Artistic Necessity

Abstract In Nietzsche’s view, when we are properly creative, ‘necessity and “freedom of the will”’ become one in us. This essay attempts to explain what he might have meant by that. In part, his thought is that freedom and necessity are not the opposites that they might appear to be. Our freedom to express ourselves in English, for instance, is secured by our acknowledgement of its constitutive grammatical rules. But—and here Nietzsche follows Kant—not all of the artist’s rules can be stated as precepts. Rather, they have to be grasped, intuitively, in the creative act itself, a capacity that Kant aligns with ‘genius’ and that Nietzsche would prefer to attribute to hard work and practice. The argument of the present essay is that the best explanation for the peculiar sense of freedom that interests Nietzsche lies in a more Kantian direction than he would have wished.