Joel Garver - Responsible Believing - Chapter Six: Section Two

RESPONSIBLE BELIEVING

S. Joel Garver

CHAPTER SIX

Going Along with the Crowd:
Discursive Formations and Responsibility

Section II

Assessing Nietzsche on individual responsibility and freedom of the will is, of course, quite a difficult accomplishment as he seems to reject both the idea of the individual and of the will as we ordinarily think of them. In this respect, at least, Foucault is somewhat more accessible and a little more within a traditional universe of discourse. Nevertheless, Nietzsche's suggestions do form a larger picture that answers some of the more traditional questions, as well as providing an avenue by which to return to Foucault. With Nietzsche's larger picture in hand, Foucault's suggestions should come together and provide a segue into Frankfurt and Taylor. Let us examine Nietzsche's picture, then, first in terms of Nietzsche's notion of the individual subject and then in terms of what freedom and responsibility must mean for such a subject. (The following discussion closely follows Nehemas 1985:170ff.)

Nietzsche's general approach to ontology prevents him from seeing an individual subject in terms of a unified substance that underlies and persists through changes in appearance or action. Things in general, says Nietzsche, are but "the sum of their effects" (cf. The Will to Power 551; Nehemas 1985, Chapter 3). His view of the self is similar:

The belief that regards the soul as something indestructible, eternal, indivisible, as a monad, as an atomon: this belief ought to be expelled from science!...But the way is open for new versions and refinement of the soul-hypothesis; and such conceptions as "mortal soul," and "soul as subjective multiplicity," and "soul as social structure of the drives and affects" want henceforth to have citizens' rights in science. (Beyond Good and Evil 12)

We can see here both Nietzsche's idea of the self as multiplicity and foreshadowings of Foucault's analysis of social aspects of subjectivity and evaluation. And so, Nietzsche suggests elsewhere that within each "individiual" it is "permissible to assume a multiplicity of subjects, whose interaction and struggle is the basis of our thought and our consciousness in general" (Will to Power 490; for a contemporary version of the same story one can consult Dennett 1987). Like Foucault, Nietzsche takes the body to have an important role in providing some sort of unity to the self and in that sense it is more metaphysically basic. While the body itself "reveals a tremendous multiplicity" we can see "the nature of our subject-unity...as regent at the head of a communality" (Will to Power 518, 492) or as he writes in Zarathustra "a plurality with one sense...a herd and a shepherd" (I.4).

Out of this conception of the self emerges a certain approach to the will. While at times Nietzsche denies that there is any such thing as the human will (e.g., Will to Power 488), he is also preoccupied with the notion of will, especially in connection with the "will to power," and a radical notion of responsibility (placing him, therefore, somewhat within the same "existentialist" dynamics as Sartre). It is, then, the notion of will as an empty abstraction that Nietzsche rejects--will apart from willing this or that, and thus as a simple mechanism that is to function as a boat's rudder (cf. Will to Power 668, 488, 617). Since the self consists of varying and conflicting thoughts, desires, and emotions, the "sphere of a subject is constantly growing or decreasing, the center of the system constantly shifting" (Will to Power 488). Genuineness, unity, and, thus, "authenticity" require both a creation of a certain "style" to one's character and an owning up to every desire, thought, or feeling that makes up oneself, even if that desire is being eliminated for the sake of style (Gay Science 290; we find here echoes of that Greek "aesthetic of existence" urged by Foucault).

Nietzsche is critical of those who permit too much tolerance of themselves (Twilight of the Idols IX.18, 41; Will to Power 108, Untimely Meditations II.4, 10). To create a style of character requires removing, concealing, reinterpreting, and shaping various aspects of one's character until "it becomes evident how the constraint of a single taste governed and formed everything" (Gay Science 290). Nietzsche would deny, however, that creating such a unity is a matter of exercising freedom of will, as we might traditionally conceive of that. Both a free will and an unfree will are myths since "it is only a matter of strong and weak wills" (Beyond Good and Evil 21). He writes,

The multitude and disgregation of impulses and the lack of any systematic order among them results in a "weak will"; their coordination under a single predominant impulse results in a "strong will": in the first case it is the oscillation and the lack of gravity; in the latter, the precision and clarity of the direction. (Will to Power 46)

There may be, then, a relation between Nietzsche's notion of a strong will and what we might identify as a free will.

Nietzsche himself even makes such a connection, writing that "'peace of soul' can be...the expression of maturity and mastery in the midst of doing, creating, working, and willing--calm breathing, attained 'freedom of will'" (Twilight of the Idols V.3). This notion of a "mastery," which is something achieved or attained rather than merely possessed, looms large in Nietzsche's explication of freedom. He speaks of the "emancipated individual, with the actual right to make promises, the master of a free will" in whom "mastery over himself also necessarily gives him mastery over circumstances" (Genealogy of Morals II.2). Freedom is not concerned with an "abandonment to one's instincts...Our instincts contradict, disturb, destroy each other" (Twilight of the Idols IX.41), but rather it is concerned with "having them under control" (Will to Power 928).

Contrary to some popular portrayals, Nietzsche's notion of freedom is outright ascetic in tone, though always life-affirming in its asceticism since, for Nietzsche--as for the Greeks as Foucault interprets them--the goal is not primarily to eradicate or mortify certain passions, but to affirm and to direct every passion, impulse, and thought into a whole. He writes, "For what is freedom? That one has the will to assume responsibility for oneself" (Twilight of the Idols IX.38). It is, he notes, "a privilege of the strong" and even they are reckless if they "attempt it...without inner constraint" (Beyond Good and Evil 29). Richard Schacht writes,

The self-mastery involved in the achievement of such "inner constraint" is an essential aspect of freedom as he conceives it; and it is with this sort of mastery in mind that he links freedom with struggle and conquest, and characterizes the "free spirit" in terms of the complementary notions of "independence and command." (1982:309)

And so, "The highest human being," Nietzsche says, "would have the mightiest multiplicity of drives, in the relatively greatest strength that can be endured...one finds instincts that conflict powerfully...but are controlled" (Will to Power 966). Such a person is able "to form a totality out of himself, in the faith that only in the totality everything redeems itself and appears justified" (Will to Power 95).

This completes the essential picture of freedom and responsibility as Nietzsche has given it to us. Some of the continuities with Foucault should be apparent, especially Foucault's valorized description of Greek morality with which he clearly identifies. Let us now ask the same question of Nietzsche that we asked of Foucault. What must be true of human beings, of responsibility and freedom, in order for Nietzsche's basic picture to be true? Again we might disagree with some of the particular details Nietzsche has given us, but as a whole let us accept the picture.

First, it is clear that Nietzsche shares with Foucault a notion of a hierarchy of desires (thoughts, and so on). As Nehemas writes,

The creation of the self therefore appears to be the creation, or the imposition, of a higher-order accord among our lower-level thoughts, desires, and actions. It is the development of the ability, or the willingness, to accept responsibility for everything that we have done and to admit what is in any case true: that everything that we have done actually constitutes who each one of us is. (1985:188)

Freedom involves a higher-order accord that, first of all, accepts what is the case and then moves on from that to bring it into a coherent whole, a style, a character. Freedom is to be strong-willed in the sense that lower-level desires are put at the service of a higher-order accord. Thus freedom of will is not so much a power that one either possesses or lacks, but a trait of character that one has attained.

Second, and interestingly, for Nietzsche freedom does not lead to responsibility so much as (a higher-order) responsibility leads to freedom. It is by assuming responsibility for and directing lower-order desires that freedom is achieved. In this responsibility one does not so much make an autonomous, libertarian flip of some internal switch and thereby act freely. Rather, by responsibility one subjectively identifies oneself with the sets of desires, thoughts, actions, and emotions that come together to constitute the self. How that identification "hooks up" to various desires (and so on) and how it creates various relations between those desires, constitutes a coherent, strong-willed character. And it is just such a character which acts freely.

Connecting this up with what Foucault has already said concerning the ordering of desire and evaluative frameworks, a wider landscape of human subjectivity appears. We will find a helpful map to this landscape in the thinking of Harry Frankfurt.