What man wants is simply independent choice. … And choice, of course, the devil only knows what choice.

Fyodor Dostoevsky

The core idea of existentialism

For the existentialists, no idea is more central than freedom. As Kierkegaard puts it, “The most tremendous thing which has been granted to man is choice [and] freedom” (1959, 189). A century later, Sartre will refer to freedom as the defining feature of existentialism. “At heart,” he writes, “what existentialism shows is the connection between the absolute character of [freedom], by virtue of which every man realizes himself” (2001, 303). As we have seen, the existentialist view of freedom implies that there is no pre-given nature or ‘essence’ to human existence because ‘existence precedes essence.’ That is, we make or create our own essence on the basis of our ongoing choices and actions. Who we are is not determined by any underlying trait or characteristic that we are born with. It is, rather, up to the individual to shape his or her own identity by choosing certain projects and taking action in the world. Only after we make these choices do we become someone, a responsible employee, a loving mother, or a caring friend. But these identities are never secure; they are always subject to future choices. I can, after all, always decide to quit my job, leave my family, or abandon my friends. This means that whatever our factical limitations – whether it is our genetic code, our socioeconomic backgrounds, our religious or family history – they do not ultimately determine who we are. We are self-making beings responsible for the meanings we give to things through our own choices, the totality of which make us who we are. This is why Sartre claims that “man is nothing else than a series of undertakings, that he is the sum, the organization, the ensemble of the relationships which make up these undertakings” (300). He offers the example of a coward to make his case. The coward is not the way he is because of his social upbringing or because of his physiological or genetic constitution. The coward, rather, “makes himself a coward” by means of his actions. It is what he does that defines him, not his “cowardly heart or lungs or brain” (301, my emphasis).

To properly understand the existentialist view of freedom, we have to distinguish it from more traditional conceptions. First, existentialists generally reject the psychological notion of freedom as having something to do with an inner faculty, namely, the ‘mind’ or ‘will.’ This results in an overly mentalistic picture of human agency and uncritically assumes that we have transparent access to the inner dynamics of our own minds (Danto 1965, 116). In response, existentialists generally argue that much of what we take to be willful and self-conscious actions are actually unconscious. We are, in other words, largely unaware of our choices and actions because they are motivated by involuntary instincts and habituated ways of being-in-the-world. Nietzsche illuminates this point in The Gay Science:

Nietzsche's comments anticipate the views of twentieth-century figures like Heidegger and Merleau-Ponty by articulating the extent to which human beings are already acting in non-deliberate and pre-reflective ways, where conscious reflection plays only a small or derivative role in our everyday lives.

Second, existentialist freedom is not to be confused with ‘positive freedom’ or what Sartre in Being and Nothingness calls the freedom “to obtain what one has wished” (1956, 622). For the existentialists, if we can do whatever we want, then it turns out that we are not free at all; we are actually at the mercy of our wants, where we simply respond to passing whims and desires, moving in one direction or another based on whatever impulse is strongest. In The Brothers Karamazov, Dostoevsky describes such a conception of freedom in terms of a kind of self-destructive ‘bondage’:

For Dostoevsky, true freedom emerges only when we are freed from the bondage of our immediate desires and wants. When he claims that our capricious impulses “distort [our] own nature,” he is suggesting that we are being dishonest with ourselves by denying our uniquely human capacity for transcendence. Unlike infants and animals, we have the ability to surpass our brute needs and desires by taking a stand on them, interpreting them, and giving them meaning. Existentialist freedom, then, is best understood as freedom of “intention” (Solomon 1972, 280); it is our inescapable capacity to interpret the world, to give meaning and value to our situation on the basis of our own choosing. This is why Sartre says, “Every man who takes refuge behind the excuse of his passions … is a dishonest man” (2001, 305). Freedom is not a property that we may or may not have; it is an ontological or structural condition of being human. Thus, even when I choose not to choose and simply ‘go with the flow’ of my immediate desires, I am still making a choice by envisioning a certain kind of life, assigning meaning to a particular identity, and making myself who I am (Guignon 2004b, 497). “What is not possible,” says Sartre, “is not to choose. I can always choose, but I ought to know that if I do not choose, I am still choosing” (2001, 304).

Finally, existentialist freedom should not be regarded as a universal moral entity, the ultimate ‘value,’ ‘ideal,’ or ‘right’ that people struggle for, that politicians and religious leaders reify, and that needs to be preserved and protected against possible threats (Cooper 1999, 154). As a structure of being human, freedom cannot be preserved, diminished, or increased; it can only be accepted and faced as an existential given. And this acceptance is by no means a positive thing. Indeed, the sincere and clear-sighted acceptance of human freedom is usually accompanied by anguish and dread because we realize that we alone are responsible for the choices we make in our lives. There is no moral absolute, ethical calculus, or natural law that can justify our choices; there is no higher tribunal than the individual himself or herself. As Camus writes, “I continue to believe that this world has no higher meaning, but I know that something in it has meaning and that is man; for he is the one being to insist on having a meaning” (cited in Solomon 1972, 285). For the existentialists, then, the individual is always burdened with the “terrible freedom” of choosing his or her own meanings and values, and “there are no excuses behind us nor justifications before us” (Sartre 2001, 296). Even faith in God, as religious existentialists like Kierkegaard, Buber, Marcel, and Tillich make clear, is a terrifying choice, a ‘mysterium tremendum,’ because it is inexpressible to others and cannot be guided by any appeal to reason (Otto 1923, 12–23; Buber 1970, 127).

Freedom and determinism

From the preceding discussion, it is easy to see how the existentialist conception of freedom conflicts with prevailing views of scientific materialism and determinism. The brand of determinism that triumphs today is shaped by the paradigm of Enlightenment science and, in this sense, is different from older versions of determinism or ‘fatalism’ characteristic of Antiquity and the Middle Ages. Fatalism is a view that is not especially concerned with identifying and explaining specific causal chains that result in particular outcomes. Sophocles (496–406 bc), for example, makes it clear that Oedipus was fated to kill his father and marry his mother regardless of whatever causal chain he pursued (Solomon 2002, 66). By contrast, scientific determinism is specifically concerned with identifying efficient causes that bring about particular effects in fixed, law-like ways. To this end, it follows the Newtonian formula that “all events can in principle be fully explained by previous events and the laws of nature” (Fischer 1994, 6). As we have shown, this view is a rejection of older teleological accounts that saw the universe as a meaningful cosmic order where each entity had a particular function or purpose. With the rise of modern science, the universe comes to be regarded as a meaningless aggregate of causally interacting physical bodies. And human beings, as part of this system, are subject to the same mechanistic laws as other bodies. We are reduced to physical organisms that are determined by natural forces.

The determinist thesis generally results in the view that there can be no such thing as free will because all movements, including human actions, are fully caused or determined by preceding events, where some of those events are internal to the individual and some are external. On this account, in any particular case we could not have acted otherwise than we did and therefore we cannot be held morally responsible for our actions. Existentialists, with the crucial exception of Nietzsche, whom we will discuss at the end of the chapter, reject the determinist thesis and affirm the view that the human being is a moral agent who has free will, who can make choices, and be held morally responsible for his or her actions. Any other position would strip away the dignity of being human, reducing us to mere automata or machines that are at the mercy of causal laws. As Sartre puts it:

But affirming free will in the face of the overwhelming scientific evidence for determinism is difficult, and no existentialist captures this tension better than Dostoevsky in his Notes from the Underground. Indeed, Walter Kaufmann refers to the story as “the best overture to existentialism ever written” (1956, 14) because of the way it addresses the problem of free will.

Dostoevsky's nameless underground man lives in mid-nineteenth century St. Petersburg, Russia, as it is going through a period of dramatic modernization, where an older way of life based around close-knit religious communities is being replaced with the newly imported secular values of scientific materialism. As someone who self-identifies with the ‘intelligentsia’ of Russia, the underground man understands the truth of scientific principles, which he refers to as ‘the Laws of Nature,’ but he is unwilling to accept them when it comes to human actions because they deny the possibility of free will and turn human beings into mechanical cogs whose behavior can be controlled and, ultimately, predicted on the basis of mathematical formulas. These principles imply that “[a human being never] really had any caprice or will of his own … that everything he does is not done by his willing it, but is done of itself, by the Laws of Nature” (Dostoevsky 2009, 18–19). But the underground man is equally critical of forms of coercion and control based on appeals to reason. Expressing the idea that ‘existence precedes essence,’ he argues that if we subject our decisions to how well they cohere with rational principles – such as Kant's categorical imperative or the happiness calculus of utilitarianism – we are assuming that we have a pre-given essence, namely that we are rational. The underground man rejects this idea, arguing that human motivations and purposes cannot be explained and justified by means of reason. On his account, existentialist freedom entails both freedom from the deterministic laws of nature and freedom from rational principles (Solomon 1972, 280; Guignon and Aho 2009, xxii–xxv).

The underground man makes his case by attacking Enlightenment social reformers who dream of creating a rationally ordered society, a ‘Crystal Palace’ based on principles of calculative reason and deterministic laws. He understands that these utopian ideals may very well result in a life of mechanized predictability, comfort, and security, but he believes human beings will eventually revolt against living life like a ‘piano-key’ because it violates the basic human need we have to choose and create our own lives:

To be sure, the underground man acknowledges and appreciates the evidence for scientific determinism, but he simultaneously affirms the need for choice, even if these choices diminish overall happiness and result in acts of “destruction and chaos” (20) because without choice we are not human beings. This is why he says, “One's own free unfettered choice is [the] ‘most advantageous advantage.’ … What man wants is simply independent choice, whatever that independence may cost and wherever it may lead. And choice, of course, the devil only knows what choice” (20).

Dostoevsky's story captures the existentialist thesis that unlike other objects in nature, our essence is not fixed and determined; it is always in the process of being made. In this sense, we are not beings or things at all; we are nothing because we are continually negating ourselves through our moment-to-moment decisions. Yet, in affirming human freedom in this way, the underground man has to confront the anguish that there is no underlying justification for his actions. On the determinist view, every motivation for acting rests on some other cause, but the underground man realizes that the underlying cause in turn requires another cause, and another, and so on to infinity. Committed to free will, the underground man believes he is the ‘causa sui’ of his existence, and there are no limits or constraints that can hinder him. Limits emerge only if he chooses to interpret and accept them as limits (Guignon and Aho 2009, xxiv). Thus, if reason, social convention, or the laws of nature determine that he should act in a certain way, the underground man does the opposite. If he is sick, he refuses to see a doctor; if he is at a dinner party, he acts in outrageous and embarrassing ways; if someone reaches out to him with love and tenderness, he lashes out with rage. And he refuses to blame anyone or anything for his actions. He takes responsibility for his choices even though they are self-destructive and leave him feeling alienated and ashamed.

Here, it is important to note that the underground man does not represent Dostoevsky's own views on freedom. As a religious existentialist, Dostoevsky sees the reflexive rebellion of the underground man as a distortion of human nature. As we saw earlier, to impulsively act in contrarian ways is not actually freedom. True freedom, for Dostoevsky, is exhibited when the individual is freed from these impulses for the sake of something ‘higher’ in the world. This is why Father Zossima, who speaks for Dostoevsky in The Brothers Karamazov, says:

Dostoevsky sees a life ruled by impulsive rebellion as one that is ultimately self-defeating. Every time the underground man rebels against a limitation in order to assert his freedom, a new limitation emerges, resulting in a desperate cycle where he is enslaved by the need to lash out at anything that may limit or constrain him. True freedom, for Dostoevsky, emerges when we subordinate or let go of our egoistic need for self-assertion and humbly accept the mystery of God which is nothing more than an acceptance of the whole of life itself with all of its shared joys and suffering. Only this kind of freedom, a ‘freedom of spirit,’ can pull us out of the empty cycle of self-affirmation and open us up to the realization that salvation demands that we transcend our egoistic needs for the sake of others, to see that we are not willful subjects who are isolated and alone, but vulnerable beings who are mutually attached and dependent on each other (Guignon 1993).

Although it is not representative of his own views, Notes from the Underground offers a powerful, if ultimately tragic, testimony of the value of free will in the face of an increasingly rational and deterministic world. And no existentialist developed this theme more definitively than Sartre, who referred to human freedom as ‘radical’ and ‘absolute’ because it emerges ex nihilo from the contingent upsurge of choice itself.

Radical freedom

In order to understand Sartre's view of free will, we have to return to the phenomenological roots of his project. As we saw earlier, twentieth-century existentialists were indebted to Husserl's idea that human consciousness has an intentional structure, meaning that it always has an objective correlate; it is always of something. Consciousness is not, as Descartes had envisioned, an object or thing that is grasped in the reflective ‘I’ or cogito. Consciousness “is not [an] object,” as Sartre explains, “nor is it the ‘I’ of consciousness” (1957, 41). Indeed, consciousness is not a thing or substance at all. It is a relational activity or process, a no-thing that is always pointing away from itself, always directed toward objects outside it. “When I run after a streetcar,” for example, “there is no I. There is consciousness of the streetcar-having-to-be-overtaken” (49). Given this account, consciousness is intentionality, and it has no ‘inside.’ “It is just this being beyond itself, this absolute flight, this refusal to be substance which makes it a consciousness” (Sartre 2002, 383). On Sartre's view, consciousness is always “bursting toward” beings in the world, “tearing us out of ourselves” (382).

In addition to the idea of intentionality, Sartre also borrows Husserl's idea that consciousness is a meaning-giving activity. Acts of consciousness are not passive representations of objects in the world. They actively endow objects with the meaning and significance that they have. This means that when I perceive things, I perceive them as such. I don't just see the tree. “[I] see it just where it is: at the side of the road, in the midst of the dust, alone and writhing in the heat, eight miles from the Mediterranean coast” (Sartre 2002, 383). The fact that we see things as ‘this, and not that,’ means that our acts of consciousness inject a ‘not’ or ‘nothingness’ into the world. Consciousness allows us to pick things out, to make meaningful distinctions in the world by means of negation. Thus, to see the tree as a source of shade is to give meaning to it, and this requires seeing it as not something else (e.g., as a source of firewood). In this sense, our acts of consciousness carve up and order reality for us or ‘for-itself’ (pour soi), making it fit our own needs and concerns. Without consciousness, all we would encounter is formless being, the naked and disordered ‘in-itself’ (en soi) of things. Consciousness, then, is the free ‘upsurge’ of will that gives meaning to the inchoate plenum of being. On this account, I shape the world around me through my own meaning-giving activity, and therefore I alone am responsible for how the world matters to me.

Understanding this duality between ‘being’ and ‘nothingness’ allows us to better understand human existence as a tension between facticity and transcendence. Whatever limits or constrains us in terms of our facticity is something we can always transcend because we can reflect on it and give it meaning by choosing to interpret it in a particular way. If I am born into abject poverty, for instance, this may be seen as a limitation that restricts my possibilities in the future, and I may choose to resign myself to this situation. But I also have the capacity to reject the interpretation that my poverty is a limitation and embrace it as something that gives my life character, allowing me to appreciate my accomplishments more and enabling me to relate with compassion to others in similar circumstances. In either case, there is always a gap or a fissure – a ‘nothingness’ – between my being ‘in-itself’ and my being ‘for-itself’ (Guignon and Pereboom 2001, 265). Regardless of the path or identity I happen to choose, I am not that person. My identity is penetrated by a ‘not’ because I can always question myself and assign different meanings and interpretations in the future. Ortega y Gasset will refer to this aspect of our existence in terms of ‘plasticity.’ “Man is an infinitely plastic entity of which one may make what one will precisely because of itself it is nothing save only the mere potentiality to be ‘as you like’ ” (1941, 203–204). We are ‘plastic’ because we are always making ourselves who we are. And this process of self-making is itself nihilating.

This helps us to understand why the existentialists reject the idea that there is a pre-given essence to human being. “If man, as the existentialist conceives him, is indefinable,” says Sartre, “it is because at first he is nothing. Only afterward will he be something, and he himself will have made what he will be. Thus, there is no human nature” (2001, 293). There is no aspect of our facticity that absolutely determines or defines us because our being ‘in-itself’ is always being negated by our being ‘for-itself.’ Our facticity can reveal itself to us only by being imbued with meanings that are constituted by the projects and self-interpretations that we choose. This is why Sartre claims that “human reality is constituted as a being which is what it is not [for-itself] and which is not what it is [in-itself]” (1956, 107, my emphasis).

This, however, does not mean that Sartre is claiming that humans can do whatever they want. It would be absurd, for instance, to say that the slave in chains can do whatever the master does because the slave inhabits a situation that limits his actions in particular ways. But, for Sartre, the slave is just as free as the master in terms of the meanings and values that he can ascribe to his situation. He explains in the following passage:

From this, we can see that when Sartre speaks of ‘absolute’ or ‘radical’ freedom, he does not mean that there are no limits or constraints on the ways we can act, but that these limits gain their meaning from us. In addition, because there are an infinite number of meanings that any situation can have, there is nothing that ultimately compels me to interpret things in one way rather than another. It is up to me alone to determine how things are going to matter to me. For this reason freedom is invariably accompanied by “forlornness” and “anguish” (Cooper 1999, 154).

We are ‘forlorn’ when we realize that we have been abandoned to a world that is not of our choosing and that offers no underlying support or plan for our lives. And we are in ‘anguish’ when we recognize that we alone are responsible for who we are and what we do. On this account, anguish discloses the predicament of what Sartre calls being “left in the realm of possibility” (2001, 299), where we confront a dizzying array of possible meanings and that we alone are answerable for the meanings that we choose. Anguish, then, is not to be confused with fear because it is not directed at a specific object out there in the world; it is directed at oneself as an incarnation of our vertiginous freedom. “Anguish is distinguished from fear,” says Sartre, “in that fear is fear of being in the world whereas anguish is anguish before myself” (1956, 65, my emphasis).

Sartre's view of radical freedom is tempered by existentialists like Heidegger and Merleau-Ponty who argue that the meanings we choose to give to things cannot be constituted exclusively by the individual, and thus the individual can never be what Sartre calls the “the incontestable author of an event” (1956, 707). Rather, our choices are limited by our historical situation, a situation that makes it possible for things to mean something to us in the first place. On this view, our freedom is always already embedded in the meanings of an intersubjective world.

Situated freedom

In the final chapter of Phenomenology of Perception, Merleau-Ponty outlines his views on freedom. Like Sartre, he argues that there is no pre-given essence that determines us; that freedom is a structure of being human; and that our choices negate or ‘carve out’ the amorphous mass of being by giving meaning to things. Where Merleau-Ponty breaks with Sartre is in the idea that we can create ourselves through the sheer ‘upsurge’ of choice alone. For Merleau-Ponty, in order to make a choice we must first be familiar with the meanings and values of our historical situation (see Cooper 1999, 159–164). The idea, for instance, that an alienated factory worker could somehow nullify himself with an ‘initial choice’ and become a Marxist revolutionary would be impossible. This is because the choice is already a meaningful possibility in the world that the worker has been thrown into. The revolutionary, then, is not the ‘uncontested author’ of his identity who somehow reverses course and radically breaks with his proletarian history. The meanings that he chooses to take over are possibilities made available to him by a shared world, and these historical possibilities are laid out “before any personal decision has been made” (1962, 449). “I am situated in a social environment,” writes Merleau-Ponty, “and my freedom though it may have the power to commit me elsewhere has not the power to transform me instantaneously into what I decide to be” (447).

Here Merleau-Ponty is following Heidegger's interpretation of existence as ek-stasis, that humans have always already ‘stepped outside beyond’ themselves to the extent we are bound up in the meanings of our historical situation. “Nothing determines me from outside,” as Merleau-Ponty writes, “not because nothing acts upon me, but because I am from the start outside myself and open to the world” (456). On this account, we can never be the ‘uncontested author’ of our choices and actions because our choices and actions are already embedded in and open to the meanings of a particular history. Ortega y Gasset expresses a similar idea when he claims “man lives in view of the past. Man, in a word, has no nature; what he has is … history. Expressed differently: what nature is to things, history … is to man” (1941, 217). It is true, on this account, that we are self-making, but it is also true that we are already made. We create ourselves through our own meaning-giving choices and interpretations, but we are also already created because we inhabit a historical world that endows our choices and interpretations with the meaning that they have. “We exist in both ways at once,” says Merleau-Ponty. “We choose the world and the world chooses us” (1962, 453–454).

Beauvoir will make a related claim in The Second Sex when she develops the idea that the human being “is not a thing, [but] a situation” (1952, 38). Understood this way, Beauvoir suggests that women (and members of other marginalized or oppressed groups) cannot exhibit ‘radical’ or ‘absolute’ freedom because they are always constrained by their historical situation, one that, in this case, compels women to see themselves as mere things or passive objects. Of course, as an existentialist, Beauvoir rejects the idea that women are inferior to men because of pre-given biological differences. Beauvoir does not deny these differences but argues that they do not essentially define woman as inferior to man. Following Sartre, she claims that the human being “is defined as a being who is not fixed, who makes [herself] what [she] is. … Woman [then] is not a completed reality, but rather a becoming.” This means the anatomical “body is not enough to define her as a woman” (38). The woman, on this view, is not born but made through her own meaning-giving choices. But her choices are limited in a way that the man's is not because she inhabits a historical situation that is patriarchal. As a result, she tends to interpret herself as a powerless thing or object. She is self-making, but because of her oppressive situation she interprets herself as being already made.

What is missing from these accounts – and existentialist accounts of freedom in general – is an analysis of the fundamental role that biology and instinct plays in determining our choices. Nietzsche's reflections on freedom are especially important in this regard, not only because he acknowledges the significance of our biological nature and brings to light the complex ways in which instinctual forces work behind our backs to make decisions for us. He also offers a seminal critique of moralistic conceptions of free will and provides his own version of situated freedom, one that is rooted in the polymorphous drives of the body.

Creature and creator

Of all the so-called existentialists, Nietzsche is alone in emphasizing the importance of the biological body, where biology is understood in terms of the dynamic confluence of physiological drives and instincts that unconsciously guide our choices and actions. For existentialists like Nietzsche, the tendency in the West has been to “despise the body” (2006, I, 4) and to privilege the cognizing mind. But this disembodied standpoint is an illusion. We are, according to Nietzsche, nothing more than the “totality of [bodily] drives that constitute [our] being” (1997, 119, my emphasis), and the idea that we have transparent mastery over our thoughts and actions is a fiction. This is why Nietzsche writes, “Behind your thoughts and feelings stands a powerful commander, an unknown wise man – he is called a self. He lives in your body; he is your body” (2006, 1, 4). On Nietzsche's account, traditional talk about self-awareness, free will, and moral responsibility are forms of self-deception. “Our moral judgments and evaluations,” he writes, “are only images and fantasies based on a physiological process unknown to us, a kind of acquired language for designating certain nervous stimuli” (1997, 119). The self-consciousness that we commonly associate with acts of will is actually parasitic on a deeper kind of instinctive animal consciousness that is fundamentally unselfconscious. In this sense, we are continually thinking and acting without even knowing it because the “thinking that rises to consciousness is only the smallest part” of our agency (1995, 354). This means that the usual conception of the will as an autonomous faculty that serves as the primary cause of our thoughts and actions is an “error,” where we mistakenly “believe ourselves to be causal in the act of willing: [where] we at least thought that we were there, catching causality in the act” (1990, V, 3). We cannot be autonomous agents, according to Nietzsche, because we do not have control of our own thoughts. “A thought comes when ‘it’ will, not when ‘I’ want it to” (1998, I, 17). Indeed, the fact that we have historically assigned causal agency to the will is itself the product of instinct, what Nietzsche calls “the cause creating drive” (1990, V, 5) that emerges from a conditioned need to give reasons and attribute causes to events. This instinct serves a practical function in the preservation of the species because it “soothes” and “liberates” us (V, 5) from the horrifying fact that there is no underlying explanation, cause, or meaning to existence. But it is also an ‘instinct of weakness’ because it results in our standardized and herd-like tendencies.

This means, of course, that our inveterate tendency to conform, our ‘herd nature,’ is also an instinct, the result of a unique evolutionary unfolding, where we have, over tens of thousands of years, developed shared languages, beliefs, and communicative practices that are useful for our collective survival as the “most endangered animal” (1995, 354). Consciousness, on this view, does not refer to a self-directed mind that is the center of my thoughts and actions. It is, rather, a social and linguistic construction. “[Consciousness] is only a means of communication,” says Nietzsche; “it is evolved through social intercourse and with a view to the interests of social intercourse” (1968, 524). Seen in this light, my inner intentions, beliefs, and desires are already shaped in advance by the shared historical context that I have grown into unawares. It is this context that makes it possible for me to understand the world and make sense of my thoughts and actions. This is why Nietzsche suggests that “consciousness does not really belong to the individual existence of human beings, but rather to the social and herd nature in them; that, as a consequence, consciousness is subtly developed only in regard to social and herd usefulness” (1995, 354).

But simply because he rejects the notion of an autonomous mind or consciousness and regards “the body and physiology [as the] starting point” (1968, 492) of his philosophy does not mean that Nietzsche is a determinist who embraces a mechanistic account of human behavior. He makes it clear that human existence cannot be reduced to the law-like principles of Newtonian science. Indeed, Nietzsche sounds like Dostoevsky's underground man when he writes, “Do we really want to permit existence to be degraded for us like this – reduced to a mere exercise on a calculator and an indoor diversion for mathematicians?” If we did this, would we not “divest existence of its rich ambiguity” (1995, 373)? In this sense, Nietzsche is neither an advocate of freedom nor of determinism because there is no faculty (the ‘mind’ or ‘will’) or determinist calculus that can sustain the philosophical debate. They are both historical fictions that emerged out of our instinctual need to explain and simplify a reality that is irreducibly complex and ambiguous. This explains why Nietzsche says, “Freedom of the will or not freedom? – There is no such thing as ‘will’; it is only a simplifying conception of understanding, as is ‘matter’ ” (1968, 671; cited in Schacht 1983, 304).

Nietzsche is not denying that we, like all other creatures, act according to our natures, but that we are compelled to act on the basis of a multiplicity of forces and drives that we are not (and can never be) fully conscious of. But this does not make Nietzsche an ‘instinctualist’ when it comes to the question of human freedom. Such a view would reduce freedom to what he calls “laisser aller,” where we simply “let go” and “give in” (1990, IX, 41) to our animal instincts and act impulsively without any evaluative reflection (Schacht 1983, 307; Solomon 2002, 80). This creates an overly narrow and ‘decadent’ picture of human agency, where freedom would be equivalent to blindly submitting to whatever feeling or impulse that we had at a given moment. As we saw in our discussion of selfhood in , a person cannot be reduced to a ‘wanton’ who acts impulsively on the basis of whatever causal stimulation is strongest. Nietzsche sees humans as occupying a “higher stage” (1968, 928) of evolutionary development because we can evaluate, control, and even overcome our impulses. This means we are free when we do not reflexively submit to our strongest desires or to dominant social conventions. Unlike other animals, we have what Nietzsche calls “the capacity for long-range decisions” (1998, VI, 212). We are capable of envisioning the kind of life we want to live and the kind of person we want to become and create ourselves on the basis of that vision. It is true that we cannot escape the limitations of our animal nature or the habits and prejudices of our tradition, but we can resist and struggle with them insofar as they prevent us from realizing the kind of person we want to be. Indeed, for Nietzsche, freedom is nothing other than the painful exertion and struggle that we endure in the process of making ourselves who we are. This is why Nietzsche refers to the human being as both “creature and creator” (225).

Robert Solomon (2002) explains this view by drawing on the distinction between ‘first-order’ and ‘second-order’ desires that we discussed earlier. As a gambler, for example, I may have a strong first-order desire to spend my weekly paycheck at the local casino for the sake of immediate gratification. But this creaturely impulse can be overcome by a higher, second-order volition to be a responsible father and provider for my family. Acting on the basis of this second-order desire and exercising control and restraint regarding my impulses reveals my unique capacity as a creator, embodying what Nietzsche calls “self-direction” (1968, 705), to envision a particular kind of life and to act on the basis of that vision (Schacht 1983, 307). Being a creator in this way makes me responsible for the person that I become insofar as I act on these higher aspirations. However, Nietzsche makes it clear that this capacity for transcendence and self-mastery is not absolute. Because I am nothing more than the ‘totality of drives that constitute my being,’ my capacity for transcendence is always mediated by the unique confluence of creaturely strengths and weaknesses that I am born with and that I inherit from my history. In this sense, Nietzsche is presenting a version of what we have been calling ‘situated freedom,’ arguing that the capacity for transcendence that I possess is always conditioned by the complex unity of physiological and historical forces that constitute who I am. Thus, when Nietzsche refers to “the highest types of free men [in whom] the highest resistance is constantly overcome” (1990, IX, 38), he is not referring to capacities that all human beings share. “Only a very few people can be independent,” says Nietzsche. “It is a prerogative of the strong” (1998, II, 29). The measure of freedom that I am capable of is the result of the “fortunate organization [of my nature]” (1968, 705). Indeed, most of us will be incapable of genuine self-creation. This is why Nietzsche says freedom is “for the very few” (1998, II, 29). It is reserved only for the highest type of human being who cannot help but struggle and fight to become who they are.

The conception of freedom as the struggle to create oneself in the face of factical limitations and constraints leads to another core idea in existentialism, authenticity. The existentialists recognize that everyday life is usually characterized by being inauthentic, that is, we deceive ourselves by conforming to the ready-made roles, meanings, and values of the public world and, therefore, refuse to take responsibility for our own being. Existentialists offer an alternative to this kind of self-deception by addressing what it means to ‘be true’ to oneself. Consistent with the existentialist conceptions of freedom and selfhood, authenticity is not given to us by some pre-given essence; it is something we earn or realize through our actions and choices. In the following chapter, we will examine the ways in which existentialists offer different views of self-realization and articulate how these views can lead to the criticism that, in privileging authenticity, existentialism may be undermining the possibility for ethics.

Suggested reading

Arp, K. (2001). The bonds of freedom: Simone de Beauvoir's existentialist ethics. Chicago: Open Court.

Grene, M. (1948). Dreadful freedom: A critique of existentialism. Chicago: University of Chicago Press.

Howells, C. (2009). Sartre: The necessity of freedom. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.

Solomon, R. (2002). Nietzsche on fatalism and “free will.” Journal of Nietzsche Studies 23: 63–87.