capricious?

staketsels
Fallingwater (Frank Lloyd Wright) under construction

“In “Human, all too Human” he consistently describes the belief in free will as an error and refers to the unfreedom of the will as “total” and “unconditional”. Human beings are no more free than animals, or indeed than a WATERFALL in which we may “think we see (…) capriciousness and freedom of will”.

In a section entitled “The Table of Intelligible Freedom” he elegantly recaps the argument for determinism and Rée‘s rejection of Schopenhauer’s inference that because we feel guilt we must be responsible and must have freedom in some sense; but the inference is faulty, argues Nietzsche in clearly Rée-inspired mode:

“It is because man r e g a r d s himself as free, not because he is free, that he feels remorse and pangs of conscience. – This feeling is, moreover, something one can disaccustom oneself to (…) No one is accountable for his deeds, no one for his nature; to judge is the same thing as to be unjust. This also applies when the individual judges himself. The proposition is as clear as daylight, and yet here everyone prefers to retreat back into the shadows and untruth:
from fear of the consequences.”

However I shall claim that a decade later in the Genealogy Nietzsche does not offer arguments against free will in the “acting otherwise” sense, and that he attaches to the question whether there is free will in this sense.”

Christopher Janaway in Beyond Selflessness: reading Nietzsche’s Genealogy
zie: Falling Waters
zie: Be brave

onstuimig
(onstuimige waterval, gekregen van Patricia van den Dungen)

3 thoughts on “capricious?”

    1. Onvoorspelbaar, wispelturig?
      Een standpunt inzake de vrije wil kan toch slecht onwrikbaar zijn?
      Verrassende wendingen geeft:
      “de krachtige, lenig dans van het denken.”
      (Sylvain De Bleeckere, in “Landschappen van Nietzsche”)

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