Brian Leiter, Alexander Nehamas, and Richard Schact all have opposing views of Nietzsche. Their views on self-creation all vary. Leiter maintains that it’s all rhetoric, and that Nietzsche is a ‘naturalist’ and ‘fatalist’. Leiter claims Nietzsche’s ‘view of the self’ is identical to Schopenhauer’s - our character is ‘fixed’ from birth and we merely act out our character in each decision we make. Nehemas’ centres around ‘accepting all that we have done in the past and making it into a coherent whole’. Nehamas doesn’t emphasize self-discipline of any kind, just an acceptance and ‘knowing’ who we are. Whereas Schacht, claims self-creation is possible by using ‘the ripest fruit’ as a point of departure. The ‘ripest fruit’ is the man who can make promises and keep them and therefore take responsibility for his actions. This is the ‘launching position’ from which ‘higher’ men can arise; because they can continue on with giving themselves goals and tasks, as opposed to society, and make promises to themselves to keep them.
One other point worth noting, it is only Schacht who brings into the debate the decandence of modern society and that it ought to be overcome.
Has anyone else read these secondary sources and would like to comment on these fundamental different views?
“Knowing who we are” is the exact opposite of what Nietzsche writes. Nietzsche is certainly ‘fatalistic’ in a naive sense, but in reality it only in the most broadest of senses does fatalism apply anywhere in Nietzschean philosophy. The third guy sounds most like Nietzsche, except for that whole ‘responsibility’ idea.
According to Leiter, ‘knowing who we are’ is to understand our individual physiological and psychological character and that we are fated by them.
I don’t buy too much into Leiter’s interpretation because he alligns it exactly with Schopenhauer’s (with quotes!). Neitzsche’s insistence that we continually ‘overcome ourselves’ flies in the face of this fixedness.
Continual self-overcoming, coupled with Nietzsche’s insistence that the world is always becoming, is something that Leiter, to my knowledge, doesn’t desire to explain within his theory of fixed character.
I see the general point you’re making, and I agree with it. What I’m asking, though, is how are we to overcome and transcend ourselves if “self-knowledge” is not at all in the picture? (You even used the word opposite in this connection.) The “you” in “become who you are” has a referent, doesn’t it? The “subjective multiplicity”? “System of dynamic quanta”? Aren’t all notions of self – be them self-mastery, self-criticism, self-preservation, self-overcoming, etc., etc. – invariably connected to self-knowledge at some point?