Reading Nietzsche

Themes · Knowledge and the Body

Free Spirits and the Philosopher of the Future

Cluster Knowledge and the Body Writing period 1874–1888 First encounter 6 readings

"Free spirit" sounds like a compliment anyone would accept. Nietzsche defines it narrowly, uses it against most of the people who would claim it, and by 1886 is describing something he says did not yet exist when he first wrote the word.

The term is introduced in Human, All Too Human in 1878 and defined there in a single dry sentence: a free spirit is one who thinks otherwise than would have been expected on the basis of his origin, his surroundings, his position and office, or the ruling views of the age. That definition is relative by design. It says nothing about what the free spirit believes, only that the beliefs were not the ones his circumstances would have produced. Freedom, on this account, is measured against a particular inheritance rather than against constraint as such.

By 1886 Nietzsche is doing something different. In the prefaces he adds that year to Human, All Too Human and Daybreak, and in the part of Beyond Good and Evil that carries the phrase as its title, the free spirit becomes a stage on a path: a necessary separation from what one had revered, valuable because of what it prepares rather than for itself. And in Beyond Good and Evil §44 he explicitly refuses the term to the people his contemporaries would have applied it to. The Freidenker — the levelling, democratic, anti-religious free thinker of the nineteenth century — is named there as the opposite of what he means.

Two things keep this page from becoming a portrait of independence in general. The first is chronology: the retrospective prefaces are evidence of how Nietzsche in 1886 wanted the earlier books to be read, and they are not evidence about what those books were doing in 1878 and 1881. The section below sets that problem out. The second is that the free spirit is not, for Nietzsche, a person who has escaped commitments. It is the name for a stage on the way to a type that commands and legislates — and that destination is where most of the difficulty on this page lives.

Essential first encounter

Six assignments, read in order. The sequence is deliberately chronological, because on this theme the chronology is the argument: 1878 first, then the two prefaces written eight and five years later, then the 1886 chapter and the 1887 aphorism that break with the free thinkers, then the late description of what the free spirit was supposed to be a stage toward.

  1. Core · 1878

    Human, All Too Human Volume I, §225

    The definition, as it stood when the word was new

    Question: The definition is explicitly relative. Whose expectations is the free spirit free of, and what follows if those expectations change?

    Why it belongs: One short aphorism, and the only place in the book where the title phrase is defined. A free spirit is called one who thinks differently from what would have been expected given his descent, his environment, his class and occupation, or the ruling views of the time; the "fettered spirits" are those who hold their positions for reasons they have not examined. Two things are worth noticing immediately. The definition is entirely formal — it specifies a relation to inherited expectation, not a content — and it makes free-spiritedness a matter of degree and circumstance rather than a type of soul. Everything the late work adds is an addition to this, and some of it is in tension with it.

    Read alongside: Beyond Good and Evil §44; Human, All Too Human §§637–638.

    Online edition: Volume I (trans. Helen Zimmern; opens nearby — use Find for the section number) · Preferred edition.

  2. Core · Preface added 1886

    Human, All Too Human Volume I, Preface (1886), §§1–7

    A story told about a book eight years afterwards

    Question: Nietzsche says he invented the free spirits to whom the book is dedicated, and that there are none yet. What is being claimed about the 1878 book, and what is being claimed about 1886?

    Why it belongs: The preface is the fullest account Nietzsche ever gave of the figure, and it is a retrospective narrative: a great severance arriving suddenly, a first victory over what had been revered, the dangerous years of licence and wandering, and a convalescence that ends with the free spirit able to look back at what it had escaped. It also contains the admission that matters most for reading it — that the free spirits it addresses did not exist and were company invented for a sick man. Read it as the best statement of the ideal and as evidence about 1886, not as a report of what the 1878 aphorisms were doing. See the section below.

    Read alongside: Human, All Too Human §225; Daybreak, Preface (1886).

    Online edition: Preface (trans. Helen Zimmern) · Preferred edition.

  3. Development · Preface added 1886

    Daybreak Preface (1886), §§1–5; §575

    The subterranean worker, and the aeronauts at the end

    The free edition is titled The Dawn of Day (trans. J. M. Kennedy).

    Question: The preface describes the work as digging and undermining. What kind of freedom is available to someone who describes themselves that way?

    Why it belongs: The second 1886 preface presents the author as someone working underground, in the dark, at the foundations of a morality he had once trusted, and says that the book begins the campaign against morality by asking what morality's own trust in itself rests on. §575, the last section of the book, gives the other image: the birds that fly further than any bird before, and the question of where the ones who go furthest still are heading. The pair is the theme in miniature — patient destructive work at one end, an unspecified and slightly ominous open horizon at the other. Written five years after the book itself, the preface is again retrospective, and the same caution applies.

    Read alongside: Human, All Too Human, Preface (1886); Daybreak §501.

    Online edition: Preface (trans. J. M. Kennedy; for §575 use the contents at the end of Book V) · Preferred edition.

  4. Core · 1886

    Beyond Good and Evil Part II, §§24–44

    The chapter that takes the name back

    Part II: "The Free Spirit." Section numbers run continuously across the book's nine parts.

    Question: §44 ends by saying "we free spirits" and then lists what they are not. What is left in the description that is positive rather than negative?

    Why it belongs: The mature treatment, and the place where the term stops being available to Nietzsche's contemporaries. Read the whole part, and read §44 twice. It calls the levellers who call themselves free spirits by that name in quotation marks, ties them to democratic taste and to the wish for universal green pasture happiness, and sets against them a type defined by the opposite preferences — severity, distance, and the conviction that danger and hardness are what produce anything worth having. §41 is the practical counterpart: a series of tests one sets oneself, including not remaining attached to a person, a country, a pity or a science. Note where the difficulty is. Almost everything positive in the chapter is stated as a preference for one kind of person over another, and the argument for that preference is not given here.

    Read alongside: The Gay Science §347; The herd and the last man.

    Online edition: Part II (trans. Helen Zimmern) · Preferred edition.

  5. Complication · Book V (1887)

    The Gay Science §347

    The need to believe, and where it goes when religion fails

    Kaufmann: Believers and their need to believe. Common: Believers and their Need of Belief.

    Question: If the need for certainty can attach itself to any content, what would show that someone had actually stopped needing it?

    Why it belongs: The aphorism argues that faith is wanted most where will is weakest, that what such people need is not a particular doctrine but something unconditional to lean on, and that this need survives the loss of religion and reappears attached to science, to nationalism, to political certainties. It is the published, argued version of the distinction that §44 makes polemically: what separates the free spirit from the free thinker is not the content of their opinions but whether the demand for something to hold onto has been given up. It also sets the hardest possible test for this theme, since nothing in the section exempts Nietzsche's own convictions from the diagnosis.

    Read alongside: Genealogy III §24; Perspectivism.

    Online edition: §347 (trans. Thomas Common; the free edition is titled The Joyful Wisdom) · Preferred edition.

  6. Core · 1886

    Beyond Good and Evil §§203, 211

    What the free spirit was a stage toward

    §203 is in Part V, "On the Natural History of Morals"; §211 is in Part VI, "We Scholars."

    Question: §211 says genuine philosophers create values while philosophical labourers only formalize them. Which of the two does the free spirit of §225 resemble?

    Why it belongs: The destination. §203 states the hope for new philosophers strong enough to reverse eternal valuations, and admits in the same breath how unlikely it is and how heavy the thought of what might become of the human being has grown. §211 distinguishes the philosophical labourer, who takes established valuations and makes them manageable, from the philosopher proper, whose knowing is creating and whose will to truth is will to power. The pair is where the theme stops being about independence: the free spirit is valued as a stage because commanding is supposed to follow detachment. Whether Nietzsche gives any account of what would entitle such commanding is the open question this page ends on.

    Read alongside: Beyond Good and Evil §§212–213; Revaluation.

    Online edition: Part V (trans. Helen Zimmern; §211 is in Part VI — use Find for the section numbers) · Preferred edition.

Fuller route: tests and complications

Five investigations to take after the first encounter. Each assignment opens its full explanation and reading links in the work survey below. Read the assignments within a group in order; the question above them says what the comparison is meant to test.

1. Before the word existed

The figure has a prehistory in the early essays, where Nietzsche is describing the philosopher as a cultural type rather than naming a kind of reader. Ask how much of the later figure is already there and how much is read back into it.

  1. Untimely Meditations — III, "Schopenhauer as Educator" §1
    The obstacles to becoming oneself, and the fear of one's neighbours.
  2. Untimely Meditations — III, "Schopenhauer as Educator" §3
    The educator as one who reveals rather than instructs.
  3. Untimely Meditations — III, "Schopenhauer as Educator" §6
    The public claim: what a culture owes to the production of a kind of person.
  4. Homer's Contest
    Excellence as requiring rivals — a check on any purely solitary reading of the figure.

2. Free spirit against free thinker

The distinction Nietzsche cares most about. Follow it from the polemical version through the argued one to its genealogical ground.

  1. Beyond Good and Evil — §44
    The levellers named, and the term reclaimed against them.
  2. The Gay Science — §347
    The need to believe, and its migration out of religion.
  3. On the Genealogy of Morals — Essay III §24
    Unbelievers described as the ascetic ideal's most recent and most honest believers.
  4. On the Genealogy of Morals — Essay III §27
    Where that argument leads, and what it asks of anyone who accepts it.

3. What the freedom costs

Nietzsche is consistent that this is not a comfortable condition. Read the passages where the cost is stated without the compensations.

  1. Human, All Too Human — §§637–638
    The wanderer who has left one house and not found another.
  2. Thus Spoke Zarathustra — I, "On the Way of the Creator"
    Solitude, and the question of whether one may give oneself one's own law.
  3. Daybreak — §501
    The discipline the work requires, stated without heroics.
  4. The Gay Science — §283
    Preparatory human beings, described as living dangerously and for the sake of others later.

4. Neighbouring figures, kept apart

The free spirit is not the overman, not the noble type, and not simply a scholar. Test the boundaries where the corpus draws them itself.

  1. Thus Spoke Zarathustra — I, "On the Three Metamorphoses"
    Three stages, of which the lion — the destroyer of the "thou shalt" — is not the last.
  2. Thus Spoke Zarathustra — I, "On the Gift-Giving Virtue"
    The turn from taking one's independence to giving something away.
  3. Beyond Good and Evil — §§212–213
    The philosopher as the bad conscience of his age, and what cannot be learned.
  4. On the Genealogy of Morals — Essay III §10
    The philosopher's historical need for a disguise, and the type's late arrival.

5. The retrospect as evidence

The last group is methodological. Compare what the 1886 and 1888 self-descriptions claim with what the books they describe actually did.

  1. Human, All Too Human — Preface (1886)
    The great severance, the dangerous years, the convalescence.
  2. Human, All Too Human — §225
    The definition the preface is describing, which contains none of that narrative.
  3. Daybreak — Preface (1886)
    The book recast as the opening of a campaign against morality.
  4. Ecce Homo — on Human, All Too Human, §1
    The final version of the story, two years later still.

Keep these distinctions in view

Free spirit and free thinker
The Freidenker of Nietzsche's century was an anti-clerical, progressive, usually democratic type. Beyond Good and Evil §44 uses the word for exactly that figure and refuses it. The difference Nietzsche draws is not about religion at all: it is about whether the demand for something unconditional to rest on has been given up, and The Gay Science §347 is where he argues for it.
Freedom from and freedom for
The 1878 definition is entirely negative: thinking otherwise than expected. The late work treats that as a stage and asks what the freedom is for. Readings that stop at the first make Nietzsche an advocate of independence as such, which is the one thing Zarathustra's lion is explicitly not enough to be.
The book and its preface
Human, All Too Human was published in 1878; its preface was written in 1886. Quoting the preface as though it stated the book's own view telescopes eight years of development. The same applies to Daybreak and its 1886 preface. See the section below.
Free spirit and higher type
The free spirit is an intellectual achievement described in terms of what someone has detached themselves from. The higher type, in the late books, is described in terms of constitution and rank. They overlap in Nietzsche's examples and they are not the same concept, and the slide from one to the other is where a claim about thinking turns into a claim about people.
Solitude and isolation
Nietzsche's free spirit is solitary but not self-sufficient: "Homer's Contest" makes excellence depend on worthy rivals, and Zarathustra makes the friend the one before whom one must not go soft. Loneliness is described as a condition of the work, not as its reward.
Scepticism and the absence of convictions
What §347 attacks is the need for certainty, not holding views. Nietzsche holds a great many, forcefully. Whether his own position survives the test he sets there is a genuine question, and it is more interesting than either the charge of self-refutation or the claim that he is exempt.
Nietzsche's ideal and modern individualism
The free spirit is not a defence of individual autonomy, of doing as one likes, or of freedom of opinion as a political value. Beyond Good and Evil Part II is hostile to most of those, and §44 explicitly counts the taste for them as a symptom. Naming that hostility is not endorsing it; it is the condition of arguing with the text rather than with a friendlier substitute.

The 1886 prefaces and what they show

In 1886, preparing new editions, Nietzsche wrote fresh prefaces for The Birth of Tragedy, the two volumes of Human, All Too Human, Daybreak and — in 1887 — The Gay Science. Most of what this theme is built from comes from those prefaces, so it is worth being clear about what kind of document they are.

They are retrospective and they are constructive. The Human, All Too Human preface tells a story with stages — attachment, severance, wandering, convalescence, mastery — and presents the book as the record of a passage through them. That story is not in the 1878 book. What is in the 1878 book is §225, a short formal definition, a great many aphorisms about art, religion, women, and the state, and a dedication to free spirits who, the 1886 preface says plainly, did not exist and had to be invented. The preface is not describing what the earlier Nietzsche thought he was doing; it is telling the reader how the later Nietzsche wants the sequence of his books to be seen.

This is not a charge of dishonesty. A preface is entitled to interpret. The point is that it makes weaker evidence than it looks like about the middle period, and stronger evidence than it looks like about 1886. Two practical consequences follow. First, when this page cites a preface, the date is given, because a claim about a book's purpose written eight years later is a different kind of claim from one made in the book. Second, where the preface and the book disagree in emphasis, the disagreement is worth keeping rather than resolving: the drier, more relative free spirit of §225 and the dramatic convalescent of the preface are both Nietzsche's, five and eight years apart.

Ecce Homo takes the same procedure further, since the whole book is an account of what each of the earlier works was for. The chapter on Human, All Too Human gives the most explicit definition of the free spirit anywhere in the corpus — a spirit that has become free and has taken possession of itself again — and it is also the least independent source available, written in 1888 by a man reconstructing his own development. Use it for the formulation; do not use it for the chronology.

Explore by work

Twenty-nine assignments across eight works, including the six starting readings. Core identifies the first encounter; development adds a setting or a second formulation; complication tests an apparent answer; extension follows a related question. The survey follows publication chronology, with prefaces marked by the year they were written rather than the year of the book they introduce.

The early essays and Untimely Meditations4 reading assignments

The prehistory. "Schopenhauer as Educator" (1874) is the third of the Untimely Meditations; the free editions divide the four essays across two volumes under the title Thoughts Out of Season, and this one is in the volume translated by Adrian Collins. "Homer's Contest" is a short piece from 1872 that Nietzsche did not publish, and it is in a different free volume.

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Human, All Too Human4 reading assignments

The founding text, subtitled "A Book for Free Spirits." Volume II gathers Assorted Opinions and Maxims and The Wanderer and His Shadow, whose section numbers restart; the free Volume II translation is by Paul V. Cohn and titles the first part Miscellaneous Maxims and Opinions. Both volumes received new prefaces in 1886.

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Daybreak3 reading assignments

The 1881 book and its 1886 preface. Daybreak is the most patient of the middle-period books, and its treatment of the free-spirit task is correspondingly undramatic. Preferred translation: Hollingdale; the free edition is The Dawn of Day, translated by J. M. Kennedy.

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The Gay Science3 reading assignments

The transitional book. Book IV (1882) supplies the description of the preparatory type; Book V (1887) supplies the argued break with the free thinkers and is contemporaneous with the Genealogy. The year is marked on each entry.

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Thus Spoke Zarathustra4 reading assignments

The dramatic middle. Zarathustra does not use the term, and its usefulness here is that it refuses to let detachment be the end of the story. All four chapters are from Parts I and II.

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Beyond Good and Evil4 reading assignments

The major late site. Part II carries the theme's name, and Part VI describes what the free spirit is supposed to become. Section numbers run continuously from 1 to 296 across the nine parts.

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On the Genealogy of Morals5 reading assignments

The Genealogy puts the free spirit inside a history rather than outside one, and the third essay is where the theme meets its hardest objection. The free edition numbers the Preface and each essay separately.

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Ecce Homo2 reading assignments

Written in 1888 and published in 1908. It contains the most explicit definition of the free spirit in the corpus and is the least independent source for the history it narrates. The free edition titles the chapter "Why I Write Such Excellent Books."

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A note on the notebooks

This page carries no separate notebook route. There is late notebook material on the philosophers of the future, much of it from 1885–87 and overlapping with the drafting of Beyond Good and Evil Parts II and VI, but on this theme the published books are unusually complete: the definition, the break with the free thinkers, the developmental picture and the destination are all in print, and the notes mostly work toward what was printed. Adding a notebook route here would make the page longer without making the argument better.

If you do follow the material, the standard cautions apply. The Will to Power is a posthumous arrangement of notebook entries and not a book Nietzsche completed; its numbers are editorial entry numbers rather than original notebook references, and it gathers notes written at different times. For the original arrangement and manuscript references, consult Nietzsche Source's critical edition. The related notebook routes on revaluation and perspectivism cover the entries most often quoted in this vicinity.

Related extensions: what might follow?

Choose these after the central questions, according to the direction your reading takes. They return to assignments already explained in the survey.

Connections

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