Nietzsche and free will?

Question

Nietzsche claims that free will is a myth created by philoophers and society. What is his basis for these claims? Why would he say this? DOes this have any relation to the will to power/will to truth/etc?

Answer 1

it's always important to put nietzsche in context. he says a lot of things about free will, but it's very important to be mindful of what he writes before and after. "the error of free will" is in twilight of the idols, a book in which he attempts to unmask the sick, bitter, resentful christian feelings that masquerade as morality. he specifically mentions free will to explain how it had been used to reinforce the concept of guilt and sinfulness.

if you don't understand nietzsche's beef with christianity in the first place, don't start with twilight. i recommend reading kaufman's nietzsche, then geneology, then beyond good and evil. afterwards, if you're wondering how free will fits into that argument, here's how i read it.

so he has a long explanation of why religion and morality are built upon the confusion of cause and effect, and then he brings up free will as a tool theologians employ to punish mankind with "accountablity". he goes on to say that the world will be redeemed by denying god, and therefore accountability.

"accountability" should also be taken in context. for a philosopher that was all about self-overcoming, it seems kind of weird that he should suggest that nobody is accountable for their actions. but i don't think that is what he means, because in the preceding sections, he has a fit that no philosopher since heraclitus has properly distinguished "being" from "becoming", and as a result they've invented the "real" and "apparent" world. he laments that "accountability" strips "becoming" of its innocence in order to judge and condemn it.

if you seek yourself, what you'll find is not up to you. his famous dictum, "there are no philosophies, only philosophers", applies here. everyone should have a different philosophy and different values, because everyone is born different and who you are is something you discover and nurture, but can't be recreated to suit a prescribed lifestyle (i.e. the christan lifestyle, which wants everyone to be the same). the basic feeling of nietzsche's philosophy is to "love your fate", and he says in this section that there can't be accountability because "nothing exists apart from the whole".

i definitely don't think he's saying that nobody is accountable for their actions. one of the most interesting things i've ever read about free will was in the geneology of morals. i forget the passage, but in it, nietzsche says that free will is NOT the ability to do whatever you want, whenever you want... if you indulge every little whimsy, you're just a slave to your impulses. his idea of free will is the ability to set a goal and see it through.

"the will to power" is often assumed to be some kind of central teaching because of the book his stupid nazi sister published, but it's more of a psychological hypothesis, like freud's pleasure principle. it informs our understanding of others, because we can see how a theologian can profess to be selfless and objective, but then turn around and invent concepts that create a need for salvation, thus a need for the theologian himself.

Answer 2

Nietzsche Free Will

Answer 3

I'm not as familiar with Nietzsche's notion of free will as I am some other of his concepts.
But I think it has something to do with the predominantly Christian notion that a strong, warlike individual can choose to be a mild, peaceful saint. According to Nietzsche, this is as ridiculous as expecting a tiger to be a contented vegetarian.
He basically saw free will, as framed by this ethos, as a way to blame the strong for acting strong and praise the weak for acting weak. Someone who can't fight back simply says, "I choose not to fight back" and they are called good. Applied that way, free will is a cop-out.

Answer 4

Read - Beyond Good and Evil

Nietzsche opens with the provocative question, “Supposing truth is a woman—what then?” Then truth would need to be cajoled and flattered, not pursued with the tactless dogmatism of most philosophers. While philosophy must overcome its dogmatic thinking, it has at least provided our culture with the tension to spring forward into something new and better. Nietzsche catalogs a number of the dogmatisms inherent in philosophy, such as the separation of ideas into binary opposites like truth and falsehood; “immediate certainties,” like Descartes’ certainty that he is thinking; and the idea of free will. Philosophy is interested in giving us insight not into truth but into the minds of the different philosophers. Everything is governed by a will to power, and in philosophy, we see great minds trying to impose their will on the world by persuading others to see the world as they see it.
The will to power is the fundamental drive in the universe. Behind truth, thought, and morality lie drives and passions that we try to mask behind a veneer of calm objectivity. What we call truth, for instance, is just the expression of our will to power, where we declare our particular perspective on reality to be objectively and universally true. Ultimately, all reality is best understood in terms of competing wills. Nietzsche praises “free spirits” who struggle to free themselves from the prejudices of others and to question their own assumptions. In particular, they will look beneath the “moral” worldview that examines people’s motives and perceive instead the “extra-moral” worldview that examines the unconscious drives that determine our expressed motives.