Inventing a Life 37determination and causality? The young Nietzsche "solved" this prob-
lem quite simply in the very manner that it had already been "solved" bv
idealist philosophy at the beginning of the nineteenth century, although
he was still a pupil at the Pforta school and barely acquainted with ideal-
ism. He reflected on the circumstance that reflecting reason is suffi-
ciently free to allow the problem of freedom to emerge in the first place.
Even the question itself—"How is freedom possible?"—manifests a
"free will." Although free will does belong to the universe of determi-
nation, it is still free enough to be able to distance this whole world con-
ceptually. To this liberated consciousness, the world appears as the grand
Other, the universe of determination. Nietzsche called it "fate." Free
consciousness experiences this world as resistance, struggles to establish
its own latitude within it, and in doing so experiences itself as "free will."
However, this will is free only in the self-perception of consciousness.
Later Nietzsche was to call a person who had achieved this latitude the
"undetermined animal" (5,81; BGE § 62)—one that seeks conclusions
and dubs them "truths." "Truths" are regarded as morality to guide our
actions and as the recognition of laws in nature and history; they pro-
vide us with an orientation. This brilliant boyhood essay did not, of
course, fully develop Nietzsche's perspectives on truth, but further
explications would follow in due course. Fate, explained the young
Nietzsche, is the stable element, and freedom is the singular open and
mobile element in this determined world. He called free will the "high-
est power of fate" (/ 2,59), which is realized in its antithesis, namely in
the medium of freedom of will. Nietzsche did not know Kantian phi-
losophy at this time; if he had, he might have cited Kant's causality in
freedom. Nietzsche hoped to avoid seeing the world split apart into a
dualism of determination and freedom; "uniformity" should somehow
be kept intact in a polar tension. Only freedom can experience fate as a
compelling power, and only the experience of fate can prod "free will"
into liveliness and enhancement. Unity lies in dissonance.
Nietzsche rejected any interpretation that considered fate a manifes-
tation of benevolent divine providence. Fate, he insisted, is faceless and