Manuel Dries

While Nietzsche's rejection of metaphysical free will and moral desert has been widely recognised, the sense in which Nietzsche continues to use the term freedom affirmatively remains largely unnoticed. The aim of this article is to show that freedom and agency are among Nietzsche’s central concerns, that his much-discussed interest in power in fact originates in a first-person account of freedom, and that his understanding of the phenomenology of freedom informs his theory of agency. He develops a non-reductive drive-psychological motivational theory: reflective judgement and reasons can motivate by means of affective orientations agents have due to their drives. In particular, due to a standing desire or 'instinct for freedom' agents can generate, in mental simulations, the necessary motivational affects to unify their drives in view of certain long-term goals.

Why are we still intrigued by Nietzsche? This chapter argues that sustained interest stems from Nietzsche’s challenge to what we might call the ‘staticism’ inherent in our ordinary experience. Staticism can be defined, roughly speaking, as the view that the world is a collection of enduring, re-identifiable objects that change only very gradually and according to determinate laws. The chapter discusses Nietzsche’s rejection of remnants of staticism in Hegel and Schopenhauer (1). It outlines why Nietzsche deems belief in any variant of the staticist picture as problematic (2); and examines his adualistic-dialetheic stance towards, for example, first-person and third-person descriptions in the philosophy of mind (3). The chapter closes with a discussion of the contributions of "Nietzsche on Time and History".

This article answers some criticisms raised against How hard is it to create values? and offers a further formulation of the hard problem of value. Section 1 addresses the objection that Nietzsche’s criterion of life is too vague to serve as a useful value standard. Section 2 expands on the important idea of appreciating the difference among value perspectives. Sections 3 and 4 present the “hard problem of value” as a challenge for Nietzschean value agonism and value nihilism respectively. Section 5 offers a further formulation of the “hard problem of value”: a thought experiment about Mary, an expert, anti-realist value creator, whose values may or may not lack some qualities, analogous to Mary, the colour scientist of the “knowledge argument”.

This paper examines what Nietzsche might mean by the proposition that “values are created”. It further raises the issue whether there is a hard problem of value creation analogous to the “hard problem” in the philosophy of mind. Nietzsche could be seen as a philosopher who tried to shift people’s views about values away from any realist-objectivist intuitions. He was optimistic that these views could be eliminated, and that eventually most or all would come to conceive of values as created. It is shown that Nietzsche rejects value realism in favour of a compelling antirealist conception of value, which he takes to be superior due to one specific property of values, their “aliveness”. If there is a hard problem of value, however, and for the realist any created value simply does not count as a value, it is unclear if Nietzsche’s conception is constructive.