Os conceitos nietzschianos de espontaneidade e soberania e a filosofia kantiana

Abstract

This paper reconstructs the intellectual background against which Nietzsche’s concepts of spontaneity and sovereignty emerge and acquire their meanings and uses, as well as their relation to Kant’s philosophy. The first section of this paper deals with the particular significance of psychology in the early neo- Kantians’ dismissal of Kant’s conception of the spontaneity. Against this historical background, it is not surprising that Nietzsche rejects the idea of an ‘absolute’ or ‘free’ spontaneity of the will. In 1880, a new conception of life as ‘spontaneous activity’ emerges in his manuscripts. This naturalistic view Nietzsche picks up from Baumann goes back to Alexander Bain’s theory of the ‘beginnings of the will’ and strongly differs from Kant’s absolute spontaneity. These differences are explained in detail (Section 2). The conception of ‘spontaneous activity’, which Nietzsche adopts before Daybreak, is still of paramount importance in the Genealogy (Section 3). In the next section (Section 4), the paper discusses how Nietzsche’s critique of Kant’s ‘radical evil’ problem evolves through his work in connection with his thoughts on this naturalized notion of spontaneity. By analysing the use of Kantian terms in the Genealogy, I show that this criticism of freedom squares well with the description of the ‘sovereign individual’ as ‘responsible’, ‘autonomous’ and ‘free’. Arguing specially against his contemporary Eduard von Hartmann, Nietzsche employs a specific textual strategy, which consists in taking Kantian terms in an ‘anti- Kantian’ sense and systematically cultivating the art of using ‘a moral formula in a supramoral sense’. The agent’s self- ascription of absolute freedom belongs essentially to Kant’s concept of moral agency, and the self- ascription of ‘freedom’ to Nietzsche’s sovereign individuality. But the ‘freedom’ the sovereign individual ascribes to itself and to its peers is not absolute spontaneity, which for Nietzsche is a self- contradictory concept; and this self-ascription of a rare freedom does not have the same function as the postulate of absolute freedom in Kant’s practical philosophy. It is, rather, the main way in which the sovereign individual’s ‘pathos of distance’ is expressed, and hence a form of self-affirmation (Section 5).