willow: "(i know the quoted doesn’t really back up my claim more than just being another assertion of it, but it’s intended to really just be a broad gesture at a body of work and way of thinking about the question rather than a pithy one shot answer). to hopefully be a little more fleshed out tho:"

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willowMar 23, 2025

not a quantum ppl but in general i think it’s philosophical import has been way overplayed. the whole cluster of traditional free will/determinism/necessary/contingent questions are kinda the wrong ones to be answering anyways

raymond geuss, morality, culture, and history, 195. nietzsche and morality

Nietzsche's view here is like the one I ascribe to him about free will/determinism. It isn't so much that he thinks historical events are 'contingent' in some positive sense, but that the distinction 'contingent/necessary' is useless in the study of history. Since nineteenth-century philosophers of history stress 'necessity' it is convenient in exposition to emphasize 'contingency' but actually I think Nietzsche would prefer to avoid the distinction altogether.

willow @dreary.dev

(i know the quoted doesn’t really back up my claim more than just being another assertion of it, but it’s intended to really just be a broad gesture at a body of work and way of thinking about the question rather than a pithy one shot answer). to hopefully be a little more fleshed out tho:

raymond geuss, outside ethics, 54

Nietzsche, then, thinks he has found a naturalistic replacement for the traditional ethical perspective and its questions, although, in my view, this naturalistic view is one centered not, as is usually thought, around the concept of "will-to-power" but around that of admiration. His view of humans, that is, takes them as standing at the intersection of certain forces and powers operating in the world —some of them operating on humans, and some through them—on the one hand, and, on the other, certain human reactions of admiration and contempt. Forms of morality are congealed and focused structures of human admiration and contempt.
It is important to see that Nietzsche does not first accept the central ethical question "What ought I to do?" and then go on to say, for instance, that each individual should perfect himself or herself, or maximally develop his or her will-to-power, or attain the highest possible self-aggrandizement. Rather he rejects the whole question on a number of grounds. First of all, asking the question presupposes that the agent, "Ego," is confronted with a decision in which there are a number of different possible alternatives between which Ego is free to choose. Nietzsche rejects the claim that this is in any sense the usual situation in which human agents find themselves. It is not useful to think of people as having a categorically free will (or a will that is in bondage). The whole dichotomy "free will/will-in-bondage" is a false one. People have wills that differ in their degrees of strength. Some have a strong will; others have

raymond geuss, outside ethics, 55

a relatively weak will.3s If you are the right kind of person, one who has a strong will, you will not be terribly concerned with the question of what you ought to do. You will, to be sure, be looking for objects of appropriate commitment (Hingebung, Bindung), but that is just a fact about how a person like you is liable to feel the need to act, and the search on which you embark will be for something which you judge to be worth admiring. Such a search, how-ever, has a completely different structure from that into what anyone "ought" to do. Also, if you are another kind of person—a kind of person Nietzsche does not admire and who has a weak will—asking the question what you ought to do will generally be pointless, because if you are weak there will be no significantly different alternatives open to you anyway, none, that is, that makes any real difference, just as for a certain kind of traditional Christian, a person in a state of sin does not have any freedom worth the name. A sinner can choose X or Y, but from the definitive religious perspective they will just be different versions of sin. Freedom to choose one sin rather than another is utterly unimportant, or rather it is a way in which an especially deep form of human bondage plays itself out. Nietzsche's own positive use of the term
"amor fati" to describe a kind of character which he admires is an expression of this. To love one's fate is not something one ought to do, but something people sufficiently admirable will in fact do, and others will not be able to do, and in that ability and inability will lie the grounds for admiring them or despising them.

March 23, 2025 at 6:23 AM