Abstract
This essay examines Nietzsche's thought on the social and historical sources of the self as a counter-argument against the liberal concept of the individual. Nietzsche, it is argued, offers a powerful critique of the asocial, antecedently individuated concept of personhood, to which the liberal notion of freedom (the right to choose one's concept of the good) is attached, but also an alternative counter-concept of personhood and sovereignty. On the critical side are arguments to the effect that the individual or person is inseparable from its ends or values, which in turn are socially constituted, and that our capacities as individuals, especially for sovereign agency, are the product of a long social history and pre-history. On the positive side is the constructive counter-claim that the maintenance and cultivation of our capacities for productive, autonomous agency is dependent on relations of measured antagonism both between and within us as individuals, or rather: as dividua. These arguments are reconstructed along four main lines of thought: on the social origins and character of (self-)consciousness (§ I); on the (pre-)history and social constitution of our capacities as sovereign individuals (§ II); on the social origins of moral phenomena, understood as internalisations of communal norms (§ III); and Nietzsche's physiological destruction of the substantial moral subject, coupled with the physiological reconstruction of the subject as dividuum (§ IV).
Keywords
sovereignty; socio-physiology; nature; moral