Nietzsche on Causa Sui and Free Will

Beyond Good and Evil, sec. 21 (tr. W. Kaufmann):

The causa sui is the best self-contradiction that has been conceived so far, it is a sort of rape and perversion of logic; but the extravagant pride of man has managed to entangle itself profoundly and frightfully with just this nonsense. The desire for "freedom of the will" in the superlative metaphysical sense, which still holds sway, unfortunately, in the minds of the half-educated; the desire to bear the entire and ultimate responsibility for one's actions oneself, and to absolve God, the world, ancestors, chance and society involves nothing less than to be precisely this causa sui and, with more than Muenchhausen's audacity, to pull oneself up into existence by the hair, out of the swamps of nothingness.

It is easy to be seduced by the beauty and energy of Nietzsche's prose into thinking that he is talking sense when he is not. The above excerpt is a case in point. Let's take a long hard logical squint at it.

Aficionados of the Great Pessimist know that the above passage is just warmed-over Schopenhauer.  For the business about <i>causa sui</i>, see On the Fourfold Root of the Principle of Sufficient Reason, sec. 20; for the rejection of (libertarian) freedom, see On the Freedom of the Will; and for more of the philosophical antics of the good Baron von Muenchhausen, see World as Will and Representation, sec. 7.

The Nietzsche passage consists of two sentences. In the first, he claims that (i) the notion of a causa sui, a self-caused being, is a contradictory notion, and that (ii) human pride is at its origin.

To evaluate the first sub-claim we need to distinguish between two readings of causa sui, one positive, the other privative. On the positive reading, a causa sui causes its own existence. Although a cause need not be temporally prior to its effect, it must be logically prior to it. But then causa sui positively construed does appear to be an incoherent notion: it implies that something can be logically prior to its own existence, which is absurd. 'Existential bootstrapping' does indeed seem to be out of the question.

There is more to it than this, but for present purposes let's just assume that causa sui positively construed is a self-contradictory notion. Construed privatively, however, it is not. For then, to say that X is causa sui is just to say that X is not caused by another. Taken privatively, a causa sui is the same as a necessary being, one whose nature is to exist.

Since there is no obvious contradiction in the notion of a necessary being, Nietzsche's first subclaim in his first sentence fails. The second subclaim says that "the extravagant pride of man" is at the root of the notion of causa sui. This is not only not obvious, but appears to be plainly false. For if there is a causa sui, God in ordinary terms, then human pride is put in its place. Indeed, part of the motivation for the rejection of God on the part of atheists like Nietzsche and Sartre and Ayn Rand is the fact that their extravagant pride cannot tolerate the existence of a being vastly superior to them.  So, far from the "extravagant pride of man" being the source of the notion of causa sui, it is rather the source of its rejection.

In his second sentence, Nietzsche makes the surprising claim that the desire for freedom of the will is the desire to be causa sui in the positive sense, which implies that freedom of the will is a kind of self-causation in the positive sense. It it clear that Nietzsche wants us to conclude that the concept of freedom of the will is incoherent.

But Nietzsche is wide of the mark here. Suppose I perform action A. If I possess (libertarian as opposed to compatibilist) freedom of the will, then I could have done otherwise than A. I could have done B instead, or no action at all. It is up to me, within my power, in my control , whether or not A comes into existence. But that is not to say that I cause myself to exist, or that A causes itself to exist. What is says is that I have the power to create something distinct from me, namely, A. Now this agency, this power to create actions, is not self-contradictory.

To sum up, Nietzsche makes two mistakes in the above passage. He thinks that causa sui cannot be given a self-consistent reading. It can. He also thinks that causa sui positively construed is at the root of free will. It isn't.

Comments

[Brodie Bortignon]

Nietzsche's comments on free will are nowhere near as breathtakingly idiotic as most if not all of the materialist exegeses. Fortunately, it seems like libertarian free will is becoming more and more popular amongst philosophers, particularly young philosophers, probably under the influence of people like van Inwagen and Chisholm. I also think that the recrudescence of interest in dualism might have something to do with the reconsideration of libertarian free will, seeing as historically the two have tended to go together, even though there's no necessary logical connection. Work done by van Inwagen, Lucas, Lowe, O'Connor and others really show up just how question-begging and weak so many of the old arguments against libertarian free will are, derived as they so often are from some sort of deterministic, mechanical view of the universe and a strange aversion to the notion of agent causation. Dennett and others call it 'mysterious', but I don't see how event-causation is any less mysterious.

Nietzsche mentions the 'half-educated' and what the 'half-educated' believe. If there's one thing I find contemptible in so much philosophy, it's this barely concealed contempt some of them have for the common person. The contempt runs so deep, in fact, that if a philosophical analysis leads to a conclusion that seems to support some common sense intuition held by non-philosophers (the 'milk maids' whom Voltaire so derides) then this agreement with common sense is considered a decisive mark against its truth. "The common man believes he makes genuine choices?" they say. "Well, he would, the idiot. If only they were marvelous enough to understand my devastating arguments--if only they knew of the mechanical philosophy..." Dennett is a prime modern example of this sort of behaviour. In his book Freedom Evolves he equates the average person, still fettered to common-sense beliefs, to Dumbo, and the contumacious and clear-eyed philosopher (i.e. Dennett) to the crow that tells Dumbo he no longer needs the feather to fly--the implication being that people are libertarians (or dualists) because they're afraid of determinism, or afraid that death is the end--or in some way just tender-minded wimps unwilling to face up to the truth. His smug condescension (and rambling) was too much for me and I never finished the book. The recent flurry of interest in Thomas Reid, once considered the common-sense philosopher par excellence, may be a sign that the contempt for the common sense of the common person promulgated by people like Nietzsche, Voltaire, Dennett, etc. is going steadily out of fashion.

As for the claim that people believe they have libertarian free will because of pride, well, that's obviously wrong. People believe they are centres of action that make genuine choices because it's just obvious that that's the case. It's a pre-theoretical intuition, and so far as I can see, it's one that isn't at all derived from some sort of overweening pride. The fact that many of these people also believe that such freedom makes them ultimately responsible to a transcendent moral order, completely outside of their control and incomprehensible to finite minds, sounds closer to humility than pride. It seems to me that Nietzche's claim that belief in libertarian freedom stems from the delusions of human pride exposes just how little he actually understood common humanity.

[Ilíon]

Quite so, Mr Bortignon. Or, as a 'half-educated' common man, such as I, might put it: philosophy is of utmost importance ... philosophers not so.