5
David Owen
Every artist knows how far from any feeling of letting himself go his most “natural” state is – the free ordering, placing . . . giving form in the moment of “inspiration” – and how strictly and subtly he obeys a thousand fold laws precisely then, laws that precisely on account of their hardness and determination defy all formulation through concepts.
(BGE 188)
“It is the music in our conscience, the dance in our spirit that makes all the puritanical litanies, all the philistinism and moral sermons sound so dissonant.”
(BGE 216)
What is the character of Nietzsche’s account of freedom? This question is central to any appreciation or appropriation of Nietzsche’s thinking for political theory but has only recently become a subject of significant attention and in ways that focus on rather different aspects of Nietzsche’s work. Thus, at the risk of slight caricature, Patton (1993) has approached Nietzsche on freedom in terms of will to power, Ridley (2007) in terms of artistic agency, Siemens (2006) in terms of agonism and Guay (2003) in terms of perfectionism. My own previous work (1995, 2005, 2007) has touched on each of these aspects but without providing an adequate integration of them. To offer such an account is the task of this chapter.
The proposal advanced here is that, in his mature work, Nietzsche draws together three elements that have variously inhabited his thought from the beginning of his philosophical career. The first is art or, more specifically, his concern with artistic agency and the distinctive character of art as a medium of expression which is announced in The Birth of Tragedy but which take their relevantly settled form from The Gay Science onwards (Ridley 2007). The second is agonism which is initially introduced in the essay ‘Homer’s Contest’ and which, as Siemens (2001, 2002, 2006; cf. also Owen 1995) has shown, pervades his later work. The third is perfectionism, which is already to the fore in the essay ‘Schopenhauer as Educator’ (Conant 2001) and remains a constant preoccupation of Nietzsche’s work from that point onwards (Guay 2002). The task of this chapter is to lay out the argument for this proposal.
This chapter proceeds as follows. I begin by situating Nietzsche in relation to Kant in order to explore his account of agency and autonomy. This section foregrounds the idea of the sovereign individual and, following Ridley, artistic agency in order to provide a formal picture of Nietzsche’s account of autonomous agency. In the second section, I turn to fleshing out this formal picture through recourse to Nietzsche’s account of self-overcoming, drawing on an apparently paradoxical point raised by Reginster’s (2006) recent work on will to power in order to introduce the centrality of the notion of a challenge to Nietzsche’s understanding of freedom and to link freedom, perfectionism and agonism. In asking the question of what cultural relations can help sustain the form of practical relationship to self that constitutes freedom on Nietzsche’s account, I return to art in its relationship to intellectual conscience.
1 Art, agency and autonomy
It is a notable feature of Nietzsche’s work that while he adopts the central elements of the Kantian revolution, he significantly alters the register in which these elements are to be understood. Thus, Nietzsche endorses the shift of focus from certainty to necessity in the deontic modality of entitlements and commitments, and the corresponding focus on agency as rule-governed, where the bindingness of a norm is predicated on our understanding and acknowledgement of it as a norm, as well as the reconciliation of a commitment to viewing human agents as rational (i.e. rule-governed) and as free ‘in the thesis that the authority of these rules over us derives from our acknowledgment of them as binding on us.’ (Brandom 1994, p. 50). However, at the same time, Nietzsche situates this understanding of human agency within a naturalistic framework in which, as the opening sections of the second essay of the Genealogy demonstrate, this view of human beings as capable of binding themselves in normative commitments is seen as a quasi-evolutionary, quasi-historical achievement which grounds both the attribution of an ‘instinct for freedom (in my language: will to power)’ (GM II: 18) to human beings as subjects of history and culture, and identifies Nietzsche’s fundamental concern with the ‘spiritualisation’ of this instinct, that is, the ways in which it is sculpted; if the artist – or, better, the model of artistic agency – has a certain primacy for Nietzsche, it is precisely because he acknowledges the point that it is part of the ethology of human beings that they are cultural beings and, consequently, recognizes that what we are is intrinsically bound up with how we reflect and act on ourselves. Nietzsche takes the elaboration of existing forms, and the invention of new forms, of practically conceiving ourselves to be a basic mode of artistry – a point illustrated by the example of the priest as artist of the ascetic ideal. (Much of the complexity of Nietzsche’s critical project of re-evaluation, including his turn to genealogical investigations, arises from the fact that he takes this point seriously.) In this respect, it is worth noting that the presentation of the slave-revolt in morality in the first essay of the Genealogy makes it clear that what drives the revolt is the instinct for freedom on the part of the slaves and what enables the revolt is a piece of artistic invention, the invention of a special and peculiar picture of human agency that is characterized, as Bernard Williams puts it, by ‘a kind of double-counting’ in constructing the idea of an agent-cause and an action-effect, where the agent-cause stands behind, and separate from, the contingent conditions in which one is embedded and produces action-effects in virtue of the operation of ‘the will,’ where ‘the mode of causation is that of command’ (Williams 1995, p. 73). This fantastic idea, Nietzsche argues, has one overwhelming point in its favour from the slave’s point of view; it enables them to experience themselves as agents (Owen 2007).
Let me now turn to Nietzsche’s own understanding of agency by noting that Nietzsche’s critique of the model of agency adopted in the slave-revolt invokes a rather different account of agency.
When Nietzsche writes ‘there is no such substratum; there is no “being” behind doing, effecting, becoming; “the doer” is merely the fiction added to the deed – the deed is everything’ (GM I: 13), it is clear that he is not denying that there are agents. Rather he is denying that agency can be conceptualized independently of the embodied and embedded circumstances of agency, that is to say, he is denying only that there are agents with free will in the sense specified by slave-morality. This being so, what is the sense of the final element of this claim: ‘the deed is everything’? In adding this element to his claim, Nietzsche is directing us to his positive account of agency (and also making explicit the idea of agency that is expressed in noble morality) which, at the very least, involves commitment to the claim that an agent’s intentions (and inner life more generally) cannot be grasped independently of what he does. Thus Nietzsche is, on the one hand, denying that ‘the inner’ (beliefs, intentions, value-commitments, etc.) is a separate domain that stands behind the agent’s actions and, through issuing commands, causes them – and, on the other hand, asserting that ‘the inner’ is only given determinate expression through ‘the outer,’ that is, that it is only in action that the agent’s intentions become the determinate intentions that they are. Indeed, in arguing that strength cannot but express itself as strength, Nietzsche moves to the broader claim that one’s deeds are constitutive of what one is. Unsurprisingly, this view of agency also finds expression in the figure of the sovereign individual in the second essay of the Genealogy.
There, you will recall, Nietzsche describes the sovereign individual as the telos of the long pre-history of humanity. The sovereign individual exhibits ‘a proud consciousness, tense in every muscle, of what has been finally achieved here, of what has become incarnate in him – a special consciousness of power and freedom, a feeling of the ultimate completion of man’ (GM II: 2). Nietzsche continues:
This liberated man who has the prerogative to promise, this master of free will, this sovereign – how should he not be aware of his superiority over everything which cannot promise and vouch for itself? How should he not be aware of how much trust, how much fear, how much respect he arouses – he “deserves” all three – and how much mastery over circumstances, over nature, and over all less reliable creatures with less enduring wills is necessarily given into his hands along with this self-mastery. (GM II: 2)
As Ridley (2011) has argued, we can draw out the relevant dimension of the sovereign individual by contrasting commitments whose success conditions (i.e. the conditions that entitle one to say that the commitment has been kept) can and cannot be specified externally (i.e. in advance and independent of the execution of the accomplishment). If I promise to meet you today for lunch in the pub, the success conditions can be specified externally: I have kept my promise if I turn up at the pub in order to eat with you within the relevant time frame. By contrast, if I promise to love and honour you until death us do part, then what counts as keeping this commitment cannot be fully specified in advance and independently of a particular way of keeping it. In the former case, keeping my promise simply confirms the presence of my intention; in the latter case, the nature of my intention is revealed in the way that I keep it. Another way of drawing the distinction between the two kinds of commitment-making invoked here is to specify them in terms of commitments whose character is fully determined by the letter of the law and commitments whose character can only be fully determined by reference to both the letter and spirit of the law (Ridley 2011). Take the example of marriage:
It is true that there are some independently specifiable success-conditions here (although they are defeasible). Respect is presumably necessary, for example, as are caring for the other person’s interest and not betraying them, say. But what exactly might count as betrayal, or what caring for the other person’s interests might look like in this case – or even whether these things are what is at issue – cannot be specified independently of the particular marriage that it is, of the circumstances, history and personalities peculiar to it, and of how those things unfold or develop over time. It is, in other words, perfectly possible that everything I do is, as it were, strictly speaking respectful, considerate and loyal, and yet that I fail to be any good as a husband – I am true to the letter but miss the spirit, as we might say. (Ridley 2011, p. 190)
This helps to draw out the sense in which the sovereign individual can be represented by Nietzsche as the ethical telos of the process of socialization which he is exploring in this second essay of the Genealogy since the freedom enjoyed and exemplified by the sovereign individual is only available to persons who are ‘socialized . . . all the way down,’ that is, have internalized the norms constitutive of the social practices and institutions in and through which they act (in this case, that of marriage). In sum, then, the sovereign individual’s entitlement to make commitments consists ‘in his capacity to commit himself whole-heartedly to undertakings whose character is inconceivable except in the context of the institutions from which they draw their sense’ (Ridley 2011, p. 192).
The importance of these reflections can be elucidated by noting that the model of agency and understanding of freedom illustrated by the figure of the sovereign individual is essentially artistic in the sense of adopting, adapting and generalizing Kant’s account of artistic agency. For our current purposes, the crucial aspect of Nietzsche’s adoption and transformation of the account of agency found in Kant’s philosophy of art is that it identifies Nietzsche’s picture of ethical agency as effectively taking artistic agency to be exemplary of agency in general. As Ridley (2007b) has argued, we can see this by considering Nietzsche’s commitment to the following three claims: first, fully effective agency requires acknowledging and internalizing the norms and necessities of the practices through which agency is exercised; second, the artist exemplifies such agency; third, fully effective agency, so conceived, is freedom. In advancing the first of these claims, Nietzsche is drawing attention to the fact that agency is not opposed to necessities as if they are capricious constraints but, rather, involves acknowledging necessities. This is, obviously enough, the stance of the sovereign individual for whom the necessities imposed by his or her commitments are not constraints on his or her agency but the enabling conditions of that agency as his or her own agency. But the point can be put more generally: ‘A person who insisted, for example, that “submitting abjectly” to the “capricious” rules of grammar and punctuation inhibited or limited his powers of linguistic expression would show that he had no idea what linguistic expression was’ (Ridley 2007b, p. 213). In advancing the second claim, Nietzsche is adapting Kant’s claim concerning genius to the notion that second nature gives the rule to art via genius and hence ‘that since exemplary artistic activity is neither arbitrary nor chaotic, but rather appears law-like . . . and yet since the procedures for such activity cannot be codified, the “rule” that is given to art cannot, in Kant’s words, have “a concept for its determining ground”: it cannot be taught, but must instead “be gathered from the performance, i.e., from the product, which others may use to put their own talent to the test, so as to let it serve as a model, not for imitation, but for following”’ (Ridley 2007b, p. 213). Nietzsche regards such agency as exemplary because the necessities ‘that are in operation here are, because unformulable, also inconceivable except as internal to what Kant calls the “performance”, that is, to the exemplary exercise of artistic agency itself; therefore those [necessities] cannot be held up as a standard external to the exercise of that agency, and so cannot be chafed against, from the perspective of that agency, as any kind of limitation upon it’ (Ridley 2007b, p. 214). Because necessity is integral to all forms of agency, artistic agency as a form of agency that explicitly acknowledges necessity as a condition of itself, is exemplary of agency as such. In advancing the third claim, namely, that fully effective agency conceived in terms of the exemplary character of artistic agency is freedom, Nietzsche is simply drawing the implication of the point the ‘necessities through which artistic agency is exercised are . . . internal to the exercise of that agency, and so cannot be adduced as independently specifiable standards against which any given instance of that exercise can be assessed’ by reformulating it thus: ‘in the exemplary exercise of agency, success is marked by the fact that the agent’s will – his intention – becomes “determinate” in its realisation, and only there’ (Ridley 2007b, p. 214). In acting thus, I discover myself precisely in so acting and hence my agency is free because it is mine, and, as mine, I acknowledge and affirm my responsibility for it. It is precisely on the basis of this commitment to an expressivist account of agency that Nietzsche can identify freedom as standing in a certain kind of self-relation which he glosses as becoming what one is with the will to self-responsibility (TI 38) expressed in the figure of the sovereign individual.
We may also note, in passing, that Nietzsche’s commitment to this view explains a central feature of his mode of argumentation, namely, argument conducted through both abstract exemplars (the slave, the priest, the noble, the free-spirit, etc.) and concrete exemplars (Goethe, Wagner, etc.). If one is committed to the view that agency is best conceived on the artistic model of exemplarity, it is hardly surprising that one’s reflections on ethical culture are expressed through a focus on exemplary figures.
Once we have acknowledged the centrality of this artistic model of agency to Nietzsche’s thinking, however, we must also recognize that this commitment has three significant entailments.
The first is that I do not stand in any privileged relationship to the specification of my intentions. What I intended can only be gathered from the performance – and this applies to my judgement of my intentions and their success or failure as much to another’s judgements of my intentions. Because artistic agency is norm-governed in the sense that it is possible to go wrong and yet what getting it right and going wrong consist in cannot be specified in advance of the activity, the phenomenology of such activity is such that the feeling of going wrong seems to be revealed only in the moment of the apparent breaching of the norm and the feeling of getting it right has the character of finding what one was searching for all along. This phenomenological character can encourage the thought that the feeling that I have got it right (i.e. successfully fulfilled a commitment) amounts to getting it right but this is not the case – what is it that I have done, whether I have fulfilled a commitment and what the character of that commitment is, is a matter which is constitutively open to public judgement. And, of course, we know this in the sense that we are no doubt all familiar with the experience of being too close to ourselves to know quite what it is that we have done or having an action that we performed re-described to us from another perspective in a way that makes perspicuous to us that what we have done is not what we thought we had done. Nietzsche’s purpose in drawing attention to this phenomenon is to make the point that the very possibility of ascribing intentions to myself, of experiencing myself as an agent at all, is dependent on the constitutive openness of action to public judgement. What my actions are (indeed, their very status as actions) and, hence, ‘what I am’ is not something over which I am sovereign. The sovereign individual is not sovereign in this sense (and thus we may note that Nietzsche’s ‘sovereign individual’ is compatible with Arendt’s critique of the sovereignty of the agent with respect to their actions.).
To see the second entailment, we need to return to the point that freedom involves internalizing the norms of a practice not as constraints on one’s agency but as the conditions of one’s agency. Taken in a holistic sense, this is clearly right – the person who regards grammar per se as a constraint on linguistic expression doesn’t know what linguistic expression is. But this point should not cause us to overlook the equally important point for Nietzsche that the norms of a practice are not (indeed, cannot be) wholly fixed; freedom includes speaking and acting differently in the course of a language game and so modifying or transforming the game (for example, the work of e. e. cummings). Indeed the history of modern art and literature provides an exemplary illustration of this point. This matters for Nietzsche because it links freedom, the modification of the norms of a practice in the course of participation in the practice, and agonistic activity, that is, Nietzsche sees the modification of the norms of any practice as itself an agonistic activity of freedom, as a form of overcoming which is, at the same time, a form of self-overcoming.
The third entailment is that Nietzsche’s understanding of freedom is incompatible with any understanding of norms and, hence, normative standards as grounded externally to human practices themselves, that is, to the natural history of humanity as cultural beings.
2 Agonism, perfectionism and will to power
Thus far, then, we have a basic and rather abstract picture of Nietzsche’s account of freedom as comprising a relation to oneself in which one understands one’s commitments not as constraints on one’s agency but as the conditions of that agency being one’s own and in which the success conditions of these individualizing commitments are understood as internal to the performance of them and as open to public judgement, that is, to being re-described from other perspectives that may prove more perspicuous than (i.e. superior to) the agent’s own self-understanding of their activity. But this picture may be misleading unless we also address it under another aspect in order to draw out more fully the dynamic element of ‘the instinct for freedom,’ namely, its relationship to self-overcoming.
Consider, first, that on the picture provided, freedom necessarily involves self-overcoming in the sense of overcoming whose desires, impulses, inclinations to wishful thinking or self-deception that obstruct fulfilling one’s commitments and are almost inevitable threats to such goals (often masquerading as plausible rationalizations – consider the example of marriage again). Moreover, it is a mistake to construe the place of self-overcoming in this account purely in instrumental terms, that is, as triumphing over obstacles specified as such by reference to a pre-determined goal. On Nietzsche’s expressivist account of agency in which intentions become determinate in the process of acting itself, what appear initially as obstacles may become seen as opportunities that involve a revision of the goal at which one is aiming – in becoming determinate, the character of the goal may itself shift. Nietzsche’s point can be expressed in terms of an understanding of the nature and normativity of ethical relations to self as the processual relationship of attained to attainable self (to borrow Emerson’s terms) rather than the teleological relationship of real to ideal self. Put pictorially, whereas for Kant the moral horizon is fixed even if we, composed of ‘crooked timber,’ cannot reach it, for Nietzsche, the ethical horizon moves as we move.
But Nietzsche’s view goes yet further than this in one important respect, namely, as Bernard Reginster (2006) has argued, that freedom viewed under the aspect of self-overcoming involves the apparently paradoxical claim that willing a goal means also willing resistance to achieving this goal. It is after all one thing to acknowledge that the kinds of promise made when getting married will make demands of self-surveillance, self-discipline and truthfulness in relation to oneself that are likely to be testing (and, hence, it is not a condition lightly to be entered into). It seems to be another thing to say that in willing marriage one wills the testingness of these demands. But is it? Is Nietzsche’s claim paradoxical?
On reflection, it is hard to see why one should think so – consider the notion of a ‘challenge.’ It is of the nature of challenges that, first, they involve overcoming resistances (no resistance, no challenge); second, they must be realizable (if there is no practical possibility of you achieving X, then X is not a challenge for you); third, that their value is at least partially related to their difficulty (given two challenges distinguished only by their degree of difficulty, the more challenging option is the more valuable); fourth, once a challenge is met (assuming it is the type of challenge that can be finally met), it is no longer valuable as a challenge. Freedom, on Nietzsche’s account, involves making commitments, where a commitment involves standing security for ourselves in relation to an unknown future, binding ourselves to a realistically achievable goal regardless of the difficulties or inconveniences that may attend its realization. In this respect, commitments, properly understood, are challenges we take up. Freedom as a practical relation to self is a relation of self-overcoming and Nietzsche’s perfectionism – a non-teleological perfectionism – consists in taking up (through ongoing practice) a stance towards ourselves as beings who challenge ourselves.
Thus, suppose I take myself to be committed to writing philosophy. I can stand in different relationships to this activity. On the one hand, I can skate by, never really stretching myself. On the other hand, I can try to extend my abilities, push myself to produce better arguments. Nietzsche’s first point is that if I am committed to writing philosophy, I am committed to writing good philosophy or, at least, the best philosophy of which I am capable; hence if I just skate by, it is not clear that I am actually committed to the activity at all. His second point is that the value of the philosophy that I can produce is likely to hang on the commitment that I exhibit to it. It may still not be great or even particularly good philosophy in comparison to the work of some (perhaps most) others, but it will be the best of which I am capable. In this sense, I act to realize my philosophical genius, however limited that genius may turn out to be. What, though, are the conditions needed to create and sustain such a processual perfectionist relationship to self? It is with this question that I want to return to art and agonism.
To grasp the essential role of art in this relationship requires drawing attention to the fundamental place of ‘intellectual conscience,’ of truthfulness, in Nietzsche’s account. Consider the well-known ‘One thing is needful’ passage in The Gay Science in which the picture of autonomy exemplified by the sovereign individual is pre-figured in an aesthetic register:
To “give style” to one’s character – a great and rare art! It is practised by those who survey all the strengths and weaknesses that their nature has to offer and then fit them into an artistic plan until each appears as art and reason and even weaknesses delight the eye. Here a great mass of second nature has been added; there a piece of first nature removed – both times through long practice and daily work at it. Here the ugly that could not be removed is concealed; there it is reinterpreted into sublimity. Much that is vague and resisted shaping has been saved and employed for distant views – it is supposed to beckon towards the remote and immense. In the end, when the work is complete, it becomes clear how it was the force of a single taste that ruled and shaped everything great and small – whether the taste was good or bad means less than one may think; it’s enough that it was one taste! It will be the strong and domineering nature who experience their most exquisite pleasure under such coercion, in being bound by but also perfected under their own law; . . . (GS 290)
There are numerous issues raised by this passage (Owen 2011) but my initial focus concerns the point that Nietzsche takes this process of self-artistry to require the exercise of two capacities. The first is that of intellectual conscience; the second that of art. Why?
In The Gay Science (335) entitled ‘Long live physics!’ Nietzsche remarks that our conscience exhibits a long history of inherited prejudices and that to rectify this condition, we need to exercise a conscience behind our conscience, an intellectual conscience, through which we scrutinize with ruthless honesty our experience, the grounds of our valuing and norms of conduct (an example of such scrutiny is On the Genealogy of Morals) in order to determine what is necessary to us and what simply obscures us to ourselves (for example, morality). It is just this intellectual conscience which is needful on Nietzsche’s account in surveying the strengths and weaknesses of our nature, in identifying what can be removed or transformed through patient labour on the self and what cannot. In contrast to contemporary self-help gurus, Nietzsche recognizes that there are likely to be weaknesses and uglinesses that cannot be removed or transformed, that are necessities. Ruthless honesty can lead us in the direction of nausea and suicide, Nietzsche observes, but we possess a counterforce in art ‘as the good will to appearance,’ hence: ‘Here the ugly that could not be removed is concealed; there it is reinterpreted into sublimity’ (GS 290). Nietzsche’s point is that art can make ourselves – and existence – bearable for us by foregrounding this element and concealing that, by brightening this feature and shading that. But, it might be objected, isn’t this a falsifying of one’s self-understanding? Well, do portraits falsify? They can but there is no sense in which they must do so. A woman putting on a light touch of make-up in the morning is not falsifying her appearance but trying to accentuate or highlight certain features rather than others – the brightness of her eyes, the classical line of her cheek-bones, the generosity of her smile.1 Nietzsche’s point does not license – except in extremis – falsification; what it does do is point to the need to be able to accept what is necessary in oneself. Such acceptance is a condition of sustaining one’s allegiance to a life worth living, to the demands of freedom, without succumbing to the falsifications that Nietzsche sees in ideas such as providence or the claim the modern milksop represents the pinnacle of civilization.
Yet, and here we move to the role of agonism, supporting the self-relation of ‘becoming what one is’ is hardly an activity that can be undertaken with any confidence alone. We are all too easily sources of illusion and obscurity to ourselves even as we may think that we are becoming clear to ourselves. To some extent, this problem can be addressed by acquiring the capability of stepping back from oneself, looking at oneself as ‘on stage,’ and deploying a variety of perspectives in relation to oneself so as to be better able to judge what it is that one is doing and to reflect on one’s purposes in doing what one is doing. We can acquire such a capacity insofar as culture makes available to us such a plurality of perspectives – and there is, of course, a clear sense in which the activity of re-description that Nietzsche undertakes in the Genealogy just is an exemplary attempt to provide another perspective which tries to show his contemporaries that, to borrow a phrase, ‘they know not what they do.’ Better yet, friends – and adversaries – can bring their knowledge of us to bear on our self-understanding (as Cavell’s remarkable essays on the comedy of re-marriage and Foucault’s late work on parrhesia illustrate so profoundly). Nietzsche’s point is not merely, however, that access to a plurality of perspectives is a source of self-knowledge but also that this pluralism constructs an agon, a relationship between competing perspectives. In this respect, the Genealogy – and much of Nietzsche’s later work – as articulating an alternative perspective on what we, moderns, are can be seen as the attempt to construct an agon in modern culture. But if such an ethical culture is to create and sustain freedom, it must be agonistic in a further sense of attracting individuals to a life of freedom by supplying a plurality of competing exemplars – not for imitation but for following. Exemplars serve, on Nietzsche’s understanding, as laying down challenges to us.
Nietzsche’s efforts to articulate such a perspective on modern culture took the form of proposing various exemplars and, indeed, trying to represent himself as one. This was perhaps a somewhat desperate tactic but, like Kant in the essay ‘What is Enlightenment?,’ Nietzsche saw that liberties without exemplars of freedom are insufficient. His concern was also nicely expressed by that great liberal thinker John Stuart Mill:
In our times, from the highest class of society down to the lowest, everyone lives under the eye of a hostile and dreaded censorship. Not only in what concerns others, but in what concerns themselves, the individual or the family do not ask themselves, what do I prefer? Or, what would suit my character and disposition? Or, what would allow the best and highest in me to have fair play and enable it to grow and thrive? They ask themselves, what is suitable to my position? what is usually done by person of my station and peculiar circumstances? or (worse still) what is usually done by persons of a station and circumstance superior to mine? I do not mean that they choose what is customary in preference to what suits their own inclination. It does not occur to them to have any inclination excepts for what is customary. Thus the mind itself is bowed to the yoke: even in what people do for pleasure, conformity is the first thing thought of; they like in crowds; they exercise choice only among things commonly done; peculiarity of taste, eccentricity of conduct are shunned equally with crime, until by dint of not following their own nature they have no nature to follow: their human capacities are withered and starved; they become incapable of any strong wishes or native pleasures, and are generally without either opinions or feelings of home growth, or properly their own. Now is this, or is it not, the desirable condition of human nature? (cited in Cavell 2004, pp. 96–7)
Nietzsche’s hope was grounded on the inheritance that modern man received from the ascetic ideal: unmatched capacities for self-surveillance, self-discipline and honesty towards ourselves. His worry is that we squander that inheritance – and that the instinct for freedom is reshaped into something like a desire for security and comfort. For Nietzsche, life is a challenge and a life of freedom is a life dedicated to affirming and taking up that challenge. The fundamental cultural question is thus how best to cultivate this ethos – and one part of that question concerns the political arrangements that best cultivate it both within the political arena and in social life.
Note
1 I am grateful to Caroline Wintersgill for unknowingly providing this example.
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