Anthony Kosar

In On the Genealogy of Morality, Nietzsche seems to consider the “doer” qua subject (Thäter) an erroneous and superfluous category. I argue that Nietzsche understands “Thäter” in the moral-legal sense of perpetrator or culprit, rather than in the abstract, philosophical sense of subject or agent. Whereas moralistic and legalistic interpretations of the subject hardly conceal a desire to weaken some agent’s resolve to act, a concept of doing stripped of the “doer” as wrongdoer or evildoer could instead be seen as the paradigm for a more realist politics. A political realism of this kind may even have the potential to shape political discourse by shifting the focus back onto meaningful action and away from moralistic and legalistic jargon.

Friedrich Nietzsche stresses early on in Human, All Too Human I that an historical sense can do a great deal to help undo the burden of responsibility for one’s being, inasmuch as every ‘deed’ and ‘doing’ is shown thereby to be overdetermined and thus not really in one’s hands after all (cf. Nietzsche, HH-2 I 17, 39, 70, 105-107, etc. etc.).Throughout Being and Nothingness - if most succinctly and forcefully in a relatively short subsection - Jean-Paul Sartre argues just the reverse, namely that an awareness of one’s historical situatedness by no means ‘frees’ one of responsibility for one’s being, but indeed impresses upon one an even fuller awareness of the absolute responsibility for oneself - and for the world at large - in light of the absolute freedom of choice with which one is damned from the start (cf. Sartre 1976: EN, Fourth Part, First Chapter, III. Freedom and responsibility). The following essay asks what Nietzsche and Sartre, when read together, might teach us about our everyday psychological notions of freedom and responsibility.