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Nietzsche's Conceptual Personae of Freedom

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Nietzsche's Conceptual Personae of Freedom Nietzsche’s Conceptual Personae of Freedom Faye Brinsmead A thesis submitted to the School of History and Philosophy at the University of New South Wales in fulfilment of the award of Doctor of Philosophy 2009 Acknowledgements My first thanks must go to my supervisor, Ros Diprose. From the beginning, Ros took my ideas seriously, which I thought I had no right to expect. She encouraged me to think more deeply and rigorously while always stressing the value of my own creativity and ways of expressing myself. As the thesis progressed and developed firmer contours, her engagement with its themes and structure was decisively helpful. I will always remember the neat penciled notes in the margins of the draft chapters I kept on giving her. Ros‘ contributions to my thesis went beyond her supervisory duties when she recommended me for a teaching position which allowed me to escape from an office job and focus more exclusively on my writing. My parents were wonderfully supportive for the duration of a seemingly endless project. I lived under their roof for much of my candidature. My mother, Prue, maintained a lively and detailed interest in where I was up to in my thinking, and my dad, Bernie, offered sound advice at crucial moments, advice based on his own PhD candidature. My sisters Gabrielle and Gina were always ready to listen to brainwaves, theories, and the standard postgraduate tales of woe. I need to thank some very loyal friends without whom the process would have been distinctly dreary. Anita Sekely showed her support and interest in every possible way, from reading draft chapters, listening to conference presentations and offering constant affirmation of the thesis and non-thesis aspects of my life. Dan Webster‘s intellectual curiosity was always stimulating and appreciated. Thanks also to Carl Godfrey and i Annette van Gent. Paula Keating, Sandra Field and Daniel McLoughlin were great mates as well as fellow postgrads. My work supervisors and colleagues were also extremely supportive. Sharon Szeto and Alyson Piper were more understanding and flexible than I could have expected, and many other work colleagues were gratifying interested in what I was doing for the duration of the project. ii Contents Acknowledgements i Table of abbreviations iv Introduction 1 I Nietzsche and the textual politics of conceptual personae 7 II Freedom and will: Nietzsche in conversation with his precursors 32 III The free spirit: Truth, lies, and ‗iridescent uncertainties‘ 88 IV The sovereign individual: Kantian or Nietzschean autonomy? 122 V Zarathustra‘s gift: The freedom of creative willing 168 Conclusion 226 Bibliography 231 iii Table of Abbreviations AOM — Assorted Opinions and Maxims, trans. R.J. Hollingdale, Cambridge, Cambridge University Press, 1996. BGE — Beyond Good and Evil, trans. W. Kaufmann, New York, Vintage, 1989. BT — The Birth of Tragedy, trans. S Whiteside, London, Penguin, 1993. D — Daybreak, trans. R.J. Hollingdale, Cambridge, Cambridge University Press, 1997. EH — Ecce Homo, trans. R.J. Hollingdale, Harmondsworth, Penguin, 1992. GM — On the Genealogy of Morals, trans. W. Kaufmann and R.J. Hollingdale, New York, Vintage, 1989. GS — The Gay Science, trans. J. Nauckhoff, Cambridge, Cambridge University Press, 2001. HAH — Human, All Too Human, trans. R.J. Hollingdale, Cambridge, Cambridge University Press, 1996. L — Selected Letters, ed. and trans. by Christopher Middleton, Chicago and London, The University of Chicago Press, 1969. PTG — Philosophy in the Tragic Age of the Greeks, trans. Marianne Cowan, Washington DC, Regnery Publishing, 1962. TI — Twilight of the Idols, trans. R.J. Hollingdale, London, Penguin, 1990. UM — Untimely Meditations, trans. R.J. Hollingdale, Cambridge, Cambridge University Press, 1997. WP — The Will to Power, trans. W. Kaufmann and R.J. Hollingdale, New York, Vintage, 1968. WS — Wanderer and his Shadow, trans. R.J. Hollingdale, Cambridge, Cambridge University Press, 1996. Z — Thus Spoke Zarathustra, trans. G. Parkes, Oxford, Oxford University Press, 2005. Note 1: Prefaces will be referred to by the acronyms given above followed by the letter P. For example, the 1886 preface to Human, All too Human will be noted as: HAH P. Note 2: References to Nietzsche‘s works in German are from the Kritische Studienausgabe edited by Giorgio Colli and Mazzino Montinari. Munich: De Gruyter, 1999. iv INTRODUCTION It is the guiding conviction of this thesis that Nietzsche‘s conception of freedom is no less distinctive than are his acknowledged signature concepts such as will to power, nihilism, and genealogy; and that his thought of freedom enters into and illuminates his more celebrated conceptual creations in intriguing ways.1 I explore Nietzschean freedom by deploying Deleuze and Guattari‘s notion of the conceptual persona to identify and closely study three figures which are particularly associated with freedom in Nietzsche‘s writings. These are the free spirit, the sovereign individual, and Zarathustra. I undertake close readings of the texts which feature these figures in order to study the way each persona affords Nietzsche the possibility of problematizing freedom differently.2 Nietzsche‘s conceptual personae of freedom are particularly rewarding objects of study, I argue, because they upset a number of received ideas about the nature of freedom. They 1 I have benefited from a number of insightful journal articles and book chapters on Nietzsche‘s thought of freedom. Aaron Ridley‘s argument that Nietzsche‘s reconstruction of freedom is ‗one aspect of his attempt to understand life after the model of art‘ (Ridley 2007a: 204) has informed my approach. Ridley (2007a) and Robert C Solomon (2002) offer illuminating accounts of the relation between Nietzschean freedom and fate. Michael Lackey‘s identification of the oppositionality of freedom and faith in Nietzsche‘s thought (Lackey 1999), and Herman Siemen‘s investigation of the differences between Nietzschean and liberal conceptions of freedom (Siemens 2007) have also been helpful. Few monographs on Nietzschean freedom have as yet appeared. Of those which are currently available, Müller-Lauter (1999) is, in my view, noteworthy for its thorough treatment of the complex constellation of themes, perspectives and methods with which Nietzschean freedom is enmeshed. Dudley (2002) also offers some interesting insights into Nietzschean freedom by means of the conversation between Hegel and Nietzsche which he stages. However, Dudley‘s unusual strategy of evaluating competing conceptions of freedom by reference to a notion of comprehensiveness detracts from his account. The view that philosophy evolves by way of successive attempts to come up with a more ‗comprehensive‘ conceptualisation of a given phenomenon is debatable. Regarding conceptions of freedom as a series of picnic baskets packed with progressively more items is not likely to generate valuable conclusions about the comparative merits and demerits of different thinkers‘ ideations. My own view of the evolution of conceptions of freedom is indebted to Deleuze and Guattari‘s account of concept formation, outlined in Chapter I. 2 In the case of the free spirit I privilege the 1886 preface to HAH for reasons given at the outset of Chapter III. 1 represent a rejection of philosophy‘s longstanding habit of viewing freedom as universal and a priori. In ethics, for example, free will is generally viewed as something which all of us have or none of us has. Those thinkers who hold that we do have free will generally believe that it is a basic human endowment, possessed, under ideal conditions, equally by all. One person‘s freedom is no different from another‘s. While, for ethical thinkers from Plato to Kant, freedom is presupposed, postulated at the outset as a fundamental pre- requisite for moral agency, for Nietzsche, freedom must be striven for.3 Rather than a given, then, freedom for Nietzsche becomes a goal. Where the Platonic moral agent aspires to be just, the Aristotelean to be virtuous and the Kantian to do her duty, the exceptional Nietzschean individual strives to be free. As this reference to exceptionality suggests, for Nietzsche even the ability to set one‘s sights on freedom is the preserve of the few. Although Nietzschean freedom is a goal, the process of becoming-free never ends in a terminus: ‗progress‘ towards freedom always discloses further and higher states for which one must strive. Nor is it a predictably linear process. Rather, like all ‗events in the organic world‘, it is a ‗subduing, a becoming master‘ (GM II 12) involving both self- overcoming and resistance. This gives the process of becoming free a veering, zigzagging trajectory rather than the linear path of a ‗progressus‘ (ibid.), and a heterogeneous character which encompasses ‗more or less mutually independent processes of subduing, plus the resistances they encounter, the attempts at transformation for the purpose of defense and reaction, and the results of successful counteractions‘ (ibid.). The textual 3 In the case of Kant, my claim concerns his notion of transcendental freedom rather than his conception of autonomy. Kantian autonomy does resemble Nietzschean freedom in being something which must be striven for. 2 personae associated with freedom embody this processual conception of freedom. The free spirit and Zarathustra trace out a swerving trajectory towards greater freedom, while the sovereign individual is a late stage in a long process of more or less independent impositions of mastery and the resistances these provoke. These multiple personae of freedom also communicate the view that different human types embody freedom differently, and, further, that some types are not capable or worthy of striving for it at all. The figure of the free spirit is counterpoised against the figure of the bound spirit, representative of the unthinking acceptance of consensual evaluations. The sovereign individual, characterized by its masterly practice of promising, is contrasted with weaker types incapable of keeping their word. And Zarathustra‘s emancipatory exhortations fall on many deaf ears. Each persona could be regarded as a perspectival experiment in thinking freedom.
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