Chapter 5 in Elvis Imafidon and BrendaHofmeyr (Eds.), The Ethics of Subjectivity:Perspectives since the Dawn of Modernity, 2015,Palgrave Macmillan (http://www.palgrave.com/page/detail/the-ethics-of-subjectivity-elvis-imafidon/?sf1=barcode&st1=9781137472410)

Nietzsche’s Sovereign Individual and the Ethics of

Subjectivityi

Sharli Anne Paphitis

Oh, wretched

ephemeral race,

children of chance and misery.

– Nietzsche, The Birth of Tragedy

Nietzsche is perhaps one of the most controversial

figures in Western philosophical history. This is in no

small part owed to his attacks of Christianity and

conventional morality, as well as his scepticism about

human freedom. Nietzsche’s sceptical views on human

freedom and the self might initially make him seem an

unlikely candidate for providing us with a robust account

of subjectivity, and his attacks on morality might

similarly make him a seemingly unlikely proponent of an

account of human flourishing. However, in this chapter I

explore Nietzsche’s understanding of the ethics of

subjectivity, showing that Nietzsche provides us with an

attractive positive account of human agency, personhood,

and flourishing.

Nietzsche asserts, in part through his

characterisation of the Sovereign Individual, that some

form of self-control is required for the project of

exercising agency.ii This self-control view of human

agency is similarly central to recent analytic accounts

proposed by Harry Frankfurt, Gary Watson and Alfred

Mele.iii While the self-control view of agency is

plausible, we should question whether, and in what ways,

exercising self-control contributes to our understanding

of ourselves as persons and to our flourishing – as

Nietzsche himself does.

In her paper Pity and Mercy: Nietzsche’s Stoicism, Martha

Nussbaum argues that Nietzsche’s philosophical project

can be seen as an attempt to ‘bring about a revival of

Stoic values of self-command and self-formation’.iv She

argues that, to his detriment, Nietzsche’s Sovereign

Individual epitomises a kind of stoic ideal of inner

strength and self-sufficiency which goes ‘beyond

Stoicism’ in its valorisation of radical self-

emancipation from the contingencies of life and from our

own human vulnerability. Nussbaum thus urges us to

question whether the picture of strength through self-

control in Nietzsche’s Sovereign Individual is really a

picture of human strength at which we would be willing

to, or at which we ought to, aim.

In this chapter I take up Nussbaum’s challenge

within the framework of my own thoughts on the role of

both agency and vulnerability in our conception of

personhood. While I agree with Nussbaum that the self-

emancipation characterisation of the Sovereign Individual

provides us with, in many important ways, an ultimately

unattractive ideal of human strength at which to aim,

such a characterisation of Nietzsche’s Sovereign

Individual remains problematic. It is my contention here

that the Sovereign Individual, like the stoic, is to be

characterised in terms of his deep recognition of the

necessity of his own vulnerability, but that,

importantly, it is the Sovereign Individual’s reaction to

this recognition that distinguishes the ideal of strength

which we find in him from the problematic stoic ideal.

While the stoics overemphasise the ideal subject’s

capacity for control, suggesting that he will do so in an

attempt to transcend his necessary human vulnerability

through an escaping and rejecting of it, Nietzsche’s

Sovereign Individual is antithetical to the stoic in

precisely this respect: the Sovereign Individual lives

through and with his vulnerability by actively affirming

it. The Sovereign Individual is thus, more properly to be

understood as embodying and affirming precisely the kind

of fragility and vulnerability, which the stoic person

seeks to transcend through rejection and denial.v Given

Nussbaum and Nietzsche’s criticisms of the stoic

position, I argue that Nietzsche and Nussbaum may have

more in common than Nussbaum suggests.

Finally, in this chapter I aim to show that by

proposing the Doctrine of the Eternal Recurrence as the

ultimate test for the highest affirmation of life which

the Sovereign Individual must pass, Nietzsche also

provides part of what he takes to be the solution to the

threat of both the impending nihilism and the inhibiting

current morality of his age.

Agency and the Sovereign Individual

Control, I think, is central to our understanding of

human agency. In following the suggestions made about the

nature of agency by philosophers working in the analytic

tradition of philosophy, I maintain that agency must be

understood in terms of self-control. Self-control is

central because our ability to act, rather than simply

being blown through the world like leaves in the wind,

requires the exercise of various psychological

activities, such as self-observation and critical

reflection, in order to achieve mastery over the self. A

number of robust and plausible philosophical accounts of

agency have been proposed along these lines, most notably

by Harry Frankfurt, Gary Watson and Alfred Mele.

Philosophical accounts such as these outline the

necessary structural features of the mind which must be

in place in order for us to control our initial responses

to the world, and thereby, allow us to perform actions

which are calculated and controlled rather than being

largely out of our control.

Following these self-control accounts, I think that

a major part of what makes a human agent’s mental life so

complex is the fact that, as humans, we not only have

primary, or brute, responses to the world in the form of

beliefs and desires, but we are able to assess those

basic responses through critical reflection, form

opinions or make assessments of them, and, in some

instances, we are able to change them. Following such

accounts, it seems that for the idea of human agency to

get off the ground requires that our critical reflection

be an active, rather than passive capacity, that is, to

be an agent is to be involved actively in the task of

critical reflection. This critical reflection for the

agent, then, involves a deliberative or evaluative

element. When critically reflecting on our basic

responses to the world, we evaluate whether or not to act

on those responses by assessing them in light of our

values, commitments, projects, aims and goals – what we

might be inclined to call our ‘better judgment’. In so

far as we have the capacity for critical reflection, we

have control over whether or not we act on our most basic

responses to the world. And in doing so, we control

ourselves from the inside. When we speak about exercising

our agency, then, what we mean is that we should have

self-control in this sense.

Alfred Mele, I think rightly, suggests that the idea

of self-control, or ‘the ability to master motivation

that is contrary to one’s better judgment [and]… the

ability to prevent such motivation from resulting in

behaviour that is contrary to one’s decisive better

judgment’vi is fundamental to our agency in three ways.

Firstly, he claims, we may, and often do, have

conflicts between our better judgment and our brute

desires. These accounts plausibly suggest that self-

control is needed in such cases in order for a person to

maintain her agency in the face of, quite often

compelling desires to act in ways which she would rather

not act on the basis of her own better judgment. As Mele

explains, ‘In short, a self-controlled person is someone

who is appropriately motivated to conduct himself as he

judges best and has the ability to master motivation to

the contrary’.vii

Secondly, ‘one’s evaluations themselves can be

warped in various ways by one’s wants’viii – our critical

reflection and better judgment itself can be seduced by

our basic or brute responses to the world. In such cases,

the self-controlled person must be able to master this

internal psychological threat to his control, and hence

his agency. Thus, ‘a self-controlled person must… be

disposed to promote and maintain a collection of

evaluations that is not unduly influenced by his

motivations’.ix

And finally, while to have self-control is to be in

control of oneself, there is more to being in control of

oneself than having and exhibiting the power to master

motivation that is contrary to one’s better judgment. A

person whose better judgments rest on values generated

and maintained by brainwashing or under the influence of

certain ideologies or even simply by society at large,

may be self-controlled in the first two senses; but he

seems not to be in control of himself in the broader

sense. He is ruled, ultimately, not by his ‘self’ but

rather by his brainwasher or the ideology to which he

subscribes or society at large.x

Agency then, it seems to me, is largely to be

understood in psychological terms, as something which is

to be explained from the inside: it is a story about our

own control over the internal workings of our psyche.

Exercising self-control in the way I have just described

it allows us to make our own choices and decisions about

the actions we take and the lives we come to live as a

result, and is thus I think what we most basically refer

to as human agency.

It has recently and convincingly been argued by a number

of philosophersxi that there is a sense of freedom or an

idea of agency suggested by Nietzsche which he discusses

in his conception of the Sovereign Individualxii or under

the label of self-overcoming. Nietzsche asserts that some

form of self-control is required for the project of

becoming an agent. Most interestingly, I think, the

person, for Nietzsche, exhibits precisely the kind of

self-control which I take to be central to the idea of

agency, and which is central to analytic accounts briefly

outlined above.

Nietzsche emphasises self-governance or self-control

in both the motivational and evaluative senses described

by Mele – this is ‘particularly prominent in later works

like Twilight of the Idols’.xiii Much like the agent I sketched

in the section above, on Nietzsche’s account sovereign

individuals are to be thought of as actively asserting

control over or governing themselves from the inside,

mastering conflicting inclinations and motivations. For

Nietzsche, as agents we form values on the basis of our

brute desires. But these values are not simply formed as

mere copies of all of these desires. This process

involves, for the agent, selecting and affirming or

endorsing some desires over others which may conflict

with them, and resembles the picture of agency given in

analytic accounts sketched above in which we use our

‘better judgment’xiv to guide us in deliberations about

which desires to endorse and act on. In ‘How to Harden

Your Heart’, Amelie Rorty elegantly highlights the

intuitive plausibility of this picture, saying:

Sanity and decency consist in achieving a reflectively

critical balance among all these deep-seated and contrary

tendencies. Any normal person is in principle notionally

capable of monitoring and adjusting them.xv

For Nietzsche, in mastering or controlling our

conflicting motivations in the service of the values we

endorse is a fundamental part of achieving agency.

Nietzsche explains:

Indeed, where the plant ‘man’ shows himself strongest

one finds instincts that conflict powerfully… but are

controlled.xvi

It is our ability to master and control conflicting

desires that, for Nietzsche, most fundamentally

represents our ability to overcome ourselves: in order to

follow through on our intentions, we must overcome those

conflicting desires and inclinations that would otherwise

motivate us to act against our intentions, which,

importantly, are also our own (self-overcoming). In

Nietzsche’s view, if we are not able to control our inner

conflicts (at least some of the time), we are not capable

of exercising our agency or becoming Sovereign

Individuals. In agreement with Gemes’ recent discussion

of Nietzsche on agency, I argue that if we are not able

to exercise our agency, it is a most dangerous threat to

our sovereignty because it undermines our right to make

promises, something which is perhaps the defining

characteristic of the Sovereign Individual qua agent.xvii

In The Genealogy of Morals, Nietzsche says:

We discover that the ripest fruit is the sovereign

individual, like only to himself… autonomous and

supramoral… in short, the man who has his own

independent, protracted will and the right to make

promises – and in him a proud consciousness… of his own

power and freedom, a sensation of mankind come to

completion. This emancipated individual, with the

actual right to make promises, this master of free

will, this sovereign man.xviii

It seems clear to me that the Sovereign Individual has

the right to make promises, for Nietzsche, precisely

because he is able to exercise the kind of self-control

or self-overcoming involved in the analytic picture of

agency briefly discussed above. As Gemes explains, you

cannot have agency in any genuine sense for Nietzsche if

you are ‘merely tossed about willy-nilly by a jumble of

competing desires’xix: for Nietzsche, unless you are able

to exercise control over yourself, ‘you cannot stand

surety for what you promise’xx, because if you are unable

to master your conflicting motivations, you cannot be

sure that you will honour your promise when the time

comes to act on it, since you may well act on a

conflicting or contrary inclination at any time (being

able to choose a course of action and know that you will

be able to stick with it, now and in the future, in the face

of competing desires and inclinations is what Nietzsche

here refers to as a ‘protracted will’). If you cannot

stand surety for your promises, Nietzsche thinks that you

have not earned the right to make promises at all. And

unless you have the right to make promises, you cannot be

an agent or, in Nietzsche’s terms, a Sovereign

Individual.

Second, Nietzsche emphasises that self-control, in

an evaluative sense, is an important aspect of human

agency. According to Pippin, on Nietzsche’s account: ‘If

herd morality, conformism and sheep-like timidity are to

be held in contempt, then some contrary notion seems

suggested, some ideal of social independence and a kind

of self-rule or self-reliance’.xxi Emerson, in his famous

piece ‘Self-Reliance,’ makes the following rather

dramatic claim:

Society everywhere is in conspiracy against the manhood

of every one of its members. Society is a joint-stock

company, in which the members agree, for the better

securing of his bread to each shareholder, to surrender

the liberty and culture of the eater. The virtue in

most request is conformity. Self-reliance is its

aversion […]. Absolve yourself to yourself, and you

shall have the suffrage of the world.xxii

Like Emerson, Nietzsche’s idea of agency is intricately

linked to the idea of challenging blind conformity to the

values and ideals of society at large. Nietzsche suggests

that by blindly conforming to society’s values and

ideals, we deny our capacity to derive our values for

ourselves, which is fundamental to our agency. As much is

evident when Nietzsche claims the following in Schopenhauer

as Educator:

The man who would not belong to the mass needs only to

cease being comfortable with himself; he should follow

his conscience which shouts at him: “Be yourself; you

are not really all that which you do, think, and desire

now.”xxiii

For Nietzsche, subscribing to – or even endorsing – the

values and ideals advocated by society, or any other

source of authority for that matter, poses a danger to

the possibility of our becoming agents or Sovereign

Individuals. The biggest danger, however, is that we may

find ourselves having slipped into an unreflective

acceptance of these values and ideals.xxiv Nietzsche’s

claim that we should be self-creating agents or Sovereign

Individuals can thus, first and foremost, be seen as a

call to reflect not only on our social existence, but the

values and ideals which lie at the core of this

existence. Moreover, according to him, by unreflectively

accepting transmitted values and ideals, we might be led

to make equally unreflective assessments and evaluations

about aspects of ourselves. Thus, we may find ourselves

slipping into comfortable unreflective understandings of

our selves. Here, the internal psychological threat to

our agency is clear: we may be influenced by our basic

responses to the world and brute motivations when forming

our values and ideals from which we make our better

judgements. For Nietzsche, this is a most dangerous

threat to our sovereignty.

Agency, Stoicism, Vulnerability

Something which undeniably marks us out as persons is our

ability to make our lives less subject to the

contingencies of living in a world which is largely out

of our control. As persons, there is a gap for us between

the necessities and contingencies of the physical world

in which everything exists, and the way we actually

experience living our lives. There is a gap for us

between our vulnerability to the chance and necessity of

the situations in which we find ourselves and the

possibilities of how we may try to realise our lives. And

it is precisely because of this gap that we can talk

about human agency at all.

Human agency, which I have explained as our unique

ability to guide our selves and lives in a physical world

which is indifferent to our desires and efforts, relies

on our ability to increase our control over our internal

situation. That is, in a world in which we cannot control

external circumstances, we are, perhaps uniquely,

situated by our ability to control our internal

psychological conditions and hopefully the actions and

behaviours which flow from them.xxv On such an account,

then, as alluded to above, what is most fundamental is

self-control, or control over our internal psychological

situation. This picture is clearly illustrated by

Frankfurt when he explains:

For to deprive someone of his freedom of action is not

necessarily to undermine the freedom of his will. When an

agent is aware that there are certain things he is not

free to do, this doubtless affects his desires and limits

the range of choices he can make. But suppose that

someone… has in fact lost or been deprived of his freedom

of action. Even though he is no longer free to do what he

wants to do, his will may remain as free as it was

before. Despite the fact that he is not free to translate

his desires into actions or to act according to the

determinations of his will, he may still form those

desires and make those determinations as freely as if his

freedom of action had not been impaired.xxvi

For Frankfurt, whether or not our actions are in fact

limited by our situation, or indeed when our freedom of

action has been entirely constrained, the freedom which

is available to all human agents, in all circumstances,

cannot be undermined in this way because, as Frankfurt

puts it, ‘he may still form those desires and make those

determinations as freely as if his freedom of action had

not been impaired’ - though we may not all actually

exercise this freedom at any given time, or ever.

The most persuasive cases for the centrality of

specifically self-control as central to our understanding

of agency are made by appealing to our intuitions about

what happens to agents in situations of extreme

constraint, as Frankfurt says cases in which someone ‘has

in fact lost or been deprived of… freedom of action’.

Consider here perhaps the most obvious cases we could

think of in which a person’s agency would seemingly be

fundamentally undermined – those of enslavement or

imprisonment in which the human subject is treated as

object. Viktor Frankl’s famous work, Man’s Search for Meaning,

is an exploration of the psychological condition of

prisoners in concentration camps during the Holocaust.i Much of the work in this chapter is drawn from my S. Paphitis(2013) Vulnerability and the Sovereign Individual: Nussbaum andNietzsche on the Role of Agency and Vulnerability in Personhood. TheSouth African Journal of Philosophy, 32 (2), 123-136.. ii It is important to note before delving into Nietzsche’s accountthat reference to the Sovereign Individual is only explicitly made byNietzsche in On the Genealogy of Morals Section II, and might thusnot represent the only picture of agency which could be drawn fromNietzsche’s writings. In this chapter I drawn on his conception ofthe Sovereign Individual in the Genealogy, but also put forward apicture of the Sovereign Individual which draws on ideas and claimsfrom other parts of Nietzsche’s work for supplementation andexplanation. Further, while I realise that it would take a great dealof interpretive argument (for which there is not much room here) toclaim that there is a definitive and explicit notion of agency orpersonhood in Nietzsche’s work, this project is in part an attempt totease out at least one plausible reading of Nietzsche’s thoughtsabout these concepts.iii See, for example, H. Frankfurt, (1971) Freedom of the Will and theConcept of a Person, The Journal of Philosophy, 68-1, 5-20; H. Frankfurt(1988) The Importance of what we Care About (Cambridge: Cambridge UniversityPress); H. Frankfurt (1999) Necessity, Volition and Love (Cambridge:Cambridge University Press); and H. Frankfurt, (2006). Taking Ourselves Seriously & Getting It Right (California:Stanford University Press). See also G. Watson (2004) Agency andAnswerability: Selected Essays (New York: Oxford University Press); A. Mele(1987) Irrationality: An Essay on Akrasia, Self-deception and Self-control (Oxford:Oxford University Press). A. Mele (1995) Autonomous Agents: From Self-Control to Autonomy (New York: Oxford University Press).iv M. Nussbaum (1994) Pity and Mercy Nietzsche’s Stoicism. In R.Schacht (Ed.) Nietzsche, Genealogy, Morality: Essays on Nietzsche’s ‘Genealogy ofMorals’ (Berkeley, Los Angeles and London: University of CaliforniaPress) p.140.v In putting forward my own reading of the Nietzschean notion of theSovereign Individual I do not necessarily take the notion to beeither straightforward or uncontroversial. I recognise that there hasbeen much debate amongst Nietzsche scholars about how we shouldinterpret Nietzsche’s notion. While I do not contrast my own readingof the notion of the Sovereign Individual with competing views inthis literature explicitly in this chapter, I do recognise that there

Being imprisoned in a concentration camp certainly seems

to constitute one of the most extreme situations in which

a person’s agency could be seen as fundamentally

undermined. But Frankl’s view, like Frankfurt’s, is that

human agency has most fundamentally to do with a kind of

inner freedom or self-control which remains available to

may be room for contention and debate on this. vi A. Mele, Irrationality. p. 54.vii A. Mele, Irrationality. p. 60.viii A. Mele, Irrationality. p. 53.ix A. Mele, Irrationality. p. 53.x A. Mele, Irrationality. p. 6.1xi See for example the collection in K. Gemes & S. May (Eds.) (2009)Nietzsche on Freedom and Autonomy (Oxford: Oxford University Press).xii It is important to note here that reference to the SovereignIndividual is only explicitly made in GM II, and might thus notrepresent the only picture of agency or personhood which could bedrawn from Nietzsche’s writings. In this chapter I have drawn on hisconception of the Sovereign Individual, but have tried to put forwarda picture of the Sovereign Individual which draws on ideas and claimsfrom other parts of Nietzsche’s work. Further, while I realise thatit would take a great deal of interpretive argument (for which thereis not much room here) to claim that there is a definitive andexplicit notion of either agency or personhood in Nietzsche’s work,this project is in part an attempt to tease out at least oneplausible reading of Nietzsche’s thoughts about these notions. xiii R. Pippin (2009) How to Overcome Oneself: Nietzsche on Freedom. In K. Gemes & S. May (Eds.) Nietzsche on Freedom and Autonomy (Oxford: Oxford University Press) p. 76.xiv The question of what ‘our better judgment’ actually amounts to onNietzsche’s picture is certainly an interesting one, and one whichmerits further discussion. Unlike for Frankfurt, for Nietzsche ‘ourbetter judgment’ does not merely amount to the judgments made by someprivileged ‘true/real’ self (for a further discussion of this ideasee S. Paphitis (2010) Questions of the Self in the Personal AutonomyDebate: Some Critical Remarks on Frankfurt and Watson. The South AfricanJournal of Philosophy, 29(2), 57-71). For Nietzsche ‘our better judgment’is more like a process, it is the process of making a judgment bychoosing (and perhaps ranking) between certain of my competingdesires and values. This process will require a certain strength ofwill, and for Nietzsche the actual strength of our will is tested bythe number of competing desires and motivations we are able to sortthrough and in some sense manage. Nietzsche says: “the highest manwould have the greatest multiplicity of drives, in the relativelygreatest strength that can be endured” (WP, 966). In this case, itseems there is no inner ‘true/real’ self to which we could, as it

us in even the most restrictive and oppressive

circumstances such as a concentration camp. At the very

last, he claims, we have control over our internal mental

and psychological states, and this is the kind of control

which external circumstances cannot have an effect on. He

writes:

Every day, every hour, offered the opportunity to make a

decision, a decision which determined whether you would

or would not submit to those powers which threatened to

rob you of your very self, your inner freedom; which

determined whether or not you would become the plaything

of circumstance, renouncing freedom and dignity to become

moulded into the form of the typical inmate. Seen from

this point of view, the mental reactions of the inmates

of a concentration camp must seem more to us than the

were, defer to when making judgments, rather it is the process whichwe undergo in making better judgments which directly informs what ourbetter judgment is.xv A. O. Rorty (2005) How to harden your heart: six easy ways to become corrupt. In A. O. Rorty (Ed.) The Many Faces of Evil: Historical Perspectives (London & New York: Routledge) p. 287.xvi WP 966.xvii K. Gemes (2009) Nietzsche on Free Will, Autonomy and the Sovereign Individual. In K. Gemes & S. May (Eds.) Nietzsche on Freedom and Autonomy (Oxford: Oxford University Press).xviii GM II 2.xix K. Gemes, Nietzsche on Free Will, Autonomy and the Sovereign Individual, p. 37.xx K. Gemes, Nietzsche on Free Will, Autonomy and the Sovereign Individual, p. 37.xxi R. Pippin, How to Overcome Oneself, p. 76.xxii R. Emerson (1983) Essays and Lectures (New York: Library of America) p. 261.[Sic.]xxiii SE p. 127.xxiv See D. Cooper (1991) Authenticity and Learning: Nietzsche’s Educational Philosophy (Great Britain: Routledge and Kegan Paul plc) p. 4. xxv See a nice discussion of this in J. Kekes (2010) The Human Condition(Oxford: Oxford University Press) p. 34.xxvi H. Frankfurt, Freedom of the Will and the Concept of a Person, pp. 14-15.

mere expression of certain physical and sociological

conditions. Even though conditions such as lack of sleep,

insufficient food and various mental stresses may suggest

that the inmates were bound to react in certain ways, in

the final analysis it becomes clear that the sort of

person the prisoner became was the result of an inner

decision, and not the result of camp influences alone.

Fundamentally, therefore, any man can, even under such

circumstances, decide what shall become of him – mentally

and spiritually.xxvii

On such a view, when I am faced with a world in which the

ends and goals I have conceived of are made unattainable,

I need not necessarily feel my agency restricted or

diminished because my agency is constituted by my self-

control – as Frankfurt would put it, we still have

freedom of the will. Nothing and no-one outside of me can

truly affect my agency, because my agency is purely about

the kind of control I am able to achieve for myself

regardless of what is happening to or around me.xxviii

Recall here Nietzsche’s talk of the Sovereign

Individual’s right to make promises. The right to make

promises is afforded to the Sovereign Individual becausexxvii V. Frankl (2006) Man’s Search for Meaning. Ilse Lasche (Transl. Part 1). (Boston, Massachusetts: Beacon Press) p. 74.xxviii This view might seem like an extreme, but what it is doing isproviding us with an ideal picture – of course it is true that agencycomes in degrees, and we may not be able to exercise this kind offreedom at all times. Torture and illness often break people, and thecircumstances in which we find ourselves can certainly diminish ourcapacity (and strength of will) to exercise this kind of self-control. What Frankfurt, like Sartre, endorses is that this is thekind of freedom which is always available to us as human agents,though we may not always exercise it.

he is able to master his own inclinations and thus, he is

able to stand surety for his promises because of this

motivational steadfastness. But there is something else

Nietzsche says about the Sovereign Individual, he claims

in the Genealogy that:

To ordain the future in advance in this way, man must

first have learned to distinguish necessary events from

chance ones, to think causally, to see and anticipate

distant eventualities as if they belonged to the present,

to decide with certainty what is the goal and what is the

means to it, and in general be able to calculate and

compute. Man himself must first of all have become

calculable, regular, necessary, even in his own image of

himself, he is to be able to stand security for his own

future, which is what one who promises does!xxix

Nietzsche here claims that the Sovereign Individual has

recognised the extent to which the external circumstances

can undermine his ability to be certain that he will be

able to reach the goal he has set for himself, or to

fulfil the promise that he has made. Unless, Nietzsche

seems here to suggest, he can remove those necessities and

contingencies given by external circumstances, he is

vulnerable to failure in his attempt to fulfil the

promises he has made or to attain the goals he has set

for himself. The Sovereign Individual looks, then, as if

he might need to, like the Frankfurtian person, also only

care about the kind of control he is able to achieve for

xxix GM II 2.

himself regardless of what is happening to or around him

– that is, it looks as if the Sovereign Individual might,

like the agent on Frankfurt’s picture need to be self-

sufficient: immune to the kinds of external influences

which threaten to supplant her authority, at least over

himself.

On the face of it then, both Frankfurt and

Nietzsche’s pictures of agency are quite remarkably close

to one other. On the Frankfurtian type picture, our

capacity to exercise a kind of inner freedom through

self-control is definitive of our agency. For Nietzsche,

this is also true. And there is, of course, something

quite significant about our capacity to exercise this

kind of control over ourselves, to exercise the kind of

inner freedom we take to be definitive of our agency. It

is not surprising, then, that we spend a great deal of

time reflecting on this capacity, thinking of ways to

improve it, which will hopeful lead us to living lives

which are more under our own control and less subject to

the contingencies and necessities of the physical world

in which we find ourselves. This line of reasoning,

however, may further be suggestive of the idea that by

gaining more control we will be able to live better, more

flourishing, lives precisely because our lives will be ‘up to

us’, rather than determined by the forces which are

external to us and which are indifferent to our well

being. This line of reasoning has been suggested perhaps

most fervently by the stoics, and by various forms of

asceticism, but I think it is also subtly suggested by

Frankfurtianxxx type pictures, as discussed above. While

Nussbaum suggests that this is true of Nietzsche’s

picture, and we might be inclined to agree with her based

on the above statements, in what follows I will argue

that it would be a mistake to read Nietzsche in this way.

Further, I will argue that this view about the role of

self-control in our flourishing conflates the notions of

agency and personhood in a problematic way.

Nussbaum has argued that the line of reasoning outlined

above is central in Ancient Greek philosophy to some

extent, where Socrates, the Stoics and Aristotle all

agree that we should ‘above all value our inner

resources’.xxxi Central to this line of reasoning is that,

since the capacity for self-control definitive of agency

is to be cultivated in order to make our lives go better,

this is all that must be cultivated in order to truly

live well. In the Stoic tradition the ‘good person’ is ‘a

self-commanding person – one who, rather than being the

slave of fortune, is truly free just because she doesn’t

care for the things that fortune controls. Commanding

herself, she commands all that is important for living

well; she is thus a person of real power and command in a

world’xxxii where human vulnerability is to be overcome.xxx Perhaps my reading of Frankfurt on this account could bechallenged. Given that the picture I attribute to Frankfurt hasparallels with other positions, such as that outlined by Frankl here,or the picture which Berlin is at pains to reject in ‘Two Concepts ofLiberty’, it does no damage to my arguments in general if it could beshown that I have in fact misread Frankfurt.

Through exercising the capacity for self-control, the

Stoic gains power, and takes himself to have, thus,

escaped his human vulnerability.

Nussbaum takes this stoic line of reasoning, that

having power over ourselves allows us power over ‘the

vicissitudes of fortune’xxxiii, to be central to Nietzsche’s

account of the Sovereign Individual. She characterises

the Sovereign Individual as one who is hostile to ‘human

vulnerability and fragility in general’, seeing it as a

kind of ‘impotence’. She quotes Nietzsche’s Aphorism 251

of Daybreak called ‘Stoical’ in which Nietzsche says:

There is a cheerfulness peculiar to the Stoic: he

experiences it whenever he feels hemmed in by the

formalities he himself has prescribed for his conduct; he

then enjoys the sensation of himself as dominator. xxxiv

The suggestion is that by allowing ourselves to focus only

on our agency – which is under our control – we are able

to remove all the chanciness and necessity that comes

along with living in the physical world by making all the

happenings and contingencies of that world no longer

important for our well being. What happens inside of us

is all that is important, for here we have control in

spite of what is or could be going on around us.

xxxi M. Nussbaum, Pity and Mercy Nietzsche’s Stoicism, pp. 157-158.xxxii M. Nussbaum, Pity and Mercy Nietzsche’s Stoicism, p. 146.xxxiii M. Nussbaum, Pity and Mercy Nietzsche’s Stoicism, p. 151.xxxiv D 132. As quoted by M. Nussbaum, Pity and Mercy Nietzsche’sStoicism in favour of this point.

Nussbaum argues that since Nietzsche’s approach is stoic,

his valorisation of self-command and self-overcoming can

be criticised on precisely the same grounds that the

Stoic’s can, because of their failure to recognise that

the vulnerability which is being escaped is in part

necessary for living a flourishing life. For Nussbaum,

Nietzsche and the stoics are ‘committed to denying that

the physical goods of life are necessary conditions for

eudaimonia. And thus… are committed to holding that people

who are severely deprived, and even imprisoned and

tortured, can still retain eudaimonia, so long as they are

virtuous and self commanding…’xxxv

She explains, I think quite convincingly, that the

removal of the external conditions which make us

vulnerable might be problematic because:

…one would need to decide how much worth persons and

things and events outside ourselves actually have in the

planning and conduct of our lives; what needs we actually

have from the world and to what extent those needs can be

removed by a new attitude of self command toward and

within oneself.xxxvi

However, she goes on to argue that the Nietzschean

picture of ideal strength in the character of the

Sovereign Individual is not an attractive picture of

strength for precisely this reason, saying:

xxxv M. Nussbaum, Pity and Mercy Nietzsche’s Stoicism, pp. 158-160.xxxvi M. Nussbaum, Pity and Mercy Nietzsche’s Stoicism, p. 156.

What should we think about the human being who insists on

caring deeply for nothing that he himself does not

control; who refuses to love others in ways that opens

him to serious risks of pain and loss; who cultivates the

hardness of self-command as a bulwark against all the

reversals that life can bring? We could say, with

Nietzsche, that this is a strong person. But there

clearly is another way to see things. For there is a

strength of a specifically human sort in the willingness

to acknowledge some truths about one’s situation: one’s

mortality, one’s finitude, the limits and vulnerabilities

of one’s body, one’s need for food and drink and shelter

and friendship. There is a strength in the willingness to

form attachments that can go wrong and cause deep pain,

in the willingness to invest oneself in the world in a

way that opens one’s whole life up to the changes of the

world, for good and for bad. There is, in short, a

strength in the willingness to be porous rather than

totally hard, in the willingness to be a mortal animal

living in the world. The Stoic [and the Sovereign

Individual]xxxvii by contrast, looks like a fearful person,

a person who is determined to seal himself off from risk,

even at the cost of love and value.xxxviii

In her criticism of Nietzsche, she goes on to say:

Nietzsche knows, or should know, this. For a central

theme in his work is that Christianity has taught us bad

habits of self-insulation and self-protection, alienating

us from our love of the world and all of its chanciness,

all of its becoming. On this account we have become small

xxxvii By extension because she takes him to be stoic, or even beyondstoic.xxxviii M. Nussbaum, Pity and Mercy Nietzsche’s Stoicism, p. 160.

in virtue, and will remain small, unless we learn once

again to value our own actions as ends, and our worldly

existence as their natural home. I think that in the end

Nietzsche fails to go far enough with this critique. He

fails, that is, to see what the Stoicism he endorses has

in common with the Christianity he criticizes, what

“hardness” has in common with otherworldliness: both are

forms of self-protection, both express a fear of this

world and its contingencies…xxxix

While I agree with Nussbaum that, were her

characterisation of the Sovereign Individual correct, the

Sovereign Individual would not provide us with an

attractive ideal at which to aim, because he would be

living, as Nussbaum thinks, a radically impoverished

human life by removingxl himself from the activities

which, while on the one hand make us vulnerable, on the

other actually add significant meaning and value to our

lives. But Nussbaum does not go far enough with her claim

that Nietzsche does, or ought to know, that this aspect

of stoicism is problematic.

Vulnerability and the Sovereign Individual

For the stoics, cultivating the capacity for self-control

is an attempt to escape the contingency and vulnerability

of a life lived in the physical world which must be done

xxxix M. Nussbaum, Pity and Mercy Nietzsche’s Stoicism, p160.xl The question here of removing oneself may be a question aboutvalues: by removing ourselves what we mean is that we no longer careabout or value those things over which we have no control – for sucha person these things are deemed of little value or worth.

through a kind of transcendence. This transcendence

involves, for the stoic, a rejection or a denial of the

importance those aspects of our lives which are deeply

vulnerable to the kinds of ‘contingencies and

reversals’xli Nussbaum suggests actively engaging with the

world around us might bring. Isaiah Berlin has provided

us with a canonical passage of what this line of

reasoning amounts to, in which he describes a ‘retreat to

the inner citadel’ in which we might take precisely this

approach to transcendence in an attempt to gain control.

He says:

I must liberate myself from desires that I know I cannot

realize. I wish to be master of my kingdom, but my

frontiers are long and vulnerable, therefore I contract

them… to… eliminate the vulnerable area… The tyrant threatens

me with imprisonment… But if I no longer feel attached

to property, no longer care whether or not I am in

prison… then he cannot bend me to his will… It is as if

I had performed a strategic retreat into the inner

citadel… I have withdrawn into myself; there and there

alone, I am secure… I illuminate obstacles in my path by

abandoning the path: I retreat to my own sect, my own

planned economy, my own deliberately insulated

territory, where… no external forces can have effect.xlii

xli Here I am borrowing Martha Nussbaum’s terms, this issue isimportant for her in the context of living a flourishing lifeparticularly. I am drawn to her conception of the flourishing lifewhen assessing what the concept of a person is. xlii I. Berlin (1969) Four Essays on Liberty (Oxford: Oxford University Press) p. 129.

Berlin is hostile to this approach. In his discussion of

freedom or autonomy, he rejects this line of reasoning

about gaining control through the kind of transcendence

suggested by the stoics. As Berlin, I think rightly,

argues, stoic transcendence only appears to offer us

freedom, only appears to offer us a path to follow in

order to escape our vulnerability, but this path is

deeply problematic. Berlin is particularly worried about

how such a misconstrued picture of human freedom could be

abused in political life, but Berlin’s concerns, I think,

highlight why even though Frankl’s picture of the

concentration camp inmate as still able to exercise

agency, is plausible, it somehow riles against our

intuitions that the inmate has been dehumanised – they

have had an important aspect of their personhood

undermined - and furthermore, as Berlin seems to

suggest, why Frankl’s picture riles against our

intuitions that the camp inmate has been robbed of their

ability to live a flourishing, or good, life. He says:

If I find that I am able to do little or nothing of what

I wish, I need only contract or extinguish my wishes, and

I am made free. If the tyrant… manages to condition his

subjects… into losing their original wishes and

embracing… the form of life he has invented for them, he

will, on this definition, have succeeded in liberating

them. He will, no doubt, have made them feel free – as

Epictetus feels freer than his master (and the proverbial

good man is said to feel happy on the rack). But what he

has created is the very antithesis…

If I save myself from an adversary by retreating indoors

and locking every entrance and exit, I may remain freer

than if I had been captured by him, but am I freer than

if I had defeated or captured him? If I go too far,

contract myself into too small a space, I shall suffocate

and die. The logical culmination of the process of

destroying everything through which I can possibly be

wounded is suicide.xliii

Nussbaum, similarly in her own context, rejects this kind

of transcendence and valorisation of control, suggesting

– as pointed out above – that we cannot live a

flourishing or good life by removing ourselves entirely

from our entanglements and engagements with the world. I

agree with Berlin and Nussbaum in their criticism of this

stoic transcendence.

Increasing our self-control in the way Frankfurt and

Nietzsche suggest, as discussed earlier in this chapter,

is important and vital for our understanding of ourselves

as human agents. However, while our agency is undoubtedly

important for our understanding of personhood,

maintaining a view in which control or agency takes

centre stage in our understanding of personhood, as

Frankfurt would have us do, is problematic. When control

is central we lose sight of an important aspect of our

personhood which I believe to be of the utmost importance

for us actually living flourishing lives – the necessity

and centrality of human vulnerability which Nussbaum

points out most explicitly in her work (not only the

xliii I. Berlin, Four Essays on Liberty, p. 164.

paper discussed here, but throughout her book The Fragility of

Goodness as well). There is an aspect of our personhood

which seems to contrast most explicitly with the capacity

for agency understood in terms of self-control, that is,

our reliance as persons on external goods and those

things over which we do not have complete control. While

it seems clear that agency is necessary to our

understanding of what it means to be a person, to be a

person also requires a recognition on the part of the

person themselves of their own limits and vulnerability –

the ability to recognise the extent to which

circumstances, events and other persons play a role ‘in

the planning and conduct of our lives’xliv and contribute

to our flourishing. If our understanding of what is most

central to our conceptualisation of what we as human

persons are is somehow at odds with what is central for

achieving or maintaining flourishing or desirable lives,

then I think we have done a great injustice to the notion

of personhood, and we face a great danger because of

this. We face a great danger because a misconstrued

picture of what is central to personhood will lead us to

developing an ideal, a picture of personhood towards

which we ought to strive, and if our ideal is out of sync

with what we actually take to be important for living a

flourishing life, then we will have a great deal of

difficulty achieving a flourishing life by aiming at such

an ideal. Contra Nussbaum, I think that Nietzsche

recognises this, and addresses this issue when discussingxliv M. Nussbaum, Pity and Mercy Nietzsche’s Stoicism, p. 156.

his ideal of personhood made manifest in the Sovereign

Individual.

So why does Nussbaum think of the Sovereign Individual as

offering us with a stoic ideal at which to aim? Well,

Nietzsche does say that:

Honesty, supposing that this is our virtue from which we

cannot get away, we free spirits – well, let us work on

it with all our malice and love and not weary of

“perfecting” ourselves in our virtue, the only one left

us… And if our honesty should nevertheless grow weary one

day and sigh and stretch its limbs and find us too hard,

and would like to have things better, easier, tenderer,

like an agreeable vice – let us remain hard, we last

Stoics!xlv

And here it would be easy to misinterpret what Nietzsche

says because of his explicit reference here to stoicism.

In fact, Nietzsche often says things which we may

interpret as supporting the stoic doctrine of asceticism,

especially when he says like:

To those human beings who are of any concern to me I wish

suffering, desolation, sickness, ill-treatment,

indignities – I wish that they should not remain

unfamiliar with profound self-contempt, the torture of

self-mistrust, the wretchedness of the vanquished: I have

no pity for them, because I wish them the only thing that

xlv BGE 227.

can prove today whether one is worth anything or not –

that one endures.xlvi

And citing this passage, Nussbaum argues that Nietzsche

‘does not grasp the simple fact that if our abilities are

physical abilities they have physical necessary

conditions’, he does not grasp what she calls a ‘basic

vulnerability’, and that this leads Nietzsche to his

conclusion ‘that even a beggar can be a Stoic hero’.xlvii

And so Nussbaum interprets this passage of Nietzsche as

aligning him with the stoic ideal of transcendence. In

this final section I will argue against this

characterisation of the Sovereign Individual.

When Nietzsche talks about the Sovereign Individual’s

right to make promises he emphasises that the right to

make promises is an act of self-overcoming (as explained

above). For Nietzsche, this overcoming cannot be seen, as

the stoic would have us believe, as a ‘retreat to the

inner citadel’ by which we deny the important role those

aspects of our lives that are not under control play in

our own flourishing. In order to have the right to make

promises, we must also recognise the important role our

own vulnerability plays in the actual planning and

conduct of our lives; as we have seen this is necessary

for the Sovereign Individual to have the right to make

promises. That we are deeply vulnerable is not just

xlvi WP 910.xlvii M. Nussbaum, Pity and Mercy Nietzsche’s Stoicism, pp. 158-160.

something that the Sovereign Individual can ignore. He

cannot forget it, but must keep it in mind, regardless of

how difficult and potentially frightening this prospect

may be. In fact it is the difficulty of accepting this

that will help to keep it in memory. Nietzsche says:

If something is to stay in memory it must be burned in:

only that which never ceases to hurt stays in the

memory…xlviii

When we recognise our essential vulnerability, we fear it

quite deeply (as the stoic or Frankfurtian does – for it

is a threat to our control and thus assumedly our

flourishing) but through our fear we are made aware of

its vital importance in living lives which are truly

worth living, the kind of life he takes to be epitomised

by the Sovereign Individual.

For Nietzsche, then, it would seem that unless we can

be honest with ourselves about the role of things which

are beyond our control (that is if we attempt to

transcend our vulnerability) we would be guilty of

ressentiment.xlix It is precisely this honesty with ourselves

xlviii GM II 3. This idea from GM II is most typically discussed andexplored by Nietzsche scholars with regards to Nietzsche’sdescription of a long process of civilisation on moralisation bywhich Nietzsche claims man became ‘calculable’ and ‘predictable’.Giving a psychological reading of this part of GM II, however, Ithink lends weight to my ability to use this idea from GM to talkabout learning to remember in order not to forget our basic‘vulnerability’ – this is something which we cannot leave out of ourpractical deliberations if we are to truly become agents. xlix For Nietzsche, ressentiment is, at least in part, a psychologicalcondition which results in a fractured and damaged individual,lacking in integrity.

about our own ‘all too human’ condition that Nietzsche

thinks we should cultivate and remain steadfast in, in

order to prevent ourselves from falling prey to

ressentiment. So there is here a kind of strength seen by

Nietzsche in the noble man, which he refers to as

‘strength of soul’. This noble bravery is reflected in

the Sovereign Individual, who requires this kind of

honesty with himself. Nietzsche says that:

While the noble man lives in trust and openness with

himself..., the man of ressentiment is neither upright nor

naive nor honest and straightforward with himself. His

soul squints.l

In part, at least, this honesty is for Nietzsche also a

reflection of a true agent’s bravery. This bravery is

exhibited by the agent not only because he realises that

the things which are beyond his control are out there in

the world, but because they are also present within

himself. Unlike the agent, the ‘man of ressentiment’ fails

to understand that the genuine endorsement of a value

requires acknowledgment that in fulfilling that value he

has other desires which must now remain unsatisfied, but

these desires are no less his own desires. By denying

that these desires are his own, he deceives himself about

himself. The ‘man of ressentiment’ fails to acknowledge that

certain of his own desires cannot be fulfilled, and in so

doing fails to understand the implications the

l GM I 10.

endorsement of a value has for his life and thus fails,

for Nietzsche, to genuinely endorse the value at all.

Reginster explains:

There is no genuine endorsement of a value, therefore,

without the acknowledgment of those of our desires which

conflict with its realization. To acknowledge the presence

of conflicting desires and to accept the fact that they

have to be left unsatisfied demands unflinching honesty

with ourselves. But the required honesty is precisely what

the “man of ressentiment” lacks.li

Unlike the man of ressentiment then, the Sovereign

Individual is brave when she owns up to the realisation

that what is beyond her control is vital for living

because she understands that by acting on her endorsed

values she is herself both the one who commands herself

and the one who obeys.lii What is beyond our control is

vital precisely because it forms an important part of who

we actually are – unlike the man of ressentiment, in owning

li B. Reginster (1997) Nietzsche on Ressentiment and Valuation. Philosophy and Phenomenological Research, LVII(2), p. 300.lii As Nietzsche explains: What is called “freedom of the will” isessentially the affect of superiority with respect to something whichmust obey “I am free ‘it’ must obey” – this consciousness lies inevery will, along with a certain straining of attention, a straightlook that fixes on one thing and one thing only, an unconditionalevaluation “now this is necessary and nothing else,” an innercertainty that it will be obeyed, and whatever else comes with theposition of the commander. A person who wills -, commands somethinginside himself that obeys, or that he believes to obey. But now wenotice the strangest thing about the will – about this multifariousthing that people have only one word for. On the one hand, we are,under the circumstances, both the one who commands and the one whoobeys, and as the obedient one we are familiar with the feelings ofcompulsion, force, pressure, resistance, and motion that generallystart right after the act of willing. BGE 19.

up to this realisation the Sovereign Individual has a

more holistic and integrated understanding of herself

which includes not only those aspects of herself which

‘command’ (are under my control) but also those which

‘obey’ (which are beyond my control). What this shows us

is that for Nietzsche, as Elveton puts it, ‘[t]he

fundamental Stoic opposition between what is mine (my

will and what falls under its direct control) and not

mine reduces the self in a one-dimensional and artificial

way.’liii

But perhaps even more importantly for my argument

against Nussbaum’s characterisation of the Sovereign

Individual, Elveton claims that Nietzsche rejects the

fundamental stoic picture in which it ‘is my attitude, my inner

composure, that is reflective of my individual power….

[and so] my actions in the world elude me and are not a

significant part of me… what I am is not so much what I

do, but my rational attitude toward what I do, and my

rational attitude toward what is done to and what happens

to me’.liv I agree with Elveton that Nietzsche is against

this, and I think that this explains Nietzsche’s claim

that we cannot separate the doer from the deed for

precisely this reason.lv Moreover, I think, that Nietzsche

cannot be seen to valorise self-control in the stoic mode

of transcendence precisely because, above all, Nietzsche

wants us to affirm life, ourselves and the world of chance

liii R.O. Elveton (2004) Nietzsche’s Stoicism: The Depths are Inside. In P. Bishop (Ed.) Nietzsche and Antiquity (Rochester: Camden House) p. 195.

and necessity in which we live. This is the world we live

in and we cannot seek to escape it, but must rather seek

to thrive in it, and this will require our recognition of

our vulnerable place in it.

Above all in his Doctrine of the Eternal Recurrence,

where according to Nietzsche, ‘nothing that has happened

to us is contingent’,lvi and affirming any given aspect of

our lives or selves entails our affirming all aspects of

our selves, our pasts, and indeed the whole history of

the physical world in its entirety. Recall Nietzsche’s

description of the Doctrine of Eternal Recurrence in The

Gay Science:

What if some day or night a demon were to steal into your

loneliest loneliness and say to you: ‘This life as younow live it and have lived it you will have to live once

again and innumerable times again; and there will be

nothing new in it, but every pain and every joy and every

thought and sigh and everything unspeakably small or

great in your life must return to you, all in the same

succession and sequence… The eternal hourglass of

existence is turned over again and again, and you with it

speck of dust!’lvii

liv R.O. Elveton, Nietzsche’s Stoicism, p. 195.lv Think here of the seemly strange account of agency in the 13th

section of the Genealogy where Nietzsche admonishes a separationbetween the ‘doer’ and the deed’. This passage suggests thatNietzsche is reluctant to view agency as something which could beseparated from our actual actions in the world of riskiness andchance. Nietzsche claims that there is an inextricable link betweenagents and their actual experiences, saying also: “if I remove allthe relationships, all the properties, ‘all the activities’ of athing, the thing does not remain over”. lvi See A. Nehamas (2001) The Eternal Recurrence. In J. Richardson &B. Leiter (Eds.) Nietzsche (Oxford: Oxford University Press) p. 123.

Nietzsche’s Doctrine suggests that if we deny even the

smallest part of who we are or what has actually happened

in the world, we cannot affirm our present selves, for

our present self is necessarily constituted by our own

past and all effects of the world on it – we cannot

separate who we are from our lives, nor can we separate

our lives from the world in which they have been lived.

Nietzsche suggests that in light of this there can only

be two possible reactions to the demon’s proposition:

that we reject it as the most detestable malison or we

welcome it with the greatest joy. Nietzsche writes:

Would you not throw yourself down and gnash your teeth and

curse the demon who spoke thus? Or have you once

experienced a tremendous moment when you would have

answered him: ‘You are a god, and never have I heard

anything more divine.’lviii

What Nietzsche wants us to realise is that if we can at

any point in our lives affirm who we are, even for a

‘moment’, we must necessarily affirm all aspects of

ourselves, our past actions, attitudes and opinions.

‘Have you ever said Yes to a single joy? O my friends,

then you have said Yes to all woe’lix proclaims

Zarathustra. And considering this carefully, we

understand that in order to answer positively in light of

lvii GS 341.lviii GS 341.lix Z IV 19.

the demon’s question, to affirm the demon who presents us

with the doctrine, we must will all that has gone before,

even the very worst of the worst: and in realising this,

Nietzsche’s ultimate man, Zarathustra, ‘finally becomes

able to want to undergo again all that is cheap and

detestable about the world for the sake of what is not’.lx

Through the doctrine of eternal recurrence, Nietzsche

‘asks us whether we merely want to drift with the tide of

things or whether we would be creators’lxi – whether we

would float along unthinkingly or whether we would engage

our capacity to actively affirm all that is past, all

that is present, and indeed all that is necessary. ‘Prior

to [this, Nietzsche asks in the thought of the eternal

return] whether we desire the conditions by which we might

again become creators’lxii, and these conditions centre in

large part on our human vulnerability.

Self-creation, as I am suggesting here, is one of

the defining features of the Sovereign Individual, and

the conditions suggested by Nietzsche which are required

for self-creation to flourish are the conditions in which

we ‘affirm life’. The individual who answers - like

Zarathustra - yes to the demon, more than simply

exemplifying ‘the noble type’ of man who experiences

himself as determining values, is, for Nietzsche,

‘affirming life to the highest degree’. Nietzsche’s great

love of fate – ‘Amor Fati’ – is what he calls his ‘formulalx A. Nehamas, The Eternal Recurrence, p. 124.lxi M. Heidegger (1984) Nietzsche: Volume 2 The Eternal Recurrence of the Same. Farell Krell (Transl.) (New York: Harper & Row Publishers) p. 174.lxii M. Heidegger, Nietzsche, p. 174.

for greatness in a human being’, and is thus at the heart

of understanding what he means by wanting us to actively

affirm the doctrine of eternal recurrence: ‘that one

wants nothing to be different, not forward, or backward,

not in all eternity’.lxiii For Nietzsche, then, the

conditions under which we flourish as self-creators at

first might appear to almost undermine the very idea of

self-creation – for the conditions for affirming life are

those conditions in which we come to love our fate. It

would seem then that if ‘everything recurs all decision

and every effort and will to make things better is a

matter of indifference… [And] if everything turns in a

circle nothing is worth the trouble’.lxiv Self-creation,

however, makes little sense if we understand Nietzsche’s

love of fate as mere ‘fatalism’lxv – as accepting that our

future has already been lived and that we are simply

treading an identical path over again. For Nietzsche, an

acceptance of mere fatalism would amount to nothing more

than to adopt a will to nihilism, or a will to

nothingness - in which, rather than being self-creators

involved in the practice of active evaluation, we would

cease all evaluation and indeed creation, for everything

has already been done for us. Of course, this is

precisely the kind of will that Nietzsche was at pains to

reject throughout his works.

lxiii BG 1lxiv M. Heidegger, Nietzsche, p. 65.lxv Heidegger describes this as “that turning of need which unveilsitself in the awestruck moment as an eternity, an eternity pregnantwith Becoming of being as a whole: circulus vitriosusdeus” Nietzsche, p. 65.

In order to reconcile what seems at first to be a

possible contradiction between the idea of self-creating

individuals and the Amor Fati which Nietzsche suggests is

the condition for the flourishing of self-creators, what

is called for is the understanding of the doctrine not as

fatalistic in the sense that it preaches that we have in fact

already lived this whole life before and innumerable

times before. Rather, we should see his love of fate as

self-affirmation grounded in a firm belief that we are

solely constituted by our past in its entirety, and as

for our future - what we do will stem directly, and

necessarily, from who we are. Importantly, Nietzsche

would not explain his Amor Fati as being embodied by

someone who passively accepted and was overwhelmed by his

fate, but rather his Amor Fati is embodied in one who

understands that he ‘belongs to his fate insofar as he is

a creator, that is, one who is ever resolute in it’.lxvi

For the man who creates his own values, what this should

mean is the acceptance of our fate in light of the fact

that what is done in the past is done and what will be done

in the future will flow inevitably from our characters.

The ‘creative man’ would thus take control of the moment

without showing ‘doubt and paralysis in the face of’lxvii

what has come and what now is, rather he would see all

that is necessary as the very starting block of self-

creation and active evaluation. It is this that leads

Nietzsche to think that self-creation is really our

‘greatest burden’, a burden which the stoics seek to

transcend rather than rejoice in, claiming in The Gay

Science that the thought of eternal recurrence will either

weigh us down making us world-denying men of ressentiment or

show our strength as self-creating sovereign individuals.

According to Nietzsche:

If [the thought of the Eternal Recurrence of the same]…

gained power over you, as you are it would transform and

possibly crush you; the question in each and every thing,

‘Do you want this again and innumerable times again?’

would lie on your actions as the heaviest weight! Or how

well disposed would you have to become to yourself and to

life to long for nothing more fervently than for this ultimate

eternal confirmation and seal?lxviii

What Nietzsche seems to be proposing via the Doctrine of

Eternal Recurrence understood as a psychological testlxix

is thus that ‘the relative significance of our

experiences and actions is not determined once and for

all; it is rather a characteristic over which we have

serious control’lxx and it is this control that is

important for our flourishing. To answer yes to the

demon, we must be able to affirm our life in its

entirety, and in so doing, we affirm every good and bad

aspect whatsoever, and thus, we must also affirm every

aspect of ourselves that goes along with this. By facing

the prospect of our life’s eternal recurrence with joy,lxvi M. Heidegger, Nietzsche, p. 207.lxvii M. Heidegger, Nietzsche, p. 126.lxviii GS 341.

we determine the significance of our past, and this is

our first act of self-valuation from which we gain an

‘active will to self-empowerment’.lxxi It is this active

valuation of the self, and indeed self-creation, which

characterises Nietzsche’s Sovereign Individual, who

opposes the nihilistic ‘will to nothingness’ and instead

gains a ‘commanding will’, through which he gains a sense

of autonomy and mastery over himself and what his future

will hold.lxxii

So, for Nietzsche, although ‘Stoic thought is

suggestive of spiritual strength’ to some extent, he also

sees it as ‘superficial, with fateful consequences’.lxxiii

He says most tellingly:

I believe that we do not understand Stoicism for what it

really is. Its essential feature as an attitude of the

soul… [a]… comportment toward pain and representations of

the unpleasant: [it is] an intensification of a certain

heaviness and weariness to the utmost degree in order to

weaken the experience of pain. Its basic motifs are

paralysis and coldness; hence a form of anaesthesia…. In

summa: turning oneself into stone as a weapon against suffering

and in the future conferring all worthy names of divine-

like virtues upon a statue… I am very antipathetic to

this line of thought. It undervalues the value of pain

(it is as useful and necessary as pleasure), the value of

stimulation and suffering. It is finally compelled to

say: everything that happens is acceptable to me; nothing

is to be different. There are no needs over which it triumphs

because it has killed the passion for needs.lxxiv

Stoicism is a doctrine in which we acquire self-salvation

by transcending or escaping the world in which we live,

and this is precisely the kind of anti-naturalism which

Nietzsche is at pains throughout his works to rally us

against.lxxv For Nietzsche, ‘Stoic morality testifies to a

very high level reached by man’s moral consciousness, butlxix The doctrine in its entirety has largely been interpreted ineither one of two ways: namely as a ‘cosmological hypothesis’ or as a‘psychological test’ – in drawing this distinction, however, it mustbe pointed out that the two interpretations need not rule each otherout and that it would be entirely possible to view the doctrine asboth simultaneously. If we accept the cosmological hypothesisinterpretation of the doctrine, we agree that Nietzsche was making aclaim about the nature of the universe when he put the doctrineforward. Although this view has gained support amongst a fewNietzsche scholars, it is also widely disputed (especially in lightof Nietzsche’s ‘Naturalism’ and views on truth). The focus of thischapter, however, is on the psychological test assessment of thedoctrine, which requires neither the truth nor the coherence of thecosmological hypothesis. The central concern of this assessment is toask rather how we would react to the application of the doctrine ofeternal recurrence to our own lives – in other words what thepsychological implications of the idea that “If my life were torecur, it would recur in an exactly identical fashion” (A. Nehamas,The Eternal Recurrence, p. 127.) are. lxx A. Nehamas, The Eternal Recurrence, p. 131.lxxi R. White, (1998) The Return of the Master: An Interpretation of Nietzsche’s “Genealogy of Morals”, Philosophy and Phenomenological Research,LVIII (4), pp. 693-694.lxxii R. White, The Return of the Master.lxxiii R.O. Elveton, Nietzsche’s Stoicism, p. 193.lxxiv KSA 9 15 [55].lxxv Although the Stoics purport to be naturalists, Nietzsche thinksthat they offer a new brand of anti-naturalism by falsely transposingtheir ideals on nature. Nietzsche says in Beyond Good and Evil:“According to Nature you” want to live? O you noble Stoics, whatdeceptive words these are! Imagine a being like nature, wastefulbeyond measure, indifferent beyond measure, without purposes andconsideration… -how could you live according to this indifference?...In truth, the matter is altogether different: while you pretendrapturously to read the cannon of your law in nature, you wantsomething opposite… Your pride wants to impose your morality, yourideal, on nature” (BGE 9). What a more accurate version ofnaturalism, according to Nietzsche, teaches us is precisely thatvulnerability, contingency and risk are part of this world and soalso our lives in it. In seeking to transcend this aspect of the

in the last resort it is a decadent and pessimistic

morality of despair, which sees no meaning in life; it is

inspired by the fear of suffering. One must lose

sensitiveness to suffering and become indifferent – that

is the only way out’.lxxvi For Nietzsche, this is

unacceptable, and for this reason he characterises his

hero, the Sovereign Individual, against this stoic ideal

as having ‘the strength to suffer pain and to add to it’.lxxvii

Unlike the stoic, then, the Sovereign Individual does not

seek to escape the misery and pain which comes along with

being vulnerable to all the chance and necessity which

the world holds in store for us, but seeks to actively

affirm it, live through and with it. The stoics cannot

affirm life to the highest degree precisely because they

seek to transcend their vulnerability and the suffering

of this world, and for Nietzsche, this is symptomatic of

the ‘will to nothingness’ – a form of nihilism seen in

‘Platonism-late Judaism, Christianity and ‘slave

morality’’lxxviii. As May elegantly explains:

They will ‘nothing’ because they are driven by an all-

consuming will to escape a world of suffering, a will

that, because it repudiates what is constitutive of

living – the loss or elusiveness of what we most desire,

world and our lives we strive towards what he refers to as ‘other-worldy’ hopes, and cannot properly affirm this life, this world, asit is, and this will impoverish our experience of it. lxxvi R.O. Elveton, Nietzsche’s Stoicism, p. 199.lxxvii R.O. Elveton, Nietzsche’s Stoicism, p. 200.lxxviii See S. May (2009) Nihilism and the Free Self. In K. Gemes & S.May (Eds.) Nietzsche on Freedom and Autonomy (Oxford: Oxford UniversityPress) p. 89.

such as loved ones, health, achievements, predictability,

joy, and ultimately life itself – wills what is not human

life, not the world of transience, chance, fate, and time

in which we are actually situated. In refusing to affirm

that life is structured by the possibility of loss they

imagine an ideal order out of which this possibility has

been conceptually airbrushed, an order that is clearly

not the one into which humans are born.lxxix

Thus, it is only by affirming his own vulnerability that

the Sovereign Individual is able to engage in ‘affirming

life to the highest degree’.

Suffering and Laughter: The Sovereign Individual,

Nihilism and Morality

Nietzsche claims in The Gay Science that with the advent of

‘the death of God’, what may be experiences is the

collapse of all moral values, since they were ‘built on

this faith [theism], leaned on it, had grown into it –

for example, our entire European morality.’lxxx Nietzsche’s

greatest fear is that after ‘the death of God’ what we

will see in modern society is the rise of nihilism.

Although he realised that society’s reliance on theism

had been extremely detrimental to our positive valuation

of ourselves, he was acutely aware of the danger involved

in pulling the rug of theism out from under us. Such a

move, Nietzsche feared could easily result in the

lxxix S. May Nihilism and the Free Self, p. 89.

‘complete loss of all significance’lxxxi for all values. If

the foundation (theism) of our values is removes, he

thought, we may think that we have no reason for maintain

any values at all. Though Nietzsche feared that with the

advent of God’s death nihilism would gain a foothold in

modern society, he feared in equal part that the exact

opposite and equally dangerous reaction to ‘the death of

God’ may result: namely, that atheism would see no

changes being made to the current oppressive moral

system. Nietzsche proposes then, that in order to avoid

simply maintaining a set of values which he exposes to be

‘by our own standard, poisonously immoral’lxxxii, as well as

the threat of nihilism, we must begin the project of

revaluation of our values – a project which Nietzsche

embarks on himself in On the Genealogy of Morals. In his

project of revaluation, Nietzsche asks us to consider the

Ascetic Ideal, and he proposes that the Sovereign

Individual must reject the Ascetic Ideal in favour of the

Doctrine of Eternal Recurrence.

Here we can compare the role Nietzsche sees Ascetic

Ideals and the Doctrine of Eternal Recurrence playing in

interpreting suffering in my life. Ascetic ideals would

justify the suffering I experience in my life by looking

for a transcendental justification of the suffering: I

appeal to the notion that this world and all it has to

offer is lesser than the pleasures I will find in somelxxx GS 343.lxxxi W. Kaufmann (1974) Nietzsche: Philosopher, Psychologist, Antichrist (New Jersey: Princeton University Press) p. 101.lxxxii W. Kaufmann, Nietzsche: Philosopher, Psychologist, Antichrist, p. 113.

other world which I will only reach by denying myself the

‘worthless’ pleasures of this world – I am essentially

the ‘author’ of my own suffering. What Nietzsche finds

objectionable about this kind of ‘justification’ of the

suffering faced in this life, is the fact that it not

only denies the pleasures of this world and life (which

Nietzsche thinks is all that we can know and all that

should affect us), but that it looks forward to the time

of eventual release from this life; and it is this very

objection which the Doctrine of Eternal Recurrence seeks

to point out. What Nietzsche points to in the Doctrine of

Eternal Recurrence is that we are denying life its

fullest beauty and joy if we continually look forward to

our escape from it. The doctrine asks us to look for a

new way to justify our sufferings – given that we will

have to live through them ad infinitum. And it is only

when we have found a way to justify our sufferings (local

– with respect to achieving a goal, and global – with

respect to suffering at all) as meaningful in this life –

that we in fact will our suffering – that we will be

affirming life to its fullest. Unlike the man of

ressentiment then, the Sovereign Individual, in accepting

the Doctrine of Eternal Recurrence and accepting that it

will entail the eternal recurrence of the pain

experienced in this life, rejects the notion of the

‘Buddhists’ Nirvána’lxxxiii, in which what is sought is the

life without pain - and indeed what Nietzsche sees as

central to the modern European Buddhism which seeks to

devalue pain and suffering. Perhaps, then, we can see the

doctrine of eternal recurrence as Nietzsche’s attempt to

provide the alternative to the Ascetic Ideal as a way to

give meaning to our suffering in a world in which we no

longer have the transcendental to appeal to for

otherworldly hope or in which we can cling to the current

moral code which equally seeks to avoid suffering.

Nietzsche’s cry behind the Doctrine of Eternal Recurrence

then resounds as follows: ‘Remain true to the earth and

do not believe those who speak to you of otherworldly

hopes… they are despisers of life, atrophying and self-

poisoned men, of whom the earth is weary’.lxxxiv With the

advent of the death of God, we cannot passively await our

emancipation from this life any longer, but rather see

this life as the eternal life. And in so doing, we must

affirm all things which have gone, all things that we

thus are, and move into the future as Sovereign

Individuals able of self-creation, valuation and

expressing the highest affirmation of life:

he who rejoices in this prospect is the man who has

health and self-discipline to overcome both the hankering

after other-worldly values and the nausea of the nihilism

that threatens when that hankering is shown to be

vain.lxxxv

lxxxiii J. Llewelyn (1988) Value, Authenticity and the Death of God. In G.H.R. Parkinson (Ed.) An Encyclopedia of Philosophy (London and New York: Routledge) p. 645.lxxxiv N. Rodgers and M. Thompson (2005) Philosophers Behaving Badly (London and Chester Springs: Peter Owen Publishers) p. 82.lxxxv J. Llewelyn, Value, Authenticity and the Death of God, p. 646.

Further, we can understand Nietzsche’s Sovereign

Individual as embodying the new ethic of the Doctrine of

Eternal Recurrence in light of Nietzsche’s broader

attempt to promote what he calls ‘the gay science’. For

Nietzsche the Doctrine of Eternal Recurrence, feeds into

his notion of ‘the gay science’ because when we have

become the kind of person who is able to affirm what the

demon asks, answering yes to his question, a certain kind

of ‘cheerfulness’ washes over us – a sense of joy of

spirit. The thought of eternal recurrence gives meaning

not only to all suffering, but to all pleasure as well

for Nietzsche’s Sovereign Individual (unlike the man of

ressentiment) because for the Sovereign Individual ‘pain may

even be an ingredient of pleasure’lxxxvi itself. We thus

emerge from the pit of despair into which nihilism, post

the death of God, cast us not merely as one who survives

a trauma but one who has an altogether new lease on life,

practicing the ‘gay science’ with a Dionysian kind of

laughter. It is this thought which sheds light on what

Nietzsche means when he claims:

I should actually risk an order of rank among

philosophers depending on the rank of their laughter –

all the way up to those capable of a golden laughter. And

supposing that the gods, too, philosophize… I should not

doubt that they also know how to laugh the while in a

superhuman and new way.lxxxvii

lxxxvi J. Llewelyn, Value, Authenticity and the Death of God, p. 645.lxxxvii BGE 294, emphasis added.

Schopenhauer points out the difference ‘between the

Greeks and the Hindoos… the former has for its object to

facilitate the leading of a happy life… the latter, on

the contrary, the liberation and emancipation from life

altogether’.lxxxviii Nietzsche, however, points to the

difference between the Christian (current and slavish)

morality which the Genealogy is focused on bringing into

question, and the Dionysian life affirming faith which

lies at the root of his Doctrine of Eternal Recurrence.

The former is in Nietzsche’s opinion stifling and

essentially anti-life, while the later with its love of

fate and fostering of the Sovereign Individual as the

truly life-affirming human is what he sees as the only

cure to the nihilism or moral stagnation of the age.

Concluding Remarks

In his seminal paper ‘Freedom of the Will and the Concept

of a Person’, Harry Frankfurt outlines what he takes to

be most distinctive of our personhood. Personhood, for

Frankfurt, is a term which has been misappropriated by

P.F Strawson precisely because of the lack of agency talk

in his discussions of personhood. Against the Strawsonian

view in which the person is defined exclusively as

something which has a mind and a body, Frankfurt outlines

what he takes to be most distinctive of our personhood,lxxxviii A. Schopenhauer (1914) On Ethics, and, Contribution to the Doctrine of the Affirmation and Negation of the Will-to-Live. In Belfort Bax, E (Ed.) Selected Essays of Schopenhauer (London: G. Bell and Sons LTD) p. 263.

those characteristics and abilities which he claims are

‘essential to persons’ or which are ‘uniquely human’, as

primarily defined by our agency. Recall that on

Frankfurt’s account, and similarly on other formal

analytic accounts which follow Frankfurt’s general

framework, it is our ability to govern and control our

own actions and behaviour that is the distinguishing mark

of our humanity, since it is this ability that is taken

to make us the authors of ourselves and our lives. And

agency is taken to be what constitutes our personhood

because agency gives us the kind of control over

ourselves that is thought to distinguish us from the rest

of the animal kingdom.

In this chapter, I have argued against the

Frankfurtian picture of the role of agency in personhood,

although I do, nevertheless, think that agency is an

important constitutive element of our personhood. There

is, of course, something quite remarkable (and arguably

unique) about our capacity to exercise this kind of

control over ourselves. And here, I do think that

Frankfurt points out precisely what is, in part, wrong

with the Strawsonian view of personhood. However, I have

also argued that to characterise agency as of primary

importance in our understanding of personhood is not only

to misunderstand the nature of our personhood, it is also

a dangerous misunderstanding which impoverishes our idea

of both personhood and human flourishing, or living the

‘good life’ (in broadly speaking ethical terms). My life,

I think, would not be recognisably human and it would be

radically impoverished, if not wholly undesirable, if I

did not care very deeply about the things over which I

have no control – specifically we could mention concerns

such as how my projects actually fare in the external

world and my interpersonal relationships with other

people. Nussbaum is right, I have argued, to point out

that our human vulnerability and our reaction to this

vulnerability are necessary for understanding what

personhood entails. Where I have disagreed with Nussbaum

is in her reading of Nietzsche. Nietzsche, I have argued,

similarly to Nussbaum, disagrees with Frankfurt about the

role of agency and vulnerability in personhood. And this

is precisely where Nietzsche’s account of personhood,

like Nussbaum’s, gains its strength. lxxxix

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Z Thus Spoke Zarathustra

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SE Schopenhauer as Educator

Hollingdale, R. J. (Trans.). (1989). Friedrich Nietzsche:

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TI Twilight of the Idols; The Anti-Christ

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BGE Beyond Good and Evil

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BT The Birth of Tragedy from the Spirit of Music

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GM On the Genealogy of Morals

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KSA Unpublished Works

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