In §214 of Beyond Good and Evil Nietzsche asks “is there anything more beautiful than looking for one’s own virtues?” By inquiring into the notion of authenticity as it occurs in Nietzsche’s ethical thinking, my essay will consider this question and potential answers to it. Specifically, I will argue that in Nietzsche’s middle period works the virtue of authenticity is paramount; it is embodied by the ideal of the free spirit. Nietzsche has qualified his middle period works, Human, All Too Human, Dawn and The Gay Science, as his ganze Freigeisterei, literally: his whole free spiritedness. On the back cover of the 1st edition of The Gay Science, Nietzsche indicates that his book completes a series of works which started with Human, All Too Human. The overall goal of these works was to draw a new portrait and ideal of the free spirit.Footnote 1 While Nietzsche will later reject this ideal as too moral, an examination of his middle period works shows that the free spirit is Nietzsche’s ethical ideal at that time.Footnote 2 This investigation will also serve to show that it is a viable ethical ideal within the economy of the philosophy of the free spirit.

The free spirit is the being who seeks authentic becoming and thereby becomes what and who she is thanks to the virtues of authenticity and probity that she cultivates. Therefore, my essay will consider the claims presented in Human, All Too Human, Dawn and The Gay Science regarding morality, ethical flourishing, and authenticity. In addition, I will examine Nietzsche’s early formulation of authenticity in “Schopenhauer as Educator” §1. I will argue that the essence of Nietzsche’s ethics of authenticity may be found in these works. I will show that this ethics is similar to and yet distinct from Aristotelian virtue ethics. Nietzsche argues for a cultivation of the self that rejects the role of Aristotelian rationality. However, the notion of care of the self that is entailed by his virtue ethics is akin to that which we find in ancient virtue ethics such as Stoicism and Epicureanism. This notion of care of the self is at the heart of Nietzsche’s ethics insofar as it focuses on the character development of the moral agent. What matters for Nietzsche is the style of one’s being, creating oneself as the agent of one’s own life. This ethical flourishing is possible only through caring for one’s own being and becoming through certain practices.

1 The Critique of Morality

The middle period works start with a critique of important traditional discourses: metaphysics, morality, religion, and art. According to Nietzsche, these discourses have presented truths to human beings that have been detrimental to human flourishing. The critique of these discourses is risky since one may not have the strength to reconstruct new discourses and worldviews following the great liberation. The critique and rejection of traditional discourses leaves one empty-handed until one undertakes the project of creating values and establishing truths for oneself. As Nietzsche puts it in the Preface to Human, All Too Human, “to become sick in the manner of these free spirits, to remain sick for a long time and then, slowly, slowly, to become healthy, by which I mean ‘healthier,’ is a fundamental cure for all pessimism” (HH P:5).Footnote 3 The sickness that he identifies here is brought on by the absence of truths and values, the negative nihilism that one must overcome through a constructive nihilism, one in which the free spirit becomes creator.Footnote 4 Nihilism, as risky as it may be, is a necessary step for the liberation of the spirit. Nietzsche says, “we negate and must negate because something in us wants to live and affirm – something that we perhaps do not know or see as yet. – This is said in favor of criticism” (GS 307).

Human, All Too Human is a work written in the Enlightenment spirit of criticism and search for truth. The book is dedicated to Voltaire, this “great liberator of the spirit.”Footnote 5 In it, Nietzsche refers to himself and the free thinkers – Human, All Too Human is a book for free spirits – as “children of the Enlightenment” (HH 55). The figure of the free spirit emerges as one who frees herself from the shackles of traditional discourses and the supposed truths they offer. The free spirit is a critic and a nihilist in the sense mentioned above. She is such because of her search for truth and authenticity. This search is the driving force of the free spirit. As Amy Mullin puts it, “one of the most striking features of the free spirit is his passion for knowledge – his need for reasons rather than faith.”Footnote 6 This fundamental need is what leads the free spirit to embrace her critical stance. I return to this aspect of the free spirit below.

While the free spirit makes a quick appearance in HH 30, it is really in Chapter 5, “Tokens of Higher and Lower Culture” that the notion is fleshed out by Nietzsche. This is interesting if one considers the theme of this chapter: cultural evolution. This chapter discusses how cultures and societies evolve through a dialectic of regression/progression. The free spirit and the genius are figures that trigger change and help the movement forward to occur. This movement forward is not straightforward however: it comprises many backward steps.Footnote 7 Importantly, Nietzsche explains in the opening aphorism of that chapter that progress is parallel in the individual and in the social or cultural group. Further, he insists on the dialectical relation between fettered and free spirits: both are needed for progress to happen.Footnote 8

Aphorism 225 of HH offers us a first definition of the concept of the free spirit: the free spirit is a relative concept. Nietzsche explains, “he is called a free spirit who thinks differently from what, on the basis of his origin, environment, his class and profession, or on the basis of the dominant views of the age, would have been expected of him” (HH 225). The free spirit is an exception as opposed to the rule, which is to be a fettered spirit, a creature of habits who has faith in institutions and supports them. Because the free spirit thinks differently and defies commonly held beliefs, she is perceived as evil and as a threat by the fettered spirits.Footnote 9 The free spirit is a threat because she makes use of her intellect, which is of superior quality and sharpness, to question things and embody a skeptical outlook, to pursue the goals of the Enlightenment in herself.Footnote 10 Nietzsche says that her spirit of inquiry remains lighthearted against the age of seriousness, thus anticipating the gay science that will be the object of the book concluding the Freigeisterei series.Footnote 11

Nietzsche proposes that the free spirit is superior, but the strength of her intellect does not entail that she possesses the truth. Instead, Nietzsche says, “what characterizes the free spirit is not that his opinions are the more correct but that he has liberated himself from tradition, whether the outcome has been successful or a failure. As a rule though, he will nonetheless have truth on his side, or at least the spirit of inquiry after truth: he demands reasons, the rest demand faith” (HH 225). The free spirit is presented as a seeker, one who searches for truth on her own and refuses to accept authoritative discourses. This will eventually allow her to uncover the truth about herself. Authenticity is here hinted at as the longing for truth. In aphorism 292, Nietzsche appeals to the reader to try to make of herself a free spirit. He indicates how to achieve this: by not looking down on past experiences, such as religion and art, and by making oneself an instrument of knowledge since knowledge frees the spirit.Footnote 12 In section 252, the acquisition of knowledge is described as a form of overcoming—every pursuit of truth is considered worthwhile. Knowledge makes one “conscious of one’s strength” and allows one to go “beyond former conceptions” (HH 252).

Indeed, what matters is for the free spirit to avoid any inertia of one’s spirit which may lead to a stiffening of one’s thoughts. Exercising skepticism, the free spirit will be the enemy of convictions and will be on the path of truth, a special path. The free spirit is an ever-evolving concept and error is an integral part of its progress.Footnote 13 The concluding two chapters of Book I of Human, All Too Human, provide us with a portrait of the free spirit and his philosophy of the morning. It follows a series of aphorisms on truth and convictions. In aphorism 637, Nietzsche says of the free spirit that “even if he should be altogether a thinking snowball, he will have in his head, not opinions, but only certainties and precisely calculated probabilities.” Further, he says that the way of the free spirit is to “advance from opinion to opinion, through one party after another, as noble traitors to all things that can in any way be betrayed” (HH 637). Thus, free spirits are presented as seeking “spiritual nomadism” (AOM 211). This is part of the obligation for free spirits to become masters of themselves. To be such, one must have freed oneself from alienating beliefs and convictions. This means adopting the critical skeptical stance that Nietzsche champions. One must free oneself from “conceptions of morality, religion, and metaphysics. Only when this sickness from one’s chains has also been overcome will the first great goal have truly been attained: the separation of man from the animals” (WS 350).Footnote 14 But this freedom from constraints and received dogma carries with it an implicit ought. As Ken Gemes explains it, “this is not to say that they [free spirits] are free of the constraint of a self imposed form. Their play is the serious play of self-creation.”Footnote 15 This brings me to the virtue of authenticity.

2 The Virtuous Free Spirit

A fundamental virtue of the free spirit is her capacity to be true to the strength of her intellect and to have the will to use it. Once she has done so, she will engage in spiritual nomadism. Nietzsche writes:

He who has attained to only some degree of freedom of mind cannot feel other than a wanderer on the earth – though not as a traveller to a final destination: for this destination does not exist. But he will watch and observe and keep his eyes open to see what is really going on in the world; for this reason he may not let his heart adhere too firmly to any individual thing; within him too there must be something wandering that takes pleasure in change and transience. (HH 638)

While this may seem to speak against the notion of authentic becoming—becoming what one is—I would argue that it is rather the key to authenticity.Footnote 16 As Jacob Golomb aptly explains, “Nietzsche makes it clear that becoming one’s true self is a perpetual movement of self-overcoming, a free creation of one’s own values and perspectives. These presuppose the persistent overcoming of any ‘higher self’.”Footnote 17 The middle period writings are those in which the notion of Einheit, the unity of the self, is the least discussed. However, it is what the free spirit aims for. This unity of the self, toward which one aims, is not the actualization of one’s essence but rather, the actualization of oneself as this perpetual movement of overcoming.Footnote 18

In the middle period works, Nietzsche offers a list of ends and excellences that the free spirit ought to pursue: self-mastery, self-sufficiency, self-discipline, and self-reverence.Footnote 19 All of these are means to become an authentic self. They also entail self-knowledge. As Nietzsche understands it, learning about things and the world is important but the most important undertaking is to learn about oneself.Footnote 20 As Simon Robertson puts it, “to master oneself, though, one must understand oneself. This involves uncompromisingly honest scrutiny (GS 335; BGE 39; A 50; EH “Wise” 7): [a] veridical assessment of the kind of person one already is […] the ends a free spirit sets himself reflect both the particularities of who he already is, as embodied in his motives, and what he realistically believes he can make of himself.”Footnote 21 This uncovers the virtue of honesty, being true to one’s self which is the overarching virtue for the free spirit. In other words: authenticity is paramount to free spiritedness.

It is in the third of the Untimely Meditations, “Schopenhauer as Educator,” that the notion of authentic striving alongside the notion of selfhood, is first presented.Footnote 22 In the first section, Nietzsche claims “we are accountable to ourselves for our own existence; consequently, we also want to be the real helmsmen of our existence and keep it from resembling a mindless coincidence” (SE 1).Footnote 23 Further he adds, “your true being does not lie deeply hidden within you, but rather immeasurably high above you, or at least above what you commonly take to be your ego” (SE 1). It is important to unpack these statements before moving on. In the first one, Nietzsche posits that we are responsible for our own being and for what we make of it. It is not enough to be born with a certain set of qualities, we must endeavor to actualize them.Footnote 24 This entails that we must take our own becoming in our hands, making it our responsibility. The term “helmsmen” which is used here, “Steuermänner” in German, indicates that we can gear our existence in certain ways and thus, we can be held responsible for the direction we give ourselves.Footnote 25 In Human, All Too Human, Nietzsche writes, “everyone possesses inborn talent, but few possess the degree of inborn and acquired toughness, endurance and energy actually to become a talent, that is to say to become what he is; which means to discharge it in works and actions” (HH 263). It is presumably the free spirits who will have that strength.

In the second statement, Nietzsche introduces the notion of authenticity with the term “true being,” “eigentliche Selbst” in German. It is not deeply hidden within oneself, as the metaphysical tradition would have it. When Nietzsche speaks of self-knowledge, it is not a matter of introspecting in order to uncover what one is and do nothing with it. Instead, it is a matter of discovering oneself through one’s actions and the steering of one’s existence. This is expressed in the later imperative found in The Gay Science. Aphorism 270 reads: “what does your conscience say? – ‘You shall become the person you are.’” That self, das eigentliche Selbst, the one that we must become is our ethical goal. But the key to authenticity, as said before, is to know oneself. To understand what one is is the key to one’s authentic ethical becoming. And, as Nietzsche says, “no one can build for you the bridge upon which you alone must cross the stream of life, no one but you alone. […] There is one single path in this world on which no one but you can travel” (SE 1). Knowing oneself is the key to becoming oneself. However, in order to know oneself, one must be freed from traditional understandings of morality and the moral self.Footnote 26 This is why the free spirit may possess this virtue; she has freed herself from traditional understandings. Nietzsche explains further the meaning of this imperative to become the person one is by saying:

We, however, want to become those we are – human beings who are new, unique, incomparable, who give themselves laws, who create themselves. To that end we must become the best learners and discoverers of everything that is lawful and necessary in the world: we must become physicists in order to be able to be creators in this sense – while hitherto all valuations and ideals have been based on ignorance of physics or were constructed so as to contradict it. Therefore: long live physics! And even more so that which compels us to turn to physics – our honesty! (GS 335)

Here again, the virtues of honesty and authenticity are emphasized, as are the related virtues of creativity, self-mastery, and knowledge, understood as both self-knowledge and knowledge of the world. In fact, Nietzsche associates authenticity, being who one is, with knowledge to such an extent that it is as much an ethical virtue as it is an epistemological one. The free spirit engages in law-giving, in norm creation, as a result of having freed herself from metaphysical and moral discourses. What matters for the free spirit is not which norm she will create for herself but rather, the manner in which these norms are adopted, namely, through a process of critical inquiry commanded by the virtue of authenticity and its correlate, honesty.Footnote 27

3 Free Spirited Virtue Ethics

The connection between Nietzsche’s moral agent who creates her own self through law-giving creativity and the moral agent of ancient virtue ethics has been discussed in the literature.Footnote 28 It has been suggested by Michael Ure, among others, that Nietzsche understood himself as developing a new philosophical therapy. Thus, he says that Nietzsche “shares with the Hellenistic schools the belief that the central motivation for philosophizing is the urgency of human suffering and that the goal of philosophy is human flourishing, or eudaimonia.”Footnote 29 There is some debate, however, as to which Hellenistic school may have influenced him or even whether it was Aristotle’s views on the development of one’s character in the Nicomachean Ethics that served as a source of inspiration.

In an article published earlier, I have picked up on the question of whether Nietzsche offers an Aristotelian ethical ideal as Walter Kaufmann has argued.Footnote 30 Following Bernd Magnus’ critique of Kaufmann’s interpretation, I argued that Aristotle’s understanding of eudaimonia and of phronesis are at odds with Nietzsche’s ideals.Footnote 31 Aristotelian eudaimonia is linked to the exercise of one’s rationality in thought and in action. The good life is that of the individual who lives a rational life, i.e., one that is guided by practical wisdom, phronesis. Aristotle’s practically wise person, the phronemos, possesses the wisdom necessary to determine virtue, understood as the means between a vice by excess and a vice by default. Briefly put, virtues are the means by which a phronemos will attain eudaimonia, the happy life of intellectual activity. Human beings need virtues as such character traits allow them to flourish. The phronemos chooses her own virtues in view of her own maturation as a rational being. This emphasis on the rational nature of the human being and the Aristotelian definition of happiness as the life of reason clashes with Nietzsche’s own views. As Magnus and others have pointed out, Nietzsche would see in this yet another iteration of the metaphysical-religious view of the human that prevents flourishing rather than fosters it. What then are we to make of this?

I still hold to the view that we cannot understand Nietzsche’s ethical ideals in Aristotelian terms. However, I think there are interesting aspects of the program set out in the Nicomachean Ethics that resemble what Nietzsche puts forth in the figure of the free spirit. Interestingly, the phronemos, like the free spirit, is her own master and law-giver. One could even offer that the phronemos is also a relative concept. Indeed, while there is extensive discussion of virtues and their related vices by excess or by default in the Nicomachean Ethics, it is interesting to note that they are all relative to circumstances and to individuals. One must be virtuous but the exact way in which one must be virtuous is not specified. What matters throughout is the moral development and flourishing of the agent. Because Aristotle conceives of the human being as essentially a rational animal, this flourishing is linked to the exercise of reason. But if one conceives of the human in a different way, as Nietzsche does, the concern with flourishing will not ultimately rest with the development of one’s intellectual abilities.

Scholars who examine the connection between Nietzsche’s ethics and ancient virtue ethics agree that Nietzsche is concerned with the good life and the means to attain it. However, this good life differs from that described by Aristotle. For example, Ure argues that Nietzsche was embracing a form of Stoicism in which eudaimonia amounts to “freedom from emotional disturbance.”Footnote 32 On the other hand, Keith Ansell-Pearson argues that it was Epicurus’ understanding of eudaimonia as simple and modest living that appealed to Nietzsche. Indeed, Ansell-Pearson thinks that it was Epicurus who was the main source of inspiration in the middle period works.Footnote 33 He claims that “in the middle period, then, Epicurus is one of Nietzsche’s chief inspirations in his effort to liberate himself from the metaphysical need, to find serenity within his own existence, and to aid humanity in its need to now cure its neuroses.”Footnote 34 Ansell-Pearson thinks that it is in Epicurus that Nietzsche finds the inspiration to focus on the closest things rather than on metaphysical-religious first and last things. This relates to what Nietzsche says of the free spirit’s renewed attention to the things closest to her in section 5 of his 1886 preface to Human, All Too Human which, as we know, opens with a chapter titled “Of First and Last Things” critiquing metaphysics. Nietzsche speaks of the free spirit’s convalescence, writing:

It seems to him as if his eyes are only now open to what is close at hand. He is astonished and sits silent: where had he been? These close and closest things: how changed they seem! What bloom and magic they have acquired! […] He had been beside himself: no doubt of that. Only now does he see himself – and what surprises he experiences as he does so! (HH P:5)

Interestingly this passage ends with Nietzsche referring to the notion of practical wisdom: “there is wisdom, practical wisdom, in for a long time prescribing even health for oneself in small doses” (HH P:5). The practical wisdom of the free spirit consists in looking at the world differently, in thinking differently, and reevaluating things thanks to her new gaze. Having freed herself from metaphysical-religious discourse, the free spirit may pay attention to the things closest to her and may discover herself anew.

In Ecce Homo, the book which tells the story of “How One Becomes What One Is,” Nietzsche wonders, half ironically, “why on earth I’ve been relating all these small things,” and answers:

small things – nutrition, place, climate, recreation, the whole casuistry of selfishness – are inconceivably more important than everything one has taken to be important so far. Precisely here one must begin to relearn. What mankind has so far considered seriously have not even been realities but mere imaginings – more strictly speaking, lies prompted by the bad instincts of sick natures that were harmful in the most profound sense – all these concepts, ‘God,’ ‘soul,’ ‘virtue,’ ‘sin,’ ‘beyond,’ ‘truth,’ ‘eternal life.’ (EH “Why I am So Clever” 10)

Paying attention to the small things, the things closest to us, turning one’s gaze away from harmful illusions and imaginings, that is, freeing oneself from them, will lead one to become who one is. This is the path to truth, a reevaluated notion of truth, one which is to be gained through self-knowledge and knowledge of the world or of the closest things, that is, of the immanent realm of existence as opposed to the transcendent realm which has been rejected. This path to truth is the path to authenticity for the self.

For the reasons mentioned above, I do not think Nietzsche is Aristotelian. There are also reasons why we should not take him to be a Stoic or an Epicurean. There are elements in both schools of thought that are interesting to him and others that he would reject. I do not wish to settle the debate as to whether Nietzsche is actually closer to one school rather than to the other, nor do I need to for my purposes. All ethics have a concept of eudaimonia, be it implicit or explicit. Therefore, this is not what aligns Nietzsche with virtue ethics specifically. Instead, what aligns him with virtue ethics is his concern with the moral development and flourishing of the agent. The focus on the character of the individual and her flourishing is what aligns him with ancient virtue ethics, be they of Aristotelian, Stoic, or Epicurean leanings. Each emphasize that the agent must be concerned with her own flourishing and all views hold that one must actualize one’s nature. This means that they all adhere to an ideal of authenticity. Nietzsche’s focus on authenticity and the free spirit’s search for authenticity entitles us to conclude that he presents a virtue ethics, a free spirited one.