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This chapter argues that a central, but usually overlooked, condition for attaining freedom in Nietzsche's sense is to overcome that most fundamental form of ressentiment: against time. Time is the ‘dimension’ of living that makes us feel most powerless (and so is the greatest stimulus to ressentiment). Unlike that better-known object of ressentiment, the ‘masterly type’, which can be subdued through ‘slave morality’, and especially through a certain valuation of pity, equality, and truthfulness, there is nothing we can do to change the past. So the hardest test of whether we can affirm our own particular life is not merely to recognize the inevitability of the past that has made us what we are, but actively to ‘will’ it. The chapter argues that abandoning a metaphysical worldview does not, therefore, just mean abandoning absolute standards or sources of value, such as God, Reason, or The Good. It also means seeing life as inescapably in time, as structured by time, with no timeless realm to give it meaning. But what is the history in which any contemporary Western self is situated and with which it must reckon if it is to achieve sovereignty? The answer is that our history — the history of Judeo-Christian cultures — is the history of nihilism. A sovereign life must therefore be a coming-to-grips with the challenge of overcoming nihilism — that is, of overcoming Western history as the history of the ascetic ideal, as the history of the ‘will to nothingness’. This claim involves elucidating aspects of the complex relationship between Nietzsche's concepts of selfhood, autonomy and nihilism.
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