Peter Poellner

This paper offers a revisionary interpretation of Sartre's early views on human freedom. Sartre articulates a subtle account of a fundamental sense of human freedom as autonomy, in terms of human consciousness being both reasons-responsive and in a distinctive sense self-determining. The aspects of Sartre's theory of human freedom that underpin his early ethics are shown to be based on his phenomenological analysis of consciousness as, in its fundamental mode of self-presence, not an object in the world. Sartre has a multi-level theory of the reasons-sensitivity of consciousness. At one level, consciousness's being alive to reasons is a matter of the affective perception of values and disvalues as features of phenomenal objects. This part of his theory, a development of Scheler's, is, however, situated within a broader phenomenological analysis resulting in the claim that the ultimate reasons acknowledged by consciousness neither are nor justifiably could be values adequately presentable as intentional objects. Consciousness's ultimate reasons are, in this sense, not given by the world but by itself. Section 4 reconstructs and assesses Sartre's argument that consciousness cannot rationally have an ultimate end other than self-transparent freedom itself

This chapter argues that Nietzsche's work contains a compatibilist theory of freedom. There are two distinct but complementary conceptions of freedom in Nietsche's later works: (i) freedom or autonomy as a ‘transcendental’ condition of personhood; and (ii) freedom as a substantive ideal (the ‘free spirit’). With respect to (i), it is argued that, for Nietzsche, formal conditions (such as a unified system of desires) are not sufficient for autonomous personhood, but that a proper account of autonomy requires in addition an explanation of what enables an agent to _identify_ with some of her desires and motives. Such identification requires an agent's understanding of her affectivity as being intentional, and as potentially revealing value features of the phenomenal world. This view is consistent with Nietzsche's rejection of a strong realism about values, i.e., with his view that there are no actual values in the world without valuers. With respect to (ii), it is argued that a central component of Nietzsche's ideal of the free spirit is indifference to the metaphysical will to truth and to the metaphysical status of the practical values guiding one's life.

Nietzsche's central criticisms of the evaluative hierarchies he claims to be inscribed in the philosophical tradition and in various everyday practices are based on the idea that the self is opaque to itself. More specifically, he proposes that these hierarchies cannot be adequately explained without reference to a particular form of self-deception he labels ressentiment. What makes this type of self-deception distinctive is that it is alleged to concern the subject's own contemporaneous conscious states. It is shown that none of the three main current models of self-deception can accommodate the type of phenomenon Nietzsche claims to have discovered. Rather than this failure providing grounds for rejecting the concept of ressentiment as incoherent, it is argued that a reconstruction of some of Nietzsche's own observations, in conjunction with insights from later phenomenology, can explain the possibility envisaged by Nietzsche of a subject's intentionally misinterpreting her own current affective experiences. Nietzsche's analysis continues to be of importance in highlighting central aspects of the kind of theory of consciousness needed to do justice to the actual complexity of affective experience

Poellner here offers a comprehensive interpretation of Nietzsche's later ideas on epistemology and metaphysics, drawing extensively not only on his published works but also his voluminous notebooks, largely unpublished in English. He examines Nietzsche's various distinct lines of thought on the traditionally central areas of philosophy and shows in what specific sense Nietzsche, as he himself claimed, might be said to have moved beyond these questions. He pays considerable attention throughout both to the historical context of Nietzsche's writings and to subsequent developments in philosophy--English-language as well as Continental.