A Nietzschean account of free will.

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The classic question of free will has changed in light of contemporary programs of accounting for moral responsibility. What once was a question of what is necessary for someone to be free, in a metaphysical sense, is now a question of what about us allows us to have the intuitions that we are morally responsible while lesser creatures are are not. This is distinctively a compatibalist program, but in light of certain indeterminacies at the sub atomic level, it has increasingly become a rising methodological approach among incompatibalist. Various accounts in the literature have emerged, each as clever as the last, but the most striking attempts of accounting for free will are those that integrate past philosophies into the methodology.

Now, all the Nietzsche people will undoubtedly point out that Nietzsche manifestly denied free will on the grounds that such a thing would require an agent to be causa sui, but this is simultaneously the beginning and the end of that discussion… Clearly, the claim is about a metaphysical free will, but that’s not what I’m concerned with. The question to be answered here is what, if anything, can Nietzsche tell us about the free will.

A Niezschean account of the modern question of free will goes something like this:

There are two main currents of thought concerning the role of reason in man’s motivational systems. The Humean account that the Passions are the sole motivator of man, and that reason is but a calculator that lets us apply our desires in the most efficient way. Second, is the Platonic model. Reason is productive in a radical and primary way. That which we value, and that which actually has value is a matter of reason. Sense reason tends toward the true and the good, the free man is motivated by reason, and reason is godly.

Somewhere in between lies a Nietzschean account, and the following question elucidates it. The question of “what one most strongly wants” can be bifucated into two finer questions. They are, what does one most value, and what does one most desire. The Humeans account claims that the latter is the only question, and the Platonic account claims that the former is the only true account.

The Nietzschean account is that they are both important questions, but freedom lies in the alignment of one with the other. Modern programs concerning the free will claim that the motivational system must come to be in line with the valuational system. That is, if what motivates us to act is not what we most desire, but what we most value, then we are free. It seems that Nietzschean accounts would be the exact opposite. The truly free man, the overman, happens when the valuational system comes to line up with the motivational system in reference to instincts, when instinct is understood as the will to power.

Notice this, the claim is not that we line our valuational system up with the instincts themselves, but we look to the instincts to tell us what our motivational system actually is. And that is the will to power. Hence, we are the most free, and experience the greatest feeling of power, when what we value is also what motivates us - The Will to Power.

This account fits in nicely with Nietzschean critiques of Christianity where we are no longer motivated directly by the will to power, but by habituation and rationalization.

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nietzsche’s wills are not “free”. the will is what determines, it is not what is determined by “us”.

the christian or common idea of a free will which is beyond causal predetermination is not a concept that can even be found within a nietzschean framework. its like asking if a certain sin of adultery will stop you from getting into heaven or not according to nietzsche’s views… it just doesnt make sense to ask the question.

nietzsche criticized rote determinism and strict “mechanical” causality. he also criticized idealistic and romantic concepts of free willing which was somehow beyond the scope and bounds of reality and causal factors. naturally, he seems to have considered both of these extremes as false perspectives.

willing isnt a thing “we” do. there is no “agent”; a true accounting of wills to power does not posit an irreducible primary or singularity to which this willing is tied. we are not “something which wills”… we are a collection of multiple different wills, each of which struggles against the others constantly in order to manifest “us” in every way. saying we are somehow “free” or even that there is a concrete and separate “i” to do this willing, is not an accurate picture of reality as will to power, according to nietzsche:

“My idea is that every specific body strives to become master over all space and to extend its force (its will to power) and to thrust back all that resists its extension. But it continually encounters similar efforts on the part of other bodies and ends by coming to an arrangement (“union”) with those of them that are sufficiently related to it: thus they then conspire together for power. And the process goes on–”

 – Friedrich Nietzsche; trans. Walter Kaufmann , The Will to Power, §636 (1888)
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While you’re right about all that, it’s just not the point. Modern accounts of free will hinge on none of that, nor does this account, and Nietzsche certainly doesn’t hold strict to it.

You’re right about one thing though, this requires one to be “on board” so to speak.

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I think that Nietzsche supported “freewill”…just not the classical idea of freewill. Like some christians before him, he also saw the impotence of reason. The old classical view was that wrong behaviour and wrong valuations were caused by wrong judgments, which could be corrected if one could educate reason as to what is good and right. If the person knew what was the proper thing to do, so the view went, he or she had the ability to do it, the ability to choose it. But the problem here is that the will would not be “free” but regulated, determined, by whatever it was instructed to consider as good and right. In fact, what passed as “freewill” was in fact determinism, if not by material causes then by reasons. If you had a reason, clear and simple, then your choice is not “free”, but determined by your reasons…which is really all mean by saying that they believe in freewill, i.e., that they believe in determinism, no problem, but that choices be determined by reasons.
Nietzsche I think denied at once both determinism and freewill, in the classical context, by his disbelief in clear causal chains. A choice is at the end of a struggle among competing drives, but the outcome is uncertain. There is also the part that opinion plays in the process of a choice. As materialists we misread complexity by claiming clear causal chains, one cause, one effect that apply in all cases. That denies the individuality of each case and can only be based on an assumption about “man”, which of course Nietzsche would not advise. As witness to our own choices we again misread complexity by assuming that we know ourselves when in fact there is much that we don’t know, a lot that lies in the unconscious, but which affect what goes on in our conscious judgments. The reality might be that we behave as we do without having reason as a cause. Reasons would be just after-the-fact rationalizations we make, create, out of the prejudice that whatever is a good action, a moral action, also has a reason or a purpose or a meaning, and is, so to speak, a predictable effect to known reasons.
If Nietzsche is to be believed then no action is predictable and thus it is truly “free”, individual. Because we don’t know the reason for an action we also lack the ability to hold a person responsible for an action. He insists that everything is in play, that actions are never what they appear, and that all actions are essentially unknown, as they would be, if human action is in fact, as Nietzsche postulates, the end-result of a continuous struggle among drives and affected by the finiteness of human perception and retention.

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Yes, now we’re talking. There are two senses in which we can talk of reasons for actions. One is the back-tracking rationalizations that allow us to make sense and moralize actions, the other is the unseen struggle of forces within ourselves that result in and is concomitant with the action.

Nietzsche makes quick work of the former, but uses the latter to generate a hierarchy, or more precisely, a gradated typology of actions/humans based on their motivations. At the extremes we find the Christian who is motivated by the will to nothingness and the overman who is motivated by the will to power. The former is a negation of life and is typified by the inversion of all values begun by Plato’s move of placing purpose and ultimate existence in the forms. This was done at the cost of worldly meaning, and it found what is both it’s fulfillment and exposition as complete contradiction in the Christian creed that the meek will inherit the earth. The latter is a revaluation of all values leading to the necessary realization that all meaning is human meaning and human meaning is the will to power.

Now, how does that fit into the OP’s program of a Nietzschean free will? Like this: The will to nothingness in the Christian is at once both a denial of life and of human potential. It is a separation of the human from what he can do, resulting in an entirely controlled, docile, and powerless organism. Such a specimen is unfree in a radical sense because it’s life is restricted to one possibility, and that possibility is uncreative and self-destructive. The Christian can only die. It’s motivational system is being controlled by a decadent evaluational system that denies it’s own life.

The will to affirmation of the overman is at once both the radical embrace of life and of human potential. It represents man when the crossroads of what he can do and what he shall do come together to generate a hitherto unforeseen power and creativity. It’s evaluational system has come in line with it’s motivational system. It is both the walking embodiment and endorsement of the will to power, the embrace of life in chaos. The overman is radically free, in the human sense of free, in the sense that he actualizes all potential.

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There is no will to nothingness. Even the Christian has his own will to power. Though we may find it based on fictions and superstition it is nonetheless, stripped down, will to power. Ignatious, Polycarp and of course Paul all had a lust for domination. And the history of Christianity is just that.
People don’t just go into monasteries and abandon all striving out of a will for nothing. Their choice would have to be the end itself. But however all Christian sacrifice is merely a means to an end an end guilded in power. People forget that second comming.

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Yes, your concerns are on the mark. All is will to power, even the will to nothingness. But it is will to power turned against itself, subject to the motivations of denial. The wretched, weak, and powerless ressent and scheme and eventually gain power over those who are stronger by separating them from what they can do. Imposing self-denying rationalizations and standards of behavior, ect ect. The backwards values come to be what motivates, the will to nothingness as a particularized will to power. One that denies itself.

Are you beginning to see it yet? Everything is will to power, and all human motivation is will to power. There are those who deny it and there are those who embrace it. Those who come to value and embrace it are the free, and those who deny it with backwards values are unfree.

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Interesting way to put it.
How does this work? How do the weak separate the strong from what they can do? Do you purely mean in terms of morality? And what is prevented from being done?

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I think the question that Nietzsche had to answer was how ressentiment, the ascetic ideal, and bad conscience came to dominate man when they are all forces that turn against themselves. That is, how does it happen that what motivates man is a purely negative thing when their are affirmative forces floating around - How does something that decays come to take control of something that is dominating, subjugating, aggressive and creative.

Obviously the answer that the reactive forces come to overpower or dominate the active forces is unsatisfactory because active forces are not just quantitatively superior to reactive forces, but also qualitatively superior. Further, reactive forces are divisive and, by nature, turn against themselves, so they couldn’t combine strength to overcome active forces even if there qualitative inferiority wasn’t a problem.

The answer is in the analysis of their respective natures, and the genealogy of morals is the case study. The slave is dominated by the master, the slave becomes reactive and resentful, so the Slave develops an image of morality that is the opposite of the Master morality. The Slave makes everything noble in the Master a sin, and brings the Master to feel guilt and resentment toward all it’s creativity and strength; this results in the Master being separated from that creativity and strength.

Hence, the reactive forces of the slave work by subversion rather than strength or combination, and rather than the slave wanting to move past or overcome the Master, the Slave wants to turn the master in a slave. The reactive forces of the slave don’t overpower the active Master, they decay the active forces until they are no longer different and Master becomes Slave.

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I don’t think Nietzsche always viewed ressentiment as being negative.

The slave may make creative use of it and indeed they did to win out…The method was creative, collective and original even if the result was far from good!

The ressentiment of the “little man” may possess its own tragic heroism…

“the slave revolt in morality begins when ressentiment itself becomes creative and gives birth to values” (GM Essay 1; 10).

prometheus-journal.com/2008/ … sentiment/

Or even Zizek’s very recent (and extremely confused) attempt to rehabilitate it in some way under the rubric of divine violence (after walter benjamin (and maybe even more so after a particularly scary section of Camus’s The Rebel which more or less seeks to justify of “understand” the turn of the century propaganda by deed Russian bombers…))

jdeanicite.typepad.com/i_cite/20 … nd-it.html

en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Rebel_(book

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But what type of values? Surely, negative ones. “Thou shalt not etc etc.”

Modern revenge-ism of revolutionary Islam is a good example of ressentiment turned into values stronger than the values of the classes it revolts against. It is very much alike to the Christian revolts against the emperors.

A quote of, if I remember correctly, Al Zarkawi: “You love life. We hate life. That is why we will defeat you.”

Nietzsche couldn’t have phrased it as sharply.

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Not always negative values I believe - been booted about a bit on this thread…

viewtopic.php?f=1&t=168994

(Zarathustra

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I arrived at this thread through that one (somehow) but I didn’t run into any positive values from resentment. Do you perhaps have examples?

Resentment is a very different concept from contempt.
The latter is very much an attribute of ascending, affirming humans.

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Cutting and pasting from the other thread!!!

Just as food for thought take as an example the above-mentioned socialist agitator James Connolly.

http://anarchism.pageabode.com/andrewnf%20…%20onal-nevin

Connolly is born into extremely poor, working class conditions in Glasgow.
He becomes a full time union organiser and revolutionary socialist in Ireland.

He remains both a staunch libertarian socialist/syndicalist and, a reasonable conservative, Catholic all his life.
(So, in Nietzschian terms raised on a diet of will to nothingness and ressentiment twice over?)

He subsumes his socialist position into a nationalist one to take part in an armed rebellion with almost zero chance of success.

He dies a (tragic?) hero’s death by firing squad barely able to stand up from his injuries.

Is Connolly some how by genetic disposition and contrary to all his influences and stated beliefs a tragic hero?

Or does his heroism not actually springfrom those very egalitarian beliefs
(which as socialist and religious are surely expressions of mass ressentiment in the Nietzschian sense?)

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Nothing can be known for certain about his genetic makeup simply by seeing his political and religious convictions. We’d have to look at how this person was experiencing all of it. The fact that he was socialist and catholic do not guarantee he was driven be resentment. Maye he was just ambitious and fair-minded. But say he was genetically resentful, which positive values did he express?

Looking at his picture on wiki, I must say that he looks quite cheerful and life affirming. He also seems to have been proud of things. Pride is of course a positive value. That’s what might have enabled him to be a tragic hero.

I would say that indeed his heroism springs from something more personal, more particular to him than the beliefs he fought for. That’s how it seems from observing him, and of course it’s clear that not every catholic or socialist has it in him to be a hero.

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I’m pretty sure Nietzsche’s entire program is to criticize and eventually overturn the values that grew out of the reactive typology, with ressentiment being one of the driving forces of those values. The quote you just gave me said that Ressentiment brought about the slave morality, and attacking slave morality is what Go’M is doing.

I could be wrong, but I don’t remember ever seeing him write about active ressentiment, but the closest he gets to something of the sort is the actions of the reactive, or as the quote puts it, the revolt that gives birth to values. But those values, for Nietzsche, are nihilism - what does it even mean to give creative birth to self-defeating nothingness? Surely it doesn’t mean the same thing to be creative from overflowing healthiness.

I don’t like that article, and this is why, disregarding the fact that it never answers the only question that matters… I think there is a distinction between creativity and a “creative force”. I think it is undeniable that Nietzsche thinks that Ressentiment grows out of reaction, and reaction is the negative counterpart of action. How then could it make sense to say that ressintment becomes a creative force? In fact why would Nietzsche have bothered at all if at the conception of the values he’s arguing against, ressentiment turned into a creative force, and thus generated active values.

The point is that for Ressentiment, [b]“its action is fundamentally a reaction”/b, and that means that it’s creativity is a reactive creativity, meaning it produces an inverted image of the Will to Power. This is born out in the fact that it produces nihilism. What that quote does not mean is that ressentiment becomes a creative force.

I also think there has to be distinction made between a “reactive typology - reaction”, and a sort of revolutionary reaction that is considered reaction only because it goes against the status quo. Rebels are necessary reactive from the stand point of the status quo, but that, I don’t think, is the reference point we ought to use. We ought to seek out what motivates them and find out why they act before we pronounce judgement.

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Hello Sittlichkeit:

— I think the question that Nietzsche had to answer was how ressentiment, the ascetic ideal, and bad conscience came to dominate man when they are all forces that turn against themselves. That is, how does it happen that what motivates man is a purely negative thing when their are affirmative forces floating around - How does something that decays come to take control of something that is dominating, subjugating, aggressive and creative.
O- The will, even when turned against itself, even when we seek to self-castigation is still limited and so even at it’s confiness such as in the german monks a few centuries back during the plague, this instinct does not turn against itself because it is not an end in itself but a means to an end. The actions might be damaging to the organism but the idea is not here to kill…not suicide but control over. Nietzsche would probably speak of “types” of men and use that to explain how for some there is a negatiuve striving while for others there is a positive striving, but that in any case it is all striving. Their “choice” is a fiction. They are simply following the course set by their physical and psychological make. “Something that decays…” well, “decay” is an opinion. One takes up only that which to us seems “good” or “right” or even, but not necessarly, “true”. So I am not too surprised that the majority come to find Jesus in their old age, all things considered. “Health” is central to understand that.

— Obviously the answer that the reactive forces come to overpower or dominate the active forces is unsatisfactory because active forces are not just quantitatively superior to reactive forces, but also qualitatively superior.
O- So maybe there is something affirmative in the apparent reactiveness. Give it some thought. Remember that this is one man’s opinion and that he has his own motivation for holding on to it, more so than truth. How complete are the concepts “reactive” and “active”? Do we know for sure where one begings and the other ends? Or do they stand as the limits of a scale with human action set complexively somewhere between the two edges of human possibility?

— The Slave makes everything noble in the Master a sin, and brings the Master to feel guilt and resentment toward all it’s creativity and strength; this results in the Master being separated from that creativity and strength.
O- How does the slave “bring” the master to feel guilt? If someone of lower rank disagrees with the way you choose to do things, does that give you a pang of conscience? If it does then you’re already a fellow slave. If you despise the slave even for his resistance to your choices then you remain the master, a separate being. I can go inside any Church and sit through the entire sermon and while those around me are dropping like flies to the ground to beg for forgiveness I feel no guilt. You cannot bring someone to believe in God…it is, as Paul knew, useless to strive to bring someone to feel guilt through argumentation. It is the “grace of God”, or as we might understand it, due to physical and psychological predispositions already in a person that bring that person to his knees and not what the “slave” does or says. The slave is simply of utility to narrate the entire thing to the new convert: “You feel this way because…”
The other factors that separate a person from his own confidence is reversal (defeat/illness) or fear due to our active immagination that marks false causal chains. Man, master or slave, is well equiped to deal with fear, but his equipment that often helps him also leaves him suceptible to gross exagerations. There were/are unseen forces that threatened early human life. This created some false causalities which nonetheless may have assisted man. This is my opinion of course, but some studies have tried to connect the reasons behind some myths as not just arbitrary but perhaps encouraged by unintended benefits. In any case, early “success”, real or immagined, led to a belief of our immagination as connected to a higher reality.

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Lets fact it at the end of the day – who can figure out a person :- )
(what a work is man - nature/nurture etc)
We can only give it our best guess – right?
It seems to me that Deleuze may have posited that at a certain critical point – reactive or negative will may have to either cease to will at all or have to turn into some thing positive. However as three times points out

viewtopic.php?f=1&t=168994

Deleuze’s point is subtle and it seems there was always something positive in there – e.g. its not simply a negation of negation – Hegel style.

This is surely where the Nietzsche influenced Camus is coming from some sort of heroism which springs from Nihilism driven to its end point and turned inside out?

By the way I would strongly accept that this is not classical Nietzsche – but attempting to extend/distort
, and possibly, even do violence to his thought (Deleuze speaks of taking ideas up the rear – I dunno how far we want to go with that!)
However I think any movement in philosophy is usually an overcoming of some teaching (much as Nietzsche starts by “overcoming” Schopenhauer…)

What else?

Yes very well put – how ever you do get the feeling that Nietzsche himself had certain types of individual grand rebels in mind – Napoleon of course – whereas the Conollys, the communards, the socialist agitator’s rebellion was (for him) a fruit of ressentiment
(and the courage of the Louis Michels or Robert Emmets of this world of no consequence…given where they came from, there mass/egalitarian origins…The communards are the only people in the Pierre La Chez burried collectively)

One academic (Brian Lieter) uses the words – typefacts – there is certainly a type of weak determinism here.
When the going gets rough the strong shine forth and the weak organise, huddle and protect themselves collectively via resentiment…

Its in their natures!

This is excellent – go Omar!
I think this is where Deleuze may be coming from too…
Anyhow simple binaries and opposites – do no justice to any thinker especially one a nimble as Nietzsche.

Keep it coming work is not amusing me much!

kp

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Well, Deleuze is no metaphysician who argues from an abstraction of being. Like Nietzsche he starts thinking at experiential reality, does not use concepts as if they are prior to experience, as Hegel does. Hegel sees overcoming as a concequence of a direction of spirit, N sees it as ideally self explanatory and otherwise unexplained.

N aimed for the pposite as Deleuze: patriarchal dominion. Im not sure Deleuze was resentful facing this, just too French to take any German literally. Two different paradigms. If he had been a German he would not have been as arrogant in his subersive attempts at the patriarchal order of rank. Much more a master than the Nietzschean slave because he know his own will to power - but Deleuze is undividedly in the side of the masses. He just sees masses,
consciousness is made of it. Democracy of the instincts through anarchy, an idea which goes directly against Nietzsches taste.

Does Nietzsche specifically connect resentment to being reactive? Resentment is not being able to overcome obstacles by superior health, and dreading that. Christianity, in its purest and simplest form, is letting go of that dread. ‘I accept Jesus Christ as my personal lord and saviour’ releases one from shame of helplessness. Who knows, maybe thats where the turnaround occurs. It would explain why Nietzsche didnt talk about; he hadnt reached that point, and may have refused to accept it when it came. Not so nice!! ](*,) - I wonder what ten years of insanity brought to his mind.

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He has a sort of metaphysics – certainly in Difference and Repetition he seems to present some sort of bizarre Heraclitian meta physics of becoming but its well after his Nietzsche book I guess
…(and your right in that its experientially derived I think…)

Absolutely and undeniable true on both counts – Deleuze is trying to wrest some grandeur for the little man perhaps – he absolutely would not be to Nietzsche’s taste – he is doing some violence to N’s thought…

Jakob that’s a genuinely interesting idea one I haven’t come across before – Zizek has a line (after GK Chesterton of all people!!) that Christianity’s strength is that it’s the first atheist religion in that Jesus on the cross is forsaken, therefore absolutely human.

It becomes the first religion to incorporate doubt at its centre or an absence of absolute knowledge…

Atheism as per desertion by an all powerful God; becoming all to human… is built into the new testament.

Dunno what Nietzsche would have made of it - maybe thats were he hugged the horse and lost the plot!

kp