Aaron Ridley - Nietzsche on Art and Freedom

8/18/2019 Aaron Ridley - Nietzsche on Art and Freedom

1/21

DOI: 10.1111/j.1468-0378.2007.00259.x

Nietzsche on Art and Freedom

Aaron Ridley

There are passages in Nietzsche that can be read as contributions to the free will/determinism debate. When read in that way, they reveal a fairly amateurishmetaphysician with little of real substance or novelty to contribute; and if thesereadings were apt or perspicuous, it seems to me, they would show thatNietzsche’s thoughts about freedom were barely worth pausing over. Theywould simply confirm the impression—amply bolstered from other quarters—

that Nietzsche was not at his best when addressing the staple questions of philosophy. But these readings sell Nietzsche short. He had next to no systematicinterest in metaphysics, and his concern with the question of freedom was notmotivated by metaphysical considerations. Rather—and as with all of Nietzsche’sconcerns—his motivations were ethical. He was interested, not in the relation of the human will to the causal order of nature, but in the relation between freedomand the good life, between the will and exemplary human living. Read from thisperspective, Nietzsche’s remarks about freedom actually add up to something.And what they add up to is one aspect of his attempt to understand life after themodel of art. Beauty, for Kant, was an image of the moral.1 For Nietzsche, by

contrast—and the contrast can be hard to spell out—art was an image of theethical.2 My hope here is to begin to explain why Nietzsche might have thoughtthat the issue of freedom was relevant to that. In sections 1–3, I attempt to showwhy Nietzsche is not best read as a participant in the standard free will/determinism debate; in sections 4–6, I try to spell out the ethical conception of freedom that he develops instead.

1. Threats to Freedom

I have suggested that Nietzsche was not much of a metaphysician, and I thinkthat that is true. But in order to make clear what I mean by this, and so whatswings on the suggestion, it may be helpful to start with a quick sketch of the sortof debate that I do not believe that Nietzsche was primarily interested in.

In modern philosophical discussion, human freedom and responsibility areoften thought to be threatened by what might be termed ‘physical determinism’.Freedom to act appears to involve, at a minimum, the ability to choose how to act.And a choice does not seem to be a genuine choice unless an agent has more thanone alternative course of action open to him. So freedom to do something seemsto require that, at the very least, the possibility of not doing it (as a result of

European Journal of Philosophy 15:2 ISSN 0966-8373 pp. 204–224 r 2007 The Author. Journal compilation r BlackwellPublishing Ltd. 2007, 9600 Garsington Road, Oxford OX4 2DQ, UK and 350 Main Street, Malden, MA 02148, USA.


2/21

choice) should also be open. But this minimum sense of freedom to act, and thenotion of responsibility that goes with it, would seem to be threatened if it weretrue that the physical state of the universe is predetermined at every point intime, as certain views about the laws of physics, together with certain views

about causation, suggest that it is. For on these views it would follow that thephysical state of our bodies is also predetermined at every point. And if this isright, then, given that actions generally involve the body, it seems that in generalan agent can never be free, for he never has a genuine choice open to him: at anygiven time, there is only one possibility concerning the state of his body. There areseveral standard responses to this apparent conflict between freedom anddeterminism. Incompatibilists think that the conflict is real, with some denyingthat we are really free and others denying that determinism is or could be true;while compatibilists, on the other hand, deny the reality of the conflict, eitherrejecting the view that freedom to act requires more than one option, or claiming

that the kind of determinism at issue, when properly understood, does notexclude the possibility of alternative courses of action.With this brief sketch in mind, let’s turn to a well-known passage from Beyond

Good and Evil, in which Nietzsche denounces the idea of a self-causing will: ‘thecausa sui’, he says,

. . . is the best self-contradiction that has been conceived so far, it is a sortof rape and perversion of logic; but the extravagant pride of man hasmanaged to entangle itself profoundly and frightfully with just thisnonsense. The desire for ‘freedom of the will’ in the superlative

metaphysical sense . . . ; the desire to bear the entire and ultimateresponsibility for one’s actions oneself, and to absolve God, the world,ancestors, chance and society involves nothing less than to be preciselythis causa sui and . . . to pull oneself up into existence by the hair, out of the swamps of nothingness. Now, if someone can see through thecloddish simplicity of this famous concept ‘free will’ and eliminate itfrom his mind, I would then ask him to take his ‘enlightenment’ a stepfurther and likewise eliminate from his head the opposite of the non-concept ‘free will’: I mean the ‘unfree will’. (BGE §21)

—a point that he makes again later, most notably in The Anti-Christ (AC §15). It is just about possible to see how these claims, taken together, might be construed asa statement of compatibilism.3 The claim in the first two sentences might be takenas a denial that the will is capable of traducing the causal order of nature; theclaim in the final sentence as a denial that the will is consequently ‘unfree’. It maythen seem natural to conclude that Nietzsche thought that the will was a part of the causal order of nature, and that it was ‘free’ in some strictly unsuperlative,unmetaphysical sense—perhaps, in fact, in a sense much like Hume’s, whereone’s choices are construed as ‘free’ to the extent that they are caused by one’scharacter.4

Nietzsche on Art and Freedom 205

r The Author 2007. Journal compilation r Blackwell Publishing Ltd. 2007


3/21

So Nietzsche can be seen as responding to the worry that human freedom isthreatened by what I have called physical determinism. But this would surely bean odd way to read the passage. For not only does Nietzsche fail to root hisargument in reflections about physics or causation,5 he quite explicitly roots it

elsewhere—in talk of ‘God, the world, ancestors, chance and society’, terms that,with the possible exception of ‘the world’, have little to do with the debate withinwhich a position such as compatibilism has its natural place. Nowhere, moreover,does Nietzsche even hint at what sort of compatibilism he might have in mind.Does he think that our freedom to act does not require that we have more thanone option? Or does he deny that determinism, properly understood, excludesthe possibility of alternative courses of action? He is perfectly silent on the matter.And this strongly suggests that his remarks here are not best understood as acontribution to the standard philosophical debate.

It is altogether more plausible to read him as addressing a different way in

which freedom and responsibility might be thought to be threatened, a way thatis, as it were, orthogonal to the worry about determinism. Here, freedom isthought to be seriously diminished, if not entirely eliminated, by (one or severalof) such things as one’s history, character and temperament, personal geneticmake-up, economic position, the conventions of one’s society, peer pressure,God’s influence, and even by the very fact of being a human being, given thevarious physiological and psychological limitations that come with that. This is aworry to which 19th century novelists, for example, appear to have beenparticularly prone. Zola is of course is a rich source of illustrative material; 6 buthere, just as characteristically, is a passage from Tolstoy:

Do not the very actions for which the historians applaud Alexander I—the attempts at liberalism at the beginning of his reign, his struggle withNapoleon . . . —proceed from those very sources—the circumstances of his birth, breeding and life that made his personality what it was—fromwhich also flowed the actions for which they censure him, like the HolyAlliance . . . and the reaction of the 1820s? (Tolstoy 1982 Epilogue, Part 1, §1)

And he summarizes the point a little later on: ‘Free will’, he says, ‘is for historyonly an expression connoting what we do not know about the laws of human life’(Tolstoy 1982: Epilogue, Part 2, §10).7

A view of this sort does not arise from the worry that a plausible minimumrequirement for freedom might be inconsistent with a certain conception of thephysical universe. It arises, rather, from a certain conception of what being freewould ‘really’ amount to.8 In its most radical form, this conception involves theidea that one is not free at all unless one is free from every kind of constraint thatone’s circumstances might seem to impose; perhaps even from the constraint of

being oneself. Here, a free choice is the choice of a free will, a will liberated, ineffect, from everything. And this conception is nothing but the causa sui—the viewthat an act of free will is not caused or affected by anything other than itself. Onthis reading, therefore, Nietzsche rejects as unintelligible a particular conception

206 Aaron Ridley



4/21

of ‘freedom’—freedom in the ‘superlative metaphysical sense’—and rejects toothe sense of ‘unfreedom’ which would mark the lack of this.9

Now of course one might choose to label a supporter of the causa sui a sort of ‘radical incompatibilist’, and Nietzsche a ‘compatibilist’ on account of his

rejection of that view. But this would not turn Nietzsche’s remarks into acontribution to the standard debate. It is true that some participants in thatdebate might be thought to espouse a version of the causa sui, in the sense thatthey do not believe that an act of will can be caused by anything other than anagent.10 But the ‘radical incompatibilist’ claims more than this: his claim is thatno act of free will is caused or affected by anything other than itself. And it is thissort of ‘incompatibilist’ that Nietzsche has in his sights. It would therefore bemisleading to label Nietzsche a ‘compatibilist’, for at least three reasons. First, asI have said, it would resituate the disagreement between Nietzsche and hisopponent in the context of the free will/determinism debate, a debate in which—

for the reasons I have given—it does not belong. Second, it would obscure the factthat Nietzsche clearly agrees with the ‘radical incompatibilist’ that freedom in the‘superlative metaphysical sense’ is incompatible with the constraints imposed byancestors, chance, society and the like. And third, it would wholly occludeNietzsche’s real reason for picking the quarrel in the first place—to which I turnin a moment.11

2. Varieties of Necessity

First, though, and in light of the foregoing, it would be sensible to say a littleabout the way in which notions such as ‘constraint’ and ‘necessity’ need to beunderstood if Nietzsche’s position is to be appreciated. He does not, as I haveremarked, confine his attention to—or even seem especially interested in—thesorts of constraint or necessity that are imposed by ordinary physical causation.Rather, he is interested in the role that factors such as ‘God, the world, ancestors,chance and society’ may play in our lives—in the ways, that is, in which ourpeculiarly human circumstances may shape what we do, or don’t do. Andconstraints or necessities of this kind come in a wide variety of forms. At the mostcausal end of the scale we might consider facts such as that we are incapable of unaided flight, or that too many carrots will make us sick (physical constraints,incidentally, that are quite different from, and which may or may not presuppose,the kind of physical determinism that concerns the standard incompatibilist).Less causally, we might pass from constraints such as having to speak English if one wants to be understood in England, say, or the strong likelihood of notwinning the lottery this week, through the influence upon us of the socialdiscouragement of murder, theft and undressing in public, for instance, until wearrive eventually at constraints and necessities of a sort that are, as one might putit, purely normative. Examples at this end of the scale might include theconstraints imposed by the norms of proper spelling, say, or by the laws of tennisconcerning tie-breaks, or by the rules for voice-leading in counterpoint. Here,




5/21

factors that might be glossed in terms of ‘ancestors’ and ‘society’ move centre-stage, and ordinary physical causation drops from view (which is not, of course,to deny that the operation of these normative constraints and necessitiespresupposes the regularities of nature that ordinary physical causation brings

with it). Nietzsche himself does not trouble to make these distinctions explicit, but, as will become clear—and as one might anyway expect, given the generalcharacter of his concerns—it is the more normatively structured constraints andnecessities that primarily engage his attention. And this emphasis, of course,serves further to underline the difference between Nietzsche’s interest in theissue of freedom and that which motivates the standard debate about thecompatibility or otherwise of freedom with ‘physical determinism’.

3. Strong Wills, Weak Wills

So what is the point of Nietzsche’s claims about freedom and unfreedom of thewill? He tells us what it is at the end of the same section:

It is almost always a symptom of what is lacking in himself when athinker sees in every ‘causal connection’ and ‘psychological necessity’something of constraint, need, compulsion to obey, pressure, andunfreedom; it is suspicious to have such feelings—the person betrayshimself. And in general, if I have observed correctly, the ‘unfreedom of the will’ is regarded as a problem from two entirely oppositestandpoints, but always in a profoundly personal manner: some will

not give up their ‘responsibility’, their belief in themselves, the personalright to their merits at any price (the vain races belong to this class).Others, on the contrary, do not wish to be answerable for anything, or

blamed for anything, and owing to inward self-contempt, seek to lay theblame for themselves somewhere else. The latter, when they write books, arein the habit today of taking the side of criminals; a sort of socialist pity istheir most attractive disguise. (BGE §21)

Nietzsche’s point, then, is not very surprisingly an elaboration of the notoriousclaim he had made fifteen sections earlier, namely, that:

. . . every great philosophy so far has been . . . the personal confession of its author and a kind of involuntary and unconscious memoir; also thatthe moral (or immoral) intentions in every philosophy constituted thereal germ of life from which the whole plant had grown. (BGE §6)

In the context of the causa sui argument, therefore, his point is simply thatthose who insist that they are free in the ‘superlative metaphysical sense’ do soout of vanity; while those who insist that the will is radically unfree—i.e. whoshare the radical view about what freedom would amount to, but deny that theyhave it—do so out of ‘inward self-contempt’. It is true that Nietzsche thinks that

208 Aaron Ridley



6/21

both parties hold views that are incoherent.12 But this is more or less incidental.His central concern is with the way in which those views spring from, and alsoreinforce, certain formations of character. His concern, in other words, is ethical—it is about the connection between one’s views about oneself as an agent (as

radically free, or as radically unfree) and how one sees oneself as a self (withvanity, or with contempt). And—since Nietzsche was not a fan of either kind of self-relation—neither of the views that he canvasses strikes him as symptomaticof a well-lived life.

We can conclude, then, that where Nietzsche speaks positively of freedom andof freedom of the will—and he often does speak positively of them—he does sonot in order to advance a metaphysical thesis, but in order to recommend a kindof self-relation that might support, and be supported by, an understanding of freedom that has nothing, in its primary motivations, to do with the free will/determinism debate at all.13

Before moving on from section 21 of Beyond Good and Evil, let me quote again asentence that I have already quoted, but this time prefaced by the sentence thatimmediately precedes it:

The ‘unfree will’ is mythology; in real life it is only a matter of strong andweak wills. It is almost always a symptom of what is lacking in himself when a thinker sees in every ‘causal connection’ and ‘psychologicalnecessity’ something of constraint, need, compulsion to obey, pressure,and unfreedom; it is suspicious to have such feelings—the person betrayshimself.

Two things are worth highlighting here. The first is that, in insisting that theimportant issue is the strength or weakness of will of individual agents, Nietzscheis once again underlining the distance that separates his concerns from those thatmotivate the standard debate. Within that debate, after all, everyone is eitherequally free or equally unfree, and there is no place for consideration of therelative qualities of different individuals’ wills. This point, I think, should allayany remaining temptation to read the causa sui passage as if it were concerned tomark out a position within the debate about free will and determinism.

The second thing to notice is that we have here the only hint in the entirepassage of Nietzsche’s positive conception of freedom, and of the self-relationthat it expresses. What it tells us is that weak-willed characters experience everysort of ‘necessity’ in the wrong way: the vain weak ones experience it as‘constraint’, as a threat to ‘their ‘responsibility’’, to ‘their belief in themselves’;while the self-contemptuously weak ones experience it as an opportunity ‘to laythe blame for themselves somewhere else.’ Both, that is—whether chafing against it orwelcoming it—experience necessity as, precisely, ‘unfreedom’; and this is whatNietzsche finds objectionable, and signals his objection to by labelling ‘weak’.

We can take it, then, that Nietzsche’s ‘strong’-willed characters respond tonecessity differently—neither as a threat to some fantasy of a metaphysicallysuperlative sense of responsibility, nor as an excuse to abdicate responsibility




7/21

altogether. Indeed, we can take it that, for the ‘strong’-willed characters whomNietzsche admires, the sense of necessity must somehow be integral to takingresponsibility for oneself, and must—also somehow—be integral to the properexperience of freedom. Section 21 of Beyond Good and Evil can get us no further

than this. But the hints that it offers do tell us where to go for more, and, infollowing up on some of the most obvious of these, we will start to see how theissue of freedom is indeed central to Nietzsche’s understanding of the relation

between art and ethics.

4. Style and Necessity

A natural first port of call is section 290 The Gay Science, where the notion of ‘art’is brought together with the notions of ‘constraint’ and strength of character. Thepassage goes as follows:

One thing is needful.—To ‘give style’ to one’s character—a great and rareart! It is practised by those who survey all the strengths and weaknessesof their nature and then fit them into an artistic plan until . . . evenweaknesses delight the eye . . . [W]hen the work is finished, it becomesevident how the constraint of a single taste governed and formedeverything large and small . . . . It will be the strong and domineeringnatures that enjoy their finest gaiety in such constraint and perfectionunder a law of their own . . . Conversely, it is the weak characters . . . thathate the constraint of style: they feel that if this bitterly evil compulsion

were to be imposed on them, they would be demeaned—they becomeslaves as soon as they serve; they hate to serve.

Constraint, in this passage, is equated to the discipline of ‘style’, to the exercise of a ‘single taste’; and the effect of that discipline is the imposition of form, where theimposition of form—any form—is regularly treated by Nietzsche as synonymouswith artistry as such.14 So the artist of character is one who imposes form uponhimself, and gains the ‘most exquisite pleasure’ from doing so.

His is a strong character, we are told; and the connection to the ‘strength’alluded to in the causa sui argument is evident. Unlike ‘the weak characters’whom Nietzsche mentions, self-stylists do not regard the necessity that theyimpose on themselves as a threat to ‘their belief in themselves’—as a sentence of slavery—and still less, for obvious reasons, do they regard it as any sort of excuseto abdicate responsibility for themselves. Rather, they experience it as thecondition of being ‘perfected under their own law’—of which more in amoment.15 So these characters welcome the constraint of style. We should also notethat that constraint is structured dialectically.16 On the one hand, there is the formthat is imposed; on the other hand, there is the resistance of the relevantmaterial—that is, the elements of the self-stylist’s character—to having any givenform imposed upon it.17 That the latter is also a constraint that Nietzscherecognises is clear: ‘Here’, he says, ‘the ugly that could not be removed is

210 Aaron Ridley



8/21

concealed; there it has been reinterpreted and made sublime. Much that is vagueand resisted shaping has been saved and exploited for distant views’ (GS §290).So the ‘exquisite pleasure’ that the self-stylist takes in constraint derives from theinterplay between the constraint of the form that is imposed and the constraint,

or resistance, of the material that is to be formed.18

The significance of this secondsort of constraint is noted by Nietzsche, in several registers, elsewhere.19 As aprelude to self-stylisation, it features in Daybreak, first as an injunction to ‘reflecton one’s circumstances and spare no effort in observing them’, since ‘ourcircumstances do not only conceal and reveal’ our power ‘to us—no! theymagnify and diminish it’ (D §326); and then in the observation that ‘One candispose of one’s drives like a gardener and . . . cultivate the shoots of anger, pity,curiosity, vanity as productively and profitably as a beautiful fruit tree on a trellis. . . All this we are at liberty to do: but how many know we are at liberty to do it?’(D §560). More famously, and from the midst of the stylising process itself, the

place of the second constraint is evoked wonderfully in Nietzsche’s finest remarkabout the love of fate: ‘I want to learn more and more to see as beautiful what isnecessary in things’, he says; ‘then I shall be one of those who make things

beautiful. Amor fati: let that be my love henceforth!’ (GS §276). The self-stylist thusimposes a necessity upon himself, his style, in the very process of accommodat-ing, of understanding and even affirming, ‘what is necessary in things’, himself included.20 And this, says Nietzsche, is an ‘art’—a source of ‘exquisite pleasure’for those who are ‘strong’ enough to engage in it.

5. Artistic Agency

Art, ‘strength’ and necessity, or constraint, are thus brought together here, and insome potentially fruitful ways. But we seem to have lost sight of freedom. And toget it back into view, we need to return to Beyond Good and Evil; for there, in avery significant passage, things begin to crystallise. The passage in question—section 188—must be quoted at some length. It goes like this:

. . . one should recall the compulsion under which every language so farhas achieved strength and freedom—the metrical compulsion of rhymeand rhythm. How much trouble the poets and orators of all peoples havetaken . . . —‘submitting abjectly to capricious laws’, as anarchists say,feeling ‘free’, even ‘free-spirited’. But the curious fact is that all there is orhas been on earth of freedom, subtlety, boldness, dance, and masterlysureness, whether in thought itself . . . , or in rhetoric and persuasion, inthe arts just as in ethics, has developed only owing to the ‘tyranny of such capricious laws’; and in all seriousness, the probability is by nomeans small that this is ‘nature’ and ‘natural’—and not that laisser aller.Every artist knows how far from any feeling of letting himself go hismost ‘natural’ state is—the free ordering, placing, disposing, giving formin the moment of ‘inspiration’—and how strictly and subtly he obeysthousandfold laws precisely then, laws that precisely on account of their




9/21

hardness and determination defy all formulation through concepts . . .[G]iven that, something always develops, and has developed, for whosesake it is worth while to live on earth; for example, virtue, art, music,dance, reason, spirituality.

Nietzsche’s point here can be summarised, crudely, in three related claims. Thefirst is that fully effective agency—or ‘masterly sureness’, as he puts it—has, asone of its necessary conditions, the ‘tyranny of . . . capricious laws’. The second isthat the artist—whose most characteristic laws ‘defy all formulation throughconcepts’—is exemplary of such agency. The third claim is that the exercise of fully effective agency, so conceived, equals ‘freedom’—that is, freedom in theethical sense with which Nietzsche is concerned. I will try to say something abouteach of these claims in turn.

5.1

The first claim connects agency to the notion of ‘law’, or, as Nietzsche also termsit, ‘compulsion’. ‘Law’ or ‘compulsion’, here, can be regarded as equivalent forour purposes, as indeed for Nietzsche’s, to the kinds of (normative) ‘constraint’and ‘necessity’ that we have primarily been discussing so far. And submission tosuch laws or constraints is taken to be a (necessary) condition of ‘masterlysureness’.21 This is a highly significant move, which for the first time marks

clearly the distinctive relation of Nietzsche’s ‘strong’ characters to the forms of necessity that interest him. Rather than regarding such constraints or necessitiesas limits on their powers—as those ‘weak’ characters do, who ‘feel that if [these]

bitterly evil compulsion[s] were to be imposed on them, they would bedemeaned’—the ‘strong’ recognise such constraints as essential to the effectiveexercise of those powers. And it is reasonably easy to see that Nietzsche must beright about this. My quotation from section 188 picked it up at the point at whichNietzsche mentions language, and speaks of ‘the metrical compulsion of rhymeand rhythm’. But we needn’t appeal to poetry to see what he means. A personwho insisted, for example, that ‘submitting abjectly’ to the ‘capricious’ rules of grammar and punctuation inhibited or limited his powers of linguisticexpression would show that he had no idea what linguistic expression was.22

Like Nietzsche’s ‘weak’ characters, he would fail to recognise that it is only byworking with and through those rules—by taking the ‘trouble’, as Nietzsche putsit—that effective linguistic expression is so much as possible. And as forlinguistic agency, so for agency in general. Nietzsche’s highly plausible thought,in other words, is that fully effective agency requires the acknowledgement, andindeed the internalisation, of the norms or necessities constitutive of the practicesthrough which that agency is exercised; and on this picture, clearly enough,‘constraint’, ‘law’ or ‘compulsion’ feature, not as limits on our powers of acting,

but as their sine qua non.

212 Aaron Ridley



10/21

Now it might be objected here that this is such a weak claim as to be barelyworth making: of course one must play by the rules if one is to play the game atall. But this isn’t a well-directed objection. Nietzsche’s claim at this point is weak,deliberately so. He merely intends to steer off the ‘laisser aller’ conception of

freedom—the thought that any and every constraint necessarily curtails one’spower to act.23 Nor, by the way, is he concerned to distinguish here betweenadmirable and despicable forms of agency. It may well be that some of the normsand constraints constitutive of our practices are unwelcome, or even offensive—as, for example, I might conclude when I find that I have to work with andthrough the rules of an appeals process that I think defective against a decisionthat I consider unjust. But the offensiveness of these norms does not preclude thepossibility of ‘masterly sureness’ in the navigation of them, as the existence of certain kinds of lawyer attests. The shyster’s powers are made possible, ratherthan limited, by the norms constitutive of our legal practices, however much we

might deplore some of those norms and his sort of mastery. And Nietzsche’spoint at this stage requires no more than this. He is claiming only that theacknowledgement of ‘capricious laws’ is a necessary condition of engagingeffectively in any human practice whatsoever, a point that the ‘laisser aller’conception of freedom wholly obscures.

5.2

The second claim was that artists are exemplary of fully effective agency, so

conceived, and that they are so, at least in part, because their ‘thousandfold laws. . . defy all formulation through concepts’. Nietzsche is clearly drawing, here, onthe Kantian claim that genius gives the rule to art—or, more strictly, the claim thatnature gives the rule to art, and does so via genius. Nietzsche modifies Kant’sthought in one respect: for Nietzsche, the ultimate source of the rule that is givento art is not ‘nature’, in Kant’s sense, but rather what we might term ‘secondnature’, the ‘nature’ that is constituted by our practices and the ‘tyranny’ of the‘capricious laws’ that constitute them.24 Otherwise, though, his claim about the‘thousandfold laws’ of art is substantially the same as Kant’s—namely, that sinceexemplary artistic activity is neither arbitrary nor chaotic, but rather appears law-like (to be a matter of ‘giving form’), and yet since the procedures for suchactivity cannot be codified, the ‘rule’ that is given to art cannot, in Kant’s words,have ‘a concept for its determining ground’ (Kant 1952: §46): it cannot be taught,

but must instead ‘be gathered from the performance, i.e. from the product, whichothers may use to put their own talent to the test, so as to let it serve as a model,not for imitation, but for following’ (Kant 1952: §47).

Why, then, does Nietzsche regard the exercise of a form of agency whoseenabling necessities are not merely ‘capricious’ and numerous, but alsounformulable, as exemplary of agency as such? There are a number of ways inwhich one might answer this question, but the most economical—for presentpurposes—is the following. The laws that are in operation here are, because




11/21

unformulable, also inconceivable except as internal to what Kant calls the‘performance’, that is, to the exemplary exercise of artistic agency itself; thereforethose laws cannot be held up as a standard external to the exercise of that agency,and so cannot be chafed against, from the perspective of that agency, as any kind

of limitation upon it. Artistic agency is exemplary for Nietzsche, then, because itis a form of agency that simply cannot be engaged in effectively by those ‘weak’characters who construe every kind of necessity as a ‘demeaning’ constraint, as athreat to ‘their belief in themselves.’25 To exercise artistic agency at all, in otherwords, just is to acknowledge that necessity is a condition of (pointful, artistic)action. So, since necessity is integral to every type of agency, this kind of agency isexemplary of agency as such—or so Nietzsche concludes.

Again, though, an objection suggests itself, this time in the form of a dilemma.Either these ‘laws’ are indeed laws, it might be said, in which case they must beformulable and capable of being held up as an external standard; or else they

really are unformulable, in which case they aren’t laws at all, and can be said to be ‘internal’ only in the uninteresting sense that they refer to the whims orpreferences of some individual agent.

But this is a false dilemma. As Aristotle argued, the fact of unformulabilitydoes not, by itself, indicate the absence of norms that transcend the idiosyncrasiesof individual agents: the good man ‘perceives’ what a situation requires of him,even though there is no statable rule that allows him to do this.26 Now of coursewe might choose to withhold the name ‘law’ from what the good man is obedientto in seeing what is demanded of him. But this would be a merely terminologicaldecision. It would not affect the fact that the good man’s perception is

independent of—and has a normative force that is independent of—his whimsor preferences, despite the fact that there is no formulable procedure forperceiving what he perceives. And this, translated into an artistic register, isNietzsche’s point. When Beethoven saw, for example, how the coda to the finaleof his C-minor symphony had to go, he was answerable to the demands of hismaterial: he could have got it right, he could have got it wrong. But prior to hiscompositional act no one, himself included, could have stated a rule for arrivingat what he arrived at. Rather, he ‘strictly’ and ‘subtly’ obeyed laws that emergedonly in the course of his ‘performance’—that were, as I have put it, internal to theexercise of his agency.27 Now of course these laws might, in one sense, be statedex post facto—which is to say, Beethoven’s compositional acts can be maderetrospectively intelligible in terms of musical logic (rather than in terms, merely,of his whims or preferences). But—so stated—such laws would provide materialonly for ‘imitation’, as Kant had it, not for ‘ following’. When Beethoven followedthem, those laws were unformulable.28

5.3

The third claim was that fully effective agency, conceived on the artistic model setout above, equals ‘freedom’. At one level this claim is now trivial, given what has

214 Aaron Ridley



12/21

been said: it is obviously true that to be ‘free’ is to be able to ‘act’. But the pointgoes deeper than this. Recall that the laws or necessities through which artisticagency is exercised are, as I have said, internal to the exercise of that agency, andso cannot be adduced as independently specifiable standards against which any

given instance of that exercise can be assessed. We can now put the same point ina different way. We can say: in the exemplary exercise of agency, success ismarked by the fact that the agent’s will—his intention—becomes ‘determinate’ inits realisation, and only there. This point, which is essentially Kant’s,29 directs usto a picture of willing that culminates and crystallises only in the moment atwhich one can say ‘Yes!—that’s what I was after’. One knows what one’sintention is, determinately, only in realising it. And it is this kind of exercise of the will, which is also a process of self-discovery, which Nietzsche equates withfreedom.30

Consider Beethoven and his coda again. Presumably he could have said before

starting to compose it that he meant the coda to be as emphatic as possible andthat he wanted to ram home the tonic as unignorably as he could. In this sense, hehad a perfectly clearly formed intention before he began—and one which heindeed went on to realize in ‘the performance’. But his sketch-books show in avery vivid way how difficult he found it to arrive at such performances—howmuch labour and revision went into finally getting it right, into making the ratherabstract intention with which he may be supposed to have begun into somethingconcrete and determinate. As Stuart Hampshire helpfully puts it:

I may very easily make a mistake in the description or identification of my activity . . . without being confused in my practical intentions . . .[That this is so] would be shown when I recognised something ashappening contrary to my intentions, or recognised it as happening inaccordance with them. I might say truthfully ‘This is not what Iintended,’ even though I point to something that accords precisely withmy own declaration of my intentions . . . But it does not follow from thisthat I did not know what I was doing, in one familiar sense of thistreacherous phrase. (Hampshire 1959: 95–96)

Beethoven knew what he was doing, all right. He was trying to composean emphatic, tonic-heavy coda to his symphony. But he couldn’t know whatprecisely would count as that—what would conclude this symphony in asatisfyingly emphatic, tonic-heavy way—until he found, or came up with, thecoda that we all know, and recognized it as what he was after. He thereforediscovered the determinate character of his intention only in (finally) realizing it.And in doing so he exercised—by Nietzsche’s lights—free agency at itsexemplary best.

Again one might ask, why? The obvious answer, which isn’t wrong, is that todo as one intends is to be free. But I think that we can also say a little more thanthat. For a certain sort of metaphysician, the central question about freedom of the will is ‘Could I have done otherwise?’ For Nietzsche, by contrast, the central




13/21

question is ‘Would I have done otherwise?’—or: ‘Would I will it otherwise?’ I amfree, on this conception, if my answer is ‘No’. My exemplary exercise of agencyresults, ex hypothesi, in an action in which my intention is crystallised precisely inits realisation. Therefore—since my action simply is, exclusively and without

remainder, the expression of my intention—there is no room, at this level, for mywilling that the action were otherwise. The action is not only the action that Iintend, but, in performing it, I discover exactly what my intention is.31 To call this‘freedom’ seems to me to be entirely natural. My action is ‘mine’, as it were, allthe way down; and, in acting thus, I find myself—realise and recognise myself—precisely in so acting.32 Nor, to reiterate, is this any sort of metaphysical view:freedom, as Nietzsche construes it, is consistent with any minimally plausibleaccount of the relation between the causal order of nature and the human will.33

Rather, and again to reiterate, it is an ethical view, a normative conception of human agency at its best. And it is this conception of agency that Nietzsche

repeatedly glosses, for reasons that should now be apparent, in terms of ‘becoming what one is’.34

Two final worries must be addressed, however. Perhaps the more serious of them, which concerns the scope of Nietzsche’s account—that is, the applicabilityof his account to agency in general—I defer to the following section. The otherworry is essentially a request for clarification. It is this: doesn’t Nietzsche’sconception of freedom-through-constraint—as one might put it—set up thoseconstraints as so fundamentally independent of the agent (of his identity,preferences, etc.) that they really do function as limits on his action, even if they are, as a matter of fact, unformulable in advance? And, if so, mightn’t this

more plausibly be regarded as a model of unfreedom—of action curtailed ratherthan action enabled?The answer to both questions is ‘No’. And both questions stem from the causa

sui fantasy with which we began. Their grounding assumption is that freedom of willing and acting is possible only in a vacuum, only if what an agent choosesand does is explicable—exhaustively explicable—with reference to the agent’swill alone. And this assumption, or so Nietzsche has given us reason to conclude,is absurd. Human agency requires a human world for its possibility.35 It requiresNietzsche’s ‘tyranny of . . . capricious laws’. And this point is quite general. If anything can be described as free, after all, an intentional action can be; and oneacts intentionally when one acts for a reason. One can only act for a reason,however, if one has the capacity to give and respond to reasons; and that capacitydepends upon one’s participation in a set of social practices whose norms are, inthe relevant sense, wholly independent of one’s own whims and preferences.36

The very possibility of intentional action, that is, requires a context made upprecisely of factors such as the ‘ancestors’ and ‘society’ to which Nietzsche refers.So freedom presupposes an explanatory context to which the agent’s will isessentially incidental, and to the norms constitutive of which the agent isanswerable. Freedom is therefore acquired through, rather than eroded by, lawsthat are not of one’s own making (even if they are laws that one can come torecognize and acknowledge as one’s own).

216 Aaron Ridley



14/21

This is, as I say, a general point, and it applies to formulable and unformulablelaws alike. Many such norms can of course be formulated very easily. I havethe freedom to castle my king, say, only in virtue of my acknowledgement of some readily statable rules of chess. These rules are conditions of, rather than

limits upon, my freedom to do as I intend. But rules that are formulable in thisway bring with them the danger of self-misunderstanding. For example, I mightidly lament the fact that it is impossible to move my rook diagonally, or that myrook and my queen cannot both occupy the same square at the same time, andmistake this for an irritating restriction on my freedom. But what I would really

be minding is the fact that I am playing chess, not that my freedom (to makechess moves) is curtailed. And this is why Nietzsche regards artistic agency asexemplary. For where (many of) the relevant norms are unformulable, this sort of self-misunderstanding is ruled out. I can’t chafe in advance against the fact thatthis or that artistic act is impossible, since I could only know that it was

impossible if the rule that it breached could be formulated. The most that I cando, therefore, is to lament the fact that there should be any constraints on myactivity at all; and that, in a peculiarly direct way, would be simply to renouncemy (real) freedom in favour of the fantasy of freedom in ‘the superlativemetaphysical sense’. It is true, then, that the freedom-through-constraint accountsets up those constraints as fundamentally independent of the agent. But it doesnot follow from this that they function as limits upon the agent’s freedom to act.Rather, to say it once again, they function as conditions of that freedom.

6. The Limits of Artistry

If what I have argued so far is plausible, section 188 of Beyond Good and Evilencapsulates particularly crisply some of the main strands of Nietzsche’s positivethoughts about freedom of the will. It also casts light retrospectively on the othertwo passages that I have devoted most space to (i.e. BGE §21 and GS §290).

The causa sui argument (BGE §21) now emerges as a sketch of two ways inwhich one can fail to relate to oneself properly as an agent. The devotee of the‘superlative, metaphysical sense’ of freedom of the will vainly holds himself aloof from the constitutive necessities of human practices, and in doing so forfeits thecapacity not only to realise, but so much as to arrive at, anything worth calling anintention with respect to them (as opposed to a wish, say). Bound up in hisfantasy of himself as a law above all laws, he can neither legislate effectively noract. The self-contemptuous character, on the other hand, who seeks to ‘lay theblame for’ himself ‘somewhere else’, recognises the necessities constitutive of human practices as necessities, but takes this, not as an invitation to work withand through them so as to discover himself in expressing himself, but as anexcuse to abscond from the field of agency altogether. For the stylist of character,

by contrast, whose one needful thing is to realise himself as an exemplaryproduct of his own artistry (GS §290), the compulsions shirked by the weak are to

be embraced. In learning to make a beauty out of necessity, as it were, he ‘perfects




15/21

himself under his own law’, and discovers the determinate character of thatlaw—and hence his freedom—precisely in the process of perfecting himself.37

Clearly much more might be said about all of this, and there are manyinteresting implications to be drawn out. But I can’t draw them out here. Instead,

and by way of conclusion, I propose to return for a moment to the centrality of artto Nietzsche’s thoughts about freedom. The activity of art-making, recall, doesnot serve Nietzsche merely as an example of agency at its best, or at its most free.Rather, he takes that activity as exemplary of such agency. And—to press the pointharder—the exercise of artistry may even be the only fully convincing exem-plar available to him. Except, perhaps, for chess, and certain other games,38 it isonly in art that we find obvious instances of the kind of mastery that Nietzsche isconcerned with—not least because artistic activity offers a possibility of closurenot readily available elsewhere. And art far exceeds chess, or any other game, inthe range and depth of mastery that is capable of being expressed through it.39 In

this much, then, since art has the field pretty well to itself in the relevant respect,Nietzsche’s constant invocations of it may seem more or less self-justifying. Butthis—while it may well explain Nietzsche’s tactics—might perhaps also makeone wonder a bit about the applicability of those tactics to agency in general. Oneof the main reasons, after all, why we have and need art, according to one veryplausible cliché, is that life is simply too disorderly and contingent to be borneneat.40 Art joins the disparate pieces up, and makes them mean something—itcompletes them. And to think that closure of this sort might reliably be achievedthrough the flow of life itself is surely to posit as exemplary an ideal that may beentirely unrealisable—precisely the kind of move, in other contexts, that

Nietzsche roundly and rightly denounces.

41

This is the worry about the scope of Nietzsche’s account that I mentioned inthe previous section; and I think that it is right to take it seriously. But I also thinkthat Nietzsche can go a good way towards meeting it. When he commends (theexemplary) Stendhal for regarding art—beauty—as ‘a promise of happiness’ (GMEssay III §6), he is in the midst of criticising points of view from which thatpossibility is altogether invisible. And his response, in the context of the presentworry, should have something of the same structure. He has shown, after all, thatcertain prevailing perspectives—for instance, those canvassed in the causa suiargument—are incapable of making sense of agency in general, in virtue of theirfailure to recognise that every kind of agency requires the acknowledgement andinternalisation of the norms or necessities constitutive of the practices throughwhich that agency is exercised. From these perspectives, that is, the verypossibility of mastery is rendered invisible. Nietzsche also has good grounds tosuppose that the same failure must undermine even more decisively the capacityof such perspectives to support convincing accounts of artistic agency,specifically, since the relevant norms or necessities are not only integral to thepractices concerned, and so to be acknowledged and internalised, but areunformulable as well. He has good grounds, that is, to conclude that from theseperspectives the possibility of artistic mastery must be the most invisible of all.And, from here, it is a short step to a relatively modest conclusion, which is this:

218 Aaron Ridley



16/21

if there are forms of mastery in other types of agency, and if these forms of mastery depend for their possibility upon the acknowledgement of unformulablenecessities constitutive of the practices through which those types of agency areexercised, then to that extent artistic agency is exemplary of agency as such.42

Nietzsche’s conclusion, then, as I read him, is that it is reasonable, within theselimits, to regard the freedom exemplified in the exercise of artistic mastery as atleast a regulative ideal for the exercise of agency in general.43 And it is in thissense, I suggest—to which his thoughts about freedom are central—thatNietzsche regards art as an image of the ethical.44

Aaron RidleyPhilosophy, School of HumanitiesUniversity of SouthamptonSouthampton SO17 1BJ UK [email protected]

NOTES

1 Kant 1952: §59. For an excellent discussion of this thought, see Henrich 1994.2 I follow a number of recent writers here in distinguishing the ‘moral’ from the

‘ethical’, and in construing the former as a special—or allegedly special—case of the latter.For discussion, see, e.g., Clark 1994: 15–34; Williams 1985: ch.10; Raz 1999: 273–302.

3 —or even, perhaps, as a statement of some other position within the relevant debate.Brian Leiter, for instance, takes the passage to be part of Nietzsche’s defence of a view thathe (Leiter 2002: ch. 3) calls ‘causal essentialism’, although the distinction between thatposition and out-and-out determinism (and indeed incompatibilism) collapses in thecourse of his own argument. (For discussion, see Owen and Ridley 2003: 74.) For recenttreatments of Nietzsche on freedom that are more consonant with the line that I go on todevelop here, see, e.g., Gemes 2006 and Janaway 2006.

4 Hume 1977: §8.5 Nietzsche does in fact mention causation a little later, but not in a way that should

offer much encouragement to those who would see him as a compatibilist. He wascommitted at this point to a version of Lange’s neo-Kantian scepticism about causation, ashe makes clear a couple of sentences further down: the concepts of ‘cause’ and ‘effect’, hesays, are ‘conventional fictions for the purpose of designation and communication—not forexplanation. In the ‘‘in-itself’’ there is nothing of ‘‘causal connections’’’ (BGE §21). So hedidn’t think that there was a causal order of nature—and so, a fortiori, cannot have worriedwhether there might be a conflict between it and human freedom, and so cannot, in thissense at any rate, have been a compatibilist. (At most, he might be said to be a libertarian.)Nietzsche later changed his mind about causation, and accepted that it was real (partlythrough coming to reject the thought that there was any ‘in-itself’ of things [see Clark 1990:103–106 and 109–117 for discussion]). But once he’d done that, he continued to insist, inexactly the same terms, that both the ‘free’ will and the ‘unfree’ will were ‘monstrousconceptions’, or—as he has it in The Anti-Christ—‘imaginary causes . . . purely fictitious’(AC §15). Following this line of thought, we might then conclude that Nietzsche’s remarksin Beyond Good and Evil about freedom of the will are neither a statement of compatibilism,




17/21

since compatibilism is inconsistent with scepticism about causation, nor a specificconsequence of his temporary allegiance to Lange, since he remained committed to theremarks in question even once he had become a causal realist. But, as I argue in the maintext, even this line of thought must be, at best, incidental to Nietzsche’s principal concern.

6 See, for example, his preface to the second edition of Thé rèse Raquin.7 Tolstoy makes it clear in the same section that his conception of ‘complete freedom in

man’, as he puts it, is a version of the causa sui: ‘To conceive of a man being absolutely freewe must imagine him outside space, . . . a being uninfluenced by the external world,standing outside of time and independent of causes’.

8 —a conception now perhaps most closely associated with Jean-Paul Sartre. SeeSartre 1969: Part 4, chapter 1.

9 One might characterize Nietzsche’s target here as the style of thinking that wouldconnect an exaggerated notion of responsibility to an exaggerated notion of the voluntary. Fora contemporary version of Nietzsche’s complaint, see Williams 1993: ch.3. For an excellentdiscussion of the affinities between Nietzsche and Williams, see Clark 2001: 100–122.

10 This is the idea known as ‘agent causation’, which—crucially—does not include thethought that the agent’s will is hermetically sealed from the rest of the world.

11 None of this is to say, of course, that Nietzsche mightn’t in fact have been acompatibilist. It is only to say that, if he was, passages such as the one that I have beenconsidering cannot be taken as evidence of that.

12 Of course, in one sense there needn’t be two parties here. Someone might vainlyhold himself to be radically free while reserving ‘a sort of socialist pity’ for others whom heregards as lacking that freedom; and, in this case, his ‘pity’ will be a form of contempt.

13 It is worth noting the strong affinity between the structure of Nietzsche’s interest inthe issue of freedom and the structure of Hegel’s, and, specifically, the way in which bothregard questions concerning a possible conflict between free will and the causal order of nature as a red herring in this context. For an excellent discussion of Hegel on these

matters, see Pippin 1997.14 See, e.g., GM Essay II §§17 and 18. For discussion see Ridley 1998: ch.4. For broader

discussions that make or presuppose the same point, see, e.g., Young 1992 and Pothen2002.

15 See also GS §335, where the task of imposing a law upon oneself is tied, importantly,to ‘the intellectual conscience’, to ‘self-knowledge’ and to ‘honesty’.

16 Or, in more overtly Nietzschean terms, ‘agonistically’. See his early essay, HC.17 Nietzsche is often concerned with this kind of reciprocal relation. For a particularly

clear example, and one that has an evident bearing in the present context, see GM Essay II§12.

18 Jenkins 1998: 213 makes a similar point.19 And is overlooked, on the whole, by, e.g., Nehamas 1985: ch. 6. For a corresponding

overstatement of the force of this constraint, see Leiter 2002: ch. 3.20 For a more extended discussion of GS §290, which seeks to make explicit the

connections between self-stylisation and the ‘intellectual conscience’, see Ridley 1998:135–142.

21 See D §537 for a gloss on ‘mastery’.22 For a contrasting account of Nietzsche’s views about language, see Jenkins 1998:

231–235. Jenkins gives primacy to a pair of very thorny passages, BGE §268 and GS §354,which are badly at odds with the (genuine) insight expressed in BGE §188.

23 In Twilight of the Idols he describes this as the ‘modern concept of ‘‘freedom’’’: TIRaids §41.

220 Aaron Ridley



18/21

24 This point—which is forcefully brought out by Schacht 2001: §4—brings Nietzsche’sunderstanding of the connection between normativity and human practices rather closelyinto line with that defended by John McDowell: see, e.g. 1998a and 1998b. For Nietzsche’sconception of ‘second nature’, see D §38.

25 Kant would agree with Nietzsche about this, at least in so far as artistic agency isconcerned. He remarks: ‘Now, seeing that originality of talent is one . . . essential factorthat goes to make up the character of genius, shallow minds fancy that the best evidencethey can give of being full-blown geniuses is by emancipating themselves from allacademic constraint of rules, in the belief that one cuts a finer figure on the back of an ill-tempered than of a trained horse’—op.cit., §47.

26 Aristotle: II.9.27 I say ‘emerged’ here in order to leave open the question whether these laws, and the

coda that obedience to them made possible, are better thought of as creations or asdiscoveries. And there are at least two reasons why this question should be left open. First,and very locally, nothing that I want to say here depends upon the answer: either will do.But—second—it is quite uncertain whether we understand the terms ‘creation’ and‘discovery’ perspicuously enough for the question to have a clear sense. Did Rui Lopez, forexample, create or discover the chess opening named after him? Did he come up with it orcome across it? I simply don’t know how one would go about answering this.

28 And what Sibelius ‘gathered from [Beethoven’s] performance’, in composing thecoda to his own fifth symphony, wasn’t formulable either. Sibelius followed; he didn’timitate.

29 —and which has been widely taken up: by Hegel, of course, in The Philosophy of Right (for a superb discussion of this aspect of Hegel’s thought, see Pippin 2000) andfollowing Hegel by, e.g., Taylor 1985 and by Collingwood 1938: ch.6 in his account of art asexpression. For the same point in a slightly different context, see, e.g., Hampshire 1959: ch. 2.

30 For an excellent, and closely related, argument to similar effect, see Owen 2003:

259–261.31 Of course, I may not like what I find when I make this discovery, and may, in that

sense, prefer that my action were otherwise. But, if so, this merely shows that, while myagency in this instance may have been fully effective, there is nevertheless somethingabout the sort of person I am that I do not care for, and would like—and may, as a self-stylist, come to intend—to change.

32 Again, this is a strikingly Hegelian thought. As Pippin puts it: Hegel’s conception of agency is ‘expressive’, and his ‘most frequent example . . . is an artist and his art work. Insome sense of course, the artist causes the statue to be made, but what makes it ‘‘his’’ isthat it expresses him and his artistic intentions adequately’ (Pippin 2000: 158).

33 This might be disputed. It might be said, for example, that, for Nietzsche’s account

to be convincing, certain metaphysical presuppositions need to be in place, and that theseshould be made explicit (e.g., as it might be, that we inhabit a compatibilistic world, or anindeterministic one). But this would be to reverse the order of the argument. My claim isthat, if Nietzsche’s account of freedom is convincing (as I believe it is), that accountfurnishes a constraint on what can and cannot be regarded as a minimally plausible storyabout the relation between the causal order of nature and the human will. It is not,therefore, incumbent upon Nietzsche to tell such a story in order to make the points that hewants to make about freedom; and nor, if what I have argued earlier is correct, does heattempt to do so. The position that I attribute to him is therefore similar, in certain crucialrespects, to that famously advanced in Strawson 1974.

34 See Ridley 2005 for further discussion of this point.




19/21

35 It also, of course, requires a natural world—a world structured by causalregularities and so forth. But, for the reasons given in the earlier sections of this essay,Nietzsche’s attention is focused on the peculiarly human world of norms and practices.

36 For a compelling defence of these claims, see Kenny 1989: ch. 3.37 Nietzsche first began to develop his conception of the process of self-perfection in

the third of the Untimely Meditations, and the idea that I am attributing to him here iscontinuous, at least, with the one expressed there. For an excellent discussion, see Conant2001.

38 For the special sense of freedom that the (competent) participation in games allows,see Cavell 1979: 307–309.

39 Examples are legion; illuminating commentary upon them rather rarer. Twonoteworthy and accessible instances of the latter, both concerning the art that Nietzschecared most about, are Charles Rosen’s discussion of the B/B-flat conflict in Beethoven’s

Hammerklavier sonata (Rosen 1971: 413–420) and Stephen Davies’s discussion of the role of the unexpected C-sharp in the opening theme of the same composer’s Eroica symphony(Davies 2002: 353–354).

40 As Nietzsche himself insists: see, e.g., GS §§107 and 109.41 —not least in the causa sui argument.42 And it is very plausible to think that these antecedent conditions are often met.

Consider, for example, Aristotle’s discussion of the virtues: the virtuous man undoubtedlyexhibits mastery, and his sort of mastery depends precisely upon the acknowledgement of norms that cannot be formulated. Again, see Aristotle 1980: II.9.

43 A strong case could be made for regarding Max Weber’s ‘Vocation’ lectures asattempts to spell out what ‘mastery’, in this sense, amounts to in non-artistic contexts: seeWeber 2004.

44 A version of this paper was first read at the 2003 conference of the FriedrichNietzsche Society, held at Warwick, and I am grateful to the participants in that event for

their questions and suggestions—as, too, to Ken Gemes and Chris Janaway, both of whomcommented very helpfully. My particular thanks, though, must go to Maria Alvarez andDavid Owen. It was through discussion with the latter that many of the ideas advancedhere were had in the first place, and through discussion with the former that the expositionof those ideas acquired whatever clarity it now has.

REFERENCES

Works by Nietzsche

AC—The Anti-Christ, trans. R. J. Hollingdale. Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1968.BGE—Beyond Good and Evil, trans. W. Kaufmann. New York: Vintage, 1966.D—Daybreak, trans. R. J. Hollingdale, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1997.GM—On the Genealogy of Morals, trans. W. Kaufmann and R. J. Hollingdale, New York:

Vintage, 1969.GS—The Gay Science, trans. W. Kaufmann, New York: Vintage, 1974.HC—‘Homer on Competition’, in K. Ansell-Pearson (ed.), On the Genealogy of Morality [and

other writings]. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1994: 187–194.TI—Twilight of the Idols, trans. R. J. Hollingdale. Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1968.

222 Aaron Ridley



20/21

Other Works

Aristotle (1980), Nicomachean Ethics, trans. D. Ross. Oxford: Oxford University Press.Cavell, S. (1979), The Claim of Reason. Oxford: Oxford University Press.Clark, M. (1990), Nietzsche on Truth and Philosophy. Cambridge: Cambridge University

Press.—— (1994), ‘Nietzsche’s Immoralism and the Concept of Morality’, in R. Schacht (ed.),

Nietzsche, Genealogy, Morality. Berkeley: University of California Press, 15–34.—— (2001), ‘On the Rejection of Morality: Bernard Williams’s Debt to Nietzsche’, in

R. Schacht (ed.), Nietzsche’s Postmoralism. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 100–22.Collingwood, R. G. (1938), The Principles of Art. Oxford: Oxford University Press.Conant, J. (2001), ‘Nietzsche’s Perfectionism: A Reading of ‘‘Schopenhauer as Educator’’ ’,

in R. Schacht (ed.), Nietzsche’s Postmoralism. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press,181–257.

Davies, S. (2002), ‘Profundity in Instrumental Music’, British Journal of Aesthetics, 42: 343–356.Gemes, K. (2006), ‘Nietzsche on Free Will, Autonomy and the Sovereign Individual’,

Proceedings of the Aristotelian Society, Supp. Vol. LXXX: 321–338.Hampshire, S. (1959), Thought and Action. London: Chatto and Windus.Henrich, D. (1994), Aesthetic Judgement and the Moral Image of the World . Stanford: Stanford

University Press.Hume, D. (1977), An Enquiry Concerning Human Understanding. Indianapolis: Hackett.

Janaway, C. (2006), ‘Nietzsche on Free Will, Autonomy and the Sovereign Individual’,Proceedings of the Aristotelian Society, Supp. Vol. LXXX: 339–357.

Jenkins, F. (1998), ‘Performative Identity: Nietzsche on the Force of Art and Language’, inS. Kemal, I. Gaskell and D. Conway (eds), Nietzsche, Philosophy and the Arts. Cambridge:Cambridge University Press, 212–238.

Kant, I. (1952), The Critique of Judgement, trans. J. Meredith. Oxford: Oxford UniversityPress.

Kenny, A. (1989), The Metaphysics of Mind. Oxford: Oxford University Press.Leiter, B. (2002), Nietzsche on Morality. London: Routledge.McDowell, J. (1998a), ‘Virtue and Reason’ in his Mind, Value and, Reality. Cambridge, MA:

Harvard University Press, 50–73.—— (1998b), ‘Aesthetic Value, Objectivity, and the Fabric of the World’, in his Mind, Value

and, Reality. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 112–130.Nehamas, A. (1985), Nietzsche: Life as Literature. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press.Owen, D. (2003), ‘Nietzsche, Re-evaluation and the Turn to Genealogy’, European Journal of

Philosophy, 11: 249–72.Owen, D. and Ridley, A. (2003), ‘On Fate’, International Studies in Philosophy, 35: 63–78.Pippin, R. (1997), ‘Hegel, Freedom, the Will: The Philosophy of Right, §1–33’, in L. Siep

(ed.), Hegel: Grundlinien der Philosophie des Rechts. Berlin: Akademie Verlag.—— (2000), ‘What is the Question for which Hegel’s Theory of Recognition is the

Answer?’, European Journal of Philosophy, 8: 155–172.Pothen, P. (2002), Nietzsche and the Fate of Art. Aldershot: Ashgate.Raz, J. (1999), ‘The Amoralist’, in his Engaging Reason. Oxford: Oxford University Press,

273–302.Ridley, A. (1998), Nietzsche’s Conscience: Six Character Studies from the ‘Genealogy’. Ithaca:

Cornell University Press.—— (2005), Introduction to: Friedrich Nietzsche, The Anti-Christ, Ecce Homo, Twilight of the

Idols and other writings. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, vii–xxxiv.




21/21

Rosen, C. (1971), The Classical Style. London: Faber.Sartre, J. -P. (1969), Being and Nothingness, trans. H. Barnes. London: Routledge.Schacht, R. (2001), ‘Nietzschean Normativity’, in R. Schacht (ed.), Nietzsche’s Postmoralism.

Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 149–180.Strawson, P. F. (1974), ‘Freedom and Resentment’, in his Freedom and Resentment and other

essays. London: Methuen, 1–25.Taylor, C. (1985), ‘Hegel’s Philosophy of Mind’, in his Human Agency and Language:

Philosophical Papers, Vol. 1. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 77–96.Tolstoy, L. (1982), War and Peace, trans. R. Edmonds. London: Penguin.Weber, M. (2004), ‘Science as a Vocation’ and ‘Politics as a Vocation’, in D. Owen and

T. Strong (eds), R. Livingstone trans., The Vocation Lectures. Indianapolis: Hackett.Williams, B. (1985), Ethics and the Limits of Philosophy. London: Fontana.—— (1993), Shame and Necessity. Berkeley: University of California Press.Young, J. (1992), Nietzsche’s Philosophy of Art. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.

224 Aaron Ridley


Documents

Aaron Ridley - Nietzsche on Art and Freedom