Free Will Nietzsche Could Believe In: A Philosophical Analysis
This paper examines Friedrich Nietzsche's critique of the Christian concept of free will and proposes a conception of human volition compatible with his broader philosophical commitments. Nietzsche argues that free will was invented by ancient priests to justify punishment and impose life-negating values, rather than reflecting any genuine feature of human agency. The paper traces a tension in Nietzsche's thought between his denial of responsibility and his apparent call for personal integrity in action. It then resolves this tension by proposing a naturalistic account of agency: one's existence makes differences in the world without requiring any supernatural causal power or assignable moral responsibility. The paper concludes that genuine freedom, for Nietzsche, lies in affirming one's life as an inseparable part of the whole.
- Introduction: The Conditions of Human Freedom: Freedom depends on wants and operative constraints
- Nietzsche's Critique of the Christian Concept of Free Will: Priests invented free will to justify punishment
- Human Action as Fate: The Problem of Responsibility: Human action as indistinct from natural causation
- A Tension in Nietzsche: Responsibility Without Blame: Nietzsche's aphorisms seem to demand accountability
- Toward a Naturalistic Account of Agency: Existence makes differences without requiring responsibility
- Affirming Life as the Only Free Will Worth Having: Life affirmation as freedom consistent with naturalism
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What makes this paper effective
- The paper identifies and carefully works through a genuine internal tension in Nietzsche's thought — his denial of responsibility alongside aphorisms that seem to demand personal integrity — rather than simply summarizing his views.
- The thought experiment of "a world without Nietzsche" is a creative and original philosophical move that illustrates the difference one's existence makes without invoking moral responsibility or supernatural agency.
- The writing is clear and appropriately self-aware, acknowledging the limits of its own question ("the question was asked from the darkness") and modeling the kind of philosophical humility consistent with its argument.
Key academic technique demonstrated
The paper demonstrates internal critique and reconstruction: rather than attacking Nietzsche from outside, it accepts his premises, exposes a tension they generate, and then proposes a resolution consistent with his own commitments. This technique — taking a thinker seriously enough to work within their framework — is a hallmark of rigorous analytic philosophy of religion and action theory.
Structure breakdown
The paper opens by establishing the conditionality of freedom through concrete examples, then pivots to Nietzsche's historical and theological critique of free will. It next identifies the conceptual problem this creates for attributing actions to persons at all, surfaces a specific tension in a Nietzsche aphorism, and ultimately resolves that tension through an original thought experiment. The conclusion reframes the opening question, arguing that life-affirmation is both what we can and what we should want.
Introduction: The Conditions of Human Freedom
Are we free to do what we want with our lives? There are a number of ways in which we are clearly not. I am not free to live in 13th-century France; I am not free to square circles, to bi-locate, to respire carbon dioxide rather than oxygen, to learn all the languages of the world in five minutes, or to make "schnee" an English word. If I should ever want to do any of these things, then I am not free to do what I want with my life. There does, however, seem to be some sense in which I am free. I can get a glass of water when I'm thirsty. If that's what I want to do with my life, then, yes, I am free to do that.
It is clear, then, that one's freedom to do what one wants depends on (i) what one wants at a given time and (ii) which constraints of various sorts are in force at the time. These points make the question difficult to answer unconditionally; but we can still make some general claims. Some constraints seem to be inescapable, and perhaps some of our wants follow us all throughout our lives. This paper attempts to narrow in on one way of thinking of human "free will," partly by considering Friedrich Nietzsche's views on the Christian concept of free will. The view of free will eventually arrived at is one, I believe, with which Nietzsche would be sympathetic.
Nietzsche's Critique of the Christian Concept of Free Will
Nietzsche is unreserved in his criticism of Christian values, thought, metaphysics, and morality. His critique of the Christian concept of free will is no less unabashed. Nietzsche thinks that not only do we lack free will of this sort, but that the concept was introduced for unsavory reasons:
"We no longer have any sympathy nowadays for the concept 'free will': we know only too well what it is — the most disreputable piece of trickery the theologians have produced…" (31)
Nietzsche believes that free will was conceived by religious leaders in order to assimilate the concepts of bad and blame on the one hand, and good and praise on the other. The idea is that if one is free to be bad, then one deserves blame, and if one is free to be good, then one deserves praise. "The priests at the head of ancient communities" devised the "psychology of will" so that they could claim the right to punish those who behaved in ways they didn't like. They asserted their own values — values which Nietzsche considers "life-negating" — and claimed a right to punish anyone who acted in ways that threatened those values. We can see this as an extremely aggressive form of moral chauvinism or ethnocentrism: Nietzsche's ancient priests not only held fast to their own values, they imposed them on others with punishment and claimed a right to do so. They asserted that acting contrary to priestly values deserved punishment.
"…the doctrine of the will was fabricated essentially for the purpose of punishment, i.e. of wanting to find guilty… People were thought of as 'free' so that they could be judged and punished" (31, emphasis in the original)
Nietzsche claims that prior to this maneuver, to be good or bad was not one's fault — it was simply "the way it is," as we might now say. And Nietzsche considers this to have been a more accurate attitude toward the role that humans play in the universe.
Human Action as Fate: The Problem of Responsibility
If responsibility, praise, and blame are discredited, what are we to think of human volition? Nietzsche writes:
"We invented the concept 'purpose': in reality, 'purpose' is absent… One is necessary, one is a piece of fate, one belongs to the whole, one is the whole… there is nothing apart from the whole!" (32, emphasis in original)
If we take human action as "a piece of fate," it seems we must regard ourselves and our freedom to act as playing no larger role in what transpires than that played by an inanimate object — like a rock. A rock can bring about consequences by falling into a pond and causing ripples, but it is not responsible for those ripples. It is simply part of "the whole" as it unfolds. We might then ask: why should we think ourselves to be any different? Why should we differ from everything else in nature, uniquely having a free hand in the determination of the future while everything else is simply part of the whole?
This way of conceiving of ourselves — as indistinct from nature, as "earthly" — does seem to be consistent with Nietzsche's far-ranging rejection of whatever he deems "other-worldly" or "life-negating." If free will is supposed to be a human life-force "outside" of nature, then part of accepting ourselves as natural would be to deny that we have free will.
References
Clark, Maudemarie. "Nietzsche, Friedrich," in E. Craig (Ed.) Routledge Encyclopedia of Philosophy. London: Routledge, 1998.
Nietzsche, Friedrich. Twilight of the Idols and the Anti-Christ, translated by R. J. Hollingdale. New York: Penguin Books, 1990.
Nietzsche, Friedrich. Twilight of the Idols, translated by Duncan Large. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1998.
Nietzsche, Friedrich. On the Genealogy of Morality, translated by Carol Diethe. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2007.
O'Connor, Timothy. "Free Will," in the Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy (Fall 2008 Edition), Edward N. Zalta (ed.). URL: http://plato.stanford.edu/archives/fall2008/entries/freewill/.
Strawson, Galen. "Free will," in E. Craig (Ed.), Routledge Encyclopedia of Philosophy. London: Routledge, 2004.
Wicks, Robert. "Friedrich Nietzsche," in the Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy (Spring 2010 Edition), Edward N. Zalta (ed.). URL: http://plato.stanford.edu/archives/spr2010/entries/nietzsche/.
All page numbers in parentheses refer to Nietzsche 1998.
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