Becoming an individual: two challenges to inherited values

Two ways to stay out of reach

Imagine two people. Olivia speaks beautifully about keeping promises, yet when a friend needs the help she promised, she opens another discussion of what loyalty really means. Leon wanted a place in a prestigious orchestra. After being rejected, he announces that serious musicians should despise public recognition, and he spends his evenings following the careers of those who got in.

Each case suggests a way of avoiding an uncomfortable truth about oneself. Olivia’s reflection may protect her from acting, and Leon’s apparent independence may leave him governed by the people he condemns. Having the freedom Mill defended does not by itself resolve either difficulty.

Who is speaking?

Søren Kierkegaard wrote Fear and Trembling under the name Johannes de Silentio, and he gives this voice its own standpoint. Johannes admires the faith of the biblical Abraham while repeatedly saying that he cannot understand it or make its movement himself. We should attribute his claims to him, not treat every sentence as Kierkegaard’s direct teaching. [1] [3]

Kierkegaard’s wider religious project criticized the assumption that belonging to a Christian society made someone a Christian. In the selected work, Johannes mocks an age that claims to have gone beyond faith before examining what faith would demand. Familiar words can make a demanding faith seem easy. [1] [3]

Admiration can become an escape

The biblical story tells of God commanding Abraham to sacrifice his son Isaac, then stopping him before the killing. Johannes notices that people praise Abraham for giving up his most precious possession, and that this description hides the particular horror: Isaac is a child toward whom Abraham has a father’s responsibility. A sermon can celebrate the story while removing everything that would disturb a comfortable listener. [1]

Here the question becomes one of existential commitment: how a conviction shapes a life, through choices and consequences the person must face. Olivia’s knowledge of arguments about loyalty cannot keep her promise for her. More thought could clarify a real difficulty, but it could also postpone the moment when her conduct shows what she values. None of this makes her ordinary situation equivalent to Abraham’s.

A faith Johannes cannot explain away

Johannes distinguishes faith from infinite resignation, which gives up a cherished earthly hope while preserving its eternal meaning. His Abraham is willing to relinquish Isaac and yet trusts that he will receive him back in this life. Johannes calls this trust the absurd: it cannot be reached through human calculation, and it is not simply confidence that an unlikely outcome will occur. [1]

The distinction is difficult, and interpretations differ. Johannes’s imagined knight of faith can enjoy a walk and look forward to dinner, so faith need not mean abandoning ordinary life. But the moral danger remains. Johannes calls Abraham’s intended act murder in ethical terms and sacrifice in religious terms, and personal intensity alone supplies no public reason to harm someone. The text exposes a conflict without giving us a simple rule for resolving it. [1] [3]

How a judgment acquires its authority

Friedrich Nietzsche approaches inherited values through genealogy, an inquiry into the conditions, struggles and motives through which valuations arise and change. In the preface to On the Genealogy of Morals, he asks about their value as well as their origins: what do these ways of judging make possible, and what do they damage? [2]

The first essay contrasts two patterns. In what Nietzsche calls noble valuation, people first affirm their own power and excellence as good, and “bad” names what falls below them. In what he calls slave morality, the condemning judgment comes first: an enemy is evil, and goodness is defined in opposition to that enemy. These are Nietzsche’s loaded categories, not neutral names for better and worse people. [2]

When opposition becomes dependence

Nietzsche calls the persistent, frustrated resentment behind this reversal ressentiment. Unable to act effectively against an enemy, a person wins an imagined victory by changing the terms of praise and blame, so that the inability to retaliate can become a claim to superior goodness. Someone may sincerely believe that story while concealing the revenge it serves. [2] [4]

Leon may be doing something similar. His contempt for recognition arrived just when recognition escaped him, and his former rivals still organize his attention. Yet the resemblance is a reason to investigate, not a diagnosis we can establish from one disappointment: perhaps the orchestra really does reward status over musical quality.

Nietzsche ties his account to Judaism and Christianity through sweeping hostile claims, and he includes racial conjectures. We are examining his argument, not accepting that story as verified history. He also describes the nobles’ cruelty, and exposing resentment among the oppressed would not establish that their oppressors deserve admiration. [2]

An origin is not a verdict

Suppose Leon admits that envy prompted his criticism. It does not follow that the criticism is false: a resentful person can identify a real fault, and an admirable person can be mistaken. To assess the orchestra, we still need evidence about its decisions.

A genealogy can nevertheless challenge Leon’s claim to impartial judgment. It can ask whether his new values help him make music or keep him absorbed in revenge, which tests both his stated reasons and the kind of life his values sustain. But moving from an origin to a verdict requires further argument, and Nietzsche’s own preference for strength and flourishing needs examining too. [2] [4]

Value creation means shaping what counts as worth pursuing. Nietzsche even describes the reversal he criticizes as creative, so novelty, personal choice and defiance cannot by themselves make a value good. His positive account of creating values remains disputed. [2] [4]

Try the two diagnoses

Olivia says, “Once I understand loyalty completely, I can decide whether to help.” Leon says, “My resentment proves the orchestra’s values are worthless.” Explain the evasion each statement might conceal, and why identifying it does not settle what either person should do. This exercise is optional.

Read a possible response

Olivia may be using the demand for complete understanding to avoid a commitment she has already made. The challenge drawn from Johannes is to tell talking about a value apart from taking responsibility for living it. Naming the evasion does not decide what she should do: she still needs to weigh what she promised, her friend’s need and any competing responsibility, and acting intensely or at once would not guarantee a good decision.

Leon may have renamed frustrated ambition as moral independence while staying preoccupied with his rivals. A genealogy asks how his judgment arose and what it does for him. His admission of resentment could weaken his claim to impartiality, but it does not disprove the criticism, so evidence about the orchestra still matters. Neither diagnosis makes inherited values automatically right or automatically worthless.

Different demands on a life

Johannes asks us to face the difficulty of a commitment that religious familiarity can conceal; Nietzsche asks whether apparently good values express resentment and stifle human possibilities. Their projects conflict sharply over religion, and blending them into advice to “be yourself” would lose that conflict. What they share is a way of exposing the distance between the story we tell about our values and the life we lead through them.

Looking back: reasons and conditions

What does it take to judge and direct a life when we do not choose all the conditions that shape it? That question runs through the module without making its answers identical. Kant examined the conditions of experience and the authority of a moral rule. Hegel and Marx asked how social relations shape what people can do. Mill examined well-being and the protection of liberty. Johannes de Silentio challenged easy talk about faith, and Nietzsche questioned how values arise and what they do to a life.

Two concepts bring these inquiries together. From Kant’s moral philosophy comes autonomy: giving ourselves a law we can rationally require of everyone, which is more than choosing a rule for ourselves. From Marx’s early manuscripts comes alienation: damaging separations from our products, our activity, our human capacities and other people, which enjoying a day at work need not change. One concept tests the authority of a person’s principle; the other asks how a way of working frustrates human flourishing. And having a defensible principle does not settle whether the conditions of acting on it are just. [5] [6] [7]

Checkpoint: a promise at the workshop

Return to Beatriz’s furniture workshop from the lesson on Marx. Her manager asks her to promise a customer delivery on Friday. Both know that the table will not be ready, and refusing may cost her a week’s shifts. Beatriz says, “If I decide for myself, the promise is autonomous. If I feel proud of my decision, my work cannot be alienated.” Use autonomy and alienation to explain what each claim overlooks. Then say what question these concepts leave open, and what the sources used here cannot show. This checkpoint is optional.

Read a checkpoint response

Deciding for herself is not enough to make Beatriz’s principle autonomous in Kant’s sense; she must ask whether she could rationally will it as a law for everyone. Kant’s objection to a policy of knowingly false promises is that it relies on trust the policy would undermine if everyone followed it. The threat to her shifts makes an honest refusal costly, but it does not establish that the deception is justified.

Marx’s account directs us to who controls Beatriz’s work and the products on which her livelihood depends, and feeling proud does not change those relations. Even an honest refusal would leave the workshop’s ownership, and its power to withdraw shifts, in place. So two questions stand side by side: whether Beatriz has a defensible reason for acting, and whether the arrangement prevents her from developing and using her capacities.

That leaves a real question open: how much can we fairly demand of someone whose livelihood depends on obeying a rule they have reason to reject? Judging her promise does not tell us how to change the conditions that make refusal costly. And remember what kind of evidence we have been reading: selected passages in English translation, which clarify arguments but do not establish what actual workers face, or represent either thinker’s whole work.

The next module opens with What difference would an idea make in practice?, which turns from the demands a conviction makes on a life to the consequences that help clarify its meaning.

Sources and limits

[1] Søren Kierkegaard, Fear and Trembling (1843), voiced by Johannes de Silentio, in Lee M. Hollander’s Selections from the Writings of Kierkegaard, University of Texas Bulletin 2326, 8 July 1923, Project Gutenberg 60333, for Johannes’s reading of Abraham, resignation and faith. Read the complete displayed selection: “Introduction II,” “Preparation” I–IV, “A Panegyric on Abraham,” “Preliminary Expectoration,” and notes 1–18.

“Preliminary Expectoration” contains the sermon, the distinction between resignation and faith, and the ordinary knight of faith. Hollander marks omissions; note 18 describes the selection as about one-third of the work. The later Problems were not directly read.

[2] Friedrich Nietzsche, The Genealogy of Morals: A Polemic, translated by Horace B. Samuel, edited by Oscar Levy, volume VIII, T. N. Foulis, 1913, Project Gutenberg 52319, for genealogy, ressentiment and value creation. Read Preface §§1–8 and First Essay §§1–17 with its concluding Note, especially:

• Origins and evaluation: Preface §§3, 5–7.
• Resentment and reversal: I.10–14.
• The racial, religious and aristocratic claims: I.5, 7–8, 11 and 16.

A locator such as I.10 means First Essay, section 10. The Latin passage in I.15 was not independently translated or checked against its source.

[3] John Lippitt and C. Stephen Evans, “Søren Kierkegaard”, Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy, first published 22 May 2023, for the authorship, its voices and interpretations of faith. Read §1 and §3.3.1 completely. Their account of later sections and other works supplies context; those works were not read directly.

[4] R. Lanier Anderson, “Friedrich Nietzsche”, Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy, substantive revision 25 June 2026, for Nietzsche’s moral criticism and the disputed accounts of value creation. Read §2, the opening of §3 and §3.1 completely. The later Nietzsche works discussed there were not independently read.

[5] Immanuel Kant, Fundamental Principles of the Metaphysic of Morals, the Groundwork (1785), translated by Thomas Kingsmill Abbott, Project Gutenberg 5682, for autonomy. The checkpoint draws on Section II’s false-promise example, its subsections on autonomy and heteronomy, and the closing paragraph where Kant states that a further argument is needed. The lesson on Kant’s moral rule gives the fuller reading scope. The underlying print edition remains unverified, and no German text or page images were compared.

[6] Karl Marx, “Estranged Labour,” Economic and Philosophic Manuscripts of 1844, translated by Martin Milligan, Progress Publishers, 1959, for alienation. The checkpoint revisits passages within manuscript pages XXII–XXV on the product, activity, human capacities and relations to others. The lesson on Marx gives the fuller reading scope. No complete work was read, and no comparison with the German manuscript is claimed.

[7] Jonathan Wolff and David Leopold, “Karl Marx”, Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy, substantive revision 27 March 2025, for alienation, human flourishing and the distinction between feelings and social relations. The checkpoint revisits the complete main text of §§1.1–1.2 and §1.5. Cited works and linked notes were not separately read.

The checkpoint’s delivery promise and threatened shifts are an invented extension of Beatriz’s workshop. The checkpoint brings two arguments to bear on one case; it does not claim to reconcile Kant and Marx.

Sources accessed 18 September 2026. Olivia, Leon and the orchestra are original teaching examples. No whole book was read, no Danish or German text or page images were collated, and Nietzsche’s historical generalizations were not verified. No independent scholarly review or learner testing is claimed.