ABSTRACT
As suggested, Nietzsche’s remarks about Epictetus present in compressed form many of his thoughts concerning control and discipline. And the appropriations from Epictetus by Montaigne and Foucault underline some of the ways in which, for the two latter as well as for Nietzsche, control and discipline are essential to power and hence to freedom.1 Their thoughts in these regards, to indulge an anachronism, have a strong Nietzschian accent. One of the numerous ways in which Nietzsche follows Epictetus and Montaigne (and anticipates Foucault) in connecting control and discipline with freedom is articulated in the following remarks from early in Book Four of The Will to Power. “The faith in the pleasure of moderation-that pleasure of the rider on a fiery steed!—has been lacking hitherto.—The mediocrity of weaker natures has been confused with the moderation of the strong!” (Nietzsche 1967: sect. 870, p. 466). In this regard, he goes on to say in the next section, there is “a confusion [that] is quite natural, although its influence has been fatal: that which men of power and will are able to demand of themselves also provides a measure of that which they may permit themselves” (sect. 871, p. 466). Instancing some “great” men, he says that Handel, Leibniz, Goethe, and Bismarck existed “blithely among antitheses, full of that supple strength that guards against convictions and doctrines by employing one against the other and reserving freedom for itself ” (sect. 884, pp. 471-472). Employing a phrase that became popular among twentieth-century thinkers influenced by him, Nietzsche asserts that every doing is a forgoing. But he turns this sometimes disheartening and even enervating idea to the advantage of his conception of free-spiritedness. “What we do should determine what we forego; by doing we forego-that is how I like it, that is my placitum [principle]” (Nietzsche 1974: Four, 304, p. 244, first italics mine). Self-control is of great importance, but “those moralists” who make of it our first and foremost duty afflict those who submit to their demands with “a peculiar disease.” Whenever a person who has embraced such teaching experiences a desire, a push or a pull, “it will always seem to him as if his self-control were endangered. No longer may he entrust himself to any instinct or free wingbeat” (Nietzsche 1974: Four, 305, p. 244). To the extent that I adopt the doctrine or dogma of self-control, I must also resist it and “lose . . . [myself] occasionally” (Nietzsche 1974: Four,
305, pp. 244-245). That magnanimity toward enemies discussed above must extend to that part of the self that is the enemy of the self ’s choosing what to do and what to forgo; that is the enemy of one’s free-spiritedness and hence one’s most valuable freedoms of action. But the magnanimity must be proud and strong, not submissive-even to the teaching that commends it. This recommendation applies to doctrines and dogmas concerning what is true as well as what is good and virtuous. Referring to a slogan that is often used against him, Nietzsche asserts of “Nothing is true; everything is permitted,” that “Here we have real freedom, for the notion of truth itself has been disposed of ” (Nietzsche 1956: Third Essay, XXIV: p. 287). What, then, are free-spiritedness and the freedom of action that is among its chief expressions or manifestations? As we would expect from the opinions and arguments we have been considering, Nietzsche presents numerous examples and characterizations of both, but nowhere to my knowledge does he offer a definition of these terms or concepts. To define them would be futile because we experience them and their absence in a great and constantly changing variety of situations and circumstances. It would also be dangerous because definitions are always restrictive and narrowing; they blind those who accept them to the fluid multiplicity of free-spiritedness and freedom of action in our lived and imagined experience. In part for this, or these, reasons, it is difficult to locate Nietzsche’s thinking on the grids or in the schemas that for many centuries have organized thinking about and disputations concerning these concepts. To take instances of typologies that have been with us for several centuries, it would be not only difficult but misleadingly reductive to classify him, exclusively as it were, as a theorist of “negative” as opposed to “positive” freedom or as solely concerned with the “conditions” as distinct from the “ends” of freedom or the reasons for valuing it. Elements in the formulations of the several proponents of these sorting devices are all prominent in his thinking. It is clear from the considerations rehearsed here, for example, that numerous among Nietzsche’s discussions are directed against restrictions on and obstacles placed in the path of individual thinking and acting, placed by hegemonic social, cultural, and occasionally political norms and values, and by institutional and other controlling mechanisms and forces. Free-spiritedness and freedom of action are importantly “negative” in character; they consist importantly in escaping from or breaking the hold of such impositions and constraints. The clearest case is of course the imperium imposed and sustained by Christianity and its agents and operatives. Nietzsche thought that the preponderance of Christians were no less than enslaved by Christianity; reduced to a herd that was not merely informed and guided but indoctrinated, controlled, and directed, and their potential for freedom deeply diminished by Christianity and its shepherds. The thought that the Christian God was dead did not mean that, literally, everything is permitted, but it did mean that the hold of a myriad of unjustifiable constraints had been broken by those who had convinced themselves of this “death” and might someday be removed from all or most of those now under the Christian yoke. In this respect, to use a word that
most proponents of “positive” freedom abhor, the death of the Christian God was a liberation. Although less vituperative concerning them than are many of his remarks about Christianity, Nietzsche had similar reactions to rationalism, customary morality, and to political doctrines such as nationalism, socialism, and what might be called democratism. We have seen that he placed substantial value on the first two and especially the second, but taken to excess they too could stifle thinking and reduce action to the dogmatic, the rote, and the formulaic. The thinking and often the acting of free spirits are importantly (but not exclusively) characterized by spontaneity, inventiveness, and unpredictability. When doctrines such as those just mentioned harden into dogmas, free spirits must resist their demands and assert their own individuality and independence. Their thinking and acting, as with Zarathustra’s, thereby become distinctive, unorthodox, even idiosyncratic. Doing so of course arouses the ire of many. Accordingly, free spirits must summon their strength and stand against the attempts of the scientistic and stupidly virtuous to control and direct their thinking and acting. Although only rarely addressing topics conventionally regarded as political, in Human All Too Human and a few other places, Nietzsche had some choice words for the doctrines mentioned above. “Socialism is the fanciful younger brother of the almost expired despotism whose heir it wants to be.” Because it “expressly aspires to the annihilation of the individual,” “it requires a more complete subservience of the citizen to the absolute state than ever existed before” and seeks to improve the individual into “a useful organ of the community.” It is therefore “in the profoundest sense reactionary” (Nietzsche 1966: sect. 473, p. 173). Nationalism and its pet entity the nation itself are sources of the same and some additional evils. The nation “is in its essence a forcibly imposed state of siege and self-defence inflicted on the many by the few and requires cunning, force, and falsehood to maintain a front of respectability” (Nietzsche 1966: sect. 475, p. 174). When heated up by nationalisms it has many of the same repugnant characteristics and effects as socialism. Thus one “should not be afraid to proclaim oneself simply a good European and actively to work for the amalgamation of nations” (sect. 475, p. 175). And those many who want to make Nietzsche into an anti-Semite and a proto-Hitlerian would do well to consider the following:
the entire problem of the Jews exists only within national states, inasmuch as it is here that their energy and higher intelligence, their capital in will and spirit accumulated from generation to generation in a long school of suffering, must come to preponderate to a degree calculated [albeit not by the Jews] to arouse envy and hatred, so that in almost every nation-and the more so the more nationalist a posture the nation is again developing-there is gaining more ground the literary indecency of leading the Jews to the sacrificial slaughter as scapegoats for every possible public or private misfortune.
