Thursday, March 21, 2019

Free Will, Determinism, Will to Power

Schopenhauer's replacement of Kant's Pure Practical Reason with the Universal Will to Live entails the denial of the possibility of Individual Free Will.  So, though he does not explicitly address it, Nietzsche's contrast, in The Gay Science #1, of Individual behavior vs. behavior that is determined by a Species drive, in which he mocks the former, seems to align him with Schopenhauer in the traditional Free Will vs. Determinism debate.  But, if so, then Will to Power is potentially just  another vain illusion.  However, underlying that dichotomy is one that he repudiates in the passage--Super-Natural vs. Natural, entailed in which is the doctrine of the divine judgment upon the behavior of Individual Souls, and, thus, the thesis of Individual Freedom.  It follows from the repudiation of the underlying dichotomy that he is no longer committed to the derived dichotomy, not even to its Hard Determinist pole.  Instead, open to him, as a third alternative, is the concept of an Event as being the confluence of multiple antecedent conditions, as Whitehead later proposes.  On that model, Individual behavior determined by a Species drive can include co-involvement with the behavior of similarly determined other Individual behavior.  On that basis, the concept of Individual Freedom is erroneous not because it false, but because it is partial, i. e. abstracts from a more comprehensive context.  Similarly, Individual Will to Power is erroneous only insofar as it is conceived as the sole determinant of an event with multiple influences.  But, despite the availability to him of that resolution of the Free Will vs. Determinism debate, Nietzsche's frequent attribution of Will to Power to isolated agents encourages the interpretation that it remains bogged down by the traditional dichotomy, and, hence, is an instance of illusory Individual Freedom.

No comments:

Post a Comment