Writes Martha Nussbaum, in Hiding from Humanity, that “the fantasy of self-transcendence… is all too likely to be a fantasy of impossible strength or purity, in which crucial elements of the human are lacking” (Nussbaum, 106). She takes Nietzsche’s moral philosophy to be exemplative of this fantasy, arguing in a footnote that Nietzsche conceives of an “impossible “overman” who lacks typical weaknesses” as the end-goal of all moral striving (Nussbaum, 362). It is important here to make a terminological distinction, as I believe Nussbaum errs in referring to an individual who “lacks typical weaknesses” as the overman. Nietzsche’s construction of the overman occurs at an ontological rather than individual level. To identify the overman with the elimination of certain human weaknesses, then, is an egregious misreading, since it leads us to understand certain concepts, such as the will-to-power, as a process whereby one individual, lacking “typical weaknesses”, violently exerts physical force over another. No doubt the concept of the will-to-power has something to do with forces, but, as mentioned above, these forces are to be understood ontologically. As Gilles Deleuze argues in Nietzsche and Philosophy, the will to power refers not “to an individual, to a person, but rather to an event, that is to the forces in their various relationships in a proposition or a phenomenon (Deleuze, xi). The discharge of strength that Nietzsche believes is necessary for the proper functioning of all living creatures should not be understood solely as the discharge of physical force (which, for Nietzsche, is the lowest, most base expression of the will to power) but also one that is, in its most sublime expression, creative : “Genuine philosophers… are commanders and legislators… their creating is legislating, their will to truth is— will to power (Nietzsche, 136). Thus the overman cannot be thought of simply as an invulnerable Stoic, since “he is the… product of the will to power”; he is beholden not to a brutish ethical ideal, but to a creative process of becoming (Deleuze, xii). A Nietzschean concept that would have been more appropriate to use in this context would have been that of the “sovereign individual” (hereafter, SI), since Nietzsche seems to understand the SI as a model for self-mastery. The SI, then, can be understood at a personal, or individual level rather than an ontological one. But even if this correction were made, and we understood the SI as representing “impossible strength or purity”, Nussbaum would yet again err in supposing that the SI is, for Nietzsche, a positive ethical ideal. In this essay, I will argue that Nietzsche does not understand the SI to be an ideal, prophet-like figure worthy of emulation. He considers the SI to be worthy of the most serious condemnation and mockery— for Nietzsche, the SI is a product, not an undoing of, the ascetic ideal.

Recent scholarship has cast doubt on the idea that Nietzsche had a positive ethical ideal at all. Given his fiercely polemical style and critical deftness, with which he deconstructs various value-systems, it might come as a surprise that Nietzsche does not offer his readers a “way forward”, so to speak, or an alternative value system. This refusal to give guidance, however, is constitutive of his philosophy as such. When, for example, Zarathustra is asked if there is a certain way one ought to live one’s life, his response is that no such way exists. Brian Leiter argues that while Nietzsche “aims at freeing higher human beings from their false consciousness about morality”, his philosophy is unconcerned with “a transformation of society at large” (Leiter, SEP). The concept of false consciousness here should not be taken to mean that an individual is deceived by certain social mores which can be overcome through a (philosophical or otherwise) corrective, yielding a fundamental truth. Rather, false consciousness means that the standpoint of modern consciousness is false; Nietzsche “look[s] upon the whole of consciousness primarily as “false” consciousness” (Ricoeur, 33). This is precisely why it is impossible to speak of a Nietzschean moral philosophy, if by moral philosophy we mean a set of edifying, instructive propositions that determine how one ought to live one’s life. Nussbaum’s political liberalism, on the other hand, requires that “certain basic rights and liberties for all citizens” are valued (Nussbaum, 62). Moreover, she identifies “primary goods”, that are, ostensibly, “prerequisites for leading a flourishing life” (Nussbaum, 62). The subject, then, for Nussbaum, is considered only in relation to the positive ethical ideals of liberalism; just institutions produce the liberal subject, and in turn, “require support from the psychology of [these] citizens” (Nussbaum, 16). The subject is conceived in an entirely different way in Nietzsche’s philosophy. Prior to an investigation of the role of the SI in the Genealogy and Nietzsche’s views on morality, one must confront the Nietzschean subject. The subject, for Nietzsche, is a multiplicity and cannot be understood independently of the will to power. (Nietzsche, 490). The subject is non-substantial, nor is it a unity. It does not possess any essential or innate characteristics in Nietzsche’s ontology— he heralds the death of the subject in the same breath that he exclaims “God is dead!”. The subject is a fabrication because it is a name that is (in a manner that is not metaphysically justifiable) added on to a “profusion of competing wills to power” (Booth, 121). It cannot play any regulative role whatsoever. Such a conception of the subject calls into question the possibility of ever arriving at absolute truth. If the subject is fabricated, a mere convention that has social rather than natural origins, then the same thing can be said of the truth. Truth is nothing but a “uniformly valid and binding designation… for things” inaugurated under contingent circumstances (Nietzsche, 354) Both the subject and the truth are then, for Nietzsche, impermanent. The Nietzschean riposte to Nussbaum’s argument that the precepts of liberalism, even if not universally true or valid, can be argued to be superior to various other socio-political arrangements (such as communitarianism) through an impartial investigative procedure, would be that this procedure would be carried out not by a rational agent, but by a “self-deceiving subject” that assumes the truth of what it is attempting to demonstrate as true. As David Booth argues in “Nietzsche on the “Subject as Multiplicity”, the subject “is able to fabricate religious ideals and “other worlds” … without necessarily having any consciousness of its authorship of those ideals or words”, and instead posits them as universal truths awaiting discovery (Booth, 121). In the second treatise of the Genealogy, Nietzsche argues that such an investigative procedure, far from being impartial, is one that is essentially “ascetic”, whereby “few ideas are to be made indelible, omnipresent, unforgettable, “fixed”… and the ascetic procedures… are means for taking these ideas out of competition with all other ideas” (Nietzsche, 38).

Earlier in the treatise, Nietzsche refers to the SI as the “ripest fruit” of a certain process— but what is this process? It might seem at first as a critical break from the morality of custom; Nietzsche’s discussion of the SI seems almost laudatory, devoid of his usual cynicism. The SI, however, is the “ripest fruit” on a tree whose roots are poisonous (Nietzsche, 37). When discussing the SI, Nietzsche’s tone is not laudatory, but rather bitterly ironic and derisive. The SI emerges from a process which has made man calculable, in fact it is the “great justification” of the morality of custom (Nietzsche, 36). But despite Nietzsche placing the SI at the end of this monstrous, “prehistoric” process, does his discussion of the matter not seemingly take an abrupt turn in the pages that follow (Nietzsche, 36)? Is the SI not constituted through a negation of the morality of custom, embodying a higher, more perfect ideal, possessing his “own independent long will”; the SI, writes Nietzsche is an “autonomous and supermoral” agent, “resembling only himself” (we know already that Nietzsche does not allow for a self-identical subject) (Nietzsche, 36). One could say that the morality of custom is the SI’s constitutive negation; the SI cannot be conceived of as truly “free… from the morality of custom” since even to negate, or overcome, the morality of custom is, in some sense, to be tied to it. Recall Nietzsche’s views on false consciousness: it is the greatest folly to think that one can pierce this veil in order to apprehend “reality”. That is, if Nietzsche truly praised the SI, it would mean that he viewed false consciousness as a state of affairs to be remedied or improved upon, which, as I have argued above, is not the case. But this is what modern man—the SI—strives towards, and it is precisely for this reason that he is an object of scorn for Nietzsche. That the SI is indelibly marked by the morality of custom becomes especially evident when one considers the relationship between memory and promise-making that Nietzsche details in the second treatise. The SI is that individual who is “permitted to promise”, but this ability to make promises does not signal a break from humanity qua herd but actually constitutes it: “one has given one’s promise in order to live within the advantages of society, — and truly!… one finally came “to reason”… how much blood and horror there is at the base of all “good things”!” (Nietzsche, 36). If one were up to this point unconvinced that Nietzsche, in referring to the SI as “autonomous and supermoral”, does so in an entirely ironic manner, this passage makes it clear that he could not have meant it otherwise. For even the most hallowed faculty of man— reason— is here subject to ridicule. The SI’s “mastery over… affects”, awe-inspiring “seriousness”, is founded on “blood and horror” (Nietzsche, 38, 39). Nietzsche is explicit on this point— all of these “good things” and qualities are in fact the culmination of, and thus belong in their entirety to “asceticism” (Nietzsche, 38, 39). If Nietzsche distinguishes between the SI and the herd, it is only to the extent that the SI remains within the herd, unlike its other members, without the threat of external punishment— “it has [thoroughly] internalized the process” (Rukgaber, 216). The SI is thus an individual who self-flagellates; he becomes his own executioner. He may very well avoid the slave morality that characterizes the herd, but he does so only superficially, since the instinct the SI internalizes— what he calls his “conscience”— is slave morality under a different name. This conscience, far from being something naturally present in man, surfaces at the same time as “contract law”, the debtor-creditor relationship, and such concepts as “guilt… duty… sacred duty” (Rukgaber, 230; Nietzsche, 41). The SI can indeed be said to be a superior being, with a major caveat: he is superior only to those weaker, less able beings in the herd.

This reading can be contested on two counts. One may argue that the SI is Nietzsche’s positive ethical ideal simply because of his affirmative power— the SI is capable of saying “yes” to himself (he is a responsible being) and this puts him outside the herd. Secondly, one could object to the evolutionary picture provided by arguing that the SI represents a “unique form of agency” that develops “out of animality”, and is for this reason fully “outside” the herd (Rukgaber, 217). I will invoke Deleuze to respond to the first objection. He writes in Nietzsche and Philosophy that “[t]o affirm is not to take responsibility for, to take on the burden of what is, but to release, to set free what lives” (Deleuze, 185). As mentioned before, according to Deleuze, true affirmation must be exhaustively creative; a certain kind of inventiveness that is absent in merely “taking responsibility”. We cannot oppose the SI to the self-denying, weak-willed ascetic since the SI’s “yes” is not affirmative in the sense that Nietzsche wants us to think about affirmation. According to Deleuze, the SI’s affirmative power is similar to that of an ass— “the ass is the animal that says “Ye-a”, the affirmative and affirming animal” (Deleuze, 170). The SI, like the ass, affirms only the negative; it does not say yes to affirmation itself but only the “nihilistic reality of the ‘no’” (de Zeeuw, 7). What is in fact an impulse hostile to life deceivingly presents itself as affirmative. There is a basic interpretative error that the second objection relies on. It assumes that Nietzsche is offering the reader an account of the evolution of the human from animality, or human agency out of animal-like instinct. But the SI evolves out of “already human capacities” that function as the ground for its conscience (Rukgaber, 217). Take for example what Nietzsche writes about forgetfulness in the second treatise: “[a]nd precisely this necessarily forgetful animal, in whom forgetting is a strength… has bred for himself a counter-device, memory, with the help of which forgetfulness can be suspended in certain cases” (Nietzsche, 36). One should not be fooled by the word “animal” here, since Nietzsche is referring to human beings at a certain stage of their development; the ability to suspend forgetfulness is, of course, preceded by forgetfulness, which is still a “uniquely human [capacity]” (Rukgaber, 217). While this development concerns the coming to birth of ethical agency, it does not emerge out of “mere animality” — the question that Nietzsche asks is not how consciousness develops in the animal mind but how the subject comes to be what it is, or, as Richard Schacht argues, how human beings develop a (modern) personal identity (Rukgaber, 219). The second part of this objection concerns the SI’s self-imposed exile from the herd. While I have argued above that the SI cannot be outside the herd, it is also important to note that, if one could attribute to Nietzsche a positive ethical ideal, he would never conceive of it along the lines of an autonomous agent completely detached from mundane, worldly affairs. If a Nietzschean ethical ideal could be described in any meaningful sense, it would be exemplified not by a being who transcends the world but one who immerses himself in it, “[burying] himself within nature” in a redemptive manner (Rukgaber, 229).

There is no doubt that Nietzsche is a masterful ironist, writing with a doubleness of tone that is purposefully confounding and misleading. Yet this should not be mistaken for a philosophical error since it is a question of style, which is part and parcel of his philosophy. If one were to attempt to “see through” Nietzsche’s various idiosyncrasies, in order to distill his thought, arrive at its “essence”, one would find that no such thing exists. He uplifts in the same breath that he debases; he offers “not one Truth but many experiences and many truths” (Ansell-Pearson, 314). Hence we should not be surprised that Nietzsche is able to maintain two seemingly contradictory positions, as appears to be the case with the SI (though I think I have demonstrated in this essay that Nietzsche only apparently praises the SI and harbors for this product of asceticism the deepest loathing).

Works Cited

Deleuze, Gilles. Nietzsche and Philosophy. Bloomsbury, 2013.

Ricœur, Paul. Freud and Philosophy. Yale University Press, 1970.

Nietzsche, Friedrich Wilhelm, and Horace B. Samuel. On the Genealogy of Morality: The Three Essays Complete with Notes. Adansonia Press, 2018.

Ansell-Pearson, Keith. “Who Is the Ubermensch? Time, Truth, and Woman in Nietzsche.” Journal of the History of Ideas, vol. 53, no. 2, 1992, pp. 309–31. JSTOR, https://doi.org/10.2307/2709876. Accessed 17 Jan. 2023.

Matthew Rukgaber. “The ‘Sovereign Individual’ and the ‘Ascetic Ideal’: On a Perennial Misreading of the Second Essay of Nietzsche’s On the Genealogy of Morality.” Journal of Nietzsche Studies, vol. 43, no. 2, 2012, pp. 213–39. JSTOR, https://doi.org/10.5325/jnietstud.43.2.0213. Accessed 17 Jan. 2023.

De Zeeuw, Daniel. “On Nietzsche’s sovereign individual.

Booth, D. Nietzsche on “the subject as multiplicity”. Man and World 18, 121–146 (1985). https://doi.org/10.1007/BF01248611

Leiter, Brian, “Nietzsche’s Moral and Political Philosophy”, The Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy (Summer 2021 Edition), Edward N. Zalta (ed.), URL = https://plato.stanford.edu/archives/sum2021/entries/nietzsche-moral-political/.

Nussbaum, Martha C. Hiding from Humanity Disgust, Shame, and the Law. Princeton University Press, 2009.