06 Constâncio_73
18-01-2013
16:08
Pagina 99
Is Nietzsche’s concept of freedom ‘political’?
99
faculty of reason and, instead, presuppose a social “outside” (a social “other”) in order to have any content. In Nietzsche’s language, every morality presupposes the prevalence of a set of customs (Sitte) in a society, and even Kantian morality is just a rationalization of certain customs which result from a historical, social process of “disciplining and breeding”: “morality is nothing other (therefore no more!) than obedience to customs”143. From this Nietzsche concludes that, in order to legitimately speak of “autonomy” or (“self-legislation”), we must believe that at least a few exceptional individuals can become “supra-moral”. “Auto-nomy” implies no less than the capacity to “create new values” by revaluing the values that prevail in a given society and historical epoch. The sovereign individual is a man who has “his own standard of value”; his values are individual, are truly his own values; he is a “master of the free will” and enjoys a “rare freedom over himself and his destiny”144 because he is able to overcome the “highest resistance” that can be overcome, namely the resistance of the very process of socialization, “the herd animalization” of man145. Philosophy is the highest form of spirituality and autonomy precisely because it essentially consists in the genealogical revaluing of the most ingrained, deepest, historically most persistent values. As genealogy, philosophy is an immanent critique of these values, and it creates new values on the basis of this immanent critique. Hence a “sovereign” philosopher must indeed be both “autonomous” (i.e. creator of his or her values) and “supra-moral” (i.e. creator of new values that go beyond those values that simply result from socialization)146. Put differently: what Hegel calls Sittlichkeit (“ethical life”) may well be, as he defends, the “self-sublation” of “abstract right” and (individual) “morality”, but, according to Nietzsche, true “autonomy” requires a further stage of “self-sublation” – the “self-sublation” of Sittlichkeit, or what Nietzsche explicitly calls “the self-sublation of morality” (“die Selbstaufhebung der Moral”147). This is meant as a step towards the “supra-moral” or “supra-ethical”, a step “beyond good and evil” – but from the inside of morality, “out of morality” (“aus Moralität!”)148. By the same token, Nietzsche’s thesis that “culture and the State […] are adversaries”
143 Daybreak / M, § 9; cf. Daybreak / M, § 16, § 19 and On the Genealogy of Morality / GM II, § 2; for the idea that no morality is effective if it is not embodied in “juridical institutions and customs”, see e.g. KSA 11, 34 [176] and The Anti-Christ / AC, § 57. 144 On the Genealogy of Morality / GM II, § 2. 145 Cf. On the Genealogy of Morality / GM II, § 2 and, again, Twilight of the Idols, «Skirmishes of an Untimely Man»/ GD, «Streifzüge eines Unzeitgemässen», § 38, where Nietzsche explains his “idea of freedom” as the overcoming of the highest resistances, most importantly “the herd animalization of man”. 146 Nietzsche speaks of the philosopher as “sovereign” (souverain) in KSA 13, 11 [48], where he emphasizes the skeptical and critical nature of the philosopher; in JGB, §§ 204-213, however, he famously defends that true philosophers are not only skeptics and critics, but also “commanders and legislators” (Beyond Good and Evil / JGB, § 211), “experimenters” who are able to create new “values” or “laws” – i.e. skeptics and critics who are also “auto-nomous” in the sense of being able to give themselves their own laws. 147 Daybreak “Preface” / M «Vorrede», § 4 (my translation), and KSA 12, 5 [71]. 148 Daybreak “Preface” / M «Vorrede», § 4. Most likely, the expression “self-sublation of morality” involves a conscious reference to Schopenhauer’s, and not Hegel’s, conception of a “self-sublation” of morality (Selbstaufhebung, Die Welt als Wille und Vorstellung I, § 70), but the important point is that Nietzsche’s understanding of this “self-sublation” implies that the critique of morality can be no more than an expansion, and not an eradication, of the moral perspective: cf. W. Stegmaier’s forthcoming paper «Spielräume der Moralkritik. Das Beispiel Schopenhauers and Nietzsches».