The Free Will of the Sovereign Individual
Sections 2—3 of the Second Treatise introduce the 'sovereign individual', but the text leaves us uncertain about who this individual is, was, or might be. He or she is described as an end-product of the conformist 'morality of custom', a mode of evaluation prior to the Christian morality Nietzsche is out to re-evaluate in the Genealogy.20 But are 'sovereign individuals' supposed to have existed after the age of the morality of custom was over or during its later stages? And are they supposed to have existed once and then faded away into history, or are there sovereign individuals around today? Or have they never existed? The tone suggests that Nietzsche may be describing an ideal type, giving us what Aaron Ridley has called 'a sort of foretaste of the (enlightened) conscience of the future'.21 But many such questions are left open.
20 Nietzsche introduces the 'morality of custom' (Sittlichkeit der Sitte) in D 9.
It has been claimed that being a sovereign individual is for Nietzsche constitutive of being truly human.22 But this is difficult to support. For although Nietzsche attributes to the sovereign individual a 'feeling of the completion of man himself' (GM II. 2), he emphasizes the distinction and superiority of the sovereign individual over other types of human individuals who lack power, pride, and autonomy.223 In the sense of free will at issue here not every human being will have free will, or at least not to the same degree.24 Nietzsche again ignores the global, metaphysical question whether absence of necessity is possible in human agency, and poses a cultural and psychological question about qualities and conditions that mark out certain human beings as peculiarly admirable or valuable. Free will in this sense is a variably realizable condition, not a universal one. It is an achievement, or a blessing, of the few, and can occur only in some cultural circumstances with people of certain character-types.
A further pointer in this direction appears right at the end of the Second Treatise, where Nietzsche envisages a different creative kind of spirit, a rare and exceptionally strong 'human of the future', a 'bell-stroke of noon and of the great decision, that makes the will free again, that gives back to the earth its goal and to man his hope; this anti-Christ and anti-nihilist; this conqueror of God and of nothingness' (GM II. 24). Such talk of making the will free again suggests a fall and redemption pattern: at some time in the past, as a product of the harshly repressive 'morality of custom', there became possible sovereign individuals with the characteristic quality of having a free will. Since that time the post-Christian morality of selflessness has been victorious, positing the desirability of guilt and self-suppression and the conception of the non-self-suppressing individual as blameworthy for not making the supposedly available choice to be harmless. In some future we might cast off this conception of morality, and the will could be free again.
The individual with free will contrasts starkly with the morality of custom (die Sittlichkeit der Sitte) because, as Nietzsche provocatively puts it, ' ''autonomous'' and ''moral'' are mutually exclusive' (GM II. 2). For there to be values at all, Nietzsche suggests, there had to be a long prehistory in which simple conformity to tradition determined what was good, departure
23 The point is made in reply to Havas by Ridley (2000: 106—7).
24 This is a central point in Gemes (2006a).
from tradition what was bad and fit to be curbed. Civilization begins with the proposition 'any custom is better than no custom', and tradition is a 'higher authority that one obeys [...] because it commands' (D 16, 9). Yet the end-product or 'fruit' of this whole constraining process is an individual 'resembling only himself', having the capacity to be 'free again from the morality of custom', to have an 'independent [...] will' and be 'autonomous'. Nietzsche says much in a short space here, perhaps grasping for a vocabulary that will capture his insights. The sovereign individual's will is 'free', 'his own', 'independent', 'long', and 'unbreakable'; and in virtue of this will the sovereign individual is permitted to promise, has 'mastery over himself', has his own standard of value, is permitted to say yes to himself/5 and has a consciousness of his 'superiority' and 'completion'. To be permitted to make promises, one must not only be minimally capable of promising but have the power to fulfil one's promises and the integrity to promise only what one genuinely has the will to do. This suggests a kind of self-knowledge in which one is properly conscious of what it is that one wills, and confident of the consistency with which one's will is going to maintain itself intact until the moment at which it can be delivered upon. The sovereign individual can count upon himself to act consistently, to be the same in the future when the time comes to produce what he promised in the past. Understanding oneself in this way, one will presumably attain a justified sense of satisfaction in one's power and integrity, and value others, not according to their conformity to some general practice imposed from without, but according to their manifestation of the kind of power and integrity one recognizes in oneself.
This positive conception of free will, then, involves acting fully within one's character, knowing its limits and capabilities, and valuing oneself for what one is rather than for one's conformity to an external standard or to what one ought to be. In the later Twilight of the Idols Nietzsche eulogizes Goethe as 'a spirit become free freigewordner)', who 'dares to allow himself the whole compass and wealth of naturalness, who is strong enough for this freedom' and 'stands in the midst of the universe with a joyful and trusting fatalism'.26 One becomes free in accepting and affirming oneself as
25 GM II. 3. All immediately surrounding quotations and paraphrases are from GM II. 2.
26 TI, 'Expeditions of an Untimely Man', 49; my trans. offreigewordne, in preference to Hollingdale's 'emancipated'.
a whole, and rather than seeing the necessity or fatedness of one's character as an inhibition or obstacle to action, one sees it as the condition of and opportunity for true self-expression. In another passage about artistic creativity Nietzsche emphasizes how much the right kind offreedom stems from acknowledging and submitting to constraints:
everything there is, or was, of freedom, subtlety, boldness, dance, or masterly assurance on earth [...] has only developed by virtue of the 'tyranny of such arbitrary laws.' And, in all seriousness, it is not at all improbable that this is what is 'nature' and 'natural'—and not that laisser-aller! Every artist knows how far removed this feeling of letting go is from his 'most natural' state, the free ordering, placing, disposing and shaping in the moment of 'inspiration'—he knows how strictly and subtly he obeys thousands of laws at this very moment.
These are among the harder parts of Nietzsche's philosophy to feel one has understood or re-expressed faithfully. There is a vagueness in Nietzsche's evocations of what future values and future individuals will be once they have liberated themselves from moral self-descriptions. We may excuse the vagueness to some extent: Nietzsche is writing of a mere aspiration that he thinks has rarely, if ever, been realized, he is writing in the midst of a moralized vocabulary that by his own lights is all-pervasive, and ex hypothesi he cannot give a general or formulaic account of the values of his future individuals because of their very individuality, their intensely personal, self-legislating nature that must resist universalization. But we might be able to conceive of something like the following as an approximation to Nietzsche's sovereign individual: someone who is conscious of the strength and consistency of his or her own character over time; who creatively affirms and embraces him- or herself as valuable, and who values his or her actions because of the degree to which they are in character; who welcomes the limitation and discipline of internal and external nature as the true conditions of action and creation, but whose evaluations arise from a sense of who he or she is, rather than from conformity to some external or generic code of values. This is a glimpse of the sense in which free will might be attained, or regained for Nietzsche. But to gain even this glimpse we must step outside our learned moralistic preoccupation with blame and with the neutralizing of character differences in explaining action, and look beyond the dichotomy between the notion of causa sui or radical independence from nature and the 'total unfreedom' of Ree's naturalism: a dichotomy between two myths, as Nietzsche has warned us, myths that prevail because they are driven by differing affective impulses within us.
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