Nietzschean Autonomy and the Meaning of the " Sovereign Individual " 1

This paper has two goals—a narrow one which I take myself to achieve, and a more ambitious one toward which I can make only preliminary suggestions. The limited goal is to resolve an interpretive dispute over Nietzsche’s intentions in the Genealogy’s description of the “sovereign individual,” a character type whose features turn out to have important bearing on Nietzsche’s distinctive conceptions of conscience, promising, and what it is to take responsibility for oneself. The more ambitious goal is to characterize what Nietzsche means by autonomy and to assess what we might have to learn from his conception. The paper’s basic idea is that the meaning of the sovereign individual emerges clearly in the light of a distinction from Bernard Williams between two senses of responsibility—one sense tied to voluntary action, the other to an ambitious conception of responsible agency. What we learn about responsibility from Williams then illuminates how we should understand Nietzschean autonomy, and what philosophical purposes his conception can (and cannot) serve.