According to Rousseau, we are
born free but we live out our life in chains. Although some people subvert background
context and foreground personhood such that the chains are believed to be
societally imposed as if people are not sufficiently free to transcend or
counter the “binding” external strictures of some institution or society,
Nietzsche argues that the sovereign individual is lies at the end of an arduous
long process by which our species has become bred to be “to a certain degree
necessary, uniform, like among like, regular, and consequently calculable” and
thus certain people can be trusted to be reliable in promise-keeping.[1]
Such people are free individuals. They are autonomous even against the “Though
Shalt Nots” of moral mores, which had their place as virtual societal straitjackets
in the development of the species but are legitimately cast off by people who
can be relied upon to keep promises without violating them in the heat of the
moment. Such people are individuals, but not narcissists, for the latter
calculate each moment as to what lies in their self-interest—the feelings of
others be damned if they are in the way. It is ironic that moral responsibility
applies to the latter rather than to the autonomous individuals because only
the free ones can call their “dominating instinct” a “conscience.”[2]
Modern society, at least in the West, could use an elaboration on Nietzsche’s description
of the autonomous individual in so far as such a person is antipodal to the
herd animals on whom moral responsibility should be imposed because they cannot
be trusted, for they are not promise-keepers. St. Paul’s dictum to keep the
fools at a distance is ironically in line with the second essay of Nietzsche’s On
the Genealogy of Morals, where the Christian ascetic priest is lampooned for
its innate weakness even as it seeks to dominate the strong out of ressentiment.
The full essay is at "Nietzsche on Free Will and Moral Responsibility."
2. Ibid.
