Freud claimed that the concept of drive is "at once the most important and the most obscure element of psychological research." It is hard to think of a better proof of Freud's claim than the work of Nietzsche, which provides ample support for the idea that the drive concept is both tremendously important and terribly obscure. Although Nietzsche's accounts of agency and value everywhere appeal to drives, the concept has not been adequately explicated. I remedy this situation by providing an (...) account of drives. I argue that Nietzschean drives are dispositions that generate evaluative orientations, in part by affecting perceptual saliences. In addition, I show that drive psychology has important implications for contemporary accounts of reflective agency. Contemporary philosophers often endorse a claim that has its origins in Locke and Kant: self-conscious agents are capable of reflecting on and thereby achieving a distance from their motives; therefore, these motives do not determine what the agent will do. Nietzsche's drive psychology shows that the inference in the preceding sentence is illegitimate. The drive psychology articulates a way in which motives can determine the agent's action by influencing the course of the agent's reflective deliberations. An agent who reflects on a motive and decides whether to act on it may, all the while, be surreptitiously guided by the very motive upon which he is reflecting. I show how this point complicates traditional models of the role of reflection in agency. (shrink)

Brian Leiter is one of the few Nietzsche interpreters who argue that Nietzsche rejects all forms of free will. Leiter argues that Nietzsche is an incompatibilist and rejects libertarian free will. He further argues that since Nietzsche is an epiphenomenalist about conscious willing, his philosophy of action cannot support any conception of free will. Leiter also offers deflationary readings of those passages where Nietzsche seemingly ascribes free will to historical figures or types. In this paper I argue against all of (...) these conclusions. In the first section I show that, on the most charitable interpretation, Nietzsche is not an epiphenomenalist. In the second section I trace Nietzsche’s alleged incompatibilism through three of his works and offer reasons to be skeptical of the claim that Nietzsche was a committed incompatibilist. Finally, I argue that Nietzsche is not being sarcastic or unacceptably revisionary when he makes positive ascriptions of free will. (shrink)

The second essay of Nietzsche’s Genealogy of Morals introduces the ‘sovereign individual’ as ‘responsible’, ‘autonomous’ and ‘free’. Does this affirmative use of moral terminology reveal an unexpected affinity between Nietzsche’s thought and philosophical modernity? In the last decades, this issue has been at the heart of a vast and controversial debate. My analysis shows that, rather than throwing light on Nietzsche’s general position, the specific use of Kantian terms in this passage of GM is due to a polemical intention. Implicitly, (...) Nietzsche rejects Eduard von Hartmann’s criticism of the ‘absolute sovereignty of the individual’. The author of the Phänomenologie des sittlichen Bewusstseins (1879) sees the most radical herald of this ‘sovereignty’ in Max Stirner. From Nietzsche’s point of view, Hartmann’s rejection and Stirner’s affirmation share a reductive conception of ‘sovereignty’. Reinterpreting and ‘revaluing’ Kant’s moral terminology, Nietzsche aims to give an interpretation of individual sovereignty that is at the same time antithetical to Stirner’s and wholly at odds with Hartmann’s ethical views. In showing this, the paper gives a new answer to an old question; for already in the 1890s, Hartmann himself, accusing Nietzsche of plagiarizing Stirner, raised the issue of the historical relationship between the two philosophers. More generally, the paper shows that Nietzsche employs a specific textual strategy, which consists in taking Kantian terms in an ‘anti-Kantian’ sense and systematically cultivating the art of using ‘a moral formula in a supramoral sense’. (shrink)

The "sovereign individual" appears as a hapax in the Nietzschean corpus. However, many commentators have seen in it as a kind of compendium of Nietzschean philosophy as if, through this figure, Nietzsche were defending an extreme, autarkic and even ferocious individualism. In contrast to these reductionist interpretations, this article puts the notion of the sovereign individual into the long history of morals. Which means to rethinking individuality as the fruit of a long history, and to making subjectivity not a founding (...) but a derived instance. Finally, we outline some contemporary extensions of this Nietzschean approach to individuality in Michel Foucault and Judith Butler. (shrink)