Transcript for Brian Leiter Interview on Nietzsche | Reject Free Will, Become Who You Are

0. Introduction

I've always thought belief in free will made me more agential, that it enabled me to act with more force and vigor, but this interview revealed how belief in free can actually limits your agency. Here's the basic idea: I came into this interview, probably like most of you, thinking that living without free will means your choices aren’t your own and that...your life is out of your control. That seems like a pretty passive way to live. But Nietzsche says “no,” giving up free will is freeing, because the sooner you give up this idea that you can choose, that you can change core aspects of your personality, the sooner you'll stop trying to be something you aren't and become who you are.

Think about the great conquerors like Caesar and Alexander, they believed they were fated to wield power, not that they chose to. And that belief in their destiny, my greatness is inevitable, allowed them to live agentially and forcefully. In my own life, I've always felt bad that I wasn't more social, every time I turned down an invitation so I could read by myself I felt guilty because I'm choosing not to go. It wasn't until I started coming to terms with my inescapable introversion that I felt empowered to live like a hermit reading books all day. That's the agency that Nietzsche wants to teach you, the agency to realize your unique potential that you are born with.

My guest today is profesor Brian Leiter, one of the world's leading Nietzsche scholars, and we are going to discuss Nietzsche's arguments against free will and why rejecting it doesn’t turn you into a powerless leaf in the wind, but a powerful agent of fate.

---

1. Free Will

1.1 Nietzsche’s Position on Free Will

Johnathan Bi: So, Professor, you've written two seminal works on Nietzsche's morality, and what was shocking to me is your disproportionate focus on Nietzsche's treatment of free will because that's not something one really thinks about when they first think of Nietzsche. Why did you want to emphasize Nietzsche's treatment here on free will? Why is it important for you? Why is it important to Nietzsche? And why should the rest of us care?

Brian Leiter: Okay. So I actually think it is pretty central in Nietzsche, and he takes it up in many different places and many different ways. And it's central because it's closely connected to his major project, the revaluation of value and attack on Judeo-Christian morality. He takes to be one of the sort of metaphysical grounds of Judeo-Christian morality is a belief in freedom of the will, such that if someone acts in an immoral way, it is justified to blame them for it, you can hold people morally responsible, punishment is justified for immoral behavior, and so on. So I think he's very interested in this question, and his rejection of free will is closely connected to his unusual and very sophisticated picture of how the mind really works and what human agency is really like. So in those regards, I think it's quite central to what he's doing.

Now, why should we care? His view on these questions is quite revisionary, I think, of what ordinary belief is. He does not believe that human beings are free or morally responsible in their choices. He believes that our conscious life is fairly superficial, that we do what we do largely because of unconscious drives that are operating in our psyche that we're largely unaware of. He doesn't think that I know more about myself than you can know about me. I discover who I am partly by observing my behavior just as I learn about you by observing yours. Because the bulk of our mental life is unconscious. So there's a whole picture Nietzsche has that anticipates Freud in various ways that's connected to his critique of free will and leads to a very different understanding of what it is to be a human being.

Johnathan Bi: Right. So what I'm hearing is, number one, it is actually quite central to Nietzsche's philosophy as a whole. Number two, it should matter to us because the reasons he gives for us not having free will is actually quite interesting and unique in terms of a contemporary view. And of course, number three, it's naturally intuitive for us to care whether we have free will or not, right? Moral responsibility flow from that. So we're going to spend this entire interview just unpacking that concept. I'm going to split it into three parts. First, we're going to talk about just what his position on free will is. Number two, we're going to understand what arguments and objections that one may have for Nietzsche's position. And number three, and this is the most exciting part, we're going to talk about how Nietzsche wants us to live if we do agree that we are unfree in the way that he described. So you already gave a rough overview of Nietzsche's understanding of the free will or lack thereof. Anything to add for a provisional first pass?

1.2 Contemporary Positions on Free Will