Money and Markets: Essays in Honor of Leland B. Yeager

circumstances and even acts of will may be placedquite safely in between the original “I will”, “I shalldo” and the actual discharge of the will, its act, withoutbreaking this long chain of the will. But what a lot ofpreconditions there are for this! In order to have thatdegree of control over the future, man must first havelearnt to distinguish between what happens by acci -dent and what by design, to think causally, to view thefuture as the present and anticipate it, to grasp withcertainty what is end and what is means, in all, to beable to calculate, compute – and before he can do this,man himself will really have to become reliable, regular,automatic [notwendig], even in his own self-image, sothat he, as someone making a promise is, is answerablefor his own future!Leland’s favorite economists 1192.That is precisely what constitutes the long history ofthe origins of responsibility. That particular task ofbreeding an animal which has the right to make apromise includes, as we have already understood, asprecondition and prepar ation, the more immediatetask of first making man to a certain degree undeviating[notwendig], uniform, a peer amongst peers, orderlyand consequently predictable. The immense amountof labour involved in what I have called the “moralityof custom” (see Daybreak, I, 9; 14; 16), the actuallabour of man on himself during the longest epoch ofthe human race, his whole labour before history, isexplained and justified on a grand scale, in spite of thehardness, tyranny, stupidity and idiocy it also contained,by this fact: with the help of the morality ofcustom and the social straitjacket, man was made trulypredictable. Let us place ourselves, on the other hand,at the end of this immense process where the treeactually bears fruit, where society and its morality ofcustom finally reveal what they were simply the meansto: we then find the sovereign individual as the ripest fruiton its tree, like only to itself, having freed itself fromthe morality of custom, an autonomous, supra-ethicalindividual (because “autonomous” and “ethical” aremutually exclusive), in short, we find a man with hisown, independent, durable will, who has the right tomake a promise – and has a proud consciousness quiveringin every muscle of what he has finally achieved andHere, Nietzscheemphasizes the rule oflaw as a pre-conditionfor human activity ata high level ofdevelopment.