1 00:00:05,860 --> 00:00:17,800 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. 2 00:00:17,800 --> 00:00:25,000 Most readers of Nietzsche's on the genealogy of morality over the last century would one suspects were astonished to discover the 3 00:00:25,000 --> 00:00:33,580 prominence recent scholarship has given to the enigmatic figure of the sovereign individual who appears just once in Section two. 4 00:00:33,580 --> 00:00:42,730 The second essay geneology and never appears again in the geneology or indeed anywhere else in the corpus. 5 00:00:42,730 --> 00:00:45,970 Yet, according to Keep Dancing Peerson, for example, and I quote, 6 00:00:45,970 --> 00:00:50,740 The overriding aim of the genealogy of morals is to show that what caught in the modern 7 00:00:50,740 --> 00:00:55,780 liberal tradition of moral and political philosophy and moral political thought simply 8 00:00:55,780 --> 00:01:00,940 take for granted the sovereign individual possession of free will and conscience is 9 00:01:00,940 --> 00:01:05,860 in reality the product of a specific historical labour of culture or civilisation, 10 00:01:05,860 --> 00:01:11,050 end quote. If this were really the overriding aim with the geneology, 11 00:01:11,050 --> 00:01:17,410 one would have expected Nietzsche to be a bit clearer about it and to have more to say about the sovereign individual. 12 00:01:17,410 --> 00:01:25,570 And so Pearsons claim is, to be sure, rather extreme, but his is nonetheless when a reckoning, recognisable continuum with other assessments. 13 00:01:25,570 --> 00:01:29,890 John Richardson, for example, describes Section two of the second essay as, quote, 14 00:01:29,890 --> 00:01:36,130 a dramatic statement of Nietzsche's positive view of freedom for Peter Pollner. 15 00:01:36,130 --> 00:01:45,790 The sovereign individual gives expression to quote, the constitutive conditions of full fledged autonomous rather than an heterogenous self. 16 00:01:45,790 --> 00:01:50,350 Can James states the sovereign individual illuminates, quote, genuine agency? 17 00:01:50,350 --> 00:01:54,760 The question, what is it to be a self capable Vakhtang? Indeed. 18 00:01:54,760 --> 00:02:01,630 And I quote again, what exactly it is to be a genuine self. So who is this sovereign individual? 19 00:02:01,630 --> 00:02:09,460 The second essay. And what does he have to do with Nietzsche's conceptions of freewill, freedom or the self? 20 00:02:09,460 --> 00:02:14,260 I shall argue for what would have been at one time a fairly unsurprising view, 21 00:02:14,260 --> 00:02:22,030 namely that first nature denies that people ever act freely and that they are ever morally responsible for anything they can. 22 00:02:22,030 --> 00:02:28,150 Second, that the figure of a sovereign individual in no way supports a denial of this first point. 23 00:02:28,150 --> 00:02:36,310 And third, the nature engages in what Charles Stevenson in his famous 1938 paper on persuasive definitions. 24 00:02:36,310 --> 00:02:42,910 Each engages in what Stevenson would have called a persuasive definition of the language of freedom and free will. 25 00:02:42,910 --> 00:02:46,660 Radically revising the content of those concepts, 26 00:02:46,660 --> 00:02:53,980 but in a way that aims to capitalise on their positive, emotive valence and authority for his readers. 27 00:02:53,980 --> 00:02:59,390 More precisely, I am to show that the image of the sovereign individual is in fact consistent with the reading of nature, 28 00:02:59,390 --> 00:03:03,950 has a kind of fatalists which I have defended at length elsewhere. 29 00:03:03,950 --> 00:03:07,630 When the Fatalis reading Nietzsche thinks that persons have certain essential 30 00:03:07,630 --> 00:03:13,210 psychological and physiological traits over which they have no autonomous control, 31 00:03:13,210 --> 00:03:20,620 and which together perhaps with environmental influences like values, caused them to determine their life trajectories. 32 00:03:20,620 --> 00:03:27,430 In particular, nature thinks that the feeling of freewill is at bottom and epiphenomenon of a process in which conscious 33 00:03:27,430 --> 00:03:34,420 thoughts that are consistent with and temporally proximate to succeeding actions are misinterpreted as causal, 34 00:03:34,420 --> 00:03:40,060 when in fact both the thoughts and the actions themselves are causally determined by nonconscious. 35 00:03:40,060 --> 00:03:44,110 Perhaps neuro physical aspects of the person. 36 00:03:44,110 --> 00:03:51,790 The upshot is that our actions are neither causes suey nor caused by any conscious state with which we might identify. 37 00:03:51,790 --> 00:03:55,390 And so our actions cannot be prescriptions of responsibility. 38 00:03:55,390 --> 00:04:04,340 That is description's unjustified praise and blame to show an image of the sovereign individual squares with nature's fatals. 39 00:04:04,340 --> 00:04:09,690 I distinguish in what follows between two different deflationary readings of the past. 40 00:04:09,690 --> 00:04:14,020 On one such reading, the figure of the sovereign individual is wholly ironic. 41 00:04:14,020 --> 00:04:18,460 A mocking of the petite bourgeois thinks his petty commercial undertakings, 42 00:04:18,460 --> 00:04:23,940 his ability to make promises and remember his debts are the highest fruit of creation. 43 00:04:23,940 --> 00:04:30,970 One another deflationary reading. The sovereign individual does indeed represent an ideal of the self, 44 00:04:30,970 --> 00:04:39,410 one marked by a kind of self mastery foreign to less coherent cells whose momentary impulses pull them this way and that. 45 00:04:39,410 --> 00:04:45,650 But such a self and itself master is a neat chain in terms of fortuitous natural artefact, 46 00:04:45,650 --> 00:04:52,060 the beat of fate, not an autonomous achievement for which anyone could be responsible. 47 00:04:52,060 --> 00:04:59,750 To associate this ideal of the self with the language of freedom and free will is an exercise in persuasive definition by nature, 48 00:04:59,750 --> 00:05:05,570 a rhetorical skill in which he was often the master. I am inclined to think the second reading. 49 00:05:05,570 --> 00:05:08,900 Probably the second inflationary reading is probably the correct one, though, 50 00:05:08,900 --> 00:05:14,300 the somewhat ridiculously hyperbolic presentation of the sovereign individual to which we return, 51 00:05:14,300 --> 00:05:21,260 we'll make the first reading attractive in some ways. But either reading allows us to understand how and why the fatalists, 52 00:05:21,260 --> 00:05:28,430 an arch sceptic about free will, would have created the figure of the sovereign individual. 53 00:05:28,430 --> 00:05:34,730 So we do well to begin by reminding ourselves of what Nicha actually says about freewill and responsibility 54 00:05:34,730 --> 00:05:40,160 in the many passages from many different books that spanned his entire philosophical career, 55 00:05:40,160 --> 00:05:45,650 that must inform any interpretation of the section on the sovereign individual. 56 00:05:45,650 --> 00:05:50,360 Even if we put to one side human all too human will work of the late 1970s, 57 00:05:50,360 --> 00:05:54,800 in which Nietzsche clearly accepted a straightforwardly incompatible picture in 58 00:05:54,800 --> 00:05:59,780 which the determinism of our universe rules out free will and moral responsibility. 59 00:05:59,780 --> 00:06:03,950 Evidence of nature's scepticism about freedom and responsibility remains plentiful. 60 00:06:03,950 --> 00:06:12,800 In his mature corpus of the eighteen eighties, thus at the start of the decade in DAYBREAK, he writes in Section 128, 61 00:06:12,800 --> 00:06:20,300 do I have to add that the wise edifice was right, that we really are not responsible for our dreams. 62 00:06:20,300 --> 00:06:30,260 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. 63 00:06:30,260 --> 00:06:36,710 So belief in freedom with will is to be explained by the ulterior motivations we have for accepting it, not by its reality. 64 00:06:36,710 --> 00:06:42,640 We are as little responsible for what we do in real life as what we do in our dreams. 65 00:06:42,640 --> 00:06:50,810 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. 66 00:06:50,810 --> 00:06:58,940 This is from Section 14. Formerly man was given a free will as his dowry from a higher order. 67 00:06:58,940 --> 00:07:03,500 Today, we have taken his will away altogether in the sense that we no longer admit the will. 68 00:07:03,500 --> 00:07:10,940 As a faculty, the old word will now serves only to denote a result in a kind of individual reaction, 69 00:07:10,940 --> 00:07:17,650 which follows necessarily upon a number of partly contradictory, partly harmonious stimuli. 70 00:07:17,650 --> 00:07:28,280 The will no longer acts or moves denial of the causality of the will or more precisely, what we experience, as will, 71 00:07:28,280 --> 00:07:36,140 is central to Nietzsche scepticism about free will and also explains why he frequently denies unfree will as well. 72 00:07:36,140 --> 00:07:40,160 What we experience, as Will, does not in fact cause our actions. 73 00:07:40,160 --> 00:07:45,890 So the causal determination or freedom of this word is irrelevant in DAYBREAK. 74 00:07:45,890 --> 00:07:55,010 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. 75 00:07:55,010 --> 00:08:00,170 That the sun shall rise. And at hand we cannot stop a wheel and says, I will. 76 00:08:00,170 --> 00:08:05,270 That it shall roll. And at him, he was thrown down in wrestling and says, Here I lie. 77 00:08:05,270 --> 00:08:11,780 I will lie here. But while laughter sigh are we ourselves ever acting any differently? 78 00:08:11,780 --> 00:08:16,010 Whenever we employ the expression, I will. 79 00:08:16,010 --> 00:08:23,430 If the faculty at the will no longer acts or moves as the anti price passage puts, if it is no longer causal, 80 00:08:23,430 --> 00:08:28,200 then there remains no conceptual space for the compatible society that the right kind 81 00:08:28,200 --> 00:08:33,810 of force of determination the world is compatible with responsibility for our actions. 82 00:08:33,810 --> 00:08:38,340 If they zaara through strict puts it thought is one thing, the deed is another. 83 00:08:38,340 --> 00:08:44,160 And the image of the deed still another. The wheel of causality does not roll between. 84 00:08:44,160 --> 00:08:48,480 Which is a pithy statement. The point of the DAYBREAK passage I just quoted. 85 00:08:48,480 --> 00:08:56,430 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, 86 00:08:56,430 --> 00:09:04,920 how can I possibly be responsible for them in the central discussion of free will and responsibility in the geneology nature. 87 00:09:04,920 --> 00:09:15,660 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. 88 00:09:15,660 --> 00:09:20,640 So popular morality also separates strength from the expressions of strength. 89 00:09:20,640 --> 00:09:28,620 As if there were an indifferent substrate behind the strong person which had the freedom to manifest strength or not. 90 00:09:28,620 --> 00:09:39,240 But there is no such substrate. The suppressed, hateful and glowing aspects of revenge and hate exploit this belief in a subject or substrate. 91 00:09:39,240 --> 00:09:49,230 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. 92 00:09:49,230 --> 00:09:54,450 They thereby gain for themselves the right to hold the bird of prey accountable. 93 00:09:54,450 --> 00:10:00,390 The weak need the belief in a neutral subject with free choice, out of an instinct of self-preservation, 94 00:10:00,390 --> 00:10:05,430 self affirmation in which every lie is sanctified at Section 13. 95 00:10:05,430 --> 00:10:11,070 The first lesson, the will that was denied is the faculty and the other passages is now here, 96 00:10:11,070 --> 00:10:16,650 I take it, up the substrate that stands behind the act and chooses to perform it or not. 97 00:10:16,650 --> 00:10:23,340 But there is no such faculty, whether we call it will or Substring choosing to manifest strength or weakness. 98 00:10:23,340 --> 00:10:30,270 There just is the doing no. Dugher, who bears the responsibility for the discussion of the four great errors in the 99 00:10:30,270 --> 00:10:36,420 twilight of the Idols is to the same effect as he concludes that chapter quote Today, 100 00:10:36,420 --> 00:10:40,590 we no longer have any pity for the concept of free will. 101 00:10:40,590 --> 00:10:48,480 We know only too well what it really is. The Fowlers, the Wall theologians artifices aimed at making mankind responsible. 102 00:10:48,480 --> 00:10:54,780 In their sense, the doctrine of the will has been invented essentially for the purpose of punishment. 103 00:10:54,780 --> 00:11:01,020 That is because one wanted to plead guilt. So once again, denial of the will is a causal factor, 104 00:11:01,020 --> 00:11:06,090 which is the central argument of this chapter of Twilight is juxtaposed with a psychological 105 00:11:06,090 --> 00:11:11,790 explanation for why people would nonetheless be motivated to believe in freedom and responsibility. 106 00:11:11,790 --> 00:11:15,580 Once we abandon this error free will. That's what Nietzsche calls it. 107 00:11:15,580 --> 00:11:22,640 We should in turn abandon the reactive concepts whose intelligibility depends on concepts like guilt. 108 00:11:22,640 --> 00:11:28,860 Zarah, through Straw well describes the required revision to our thinking about freedom and responsibility that results. 109 00:11:28,860 --> 00:11:31,890 This is from the section on the pale criminal enemy. 110 00:11:31,890 --> 00:11:39,840 You shall say, but not villain saying we shall say, but not scoundrel fool, you shall say, but not a sinner. 111 00:11:39,840 --> 00:11:48,120 The abandoned concepts that a villain, a scoundrel and sinner are all ones that require freedom and responsibility that would licence blame. 112 00:11:48,120 --> 00:11:56,580 While the substitute concepts aname, sick fool merely describe a person's condition or character without supposing anything 113 00:11:56,580 --> 00:12:03,120 about the agent's responsibility for being in that condition or having that character, 114 00:12:03,120 --> 00:12:06,900 any account of what is going on in the passage of the sovereign individual must 115 00:12:06,900 --> 00:12:12,120 show how it is consistent with these pervasive themes in the NI chain corpus. 116 00:12:12,120 --> 00:12:20,730 So let's turn now to the solemn task. Nature begins the second essay in the geneology with a characteristically naturalistic 117 00:12:20,730 --> 00:12:27,300 question how to breed an animal which is able to make an honour promise. 118 00:12:27,300 --> 00:12:33,870 The assumptions underlying this question are two fold. First, and most obviously, human beings are certain kinds of animals. 119 00:12:33,870 --> 00:12:38,610 And second, as with other animals. One explains what they do. 120 00:12:38,610 --> 00:12:45,270 For example, promises not by appeal to their exercise of some capacity for autonomous choice of decision, 121 00:12:45,270 --> 00:12:54,000 but in terms of the causal mechanisms such as bleeding, acting upon them, which yields certain steady behavioural dispositions. 122 00:12:54,000 --> 00:12:57,540 NEACH identifies two preconditions for the behavioural disposition. 123 00:12:57,540 --> 00:13:05,610 At issue here, namely promised the first regularity, behaviour and second, reliable memory. 124 00:13:05,610 --> 00:13:11,760 Regularity is necessary because a promise maker must be, as each puts it, answerable for his own future. 125 00:13:11,760 --> 00:13:15,570 And one cannot be answerable for a future that is outwardly unpredictable. 126 00:13:15,570 --> 00:13:22,710 Memory is essential for the obvious reason that only someone who can remember his promises can possible on honour. 127 00:13:22,710 --> 00:13:30,720 Two factors are singled out by nature as formative for the human animal in its development of regular behaviour and a memory. 128 00:13:30,720 --> 00:13:37,590 One equals the morality of custom, and the other is the role of pain in Dumont's with, quote, 129 00:13:37,590 --> 00:13:43,220 the help of the morality of custom and the social straitjacket man was made truly predictable. 130 00:13:43,220 --> 00:13:50,160 That's from Section two of the second essay. Nature here alludes to his own earlier discussion in DAYBREAK, which, 131 00:13:50,160 --> 00:13:56,520 drawing on the etymological connexion between Siedlecki morality and Sipah custom 132 00:13:56,520 --> 00:14:01,590 advanced a plausible hypothesis that customs constituted the first morality, 133 00:14:01,590 --> 00:14:05,820 that traditional ways of acting played the same role during early human life. 134 00:14:05,820 --> 00:14:15,090 That rarified and lofty moral codes, rules and principles play today that they provided criteria for moral right and wrong. 135 00:14:15,090 --> 00:14:18,680 In this earlier discussion, however nation that is the DAYBREAK discussion. 136 00:14:18,680 --> 00:14:24,030 Leach's goal was a certain naturalisation of the implausible Quantium account of moral motivation. 137 00:14:24,030 --> 00:14:26,640 As a matter of reverence for the more law, 138 00:14:26,640 --> 00:14:33,480 nature proposes instead that it is obedience to tradition and fear of the consequences of deviation from tradition. 139 00:14:33,480 --> 00:14:42,200 That really explains moral motivation. By the time he writes geneology, Nietzsche is now more interested in the role of custom, 140 00:14:42,200 --> 00:14:46,860 the social straitjacket, as he calls it, in making humans truly predictable. 141 00:14:46,860 --> 00:14:53,390 That is regular in their behaviour. This development eventually yields the individual with a conscience. 142 00:14:53,390 --> 00:14:58,680 The nature refers to variously as a sovereign or autonomous individual. 143 00:14:58,680 --> 00:15:03,600 Here's the crucial facet, which I'm going to quote at some length. 144 00:15:03,600 --> 00:15:10,440 With the help of the morality of custom in a social straitjacket, man was made truly predictable. 145 00:15:10,440 --> 00:15:17,820 Let us place ourselves, on the other hand, at the end of this immense process where the tree actually bears fruit. 146 00:15:17,820 --> 00:15:23,490 Where society and its morality of custom heal when they were simply the means to. 147 00:15:23,490 --> 00:15:30,150 We then find the sovereign individual as the ripest group on its tree, like only to itself. 148 00:15:30,150 --> 00:15:33,690 Having freed itself from the morality of custom and autonomous, 149 00:15:33,690 --> 00:15:39,360 super ethical individual because autonomous and ethical are mutually exclusive, exclusive. 150 00:15:39,360 --> 00:15:48,120 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 151 00:15:48,120 --> 00:15:54,330 muscle of what he has finally achieved and incorporated an actual awareness of power and freedom, 152 00:15:54,330 --> 00:16:01,800 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. 153 00:16:01,800 --> 00:16:05,130 This master of the free will. This software. 154 00:16:05,130 --> 00:16:12,660 How could he remain ignorant of his superiority over everybody who does not have the right to make a promise or answer for himself? 155 00:16:12,660 --> 00:16:17,850 How much trust. Fear and respect he arouses. He merits all three. 156 00:16:17,850 --> 00:16:25,770 And how could he, with his self master, not realise that he has necessarily been given mastery over circumstances, 157 00:16:25,770 --> 00:16:30,930 over nature and over all creatures with a less durable and reliable will? 158 00:16:30,930 --> 00:16:33,690 The free man. And now he puts free in quotes. 159 00:16:33,690 --> 00:16:41,820 The free man, the possessor of a durable unbreakable will thus grasp his own standard of value in the possession of such a will, 160 00:16:41,820 --> 00:16:46,440 viewing others from his own standpoint standpoint he respects or despises. 161 00:16:46,440 --> 00:16:53,460 And just as he will necessarily respect his peers, the strong and the reliable, those with the right to give their word. 162 00:16:53,460 --> 00:17:01,280 That is, everyone who makes a promise makes promises like a soft, ponderously, sell them slowly and is sparing with his trust. 163 00:17:01,280 --> 00:17:07,590 Who confers and honour when he places his trust, who gives his word as something which can be relied on because he is strong 164 00:17:07,590 --> 00:17:13,260 enough to remain upright in the face of mishap or even in the face of fate. 165 00:17:13,260 --> 00:17:19,740 So he will necessarily be ready to kick the febrile whippets who make a promise when they have no right 166 00:17:19,740 --> 00:17:27,570 to do so and will save the rod for the liar who breaks his word in the very moment it passes his lips. 167 00:17:27,570 --> 00:17:32,340 The proud realisation of the extraordinary privilege of responsibility, 168 00:17:32,340 --> 00:17:39,930 the awareness of this rare freedom and power over himself and his destiny has penetrated into the depths and become an instinct, 169 00:17:39,930 --> 00:17:48,240 his dominant instinct. What will he call his dominant instinct, assuming that he needs a word for no doubt about the answer. 170 00:17:48,240 --> 00:17:55,440 This sovereign man calls it his conscience. So let us start at the beginning. 171 00:17:55,440 --> 00:18:01,290 The sovereign individual is said to be the fruit of the long tradition of the morality of custom. 172 00:18:01,290 --> 00:18:10,280 But the tree bears this fruit at the point when the morality of custom is left behind. 173 00:18:10,280 --> 00:18:12,980 This individual is autonomous or super ethical, 174 00:18:12,980 --> 00:18:20,390 basically disciplined in the quite precise sense of being no longer bound by the morality of custom sitting. 175 00:18:20,390 --> 00:18:22,430 He is the perfected animal, 176 00:18:22,430 --> 00:18:32,050 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. 177 00:18:32,050 --> 00:18:35,630 And what exactly is the trick of this well-trained animal? 178 00:18:35,630 --> 00:18:44,720 Surely it bears emphasising that he is described as having one and only one skill he can actually make and keep a promise. 179 00:18:44,720 --> 00:18:46,520 And why can he do that? 180 00:18:46,520 --> 00:18:55,010 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. 181 00:18:55,010 --> 00:19:02,720 This might explain why nature gives this self-important animal, the so-called softer individual, a suitably ridiculous and pompous name. 182 00:19:02,720 --> 00:19:12,760 He refers to him in the original as the Suvorov French to Varan individual, a mix of French and perhaps Latin. 183 00:19:12,760 --> 00:19:20,980 There's also obviously a German, meaning literally something like a sovereign AB Frazey never used again anywhere in the corpus, 184 00:19:20,980 --> 00:19:25,210 and he never uses any alternative formulation of that same phrase. 185 00:19:25,210 --> 00:19:29,390 And one of the problems we can talk about especially. 186 00:19:29,390 --> 00:19:37,060 And the conscience of this self-important creatures nature makes clear consistent, nothing more than the ability to remember his debts. 187 00:19:37,060 --> 00:19:41,440 One might then be tempted to conclude that this whole passage is little more than a 188 00:19:41,440 --> 00:19:46,420 parody of the contemporary bourgeois who thinks that he has achieved something unique, 189 00:19:46,420 --> 00:19:51,850 something individual, just because he is steady enough to make a promise and honour. 190 00:19:51,850 --> 00:19:55,840 Capitalism, as everyone knows, destroys customary practises. 191 00:19:55,840 --> 00:20:03,820 Yet after their demise, there remains the upright bushwalk who can enter a contract and remember his legal obligations, no less. 192 00:20:03,820 --> 00:20:12,760 The modern Bush, while in short, fancies himself the highest fruit of creation simply because he can remember his business deals. 193 00:20:12,760 --> 00:20:18,970 Now, there is admittedly more to this passage than what we've called to attention that called attention to so far. 194 00:20:18,970 --> 00:20:25,360 Indeed, in a recent vigorous challenge, the deflationary readings of passage, including my own in earlier work, 195 00:20:25,360 --> 00:20:31,750 Thomas Miles has argued this is in the most recent international studies in philosophy. 196 00:20:31,750 --> 00:20:38,020 Think it's year 2007. In keeping with tradition, Knowledge's came out a month into retirement. 197 00:20:38,020 --> 00:20:45,180 Thomas Miles has argued that self mastery is central to the image of a sovereign individual and that, 198 00:20:45,180 --> 00:20:49,990 Miles, this self mastery consists of the self affirming conscience that guy. 199 00:20:49,990 --> 00:20:57,350 This is sovereign individual to take on great tasks and fulfil his commitments to them. 200 00:20:57,350 --> 00:21:05,890 That was, Moretti noted, the only great task concretely on offer by nature is that the sovereign individual can make a promise and keep. 201 00:21:05,890 --> 00:21:14,710 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. 202 00:21:14,710 --> 00:21:22,690 For example, read again a portion of the passage, the proud realisation of the extraordinary privilege of responsibility, 203 00:21:22,690 --> 00:21:32,020 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. 204 00:21:32,020 --> 00:21:35,890 What will he or his dominant instinct, assuming that he needs a word for it? 205 00:21:35,890 --> 00:21:40,320 No doubt about the answer to this sovereign man calls it his conscience. 206 00:21:40,320 --> 00:21:49,510 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. 207 00:21:49,510 --> 00:21:54,280 His second essay also claims mastery over circumstances. 208 00:21:54,280 --> 00:21:59,450 The conclusion of the four great hours from Twilight of the Idols is as clear as any passage in Meech on the subject. 209 00:21:59,450 --> 00:22:06,880 I hope no one gives people their qualities, not God or society's parents or ancestors, not even people themselves. 210 00:22:06,880 --> 00:22:14,230 Nobody is responsible for people existing in the first place or for the state or circumstances or environment they are in. 211 00:22:14,230 --> 00:22:20,800 That means, of course, that the sovereign individual whose privilege of responsibility extends to himself and his faith, 212 00:22:20,800 --> 00:22:27,970 indeed to his circumstances, is delusion. At least if he really believes in this, he may well feel responsible. 213 00:22:27,970 --> 00:22:31,360 But his feeling is on warrant. 214 00:22:31,360 --> 00:22:38,490 Now, that conclusion is, of course, exactly what one should expect from nature's most important discussion on the phenomenon of self mastery. 215 00:22:38,490 --> 00:22:42,940 The trait that Miles emphasises is attributed to the software. 216 00:22:42,940 --> 00:22:44,590 And this is the discussion from DAYBREAK. 217 00:22:44,590 --> 00:22:51,940 The passage through which I have called attention before striking evidence of nature's fatal in Section one or nine, 218 00:22:51,940 --> 00:22:58,690 Dayboro Nature canvasses six different ways of combating the vehemence of a draw, for example, 219 00:22:58,690 --> 00:23:01,390 by avoiding opportunities for ratification of the drive, 220 00:23:01,390 --> 00:23:09,580 thus weakening over time or by learning to associate painful thoughts with the drive so that its satisfaction no longer has a positive valence. 221 00:23:09,580 --> 00:23:10,450 More significantly, 222 00:23:10,450 --> 00:23:18,910 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. 223 00:23:18,910 --> 00:23:27,040 And I quote that one wants to come back. The vehemence of the drive and all, however, does not stand within our own power, 224 00:23:27,040 --> 00:23:32,380 nor does the choice of any particular method, nor does the success or failure of this method. 225 00:23:32,380 --> 00:23:40,210 What is clearly the case is that if this entire procedure, our intellect is only the blind instrument of another draw, 226 00:23:40,210 --> 00:23:44,260 which is a rival of the drive, this vehemence is tormenting us. 227 00:23:44,260 --> 00:23:52,360 While we believe we are complaining about the events of a drive, at bottom, it is one drive which is complaining about the other. 228 00:23:52,360 --> 00:23:56,980 That is to say, for us to become aware that we are suffering from the vehemence of the drive 229 00:23:56,980 --> 00:24:01,720 presupposes the existence of another equally vehement or even more vehement drive, 230 00:24:01,720 --> 00:24:08,390 and that a struggle is in prospect in which our intellect is going to have to take sides. 231 00:24:08,390 --> 00:24:14,860 Now, even if the intellect must take sides, there is no suggestion in this passage that the intellect determines which side prevails. 232 00:24:14,860 --> 00:24:21,550 To the contrary, the intellect is on nature's picture. The mere blind instrument of another drug. 233 00:24:21,550 --> 00:24:29,110 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. 234 00:24:29,110 --> 00:24:37,870 Characteristic of that person, namely, which of his various drives happened to be strongs, there is, as it were, no self, self master. 235 00:24:37,870 --> 00:24:42,300 That is no conscious of free self, can't contribute anything to process. 236 00:24:42,300 --> 00:24:50,290 Self mastery is merely an effect that the interplay of certain drives driver drives over which the conscious self exercises no control. 237 00:24:50,290 --> 00:24:59,350 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. 238 00:24:59,350 --> 00:25:03,730 How they play out determines what he believes, what he values, what he becomes. 239 00:25:03,730 --> 00:25:09,520 But clore conscious self or agent. The person takes no active part in the process. 240 00:25:09,520 --> 00:25:14,800 To be sure, some higher types of people. Gerges and Nietzsche's, for example, 241 00:25:14,800 --> 00:25:23,110 exemplify a unified hierarchy of drys that nature occasionally dubs as examples of freedom to return to that flow. 242 00:25:23,110 --> 00:25:27,190 But we do not honour Nietzsche's admonition to read and free of moral prejudices. 243 00:25:27,190 --> 00:25:34,280 If we get to try to reconstruct this as a moral ideal of autonomy and responsibility in song, 244 00:25:34,280 --> 00:25:38,920 we can agree with the emphasis of miles on the self and mastery characteristic of the 245 00:25:38,920 --> 00:25:44,050 sovereign individual and still acknowledge that given Nietzsche's conception of self mastery, 246 00:25:44,050 --> 00:25:52,090 it is wholly compatible with his denial of freewill and moral responsibility in so many other passengers. 247 00:25:52,090 --> 00:25:57,040 So how is this account of the sovereign individual passage which shows it to be of a piece with his fatalistic 248 00:25:57,040 --> 00:26:03,460 scepticism about freedom and responsibility to be reconciled with what Nietzsche says elsewhere in his work? 249 00:26:03,460 --> 00:26:07,000 When he talks of freedom and freewill, 250 00:26:07,000 --> 00:26:14,440 Pollner suggests that one important positive view and freedom of freedom in nature represents it as a kind of substantive ideal. 251 00:26:14,440 --> 00:26:22,370 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, 252 00:26:22,370 --> 00:26:30,970 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. 253 00:26:30,970 --> 00:26:38,650 As Pollner describes and I quote, freedom as a substantive ideal is what seems to be at stake in many of those remarks, 254 00:26:38,650 --> 00:26:41,350 where nature expresses admiration for people who, 255 00:26:41,350 --> 00:26:49,420 as he sees them, have succeeded in integrating an unusually great multiplicity of drives and a value of commitments into a long lasting, 256 00:26:49,420 --> 00:26:56,800 coherent whole. That's Paul Mischaracterisation. I think this is the best reading of what King James has recently been arguing as well. 257 00:26:56,800 --> 00:27:01,810 When he speaks of Nietzsche's wanting to understand genuine agents and wanting to change, quote, 258 00:27:01,810 --> 00:27:10,630 his preferred breeders from being mere ponder points of a vast array of conflicting inherited drives and to genuinely unify beings as genes, 259 00:27:10,630 --> 00:27:17,230 I take him to see nature's presenting us with an idea of agency one involving a kind of unity of the drops. 260 00:27:17,230 --> 00:27:23,490 Perhaps the sovereign individual is meant to represent such an ideal as well, albeit a bit taken. 261 00:27:23,490 --> 00:27:29,620 Yet the ideal itself does seem to be a recognisably may change. 262 00:27:29,620 --> 00:27:37,720 The question, however, naturally arises why this ideal should be associated with freedom or freewill or autonomy? 263 00:27:37,720 --> 00:27:42,630 Why not just say that nature's ideal agent has a certain pattern of coherent drives or dispositions, 264 00:27:42,630 --> 00:27:51,010 a pattern to be specified, of course, and leave it at that. Freedom is, after all, a promiscuous concept in ordinary language. 265 00:27:51,010 --> 00:27:54,290 We say that someone just released from prison is a free man, 266 00:27:54,290 --> 00:28:03,430 but we also say that someone who shuns conventional expectations about careers or styles of dress or other social norms is a free spirit. 267 00:28:03,430 --> 00:28:11,800 But being unconstrained by physical limits, as in prison walls or social conventions has an expectations about careers or appearance does not 268 00:28:11,800 --> 00:28:18,370 raise philosophically interesting points about freedom or human agency for nature or for anyone else. 269 00:28:18,370 --> 00:28:22,630 We need much more evidence than an occasional use of the term freedom to include that 270 00:28:22,630 --> 00:28:28,660 nature has a philosophically important positive conception of freedom or free will. 271 00:28:28,660 --> 00:28:35,110 Readers of Nature know that he often employs familiar concepts and revisionary more highly deflation than he senses. 272 00:28:35,110 --> 00:28:41,830 Such is ultimately the case with Nietzsche's view of freedom and free will. I agree with James and Pollner that nature sometimes, 273 00:28:41,830 --> 00:28:46,360 though not nearly as often as they think the passages in some detail that Nietzsche 274 00:28:46,360 --> 00:28:50,910 sometimes associates the language of freedom with certain kinds of persons agents. 275 00:28:50,910 --> 00:28:55,030 Psychic economy has a certain kind of coherence or harmony. 276 00:28:55,030 --> 00:29:00,460 But in so doing, he is engaged in what George Stevens said would have called the persuasive definition of freedom. 277 00:29:00,460 --> 00:29:08,890 He wants to radically revise the content of freedom while exploiting the positive values that the traditional concept has in his readers. 278 00:29:08,890 --> 00:29:14,590 This is because nature recognises that to really transform the consciousness of his preferred readers, 279 00:29:14,590 --> 00:29:18,100 he must reach them at an emotional and subconscious level. 280 00:29:18,100 --> 00:29:25,900 And one way to do so is to associate any change in ideals with values in which his readers are already emotionally invested. 281 00:29:25,900 --> 00:29:28,890 And, as nature notes in the gay science, values are. 282 00:29:28,890 --> 00:29:37,960 Amongst the most powerful levers in the involved mechanisms of our actions, thus by associating an ideal of the person with the evaluable, 283 00:29:37,960 --> 00:29:44,190 he got his emotion laden ideal of freedom and free will, which his readers will already accept. 284 00:29:44,190 --> 00:29:53,350 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, 285 00:29:53,350 --> 00:29:58,090 which is a cause to realise this new idea. 286 00:29:58,090 --> 00:30:06,660 Yet from a purely descriptive point of view, he might just as well hold his new ideal agents uniform or causally coherent agents. 287 00:30:06,660 --> 00:30:11,400 Not quite as catchy, since his picture really has nothing to do with free at all. 288 00:30:11,400 --> 00:30:18,890 Nietzsche's ideal unified agent is just a kind of natural artefact, one whose drys interact constructively rather than destructive. 289 00:30:18,890 --> 00:30:27,060 But with regard to his rhetorical aves, nature is shrewd to sometimes describe such natural artefacts as examples of freedom. 290 00:30:27,060 --> 00:30:29,800 Both James and Paul, like other writers in this genre, 291 00:30:29,800 --> 00:30:35,580 rely on a very small number of passages to support what they claim is nature's positive account of freedom. 292 00:30:35,580 --> 00:30:43,170 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 293 00:30:43,170 --> 00:30:47,800 will turn out that they do not generally bear the readings James and Pollner want to give them. 294 00:30:47,800 --> 00:30:53,760 You have to be clear again, I'm not denying that H-E Netsch, a highly valued persons who buy natural fortuity, 295 00:30:53,760 --> 00:31:01,590 exhibit the kind of agency picked out, I take it, by James's notion of genuine agency and Posner's notion of full person. 296 00:31:01,590 --> 00:31:08,580 But none of this has anything to do with any concept that the philosophical traditions have labelled freedom or free will. 297 00:31:08,580 --> 00:31:14,100 Well, what better place to start than the twilight of the Idols? Skirmishes of an untimely man, Section 38. 298 00:31:14,100 --> 00:31:21,600 Which nation explicitly titles my conception of freedom? Here's how he introduces and explains that concept. 299 00:31:21,600 --> 00:31:25,410 And I quote, Liberal institutions ceased to be liberal. 300 00:31:25,410 --> 00:31:34,110 As soon as they are attained later on, there are no worse and no more thorough injuries of freedom than liberal institutions. 301 00:31:34,110 --> 00:31:40,350 Their effects are known well enough. They undermine the wealth, power. They level mountain valley and call that morality. 302 00:31:40,350 --> 00:31:50,830 They make men small, cowardly and hedonistic every time it is the herd on their triumphs with liberalism, in other words, herd embolisation. 303 00:31:50,830 --> 00:31:57,510 Now, the introduction to his conception of freedom seems clear. What undermines freedom by making, quote, men small, 304 00:31:57,510 --> 00:32:03,530 cowardly and hedonistic philosophical and religious traditions have had many views of freedom, to be sure. 305 00:32:03,530 --> 00:32:09,240 But I am not aware of any in which being big, brave and indifferent to suffering loomed large. 306 00:32:09,240 --> 00:32:15,000 Yet that appears to be the concept of freedom. Nature in books here. The passage continues. 307 00:32:15,000 --> 00:32:19,830 These same liberal institutions produce different effects while they are still being fought for. 308 00:32:19,830 --> 00:32:26,610 Then they really promote freedom in a powerful way. On closer inspection, it is war that produces these effects. 309 00:32:26,610 --> 00:32:32,100 The war for liberal institutions. War educates freedom for what is freedom. 310 00:32:32,100 --> 00:32:38,010 That one has the will to assume responsibility for oneself. That one maintains the distance which separates us. 311 00:32:38,010 --> 00:32:43,140 That one becomes more indifferent to difficulties, hardships, privation, even to life itself. 312 00:32:43,140 --> 00:32:48,210 That one is prepared to sacrifice human beings for one's pause, not excluding oneself. 313 00:32:48,210 --> 00:32:53,160 Freedom means that the manly instincts which delight war and victory dominate over other instincts. 314 00:32:53,160 --> 00:33:00,480 For example, over those of happiness, the human being who has become free and much more the spirit who has become free. 315 00:33:00,480 --> 00:33:12,140 Spits on the contemptible type of well-being dreamed up by shopkeepers, Christians, cows, females, Englishmen and other. 316 00:33:12,140 --> 00:33:17,010 The free man is a worry. The fry message is clear. 317 00:33:17,010 --> 00:33:19,800 We're going to come back for it. 318 00:33:19,800 --> 00:33:26,640 So assuming responsibility for oneself is a course, not quite the same thing as actually being responsible for its actions. 319 00:33:26,640 --> 00:33:28,530 The former is an attitude, a disposition. 320 00:33:28,530 --> 00:33:35,700 Namely, that if the Warriors find out there is no sense, ordinary philosophical in which freedom means pleasure in warfare. 321 00:33:35,700 --> 00:33:40,290 The Warriors are, to be sure, usually thought to be big, brave and indifferent to suffering. 322 00:33:40,290 --> 00:33:41,940 This is quite clearly, I think, 323 00:33:41,940 --> 00:33:51,030 persuasive definition and send students and identified many decades ago in Section 41 of the same chapter from Twilight of the Idols. 324 00:33:51,030 --> 00:33:56,180 Nature then describes the, quote, freedom, which I do not mean, namely. 325 00:33:56,180 --> 00:33:59,660 And here's his explanation. Abandonment to one's instincts. 326 00:33:59,660 --> 00:34:08,910 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. 327 00:34:08,910 --> 00:34:15,640 That is a symptom of decadence. Our modern conception of freedom is one more proof of the degeneration of the instinct. 328 00:34:15,640 --> 00:34:21,720 So in other words, nature renounces one of the colonial connotations of the idea of freedom, namely freedom from constraints. 329 00:34:21,720 --> 00:34:25,530 The point here is obviously of a piece with the concern and beyond the neval. 330 00:34:25,530 --> 00:34:28,780 This is Section one, a game where nature says, and I quote. 331 00:34:28,780 --> 00:34:37,030 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, 332 00:34:37,030 --> 00:34:45,640 in persuading inartistic, just as an ethical practises has only developed by virtue of the tyranny of such arbitrary laws. 333 00:34:45,640 --> 00:34:50,260 Every artist knows how far removed from this feeling of letting go. 334 00:34:50,260 --> 00:34:58,930 Let's say L.A. is from his most natural state. The free watering, placing, disposing and shaping in the moment of inspiration. 335 00:34:58,930 --> 00:35:04,480 He knows how strict. And suddenly he obeys thousands of laws at this very moment. 336 00:35:04,480 --> 00:35:11,980 Laws that defy conceptual formulation precisely because of their hardness and determined. 337 00:35:11,980 --> 00:35:19,900 So freedom and nature's sense does not mean freedom from constraint. But it's obviously being subject to hard and determinate laws. 338 00:35:19,900 --> 00:35:24,670 Section two, 13 and beyond would neval continues this line of thought, and I quote again, 339 00:35:24,670 --> 00:35:30,580 artists are the ones who know only too well that their feeling of freedom to finesse and authority of creation, 340 00:35:30,580 --> 00:35:40,210 formation and control only reaches its apex when they have stopped doing anything voluntarily and instead do everything necessary. 341 00:35:40,210 --> 00:35:48,130 In short, they know that inside themselves, necessity. And quote, freedom of the will have become one. 342 00:35:48,130 --> 00:35:52,380 Notice that freedom of the will is placed in quotes by nature himself in this passage. 343 00:35:52,380 --> 00:35:57,610 It's not, after all, real freedom will the will, since it involves nothing voluntary. That's what he tells us. 344 00:35:57,610 --> 00:36:02,650 Only action which is necessary. Actions bound, as it says in the earlier passage by far. 345 00:36:02,650 --> 00:36:12,590 What these passages resonate turn with the famous Section 335, the gay signs, which appears to suggest that people can create themselves. 346 00:36:12,590 --> 00:36:19,900 Here is the bit of the passage emphasised by Homer and Miles in their exposition of nature's positive conception of freedom. 347 00:36:19,900 --> 00:36:30,970 And I quote, We want to become we are human beings who are new, unique, incomparable, who give themselves flaws, who create themselves. 348 00:36:30,970 --> 00:36:38,350 Yet this passage then continues as follows. And this is the continuation on which most scholars are, alas, silent. 349 00:36:38,350 --> 00:36:40,870 But I'm always full. Here it is. 350 00:36:40,870 --> 00:36:49,570 To that end of creating ourselves, we must become the best learners and discoverers of everything that is lawful and necessary in the world. 351 00:36:49,570 --> 00:36:58,870 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. 352 00:36:58,870 --> 00:37:05,320 Therefore, along with physics. So creation in this sense is a very special sense. 353 00:37:05,320 --> 00:37:12,430 Deep for it presupposes the discovery of what is lawful and necessary as revealed by the physical sciences. 354 00:37:12,430 --> 00:37:15,980 And this, of course, recalls the earlier theme about the pillars of freedom, 355 00:37:15,980 --> 00:37:23,310 the assessing in context what nature has in mind becomes clearer for the preceding part of Section three thirty five. 356 00:37:23,310 --> 00:37:29,080 He explains that while the particular cause of any action is in demonstrable, we do know that values are, 357 00:37:29,080 --> 00:37:33,940 quote, amongst the most powerful levers in the involved mechanisms of our action. 358 00:37:33,940 --> 00:37:40,690 Thus, the task for the sciences is to discover the laws of cause and effect governing particular values, in particular actions. 359 00:37:40,690 --> 00:37:47,800 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, 360 00:37:47,800 --> 00:37:54,480 namely for the human sciences to examine the effects of different kinds of valuations on the good of the majority. 361 00:37:54,480 --> 00:38:03,310 Good, the minority, as he puts it there. So what textual evidence of nature's putative positive view of freedom remains? 362 00:38:03,310 --> 00:38:09,820 Section 348 of the gay science, which equates freedom with a will, with freedom, from the need for certainty, 363 00:38:09,820 --> 00:38:16,690 the need that drives people, Nietzsche says, to faith and fanaticism obviously tells us nothing about agency or freewill. 364 00:38:16,690 --> 00:38:23,770 It is a wholly revisionary usage of concept. There is in addition to openly provisionary counter freedom in the first chapter. 365 00:38:23,770 --> 00:38:27,820 Beyond Neval, according to which, quote, freedom of the will. 366 00:38:27,820 --> 00:38:31,430 Some quotes. That is the word for the multifaceted state of pleasure. 367 00:38:31,430 --> 00:38:36,640 One commands and at the same time identifies himself to be accomplished at will. 368 00:38:36,640 --> 00:38:44,710 As such, he enjoys the triumph over resistance's, but thinks of himself that it was his will alone that truly overcame the resistance. 369 00:38:44,710 --> 00:38:51,670 Now, as I've argued elsewhere, the analysis of the will and freedom in this chapter is fully of a piece with. 370 00:38:51,670 --> 00:38:58,540 That is the first chapter beyond Neval is fully of a piece with his general denial of freewill and moral responsibility. 371 00:38:58,540 --> 00:39:04,390 That leaves us then with just two passages in the published Corpus that interpreters of his positive theory of freedom. 372 00:39:04,390 --> 00:39:08,170 Point to us in one passage, Section ten of the third essay, 373 00:39:08,170 --> 00:39:16,030 the geneology in which nature considers how the ascetic ideal validates the conditions under which philosophers can flourish. 374 00:39:16,030 --> 00:39:21,850 He concludes by noting that even in the modern world, the obstacles to being a philosopher remain great. 375 00:39:21,850 --> 00:39:27,820 I quote. Is there even now enough pride? Darah courage, self-confidence. 376 00:39:27,820 --> 00:39:37,980 Will the spirit will to take responsibility? Freedom of the will puts in italics for the philosopher on Earth to be really possible. 377 00:39:37,980 --> 00:39:41,290 This passing reference to freedom of read of will is revealing, 378 00:39:41,290 --> 00:39:49,210 since it makes clear that nature views it as interchangeable with this positions of character like pride and courage and self-confidence. 379 00:39:49,210 --> 00:39:57,550 All traits one can possess without being responsible for having them without ensured haven't developed them in any way free. 380 00:39:57,550 --> 00:40:05,930 That brings us to perhaps the most interesting rechanged passage mentioned freedom from Chapter eight of Twilight of the Idols, a passage on Earth. 381 00:40:05,930 --> 00:40:17,390 If there's quoting sunlight. This is Section 49 girds, not the German event, but a European war. 382 00:40:17,390 --> 00:40:23,300 A magnificent attempt to overcome the 18th century by returning to nature, 383 00:40:23,300 --> 00:40:30,170 by coming towards the naturalist's of the Renaissance, a type of self overcoming on the part of that century. 384 00:40:30,170 --> 00:40:36,650 He made use of history, science, antiquity and Spinoza, too. But above all, he making some practical activity. 385 00:40:36,650 --> 00:40:40,730 He did not remove himself from life. He put himself squarely in the middle of. 386 00:40:40,730 --> 00:40:45,920 He did not. Disparity took as much as he could want himself to himself in himself. 387 00:40:45,920 --> 00:40:51,080 What he wanted was totality. He fought against the separation of reasoned sensibility. 388 00:40:51,080 --> 00:40:57,560 Feeling will preached in the most forbiddingly scholastic way by Komp Gerges Antipov. 389 00:40:57,560 --> 00:41:04,070 He disciplined himself the whole mess. He created himself in the middle of an age inclined to unreality. 390 00:41:04,070 --> 00:41:09,410 Gerta was a convinced realist. He said yes to everything relating to him. 391 00:41:09,410 --> 00:41:15,140 His greatest experience was that of the most real thing that went by the name of Napoleon. 392 00:41:15,140 --> 00:41:23,360 Gerta conceived of a strong, highly educated, self respecting human being skilled in all things physical and able to keep himself in cheque. 393 00:41:23,360 --> 00:41:28,520 Who could dare to allow himself the entire expanse and wealth of naturalist's? 394 00:41:28,520 --> 00:41:32,180 Who was strong enough for this freedom? A spirit like this, 395 00:41:32,180 --> 00:41:38,240 who has become free fans in the middle of the world with a cheerful and trusting fatalism in 396 00:41:38,240 --> 00:41:45,080 the belief that everything is redeemed and affirmed in the hope he does not the game anymore. 397 00:41:45,080 --> 00:41:52,710 But a belief like this is the highest of all possible beliefs. I have presented with the name diagnosis. 398 00:41:52,710 --> 00:42:03,810 There were two striking motifs in this passage. First, the emphasis on an ideal of naturalism and realism, which is explicitly associated home. 399 00:42:03,810 --> 00:42:14,350 And secondly, the equation of commitment to this ideal with freedom, but also an attitude of fatalism and ultimately by a nice. 400 00:42:14,350 --> 00:42:19,600 So how are we to understand these motifs and their relation to the job? 401 00:42:19,600 --> 00:42:27,650 The immediately preceding section of Twilights Section 48, in fact, concerns the poet and his, quote, high three. 402 00:42:27,650 --> 00:42:35,560 Even terrible nature and not indeed Napoleon is declared by nature to be a piece of return to nature. 403 00:42:35,560 --> 00:42:41,090 As I understand exactly the return, which also attributes the girth, 404 00:42:41,090 --> 00:42:47,100 if we understand the sense in which Napoleon returns to nature and exemplifies the natural, 405 00:42:47,100 --> 00:42:51,520 we will understand something about the meaning of freedom in the following section. 406 00:42:51,520 --> 00:42:59,810 Now, Napoleon's return to nature in Section forty eight is explicitly contrasted with Roussos conception of man's natural state, 407 00:42:59,810 --> 00:43:06,710 which nature deems the idealistic fantasies of a rabbit, meaning in particular, their doctrine of quality. 408 00:43:06,710 --> 00:43:12,620 No poison is more poisonous than this as nature and Section forty eight concludes that, quote, 409 00:43:12,620 --> 00:43:20,960 Only one person perceived in this event to the 18th century correctly with disgust, namely. 410 00:43:20,960 --> 00:43:27,860 Since this freedom for which it is strong enough is equated with the entire expanse of wit and wealth of naturalness, 411 00:43:27,860 --> 00:43:30,050 of which Napoleon is the exemplar. 412 00:43:30,050 --> 00:43:36,830 It would seem to follow that the freedom of a birth is in part an acceptance of the reality of the natural inequality 413 00:43:36,830 --> 00:43:45,420 between people and a renunciation of the rhizobia illusions about what persons are like in a truly natural state. 414 00:43:45,420 --> 00:43:52,380 But this kind of freedom is becoming free, whose nature puts it is also explicitly equated with an attitude of, quote, 415 00:43:52,380 --> 00:44:00,060 cheering and trusting fatalism, which in turn is equated with the Dionysian attitude that is clearly recognisable as our fighting. 416 00:44:00,060 --> 00:44:10,000 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. 417 00:44:10,000 --> 00:44:21,900 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. 418 00:44:21,900 --> 00:44:28,690 The whole man himself, cause once it is not, however, to be a free agent as conceived by con or human, 419 00:44:28,690 --> 00:44:33,060 or as far as I can tell by any other major figure in the philosophical tradition, 420 00:44:33,060 --> 00:44:37,620 nature would rather persuade select readers to the fatalism of a girth, 421 00:44:37,620 --> 00:44:44,220 my coopting the language of freedom itself to commend to them an attitude that is premised on its denial, 422 00:44:44,220 --> 00:44:48,270 on the most profound sense of denial, the Enlightenment ideal. 423 00:44:48,270 --> 00:44:55,170 That man from free will in their rational capacities can all be kamik like the liberal ideal 424 00:44:55,170 --> 00:45:01,500 idea that defined marriage is Creegan the free man is a war or that to be free is to be big, 425 00:45:01,500 --> 00:45:10,650 brave and indifferent to suffer. This key passage from Twilight persuasively redefines freedom in the service of the chain values. 426 00:45:10,650 --> 00:45:22,380 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. 427 00:45:22,380 --> 00:45:29,760 So to conclude, if Meacher really says so little, that suggests he holds out the hope of a freedom or free will. 428 00:45:29,760 --> 00:45:35,550 That would be recognisable to the philosophical tradition or common sense. 429 00:45:35,550 --> 00:45:44,880 If his scepticism about freedom and responsibility is so resolute when he actually says about freedom and free will is often so clearly revisionist, 430 00:45:44,880 --> 00:45:53,970 so plainly an exercise in persuasive definition that means to exploit his readers and perceived prejudices on behalf of very different chain ideals, 431 00:45:53,970 --> 00:45:59,780 even quite the liberal ideals. Then how are we to explain the recent scholarly consensus? 432 00:45:59,780 --> 00:46:02,760 That is what it is with which we began. 433 00:46:02,760 --> 00:46:10,380 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, 434 00:46:10,380 --> 00:46:15,300 in hydrous transformation reach into the last metaphysical philosopher Coffman's 435 00:46:15,300 --> 00:46:19,840 rendering him of him as a harmless secular humanist in the famous is the family. 436 00:46:19,840 --> 00:46:28,260 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. 437 00:46:28,260 --> 00:46:34,830 Furniture does not believe in freedom or responsibility. He does not think we exercise any meaningful control over our lives. 438 00:46:34,830 --> 00:46:38,700 He does not think that is revisionary sense of freedom. 439 00:46:38,700 --> 00:46:46,440 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. 440 00:46:46,440 --> 00:46:52,500 Indeed, the important passage from Twilight with which we concluded freedom is rather clearly invoked on behalf of beaches, 441 00:46:52,500 --> 00:46:57,060 the liberal vision of the inescapable reality of human inequality. 442 00:46:57,060 --> 00:47:00,990 The resistance that these points and the recent scholarly literature, I conclude, 443 00:47:00,990 --> 00:47:05,550 reflects the continuing malign influence of moralising ratings, Meecham, 444 00:47:05,550 --> 00:47:10,620 of the failure to remember what he says about his conception of Renaissance virtue, 445 00:47:10,620 --> 00:47:17,060 namely that we understand it, that we should understand him and him moral line freedom. 446 00:47:17,060 --> 00:47:51,008 Thank you.