Nietzsche associates values with affects and drives: he not only claims that values are explained by drives and affects, but sometimes appears to identify values with drives and affects. This is decidedly odd: the agent's reflectively endorsed ends, principles, commitments--what we would think of as the agent's values--seem not only distinct from, but often in conflict with, the agent's drives. Consequently, it is unclear how we should understand Nietzsche's concept of value. This essay attempts to dispel these puzzles by reconstructing (...) Nietzsche's account of value. According to the view that I defend, an agent values X iff (i) the agent has a drive-induced affective orientation toward X and (ii) the agent does not disapprove of this affective orientation. Additionally, I argue that drives generate thoughts about justification, thereby inclining the agent to regard pursuit of the drive's aim as valuable. I contend that this interpretation makes sense of Nietzsche’s remarks about value and overcomes the difficulties inherent in competing interpretations. I conclude by investigating the recalcitrance of drive-induced affective orientations. (shrink)

There are passages in Nietzsche that can be read as contributions to the free will/determinism debate. When read in that way, they reveal a fairly amateurish metaphysician with little of real substance or novelty to contribute; and if these readings were apt or perspicuous, it seems to me, they would show that Nietzsche's thoughts about freedom were barely worth pausing over. They would simply confirm the impression—amply bolstered from other quarters—that Nietzsche was not at his best when addressing the staple (...) questions of philosophy. But these readings sell Nietzsche short. He had next to no systematic interest in metaphysics, and his concern with the question of freedom was not motivated by metaphysical considerations. Rather—and as with all of Nietzsche's concerns—his motivations were ethical. He was interested, not in the relation of the human will to the causal order of nature, but in the relation between freedom and the good life, between the will and exemplary human living. Read from this perspective, Nietzsche's remarks about freedom actually add up to something. And what they add up to is one aspect of his attempt to understand life after the model of art. Beauty, for Kant, was an image of the moral.1 For Nietzsche, by contrast—and the contrast can be hard to spell out—art was an image of the ethical.2 My hope here is to begin to explain why Nietzsche might have thought that the issue of freedom was relevant to that. In sections 1–3, I attempt to show why Nietzsche is not best read as a participant in the standard free will/determinism debate; in sections 4–6, I try to spell out the ethical conception of freedom that he develops instead. (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)

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)

In Nietzsche scholarship, little has been done regarding Nietzsche’s reflections on penology and criminology. This dissertation aims to critically examine Friedrich Nietzsche’s thoughts on justice, punishment, and the criminal and to show that his interest in these topics runs throughout his writings. Nietzsche attacked the tradition of Western justice theory and the idea that justice consists in giving each their due. I argue that in place of this notion of justice, he puts forth a non-metaphysical, naturalistic account of justice that (...) refuses to judge and hold man accountable. In addition, I explicate Nietzsche’s passionate critique of punishment, which stops short of calling for its complete abolition, and the various alternatives he sets forth in place of punishing. Finally, I demonstrate that Nietzsche’s reflections on criminality amount to a defense of the criminal whom he considers a valuable and essential feature of society. Nietzsche’s reflections on justice, punishment, and the criminal are important and warrant closer consideration for several reasons. First, these topics intersect with several major themes within Nietzsche’s work, such as causality, freedom, responsibility, guilt, ressentiment, hierarchy of rank, and greatness, or nobility. Second, a thorough understanding of punishment, and its relationship to justice and revenge are essential to understanding why Nietzsche rejects traditional morality and the values he wishes to call forth in its place. Third, his rejection of the traditional notion of justice as revenge, and his affirmation of mercy, as well as his insistence upon overcoming the desire to punish, undermines the idea that he is a champion of violence and cruelty. Fourth, these topics contribute to a more comprehensive understanding of what Nietzsche means by greatness and advances our knowledge of his ideal-types and moral exemplars. Finally, a thorough understanding of Nietzsche’s treatment of justice, punishment, and the criminal lends a coherent dimension to his positive ethics, his political theory, and his vision for society. While some critics have claimed that Nietzsche’s reflections on justice and punishment yield nothing of practical use, this dissertation demonstrates that Nietzsche not only provides valuable critiques but also valuable philosophical and psychological insights concerning justice, punishment, criminal law, and criminal justice reform. (shrink)