The Deed is Everything

Abstract

Nietzsche is often held to be an extreme sceptic about human agency, keen to debunk it along every dimension. He dismisses the ideas of freedom, autonomy, and morality, we are told, and even the very existence of agents or selves. This book sets out the opposite view. It does so by arguing that Nietzsche was committed to an ‘expressivist’ conception of agency, a conception that contrasts with the ‘empiricist’ orthodoxy and which—partly in virtue of that fact—allows him to develop highly distinctive accounts not only of freedom, autonomy, and morality, but also of selfhood. In the course of the argument, a variety of central Nietzschean themes are revisited—for example, self-creation, the sovereign individual, will to power, Kantian and Christian morality, amor fati—often to unexpected effect. The Nietzsche who emerges from this book has a clear, if demanding, conception of human agency and a robust commitment to the value of human excellencein all of its forms.