Nietzsche’s Critique of Free Will EXPLAINED: Why Nietzsche exchanged “moral responsibility” for Fate

A key to comprehending many of Nietzsche's core ideas is rarely talked about, or sometimes willfully ignored: Nietzsche's rejection of free will and embrace of fatalism, or what he called the "love of fate". In Nietzsche's view, the conception of free will that is most common is that of viewing ourselves as an ego-consciousness, that acts as a voluntary and autonomous governor over the body and its drives. This view of the self is incorrect in Nietzsche's view, because the ego-consciousness is not master over the drives, but created from their raw material, as a "surface and skin" which often does more to conceal the true causes of our actions than to reveal it. The conscious motive as the cause of our actions (themselves mere effects) is what Nietzsche identifies as one of his "great errors" of thought in Twilight of Idols.

On the other hand, there is the noble view of one's freedom, which comes from possessing power and the ensuing experience of seeing one's will realized in its aims. From this experience of freedom in a physical, material, political sense, man extrapolated to the idea of libertarian free will. However, Nietzsche is careful to distinguish this impulse to believing in free will from the impulse which comes from a very different source: Christianity. This is all the more common basis for freedom of the will these days: the conviction that we are minds driving bodies, an uncaused cause which presides over decision-making, independently of the age or culture. In short, the idea that everyone has true moral choices over which they deliberate in a truly independent way. The sentiment behind this sort of free will, in Nietzsche's view, is the desire to hold people accountable for their actions: to make human beings "morally responsible". It is through this doctrine that great errors of thought tyrannized over men's minds for millennia.

As Nietzsche writes in Thus Spoke Zarathustra, he dreams that one day man may be delivered from revenge. The alternative to this way of thinking is amor fati, the love of fate: embracing one's life exactly as it is and as they have lived it, and affirming it. While no one authors himself, he may still choose to love what has been authored by nature and by existence. In this in-depth talk drawn from episode ten of the Nietzsche podcast, Keegan explains all of this, and more.

Listen to the episode on Spotify: https://open.spotify.com/episode/6xLu...

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