In this provocative book, Randall Havas articulates an approach to Nietzsche which demonstrates that the authentic individual need not stand apart from his or her culture in order to resist the demands of conformism. On Havas's reading, the task of the Nietzschean individual is instead to replace the illusion of culture - "herd morality" - with real community, and in this way to avoid nihilism. It is such community that Nietzsche aspires to establish with his readers - a claim that, (...) in the author's view, suggests that Nietzsche's conception of the nature of community and, hence, of individuality must be understood in terms of his theory of reading and interpretation. Nietzsche holds that the category of the individual is itself a historical construct. Havas's interpretation of this view dissolves the threat it appears to pose to individualism. By treating genealogical method as a response to this threat, he shows how Nietzsche's defense of individualism, his conception of history, and his commitment to truth reinforce one another. On this reading, Nietzsche's more properly ethical concerns lie at the heart of his understanding of the will to knowledge. Havas argues that, for Nietzsche, ostensibly epistemological questions can be assessed only in the light of an understanding of the interdependence between individual and community. (shrink)

Meaning, in the sense that interests Nietzsche, is possible only on the basis of what he calls “obedience over a long period of time and in a single direction”. That he considers one's authority as a speaker to be in this way a function of obedience suggests that a better understanding of training more generally might help us understand his conception of the achievement of intelligibility. To that end, I begin an exploration in this article of the notions of authority (...) and obedience in Nietzsche's work through the perspective of the formal obedience training of dogs. I contend that understanding the distinction between predictability and reliability in the context of dog training sheds new light on what we might think of as the normative dimension of the sovereign individual's reliability as described in the Genealogy and helps to make clear why, for Nietzsche, individuality is best understood as a form of mutuality. (shrink)

This article develops an interpretation of Nietzsche’s notion of the overman and its links to his conceptions of agency and free will. Nietzsche sees human actions as commitments and commitment as irreducibly temporal inasmuch as it requires both obedience to the past and responsibility for the future. In making any possibility his own, the agent commits himself to certain outcomes in the face of contingencies beyond his control. An overman is someone who has overcome his resistance to the temporal character (...) of agency by taking responsibility for the choices he makes. (shrink)