ABSTRACT
What appears to be required of the 'sovereign individual' - viz. a stringent form of autonomy — is what Nietzsche sometimes refers to as 'originality'. Whereas 'Under the dominion of the morality of custom, originality of every kind has acquired a bad conscience' (D 9), Nietzsche's project is (on this view) to clear the way for an originality free from moral guilt or remorse. He gives this notion of originality some content at D 104: 'all evaluations are either originator adopted... Original evaluation: that is to say, to assess a thing according to the extent to which it pleases or displeases us alone and no one else - something extremely rare!' Again Nietzsche's ideal seems to be one of wholly prescinding from common value judgements, in order to establish oneself as a strictly autonomous agent. Indeed, this strongly negative conception of evaluative freedom - 'the free human being is immoral because in all things he is determined to depend upon himself and not upon a tradition' (ibid.) - is echoed elsewhere in Nietzsche's work. For instance, he holds that 'Your educators... reveal to you what the true basic material of your being is, something in itself ineducable ..., bound and paralysed: your educators can be only your liberators' (UM 129). And at
WP 70, he opposes 'the doctrine of the influence of the milieu and external causes' to 'the force within', which he characterises as 'infinitely superior'.
