Abstract

This chapter examines the influence that reading Emerson had on Nietzsche’s treatment of the theme of fate and free will, which is closely tied to two other central themes in Nietzsche’s philosophy: the theme of moral responsibility for one’s own actions, and that of the construction of one’s character, or self-creation. Though rejecting Emerson’s metaphysical assumptions regarding the freedom of the will and of thought, Nietzsche used certain suggestions provided to him by Emerson to work out an account of freedom as agency whereby to be free is not to act in a completely unconditioned way but rather to act as master of one’s own drives and guided by one’s own values. This chapter also examines the feeling of freedom which Nietzsche describes as the feeling of the preponderance of one’s own force vis-à-vis the force of external circumstances. Thanks to his reading of Emerson, Nietzsche comes to consider this feeling as compatible with the perception of necessity or the presence of immutable facts in one’s own life.