a radically new meaning, Nietzsche does not take target only at Kant. The parody is not on what is described –​Nietzsche, the sovereign individual; the parodic moment consists in the implicit opposition to Hartmann’s Phenomenology and in the radical revision of Kantian concepts. The latter comes closer to the second ‘deflationary reading’, preferred by Leiter himself who sees in this passage an exercise in ‘persuasive definition’ of concepts such as ‘freedom’ or ‘free will’ (cf. Leiter 2011: 103). I agree that the description of the sovereign individual squares with Nietzsche’s criticism of the free will. But whereas for Leiter the chapter is compatible with fatalism, in my reading it is compatible with the dissolution of the whole problem of ‘free will’, thus with the refuse of the ‘unfree will’ as well. On the ‘sovereign individual’, see also Gemes and May (2009), Bailey (2013: 149ff.) and Chapter 4 by Herman Siemens in this volume. See Acampora (2004:128 ff.) for a critique of the English translation of this passage. Nietzsche owes Baumann not only the term, but also the opposition between ‘the will’s memory’ and one form of inability connected to ‘memory’ in the usual sense. Baumann opposes ‘the will’s memory’ and the ‘inability to get rid of a representation, a sentiment or an action’ as two contrary sorts of ‘stubbornness’: ‘Eigensinn ist in diesem Fall nicht Stärke, sondern Schwäche, Unfähigkeit von einem Vorstellen, Fühlen, Thun loszukommen. Eigensinn kann aber auch das sein, was Herbart Gedächtniss des Willens genannt hat, wo also unter gleichen Umständen derselbe Wille wiederkehrt’ (Baumann 1879: 51; Nietzsche’s underlinings). In the margin of his exemplar of Baumann’s Handbuch, Nietzsche has marked twice and commented with a ‘good’ [gut] this passage from the first chapter ‘Die Natur des Willens und die Gesetze der Willensbildung’ (Baumann 1879: 1–​73). Baumann gives Herbart as the source of the term ‘the will’s memory’, but without mentioning a specific work by him. Nietzsche’s metaphor of consciousness as a room which can be occupied by ideas or kept free from them stems from Herbart’s conception of ‘inhibition’ (in Psychologie als Wissenschaft, 1824), even if the Genealogy replaces Herbart’s ‘mechanical’ language (the inhibition of one idea by the other) through a ‘dynamical’ conceptuality (the active force of forgetfulness). On Baumann as a source of Nietzsche’s ‘memory of the will’, cf. Brusotti (1992: 90); on Baumann’s first chapter, cf. Brusotti (1997: 33 ff.). Zarathustra unmistakably assigned the ‘overman’ only to the future, explicitly claiming that there have not yet been ‘overmen’. (And even the ‘new philosophers’ of Beyond Good and Evil, which are no ‘overmen’, clearly belong to the future.) But the ‘sovereign individual’ is not the overman. Leiter (2009: 113 ff., n. 11) mistakes Nietzsche’s thesis that there are no explanations, but only (interpretative) descriptions (cf. also FW 127) for a variant of a

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neo-​Kantian position, as if Nietzsche were still stuck in the dichotomy between phenomenon and ‘an sich’. BGE 21, KSA 5.36, puts the ‘in itself ’ into scare quotes, precisely in order to avoid such Kantian misunderstandings. Müller-​Lauter (1999a) argues that Nietzsche achieves a ‘dissolution’ (Auf-​lösung) of the problem. Müller-​Lauter (1999a: 74 ff.). ‘Because in the vast majority of cases a person only wills something where he may expect his command to take effect in obedience and thus in action, the misleading appearance [Anschein] has translated itself into the feeling, as if there were some necessary effect’ (BGE 19, KSA 5.33). Nietzsche’s reconstruction of the origin of this illusion is similar to Baumann’s (1879: 14f.). In 1880, Nietzsche had learned from him that representations and feelings alone are not sufficient, if involuntary, unconscious movements, Bain’s ‘spontaneous activity’, are missing. According to Baumann, the error consists in mistaking the ‘efficacious will’, which involves these spontaneous involuntary actions, for a free will, which would do without them. According to Nietzsche we should not mistake strength of will for a free will or weakness for an ‘unfree will’. However, the analysis of the will given in BGE 19 differs from Baumann’s who counts the involuntary movements to the will as its third, or rather its central, moment.According to Brian Leiter’s naturalistic reading, BGE 19 claims that the ‘will’ is epiphenomenal (Leiter 2009: 107–​26), whereas according to Maudemarie Clark’s and David Dudrick’s normative reading BGE 19 ‘rejects something’, but ‘leaves the causality of the will intact’ (Clark and Dudrick 2009: 247–​68). I think that Nietzsche’s aphorism does neither of the two. Here, there is a convergence with Bain, even if he is not necessarily (or even probably) Nietzsche’s direct source. According to Bain (1859: 149), ‘the Sentiment or Pleasure of Power’ belongs to the pleasure of activity, even if only as a third, supplementary moment, as a ‘super-​added luxury’ (151). It is unlikely that Nietzsche got the term ‘Gefühl der Macht’ or ‘Machtgefühl’ (sentiment of power) directly from Bain. Nietzsche would not have come across this concept in Geist und Körper, the only work by Bain he could have read before he began to analyse the sentiment of power in the posthumous notes of Human, All Too Human. In comparison with these earlier texts, the notes of 1880 on the sentiment of power have, in some way, a new ‘Bainian’ touch, linked to Nietzsche’s new attention to spontaneous activity after reading Baumann’s Handbook at the beginning of 1880. Later in the same year, he could have come across the brief chapter of Education as Science on ‘The Feeling of Power’, where Bain distinguishes between ‘real’ and ‘ideal’ power (cf. Brobjer 2008b: 60 f.). For his part, Nietzsche analyses the different forms of ‘real’ and ‘imaginary’ (or ‘illusory’) power and ‘sense of power’ (cf. Brusotti 1997: 64 ff.). However, the two distinctions, even if they sound similar, are not quite the same.

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51 On the concept of pride in Kant, Schopenhauer and Nietzsche, cf. Müller-​Lauter (1999b). On Nietzsche’s concept, cf. also Brusotti (1994).

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Nakano, H. (2011), ‘Selbstaffektion in der transzendentalen Deduktion’, Kant-​Studien 102: 213–​31. Orsucci, A. (2001), La genealogia della morale di Nietzsche, Roma: Carocci. Peirce, C. S. (1931–​35), Collected Papers, ed. Charles Hartshorne and Paul Weiss, 6 vols, Cambridge MA: Belknap Press of Harvard University Press. Pippin, R. B. (1987), ‘Kant on the Spontaneity of Mind’, Canadian Journal of Philosophy 17 (2): 449–​75. Rahden, W. von (1884), ‘Eduard von Hartmann “und” Nietzsche. Zur Strategie der verzögerten Konterkritik Hartmanns an Nietzsche’, Nietzsche-​Studien 13: 481–​502. Salaquarda, J. (1978), ‘Nietzsche und Lange’, Nietzsche-​Studien 7: 236–​60. Schopenhauer, A. (1977), Zürcher Ausgabe. Werke in zehn Bänden, Zürich: Diogenes. Sellars, W. (1974), ‘This I or He or It (the Thing) which Thinks . . .’, in W. Sellars, Essays in Philosophy and Its History, 62–​90, Dordrecht: Reidel. Spencer, H. (1870–​72), Principles of Psychology, 2nd ed., 2 vols, London: Williams & Norgate. Stingelin, M. (1996), ‘Unsere ganze Philosophie ist Berichtigung des Sprachgebrauchs’: Friedrich Nietzsches Lichtenberg-​Rezeption im Spannungsfeld zwischen Sprachkritik (Rhetorik) und historischer Kritik (Genealogie), München: Fink. Strawson, P. (1966), The Bounds of Sense: An Essay on Kant’s Critique of Pure Reason, London: Methuen. Wagner, R. (1878) ‘Publikum und Popularität’, in R. Wagner, Sämtliche Schriften und Dichtungen, 16 vols, 1911ff., vol. 10: 106–​55, Leipzig: Breitkopf & Härtel.

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Contra Kant Experimental Ethics in Guyau and Nietzsche Keith Ansell-​Pearson and Michael Ure

1.  Introduction Powerful critiques of Kantian ethics are mounted towards the end of the nineteenth century by naturalistic-​minded philosophers such as Jean-​Marie Guyau (1854–​88) and Friedrich Nietzsche (1844–​1900). This chapter examines the basis of these critiques and what, if anything, they have in common. The aim of such critiques is to challenge the universalist assumptions of Kantian ethics and favour instead a genuinely experimental ethics, one that is premised on a commitment to moral variability and that seeks to promote heterodox forms of living. As Nietzsche puts it in his text of 1881, Dawn, the idea of ‘the human being’ is a ‘bloodless abstraction’ and ‘fiction’ (D 105, KSA 3.93). But on what precise grounds do figures such as Guyau and Nietzsche challenge universalism in ethics? And what kind of future for ethical life do they envisage? Here we are not so much concerned with whether these figures get Kant right, but with exploring the nature of their experimentalism and its grounds.

2. In the preface to On the Genealogy of Morality (1887) Nietzsche claims distinction for himself on account of voicing in his writings a new demand, ‘[W]‌e need a critique of moral values, the value of these values should itself for once, be

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examined’ (GM Preface 6, KSA 5.253). In a note for the preface to Dawn (1881) he writes of the need to think about morality without falling under its spell and the seductive character of its beautiful gestures and glances (NL 1885–​6 2[165], KSA 12.147–​9). He distinguishes himself from previous philosophy, notably German philosophy, such as Kant and Hegel, and what he regards as their half-​ hearted attempts at critique. In both cases, he contends, criticism is directed only at the problem (how morality is to be demonstrated, whether as noumenon or as self-​revealing spirit) but never at the ‘ideal’. In the actual preface to Dawn Nietzsche claims that morality is the greatest of all mistresses of seduction and that all philosophers have been building ‘majestic moral structures’ under its seduction (D Preface 3, KSA 3.13–​14). Nietzsche exaggerates his singularity, and this can be shown by bringing his critique of morality into rapport with the ideas of Guyau. Guyau is a neglected figure today but was read as making an important contribution to ethics in his own day by the likes of William James and Josiah Royce. His major work on ethics was published in 1885 (Nietzsche read it at this time) and is entitled in English Sketch of Morality Independent of Obligation or Sanction (Esquisse d’une morale sans obligation, ni sanction).1 Prior to this work, which Kropotkin described as ‘remarkable’ in his Ethics,2 Guyau had published, in 1875, 1878 and 1879, studies of ancient and modern ethics (especially English utilitarianism), being especially concerned with Epictetus and Epicurus with regards to the ancients and with Darwin and Spencer with regards to the moderns. He also published in 1887 a fascinating tome entitled The Non Religion of the Future, which Nietzsche also read and admired.3 We can note at the outset that Nietzsche’s attitude towards Guyau is ambivalent. On the one hand, he calls him ‘brave Guyau’, and regards him as a courageous thinker who has written one of the few genuinely interesting books on ethics of modern times (NL 1885 35[34], KSA 11.525).4 On the other hand, he thinks Guyau is caught up in the Christian-​moral ideal, and partly for this reason he is only a free thinker and not a genuine free spirit. Nietzsche does not refer to Guyau anywhere in his published writings. What can be certain of his thoughts about him, and his work, comes from a few unpublished notes and from the marginal remarks he makes in his copy of Guyau’s Sketch (Esquisse). As one commentator has noted, the richness and diversity of late-​nineteenth-​ century free thought is symbolized by the similarities and dissonances between these two thinkers.5 It is his novel and even daring approach to questions of morality that Nietzsche greatly admired and led him to describe Guyau as ‘brave’. An examination of the annotations he makes to his copy of Guyau’s text on morality makes it clear that

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he strongly empathized with core aspects of Guyau’s approach to morality. At one point Guyau (1896: 70; 1898: 59) compares morality to an art that charms and deludes us, against which Nietzsche writes ‘moi’ in the margin.6 We are confident that Nietzsche would have found his conception of a ‘self-​sublimation’ of morality prefigured and echoed in Guyau’s text. There are indications in the annotations he makes to the section in the book on ‘the morality of faith’ which strongly suggest this was the case. Guyau’s thinking takes its bearings from a number of influences. On the one hand he is strongly influenced by naturalist and positivist developments and on the other by an idealist legacy. He has respect for three works of modern moral philosophy: Spencer’s Data of Ethics; Hartmann’s The Phenomenology of the Moral Conscience; and Alfred Fouillée’s The Criticism of Contemporary Moral Systems.7 Naturalism offers, to its credit, no unchangeable principles either with regards to obligation or sanction; idealism can furnish at best only hypothetical and not categorical imperatives. As one commentator on Guyau has noted, his goal is to provide a satisfactory holistic approach to modern ethics since positivist and idealists consider only one aspect, either the factual or the ideal, at the expense of the other. Thus a proper account of the dynamics of moral life must account for both moral ideas and moral actions.8 For Guyau (1896: 6; 1898: 4) the reign of the absolute is over in the domain of ethics: ‘[W]‌hatever comes within the order of facts is not universal, and whatever is universal is a speculative hypothesis.’ For Guyau, a chief characteristic of the future conception of morality will be ‘moral variability’: ‘In many respects this conception will not only be autonomous but anomos’ (ibid.).9 According to Guyau, we are witnessing today the decline of religious faith, and this faith is being replaced by a dogmatic faith in morality. Although its fanaticism may be less dangerous than the religious sort it is equally menacing. The new voice is conscience and the new god is duty: The great Pan, the nature-​god, is dead; Jesus, the humanity-​god, is dead. There remains the inward and ideal god, Duty, whose destiny it is, perhaps, also to die some day. (Guyau 1896: 63; 1898: 54)

The belief in duty is so questionable because it is placed above the region in which both science and nature move (Guyau 1896: 64; 1898: 55). Guyau maintains that all philosophies of duty and of conscience are, in effect, philosophies of common sense and are thus unscientific, be it the Scottish school of ‘common sense’ derived from Thomas Reid or neo-​Kantianism with its assumption that the impulse of duty is of a different order to all other natural impulses. Phrases

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such as ‘conscience proclaims’, ‘evidence proves’ and ‘common sense requires’ are as unconvincing as ‘duty commands’ and ‘the moral law demands’. Guyau, by contrast, appeals to scientific truth, which he conceives not as brute fact but as a ‘bundle of facts’, a ‘synthesis’ not simply of the felt and the seen but of the explained and connected. What lies outside the range of our knowledge cannot have anything obligatory about it, and science needs to replace habituated faith. Like Nietzsche, Guyau recognizes the paradox –​we immoralists remain duty-​ bound and freely impose on ourselves a new, stern duty (BGE 226). Guyau calls this ‘the duty of being consistent to ourselves, of not blindly solving an uncertain problem, of not closing an open question’. In short, the new method of doubt is not without its obligations and cannot be (Guyau 1896:  68; 1898:  58). The extent to which Nietzsche empathized with Guyau on these issues cannot be underestimated. With respect to Kant, Guyau notes, like philosophical predecessors such as Hegel, the formalism of his ethics. With its stress on the absolute character of the imperative independent of the idea of its object and application, such an ethics makes appeal to natural or empirical facts virtually worthless since it is always possible to find an answer by appealing to the distinction between the alleged intention behind the act and the act itself: ‘If the act is practically harmful, the intention may have been morally disinterested, and that is all that the moral philosophy of Kant demands’ (Guyau 1896: 57; 1898: 48). Furthermore, the good intention of the feeling of obligation in Kant must make an appeal to a suprasensible and supraintelligible reality. Guyau (1896: 57; 1898: 48) corrects Kant on this point: The feeling of obligation, if exclusively considered from the point of view of mental dynamics, is brought back to a feeling of resistance . . . This resistance, being of such a nature as to be apprehended by the senses, cannot arise from our relation to a moral law, which hypothetically would be quite intelligible and independent of time. It arises from our relation to natural and empiric laws [emphases in the original].

Guyau points out that the feeling of obligation is not moral but sensible, that is, the moral sentiment is, as Kant himself concedes, pathological. Kant’s position is distinctive in holding this sentiment to be aroused by the mere form of the moral law and not its subject matter. This generates a mystery, as Kant fully acknowledges: an intelligible and supranatural law generates a pathological and natural sentiment, namely, respect. How does a pure idea that contains nothing sensible produce within us a sensation of pleasure and pain? Kant acknowledges

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that he cannot explain why and how the universality of a maxim, and consequently morality, interests us.10 Guyau cannot see any reason a priori why we should connect sensible pleasure or pain to a law that would, hypothetically, be suprasensible. Equally, can duty be detached from the character and qualities of the things we have do to and the actual people to whom we have obligations? Like Hegel, Guyau appeals to ‘social life’ (what Hegel calls ‘Sittlichkeit’) as the context in which duties and obligations find their sense. The ‘moral law’ can only be a ‘social law’; just as we are not free to get outside the universe, so we are not free (in our thinking) to get outside society (Guyau 1896: 232–​3; 1898: 198). Moreover, even if we were to suppose that the universal, qua universal, produces in us a logical satisfaction this itself remains ‘a satisfaction of the logical instinct in man’ and ‘is a natural [emphasis in the original] tendency’ because it is ‘an expression of life in its higher form . . . favourable to order, to symmetry, to similitude, to unity in variety’ (Guyau 1896: 59; 1898: 50). The will cannot be indifferent to the aims it is seeking to pursue or promote. Guyau contends that a purely formal practice of morality, as Kant’s ethics demands, would ironically prove demoralizing to an agent:  ‘it is the analogy of the labour which the prisoners in English prisons are obliged to do, and which is without aim –​to turn a handle for the sake of turning it!’ (ibid.; see also Guyau 1896: 218–​20; 1898: 186–​8). Nietzsche describes Kant’s ethics as a form of ‘refined servility’ (GS 5, KSA 3.377). Guyau makes the same criticism of Kant when he questions the performance of duty for the sake of duty, which he regards as pure tautology and a vicious circle. We might as well say be religious for the sake of religion, or be moral for the sake of morality (Guyau 1896: 67; 1898: 57). He then closely echoes Nietzsche in GS 335 when he argues, ‘While I believe it to be my sovereign and self-​governed liberty, commanding me to do such and such an act, what if it were hereditary instinct, habit, education, urging me to the pretended duty?’ (ibid.).11 As Nietzsche points out, one’s judgement that ‘this is right’ has a prehistory in one’s instincts, likes and dislikes, experiences (including the lack of them) and so on (GS 335, KSA 3.561). Guyau does not dispute that Kant’s thinking on ethics is without importance or merit; indeed, he holds the theory of the categorical imperative to be ‘psychologically exact and deep’ and the expression of a ‘fact of consciousness’. What cannot be upheld, however, is the attempt to develop it without the requisite naturalistic insight in which what we take to be a practical, internal necessity will be demonstrated to be an instinctive, even mechanical, necessity (Guyau 1896: 102–​3; 1898: 89).12 In short, Guyau holds that there is within us a primitive,

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impersonal impulse to obey that is prior to philosophical reasoning on ‘goodness’, but our understanding of this needs to be opened up to naturalistic and critical inquiry. For Guyau (1896: 117; 1898: 98) this inquiry into the sentiment of obligation is to take the form of a ‘dynamic genesis’ in which we come to appreciate that we do not follow our conscience but are driven by it and in terms of a ‘psycho-​mechanical power’. In addition questions of evolution –​the evolution of the species and of societies –​also need to be taken into account. What kind of ‘impulse’ is duty? How has it evolved? And why has it become for us a ‘sublime obsession’? (Guyau 1896: 121; 1898: 101). Ultimately, Kant’s ethics, Guyau argues, must be seen as belonging to an age that future humanity will outgrow. It is ‘a moral philosophy similar to ritualist religions, which count any failure in ceremonial as sacrilege; and which forget the essence for the sake of the form’; it is thus ‘a kind of moral despotism, creeping everywhere, wanting to rule everything’ (Guyau 1896: 170; 1898: 144). Guyau argues that a strict method is to be followed if we are to determine the nature of a moral philosophy to be founded exclusively on facts. The contrast to be made is with a metaphysical thesis that posits an a priori thesis and an a priori law. He asks, ‘[W]‌hat is the exact domain of science in moral philosophy (la morale)?’ (Guyau 1896: 83; 1898: 71). Metaphysical speculation beyond the empirically given and ascertainable can be permitted in moral philosophy, but the most important task is to work out how far an exclusively scientific conception of morality can go. Guyau enquires into the ends pursued by living creatures, including humankind. The unique and profound goal of action cannot, he argues, be ‘the good’ since this is a vague conception which, when opened up to analysis, dissolves into a metaphysical hypotheses. He also rules out duty and happiness: the former cannot be regarded as a primitive and irreducible principle, whilst the latter presupposes an advanced development of an intelligent being. Guyau is in search of a natural aim of human action. The principle of hedonism, which argues for a minimum of pain and a maximum of pleasure, can be explained in evolutionary terms in which conscious life is shown to follow the line of the least suffering. To a certain extent Guyau accepts this thesis but finds it too narrow as a definition since it applies only to conscious life and voluntary acts, not to unconscious and automatic acts. To believe that most of our movements spring from consciousness, and that a scientific analysis of the springs of conduct has only to reckon with conscious motives, would mean being the dupe of an illusion (Guyau 1896: 87; 1898: 74). Although he does not enter into the debate regarding the epiphenomenalism of consciousness, except to note

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it as a great debate in England (he refers to the likes of Henry Maudsley and T. H. Huxley), he holds that consciousness embraces a restricted portion of life and action; acts of consciousness have their origins in dumb instincts and reflex movements. Thus, the ‘constant end of action must primarily have been a constant cause of more or less unconscious movements. In reality, the ends are but habitual motive causes become conscious of themselves [emphases in the original]’ (ibid.). For Guyau (1896: 247; 1898: 210) the cause operating within us before any attraction of pleasure is ‘life’. Pleasure is but the consequence of an instinctive effort to maintain and enlarge life, and nature is to be regarded as self-​moving and self-​governing. Guyau (1896: 90; 1898: 77) writes: One does not always act with the view of seeking a particular pleasure –​ limited and exterior to the act itself. Sometimes we act for the pleasure of acting . . . There is in us an accumulated force which demands to be used. If its expenditure is impeded, this force becomes desire or aversion; if the desire is satisfied, there is pleasure; if it is opposed, there is pain. But it does not follow from this that the stored-​up activity unfolds itself solely for the sake of pleasure –​with pleasure as motive. Life unfolds and expresses itself in activity because it is life. In all creatures pleasure accompanies, much more than it provokes, the search after life.

For Guyau, Epicurus, along with his faulty thinking about evolution, in which pleasure is said to create an organ’s function, needs correcting on this point. In addition, he argues contra Bentham that ‘to live is not to calculate, it is to act’ (Guyau 1896: 247; 1898: 211). An essentially Spinozist position –​the tendency to persist in life is the necessary law of life –​is deduced: ‘The tendency of the creature to continue in existence is at the root of all desire, without forming in itself a determinate desire’ (Guyau 1898: 79). Guyau (1896: 88; 1898: 75) takes this tendency to be one that goes beyond and envelops conscious life, so it is ‘both the most radical of realities and the inevitable ideal’. Therefore, he reaches the conclusion that the part of morality that can be founded on positive facts can be defined as ‘the science which has for object all the means of preserving and enlarging material and intellectual life’ (ibid.). He acknowledges that with a scientific conception of morality living well is largely a matter of an enlarged hygiene. His ethics centre, then, on a desire to increase ‘the intensity of life’ which consists in enlarging the range of activity under all its forms and that is compatible with the renewal of force (Guyau 1896:  89; 1898:  76). Like Spinoza and Nietzsche, Guyau thinks that ‘becoming-​active’ is the cure to many of life’s ills and to passive pessimism (see also Guyau 1896:  175–​8; 1898:  148–​51).13 When Guyau

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(1896:  77; 1898:  66)  argues that all action is an ‘affirmation’, a kind of choice and election, this elicits from Nietzsche one of only four ‘bravos’ he makes in the margins of his copy of the book.14 A ‘superior being’ is one that practises a variety of action; thought itself is nothing other than condensed action and life at its maximum development. Guyau (1896: 42; 1898: 35) defines this superior being as one which ‘unites the most delicate sensibility with the strongest will’. This finds an echo in Nietzsche when he entertains the idea of a future superior human being as one composed of ‘the highest spirituality and strength of will’ (NL 1885 37[8]‌, KSA 11.582). As we shall see, however, Guyau’s conception of the future of morality differs from Nietzsche in placing the emphasis on an expansion of the social and sociability: ‘Develop your life in all directions, be an “individual” as rich as possible in intensive and extensive energy; therefore be the most social and sociable being’ (Guyau 1896: 140–​1; 1898: 117). Science, he argues, can only offer ‘excellent hypothetical advice’ and not anything that would purport to be categorical or absolute. If we wish to promote the highest intensity of life, then we have to experiment, that is, if we take the realm of the practical seriously, we must recognize that a scientific conception of morality cannot give a definite and complete solution of moral obligation (Guyau 1896: 160; 1898: 134). A mature humanity is one that will decide for itself what it wishes to obligate itself to and on the basis of the insights secured by scientific knowledge (for example, placing the stress on questions of hygiene) and in terms of an experimentation15: There is one unchangeable moral philosophy –​that of facts; and, to complete it, when it is not sufficient, there is a variable and individual moral philosophy –​ that of hypotheses. (Guyau 1896: 165; 1898: 139)

Morality in the future will move in the direction not simply of autonomy but of anomy in which the differences between individuals and temperaments are taken into account along with the absence of fixed and apodictic laws and rules. Although Kant begins a revolution in moral philosophy by seeking to make the will autonomous, as opposed to bowing before a law external to itself, he stops halfway with the constraint of universality of the law. This supposes ‘that everyone must conform to a fixed type; that the ideal “reign” of liberty would be a regular and methodical government’ (Guyau 1896: 165; 1898: 139). In contrast to this Guyau argues that true autonomy must produce individual originality and not universal uniformity. The future of intelligence demands that we allow for genuine pluralism of values and ideals freely chosen and rationally deliberated over, as opposed to a uniformity that can only annihilate intelligence.

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Guyau’s hope is that heterodoxy and non-​conventional living will become in the future the true and universal religion or way of life. He envisages an end to penal justice (Guyau 1896: 182; 1898: 154), which again brings him remarkably close to Nietzsche, who expresses the desire to restore innocence to becoming and purify psychology, morality, history and nature of the concepts of guilt and punishment (NL 1888 15[30], KSA 13.425). Moreover, his championing of a ‘truly scientific and philosophic mind’ as one which does not entitle itself to possession of ‘the whole truth’ and whose only faith is that of continual ‘searching’ brings Guyau (1896: 170; 1898: 143) close to the free spirit Nietzsche celebrates in GS 347 as the enemy of fanaticism. In effect, what Guyau has done is to put aside every law anterior or superior to the facts, anything a priori and categorical. Instead we need to start from reality and build up an ideal, extracting ‘a moral philosophy from nature’. Guyau wants to know what the essential and constitutive facts of human nature are. He has curtailed consciousness since unconscious or subconscious life is the real source of our activity. Ethics concerns itself with achieving harmony between the two spheres of existence, unconscious and conscious, and this may reside in living life in ‘the most intensive and extensive possible’ so as to increase the force of life (Guyau 1896: 245; 1898: 209). In the sphere of life we necessarily deal with ‘antinomies’ (conflicts, contestations, etc.); the moralist is always tempted to resolve them once and for all by appealing to a law superior to life: ‘an intelligible, eternal, supernatural law’ (ibid.). But we need to give up making this appeal to such a law. The only possible rule for an exclusively scientific moral philosophy is that it is a more complete and larger life that is able to regulate a less complete and smaller life. Again, we find this echoed in Nietzsche when he writes in the 1886 preface to volume one of HH that it is necessary ‘to grasp the necessary injustice in every for and against . . . life itself is conditioned by the sense of perspective and its injustice’. The greatest injustice is to be found in a state ‘where life has developed at its smallest, narrowest, and neediest’. Nietzsche wishes to aid the cause of what he calls the ‘higher, greater, and richer’ life.

3. Nietzsche was impressed by Guyau’s critique of Kant, his insights into the new dogmatic faith in morality and his claim that the reign of the absolute was now over to be replaced by a new pluralism. Nietzsche has, in fact, anticipated many

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of Guyau’s insights in the works of his middle period. For example, Nietzsche has argued that there is no single moral-​making morality (D 132, KSA 3.123–​5), that the moral law should not be beyond our likes and dislikes (D 108, KSA 3.95–​6) and that we are experiments and our task is to want to be such (D 453, KSA 3.274). Both Guyau and Nietzsche, as we shall see in the next section, move thinking in the direction of a commitment to an experimental ethics. Guyau’s conception of the future is one of new individuals, of individual difference, of the greater intensity of life and so on. These are all things we find promoted in Nietzsche, as when, for example, he argues, ‘Up to now morality has been, above all, the expression of a conservative will to breed the same species, with the imperative: “All variation is to be prevented; only the enjoyment of the species must remain” ’ (NL 1885 35[20], KSA 11.515). As we have seen, it is precisely ‘moral variability’ that Guyau posits as the most desirable future for morality. In Ecce Homo Nietzsche informs his readers that his ‘campaign’ against morality begins in earnest with Dawn, and he adds that we should not smell gunpowder at work here but, provided we have the necessary subtlety in our nostrils, more pleasant odours. Nietzsche is here drawing the reader’s attention to something important, namely, the fact that he wants to open up the possibility of plural ways of being, including plural ways of being moral or ethical. His act is not one of simple wanton destruction. Nietzsche directs his main criticism against what he takes to be the dogmatic view that there is single moral-​making morality. Nietzsche’s ‘campaign’ against morality centres largely on a critique of two modern tendencies:  the Kantian notion of practical reason and its categorical imperative and its Schopenhauerian opponent –​the idea that the mark of morality is living according to sympathetic affects, especially Mitleid, rather than according to the ‘a priori soap bubbles’ of practical reason. Significantly, however, Nietzsche carries forward one key aspect of the Stoic and Kantian conception of morality: viz., their rejection of ‘pathological’ emotions as the grounds of moral action. Kant rejects compassion as the basis of moral action primarily because, so he argues, it puts agents at the mercy of natural necessity. Moral autonomy, he argues, entails freedom from such necessities. While Nietzsche endorses Kant’s rejection of compassion and sympathy as motives of action he does so for different, anti-​Kantian reasons: viz., he believes these motives fundamentally and necessarily compromise individual (and species’) flourishing. Nietzsche claims that sympathetic affects are incompatible with eudaimonia. In this section we will first examine Nietzsche’s arguments against Kantian and Schopenhauerian morality before turning to his defence of the Stoic-​Kantian critique of the tender

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emotions. In the final section we will argue that Nietzsche’s ethical eudaimonism takes a wrong turn by incorporating Stoicism and Kantianism’s anti-​pity perspective. As we shall see, while Nietzsche shares and endorses Guyau’s attempt to formulate a post-​Kantian, naturalistic and experimental ethics, his critique of sympathetic affects puts him at odds with Guyau’s identification of flourishing with sociability. We will briefly assess Nietzsche’s divergence from Guyau’s positive conception of sociability in the final section. Nietzsche, we shall argue, was wrong to conceive sociability and compassion as incompatible with human flourishing. Many of Nietzsche’s claims against morality encompass problems he believes are common to the Kantian and Schopenhauerian perspectives. Nietzsche rejects both moralities first because they both wrongly presuppose that morality must have a universally binding character in which there is a single morality valid for all in all circumstances and for all occasions. Second, Nietzsche suggests that both Kantian and Schopenhauerian conflate morality with asceticism:  their moralities require a person to be dutiful, obedient, self-​sacrificing at all times. By contrast, Nietzsche own ethics harks back to and reinvents ancient ethical eudaimonism. Nietzsche conceives Kant’s moral insistence on ascetic self-​denial as a refinement and remnant of Sittlichkeit’s ancient cruelty (D 539, KSA 3.307–​8). He laments that Kant’s anti-​eudaimonistic morality demands that moral agents sacrifice their own natural interests and desires on the altar of practical reason and its categorical imperative and that Schopenhauerian morality requires that they sacrifice themselves in the name of others’ welfare. Third, Nietzsche rejects Kant and Schopenhauer’s supposition that morality provides us with insight into the true, metaphysical character of the world and existence. Following Darwin, Lamarck and Paul Rée, however, Nietzsche argues that ‘moral man stands no closer to the intelligible world than physical man’ (HH 37, KSA 2.61). Nietzsche argues that Kant and Schopenhauer’s metaphysical picture of morality fails to give us an adequate understanding of moral agency: it does not properly identify moral motives or locate the sources of moral agency. As a result of their focus on ascertaining the metaphysical groundwork of morality, he argues, we currently almost entirely lack scientific knowledge of moral motives and agency. Metaphysics cannot explain our moral motives; this is properly the domain of evolutionary, sociological and psychological thought. Nietzsche and Guyau’s naturalistic, empirical study of moral agency aims to overcome the deficit in our understanding of morality. Nietzsche believes such metaphysical accounts of morality wrongly locate the ‘good’ in the noumenal realm and ‘evil’ in the phenomenal realm. In sharp contrast Nietzsche maintains that we cannot clearly

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separate ‘good’ virtues and ‘evil’ vices: they are both explicable in purely naturalistic terms. For Nietzsche the two are reciprocally conditioning: all good things have arisen out of dark roots through sublimation and spiritualization, and they continue to feed off such roots. Yet even as Nietzsche rejects Kant and Schopenhauer’s metaphysical notion of morality and its anti-​eudaimonistic, ascetic, self-​sacrificing character, in formulating his alternative ethical eudaimonism he retains and defends one central Kantian and Stoic motif: viz., the claim that a fully flourishing life requires rejecting the pathological, ‘soft’ emotions as motives of action. For all its failings, Nietzsche believes that Kant’s conception of morality deserves our praise for standing outside the compassionate or sentimental undercurrent of the modern age. Nietzsche observes that Kant expressly teaches that ‘we must be insensible towards the suffering of others if our beneficence is to possess moral value’ (D 132, KSA 3.125).16 Nietzsche applauds Kant for making the value of other-​ regarding actions contingent on judgements or evaluations made independently of our sensitivity to others’ pain. On this account our beneficence has no value if it is motivated by our sensibility or sensitivity rather than our practical reason. Of course, Nietzsche does not thereby endorse Kant’s own principle or formula of moral judgement, but he does share the view that we ought not to measure the value of other-​regarding actions by our sensitivity to others’ pain. Why does Nietzsche applaud Kantian insensibility? Nietzsche’s fundamental objection is that pity is incompatible with eudaimonia. For this reason Nietzsche approvingly glosses Kant’s claim that by echoing others’ suffering through our pity (Mitleid) we increase the amount of suffering in the world (D 134, KSA 3.127–​8), and in doing so we rarely reduce or eliminate this original suffering (D 144, KSA 3.136–​7).17 We can see then that while Nietzsche rejects Kant’s a priori, anti-​eudaimonistic conception of the moral law, he nevertheless shares the Stoic’s and Kant’s suspicions about the value of pity (Mitleid), fellow-​feeling (Mitgefühl), ‘philanthropy’ (Menschenliebe) and love (Liebe). Pouring cold water on the Schopenhauerian and sentimentalist current of his age Nietzsche surmises that if its obsession with elevating compassion, altruism, philanthropy and love as the highest motivation really took root in practice our ‘poets would dream of nothing but the happy, loveless past, of divine selfishness, of how it was once possible to be alone, undisturbed, unloved, hated, despised on earth, and whatever else may characterise the utter baseness of the dear animal world in which we live’ (D 147, KSA 3.138–​9). The animal world in which Nietzsche’s free spirits live is devoid of tender passions. In Nietzsche’s estimation giving and receiving love and pity is deeply distressing

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and disturbing. He therefore conceives it as incompatible with his new ethical eudaimonism. Nietzsche argues then that a fully flourishing life excludes tender passions and motivations. He identifies at least two separate reasons why we can rightly consider them incompatible with happiness. First, as we have just seen, Nietzsche argues that as the object of these passions we are encumbered and disturbed by others’ demands, interests and motives. Second, he argues that as agents of such passions we are obliged to shape our aims and goals around others’ needs and interests. As compassionate agents we adapt ourselves to the need of our community and in doing so sacrifice ourselves. Regarding the effects of the morality of compassion and altruism he writes:  ‘It seems to do every single person good these days to hear that society is on the road to adapting the individual to fit the needs of the throng and that the individual’s happiness as well as his sacrifice consist in feeling himself to be a useful member of the whole’ (D 132, KSA 3.124). The morality of compassion, as Nietzsche sees it, makes individuals mere functions of the whole. We can, he thinks, explain the modern in terms of a movement towards managing more cheaply, safely, and uniformly individuals in terms of ‘large bodies and their limbs’. This, he says, is ‘the basic moral current of our age’: ‘Everything that in some way supports both this drive to form bodies and limbs and its abetting drives is felt to be good’ (ibid.). Nietzsche reasons that if we endorse Stoicism’s and Kant’s rejection of compassion we can limit this complete adaptation of the individual to the whole. It is on this basis that he applauds both the Stoics and Kant’s rejection of the ethical value of such motives. He conceives this ban on the soft emotions as a precept that will enable individuals to prioritize their own flourishing rather than functionalize themselves for the sake of their community.18 Following Schopenhauer Nietzsche conceives Stoicism as a doctrine of happiness (or the ‘blessed life’) rather than a doctrine of virtue or duty. If we measure Stoic morality and the morality of compassion according to this yardstick of flourishing or health, he argues, then we can judge the former as a higher morality. ‘You say that the morality of being compassionate is a higher morality (Moral) than that of Stoicism? Prove it! But remember that what is “higher” and “lower” in morality is not, in turn to be measured by a moral yardstick: for there is no absolute morality (Moral). So take your rule from somewhere else –​and now beware!’ (D 139, KSA 3.131). For our purposes the important point is that even though Nietzsche rejects the Kantian notion of moral autonomy he maintains that any viable alternative notion of self-​mastery and flourishing must also place a ban on tender

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sympathetic affects. Schopenhauer’s morality of compassion, he argues, gives our attempts at self-​mastery a bad conscience and infuses our self-​interested attempts to achieve ‘happiness’ with guilt. If we examine what is often taken to be the summit of the moral in philosophy –​the mastery of the affects –​Nietzsche argues that there is pleasure to be taken in this mastery: I can impress myself by what I  can deny, defer and resist. It is through this mastery that I  grow and develop. And yet morality as we moderns have come to understand it, in which it is tied to the unegoistic, would have to give such ethical self-​mastery a bad conscience. It is clear, we would contend, that in Dawn Nietzsche is not advocating the overcoming of all possible forms of morality. Nietzsche endeavours to formulate an ethical eudaimonism that requires ‘continual self-​command and self-​overcoming . . . in great things and in the smallest’ (WS 45, KSA 2.573–​ 4). Nietzsche, however, wants to ensure that we do not compromise individual flourishing by endorsing universal or unconditional imperatives (Kant) or compelling individuals to adapt themselves to the needs of the community (Schopenhauer). Nietzsche’s concern is that ‘morality’ in the forms it has assumed in the greater part of human history, right up to Kant’s moral law, has opened up an abundance of sources of displeasure and to the point that one can say that with every ‘refinement in morality’ (Sittlichkeit) human beings have grown ‘more and more dissatisfied with themselves, their neighbour, and their lot’ (D 106, KSA 3.94). Against the Kantian notion of morality as unconditional duty Nietzsche maintains that we cannot prescribe to individuals who wish to become their own lawgiver the path to happiness simply because individual happiness springs from one’s own unknown laws and external prescriptions only serve to obstruct and hinder it:  ‘The so-​called “moral” precepts are, in truth, directed against individuals and are in no way aimed at promoting their happiness’ (D 108, KSA 3.95). Indeed, Nietzsche himself does not intend to lay down precepts for everyone. As he writes, ‘One should seek out limited circles and seek and promote the morality appropriate to them’ (D 194, KSA 3.167). Against Schopenhauer and the entire sentimentalist tradition, Nietzsche argues that individual flourishing is incompatible with prioritizing the so-​called tender, soft, other-​regarding emotions. Against these moralities Nietzsche identifies and supports a kind of ethical and social experimentation that he thinks will facilitate individual flourishing and species diversification rather than the construction of uniform, fully adapted pseudo-​individualism that flows from the dogmatic, universalist models of morality. For Nietzsche it is necessary, for example, to contest the

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idea that there is a single moral-​making morality since every code of ethics that affirms itself in an exclusive manner ‘destroys too much valuable energy and costs humanity much too dearly’ (D 164, KSA 3.147). In the future, he hopes, the inventive and fructifying person shall no longer be sacrificed and ‘numerous novel experiments shall be made in ways of life and modes of society’ (ibid.). When this takes place we will find that an enormous load of guilty conscience has been purged from the world. Humanity has suffered for too long from teachers of morality who wanted too much all at once and sought to lay down precepts for everyone (D 194, KSA 3.167). In the future, care will need to be given to the most personal questions and create time for them (D 196, KSA 3.170–​1). Small individual questions and experiments are no longer to be viewed with contempt and impatience (D 547, KSA 3.317–​18). Contra morality, then, he holds that we ourselves are experiments and our task should be to want to be such. We are to build anew the laws of life and of behaviour by taking from the sciences of physiology, medicine, sociology and solitude the foundation stones for new ideals if not the new ideals themselves (D 453, KSA 3.274). As these sciences are not yet sure of themselves we find ourselves living in either a preliminary or a posterior existence, depending on our taste and talent, and in this interregnum the best strategy is for us to become our own reges (sovereigns) and establish small experimental states. As we shall see in the next section, Nietzsche dedicates his new free spirits to the practical task of bringing about a new epoch in human history centred on individual and social experimentation. This is Nietzsche’s dawn. To understand it fully we need to explore the notion of ethical experimentation he identifies as the key to facilitating individual flourishing and pluralization. What is this ethical experimentation he wants to supplant Kant and Schopenhauer’s anti-​eudaimonistic moralities and their bogus metaphysics? What is required of individuals when they move from a metaphysical to an experimental ethics?

4. We shall now examine Nietzsche’s experimentalism in more detail. Our focus will largely be on the middle period. Here Nietzsche can be seen to be carrying a kind of moral therapy in which the chief aim is to cure us of inflated conceptions of morality, including its imperial and universalist ambitions. Nietzsche does not take the view that there is any necessary conflict between his critique of universal

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morality and his philosophical therapy. Indeed, this is obvious from the fact that in the very same sections that Nietzsche criticizes universalist moralities he proceeds to offer general therapeutic recommendations. Nietzsche assumes that his moral anti-​universalism is compatible with his therapeutic ambitions. We need to examine how Nietzsche understands the relationship between his moral critique and his philosophical therapy. Let us consider first the reasons for Nietzsche’s rejection of universal moral laws before turning to its implications for his therapeutic ambitions. In Dawn Nietzsche opposes the idea of a universally binding moral law for at least two reasons. First, as an anti-​metaphysical naturalist Nietzsche assumes that we should only accept a universal moral law if it can be shown to have ‘natural’ foundations. In other words, he argues that we can legitimately prescribe a course of action as right  –​as something that everyone should or ought to do –​only if we can identify a universal goal or telos intrinsic to our species. Yet following the general Darwinian anti-​teleological principle he argues that we cannot find in nature any final species’ goals or ends. On the Darwinian view, evolution is a purposeless, mechanical process that ‘selects’ from the species’ random variations those that contingently happen to foster its self-​preservation. Second, Nietzsche argues that prescribing universal moral imperatives conflicts with his view that every individual has ‘the right to act arbitrarily (Willkürlicher) and foolishly according to the light, bright or dim, of [their] own reason’ (D 107, KSA 3.94–​5). In Dawn one of Nietzsche’s claims is that individuals and groups should be free to impose on themselves laws that they judge to be in their own interests or conducive to their own flourishing. Nietzsche implies that the legitimacy of moral claims depends on individuals endorsing it on the basis of their own reason. What implications does Nietzsche draw from his evolutionary insight into nature and his Enlightenment commitment to individual self-​legislation for the project of reinventing philosophical therapy? We should focus on Nietzsche’s evolutionary theses. ‘Only if mankind possessed a universally recognized goal’ he argues ‘would it be possible to propose “thus and thus is the right course of action”: for the present there exists no such goal. It is thus irrational and trivial to impose the demands of morality upon mankind’ (D 108, KSA 3.95–​6). It is irrational to impose universal moral demands, Nietzsche supposes, because no species has an intrinsic or fixed design or final purpose. From the perspective of natural history, he maintains, there is simply nothing that our species is intrinsically designed to achieve; our species has no essential telos. Rather species’ attributes, he maintains, emerge randomly and are mechanically selected,

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adapted and transformed or deselected if they prove disadvantageous in the struggle for existence. Nietzsche makes explicit his non-​teleological, evolutionary view of nature a few sections later. Nietzsche speculates that if an impartial investigator studied the evolution of the eye he ‘must arrive at the great conclusion that vision was not the intention behind the creation of the eye, but that vision appeared, rather, after chance has put the apparatus together’ (D 122, KSA 3.115). We can borrow Stephen Jay Gould’s example of non-​teleological evolution to illuminate Nietzsche’s point.19 Gould explains how the feather evolved as a consequence of its adaptive capacity to provide insulation and temperature regulation. Only after they had evolved to serve this function were feathers later ‘exapted’ for their aerodynamic properties. The feather was not designed for any given purpose, rather it was an accidental variation that natural selection mechanically transformed. Flight, in Nietzsche’s terms, was not the intention behind the creation of the feather, but flight appeared, rather, after chance had put the apparatus together. The original use of an organ, drive or practice, therefore, by no means exhausts its possible range of uses; bird’s feathers may have evolved as means of insulation, but they were subsequently co-​opted or exapted for another, altogether different purpose (see D 44, KSA 3.51–​2). Vision and flight are accidents of evolutionary history, not intrinsic purposes built into nature. ‘A single instance of this kind’, Nietzsche remarks, ‘and “purposes” fall away like scales from the eyes!’ (D 122, KSA 3.115).20 In the absence of such divine, intrinsic or essential purposes, Nietzsche argues, moral philosophers have no grounds for proposing that the human species must adopt a universal maxim of action or goal. The Christian and Kantian notion that there is universal goal or moral law that ought to constrain individual judgements of how and to what end to act is inconsistent with the evolutionary perspective. From the evolutionary perspective species’ and individual attributes and goals emerge by chance and they vary across the evolutionary timescale. In this context there simply are no a priori or timeless goals or purposes; there are rather accidents of natural history that have proven adaptive or maladaptive for the species in its struggle for existence. The evolutionary test is whether a given variation (or principle of conduct) gives the species a slight advantage in the struggle for existence. In this respect, evolution is ‘neutral’: any principle can be selected or deselected depending on whether it contributes to the species’ advantage, and what is productive of the species’ advantage changes as its environment changes. ‘Morality’ is simply the species’ condition of existence at

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any given time. ‘Morality’ has no metaphysical basis, only a natural basis that changes over time. Nietzsche’s evolutionary perspective rejects Christian and Kantian idea of universal, timeless moral imperatives. ‘For there is no longer any “ought”, as he explains . . . for morality insofar as it was an “ought”, has been annihilated by our way of thinking as has religion’ (HH 34, KSA 43). Yet Nietzsche does not thereby rule out the possibility or legitimacy of therapeutic recommendations offered as hypothetical or conditional imperatives of the form: if you wish to flourish pursue ‘thus and thus course of action’ or act according to ‘thus and thus judgement’. In other words, Nietzsche argues that philosophers can offer recommendations based not on metaphysical notions of the species’ intrinsic purposes or telos, but on their evaluation of what the species and individuals require to flourish in their given context. ‘To recommend a goal to mankind is something quite different’, as he explains, ‘the goal is then thought of as something which lies in its own discretion; supposing the recommendation appealed to mankind, it could in pursuit of it also impose upon itself a moral law, likewise at its own discretion’ (D 108, KSA 3.96). Nietzsche contrasts recommendations (Empfehlungen) and prescriptions (Vorschriften): the philosophical therapist can offer the former since these are conditional imperatives that allow their recipients to decide for themselves rather than categorical imperatives that by definition deny that the application of rules is a matter of choice or discretion. Here Nietzsche does not directly contest the metaphysical groundwork of a priori moral laws. Rather he offers an explanation of why moral preachers issue such universal moral commands and why these commands may find traction with those to whom they are directed. Nietzsche assumes that an explanation of the genesis of a metaphysical belief is sufficient to make the need for a direct counterargument superfluous. Historical refutation, as he puts it, is the definitive refutation (D 95, KSA 3.86–​7). Nietzsche claims that moral preachers present their prescriptions as categorical imperatives in order to maximize their power over others. They maximize this power by mobilizing an ‘obscure fear and awe’ of the moral law (D 107, KSA 3.94–​5).21 Nietzsche maintains that moral preachers have a deeply profane motive for inspiring this fear: protecting their own social and political power. It is not from ‘sacred’ motives of ensuring that others are set free or redeemed by obeying the moral law, but from the profane motive of ruling their followers that moral preachers issue categorical imperatives. Nietzsche treats the metaphysical notion of a categorical imperative as a rhetorical device moralists use to maximize their power by minimizing their followers’ autonomy. Kant’s metaphysical

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conception of a categorical imperative, he argues, merely enshrines a peculiarly German moral attitude:  to prioritize unconditionally obedience to authority over and above one’s own practical interests in flourishing. Unconditional obedience, he remarks, is ‘the basis of all German moral teaching’ (D 207, KSA 3.185–​7). ‘How different an impression’ Nietzsche observes ‘we receive from the whole morality of antiquity! All those Greek thinkers . . . seem as moralists like a gymnastics teacher who says to his pupil: “Come! Follow me! Submit to my discipline! Then perhaps you will succeed in carrying off the prize before all the Hellenes.” Personal distinction –​that is the antique virtue. To submit, to follow, openly or in secret –​that is German virtue’ (D 207, KSA 3.187–​8). By contrast Nietzsche suggests that philosophical physicians can develop therapeutic recommendations as experientially testable propositions. That is to say, he claims that philosophical physicians’ recommendations should be the result of and subject to a type of experimental testing. Once again Nietzsche’s draws directly on the Hellenistic model of ethics in developing this notion of ethical experimentation. ‘So far as praxis is concerned’, he observes, ‘I view the various moral schools as experimental laboratories in which a considerable number of recipes for the art of living have been thoroughly practised and lived to the hilt. The results of all their experiments belong to us, as our legitimate property’ (NL 1881 15[59], KSA 9.655–​6). In order to discover whether the various recipes for the art of living are conducive to health or sickness, Nietzsche suggests, we must put them into practice and observe whether they have a regular set of effects on our health. Nietzsche’s therapist draws heavily on therapeutic knowledge derived from ‘experience’ rather than mere ‘knowledge’. The Nietzschean physician, as he puts it, lives ‘with a head free of fever, equipped with a handful of knowledge and a bagful of experiences’ (D 449). Through such experimental testing, Nietzsche implies, the physician can develop reliable knowledge about what contributes to the species’ flourishing in its current context. Nietzsche’s therapist, in short, replaces metaphysically grounded moral laws with empirically tested health recommendations. Nietzsche then does not believe that his anti-​teleological evolutionary principle or his Enlightenment principle of legitimacy necessarily rules out the identification of successful therapies. Nietzsche’s evolutionary principle simply entails that the human species has no essential purpose or telos. In the Darwinian framework this means that the species’ attributes are chance occurrences mechanically selected, so to speak, because they give it a slight edge in the evolutionary struggle. The eye was not designed for vision, the feather for flight or the species for any particular purpose or ‘higher’ end –​be this conceived as

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reason, duty or happiness. ‘Evolution (Entwicklung)’, as Nietzsche puts it, ‘does not have happiness in view, but evolution and nothing else’ (D 108, KSA 3.96). Philosophers cannot therefore claim to have knowledge of such an essential telos and to use this knowledge as the basis of their therapies. If therapists recommend a certain type of medicine as generally or universally applicable, they can do so not on the grounds that they believe it coheres with a universal human telos, but because they believe it enables individuals to achieve their optimal flourishing at a certain stage of evolution. Nietzsche sees this as an important advance in our ‘meta-​ethical’ knowledge:  we can now see moral rules not as metaphysical or divine mandates, but rather as rules that may or may not serve our flourishing as natural creatures. He also identifies this as an important breakthrough in our method of evaluating moral principles. Nietzsche claims that since we cannot know in advance whether a new rule or principle will facilitate our flourishing the only way to evaluate this is by way of experiment. Experimentation, he claims, is a learning process. Nietzsche proposes experimentation as a means of ‘moral’ or ‘practical’ learning. We must put rules or norms into practice in order to determine their effects and evaluate their worth. Nietzsche argues that in order to determine the value or necessity of a traditional or new morality we must experiment with the form of life it prescribes. We can measure moralities, Nietzsche implies, by testing them in practice and comparing the results of such experiments in living (D 61, KSA 3.61–​2). This still leaves open the question of what these experiments test and the criteria Nietzsche proposes we use to evaluate their outcomes. Nietzsche suggests that these experiments test the effects of different types of ‘moralities’ or value structures on human life, in particular their effects on the possibilities for leading a ‘heroic’ life, or, in Guyau’s terms, on the ‘intensity of life’. In GS 7, KSA 3.378–​80, Nietzsche elucidates this point by drawing an analogy between moralities and climates: just as different climates enable different types of species to flourish so too different moralities allow different ways of life to flourish. By following universalist moral prescriptions, Nietzsche implies, it is as if the species had compelled itself to live in one particular climate zone while shunning the whole range of other possible climates and the forms of life that they allow to flourish. Since in this way universalist moralities proscribe experimentation with different climates or values, he argues, we remain ignorant of the full range of value perspectives that might act as conditions of existence and therefore also of the full scope of human diversity or what he calls ‘beauty’.

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Against this proscription Nietzsche imagines a millennia of ethical experimentation. Its outcome will be a comprehensive knowledge of how moralities contribute to growth of ‘the plant “man” ’ (BGE 44, KSA 5.61) and what value climates are optimal for the propagation of different types of plants. Nietzsche conceives his ethical experimentalism as a way of discovering this array of as yet unexplored climates and their forms of life. We may have completed our physical geography, but we have barely begun to map our moral geography. Our current map, he believes, identifies only a small portion of our moral geography. For this reason he conceives ethical experimentalism in terms of the promise of new dawns –​days that will reveal new, unexplored human possibilities.22 There are so many new days ahead of us, he implies, because we have barely begun to discover these new types of human flourishing. ‘As surely as the wicked (Bösen) enjoy a hundred kinds of happiness of which the virtuous have no inkling’, he writes, ‘so too they possess a hundred kinds of beauty: and many of them have not yet been discovered’ (D 468, KSA 3.280–​1). Nietzsche’s experimentalism aims to discover the many different types of beauty that remain as yet undiscovered. In order to achieve this goal Nietzsche proposes that instead of following metaphysical moralists in contemplating allegedly eternal forms or seeking to identify the groundwork of morality we investigate moralities scientifically and experimentally: i.e. we investigate the genesis, evolution and outcomes of previous moralities and we test the outcomes of new values through experimentation. Nietzsche’s science of morals involves tracking historically all the many values and practices that have given life a certain shape, appearance and direction. Nietzsche conceives his experimentalism as an integral part of this science: it is analogous to a laboratory experiment where we can isolate a specific set of values by practising them in our own lives and observing their regular set of effects. We might ask, for example, ‘How has morality as a condition of existence, a so-​ called “moral climate”, nurtured or impeded the human drives, and what type of “plant” does it propagate?’ We can conceive previous moralities such as Stoicism and Epicureanism as experimental moralities that reveal how certain moralities act as conditions of existence, or we can experiment with other values to achieve the same end. Nietzsche’s metaphor implies that morality establishes the basic conditions that shape the human drives and that some moral climates might be more ‘favourable’ to some forms of life than others. In other words, Nietzsche’s idea of morality as a condition of existence opens up the possibility that we can measure the value of moralities in terms of the way in which they shape, nurture or develop human drives. Nietzsche emphasizes that human drives ‘still could

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grow’ in very different ways depending on the moral climates brought to bear on their development. Nietzsche suggests that his new scientific study of morality identifies the erroneousness ‘of moral judgements to date’. Nietzsche identifies at least three moral ‘errors’. The metaphysical error that consists in the belief that good and evil are objective, independent properties of actions or drives. Against this view, he holds that nothing is good/​evil in-​itself (D 210, KSA 3.189–​90). If we experience moral norms as objective or inescapable this is merely a contingent outcome of our contingent natural history (see HH 39, KSA 2.62–​4).23 Contra Kant Nietzsche identifies the value of moralities in terms of their natural effects on ‘life’ or the drives. Nietzsche conceives this post-​metaphysical conception of values as significant because it permits ethical experimentation. By definition the metaphysical view proscribes experiment by identifying one and only one set of value judgements as objective or permissible. By contrast, Nietzsche’s post-​ metaphysical, naturalist view, which conceives values as conditions of existence that promote certain types of ‘plants’ within the species allows that (1) the value of our values turns on which particular kind of plant/​s we wish to cultivate; and (2)  we may not yet have discovered the full range of variations our species is capable of producing and the values required to promote such as yet unrealized variations. Nietzsche identifies another type of ‘error’ in contemporary naturalists’ conception of morality as a naturally selected mechanism of adaptation. Nietzsche’s criticism of these naturalists provides us with clue about the measure he uses to establish an ‘order of rank’ among values. As with Guyau, Nietzsche claims that experimentation should not simply be aimed at multiplying the available number of climates and forms of life, but at identifying the values that facilitate the most ‘intense’ forms of life. Nietzsche argues that if we measure altruistic moral values by the Darwinian naturalist’s measure  –​the species’ adaptation to its environment –​we can conclude that they are ‘errors’: they do not facilitate species’ preservation. Against these contemporary naturalists Nietzsche argues that the contemporary altruistic morality of good and evil, which naturalists have inherited from earlier metaphysical systems, does not sum up what is useful for the species. In fact, he argues, the morality of good and evil is an evolutionary danger: if we were to allow this morality to operate as the species’ fundamental condition of existence, it would in fact perish (GS 1, KSA 3.345–​6). Nietzsche does not contest their evolutionary or genealogical explanation of morality, only their substantive claim that the cooperation altruism promotes is a necessary condition of existence. The ‘error’ here lies not in the metaphysical conception

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of values as eternal and objective but in the mistaken judgement that our current values accurately select the drives required to facilitate species’ flourishing and deselect those that impede its. Nietzsche then identifies two distinct kinds of error: the metaphysical error of value objectivity and the naturalist error of utility miscalculation. Nietzsche’s indictment of the naturalist’s moral ‘error’ is still only an immanent critique: it indicts the Darwinian naturalists according to their own criteria. It does not yet contest their measure of value (adaptation) or spell out an alternative measure of value. Nietzsche then takes the controversial step of contesting what he conceives as the Darwinians’ fundamental error, viz., measuring the value moralities in terms of the allegedly naturalistic principle of species’ adaptation. Nietzsche suggests his alternative naturalistic line of inquiry into moralities as conditions of existence culminate in ‘the most delicate question: “Can science not only eliminate morality as ‘error’, but also furnish (zu geben) goals of action?” ’ (GS 7, KSA 3.379). After proving that it can annihilate goals of action Nietzsche suggests that ethical experimentation can help address this question. In place of the Kantian search for the metaphysical ground of morality and the Darwinian search for the natural grounds of morality as a successful mechanism of adaptation, he envisages centuries of moral experimentation in which ‘every kind of heroism could find satisfaction’, an experimenting that would ‘eclipse all the great projects and sacrifices of history to date’ (GS 7, KSA 3.379–​80; our italics). Nietzsche conceives this great ethical experimentation as a means for ascertaining how different moralities or value regimes might cultivate or support different ‘heroisms’ and the structure of human drives on which they depend. Nietzsche’s target here is both the metaphysical picture of morality and his contemporaries’ naturalist picture of morality. Kantians and naturalists alike identify a single type of morality as legitimate, but unlike Kantians the naturalists justify this morality a posteriori as an evolutionary mechanism of self-​ preservation. Nietzsche’s ethical experimentation rejects the Kantian a priori claim that there is a single, unconditional morality and the naturalists’ a posteriori claim that value or measure of morality lies in its contribution to a species’ self-​preservation. Against Kantians he maintains that there are many moralities and their value lies in their effects, but against the Darwinians he uses a very different, non-​Darwinian measure of the value. Nietzsche insists that this non-​Darwinian measure in nonetheless true to nature. We should not conceive nature as a utility maximizer that ‘aims’ at self-​preservation, he claims, but as an absurd squanderer of life (GS 349).24 Moralities that structure the drives to make self-​preservation possible, he claims, are exceptions within

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nature; the rule is ‘heroic’ squandering of energy. Nietzsche’s allegedly naturalistic measure is implied by his choice of the word ‘heroism’. Heroic life, as Nietzsche conceives it, is the antithesis of self-​preservation: ‘What makes one heroic? To approach at the same time one’s highest suffering and one’s highest hope’ (GS 268).25 Nietzsche’s experimentation aims not at identifying moralities that establish secure conditions of life (self-​preservation via adaptation), but identifying the full range of moralities that make possible ‘heroic’ lives or lives that require enormous risks in the pursuit of ‘higher’ goals (see also GS 292 and 303, KSA 3.532–​3 and 541–​2). Nietzsche shares the Hellenistic view that the fundamental principle of ethics is to ‘live according to nature’, but this is not to live in serene, untroubled harmony with a providential order (Stoic), tranquilly through the satisfaction of natural and necessary pleasures (Epicurean), or through ‘modest’ adaptation to the environment (Darwinian), but to live heroically. Nietzsche’s concept of ethical experimentation challenges Kantian ethics (as he understood it) insofar as it defends a plurality of moral perspectives and identifies the natural origins of metaphysical morality. Nietzsche’s ethical experimentation also challenges Darwinian naturalism insofar as it rejects the view that nature ‘measures’ different moralities in terms of successful adaptation. Nietzsche replaces Kantian universalizabilty and Darwinian adaptation as measures of value, with the measure of ‘heroism’, or in Guyau’s terms ‘the intensity of living’. Nietzsche’s ethical experimentation aims to expand the scope for different kinds of heroism by identifying the climates or value conditions that enable them to flourish. Nietzsche ethical experimentation replaces universality and self-​preservation with ‘heroism’ as the measure of the value of values.

5. Although the late Nietzsche criticizes Guyau for remaining within the ambit of free thinking, in his middle period writings he too favours the kind of ethical experimentalism Guyau champions. Their criticism of Kant is strikingly similar. Both see Kant’s ethics as a mode of thinking that has been superseded by evolutionary theories’ insights into the origins of moral feelings or sensations. On the one hand, they investigate the historical sources of feelings of duty and obligation, and on the other they champion the ‘rights’ of free-​spirited individuals to engage in ethical experiments. They also both identify such ethical experimentation as a way of promoting moral variability and species’ diversification.

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As Guyau notes, although the ‘rigorous law’ of Kant’s philosophy still reigns in some minds, it is necessary to deviate from it practically. This moral philosophy is no longer the Jupiter whose frown was sufficient to move the world, but rather ‘the prince’ that can now be disobeyed without too much danger. Guyau (1896: 171; 1898: 144) asks: is there not something higher than this mock royalty, and must we not reject all ‘absolute sovereignty’ and in order to promote ‘individual speculation’? Similarly, in his middle period writings, such as Dawn, Nietzsche seeks to advance the cause of emerging individuals who no longer consider themselves to be bound by existing mores and laws and are thus making the first attempts to organize and create for themselves a right. Hitherto, he claims, such individuals have lived their lives under the jurisdiction of a guilty conscience, being decried and decrying themselves as criminals, freethinkers and immoralists (D 164, KSA 3.146–​7). Although Nietzsche thinks their experimentalism will make the coming century a precarious one (it may mean, as he notes, that a rifle hangs on each and every shoulder), it is one that he thinks we should support since it at least ensures that there will be opponents of any claims to a moral monopoly. Though on some occasions Nietzsche gives the impression that he wishes to see the abolition of morality tout court in truth he argues for something more specific and limited: namely, liberation from the narrow and superstitious, fear-​ ridden bonds of unconditional morality (NL 1887 10[164], KSA 12.551–​2). After Kant he thinks we need a new perspective on moral values, one that will enable us to discover how the type ‘man’ can be further strengthened and elevated (NL 1885–​6 2[131], KSA 129–​32). This requires, so he claims, that we extend the concept of ‘morality’ and recognize the need for a moral pluralism –​as he says, the values of the herd can be allowed to rule but in and for the herd (NL 1886–​7 7[6]‌, KSA 12.273–​83; see Schacht 1983: 463, 469; Conway 1997: 28–​34). Moreover, Nietzsche suggests that we should extend this pluralism to cater for constitutional differences between individuals and types. Different moralities, he argues, are warranted in different human contexts and in relation to different human types. We should also not conflate Nietzsche’s ‘experimental morality’ (NL 1883–​ 4 24[15], KSA 10.651–​2) in which one gives oneself a goal with a petty egoism that aims at identifying how to lead a life of minimal danger, risk or adversity. On the contrary, Nietzsche conceives this experimentalism as practices in the service of discovering how one might expand and ‘elevate’ the species’ capacities and powers. Nietzsche’s experimentalist ethic requires individuals to test various modes of living and maxims of action to determine which

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enable them to expand the scope of human flourishing. Nietzsche maintains that this experimentalism requires free spirits to overcome the suffering they necessarily experience when they jettison comforting horizons and moral codes, or ‘murder’ the law, as he puts it, and not give way to the pity they might feel over the distress their moral transgressions cause those settled spirits wedded to tradition (D 146, 562, KSA 3.137–​8, 327). Free spirits must, as he puts it, sojourn in the wilderness. Nietzsche therefore suggests that the key features of spiritual superiority include indifference to one’s own and others’ tender emotions and feelings for the sake of pursuing goals that go beyond the species’ current limits. The type of morality Nietzsche posits for the future, therefore, might best be described as ‘supra-​individualistic’ even if it is specific individuals who practise the experimental life and lead the way by offering themselves and their lives as sacrifices to knowledge. Here the goal is a new ‘ploughshare’ of potential universal benefit and enrichment, leading to a strengthening and elevation of the human feeling of power (D 146, KSA 3.137–​8). Finally, one cannot overlook the differences that ultimately separate Guyau and Nietzsche. Guyau’s philosophy of life departs from the core assumptions of Nietzsche’s thinking. For him, life is expansive in the sense of a need to share: ‘It is as impossible to shut up the intelligence as to shut up flame’ (Guyau 1896: 247; 1898: 210). For Guyau human nature is sociable and cannot be entirely selfish even if it wished to be: ‘We are open on all sides, on all side encroaching and encroached upon . . . Life is not only nutrition; it is production and fecundity’ (ibid.). It is this fecundity of life that reconciles egoism and altruism for Guyau. He thinks that an evolutionary growth can be located in the development of human nature in which from a growing fusion of sensibilities and the increasingly sociable character of elevated pleasures there arises a superior necessity, a kind of duty in fact, which moves us towards others and does so naturally and rationally: ‘We cannot enjoy ourselves in ourselves as on an isolated island . . . Pure selfishness . . . instead of being a real affirmation of self, is a mutilation of self’ (Guyau 1896: 249; 1898: 212). Guyau objects to any ethics of pure egoism: ‘We cannot mutilate ourselves, and pure egoism would be meaningless, an impossibility. In the same way that the ego is considered an illusion by contemporary psychology, that there is no personality, that we are composed of an infinite number of beings and tiny consciousnesses, in the same way we might say that egoist pleasure is an illusion:  my pleasure does not exist without the pleasure of others . . . My pleasure, in order to lose nothing of its intensity, must

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maintain all of its extension’. Guyau regards morality conceived as caritas as the great ‘flower of life’: There is a certain generosity which is inseparable from existence and without which we die –​we shrivel up internally. We must put forth blossoms . . . in reality, charity is but one with overflowing fecundity; it is like a maternity too large to be confined within the family. (Guyau 1896: 101; 1898: 87)

Nietzsche finds this aspect of Guyau’s thinking incredible. Like Guyau he wishes to push life in the direction of a maximization of individual difference or ‘individual speculation’. Yet in opposition to Guyau Nietzsche often seems to assume that this entails a radical form of self-​sufficiency, associability and incommunicability (NL 1880 6[158], KSA 9.  237). Nietzsche stresses that his model of individual experimentalism is incompatible with all or most forms of shared sentiment, especially shared suffering (Mitleid). In many ways Nietzsche’s ethical experimentalism would have benefitted from following Guyau in recognizing the value of shared sentiment for human flourishing. In this respect Guyau’s ethic helps to clarify an important philosophical and ethical inconsistency in Nietzsche’s perspective. In The Gay Science Nietzsche is acutely aware that the Stoic strategy of eliminating the passions, conceived as a capacity to be affected by external causes, significantly limits on our capacity to flourish (GS 12, 306, 326, KSA 3.383–​4, 544, 553–​4; see Ure and Ryan 2014). ‘In denying value to stimulation, suffering and passion’ as Armstrong (2013, 20)  explains ‘Stoicism also denies what, for Nietzsche, is a fundamental condition for growth in activity and joy; namely, openness to being affected. Insofar as Stoic ethics advocates withdrawal, endurance and indifference towards the world, it closes the door to valuable sources of stimulation and struggle, thus impeding rather than promoting human freedom and flourishing’. Yet Nietzsche follows just this course in rejecting Mitleid or shared suffering as a pathological affect that only leads to ill-​health (D 134, KSA 3.127–​8). If, as Nietzsche argues strongly elsewhere, overcoming one’s own suffering is a necessary condition of individual flourishing then prime facie there is good reason for supposing that receptivity to and overcoming others’ suffering can also contribute to one’s own and others’ flourishing. Indeed, on the score Nietzsche wants to have his cake and eat it too. In GS he declares that he wants to ‘teach . . . what is understood by so few today, least of all by those preachers of pity: Mitfreude!’ (GS 338, KSA 3.568). Nietzsche concedes that Mitfreude is an important part of those mutually beneficial friendships that contribute to both parties’ flourishing,

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but he draws the line at Mitleid. Mitfreude, he declares, not Mitleid, makes the friend (HH 499, KSA 2.320). Yet, the same judgements that motivate Mitfreude with friends must also motivate Mitleid: one cannot genuinely have one with the other, and in fact, if Nietzsche is correct, one must maximize the latter in order to maximize the former. In the first place, if we genuinely share in others’ joy, then we must also suffer with them when they experience misfortune or defeat. The condition of our joy in others’ success or good fortune is distress over their failure or misfortune. Second, Nietzsche argues that maximal suffering is a necessary condition of maximal joy. Nietzsche makes just this conceptual point in criticizing what he sees as Stoicism’s cowardly or prudent failure to embrace the conditions of human flourishing: ‘To this day you have the choice: either as little displeasure as possible, painlessness in brief . . . or as much displeasure as possible as the price for the growth of an abundance of subtle pleasures and joys that have rarely been relished yet’ (GS 12, KSA 3.383–​4). The same applies (mutatis mutandis) to our relations with others: if we wish to have as much pleasure or joy as possible in and through our relations with others (Mitfreude), then we must also be prepared to derive as much displeasure as possible through shared suffering (Mitleid). One cannot be a teacher of Mitfreude without being a teacher of Mitleid. No doubt Nietzsche had reason for his scepticism about whether Mitleid might contribute to one’s own and others’ joy in life. As he noted with a mixture of despair and contempt, Rousseau and Schopenhauer argued that those who suffer with others are also those who also envy their success (Ure 2006). However Nietzsche’s justified suspicion that in some cases ‘pity’ merely masks envy should have led him to criticize inauthentic pity and friendship, not mistakenly and inconsistently sever the ties between shared suffering and shared joy. Perhaps then even if we are destined to forget Guyau as an intellectual figure, we should not forget his warning that we mutilate ourselves without sharing others’ pleasures and pains. Guyau signposts the post-​Stoic, post-​Kantian road Nietzsche should have taken in formulating a new ethical eudaimonism.

Notes 1 Brobjer (2008: 91) notes that Nietzsche’s reading of the text ‘is likely to have been of major importance for his views on ethics’. For Guyau’s text we have consulted the fourth edition of the French from 1896 and the English translation of 1898 based on the second edition. The differences between the different editions are slight.

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2 Kropotkin (1924: 322). 3 For some details, see Brobjer (2008: 102, 235 n. 32). Guyau’s text was first translated into English in 1897. 4 This note is from May–​July of 1885. It begins with Nietzsche noting the deplorable condition of literature on morality in today’s Europe and then reviews contributions in the area from England, France and Germany. Nietzsche singles out Guyau’s book for special praise along with Rée’s The Origin of Moral Sensations (1877) and W. H. Rolph’s Biological Problems (1881). He regards these three texts as the strongest in contemporary ethics. 5 Glatzer (1962: 11). 6 Guyau’s Esquisse appears as part of a set of books listed by Nietzsche in a note from the beginning of 1885 (NL 1884–​5 29[67], KSA 11.352). His annotated copy of the book has been lost but his annotations can be found in the appendix to the German translation of Guyau’s text by Elisabeth Schwarz: see Guyau (1912: 279–​ 303). The marginal notes were copied from the original by Gast and obtained by Schwarz, supported by Fouillée, from the archive. For further insight see Fidler (1994: 77 n. 3) and Brobjer (2008: 234 n. 22). Nietzsche writes ‘Ja’ approximately ten times, ‘bravo’ four times, ‘ecco’ two times and ‘gut’ and ‘sehr gut’ approximately thirty times. 7 Nietzsche was, of course, very familiar with Spencer and Hartmann, including these particular works, and he critically engages with them in his notes. Although he did read Fouillée’s book on contemporary social science in 1887, we do not know if he was familiar with his book on moral systems though we think not. See Brobjer (2008: 102, 181 n. 67). Nietzsche refers to Fouillée in NL 1887 10[171], KSA 12.559 (along with Guyau), and NL 1887–​8 11[137] and 11[147], KSA 13.63 and 13.69. Fouillee was Guyau’s stepfather and wrote a book on Nietzsche after Guyau’s premature death, Nietzsche et l’immoralisme (1902). Nietzsche’s annotations to his copy of Guyau’s Esquisse are also discussed in it. NL 1887–​8 11[137], KSA 13.63, indicates that Nietzsche regarded him as another free thinker: ‘The “growing autonomy of the individual”: these Parisian philosophers such as Fouillée speak of this they ought to take a look at the race mountonnière [race of sheep] to which they belong! Open your eyes, you sociologists of the future! The individual has grown strong under opposite conditions; what you describe is the most extreme weakening and impoverishment of mankind; you even desire it and employ to that end the whole mendacious apparatus of the old ideal! You are so constituted that you actually regard your herd-​animal needs as an ideal! A complete lack of psychological integrity!’ 8 Orru (1983: 503–​4). 9 In the French original Guyau employs the Greek for both terms. Guyau’s conception of ‘anomos’ was of course taken up by Emile Durkheim and put to quite different

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ends in his well-​known theory of ‘pathological anomie’. For further insight, see Orru and Miller (1996). GMS 460. On this issue, see Ross (2009). In GS 335, KSA 3.560–​4, Nietzsche seeks to show that any attempt to truly know ourselves must have recourse to the intellectual conscience which works as a conscience behind our moral conscience and which may be little more than the product of habitually acquired opinions and valuations. Guyau’s insight seems to anticipate the approach to the categorical imperative Bergson (1979: 26) proposes in his Two Sources: ‘an absolutely categorical imperative is instinctive or somnambulistic, enacted as such in a normal state . . .’ . See also Nietzsche on ‘the automaton of duty’ in A 11, KSA 6.177. There is an extended treatment on pessimism by Guyau in his Non-​Religion of the Future, where he treats the same figures that occupy Nietzsche’s attention: Leopardi, Schopenhauer, and von Hartmann (Guyau 1962: 457–​66). For Nietzsche’s annotation, see Guyau (1912: 286). On the need for an ‘experimental morality’, compare Nietzsche, BGE 210, KSA 5.142–​4, NL 1883–​4 24[15], KSA 10.651–​2, and NL 1885–​6 1[136], KSA 12.42. Arguably, Nietzsche oversimplifies Kant’s analysis of pity (Mitleid). Drawing on his argument in the Doctrine of Virtue 34/​35 Gudrun von Tevenar plausibly argues that Kant in fact ‘rejects Mitleidenschaft, tolerates pity, and recommends compassion’; Tevenar (2001: 252). On Kant’s troubled reflections on the value of pity (Mitleid) as a motivation of moral action, see Tevenar (2001: 235–​54), Baxley (2010: 163–​71) and Fraser (2010: ­chapter 5). Nietzsche glosses Kant’s ‘Doctrine of Virtue’, MS §34 457. It is true that Nietzsche occasionally advocates a kind of ‘empathy’, but he does so for epistemic not social reasons. Indeed, he advocates empathy without sympathy. In GS 249, KSA 3.515, for example, he claims that we need to develop what we might call ‘empathy’ in order to appropriate others’ perspectives for ourselves, but he does not advocate that we ought to use this empathy to develop our concern about their fate. Indeed, as Nietzsche takes great pains to stress in this very section, his kind of empathy is motivated by a purely selfish greed to appropriate others’ eyes for the sake of expanding or refining one’s own vision. Nietzsche’s empathy is a greed for possession (see also GS 14, KSA 3.386–​7). Nietzsche goes on to explain in GS 338 that if what we might call our natural, ‘autonomic’ empathy begin to tilt over into sympathy, we need to shut it down by placing a layer of several centuries between ourselves and the cries of distress in the present that threaten to lure us down the path of sympathy or pity with our fellow citizens or friends. So Nietzsche endorses empathy as a way of expanding ourselves and appropriating others for ourselves, but he does not by any means endorse or support sympathy. In fact Nietzsche urges us to protect and immunize ourselves against this pathological love lest it lure us into helping others rather than following our own way.

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19 Gould (1991). 20 Nietzsche ironically alludes here to Paul’s famous conversion on the road to Damascus, Acts 9:1–​19. When the scales fall from Paul’s eye he is able to see that Jesus is the Son of God who can deliver believers from the via dolorosa. Paul’s conversion is by way of a religious epiphany. It converts him from Judaism’s defender to its attacker. By contrast, when the scales fall from the eyes of the Nietzschean he is able to see that there are no purposes or designs in nature, only the operations of blind chance. The Nietzschean conversion is by way of evolutionary history. 21 Nietzsche clearly alludes to Kant’s GMS and KpV, especially the chapter ‘Incentives of Pure Practical Reason’. ‘Two things fill the mind with ever-​increasing wonder and awe (Ehrfurcht), the more often and the more intensely the mind of thought is drawn to them: the starry heavens above me and the moral law within me.’ 22 Nietzsche prefaced Daybreak with a phrase from the Rig Veda: ‘There are so many days (Morgenröthen) that have not yet broken’ (D, KSA 3.9). 23 See also Joyce (2006). For a cogent analysis of the significance of such genealogical accounts for the epistemic standing of our moral judgements, see Hanfield (forthcoming). His analysis supports the Nietzschean claim that genealogical considerations suggest that ‘we are not justified in believing certain core [Kantian] claims about morals: claims about the inescapability of moral demands and the appropriateness of guilt’. 24 We do not have space here to examine the competing interpretations of Nietzsche’s concept of life as ‘will to power’. For an excellent summary and analysis of these interpretations, see Loeb (2015). 25 This heroic conception of Nietzsche’s ethics of experimentation is consistent with what we might call Bernard Reginster’s (2006) ‘Olympian’ conception of Nietzsche’s ethics. He argues that it ‘essentially rests on the view that the difficulty of an achievement contributes to its value’ (13).

References Armstrong, A. (2013), ‘Passions, Power, and Practical Philosophy: Spinoza and Nietzsche contra the Stoics’, Journal of Nietzsche Studies 44: 6–​24. Baxley, A. M. (2010), Kant’s Theory of Virtue: The Value of Autocracy, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Bergson, H. (1979), Two Sources of Morality and Religion, trans. R. Ashley Audra and C. Brereton, with the assistance of W. Horsfall Carter, Notre Dame, IN: University of Notre Dame Press. Brobjer, T. H. (2008), Nietzsche’s Philosophical Context: An Intellectual Biography, Urbana and Chicago: University of Illinois Press.

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Conway, D. W. (1997), Nietzsche and the Political, London: Routledge. Fidler, C. G. (1994), ‘On Jean-​Marie Guyau, Immoraliste’, Journal of the History of Ideas 55: 75–​98. Fraser, M. (2010), The Enlightenment of Sympathy: Justice and the Moral Sentiments in the Eighteenth Century, Oxford: Oxford University Press. Glatzer, N. N. (1962), ‘Introduction’, in J.-​M. Guyau, The Non-​religion of the Future: A Sociological Study, New York: Schocken Books. Gould, S. J. G. (1991), ‘Exaptation a Crucial Tool for an Evolutionary Psychology’, Journal of Social Issues 47 (3): 43–​65. Guyau, J.-​M. (1896), Esquisse d’une morale sans obligation, ni sanction, 4ième édition, Paris: Baillière/​Alcan. Guyau, J.-​M. (1898), A Sketch of Morality Independent of Obligation or Sanction, trans. Gertrude Kapteyne, London: Watts & Co. Guyau, J.-​M. (1912), Sittlichkeit ohne ‘Pflicht’, Ins Deutsche übersetzt von Elisabeth Schwarz. Mit einer für die deutsche Ausgabe verfassten biographischkritischen Einleitung von Alfred Fouillée und bisher unveröffentlichen Randbemerkungen Friedrich Nietzsches, Leipzig: W. Klinkhardt. Guyau, J.-​M. (1962), The Non-​religion of the Future: A Sociological Study, New York: Schocken Books. Hanfield, T. (forthcoming), ‘Genealogical Explanations of Chance and Morals’, in U. Leibowitz and N. Sinclair (eds), Explanation in Ethics and Mathematics, Oxford: Oxford University Press. Joyce, R. (2006), The Evolution of Morality, Cambridge, MA: MIT Press. Kropotkin, P. (1924), Ethics, Origin and Development, trans. L. S. Friedland and J. R. Piroshnikoff, New York: The Dial Press. Loeb, P. (2015), ‘Will to Power and Panpsychism: A New Exegesis of BGE 36’, in M. Dries and P. Kail (eds), Nietzsche on Mind and Nature, 57–​88, Oxford: Oxford University Press. Orru, M. (1983), ‘The Ethics of Anomie: Jean-​Marie Guyau and Émile Durkheim’, The British Journal of Sociology 34 (4): 499–​518. Orru, M., and Miller, W. W. (1996), Durkheim, Morals, and Modernity, Montreal: McGill-​Queen’s University Press. Reginster, B. (2006), The Affirmation of Life: Nietzsche on Overcoming Nihilism, Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press. Ross, A. (2009), ‘What Is the Force of the Moral Law in Kant’s Practical Philosophy?’ Parallax 15(2): 27–​40. Schacht, R. (1983), Nietzsche, London: Routledge & Kegan Paul. Tevenar, G. T. (2001), Pity and Compassion, Birkbeck College, University of London (PhD). Ure, M. (2006), ‘The Irony of Pity: Nietzsche contra Schopenhauer and Rousseau’, Journal of Nietzsche Studies 32: 68–​91.

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Ure, M., and Ryan, T. (2014), ‘Nietzsche’s Post-​Classical Therapy’, PLI: Warwick Journal of Philosophy 25: 91–​110.

Translations of Kant’s works Kant, I. (1964), Groundwork of the Metaphysics of Morals, trans. H. J. Paton, New York: Harper and Row. Kant, I. (1964), The Doctrine of Virtue: Part II of the Metaphysics of Morals, trans. by Mary J. Gregor, New York: Harper and Row.

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Question or Answer? Kant, Nietzsche and the Practical Commitment of Philosophy Paul van Tongeren

For Immanuel Kant as well as for Friedrich Nietzsche, it is only to some extent that ‘ethics’, or more generally ‘practical philosophy’, can be called a specific part of philosophy, next to ‘theoretical philosophy’. Of course, in Kant we find the distinction between (the critique of pure) theoretical and (the critique of pure) practical reason, and in several of Nietzsche’s books we recognize the same distinction –​for example, in the titles of book chapters such as ‘On the Prejudices of Philosophers’ or ‘Natural History of Morals’ (BGE I and V). At the same time, however, both philosophers are convinced that philosophy is as such a practical affair:  together with Socrates they hold that philosophy aims at some kind of improvement of the (individual as well as social and cultural) practice of life. Kant in his Introduction to Logic opposes ‘[t]‌he master of the art of reason, or as Socrates calls him, the philodoxus’ to ‘the true philosopher’, who is a ‘practical philosopher, [a] teacher of wisdom by doctrine and example’ (Log 24). Moreover, Nietzsche knows himself to be closely related to Socrates (cf. Nietzsche, NL 1875 6[3], KSA 8.97), whom he criticizes not because of the practical commitment of his philosophizing, but rather because of the way he implemented this commitment, or more precisely, because of the kind of life that committed itself in his philosophy. The philosopher’s practical commitment that I am referring to is not so much made explicit in declaratory statements, but rather expresses itself in the tone and the tendency of his philosophy. In this chapter I want to focus on one of the ways in which it articulates itself in Nietzsche’s writings, especially in contradistinction to what we find (or rather what Nietzsche finds) in Kant. It will be my

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contention that for Nietzsche, not only but most strongly in the writings of 1886/​ 1887,1 his practical commitment has the form of the effort to make himself and his selected readers incorporate a distressing question: how to live under conditions of nihilism? With help of three examples from Nietzsche’s writings –​each one related to Kant, though in different ways  –​I  will try to show how this commitment is performed, that is, how that question appears and is forced upon the reader. The first will be brief and concerns the presentation of an aphorism that explicitly criticizes Kant; the second is a bit more elaborate and gives an interpretation of a series of aphorisms in which Nietzsche summarizes his philosophy in a way in which we might recognize an (implicit) allusion to a well-​known passage in Kant’s writings; and the third example is a somewhat more extensive reconstruction of Nietzsche’s position in the history of thought about friendship in which Kant plays an important role.

1.  From answer to question (BGE 11, KSA 5.24–​6) Section 11 of the first chapter of Beyond Good and Evil, ‘one of the high points of this chapter’,2 might serve as a first introduction to the point I want to make. It is one out of many texts in which Nietzsche criticizes Kant and the way in which contemporary German philosophy deals with the Kantian heritage. Nietzsche quotes Kant’s revolutionary question ‘How are synthetic judgments a priori possible?’ and criticizes him for having given an answer (‘by virtue of a faculty’), which in fact was, according to Nietzsche, no real answer but ‘rather merely a repetition of the question’. Then he goes on to suggest what he deems a different and more appropriate question, namely, ‘Why is belief in such judgments necessary?’ But he immediately answers his own question, or suggests that he knew the answer already long before: ‘[I]‌t is high time [. . .] to comprehend that such judgments must be believed to be true, for the sake of the preservation of creatures like ourselves.’ In the present framework I  am not interested in the question whether Nietzsche is correct in his criticism or whether he is honest and sincere at all.3 I rather want to point at a specific feature of the way in which he phrases his criticism here. At first sight, it seems that, while Kant gives an answer that according to Nietzsche only repeats (and thus maintains) the question, Nietzsche knows the answer almost before having asked the question (and

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thus doesn’t really ask a question). This is, however, a misleading impression, as we will see. The ‘development and rapid flourishing of German philosophy’ showed the impact of Kant’s manoeuver:  after Kant himself ‘discovered’ the possibility of real knowledge, and after he ‘further discovered a moral faculty in man’, his successors discovered all kind of further faculties, ‘[a]‌bove all, a faculty for the “suprasensible” ’. Along this way philosophy confirmed the possibility of true knowledge, as well of morality and religion, or rather it conformed itself to the prevalent belief in truth, morality and God instead of questioning these beliefs as it should do. The philosopher who confessed in his Prolegomena to Any Future Metaphysics ‘that the suggestion of David Hume was the very thing, which many years ago first interrupted my dogmatic slumber’ (Prol 13), in fact continued to dream according to Nietzsche: ‘One had been dreaming, and first and foremost –​old Kant’.4 Nietzsche on the contrary wants to really wake up: ‘But let us reflect; it is high time to do so.’ Reflection means putting the beliefs into question, but –​and this is according to Nietzsche the important difference between him and Kant –​this time with different questions: questions that cannot be answered at all. These are rather questions that we will have to learn to sustain, to incorporate, to live with; questions, therefore, that show the practical nature of philosophy, even of epistemology. These questions are hidden under the apparent answers that Nietzsche adds.5 For immediately after having given his ‘answer’, Nietzsche points to the problem that rises through that answer: ‘[S]‌ynthetic judgments a priori should not “be possible” at all; we have no right to them; in our mouths they are nothing but false judgments. Only, of course, the belief in their truth is necessary.’ The problem therefore is that we necessarily continue to believe in what we know is untrue. This problem is, as I will point out later, the core of what Nietzsche diagnoses as our ‘European nihilism’; it confronts us with the question how to incorporate this problem (cf. GS 110, KSA 3.471), and it transforms our situation and maybe even our selves into ‘a rendezvous, it seems, of questions and question marks’ (BGE 1, KSA 5.15). Nietzsche criticizes Kant for having silenced and removed a question (by using the virtus dormitiva of his answer), whereas he himself tries to confront us with a question that will keep us awake, and possibly even bring us in despair. For whereas the type of answers such as Kant (and Molière’s doctor) give them ‘belong in comedy’, Nietzsche’s questions confront us with tragedy: it is here that tragedy begins: ‘incipit tragoedia’ (GS 342, KSA 3.571).6 For an elaboration of

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this distressing question I move on to the series of aphorisms, immediately following this ‘incipit’.

2.  A philosophy summarized in questions (GS 343–​6, KSA 5.573–​81) We have seen already that Kant distinguished ‘philodoxia’ or ‘[p]‌hilosophy, in the scholastic conception of it’ from true philosophy, or philosophy in the sense of ‘the science of the relation of all knowledge and every use of reason to the ultimate end of human reason, to which, as supreme, all other ends are subordinated’ (Log 24–​5). It is in this sense that philosophy is, as indicated, in principle a practical affair. Kant famously summarized this ‘true’ philosophy in the introduction to his Introduction to Logic in four questions (Log 25). Earlier he had already summarized ‘[t]he whole interest of reason, speculative as well as practical, [. . .] in the three following questions: 1. What can I know? 2. What ought I to do? 3. What may I hope? (KrV A804f/​ B832f) It is important to see that this passage comes at the end of the Critique of Pure Reason, immediately after Kant has expressed a certain ‘dissatisfaction’ with the results of his Critique, and after he has asked the question ‘whether pure reason is also to be found in practical use, whether in that use it leads us to the ideas that attain the highest ends of pure reason’; in other words: ‘whether from the point of view of its practical interest reason may not be able to guarantee that which in regard to its speculative interest it entirely refuses to us’ (ibid.). Just like, according to Kant, ‘[t]‌he first question [‘what can I  know?’] is answered by Metaphysics’, be it without ‘complete satisfaction’, so the other questions (‘what ought I to do?’ and ‘what may I hope?’) will be answered in his moral philosophy and his philosophy of religion: yes, we do know what we ought to do, and yes, we may hope for the unity of duty and happiness in the life to come. In his Introduction to Logic Kant summarizes these three questions in a fourth one:

‘4. What is man?’ (Log 26) As he writes, ‘[T]‌he first three questions refer to the last’. Though this fourth question is according to Kant ‘answered [.  . .] by anthropology’ (ibid.), it

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should –​I think –​rather be seen as the summarizing question for the whole of his philosophy. As such it is actually not a real question but rather an expression of wonder and respect for this human being that is able to indicate the limits of his or her own knowledge, that has an incontestable conscience of his or her moral duty and that may trust God’s ultimate justice. Understood in this way, the fourth question reminds us of psalm 8, verses 3–​5: When I look at your heavens, the work of your fingers, the moon and the stars, which you have set in place, /​what is man that you are mindful of him, and the son of man that you care for him? /​Yet you have made him a little lower than the heavenly beings and crowned him with glory and honor.

Kant summarizes his philosophy in questions and these questions are being answered in his writings in such a way that the final summarizing question is hardly a question anymore, but shows his philosophy to be a reflection on the human being, which at the same time exemplifies its dignity and pays tribute to its Creator. I would like to suggest that Nietzsche varies on Kant’s four questions in the beginning of the fifth book of the (1886 edition of) The Gay Science; that is, immediately following the incipit tragoedia with which the fourth book (and the 1882 edition of the whole book) closes. Even if Nietzsche does not do so intentionally, it is my contention that this series of texts can be interpreted as a variation on Kant’s questions. The variation consists not only in Nietzsche’s implementing Kant’s questions in the framework of the death of God, but also in reversing the rhetorical force of the questions: whereas Kant asks three real questions, which he then answers and summarizes in a respectful wonder about the human being, Nietzsche hides his questions in statements or rhetorical questions, but ends up in a distressing presentation of the human being as a labyrinthic question.7 Although Nietzsche does not mention Kant’s first three questions in the same order, the three domains can still be recognized: knowledge, morality and religion are present in each of the first three sections of the fifth book. By collecting all three domains in each section, Nietzsche points already to their being intertwined stronger than Kant would have it. But also in Nietzsche’s version it is in each section a different domain that comes first: religion, knowledge and morality respectively. Section 343, ‘The meaning of our cheerfulness’, deals primarily with religion and the consequences of the death of God; section 344, KSA

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3.574–​7, ‘How we, too, are still pious’, is first and foremost about knowledge and the search for truth; and section 345, KSA 3.577–​9, ‘Morality as a problem’, deals obviously with morality in the first place. Neither of these sections has a question mark in their headings, but the texts are full of ever more pressing questions, even if under the guise of bold statements. Section 343 asserts that most of us still don’t know ‘what this event [i.e. the death of God] really means –​and how much must collapse now that this faith has been undermined’. ‘Even we’ seem not yet sufficiently aware of the meaning of this event ‘to be compelled to play the teacher and advance proclaimer of this monstrous logic of terror, the prophet of a gloom and an eclipse of the sun whose like has probably never yet occurred on earth’. Section 344, KSA 3.574–​7, has relatively many (16) question marks. Here our will to truth as well as our morality are put into question: don’t they lean on the same old faith ‘that God is the truth, that truth is divine’? And once again Nietzsche suggests that ‘even we’ are not fully aware of what this means: ‘even we seekers after knowledge today, we godless anti-​metaphysicians still take our fire’ from this faith. The text closes on a rhetorical question; rhetorical not because the answer is already given, but rather because it seems no real answer could be imagined: ‘what if this should become more and more incredible, if nothing should prove to be divine any more unless it were error, blindness, the lie  –​if God himself should prove to be our most enduring lie?’ Section 345, KSA 3.577–​9, problematizes morality in an extremely radical way: not only the possibility that ‘morality has grown out of an error’ should be acknowledged; but even the paradoxical question for ‘the value of that most famous of all medicines which is called morality’ must be asked. That means that one should take ‘morality as a problem, and this problem as [one’s] own personal distress, torment, voluptuousness, and passion’. So far ‘nobody [has] ventured’ that –​probably ‘even we’ haven’t yet, since the text ends by saying ‘precisely this is our task’. In my presentation of these three sections, that parallel Kant’s questions, I underlined the different nature of Nietzsche’s questions: they seem not so much to be questions that can or have to be answered, problems that could be solved, but rather question (or exclamation) marks that confront us with a situation that we –​‘even we’ –​have to acknowledge. This brings us to the last section of this series, in which I think we find Nietzsche’s parallel to Kant’s fourth question. This section (GS 346, KSA 3.579–​81) has again, at least in a certain sense, no question mark in its title. But in another sense it does have one, or even is one; for the title reads: ‘Our question mark’. The whole title is a question mark, or rather: it draws the conclusion from the way in which ‘even we’ were put into question in the preceding sections and presents ‘us’ as a question mark. The

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thinker who has interrogated as thoroughly as possible every belief (religion), every practice (morality) and all knowledge (metaphysics and science), ends up being confronted with his own suspicious questions. This thinker starts to surmise that religion, morality and truthfulness were not only the object of his questions, but animated his very questioning. Religion, morality and knowledge have been criticized because of their being motivated by ideals (God, goodness, truth) that include a negation of reality. The mistrustful philosopher has criticized ‘man [as] a reverent animal’. But now he discovers that this reverence and these ideals were still effective in his own mistrust. He cannot escape the confronting question, ‘[H]‌ave we not simply carried the contempt for man one step further? [. . .] Have we not exposed ourselves to the suspicion of an opposition [. . .] an inexorable, fundamental, and deepest suspicion about ourselves?’8 Kant summarized his three questions in a fourth one, which was not so much a question but rather an expression of reverence for the human being who proved to be capable of true knowledge, good will and firm faith. Nietzsche on the contrary summarizes his rhetorical questions in a problematization of the reverence included in his own questioning. For even the mistrustful philosopher turns out to be an idealist, so it seems. As soon as he acknowledges this, he becomes a question mark for himself. In the next section I will elaborate on this idealism and show how it haunts its very problematization, by focusing on the topic of friendship: a topic from practical philosophy on which both Kant and Nietzsche wrote, and  –​more importantly –​which was extremely important for both in the practice of life. But before doing that I want to conclude this section by quoting Nietzsche’s conclusion so far: when the philosopher discovers that he is being driven by what he tries to overcome, he experiences by anticipation ‘the terrifying Either/​Or’ that according to Nietzsche will ‘confront coming generations’: ‘ “Either abolish your reverences or –​yourselves!” The latter would be nihilism; but would not the former also be –​nihilism? –​This is our question mark.’ Nietzsche’s fourth question is the opposite of Kant’s: not a consoling awareness of our dignity as a human being in a tribute to its Creator, but a distressing confrontation with the consequences of nihilism in the light (or rather the shadow) of the death of God.

3.  Friendship and nihilism In order to elaborate my third example of the practical commitment of Nietzsche’s philosophy, I will first introduce the topic of friendship and relate it to Nietzsche’s concept of nihilism, by expanding very briefly on this concept

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(3.1), and by a very quick overview of the history of thought on friendship (3.2), before focusing on the antagonism as well as the similarity between Kant (3.3) and Nietzsche (3.4) regarding this topic.9

3.1  Nihilism Nihilism as conceptualized by Nietzsche has a threefold meaning:  it is (in an inverted chronological order) (3) the corrosion of (2) the protective structure that was built to hide (1) the absurdity of life and world.10 Nihilism-​1 is sometimes also indicated as ‘Greek pessimism’, but seems to me to be the basis of Nietzsche’s concept of nihilism; it refers to the meaningless and chaotic nature of the world and the tragic acknowledgement thereof in pre-​Socratic Greek culture. Nihilism-​2 is Nietzsche’s way to refer to the history of European culture from Socrates and Plato on unto the nineteenth century; and nihilism-​3 refers to what is happening since then, that is, what Nietzsche sometimes labels as ‘the death of God’, what he describes as the history of the centuries to come and with regard to which he makes all these well-​known distinctions (such as between active and passive, complete and incomplete nihilism, etc.). Nihilism is therefore not only, and not primarily the corrosion of ‘meaning’ or ‘value’ as summarized in the formula of the death of God (nihilism-​3). On the contrary: it is important to acknowledge that according to Nietzsche ‘God’ is itself a nihilistic concept, even the core concept of nihilism-​2. The history of European philosophy, science, morality, politics, religion and art is itself deeply nihilistic.11 It is because of the nihilistic structure of European culture (from Plato up to Nietzsche) that the death of God has become possible and is (and will continue to be) such a threatening event. Only because ‘truth’ or the idea(l) of truth and the ‘will to truth’ have been the driving force of European culture could they eventually undermine the whole construction they helped build; a construction that on the one hand has protected us against the ‘fact’ that there is no truth, but that on the other hand has done so by imagining a true world behind or beyond all apparent (contingent etc.) reality:  a construction  –​in other (Samuel Beckett’s (1981:  408)) words  –​that had us ‘waiting for Godot’, even accepting that ‘mr. Godot [. . .] won’t come this evening’ in order not to ­acknowledge that there is no Godot. That there is no Godot, no God, no absolute principle of truth, beauty and goodness, makes human existence extremely difficult. Humans –​at least since Socrates made an end to the ‘tragic age of the Greek’ –​cannot live without the difference between true and false, good and bad, beautiful and ugly, that is: we

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cannot live without that what is indicated with these words, that is:  without ‘meaning’. The tradition recognized this as it called the human being an animal rationale. Aristotle pointed to an important implication of this by linking two defining characteristics of the human being to each other: because the human being is a dzooion logon echoon, (s)he is a dzooion politikon. For logos deals with meaning; that is, with the difference between to sumpheron and to blaberon, to dikaion and to adikon (Aristotle, Politics 1253 a1–​20), or between true and false, good and bad, beautiful and ugly. Aristotle seems to contend that because we cannot live (at least not as human beings, not in a humane way) without meaning, we cannot live as isolated, solitary individuals: because we are logikoi, we are politikoi. From a Nietzschean perspective, I understand this as follows: Human beings need each other, because their lives in order to be meaningful depend on something highly insecure: ‘meaning’. Human beings need communication and community in order to get hold on this meaning by sharing their interpretations of it. They are all the more in need of it to the extent that this meaning is threatened, that is, to the extent to which they recognize the groundlessness (the nihilism-​2) of their interpretations; in other words, to the extent to which nihilism-​3 imposes itself on them. Friendship is a name for the ideal community –​therefore, nihilism calls for friendship. What would Vladimir as well as Estragon be without the other! In the most literal sense of the word, it is their being together that prevents them from committing suicide.12 But . . .

3.2  Friendship and philosophy Nihilism-​2, that is, the nihilism of this construction that was supposed to protect us against nihilism-​1 consists –​to put it very briefly –​in the denial of the apparent world on behalf of a true world. The contingency of this world is put in perspective by the eternity of the true world; the evil in this world by the goodness of its creator; the imperfection of factual reality by the perfection of the ideal. The ideality of the true world is, however, a devaluation of the real world. The history of nihilistic European culture can therefore be summarized as the history of this construction of an ideal world, the history of ‘idealism’ in this sense of the word. It is the construction as Nietzsche had in mind when he wrote in section 346 of the Gay Science, KSA 3.580: ‘The whole pose of “man against the world,” of man as the measure of the value of things, as judge of the world who in the end places existence itself upon his scales and finds it wanting.’ Nietzsche

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famously completes this history of the construction of an ideal world with the history of its de(con)struction, and summarizes the whole in the Twilight of the Idols as the ‘History of an Error’ (TI Fable, KSA 6.80–​81). As I wrote before: friendship is the ideal community. It is an ideal. It is probably not by accident that the praise of friendship has been sung throughout the history of philosophy, and especially by those thinkers who had a sharp eye for the problem of contingency and for the contingencies of life, such as Aristotle, Augustine, Montaigne and also Immanuel Kant (cf. Derrida 1994). The history of thinking about friendship makes it obvious that friendship has always been idealized, even extremely so. Let’s have a quick look at some moments from this history. Aristotle is usually considered to be the normative beginning of the history of thinking about friendship. Friendship between two perfectly virtuous men is for him the crowning glory of the good and happy life. Of course he knows that there are forms of friendship that do not meet this ideal highest form. The less perfect forms of friendship –​for utility or for pleasure –​can only be called forms of friendship pros mian kai prootèn (Aristotle, Eudemian Ethics 1236a16), that is, to the extent to which they keep oriented towards the ideal friendship, towards what can be called ‘friendship protoos kai kyrioos’. But this latter friendship is very rare, if it can exist at all. It is not by chance that the famous words O philoi, oudeis philos (‘O my friends, there is no friend’), words that have been quoted time and again throughout the history of thinking about friendship, are ascribed to Aristotle, although we don’t find them literally in his writings. Augustine’s Confessions contain moving passages on friendship that show how important the topic was for him. It looks like an awkward contrast when Augustine in the midst of his lively memories of one of his closest friendships suddenly states that friendship can only become true friendship through God: amicitia [. . .] non est vera nisi cum eam tu agglutinas (Augustine Confessions, IV.7).13 The framework of this remark in the Confessions suggests that the explanation has to do with the contingency of human life or the variability and uncertainty of human relations. His friend’s passing away shows how he has loved something transient and it moreover confronts him with his own mortality. In order to save him from the despair caused by this death, he discovers or constructs an eternally loving and lovable God: ‘Blessed is he, who loves you and loves his friend in you’ (Augustine 1997: 101; Confessions, IV.14). Montaigne doesn’t need God for true friendship, but he nevertheless continues the history of idealization of friendship. His famous essay on friendship is built on the opposition between what people call friendship on the one hand

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and friendship as he experienced it with Etienne de la Boetie on the other hand. Only this was true friendship. The ideality of this friendship appears most clearly in the famous lines in which Montaigne (1969: 92) claims that there were in a certain sense no reasons for this friendship: it was ‘[b]‌ecause it was he, because it was my self ’. This ideal is however conceptualized following the friend’s passing away, that is, the ideality appears after the ‘real thing’ has ended. There are many more landmarks in the history of thought about friendship, but these few indications may suffice as a framework for our main authors: Kant and Nietzsche.

3.3  Kant on friendship In a lecture on friendship that was part of a course on ethics that Kant offered at the University of Königsberg from 1775 till 1780, he states: ‘[T]‌here are two motives to action in man. The one –​self-​love –​is derived from himself, and the other –​the love of humanity –​is derived from others and is the moral motive. In man these two motives are in conflict’ (Lecture, 210). This conflict is so deep, the opposition between the two so absolute, that a synthesis of these two motives is actually impossible. We do have, however, a name for this synthesis: friendship. Friendship is self-​love that is completely merged into love of the other, or love of the other that is so absolutely sure about its being reciprocal that it is no longer in conflict with self-​love. We can hardly be surprised that Kant immediately adds that this impossible combination of self-​love and love of humanity cannot be an empirical fact. It will never be experienced in reality, because this coincidence of love of the other and self-​love is humanly impossible: ‘in practical life such things do not occur’ (Lecture, 212). In the Metaphysics of Morals Kant stresses a slightly different reason for the same impossibility of friendship: since friendship is ‘the union of two persons through equal mutual love and respect,’ and since not only the equality in this reciprocity is extremely difficult to realize, but –​more importantly –​there is an inherent contradiction between love and respect (‘For love can be regarded as attraction and respect as repulsion’), ‘it is readily seen that friendship is only an Idea and unattainable in practice’ (MS 469). Notwithstanding his pessimism regarding the possibility of friendship, we know that Kant used to have lunch with ‘friends’ on a daily basis. The apparent contradiction might be solved with the help of Aristotle’s distinction between kinds of friendship. Just like him, Kant, too, distinguishes three kinds, founded ‘respectively on need, taste and disposition’. But whereas for Aristotle these really

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are three ways in which friendship can be realized, for Kant they all have a mark of impossibility. Friendship based on need (which equals Aristotle’s friendship for utility) is, according to Kant (in his Lecture), less possible to the extent to which someone is more needy; the more needs one has, the more one will be concerned about getting them fulfilled; and the more one is obsessed with taking care of one’s own needs, the less one will be concerned about the other’s well-​being. Moreover, needs increase with their being fulfilled. Luxury creates ever-​new needs. Therefore the conclusion must be a very paradoxical one, namely, that friendship based on need can only exist to the extent that this friendship proves unable to fulfill this need. There is another reason why this friendship based on need is nearly impossible: friendship always (for Kant as for Aristotle) requires equality. But as soon as my friend has helped me, I owe him something, that is, I am not his equal until I pay off my debt. In other words (and according to the Metaphysics of Morals): if one of the ‘friends’ ‘accepts a favor from the other, then he may well be able to count on equality in love, but not in respect’. ‘Hence,’ as Kant concludes, ‘friendship cannot be a union aimed at mutual advantage’ (MS 470). Friendship based on taste is similar to Aristotle’s friendship for pleasure. What Kant writes about this type of friendship in his Lecture (in the Metaphysics of Morals he hardly touches on it at all) is very peculiar. It seems that here again the requirement of equality is the problem. According to Kant pleasure can only be given among those who are different. I quote: ‘I am not attracted to another because he has what I  already possess, but because he can supply some want of mine by supplementing that in which I am lacking.’ Moreover, ‘[p]‌ersons of the same station and occupation in life are less likely to form such a friendship than persons of different occupations. One scholar will not form a friendship of taste with another; because their capacities are identical; they cannot entertain or satisfy one another, for what one knows, the other knows too’ (Lecture, 214). However, those who are different will easily annoy one another:  a scholar would be rather irritated by a businessman or a soldier than entertained. The examples of businessman and soldier are Kant’s. A  friendship for pleasure is therefore hardly conceivable to Kant. The only way he can imagine something like that is, and I quote again, ‘if the scholar is not a pedant and the business-​ man not a blockhead’. The conditions seem for Kant to suggest that such a thing never happens. Or if it happens, it will ‘after a while [. . .] go [. . .] up in smoke’ (MS 470).

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The third form of friendship is of course the highest one. Kant’s version (‘friendship of disposition or sentiment’) is a bit different from Aristotle’s ‘friendship for the good’. Here Kant relies probably more on the romantic tradition or on Montaigne than on Aristotle. They agree, however, in this respect that, according to both, this highest form of friendship is very exclusive. This type of friendship can be characterized as a relation that makes one abandon the distance and suspicion that are normal and required in everyday life. A friend, in this type of friendship, is therefore, I quote, ‘one in whom we can confide unreservedly, to whom we can disclose completely all our dispositions and judgments, from whom we can and need hide nothing, to whom we can communicate our whole self ’ (Lecture, 214). In his Metaphysics of Morals Kant immediately adds that such a friendship is ‘rare like a black swan’ (MS 472), and if it can exist at all, it cannot be between many people, but at most between two people only. But what is more remarkable, it seems that Kant –​at least in the Lecture –​deems this friendship morally impossible or unlawful. It is, according to Kant, distasteful and repugnant, to give oneself away completely: ‘Even to our best friend we must not reveal ourselves, in our natural state as we know it ourselves. To do so would be loathsome’ (Lecture, 215). Instead ‘we must so conduct ourselves towards a friend that there is no harm done if he should turn into an enemy’ (217). In other words, we should conduct ourselves with great reservation. It is difficult to avoid an ironical conclusion:  for Kant the ideal friendship can only exist (or at least be approximated) among friends who are not in need of anything, who are so different that they hardly have anything to say to each other, and who make no distinction between their friends and others. In other words: this kind of friendship does not exist; it cannot exist. With a quotation from the Metaphysics of Morals: ‘[I]‌t is readily seen that friendship is only an Idea (though a practically necessary one) and unattainable in practice, although striving for friendship (as a maximum of good disposition toward each other) is a duty set by reason, and no ordinary duty but an honorable one’ (MS 469). It comes to no surprise that Kant, in his Metaphysics of Morals, as well as in his earlier lecture, quotes with approval this famous pronouncement attributed to Aristotle: ‘My dear friends, there is no such thing as a friend!’ (MS 470).

3.4  Nietzsche’s inverted idealism Reading that true friendship for Kant exists only as an ideal and as an idea, we are reminded of what Nietzsche writes about what happens to the ‘real world’ in Kant’s philosophy. I refer to the third step in his six-​step summary of the history

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of metaphysics, which, in his view, coincides with the history of nihilism: ‘The [true] world, unattainable, undemonstrable, cannot be promised, but even when merely thought of [–​] a consolation, a duty, an imperative. (Fundamentally the same old sun, but shining through mist and skepticism; the idea grown sublime, pale, northerly, Königsbergian.)’ (TI Fable, KSA 6.80). The tradition of thinking about friendship is a good example of what Nietzsche calls ‘nihilism’, to be more precise: nihilism-​2, the nihilism of European history since Plato; nihilism as the name for this structure of meanings, constructed with the help of philosophy, morality and religion, which was meant to replace (or to hide) the actual chaotic, absurd and aimless reality. Friendship fits perfectly in this construction: by way of negating the reality of suspicion and deceit, of reservation, distance and solitude, and by inverting this reality into its opposite, an ideal of friendship is being construed. This ideal is itself nihilistic, because it originates from a negation of factuality, and because it takes its energy and attraction from this negation. It is a conspicuous feature of Nietzsche’s critique of this nihilistic structure that the nihilism returns in the criticism itself. This becomes very clear in what Nietzsche writes about friendship, especially in the earlier aphoristic books. A full and systematic presentation of Nietzsche’s thoughts on friendship is not possible in the given framework,14 but the following examples, which are admittedly only a limited selection, may give an indication of what is at stake, and an illustration of the practical commitment of Nietzsche’s philosophy and the way it differs from Kant’s. Friendship is, according to Nietzsche, only possible through concealment and deceit, that is, deceit of the other as well as self-​deception. The idea that friends could possibly know one another is an illusion. They can only be friends as long as they are ready to hide and to pretend: ‘For such human relationships almost always depend upon the fact that two or three things are never said or even so much as touched upon: if these little boulders do start to roll, however, friendship follows after them and shatters’ (HH I 376). Living together is just not a simple thing, ‘even the best friendships are only seldom able to endure this’ (NL 18[38]123, KSA 8.325). Conversations among old friends usually make clear that they have grown apart; such conversations will often be ‘like those in the realm of the dead’ (AOM 259, KSA 2.491). It is most unlikely that friends will not deceive one another if the occasion arises: ‘There will be a few who, when they are in want of matter for conversation, do not reveal the more secret affairs of their friends’ (HH 327, KSA 2.245–​6). Many more examples could be added, also from later writings.15

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The tone of disappointment and even bitterness cannot be misheard and is symptomatic for the critic’s suffering from his own critique; that is, it shows –​in the terminology of the later Nietzsche –​how strongly the nihilism of the critique is tied to the nihilism that is being criticized. Against this background it is not surprising that we find in Nietzsche’s writings quite a few texts on friendship that perfectly fit in the idealist tradition. When we read in Human, All Too Human that many people ‘would be mortally wounded if they discovered what their dearest friends actually know about them’ (HH 376, KSA 2.263), we hear (possibly via Schopenhauer’s Parerga) the echo of Pascal’s (1958: 101) saying that ‘si tous les hommes savaient ce que disent les uns des autres, il n’y aurait pas quatre amis dans le monde’. Just like Kant, Nietzsche, or Zarathustra to be more precise, also rejects the idea that friends should be completely open toward one another. Kant called it ‘loathsome’ (repugnant, ‘ekelhaft’), Nietzsche/​ Zarathustra calls it ‘empörend’ (‘shocking’ or ‘revolting’). But similar to Kant, who despite his scepticism continues to long for a friend ‘in whom [h]‌e can confide unreservedly, to whom [h]e can disclose completely all [his] dispositions and judgments, from whom [h]e can and need hide nothing, to whom [h]e can communicate [his] whole self ’ (Kant Lecture, 214), also Nietzsche writes about the ‘full happiness of love, which resides in unconditional trust’ (D 216, KSA 3.192). In the 1886 preface to Human, All Too Human he confesses that what he needs most is precisely this friendship:  ‘a reposing in a trust of friendship, a blindness in concert with another without suspicion or question-​ marks’ (HH I Preface 1, KSA 2.14). The attachment to the ideal makes for the bitterness of the criticism. This might give the impression that Nietzsche’s criticism is less radical and in a certain sense less revolutionary than it claims to be. What else does it do than revealing the unreality of the ideal, of which –​after all –​the criticized tradition was already aware by itself? Isn’t Nietzsche after all, just like Kant, one of those many authors quoting Aristotle’s melancholia? ‘ “Friends, there are no friends!” thus said the dying sage’ (HH 376, KSA 2.263).

4.  The practical commitment of Nietzsche’s philosophy At least one point of difference between Nietzsche and Kant will be clear: Nietzsche puts to the fore almost violently what Kant rather hides by transforming into an ‘honorable duty’ what turned out to be ‘unattainable in practice’. I want to focus, however, on something else in Nietzsche’s critique of friendship and of idealism

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in general, something that refers to the question that is central in the practical commitment of Nietzsche’s philosophy. For not only do we find the criticized idealism return in Nietzsche’s critique of it, but he himself is also constantly aware of this self-​referentiality of the critique. This is most apparent in the critique of the will to truth or truthfulness, which itself is motivated precisely by what it criticizes. I quoted already the conclusion Nietzsche draws from this awareness: it transforms us into ‘a rendezvous, it seems, of questions and question marks’ (BGE 1, KSA 5.15). But the same is the case in all domains of Nietzsche’s critique of nihilism. He is aware of the fact that in his critique of the traditional ideals he repeats the old idealism. That is –​I think –​the reason why the third essay of his Genealogy of Morals is about ideals; not only about a particular, ‘ascetic’ ideal but rather about the asceticism of all ideals, and about the way these ideals continue to work through everything we think and do and create. Nietzsche’s critique of nihilism repeats the criticized structures, but does not do so naively. It expressly demonstrates how this critique necessarily gets entangled in these idealist structures, and concludes that the recognition of this inevitability is a point beyond which one cannot get any further: ‘what meaning would our whole being possess if it were not this, that in us the will to truth becomes conscious of itself as a problem?’ (GM III 27, KSA 5.410). Nietzsche’s thoughts on friendship give a perfect example of what according to him is the ultimate problem of nihilism, the problem that he foresees and of which he describes the future history. In his criticism of the unreality of the ideal of friendship, we clearly hear the longing for precisely this ideal friendship. But this longing for friendship is always already affected by the scepticism about the possibility of its being realized. The tension between the two is not overcome, as in Aristotle by a melancholic complaint or resignation or as in Kant by a moral imperative, but rather presented as the actual problem, as the question mark that defines our condition. The ambivalence in Nietzsche’s thoughts on friendship is a perfect exemplification of the imminent nihilistic catastrophe that Nietzsche announced at the end of section 346 from the Gay Science: ‘an inexorable, fundamental, and deepest suspicion about ourselves that is more and more gaining worse and worse control of us Europeans and that could easily confront coming generations with the terrifying Either/​Or: “Either abolish your reverences or  –​ yourselves!” The latter would be nihilism; but would not the former also be –​nihilism?’ (GS 346, KSA 3.581). Who abandons or abolishes his or her reverences, including his or her ideal of friendship, will as a result abolish him-​or herself. For without friendship, without this commonality, without any release from our choking solitude, we would not be able to live as human beings. Therefore, when we lose our faith in the

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possibility of friendship, a faith that for a long time was nourished with descriptions of the ideal and for which doubts about its possibility were relegated to the melancholic quote from Aristotle, or to the ‘honorable’ moral duty that Kant suggested, we might lose faith in ourselves, we might lose ourselves and sink into nihilism. So what Nietzsche adds to this history of nihilistic thinking on friendship that I outlined is not very hopeful: we remain caught in the longing for what we cannot believe in any more; or we cannot but criticize the ideals that we need in order to live. There might be something more; there might be a step beyond nihilism. But I have my doubts whether what Nietzsche writes on the overcoming of nihilism is more than a question, more than a ‘maybe’. At the end of one of his most important texts on nihilism, the Lenzer Heide outline, Nietzsche appeals to the strongest, which he describes as follows: The most moderate; those who do not require any extreme articles of faith; those who not only concede but love a firm amount of accidents and nonsense; those who can think of man with a considerable reduction of his value without becoming small and weak on that account:  those richest in health who are equal to most misfortunes and therefore not so afraid of misfortunes –​human beings who are sure of their power and represent the attained strength of humanity with conscious pride. (NL 1887 5[71] 12.217)16

This is the penultimate section of Nietzsche’s text. The very last one is –​once again –​a question. ‘How would such a human being even think of the eternal return?’ In the present framework, we could make a variation: ‘How would such a human being even think of friendship?’ We don’t find the answer to either question. More important than the answer is the question as well as the task included in that question. The practical commitment of Nietzsche’s philosophy comes to a question, a question that invites or forces us, or at least the philosopher, to incorporate it, and to which there is no other answer than to engage in the experiment.

Notes 1 That is, in the writings in which Nietzsche’s thinking reaches its climax and in which the author finally discovers the true question that guides him: cf. Van Tongeren (2012b).

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2 Cf. Lampert (2001: 39), who correctly underlines (and gives evidence for) the importance of this section, although he mistakenly restricts its meaning to it being a confrontation with the materialism from which ‘the Kantian dream [. . .] sheltered us’ (40). 3 Burnham (2007: 26f ) also writes regarding this section that he does not want to consider whether Nietzsche’s critique ‘involves a misunderstanding, perhaps a deliberate one, of Kant’s thought’. But he nevertheless does call Nietzsche ‘disingenuous here’ and shows in an interesting way what he calls ‘the problem of the outside’ that the two authors have in common: ‘What is the thinking that can look outside the conditions of thinking, and judge what is necessary for it such that it could in fact be false or contingent?’ or –​in a Nietzschean phrasing –​‘How is it possible for thought to look outside the value of truth in order to ask the question of the value of the will to truth?’ I agree with Burnham but want to highlight an important difference within this commonality. 4 The quotation is again from BGE 11, but Nietzsche makes the same pun even more eloquently already in his early text On the Pathos of Truth (PT: 65 ff., KSA 1.760): ‘Yet even while he believes himself to be shaking the sleeper, the philosopher himself is sinking into a still deeper magical slumber. Perhaps het then dreams of the “ideas” or of immortality.’ 5 Cf. also Acampora and Ansell-​Pearson (2011: 31) who (although they do not pay much attention to aphorism 11) with regard to the first chapter of BGE correctly speak about ‘[t]‌he question [that] Nietzsche lays at the feet of his readers’ (my emphasis). 6 GS 342, KSA 3.571, is the last section of the fourth book. At the end of the fifth book, just before the epilogue, this reference to the beginning tragedy returns: GS 382, KSA 3.637. 7 Werner Stegmaier (2012) in his astonishingly rich ‘contextual interpretation’ of the fifth book of The Gay Science does not mention (and he possibly does not agree with my suggestion that there is) this implicit reference to Kant, but he does clearly agree that the first four sections of the fifth book present what is implied in what Nietzsche already in the first edition of GS (section 125, KSA 3.480–​2) had indicated as ‘the death of God’ and the difficult task for philosophy that is the result of this event. Different from my interpretation, though, Stegmaier emphasizes the way in which Nietzsche brings that task to a successful ‘liberation of thinking’ in the final part of the fifth book. Without being able to discuss this in detail in the present framework, I want to point to the fact that Nietzsche in the final section of the book, right before the epilogue, refers to his ‘ideal’ (GS 382), which –​however different it may be –​shows how much even his thinking is ‘idealist’ and dependent on the old faith. Different from B. Reginster (2006: 53), I do not think that Nietzsche in this

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period still ‘believes in the possibility of “new values” ’, or at least not unless in a sense in which he at the same time put serious question marks behind his ‘idealism’. In my opinion it is this idealism that already in the end of GS 346, KSA 3.580–​1, but more explicitly in the third essay of GM, will be criticized as the core of what Nietzsche diagnoses as ‘nihilism’ (cf. Sections 3 and especially 4 of this chapter). Therefore it would be my suggestion that Nietzsche at the end of the fifth book of GS refers back, in a self-​critical way, to its beginning and by doing so shows how he himself is caught in the nihilism he tries to describe. That would also explain why he (as of course also Stegmaier observes) at this point repeats as a matter of fact the end of the fourth book (‘Incipit tragoedia’ GS 342, KSA 3.571): ‘the tragedy begins. . .’ (GS 382, KSA 3.637), the formula that he repeats once again in the newly added preface (section 1) to the 1886 edition of GS (cf. Stegmaier 2012: 619–​29)! For Stegmaier’s interpretation of GS 343–​46 (and related sections), cf. Stegmaier (2012: 91–​221). Cf. also from the 1886 preface to Daybreak: ‘there is no doubt that a “thou shalt” still speaks to us too, that we too still obey a stern law set over us’ (D Preface 4, KSA 3.16). Parts of this section are (with minor changes) taken from my article ‘Kant, Nietzsche and the Idealization of Friendship into Nihilism’ (Van Tongeren 2013). I have elaborated this differentiation of meanings of ‘nihilism’ more extensively in chapter IV of my book on Nietzsche’s concept of nihilism, Het Europese nihilisme (Van Tongeren 2012a: 83–​133). This is one of the important insights of Heidegger’s Nietzsche interpretation (cf. Heidegger 1961; 1986), completely overlooked in Bernard Reginster’s (2006) and many other interpretations of Nietzsche’s concept of nihilism, with which I therefore strongly disagree at this crucial point. Cf., for example, the hilarious passage in Beckett (1981: 373f.). The English translation (Augustine 1997: 96) reads, ‘friendship is genuine only when you bind fast together people who cleave to you’. The topic is clearly much more central to Nietzsche’s than to Kant’s philosophy. The word ‘freund’ together with all its compounds occurs about one thousand times in Nietzsche’s writings, more or less equally spread over the whole of his oeuvre. A full presentation of the different meanings will be given in the entry ‘Freund(schaft)’ that I will prepare for the Nietzsche Wörterbuch, to be published in Nietzsche Online. Cf., for example, in BGE, sections 27, 40, 268 and the ‘Aftersong’, KSA 5.45–​6, 57–​ 8, 221–​2, 241–​3. With regard to the chapter ‘On the friend’ from the first part of Thus spoke Zarathustra, a text that has often been (mis)interpreted in a much too optimistic way, see Van Tongeren (2003/​2004). English translation taken from Kaufmann (1967: 38 ff.).

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References Immanuel Kant Kant, I. (1885), Kant’s Introduction to Logic, trans. Thomas Kingsmill Abbott, London: Longmans, Green & Co: https://​archive.org/​stream/​kantsintroductio00kant uoft#page/​n21/​mode/​2up (accessed 13 January 2014). Kant, I. (1949), Prolegomena to Any Future Metaphysics, trans. Paul Carus, Chicago/​ London: The Open Court Publishing Company. Kant, I. (1991) ‘Lecture on Friendship’, in M. Pakaluk (ed.), Other Selves. Philosophers on Friendship, 208–​17, Indianapolis/​Cambridge: Hackett (quoted as Lecture). Kant, I. (1991), The Metaphysics of Morals, trans. Mary Gregor, London: Cambridge University Press. Kant, I. (1998), Critique of Pure Reason, trans. Paul Guyer and Allen Wood, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.

Friedrich Nietzsche Nietzsche, F. (1968), Beyond Good and Evil, trans. W. Kaufmann, New York: Modern Library. Nietzsche, F. (1968), On the Genealogy of Morals, trans. W. Kaufmann, New York: Modern Library. Nietzsche, F. (1974), The Gay Science, trans. Walter Kaufmann, New York: Vintage. Nietzsche, F. (1979), ‘On the Pathos of Truth’, in Dan Breazeale (ed.), Philosophy and Truth, 61–​6, New Jersey/​London: Humanities Press. Nietzsche, F. (1982), Daybreak, ed. and trans. R. J. Hollingdale, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Nietzsche, F. (1986), Human, All Too Human, ed. and trans. R. J. Hollingdale, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Nietzsche, F. (1990) Twilight of the Idols, trans. R. J. Hollingdale, London: Penguin Books.

Other references Acampora, C. D., and Ansell-​Pearson, K. (2011), Nietzsche’s Beyond Good and Evil. A Reader’s Guide, London/​New York: Continuum. Aristotle, Politics (1977), Loeb Classical Library Nr. 264, with an English translation by H. Rackham, Cambridge/​London: Harvard University Press/​William Heinemann.

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Aristotle, Eudemian Ethics (1981), Loeb Classical Library Nr. 285, with an English translation by H. Rackham, Cambridge/​London: Harvard University Press/​William Heinemann. Augustine Aurelius (1997), Confessionum Libri XIII. Zwolle: Tjeenk Willink, 1960; Engl. translation: The Confessions New York. Beckett, S. (1981), ‘Waiting for Godot’, in Dramatische Dichtungen in drei Sprachen, Frankfurt/​M: Suhrkamp. Burnham, D. (2007), Reading Nietzsche. An Analysis of Beyond Good and Evil, Stocksfield: Acumen. Derrida, J. (1994), Politiques de l’amitié. Paris: Galilée. Heidegger, M. (1961), Nietzsche, 2 vols, Pfullingen: Neske. Heidegger, M. (1986), Nietzsche: der europäische Nihilismus. Gesamtausgabe Vol. 48. Frankfurt/​M: Klostermann. Kaufmann, W. (1967), Friedrich Nietzsche, The Will to Power, trans. Walter Kaufmann, New York: Vintage. Lampert, L. (2001), Nietzsche’s Task. An Interpretation of Beyond Good and Evil, New Haven/​London: Yale University Press. Montaigne, Michel de (1969), The Essays, Menston: The Scolar Press. Pascal, B. de (1958), Pensées, Paris: Garnier. Reginster, B. (2006), The Affirmation of Life. Nietzsche on Overcoming Nihilism, Cambridge MA, et al.: Harvard University Press. Stegmaier, W. (2012), Nietzsches Befreiung der Philosophie. Kontextuelle Interpretation des V. Buchs der Fröhlichen Wissenschaft, Berlin: De Gruyter. van Tongeren, P. (2003/​4), ‘On Friends in Nietzsche’s Zarathustra’, New Nietzsche Studies 5 (3/​4) and 6 (1/​2): 73–​88. van Tongeren, P. (2012a), Het Europese nihilisme. Friedrich Nietzsche over een dreiging die niemand schijnt te deren, Nijmegen: Vantilt. van Tongeren, P. (2012b) ‘Nietzsche’s Questioning’, South African Journal of Philosophy (31) 4: 727–​36. van Tongeren, P. (2013), ‘Kant, Nietzsche and the Idealization of Friendship into Nihilism’, Kriterion 128: 401–​17.

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Index Adorno, T. 214 agency 1, 2, 6, 7, 8, 9, 10, 19, 45, 54, 55, 69, 70, 74, 76, 80, 82, 91, 93, 94, 95, 97, 98, 99, 100, 102, 103, 105, 106, 107, 109, 126, 128, 129, 146, 148, 149, 150, 154, 156, 163, 164, 168, 190, 194, 219, 220, 221, 233, 241, 267 agon see agonism agonism 7, 11, 146, 149, 150, 151, 153, 156 Anscombe, G. E. M. 208 Aristotle 152, 208, 209, 223, 299, 300, 301, 302, 303, 305, 306, 307 ascetic ideal see asceticism asceticism 13, 15, 98, 102, 156, 163, 179, 180, 182, 183, 184, 185, 267, 268, 306 Augustine 300, 309 autonomy 1, 3, 4, 5, 6, 7, 8, 9, 11, 12, 19, 20, 22, 28, 30, 32, 33, 34, 40, 41, 42, 44, 45, 51, 52, 54, 55, 56, 69, 70, 71, 74, 75, 76, 82, 83, 84, 86, 95, 103, 109, 119, 128, 129, 153, 159–70, 173, 176, 177, 180, 181, 182, 185, 188, 189, 220, 235, 236, 238, 239, 242, 244, 259, 264, 266, 269, 274, 285, 286 back to Kant movement 219, 220, 221 bad conscience see conscience Bain, A. 13, 219, 224, 225, 226, 227, 228, 229, 232, 237, 246, 247, 248, 252 Baumann, J. 13, 219, 224, 225, 226, 227, 228, 231, 232, 236, 237, 240, 246, 247, 248, 251, 252 Beckett, S. 298, 309 Beethoven, L. W. 204 Bentham, J. 263 Bergson, H. 286 Bradley, F. H. 199, 212 Brandes, G. 207, 214

categorical imperative 2, 4, 19, 22, 23, 24, 25, 28, 30, 42, 44, 51, 53, 54, 55, 56, 59, 68, 69, 70, 71, 72, 74, 77, 78, 83, 84, 86, 87, 193, 199, 202, 205, 206, 211, 213, 235, 236, 239, 259, 261, 264, 265, 267, 274, 275, 286 Christianity 7, 27, 152, 161, 167, 170, 177, 178, 179, 180, 182, 183, 184, 185, 209, 245, 258, 273, 274 Cicero 201 Cohen, H. 219, 222, 245 community 6, 7, 106, 127, 142, 166, 197, 198, 269, 270, 299, 300 compassion/​pity 30, 31, 41, 152, 203, 266, 267, 268, 269, 270, 282, 283, 284, 286 conscience 5, 8, 11, 12, 109, 129, 151, 164, 165, 165, 167, 170, 174, 175, 176, 177, 178, 181, 182, 184, 189, 190, 195, 198, 201, 203, 237, 241, 242, 243, 259, 260, 262, 270, 271, 281, 286, 295 contracts 12, 15, 139, 162, 197, 199, 206, 211 creativity 2, 3, 12, 52, 147 Darwin, C. 172, 186, 189, 210, 212, 223, 258, 267, 272, 275, 278, 279, 280 deliberation 2, 9, 53, 54, 68, 69, 71, 73, 74, 83, 84, 93, 106, 153 Derrida, J. 300 Descartes, R. 235, 249 dignity 1, 8, 140, 144, 207, 295, 297 dominantion/​non-​domination 11, 137, 139, 149, 150, 151, 154 drives 3, 7, 10, 36, 37, 47, 54, 61, 63, 64, 72, 85, 92, 98, 101, 103, 120, 124, 125, 152, 153, 154, 174, 187, 231, 232, 240, 250, 269, 273, 277, 278, 279 Drossbach, M. 249

326

326

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duty/​moral duties 2, 4, 5, 6, 8, 12, 14, 15, 51, 53, 54, 55, 56, 58, 59, 68, 70, 74, 75, 77, 78, 79, 80, 83, 112, 139, 142, 156, 157, 193–215, 261 egalitarianism 7, 27, 42 end in itself 1, 6 enlightenment 11, 119, 140, 142, 143, 144, 151, 272, 275 Epictetus 258 Epicurus 258, 263, 277, 280 equality 1, 6, 8, 41, 44, 139, 140, 206, 301, 302 equals 6, 12, 59, 152, 203, 207, 214, 247, 302 evil 1, 32, 45, 147, 170, 182, 203, 220, 229– 33, 239, 245, 248, 249, 267, 268, 278, 299 feeling of power 10, 33, 109, 110, 122, 123, 126, 127, 128, 129, 134, 149, 232, 252, 282 Féré, C. 229, 248 Fichte, J. 1 Fischer, K. 1, 221, 245, 249 Foot, P. 204, 208 Fouillée, A. 259, 285 free spirit 5, 28, 59, 61, 78, 231, 258, 265 free will 5, 8, 12, 27, 33, 52, 54, 55, 74, 92, 94, 96, 99, 100, 111, 220, 223, 224, 226, 227, 237, 238, 239, 240, 241, 251, 252 freedom 1, 2, 36, 7, 8, 9, 10, 11, 13, 14, 19, 20, 24, 25, 26, 27, 28, 30, 31, 33, 34, 36, 38, 40, 42, 43, 45, 46, 55, 70, 74, 76, 79, 84, 93, 95, 110, 111, 112, 113, 114, 115, 116, 121, 122, 123, 124, 125, 126, 128, 129, 137, 138, 139, 140, 141, 142, 143, 144, 146, 147, 149, 150, 151, 153, 154, 155, 156, 161, 162, 163, 166, 168, 173, 175, 220, 222, 225, 227, 232, 238, 240, 241, 243, 251, 266, 283 Freud, S. 189 friendship 7, 14, 15, 152, 283, 284, 292, 297, 299, 300, 301, 302, 303, 304, 305, 306, 307, 309 Fries, J. F. 220

German idealism 12, 164, 219 God 1, 2, 7, 176, 177, 182, 184, 190, 198, 209, 259, 287, 295, 296, 297, 298, 300 Goethe, J. W. 204, 229, 230, 245, 248 good/​goodness 1, 2, 4, 13, 21, 31, 32, 33, 45, 52, 54, 57, 58, 59, 75, 80, 81, 147, 151, 152, 153, 164, 166, 174, 176, 181, 182, 184, 193, 195, 203, 205, 209, 211, 242, 243, 251, 262, 267, 268, 269, 278, 297, 298, 299, 300, 303 good will 54, 80, 191, 297 Gould, S. J. 273 Guyau, J.-​M. 13, 257–88 Habermas, J. 2, 155 happiness 1, 152, 156, 189, 190, 204, 213, 262, 269, 270, 276, 277, 294, 305 Hartmann, E. von 13, 220, 236, 239, 243, 244, 245, 250, 251 Hegel, G. W. F. 1, 2, 8, 9, 14, 19, 20, 21, 22– 6, 29, 30, 31, 32, 33, 34, 41, 42, 43, 44, 45, 46, 48, 110, 111, 131, 160, 161, 167, 168, 169, 171, 184, 188, 189, 198, 199, 212, 258, 260, 261 Heidegger, M. 46, 309 Helmholtz, H. von 222 Herbart, J. F. 220, 221, 224, 245, 251 herd 5, 6, 61, 82, 208, 281, 285 higher types 5, 9, 60, 61, 62, 63, 64, 65, 66, 67, 69, 75, 76, 77, 78, 81, 82, 83, 84 Hume, D. 2, 10, 39, 72, 92, 95, 96, 101, 117, 293 Huxley, A. 263 immorality 23, 47, 59, 109, 122, 130, 131, 202, 203, 235, 236, 260, 281, 285 immortality 2, 308 individualism 3, 4, 6, 9, 12, 13, 14, 69, 204, 270, 282 James, W. 246, 258 Jesus 259, 287 Kant, I. passim Kierkegaard, S. 170

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Index kingdom of ends 1, 6, 128 Kipling, R. 212 Kirchhoff, G. 233 Korsgaard, C. 2, 43, 49, 69, 79, 83, 84, 86, 209 Kropotkin, P. 258, 285 Lamarck, J.-​B. 267 Lange, F. A. 1, 45, 219, 220, 221, 222, 224, 248 law/​moral law 1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 6, 9, 10, 20–5, 27, 31, 44, 45, 51, 53, 56, 57, 58, 59, 60, 62, 64, 65, 66, 67, 68, 69, 70, 71, 75, 76, 79, 80, 82, 83, 84, 86, 87, 92, 93, 94, 95, 103, 104, 107, 109–22, 123, 124, 127, 130, 131, 132, 137, 138, 143, 144, 155, 161, 162, 164, 165, 181, 187, 197, 198, 203, 206, 208, 211, 213, 221, 224, 230, 239, 260–75, 281, 282, 287, 303, 309 Leopardi, G. 286 Lichtenberg, G. C. 220, 233, 234, 235, 249 Liebmann, O. 221, 245 life 2, 3, 7, 8, 11, 12, 14, 23, 34, 36, 41, 53, 62, 107, 125, 128, 129, 130, 135, 168–80, 185–7, 189, 190, 193, 203, 205, 207, 213, 214, 219, 226, 227, 228, 230, 231, 232, 240, 243, 261, 263, 264, 265, 266, 268, 269, 271, 276, 277, 278, 279, 280, 282, 283, 284, 287, 291, 294, 297, 298, 300, 301, 302, 303 Lotze, H. 224, 245 love 7, 11, 97, 112, 131, 137, 140, 150, 151, 152, 153, 154, 183, 268, 286, 300, 301, 302, 305 Mach, E. 233 MacIntyre, A. 209, 212 Maudsley, H. 263 Mayer, J. R. 133, 220, 227, 244, 247 metaphyscis 1, 2, 3, 7, 8, 12, 13, 55, 71, 76, 91, 92, 106, 107, 183, 202, 209, 214, 220, 221, 223, 228, 229, 230, 231, 233, 234, 236, 240, 241, 250, 262, 267, 268, 271– 80, 294, 296, 297, 304

327

Meyer, J. B. 219, 221, 222, 224, 244–​5 Mill, J. S. 161, 250 Molière 293 Montaigne, M. 300, 301, 303 moral duties see duty/​moral duties moral law see law moral psychology 8, 9, 51–​86, 102 morality 3, 5, 7, 8, 14, 24, 28, 29, 30, 31, 32, 41, 51–​5, 57, 58, 59, 62, 68, 69, 70, 71, 74, 75, 76, 77, 78, 79, 80, 82, 83, 84, 86, 105, 107, 109, 111, 115, 122, 126, 127, 128, 129, 130, 131, 134, 145, 146, 153, 154, 156, 159, 163, 164, 167, 168, 178, 188, 193, 194, 195, 196, 200, 201, 203, 206, 207, 210, 211, 212, 214, 215, 235, 237, 238, 239, 242, 244, 258, 259, 261, 262, 263, 264, 265, 266, 267, 268, 269, 270, 271, 272, 274, 275, 276, 277, 278, 279, 281, 282, 283, 285, 286, 293, 295, 296, 297, 298, 304 morality of custom/​morality of mores (Sittlichkeit der Sitte) 3, 5, 82, 163, 164, 167, 188, 196, 237, 237, 239 Müller, J. 224, 225 naturalism 3, 8, 15, 96, 121, 129, 130, 196, 202, 210, 259 neo-​Kantianism 1, 12, 79, 80, 86, 219, 220, 221, 244, 245, 252 Nietzsche, F. passim nihilism 7, 8, 14, 15, 177, 180, 183, 236, 292, 293, 297, 298, 299, 304, 305, 306, 307, 309 non-​domination see domination/​non-​ domination 11, 137, 139, 149, 150, 151, 154 normative claims see norms normative judgements see norms normative laws see norms normativity 1, 9, 24, 33, 34, 41, 46, 51, 57, 58, 59, 65, 77, 78, 85, 122 norms 7, 8, 9, 15, 20, 21, 22, 25, 26, 27, 41, 42, 43, 53, 54, 56, 57, 58, 59, 60, 65, 67, 69, 71, 76, 77, 80, 81, 82, 83, 84, 85, 153, 162, 210, 211, 214, 276, 278

328

328

Index

O’Neill, O. 2 Pascal, B. 305 pathos of distance 13, 15, 149, 156, 220, 242, 243 Paul 287 Peirce, C. S. 247 pity see compassion/​pity Plato 211, 298, 304 positivism 12, 219 power 6, 7, 9, 11, 15, 20, 27, 31, 33, 34–​48, 52, 64, 81, 109, 110, 121, 122–​35, 138, 145, 146, 148, 149, 150, 155, 156, 162, 170–​5, 180, 181, 186, 187, 188, 189, 197, 225, 228, 231, 232, 233, 238, 241, 242, 252, 275, 282, 287 practical reasoning 1, 39, 53, 54, 55, 57, 59, 67, 68, 70, 71, 73, 81, 84, 91, 92, 93, 94, 98, 102, 110, 111, 112, 113, 114, 115, 116, 117, 118, 126, 131, 146, 151, 154, 168, 189, 221, 222, 224, 246, 266, 267, 268, 276, 291, 294, 303 progress 1, 52, 165 promise-​keeping 10, 12, 95, 102, 109, 111, 117, 118, 119, 120, 121, 163, 164, 165, 167, 169, 185, 186, 188, 190, 196, 197, 198, 205, 206, 210, 211, 212, 236, 237, 238, 239, 240, 241 radical evil 220, 229, 230, 231, 239, 245, 248, 249 Rawls, J. 2 Rée, P. 267 Reid, T. 259 resistance 10, 35–​40, 46, 47, 110, 112–​15, 116, 121, 122, 123, 124, 131, 146, 147, 150, 260 respect (Achtung) 10, 56, 63, 69, 80, 109–​ 17, 120, 121, 123, 131, 132, 139 respect (Ehrfurcht) 6, 7, 197 responsibility 4, 5 reverence (Achtung) see respect (Achtung) reverence (Ehrfurcht) see respect (Ehrfurcht) rights 1, 6, 7, 15, 139, 200, 203, 205, 213, 280

Rousseau, J.-​J. 139, 161, 170, 189, 284 Royce, J. 258 Schaarschmidt, K. 223, 245, 246 Schiller, F. 1 Schopenhauer, A. 1, 13, 14, 72, 98, 126, 134, 169, 190, 223, 230, 231, 244, 246, 248, 253, 266, 267, 268, 269, 270, 271, 284, 286, 305 self-​legislation 1, 3, 4, 5, 9, 11, 21, 28, 42, 43, 54, 55, 57, 59, 60, 61, 66, 70, 94, 110, 137, 139, 164, 165, 168, 186, 204, 212, 238, 239, 272, 274, 279 self-​love see love Shakespeare, W. 124, 133, 199, 212 slave revolt 11, 134, 146, 147 Socrates 102, 211, 291, 298 Stoics/Stoicism 206, 266, 267, 268, 269, 277, 280, 283, 284 sovereign individual 3, 4, 5, 6, 7, 10, 12, 13, 45, 82, 109, 110, 117–​22, 125, 128, 164, 188, 235–​44, 249, 250 sovereignity 12, 13, 109, 122, 123, 129, 159, 219, 220, 235–​44, 261, 271, 281 Spencer, H. 212, 225, 246, 258, 259 Spinoza, B. 35, 263 Spir, A. 249 spontaneity 12, 13, 92, 102, 219–​35, 237, 239, 241, 243, 244, 245, 246, 247, 248, 252 Stirner, M. 13, 236, 239, 243, 244, 250 Teichmüller, G. 249 Trendelenburg, F. A. 249 universal law(s) see law universality 1, 2, 3, 4, 8, 9, 41–​86, 164, 261, 264, 280 unsociable sociability 1, 139, 154, 159, 166, 169, 187 value(s) 1, 3, 4, 5, 9, 12, 14, 20, 21, 26–​34, 38–​47, 52, 53, 58, 65, 66, 72, 79, 81, 83, 109, 110, 122, 125, 126, 127, 128, 129,

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Index 130, 135, 146, 147, 148, 149, 151, 156, 164, 165, 174, 175, 176, 179, 181, 182, 183, 184, 185, 190, 194, 195, 202, 204, 206, 207, 224, 242, 246, 257, 264, 268, 269, 276, 277, 278, 279, 280, 281, 283, 286, 287, 296, 298, 299, 307, 308, 309 virtue(s) 1, 2, 3, 4, 12, 30, 46, 59, 64, 82, 127, 147, 153, 162–5, 180, 182, 190, 193, 205, 206, 208, 209, 243, 268, 269, 275 Wagner, R. 223, 228, 246 Widemann, P. H. 249

329

will 1, 6, 10, 12, 20, 21, 22, 33, 35, 36, 54, 55, 62, 71, 80, 84, 92, 93, 94, 97, 98, 101, 102, 110, 111, 112, 113, 114, 115, 116, 117, 118, 119, 121, 123, 125, 126, 128, 131, 138, 151, 191, 177, 180, 219, 220, 221, 222, 223, 224, 225, 231, 236, 237, 238, 239, 240, 241, 242, 243, 246, 251, 252, 261, 264 will to power 9, 20, 31, 33, 34–48, 130, 146, 149, 150, 159, 180, 188, 227, 228, 232, 287 will to truth 296, 298, 306, 308 Williams, B. 82, 84, 86, 208

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