Introduction: On “Complete Irresponsibility”

The “complete irresponsibility of a human being for his behavior and his nature” (HH I 107) seems to be one of Nietzsche’s most consistently held beliefs.^[1] In Human, All too Human (1878–80), the idea is presented as a “doctrine” (HH I 105) and as the “philosophical conviction” of “the unconditional necessity of all actions and of their complete irresponsibility [die philosophische Ueberzeugung von der unbedingten Nothwendigkeit aller Handlungen und ihrer völligen Unverantwortlichkeit]” (HH I 133). Formulated as a doctrine, we still find it as late as the 1888 Twilight of the Idols, where Nietzsche presents as “our doctrine [unsre Lehre]”: “That nobody is held responsible anymore [Dass Niemand mehr verantwortlich gemacht wird].” Nietzsche consistently ties the idea of complete irresponsibility to “innocence.”^[2] In Twilight of the Idols, the doctrine is presented as the “only way” to “restore” the “innocence of becoming” (TI, Errors 8).

What does irresponsibility mean? A strong “seduction on the part of grammar” (BGE, Preface) can make us believe that irresponsibility is a negative and therefore derivative concept: the inflexion “ir-” (the Un- of Unverantwortlichkeit) tells us that irresponsibility is the negation of the conceptually more primary notion of responsibility. But, like any negation, this negation is ambiguous. There are different ways to be irresponsible. First, one can be irresponsible by failing to live up to a pre-given responsibility or demand. This is irresponsibility as blameworthy negligence of a given task (regardless as to whether that task is moral, legal, role-based or otherwise). In this sense, I act irresponsibly if I fail to follow rules or adhere to demands that are in principle transparent and possible to articulate. This transparency makes this type of irresponsibility calculable: I know (or may be presupposed to know) what I ought to do and what it means (not) to do it. It also makes responsibility a matter of purity: I am responsible if I stick to the rules and adhere to my tasks. Conversely, I may be blamed and “held responsible” if I ignore or break said rules. Thus, irresponsibility here is a break with given responsibilities.

Although this conception of responsibility has its necessity, things are not quite so simple, if only because, ironically, this very responsibility is a common way of evading one’s responsibility. Hiding behind prescribed duties is one popular way to avoid facing the music, like those who say: “don’t look at me, I just followed the rules, I have fulfilled my responsibility.” This is why we tend to think the most responsible person is actually not the one who sticks to the rules, but rather the one who is somehow able to choose or to judge in the absence of given criteria or rules – a conception of responsibility that is closer to the one held by Jean-Paul Sartre or Hannah Arendt.^[3] In his thorough study of Nietzsche’s doctrine of complete irresponsibility, Richard Wisser calls this “situational” responsibility (situationelle Verantwortung), as opposed to the calculable responsibility before an already established instance or authority (instantielle Verantwortung). Rather than hiding behind preformulated answers or rules, situational responsibility demands the production of a responsible response in the absence of certainty about what such a response would entail, which means to stick one’s neck out or to “stand up for something with one’s existence.”^[4]

The paradox of situational responsibility is that it necessarily involves a measure of irresponsibility. It can mean a break with given responsibilities, this time not in the sense of reckless negligence, but because it is demanded by some higher responsibility. Alternatively, it can mean being in a situation in which no responsibilities are articulated or given to begin with. Then, the “ir-” of irresponsibility is no longer a counter-movement or opposition, but an absence or lack of given responsibilities. This lack can in turn be conceived in different ways. It may be the lack of given duties that enables someone to stick out their neck and assume a situational responsibility that was not previously given. Or this lack may be conceived radically, as that which falls entirely outside of the sphere of responsibility. Granite is irresponsible but, clearly, not in the sense that it fails to live up to given responsibilities or that it fails to assume situational ones; it seems rather to exist outside of the sphere of responsibilities at all. If it sounds semantically awkward to call granite irresponsible, then consider that one of our questions will precisely be how to understand Nietzsche’s claim in Human, All too Human that the cruel man is “no more responsible than a piece of granite is for being granite” (HH I 43), which is one formulation of Nietzsche’s idea of complete irresponsibility.^[5]

From these considerations, we can derive a final sense of irresponsibility. If irresponsibility can also refer to something that falls entirely outside of the sphere of responsibility, then in another sense it names something that can no longer be adequately grasped through the opposition of responsibility to irresponsibility – something neither responsible nor irresponsible. Indeed, Nietzsche’s idea of irresponsibility is also a reinterpretation (Umdeutung) and a revaluation (Umwertung). This is most clearly the case when the opposition between responsibility and irresponsibility either becomes undecidable (as we shall see, for example, in the play of the child and the artist) or paradoxical (as we shall see in the different ways in which Nietzsche, over time increasingly explicitly, takes responsibility for complete irresponsibility). Our more customary word for the irresponsibility of the child, perhaps also of the granite, is innocence. Innocence is conceptually similar to irresponsibility in the sense of also being a negative concept, denoting the negation of guilt (reflected more clearly in the German Un-schuld). It thus suffers all the same ambiguities: one can be innocent by sticking to given rules, or because no rule applies, or because the very opposition of innocence to guilt becomes undecidable or paradoxical.

Following the ambiguity of the concept of irresponsibility, we can look at Nietzsche’s “doctrine” in different ways. On the one hand, Nietzsche employs the doctrine as a counter-idea in his critique of morality, determining the meaning of irresponsibility in its oppositional relation to responsibility. But that critique shows that “responsibility” has a specific and limited history. This already points to the fact that the ideas of irresponsibility and of innocence exceed the oppositional relation to responsibility and guilt as they arise in the context of the specific history of European morality. Thus, in this article, I will not follow Nietzsche’s critique of morality and the immanent critique of responsibility; of its characteristics, genealogy and limits.^[6] Rather than study the critique of responsibility, I will focus on those texts where “complete irresponsibility” and “innocence” are treated in a sense that is somehow non-derivative and no longer only determined solely by their opposition to responsibility. Nietzsche mainly proceeds in three ways: (1) by studying the innocence and irresponsibility in the Greeks that precede the development of moral responsibility in Europe under the influence of Platonism and Christianity; (2) by speculatively envisioning a future type of irresponsible human after that history; and (3) on a conceptual level by showing how “complete irresponsibility” not only excludes or opposes responsibility, but in various ways complicates the opposition between responsibility and irresponsibility. This latter point involves recognizing that in spite of Nietzsche’s apparently unequivocal positing of complete irresponsibility as a doctrine, he also (a) criticizes specific forms of irresponsibility as a weak evasion or abdication of one’s task; (b) allows for a more affirmative notion of responsibility after 1881; and (c) shows where the determination of irresponsibility becomes undecidable and paradoxical.

It should come as no surprise that the “doctrine” of complete irresponsibility does not function in Nietzsche’s writings as an unequivocal doctrine. His writings are rarely, if ever, theoretically doctrinal in such a way. As we will see, when he first presents the doctrine of complete irresponsibility as a “philosophical conviction” in Human, All too Human, he does so in the same work in which he criticizes convictions as such. Nietzsche’s interest is not simply to teach the doctrine as an unequivocal claim to knowledge. In his excellent and impressive study, Silvio Pfeuffer has convincingly shown that with the doctrine Nietzsche “does not superficially follow theoretical paths” or express “universal knowledge [allgemeine Erkenntnis].”^[7] Rather, expressing a “paradox,”^[8] the doctrine “disturbs” and “irritates,” thus preventing one “from legitimizing one’s own deeds through it.”^[9] Its function lies in its “potential for self-examination” on the part of the reader. Pfeuffer is entirely right that with the doctrine Nietzsche “does not simply offer the reader a new morality with new theorems [Lehrsätze] that would replace Christian European morality.” My aim in this paper is to supplement Pfeuffer’s account in two ways: by showing how the doctrine is not just set up as the “counter-hypothesis to christian-European morality”^[10] but is rooted in Nietzsche’s early engagement with Heraclitean “innocence,” and by showing that Nietzsche gradually came to understand and value man’s irresponsibility differently, textually positioning the doctrine and his relation to it differently over time.

I will structure my argument around three moments that I take to exemplify both the continuity as well as the development of Nietzsche’s insistence on the complete irresponsibility of human beings. I will argue that Nietzsche’s engagement with irresponsibility starts avant la lettre with his foundational early study of Heraclitus, where he develops the idea that he will later designate as the “innocence of becoming [die Unschuld des Werdens].” In the first section, I will show how Nietzsche admires Heraclitus both for expounding and for embodying a radical innocence. Here, too, Nietzsche’s interest is not simply doctrinal, but lies in Heraclitus’ doctrine of innocence insofar as it reflects a type of personality characterized by strength, pride and divinely intuitive insight that he believes is no longer possible in modern Europe. I will also argue that what Nietzsche admires in Heraclitus’ innocence paradoxically contains the latent contours of a responsibility-in-irresponsibility that Nietzsche will later explicitly affirm, especially with regard to Heraclitus’ refusal to take shelter from the abyssal truth of becoming. And with the corresponding model of the play of the child and the artist, Nietzsche pushes innocence beyond the opposition of responsibility and irresponsibility. The second section focuses on Human, All too Human, where Nietzsche turns Heraclitus’ divinely intuitive insight into an explicit philosophical conviction and “doctrine” but one that he, crucially, does not teach. Instead, he speculatively and experimentally envisions the possibilities for its future incorporation, thereby opening complete irresponsibility up to a responsibility for the future liberation of mankind. In the third section, I discuss a number of later passages that demonstrate a more acute awareness of this reflexive entanglement of responsibility and irresponsibility. I focus on how the doctrine of irresponsibility is now posited as “our teaching” out of a paradoxical responsibility for the “redemption of the world” in TI, Errors 8, as well as on how Nietzsche now criticizes weak forms of irresponsibility, focusing on BGE 21 and GS 285.

How is it that all these complications should surround what superficially seems like an unequivocal doctrine? The complication lies in the fact that not just what Nietzsche writes, but also how he writes it is itself an expression of (ir)responsibility. Nietzsche’s writings display an increasing performative awareness of this complication – one that he not only recognized, but actively exploited in his texts for maximum tension. The fourth section addresses how the different, often contradictory senses of irresponsibility in Nietzsche’s texts are related to each other. I will give an account of the senses of irresponsibility, but I will argue above all that such categorization must ultimately remain inadequate. That Nietzsche’s texts often do more to complicate than to clarify such distinctions is an important performative reflection of how Nietzsche paradoxically takes responsibility for “complete irresponsibility.”

I “A Star without Atmosphere”: Irresponsibility and the “Innocence of Becoming” in Nietzsche’s Early Reading of Heraclitus

Heraclitus remains a pivotal figure throughout Nietzsche’s development, and Nietzsche never breaks with one of the most important ideas he takes from him: that of the “innocence of becoming [die Unschuld des Werdens].” Although that phrase is not coined until 1883, the insight clearly originates in Nietzsche’s early interpretation of Heraclitus. We find this interpretation in the lecture series The Pre-Platonic Philosophers which he taught in 1872, 1873 and 1876 (= PPP), and also in a condensed and sharpened form in the unpublished text Philosophy in the Tragic Age of the Greeks from 1873. There is no doubt about what Nietzsche saw as Heraclitus’ teaching: Nietzsche hails Heraclitus as the teacher of “law in becoming and of play in necessity [die Lehre vom Gesetz im Werden und vom Spiel in der Nothwendigkeit]” (PHG 8, KSA 1.835). The pre-Platonic philosophers comprehended “the eternal problems and also their eternal solutions” (Nachlass 1871/72, 14[28], KSA 7.387), and with his teaching in particular Heraclitus “raised the curtain” on the “greatest of all dramas.” His teaching “must be seen from now on in all eternity” (PHG 8).

Why does Nietzsche regard this doctrine so highly? The central premise of Nietzsche’s approach in these lectures is to ask “how the ‘philosopher’ appeared among the Greeks, not just how philosophy appeared among them” (PPP, KGW II 4.212). It is the philosophers and their work only as it relates to their personality which interests Nietzsche. Their doctrines belong to what is “refutable” about them; it is their characters that are “irrefutable.”^[11] Even though several Heraclitean ideas can be seen to find their way into Nietzsche’s works (such as becoming or strife), the most profound influence of Heraclitus on Nietzsche does not lie in the refutable specifics of Heraclitus’ doctrine but in the “irrefutable”^[12] aspects of his personality.^[13] What, then, is irrefutable about a character expounding the innocence of becoming?

The first thing to notice is that innocence does not apply to persons but to becoming as such, i. e., to the “everlasting and exclusive coming-to-be, the impermanence of everything actual, which constantly acts and comes-to-be but never is [Das ewige und alleinige Werden, die gänzliche Unbeständigkeit alles Wirklichen, das fortwährend nur wirkt und wird und nicht ist]” (PHG 5, KSA 1.824). Heraclitus thus severs a connection we quickly take to be self-evident, namely: that between reality or actuality (Wirklichkeit) and being. Actuality is not what “is,” it is only ever what “acts” or “works” (wirkt) and “becomes.” Becoming, as an eternal process of growth and decay, never “is” insofar as it nowhere solidifies into fixed stability. The appearance of stability comes only from the short-sightedness of man. Outside of that short-sightedness, there is no land anywhere in “the ocean of coming-to-be and passing away” (PHG 5). In this way, “innocence” applies to an actuality that, although in principle accessible to everyone, remains inaccessible “to the common human eye” (PHG 7).

Why is the insight into actuality as becoming so compelling? It is not because there are good reasons to conceive of actuality in that way. Nietzsche stresses that the insight is not “attained by the rope ladder of logic” (PHG 9). Heraclitus “knows but does not calculate.” His is the truth as “grasped in intuitions.” In fact, his insight is “a truth of the greatest immediate self-evidence for everyone.” It corresponds not only to “the present many-colored and changing world that crowds in upon us in all our experiences” (PHG 5), but also to our intuition of time and space as conditions for knowing that very world. Everything we know, we know in time and space, and everything in time and space only has “relative existence [ein relatives Dasein],” that is to say: relative in relation to something else that, in turn, is relative again in the same way. Nietzsche here generalizes to the level of a condition for knowledge that familiar failure to hold onto any moment that seems to slip through our fingers as soon as we try to grasp it. Heraclitus’ ability to articulate this is what made him god-like (dem beschaulichen Gotte ähnlich). This near-divine “extraordinary power” to think or imagine intuitively (höchste Kraft der intuitiven Vorstellung) is, writes Nietzsche, Heraclitus’ “regal possession” (PHG 5, KSA 1.823).

But what is irrefutable about Heraclitus, is not only this highest power of intuition. It is also a very specific strength. It is this strength which underlies the law in becoming. Because what is the effect of seeing in actuality nothing but becoming?

The everlasting and exclusive coming-to-be, the impermanence of everything actual, which constantly acts and comes-to-be but never is, as Heraclitus teaches it, is a terrible, paralyzing thought. Its impact on men can most nearly be likened to the sensation during an earthquake when one loses one’s familiar confidence in a firmly grounded earth. It takes astonishing strength to transform this reaction into its opposite, into sublimity and the feeling of blessed astonishment. Heraclitus achieved this by means of an observation regarding the actual process of all coming-to-be and passing away. He conceived it under the form of polarity, as being the diverging of a force into two qualitatively different opposed activities that seek to re-unite (PHG 5, KSA 1.824–5).

Das ewige und alleinige Werden, die gänzliche Unbeständigkeit alles Wirklichen, das fortwährend nur wirkt und wird und nicht ist, wie dies Heraklit lehrt, ist eine furchtbare und betäubende Vorstellung und in ihrem Einflusse am nächsten der Empfindung verwandt, mit der Jemand, bei einem Erdbeben, das Zutrauen zu der festgegründeten Erde verliert. Es gehörte eine erstaunliche Kraft dazu, diese Wirkung in das Entgegengesetzte, in das Erhabne und das beglückte Erstaunen zu übertragen. Dies erreichte Heraklit durch eine Beobachtung über den eigentlichen Hergang jedes Werdens und Vergehens, welchen er unter der Form der Polarität begriff, als das Auseinandertreten einer Kraft in zwei qualitativ verschiedne, entgegengesetzte und zur Wiedervereinigung strebende Thätigkeiten.

The idea that actuality is becoming, and is nowhere stable, does not mean that becoming is unordered. On the contrary: growth and decay are ever “flowing upward and downward in brazen rhythmic beat” (PHG 5). As such, they follow unwritten laws. Becoming is structured, and its structure is oppositional: growth and decay operate “under the form of polarity.” A power divides into two qualitatively different, opposing activities that strive to be reunited. What appears to people as light and dark or bitter and sweet belongs together “like wrestlers of whom sometimes the one, sometimes the other is on top” (PHG 5). The appearance of stability (say, the sweetness of honey) is but the temporary victory, the momentary prevalence of one of these two wrestlers within the eternal strife. All becoming derives from this eternal war of opposites, which constitutes the “law in becoming” that determines one side of Heraclitus’ teaching. But what grounds the insight into the polarity of the law of becoming? It is the ability – the strength – to recognize in the intuitively grasped actuality as becoming nothing but the innocence and the justice of becoming itself: in the “everlasting wavebeat and rhythm of things,” Heraclitus found “Lawful order [Gesetzmäßigkeiten], unfailing certainties, ever-like orbits of lawfulness [immer gleiche Bahnen des Rechtes], […] the whole world the spectacle of sovereign justice [die ganze Welt das Schauspiel einer waltenden Gerechtigkeit]” (PHG 5, KSA 1.822).

What therefore grounds the insight into the “innocence” of becoming is not primarily that it is theoretically convincing or rationally necessary, nor that the flux of becoming precludes any fixed norm for responsibility. What grounds it is the irrefutable strength of Heraclitus’ personality which enabled him to see nothing but sublime justice in the most abysmal, destabilizing thought – the thought that all actuality only ever becomes and never is – a thought that in turn could present itself to Heraclitus only because of his near-divine power of intuitive representation.^[14]

The idea of becoming’s innocence is therefore not an ontological knowledge-claim, nor merely a negative claim about the absence of moral criteria. It is a positive idea about Heraclitus’ ability – faced with the “paralyzing thought” and losing the ground beneath his feet – to not try to escape it or judge it, but to recognize in this intuitive, abyssal truth a divine justice. In this refusal to seek shelter in the illusion of stability, we can already recognize the latent contours of what much later for Nietzsche will constitute an affirmative responsibility in the very idea of complete innocence and irresponsibility.

But if there are no criteria with which to judge becoming, surely there are no criteria to call becoming “just” either. So how exactly are the two spheres – of strife and justice, of human (ir)responsibilities and divine innocence – related? Is strife ultimately harmony? Or harmony ultimately strife? Does Nietzsche’s Heraclitus “sublate” the opposition?

The answer is: none of the above. The law in becoming applies also to the world as a whole. Nietzsche believed that, following Anaximander, Heraclitus proclaimed a periodic renewal of the world through an all-consuming world-fire.^[15] For Nietzsche, the decisive question is what one takes this periodic renewal to signify. He explains that because the time leading up to it is characterized as desire, and the consumption of the world through fire as saturation, Heraclitus had in late Antiquity become known as the “weeping philosopher” because the world-process was interpreted as a process of punishment for hybris, following the Greek adage that “satiety gives birth to hybris.” Nietzsche wants to save Heraclitus from this reading by arguing that for Heraclitus the periodic destruction of the world is emphatically not the “punishment of what has come-to-be [Bestrafung des Gewordenen],” but rather the “justification” of becoming (Rechtfertigung des Werdens):

That dangerous word hybris is indeed the touchstone for every Heraclitan. Here he must show whether he has understood or failed to recognize his master. Do guilt, injustice, contradiction and suffering exist in this world?

They do, proclaims Heraclitus, but only for the limited human mind which sees things apart but not connected, not for the con-tuitive god. For him all contradictions run into harmony, invisible to the common human eye, yet understandable to one who, like Heraclitus, is related to the contemplative god (PHG 7, KSA 1.830).

Jenes gefährliche Wort, Hybris, ist in der That der Prüfstein für jeden Herakliteer; hier mag er zeigen, ob er seinen Meister verstanden oder verkannt hat. Giebt es Schuld Ungerechtigkeit Widerspruch Leid in dieser Welt?

Ja, ruft Heraklit, aber nur für den beschränkten Menschen, der auseinander und nicht zusammen schaut, nicht für den contuitiven Gott; für ihn läuft alles Widerstrebende in eine Harmonie zusammen, unsichtbar zwar für das gewöhnliche Menschenauge, doch dem verständlich, der, wie Heraklit, dem beschaulichen Gotte ähnlich ist.

According to Nietzsche, Heraclitus does not relapse into an Anaximandrian two-world view that would posit the one law as somehow behind the many as its eternal truth, which would mean to negate the pervasive nature of becoming. Nor does he maintain that stability is the mere appearance of a reality that is becoming. Instead, for Heraclitus, the one is the many, and the law is in becoming. But this also means that becoming is never “justified” in any colloquial sense. Becoming is indeed the “spectacle of a sovereign justice [Schauspiel einer waltenden Gerechtigkeit],” but not in order to conform to some criterion or principle of justice (i. e., this justice is neither rewarding nor punishing), but by conceiving all opposition itself as harmony.^[16]

So why does pure fire periodically release itself into the impure and limited multitude? Clearly not in order to tear it down again, nor to punish the world. The right answer, according to Nietzsche, is: for no reason. Innocence also signifies this lack of reason. Nothing or no one is accountable for the world. Heraclitus articulated this innocence through the image of fire or Zeus playing a game with and for themselves, exhibiting “coming-to-be and passing away, structuring and destroying, without any moral additive, in forever equal innocence” (PHG 7). With this, Heraclitus becomes not just the teacher of the “law in becoming,” but also of “play in necessity.”

For two reasons, I have emphasized that this notion of justice-in-opposition also is not a dialectical solution: the first reason is that, as we have seen, the insight into actuality as becoming is not a rational but an intuitive insight; the second reason is (and for Nietzsche this is crucial) that Heraclitus’ solution is not only not rational but in an important sense absurd.

The idea that the world-process is Zeus or fire playing a game with itself is a ludicrous proposition that undoubtedly belongs to the refutable part of the system. Nevertheless, Nietzsche emphasizes that, with this idea, Heraclitus has joined his most intuitive insight with the most counter-intuitive possibility, one that nobody could guess “by dialectic detective work nor figured out with the help of calculations.” It is “a rarity even in the sphere of mystic incredibilities and unexpected cosmic metaphors” (PHG 6). In explaining this teaching, Heraclitus expounded something that is wildly contrary to all common sense and public opinion. This is another sense of Heraclitus’ innocence, and a large part of his irresponsibility: he was unaccountability incarnate. Nietzsche’s admiration for the pre-Platonic philosophers in general lay in their being “pure types,” in contrast to the emergence of a “mixed” culture after Plato that Nietzsche still found prevalent in modern Europe when knowledge had become a goal in itself severed from its essential ties to life. But for the pure types, there was a strict necessity binding their thought to their character, which drove them to lead solitary lives devoted to knowledge through a one-sidedness or “unity of style” that Plato and his successors lacked. But for Nietzsche, even among the pre-Platonic philosophers, Heraclitus’ solitude was radical. Unlike Empedocles or Pythagoras, who’s connection to the people was restored through their compassion or sense of the unity of life, Heraclitus’ writings convey no “feeling of compassionate emotions, no desire to help, to heal, to save” whatsoever (PHG 8). Heraclitus showed no interest in redeeming the world. He was, writes Nietzsche, “a star without atmosphere.” Heraclitus’ will to solitude, reflected in his will to conjoin the most intuitive with the most counter-intuitive insight, was a symptom of his pride: “Heraclitus was proud, and when a philosopher exhibits pride, it is a great pride indeed” (PHG 8). Of the pure types, Heraclitus was possibly the purest: where Pythagoras was “the wise man as religious reformer” and Socrates “the wise man as the eternal investigator of all things,” Heraclitus was “the wise man as proud, solitary searcher after truth [der Weise als stolz-einsamer Wahrheitsfinder],” the proud-lonely truth-finder (PPP, KGW II 4.265).

Finally, we should stress that however counter-intuitive Heraclitus’ explanation was, it did rest on an insight that is itself highly intuitive. Here we encounter a final type of irresponsibility that will remain decisive throughout Nietzsche’s development. This type, too, puts the conventional opposition between irresponsibility and responsibility in question. The counter-intuitive notion of Zeus’ divine play has, writes Nietzsche, analogues in “this world.” These analogues of eternal innocence are found in the play of the child and of the artist. This model of play will inform many of Nietzsche’s later ideas:

And as children and artists play, so plays the ever-living fire. It constructs and destroys, all in innocence. […] Not hybris but the ever self-renewing impulse to play calls new worlds into being. The child throws its toys away from time to time – and starts again, in innocent caprice. But when it does build, it combines and joins and forms its structures regularly, conforming to inner laws (PHG 7, KSA 1.830–1).

Und so, wie das Kind und der Künstler spielt, spielt das ewig lebendige Feuer, baut auf und zerstört, in Unschuld – […]. Nicht Frevelmuth, sondern der immer neu erwachende Spieltrieb ruft andre Welten ins Leben. Das Kind wirft einmal das Spielzeug weg: bald aber fängt es wieder an, in unschuldiger Laune. Sobald es aber baut, knüpft fügt und formt es gesetzmäßig und nach inneren Ordnungen.

I restrict myself here to the model of the artist.^[17] What do we learn about play and necessity from the artist? The central terms are those that are the central concepts of any traditional theory of responsibility: freedom and necessity. In the creation of the work of art, we see:

how the struggle of the many can yet carry rules and laws inherent in itself, how the artist stands contemplatively above and at the same time actively within his work, how necessity and random play, oppositional tension and harmony, must pair to create a work of art (PHG 7, KSA 1.831).

wie der Streit der Vielheit doch in sich Gesetz und Recht tragen kann, wie der Künstler beschaulich über und wirkend in dem Kunstwerk steht, wie Nothwendigkeit und Spiel, Widerstreit und Harmonie sich zur Zeugung des Kunstwerkes paaren müssen.

The work of art combines contradiction (Widerstreit) and harmony, necessity and play because the artist both stands “contemplatively above [beschaulich über]” the work of art and is efficacious in (wirkend in) the work of art. How can we understand this and why does it complicate the distinction of responsibility from irresponsibility?

On one level, the artist is undoubtedly “responsible” for the work of art. Consider a painting: it is undoubtedly the artist who is responsible for the stroke of the brush, for the fact that it comes out in the way that it does. This is the moment of freedom. Especially in the domain of art, this freedom is radical: what we call the autonomy of art is that the work in principle does not serve any purpose or conform to a demand. However, precisely for this reason, cracks appear in this model of responsibility: art may be autonomous in this respect, but the artist is not since the form of self-legislation involved is not reducible to rational autonomy. The artist will be unable to give reasons why every stroke is there in the precise way that it is. No true work of art is the simple externalization of a prior intention, the realization of a blueprint, or any type of application or externalization. But the absence of reasons does not make the stroke arbitrary, as if it could have been on the canvas in any other way. On the contrary: for the artist, the stroke must go there. This is the moment of necessity. The actions of the artist are no longer fully the result of conscious intent. In that sense, they are no longer “actions” strictly speaking, for which the artist could take or assume responsibility. Nor can we say that the artist “decides” that the stroke goes there, for such a decision is not legislated by some rule or criterion. Artistic freedom is therefore a freedom-in-necessity that is irreducible to “freedom of the will” or “freedom of choice.” Therefore, rather than in terms of decisions Nietzsche – in later works (in a language that is especially prominent in and after Thus Spoke Zarathustra) – will work out this moment in terms of commanding (Befehlen). As such, the radical innocence of the play of the artist in this experience is such that the artist is just as much responsible (because beschaulich über) as not responsible for (because wirkend in) the work.^[18]

By relegating all judgement to the rank of human short-sightedness, Heraclitus’ teachings reflected for Nietzsche his intuitive power to see the world in complete innocence, but also his strength to recognize harmony and justice in the abyssal thought of becoming. Heraclitus personified irresponsibility in his bold and proud conjoining of his divine intuition with the most counter-intuitive possibility, but in this bold truth-seeking and in his refusal to take shelter in stability from the abyssal truth of becoming, one can paradoxically recognize the latent contours of what Nietzsche will later identify as the kind of “higher responsibility” of which only higher men are capable. Finally, in the play of the child and the artist we see the structure of an experience of innocence that is neither fully irresponsible nor fully responsible: a freedom in commanding necessity.

If everyone were as enlightened as Heraclitus, everyone would live “in accordance with the eye of the artist.” This would involve recognizing that, insofar as there is no simple freedom of the will, everything about the human is “completely necessary.” This notion of complete necessity will return in Human, All too Human, when Nietzsche first formulates the complete irresponsibility and innocence of humans as a doctrine, but it can already be found in Nietzsche’s reading of Heraclitus:

Man is necessity down to his last fibre, and totally “unfree,” that is if one means by freedom the foolish demand to be able to change one’s essentia arbitrarily, like a garment – a demand which every serious philosophy has rejected with the proper scorn (PHG 7, KSA 1.831).

Der Mensch ist bis in seine letzte Faser hinein Nothwendigkeit und ganz und gar „unfrei“ – wenn man unter Freiheit den närrischen Anspruch, seine essentia nach Willkür wie ein Kleid wechseln zu können, versteht, einen Anspruch, den jede ernste Philosophie bisher mit dem gebührenden Hohne zurückgewiesen hat.

II Complete Irresponsibility and the “Necessity of all Actions” in Human, All too Human

The next big step in Nietzsche’s thinking of irresponsibility comes in the second half of the 1870’s, and its culmination can be found in Human, All too Human. We will see that we can recognize the main themes of the reading of Heraclitus but with modifications. Whereas in Philosophy in the Tragic Age of the Greeks Nietzsche read the Greeks as the epitomes of a culture no longer possible in modern Europe, he now speculatively asks what form of human life would result if modern Europeans were to incorporate Heraclitean insights. In both cases, Nietzsche confronts his modern readers with an extreme thought, showing them how radically demanding the ideas of complete innocence, complete irresponsibility and complete necessity are, how incomprehensibly near-divine Heraclitus was, and how unfathomably demanding their incorporation would be.

Nietzsche seems to shift his attention from the innocence of becoming to the innocence of humans and their actions, although, as we will see, the latter is presented as rooted in the former and thus continues Nietzsche’s commitment to the innocence of becoming. The biggest change is that man’s complete irresponsibility is now approached as a “conviction,” as “doctrine” and as “knowledge,” namely: as the “philosophical conviction of the unconditional necessity of all actions and of their complete irresponsibility [die philosophische Ueberzeugung von der unbedingten Nothwendigkeit aller Handlungen und ihrer völligen Unverantwortlichkeit]” (HH I 133); as “the doctrine [Lehre] of everyone’s complete lack of responsibility and innocence” (HH II, WS 81) and as the knowledge (Erkenntnis) that “All is necessity – so says the new knowledge […]. All is innocence: and knowledge is the way to insight into this innocence” (HH I 107). We will see, however, that Nietzsche does not explicitly teach the conviction or theoretically posits this knowledge. Instead, he experimentally and speculatively asks what would happen if the thought of complete irresponsibility were to be incorporated as conviction and what type of human would be capable of it. With this, Human, All too Human hints at a different kind of responsibility out of which the doctrine of complete irresponsibility would be taught.

It should not be overlooked that in Human, All too Human I Nietzsche spends a significant amount of time criticizing convictions as such. Convictions are a greater danger to truth than lies (HH I 483), because they represent an unwillingness to examine or change one’s ideas (HH I 511).^[19] Rather than explicitly teaching the doctrine, or endorsing the conviction, of complete irresponsibility, Nietzsche is interested in the efficacy and consequences of convictions. He therefore experiments with them, and asks what might be the consequences if the conviction or doctrine that “everything is necessary” were incorporated as “a new gospel” (HH I 107). At this point, he presents the doctrine as counter-doctrine to the opposite doctrines that determine modern European culture, to wit: the “doctrine of free will”^[20] (to which he opposes the unconditional necessity of all actions and their irresponsibility) and the “doctrine of everyone’s complete responsibility and guilt,” in other words the Christian doctrine of original sin (HH II, WS 81), to which he opposes the complete irresponsibility and innocence of everyone. It should also not go overlooked that at least in one sense the doctrine of original sin achieved the same thing that Nietzsche thinks its opposite (which we could call the doctrine of original innocence, i. e., the innocence of becoming) would achieve, namely: “to turn worldly justice upside down [die weltliche Gerechtigkeit aus den Angeln zu heben]” (HH II, WS 81).^[21] We recognize the Heraclitean view of a divine justice: the teaching of Christ and that of complete irresponsibility both deny the validity of “worldly” judgement and worldly justice. The doctrine of irresponsibility and the Christian doctrine both show the vacuity of all merely human moral praise and blame. The difference is that the Christian view retains judgement: according to Nietzsche, Christ (as God himself) held himself to be the supreme judge (HH II, WS 81).

The doctrines or convictions of irresponsibility concern three different, though inherently related, subjects: that all actions are necessary; that praise and blame are not justified; that guilt is not justified. I start with the first. In what sense are all actions necessary?

The argument in Human, All too Human is based on the notion of the complete necessity of actions already articulated in Philosophy in the Tragic Age of the Greeks. Nietzsche’s use of the concept of necessity is many-layered and not easy to interpret. In Human, All too Human alone, the concept points to several tendencies that Nietzsche does not resolve conclusively. In my view, this is at least partly because Nietzsche is translating Greek ideas into Kantian-Schopenhauerian terminology. Specifically, he is fusing the Heraclitean “law in becoming and play in necessity” (the necessity of cosmic harmony, fate and play) with Schopenhauer’s (and eo ipso Kant’s) notion of calculable causal necessity as expressed in the laws of empirical nature (as opposed to the noumenal or intelligible character of freedom). Regarding the necessity of human actions, Nietzsche now credits Schopenhauer with the insight “that all human action is preceded by necessity” (HH I 39; cf. HH II, VM 33). A clear enough picture of the type of causal necessity that Nietzsche has in mind here can be found at HH I 106. He writes there that the movements of the waterfall are all necessary in the sense of being in principle mathematically calculable and predictable. Nietzsche’s thesis in Human, All too Human is that the realm of human action is no different from that of the waterfall. The cruel man is not responsible for his cruelty any more than the granite is for being granite (HH I 43). The necessity or fatality pervading nature extends without exception to human action: “A real person is something absolutely and entirely necessary [Ein wirklicher Mensch ist etwas ganz und gar Nothwendiges]” (HH I 160). Nietzsche suggests elsewhere that even man’s opinions are “as necessary and irresponsible as their actions” (HH I 376). But whereas Schopenhauer retained the Kantian idea of intelligible freedom by deducing it from the existence of remorse (the feeling of guilt) and the sense of responsibility that the acting agent has, Nietzsche rails against Schopenhauer for smuggling freedom (as “intelligible”) in through the “back door” (HH II, VM 33). According to Nietzsche, the feeling of remorse could well be (and in fact is) irrational.^[22] Remorse (and with that guilt, and thus responsibility) is learned, and it can be unlearned. The mere existence of the feeling proves nothing. In fact, according to Nietzsche, even the very fact that the agent has this illusion of free will is itself not exempt from this calculable mechanism (HH I 106). Nietzsche is very clear on the matter in HH I 133: if man were to become convinced of the “unconditional necessity of all actions and of their complete irresponsibility” and were to succeed in incorporating that conviction and absorbing it “into his flesh and blood,” then all remorse and guilty conscience would completely disappear.

The “necessity” of all actions seems therefore at first to mean calculability, and therefore it seems to imply a type of determinism. By denying even “intelligible” freedom, this determinism seems radical. But things are not so simple. Most importantly because we will see that, as the absence of guilt, complete necessity is for Nietzsche above all a liberating notion, in a sense that it is neither simply freedom of choice nor intelligible freedom. Moreover, in Nietzsche’s critique of the distinction of phenomena from noumena (thus of Schopenhauer and Kant) we see a different, Heraclitean sense of necessity – the necessity inherent in the play of opposing forces that forms Heraclitus’ “law in becoming” is not the same as the calculable necessity of modern natural laws.^[23] Nietzsche criticizes the distinction between appearances and things in themselves on the grounds that it presupposes that life or experience lay before one like a finished painting, whereas life and experience are the results of a process of becoming and remain at all times involved in that process (HH I 16). Therefore, everything that we project onto this process of becoming is just that: mere projection or representation (Vorstellung). This includes the idea of free will, which is “an atomistics in the realm of willing and knowing” insofar as it presupposes the possibility to discriminate between discrete actions, which “is incompatible with the representation of a continuous, homogeneous, undivided, indivisible flowing” (HH II, WS 11).

Everything is thus necessity in the sense that the Heraclitean flow excludes free will, a reproduction of the insight Nietzsche already articulated in Philosophy in the Tragic Age of the Greeks as the claim that “man is necessity down to his last fibre, and totally ‘unfree’” (PHG 7). Nietzsche also uses a different term for this necessity of the flowing of becoming: Fatum. Through his discussions of fatalism, we learn that even though science can force us to believe in fatalism, the important part is what the consequences of such a belief would be:

The fatalist. – You have to believe in fate – science can force you to do so. What then grows out of this belief for you – cowardice and resignation or grandeur and sincerity – that bears witness to the soil in which that seed has been spread; but not to the seed itself, for it can turn into anything and everything (HH II, VM 363).

Der Fatalist. – Du musst an das Fatum glauben, – dazu kann die Wissenschaft dich zwingen. Was dann aus diesem Glauben bei dir herauswächst – Feigheit, Ergebung oder Grossartigkeit und Freimuth – das legt Zeugniss von dem Erdreich ab, in welches jenes Samenkorn gestreut wurde; nicht aber vom Samenkorn selbst, denn aus ihm kann Alles und Jedes werden.

Note that it is not the truth or falsity of fatalism that Nietzsche seeks to establish here. Here, too, Nietzsche is not being simply doctrinal. Even if science can force one to accept fatalism, even if fatalism entails the belief in a determinism so radical that it even excludes intelligible freedom, then still “anything and everything” can follow from this, depending on the person in question. Different people still relate to this belief in different ways; a relation that is no longer a choice that would itself be external to fate.^[24] Rather, one’s response (cowardly submission or liberating boldness) testifies to the “soil” in which this idea takes root. The idea – the fear – that resignation is the only possible result from fatalism (that there is no sense in doing anything because fate always wins) is only one particular type of fatalism that Nietzsche dismisses as “Turkish fatalism [Türkenfatalismus]” (HH II, WS 61).

What would the consequences be of the incorporation of the idea of complete irresponsibility? The effects for responsibility are worked out by Nietzsche through a sketch of the “phases” of the “history of moral feelings” or the feelings through which we hold someone accountable or find someone responsible. Nietzsche holds that man attributed the good and the bad to feelings, but then forgot that he was himself the source of this attribution. Nietzsche likens this mechanism to the linguistic misunderstanding, “as when language describes the stone itself as hard, the tree itself as green,” and the mechanism is also reminiscent of the oblivion through which truths are held to be valuable in On Truth and Lying in an Extra-Moral Sense (1873) (namely, as illusions of which we have forgotten that they are illusions). In this way in Human, All too Human, people are held responsible first for the consequences or effects (Wirkungen) of their actions, then for the acts themselves as their causes, then the motives behind these acts, and ultimately for their “whole being.” But no one can be responsible for any of these, as this being, too, is wholly necessary, in the sense of being a necessary effect of “the elements and influences of past and present things.” That knowledge shows the history of moral feelings to be the history of an error:

No one is responsible for his actions, no one for his nature; judging is the same as being unjust. This holds equally true when the individual judges himself. The principle is as clear as daylight, and yet here everyone prefers to go back into the shadows and into untruth: from fear of the consequences (HH I 39).

Niemand ist für seine Thaten verantwortlich, Niemand für sein Wesen; richten ist soviel als ungerecht sein. Diess gilt auch, wenn das Individuum über sich selbst richtet. Der Satz ist so hell wie Sonnenlicht, und doch geht hier Jedermann lieber in den Schatten und die Unwahrheit zurück: aus Furcht vor den Folgen.

Nietzsche emphasizes that the distinction of responsibility for actions from responsibility for what one is, is not relevant. In all these senses, man is completely irresponsible. In “judging is the same as being unjust” we recognize the aforementioned parallel with Christianity: all “worldly” judgement, all praise and blame (no matter whether one holds others, oneself, history, God or destiny responsible) is unjust (HH II, VM 78).

If the claim that all judgement is unjust is “as clear as daylight,” then why do people persist in the error? What consequences do they fear? Nietzsche gives different answers. First of all, if no regret, remorse or guilt were to follow upon bad deeds, then no feeling of reward or achievement would follow good ones. Nietzsche makes the latter point in HH I 91: much enjoyment (Vergnügen) and agreeable tears (angenehme Tränen), indeed much of the charm or appeal (Reiz) of life, would disappear if the belief in complete irresponsibility took hold. Worse still, since all actions are guided by their prospects of pleasure or pain (Lust und Unlust), one would ultimately be forced to reconsider the value of acting at all and ultimately the value of living over not-living. Removing responsibility has nothing less than potentially suicidal consequences.^[25]

A second answer is more genealogical: man will not be able to resist much longer the insight that behind every back door there is “the glittering bronze wall of fate;” that we are “in prison” and that we can at best “dream that we are free, not make ourselves free” (HH II, VM 33). Moral man is cracking at the seams. But praise and blame have been incorporated for so long, that man comes up with the most “despairing and unbelieving postures and contortions” to maintain the faith in free will, such as the idea that, if individual man – “the poor wave caught up in the necessary play of the waves of becoming” – is not responsible, then this wave-play itself is held responsible, blaming world-history or God himself; a position Nietzsche calls “Christianity turned on its head” – for then it is God who is guilty and man who is the innocent redeemer of God (HH II, VM 33).

So, people adhere to the illusion of responsibility as a justification for praise and blame because it has been incorporated for centuries and because removing it could deprive life of its perceived worth.^[26] But the possibility of suicide is merely the immediate response to embracing the knowledge of the necessity of action and our complete irresponsibility. Indeed, if man were to incorporate man’s complete necessity and irresponsibility, then “all these motives, however lofty the names we give to them, have grown from the same roots in which we think evil poisons reside” (HH I 107). To be sure, this would make the complete irresponsibility of man for his actions “the bitterest drop that the man of knowledge must swallow.” But even so, they are still only growing pains:

The butterfly wants to break through its sheath, it pulls at it, it tears it apart: then the unknown light, the kingdom of freedom, blinds and confuses it. In such people, ones who are capable of that sorrow – how few it will be! – the first attempt is being made to see whether humanity could transform itself from a moral into a wise humanity (HH I 107).

Der Schmetterling will seine Hülle durchbrechen, er zerrt an ihr, er zerreisst sie: da blendet und verwirrt ihn das unbekannte Licht, das Reich der Freiheit. In solchen Menschen, welche jener Traurigkeit fähig sind – wie wenige werden es sein! – wird der erste Versuch gemacht, ob die Menschheit aus einer moralischen sich in eine weise Menschheit umwandeln könne. 

With that, we catch a glimpse of what Nietzsche will slowly start to designate after 1882 as a “higher” or “greater” responsibility. With this move, Nietzsche places his own thought on a grand scale of no less than thousands of years and its effects in the light of nothing less than the future or destiny of humanity.^[27] In this remarkable closing passage, Nietzsche describes the effect of embracing complete irresponsibility for the very few who would be capable of swallowing that bitterest drop – capable, that is, of the immense sadness of losing the possibility of praise and blame, guilt or achievement, as follows. Liberation from responsibility does not stand in opposition to the suffering of giving up responsibility. Liberation follows only for those who are capable of this suffering and sadness: the man capable of this sadness is presented by Nietzsche as “the necessary, preliminary stage” and “not [the] opposite” of a new kind of human being. This is consistent with the very knowledge that fuels the transition: “All is necessity – so says the new knowledge: and this knowledge itself is necessity.” As a stage leading up to the new man, the very illusion of responsibility was itself no less necessary. Because the knowledge that everything is necessary and innocent collapses the difference between good and bad deeds, everything pertaining to morality becomes “changeable, unsteady”: “everything is in flux, it is true,” writes Nietzsche, “but everything is also streaming: toward a single goal” (HH I 107).

The necessary goal in question is the type of man capable of incorporating the necessity of everything. Such a man is conscious of his innocence and irresponsible in the sense of being beyond praise and blame. As has been noted, at this stage Nietzsche formulates his ideal in Spinozistic terms.^[28] What names this non-judgmental mode is no longer Heraclitus’ intuition, strength and pride, but wisdom or comprehending: a “new habit of comprehending, not loving, not hating [des Begreifens, Nicht-Liebens, Nicht-Hassens],” replaces the old one “of erroneously evaluating, loving, hating” (HH I 107). We can still recognize, however, Heraclitus’ divine insight into the limited standpoint of judgement. But Nietzsche will abandon this conception of non-judgmental wisdom soon after, and already at BGE 198 he will deride Spinoza’s intellectual notion of wisdom for dismissing the affects.

Ultimately, although in a different way than Nietzsche’s reading of Heraclitus, Human, All too Human also paints an ambiguous picture with respect to the thought of complete irresponsibility and the necessity of all actions. Rather than as intuitive Heraclitean insight, Nietzsche now considers the thought as a philosophical conviction and asks experimentally: what if it were incorporated? On the one hand, such incorporation can still yield many types of man, and the outcome is speculative. On the other hand, after meeting with strong resistance initially, the incorporation of the doctrine of complete necessity is also itself said to be necessary. Finally, through that self-fulfilling dynamic of necessity and its incorporation, man is to find his true liberation, but in a paradoxical sense of freedom that remains undetermined in Human, All too Human^[29] – a liberation from a freedom that is opposed to necessity, to a freedom in necessity. In this way, Nietzsche’s speculation about the liberation involved in incorporating the conviction of complete irresponsibility paradoxically evinces, at least implicitly, a sense of responsibility for the fate of humanity. Rather than solve the paradox, Nietzsche will come to textually account for it more explicitly. He will do this, on the one hand, by no longer experimentally considering the thought of complete irresponsibility as philosophical conviction but instead by blatantly declaring it “our doctrine,” while on the other hand acknowledging that such a teaching cannot but proceed from a specific kind of responsibility: one for the “future of mankind” and the “redemption of the world.”

III The Twilight of the Idols: Complete Irresponsibility and the Redemption of the World

We have seen that in Human, All too Human the question remains whether the insight into man’s complete irresponsibility can be incorporated fully and whether such incorporation would be liberating, albeit in a sense yet to be determined. Elsewhere, Nietzsche will write that the insight provides relief (erleichtert).^[30] In a remarkable autobiographical passage – that Nietzsche first wrote in 1883 when looking back and critically reflecting on The Birth of Tragedy (1872) (Nachlass 1883, 7[7], KSA 10.237–40), then rewrote and edited in 1885 (Nachlass 1885, 36[10], KSA 11.553) for the new edition of Human, All too Human^[31] but ultimately did not select for publication – Nietzsche identifies as a guiding thread running through his own development his attempt to prove the innocence of becoming to himself: “How long has it been that I have made an effort to prove the complete innocence of becoming to myself! [Wie lange ist es nun her, daß ich bei mir selber bemüht bin, die vollkommne Unschuld des Werdens zu beweisen!] And what strange paths I have already walked in doing so!”^[32] The paths he mentions are the aesthetic justification of existence; the idea that all morality is mere appearance; that all concepts of guilt are objectively worthless; his denial of all natural purposes (Zwecke) and the unknowability of causality. All of these now appear as ways in which Nietzsche has time and again attempted to prove the innocence of becoming to himself. Before adding:

And why did I do all this? Was it not to provide myself with the feeling of complete irresponsibility – to position myself outside of any praise and blame, independent of all formerly and today, in order to pursue my goal in my way? – (Nachlass 1885, 36[10], KSA 11.553)

Und wozu dies Alles? War es nicht, um mir selber das Gefühl völliger Unverantwortlichkeit zu schaffen – mich außerhalb jedes Lobs und Tadels, unabhängig von allem Ehedem und Heute hinzustellen, um auf meine Art meinem Ziele nachzulaufen? –

Even if it turns out to be impossible to incorporate complete irresponsibility, Nietzsche has consistently tried to sell himself on the idea, because the feeling of irresponsibility could still be productive. Productive for what? The 1883 version is a bit more specific: Nietzsche wanted to give himself that feeling, make himself independent of praise and blame, not just because science shows it to be true, but “in order to pursue goals that concern the future of humankind” (Nachlass 1883, 7[7], KSA 10.238).^[33] In this remarkable passage we see Nietzsche applying his own distrust of conscious motives to himself. What did he find? The advocation of complete irresponsibility, including the denial of all purposes (Zwecke) was not an end in itself. It was a means to pursue a higher goal (Ziel). Nietzsche catches himself in the act, and the passage expresses Nietzsche’s awareness of the reflexive character of his own endeavor. His denial of all purposes itself served a purpose.

Whence that purpose? Should we say that Nietzsche gave himself the feeling of irresponsibility out of a sense of responsibility for the future of mankind? This would be consistent with one shift in Nietzsche’s use of the concept of responsibility. Although the expression “the innocence of becoming” stays with Nietzsche and is an important candidate-title for a theoretical work during and after the period of Thus Spoke Zarathustra, from about 1882 onwards Nietzsche adds a new, less pejorative, “higher” sense of responsibility to his register. This culminates for example in Beyond Good and Evil’s (1886) definition of the philosopher as “someone of the most comprehensive responsibility [der Mensch der umfänglichsten Verantwortlichkeit]” (BGE 61), or in Twilight of the Idols’s definition of freedom: “For what is freedom! That we have the will to self-accountability [Dass man den Willen zur Selbstverantwortlichkeit hat]” (TI, Skirmishes 39).^[34] In his later works, the doctrine of complete irresponsibility does not disappear, but Nietzsche’s late writings increasingly evince his awareness that a consistent application of the doctrine would entail new kinds of responsibilities.^[35] This is perhaps nowhere more evident than in one of the most emphatic affirmations of the doctrine, in the final section of Twilight of the Idols (TI, Errors 8), written in 1887–88.

The four great errors in question are: (1) confusing cause with effect; the belief in (2) false or (3) imaginary causes and in (4) free will. The belief in false, imaginary or confused causes is rooted in two psychological mechanisms. With this, Nietzsche expands the familiar critique of free will and responsibility. The belief in free will psychologically does not just facilitate judgement (as in Human, All too Human), but it is above all the “most disreputable theologians’ artifice” that makes man dependent by making him guilty in order to unleash upon him the instinct for punishment and revenge: “everywhere that responsibilities are looked for, it tends to be the instinct of wanting to punish and judge that is doing the looking” (TI, Errors 7). Aside from this instinct for punishment, the other mechanism for the belief in confused or false causes is psychological reassurance. False and imagined are all the causes of actions that are of the order of consciousness: the mind, the self, and especially the will (TI, Errors 3). We only believe in the efficacy of motives, the authority of the self and free will (without which there would be no responsibility) because of their reassuring psychological effect. Nietzsche argues that morality and religion belong to this “psychology of error” in their entirety (TI, Errors 6): at bottom they confuse cause and effect by promising a state of well-being or happiness as attainable through specific actions or a particular morality or politics. Nietzsche turns this around: one’s morality is already an expression of one’s well-being or degeneration (TI, Errors 2). What Nietzsche therefore criticizes is the very possibility to judge actions on the basis of any given purpose (whether happiness, well-being, moral good, religious duty, divine authority, etc.). In this sense, man is radically irresponsible in a very basic sense because there is, quite simply, nothing that anyone “should be” (a thought that Nietzsche also forcefully defends in the subsequent section of Twilight of the Idols, against The “Improvers” of Humanity). This is the thought that TI, Errors 8 insists on, but also radicalizes.

What is posited as “our doctrine” is “that nobody gives a human their characteristics,” and Nietzsche crucially emphasizes that this includes man himself: “neither God, nor society, nor parents and ancestors, nor they themselves” (TI, Errors 8, italics in the original). The problem of responsibility is therefore not just that there are external constraints to what one should be (whether prescribed by morality or society or tradition or religion). The solution to this could be some model of individual autonomy, but Nietzsche’s critique is much more radical. What the psychology of errors showed was that the very idea of internal constraints (that we decide for ourselves who and what we are or will be) was invented as a tool for those external constraints. The doctrine of irresponsibility therefore emphatically does not entail that we get to decide for ourselves who or what we should be. Consistent with the thought of the necessity of all actions found in the early reading of Heraclitus as well as in Human, All too Human, Nietzsche calls the idea that I would give myself my properties the very “nonsense [Unsinn]” of “intelligible” freedom. Instead:

Nobody is responsible for the fact that they are there at all, that they are created in such and such a way, that they are in these circumstances and in this environment. The fatality of our nature cannot be separated from the fatality of all that has been and will be. We are not the consequence of an intention, a will, a purpose; with us the attempt is not made to achieve an “ideal human” or “ideal happiness” or “ideal morality” – it is absurd to want to offload our nature into a purpose of some sort (TI, Errors 8, translation amended).^[36]

Niemand ist dafür verantwortlich, dass er überhaupt da ist, dass er so und so beschaffen ist, dass er unter diesen Umständen, in dieser Umgebung ist. Die Fatalität seines Wesens ist nicht herauszulösen aus der Fatalität alles dessen, was war und was sein wird. Er ist nicht die Folge einer eignen Absicht, eines Willens, eines Zwecks, mit ihm wird nicht der Versuch gemacht, ein „Ideal von Mensch“ oder ein „Ideal von Glück“ oder ein „Ideal von Moralität“ zu erreichen, – es ist absurd, sein Wesen in irgend einen Zweck hin abwälzen zu wollen.

We are by now familiar with how Nietzsche dissolves all constraints, whether external or internal, in the notion of fatality. In the space I have left, I will be making a few remarks around one term that is of special interest here, and that is abwälzen: to abdicate, offload or devolve. It is absurd to offload man’s (irresponsible) existence into a purpose.^[37] Tracing the connotations of this term will allow us to show how complete irresponsibility is here both expounded and complicated.

First of all, abwälzen is a term that Nietzsche typically reserves for the shirking, abdicating or offloading of a responsibility that one should take.^[38] He makes this point for example in BGE 21, where he distinguishes a weak will to responsibility from a weak will to irresponsibility (or so I submit, contrary to some commentators).^[39] There, Nietzsche discusses the “unfreedom of the will” as being equally “mythological” as the “free will.” Much like how the seed of fatalism can still grow differently in different soils, here the decisive question is what feeling is evoked by the notion of the unfree will: if causality or psychological necessity evoke “some kind of compulsion, need, being forced to follow, pressure, unfreedom [etwas von Zwang, Noth, Folgen-Müssen, Druck, Unfreiheit],” then a weak-willed personality shows itself. Nietzsche then presents two examples of this weak will that come from contrary directions. The first refuse such an unfree will out of vanity: they display a will to “responsibility” (in quotes in the text because such vain self-interest is hardly responsibility) because they are unwilling to give up the possibility of accomplishment and merit (Verdienst). The second are those that “conversely, motivated by inner self-contempt, want to be responsible for nothing and guilty of nothing [wollen umgekehrt nichts verantworten, an nichts schuld sein], and wish they were able to shift responsibility for themselves to some other place [sich selbst irgend wohin abwälzen zu können]” (BGE 21). Nietzsche calls this: “fatalism of the weak-willed.” These people equally experience the unfree will as coercive, but this time because it exculpates them. This is why Nietzsche writes that the latter position expresses itself in literature as sympathy for criminals: the poor criminal was forced by circumstance, upbringing, etc. – it was not their fault.

Some surprising insights follow from this. First, apparently embracing complete irresponsibility is not necessarily a sign of strength: there is also a weak will to complete irresponsibility that does the opposite of what Nietzsche’s doctrine intends. Secondly, and conversely, apparently there is a kind of responsibility that these weak people are fleeing from but should not be fleeing from.^[40] What would it mean not to devolve oneself into something else?

A remarkable passage from The Gay Science (1882–87) may be taken to paint a vivid picture of precisely what it would mean not to devolve oneself into something else (GS 285). It addresses a “man of renunciation” or of abnegation (Mensch der Entsagung) who is asked to renounce all “resting places,” whether they be prayer or worship, wisdom or power, guardians or love – anything in which to find “ultimate peace” or any type of finality. Nietzsche does not specify what these resting places entail and the passage is open to interpretation, but it may be read as the kind of unburdening whereby a weight is shifted or abdicated from oneself to some external authority. The renunciation of “avengers” and “improvers” certainly suggests some form of displacement of all worldly judgement and justification that we saw in Heraclitus and in Human, All too Human. Rather than using the concept abwälzen, Nietzsche presents an image of it in the form of a lake that one day refused to flow off (abzufließen), that formed a dam and has been rising higher ever since (the section is titled Excelsior!). The section ends as follows: “Perhaps this very renunciation will lend us the strength to bear renunciation; perhaps man will rise ever higher when he no longer flows off into a god [vielleicht wird der Mensch von da an immer höher steigen, wo er nicht mehr in einen Gott ausfliesst]” (GS 285). This reflects two important thoughts.

First, for the later Nietzsche, Heraclitus can no longer furnish the model of strength. To be sure, what guides Nietzsche’s critique up to Twilight of the Idols is still the Heraclitean insight that man is judged only on the basis of his own fictional creations (“We have invented the concept ‘purpose’: in reality, purpose is lacking,” TI, Errors 8) and that in reality man is part of the whole which cannot itself be judged:

You are necessary, a piece of fate, you belong to the whole, you are in the whole – there is nothing that could judge, measure, compare, condemn our being, for that would mean judging, measuring, comparing, condemning the whole … But there is nothing except for the whole! (TI, Errors 8)

Man ist nothwendig, man ist ein Stück Verhängniss, man gehört zum Ganzen, man ist im Ganzen, – es giebt Nichts, was unser Sein richten, messen, vergleichen, verurtheilen könnte, denn das hiesse das Ganze richten, messen, vergleichen, verurtheilen … Aber es giebt Nichts ausser dem Ganzen!^[41]

Since judgement arises only in man’s misconceptions, Nietzsche still presents as his teaching the restoration of Heraclitus’ “innocence of becoming” through the complete renunciation of all responsibility. The difference is, however, that there is so much more to renounce for modern Europeans than for the ancient Greek. Christian morality, with all its mechanisms of reassurance, has been incorporated so much longer. Precisely for that reason, there is now the opportunity for an unprecedented build-up of strength:^[42] “No one yet has had the strength!” (GS 285) – and that includes Heraclitus. The same is true for the doctrine of irresponsibility: it requires not just the strength to see divine justice and cosmic harmony in the experience of becoming, but rather the strength to renounce all those purposes, responsibilities, goals, causes, free will, etc. that have been incorporated over centuries into European (Christian) culture. At the time of Twilight of the Idols, it has become crystal clear to Nietzsche what today stands in the way of Heraclitean wisdom. It is the ultimate idol,^[43] God himself, as a false criterion for the judgement of the whole: “The concept ‘God’ has hitherto been the greatest objection to existence … We repudiate God, we repudiate responsibility in God [Wir leugnen Gott, wir leugnen die Verantwortlichkeit in Gott]” (TI, Errors 8). Ultimately, the resting-place given by Christianity is the belief in some responsible entity (whether God or history or society or oneself) in which to offload oneself or in which to flow off like the lake. This means that it is not enough to simply avoid making the great errors, it is a matter of harnessing the tension that comes from exposing and fighting against them. The ideal that Nietzsche sketches at GS 285 is to not offload or devolve in such a way, but that of an ever-building tension. Or as he writes a bit further on: “a continual sense of ascending stairs and at the same time of resting on clouds [ein beständiges Wie-auf-Treppen-steigen und zugleich Wie-auf-Wolken-ruhen]” (GS 288).

The second thought that can be taken from this reading in GS 285 is that such renunciation of resting-places, such a refusal to offload oneself, could itself be interpreted as a way of taking responsibility, but a responsibility of a very different order. It would be consistent with the aforementioned affirmative use of responsibility we find later in Beyond Good and Evil and Twilight of the Idols. But one can also find such formulations in the Nachlass, for example at Nachlass 1887, 9[43], KSA 12.356. There, nihilism is said to consist not in moral responsibility (as one might think) but in the abdication of responsibility: “one wants to abdicate responsibility (– one would accept fatalism) [man möchte die Verantwortung abwälzen (– man würde den Fatalism acceptiren)].” Is that not precisely what TI, Errors 8 teaches us? But here the acceptance of fatalism and renunciation of responsibility are symptoms of the greatest weakness. They constitute the attempt to avoid “willing;” that is to say: to avoid “willing a goal [das Wollen eines Zieles]” or to avoid “the risk of giving oneself a goal [das Risico, sich selbst ein Ziel zu geben].” The nihilistic question “for what? [Wozu?]” arises only out of the common assumption that some goal or purpose must be found somewhere, the assumption that such a goal or purpose is externally posited, given or demanded. One desires such given commands or purposes “merely to avoid having to will [nur um nicht wollen zu müssen],” to not have to risk “having to posit the ‘what-for’ for oneself [sich selbst das „Wozu“ setzen zu müssen].”^[44]

After following the connotations of abwälzen we can see how the doctrine of irresponsibility is now complicated in two ways: (1) there is also a weak will to irresponsibility, and this weak will is (2) an attempt to flee from a strong (affirmative, higher) responsibility. That a more affirmative responsibility is paradoxically implicit in these later formulations of the doctrine of complete irresponsibility, comes out especially in TI, Errors 8, if we approach that text from a performative perspective. Let me make two remarks on this point.

First, we might ask whether the text of TI, Errors 8 does not – in the name of a rejection of all judgement – performatively still precisely pass judgement on judgement? Nietzsche is well aware of this problem that he calls a problem of “desirability [Wünschbarkeit]”, of “every ‘thus it should be, but it is not’”:

But when we say this, we do what we renounce; the standpoint of desirability, of playing judge without authority, is comprehended in the character of the movement of things (Nachlass 1886/87, 7[62], KSA 12.316).

Aber, indem wir dies sagen, thun wir das, was wir tadeln; der Standpunkt der Wünschbarkeit, des unbefugten Richterspielens gehört mit in den Charakter des Gangs der Dinge.

Nietzsche does not solve this problem, but he does respond to it: this line of thinking would end up declaring desirability itself to be unavoidable, to be the basic phenomenon: “is desirability perhaps the driving force itself? Is it – deus?” But this would be saying that “everything” is ultimately desirability, and Nietzsche’s response is precisely:

It seems important to me to get rid of the all, of unity, of some power, some unconditioned; it would be impossible to avoid taking it as the highest instance and baptizing it God. One must shatter the all; unlearn the respect for the all; what we have given away to the unknown and the whole must be taken back for the closest, for what is ours (Nachlass 1886/87, 7[62], KSA 12.316, my translation).

Es scheint mir wichtig, daß man das All, die Einheit los wird, irgend eine Kraft, ein Unbedingtes; man würde nicht umhin können, es als höchste Instanz zu nehmen und Gott zu taufen. Man mu<ß> das All zersplittern; den Respekt vor dem All verlernen; das, was wir dem Unbekannten <und> Ganzen gegeben haben, zurücknehmen für das Nächste, Unsre.

Is this possible? This exhortation to destroy “the all” (zersplittern: to shatter or to fragment the whole) does not, as Maurice Blanchot suggests,^[45] undermine the fatalism in TI, Errors 8 that declares there is “nothing except for the whole,” but it is in fact in line with Nietzsche’s declaration in Twilight of the Idols “that the nature of being [die Art des Seins] may not be traced back to a causa prima, that the world is neither a unity of sensation nor of ‘mind’ [dass die Welt weder als Sensorium, noch als „Geist“ eine Einheit ist] – this alone is the great liberation” (TI, Errors 8, translation amended).

Second, perhaps the biggest textual difference between Twilight of the Idols and the early and middle works is that in Twilight of the Idols the doctrine is finally posited explicitly as “our doctrine.”^[46] The speculation about what might follow from the incorporation of the doctrine in Human, All too Human is replaced by a much more direct involvement, explicitly taking up the perspective of the teacher. With that, through this text, Nietzsche performatively takes upon himself the responsibility for the future of mankind.^[47] How could “complete irresponsibility” be taught, if not out of such a sense of responsibility? If irresponsibility were absolute, why teach at all? This problem is reflected especially in the final sentence of the passage: “We repudiate God, we repudiate responsibility in God: only with that do we redeem the world. –” Recall that it was a fundamental characteristic of Heraclitus’ pride that he was not interested in helping or redeeming anyone. But now, complete irresponsibility is explicitly no longer an end in itself, but it is placed in the service of the redemption of the world. These questions bring us back to the question of what kind of freedom is involved in the relief, the Erleichterung, of the renunciation of all judgement and guilt. How to posit for oneself a “for what? [Wozu]” if this cannot follow the model of individual autonomy rejected in TI, Errors 8? What form of self-legislation is involved here? In Human, All too Human, the doctrine of irresponsibility only implicitly hinted at a new, affirmative responsibility. But in Twilight of the Idols, this paradox is radicalized into a most unexpected result: a critique of irresponsible freedom, in the name of freedom as a capacity for responsibility. There, what passes for freedom is an “irresponsible” life that lives only for today: “one lives for today, one lives at great speed – one lives very irresponsibly: and precisely this is called ‘freedom’” (TI, Skirmishes 39). Instead: “For what is freedom! That we have the will to self-accountability [Dass man den Willen zur Selbstverantwortlichkeit hat]” (TI, Skirmishes 39).

What grounds the responsibility to redeem the world? And how does it relate to the free will to self-responsibility? Answering these questions requires a closer look at the development of Nietzsche’s more affirmative notion of a “higher” or “greater” responsibility, and this is a task that must be left for another time. In any case, it cannot be done without taking Nietzsche’s own development into account: how he finds that for himself a more rudimentary model of aimless freedom (as negatively free from the constraints of the old morality) developed into a more sophisticated freedom as finding oneself in one’s task,^[48] and how with that also the model of the strong individual shifts. Goethe exemplifies this richer model. To be sure, we still clearly recognize the Heraclitean rejection of the partial in favor of a fatalist affirmation of the whole:

Such a spirit who has become free stands with joyful and trusting fatalism in the midst of the universe, in the belief that only what is isolated is to be shunned, and that in the whole, everything is redeemed and affirmed – he no longer negates … But such a belief is the highest of all possible beliefs: I have baptized it with the name of Dionysus. – (TI, Skirmishes 49)

Ein solcher freigewordner Geist steht mit einem freudigen und vertrauenden Fatalismus mitten im All, im Glauben, dass nur das Einzelne verwerflich ist, dass im Ganzen sich Alles erlöst und bejaht – er verneint nicht mehr … Aber ein solcher Glaube ist der höchste aller möglichen Glauben: ich habe ihn auf den Namen des Dionysos getauft. –

But where Heraclitus’ virtue was to be unmixed and cut from a single cloth, Goethe represents the excelsior-model: a cultivation of a maximum inner complexity and tension. Such an individual is certainly irresponsible, but also assumes responsibility in the sense of the refusal to flow out. And the doctrine of complete irresponsibility is now taught by Nietzsche out of an exhortation to redeem the world, while the early Nietzsche still admired Heraclitus for rejecting just such a desire for redemption.

IV Nietzsche’s Irresponsibilities

Tracing the idea of complete irresponsibility throughout Nietzsche’s development has yielded different, at times mutually exclusive senses of irresponsibility. From a developmental standpoint, we started with Nietzsche’s admiration of Heraclitus as the embodiment of an innocence that has become unthinkable in his contemporary Europe. Nietzsche listens in Heraclitus for what the modern European ear can no longer hear. What is irrefutable in him is not the doctrine of the innocence of becoming as such, but the type of human capable of endorsing it: near divine intuition, the strength to see in strife itself justice and harmony, and the pride and capacity for solitude to wed his divine intuition to the most counter-intuitive possibility. But in his refusal to take shelter in stability from the abyssal truth of becoming, we also find the latent contours of what Nietzsche will later identify as a “higher” responsibility. In Human, All too Human, Nietzsche speculates how a type of man capable of Heraclitus’ insight into humanity’s complete necessity and irresponsibility could ever develop out of a modern European who has now so thoroughly incorporated the need for praise and blame that life seems to have become unthinkable and unlivable without it. Consistent with Human, All too Human’s critique of convictions as such, actually teaching the doctrine of irresponsibility is not the main point of the passages. Instead, Nietzsche experiments with complete irresponsibility as a conviction by speculatively envisioning man’s liberation from responsibility as the result of its hypothetical future incorporation. In the later works, Nietzsche more explicitly acknowledges this paradoxical responsibility involved in the thought of complete irresponsibility, making his reflexive entanglement with the problem of irresponsibility clear to himself: he denied all purposes only to pursue his own purposes, pertaining to nothing less than the future of mankind. Thus, in Twilight of the Idols, we see Nietzsche finally explicitly appropriating complete irresponsibility as “our teaching,” as well as acknowledging that to teach that doctrine means assuming responsibility for the redemption of the world. That Heraclitus rejected precisely such desire had constituted an important reason for the early Nietzsche’s admiration of him. Yet in the early Nietzsche’s conviction of the “irrefutability” and thus the contemporary relevance of at least Heraclitus’ “personality” one can see the explicit later responsibility for the future of mankind as latently present in Nietzsche’s early concern for the fate of culture. Finally, we have seen that the later doctrine of complete irresponsibility also entails a critique of the “irresponsible” life of modernity that shies away from positing a goal for itself; abdicating this higher responsibility to will by seeking refuge in externally given goals and offloading one’s existence into a purpose.

What do these changes in Nietzsche’s development tell us about the meaning of irresponsibility? I started by pointing out the ambiguities involved in the grammatical seduction of treating complete irresponsibility solely as a counter-thesis to responsibility. It would be short-sighted to concluded that Nietzsche taught that there simply “are no” responsibilities. Nor is the point to consider the thought of complete irresponsibility refuted because it is taught out of some sense of responsibility and thus contradicts itself. Karl Jaspers famously wrote that no interpretation of Nietzsche is sufficient if it does not seek out contradictions in order to keep the tension of different possibilities alive.^[49] We would then have to ask how to understand the contradiction between the doctrine of complete irresponsibility and Nietzsche’s critiques of irresponsibility. One common way to reconcile such contradictions, and to respond to the famous question of the unity of Nietzsche’s fragmentary writing, is by distinguishing different senses of the concept at hand. Since such commentary is geared towards the reconciliation of contradictions, it often has the specifically binary form of identifying a “positive” and a “negative” irresponsibility; an irresponsibility that Nietzsche “endorsed” and a different one that he “criticized.”^[50] Although such expressions do occur in Nietzsche’s texts and have their place in commentary, I see three main shortcomings in this approach.

The first problem is that Nietzsche’s texts, to put it very plainly, most often are just not like that. Rarely are Nietzsche’s criticisms and affirmations so unequivocal. Understanding the contradictions in Nietzsche’s work has often been interpreted as the challenge to reconcile one passage or fragment with another. This then leads to the famous question of the unity of Nietzsche’s fragmentary writing. Taking a cue from Blanchot, one could thus say that the challenge in the famous question of Nietzsche’s fragmentary writing is not that of reconciling one passage with another that would contradict it, but of reading the same passage in different senses simultaneously.^[51] It is not only that Nietzsche in fact never wrote a text that unequivocally or definitively distinguishes a bad, criticized form of irresponsibility from a good, affirmed one. It is that he often expends extra effort to complicate such distinctions. Nietzsche’s specific type of Umdeutung does not just push concepts into new and uncharted territory; retaining the old names as well as deliberately mixing “old” and “new” levels is a crucial part of that practice. The identification of “good and bad” senses of a concept in these texts is an imposition that cannot but reduce the ways in which Nietzsche deliberately textually complicates the possibility of distinguishing such contradictory senses. Part of that has to do with Nietzsche’s specific suspicion of the philosophical tradition of which he shows in many different ways that it is animated by the very things it pretends to be able to keep at bay (the intellectual by the affects, the good by the bad, etc.).

But the equivocality of Nietzsche’s concepts, the fact that they do not fit neatly into the binary distinction of the positive from the negative, does not deliver them over to an entirely open, more or less contingent, more or less determinable plurality of senses. This brings me to the second problem. In a codification loosely inspired by Jacques Derrida’s interpretive strategy,^[52] I suggested at the start of this text that, more than the binary symmetry of contradictions, Nietzsche’s affirmations of irresponsibility seem always to entail not two but three senses or connotations: (1) a break with given responsibilities; (2) the absence of given responsibilities; and (3) what is not determinable through the opposition of responsibility and irresponsibility as either undecidable or paradoxical (if one wishes to label these ambiguities of the negation, one could perhaps say that the irresponsible can either be the anti-responsible, the unresponsible or the quasi-responsible). When Heraclitus chalked up all responsibility to mere human shortsightedness, his irresponsibility simultaneously broke with prevailing responsibility, denied any given standards for responsibility, and he did so out of a sense of responsibility and by seeing the world through the undecidably (ir)responsible “eye of the artist.” Paradoxically, the “proud-lonely truth-finder” was irresponsibility incarnate as proud-lonely, and was responsible as truth-finder in his refusal to take shelter in stability from the abyssal truth of becoming. In Human, All too Human, complete irresponsibility became the anti-responsible counter-doctrine as well as a denial of all responsibility, the incorporation of which would result in an experimental (and indeed unresolved) form of great liberation that Nietzsche paradoxically envisions out of a sense of responsibility for the fate of humankind. This implicit paradox then became explicit in Twilight of the Idols, which is at once a forceful anti-responsible critique of responsibility as resulting from the instinct for punishment, a complete affirmation of unresponsibility by positing the denial of all purposes as “our doctrine,” as well as an explicitly paradoxical advocation of irresponsibility out of the responsibility for the redemption of the world.

This rough threefold codification is not meant to be exhaustive, but it should rather serve to emphasize that all of these senses belong to irresponsibility and that irresponsibility cannot be reduced to any one of them. One cannot say that one of them is the truer or better sense of irresponsibility. But why could we still not say that, rather than having a “positive and negative” sense, irresponsibility simply has this threefold conceptual character? This brings me to the third problem. One reason is that the third sense is inherently experimental and therefore open. But more importantly, it is because the problem of Nietzsche’s equivocality does not just reflect the general logics of Umdeutung, but it performatively reflects his very (ir)responsibility. In the will to fixate such distinctions one can recognize the very will to Verantwortung that goes against the way Nietzsche textually assumes his (responsibility for) “complete irresponsibility.” Nietzsche’s texts deliberately shun the impulse to be held to account, to provide legitimization, to seek shelter in justification or exemption. In this way, in their thoroughgoing defiance, Nietzsche’s texts also performatively embody the complete irresponsibility they espouse.

When Richard Wisser published his text on Nietzsche’s doctrine of complete irresponsibility in 1972, the main impetus of his research was still the question to what extent Nietzsche could be held “responsible” for the horrors of Nazism.^[53] We owe to the likes of Wisser (and his mentor Karl Jaspers) that the reductive readings involved in that idea are now well known, and Nietzsche’s relation to Nazism is no longer our most pressing question in engaging with Nietzsche today. Wisser showed that nothing of the horrors of Nazism can be attributed to Nietzsche because Nietzsche’s insistence on complete irresponsibility was neither simply destructive, nor did it ever turn into a new, positive doctrine of responsibility. But if Nietzsche is never responsible on those grounds, can he ever be fully exculpated? Does there not belong an essentially excessive, dangerous character to a thinking of complete irresponsibility? Is not something essential about Nietzsche’s writing lost if his domestication were truly complete?

Pfeuffer has done Nietzsche even more justice by showing how Nietzsche did come to recognize (not positively but paradoxically) in the very idea of complete irresponsibility his own affirmative responsibility, which we have recognized latently in the model of the artist and explicitly in Nietzsche’s concern for the fate of mankind. This responsibility can be likened to the one Derrida described when characterizing literature’s right to say anything. For Derrida, the literary writer must “demand a certain irresponsibility”: “this duty of irresponsibility, of refusing to reply for one’s thoughts or writing to constituted powers, is perhaps the highest form of responsibility.”^[54] Such is also the freedom in Nietzsche’s writing that allowed Pfeuffer to illuminate the most improbable connection: between Nietzsche and Emmanuel Levinas. For Pfeuffer, their shared “responsibility for irresponsibility” resides in a transformed relation to the other that exceeds the sphere of all worldly judgement, resentment and the spirit of revenge: “Responsibility for the other, as Nietzsche and Levinas think it, exists exactly where, according to general ethical guidelines, nothing points to it.” It is “not comprehensible by third parties and eludes any evaluation.”^[55] But when Pfeuffer proceeds to declare this Nietzsche’s “real” or “proper [eigentliche]” responsibility,^[56] the question arises: is something of the will to Verantwortung still active in this gesture? Is this a justification? Does it protect the right kind of responsibility from the wrong ones? It would be easy to show that declaring Nietzsche irresponsible in the sense of promoting destructive recklessness is entirely reductive.^[57] But that holds also for a reading that wants to exculpate Nietzsche from it.

Perhaps Pfeuffer’s gesture serves to curb the risk on the part of the reader. Because we will recall that Pfeuffer rightly pointed out that what Nietzsche’s doctrine of irresponsibility does most fundamentally is not to teach but to disturb and irritate. Preventing the reader “from legitimizing [their] own deeds through it,” its function lies in its “potential for self-examination.”^[58] But the results of such examination can never be guaranteed; there are no safeguards for what is triggered by an irritation; a disturbance consists precisely in providing no assurances and safeguards. It belongs to Nietzsche’s writings (and to his paradoxical responsibility for complete irresponsibility) that he takes that risk deliberately, exploiting and putting into play a multiplicity of senses he could not oversee or control, affirming the limits of authorial authority.

As for Nietzsche himself, he made this abundantly clear especially in the period following that “dangerous book,”^[59] Beyond Good and Evil – a designation that delighted Nietzsche so much that he famously declared himself dynamite (EH, Destiny 1). When conceived as a disturbance, as it should be, we can agree with Jaspers that at the heart of Nietzsche’s work, and at the center of the different senses of irresponsibility, we find “not a concept, a world-view, or a system;” not so much a “basic doctrine,” but a “basic drive” (not Grundlehre, but Grundantrieb).^[60] What constitutes this animating drive – this exigency, as Blanchot calls it – may be given different names. Nietzsche himself has called it righteousness or justice (Gerechtigkeit), love, intellectual honesty (Redlichkeit) and courage (Tapferkeit). But a favorite among those names is also Verwegenheit, that is, an audacity that always has an element of bold courageous recklessness. Rather than worry whether his thought – including that of complete irresponsibility – might be misunderstood as dangerous, he worried that he might be understood; i. e.: domesticated, without taking into account the radicality of his thought. He accordingly appropriated bold and reckless irresponsibility as a fundamental characterization of his thought. By experimentally pushing the concept of (ir)responsibility into new and unforeseen directions in the third of the three senses of irresponsibility mentioned above, and especially in the refusal to reduce this multiplicity of senses and provide the reader with reassurances, Nietzsche’s experimental writing textually embodies his call to audacious knowledge.