Definition of Spiritual Freedom & Nietzsche

The free spirit's intellect is of a "superior quality and sharpness." It does not matter what motivates him---morality or immorality or the desire to shock---but what matters is that he refuses to be limited or shaped in his thinking by tradition and that he courageously seeks the truth, whatever it may be, and whether he finds it or not.

The free spirit ensures his independence from tradition by keeping reason as his ally. He does not believe or disbelieve in this claim or that claim because of habit, as does the "fettered spirit," but instead bravely applies his reason to all things, discovering for himself what is true or not, instead of letting society decide for him.

Nietzsche believes that the rigorous application of reason will ensure the free spirit his or her independence rom tradition, because tradition, he says, is based not on reason but on habit. As long as the free spirit does not fall into habit in his thinking, he will remain free. He says that the fettered spirit is not fettered because of his conclusions, but because he is a slave to an habitual way of seeing and thinking about the world and his place in it.

The fettered person may "believe" in something which is true, but he w

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the fettered spirits cling together around a campfire of habit and illusions, trying not to think about the fragile basis of their world, their beliefs, their opinions, and their tradition. That is precisely why the free spirit is so rare, and why there are so many fettered spirits who obey tradition and believe what they are told to believe, out of not only habit but out of fear as well. This is not to say that the fettered spirit never acquaints himself with reason. To the contrary, as Nietzsche writes, the fettered spirit has often been known to use reason, but it is the way in which he uses it that differentiates him from the free spirit and that spirit's use of reason. The free spirit applies reason to the subject at hand from the beginning of the process, accepting a claim as true only after putting it through the rigors of that reasoning process, entirely regardless of whether that conclusion fits in with tradition or social standards or not. The fettered spirit, on the other hand, operates in the precisely opposite direction, starting with the blind acceptance of the conclusion as true based on tradition and social standards. Only after coming to such a conclusion, with no reference to reason at all, does the fettere
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