Crepuscolo della volontà nel Crepuscolo degli idoli

This paper attempts to explain Nietzsche’s apparently contradictory understanding of the ‘will’ in Twilight of the Idols. There he repeats his rejection of the traditional sense of the ‘will’ as the ‘principle of action’ of a ‘subject’ and introduces the notion of the ‘innocence of becoming’ to emphasise his insistence on the non-subjective ‘origins’ of action. Yet he also continues to use the term, ‘will’, and attempts to rethink it in terms of a distinction between ‘strong’ and ‘weak’ wills that recalls the Aristotelian distinction between enkràteia e akrasìa. The paper argues that Nietzsche thus provides a sophisticated account of the relation between will and time. This account is illuminated in terms of the ability to make and keep promises, and thus to determine future action, that Nietzsche attributes to the ‘sovereign individual’ in the second essay of the Genealogy. It is also compared with Kant’s conception of the will, with a view to showing that Nietzsche differs radically from Kant in considering willing to be an immanent process – one that excludes both a supersensible and atemporal origin of action and any distinction between the plane of intention and that of the realization of action.