Nietzsche on Freedom and Autonomy (review)

Nietzsche on Freedom and Autonomy collects twelve essays by some of the heaviest hitters in Nietzsche studies today: Sebastian Gardner, Ken Gemes, Christopher Janaway, Robert Pippin, Simon May, Brian Leiter, John Richardson, Peter Poellner, Aaron Ridley, David Owen, Mathias Risse, and, writing jointly, Maudemarie Clark and David Dudrick. A number of these essays began their lives at a 2006 Nietzsche on Self, Agency, and Autonomy conference at the University of London, and there is sporadic yet substantive engagement between them. About one essay, Leiter's previously e-published "Nietzsche's Theory of the Will," we are told that "there is already a secondary literature" (125n22),¹ and, as if on cue, Clark and Dudrick's "Nietzsche on the Will: An Analysis of BGE 19" adds to it. Simon May provides a serviceable introduction; the index is superb.

The difficulty of this book deserves emphasis at the outset. Although the secondary literature has lately been flooded with so-called guides and introductions intended to salve the wounds of Nietzsche novitiates fresh from their initial intellectual bludgeoning by, say (especially), On the Genealogy of Morals, Nietzsche on Freedom and Autonomy is cover-to-cover professional grade. Obvious reasons for the book's difficulty include the inherent difficulty of its subjects and the inherent difficulty of its source. Take the subject of freedom. As Pippin helpfully points out in the opening paragraph of "How to Overcome Oneself: Nietzsche on Freedom," the history of philosophy features numerous senses of what it means for an individual to be free: "self-knowledge, voluntarist 'spontaneity,' self-realization, autonomy, freedom from external constraint, morality, rational agency, authenticity, 'non-alienated' identification with one's deeds, power to do what one desires" (69).² So just agreeing on how best to characterize the book's key subjects is hard enough, but now consider the source. Pippin further observes that "the problem of freedom, whether as a metaphysical issue or as a possible human aspiration in any of the above senses, does not seem to be one of Nietzsche's central concerns" (68), and May echoes this observation, beginning his introduction as follows: "Why devote a volume to Nietzsche on freedom and autonomy? Nietzsche does not often speak of these topics" (xiii). What we have, then, are a number of different interpretations of a number of different conceptions of freedom and autonomy attributed to Nietzsche on the basis of characteristically brief, dense, and diffuse passages across both published and unpublished works, and this naturally makes for a difficult book.

Since the diversity and complexity of the book's twelve papers preclude blow-by-blow summaries within the confines of this review, my strategy is to provide an overall impression by focusing on two presumed loci classici of Nietzsche's discussions of freedom and autonomy, GM II:2 and BGE 19, and describing some of the contributors' approaches to interpreting them.³ GM II:2, of course, introduces the notorious figure of "the sovereign individual," while BGE 19 appears to provide Nietzsche's considered account of, at the very least, the phenomenology of willing.

That the sovereign individual might prove germane to detecting Nietzsche's views on freedom and autonomy should be readily apparent from the following:

By way of contrast, let us place ourselves at the other end of this enormous process, where the tree finally bears its fruit, where society and the morality of custom finally reveal the end to which they were merely a means: there we find as the ripest fruit on the tree the sovereign individual, the individual who resembles no one but himself, who has once again broken away from the morality of custom, the autonomous supramoral individual (since "autonomous" and "moral" are mutually exclusive)—in short, the man with his own independent, enduring will, the man who is entitled to make promises. And in him we find [. . .] a special consciousness or power and freedom, a feeling of the ultimate completion of man. This liberated...