DOI: 10.1111/j.1468-0378.2007.00259.

Nietzsche on Art and Freedom

Aaron Ridley

There are passages in Nietzsche that can be read as contributions to the free will/
determinism debate. When read in that way, they reveal a fairly amateurish
metaphysician with little of real substance or novelty to contribute; and if these
readings were apt or perspicuous, it seems to me, they would show that
Nietzsches thoughts about freedom were barely worth pausing over. They
would simply confirm the impressionamply bolstered from other quarters
that Nietzsche was not at his best when addressing the staple questions of
philosophy. But these readings sell Nietzsche short. He had next to no systematic
interest in metaphysics, and his concern with the question of freedom was not
motivated by metaphysical considerations. Ratherand as with all of Nietzsches
concernshis motivations were ethical. He was interested, not in the relation of
the human will to the causal order of nature, but in the relation between freedom
and the good life, between the will and exemplary human living. Read from this
perspective, Nietzsches remarks about freedom actually add up to something.
And what they add up to is one aspect of his attempt to understand life after the
model of art. Beauty, for Kant, was an image of the moral.1 For Nietzsche, by
contrastand the contrast can be hard to spell outart was an image of the
ethical.2 My hope here is to begin to explain why Nietzsche might have thought
that the issue of freedom was relevant to that. In sections 13, I attempt to show
why Nietzsche is not best read as a participant in the standard free will/
determinism debate; in sections 46, I try to spell out the ethical conception of
freedom that he develops instead.

1. Threats to Freedom
I have suggested that Nietzsche was not much of a metaphysician, and I think
that that is true. But in order to make clear what I mean by this, and so what
swings on the suggestion, it may be helpful to start with a quick sketch of the sort
of debate that I do not believe that Nietzsche was primarily interested in.
In modern philosophical discussion, human freedom and responsibility are
often thought to be threatened by what might be termed physical determinism.
Freedom to act appears to involve, at a minimum, the ability to choose how to act.
And a choice does not seem to be a genuine choice unless an agent has more than
one alternative course of action open to him. So freedom to do something seems
to require that, at the very least, the possibility of not doing it (as a result of
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choice) should also be open. But this minimum sense of freedom to act, and the
notion of responsibility that goes with it, would seem to be threatened if it were
true that the physical state of the universe is predetermined at every point in
time, as certain views about the laws of physics, together with certain views
about causation, suggest that it is. For on these views it would follow that the
physical state of our bodies is also predetermined at every point. And if this is
right, then, given that actions generally involve the body, it seems that in general
an agent can never be free, for he never has a genuine choice open to him: at any
given time, there is only one possibility concerning the state of his body. There are
several standard responses to this apparent conflict between freedom and
determinism. Incompatibilists think that the conflict is real, with some denying
that we are really free and others denying that determinism is or could be true;
while compatibilists, on the other hand, deny the reality of the conflict, either
rejecting the view that freedom to act requires more than one option, or claiming
that the kind of determinism at issue, when properly understood, does not
exclude the possibility of alternative courses of action.
With this brief sketch in mind, lets turn to a well-known passage from Beyond
Good and Evil, in which Nietzsche denounces the idea of a self-causing will: the
causa sui, he says,
. . . is the best self-contradiction that has been conceived so far, it is a sort
of rape and perversion of logic; but the extravagant pride of man has
managed to entangle itself profoundly and frightfully with just this
nonsense. The desire for freedom of the will in the superlative
metaphysical sense . . . ; the desire to bear the entire and ultimate
responsibility for ones actions oneself, and to absolve God, the world,
ancestors, chance and society involves nothing less than to be precisely
this causa sui and . . . to pull oneself up into existence by the hair, out of
the swamps of nothingness. Now, if someone can see through the
cloddish simplicity of this famous concept free will and eliminate it
from his mind, I would then ask him to take his enlightenment a step
further and likewise eliminate from his head the opposite of the nonconcept free will: I mean the unfree will. (BGE 21)
a point that he makes again later, most notably in The Anti-Christ (AC 15). It is
just about possible to see how these claims, taken together, might be construed as
a statement of compatibilism.3 The claim in the first two sentences might be taken
as a denial that the will is capable of traducing the causal order of nature; the
claim in the final sentence as a denial that the will is consequently unfree. It may
then seem natural to conclude that Nietzsche thought that the will was a part of
the causal order of nature, and that it was free in some strictly unsuperlative,
unmetaphysical senseperhaps, in fact, in a sense much like Humes, where
ones choices are construed as free to the extent that they are caused by ones
character.4
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So Nietzsche can be seen as responding to the worry that human freedom is

threatened by what I have called physical determinism. But this would surely be
an odd way to read the passage. For not only does Nietzsche fail to root his
argument in reflections about physics or causation,5 he quite explicitly roots it
elsewherein talk of God, the world, ancestors, chance and society, terms that,
with the possible exception of the world, have little to do with the debate within
which a position such as compatibilism has its natural place. Nowhere, moreover,
does Nietzsche even hint at what sort of compatibilism he might have in mind.
Does he think that our freedom to act does not require that we have more than
one option? Or does he deny that determinism, properly understood, excludes
the possibility of alternative courses of action? He is perfectly silent on the matter.
And this strongly suggests that his remarks here are not best understood as a
contribution to the standard philosophical debate.
It is altogether more plausible to read him as addressing a different way in
which freedom and responsibility might be thought to be threatened, a way that
is, as it were, orthogonal to the worry about determinism. Here, freedom is
thought to be seriously diminished, if not entirely eliminated, by (one or several
of) such things as ones history, character and temperament, personal genetic
make-up, economic position, the conventions of ones society, peer pressure,
Gods influence, and even by the very fact of being a human being, given the
various physiological and psychological limitations that come with that. This is a
worry to which 19th century novelists, for example, appear to have been
particularly prone. Zola is of course is a rich source of illustrative material; 6 but
here, just as characteristically, is a passage from Tolstoy:
Do not the very actions for which the historians applaud Alexander I
the attempts at liberalism at the beginning of his reign, his struggle with
Napoleon . . . proceed from those very sourcesthe circumstances of
his birth, breeding and life that made his personality what it wasfrom
which also flowed the actions for which they censure him, like the Holy
Alliance . . . and the reaction of the 1820s? (Tolstoy 1982 Epilogue, Part 1, 1)
And he summarizes the point a little later on: Free will, he says, is for history
only an expression connoting what we do not know about the laws of human life
(Tolstoy 1982: Epilogue, Part 2, 10).7
A view of this sort does not arise from the worry that a plausible minimum
requirement for freedom might be inconsistent with a certain conception of the
physical universe. It arises, rather, from a certain conception of what being free
would really amount to.8 In its most radical form, this conception involves the
idea that one is not free at all unless one is free from every kind of constraint that
ones circumstances might seem to impose; perhaps even from the constraint of
being oneself. Here, a free choice is the choice of a free will, a will liberated, in
effect, from everything. And this conception is nothing but the causa suithe view
that an act of free will is not caused or affected by anything other than itself. On
this reading, therefore, Nietzsche rejects as unintelligible a particular conception
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of freedomfreedom in the superlative metaphysical senseand rejects too

the sense of unfreedom which would mark the lack of this.9
Now of course one might choose to label a supporter of the causa sui a sort of
radical incompatibilist, and Nietzsche a compatibilist on account of his
rejection of that view. But this would not turn Nietzsches remarks into a
contribution to the standard debate. It is true that some participants in that
debate might be thought to espouse a version of the causa sui, in the sense that
they do not believe that an act of will can be caused by anything other than an
agent.10 But the radical incompatibilist claims more than this: his claim is that
no act of free will is caused or affected by anything other than itself. And it is this
sort of incompatibilist that Nietzsche has in his sights. It would therefore be
misleading to label Nietzsche a compatibilist, for at least three reasons. First, as
I have said, it would resituate the disagreement between Nietzsche and his
opponent in the context of the free will/determinism debate, a debate in which
for the reasons I have givenit does not belong. Second, it would obscure the fact
that Nietzsche clearly agrees with the radical incompatibilist that freedom in the
superlative metaphysical sense is incompatible with the constraints imposed by
ancestors, chance, society and the like. And third, it would wholly occlude
Nietzsches real reason for picking the quarrel in the first placeto which I turn
in a moment.11

2. Varieties of Necessity
First, though, and in light of the foregoing, it would be sensible to say a little
about the way in which notions such as constraint and necessity need to be
understood if Nietzsches position is to be appreciated. He does not, as I have
remarked, confine his attention toor even seem especially interested inthe
sorts of constraint or necessity that are imposed by ordinary physical causation.
Rather, he is interested in the role that factors such as God, the world, ancestors,
chance and society may play in our livesin the ways, that is, in which our
peculiarly human circumstances may shape what we do, or dont do. And
constraints or necessities of this kind come in a wide variety of forms. At the most
causal end of the scale we might consider facts such as that we are incapable of
unaided flight, or that too many carrots will make us sick (physical constraints,
incidentally, that are quite different from, and which may or may not presuppose,
the kind of physical determinism that concerns the standard incompatibilist).
Less causally, we might pass from constraints such as having to speak English if
one wants to be understood in England, say, or the strong likelihood of not
winning the lottery this week, through the influence upon us of the social
discouragement of murder, theft and undressing in public, for instance, until we
arrive eventually at constraints and necessities of a sort that are, as one might put
it, purely normative. Examples at this end of the scale might include the
constraints imposed by the norms of proper spelling, say, or by the laws of tennis
concerning tie-breaks, or by the rules for voice-leading in counterpoint. Here,
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factors that might be glossed in terms of ancestors and society move centrestage, and ordinary physical causation drops from view (which is not, of course,
to deny that the operation of these normative constraints and necessities
presupposes the regularities of nature that ordinary physical causation brings
with it). Nietzsche himself does not trouble to make these distinctions explicit,
but, as will become clearand as one might anyway expect, given the general
character of his concernsit is the more normatively structured constraints and
necessities that primarily engage his attention. And this emphasis, of course,
serves further to underline the difference between Nietzsches interest in the
issue of freedom and that which motivates the standard debate about the
compatibility or otherwise of freedom with physical determinism.
3. Strong Wills, Weak Wills
So what is the point of Nietzsches claims about freedom and unfreedom of the
will? He tells us what it is at the end of the same section:
It is almost always a symptom of what is lacking in himself when a
thinker sees in every causal connection and psychological necessity
something of constraint, need, compulsion to obey, pressure, and
unfreedom; it is suspicious to have such feelingsthe person betrays
himself. And in general, if I have observed correctly, the unfreedom of
the will is regarded as a problem from two entirely opposite
standpoints, but always in a profoundly personal manner: some will
not give up their responsibility, their belief in themselves, the personal
right to their merits at any price (the vain races belong to this class).
Others, on the contrary, do not wish to be answerable for anything, or
blamed for anything, and owing to inward self-contempt, seek to lay the
blame for themselves somewhere else. The latter, when they write books, are
in the habit today of taking the side of criminals; a sort of socialist pity is
their most attractive disguise. (BGE 21)
Nietzsches point, then, is not very surprisingly an elaboration of the notorious
claim he had made fifteen sections earlier, namely, that:
. . . every great philosophy so far has been . . . the personal confession of
its author and a kind of involuntary and unconscious memoir; also that
the moral (or immoral) intentions in every philosophy constituted the
real germ of life from which the whole plant had grown. (BGE 6)
In the context of the causa sui argument, therefore, his point is simply that
those who insist that they are free in the superlative metaphysical sense do so
out of vanity; while those who insist that the will is radically unfreei.e. who
share the radical view about what freedom would amount to, but deny that they
have itdo so out of inward self-contempt. It is true that Nietzsche thinks that
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both parties hold views that are incoherent.12 But this is more or less incidental.
His central concern is with the way in which those views spring from, and also
reinforce, certain formations of character. His concern, in other words, is ethical
it is about the connection between ones views about oneself as an agent (as
radically free, or as radically unfree) and how one sees oneself as a self (with
vanity, or with contempt). Andsince Nietzsche was not a fan of either kind of
self-relationneither of the views that he canvasses strikes him as symptomatic
of a well-lived life.
We can conclude, then, that where Nietzsche speaks positively of freedom and
of freedom of the willand he often does speak positively of themhe does so
not in order to advance a metaphysical thesis, but in order to recommend a kind
of self-relation that might support, and be supported by, an understanding of
freedom that has nothing, in its primary motivations, to do with the free will/
determinism debate at all.13
Before moving on from section 21 of Beyond Good and Evil, let me quote again a
sentence that I have already quoted, but this time prefaced by the sentence that
immediately precedes it:
The unfree will is mythology; in real life it is only a matter of strong and
weak wills. It is almost always a symptom of what is lacking in himself
when a thinker sees in every causal connection and psychological
necessity something of constraint, need, compulsion to obey, pressure,
and unfreedom; it is suspicious to have such feelingsthe person betrays
himself.
Two things are worth highlighting here. The first is that, in insisting that the
important issue is the strength or weakness of will of individual agents, Nietzsche
is once again underlining the distance that separates his concerns from those that
motivate the standard debate. Within that debate, after all, everyone is either
equally free or equally unfree, and there is no place for consideration of the
relative qualities of different individuals wills. This point, I think, should allay
any remaining temptation to read the causa sui passage as if it were concerned to
mark out a position within the debate about free will and determinism.
The second thing to notice is that we have here the only hint in the entire
passage of Nietzsches positive conception of freedom, and of the self-relation
that it expresses. What it tells us is that weak-willed characters experience every
sort of necessity in the wrong way: the vain weak ones experience it as
constraint, as a threat to their responsibility, to their belief in themselves;
while the self-contemptuously weak ones experience it as an opportunity to lay
the blame for themselves somewhere else. Both, that iswhether chafing against it or
welcoming itexperience necessity as, precisely, unfreedom; and this is what
Nietzsche finds objectionable, and signals his objection to by labelling weak.
We can take it, then, that Nietzsches strong-willed characters respond to
necessity differentlyneither as a threat to some fantasy of a metaphysically
superlative sense of responsibility, nor as an excuse to abdicate responsibility
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altogether. Indeed, we can take it that, for the strong-willed characters whom
Nietzsche admires, the sense of necessity must somehow be integral to taking
responsibility for oneself, and mustalso somehowbe integral to the proper
experience of freedom. Section 21 of Beyond Good and Evil can get us no further
than this. But the hints that it offers do tell us where to go for more, and, in
following up on some of the most obvious of these, we will start to see how the
issue of freedom is indeed central to Nietzsches understanding of the relation
between art and ethics.
4. Style and Necessity
A natural first port of call is section 290 The Gay Science, where the notion of art
is brought together with the notions of constraint and strength of character. The
passage goes as follows:
One thing is needful.To give style to ones charactera great and rare
art! It is practised by those who survey all the strengths and weaknesses
of their nature and then fit them into an artistic plan until . . . even
weaknesses delight the eye . . . [W]hen the work is finished, it becomes
evident how the constraint of a single taste governed and formed
everything large and small . . . . It will be the strong and domineering
natures that enjoy their finest gaiety in such constraint and perfection
under a law of their own . . . Conversely, it is the weak characters . . . that
hate the constraint of style: they feel that if this bitterly evil compulsion
were to be imposed on them, they would be demeanedthey become
slaves as soon as they serve; they hate to serve.
Constraint, in this passage, is equated to the discipline of style, to the exercise of
a single taste; and the effect of that discipline is the imposition of form, where the
imposition of formany formis regularly treated by Nietzsche as synonymous
with artistry as such.14 So the artist of character is one who imposes form upon
himself, and gains the most exquisite pleasure from doing so.
His is a strong character, we are told; and the connection to the strength
alluded to in the causa sui argument is evident. Unlike the weak characters
whom Nietzsche mentions, self-stylists do not regard the necessity that they
impose on themselves as a threat to their belief in themselvesas a sentence of
slaveryand still less, for obvious reasons, do they regard it as any sort of excuse
to abdicate responsibility for themselves. Rather, they experience it as the
condition of being perfected under their own lawof which more in a
moment.15 So these characters welcome the constraint of style. We should also note
that that constraint is structured dialectically.16 On the one hand, there is the form
that is imposed; on the other hand, there is the resistance of the relevant
materialthat is, the elements of the self-stylists characterto having any given
form imposed upon it.17 That the latter is also a constraint that Nietzsche
recognises is clear: Here, he says, the ugly that could not be removed is
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concealed; there it has been reinterpreted and made sublime. Much that is vague
and resisted shaping has been saved and exploited for distant views (GS 290).
So the exquisite pleasure that the self-stylist takes in constraint derives from the
interplay between the constraint of the form that is imposed and the constraint,
or resistance, of the material that is to be formed.18 The significance of this second
sort of constraint is noted by Nietzsche, in several registers, elsewhere.19 As a
prelude to self-stylisation, it features in Daybreak, first as an injunction to reflect
on ones circumstances and spare no effort in observing them, since our
circumstances do not only conceal and reveal our power to usno! they
magnify and diminish it (D 326); and then in the observation that One can
dispose of ones drives like a gardener and . . . cultivate the shoots of anger, pity,
curiosity, vanity as productively and profitably as a beautiful fruit tree on a trellis
. . . All this we are at liberty to do: but how many know we are at liberty to do it?
(D 560). More famously, and from the midst of the stylising process itself, the
place of the second constraint is evoked wonderfully in Nietzsches finest remark
about the love of fate: I want to learn more and more to see as beautiful what is
necessary in things, he says; then I shall be one of those who make things
beautiful. Amor fati: let that be my love henceforth! (GS 276). The self-stylist thus
imposes a necessity upon himself, his style, in the very process of accommodating, of understanding and even affirming, what is necessary in things, himself
included.20 And this, says Nietzsche, is an arta source of exquisite pleasure
for those who are strong enough to engage in it.
5. Artistic Agency
Art, strength and necessity, or constraint, are thus brought together here, and in
some potentially fruitful ways. But we seem to have lost sight of freedom. And to
get it back into view, we need to return to Beyond Good and Evil; for there, in a
very significant passage, things begin to crystallise. The passage in question
section 188must be quoted at some length. It goes like this:
. . . one should recall the compulsion under which every language so far
has achieved strength and freedomthe metrical compulsion of rhyme
and rhythm. How much trouble the poets and orators of all peoples have
taken . . . submitting abjectly to capricious laws, as anarchists say,
feeling free, even free-spirited. But the curious fact is that all there is or
has been on earth of freedom, subtlety, boldness, dance, and masterly
sureness, whether in thought itself . . . , or in rhetoric and persuasion, in
the arts just as in ethics, has developed only owing to the tyranny of
such capricious laws; and in all seriousness, the probability is by no
means small that this is nature and naturaland not that laisser aller.
Every artist knows how far from any feeling of letting himself go his
most natural state isthe free ordering, placing, disposing, giving form
in the moment of inspirationand how strictly and subtly he obeys
thousandfold laws precisely then, laws that precisely on account of their
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hardness and determination defy all formulation through concepts . . .

[G]iven that, something always develops, and has developed, for whose
sake it is worth while to live on earth; for example, virtue, art, music,
dance, reason, spirituality.
Nietzsches point here can be summarised, crudely, in three related claims. The
first is that fully effective agencyor masterly sureness, as he puts ithas, as
one of its necessary conditions, the tyranny of . . . capricious laws. The second is
that the artistwhose most characteristic laws defy all formulation through
conceptsis exemplary of such agency. The third claim is that the exercise of
fully effective agency, so conceived, equals freedomthat is, freedom in the
ethical sense with which Nietzsche is concerned. I will try to say something about
each of these claims in turn.

5.1
The first claim connects agency to the notion of law, or, as Nietzsche also terms
it, compulsion. Law or compulsion, here, can be regarded as equivalent for
our purposes, as indeed for Nietzsches, to the kinds of (normative) constraint
and necessity that we have primarily been discussing so far. And submission to
such laws or constraints is taken to be a (necessary) condition of masterly
sureness.21 This is a highly significant move, which for the first time marks
clearly the distinctive relation of Nietzsches strong characters to the forms of
necessity that interest him. Rather than regarding such constraints or necessities
as limits on their powersas those weak characters do, who feel that if [these]
bitterly evil compulsion[s] were to be imposed on them, they would be
demeanedthe strong recognise such constraints as essential to the effective
exercise of those powers. And it is reasonably easy to see that Nietzsche must be
right about this. My quotation from section 188 picked it up at the point at which
Nietzsche mentions language, and speaks of the metrical compulsion of rhyme
and rhythm. But we neednt appeal to poetry to see what he means. A person
who insisted, for example, that submitting abjectly to the capricious rules of
grammar and punctuation inhibited or limited his powers of linguistic
expression would show that he had no idea what linguistic expression was.22
Like Nietzsches weak characters, he would fail to recognise that it is only by
working with and through those rulesby taking the trouble, as Nietzsche puts
itthat effective linguistic expression is so much as possible. And as for
linguistic agency, so for agency in general. Nietzsches highly plausible thought,
in other words, is that fully effective agency requires the acknowledgement, and
indeed the internalisation, of the norms or necessities constitutive of the practices
through which that agency is exercised; and on this picture, clearly enough,
constraint, law or compulsion feature, not as limits on our powers of acting,
but as their sine qua non.
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Now it might be objected here that this is such a weak claim as to be barely
worth making: of course one must play by the rules if one is to play the game at
all. But this isnt a well-directed objection. Nietzsches claim at this point is weak,
deliberately so. He merely intends to steer off the laisser aller conception of
freedomthe thought that any and every constraint necessarily curtails ones
power to act.23 Nor, by the way, is he concerned to distinguish here between
admirable and despicable forms of agency. It may well be that some of the norms
and constraints constitutive of our practices are unwelcome, or even offensive
as, for example, I might conclude when I find that I have to work with and
through the rules of an appeals process that I think defective against a decision
that I consider unjust. But the offensiveness of these norms does not preclude the
possibility of masterly sureness in the navigation of them, as the existence of
certain kinds of lawyer attests. The shysters powers are made possible, rather
than limited, by the norms constitutive of our legal practices, however much we
might deplore some of those norms and his sort of mastery. And Nietzsches
point at this stage requires no more than this. He is claiming only that the
acknowledgement of capricious laws is a necessary condition of engaging
effectively in any human practice whatsoever, a point that the laisser aller
conception of freedom wholly obscures.

5.2
The second claim was that artists are exemplary of fully effective agency, so
conceived, and that they are so, at least in part, because their thousandfold laws
. . . defy all formulation through concepts. Nietzsche is clearly drawing, here, on
the Kantian claim that genius gives the rule to artor, more strictly, the claim that
nature gives the rule to art, and does so via genius. Nietzsche modifies Kants
thought in one respect: for Nietzsche, the ultimate source of the rule that is given
to art is not nature, in Kants sense, but rather what we might term second
nature, the nature that is constituted by our practices and the tyranny of the
capricious laws that constitute them.24 Otherwise, though, his claim about the
thousandfold laws of art is substantially the same as Kantsnamely, that since
exemplary artistic activity is neither arbitrary nor chaotic, but rather appears lawlike (to be a matter of giving form), and yet since the procedures for such
activity cannot be codified, the rule that is given to art cannot, in Kants words,
have a concept for its determining ground (Kant 1952: 46): it cannot be taught,
but must instead be gathered from the performance, i.e. from the product, which
others may use to put their own talent to the test, so as to let it serve as a model,
not for imitation, but for following (Kant 1952: 47).
Why, then, does Nietzsche regard the exercise of a form of agency whose
enabling necessities are not merely capricious and numerous, but also
unformulable, as exemplary of agency as such? There are a number of ways in
which one might answer this question, but the most economicalfor present
purposesis the following. The laws that are in operation here are, because
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unformulable, also inconceivable except as internal to what Kant calls the

performance, that is, to the exemplary exercise of artistic agency itself; therefore
those laws cannot be held up as a standard external to the exercise of that agency,
and so cannot be chafed against, from the perspective of that agency, as any kind
of limitation upon it. Artistic agency is exemplary for Nietzsche, then, because it
is a form of agency that simply cannot be engaged in effectively by those weak
characters who construe every kind of necessity as a demeaning constraint, as a
threat to their belief in themselves.25 To exercise artistic agency at all, in other
words, just is to acknowledge that necessity is a condition of (pointful, artistic)
action. So, since necessity is integral to every type of agency, this kind of agency is
exemplary of agency as suchor so Nietzsche concludes.
Again, though, an objection suggests itself, this time in the form of a dilemma.
Either these laws are indeed laws, it might be said, in which case they must be
formulable and capable of being held up as an external standard; or else they
really are unformulable, in which case they arent laws at all, and can be said to
be internal only in the uninteresting sense that they refer to the whims or
preferences of some individual agent.
But this is a false dilemma. As Aristotle argued, the fact of unformulability
does not, by itself, indicate the absence of norms that transcend the idiosyncrasies
of individual agents: the good man perceives what a situation requires of him,
even though there is no statable rule that allows him to do this.26 Now of course
we might choose to withhold the name law from what the good man is obedient
to in seeing what is demanded of him. But this would be a merely terminological
decision. It would not affect the fact that the good mans perception is
independent ofand has a normative force that is independent ofhis whims
or preferences, despite the fact that there is no formulable procedure for
perceiving what he perceives. And this, translated into an artistic register, is
Nietzsches point. When Beethoven saw, for example, how the coda to the finale
of his C-minor symphony had to go, he was answerable to the demands of his
material: he could have got it right, he could have got it wrong. But prior to his
compositional act no one, himself included, could have stated a rule for arriving
at what he arrived at. Rather, he strictly and subtly obeyed laws that emerged
only in the course of his performancethat were, as I have put it, internal to the
exercise of his agency.27 Now of course these laws might, in one sense, be stated
ex post factowhich is to say, Beethovens compositional acts can be made
retrospectively intelligible in terms of musical logic (rather than in terms, merely,
of his whims or preferences). Butso statedsuch laws would provide material
only for imitation, as Kant had it, not for following. When Beethoven followed
them, those laws were unformulable.28

5.3
The third claim was that fully effective agency, conceived on the artistic model set
out above, equals freedom. At one level this claim is now trivial, given what has
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been said: it is obviously true that to be free is to be able to act. But the point
goes deeper than this. Recall that the laws or necessities through which artistic
agency is exercised are, as I have said, internal to the exercise of that agency, and
so cannot be adduced as independently specifiable standards against which any
given instance of that exercise can be assessed. We can now put the same point in
a different way. We can say: in the exemplary exercise of agency, success is
marked by the fact that the agents willhis intentionbecomes determinate in
its realisation, and only there. This point, which is essentially Kants,29 directs us
to a picture of willing that culminates and crystallises only in the moment at
which one can say Yes!thats what I was after. One knows what ones
intention is, determinately, only in realising it. And it is this kind of exercise of
the will, which is also a process of self-discovery, which Nietzsche equates with
freedom.30
Consider Beethoven and his coda again. Presumably he could have said before
starting to compose it that he meant the coda to be as emphatic as possible and
that he wanted to ram home the tonic as unignorably as he could. In this sense, he
had a perfectly clearly formed intention before he beganand one which he
indeed went on to realize in the performance. But his sketch-books show in a
very vivid way how difficult he found it to arrive at such performanceshow
much labour and revision went into finally getting it right, into making the rather
abstract intention with which he may be supposed to have begun into something
concrete and determinate. As Stuart Hampshire helpfully puts it:
I may very easily make a mistake in the description or identification of
my activity . . . without being confused in my practical intentions . . .
[That this is so] would be shown when I recognised something as
happening contrary to my intentions, or recognised it as happening in
accordance with them. I might say truthfully This is not what I
intended, even though I point to something that accords precisely with
my own declaration of my intentions . . . But it does not follow from this
that I did not know what I was doing, in one familiar sense of this
treacherous phrase. (Hampshire 1959: 9596)
Beethoven knew what he was doing, all right. He was trying to compose
an emphatic, tonic-heavy coda to his symphony. But he couldnt know what
precisely would count as thatwhat would conclude this symphony in a
satisfyingly emphatic, tonic-heavy wayuntil he found, or came up with, the
coda that we all know, and recognized it as what he was after. He therefore
discovered the determinate character of his intention only in (finally) realizing it.
And in doing so he exercisedby Nietzsches lightsfree agency at its
exemplary best.
Again one might ask, why? The obvious answer, which isnt wrong, is that to
do as one intends is to be free. But I think that we can also say a little more than
that. For a certain sort of metaphysician, the central question about freedom of
the will is Could I have done otherwise? For Nietzsche, by contrast, the central
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question is Would I have done otherwise?or: Would I will it otherwise? I am

free, on this conception, if my answer is No. My exemplary exercise of agency
results, ex hypothesi, in an action in which my intention is crystallised precisely in
its realisation. Thereforesince my action simply is, exclusively and without
remainder, the expression of my intentionthere is no room, at this level, for my
willing that the action were otherwise. The action is not only the action that I
intend, but, in performing it, I discover exactly what my intention is.31 To call this
freedom seems to me to be entirely natural. My action is mine, as it were, all
the way down; and, in acting thus, I find myselfrealise and recognise myself
precisely in so acting.32 Nor, to reiterate, is this any sort of metaphysical view:
freedom, as Nietzsche construes it, is consistent with any minimally plausible
account of the relation between the causal order of nature and the human will.33
Rather, and again to reiterate, it is an ethical view, a normative conception of
human agency at its best. And it is this conception of agency that Nietzsche
repeatedly glosses, for reasons that should now be apparent, in terms of
becoming what one is.34
Two final worries must be addressed, however. Perhaps the more serious of
them, which concerns the scope of Nietzsches accountthat is, the applicability
of his account to agency in generalI defer to the following section. The other
worry is essentially a request for clarification. It is this: doesnt Nietzsches
conception of freedom-through-constraintas one might put itset up those
constraints as so fundamentally independent of the agent (of his identity,
preferences, etc.) that they really do function as limits on his action, even if
they are, as a matter of fact, unformulable in advance? And, if so, mightnt this
more plausibly be regarded as a model of unfreedomof action curtailed rather
than action enabled?
The answer to both questions is No. And both questions stem from the causa
sui fantasy with which we began. Their grounding assumption is that freedom of
willing and acting is possible only in a vacuum, only if what an agent chooses
and does is explicableexhaustively explicablewith reference to the agents
will alone. And this assumption, or so Nietzsche has given us reason to conclude,
is absurd. Human agency requires a human world for its possibility.35 It requires
Nietzsches tyranny of . . . capricious laws. And this point is quite general. If
anything can be described as free, after all, an intentional action can be; and one
acts intentionally when one acts for a reason. One can only act for a reason,
however, if one has the capacity to give and respond to reasons; and that capacity
depends upon ones participation in a set of social practices whose norms are, in
the relevant sense, wholly independent of ones own whims and preferences.36
The very possibility of intentional action, that is, requires a context made up
precisely of factors such as the ancestors and society to which Nietzsche refers.
So freedom presupposes an explanatory context to which the agents will is
essentially incidental, and to the norms constitutive of which the agent is
answerable. Freedom is therefore acquired through, rather than eroded by, laws
that are not of ones own making (even if they are laws that one can come to
recognize and acknowledge as ones own).
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This is, as I say, a general point, and it applies to formulable and unformulable
laws alike. Many such norms can of course be formulated very easily. I have
the freedom to castle my king, say, only in virtue of my acknowledgement of
some readily statable rules of chess. These rules are conditions of, rather than
limits upon, my freedom to do as I intend. But rules that are formulable in this
way bring with them the danger of self-misunderstanding. For example, I might
idly lament the fact that it is impossible to move my rook diagonally, or that my
rook and my queen cannot both occupy the same square at the same time, and
mistake this for an irritating restriction on my freedom. But what I would really
be minding is the fact that I am playing chess, not that my freedom (to make
chess moves) is curtailed. And this is why Nietzsche regards artistic agency as
exemplary. For where (many of) the relevant norms are unformulable, this sort of
self-misunderstanding is ruled out. I cant chafe in advance against the fact that
this or that artistic act is impossible, since I could only know that it was
impossible if the rule that it breached could be formulated. The most that I can
do, therefore, is to lament the fact that there should be any constraints on my
activity at all; and that, in a peculiarly direct way, would be simply to renounce
my (real) freedom in favour of the fantasy of freedom in the superlative
metaphysical sense. It is true, then, that the freedom-through-constraint account
sets up those constraints as fundamentally independent of the agent. But it does
not follow from this that they function as limits upon the agents freedom to act.
Rather, to say it once again, they function as conditions of that freedom.

6. The Limits of Artistry

If what I have argued so far is plausible, section 188 of Beyond Good and Evil
encapsulates particularly crisply some of the main strands of Nietzsches positive
thoughts about freedom of the will. It also casts light retrospectively on the other
two passages that I have devoted most space to (i.e. BGE 21 and GS 290).
The causa sui argument (BGE 21) now emerges as a sketch of two ways in
which one can fail to relate to oneself properly as an agent. The devotee of the
superlative, metaphysical sense of freedom of the will vainly holds himself aloof
from the constitutive necessities of human practices, and in doing so forfeits the
capacity not only to realise, but so much as to arrive at, anything worth calling an
intention with respect to them (as opposed to a wish, say). Bound up in his
fantasy of himself as a law above all laws, he can neither legislate effectively nor
act. The self-contemptuous character, on the other hand, who seeks to lay the
blame for himself somewhere else, recognises the necessities constitutive of
human practices as necessities, but takes this, not as an invitation to work with
and through them so as to discover himself in expressing himself, but as an
excuse to abscond from the field of agency altogether. For the stylist of character,
by contrast, whose one needful thing is to realise himself as an exemplary
product of his own artistry (GS 290), the compulsions shirked by the weak are to
be embraced. In learning to make a beauty out of necessity, as it were, he perfects
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himself under his own law, and discovers the determinate character of that
lawand hence his freedomprecisely in the process of perfecting himself.37
Clearly much more might be said about all of this, and there are many
interesting implications to be drawn out. But I cant draw them out here. Instead,
and by way of conclusion, I propose to return for a moment to the centrality of art
to Nietzsches thoughts about freedom. The activity of art-making, recall, does
not serve Nietzsche merely as an example of agency at its best, or at its most free.
Rather, he takes that activity as exemplary of such agency. Andto press the point
harderthe exercise of artistry may even be the only fully convincing exemplar available to him. Except, perhaps, for chess, and certain other games,38 it is
only in art that we find obvious instances of the kind of mastery that Nietzsche is
concerned withnot least because artistic activity offers a possibility of closure
not readily available elsewhere. And art far exceeds chess, or any other game, in
the range and depth of mastery that is capable of being expressed through it.39 In
this much, then, since art has the field pretty well to itself in the relevant respect,
Nietzsches constant invocations of it may seem more or less self-justifying. But
thiswhile it may well explain Nietzsches tacticsmight perhaps also make
one wonder a bit about the applicability of those tactics to agency in general. One
of the main reasons, after all, why we have and need art, according to one very
plausible cliche, is that life is simply too disorderly and contingent to be borne
neat.40 Art joins the disparate pieces up, and makes them mean somethingit
completes them. And to think that closure of this sort might reliably be achieved
through the flow of life itself is surely to posit as exemplary an ideal that may be
entirely unrealisableprecisely the kind of move, in other contexts, that
Nietzsche roundly and rightly denounces.41
This is the worry about the scope of Nietzsches account that I mentioned in
the previous section; and I think that it is right to take it seriously. But I also think
that Nietzsche can go a good way towards meeting it. When he commends (the
exemplary) Stendhal for regarding artbeautyas a promise of happiness (GM
Essay III 6), he is in the midst of criticising points of view from which that
possibility is altogether invisible. And his response, in the context of the present
worry, should have something of the same structure. He has shown, after all, that
certain prevailing perspectivesfor instance, those canvassed in the causa sui
argumentare incapable of making sense of agency in general, in virtue of their
failure to recognise that every kind of agency requires the acknowledgement and
internalisation of the norms or necessities constitutive of the practices through
which that agency is exercised. From these perspectives, that is, the very
possibility of mastery is rendered invisible. Nietzsche also has good grounds to
suppose that the same failure must undermine even more decisively the capacity
of such perspectives to support convincing accounts of artistic agency,
specifically, since the relevant norms or necessities are not only integral to the
practices concerned, and so to be acknowledged and internalised, but are
unformulable as well. He has good grounds, that is, to conclude that from these
perspectives the possibility of artistic mastery must be the most invisible of all.
And, from here, it is a short step to a relatively modest conclusion, which is this:
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if there are forms of mastery in other types of agency, and if these forms of
mastery depend for their possibility upon the acknowledgement of unformulable
necessities constitutive of the practices through which those types of agency are
exercised, then to that extent artistic agency is exemplary of agency as such.42
Nietzsches conclusion, then, as I read him, is that it is reasonable, within these
limits, to regard the freedom exemplified in the exercise of artistic mastery as at
least a regulative ideal for the exercise of agency in general.43 And it is in this
sense, I suggestto which his thoughts about freedom are centralthat
Nietzsche regards art as an image of the ethical.44
Aaron Ridley
Philosophy, School of Humanities
University of Southampton
Southampton SO17 1BJ
UK
amr3@soton.ac.uk
NOTES
1

Kant 1952: 59. For an excellent discussion of this thought, see Henrich 1994.
I follow a number of recent writers here in distinguishing the moral from the
ethical, and in construing the former as a specialor allegedly specialcase of the latter.
For discussion, see, e.g., Clark 1994: 1534; Williams 1985: ch.10; Raz 1999: 273302.
3
or even, perhaps, as a statement of some other position within the relevant debate.
Brian Leiter, for instance, takes the passage to be part of Nietzsches defence of a view that
he (Leiter 2002: ch. 3) calls causal essentialism, although the distinction between that
position and out-and-out determinism (and indeed incompatibilism) collapses in the
course of his own argument. (For discussion, see Owen and Ridley 2003: 74.) For recent
treatments of Nietzsche on freedom that are more consonant with the line that I go on to
develop here, see, e.g., Gemes 2006 and Janaway 2006.
4
Hume 1977: 8.
5
Nietzsche does in fact mention causation a little later, but not in a way that should
offer much encouragement to those who would see him as a compatibilist. He was
committed at this point to a version of Langes neo-Kantian scepticism about causation, as
he makes clear a couple of sentences further down: the concepts of cause and effect, he
says, are conventional fictions for the purpose of designation and communicationnot for
explanation. In the in-itself there is nothing of causal connections (BGE 21). So he
didnt think that there was a causal order of natureand so, a fortiori, cannot have worried
whether there might be a conflict between it and human freedom, and so cannot, in this
sense at any rate, have been a compatibilist. (At most, he might be said to be a libertarian.)
Nietzsche later changed his mind about causation, and accepted that it was real (partly
through coming to reject the thought that there was any in-itself of things [see Clark 1990:
103106 and 109117 for discussion]). But once hed done that, he continued to insist, in
exactly the same terms, that both the free will and the unfree will were monstrous
conceptions, oras he has it in The Anti-Christimaginary causes . . . purely fictitious
(AC 15). Following this line of thought, we might then conclude that Nietzsches remarks
in Beyond Good and Evil about freedom of the will are neither a statement of compatibilism,
2

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since compatibilism is inconsistent with scepticism about causation, nor a specific

consequence of his temporary allegiance to Lange, since he remained committed to the
remarks in question even once he had become a causal realist. But, as I argue in the main
text, even this line of thought must be, at best, incidental to Nietzsches principal concern.
6
See, for example, his preface to the second edition of There`se Raquin.
7
Tolstoy makes it clear in the same section that his conception of complete freedom in
man, as he puts it, is a version of the causa sui: To conceive of a man being absolutely free
we must imagine him outside space, . . . a being uninfluenced by the external world,
standing outside of time and independent of causes.
8
a conception now perhaps most closely associated with Jean-Paul Sartre. See
Sartre 1969: Part 4, chapter 1.
9
One might characterize Nietzsches target here as the style of thinking that would
connect an exaggerated notion of responsibility to an exaggerated notion of the voluntary. For
a contemporary version of Nietzsches complaint, see Williams 1993: ch.3. For an excellent
discussion of the affinities between Nietzsche and Williams, see Clark 2001: 100122.
10
This is the idea known as agent causation, whichcruciallydoes not include the
thought that the agents will is hermetically sealed from the rest of the world.
11
None of this is to say, of course, that Nietzsche mightnt in fact have been a
compatibilist. It is only to say that, if he was, passages such as the one that I have been
considering cannot be taken as evidence of that.
12
Of course, in one sense there neednt be two parties here. Someone might vainly
hold himself to be radically free while reserving a sort of socialist pity for others whom he
regards as lacking that freedom; and, in this case, his pity will be a form of contempt.
13
It is worth noting the strong affinity between the structure of Nietzsches interest in
the issue of freedom and the structure of Hegels, and, specifically, the way in which both
regard questions concerning a possible conflict between free will and the causal order of
nature as a red herring in this context. For an excellent discussion of Hegel on these
matters, see Pippin 1997.
14
See, e.g., GM Essay II 17 and 18. For discussion see Ridley 1998: ch.4. For broader
discussions that make or presuppose the same point, see, e.g., Young 1992 and Pothen
2002.
15
See also GS 335, where the task of imposing a law upon oneself is tied, importantly,
to the intellectual conscience, to self-knowledge and to honesty.
16
Or, in more overtly Nietzschean terms, agonistically. See his early essay, HC.
17
Nietzsche is often concerned with this kind of reciprocal relation. For a particularly
clear example, and one that has an evident bearing in the present context, see GM Essay II
12.
18
Jenkins 1998: 213 makes a similar point.
19
And is overlooked, on the whole, by, e.g., Nehamas 1985: ch. 6. For a corresponding
overstatement of the force of this constraint, see Leiter 2002: ch. 3.
20
For a more extended discussion of GS 290, which seeks to make explicit the
connections between self-stylisation and the intellectual conscience, see Ridley 1998:
135142.
21
See D 537 for a gloss on mastery.
22
For a contrasting account of Nietzsches views about language, see Jenkins 1998:
231235. Jenkins gives primacy to a pair of very thorny passages, BGE 268 and GS 354,
which are badly at odds with the (genuine) insight expressed in BGE 188.
23
In Twilight of the Idols he describes this as the modern concept of freedom : TI
Raids 41.

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221

This pointwhich is forcefully brought out by Schacht 2001: 4brings Nietzsches

understanding of the connection between normativity and human practices rather closely
into line with that defended by John McDowell: see, e.g. 1998a and 1998b. For Nietzsches
conception of second nature, see D 38.
25
Kant would agree with Nietzsche about this, at least in so far as artistic agency is
concerned. He remarks: Now, seeing that originality of talent is one . . . essential factor
that goes to make up the character of genius, shallow minds fancy that the best evidence
they can give of being full-blown geniuses is by emancipating themselves from all
academic constraint of rules, in the belief that one cuts a finer figure on the back of an illtempered than of a trained horseop.cit., 47.
26
Aristotle: II.9.
27
I say emerged here in order to leave open the question whether these laws, and the
coda that obedience to them made possible, are better thought of as creations or as
discoveries. And there are at least two reasons why this question should be left open. First,
and very locally, nothing that I want to say here depends upon the answer: either will do.
Butsecondit is quite uncertain whether we understand the terms creation and
discovery perspicuously enough for the question to have a clear sense. Did Rui Lopez, for
example, create or discover the chess opening named after him? Did he come up with it or
come across it? I simply dont know how one would go about answering this.
28
And what Sibelius gathered from [Beethovens] performance, in composing the
coda to his own fifth symphony, wasnt formulable either. Sibelius followed; he didnt
imitate.
29
and which has been widely taken up: by Hegel, of course, in The Philosophy of
Right (for a superb discussion of this aspect of Hegels thought, see Pippin 2000) and
following Hegel by, e.g., Taylor 1985 and by Collingwood 1938: ch.6 in his account of art as
expression. For the same point in a slightly different context, see, e.g., Hampshire 1959: ch. 2.
30
For an excellent, and closely related, argument to similar effect, see Owen 2003:
259261.
31
Of course, I may not like what I find when I make this discovery, and may, in that
sense, prefer that my action were otherwise. But, if so, this merely shows that, while my
agency in this instance may have been fully effective, there is nevertheless something
about the sort of person I am that I do not care for, and would likeand may, as a selfstylist, come to intendto change.
32
Again, this is a strikingly Hegelian thought. As Pippin puts it: Hegels conception of
agency is expressive, and his most frequent example . . . is an artist and his art work. In
some sense of course, the artist causes the statue to be made, but what makes it his is
that it expresses him and his artistic intentions adequately (Pippin 2000: 158).
33
This might be disputed. It might be said, for example, that, for Nietzsches account
to be convincing, certain metaphysical presuppositions need to be in place, and that these
should be made explicit (e.g., as it might be, that we inhabit a compatibilistic world, or an
indeterministic one). But this would be to reverse the order of the argument. My claim is
that, if Nietzsches account of freedom is convincing (as I believe it is), that account
furnishes a constraint on what can and cannot be regarded as a minimally plausible story
about the relation between the causal order of nature and the human will. It is not,
therefore, incumbent upon Nietzsche to tell such a story in order to make the points that he
wants to make about freedom; and nor, if what I have argued earlier is correct, does he
attempt to do so. The position that I attribute to him is therefore similar, in certain crucial
respects, to that famously advanced in Strawson 1974.
34
See Ridley 2005 for further discussion of this point.

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35

It also, of course, requires a natural worlda world structured by causal

regularities and so forth. But, for the reasons given in the earlier sections of this essay,
Nietzsches attention is focused on the peculiarly human world of norms and practices.
36
For a compelling defence of these claims, see Kenny 1989: ch. 3.
37
Nietzsche first began to develop his conception of the process of self-perfection in
the third of the Untimely Meditations, and the idea that I am attributing to him here is
continuous, at least, with the one expressed there. For an excellent discussion, see Conant
2001.
38
For the special sense of freedom that the (competent) participation in games allows,
see Cavell 1979: 307309.
39
Examples are legion; illuminating commentary upon them rather rarer. Two
noteworthy and accessible instances of the latter, both concerning the art that Nietzsche
cared most about, are Charles Rosens discussion of the B/B-flat conflict in Beethovens
Hammerklavier sonata (Rosen 1971: 413420) and Stephen Daviess discussion of the role of
the unexpected C-sharp in the opening theme of the same composers Eroica symphony
(Davies 2002: 353354).
40
As Nietzsche himself insists: see, e.g., GS 107 and 109.
41
not least in the causa sui argument.
42
And it is very plausible to think that these antecedent conditions are often met.
Consider, for example, Aristotles discussion of the virtues: the virtuous man undoubtedly
exhibits mastery, and his sort of mastery depends precisely upon the acknowledgement of
norms that cannot be formulated. Again, see Aristotle 1980: II.9.
43
A strong case could be made for regarding Max Webers Vocation lectures as
attempts to spell out what mastery, in this sense, amounts to in non-artistic contexts: see
Weber 2004.
44
A version of this paper was first read at the 2003 conference of the Friedrich
Nietzsche Society, held at Warwick, and I am grateful to the participants in that event for
their questions and suggestionsas, too, to Ken Gemes and Chris Janaway, both of whom
commented very helpfully. My particular thanks, though, must go to Maria Alvarez and
David Owen. It was through discussion with the latter that many of the ideas advanced
here were had in the first place, and through discussion with the former that the exposition
of those ideas acquired whatever clarity it now has.

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other writings]. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1994: 187194.
TITwilight of the Idols, trans. R. J. Hollingdale. Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1968.

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