The title, my papers. Who is the sovereign individual, Nichel and Freedom Papers should run about 50 minutes or that should leave us with discussion.
Most readers of Nietzsche's on the genealogy of morality over the last century would one suspects were astonished to discover the
prominence recent scholarship has given to the enigmatic figure of the sovereign individual who appears just once in Section two.
The second essay geneology and never appears again in the geneology or indeed anywhere else in the corpus.
Yet, according to Keep Dancing Peerson, for example, and I quote,
The overriding aim of the genealogy of morals is to show that what caught in the modern
liberal tradition of moral and political philosophy and moral political thought simply
take for granted the sovereign individual possession of free will and conscience is
in reality the product of a specific historical labour of culture or civilisation,
end quote. If this were really the overriding aim with the geneology,
one would have expected Nietzsche to be a bit clearer about it and to have more to say about the sovereign individual.
And so Pearsons claim is, to be sure, rather extreme, but his is nonetheless when a reckoning, recognisable continuum with other assessments.
John Richardson, for example, describes Section two of the second essay as, quote,
a dramatic statement of Nietzsche's positive view of freedom for Peter Pollner.
The sovereign individual gives expression to quote, the constitutive conditions of full fledged autonomous rather than an heterogenous self.
Can James states the sovereign individual illuminates, quote, genuine agency?
The question, what is it to be a self capable Vakhtang? Indeed.
And I quote again, what exactly it is to be a genuine self. So who is this sovereign individual?
The second essay. And what does he have to do with Nietzsche's conceptions of freewill, freedom or the self?
I shall argue for what would have been at one time a fairly unsurprising view,
namely that first nature denies that people ever act freely and that they are ever morally responsible for anything they can.
Second, that the figure of a sovereign individual in no way supports a denial of this first point.
And third, the nature engages in what Charles Stevenson in his famous 1938 paper on persuasive definitions.
Each engages in what Stevenson would have called a persuasive definition of the language of freedom and free will.
Radically revising the content of those concepts,
but in a way that aims to capitalise on their positive, emotive valence and authority for his readers.
More precisely, I am to show that the image of the sovereign individual is in fact consistent with the reading of nature,
has a kind of fatalists which I have defended at length elsewhere.
When the Fatalis reading Nietzsche thinks that persons have certain essential
psychological and physiological traits over which they have no autonomous control,
and which together perhaps with environmental influences like values, caused them to determine their life trajectories.
In particular, nature thinks that the feeling of freewill is at bottom and epiphenomenon of a process in which conscious
thoughts that are consistent with and temporally proximate to succeeding actions are misinterpreted as causal,
when in fact both the thoughts and the actions themselves are causally determined by nonconscious.
Perhaps neuro physical aspects of the person.
The upshot is that our actions are neither causes suey nor caused by any conscious state with which we might identify.
And so our actions cannot be prescriptions of responsibility.
That is description's unjustified praise and blame to show an image of the sovereign individual squares with nature's fatals.
I distinguish in what follows between two different deflationary readings of the past.
On one such reading, the figure of the sovereign individual is wholly ironic.
A mocking of the petite bourgeois thinks his petty commercial undertakings,
his ability to make promises and remember his debts are the highest fruit of creation.
One another deflationary reading. The sovereign individual does indeed represent an ideal of the self,
one marked by a kind of self mastery foreign to less coherent cells whose momentary impulses pull them this way and that.
But such a self and itself master is a neat chain in terms of fortuitous natural artefact,
the beat of fate, not an autonomous achievement for which anyone could be responsible.
To associate this ideal of the self with the language of freedom and free will is an exercise in persuasive definition by nature,
a rhetorical skill in which he was often the master. I am inclined to think the second reading.
Probably the second inflationary reading is probably the correct one, though,
the somewhat ridiculously hyperbolic presentation of the sovereign individual to which we return,
we'll make the first reading attractive in some ways. But either reading allows us to understand how and why the fatalists,
an arch sceptic about free will, would have created the figure of the sovereign individual.
So we do well to begin by reminding ourselves of what Nicha actually says about freewill and responsibility
in the many passages from many different books that spanned his entire philosophical career,
that must inform any interpretation of the section on the sovereign individual.
Even if we put to one side human all too human will work of the late 1970s,
in which Nietzsche clearly accepted a straightforwardly incompatible picture in
which the determinism of our universe rules out free will and moral responsibility.
Evidence of nature's scepticism about freedom and responsibility remains plentiful.
In his mature corpus of the eighteen eighties, thus at the start of the decade in DAYBREAK, he writes in Section 128,
do I have to add that the wise edifice was right, that we really are not responsible for our dreams.
But just as little for our waking life. And that the doctrine of freedom with will as human pride and feeling of power for its father and mother.
So belief in freedom with will is to be explained by the ulterior motivations we have for accepting it, not by its reality.
We are as little responsible for what we do in real life as what we do in our dreams.
It's hard to imagine a more bracing denial of freedom and responsibility. The same themes are sounded in one of his very last words, the Antichrist.
This is from Section 14. Formerly man was given a free will as his dowry from a higher order.
Today, we have taken his will away altogether in the sense that we no longer admit the will.
As a faculty, the old word will now serves only to denote a result in a kind of individual reaction,
which follows necessarily upon a number of partly contradictory, partly harmonious stimuli.
The will no longer acts or moves denial of the causality of the will or more precisely, what we experience, as will,
is central to Nietzsche scepticism about free will and also explains why he frequently denies unfree will as well.
What we experience, as Will, does not in fact cause our actions.
So the causal determination or freedom of this word is irrelevant in DAYBREAK.
He writes this a section 124. We laugh at him who steps out of his room at the moment when the sun steps out of its room and then says, I will.
That the sun shall rise. And at hand we cannot stop a wheel and says, I will.
That it shall roll. And at him, he was thrown down in wrestling and says, Here I lie.
I will lie here. But while laughter sigh are we ourselves ever acting any differently?
Whenever we employ the expression, I will.
If the faculty at the will no longer acts or moves as the anti price passage puts, if it is no longer causal,
then there remains no conceptual space for the compatible society that the right kind
of force of determination the world is compatible with responsibility for our actions.
If they zaara through strict puts it thought is one thing, the deed is another.
And the image of the deed still another. The wheel of causality does not roll between.
Which is a pithy statement. The point of the DAYBREAK passage I just quoted.
Then there is no room for moral responsibility. I may well identify with my thoughts or my will, but if they do not cause my actions,
how can I possibly be responsible for them in the central discussion of free will and responsibility in the geneology nature.
Right. For just as common people separate the Lightwood from its flesh and take the latter to be a deed, something performed by a subject for.
So popular morality also separates strength from the expressions of strength.
As if there were an indifferent substrate behind the strong person which had the freedom to manifest strength or not.
But there is no such substrate. The suppressed, hateful and glowing aspects of revenge and hate exploit this belief in a subject or substrate.
And basically even uphold no other belief or ardently in this world that the strong are free to be weak and the birds of prey are free to be lands.
They thereby gain for themselves the right to hold the bird of prey accountable.
The weak need the belief in a neutral subject with free choice, out of an instinct of self-preservation,
self affirmation in which every lie is sanctified at Section 13.
The first lesson, the will that was denied is the faculty and the other passages is now here,
I take it, up the substrate that stands behind the act and chooses to perform it or not.
But there is no such faculty, whether we call it will or Substring choosing to manifest strength or weakness.
There just is the doing no. Dugher, who bears the responsibility for the discussion of the four great errors in the
twilight of the Idols is to the same effect as he concludes that chapter quote Today,
we no longer have any pity for the concept of free will.
We know only too well what it really is. The Fowlers, the Wall theologians artifices aimed at making mankind responsible.
In their sense, the doctrine of the will has been invented essentially for the purpose of punishment.
That is because one wanted to plead guilt. So once again, denial of the will is a causal factor,
which is the central argument of this chapter of Twilight is juxtaposed with a psychological
explanation for why people would nonetheless be motivated to believe in freedom and responsibility.
Once we abandon this error free will. That's what Nietzsche calls it.
We should in turn abandon the reactive concepts whose intelligibility depends on concepts like guilt.
Zarah, through Straw well describes the required revision to our thinking about freedom and responsibility that results.
This is from the section on the pale criminal enemy.
You shall say, but not villain saying we shall say, but not scoundrel fool, you shall say, but not a sinner.
The abandoned concepts that a villain, a scoundrel and sinner are all ones that require freedom and responsibility that would licence blame.
While the substitute concepts aname, sick fool merely describe a person's condition or character without supposing anything
about the agent's responsibility for being in that condition or having that character,
any account of what is going on in the passage of the sovereign individual must
show how it is consistent with these pervasive themes in the NI chain corpus.
So let's turn now to the solemn task. Nature begins the second essay in the geneology with a characteristically naturalistic
question how to breed an animal which is able to make an honour promise.
The assumptions underlying this question are two fold. First, and most obviously, human beings are certain kinds of animals.
And second, as with other animals. One explains what they do.
For example, promises not by appeal to their exercise of some capacity for autonomous choice of decision,
but in terms of the causal mechanisms such as bleeding, acting upon them, which yields certain steady behavioural dispositions.
NEACH identifies two preconditions for the behavioural disposition.
At issue here, namely promised the first regularity, behaviour and second, reliable memory.
Regularity is necessary because a promise maker must be, as each puts it, answerable for his own future.
And one cannot be answerable for a future that is outwardly unpredictable.
Memory is essential for the obvious reason that only someone who can remember his promises can possible on honour.
Two factors are singled out by nature as formative for the human animal in its development of regular behaviour and a memory.
One equals the morality of custom, and the other is the role of pain in Dumont's with, quote,
the help of the morality of custom and the social straitjacket man was made truly predictable.
That's from Section two of the second essay. Nature here alludes to his own earlier discussion in DAYBREAK, which,
drawing on the etymological connexion between Siedlecki morality and Sipah custom
advanced a plausible hypothesis that customs constituted the first morality,
that traditional ways of acting played the same role during early human life.
That rarified and lofty moral codes, rules and principles play today that they provided criteria for moral right and wrong.
In this earlier discussion, however nation that is the DAYBREAK discussion.
Leach's goal was a certain naturalisation of the implausible Quantium account of moral motivation.
As a matter of reverence for the more law,
nature proposes instead that it is obedience to tradition and fear of the consequences of deviation from tradition.
That really explains moral motivation. By the time he writes geneology, Nietzsche is now more interested in the role of custom,
the social straitjacket, as he calls it, in making humans truly predictable.
That is regular in their behaviour. This development eventually yields the individual with a conscience.
The nature refers to variously as a sovereign or autonomous individual.
Here's the crucial facet, which I'm going to quote at some length.
With the help of the morality of custom in a social straitjacket, man was made truly predictable.
Let us place ourselves, on the other hand, at the end of this immense process where the tree actually bears fruit.
Where society and its morality of custom heal when they were simply the means to.
We then find the sovereign individual as the ripest group on its tree, like only to itself.
Having freed itself from the morality of custom and autonomous,
super ethical individual because autonomous and ethical are mutually exclusive, exclusive.
In short, we find a man with his own independent, durable will who has the right to make a promise and has a proud consciousness quivering in every
muscle of what he has finally achieved and incorporated an actual awareness of power and freedom,
a feeling that man in general has reached completion. This man who is now free and who really does have the right to make a promise.
This master of the free will. This software.
How could he remain ignorant of his superiority over everybody who does not have the right to make a promise or answer for himself?
How much trust. Fear and respect he arouses. He merits all three.
And how could he, with his self master, not realise that he has necessarily been given mastery over circumstances,
over nature and over all creatures with a less durable and reliable will?
The free man. And now he puts free in quotes.
The free man, the possessor of a durable unbreakable will thus grasp his own standard of value in the possession of such a will,
viewing others from his own standpoint standpoint he respects or despises.
And just as he will necessarily respect his peers, the strong and the reliable, those with the right to give their word.
That is, everyone who makes a promise makes promises like a soft, ponderously, sell them slowly and is sparing with his trust.
Who confers and honour when he places his trust, who gives his word as something which can be relied on because he is strong
enough to remain upright in the face of mishap or even in the face of fate.
So he will necessarily be ready to kick the febrile whippets who make a promise when they have no right
to do so and will save the rod for the liar who breaks his word in the very moment it passes his lips.
The proud realisation of the extraordinary privilege of responsibility,
the awareness of this rare freedom and power over himself and his destiny has penetrated into the depths and become an instinct,
his dominant instinct. What will he call his dominant instinct, assuming that he needs a word for no doubt about the answer.
This sovereign man calls it his conscience. So let us start at the beginning.
The sovereign individual is said to be the fruit of the long tradition of the morality of custom.
But the tree bears this fruit at the point when the morality of custom is left behind.
This individual is autonomous or super ethical,
basically disciplined in the quite precise sense of being no longer bound by the morality of custom sitting.
He is the perfected animal,
the one so perfected by the breeding of the morality of custom that he no longer needs the discipline of Sittar to perform his trick, as it were.
And what exactly is the trick of this well-trained animal?
Surely it bears emphasising that he is described as having one and only one skill he can actually make and keep a promise.
And why can he do that?
Because he can remember that he made it and his behaviour is sufficiently regular and predictable that others will actually act based on his promises.
This might explain why nature gives this self-important animal, the so-called softer individual, a suitably ridiculous and pompous name.
He refers to him in the original as the Suvorov French to Varan individual, a mix of French and perhaps Latin.
There's also obviously a German, meaning literally something like a sovereign AB Frazey never used again anywhere in the corpus,
and he never uses any alternative formulation of that same phrase.
And one of the problems we can talk about especially.
And the conscience of this self-important creatures nature makes clear consistent, nothing more than the ability to remember his debts.
One might then be tempted to conclude that this whole passage is little more than a
parody of the contemporary bourgeois who thinks that he has achieved something unique,
something individual, just because he is steady enough to make a promise and honour.
Capitalism, as everyone knows, destroys customary practises.
Yet after their demise, there remains the upright bushwalk who can enter a contract and remember his legal obligations, no less.
The modern Bush, while in short, fancies himself the highest fruit of creation simply because he can remember his business deals.
Now, there is admittedly more to this passage than what we've called to attention that called attention to so far.
Indeed, in a recent vigorous challenge, the deflationary readings of passage, including my own in earlier work,
Thomas Miles has argued this is in the most recent international studies in philosophy.
Think it's year 2007. In keeping with tradition, Knowledge's came out a month into retirement.
Thomas Miles has argued that self mastery is central to the image of a sovereign individual and that,
Miles, this self mastery consists of the self affirming conscience that guy.
This is sovereign individual to take on great tasks and fulfil his commitments to them.
That was, Moretti noted, the only great task concretely on offer by nature is that the sovereign individual can make a promise and keep.
This is not nothing to be sure. But it seems prima fascia hard to square with the overblown rhetoric of Section two, to which Miles calls attention.
For example, read again a portion of the passage, the proud realisation of the extraordinary privilege of responsibility,
the awareness of this rare freedom and power over himself. And his faith has penetrated into the depths and become an instant his dominant themes.
What will he or his dominant instinct, assuming that he needs a word for it?
No doubt about the answer to this sovereign man calls it his conscience.
But nature, as we have already seen, denies, and not just once that anyone as, quote, freedom and power over himself from his faith within anyone has.
His second essay also claims mastery over circumstances.
The conclusion of the four great hours from Twilight of the Idols is as clear as any passage in Meech on the subject.
I hope no one gives people their qualities, not God or society's parents or ancestors, not even people themselves.
Nobody is responsible for people existing in the first place or for the state or circumstances or environment they are in.
That means, of course, that the sovereign individual whose privilege of responsibility extends to himself and his faith,
indeed to his circumstances, is delusion. At least if he really believes in this, he may well feel responsible.
But his feeling is on warrant.
Now, that conclusion is, of course, exactly what one should expect from nature's most important discussion on the phenomenon of self mastery.
The trait that Miles emphasises is attributed to the software.
And this is the discussion from DAYBREAK.
The passage through which I have called attention before striking evidence of nature's fatal in Section one or nine,
Dayboro Nature canvasses six different ways of combating the vehemence of a draw, for example,
by avoiding opportunities for ratification of the drive,
thus weakening over time or by learning to associate painful thoughts with the drive so that its satisfaction no longer has a positive valence.
More significantly,
Miach is also concerned in this passage to answer the question as to the ultimate motive for self Maskew and he explains it as follows.
And I quote that one wants to come back. The vehemence of the drive and all, however, does not stand within our own power,
nor does the choice of any particular method, nor does the success or failure of this method.
What is clearly the case is that if this entire procedure, our intellect is only the blind instrument of another draw,
which is a rival of the drive, this vehemence is tormenting us.
While we believe we are complaining about the events of a drive, at bottom, it is one drive which is complaining about the other.
That is to say, for us to become aware that we are suffering from the vehemence of the drive
presupposes the existence of another equally vehement or even more vehement drive,
and that a struggle is in prospect in which our intellect is going to have to take sides.
Now, even if the intellect must take sides, there is no suggestion in this passage that the intellect determines which side prevails.
To the contrary, the intellect is on nature's picture. The mere blind instrument of another drug.
Thus, the fact that one masters oneself is not a product of autonomous choice by the person, but rather the fact that the underlying psychological.
Characteristic of that person, namely, which of his various drives happened to be strongs, there is, as it were, no self, self master.
That is no conscious of free self, can't contribute anything to process.
Self mastery is merely an effect that the interplay of certain drives driver drives over which the conscious self exercises no control.
Though it may as well root for one side or the other, the conscious self and its body is simply an arena in which the struggle drives as played out.
How they play out determines what he believes, what he values, what he becomes.
But clore conscious self or agent. The person takes no active part in the process.
To be sure, some higher types of people. Gerges and Nietzsche's, for example,
exemplify a unified hierarchy of drys that nature occasionally dubs as examples of freedom to return to that flow.
But we do not honour Nietzsche's admonition to read and free of moral prejudices.
If we get to try to reconstruct this as a moral ideal of autonomy and responsibility in song,
we can agree with the emphasis of miles on the self and mastery characteristic of the
sovereign individual and still acknowledge that given Nietzsche's conception of self mastery,
it is wholly compatible with his denial of freewill and moral responsibility in so many other passengers.
So how is this account of the sovereign individual passage which shows it to be of a piece with his fatalistic
scepticism about freedom and responsibility to be reconciled with what Nietzsche says elsewhere in his work?
When he talks of freedom and freewill,
Pollner suggests that one important positive view and freedom of freedom in nature represents it as a kind of substantive ideal.
And actually, these papers by Pollner Richardson genes that I'm referring to our wall in the genes and may meech on freedoms and autonomy,
which is which is back there for those who are interested. So Pollner suggests one view is as a freedom, as a kind of substantive ideal.
As Pollner describes and I quote, freedom as a substantive ideal is what seems to be at stake in many of those remarks,
where nature expresses admiration for people who,
as he sees them, have succeeded in integrating an unusually great multiplicity of drives and a value of commitments into a long lasting,
coherent whole. That's Paul Mischaracterisation. I think this is the best reading of what King James has recently been arguing as well.
When he speaks of Nietzsche's wanting to understand genuine agents and wanting to change, quote,
his preferred breeders from being mere ponder points of a vast array of conflicting inherited drives and to genuinely unify beings as genes,
I take him to see nature's presenting us with an idea of agency one involving a kind of unity of the drops.
Perhaps the sovereign individual is meant to represent such an ideal as well, albeit a bit taken.
Yet the ideal itself does seem to be a recognisably may change.
The question, however, naturally arises why this ideal should be associated with freedom or freewill or autonomy?
Why not just say that nature's ideal agent has a certain pattern of coherent drives or dispositions,
a pattern to be specified, of course, and leave it at that. Freedom is, after all, a promiscuous concept in ordinary language.
We say that someone just released from prison is a free man,
but we also say that someone who shuns conventional expectations about careers or styles of dress or other social norms is a free spirit.
But being unconstrained by physical limits, as in prison walls or social conventions has an expectations about careers or appearance does not
raise philosophically interesting points about freedom or human agency for nature or for anyone else.
We need much more evidence than an occasional use of the term freedom to include that
nature has a philosophically important positive conception of freedom or free will.
Readers of Nature know that he often employs familiar concepts and revisionary more highly deflation than he senses.
Such is ultimately the case with Nietzsche's view of freedom and free will. I agree with James and Pollner that nature sometimes,
though not nearly as often as they think the passages in some detail that Nietzsche
sometimes associates the language of freedom with certain kinds of persons agents.
Psychic economy has a certain kind of coherence or harmony.
But in so doing, he is engaged in what George Stevens said would have called the persuasive definition of freedom.
He wants to radically revise the content of freedom while exploiting the positive values that the traditional concept has in his readers.
This is because nature recognises that to really transform the consciousness of his preferred readers,
he must reach them at an emotional and subconscious level.
And one way to do so is to associate any change in ideals with values in which his readers are already emotionally invested.
And, as nature notes in the gay science, values are.
Amongst the most powerful levers in the involved mechanisms of our actions, thus by associating an ideal of the person with the evaluable,
he got his emotion laden ideal of freedom and free will, which his readers will already accept.
Which increases the likelihood that he can activate the causal levers of at least some of these rivers that will lead them towards this new idea,
which is a cause to realise this new idea.
Yet from a purely descriptive point of view, he might just as well hold his new ideal agents uniform or causally coherent agents.
Not quite as catchy, since his picture really has nothing to do with free at all.
Nietzsche's ideal unified agent is just a kind of natural artefact, one whose drys interact constructively rather than destructive.
But with regard to his rhetorical aves, nature is shrewd to sometimes describe such natural artefacts as examples of freedom.
Both James and Paul, like other writers in this genre,
rely on a very small number of passages to support what they claim is nature's positive account of freedom.
I want to examine these passages with some care. I've already dealt with the second section of the second essay in the geneology since I think it
will turn out that they do not generally bear the readings James and Pollner want to give them.
You have to be clear again, I'm not denying that H-E Netsch, a highly valued persons who buy natural fortuity,
exhibit the kind of agency picked out, I take it, by James's notion of genuine agency and Posner's notion of full person.
But none of this has anything to do with any concept that the philosophical traditions have labelled freedom or free will.
Well, what better place to start than the twilight of the Idols? Skirmishes of an untimely man, Section 38.
Which nation explicitly titles my conception of freedom? Here's how he introduces and explains that concept.
And I quote, Liberal institutions ceased to be liberal.
As soon as they are attained later on, there are no worse and no more thorough injuries of freedom than liberal institutions.
Their effects are known well enough. They undermine the wealth, power. They level mountain valley and call that morality.
They make men small, cowardly and hedonistic every time it is the herd on their triumphs with liberalism, in other words, herd embolisation.
Now, the introduction to his conception of freedom seems clear. What undermines freedom by making, quote, men small,
cowardly and hedonistic philosophical and religious traditions have had many views of freedom, to be sure.
But I am not aware of any in which being big, brave and indifferent to suffering loomed large.
Yet that appears to be the concept of freedom. Nature in books here. The passage continues.
These same liberal institutions produce different effects while they are still being fought for.
Then they really promote freedom in a powerful way. On closer inspection, it is war that produces these effects.
The war for liberal institutions. War educates freedom for what is freedom.
That one has the will to assume responsibility for oneself. That one maintains the distance which separates us.
That one becomes more indifferent to difficulties, hardships, privation, even to life itself.
That one is prepared to sacrifice human beings for one's pause, not excluding oneself.
Freedom means that the manly instincts which delight war and victory dominate over other instincts.
For example, over those of happiness, the human being who has become free and much more the spirit who has become free.
Spits on the contemptible type of well-being dreamed up by shopkeepers, Christians, cows, females, Englishmen and other.
The free man is a worry. The fry message is clear.
We're going to come back for it.
So assuming responsibility for oneself is a course, not quite the same thing as actually being responsible for its actions.
The former is an attitude, a disposition.
Namely, that if the Warriors find out there is no sense, ordinary philosophical in which freedom means pleasure in warfare.
The Warriors are, to be sure, usually thought to be big, brave and indifferent to suffering.
This is quite clearly, I think,
persuasive definition and send students and identified many decades ago in Section 41 of the same chapter from Twilight of the Idols.
Nature then describes the, quote, freedom, which I do not mean, namely.
And here's his explanation. Abandonment to one's instincts.
Today, the claim for independence or redevelopment for less VLA is prest most commonly by the very people for whom no Rheins would be too strict.
That is a symptom of decadence. Our modern conception of freedom is one more proof of the degeneration of the instinct.
So in other words, nature renounces one of the colonial connotations of the idea of freedom, namely freedom from constraints.
The point here is obviously of a piece with the concern and beyond the neval.
This is Section one, a game where nature says, and I quote.
Everything there is or was a freedom, so bonus dance or master reassurance on Earth, whether it thinking itself or in ruling or in speaking,
in persuading inartistic, just as an ethical practises has only developed by virtue of the tyranny of such arbitrary laws.
Every artist knows how far removed from this feeling of letting go.
Let's say L.A. is from his most natural state. The free watering, placing, disposing and shaping in the moment of inspiration.
He knows how strict. And suddenly he obeys thousands of laws at this very moment.
Laws that defy conceptual formulation precisely because of their hardness and determined.
So freedom and nature's sense does not mean freedom from constraint. But it's obviously being subject to hard and determinate laws.
Section two, 13 and beyond would neval continues this line of thought, and I quote again,
artists are the ones who know only too well that their feeling of freedom to finesse and authority of creation,
formation and control only reaches its apex when they have stopped doing anything voluntarily and instead do everything necessary.
In short, they know that inside themselves, necessity. And quote, freedom of the will have become one.
Notice that freedom of the will is placed in quotes by nature himself in this passage.
It's not, after all, real freedom will the will, since it involves nothing voluntary. That's what he tells us.
Only action which is necessary. Actions bound, as it says in the earlier passage by far.
What these passages resonate turn with the famous Section 335, the gay signs, which appears to suggest that people can create themselves.
Here is the bit of the passage emphasised by Homer and Miles in their exposition of nature's positive conception of freedom.
And I quote, We want to become we are human beings who are new, unique, incomparable, who give themselves flaws, who create themselves.
Yet this passage then continues as follows. And this is the continuation on which most scholars are, alas, silent.
But I'm always full. Here it is.
To that end of creating ourselves, we must become the best learners and discoverers of everything that is lawful and necessary in the world.
We must become physicist in order to be creators. In this sense, while hitherto all valuations and ideals have been based on ignorance of physics.
Therefore, along with physics. So creation in this sense is a very special sense.
Deep for it presupposes the discovery of what is lawful and necessary as revealed by the physical sciences.
And this, of course, recalls the earlier theme about the pillars of freedom,
the assessing in context what nature has in mind becomes clearer for the preceding part of Section three thirty five.
He explains that while the particular cause of any action is in demonstrable, we do know that values are,
quote, amongst the most powerful levers in the involved mechanisms of our action.
Thus, the task for the sciences is to discover the laws of cause and effect governing particular values, in particular actions.
A more refined version of the task that nature later calls for in the note at the end of the first essay of the geneology,
namely for the human sciences to examine the effects of different kinds of valuations on the good of the majority.
Good, the minority, as he puts it there. So what textual evidence of nature's putative positive view of freedom remains?
Section 348 of the gay science, which equates freedom with a will, with freedom, from the need for certainty,
the need that drives people, Nietzsche says, to faith and fanaticism obviously tells us nothing about agency or freewill.
It is a wholly revisionary usage of concept. There is in addition to openly provisionary counter freedom in the first chapter.
Beyond Neval, according to which, quote, freedom of the will.
Some quotes. That is the word for the multifaceted state of pleasure.
One commands and at the same time identifies himself to be accomplished at will.
As such, he enjoys the triumph over resistance's, but thinks of himself that it was his will alone that truly overcame the resistance.
Now, as I've argued elsewhere, the analysis of the will and freedom in this chapter is fully of a piece with.
That is the first chapter beyond Neval is fully of a piece with his general denial of freewill and moral responsibility.
That leaves us then with just two passages in the published Corpus that interpreters of his positive theory of freedom.
Point to us in one passage, Section ten of the third essay,
the geneology in which nature considers how the ascetic ideal validates the conditions under which philosophers can flourish.
He concludes by noting that even in the modern world, the obstacles to being a philosopher remain great.
I quote. Is there even now enough pride? Darah courage, self-confidence.
Will the spirit will to take responsibility? Freedom of the will puts in italics for the philosopher on Earth to be really possible.
This passing reference to freedom of read of will is revealing,
since it makes clear that nature views it as interchangeable with this positions of character like pride and courage and self-confidence.
All traits one can possess without being responsible for having them without ensured haven't developed them in any way free.
That brings us to perhaps the most interesting rechanged passage mentioned freedom from Chapter eight of Twilight of the Idols, a passage on Earth.
If there's quoting sunlight. This is Section 49 girds, not the German event, but a European war.
A magnificent attempt to overcome the 18th century by returning to nature,
by coming towards the naturalist's of the Renaissance, a type of self overcoming on the part of that century.
He made use of history, science, antiquity and Spinoza, too. But above all, he making some practical activity.
He did not remove himself from life. He put himself squarely in the middle of.
He did not. Disparity took as much as he could want himself to himself in himself.
What he wanted was totality. He fought against the separation of reasoned sensibility.
Feeling will preached in the most forbiddingly scholastic way by Komp Gerges Antipov.
He disciplined himself the whole mess. He created himself in the middle of an age inclined to unreality.
Gerta was a convinced realist. He said yes to everything relating to him.
His greatest experience was that of the most real thing that went by the name of Napoleon.
Gerta conceived of a strong, highly educated, self respecting human being skilled in all things physical and able to keep himself in cheque.
Who could dare to allow himself the entire expanse and wealth of naturalist's?
Who was strong enough for this freedom? A spirit like this,
who has become free fans in the middle of the world with a cheerful and trusting fatalism in
the belief that everything is redeemed and affirmed in the hope he does not the game anymore.
But a belief like this is the highest of all possible beliefs. I have presented with the name diagnosis.
There were two striking motifs in this passage. First, the emphasis on an ideal of naturalism and realism, which is explicitly associated home.
And secondly, the equation of commitment to this ideal with freedom, but also an attitude of fatalism and ultimately by a nice.
So how are we to understand these motifs and their relation to the job?
The immediately preceding section of Twilights Section 48, in fact, concerns the poet and his, quote, high three.
Even terrible nature and not indeed Napoleon is declared by nature to be a piece of return to nature.
As I understand exactly the return, which also attributes the girth,
if we understand the sense in which Napoleon returns to nature and exemplifies the natural,
we will understand something about the meaning of freedom in the following section.
Now, Napoleon's return to nature in Section forty eight is explicitly contrasted with Roussos conception of man's natural state,
which nature deems the idealistic fantasies of a rabbit, meaning in particular, their doctrine of quality.
No poison is more poisonous than this as nature and Section forty eight concludes that, quote,
Only one person perceived in this event to the 18th century correctly with disgust, namely.
Since this freedom for which it is strong enough is equated with the entire expanse of wit and wealth of naturalness,
of which Napoleon is the exemplar.
It would seem to follow that the freedom of a birth is in part an acceptance of the reality of the natural inequality
between people and a renunciation of the rhizobia illusions about what persons are like in a truly natural state.
But this kind of freedom is becoming free, whose nature puts it is also explicitly equated with an attitude of, quote,
cheering and trusting fatalism, which in turn is equated with the Dionysian attitude that is clearly recognisable as our fighting.
That is acceptance, an affirmation of the way things really are, rather than falling prey to the fantasies of the idealist and rabble rolled into one.
We mousel to be free in this sense, and that is to be free of the wish that reality being other than it is, that is unequal, terrible and cruel.
The whole man himself, cause once it is not, however, to be a free agent as conceived by con or human,
or as far as I can tell by any other major figure in the philosophical tradition,
nature would rather persuade select readers to the fatalism of a girth,
my coopting the language of freedom itself to commend to them an attitude that is premised on its denial,
on the most profound sense of denial, the Enlightenment ideal.
That man from free will in their rational capacities can all be kamik like the liberal ideal
idea that defined marriage is Creegan the free man is a war or that to be free is to be big,
brave and indifferent to suffer. This key passage from Twilight persuasively redefines freedom in the service of the chain values.
In this case, the liberal idea that to be truly fee free is to be not just reconciled to, but to affirm the essential inequality of the persons.
So to conclude, if Meacher really says so little, that suggests he holds out the hope of a freedom or free will.
That would be recognisable to the philosophical tradition or common sense.
If his scepticism about freedom and responsibility is so resolute when he actually says about freedom and free will is often so clearly revisionist,
so plainly an exercise in persuasive definition that means to exploit his readers and perceived prejudices on behalf of very different chain ideals,
even quite the liberal ideals. Then how are we to explain the recent scholarly consensus?
That is what it is with which we began.
It is, I fear, a manifestation of default against which nature often railed on which we have seen so many times before in the nature literature,
in hydrous transformation reach into the last metaphysical philosopher Coffman's
rendering him of him as a harmless secular humanist in the famous is the family.
With him is a statuses in each case. I think the aim is to make Miach a less appalling, to be delicate Monov readers than he really is.
Furniture does not believe in freedom or responsibility. He does not think we exercise any meaningful control over our lives.
He does not think that is revisionary sense of freedom.
The long, protracted will, as he puts it in the passage of a sovereign individual, isn't reached just anyone that anyone could choose to happen.
Indeed, the important passage from Twilight with which we concluded freedom is rather clearly invoked on behalf of beaches,
the liberal vision of the inescapable reality of human inequality.
The resistance that these points and the recent scholarly literature, I conclude,
reflects the continuing malign influence of moralising ratings, Meecham,
of the failure to remember what he says about his conception of Renaissance virtue,
namely that we understand it, that we should understand him and him moral line freedom.
Thank you.