NIETZSCHE, NATURALISM, AND NORMATIVITY
Nietzsche, Naturalism,
and Normativity
Edited by
CHRISTOPHER JANAWAY
AND SIMON ROBERTSON
1
3
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Contents
Preface
Notes on texts, translations, and abbreviations
Notes on Contributors
1. Introduction: Nietzsche on Naturalism and Normativity
Christopher Janaway and Simon Robertson
2. Nietzsche’s Normative Theory? The Art and Skill of Living Well
Peter Railton
3. Aestheticist Ethics
Peter Poellner
4. The Scope Problem—Nietzsche, the Moral, Ethical,
and Quasi-Aesthetic
Simon Robertson
5. Nietzsche and Non-cognitivism
Nadeem J. Z. Hussain
6. Nietzsche and Moral Fictionalism
Alan Thomas
7. Compassion and Selflessness
Bernard Reginster
8. Nietzsche on Morality, Drives, and Human Greatness
Christopher Janaway
9. What is a Nietzschean Self?
R. Lanier Anderson
10. Nietzsche’s Naturalism and Normativity
Richard Schacht
Index
vi
vii
viii
1
20
52
81
111
133
160
183
202
236
259
Preface
The pieces collected in this volume began life as contributions to a three-year
research project entitled ‘Nietzsche and Modern Moral Philosophy’, which took
place at the University of Southampton during 2007–2010. The entire project of
conferences and workshops was generously funded by the UK’s Arts and Humanities Research Council (AHRC), to whom we express our gratitude on behalf
of all contributors to the project. The project’s express aim was to bring together
researchers in two fields—Nietzsche scholarship and contemporary ethics—with
two broad goals: to assess the challenge that Nietzsche’s critique poses to modern
moral philosophy and to assess the resources available to modern moral philosophy for responding to that challenge. In all the project comprised sixty-eight
presentations, and much fertile discussion, which pitted Nietzsche interpretation
against different strands of contemporary ethics and its history. We have selected
around thirty of the presented papers for publication, in this and two companion
volumes. But we would like to take this opportunity to thank all participants for
contributing to the success of this uniquely concentrated project. Finally, for
their part in the collective planning and running of the conferences and workshops, we wish to thank our colleagues in Southampton during the project,
Aaron Ridley, David Owen, and Ken Gemes.
C.J.
S.R.
Notes on texts, translations,
and abbreviations
The following abbreviations are used in this volume for the titles of writings by Nietzsche:
A
BGE
BT
CW
D
EH
GM
GS
HH
TI
TL
UM
WP
Z
The Antichrist
Beyond Good and Evil
The Birth of Tragedy
The Case of Wagner
Daybreak
Ecce Homo
On the Genealogy of Morality
The Gay Science
Human, All Too Human
Twilight of the Idols
‘On Truth and Lies in a Nonmoral Sense’
Untimely Meditations
The Will to Power
Thus Spoke Zarathustra
Translations used by essay authors are noted separately in each essay. German texts of
Nietzsche referred to are:
KGW
KSA
Nietzsche Werke: Kritische Gesamtausgabe, ed. Giorgio Colli and Mazzino
Montinari, 30 vols. Berlin: Walter de Gruyter Co., 1967–.
Kritische Studien-Ausgabe, ed. Giorgio Colli and Mazzino Montinari, 15 vols.
Munich: Deutscher Taschenbuch Verlag and Walter de Gruyter, 1988.
Notes on Contributors
R. Lanier Anderson is Associate Professor of Philosophy at Stanford University. He
works on the history of late modern philosophy, focusing primarily on Nietzsche, and
Kant and his influence on nineteenth-century philosophy. He has published a number of
recent papers on Nietzsche, and current research interests include a book in progress on
Kant’s theoretical philosophy, as well as work on Nietzsche’s moral psychology and
special topics in existentialism and the relations between philosophy and literature.
Nadeem J. Z. Hussain is Associate Professor of Philosophy at Stanford University. He
specializes in metaethics and the history of late nineteenth-century German philosophy.
He has written extensively on interpretations of Nietzsche’s metaethics, and published
articles in a number of recent collections.
Christopher Janaway is Professor of Philosophy at the University of Southampton. He
has been principal investigator on the AHRC-funded project ‘Nietzsche and Modern
Moral Philosophy’ and is general editor of the Cambridge Edition of the Works of
Schopenhauer. His publications include Self and World in Schopenhauer’s Philosophy
(1989), Beyond Selflessness: Reading Nietzsche’s Genealogy (2007), Willing and
Nothingness: Schopenhauer as Nietzsche’s Educator (ed., 1998), and The Cambridge
Companion to Schopenhauer (ed., 1999).
Peter Poellner is Professor of Philosophy at the University of Warwick. He is the author
of Nietzsche and Metaphysics (1995) and has published articles on various aspects of
Nietzsche’s philosophy, on topics in phenomenology, and on non-conceptual content.
Peter Railton is Perrin Professor in the Department of Philosophy at the University of
Michigan. He has written on subjects in moral philosophy, moral psychology, aesthetics,
and the philosophy of science. The essay in this volume marks his first foray into
Nietzsche studies. He has published a volume of selected essays in metaethics and
normative ethics entitled Facts, Values, and Norms (2003).
Bernard Reginster is Professor and Chair in the Philosophy Department at Brown
University. He has published The Affirmation of Life (2006) and numerous articles in
nineteenth- and twentieth-century continental philosophy, particularly in ethics, moral
psychology, and the philosophy of mind. He is currently working on Nietzschean moral
psychology, as well as on issues in contemporary psychiatry and psychoanalytic theory.
Simon Robertson is currently a lecturer in philosophy at Cardiff University. He was a
postdoctoral fellow working on the AHRC-funded research project ‘Nietzsche and
Modern Moral Philosophy’, at the University of Southampton. Simon’s research lies
mainly in contemporary ethics (especially metaethics and practical reason) and Nietzsche.
He has published several articles in both fields, in journals and edited collections, and is
the editor of Spheres of Reason (2009).
Notes on Contributors
ix
Richard Schacht is Professor of Philosophy and Jubilee Professor of Liberal Arts and
Sciences (Emeritus) at the University of Illinois. He has written extensively on Nietzsche
and other figures and developments in the post-Kantian interpretive tradition. His
interests revolve around the general topic of human reality and issues in social,
normative, and value theory. His books include Nietzsche (1983), Making Sense of
Nietzsche (1995), Nietzsche, Genealogy, Morality (ed., 1994), and Nietzsche’s Postmoralism
(ed., 2001).
Alan Thomas is Professor of Ethics at Tilburg University and Director of the Tilburg
Hub for Ethics and Social Philosophy. He has published papers in moral and political
philosophy and the philosophy of mind. His publications include Value and Context: the
Nature of Moral and Political Knowledge (2006).
1
Introduction: Nietzsche on Naturalism
and Normativity
Christopher Janaway and Simon Robertson
The primary motivation for this volume of essays is to assess Nietzsche’s
normative views and their relation to the naturalistic worldview it has become
common to attribute to him. Thirty years ago such a collection might have
seemed rather unlikely. For on the one hand, Nietzsche was widely regarded as a
debunker of central regions of normative thought, rather than someone to
whom positive normative views could be ascribed, while on the other hand,
the suggestion that he is a naturalist might have seemed outlandish amidst the
more orthodox postmodernist interpretative milieu of the time. Nevertheless,
the last thirty years have witnessed several, no doubt related, transformations in
Nietzsche studies. One is Nietzsche’s growing reception within Anglo-American
philosophical circles, both by scholars of a broadly ‘analytic’ stripe and by a
number of more ‘mainstream’ moral philosophers grappling with the ethical
traditions of Plato, Aristotle, Hume, Kant, Mill, and so forth. A second concerns an increased sensitivity to the naturalistic presuppositions and ambitions
informing much of Nietzsche’s writing. Indeed, it would be surprising if
English speaking commentators, themselves typically versed in a naturalistic
philosophical tradition, were not to pick up on and use these as a point of entry
for interpreting a thinker who had otherwise and for so long proved so elusive.
Third, the works and ideas that Nietzsche’s analytically minded commentators
have found most accessible and systematically developed typically concern his
views on, and about, normativity. And it is on these matters that Nietzsche has
become increasingly seen as someone who, although highly critical of established approaches and outlooks, engages with many of the same traditions and
some of the same issues that shape contemporary ethical thought. Added to this,
Anglo-American moral philosophy has itself undergone considerable rejuvenation over the last four decades—due in no small part to a number of writers,
clearly influenced by Nietzsche, who have developed important challenges to
traditional moral theory and thereby brought Nietzsche into the contemporary
2
Christopher Janaway and Simon Robertson
academic fray as a figure from whom we may after all have something important
to glean.1
This volume brings together both Nietzsche specialists and mainstream moral
philosophers to critically assess Nietzsche’s normative thought and, in particular,
its significance for ongoing debates within and about ethics. All our authors
attribute to Nietzsche some form of naturalism, though they disagree as to its
centrality to his philosophy overall. Their essays all concern Nietzsche’s views on
or about normativity and value, with greater and lesser degrees of sympathy.
Before introducing the essays, this chapter offers some further background and
context, both philosophical and interpretative, to the themes they address. We
begin with some general remarks on our two topics, naturalism and normativity,
as they feature in Nietzsche’s thought. We then lay out some of the deeper issues
these remarks raise.
1. NIETZSCHE’S NORMATIVE AND NATURALIST
PROJECTS: A BRIEF OVERVIEW
It is Nietzsche’s concern with value—the value of life, morality, art, great
individuals, culture, truth—and what this might imply normatively that animates his thought as a whole. If there is an overarching project unifying his work, it
consists in what he labels his ‘revaluation of all values’: a critical assessment of the
nature and value of, as well as justification for, the values we variously endorse,
and which he hopes will pave the way for some superior ideal. This is a
multifaceted project with many interweaving strands. But it may be useful
initially to separate out its critical and positive dimensions.2
Nietzsche’s central critical target is prevailing ‘morality’, his critique of it
comprising two main elements. At an evaluative level, he calls into question
the value of morality—the value of those values, norms, and ideals we have
inherited from Christianity but which remain dominant today despite our
increasingly secular modern culture—on grounds that morality is inimical to
realizing the highest forms of human flourishing and excellence. This is supplemented, secondly, by a challenge to the foundational or metanormative presuppositions that continue to hold morality in place, presuppositions that undergird
morality’s claims to objectivity and truth, and, in particular, the assumption that
morality represents an authoritative and hence non-optional normative-evaluative
standpoint. Nietzsche’s goal is to free us from the grip of morality, his own positive
1 These writers include, most obviously, Bernard Williams, Philippa Foot, Charles Taylor, and
Alasdair MacIntyre. For discussion of Nietzsche’s influence on them, see Owen and Robertson
(forthcoming).
2 For further detail on the structure and content of Nietzsche’s revaluative project, as well as the
many attending interpretative and philosophical puzzles it raises, see Robertson (2009).
Introduction
3
ideal representing some alternative, demoralized conception of human flourishing
and excellence.
What role, then, might a naturalistic picture play in this revaluative project?
Clearly a lot will turn on what is meant by ‘naturalism’; and, despite some
generic pronouncements about his ‘task’ to ‘translate humanity back into nature’
(BGE 230), Nietzsche offers rather little in the way of more exact and detailed
characterization. At a very general level, though, whatever else naturalism
amounts to, it involves a denial of ‘supernaturalism’. However we explicate
this contrast more precisely, Nietzsche at least observes that many traditional
accounts of morality’s justification have recourse to something we would ordinarily regard as supernatural, in the sense of ontologically robust items standing
beyond the natural realm—be it a divine order or Platonic transcendent world—
or the subtler Kantian notion of the intelligible or noumenal realm, which for
Nietzsche is a ‘pale, elusive’ version of more full-blooded transcendent metaphysics (see TI, ‘How the “True World” Finally Became a Fable’). Were one to
grant Nietzsche some relevantly naturalistic presumption, such accounts would
face serious difficulties. However, Nietzsche nowhere argues, at least not directly,
for such a presumption. Furthermore, it sometimes appears that, as with many
naturalists, he just stipulates a naturalistic premise and then argues from it by
teasing out its implications. For example, he sometimes assumes that God does
not exist (or at least that belief in God is dying out) and then, on that premise,
argues that since the justification and value of Christian morality depends on
divine authority, we are not entitled just to assume that the morality we have
inherited from Christianity possesses the normative authority or value we commonly suppose (e.g. TI, ‘Skirmishes of an Untimely Man’, 5). Yet the absence in
Nietzsche of an argument for such a naturalistic presumption raises wide-ranging
questions about his right to any such starting point.
Nonetheless, this is not the full story. For one thing, Nietzsche does occasionally offer lines of argumentation against particular supernaturalistic premises.
More significantly, throughout his writings he programmatically develops
accounts of human nature, as manifested both in individuals and groups, that
arguably represent a more specific naturalistic endeavour: namely, to explain a
wide variety of phenomena, including morality and our normative-evaluative
commitments more generally, in terms of distinctively natural facts and processes. Suppose that we can provide a naturalistic account of, say, the origins of
morality and our continued allegiance to it. This has two immediate implications. First, those who do not accept the general naturalistic picture are no longer
entitled merely to assume the veracity of their own position, given that there is a
rival naturalistic explanation now on the table. Second, there may also be an onus
on those who already accept a naturalistic picture to reassess, in light of
Nietzsche’s account, whether the moral outlook they accept really does or can
possess the kind or degree of value and authority they assume. The particular
explanatory materials Nietzsche deploys, and the uses he puts these to, serve
4
Christopher Janaway and Simon Robertson
substantively richer ends, of course—and it is here, in assessing the explanatory
adequacy of such materials, that the philosophical debate between Nietzsche and
his opponents takes place. For his analysis of morality is in large part a debunking
one. He seeks to draw attention not just to morality’s decidedly human origins,
but to the ways it covertly expresses various drives for power (say)—drives
that are all too often contrary to its own professed evaluative ideals and
which, moreover, result in a normative system inimical to the highest human
flourishing.
This much should be relatively uncontroversial as a reading of Nietzsche.
Matters become more contentious, though, when we move to the wider applications of his naturalism—concerning the positive and demoralized views of
agency, normativity, and value Nietzsche himself espouses—and to its details.
Indeed, merely labelling Nietzsche a ‘naturalist’ conceals as much as it reveals.
On the one hand, there are perennially vexing philosophical issues about how
exactly to characterize ‘naturalism’, what sorts of views therefore count as suitably
‘naturalistic’, and whether there can be a non-question-begging argument for a
naturalistic worldview. On the other hand, considerable disagreement persists
over Nietzsche’s naturalism specifically: whether, for instance, its explanatory
aspirations reflect or entail more substantial ontological commitments; whether,
methodologically speaking, it is merely a guiding heuristic or a more thoroughgoing procedural precept; which items and concepts comprise the relevant
explanatory bases; how reductive a naturalism he intends; and which regions of
thought he even reinterprets naturalistically. In short, it remains a matter of
contention as to what kind of naturalism Nietzsche espouses and how systemic
and systematic it really is. We return to such issues in the following sections.
A final preliminary point to note for now: If Nietzsche is a philosophical
naturalist, and if part of his revaluative project involves explaining such phenomena as morality away in naturalistic terms, it remains to be seen how the values
constitutive of his own positive ideal fit into this naturalized vision. Does he leave
enough space for a conception of value and normativity that is immune to the
errors and foibles he attributes to morality, yet which retains a claim to being a
genuine conception of value and normativity? In short, how comfortably can
Nietzsche’s views on naturalism and normativity sit together? These issues
inform much of the present volume.
2 . NIETZSCHE AS A NATURALIST
Given the plethora of contrary views concerning what kind of naturalism
Nietzsche espouses, it is worth taking a step back and asking two questions:
Why might it be interpretatively worthwhile to read Nietzsche as a naturalist?
And why might a naturalistic philosophy be important for Nietzsche himself?
Introduction
5
Early naturalist readings of Nietzsche were intended, at least in part, as
correctives to certain established postmodernist interpretative orthodoxies—one
notable case in point being the idea that for Nietzsche there can be no facts,
truths, or knowledge (at least as these are understood by much of traditional
philosophy), since they presuppose some non-perspectival, non-interpretative,
epistemic ideal in comparison to which all truth- and knowledge-claims necessarily fall short. It is not hard to see, given both the paradoxical whiff and the
insensitivity to different conceptions of truth the statement displays, why readers
of a more analytic stripe might balk here. Nonetheless, not only are there serious
questions as to whether many of the passages cited in support of this postmodernist reading really do vindicate it (see, for instance, WP 481), many texts
expressly utilize (and even valorize) certain notions of truth and knowledge
(e.g. GM III, 14). Furthermore, Nietzsche does frequently issue assertions that
(at least seem to) aim at some kind of truth—including, for instance, truths
about the nature and genesis, as well as the errors and disvalue, of morality.
Naturalistic readings offer a way to make sense of this. For, as we have seen,
Nietzsche’s naturalism is explanatory in character: drawing on a range of explanatory resources—historical, anthropological, and psychological, say—he seeks to
explain morality away as the product of various naturalistic, sometimes pernicious, phenomena, and thereby to undermine both morality’s claim to authority
and the assumption that morality is straightforwardly a good thing. Thus, given
that explanation is factive, naturalist readings license the hard-to-deny view that
Nietzsche’s own explanatory endeavours aim to expose certain truths about
morality. Reading him as a naturalist also offers a way to unify aspects of his
thought under a guiding methodological approach. It helps explain why he
objects to certain views (because, for instance, they offend against a naturalistic
presumption and may therein represent what he takes to be little more than
philosophical fantasy); it supplies a principled way to elucidate what counts as a
minimally acceptable mode of explanation (namely, one that coheres with a
suitably naturalistic worldview); and, importantly, it circumscribes the options
available to him when developing his own positive views about value, normativity, and the will (any such account being subject to relevant naturalistic constraints). In short, then, naturalist readings may reveal in Nietzsche a modus
operandi that at once structures, shapes, and constrains the direction and content
of his otherwise wide-ranging views, both critical and positive. Our next question
concerns what such a naturalism involves.
Probably the most thoroughgoing naturalist reading is that given by Brian
Leiter (2002: ch. 1; forthcoming). Leiter regards Nietzsche as a methodological
naturalist, for whom the methods and results of philosophy should be modelled
on and continuous with best empirical enquiry (2002: 3, 6–8). Although
Nietzsche is not also a substantive naturalist in the strong sense of someone
who thinks that ‘only those properties picked out by the laws of the physical
sciences are real’, he seeks ‘to reveal the causal determinants’ of human
6
Christopher Janaway and Simon Robertson
phenomena by locating these in, and explaining them mainly in terms of,
‘physiological and psychological facts about persons’ (2002: 6). This, for Leiter,
represents a systemic methodological agenda, governed not just by the methods
and ideals of scientific enquiry but also its results, with the bulk of human
phenomena, including morality and agency, being explained ultimately in
terms of, and in that sense reduced to, psycho-physiological states and processes.
Many have taken this to be too thoroughgoing a naturalism to be Nietzsche’s,
though: too systematic, scientistic, mechanistic, and reductive (e.g. Janaway
2007: ch. 3; Schacht (this volume)), paying insufficient attention to the role
culture plays in the construction of values and persons (Williams 1995: 67;
Ridley 2005; Janaway 2007: ch. 3; Pippin 2010: 58; Schacht (this volume)), and
insufficiently receptive to the kinds of first-personal awareness and engagement
Nietzsche seeks to elicit (Janaway 2007: ch. 3; Pippin 2010: 43–4). A more
modest naturalism now seems the orthodoxy, one that often takes its lead from
Bernard Williams’ influential paper ‘Nietzsche’s Minimalist Moral Psychology’
(reprinted in Williams 1995: 65–76). Well aware of vexing issues about the
ambit of ‘naturalism’, though eschewing any ‘fiercely reductive’ version of it,
naturalism in Williams’ hands plays the role of a guiding heuristic, by which,
through piecemeal testing, one attempts to interpret human experiences in a way
that is ‘consistent with . . . our understanding of humans as part of nature’ (1995:
67). In offering some further direction to this endeavour, Williams finds in
Nietzsche ‘a general attitude . . . that can be a great help’ (1995: 68). The attitude
has two relevant dimensions (like Leiter, Williams is particularly interested in the
bearing naturalism has on moral psychology and agency, though his account has
wider implications). It manifests suspicion upon whichever aspects of moral
thought are at odds with human experience more generally; and it calls on us
to enquire whether ‘what seems to demand more moral material makes sense in
terms of what demands less’ (1995: 68). In response to the question ‘How much
should our accounts of distinctively moral activity add to our accounts of other
human activity?’, Williams replies:
as little as possible . . . the more that some moral understanding of human beings seems
to call on materials that specially serve the purpose of morality—certain conceptions
of the will, for instance—the more reason we have to ask whether there may not be
a more illuminating account that rests only on conceptions that we use anyway elsewhere. (1995: 68)
Disagreements about the nature of Nietzsche’s naturalism can in turn yield
markedly different views about his more substantive ambitions and conclusions.
It may be useful to show how with reference to two topics: the will and
normativity.
According to Leiter (see esp. 2002: 91ff and 2009), for Nietzsche there is no will
standing as the locus of reflection and volition. Conscious mental life, including our
experience of what we erroneously label ‘willing’, is therefore not under the causal
Introduction
7
control of any such will but is instead a series of type-epiphenomenal events
manifesting and controlled by deeper facts about our physiological and unconscious
psychological makeup. Others, meanwhile, afford Nietzsche a view of willing
which, although not entirely separable from the conscious and unconscious firstorder psychological states its obtaining depends on, does nonetheless possess some
degree of unity over and above those states in ways that license some modicum of
volitional and reflective control.3 All parties agree that, for Nietzsche, many
traditional views of the self, willing, and freewill are erroneous, in part because
they rest on assumptions that resist integration into a broadly naturalistic picture,
and that these views misdescribe what willing actually involves. Nietzsche’s objections to these views of the will are important for his critique of morality, since it is by
attacking these that he seeks to undermine traditional conceptions of moral responsibility and blameworthiness. What commentators disagree on, though, is whether
there are enough materials left over for a positive conception of critical reflection
and agency that does justice to how we experience ourselves in a first-personal way.
Nobody denies that, for Nietzsche, we do reflect and act. The dispute concerns what
reflection and agency amount to. The revaluative process Nietzsche envisages
presupposes that at least some people can alter their evaluative beliefs and attitudes
in light of reassessing their evaluative commitments—and that this may in turn
affect what they do. For Leiter, each of the following is ultimately explained by the
push and pull of the elements comprising one’s psycho-physical constitution, over
which one has no real control: whether to engage in evaluative assessment in the first
place; whether to alter one’s evaluative commitments in light of the conclusions one
comes to; and whether to free oneself from morality’s grip and pursue some
alternative perfectionist ideal once one concludes that morality is a sham. On this
view, there may be rather little room to say that a person ought to engage in critical
reflection, or that one has any reason to modify one’s evaluative commitments, or
that one should free oneself from morality’s grip and pursue some alternative course.
For either one will or one won’t do so; and that’s not under the control of the
person. In this respect, the processes and contents of reflection, as well as all our
decisions, are epiphenomenal manifestations of deeper underlying psycho-physical
facts and processes. If, therefore, we do want to attribute to Nietzsche the view that
at least some people have good reason to reassess and modify their evaluative
commitments, or that at least some people really should pursue relevant excellences,
we may want a picture of volition and agency that is less eliminativist.
So these views about the character of Nietzsche’s naturalism have significant
implications for his views about the nature and possibility of full-blown agency,
and in turn his views in and about normativity. It is to these issues about
normativity that we now turn.
3 This now seems the more common interpretative line, although there are numerous ways it can
be developed; see the essays by Gardner, Gemes, Janaway, Pippin, Poellner, and Clark and Dudrick,
all in Gemes and May (2009).
8
Christopher Janaway and Simon Robertson
3 . NIETZSCHE AND NORMATIVITY
We have so far been speaking, a little loosely, of Nietzsche’s views on and about
both normativity and value. On standard models, the normative domain is
centred around the paradigmatically normative concepts ought and a reason,
whereas the evaluative realm is characterizable in terms of more narrowly valoric
concepts like good and bad, perhaps also virtue. There are many controversies
over how (and whether) the normative and evaluative spheres connect, and such
issues are likely to have a bearing on the interpretation of Nietzsche’s position.
Nonetheless, for ease of exposition we’ll here continue to include both under the
rubric of the normative.
Nietzsche’s governing critical concern when it comes to morality is normative
(in this broad sense), rather than metanormative. He thinks morality overall
disvaluable because antagonistic to realizing the highest forms of human flourishing and excellence. It can be useful to distinguish these two ideals, flourishing
and excellence, and to ask how for Nietzsche they connect. Flourishing to the
highest degree is itself, for Nietzsche, an excellence. And a flourishing agent is
one who, by imposing order onto the otherwise conflicting set of drives that
partially constitute who he or she is, achieves a unified self and who (either as part
of the unifying process or its result) expresses who he or she is through action.
Arguably, though, flourishing thus understood is not sufficient for full-blown
Nietzschean excellence: this may also require that the activities through which
one expresses one’s agency realize externally excellent achievements. Not implausibly, a Nietzschean great individual or ‘higher type’ is someone whose drives
dispose him or her towards relevant forms of external excellence: it is by
discharging these drives through action that the higher individual both realizes
the highest forms of excellence and flourishes as the individual he or she is.
Morality, though, somehow thwarts both goods. On one interpretation, internalizing moral values (like altruism, say) in the ways needed to comply with
morality fosters a set of drives that dispose one to conform to pre-given moral
values and ideals, thereby either inhibiting or eradicating drives antithetical to
morality. Yet, someone who is overly altruistic (say) may then be more concerned
with the good of others than with pursuing whatever projects would realize
great non-moral excellences. This, in turn, will render those capable of such
excellence less likely to express their excellence-directed drives in the ways needed
to flourish.
Even these general remarks raise some pressing interpretative questions
concerning the nature of the alternative to morality Nietzsche might be advancing. One issue concerns how that alternative differs from the conceptions of
morality he attacks. A related issue is whether Nietzsche seeks to jettison deontic
normative concepts (like duty, perhaps ought), or whether he retains them but in
some demoralized form. Either way, it is plausible to suppose that Nietzsche’s
Introduction
9
positive ideal is ‘value-oriented’: action and normativity, as they figure in it, are
typically couched in, or at least ultimately explained in terms of, valoric notions,
both thin and thick, where these display a broadly aesthetic character. Yet a
further issue emerges from the fact that Nietzsche says notoriously little about
what exactly this positive ideal does involve—conspicuously little, in particular,
about the determinate content of the ends a great individual does or should
pursue. As we might put it, he offers no normative blueprint specifying what a
great individual’s life or activities will involve—perhaps because, for Nietzsche, a
great individual lives a self-styled life that he or she determines for him- or
herself, for which there can simply be no normative blueprint. This, however,
leaves open how we might assess the value of a goal or achievement once realized.
Here there appear to be three main interpretative options: that Nietzsche at least
implicitly endorses a substantive conception of value, according to which realizing the highest good requires realizing goals with a substantively specifiable
content; or that he advances a formal account of value, in which the criteria of
evaluative assessment are specified independently of the contents of the achievements themselves (Hurka 2007); or that he combines both substantive and
formal criteria (Reginster 2007). All these interpretative issues remain matters
of ongoing debate.
4. METANORMATIVITY
Although, as noted, Nietzsche’s guiding revaluative agenda is a first-order normative one, his critique of morality and positive ideal nevertheless rely on or are
otherwise committed to a range of metaethical (or metanormative) views. While
there is some consensus as to Nietzsche’s position concerning the metaethical
status of the moral claims he attacks, disagreement reigns over the metaethical
status of his own positive, perfectionist claims. But before turning to Nietzsche
himself, it may be useful to first sketch some of the metaethical terrain most
relevant to his revaluative ambitions.
We can begin by dividing metanormative positions into sets of camps: those
according to which there are normative truths, and those that deny this. Those
who accept that there are normative truths might then be divided into two
further subgroups. Firstly, realists about the normative hold that normative
claims can be true and that, when they are, this is because they pick out (are
made true by, or correspond to) metaphysically robust normative facts or properties. Realisms come in many guises. Non-naturalists regard normative properties
as non-natural, sui generis properties ontologically distinct from natural ones,
whereas naturalist realists generally hold that normative properties are identical
to (or wholly constituted by) natural properties. Either way, objective realists
think that normative properties are objective constituents of reality: objective to
the extent that their existence and character does not depend on individuals’
10
Christopher Janaway and Simon Robertson
thoughts about or attitudes towards them. Subjective realists think that normative
properties do depend, in some significant way, on subjective features of at least
some individuals. Irrealists, secondly, accept that there are normative truths but
deny that these are made true by or correspond to ontologically robust normative
properties. Typically, irrealists think that normative claims are true when they
satisfy some formal truth-condition; Kant, for instance, could be understood as
an irrealist insofar as the notion of universalizability involved in the Categorical
Imperative presents a formal criterion for assessing the truth of a normative
claim. Anti-realists, on the other hand, deny the truth of (positive atomic)
normative claims, holding that such claims are either false or non-truth-apt.
Nietzsche, it is widely agreed, is an anti-realist about morality’s normative
claims. Many passages indicate that he advances what we would now label an
‘error theoretic’ form of moral anti-realism. Although morality embodies a claim
to objectivity, nothing does the work (ontological or conceptual) needed for
moral claims to be (objectively) true; thus, moral claims are literally false. And
some commentators attribute to him standard anti-realist arguments in support
of his denial of moral objectivity—including, for instance, naturalistically driven
arguments from ontological parsimony and best explanation (see esp. Leiter
2002: 146, and chs. 5–8). There are of course a range of specific things that
might be meant in saying that morality is (or is not) ‘objective’. Work on
Nietzsche’s moral anti-objectivism has focused mostly on value. It is widely
agreed not only that he denies the existence of metaphysically robust moral
properties, but that he also rejects both the existence of some supernatural
realm and the possibility of some non-perspectival Archimedean standpoint,
either of which might be invoked to justify moral values as objective. Less
attention has been paid, however, to a different kind of Nietzschean antiobjectivism, one regarding morality’s normative claims, in the narrower sense
of claims specifiable in terms of oughts and reasons. On many traditional views,
morality is objective in virtue of representing a normatively authoritative standpoint, such that any agent ought and has reason to comply with morality
irrespective of whether doing so serves or conflicts with the agent’s motivational
profile. On one view, denying morality’s normative authority is crucial to
Nietzsche’s critique. For Nietzsche thinks that complying with morality is
inimical to realizing the highest values—and, therefore, that those capable of
realizing such values ought not comply with morality. Yet that would not be
possible if morality were normatively authoritative. So, on this view, he needs to
deny that it is.
Combining an error theory about morality with an alternative normative ideal
raises an immediate metaethical query, though, which we might label the
authority puzzle. There is no canonical statement of it; but the basic thought is
this: If Nietzsche denies the kinds of objectivity upon which morality’s claims to
authority rest, he may thereby deprive his own positive ideal of a legitimate claim
to objectivity and authority; in which case, the evaluative and normative claims
Introduction
11
constitutive of his own positive outlook would be no more justified than, or
superior to, those he rejects; there may then be no justification for the claim that
anyone should alter their evaluative commitments or realize Nietzschean excellences. The challenge, then, is to provide Nietzsche with a positive metaethic that
either vindicates his perfectionist ideal without commitment to the errors he
attributes to morality or else explains why it requires no such vindication.4
In addressing this challenge, most commentators again focus principally on
the evaluative domain, narrowly understood. Here we might distinguish two
main traditional approaches. Some have held that that while Nietzsche is an error
theorist about moral value, he is a naturalist realist and objectivist about his
preferred values (Kaufmann 1974: 199–200; Schacht 1983: 348–9, 398–9); his
disagreement with the moralist is then a first-order one over what the relevant
values are. Others, however, attribute to Nietzsche a (more or less) global antirealism by which (more or less) all claims to evaluative objectivity, moral or
otherwise, embody error—whereby his perfectionist ideal admits no privilege
over the moral values he attacks. Leiter (2000; 2002: 146ff ), for example, argues
that Nietzsche’s positive claims represent little more than his (Nietzsche’s) own
idiosyncratic opinions and tastes about what is excellent or valuable. Nadeem
Hussain instead supplements the global error theory about value (and normativity more generally) he attributes to Nietzsche with a fictionalist rejoinder:
Nietzschean great individuals or free sprits engage in an honest fiction, makebelieving that the values they create are valuable even though they know nothing
is intrinsically valuable. These values must nonetheless engage their emotional
and motivational repertoire, whereby the make-belief provides them with the
sense that their life has a goal and purpose. Both accounts are motivated in part
by worries about what a more objectivist view of value would (supposedly)
imply—namely, something that offends against Nietzsche’s naturalism.
There may, however, be two further metaethical options available to
Nietzsche. On the one hand, a number of writers are now attributing to him a
form of subjective realism, according to which evaluative qualities constitutively
depend on both a subject’s attitudes and the features of the world to which these
attitudes are responsive. On the other hand, there remains a largely unexplored
option that Nietzsche could endorse an irrealist conception of value, a view that
explicates value via a formal account delivering evaluative truths but which incurs
no commitment to ontologically robust evaluative items. It is worth concluding
4 Nietzsche, of course, does not have a well worked out metaethics in our contemporary sense—
any more than his contemporaries did—if by that we mean to include clear views about the
ontological, epistemological, and semantic commitments of ethical discourse. Nevertheless, given
the authority puzzle, he needs views that are metaethical in a broader sense, concerning the
justification for the normative-evaluative claims he endorses. Since, as most agree, Nietzsche’s
own remarks do not fully determine any single positive metaethical position, any account
involves some rational reconstruction, the interpretative adequacy of which will depend both on
how well it fits what he does say and how well it serves his revaluative ambitions more generally.
12
Christopher Janaway and Simon Robertson
this metaethical survey, though, by noting that however well these approaches
fare when it comes to Nietzsche’s views about value, they leave two important
issues outstanding. One concerns how these views on value connect to
Nietzsche’s normative claims in the narrower sense; the other concerns how
Nietzsche can be an error theorist about morality’s normative verdicts in the
narrow sense and yet endorse normative claims of his own.
Suffice to say, Nietzsche’s views on all these topics—naturalism, normativity,
and metanormativity—remain subject to intense scholarly debate. But we will
conclude by now turning to the essays themselves.
5. THE ESSAYS
The three essays that open this collection, by Peter Railton, Peter Poellner, and
Simon Robertson, all in different ways suggest that Nietzsche’s normative stance,
the stance from which he criticizes morality and within which he can legitimately
locate values that he endorses, is in a broad sense aesthetic, or at least akin to the
aesthetic.
Peter Railton’s essay starts by laying out four principal problems of interpretation that confront us when trying to discern any coherent and distinctive
normative theory in Nietzsche’s work.
(1) Does Nietzsche’s perspectivism about truth result in a kind of relativism,
precluding the seemingly absolute claims about the superiority of certain beings,
values, or ways of life for which he is famous? In what sense, if any, can there be
truths about such values?
(2) Nietzsche often makes utterances which are imperatival or prescriptive in
nature, but is it coherent for him to do so in the light of his debunking of certain
central features of traditional moral thought? In particular, can an action-guiding
normative theory be formulated without incorporating the deontic concepts and
associated idea of a free or autonomous will that Nietzsche dismisses?
(3) Does Nietzsche’s naturalism preclude the idea of finding genuine values in
the world?
(4) If his theory is founded upon values that he endorses as genuine—say, nobility,
health, strength, knowledge, and aesthetic excellence—how could it also be the case
that, as Nietzsche says, we invent or create our values?
To address these issues Railton develops a distinction between evaluative and
normative concepts. The former include good, bad, noble, base, beautiful, healthy,
and many more; the latter concern correctness or conformity and include right,
wrong, correct, rule, obligation. Nietzsche’s objections to morality’s use of these
latter concepts can in principle leave the wide category of evaluative concepts
untouched. So Railton addresses his four initial problems by developing an idea
of attunement to value, or appreciative realization of value through life. Aesthetic
Introduction
13
appreciation provides a powerful model of the kind of sensitivity to value that is
open to Nietzsche. Railton regards his interpretation in a somewhat speculative
light: if this were established from Nietzsche’s texts as the sort of view he holds, it
would make sense of some of Nietzsche’s most prominent claims and his
distinctive style of writing philosophy.
Peter Poellner’s contribution to the volume seeks to clarify the normative
grounds and some of the contents of Nietzsche’s own evaluative commitments.
There have been attempts to ground Nietzsche’s own values in the psychology of
the will to power, which on one plausible interpretation is a type of second-order
desire, the desire to attain ends by one’s own activity, and by overcoming
obstacles to one’s ends. But for Poellner this notion generates insufficient constraints on kinds of evaluation, letting in too wide a range of value systems, many
of which Nietzsche explicitly opposes. Poellner looks not primarily at Nietzsche’s
reflection on the nature of values as such, rather at his own direct first-order
evaluations of various phenomena such as music and the sound of the spoken
German language. Here we find that Nietzsche’s remarks revolve around a
notion of taste, which always concerns affective responses. Things are judged
‘disgusting’, for instance, and a wide range of similarly affective terms occurs. In a
manner in some ways parallel with Railton, Poellner argues that Nietzsche’s
reasons for evaluative distinctions among first-order values are ultimately to be
found in what he calls ‘essentially world-involving affective experiences’, which
are best analysed as aesthetic in a broad but clearly delimited sense. Nietzsche’s
ethics can therefore be said to be aestheticist, in that his evaluations are grounded
in affective responses to the expressive features of things, features that ‘express an
actual or possible interiority, a mental life’. Nietzsche’s evaluations can be
veridical to the extent that they are grounded in adequate responses to the mental
life of which things are expressive. The final sections of the essay seek to show that
and why the most significant positive and negative values are, for Nietzsche,
essentially associated with human or relevantly similar subjectivity. While his
ideas and arguments on this issue warrant the judgement that Nietzsche’s ethics is
humanist, his humanism differs from mainstream enlightenment humanism—
say, of Kantian provenance—in important and illuminating ways.
Simon Robertson’s starting point is what is often labelled the ‘scope problem’.
Commentators tend to agree that Nietzsche is an ardent critic of ‘morality’ and
that he champions some alternative ideal, but there is considerable disagreement
over how precisely to characterize Nietzsche’s critical target and thereby limit the
scope of his critique in a way that distinguishes it from the positive ideal.
Robertson outlines some prominent responses to the scope problem, notably
those of Philippa Foot, Maudemarie Clark, and Brian Leiter. Robertson argues
that, although none of these approaches is satisfactory on its own, elements of each
can be retained, and that the resulting interpretation will show Nietzsche’s
positive stance to be a ‘quasi-aesthetic individualist perfectionism’. Foot’s suggestion is that Nietzsche’s own evaluative project is quasi-aesthetic, and that from this
14
Christopher Janaway and Simon Robertson
standpoint he is critical of all morality. However, by construing morality in terms
of a conception of justice as presupposing equality between individuals, she
demarcates Nietzsche’s target too narrowly. Clark’s reading counters this by
trading on Bernard Williams’ distinction between the moral and the ethical.
According to Williams an ethical scheme is ‘any scheme for regulating the
relations between people that works through informal sanctions and internalized
dispositions’, while morality is one particular version of such a regulatory scheme,
characterized by the notions of categorical obligation and blame. On this basis
Clark argues that we can see that Nietzsche adopts an ethical position in his
opposition to morality, rather than advocacy of a mere ruthless egoism. But this
faces the criticism that Nietzsche’s ideal looks to be too individualistic to count as
ethical on such a characterization. Leiter argues that Nietzsche opposes ‘morality
in the pejorative sense’, circumscribed by particular descriptive and normative
characteristics which Robertson debates in detail. He agrees with the claim that
Nietzsche objects to ideals and values that are detrimental to the highest forms of
human excellence, but emphasizes further features of morality as especially
objectionable to Nietzsche: its claims to normative authority and universal
jurisdiction. Nietzsche’s positive ideal is the quasi-aesthetic imperative to perfect
oneself. It lacks the distinctive features of morality to which Nietzsche objects, but
cannot be construed as an ethical system in the terms advanced by Clark.
The essays by Alan Thomas and Nadeem Hussain are united in their concentration on the interpretation of Nietzsche’s metaethical views. Both reflect
debates in recent analytic philosophy concerning non-cognitivism and fictionalism in particular, and a move in recent Nietzsche studies to situate Nietzsche
with respect to these debates.
Nadeem Hussain argues, contra a line of interpretation recently developed by
Maudemarie Clark and David Dudrick (2007), that Nietzsche is not a noncognitivist about normative claims. Clark and Dudrick agree with Hussain and
others that the Nietzsche of Human, All Too Human is both a cognitivist and an
error theorist: our normative claims express cognitive states, like belief, which
purport to represent the world; but, since (given Nietzsche’s naturalistically
driven anti-realism) there are no (irreducibly) normative properties, these claims
are systematically false. Nonetheless, Clark and Dudrick contend, by the time of
The Gay Science Nietzsche gives up his error-theoretic stance, in part because he
relinquishes cognitivism in favour of a view akin to contemporary forms of noncognitivism, such that normative claims have a primarily non-cognitive function
and express non-cognitive states. Hussain argues, however, that there is inadequate textual evidence to support Nietzsche’s commitment to the basic framework, semantic or psychological, this non-cognitivism implies, and moreover
that Nietzsche’s vocabulary of ‘passions’ and ‘projection’ fails to vindicate a noncognitivist reading more in line with that sometimes associated with the eighteenth-century precursor of contemporary non-cognitivism, Hume. Indeed,
Hussain concludes, Nietzsche retains his error-theoretic leanings throughout
Introduction
15
The Gay Science and on, the subplot being that the account Hussain has pressed
elsewhere—in which Nietzsche combines a global error theory about value and
normativity with a fictionalist rejoinder (Hussain 2007)—remains a viable interpretation.
In our next essay, however, Alan Thomas questions this fictionalist approach,
on both interpretative and philosophical grounds, and, like Railton and Poellner,
suggests that Nietzsche may instead endorse a form of subjective realism akin to
some more recent sensibility theories about ethics and aesthetics. According to
Hussain’s fictionalist reading, Nietzschean free spirits engage in honest illusions in
which they regard the values they create as valuable even though they know that
nothing is valuable in itself. However, Thomas argues firstly, although Hussain’s
account may explain how by engaging in evaluative fictions Nietzsche’s free spirits
create new values that then replace the moral values they reject, it cannot explain an
important yet crucially different mode and outcome of revaluation: namely, how
some of our existing but life-denying values might be reinterpreted in life-enhancing ways and thus retained, rather than rejected outright and replaced. Thomas
then considers the prospects for fictionalism as a free-standing metaethical position aside from Nietzsche, but argues that, since this faces some serious difficulties
anyway, interpretative charity calls on us to consider whether there is an alternative metaethical approach suiting Nietzsche’s revaluative purposes. The positive
proposal is that Nietzsche’s error theoretic commitments about value are localized
rather than global and that he may well endorse a eudaimonistic conception of
value. As Thomas explicates it, this comprises a form of subjective realism:
subjective to the extent that all values are perspectival and constitutively tied to
agents’ responses; yet realist, not in the sense that values just are (or are otherwise
reducible to) subjective states of agents, but in that what is valuable depends on
both the properties an agent responds to and the response itself being an exercise
of virtue that is internally connected to the agent’s flourishing.
Bernard Reginster’s essay concentrates on one of the central targets of
Nietzsche’s critique of values, the ‘morality of compassion’ as put forward by
Nietzsche’s chief historical opponent, Schopenhauer. One of Nietzsche’s main
objections to Schopenhauer’s theory of compassion is that it rests on an indiscriminate devaluation of suffering. Another, more elusive, objection is that
Schopenhauerian compassion fosters selflessness, understood as a kind of selfdevaluation. In his essay Reginster focuses on this second objection, suggesting
that at least some of the elusive character of this objection may be explained by
the fact that both Schopenhauer and Nietzsche operate with several distinct
concepts of selflessness. Schopenhauer misleadingly assimilates ascetic selflessness, a loss of any sense of self, which devalues interests or will per se, and
compassionate selflessness, which devalues interests insofar as they are one’s own.
Reginster analyses Schopenhauer’s contrast between egoism and compassion,
locating a crucial assumption Schopenhauer makes: that egoism involves the
specific illusion of taking the personal significance that my own individual
16
Christopher Janaway and Simon Robertson
interests have for me as something real or genuine. Schopenhauer thus ascribes to
the compassionate agent a kind of selflessness that is resistant to the charge of
being ultimately egoistic (expanding self-interest by expanding the boundaries of
the self beyond the individual), and is rather concerned with the dissolution of
those boundaries. But this, Reginster, argues, leads to a deep, if less than fully
explicit, point behind Nietzsche’s objection to selflessness. Schopenhauerian
compassion cannot be altruistic because it cannot reflect a proper appreciation
of the personal significance another person’s interests have for her. Thus the
compassionate selflessness that Schopenhauer takes to be essential to altruism
turns out to be incompatible with it.
The next two essays in the collection, by Christopher Janaway and Lanier
Anderson, bring Nietzsche’s own conception, or conceptions, of self under
scrutiny. Two prominent features of Nietzsche’s thought here present conundrums for interpreters. On the one hand his naturalist project looks to be
eliminativist with respect to anything that might be called a self. He frequently
rails against conceptions such as ‘subject’, ‘I’, or ‘soul’: there is no such thing, and
each human being is no genuine unity, merely a composite of drives or instincts
with a physiological basis in an organism. On the other hand, Nietzsche’s
positive conception of value invokes notions such as ‘self-affirmation’ and
‘becoming who you are’, which appear to suggest an attitude of reflectiveness
and a state of unity that might be constitutive of a self. As Alexander Nehamas
(1985: 182) has put it ‘The unity of the self . . . is not something given but
something achieved, not a beginning but a goal’. Some have found it puzzling
how there can be such a goal for a composite of drives, rather than for something
that is already in some sense a self.
Christopher Janaway arrives at these issues from the starting point of
Nietzsche’s positive conceptions of human greatness, in a discussion that in
certain respects intersects with Robertson’s notion of an ‘individualistic perfectionism’. Nietzsche presents as an ideal the ability to affirm oneself, or one’s life,
as a whole, without wanting anything to be different, an ability that could be
tested by entertaining the thought of ‘eternal recurrence’. To be capable of such
self-affirmation would be the most valuable state for a human being; but only
certain rare individuals would have reason to want to be in such a state. On the
other hand, Nietzsche sometimes talks of greatness in terms of properties of, and
relations between, a human being’s drives or instincts: the ‘highest’ human being
would have strong drives, a multiplicity of drives, and internal opposition
between drives that were harnessed into a unity. As to what brings about or
constitutes the unity among drives that is requisite for greatness, Nietzsche
appears to vacillate: sometimes it is a matter of chance, at other times it seems
to be a task whose achievement involves conscious agency of a kind that some
naturalist readings wish to deny. A central question for the essay is how the ideal
of self-affirmation and the ideal of greatness as an internal constitution of the
drives relate to one another. Janaway argues that Nietzschean drives and instincts
Introduction
17
are dispositions of a certain kind that are not fully within the agent’s rational
control. However, they are mutable for Nietzsche and are subject to alteration by
cultural environments. Drives or instincts may be strengthened, weakened, or
even die out given the degree of nourishment they receive from their environment. Hence instincts such as those of ‘self-denial’ and ‘self-sacrifice’ that
Nietzsche links with morality, may be culturally acquired. Moral beliefs and
other consciously held moral attitudes must be seen as effects of states of the
drives, but also as causally influencing the states of the drives, since Nietzsche
regards morality as both a symptom of decline in human flourishing and a danger
to it. The converse of this is that an attitude of self-affirmation can function both
as a symptom of the state of the drives characteristic of greatness, and as a
promoter of that state.
In historical terms Nietzsche stands in an interesting position vis-à-vis Kantianism, which in one way or another dominates the nineteenth century. Nietzsche
radically opposes Kantian ethics, yet sets a high value on autonomous agency,
itself the centre piece of Kantian ethics. Taking this as his starting point, Lanier
Anderson poses the question: ‘What is a Nietzschean self?’ He first summarizes
some of the debate concerning this issue in recent interpretive literature. Many
passages in Nietzsche’s texts suggest a sceptical eliminativism or reduction of the
self to subpersonal drives: on this reading there is for Nietzsche no self capable of
‘standing back’ from naturally occurring desires or inclinations. Yet core
Nietzschean doctrines (self-overcoming, perspectivist objectivity) seem to require
substantial self-management; Kantians, or those influenced by more or less Kantian considerations, insist that only a separate, transcendental self could play this
role. Anderson’s line is to resist both naturalistic reductionism and transcendentalism. Through analysis of the nature of drives and affects, and then of their
interactions, he shows how the Nietzschean self emerges as a numerically distinct
psychological object, over and above its constituent drives and affects. However,
this minimal self lacks the strong features of a transcendental ‘I’; it is complex, not
simple, and its boundaries do not coincide with those of consciousness. Nevertheless, the resulting conception of the self affords an adequate basis for understanding Nietzsche’s valuation of autonomy (self-governance). Anderson
emphasizes the sense in which Nietzsche operates not just with a descriptive
conception of the self but with a normative sense of selfhood, in which it is seen
as a kind of task, whose achievement may be attained by some human beings but
not others. He argues that a coherent Nietzschean position on the achievement of
selfhood emerges if one avoids both naturalistic reductionism and transcendentalism: someone who already is a self in the descriptive sense can be said in
addition to have created the self in the normative sense.
The essay by Richard Schacht also puts the issue of naturalism centre stage.
Schacht argues that Nietzsche is a kind of philosophical naturalist, for whom
normativity (along with all other human phenomena) must be reconceived
18
Christopher Janaway and Simon Robertson
naturalistically. However, while Nietzsche intends his position to be scientifically
informed, his naturalism is not scientistic. Nietzsche’s talk of ‘translating man
back into nature’ should not, for Schacht, be read as privileging the modes of
description and explanation peculiar to the natural sciences. Similarly,
Nietzsche’s talk of being ‘hardened in the discipline of science’ can be best
interpreted as his advocating the virtues of intellectual conscience and toughminded honesty. His naturalism insists upon the mundanely developmental
origins of everything human, but recognizes the historically and culturally
emergent character of much of that development. It further involves conceiving
much of human reality in terms of forms of life and the sensibilities associated
with them—social, cultural, artistic, and religious—to the comprehension of
which the various natural sciences and other Wissenschaften (sciences, or better:
cognitive disciplines) can contribute, but cannot do full justice. Nietzsche is
concerned with the historical development of meanings, in a way that scientistic
naturalism cannot capture, and to this end his procedure employs ‘a multiplicity
of differing perspectives, “optics” and sensibilities in its interpretive attempt to
broaden and deepen our understanding of ourselves’. Schacht goes on to argue
that the conception of normativity suggested by Nietzsche’s ‘naturalization of
morality’ is one that situates and reconceives normativity within this human
context. Taking his departure from Christine Korsgaard’s discussion of the
possible sources of normative force, Schacht argues that Nietzsche rejects traditional accounts in favour of the idea that evaluative norms have authority or
‘make a claim upon us’ only to the extent that we occupy the sensibility that has
historically developed as part of some particular human form of life.
BIBLIOGRAPHY
In Nietzsche
Beyond Good and Evil, ed. Rolf-Peter Horstmann and Judith Norman, trans. Judith
Norman. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1886/2002.
On the Genealogy of Morality, trans. Maudemarie Clark and Alan J. Swensen. Indianapolis: Hackett, 1887/1998.
The Gay Science, ed. Bernard Williams, trans. Josephine Nauckhoff and Adrian del Caro.
Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1882–7/2001.
The Will to Power, ed. Walter Kaufmann, trans. Walter Kaufmann and R. J. Hollingdale.
New York: Vintage Books, 1883–8/1968.
‘Twilight of the Idols’, in The Anti-Christ, Ecce Homo, Twilight of the Idols, and Other
Writings, ed. Aaron Ridley, trans. Judith Norman. Cambridge: Cambridge University
Press, 1888/2005.
Introduction
19
Other sources
Clark, Maudemarie, and Dudrick, David (2007). ‘Nietzsche and moral objectivity: the
development of Nietzsche’s metaethics’, in Leiter and Sinhababu (2007: 192–226).
Gemes, Ken, and May, Simon (eds) (2009). Nietzsche on Freedom and Autonomy. Oxford:
Oxford University Press.
—— and Richardson, John (eds) (forthcoming). The Oxford Handbook of Nietzsche.
Oxford: Oxford University Press.
Hurka, Tom (2007). ‘Nietzsche: perfectionist’, in Leiter and Sinhababu (2007: 9–31).
Hussain, Nadeem J. Z. (2007). ‘Honest illusion: valuing for Nietzsche’s free spirits’, in
Leiter and Sinhababu (2007: 157–91).
Janaway, Christopher (2007). Beyond Selflessness: Reading Nietzsche’s Genealogy. Oxford:
Oxford University Press.
Kaufmann, Walter (1974). Nietzsche: Philosopher, Psychologist, Antichrist, 4th edn. Princeton: Princeton University Press.
Leiter, Brian (2000). ‘Nietzsche’s metaethics: against the privilege readings’, European
Journal of Philosophy, 8: 277–97.
—— (2002). Nietzsche on Morality. London: Routledge.
—— (forthcoming). ‘Nietzsche’s naturalism reconsidered’, in Gemes and Richardson
(forthcoming).
—— and Sinhababu, Neil (eds) (2007). Nietzsche and Morality. Oxford: Oxford University Press.
Nehamas, Alexander (1985). Nietzsche: Life as Literature. Cambridge, MA: Harvard
University Press.
Owen, David, and Robertson, Simon (forthcoming). ‘Nietzsche’s influence on analytic
philosophy’, in Gemes and Richardson (forthcoming).
Pippin, Robert (2010). Nietzsche, Psychology, and First Philosophy. Chicago: Chicago
University Press.
Reginster, Bernard (2007). ‘The will to power and the ethics of creativity’, in Leiter and
Sinhababu (2007: 32–56).
Ridley, Aaron (2005). ‘Nietzsche and the re-evaluation of values’, Proceedings of the
Aristotelian Society, 105: 171–91.
Robertson, Simon (2009). ‘Nietzsche’s ethical revaluation’, Journal of Nietzsche Studies,
37: 66–90.
Schacht, Richard (1983). Nietzsche. London: Routledge and Kegan Paul.
Williams, Bernard (1995). ‘Nietzsche’s minimalist moral psychology’, reprinted in
Making Sense of Humanity. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 65–76.
2
Nietzsche’s Normative Theory?
The Art and Skill of Living Well
Peter Railton
1 . INTRODUCTION
As someone who has always been puzzled by the question of how best to
understand, and learn from, Nietzsche’s ‘critique of morality’, I welcome this
opportunity to enter into dialogue with scholars of Nietzsche, and to think with
them out loud about the question of whether one might be able to associate a
coherent normative theory with Nietzsche. A scholar of Nietzsche I emphatically
am not, and wiser heads might tell me that seeking a coherent account of
Nietzsche’s wide-ranging critique is chasing a will o’ the wisp, or missing the
point. But I am inexperienced enough to think the effort worth trying, and
foolish enough to think I can begin to see a way to carry it out. What I will
venture is built entirely ‘on spec’, as builders say—offered on the market, with no
buyer in sight.
I will start out with some ‘design requirements’ for a satisfactory interpretation
of his critique of morality—insofar as I understand it.1 These are some of the
chief problems that it seems to me must be solved, or dissolved, if a coherent and
philosophically interesting interpretation is to be built. Once these requirements
are before us, we can proceed to collect, and then assemble, philosophical
materials that might enable us to meet them. The aim, I should stress, is not to
defend Nietzsche’s views, but to construct a distinctively Nietzschean viewpoint that might be defended.
1 I will spare the reader the repetition of this qualification in what follows, but it should
throughout be understood as in place.
Nietzsche’s Normative Theory?
21
2. FOUR PROBLEMS FOR AN INTERPRETATION
OF NIETZSCHE’S CRITIQUE OF MORALITY
The ‘truth problem’
Certain key elements of Nietzsche’s critique are historical and philological. In his
genealogy, for example, he claims to have laid bare the narrow-minded vengefulness towards everything noble that is the secret history of contemporary morality.
A critique of this kind appears to presuppose at a minimum a distinction between
appearance and reality, and, further, to stake a claim to being on the side of reality,
of getting things right—for example, to be giving ‘a real history of morality’ (GM
Preface, 7), or to be ‘absorbing facts without interpreting them falsely, and without
losing caution, patience and subtlety in the effort to understand them’ (A 52).
But how are such claims to be reconciled with another important strand of
Nietzsche’s thought, namely, his ‘perspectivism’ about truth? If his genealogy has
validity only from a certain perspective, what claim to authority would it have for
those who do not share this standpoint? How could it purport to be a true history
of morality, sans phrase?
Perhaps he would claim only that his is the perspective of ‘free spirits’: those
select few with the strength of mind and character to follow the arduous and
unsettling intellectual journey Nietzsche lays out ahead of us. But how would the
fact that his genealogy rings true only to those who are prepared to ‘sail away
right over morality’ do anything to show that it affords us entry into ‘a profounder
world of insight’, an ‘immense and almost new domain of dangerous knowledge’
(BGE 23)? Would we be impressed with a critique of science that had force only
for those individuals antecedently disposed to ‘sail away right over’ the norms of
the scientific inquiry?
The ‘morality problem’
Suppose that Nietzsche were able to solve the truth problem, and to make a
compelling case that his account affords profounder knowledge. Still, a critique as
such is merely a negative enterprise, and the ultimate goal of his genealogical
inquiry appears to be something much grander: a wholesale revision of what to
think about how to live. This raises the question of whether, instead of transcending morality, Nietzsche might be advancing a morality of his own. An
aristocratic morality, to be sure, and one he saw as profoundly out of tune with
the temper of his times, but a morality nonetheless. There is ‘a distinction of rank
between man and man’, he writes, ‘and consequently between morality and
morality’ (BGE 228). Is his normative view then simply a higher morality?
Nietzsche’s language is hardly devoid of normative imperatives. Within the
first 45 sections of Beyond Good and Evil alone we learn that ‘new philosophers’
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must: ‘declare war, relentless war to the knife’ against the Christian doctrine of
‘soul atomism’ (12); ‘regard even the emotions of hatred, envy, covetousness, and
imperiousness as life-conditioning emotions, as factors which must be present,
fundamentally and essentially, in the general economy of life (which must,
therefore, be further developed if life is to be further developed)’ (23); ‘surmount’
existing morality such that it is ‘mercilessly called to account, and brought to
judgment’ (32–33); ‘subject’ themselves to their ‘own tests’ to show that they are
‘destined for independence and command, and do so at the right time’, not
avoiding these challenges, however dangerous and difficult they prove (41), and
undergo a development of ‘spirit’ and ‘inventive faculty’ such that their ‘will to
life had to be increased to the unconditioned will to power’ (44).
Moreover, this ‘must’ does not appear to be merely an expression of the selfinterest of the ‘new philosophers’. Speaking of himself, Nietzsche proclaims,
‘I feel under obligation almost as much to them as to ourselves (we free spirits
who are their heralds and forerunners), to sweep away from ourselves altogether a
stupid old prejudice and misunderstanding’ (44). And it looks as if the morality
of those of higher rank is an ideal for the rest of us, who do not share in, but
nonetheless can appreciate and marvel at, their greatness. In a passage reminiscent
of Kant’s famous remark that ‘Two things fill the mind with ever new and
increasing admiration and reverence . . . the starry heavens above and the moral law
within me’ (CPrR 5: 162), such that ‘my spirit bows’ before those who enact
‘sublime’ duty (CPrR 5: 76), Nietzsche writes, ‘One can never cease wondering
when once one has got eyes for beholding this marvel!’ (24). If one has had a
glimpse of this higher form of life, ‘once drifted hither with one’s bark’, one will
think, with Nietzsche, ‘well! very good! now let us set our teeth firmly! let us open
our eyes and keep our hand fast on the helm!’ to attempt the perilous voyage to
the world it holds before us (23).
The ‘normativity problem’
Suppose that Nietzsche were able to convince us that his critique does not yield a
replacement morality, with the ‘unconditional will to power’ simply standing in
for the ‘unconditional good will’. Still, a serious problem would remain.
Nietzsche was a pioneering naturalist (Leiter 2002), and among the first to
point out that, once we see ourselves as part of the order of nature—as one
species among others rather than a mixture of God and mud—many of our
normative notions seem at risk. For example, one can ask: Where in the portrait
of the natural world and its laws, and of the human organism and its physiochemical nature, does one find anything corresponding to free will as we understand it? Or to autonomy—the capacity to be governed by reason according to
principles we impose upon ourselves, not merely dominated by causal laws and
lacking ultimate responsibility for our actions? As Nietzsche writes, seeking to
deflate the pious Christian’s pretense of moral action:
Nietzsche’s Normative Theory?
23
. . . in glorifying God they glorify themselves; . . . they assume the grand air of men
struggling for virtue, of men engaging in a war that virtue may prevail. ‘We live, we
die, we sacrifice ourselves for the good ’ (—‘the truth’, ‘the light’, ‘the kingdom of God’):
in point of fact, they simply do what they cannot help doing. (A 44)
But doesn’t such thorough-going naturalism also threaten Nietzsche’s positive
view? For isn’t he making recommendations of his own, pointing to reasons to
reject the ‘strange simplification and falsification man lives’ in acting ‘for the
good’ or ‘for God’ (BGE 24)? But what if, by our nature, we ‘cannot help doing’
what we do, and all human activity is merely the inexorable consequence of our
animal nature, with no more rational autonomy than the instinctual behavior of
beasts? What then becomes of the possibility of normative action-guidance—of
acting for a reason rather than simply as a result of causal forces? And what
ground does Nietzsche himself stand on—what role is there for a critique of the
inevitable? It will not help him to claim that he is speaking only to an audience of
a special few, since they are made—better made, to be sure—of the same animal
stuff as the rest of us. How could his doctrines have any critical or normative
force for them, either?
The ‘value problem’
Hostile as he is to morality and associated notions of agency, Nietzsche seems
quite hospitable to notions of value, at least of the non-moral kind, calling for the
replacement of ‘good and evil’ with ‘good and bad’. He does not hesitate to speak
of people or lives as of greater or lesser worth and indeed speaks not of the
abolition of value but of a ‘Revaluation of All Values’—‘I see a fundamentally
different valuation cutting across all the moral idiosyncrasies’ (WP 69n, 382). Of
his ‘fundamental innovations’, he writes, ‘In place of “moral values”, purely
naturalistic values’ (WP 462). Yet not mere replacement of moral values, but
improvement over them—a clear hierarchy of value: ‘The moral man is a lower
species than the immoral’ (WP 382). With the hierarchy of value, and the
‘peculiar, seductive, dangerous ideal’ (GS 382) it represents, comes a hierarchy
of people and their value:
Every enhancement of the type ‘man’ has so far been the work of an aristocratic society—
and it will be so again and again—a society that believes in the long ladder of an order of
rank and differences in value between man and man . . . (BGE 257)
The immoral, noble man, then, is an enhancement, not a mere alternative to
the moral and base. He might turn his back on Christian ‘Virtue’, yet he will
possess ‘new virtues’, non-moral ones: ‘A virtue must be our own invention, our
most necessary self-expression and self-defense’ (A 11).
But are values and virtues, new or old, any more compatible with thoroughgoing naturalism than autonomy? Just where in a world of purely natural, causal
processes and entities are ‘naturalistic values’ to be found? And how could they
24
Peter Railton
enter into or shape our lives, or be part of something that deserves to be called
‘self-expression’?
And what could it mean to say that the task ‘demanded’ of ‘the true philosopher’ is ‘to create values’ (BGE 211)? We can, by gaining experience or knowledge, come to re-evaluate our priorities and commitments, paying attention to
values we had neglected or simply been unable to see and appreciate. Or we
might come to reject as false or devalue as insignificant values we had cherished.
But there is no suggestion in this way of seeing things that the underlying values
themselves have changed, much less that new values are being invented or that
anything remotely like this could be within our power.
Moreover, isn’t value inherently general? What, after all, marks the difference
between a judgement of personal taste and a judgement of aesthetic value? As Kant
pointed out, the latter, but not the former, lodges a claim that others should share
one’s appreciation. We can expand upon this thought by saying that a judgement
of value places a claim upon oneself as well as others—whether or not one feels like
it at the time, one ought to show respect for that which one recognizes as having
value. ‘Respect,’ Kant wrote, ‘is a tribute that we cannot refuse to pay to merit,
whether we want to or not; we may indeed withhold it outwardly but we still
cannot help feeling it inwardly’ (CPrR 5: 77). When Nietzsche speaks of noble
and base, or higher and lower, and of what, once we have glimpsed it from our
wandering bark, we cannot help but find compelling, isn’t he deploying just such
an impersonal, preference-independent notion of value?
And yet elsewhere Nietzsche insists that any ‘good in itself’ that purports to be
‘universal and impersonally valid’ is a ‘chimera’ and ‘expression of decline’
(A 11). It won’t suffice to defend this claim to say that only certain, higher
individuals are able to appreciate the value that lies in a life of unconditioned ‘will
to power’. For it is no part of the notion of something being ‘good in itself’ or
even ‘universal and impersonally valid’ that everyone, however limited or benighted, will be able to appreciate it. If Nietzsche’s ‘new values’ and ‘new virtues’
are to have the standing and normative force of genuine values and virtues, such
that they could create ‘demands’ upon those of us—the ‘new philosophers’—able
to glimpse them, mustn’t he, on pain of rendering this demand empty, reject a
conception of them as depending for their existence and nature entirely upon the
personal preferences or choices of those individuals?
3 . TWO FAMILIES OF NORMATIVE CONCEPTS
These are problems enough to keep us busy. On to the task of assembling the
materials with which to build possible solutions.
Let’s begin with a distinction that will be fundamental for all that follows. The
realm of normative thought and assessment involves certain generic concepts,
such as ought and reason (to act, to believe, etc.), that are passepartout and figure
Nietzsche’s Normative Theory?
25
pervasively in our explications of other normative concepts and their interrelations. But this realm is also divided into two large domains, picked out by
two categories—families, really—of normative concepts. The families are etymologically distinct,2 a point Nietzsche would have appreciated, and one can
learn a good deal about a normative theory by asking which roles or priorities it
attributes to concepts drawn from one or the other of these two families. Perhaps
the best-known such example is the contrast between deontological and teleological
moral theories, which differ with respect to the relative priority of category
1 versus category 2 normative concepts.
Category 1: normative concepts proper,3 e.g. rule, norm, standard, law,4 right,
wrong, correct, incorrect, rectify, regulate, require, permit, prohibit, duty, obligation.
Category 2: evaluative concepts, e.g. good, bad,5 noble, base, fine, magnificent, great, desirable, rewarding, harming, virtue, virtuous, vice, vicious,
worthy, worthless, admirable, detestable, lovable, hateful, beautiful, ugly,
sublime, disgusting, amusing, dull, intelligent, stupid, credible, reliable, trustworthy, untrustworthy, compelling, strong, weak, healthy, unhealthy.
Philosophers discussing normativity usually focus on the first family, since
these are directive concepts, often explicated in terms of the practical ‘ought’. But
this has the effect of skewing discussions of normativity in such a way as to make
some understandings of the normative realm more readily available than others.6
To start with a focus on the second yields an importantly different perspective, as
a brief survey of their characteristic features reveals (Table 1).
2 Since this is a paper on Nietzsche, it might not be amiss to note that each of these categories
also shares family resemblances in their etymologies. Category 1 concepts largely derive from IndoEuropean roots related to straightness and squareness (and their opposites), and tools for measuring
these. Category 2 concepts largely derive from roots relating to wholeness, strength, power, firmness,
completeness, virility, activity, and so on. (For discussion, see Watkins 2000). Though these are not
the etymologies Nietzsche favoured, they do help explain why Nietzsche felt antipathy to the tidy,
rule-bound first family, and sympathy for the virile and unruly second family. Nietzsche (though
one hesitates to say it) was no square.
3 I use the qualified expression ‘normative concepts proper’ since category 2 are equally entitled
to be called ‘normative concepts’ in the broad sense—not only are they on the ‘value’ side of the
‘fact/value’ distinction, but they also are practically action-guiding, as I will argue below. Category
1 concepts do, however, characteristically involve norms or standards in an essential way, and are
appropriately called ‘normative concepts’ in the narrow or ‘proper’ sense.
4 ‘Law’ is here understood in the legal or normative sense, not in the sense of a ‘law of nature’ or
‘law of survival’. Normative laws are supposed to bind one’s conduct through the exercise of will;
natural laws bind one’s conduct in a very different sense: they express the regularities of the
operation of natural forces, which need have no element of wilfulness or thoughtfulness about
them. Nietzsche uses the word in both ways. In the legal sense, he generally casts scorn; about the
natural sense, he generally is enthusiastic. We will return to this question briefly below.
5 ‘Good’ and ‘bad’ are used here in the non-moral sense, as a direct form of evaluation, rather
than one mediated by a moral judgement, e.g. of rightness or wrongness. The same is true for the
other evaluative terms on this list, e.g. ‘admirable’, ‘detestable’, ‘virtue’, ‘virtuous’, etc.
6 For an important exception to this dominant tendency, and a critique of duty-centred
morality, see Williams (1985).
Peter Railton
26
Table 1 The characteristic features of the two families of normative concepts
Category
Features
Category 1
Fit
Voluntary
Discrete
Exclusionary
Formal correctness, e.g. conformity to a standard, ruled in (permitted or
required) by a law or norm versus ruled out (prohibited or excluded).
‘Ought’ implies ‘can’; characteristically associated with acts within the scope
of the will, and compliance therefore can be required, a duty or obligation;
respect as Kantian observantia, the Theory of Right (MM Part I).
Norms and rules are typically binary or discontinuous; characteristically
function in the guidance of action or deliberation as conditions that must
be met, standards, requirements, directives, or side constraints.
Conflicting rules or duties create ‘practical contradictions’, requiring
adjudication or verdict to yield an overall assessment or practical conclusion.
Category 2
Fit
Non-voluntary
Continuous
Non-exclusionary
Substantive match, e.g. realizing or harmonizing with a ‘nature’, telos, end,
or purpose, fulfilling a lack or meeting a need, completing or perfecting a
whole; fitness as a substantial condition (e.g. health).
Characteristically associated with non-voluntary states, attitudes, or
motivations as well as acts: the good attracts approval, admiration,
respect, desire; the bad attracts disapprobation, disgust, aversion; the
beautiful attracts appreciation and yields enjoyment; the excellent
produces admiration and pride; the desirable yields wanting or longing;
the credible gives rise to confidence, trust, or belief; the evident yields
conviction or certainty; the sublime awes; compliance typically cannot be
required—one cannot produce at will that which is excellent, beautiful,
or desirable, nor can one be required to appreciate, esteem, enjoy, admire,
desire, trust, or find disgusting; respect as Kantian reverentia, the Theory
of Virtue (MM Part II).
Values, ideals, ends, etc. can be realized to greater or lesser degrees;
characteristically function in the guidance of action or deliberation as
goals to aim at or goods to appreciate, rather than constraints, rules, or
requirements; function as weights or vectors with relative or absolute
importance, favouring or disfavouring with variable strength.
Conflicting values can coexist and be promoted in a single act, event, object,
or individual; recognizing a conflict among goods need not be a defect,
and does not preclude combining and weighing.
For the purposes of this paper, let us suppose that Nietzsche’s critique of
autonomous agency and voluntariness has rendered category 1 concepts deeply
problematic, throwing traditional morality into doubt and making these concepts—
at least with their traditional understanding—unavailable for foundational use for his
own normative purposes.7 Still, with very few, mostly moral, exceptions, category
7 I emphasize foundational use here because there is no problem with Nietzsche continuing to use
category 1 concepts once these are ‘embedded’ within category 2 concepts. That is, if category
2 concepts set my aims—e.g. a person whose excellence I admire becomes for that reason a model
Nietzsche’s Normative Theory?
27
2 concepts would be unaffected and remain serviceable. Our task therefore is to ask
whether they could suffice to underwrite his critique of morality and explain the
normative force of his own enterprise.
4. EVALUATION AND ACTION—A SIMPLE EXAMPLE
Picture me passing down the corridor after teaching; exhausted, throat parched.
Seeing the common room door open, I enter, put my awkward armload of papers
down on the first available surface and head for the kitchen in the back. There
I open a cabinet but, finding no mug, hesitate briefly, open another cabinet,
pluck a disposable plastic cup from a nested stack, place it under the tap, fill it
with water, and drink.
Suppose that you have been watching me from a perspective that is, at least
locally, omniscient. You can perceive not only my outward behaviours, but also
observe everything taking place in my mind and body. You see how my visual
field changes as I scan the scene upon entering the common room, noticing an
empty tabletop in my peripheral vision, and focusing attention upon it, and how
I am experiencing the kinaesthetic sensation of the weight of my load of papers
and of my movements as I approach the table, extend and lower my arms, and
release my slipping grasp. When, with my hands now free, I open the first
cabinet, you see the thought flash through my mind, ‘Rats—no mug. Now
what?’, as well as the sudden recollection, ‘Ah. There are those left-over plastic
cups above the sink’. You observe my attention shift immediately to the over-sink
cabinet and see my almost-simultaneous extension of my left hand to open it
(‘automatically’, executing a ‘procedural memory’ of past cabinet openings)
while my right reaches out (equally ‘automatically’) to grasp the cup. ‘Good,
still here’, you hear me think when I see the cabinet swing open, and you detect
the presence of a tiny bit of pleasure at this fact. A moment or two later, you
perceive a larger, though still modest, pleasure when, having filled and hoisted
the cup, cool water bathes my throat.
I aspire to live up to—then category 1 concepts can come into play for assessing how well I am
succeeding in achieving my aims. A characteristic role of category 1 concepts is, after all, in relating
means to ends, and measuring whether the means is conducive towards realizing the end. An ideal,
or model, or end becomes a standard for action and, given this standard, certain things are required,
or permitted, or ruled out. Think of the sailor’s use of a compass and parallel rules in determining
whether she is managing to stay on a course for the destination she has set. Nietzsche is appealing to
this sort of embedded use of category 1 concepts within category 2 attitudes (in this case, respect and
contempt) when he writes:
The ‘free’ man, the owner of an enduring unbreakable will, by possessing this, also acquires his own
standard of value : he looks out from himself at others and confers respect or contempt. (GM II, 2)
I thank participants in the Moral Philosophy Club at the Centre for the Study of Mind in Nature
(University of Oslo) for helping me to clarify this point.
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Peter Railton
You could report that at no point in this sequence did I ever explicitly
deliberate, or make a decision, or formulate any express intention or plan.
Nothing like an ‘act of will’ seems to have occurred. The acts simply came
along one after another, cued and guided fairly directly by circumstances, how
I felt, what I saw, and what ‘occurred to me’ by way of thoughts and memories.
Even my momentary surprise and hesitation after failing to find my mug in the
expected spot didn’t precipitate a serious bout of deliberation. No sooner had the
question, ‘Now what?’, come to mind, than a pertinent bit of information
popped into consciousness answering it, after which I straightaway reached for
the cabinet. Despite this lack of deliberateness, you could see that I did not act
blindly, by mere reflex, or unintentionally. You can see that I was acting under
the idea of getting a drink of water, and that I could have told you as much had
you asked. When the smooth flow of this idea into action was stymied, I noticed
and regrouped.
Getting this drink was more than an idea, however; it was an active, attractive,
motivating goal. Not all goals are conscious, but this one happened to be, in part
because I had become aware of the sharpness of my thirst as soon as I stopped
lecturing. But although thirst is a physiological drive state brought on by
dehydration, I was not simply driven to drink. Thirst stimulated in me the
idea of having a drink of water and helped make it salient and attractive. As a
result, I acquired an active, self-intelligible desire to drink. Doubtless a host of
drives, desires, motives, aims, values, inhibitions, etc. also played a role, more or
less conscious, in shaping my conduct: my tacit aim of avoiding furniture, my
conscious desire to be rid of a heavy, slipping load, my inhibition against taking
someone else’s mug, etc. Although I didn’t do any conscious weighing of these
various motives or aims, your omniscient perspective on my psyche allowed you
to see that they all played some role in shaping what I noticed, thought,
remembered, considered, felt, or did, and that this role was roughly proportional
to their strength and urgency. In such ‘motivated cognition’ you observed a
constant and more or less effective interplay between perception, thought, desire,
and action, in which means were rapidly and intelligently matched with my end.
Moreover, because my attraction to the idea of having a drink cast a favourable
light upon the idea of locating my mug, as soon as I thought of this mug
I became motivated to find it, without need for a practical syllogism to mediate
this transfer of motive force from end to means. Not finding my mug, I quickly
shifted focus to finding another cup, and simultaneously wanted to find one:
I would have been frustrated if none were at hand and was (a tiny bit) satisfied
when I found one. In this way not only my perceptual beliefs, but also my
attention, motives, and feelings were constantly being adjusted to the changing
information I was receiving about my circumstances.
You are now in a position to make a variety of assessments or evaluations of my
thought and conduct. For example, you can ask how well I succeeded in
identifying and meeting my needs, how adequate my thought and behaviour
Nietzsche’s Normative Theory?
29
were to my purpose and circumstances. Were my sensory and kinaesthetic
impressions, perceptual system, beliefs, memory, and motor system adequate
to the task of navigating through my environment to locate and attain objects of
my needs and desires? Was my mind sufficiently focused to keep me ‘on task’,
and alert enough to notice when things were not going well? Did conscious
thought kick in when my routine procedure (finding and using my mug) was
thwarted and was it agile and imaginative enough to find a way out? Did I in the
end succeed in satisfying my most urgent need or desire?
Although I won’t claim great credit for this simple sequence of mental and
physical activity, I could certainly have been less competent as an agent or
performed more poorly. I might have been unable to stay focused, forgotten
why I entered the common room, and ended up standing uselessly about,
casting about for some way to reconstruct my purpose. I could have been so
rigid in my routine or so unimaginative that I simply ground to a halt,
flummoxed, when my familiar mug could not be found. Or been so out of
touch with my own body that I failed altogether to notice my need for water in
the first place. Or been so poor in coordinating visual and kinaesthetic feedback
that I walked smack into the door frame rather than passing through it. Or
been so prone to over-intellectualizing that I got lost in an endless mental
regress, deliberating about whether to deliberate about whether to deliberate
about getting a drink of water. Or been so lacking in resolve that no sooner had
a purpose begun to form in my mind than I would second-guess it and be left
dithering, as thirsty as ever. Or been so impervious to new experience that
I failed to notice that the kitchen tap had been changed, and operated it as
I would the old tap, filling the cup with hot water and scalding my tongue.
These would all be ways in which, despite a benign environment, my own
capacities, thoughts, and actions could have led me to fail to accomplish my
aims or meet my needs.
You could also make various assessments, if you had a mind to, of the feelings
or emotions I experienced and of my responses to them. These too are part of my
competence and performance as an agent. Was I so fearful that, at the least
unexpected event, I seized up with anxiety despite the absence of any real risk?
Were my motives proportional to my needs or aims and suitably responsive to
changing circumstances? Were my surprise and annoyance at not finding my
mug well-modulated, spurring me to find an alternative solution, or were they so
unmodulated that I flew into a self-defeating rage? Was I able to appreciate the
modest pleasure of drinking or was I so mechanically goal-directed that I barely
noticed it? Or so easily undone by this slight pleasure that I gulped compulsively
until I choked?
You could also assess my goals themselves. I felt a need for water, but perhaps
this was the result of some condition other than dehydration, and which required
much more urgent attention and would be unaffected by having a drink of water.
Was I oblivious to other needs, goals, or values of mine? Did they have a hand in
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Peter Railton
shaping my responses in rough proportion to their relevance, urgency, and
importance? Were unconscious goals at work that I would not or could not
consciously acknowledge or endorse? If you had a substantive theory of value—of
what was good for me, for example, or good, full stop—you could also assess my
motives, aims, and accomplishments in light of it.
All of these assessments concern, in some sense, how well I responded to what
it might please us to call reasons to act. But none of them presupposes that the
actions were under control of a faculty of reason or an autonomous self, in the
sense that excludes empirical determination. Much of what you evaluated in
assessing my responsiveness to my needs, goals, and circumstances was either
non-voluntary or took the form of freedom of spontaneity—doing what I wanted
to do because I wanted to do it, without compulsion or interference—rather than
some notional freedom from desire. You did not need to ask whether I acted ‘as
I ought and because I ought’. Indeed, apart from a few details about the linguistic
character of some of my thoughts and feelings, virtually everything you observed
would have been very much the same had I been a moderately intelligent ape
operating in familiar surroundings. (Offstage, Nietzsche might be heard to
comment that we all are closer to apes than we care to acknowledge.) Even so,
you could have assessed my perceiving, thinking, feeling, and acting—my
performance and competence—in essentially the same ways. In short, even if
we accept Nietzsche’s dismissal of rational self-determination or objective laws of
right conduct, a nuanced and wide-ranging critical perspective on how we act
and react remains possible.
Such an evaluative basis might be enough to sustain his critique of morality.
For we can ask, in just the evaluative terms considered above, whether individuals
who have internalized a ‘moral perspective’ on their lives—who think in terms
of, and are influenced by, moral thoughts, feelings, and motives—do more or less
well at realizing their individual or shared goals than those who have not. Are the
‘moralizers’ more, or less, effective in understanding and meeting their wants and
needs? Are those who respond to others in a way mediated by moral principles
more likely to understand the actual needs or desires of others than those
who respond to others via empathy and intuition? Are active moralizers more
or less responsive to their environment or in touch with their bodies? More or less
capable of learning from experience? More or less able to avoid becoming
trapped in repeated cycles of frustrated needs and toxic feelings? More or less
reflectively aware of what lies behind their values? More or less likely to become
entangled in self-defeating self-consciousness, second-guessing, or tied in knots
by their own deliberation? Do their actions tend to augment or undermine the
strength, happiness, and health of themselves or others? Do their wants track
their needs or what is substantively good for them? The answer to these questions
could support a compelling critique of morality as a way of life—because, for
example, morality might have effects that undermine our health and power or our
ability to achieve excellence, individually or collectively—without presupposing
Nietzsche’s Normative Theory?
31
any of the voluntaristic categories of normative assessment problematic from the
standpoint of Nietzschean naturalism.8
But the worry will be raised: How could this critique be normative or have
genuine authority if what it concerns is not voluntary, such that this critique does
not eventuate in category 1 claims about what we ought or ought not to do? How
could category 2 evaluations be ‘action-guiding’ in virtue of their normative
authority except through precisely the sort of free will and self-determining
agency Nietzsche attacks?9 To meet this worry, we must turn to a more impressive kind of example.
5 . EVALUATION AND ACTION—ADMIRATION,
TRUST, RELIANCE, CONFIRMATION
Forget about looking over my mental shoulder for a while, and try looking over
the mental shoulder of someone genuinely skilled in a given craft or art in the
midst of practising it well. Imagine a skilled mariner in a storm, bringing her
pitching and rolling schooner through breaking seas, eking everything she can
from the savage gale to claw her way upwind around the rocky headland and into
a safe anchorage.
From your (locally) omniscient perspective, you readily convince yourself that
the sequence of difficult but successful actions you are observing is the result of
great skill and knowledge, not accident. Watching this mariner in action, you
might naturally come to esteem or admire her ability, to respect her skill and
intelligence in her craft. Such attitudes would be quite warranted by your
evidence. You can also see just how intuitive yet non-mechanical her responses
are. She is not simply following routines or fixed rules, but constantly attending
to a large array of changing facts, improvising solutions, acting with firm resolve
and great, highly focused mental energy, but without much explicit deliberation,
except perhaps for those moments when her first responses seem not to be
working and some quick rethinking is required. This evaluative esteem or respect
for her can grow within you even though you are too distracted by anxiety for her
fate to pass any explicit judgement upon her or her actions—certainly no moral
judgement or judgement of the absence of ‘empirical determination’ of her acts.
For all you know, this mariner could have sold her services to a drug smuggler or
be acting under duress. What you have come to recognize, and in no small
measure to appreciate, is her talent, skill, and assurance. Not her ‘good will’ or
8 I have benefited here from Brian Leiter’s suggestion that Nietzsche’s notion of value is centred
on excellence and his pointing out that Nietzsche’s official position is scepticism about our ability to
understand our own motives (see Leiter 2002: 95).
9 For accounts of action that emphasize the importance of active agency, see Velleman (2000),
Wallace (2006), and Korsgaard (2008).
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‘free will’—for you know nothing of this—but her impressive ability to translate
perception into effective action in the face of peril.
Such recognition and appreciation naturally bring in their train other evaluative attitudes. For example, you will find that you are beginning to trust this
individual to meet the sorts of challenges she is facing, much as you would
quickly lose trust in a sailor who displayed equally remarkable incompetence and
failure. Thanks to this growing confidence in her skill, you would be increasingly
willing to rely upon it or recommend it to another. In effect, you have begun to
accord her a certain action-guiding authority with respect to her craft.
One often can recognize signs of exceptional skill or craftsmanship without
oneself possessing comparable abilities. Indeed, inspiration and learning by
example typically assume something like this. One can, as it were, bootstrap
one’s way into acquiring a certain capacity by emulating those whose manifestly
greater skill has made you believe in them. Of course, the emulation will at first
necessarily be imperfect. Highly skilled individuals operate largely intuitively,
whereas a beginner often needs explicit guidelines and self-conscious deliberation
to see his way through. Would these skilled individuals possess a yet higher or
more perfect skill if they acted less spontaneously and more by consulting explicit
standards of evidence and norms of conduct, and constructing practical syllogisms? It would be quite amazing to discover highly skilled, experienced, and
successful individuals who did in fact typically function in this way.10 And if we
did find them, would they deserve any higher esteem, like the true masters?
Skills vary greatly in how specialized is the domain they serve or the set of
capacities upon which they draw. Some, like being a skilled doctor, teacher,
coach, administrator, or parent, stretch across many kinds of situations and
challenges, and call for the development and coordination of a great many
abilities, sensitivities, and competencies. To have profound confidence in someone as a parent, for example, is to pay a profound tribute. Such confidence
cannot be willed into existence, and it is unlikely to come from mere scrutiny of
the formal excellence of the individual’s reasoning. It is not characteristically
based upon holding the individual to a standard, not even the standard of
rationality. And does anyone amongst us know of a rule-like ‘standard of good
parenting’? There seem to me too many ways to be a good parent, and I have
much more confidence in the skill of the parents I admire than I could possibly
have in any ‘standard of good parenting’ I might devise.
Nor is such confidence equivalent to a judgement that this is how one ought to
parent. Again, the ways are too many. But more importantly, ought implies can,
and a capacity to be so exceptional a parent is nothing a person can voluntarily
bring about or be held accountable for failing to achieve. Even so, knowing a
10 Indeed, it is not clear that we can give a picture of agency that is explicitly based on
deliberation and principle ‘all the way down’ without debilitating regress. See Arpaly (2003) and
Railton (2004) for discussion.
Nietzsche’s Normative Theory?
33
parent one admires and trusts in these ways can have a profound influence in
one’s own parenting at many levels, conscious and unconscious. If such influence, mediated by deep, well-warranted admiration and trust, does not count as
genuinely normative action-guidance, what could?11
Might we go one step further? Might there be some people who are skilled at
living? Who ‘know how to live’—possess what the French call savoir vivre—in
much the same way that some people know how to doctor, teach, or parent?12
We do sometimes speak of someone in this way. Such individuals we admire, less
for any particular skill or expertise than for their ability to make the most of life,
even under very difficult circumstances. Their lives seem to us in touch with what
really matters, their time on earth well spent. Knowing such a person helps one to
think about how to live, and even gives one a certain confidence in the possibilities of humankind. But this is not to say that we judge that such individuals
have met a certain standard, or have always done what they ought. Lives well
lived are as different as the people living them, and wonderful lives typically stray
in a variety of ways from the straight and narrow, or the strictly rational.13
Moreover, much of what it takes to be able to live well in this way lies outside the
sphere of choice or volition, and is nothing we could hold people responsible for
lacking. On the other hand, one’s admiration of such a person naturally affects
one’s own ways of thinking, feeling, and acting—one’s way of being in the world.
This, plainly, can deserve the name normative guidance, for it is not mere
influence by contagion, mimicry, or status, but rather influence with its roots
in an implicit or explicit appreciation of authority.
11 Even Kant recognized this. For he began the Groundwork not with a principle, but with an
attitude—our unconditional admiration for a good will (G 393). And he stressed in the Metaphysics
of Morals that the respect we have for the moral law is ‘a feeling of a special kind, not a judgment’
(MM 6: 402). One can argue, as he himself seems in places to do, that this is unavoidable on pain of
regress (cf. MM 6: 402). No principle or rule could have normative force in thought and action
unless we trusted and respected it. For discussion, see Railton (1999). Simon Robertson rightly
pointed out to me that we can distinguish a capacity to parent well from the exercise of this
capacity—the latter might be voluntary even if the former is not. At the same time, it isn’t clear
that one’s admiration of an individual’s skill in parenting (or sailing, or doctoring)—as opposed to
one’s admiration of his or her character—would be affected by the thought that it requires continual
acts of will. Pete Rose might have owed his success at batting to sheer, dogged determination, and
Joe DiMaggio might have come by his success ‘naturally’, but this seems not to show anything more
estimable in Rose’s skill as such.
12 For an account of living well that emphasizes the limits as well the importance of reflection, see
Tiberius (2008). My use of ‘know how’ here is not meant to prejudge the question whether such
knowledge can be captured as ‘knowledge that’ (see Stanley and Williamson, 2001).
13 A similar point can be made with regard to aesthetic evaluation—there are simply too many
ways of being an excellent painting, musical composition, performance, etc. for the notion of a
standard to be at the bottom of appreciation. Alexander Nehamas’ account of Nietzsche is one that
emphasizes the role of the aesthetic as a paradigm for his normative thought; Nehamas stresses that
many of the sources of aesthetic excellence are non-voluntary, and that excellence in art is not only
varied, but this variety itself can be prized. See Nehamas (1985).
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6. AESTHETIC APPRECIATION
AND NORMATIVE FORCE
We can extend this way of thinking about the normative force of admiring or
appreciative attitudes by considering the aesthetic domain. We happily think of
aesthetic creation and appreciation as among the highest accomplishments of the
human mind, body, and spirit. Yet it is notable that notions belonging to
category 1—correctness, rule, requirement, prohibition, duty, voluntariness,
etc.—play a very limited role in the aesthetic realm.
Consider first aesthetic appreciation. This is not merely passive enjoyment or
correct judgement, but an active, engaged state in which one’s sensory, cognitive,
affective, and imaginative resources typically are all brought into play in a way
one finds intrinsically rewarding—even when wrenching. A riveting performance
of Macbeth, for example, will not be pleasant to live through, yet it can be an
experience we find rewarding in itself. Should we say that such a performance
ought to be appreciated? Yes, if this is simply another way of saying that it is
worthy of appreciation. But no, if the ought is taken seriously as a category
1 action-guiding concept. For although one can decide to attempt to engage
with, and appreciate, a given work, engagement and appreciation are states of
mind that are not proper objects for the will. Indeed, many of the most powerful
aesthetic experiences overwhelm us, take us by surprise, draw us in despite
ourselves, blow us away. None of these are, or require, express judgements, or
the exercise of a ‘free will’.
Consider next aesthetic creation. While creation often involves a great deal of
deliberate choice and volition, it need not. An improvisatory musician who is
simply transported by the music, playing by ear and by inspiration, without
premeditation or self-consciousness, is a paradigm of artistic creation. So is the
composer who, like Mozart, writes so fluently that he covers pages without pause
or correction, or who, like Saint-Saëns in his own words, ‘writes music as a tree
grows apples’. So, too, the novelist who, having been struck by the image of a
certain scene or character, begins to write simply by following where her
imagination and pen lead her, learning from the writing itself how things will
turn out. So, too, the unschooled artist whose unselfconscious style expresses
itself in every brushstroke.14 It is no defect in these creative acts, no sign that they
are other than the highest achievements of the human mind, that they are
experienced by their authors as non-volitional, governed not by deliberation,
will, and intent, but by forces within them, ideas, feelings, images, motives,
memories, and associations that they themselves may only dimly understand.
14 I thank Alexander Nehamas for stressing to me the pervasiveness of the non-deliberative in all
aspects of artistic creation.
Nietzsche’s Normative Theory?
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Whether an appreciative response or creative act counts as aesthetic depends
upon how it is produced within the individual, what features it is responsive to,
and why. If one creates a piece of music purely instrumentally—say, copying a
teacher’s style to curry favour—or appreciates a performance purely instrumentally—because it causes a rival to be ridiculed (even if undeservedly)—these
responses can be seen not to be attuned to aesthetic value as such. As a first
approximation, but only that, we can think of such attunement counterfactually:
to say that one is responding to the features of a work of art, performance, or
natural landscape that account for its beauty or power is in part to say that, were
it to vary in these features, one’s experience of it would likewise vary, and one’s
appreciative response would reflect this variation. A lovely melody might, for
example, owe its loveliness to the sequence of notes and their phrasing and
timing. It is a trick of teachers on the first day of a music appreciation class to play
a melody of aching lyrical beauty, or that feels freighted with foreboding or
tragedy. The instructor then adds a single note, or slightly alters the tempo,
rhythm, or phrasing, with the result that the effect is destroyed and the music
sounds awkward or silly. The trick allows the instructor to show the sceptical
beginning student that she already is attuned to certain aesthetic features in
music, and to awaken in her mind the desire to understand how this works.
7 . AT THE MUSEUM
Now return to your post peering over my mental shoulder, and follow me as
I pass through an exhibition of paintings by Jean Siméon Chardin, an eighteenth-century French painter of still lifes and genre scenes. I am there because
the Frank Stella retrospective I came to see happened to be closed that day. Not
to waste a trip, I decide to have a go at the Chardin exhibit, even though painting
of this kind has never appealed to me. As you find me, I’m two-thirds of the way
through, passing somewhat sluggishly by the small, detailed canvases. My eye
tends to alight upon the central object or person in each, to take it in without
much thought, to notice a few details, to glance at the museum label, glance back
at the canvas, and then shift on to the next. You observe in me a rapid, summary
positive or negative response to each when I first observe it, and you see how this
colours how I look at the work. When the reaction is positive, you might
overhear in my internal dialogue, ‘Huh. Nicely done’; when it is negative,
‘Oof. That looks more like a rock than a loaf of bread’. You can see that I am
finding the subjects of the paintings trite and unsurprising, just as I expected to.
Indeed, it seems to you that I am mostly going through the motions, with very
little active engagement, excitement, imagination, or appreciation, despite my
self-announced intention of giving Chardin a go. My preconceptions will leave
the exhibition exactly as they entered it, you predict. Then, in front of the last
painting, a late self-portrait, you observe how I pause, and focus hard on the face.
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Peter Railton
At last a dawning appreciation of Chardin? Not really, for my gaze quickly
softens and my thoughts turn inward. My mind is flooded with shards of
memory of a former teacher whose face and characteristic expression resembled
those of the artist as portrayed. A jumble of feelings follows: affection, sorrow,
guilt. You note my deeply affected response, but can see that it arises from
personal recollections triggered by the painting, not deepening aesthetic appreciation with it. Eventually, I move on.
As before, you are in a position to evaluate this total sequence of thoughts and
actions in a variety of ways. You can ask how sensitive my responses were to the
various features of the works I viewed: did I pay attention, make discriminations,
notice important differences between works, find significance? Or was my
attention weak, my thought and imagination unengaged, my judgement hasty?
How well was I realizing my goal of trying to appreciate Chardin, or of
broadening myself? Was I entirely dead aesthetically or did I show a capacity
for real appreciation or attunement to aesthetic value?
Now imagine that you follow another viewer, Tami, also a fan of modern
painting who had come for the Stella exhibit only to be sidetracked into the
Chardin. She, too, has never felt any attraction to this sort of painting. But you
immediately notice many differences. Her gaze as she observes the first canvases is
attentive and exploratory, taking in many features of the works that I did not
notice and keeping track of differences and similarities among the works that had
escaped me. She looks carefully at each work, her mind actively engaged, noticing
not only of the explicit subject of the painting but also sensitive to the balance
and tension of the composition, and the geometry of shapes and colours. Her
imagination associates freely, and she begins to find striking juxtapositions of
forms, not evident at first, that seem to her almost modern. She puzzles over how
the brushstrokes and painterly techniques give the objects their striking realism.
She begins to notice, too, to a nascent feeling—surprisingly strong, she thinks,
given the predictable content of the work and her previous lack of interest in it.
‘What is this feeling?’ Tami wonders, unable to name it, or even get it clearly in
focus. But she makes no judgement, and it simply grows and develops within her,
unattended. Then, in a flash, it comes to her: the word ‘still’ in a caption ‘Still
Life with Plums’ hits home. She realizes that she is entering, through these
paintings, the silent world of the objects in themselves. She feels their presence,
their materiality, their reality—not as foodstuff, dinnerware, or furniture, such
instruments of our purposes, but as previously unnoticed individual beingsin-themselves, standing side by side, or crowded against one another, or strained
by dangling from a peg. She is delighted with this thought, new to her, and
searches for the right phrase to describe it. And she now turns to the paintings
more eagerly than ever, and more intently, acceptingly, admiringly. She feels they
have begun, she is saying to herself, to ‘speak in their own voice’.
Let us suppose that you, like me, have never found this sort of painting
engaging or attractive. But as you follow Tami through the exhibit, you find
Nietzsche’s Normative Theory?
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her responses surprising, suggestive. You begin to become intrigued yourself,
interested to see what she will make of things. Her thoughts and feelings are
drawing you to look more closely at the paintings, and to think harder about
them. You can see that she is finding much more in them than I did, and drawing
creatively upon her experience with, and feel for, geometric and abstract painting. Soon you are not simply listening in on her inner dialogue, but find yourself
resisting here, agreeing there, trying her thoughts and feelings on for size. As her
reaction to the work blossoms into appreciation, you find that you are beginning
to appreciate it as well. Not because you always share her reactions—you suspect
she is ‘overinterpreting’ them in an anachronistic way—but because you now see
the works more fully, and seem to get more out of them, even if you cannot at
this point say what. You’re pretty sure you don’t understand what she means
when she speaks of the objects as ‘beings-in-themselves’, an expression you swore
off after a bad experience with a freshman course in phenomenology. And you
wonder whether she understands what she’s saying, either. Still, you listen, trying
to make sense it of it.
Indeed, you find that you are listening respectfully, with a growing admiration
for the sensitive and imaginative way she engages this work, initially so foreign to
her. You now want to look at these works more closely and think about them
more fully. Certain of the paintings delight or unsettle you in ways you didn’t
expect. The self-portrait with which the exhibition closes draws you in and
intrigues you, ‘What did this man see?’, you find yourself saying, almost aloud.
You won’t again look at these paintings as flatly and incuriously as you did
before. All this has taken you by surprise, and now you find yourself, like her,
eager to learn a bit more about Chardin, to see more of his work, to mention the
exhibition to friends, to share reactions with them.
You have in this way been led by your appreciation of Tami’s reactions to take
her views seriously, attributing some authority to them even though you do not
claim any special authority for yourself regarding this sort of painting. Your
growing respect for her way of engaging these paintings was confirmed in some
measure by the richer, more compelling and rewarding aesthetic experience they
have made available to you. And your initial, flat reactions no longer have your
trust. Though you did not end up exactly where she did, you now feel challenged
by the exhibition, and clearer about the delicate value some find in Chardin.
My way of responding to the exhibit, in contrast, did not inspire any such
admiration or confidence in you. Looking over my mental shoulder seemed to
add nothing to your own reactions to the works, and so the fact that my
judgements fit with your own at the time did not give you any greater confidence
or sense of confirmation. Unappreciated by you, my reactions lacked any
authority to guide your own appreciation—a rather severe implicit evaluation
of them, which no doubt they warranted.
Does any of this have to do with whether her responses were freer than mine of
‘empirical determination’ or more the product of self-legislated judgement? On
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Peter Railton
the contrary, it seems an indicator of the genuineness and credibility of her
responses that they were highly ‘empirical’, not based upon a priori judgements or
‘standards of beauty’, or self-legislated aesthetic principles. It was something these
works won from her, emerging unexpectedly within her as she engaged closely with
these works. It does not seem to matter in the least that her eventual sense of the
special significance of these works simply came to her, rather than being the product
of reasoning. As Kant points out in the Critique of Judgment, in the experience of
beauty is a form of attunement in which the object is not ‘brought to concepts’ by the
mind in the manner of a theoretical judgement (CJ 211–13, 226–7).
In this way, as in the cases of skill discussed earlier, authority arises from
evidence of the right sort of attunement, that is, evidence of a responsive sensory,
cognitive, affective, and imaginative engagement with the world that is adequate
(or better) to the task before it. Observing such efficacious engagement can give
rise to evaluative responses with normative significance for the observer, such as
respect or appreciation. None of this requires, or much involves, will or principle. A sense can emerge within the observer that someone knows (or does not
know) how to do something—such as using his or her abilities to engage an
unfamiliar genre of art.
This attribution of know-how can receive some support through the experiences it makes available, such as your own greater sense of why Chardin’s
seemingly bland canvases might still matter. Now let us suppose that, a day
later, you are sitting in a café. You finish reading your newspaper, and as you are
about to put it down you suddenly notice the objects on the tiny table before you
in a way that makes you hesitate: a plate, bearing only crumbs, lying on its back,
thick, round, white, and smooth; the empty demitasse cup, adrift from its saucer
and skewered by a spoon; a half-torn sugar packet, lying in a circle of the tiny
crystals it once held. Suddenly you realize that you understand what Tami meant
by ‘beings-in-themselves’ when looking at the Chardins. The objects before you
are almost frighteningly real, self-contained, sitting in silence in the noisy world
around them, waiting—as they must, as is their fate. You feel weirdly different
about putting your paper down and intruding upon this scene. And so you, too,
have found a new, non-instrumental way of looking at the utilitarian objects you
have lived amongst all your life. In a moment, the spell is broken. But not
without leaving you with a striking sense that Tami’s insight has been confirmed
by your own eyes and that you have perhaps had a momentary glimpse of
Chardin’s own vision. ‘Of course,’ you think.
8 . APPRECIATION, PERSPECTIVE, AND TRUTH
It should now be clear that, in the previous example, I was cheating in a small but
critical detail. I blandly claimed that you had a locally omniscient standpoint, but
failed to explain how this could be so. In particular, I failed to explain how you
Nietzsche’s Normative Theory?
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could see things the way someone else does. For example, how could you have
seen what Tami did if, up until your revelation in the café, you could not enter
into her experience of the objects as things-in-themselves? Seeing that someone is
finding a certain meaning and value in a work of art is quite different from seeing
this meaning and value yourself. So did you have full access to the contents of her
mind? Could you?
Indeed, even my earlier examples concerning skilled individuals involved a
similar cheat. Consider someone new to the sea, standing in the stern of the
schooner rising and plunging through the heavy seas, decks awash, holding on for
dear life, everything around him a threatening confusion. Could he, even by
looking over the mental shoulder of a time-tested mariner, actually see the ocean
and ship as they look to her? The answer, it seems, must be no. An observer can
clearly see that a skilled individual sees things differently, and could know
something of what this signifies, but this would not give the observer the
wherewithal to see things that way, too.
Psychologists since William James have insisted that ‘perceiving is for doing’.
It is not a passive system registering sense-contents and filing them away, but an
active, highly selective, and constructive faculty that delivers to the brain a
complex bundle of structured information, readying the subject for action.
Incoming visual information is at first deposited on the retina at a rate of 1010
bits per second, but the limitations of the optic nerve mean that only 6 106 bits
per second make it to the visual cortex, a figure that is reduced still further as the
information passes through successive cortical layers.15 This does not mean,
however, that the visual system simply subtracts information: it also extracts
information in systematic ways, to construct first spots, then straight lines,
then moving lines, then curves, and ultimately the familiar bounded objects,
seen in perspective, of our normal visual experience. This is a convenient way of
representing things for macroscopic, dexterous beings such as ourselves, but
hardly a definitive one. After all, the input we actually receive is continuous,
not discontinuous, so discrete lines, shapes, and boundaries are in some sense
artefacts. Think of how the film in a fixed camera with an open shutter will ‘see’
as a blur the same object we see as a well-defined bird in flight. Which more
accurately records the incoming light? More generally, we should realize that
humans’ particular way of representing incoming light in the conscious mind—
arising from a complex, ‘subpersonal’ calculation—is the product of a particular
evolutionary past. There is no guarantee that equally intelligent beings resulting
from a different evolutionary process and facing different environmental challenges would subtract and extract information—or see things—in the same way.
Indeed, the full process of perceptual readiness for action involves much more
than object individuation and spatial geometry. It includes attention, affect,
15 See Anderson et al. (2005).
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Peter Railton
expectation, and meaning. Attention highlights some components of the sensory
field, cuing thought and feeling and priming association and memory. Affective
systems code incoming information in milliseconds as positive, negative, or
indifferent, well before the information reaches consciousness. This affect, and
native and acquired expectations, shape and colour what we eventually perceive,
presenting the current situation to consciousness as possessing a certain significance, and affording certain possibilities rather than others. Is a bit of dead
animal matter food or offal, carcass or corpse? Is a given sound a noise or a word?
Such meanings are woven directly into what we consciously see and hear,
readying it for use, and readying us for action.
Small wonder that it is problematic to speak of ‘seeing through another’s eyes’.
Indeed, once perceptual information crosses the threshold into consciousness,
things become yet more complicated. It is possible for a good studio photographer to portray a movie star in a manner that rather closely resembles how she
looks to an infatuated fan. But could even the best photographer create an image
that presents how one spouse looks to the other after thirty years of marriage? Or
how one looks to oneself? Is there even a stable answer to the question of how one
looks to one’s spouse, or oneself?
If Nietzsche were here, he would point out that all this is the death of the
notion of an omniscient perspective, local or universal. There can be no ‘way of
appearing’ that incorporates all ways of seeing things, all interests and feelings, all
interpretations, and all foci. As Nietzsche writes:
. . . let us guard ourselves better from now on, gentlemen philosophers, against the
dangerous old conceptual fabrication that posited a ‘pure, will-less, painless, timeless
subject of knowledge’; let us guard ourselves against the tentacles of such contradictory
concepts as ‘pure reason’, ‘absolute spirituality’, ‘knowledge in itself ’: here it is always
demanded that we think an eye that cannot possibly be thought, an eye that must not
have any direction, in which the active and interpretive forces through which seeing first
becomes seeing-something, are to be shut off, are to be absent; thus what is demanded
here is always an absurdity and non-concept of an eye. There is only a perspectival seeing,
only a perspectival ‘knowing’; and the more affects we allow to speak about a matter,
the more eyes, different eyes, we know how to bring to bear on one and the same
matter, that much more complete will our ‘concept’ of this matter, our ‘objectivity’ be.
(GM III, 12)16
We therefore can make sense of growth in one’s ability to see and know even if
we must dispense with the idea of an ‘absolute’ or omniscient perspective. The
aesthetic case makes this especially clear, as we saw. Such growth can be mediated
by our respect or admiration for another, but in order for it to occur in fact, and
not only in aspiration, we must ourselves grow—not only in our perceptual and
cognitive faculties, but also in our ability to feel and appreciate. And it can be
16 I am grateful to Simon Robertson for drawing my attention to this passage.
Nietzsche’s Normative Theory?
41
confirmed as growth—rather than mere change—by the occurrence of vindicating experiences, in which what was previously unseen or misunderstood or
unappreciated comes to life in our minds. Nor is all such growth self-directed.
A novel situation or challenge enables one to see dimensions or depths in another
person one had not previously suspected, but now cannot help but admire or
detest.
The aesthetic case also makes it clear that there is something essentially
unachievable about the notion of having access to all ways of seeing or forms
of appreciation. Beings quite different from ourselves, possessing different faculties of perception, cognition, affect, and imagination, could well have intrinsically rewarding aesthetic experiences of a kind inaccessible to us. They might see
different things, resonate with different features, experience a different range of
emotions, and think or imagine in ways we cannot. The fact that these experiences could not be shared with us would do nothing to discredit them—they
could ‘fit’ these different beings in just the same way that a song we find
beautiful, or story we find compelling, or sunrise we find magnificent, ‘fit’ us.
Indeed, our own, everyday concept of aesthetic value makes room for this sort of
variation, by allowing for differences among human sensory capacities or sensibilities. Sounds, we think, could have quite different meanings for those blind
from birth or brought up in different musical cultures. What besides prejudice
would lead us to deny that these different capacities or experiences could support
equally robust forms of aesthetic appreciation?
A naturalist like Nietzsche can readily make sense of aesthetic value understood in this relational but not relativistic way. On a relational view of value,
values are constituted by certain invariant relations that are not observer-dependent. Consider for example this relation: x is a feature of an object that, when
attended to and engaged with by individuals of type F (e.g. possessing certain
sensory, cognitive, imaginative, and affective capacities), tends to yield for such
individuals intrinsically rewarding appreciative experiences.17 Whether a given
object bears this appreciation-producing relationship to a class of individuals F
does not depend upon whether the question is asked by individuals of type F or
some other type—they should give the same answer. Nietzsche’s view of ‘giving
style’ to one’s character seems clearly to fit this idea of a relational aesthetic value,
since one can recognize what it is for others to have genuine style even if, given
one’s own characteristics, this could not be one’s own style:
One thing is needful—To ‘give style’ to one’s character—a great and rare art! It is practised
by those who survey all the strengths and weaknesses that their nature has to offer and fit
them into an artistic plan until each appears as art and reason and even weaknesses delight
the eye. (GS 290)
17 For further discussion of the distinction between relational versus relativistic conceptions of
value, see Railton (1997).
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In what sense might a relational view of aesthetic value be a form of perspectivism, then? Sensory systems, sensibilities, and styles get their distinctive character
from what they exclude as well as what they include, so that it is impossible for
any one sensory system, sensibility, or style to realize all possible aesthetic values.
Thus the weak, for Nietzsche, are ‘distrustful’ or afraid of style, because, given
their natures, the only style they could realize would be ‘commonplace’ or ‘slave’—
their sense of this, which even if tacit is nonetheless a back-handed recognition of
what style is and when it is or is not great, makes them ‘hate the constraint of
style’ (GS 226, 290).18
Might this serve as a suitable model for perspectivism about truth as well, such
as Nietzsche notoriously advocated? First let us say a bit more about aesthetic
value, on the present conception. It is not realized simply when, for example, the
Grand Canyon is cut by erosion: ‘nature is always value-less’ (GS 301). Or when
beings with sensory capacities and sensibilities capable of appreciating this
landscape as beautiful first see the light of day. It arises when these two elements
come together in an engaged, appreciative experience. Aesthetic value thus is a
living thing, not an inert substance lying about like underground petroleum. Just
as life does not exist until the various elements of matter are brought together and
take the form of an organism, so aesthetic value does not exist until its elements
are brought together in a unity that G. E. Moore called an ‘organic whole’.19 And
just as diverse species of living organisms can co-exist, none more or less genuine
than the others, so can many species of genuine aesthetic value. Not every jumble
of elements counts as living, they must possess an active functional integrity; not
every way in which subjects derive pleasure from interacting with the world will
count as aesthetic appreciation, it too has a distinctive functional integrity.
Moreover, like living species, aesthetic creation and appreciation can evolve.
Some organisms or species fail to flourish, meet their own needs, or sustain
their continuing existence, while others win their way in the world; some
practices of creation and appreciation wither and die while others remain vital,
continuing to generate fresh rewards, to enlarge our understanding, winning
their way in the world by providing possibilities for growth and renewal. The
survival of species and aesthetic practices alike is a matter of health and adaptiveness to a changing world, not conformity to fixed, a priori rules or principles.
Now consider truth. On one way of thinking about truth, truths are fact, pure
and simple. The existence of the world and the existence of truths about it are
coeval. But more commonly we think of truth rather differently, as a property of
representations of facts. On this view, truth could come into the world only when
representations with intentional content—representations about the world—
emerged. Such representations, unlike bare facts, can be asserted or denied,
and true or false, and depend for their meaning or capacity to refer upon the
18 I thank Alex Silk for suggesting this analogy.
19 See Moore (1903). For helpful discussion, see Thomas Hurka (2003).
Nietzsche’s Normative Theory?
43
existence of a suitable semantic practice. Like aesthetic value, truth involves a
‘unity’ between a ‘subjective’ and an ‘objective’ element—between the content of
a representation, on the one hand, and the way the natural world is, on the other.
Like aesthetic value, truth is therefore a living thing, an ongoing process within
reality, rather than an inert substance that somehow pervades reality.
It is we, the thinking-sensing ones, who really and continually make something that is not
yet there: the whole perpetually growing world of valuations, colours, weights, perspectives, scales, affirmations, and negations. (GS 301)
Grant for the purposes of argument that truth is indeed this living relation
between thought and the world. Several things follow that are relevant for the
would-be perspectivalist about truth.
First, when it exists, truth always exists through representations. But, as we
saw, not all representations are available from all perspectives, and no perspective
can be omni-representational. As a result, not all truths are available from all
perspectives, and no perspective can be omniscient.
Second, so long as we keep the linkage between truth and representation in
mind, it need not be paradoxical to speak of perspectivism about truth. Truth,
like aesthetic value as discussed above, can be relational without being relativistic.
Language affords a simple example. That zombies have allure is true in French
but not in English, for in French ‘allure’ refers to (among other things) an
individual’s bearing or characteristic way of looking and acting, while in English
it refers to an individual’s attractiveness or appeal. So it is true-in-French that
zombies have allure and false-in-English, but, as the previous sentence showed, it
is also true-in-English-that-it-is-true-in-French that zombies have allure (and
similarly, true-in-French-that-it-is-false-in-English), so English speakers and
French speakers agree about zombies, and it would be a mistake to think that
because truth involves a language-to-world relation, truth itself is relative to a
point of view.
Third, perspectivism can be more than the seemingly trivial doctrine
illustrated by allure, because representational systems can differ in much more
interesting and profound ways. Like perception, representation is highly constructive, such that our ongoing image of the world around us contains not only
structure and perspective, but also encodes feelings, expectations, meanings,
assertions, and denials: ‘the whole perpetually growing world of valuations,
colours, weights, perspectives, scales, affirmations, and negations’. And, like
perception, representation is for doing. Consider the difference in the mental
representation of the same dark cave by inhabiting rats and bats. The rat has an
exquisitely refined olfactory sense, navigating the cave floor by chiefly smell and
feel, knowing the identities of fellow rats or the location of food or predators
by their characteristic scent, and able to perceive past as well as present
events simultaneously through the drifting trails of scent they leave behind;
the bat is blind, yet capable of very precise echo-location, keenly aware of the
44
Peter Railton
three-dimensional contours of the cave walls and ceiling and the precise location
of other bats and flying insects. Each animal’s internal representation of its lived
world serves admirably, one supposes, to guide its behaviour in meeting its needs,
but neither representation would present that world in ways adequate to the
needs of the other. Does it make any sense to ask which is truer? Nietzsche has
given us his answer. He held that ‘every creature different from us senses different
qualities and consequently lives in a different world’ (WP 565), and wrote:
. . . the insect or the bird perceives an entirely different world from the one that man does,
and the question which of these perceptions of the world is the correct one is quite
meaningless. (TL 86)
Fourth, although there are multiple, distinct representational systems, each of
which is capable of truth, we need not accept that all representations are equal, or
that none can be improved. An individual’s representational capacity is a fundamental skill for living: ‘The utility of preservation . . . stands as the motive behind
the development of the organs of knowledge’ (WP 480). This skill can be
enlarged and made more effective through more encompassing, more discriminating, more generalizable, and more reliable representations. New domains of
truths can be gained through the hard work of attentive perception, disciplined
reasoning, imaginative conjecture, practical inventiveness, ambitious implementation, and non-evasive responsiveness to failure. Such efforts can be vindicated
by one’s enhanced ability and power in engaging with others and the world.
What is this but the ‘scientific method’ writ large? Nietzsche shares Goethe’s
detestation of ‘all that attempts to instruct me, if it does not also directly enlarge
my capacity for action’. What matters above all is ‘adequacy to purpose’:
We need history, certainly, but we need it for reasons different from those for which the
idler in the garden of knowledge needs it . . . We need it, that is to say, for the sake of life
and action, not so as to turn comfortably away from life and action, let alone for the
purpose of extenuating the self-seeking life and the base and cowardly action. We want to
serve history only to the extent that history serves life. (UM II, Foreword)
Not every body of truth or every skill in representing or living can be reached
from every starting point, but this is no reason for thinking we cannot have a
workable notion of gain in truth or skill. (Or of loss—the hard-won understandings of previous generations can become inaccessible to us moderns precisely because we have not, and cannot, live through what it took to win them.)
Fifth and finally, although we cannot speak of truth in an a-perspectival sense,
it is important to note that not all notions of improvement or growth are internal
to a perspective. Life-altering, perspective-changing experiences can occur, and
here too the aesthetic comparison is useful. Certain aesthetic accomplishments
seem to have the power to re-orient our ways of seeing non-incrementally, by
inspiring a response within us that changes our sense of what is possible and
knocks fixed things loose. Scientific and conceptual revolutions are spoken of in
Nietzsche’s Normative Theory?
45
the same way. But if, post-revolution, we cannot find a neutral perspective from
which to see such changes incrementally, is there no hope of calling this progress,
a genuine gain in value or truth? In the aesthetic case the answer seems clear
enough. Look to the conviction that comes with the changed quality of experience made possible by the revolution: its compellingness, depth, richness, and
ability to give new insights and sustain new growth. This is not proof or
validation, but it is vindication. Where it does not occur, we have a fad, not an
aesthetic watershed. In the scientific case, something similar seems true. The new
conceptual scheme vindicates itself not by demonstrative proof, but by enlarging
our capacity to live effectively in the world, supporting a renaissance in theorizing, the formation of deeper, more comprehensive theories, and unprecedented
ways to predict and control nature. Adequacy to purpose thus takes many
forms.20
Nietzsche, I believe, thought his attack on morality could effect such a
revolution—not for everyone, but for those with sufficient strength of mind
and body, and nerve. Vindication would come in the lived experience of those
capable of making this revolutionary change in value and virtue. Such lives might
seem incomprehensible and immoral to the rest of us, but for those who make
the change, Nietzsche’s knowledge of how to live well will be ‘confirmed’.
9. CREATING TRUTH AND VIRTUE
New realms of beauty can be brought into being by the emergence of new sensory
systems and sensibilities or new technologies of creation. Vital practices of
aesthetic creation and appreciation can spring up around these new possibilities,
and there can emerge ‘new aesthetic values’, undreamt of by previous generations.
In a similar way, changes in our capacity to perceive or conceive—including of
course changes in the technology of representation, whether in the form of new
languages, images, or instruments of science—make available new realms of
truth. Here, too, we can find the flourishing of new ways of living and learning:
enlarged ‘vital powers’ to understand and shape our world. Those inhabiting
these practices will call their new truths discoveries rather than creations, as
perhaps they should. For although we can invent new means of representation,
we cannot invent their adequacy to purpose—the human organism and the
world in which it lives might not be so easily persuaded. In this way, the realms
of beauty and truth are essentially open-ended, just as, I believe, Nietzsche would
have them be.
20 I therefore take myself to be in broad agreement with Leiter’s view that ‘there is nothing in the
optical analogue Nietzsche invokes . . . that requires him to deny the existence or possibility of
objective knowledge . . . ’ (Leiter 2002: 274).
46
Peter Railton
1 0. THE FOUR PROBLEMS REVISITED
How much progress have we made in creating materials adequate to our purpose—solving the four problems for a coherent interpretation? I will, perforce, be
very brief, taking the problems up in a different order.
The ‘normativity problem’
Perhaps the thorniest problem for an interpretation of Nietzsche’s critique of
morality is to explain how normativity—a critical, evaluative, authoritative,
action-guiding perspective on how to live and how to be—could survive his
attack on free will, autonomous agency, and morality. To come fully to terms
with this problem would require much more space than the present paper, but
perhaps we have made some headway. For we have seen how normative guidance
can operate via evaluative notions and attitudes without presupposing the sorts of
freedom or agency Nietzsche attacked. Since such guidance can be mediated by
an appreciation of value, an experience-based form of knowing, it has normative
authority in an obvious sense. It is, for those inclined to talk this way, a form of
apt responsiveness to reasons.
This model of normative guidance would help explain two very distinctive
features of Nietzsche’s work—his aphoristic, poetic style, and the ‘doctrine of
eternal recurrence’. On this model, normative force operates less by argument or
reasoning than by inspiring admiration and appreciation.21 Rather than attempt
to argue us, or the select few, into following him, Nietzsche portrays our current,
moralistic ways of living in a manner that will elicit the disdain and disgust of
anyone of great spirit, while presenting his ‘new values’ in ways that will win
admiration from those capable of appreciating them. Like an artist, he wants his
chosen audience to see things differently but realizes he cannot do this simply by
explaining or arguing for his ideas. He must, through his creative work, present
the world in a new and challenging way—a way they will find compelling, and
which thereby has the power to change their own ways of seeing, feeling,
thinking, and acting. If his work succeeds, he will win their appreciation, move
them, and eventually earn their trust and belief.
The select few will find Nietzsche’s skill in living and artistry in writing
vindicated and ‘confirmed’ when they break the bonds of morality and live the
kinds of lives Nietzsche commends to them. The idea that such a life-transformation is to be vindicated or confirmed—like a work of art—in the lived
experience it makes possible is dramatically expressed in the notion of ‘eternal
recurrence’. Perhaps everyone has some self-justifying story about his or her life.
21 A related, much more textually grounded, account can be found in Janaway (2007).
Nietzsche’s Normative Theory?
47
But would everyone joyously affirm and will the eternal repetition of their lives?
This is a severe test, indeed. Those capable of self-transformation would find
such richness, power, renewal, and joy that they would have no regrets or remorse
for whatever they might have given up, and would gladly repeat such lives
eternally. As in a thoroughly convincing aesthetic experience or accomplishment,
one would have nothing changed, and would gladly relive the experience—
hearing the piece of music, reading the poem, seeing the image—many times
over, throughout one’s life. No argument could accomplish as much, and, once
accomplished, no argument is needed.
The ‘value problem’
What entitles Nietzsche to speak of value—the basis for this account of aptresponsiveness-as-appreciation—if he is a thorough-going naturalist?
Using aesthetic value as the paradigm, we saw in outline how value might be
found at the intersection of the ‘thinking-feeling’ and unthinking-unfeeling parts
of the natural world. The resulting notion of value is relational, fitting Nietzsche’s
rejection of intrinsic, absolute value. It treats value as part of the fabric of lived
existence, something we can directly experience and learn through doing. Not all
values would be accessible, or intelligible, to all individuals, and in this sense value
would not be universal either. But the various realms of value would be real
enough—not just whatever we take them to be. One can be led—through a
compelling aesthetic experience or by admiration of an exemplar (such as
Nietzsche takes himself to be)—to recognize and eventually appreciate values
beyond one’s current ken. Lives in accord with these values would realize goods
unprecedented in magnitude and kind, and embody ‘new virtues’—that is, skills at
being aptly and intuitively attuned to these goods in thought, feeling, and practice,
embodying and enlarging them. Such new values and new virtues can come into
being only because new kinds of persons have come into being, a person with a
capacity for greatness sufficient to occupy her place in the expanded value relation.
Could a theory of value of this kind do all the work Nietzsche requires? It is
not difficult to see how it could be extended to notions of health, well-being, and
perhaps even living well.22 These, in league with aesthetic value, could well be
enough to underwrite Nietzsche’s critique of morality and to fund his ideals.
We have established no a priori duty, obligation, or rational necessity in
connection with these values. The force they have is relational and arises from
the desires, appreciative capacities, rewards, and powers of imagination that
underwrite them—Nietzsche writes of the ‘great love’ and ‘reverence for itself ’
of the noble soul (cf. BGE 287)—not from a categorical rational standard. This
lack of a theory of a priori duty, however, is part of our original ‘design
22 For a fuller account of such a theory of value, see Railton (1986) or Lewis (1989).
48
Peter Railton
specification’ for an interpretation of Nietzsche, not a flaw in it. Nietzsche’s
normative theory, as best I can tell, is a theory of how to live well.23 And living
well, living in the greatest and fullest sense, is not acting from duty, or as reason
requires. The ‘laws’ it involves are not a priori moral principles, but laws of
nature, which include man as a part:24
The noble soul accepts the fact of his egoism without question, and also without
consciousness of harshness, constraint, or arbitrariness therein, but rather as something
that may have its basis in the primary law of things. (BGE 265)
Such new virtue—acting spontaneously, joyously, ferociously, unflinchingly,
remorselessly from the strongest desires, through the greatest hardships, with the
greatest satisfactions—is not available to everyone. Conscientiousness will never
get us there, nor will the familiar virtues of contemporary virtue theory or even
virtues of the ancients. These are lives of a kind unattainable to most of us, and
which, in our worst moments, we resent. But in our best moments, we cannot
help but in some measure admire them. In our weak and jealous way, we, too,
feel their normative force.
The ‘morality problem’
These considerations help make it clear why Nietzsche is not holding out to us
the prospect of a new morality. The notion of value involved is relational, not
absolute or impersonal, and it makes no claim of universality. Its ‘necessity’, for
those capable of experiencing it, does not involve any concept of duty, or explain
its origin in the requirements of reason. As we have seen, what will make
Nietzsche’s ideals compelling and convincing—if anything does—is something
quite different.
And what of the rest of us? What we will find, it would seem, if we cannot
discover our own ways of getting beyond morality, are lives whose mediocrity,
frustration, and sickliness are attested in their lived character. To imagine
repeating such lives eternally is not to be filled with affirmation and joy. It
seems we will have to muddle through as best we can. Nietzsche’s ideal types are
no help here, nor are they meant to be. He abandons us to our fates without
remorse: Tant pis, mes pauvres moutons! A clear indication, if another one were
needed, that he is not in the business of morality.25
23 For an interpretation of Nietzsche’s approach to morality that also places important emphasis
on value but gives a distinctive role to deontic concepts, see Clark (2001) and Robertson (Chapter 4,
this volume).
24 See Nietzsche’s remark that the ‘will to power’ has priority in giving ‘the essence of life’ in the
biological sense, since its ‘spontaneous, aggressive, over-reaching, reinterpreting, re-directing, and
shaping powers [act first], after whose effects “adaptation” then follows’ (GM II, 12).
25 Nietzsche’s view is plainly not an aristocratic morality since it involves no duty of the base to
obey the noble, and no obligation of the noble to rule wisely over the base.
Nietzsche’s Normative Theory?
49
The ‘truth problem’
We considered the idea that truth can be viewed as a living thing, an organic
unity involving both a representation and the world represented. On this view,
representations are, like aesthetic appreciations, essentially linked to perspectives.
There can be no such thing as a complete and comprehensive representation of
the world, such as might support a univocal notion of truth. Instead, we were led
to consider the possibility of salvaging a notion of truth through a relational or
perspectival theory. But what, if anything, can be said for this putative ‘truth
about truth’ over others? To answer without incoherence, Nietzsche can say, look
to vindication through adequacy to purpose, not validation as an a priori demand
of reason. Even the empirical sciences can, in the end, do no more than this.
Perspectives launch us into reality, but are not always up to the task of
sustaining a flourishing life in the face of reality. Truth cannot be reduced to
adequacy to purpose, but without this truth cannot go on living and growing.
There are many ways of living and growing for many sorts of beings, but few will
attain and sustain truth. To maintain coherence, all that Nietzsche strictly needs
is a perspective adequate to his purposes—one that makes possible, and keeps
alive, flourishing, and self-confirming, the kinds of existence he admires. To
vindicate what nothing could validate.
What remains to me unclear, however, is whether his perspective would enable
anyone, even the select few, to find such vindication. Nietzsche’s genealogical
method has certainly been influential in the subsequent development of social
and intellectual history, but his own bold but rather careless and often prejudiced
genealogical and historical claims have not stood the test of time. This is not a
mere matter of getting the details wrong: what understanding we do have of the
origins of contemporary religion and morality, or of the natural history of
mankind, are to be found quite elsewhere. The vindication that would be needed
to sustain Nietzsche’s distinctive evaluative perspective thus seems not to be
forthcoming.
Nietzsche’s own life might raise qualms about his skill at living, or exhibition
of a vindication-in-living that the greatest souls can admire. Surely Nietzsche was
a giant, who, despite suffering from isolation and ill health, created a body of
work that will eternally recur in the intellectual life of humankind. Few individuals achieve such a fate. But might not Nietzsche nonetheless stand out among
such individuals as excessively contemptuous of others, grandiose, and selfcentred, as another giant, Beethoven, struck out the dedication of the Eroica
symphony to his fellow giant Bonaparte upon hearing that he had crowned
himself Emperor?26
Yet if Nietzsche’s writings could accomplish their ambitious purposes for the
select few, they would find in their lives all the vindication that internal
26 I am indebted to Brian Leiter for helping me set these reservations in perspective.
Peter Railton
50
coherence demands. Of course, most of us could never be in a position to assess
this. Certainly I am not. That, however, would be our problem, not his.27
BIBLIOGRAPHY
In Nietzsche
Beyond Good and Evil, trans. Helen Zimmern. Edinburgh: Foulis, 1907.
‘On the Uses and Disadvantages of History for Life’ in Untimely Meditations, trans. R. J.
Hollingdale. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1983.
‘On Truth and Lies in a Nonmoral Sense’ in Daniel Breazeale (ed.), Philosophy and Truth:
Selections from Nietzche’s Notebooks of the Early 1870’s. New Jersey, London: Humanities Press, 1979.
On the Genealogy of Morality, trans. Maudemarie Clarke and Alan J. Swensen. Indianapolis: Hackett, 1998.
The Antichrist, trans. H. L. Mencken. New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 1918.
The Gay Science, ed. Bernard Williams, trans. Josephine Nauckhoff and Adrian del Caro.
Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2001.
The Will to Power, ed. Walter Kaufmann, trans. Walter Kaufmann and R. J. Hollingdale.
New York: Vintage Books, 1968.
In Kant
CJ
CPrR
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MM
Critique of Judgment, trans. Werner S. Pluhar. Indianopolis: Hackett, 1987.
Critique of Practical Reason, trans. Mary J. Gregor, in Practical Philosophy.
Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1996.
Groundwork of the Metaphysics of Morals, trans. H. J. Paton. New York: Harper
and Row, 1964.
The Metaphysics of Morals, trans. Mary J. Gregor, in Practical Philosophy. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1996.
27 With thanks to all those who participated in the Workshop on Nietzsche at the University of
Southampton in April 2008 and provided many helpful responses to an earlier version of this paper.
Thanks as well to Brian Leiter, Alexander Nehamas, and Alex Silk, who generously provided written
comments on the earlier version, from which I have benefited greatly. I only wish I could answer all
of the probing questions they posed. Nehamas and R. Lanier Anderson also gave me the benefit of
several stimulating conversations about the problems of Nietzsche interpretation discussed herein.
Much earlier, Leiter and Nadeem Hussain challenged me to get beyond my puzzlement and think
harder about Nietzsche. Though it has taken me this long to take up the challenge, I believe I now
see better what they meant. I hope they will agree. Simon Robertson and Chris Janaway gave me
excellent editorial advice, thought-provoking philosophical comments, and indispensible help in
locating relevant passages in Nietzsche’s texts—and they saved me from several errors. I claim full
credit for any remaining errors.
Nietzsche’s Normative Theory?
51
Other sources
Anderson, C. H. et al. (2005). ‘Directed visual attention and the dynamic control of
information flow’, in L. Itti et al. (eds), The Neurobiology of Attention. Amsterdam:
Elsevier.
Arpaly, N. (2003). Unprincipled Virtue. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.
Clark, M. (2001). ‘On the rejection of morality: Bernard Williams’ Debt to Nietzsche’, in
R. Schacht (ed.), Nietzsche’s Postmoralism. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.
Hurka, T. (2003). Virtue, Vice, and Value. New York: Oxford University Press.
Janaway, C. (2007). Beyond Selflessness: Reading Nietzsche’s Genealogy. Oxford: Oxford
University Press.
Korsgaard, C. (2008). The Constitution of Agency. Oxford: Oxford University Press.
Leiter, B. (2002). Nietzsche on Morality. London: Routledge.
Lewis, D. K. (1989). ‘Dispositional theories of value’, Proceedings of the Aristotelian
Society, supplementary volume 63: 113–37.
Moore, G. E. (1903). Principia Ethica. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.
Nehamas, A. (1985). Nietzsche: Life as Literature. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University
Press.
Railton, P. (1986). ‘Facts and values’, Philosophical Topics 14: 5–31.
—— (1997). ‘Aesthetic value, moral value, and the ambitions of naturalism’, in
J. Levinson (ed.), Aesthetics and Ethics. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.
—— (1999). ‘Normative force and normative freedom: Hume and Kant, but not Hume
versus Kant’. Ratio 12: 320–53.
—— (2004). ‘How to engage reason: the problem of regress’, in R. Jay Wallace, et al.
(eds), Reason and Value. New York: Oxford University Press.
Robertson, S. (this volume). ‘The scope problem—Nietzsche, the moral, ethical, and
quasi-aesthetic’.
Stanley, J. and Williamson, T. (2001). ‘Knowing how’, Journal of Philosophy 98: 411–44.
Tiberius, V. (2008). The Reflective Life: Living Wisely within our Limits. Oxford: Oxford
University Press.
Velleman, J. D. (2000). The Possibility of Practical Reason. New York: Oxford University
Press.
Wallace, R. J. (2006). Normativity and the Will. Oxford: Clarendon.
Watkins, C. (2000). The American Heritage Dictionary of Indo-European Roots, 2nd edn.
Boston: Houghton Mifflin.
Williams, B. (1985). Ethics and the Limits of Philosophy. Cambridge, MA: Harvard
University Press.
3
Aestheticist Ethics
Peter Poellner
1 . THE PROBLEM
The nature of Nietzsche’s philosophy of value continues to be the subject of
intense debate. Despite much sophisticated commentary that has been produced
on it, especially during the last decade, significant disagreement persists about
both the grounds of his evaluative commitments and about their substantive
content. In recent years there has been a renewed focus on Nietzsche’s concept of
the will to power, the hope being that it might provide the key to his thinking
about value. It is not difficult to see why Nietzsche’s reflections on what he calls
the will to power might be thought to be pregnant with ethical implications.
Consider, for example, the following notebook remarks about the psychology of
pleasure:
It is notably enlightening to put power in the place of individual ‘happiness’ (after which
every living thing is supposed to be striving): ‘there is a striving for power, for an increase
of power’—pleasure is only a symptom of the feeling of power attained, a consciousness
of a difference. (WP 688)
Can we assume a striving for power divorced from sensations of pleasure and displeasure,
i.e. divorced from the feeling of enhanced or diminished power? . . . Life as a special
case . . . strives after a maximal feeling of power. (WP 689; cf. A 2)
Nietzsche’s point here is plausibly interpreted as, minimally, an empirical
claim about the character of human desire. The ends desired by human beings,
properly understood, include positive hedonic experiences (‘pleasure’) of a
certain type, which he calls feelings of power, or sometimes feelings of growth.
This idea is central to Nietzsche’s concept of the will to power, and it has rightly
received increased attention in recent years. Bernard Reginster has argued that it
plays a key role in Nietzsche’s response to what he diagnosed as the impending
cultural crisis of nihilism.1 In Reginster’s reading, the will to power as a psychological phenomenon is a second-order desire, one which by Nietzsche’s lights is
1 Reginster (2006).
Aestheticist Ethics
53
non-optional for human beings. Humans desire not only various particular or
specific first-order ends or goods, but they necessarily desire that some of these
ends be attained by their own activity, and that this activity involve the experienced overcoming of resistance. ‘Pleasure’—as Nietzsche understands it in the
passages I have cited—is this conscious registering of one’s own successful
activity as it unfolds. The thinker who seeks to solve a philosophical problem
not only desires the solution to the problem; he not only desires this outcome for
his mental activity, but also that activity itself, the route to the solution, more
precisely, the experience of overcoming the conceptual or interpretive difficulties
along the way, and he desires this experience of overcoming—the feeling of
power—as itself an end, and not just as a means to the solution.
If this is what the will to power is in the domain of human psychology, it is
tempting to expect that it might provide the key to Nietzsche’s demand for a
‘critique of moral values’ (GM Preface, 6)—that it might give us a standard of
evaluation ‘by which the value of moral evaluation’ (WP 391) or indeed any
evaluation of putative first-order goods is to be assessed. The psychological theory
of the will to power would vindicate Nietzsche’s demand, in the first instance, for
a descriptive psychology of ‘delicate value-feelings and value-distinctions’ (BGE
186), for it would permit Nietzsche to move from empirical psychology to ethics
in the broadest sense; that is, to a reasoned view about what it is worthwhile to do,
or how it is worthwhile to be. In a subtle recent paper, Paul Katsafanas has
suggested that the will to power functions in precisely this way in Nietzsche’s
critique of moral values.2 He agrees with Reginster that the will to power cannot
be, contrary to what Nietzsche sometimes suggests (A 2, WP 663), a psychological
structure or feature from which all values are derived or to which they can be
reduced. As Reginster puts it, the will to power ‘gets a determinate content only
from its relation to some determinate desire or drive’. It ‘cannot be satisfied unless
the agent has a desire for something else than power’, for ‘something constitutes a
resistance only in relation to a determinate end one desires to realize’.3 The
thought is that only if I really care about winning a race will the obstacles put in
my way by my opponents and my own physical limitations produce the kind of
experienced resistance whose surmounting can matter to me sufficiently so as to
be registered as pleasurable in consciousness. If this is right, then the will to power
cannot supply a principle from which all reasons for action can be derived. What it
can at most give us, and according to Katsafanas does give us, is a standard which
our other values need to be consistent with.4
2 Katsafanas (2011).
3 Reginster (2006: 132).
4 Even this it can achieve only on the premise (which Nietzsche accepts) that the will to power is
not only an inescapable but also a deep, dominant feature of our psychic economies. A desire might
be inescapable but nevertheless be motivationally insignificant. Hence it might not be sufficient to
provide overriding reasons when it conflicts with other desires. It is clear that Nietzsche does not
think of the will to power in this way. The will to power is a strong, dominant desire, such that
renouncing it inevitably produces a profound, fundamental psychological dissatisfaction—an
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However, the rational constraints on evaluation generated by the will to power
understood in this way seem to be quite limited. To be sure, they rule out systems of
evaluative judgement which privilege passivity, inactive repose, or Schopenhauerian
will-lessness as pre-eminently desirable for human beings. But many of the evaluative paradigms prevalent in Western culture clearly rejected by Nietzsche are
immune to this particular critique. Some of the most ascetic types of Christianity,
as Max Weber reminded us, have been highly suspicious even of quotidian leisure,
let alone will-less contemplative respose, free of striving. Nor is the latter ideal
important, and certainly not essential, to the more influential styles of modern
philosophical ethics, whether of Kantian or utilitarian provenance, which Nietzsche
sees himself as in competition with. So one worry with taking the will to power in
the sense sketched above to be the heart of Nietzsche’s critique of morality is that it is
too accommodating. On its own, it has nothing to say on many ethical commitments Nietzsche excoriates throughout his later writings.
One reason for this is that the will to power understood as a second-order
psychological phenomenon can tell us nothing about what gives those first-order
ends or goods, upon whose active pursuit it is parasitic, their normative authority. So it cannot tell us what constitutes non-instrumental value at the fundamental level. There are two ways in which one might seek to deflect that criticism.
One is to say that those first-order ends are never chosen as ends for their own
sake; they are chosen merely as opportunities for transformative agency, i.e. for
the exercise of will to power. They are thus in this respect all on a par with those
game-like activities whose ends—the state of affairs aimed at in them—are
arbitrarily stipulated. The fact that the specific ends of many games, paradigmatically those in sport, are arbitrarily stipulated suggests that they have no significant non-instrumental value for us. Even for the participant in such a game, it is
plausible to think that its specific end (e.g. crossing the line ahead of one’s
competitors, all having run exactly 100 m) has no significant value in its own
right. Its value is essentially instrumental; it supplies the occasion or opportunity
for an ‘overcoming of resistances’ in Nietzsche’s sense, and it is the latter which
has non-instrumental value for the athlete (although no doubt what often matters
just as much to the participants is the recognition from others resulting from
competitive success). If all first-order ends were of this nature, then there would
be no deep question regarding their normative authority. Their justification
would lie in their instrumental character vis-à-vis ends ultimately reducible to
the will to power. Some of Nietzsche’s late formulations suggest such a reducibility of all intrinsic goods to the feeling of power (A 2; WP 663; Z, ‘Of selfovercoming’), but I submit that these do not do justice to his actual, much
more complex, commitments. Nietzsche does think that the first-order ends of
many activities have, and should have, a more than instrumental character. What
experienced ‘sickness’. Of course, such renunciation, central to the ascetic ideal, has not been
understood as a sickness by its adherents.
Aestheticist Ethics
55
intrinsically matters about an activity, according to him, is not just the quantity
of resistance it overcomes, whatever that resistance may be. Not every overcoming of obstacles, however great, is necessarily significant or worthwhile.
Evaluative judgements are also possible and required about the worth of an
overcoming in terms of what it is an overcoming of and what it is an overcoming
towards; that is, what our first-order desires aim at. Nietzsche’s ideal, as we shall
see, is not simply an analogue of body-building.
A second, more traditional, route to deflate the problem of the normative
authority of evaluative claims about first-order ends would be to construe them as
purely expressive, and as indexed to agents and times. On this view, a noninstrumental value for x at t is just whatever end seems attractive or worthwhile to
x at t. But, ignoring for now the familiar philosophical problems generated by such a
position, it suffices to say here that it is exegetically off the mark, running counter to
Nietzsche’s insistence in his characterization of his ideal of the free spirit, on the
importance of self-given laws that the individual holds himself to across time:
For an individual to posit his own ideal and through it his own law, joys, and rights—that
may well have been considered hitherto as the most outrageous human aberration and
idolatry itself. The few who dared as much always felt the need to apologize to themselves,
usually by saying: ‘It wasn’t I! Not I! But a god through me’ . . . In polytheism the freespiritedness and many-spiritedness of man attained its first preliminary form—the
strength to create for ourselves our own new eyes and ever again new eyes that are even
more our own (GS 143, trans modified)
Nietzsche speaks of the essential element of every morality, not merely of the
kinds of morality he rejects, being a ‘protracted constraint’ (BGE 188) which, in
the sovereign, autonomous individual, becomes a self-imposed constraint understood by him as constituting and expressing himself (GM II, 2; GS 335).5 But
where do the constraints through which we bind ourselves to an ‘ideal’ over time
originate; how do we ‘posit’ or ‘create’ them, and how can they be created by us
while also binding us?
2 . NIETZSCHE’S FIRST-ORDER VALUATIONS:
TWO EXAMPLES
I want to approach these questions through a close examination of some typical
passages in which Nietzsche expresses or adumbrates core elements of his own
commitments. Such detailed attention to Nietzsche’s own evaluative practice in
5 The idea of self-imposed laws understood by the agent as expressing and constituting herself is
central to Nietzsche’s concept of fully individuated, ‘unique’ personhood (GS 335; Z, ‘Of the Way
of the Creator’). For a more detailed discussion of Nietzsche’s conceptions of freedom and
personhood, see Poellner (2009).
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concrete instances is sometimes more revealing of his ideas on value than his
occasionally misleading meta-reflections, for reasons I shall return to in
Section 4. Here, then, is a typical example of Nietzsche’s own practice. Speaking
of certain everyday aesthetic preferences of his German contemporaries, he
observes:
Now I note that once again [these] former admirers of officialdom are succumbing
rapidly to a shared craving for an elegant tone, and the Germans are submitting to a
most peculiar ‘acoustic spell’ that in the long run could become a real danger for the
German language—for one would seek in vain all over Europe to find more abhorrent
sounds. Something scornful, cold, indifferent, and careless in one’s voice—that is what
the Germans now consider elegant . . . even little girls are beginning to imitate this
officers’ German. For it is the officers—specifically, Prussian officers—who have set
this tone . . . Just listen to the sounds of the commands whose bellowing surrounds the
German cities now . . . : what arrogance, what raging sense of authority, what scornful
coldness speak out of this bellowing! . . . Unquestionably, the Germans are becoming
militarized in the sound of their language. . . . Becoming accustomed to certain sounds has
a profound effect on character; soon one acquires the words and phrases and eventually
also the ideas that go with these sounds . . . the public proclamations that are heard in
other countries, too, are not inspired by German music but by this new sound of
distasteful arrogance. In almost every speech of the foremost German statesman . . . we
hear an accent that repels and disgusts the ears of foreigners. (GS 104)
Evidently Nietzsche includes himself among those ‘foreigners’. This passage is
characteristic of many in which Nietzsche expresses his own first-order evaluative
judgements in respect of both its contents and its grounds. Consider, first, the
grounds of what is here clearly a negative judgement, an attribution of disvalue to
the phenomena he is describing. The only warrant for the judgement indicated
by Nietzsche is a conscious, negative affective response to what manifests itself in
these phenomena: the sounds appear ‘abhorrent’, ‘distasteful’, they ‘repel’ and
‘disgust’. There are innumerable passages like this in Nietzsche’s corpus, and we
can take them as illustrating what Nietzsche means when he has Zarathustra say
that ‘Taste: that is at the same time weight and scales and weigher’ (Z, ‘Of the
sublime men’), and when he says in his own voice that ‘moralities too are only a
sign-language of the affects’ (BGE 187). I have argued elsewhere that ‘taste’, in
Nietzsche, signifies a pattern of conscious affectivity.6 And if we attend to his
own evaluative practice in particular cases, we will find that the ground level of
evaluative justification is invariably located in judgements expressing a ‘taste’. At
first sight, it is not obvious how, given this psychological basis, these judgements
might be authoritative across time for Nietzsche himself, let alone for others .
Indeed it continues to be a subject of debate whether, or in what respect, they are
intended to be authoritative for others.
6 Poellner (2007).
Aestheticist Ethics
57
If experiencing something as (for example) ‘abhorrent’ or distasteful’ were a
matter of an inner, conceptually world-independent affective sensation, then
type-identical phenomenal objects—items experienced or judged as identical in
terms of their phenomenal properties—might produce different sensational
effects in different perceivers, or indeed in Nietzsche himself on different occasions, and it is then puzzling how evaluative judgements about anything other
than sensations (granting that such sensation-judgements are possible) could be
binding —how they could possibly constitute or express a normative ‘law’—even
for Nietzsche himself. Indeed, even his commitment to a ‘protracted will’—itself
motivated, as it would have to be on Nietzsche’s account, by a persistent pattern
of affectivity he happens to find himself with—would in that case have to be
rationally dependent, for him, upon the fortuitous recurrence of positive affective
sensations elicited by his various entertainings of the idea of such a protracted
will. I simply want to signal these prima facie difficulties with affect-based
normative justification here, and will return to them more fully later.
But for now, consider what the objects of Nietzsche’s value judgements in the
cited passage are. On the face of it, the objects are simply sensory appearances:
sounds that strike Nietzsche as repellent. But his response is more subtle and
interesting than this. What makes these sounds abhorrent, rather than merely,
say, sensorily unpleasant or irritating, is that they are recognized by him as
expressive of the mental states of those who utter them. In fact, Nietzsche uses
predicates typically used for mental states or dispositions to characterize the
quality of the sounds as experienced: they are ‘scornful’ ‘cold’, ‘indifferent’,
‘careless’, and ‘arrogant’. The fact that Nietzsche describes these acoustic phenomena in these terms suggests that they are directly, without conscious inference, experienced by him in this way: the mental states he takes to ‘speak out of’
the sounds, to be expressed by them, are understood by him as themselves
experientially accessible to him through their expressions; they are not merely
inferred by him as their causes. Moreover, it is the presumed fact that the sounds
are correctly described in these terms that makes them ‘abhorrent’. Their expressive character furnishes them with their main evaluative significance; it is safe to
assume that a mindless grating sound, a metal screeching for example, however
unpleasant, would not have moved Nietzsche to ponder its significance for long:
it would simply not be important enough. I want to suggest that the general style
of evaluation exemplified in this passage is one of the most distinctive features of
Nietzsche’s reflections on value; it is present throughout his writings in his
engagement with specific evaluative phenomena; and it is never superseded,
relativized, or overridden by other types of evaluation. I shall call this Nietzsche’s
aestheticist style of evaluation.
Before considering in more detail just what it involves, let me address one basic
and initial worry about my interpretation of GS 104. Sensory phenomena such as
sound patterns, even when they can be said to express mental states, are for the
most part not connected with those states by natural nomological necessity. Nor
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does there seem to be a constitutive type-correlation between determinate expression types and specific mental states. Arrogance, scorn, or indifference are not
necessarily expressed through a certain tone of voice, nor does the latter indicate
the former by a natural necessity, in the way that boiling water indicates a source
of heat as its cause. In most cases—although, importantly, not in all cases—the
relation between the sense-perceptible expression and the mental state it expresses
is mediated by intention and choice, and therefore, very often, also by convention. But if that is so, how could an observer be directly, experientially aware of
these mental states through their expressions? Would such an awareness not have
to be inferential, i.e. indirect, requiring the use of one’s knowledge of the relevant
conventions as a premise in the inference? The question can be sharpened by
considering cases of obviously convention-mediated, artistic expression, which
figure frequently in Nietzsche’s own examples. Take the following passage on
Wagner:
I have heard, once again for the first time, Wagner’s Meistersinger: it is a magnificent,
overladen, heavy and late art which has the pride to presuppose for its understanding that
two centuries of music are still living— . . . Now it seems archaic, now strange, acid and
too young, it is as arbitrary as it is pompous-traditional, it is not infrequently puckish, still
more often rough and uncouth—it has fire and spirit and at the same time the loose
yellow skin of fruits which ripen too late. It flows broad and full: and suddenly a moment
of inexplicable hesitation . . . an oppression producing dreams, almost a nightmare—but
already the old stream of well-being, of happiness old and new, very much including the
well-being of the artist himself [....] All in all, no beauty, nothing of the south or of subtle
southerly brightness of sky, nothing of gracefulness, no dance, hardly any will to logic; a
certain clumsiness, even, which is actually emphasized, as if the artist wanted to say: ‘it’s
intentional’; a cumbersome drapery, something capriciously barbarous and solemn . . .
something manifold, formless and inexhaustible in the German fashion; a certain powerfulness and overfulness of soul which is not afraid to hide itself among the refinements of
decay—which perhaps feels most at ease there; a true, genuine token of the German soul
[....] This kind of music expresses best what I consider true of the Germans: they are of the
day before yesterday and the day after tomorrow—they have as yet no today. . . . We ‘good
Europeans’: we too have our hours when we permit ourselves a warm-hearted patriotism,
a lapse and regression into old loves and narrownesses—I have just given an example of
it—(BGE 240, 241)
Note that, in this passage also, both the character and the significance, the
value, of certain acoustic phenomena are understood by Nietzsche to a large
extent in terms of mental states, including dispositional states, which he takes
these phenomena to be expressive of. Nietzsche describes the music itself as
simultaneously proud, archaizing, ‘too young’, pompous-traditional, puckish,
rough, uncouth, capriciously barbarous and solemn—and in all of this it is said
to manifest a certain kind of well-being and happiness, a powerfulness and
Aestheticist Ethics
59
overfulness, as a ‘token of the soul’. Now, unlike in the previous example, it
would be implausible to describe the response to the Meistersinger music which is
recorded in this extract as a perception of any actual mental state, for while
Nietzsche heard that particular performance, there presumably was no such
mental state to be perceived. Nietzsche’s response to the performance is therefore
more adequately characterized as a direct (non-inferential) experience, a perception, of certain sensory phenomena as suitable or appropriate for the expression
of certain mental states. We might alternatively say that what the musical
performance made directly, experientially accessible to him is a complex and
highly specific type of mental state, although that type was not actually instantiated at the time and place of the performance.7 Similarly, when watching a film,
one may see certain facial expressions by an actor non-inferentially as anger, as
suitable to co-constitute, rather than merely to signify or indicate, an episode of
anger, while simultaneously being aware that there is no actual instance of anger
there to be perceived.8
What is the ‘soul’, the type of mindedness that Nietzsche hears in the
Meistersinger music? It is tempting to say that it is a specific kind of well-being,
a ‘happiness old and new’ whose very specificity the music is taken to articulate
and which has essentially to do with the mastery of an artistic tradition and,
simultaneously, a sovereignty over it—an ability to dispose of certain artistic
techniques, forms, and traditional effects while also not feeling bound by them.
This sovereign disposal involves, moreover, an enjoyment of manifoldness, even
formlessness, and of inexhaustibility, of an ‘overfulness of soul’—overfull, one
assumes, with conflicting inclinations and appreciations of the solemnly archaic
and the rebelliously youthful, of the fire of passion, and of the detached repose of
achieved maturity. All of this goes with an indifference, even a pointed irony,
towards the well-roundedness, harmony, and well-proportionedness of elegance
or gracefulness. The lack of this kind of form in Die Meistersinger Nietzsche takes
as revealing, not an inability to achieve it, but a receptiveness to too many diverse
goods and aspirations, relative to which the demands of graceful, harmonious
form appear limited and limiting. What Nietzsche takes Die Meistersinger to be
7 Cf. Ridley (1995: 117–18).
8 The picture of mental states I am suggesting here is one according to which expressive
appearances such as bodily expressions are, in an epistemologically fundamental class of cases,
linked to the first-personal phenomenology of the mental states which they express by a connection
which is stronger than ‘Humean’ causation, such that the first-personally given features of the state
can be said, in these cases, to necessitate the expression. There can be no question here, of course, of a
reduction of the mental state to its behavioural expressions considered third-personally. The picture
I am recommending has been advocated especially by philosophers in the phenomenological
tradition: ‘The facial mien is the external aspect of the grief, both form a natural unity . . . Affective
acoustic expressions are on exactly the same plane as visible expressive movements; the fear is one
with the cry of fear just as the grief is with the facial mien, and it [also] differs in its [third-personal]
mode of givenness from that of the coach which is indicated to me by the rumbling of its wheels just
as the givenness of grief in the mien differs from that of a fire through smoke’ (Edith Stein, 1980:
87, 89; translation and emphases mine).
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expressive of, then, is a web of thoughts, capacities, commitments, inclinations,
and feelings. The type of mentality he takes the music to reveal or manifest—to
be essentially suitable for expressing—thus includes both intentional contents
(such as references to a cultural tradition, and indeed to the work itself) and
attitudinal characteristics. The complexity of this type of mindedness, which
gives it its evaluative significance for Nietzsche, could be expressed in its specificity only through this or a similarly complex articulation.
We may therefore say that Nietzsche’s evaluations of Wagner’s music concern
mostly its expressive properties. An expressive property, as I shall use this label
henceforth, is a perceptible property of an object (event, etc.) that is noninferentially taken as presenting intentional contents and/or attitudinal characteristics of some actual or possible mental state. Nietzsche acknowledges that
understanding the music in this way, as an expression of a certain highly specific
kind of interiority, requires a knowledge of the symbolic and other stylistic
conventions of a musical tradition (the point is explicitly made in HH 215).
But for someone immersed in that tradition, that mental life can in favourable
circumstances be given directly, experientially, in the musical appearance. For
such a listener, Die Meistersinger may rightly appear, as Nietzsche puts it in HH,
‘to speak directly to an interiority and come from an interiority’, to be ‘thoroughly interwoven with conceptual and emotive threads’ (HH 215). One suggestion,
then, that I would like to take from Nietzsche’s applying mental predicates to
perceptible acoustic phenomena in the two passages considered is that it is no
more problematic in principle to speak of mental states being directly presented
in these phenomena than it is to speak of some sensory appearance being directly
presented to me as a meaningful sentence-token. In both cases, non-inferential
recognition or conceptualization as a so-and-so is dependent upon a certain
cultural context and immersion, and in both cases I may of course get it
wrong, but this does not impugn the possibility of getting it right.
3 . CHARACTERIZING AESTHETICISM
I have said that Nietzsche’s style of evaluation is fundamentally aestheticist. Let
me now try to explain what I mean by this. A useful route to approach this issue is
through the concept of aesthetic experience, now largely out of fashion in the
philosophy of art. Historically, different versions of this concept, or family of
concepts, have been influential, but there have been some common core features
across most of these variations. An aesthetic experience has generally been taken
to involve (1) an experience of some particular object (event, action, etc.)
although that object need not be presented as a particular in the experience;9
9 Some accounts of aesthetic ‘contemplation’, notably Schopenhauer’s, define it as an awareness
of universals (‘ideas’) on the basis of a perceptual presentation of particulars. In aesthetic
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61
(2) an awareness of certain phenomenal features of the object, which awareness
(3) includes or motivates an affective response to the object. The object is
presented as having an affective significance, it moves the subject in some way.
If the subject also judges the object in terms of its value, the affectively experienced significance underwrites some of those judgements. Furthermore (4) an
aesthetic experience presents its object as having an autonomous value. The
affective component of the experience is motivated by what the phenomenal
object itself is, not by what it may be instrumentally good for. In particular,
the affective component of the experience is not elicited by beliefs about the
object’s conduciveness towards those of the subject’s own ends that do not
involve the object itself. We might put this by saying that the object, by virtue
of some of its own phenomenal properties, is given as an end—as itself valuable
(or disvaluable)—rather than as a means, that is, as owing whatever value it has to
some end other than itself.
There are influential historical construals of aesthetic experience emphasizing
other features that I specifically want to exclude for present purposes. Aesthetic
experience in the minimal sense I am concerned with does not essentially involve
an indifference to the existence of the object;10 nor is it a will-less or desire-less
experience;11 nor is it an experience which exclusively relates to certain intentionally produced objects—artworks—or serves to distinguish these as a functional class from other things.12 Finally, aesthetic experience need be neither
unqualifiedly satisfying nor purely contemplative in an Aristotelian sense. That
is, it need not be an exclusively intuitive activity of the mind involving no desire
for change, nor need it be a kind of experience that calls for no further, ‘practical’
action on the part of the experiencing subject. This last point is of course crucial
if aesthetic experience as defined above is to have ethical significance. Most of the
critical attacks on the idea of aesthetic experience during the twentieth century
and beyond have targeted one or more of these features just excluded.13
In saying that Nietzsche’s philosophy of value is aestheticist I am suggesting
that all of Nietzsche’s value judgements are ultimately grounded in aesthetic
‘contemplation’, particulars perceptually presented are perceived, not as particulars, but as universal
properties that could be exemplified at any time or place. (Schopenhauer 1969, Vol. i, }} 34, 36).
The idea of a perception of universals in particulars (in rebus) is defended, among others, by Husserl
(2001: 2nd Investigation, }} 1–4) and Sprigge (1970: ch. 2), albeit without commitment to
Schopenhauer’s additional claim that such perception essentially requires an absence of affective
and conative states in the perceiver.
10 Famously, Kant thought that aesthetic response is characterized by ‘disinterestedness’:
‘A judgement of taste, on the other hand, is merely contemplative, i.e., it is a judgement that
is indifferent to the existence of the object’ (Kant 1987: } 5). Sartre argues, more radically,
that aesthetic responses are necessarily about objects taken as irreal (Sartre 2004: 189–94).
11 As claimed by Schopenhauer (1969: Vol. i, }} 34, 37). See note 9 above.
12 Such a demarcating function has been assigned to aesthetic experience, among others, by
Monroe Beardsley (1958).
13 As noted by Richard Shusterman (1997: 29–41).
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experiences as just defined. Since these judgements include many verdicts about
ethical issues, we may say that his ethics is aestheticist at least with regard to the
first-order ends upon the pursuit of which the feeling of power is parasitic and
which co-determine its value. In order to pre-empt misunderstandings, let me
stress immediately that the claim is of course not that the values and disvalues
Nietzsche ascribes to ethically significant phenomena, such as generosity, injustice, or murder, are substantively comparable or similar to those which he sees in
what would standardly be called ‘aesthetic’ phenomena, such as natural beauty or
the enjoyment of artworks or musical genius. On substantive questions of value,
his position, for all that has been said so far, may turn out to be perfectly
compatible with the common intuition that certain ethically relevant attitudes
and actions (for instance, those exemplified by the militarized Germans of GS
104) are more significant—that is, more valuable or more disvaluable—than any
kind of artistic creativity (such as that exemplified in Wagner’s Die Meistersinger).
Nietzsche’s aestheticism is not a doctrine of substantive value, but a view about
the grounds of such comparative value judgements, a view according to which
these grounds, in both ethical and what are conventionally labelled ‘aesthetic’
contexts, are ultimately located in experiences which are aesthetic in the specific
sense I have outlined.
There may still seem to be something fundamentally misguided about locating
the ground of the authority of ethical judgements ultimately in aesthetic experiences in the wide sense sketched above. The clear distinction between an ethical
and an aesthetic domain, which has been canonical in modern thought at least
since Kant, has, it may be objected, a solid basis in categorical differences
between the values at stake in these distinct domains. Ethically relevant values,
it may be said, are paradigmatically such things as the well-being and/or the
autonomy of rational (and perhaps other) conscious beings, and these values give
rise to particularly deep or overriding obligations, while aesthetic values are
values which license and perhaps merit certain kinds of contemplative and
imaginative enjoyment while not by themselves generating such obligations. As
I interpret him, Nietzsche does not need to question the usefulness of such a
distinction. It is indeed helpful to delimit a domain of particularly important
values—call these ethically significant values—and there are good reasons, some
of which we shall consider in Section 7 below, for the further substantive claim
that these are intimately connected with the well-being and autonomy of rational
conscious beings. And it is also useful in some contexts to delimit a region of
aesthetic values in a narrow sense—call them ‘aesthetic’ values—which are
associated with certain objects of contemplative or imaginative enjoyment and
which do not give rise to the deep obligations pertaining to the realization or
safeguarding of those particularly important—i.e. ethical—values. For all that
I have argued up to this point, Nietzsche might agree that if I have a choice
between saving a human life and saving the only surviving score of a newly
discovered Beethoven symphony, where I know that the outcome in either case
Aestheticist Ethics
63
depends entirely on my actions or omissions, I should choose the former. The
claim that I am attributing to Nietzsche is that if those specific values which we in
our culture regard as ethically significant are indeed more important than
‘aesthetic’ values in the narrow, ‘modern’, sense, then this difference has to be
in principle demonstrable, it has to show up, in experiences in which the
respective intrinsic values and disvalues at issue are adequately presented to
us—and these experiences would have to be aesthetic in the wide sense characterized above.14
If value judgements are grounded in aesthetic experience, it is easy to see how
they might motivate. They motivate to the extent that they are based on affective
components of those experiences, and the latter are intrinsically motivating. But,
to return to the question posed at the end of Section 1, how could aesthetic
experiences ‘create’ a self-given ‘law’? How can they create rational normative
constraints? One way to address these questions would be to say that aesthetic
experiences themselves have normative force, and they owe this force, pace Kant,
to a relation of appropriateness or adequacy to their objects which they inherently
lay claim to. Specifically, the suggestion would be that the relevant affective
experiences are essentially intentional or representational. I have argued for this
construal of what Nietzsche calls ‘affects’ at some length elsewhere. Here I merely
want to give a brief outline of the general shape of the theory before putting it to
work towards understanding the grounds of Nietzsche’s own substantive commitments. The general idea is that many affective experiences, especially those
individuated by emotion concepts, have intentional objects, which, at the conceptually most basic level of affectivity, are particular objects or events taken as
actual. Affective experience represents these objects under value aspects; grief
represents an event as sad (in a specific way), indignation as unjust or immoral,
disgust represents its object as nauseous, sexual desire as physically attractive,
‘aesthetic’ contemplative pleasure as beautiful or perhaps harmonious, in depression a very comprehensive ‘object’—the world as a whole—is represented as
bleak, hostile, closed off, and so forth. Our emotion terms, and the value terms
corresponding to them, even if they are relatively ‘thick’ or determinate, are of
course far too crude to pick out the determinacy of the affective experiences and
of the specific value features as they are presented in them, just as our colour
vocabulary is too crude to pick out all the differences of shade we are capable of
discriminating. Now it may not seem very illuminating to say that disgust
represents an object as nauseous or that horror picks out something in the
world as horrific. The near-homonyms by which we often describe the response
and what it is a response to draw attention to the close conceptual correlation
between affective experiences and values, but they also tend to mask the important point emphasized by intentional theories of conscious affectivity, which is
14 This claim will be qualified in note 20 below.
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twofold. First, in saying that some affects represent putative value features of
objects, we are saying that, being intentional, they have conditions of success.15
My grief or horror or fear may turn out to have been misplaced, inappropriate, to
have misrepresented the object. Secondly, the phenomenology of these affects is
not characterizable without reference to the way in which the object appears in
them, that is, without predicates used to pick out phenomenal properties of
objects. The phenomenological distinctiveness of horror, or depression, or sexual
desire, or of a certain ‘aesthetic’, contemplative pleasure is not specifiable in an
object-independent way, the way in which one might (perhaps) characterize a
sensation. Even when sensations are involved in these affective episodes, it is not
those sensations that individuate these emotions. Indeed, if sensations are
involved at all, they tend to be effects of the way the object of the emotion is
presented. In fear, for example, the sensations registering a constricted throat, an
increased pulse rate, and so forth are results of one’s awareness of some object as
disagreeably dangerous or threatening; the bodily sensations are not what that
mode of presentation is based on. It follows that the specific affective or hedonic
character of these experiences, the way they move us, their specific pleasantness or
unpleasantness, consists at least in part, and often exclusively, in their presenting
their objects as being in highly specific ways pleasant or unpleasant, intriguing or
boring, attractive or repulsive. In other words, the affective character here just is,
in part or wholly, the object’s appearing as valuable or disvaluable in a highly
determinate manner. The affects present the phenomenal world itself as suffused
with value. So when Nietzsche records his distaste at the preferred intonations of
his German contemporaries, the specific hedonic character of that distaste just
consists in their mode of communication appearing as scornfully cold, arrogant,
and indifferent. And when he responds with a somewhat ambiguous admiring
fascination to Wagner’s Meistersinger, that engrossed fascination just is his
attention being captured by the music’s strangely contradictory, ‘manifold,
formless and inexhaustible’ appearance, its ‘overfulness of soul’. Such experiences
thus include evaluative conceptual contents. But these conceptual contents are
not necessarily judged contents. Intentional affective experiences are not necessarily judgements of value, or even dispositions to judge, although their conceptual content can ground evaluative judgements, as in the example passages I have
cited. But someone might be regularly frightened by snakes, experiencing them
as threatening, while judging that snakes are harmless; or he can affectively
experience a tone of voice on a particular occasion as malicious, perhaps due to
some childhood association deeply ingrained in his psychology, while judging
15 The term ‘object’ will henceforth be used in the broad sense familiar from the
phenomenological tradition, including in its extension events, states of affairs, properties, fictional
individuals, illusory or hallucinated items, and experiences as thought about (rather than ‘lived
through’).
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with confidence that the voice on this particular occasion actually expresses no
malice at all.16
4 . THE NORMATIVITY OF AESTHETIC EXPERIENCE
If affective experiences such as conscious emotions are intentional, then they have
conditions of success, and hence they are subject to an inherent normativity. But
what kind of normativity is this? One answer here would be to say that the
normative force is based on the emotion’s correctly identifying a relation between
some phenomenon in the world and values to which the subject is committed
quite independently of it. Fear, for example, is appropriate if it correctly
identifies some phenomenon as threatening to something that we independently,
and justifiably, value, such as our life or health. Fear therefore involves a higherorder valuation dependent for its authority on the authority of a more basic
value. On Nietzsche’s account, that more basic value—of health or life in this
case—is also disclosed through affectivity (BGE 187; Z, ‘Of the Thousand and
One Goals’; KGW VIII.2.10.9). But what gives the affects that disclose these
ground-level values their authority? In order to answer that question, it is
instructive to look again at Nietzsche’s own practice. The two characteristic
examples I introduced earlier can serve us well here. In both cases, Nietzsche’s
affective evaluations are directed at sense-perceptible phenomena taken as expressive of actual or possible conscious mental states and consciously exercised
capabilities. There is no indication, in the Meistersinger example, that Nietzsche’s
appreciative response, his fascination with the music, is elicited in any significant
way by purely formal properties of the music—the music’s formal and sensory
properties are interesting for him very largely on account of the mindedness, the
type of ‘soul’ that he takes them to express and articulate. Moreover, this affective
valuation of the music qua expression takes as its object the intrinsic character of
those mental states. Nietzsche is fascinated by the ‘soul’ manifest in Wagner’s
music for what it is itself; he does not value it for, say, the vivifying effect it may
have had on himself, Nietzsche, in particular. The direction of justification here
does not run: the music is valuable for Nietzsche by reason of its effects on him.
Instead those effects either consist in or are grounded in—are both caused and
justified by—Nietzsche’s affective apprehension of apparent value features of
some possible mentality-as-expressed in the music. While the values Nietzsche
takes himself to apprehend here are values that can only be instantiated in
persons—in a soul, as he puts it—they are thus not essentially indexed to
particular persons, for example, to Nietzsche himself. They are, in that sense,
essentially universal. This shows that Nietzsche’s actual practice here aligns with
16 On the ‘cognitive impenetrability’ of affective experiences, see Goldie (2000: 74–6) and also
Drummond (2004).
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the characterization of aesthetic experience I gave earlier. Aesthetic experience
involves an affective valuing of an object for its own sake, on account of its
intrinsic phenomenal properties, and these can in principle be instantiated in
different times and places.
I have been stressing this point partly because it seems to me that Nietzsche
often tends to misconstrue his own practice in his theoretical reflection on it, and
this misconstrual tends to lead him astray in some of his later reflections on
evaluative psychology. Here are two typical passages:
Avarice and love: what different feelings these two terms evoke! Nevertheless it could be
the same instinct that has two names . . . Our love of our neighbour—is it not a lust for
new possessions? And likewise our love of knowledge, of truth, and altogether any lust for
what is new? . . . Even the most beautiful scenery is no longer assured of our love after we
have lived in it for three months, and some more distant coast attracts our avarice . . . Our
pleasure in ourselves tries to maintain itself by again and again changing something new
into ourselves; that is what possession means. To become tired of some possession means
tiring of ourselves. (GS 14)
In avarice I value my possessing or acquiring some thing, and the suggestion in
GS 14 is that my valuing of that thing as a good depends on its contingent
relation to myself—specifically on its being ‘new’ to me and on being either
freshly acquired or available to be taken possession of. The scenery is valued as
beautiful at least in part in so far as it is, or promises to be, newly possessed by
myself, and it loses this apparent value when, and because, I get tired with myself.
Now while Nietzsche here points to important connections between the concepts
of value and ‘possession’ in the widest sense—I shall come back to these later—he
gets the direction of explanation the wrong way round. Surely I desire possession
of the thing because it is affectively presented to me as beautiful, and I become
tired of myself ‘possessing’ it because the thing ceases to be presented to me in that
way—which may well be partly a function of the thing now appearing to me as
being itself such as to allow being possessed, whether by myself or someone else.
We find a similar inversion of explanandum and explanans in BGE 265, where
Nietzsche says:
I set it down that egoism pertains to the essence of the noble soul . . . Under certain
circumstances . . . it will admit that there are others with rights equal to its own . . . This
refinement and self-limitation in traffic with its equals is one more aspect of its egoism . . . : it
honours itself in them and in the rights it concedes them. (BGE 265)
The noble soul, Nietzsche suggests here, does not grant universal recognition
to other subjectivity qua rational subjectivity, or even selectively to the extent that
the Other has substantive qualities taken to be intrinsically valuable, but rather, it
respects to the extent that the Other has whatever traits itself happens to have; the
suggestion seems to be that the general features that are valued by the noble are
valued by him only by virtue of the fact that he, the noble, happens to have these
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features, so that all the noble’s affirmations are necessarily self-affirmations.
A similar point seems to be made in GM I, 5, where Nietzsche maintains that
the specific qualities valued by the politically or physically powerful nobles in
archaic warrior society are just those that happen to be ‘their typical character
trait[s]’. These traits, it is implied, are taken as valuable by the nobles, not
because of what they are in themselves, but because of who possesses them.
The affirmation of some quality of character as valuable is said to be derived from
a self-affirmation prior to and independent of it. Now, the picture of the nobles
that emerges from the first essay of the Genealogy as a whole is arguably rather
more complex, and parts of it are incompatible with the story in GM I, 5. But it is
still worth emphasizing the view adumbrated in that passage and in BGE 265,
since it forms one important, though internally contested, strand in Nietzsche’s
thinking about value in the later writings. This view is also echoed in the
psychology of the will to power that was sketched earlier. According to that
psychology, what I value when I value ‘power’ is necessarily something about
myself: my own successful transformative activity (see esp. WP 663, 688, 689).
This is very different from the aesthetic style of first-order evaluation in the
Meistersinger passage (and many similar ones, e.g. GS 290, 291, 302, 321; BGE
224, 260, 261, 263). To be sure, the values that Nietzsche’s affective response
picks out in this latter passage, like all values on Nietzsche’s account, cannot be
exemplified independently of some actual affectivity. But they are not essentially
indexed to a particular, neither to Nietzsche, nor to the composer of Die
Meistersinger. They are, precisely, exemplifications of maximally specific value
types, which could in principle be exemplified, given a relevantly similar context,
by any number of other subjects.
Let me summarize the salient points of the discussion so far. I have argued
that, for Nietzsche, the most basic first-order goods or values which co-determine
even the value of the ‘feeling of power’, are given as values in affective experiences
that are aesthetic in the sense of being responses to objects (persons, actions) for
what they themselves phenomenally are. These affective, aesthetic experiences,
which Nietzsche often simply calls ‘taste’, are not necessarily judgements, but
they are intentional acts analogous to sense-perceptions or quasi-sensory
imaginings. They presumptively represent value features of their intentional
objects. I have further argued that most of the affective–evaluative responses
recorded in Nietzsche’s own writings are to phenomenal objects in so far as they
either are or express an actual or possible interiority, a mental life. It follows that
they lay claim to being representations of the intrinsic value of that mental life,
that is, to being veridical of it. And if they can make good this claim, this would
give us the normative constraint we have been looking for.
The general kind of account I have canvassed seems to me strongly supported
by Nietzsche’s reflections in Beyond Good and Evil on those aspects of the ‘noble’
mode of evaluation that he evidently remains in sympathy with:
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What is noble? What does the word ‘noble’ mean to us today? What . . . makes evident the
noble human being?—It is not his actions which reveal him—actions are always ambiguous, always unfathomable—; neither is it his ‘works’ . . . It is not the works, it is the faith
which is decisive here, which determines the order of rank here, to employ an old
religious formula in a new and deeper sense (BGE 287)
When it is the rulers who determine the concept ‘good’, it is the exalted, proud states of
soul which are considered distinguishing and distinguishable and determine the order of
rank . . . It is immediately obvious that designations of moral value were everywhere first
applied to human beings, and only later and derivatively to actions . . . In the foreground
stands the feeling of plenitude, of power which seeks to overflow, the happiness of high
tension, the consciousness of a wealth that wishes to give away and bestow (BGE 260)
Lest we think that the ‘states of soul’ eulogized here are a little too close to
complacency, the typical companion of privilege, Nietzsche disabuses us a few
sections later:
How deeply human beings can suffer almost determines their order of rank—the harrowing
certainty, with which he is wholly permeated and coloured, that by virtue of his suffering he
knows more than even the cleverest and wisest can know . . . this spiritual, silent haughtiness
of the sufferer . . . finds all forms of disguise necessary to protect itself . . . Profound suffering
ennobles; it separates. (BGE 270)
The style of evaluation in these passages illustrates much of what I have been
arguing for in this essay. Note that, for all its emphasis on states of soul and selfconsciousness, it does not need to be consciousness-centred in implausible ways;
it does not commit Nietzsche to saying that all value or the most important kinds
of value are found in world-independent, ‘Cartesian’ experiences, or that physical
actions are comparatively insignificant or even devoid of value. On the interpretation I am proposing, the identity of the mental states at issue is co-determined
by the actual or possible worldly items they are about, and they are often
essentially such as to call for, rather than just to cause, public expression in
actions in appropriate circumstances. Many emotions, for example, essentially
include action dispositions. Nietzsche seems to acknowledge this when he
reminds us that ‘happiness should not be sundered from action’ (GM I, 10).
What he is referring to when he cautions, in BGE 265, that ‘actions are always
ambiguous’ is simply the ambiguity of the third-personal, behavioural component of action when abstracted from its first-personal aspect.
If Nietzsche’s affective valuations of others’ conscious mental states and of
their actions in their first-personal aspects are best construed as aiming at
veridicality, it is plausible to say that they aim to represent the values which are
phenomenally intrinsic to those mental states and those actions, considered from
the point of view of the agent. What do I mean by this?
The phenomenally intrinsic value (or disvalue) of a conscious mental state, or
of an action essentially involving such a state, is its experienced attractiveness
(or unattractiveness) from the point of view of the subject being in that state (or
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performing the action) if it is presented adequately to her and if it is considered
by itself.
The second conditional clause—that the state or action be ‘considered by
itself ’—should not be understood as a requirement that an objectifying or
reflective stance be taken towards it (as opposed to merely being in it or
performing it). It is simply intended to rule out considerations relating to the
state’s or action’s actual effects or consequences, or its enabling conditions,
except in so far as these figure in the intentional content of the state or action
itself. The first conditional clause—that the state or action should be adequately
presented to the subject herself—is in part to indicate that most, if not all, of
these constitutively have intentional objects, presented under certain aspects, and
that the specification of the intrinsic phenomenal character of those states or
actions will therefore need to make reference to all their evaluatively relevant
intentional objects and the latter’s modes of presentation. Indeed, if, as I have
been suggesting, the contents of many conscious affective states are phenomenologically external to the subject herself—for example, the specific beauty of a
painting—the adequate givenness of the state itself to the subject will include a
conscious reference to external empirical contents—in this case, certain aspects of
the painting.
The condition of ‘adequate givenness’ is also intended to disqualify the
experienced value of mental states that involve an occlusion or misinterpretation
by the subject of her own experiential life. Few philosophers have been as
attentive to this sort of phenomenon as Nietzsche, who takes it to be at the
heart of ‘slave morality’. The ‘slaves’ typically affirm themselves on the basis of
their ostensible access to values of character (justice, forbearance, and so forth)
that they do not genuinely, experientially acknowledge. It is this motivated
misinterpretation of their own experiences that enables them, as Nietzsche puts
it, to ‘establish their happiness artificially . . . to deceive themselves that they [are]
happy’ (GM I, 10). The intrinsic phenomenal value of their mental life is
different from the value it appears to them to have, since their own mental states
are not given adequately to themselves.
5 . APPLYING THE THEORY
We can put some flesh on these rather abstract remarks by applying them to the
examples introduced earlier. What are the values that Nietzsche’s affective
response—his slightly ambiguous, but mostly enthralled, appreciative fascination—recorded in the Meistersinger passage might be said veridically to pick up
on? As I suggested earlier, these values comprise a specific kind of well-being
involving a mastery of and sovereignty over a tradition, an enjoyment of
manifoldness, an ‘overfulness’ with conflicting inclinations and appreciations, a
receptiveness to many diverse goods and aspirations relative to which the beauty
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of graceful, harmonious form is experienced as limited and limiting. So what
Nietzsche’s affective response aims to be veridical to is the intrinsic value of a
highly specific type of well-being constituted by a complex web of thoughts,
exercised capacities, commitments, inclinations, and feelings. And the evaluative
adequacy or inadequacy of Nietzsche’s response is transitive: it is adequate only if
that type of mental life that he hears expressed in the music is itself adequate to its
objects. If, for example, the mentality expressed in the music were rightly
construed as involving not merely a relativizing of the values of grace and beauty,
but instead an insensitivity to, or even ressentiment against them, then Nietzsche’s
own affective appreciation of it would be unwarranted. Conversely, if Nietzsche
does construe the expressive character of the music correctly in its essential
features, then an affective response that differed fundamentally from Nietzsche’s
would be indicative of ignorance or blindness; either an ethically indifferent
ignorance of the complex cultural and (perhaps) personal knowledge required to
understand the music, or a blindness to the specific values it exhibits.
Notoriously, Nietzsche often talks about an order of rank among values, and
frequently he uses objectivist, realist language in this context: ‘there exists an
order of rank . . . also between morality and morality’ (BGE 228). Given his
aestheticist style of evaluation, this should come as no surprise; relative evaluative
judgements are after all standard fare in aesthetic criticism: some works of art are
said to be better, more interesting, more worthwhile, than others. It is worth
exploring what might underwrite this talk when it is transposed to the ethical
domain. Consider again, as an uncontroversially ethical example, the passage
about the militarized Germans (GS 104). It is evident that Nietzsche wants to say
that the mind-set and attitudes exhibited among them are very much inferior to
that which he finds, for instance, in ‘German music’. The passage is especially
revealing because the attitudes described in it are uncomfortably close to some of
the descriptions of the nobles in GM I. There is the conviction or pre-reflective
confidence that one is entitled to command, a ‘raging sense of authority’, a
‘pathos of distance’, a careless indifference, contemptuous of what is ‘not oneself’, and so on. According to the account of Nietzsche’s aestheticist style of
valuation I have been articulating, his own affective evaluation of these attitudes
as ‘abhorrent’ and ‘distasteful’ depends for its authority in large part on whether
or not it veridically picks up intrinsic disvalues exemplified in them. If we accept
the principle that it is a necessary condition for the direct givenness of something
as a disvalue that it should be presented in a negative affective mode (as repellent,
unattractive, distasteful in some specific way), then it follows that Nietzsche’s
valuation is veridical just in case that, necessarily, these attitudes would be
presented in this way to their subjects if they were recognized by them for
what they are. And since they are evidently not given as disvalues to them,
Nietzsche would have to say that those of his German contemporaries who
exhibit these attitudes are ignorant of the actual character of their own conscious mental life. The truth about these subjects as they are described in this
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passage—a truth which they fail to recognize—is that the contents of their basic
evaluative commitments are essentially indexed to themselves, being based on or
even constituted by a kind of self-affirmation that floats free of any acknowledgement of values that might in principle be instantiated in others. These
subjects, as Nietzsche portrays them, implicitly deny any element of generality
or universality of value at the basic level. For the mindedness expressed in their
communicative practices is one that indiscriminately assumes their own ‘authority’ and superiority over others in advance of any knowledge of their interlocutors
and without any interest in acquiring such knowledge. If this interpretation of
their evaluative stance is correct, then the idea of self-improvement, of ethical
education, can make no sense to them, since this would require an orientation
towards value properties that one currently fails to actualize or recognize.
A mental life of the kind Nietzsche describes in GS 104 is imprisoned in what
it is; it is evaluatively stagnant or inert, for it has voluntarily cut itself off from any
possibility of value discovery. The only actively initiated evaluative development
there can be for such a subject is an increase or decrease of its own power. The
unconditional commitment to one’s own power or domination over others—the
‘raging sense of authority’ Nietzsche describes—implies the affirmation of a
subject’s own will and power over whatever values there may be outside the
boundaries of himself. Every value or disvalue present in otherness is from such a
point of view considered only in instrumental terms, as an obstacle to or occasion
for the self-affirmation of the subject and its power. Now, according to the
argument presented in Section 4, the kind of justification that Nietzsche’s most
fundamental evaluations aspire to is veridicality: they aim to be adequate representations of the intrinsic phenomenal (dis)value of their targets. With respect to
the present example, this commits Nietzsche to the claim that the set of attitudes
described in GS 104 could not fail to be experienced as repellent by the subjects
themselves if they were transparently recognized by them. Nietzsche’s explanation of why these attitudes are not experienced by their subjects in this way would
presumably be that these individuals are motivatedly deceived about the nature
of their own commitments, not unlike the subjects of ressentiment in the first
essay of On the Genealogy of Morals. This also explains why the attitudes
portrayed in this passage are very rarely held explicitly. Indeed, they may be
rare even as implicit commitments. Nietzsche’s description here, as so often,
seems to delineate an ideal type (in this case, a negative one), to which actual
historical individuals or cultures approximate to various degrees.
6 . THE VALUE OF SUBJECTIVITY
The materials are now in place for explaining why Nietzsche’s talk about an
‘order of rank’ among values is often blithely realist and why this is compatible
with his insistence that values are not ontologically independent of subjectivity:
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‘Truly, human beings have given themselves all their good and evil . . . Only
through valuing is there value’ (Z, ‘Of the Thousand and One Goals’). Subjectivities themselves manifest, in Nietzsche’s view, different types of intrinsic
value, which allow for, indeed in his view require, qualitative distinctions in
terms of ‘higher’ and ‘lower’, although there is no suggestion that they are
reducible to a single metric. If there is only value through valuing, then unconscious items, such as natural objects and landscapes cannot have actual value in
themselves—‘nature is always valueless’ (GS 301)—but they may well have noninstrumental value, i.e. they may be rightly valued as ends rather than as mere
means towards ends specifiable independently of them.
Now recall that, according to the view I have been recommending, the evaluative content of many affective conscious states is to be construed in an empirically,
or phenomenologically, externalist way. Many of these states will have whatever
intrinsic value they have by virtue of empirical physical objects co-constituting
them and also figuring as ends in them, for example in the contemplative
appreciation of a landscape purely for its formal or other non-expressive features.
But Nietzsche shows conspicuously little interest in these kinds of values. Most of
his concrete evaluative practice concerns either the putative instrumental value of
various kinds of things (for example of suffering, or of arbitrary discipline) or the
intrinsic values and disvalues associated with subjectivity: of mental states, or
persons, or conscious actions or objects taken as expressive of subjectivity. It is
tempting to conclude from this that he considers the non-instrumental values of
non-expressive objects to be of comparatively lesser significance than the values of
objects that are expressive of subjectivity. This is not to say that all non-expressive
objects are necessarily less valuable as ends (‘for their own sake’) than any
expressive objects. Rather, the thought suggested by Nietzsche’s emphases in his
own practice is that both the highest value and the lowest disvalue potentially
possessed by non-expressive objects is less than that potentially had by objects
expressive of subjectivity—non-expressive objects or happenings neither attain to
the peaks nor to the nadir of value, so to speak.
Before some concluding reflections on why Nietzsche seems to think this, I want
to face head-on a central worry about the aestheticist foundations of his ethics as
outlined so far. The idea that mental lives, subjectivities, and the actions that express
them can be ranked in terms of values construed as possessing objective authority in
the way I have sketched seems to offend against deep-seated value commitments in
modernity, and Nietzsche often revels in this confrontation with mainstream
modernity. In his writings after The Gay Science, he not only suggests that (1)
human subjects differ fundamentally, categorically, in terms of the ‘rank’ of the
values they are capable of realizing, but also that (2) we can know this in individual
cases. But where he clashes most fundamentally with modern moral sensibilities is in
the idea mooted in some passages that (3) some humans—those known to be
constitutionally incapable of realizing ‘higher’ values—should be regarded not as
ends, but as instruments for the attainment of a higher culture among a spiritual
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aristocracy (BGE 239, 257). None of these three tenets follow from Nietzsche’s
aestheticist style of valuation; they all depend on unrelated empirical claims of, at
best, dubious standing. Nietzsche’s aestheticism is in principle compatible with a
version of humanism that considers all humans as intrinsically valuable ends in so far
as they instantiate one fundamental value on which all other values are dependent,
namely the capacity for recognizing value. Acknowledging X as a value for its own sake
rationally commits one to valuing for their own sake whatever conditions are
constitutive for X, and these conditions, on Nietzsche’s own account, include the
capacities needed to recognize, to appreciate X. All actual values are essentially
phenomenal, that is, it is constitutive for them that they appear to some consciousness. So, if we acknowledge any general values (values not essentially indexed to
particulars) we are also rationally bound to value human subjectivity quite generally
in so far as it is constituted by the capacity to recognize such values. Variations on this
idea can be found in Scheler’s phenomenology of value,17 in Sartre’s existentialist
ethics,18 and in Christine Korsgaard’s version of Kantianism.19 Nietzsche seems
explicitly to embrace a version of it when he says that ‘valuing is itself the value and
jewel of all valued things’ (Z, ‘Of the Thousand and One Goals’).20 But Nietzsche is
surely mistaken when he implies in some late passages that we can conclusively know
about some actual human subjects that they lack the capacity to recognize any
significant (or ‘higher’) values or the potential to acquire such a capacity—that
they are, as it were, constitutionally ‘slaves’. And if we cannot know this, then the
antecedent of his occasional musings about the virtues of slavery is false.
7. VALUE AND CONCEPTUALIZATION
Let me now finally return to the issue of why Nietzsche seems to think that the
most significant—the ‘highest’ or ‘lowest’—values are those associated with
valuating consciousness and objects expressive of it, rather than values supervenient on non-expressive properties of objects (such as formal, or sensory, or
17 Scheler (1973: 94–100).
18 Sartre (1992: 51–3).
19 Korsgaard (1996: 120–30).
20 Nietzsche’s espousal of the normative claim that (the capacity for) valuing is itself a
fundamental value may seem difficult to square with the central argument of this essay, according
to which the warrant for Nietzsche’s evaluative claims lies ultimately in what I have called aesthetic
experience. How could the value of such a highly general capacity—a dispositional value—be given
in experiences of the relevant sort? If Nietzsche’s position is to have any plausibility, he surely needs
to concede that we can acknowledge intrinsic values which are not, and perhaps cannot be,
presented to us intuitively, but which we rightly acknowledge on the basis of rational inference.
Our commitment to them therefore presupposes a commitment to the value of rationality. But why
should we value rationality? It is not implausible to think that this value can be presented in aesthetic
experience in the sense employed in this essay. It is not exotic to suppose that the flouting of basic
formal requirements of thought in matters of importance cannot but appear as unattractive if
contemplated lucidly, and that any genuinely envisaged wholesale loss of the ability to conform to
these requirements cannot but strike us with profound dismay or horror.
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scientific properties). The following remark from Beyond Good and Evil may
serve as a guide here:
A thing elucidated is a thing that no longer concerns us. (BGE 80)
I submit that Nietzsche is here not just talking about causal explanation, but is
articulating a point, slightly hyperbolically, about the essentially limited value of
anything that is fully conceptually grasped. As evidence for this interpretation,
consider another extract from the same text:
That which we men of the ‘historical sense’ find hardest to . . . love, that which at bottom
finds us prejudiced and almost hostile, is just what is complete and wholly mature in every
art and culture, that which constitutes actual nobility in works and in men, their moment
of smooth sea and halcyon self-sufficiency, the goldness and coldness of all things which
have become perfect (BGE 224).
That ‘completeness’, and ‘self-sufficiency’ of a noble culture is to be understood in terms of its dominant taste:
that unwillingness of a noble and self-sufficient culture to admit to a new desire, a
dissatisfaction with one’s own culture, an admiration for what is foreign: all this disposes
them unfavourably towards even the best things in the world which are not their property
and could not become their prey. (BGE 224)
The nobles, in other words, are culture chauvinists. Their unwillingness to
admit to a new desire, their indifference towards anything that is not or cannot
become their property, are obviously not to be understood as the nobles’ being
desireless, or as possessing everything they desire—being self-sufficient in an
Aristotelian sense. The first essay of the Genealogy quickly disabuses us of this
idea. Rather, the nobles lack an interest in kinds of desires whose contents they do
not or cannot know, and in goods whose nature they do not or cannot understand, given the way they (the nobles) already are. Bearing in mind that Nietzsche
often glosses conceptualization as essentially a form of appropriation or possession-taking (BGE 230; WP 423, 501), we might say that the nobles are unconcerned about desires or goods which they, given the way they already are, do not
or cannot have a concept of.
The taste of Nietzsche’s ‘free spirit’, by contrast, is one according to which a
thing fully conceptualized is a thing ‘that no longer concerns’ him; less hyperbolically, it is a thing he has only a limited or subordinate interest in. Now the
values that supervene on the non-expressive sensory, formal, and scientific
properties of things are precisely values that essentially depend on what we, as
we already are, do or can conceptually grasp. To be sure, Kant argued that
judgements of the beautiful have their ground in formal properties of objects that
we do not grasp in determinate concepts, but the whole basis of Kant’s theory of
the judgement of beauty is that these properties are available for determinate
classification; the judgement of beauty, according to Kant, registers the harmony
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of the faculties and is thus a state in which the subjective condition for knowledge
already exists without any objective judgement actually being made.21
Nietzsche sharpens the contrast between his own ethical–aesthetic sensibility
and ‘nobility’ in the final crescendo of BGE 224:
Measure is alien to us, let us admit it to ourselves; what we itch for is the infinite, the
unmeasured. Like a rider on a charging steed we let fall the reins before the infinite, we
modern men, like semi-barbarians—and attain our state of bliss only when we are most—
in danger. (BGE 224)
This passage is echoed by others where Nietzsche’s preferred metaphor to make
the same point is that of the seafarer or explorer venturing out into an open,
undiscovered sea (e.g. GS 341, 377). There is clearly a connection between this
taste for the ‘unmeasured’, the ‘infinite’, and Nietzsche’s practice of associating the
most significant values—the apex and nadir of value—with evaluating consciousness itself and with objects taken as expressive of it. We may begin to appreciate the
nature of that link when we consider the following remark on desire:
Ultimately one loves one’s desires and not that which is desired (BGE 175)
This aphorism is also clearly hyperbolical; as it stands it is inconsistent with
most of what Nietzsche says elsewhere. But it does capture something that is
important to Nietzsche. A plausible rephrasing, making it compatible with the
main thrust of his thinking, would be:
One fundamentally loves not an object of desire, but desiring itself.
On this rephrasing, the remark calls to mind the slightly different but related
claim Bernard Reginster attributes to Nietzsche: that our mental life includes an
ever-present second-order desire to pursue some first-order desire.22 Reginster
traces this idea, I think correctly, to Nietzsche’s continuing commitment to a
core element of Schopenhauer’s psychology of conscious desire. Human desire,
Schopenhauer argued, has a seemingly paradoxical structure, for while each
instance of desire for some determinate end aims at some state of affairs whose
attainment or realization would make that particular desire cease, human psychology also includes a standing second-order desire for the continuation of
desiring.23 Schopenhauer took this structure of desire to be revealed by the
phenomenon of boredom, which invariably sets in once all the determinate
ends of one’s first-order desires at a given time have been attained and no new
determinate desires have yet arisen. On Reginster’s reading, Nietzsche modifies
this Schopenhauerian psychology of desire, contending that a standing desire for
the successful pursuit of desires against resistances is a primitive and humanly
inescapable empirical fact. But if we accept, as Nietzsche does, Schopenhauer’s
21 Kant (1987: 407–9). See also Guyer (1997: 74–80).
22 Reginster (2006: 125).
23 Reginster (2006: 120–3).
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Peter Poellner
claim that the phenomenon of boredom shows the nature of human desire to be
such that it cannot be satisfied by the attainment of any determinate end, might
not a different explanation of this phenomenon be available to Nietzsche? The
final aphorism of Beyond Good and Evil gestures towards an explanatory alternative:
Alas, and yet what are you, my written and painted thoughts! . . . You have already taken
off your novelty and some of you, I fear, are on the point of becoming truths: they already
look so immortal, so pathetically righteous, so boring! And has it ever been otherwise? For
what things do we write and paint . . . we immortalizers of things which let themselves be
written, what alone are we capable of painting? Alas, only that which is about to wither and
is beginning to lose its fragrance! . . . Alas, only birds strayed and grown weary in flight
who now let themselves be caught in the hand—in our hand. (BGE 296; first two
emphases mine)
Most of the ‘thoughts’ in Beyond Good and Evil, like anywhere in Nietzsche’s
work, relate to issues of value. Having been articulated and written down, they
have withered and grown stale—indeed, he professes himself bored by them. Now
one reason why this might be so is that these written-down thoughts have since
become detached from actual lived experience. We can understand the content of
a sentence, or indeed a painting, about a certain sort of experience without
actually undergoing the experience, and most of our linguistic understanding is
of this nature. Where the experience in question is an affective registering of some
value, we can understand the description without the value itself being experientially present to us. The description and our understanding of it is, in this case,
‘withered’ and stale when contrasted with the phenomenon itself.
But this is not the heart of what Nietzsche is getting at in this passage. He
pointedly says that all we can ‘write and paint’ are things that are ‘beginning to
lose [their] fragrance’, birds ‘grown weary in flight’. For all of them are, metaphorically, things that ‘let themselves be caught in . . . our hand’ in the sense that
we, as we are, can grasp their nature in determinate concepts capable of figuring
in true judgements. So the passage suggests a quite distinctive interpretation of
boredom, the phenomenon that so impressed Schopenhauer and which, in
Reginster’s interpretation, also constitutes evidence for the psychology of the
will to power. Reginster’s Nietzsche would have to say that boredom is a
conflicted, internally torn, psychological state, because it involves both the satisfaction normally attendant upon the attainment of a desired end, and also a
dissatisfaction with that attainment, due to the second-order desire for the
activity of successfully pursuing determinate first-order desires. But the explanation of boredom suggested by BGE 296 is somewhat different: it is that whatever
ends we can specify in determinate concepts turn out to be inadequate to the
implicit character or content of our first-order desiring itself. It is for this reason
that becoming dissatisfied with any thus-specified attained ends is eventually
inevitable. As Nietzsche himself puts it, ‘a thing elucidated no longer concerns us’
Aestheticist Ethics
77
(BGE 80). This explanation also seems to fit better with the phenomenology of
boredom, which, in its full-blown instances, is a lack of interest in any determinate ends or goods one can present to oneself, conjoined with a desire that there
be something which would engage one’s interest. And the mere availability of
plentiful opportunities for the overcoming of resistances is often not sufficient to
generate such interest. The prospect of a successful mastery of obstacles—of
exercising the will to power—will not alleviate boredom if the ends towards
which the obstacles are to be overcome are experienced as ‘withered’ and without
‘fragrance’.
If such is the structure of human desire, then this explains why Nietzsche’s
own evaluative practice privileges the values manifested by human consciousness
itself, or in kinds of consciousness relevantly similar to it. Human subjectivity, as
Nietzsche understands it, most fundamentally ‘loves’ not ‘that which is desired’—any determinately conceptualizable end—but a desiring that is incommensurate with any object representable by us. We might say that human
subjectivity loves the desire for self-transformation through an orientation towards what Nietzsche calls ‘ideals’, the contents of which cannot be determinately specified by us as we are—towards ‘an as yet undiscovered country whose
boundaries nobody has surveyed yet’ (GS 382).24 In so far as human subjectivity
involves such a desire that is incommensurate with any object—any fully conceptualizable content—human subjectivity is itself not determinately and exhaustively conceptualizable by us, not describable as an object with a specifiable
essence. And therefore it instantiates values that are categorically different from,
and more significant than, that of any thing whose nature we can fully ‘elucidate’
(BGE 80) and which therefore can concern us only in the limited way which
becomes manifest in the boredom eventually ensuing upon such a thing’s
possession or realization.25
24 A stronger claim, which I hesitate to attribute to Nietzsche, would be that these contents cannot
be exhaustively conceptualized in principle. For a powerful literary-philosophical development, clearly
influenced by Nietzsche, of this latter idea, see Musil (1995).
25 The view I am attributing to Nietzsche is that human (or relevantly similar) subjectivity has a
special evaluative significance which is different from that of any possible object. While this arguably
amounts to a kind of humanism, it differs from Enlightenment humanism as represented with
exemplary perspicacity by Christine Korsgaard. For Korsgaard, what has unconditional value is
humanity itself, understood as the capacity for reflectively endorsed and consistently universalizable
(‘rational’) choice (Korsgaard 2006: 125–7). Nietzsche, while rejecting the terminology of
unconditional value (e.g. BGE 31), concurs on one important substantive point: that ‘valuing is
itself the value and jewel of all valued things’ (Z, ‘Of a thousand and one goals’). But what he
understands by ‘valuing’ is more substantial than reflective and practically consistent endorsement
of inclinations and (in this sense) creating a law for oneself. ‘Valuing’, in this remark from Thus
spoke Zarathustra, essentially encompasses the capacity for recognizing ‘higher’ values, and this
capacity, Nietzsche insists, is neither equivalent to nor entailed by the capacity for consistently
endorsable choice. For explicit statements of aspects of Nietzsche’s humanism, see e.g. TI,
‘Expeditions of an untimely man’, 32; Z, ‘On the blissful islands’.
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On the interpretation I am proposing, the characterization of human subjectivity just given applies not only to the Nietzschean free spirit, but rather
delineates what he takes to be a feature—albeit a historically often only implicit,
unrecognized feature—of human desire more generally. What distinguishes the
Nietzschean free spirit is the explicit recognition and affirmation of this feature of
human subjectivity—the free spirit in this sense ‘becomes who he is’ (cf. GS 335).
Many of us are of course not explicitly aware of the character of our desiring as
Nietzsche describes it. The nobles discussed earlier certainly are not. But if
Nietzsche is right, even their desires are, implicitly and unrecognized by them,
incommensurate with the determinate goods they ‘possess’ and the ‘perfection’
they accomplish. And it is clear that Nietzsche thinks that a value higher than
nobility is potentially realized in the consciousness of those ‘modern men’ who
explicitly understand themselves aright. This aspect of Nietzsche’s aestheticist
ethics clearly distinguishes it from the aestheticist elements in earlier approaches
to ethics, such as Aristotle’s.
Let me conclude by briefly indicating two additional virtues—one textual and
one philosophical—of the interpretation broached here. Textually, it enables us to
explain a feature of Nietzsche’s reflections on value that has often been noted and
criticized: he never coherently and unambiguously specifies the contents of the
much-vaunted ‘new’ and ‘higher’ ideals that he keeps, often in highly general,
apparently empty terms, pointing us towards. On the reading I have canvassed
this is not a deficiency or a lacuna. It is entirely consistent with his substantive
philosophy of value and it does not require us to say, implausibly, that Nietzsche’s
philosophy is not concerned with value contents, but only with formal characteristics of a ‘higher’ morality-to-come. The interpretation also allows us to make
sense of two of Nietzsche’s favoured images for the value-orientation he affirms:
the image of the ‘free spirit’ as a voyager embarking onto an open, undiscovered
sea, and that of humanity as a bridge, having a mode of existence that is essentially
a ‘going-beyond’ (Übergang; Z, ‘Prologue’, 4). The distinctive value of humanity,
according to Nietzsche, accrues to it by virtue of this mode of existence.26
26 In Thus Spoke Zarathustra, Nietzsche sometimes seems to suggest that humanity’s
constitutively being a ‘going-beyond’—that is, on the present reading: humanity’s fundamentally
desiring and thus affirming something that it cannot fully grasp as an object—precludes its being
rightly thought of as an end (Zweck ; Z, ‘Prologue’, 4). The suggestion, at least on one familiar
interpretation of this remark, appears to be that if humanity constitutively seeks to transcend itself in
the sense I have indicated, then it should in consistency be regarded as a means towards an end other
than itself. But this conclusion does not follow. What does follow is that nothing about humanity
that we, as we are, can grasp, that is, objectify, in (e.g.) biological, sociological, or psychological
concepts, is commensurate with what we fundamentally value. Perhaps the most fruitful
interpretation of Nietzsche’s talk of the Übermensch is not to take this to refer to some really
possible future entity, some special kind of post- or super-human biological object, but rather to
aspects of humanity itself which self-consciously exceed any such self-objectifying categories. In fact,
immediately after Nietzsche’s remark that humanity is ‘a bridge and not an end’, he qualifies this by
saying that ‘what can be loved about human beings is that they are a going-beyond ’. But ‘to love X’
entails ‘to treat X as an end’.
Aestheticist Ethics
79
Philosophically, an important advantage of the present line of interpretation is
that it may facilitate the task of integrating the pyschology of the will to power
with Nietzsche’s quite evident concern with an ‘order of rank’ among first-order
ends. As has been stressed repeatedly in this essay, the mere pursuit of the ‘feeling
of growth’, any kind of growth, just as the indiscriminate valuing of becoming,
whatever its content, is no less stultifying than the fetishizing of stasis, selfsufficiency, and completion, and Nietzsche explicitly recognizes this (GS 370).
The ‘highest’—most valuable—form of the psychological will to power, for
Nietzsche, is arguably associated with the affective affirmation of an orientation,
a movement, which he takes to be constitutive of human subjectivity, towards a
good that is given only horizonally, that is, as something we cannot exhaustively
grasp in determinate concepts. And human subjectivity potentially is itself such
a good.
BIBL IO GR A PHY
In Nietzsche
Beyond Good and Evil, trans. R. J. Hollingdale. Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1982.
Human, All-Too-Human, trans. R. J. Hollingdale. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press,
1986.
On the Genealogy of Morals, in On the Genealogy of Morals and Ecce Homo, trans.
W. Kaufmann and R. J. Hollingdale. New York: Vintage, 1989.
‘The Anti-Christ’, in Twilight of the Idols and The Anti-Christ, trans. R. J. Hollingdale.
Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1990.
The Gay Science, trans. W. Kaufmann. New York: Vintage, 1974.
The Will to Power, ed. W. Kaufmann, trans. W. Kaufmann and R. J. Hollingdale. New
York: Vintage, 1968.
Thus Spoke Zarathustra, trans. R. J. Hollingdale. Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1969.
‘Twilight of the idols’, in Twilight of the Idols and The Anti-Christ, trans.
R. J. Hollingdale. Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1990.
Werke: Kritische Gesamtausgabe, G. Colli, M. Montinari, et al. (eds). Berlin: de Gruyter,
1967–.
Other sources
Beardsley, Monroe (1958). Aesthetics: Problems in the Philosophy of Criticism. New York:
Harcourt Brace.
Drummond, J. J. (2004). ‘ “Cognitive impenetrability” and the complex intentionality of
emotions’, Journal of Consciousness Studies 11: 109–26.
Goldie, Peter (2000). The Emotions. Oxford: Clarendon Press.
Guyer, Paul (1997). Kant and the Claims of Taste. Cambridge: Cambridge University
Press.
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Husserl, Edmund ([1900–1901]2001). Logical Investigations, trans. J. N. Findlay, 2 vols.
London: Routledge.
Kant, Immanuel ([1790]1987). Critique of Judgement, trans. W. S. Pluhar. Indianapolis:
Hackett.
Katsafanas, Paul (2011). ‘Deriving ethics from action: a Nietzschean version of constitutivism’, Philosophy and Phenomenological Research, 83: 620–60.
Korsgaard, Christine (1996). The Sources of Normativity. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.
Musil, Robert ([1930-33]1995). The Man without Qualities, trans. E. Wilkins and
E. Kaiser, 3 vols. London: Minerva.
Poellner, Peter (2007). ‘Affect, value and objectivity’ in B. Leiter and N. Sinhababu (eds),
Nietzsche and Morality. Oxford: Oxford University Press.
—— (2009). ‘Nietzschean freedom’ in K. Gemes and S. May (eds), Nietzsche on Freedom
and Autonomy. Oxford: Oxford University Press.
Reginster, Bernard (2006). The Affirmation of Life: Nietzsche on Overcoming Nihilism.
Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press.
Ridley, Aaron (1995). Music, Value and the Passions. Ithaca: Cornell University Press.
Sartre, Jean-Paul ([1946]1980). Existentialism and Humanism, trans. P. Mairet. London:
Eyre Methuen.
—— ([1983]1992). Notebooks for an Ethics, trans. D. Pellauer. Chicago: University of
Chicago Press.
—— ([1940]2004). The Imaginary, trans. J. Webber. London: Routledge.
Scheler, Max ([1913–16]1973). Formalism in Ethics and Non-Formal Ethics of Value,
trans. M. Frings and R. Funk. Evanson: Northwestern University Press.
Schopenhauer, Arthur ([1819]1969). The World as Will and Representation, trans.
E. F. J. Payne, 2 vols. New York: Dover.
Shusterman, Richard (1997). ‘The end of aesthetic experience’, Journal of Aesthetics and
Art Criticism 55: 29–41.
Sprigge, T. L. S. (1970) Facts, Words and Beliefs. London: Routledge.
Stein, Edith ([1917]1980). Zum Problem der Einfühlung. Munich: Kaffke.
4
The Scope Problem—Nietzsche, the Moral,
Ethical, and Quasi-Aesthetic
Simon Robertson
At one level it is obvious that Nietzsche is an ardent critic of ‘morality’ and that he
champions some alternative ideal. It is less obvious, however, what exactly
Nietzsche’s critical target ‘morality’ is and therefore how it differs from the favoured
alternative. Various peculiar features of Nietzsche’s own discussions have long fuelled
suspicion that his views here are contradictory, since he uses, or seems to use, the very
same term ‘morality’ to denote both an item of wholesale denunciation and an
enterprise he endorses. Although recent advances within Nietzsche scholarship have
forestalled that worry, disagreement nonetheless reigns over how precisely to characterize Nietzsche’s critical target, and thereby limit the scope of his critique, in such a
way that distinguishes it from the positive ideal. Following recent precedent, I will
call this the ‘scope problem’. The adequacy of any resolution to it must meet two
basic conditions: it needs to separate the object of critique from the positive ideal and
it must leave the positive ideal immune to whatever objections inform the critique.
Ideally, though, a satisfactory account would fulfil a third desideratum: it would
provide the basis for an informative explanation of why Nietzsche attacks morality.
This paper offers a resolution to the scope problem, by demarcating Nietzsche’s
critical target ‘morality’ and sketching the direction his positive alternative takes.
Section 1 begins by clarifying the scope problem. Section 2 introduces four prominent approaches to responding to it. Although none are individually satisfactory,
elements of each can be retained. The remainder of the paper explains how. Sections
3 and 4 explore Nietzsche’s critical agenda, Sections 5 and 6 his positive program.
1 . NIETZSCHE’S USES (AND ABUSES) OF ‘MORALITY’
Four initial textual difficulties attend any attempt to distinguish Nietzsche’s critical
target from his positive ideal, each fuelling the suspicion of contradiction. First, he
sometimes seems to claim himself a critic of ‘all morality’ (e.g. GM P6), whilst
elsewhere affirming ‘higher moralities’ (e.g. BGE 202). Similarly, he frequently
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Simon Robertson
pronounces himself an ‘immoralist’ (BT P5, D P4, BGE 32, EH IV, 2–4), yet
elsewhere claims that many actions labelled ‘immoral’ ought to be avoided (D
103). Second, he seems to deploy the very same terms—‘Moral ’, ‘Moralität ’, and
their cognates—to designate both objects of critique and approval. In fact, he uses
these terms in the context of not only an enterprise of which he is highly critical, but
also various antiquarian practices to which he is partly sympathetic yet that many
today would regard as decidedly immoral, and, moreover, an ideal he endorses.
Third, and more subtly, Nietzsche’s attitude to these enterprises is often ambivalent:
a single outlook may be laudable in some respects yet objectionable in others, not
merely from the differing perspectives of different agents but even from a more
unified vantage point (Janaway 2007; Owen 2007). Fourth, he even at one point
urges that his critique of morality involves ‘a contradiction’ because the standpoint
from which morality is denied—a standpoint ‘going beyond faith in morality’—is
itself a moral one (D P4).
The third difficulty can be dealt with swiftly, for not only does it presuppose that
we are already able to individuate the various standpoints towards which Nietzsche
is ambivalent, to avoid contradiction we require only that he overall objects to and
overall favours distinct outlooks. The fourth difficulty likewise dissipates upon
closer attention to the passage in question. It occurs in the retrospective (1886)
Preface to Daybreak (1881). Here, Nietzsche suggests that his book:
does in fact exhibit a contradiction and is not afraid of it: in this book faith in morality
[Moral] is withdrawn—but why? Out of morality [Moralität]! Or what else should we call
that which informs it—and us? . . . there is no doubt that a ‘thou shalt’ speaks to us too,
that we too still obey a stern law—and this is the last moral law which can make itself
audible even to us . . . in this if in anything we too are still men of conscience. (D P4)
The suggestion of contradiction is evidently rhetorical hyperbole.1 Any charitable reading would observe that Nietzsche is here deploying two senses of
‘morality’: that from which faith is withdrawn (the object of critique) and an
alternative standpoint (which ‘informs’ the critique). This becomes clear in one
of Daybreak’s later, indeed pivotal, passages:
I deny morality as I deny alchemy, that is, I deny their premises . . . I do not deny . . . that
many actions called immoral ought to be avoided and resisted, or that many called moral
ought to be done and encouraged—but I think the one should be encouraged and the
other avoided for other reasons than hitherto. We have to learn to think differently—in
order . . . to attain even more: to feel differently. (D 103)2
1 Thus, later in the Preface, Nietzsche declares it his taste ‘to reduce to despair every sort of man
who is “in a hurry”’, instead calling for ‘only perfect readers’ learned in the ‘venerable art’ of
philology—the ‘goldsmith’s art and connoisseurship of the word which has nothing but delicate,
cautious work to do and achieves nothing if it does not achieve it lento’ (D P5). Here, it seems, he
warns against misunderstandings, including, presumably, those based on hasty attributions of
genuine contradiction.
2 What Nietzsche actually denies in this passage is ‘Sittlichkeit’ (see below for further discussion).
His use of ‘Sittlichkeit’ in D is somewhat freer than in GM, however; and the context of D 103
The Scope Problem
83
Both passages clearly presuppose contrasting normative standpoints. However
exactly we differentiate them, insofar as they are relevantly dissimilar Nietzsche
avoids the sort of blatant contradiction his rhetorical remark inveigles.
What about the first and second difficulties? It is reasonable to think that
Nietzsche struggled in his mid-period works like Daybreak to find suitable labels
by which to distinguish the object of critique from preferred ideal. By 1886,
though, he had come to acknowledge a wider range of types of ‘morality’—and
(D P4 an odd exception) was typically careful in deploying different labels to
denote them. We can usefully separate four. First, Nietzsche uses the term
‘Sittlichkeit’ from Daybreak onwards to denote what is commonly (though not
ideally) translated ‘morality of custom’—a system of customary imperatives or
‘thou shalts’ operative in early societies, obedience to which was inculcated, at
least initially, through fear of punishment (GM II, 3–9).3 Nietzsche’s attitude
towards Sittlichkeit is ambivalent. In GM he celebrates the ways it redirects man’s
naturally aggressive instincts. Yet he is also disconcerted by the cruelty, to oneself
and others, this redirection involves. However, his philosophical interest lies not
in Sittlichkeit’s inherent value but its role in the evolution of socialized man—
especially the formation of two further outlooks: master and slave morality. The
Genealogy presents this dichotomy quasi-historically, in both the groups exemplifying them and the triumph of the latter. But there is a wider conceptual point.
They represent ‘two basic types’ of normative system reflecting contrasting
evaluative stances (BGE 260). Although Nietzsche neither wholeheartedly endorses, nor envisages (as possible or desirable; see e.g. GS 377) a return to, the
master moralities depicted in GM I–II, his critique of ‘morality’ is of the
normative-evaluative stance represented by slave morality that he thinks remains
dominant today. Yet he also writes of the ‘overcoming of [slave] morality’—
indicating, fourthly, an ‘extra-moral ’ [aussermoralische] period at whose threshold we stand (BGE 32), an era in which ‘higher moralities’ [Moralen] ‘are, and
ought to be, possible’ (BGE 202). So although Nietzsche deploys ‘Moral ’ (and its
derivates) to designate three distinct enterprises, by the time he has all in view
(roughly 1886) he is typically careful to specify which he is discussing by
suggests that he is indeed denying what he more usually picks out with the labels ‘Moral ’ and
‘Moralität’. I thank Keith Ansell-Pearson for pointing this out.
3 The standard translation is unfortunate given the exegetical issues at hand, as well as the rather
different implicatures carried by ‘Sittlichkeit’ and ‘Moralität’. Better translations of the former may
be ‘customary life’ or perhaps ‘customary ethic’. I thank Philip Ebert, Marcus Rossberg, and John
Richardson for suggestions here. Nietzsche first discusses Sittlichkeit in D 9ff (1881), drawing upon
its etymological connections with ‘Sitte’ (‘custom’). By GM (e.g. II, 1–3) his emphasis shifts to the
role custom plays in breeding calculable and reliable men. Note, also, that in BGE (1886), the term
‘Sittlichkeit’ is surprisingly absent. Nonetheless, there (e.g. BGE 32) Nietzsche refers to a ‘pre-moral
period of mankind’ that he may be identifying with Sittlichkeit, contrasting it to both (1) ‘a period
which may be called moral [das Moral] in the narrower sense’—that which forms Nietzsche’s main
critical target—and (2) an ‘extra-moral ’ [aussermoralische] period the bringing about of which
(echoing D P4) is ‘reserved for the subtlest, most honest, and also most malicious consciences’.
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Simon Robertson
deploying relevant modifiers (‘slave’, ‘master’, ‘higher’). Accusations of express
contradiction are therefore misplaced.
Even so, much work remains to properly distinguish these outlooks. This is
where the nub of the scope problem lies. For, as Brian Leiter (2002: 74) observes,
‘perplexing features of Nietzsche’s discussion’ might seem to rule out two initially
attractive solutions: that Nietzsche is a critic of all morality, or that he instead
attacks only ‘some single religiously, philosophically, socially or historically
circumscribed example’ of it. The next section introduces four generic approaches to resolving the scope problem.
2. DEMARCATING NIETZSCHE’S MORALITIES:
FOUR APPROACHES
One approach, advocated by Philippa Foot (1994, 2001), holds that Nietzsche is
a critic of all morality. She draws mainly upon Nietzsche’s ‘immoralist’ claims
and the following passage in support:
This problem of the value of pity and of the morality of pity . . . whoever pauses here,
whoever learns to ask questions here, will undergo the same experience as I—that of a
huge new prospect opening up, a vertiginous possibility, as every kind of mistrust,
suspicion, and fear leaps forward, and the belief in morality, all morality, falters. (GM P6;
quoted by Foot 1994: 5, 2001: 210)
Nietzsche doesn’t say here that he is rejecting all morality, only that his own
belief in all morality faltered—leaving it open that some conceptions, perhaps
higher moralities, may withstand the questioning he subjects them to. Foot
therefore narrows Nietzsche’s critical target ‘morality’, allying it to a conception
of justice presupposing equality of status across individuals (1994: 9). Maudemarie Clark (1994: 18) criticizes Foot on grounds that Nietzsche, for example at
GM II, 11, ‘reserves his highest words of praise . . . for justice and the just person’.
But the conceptions of justice Foot and Clark have in mind clearly differ. Clark is
right that Nietzsche extols the man of justice, conceived specifically as someone
who commands by creating and imposing laws (there are interesting affinities
between this figure in GM II, 11 and the master of GM I). Yet Foot’s point is that
Nietzsche opposes that more recognisably modern sense of justice connected
with equality. And she is surely correct about that—see, for instance, Nietzsche’s
‘levelling-down’ objection to the egalitarian ideals of the modern democratic
spirit at BGE 203, a passage Foot quotes (2001: 215). Foot’s error, we shall see
later, is to organize Nietzsche’s intended target around, and restrict it to, this
notion of justice. A further feature of Foot’s reading, to which we will also return,
is that, since Nietzsche attacks all morality thus construed, his own positive
project is not well understood as a moral one but instead a form of ‘aestheticism’
(e.g. 1994: 5): a quasi-aesthetic outlook valuing above all else the production of
The Scope Problem
85
stronger and more splendid individuals (2001: 219). Foot seems to suggest that
such individuals, because unconstrained by a concern with justice, may feel (and,
if Nietzsche is right, may be) at liberty to pursue their ends with unabashed
ruthlessness (1994: 6–10; 2001: 214ff ).
A second approach holds that Nietzsche confines his challenge to specific
instances of morality (its Christian, Kantian, utilitarian incarnations, say). But as
Leiter (1995: 114ff ) rightly objects, while no one doubts Nietzsche’s hostility
towards these, he does not ration his critique to only them.
A third view, Leiter’s own, overlaps with the second by holding that
Nietzsche’s critique is directed against only some conceptions of morality. But
rather than demarcating the object of critique by way of specific paradigms,
Leiter (1995, 2000: ch. 3) characterizes Nietzsche’s target via the features these
have in common. Any outlook committed to the specified features falls within
the remit of critique.
Finally, Clark (like Foot but contra Leiter) holds that Nietzsche rejects all
morality but (like Leiter) narrows the scope of critique by characterizing morality
in terms of its distinctive commitments (Clark 1994, 2001). Drawing on
Bernard Williams’ (version of a) distinction between a narrow conception of
morality and a wider notion of ‘the ethical’, Clark aligns Nietzsche’s target with
only the narrower enterprise, suggesting that ‘Nietzsche’s immoralism is a
rejection of what Williams calls “morality”’—and, contra Foot’s quasi-aesthetic
interpretation, that Nietzsche ‘embraces or urges us towards’ an ‘ethical orientation’ in the broader sense (2001: 102).
There is something right, but also misleading, with each of the Foot, Leiter,
and Clark approaches. The rest of the paper advances the following conclusions:
Foot’s construal of morality is too narrow. The Leiter/Clark approach to characterizing morality is fruitful. Leiter’s substantive proposal nevertheless requires
supplementing. Clark’s suggestion that Nietzsche develops a moral-ethical distinction is plausible; but the claim that he embraces an ethical outlook in the
sense she intends is misguided. Indeed, Nietzsche’s positive ideal is, as Foot
holds, better understood as quasi-aesthetic. Nonetheless, it does not necessitate
the unconstrained ruthlessness she supposes. The discussion is organized as
follows: Section 3 introduces Clark’s moral-ethical distinction; Section 4 explores Leiter’s account of (narrow) morality; Section 5 argues against Clark’s
attributing to Nietzsche an ethical outlook, thereby making way for the quasiaesthetic reading (Section 6).
3 . A MORAL-ETHICAL DISTINCTION
Part of Clark’s objection to Foot is directed at her construing the standpoint
from which Nietzsche challenges morality as quasi-aesthetic. Clark urges that
Foot ‘did not seem to fully appreciate the possibility that his opposition to
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morality was coming from the viewpoint of an alternative ethical orientation’
(2001: 104). This, she implies, was due largely to the unavailability in 1970s
analytic philosophy of a moral-ethical distinction. Although Clark does not
mention it, such a distinction was nonetheless prominent (in various guises) in
nineteenth century thought, featuring in the work of (amongst others) Hegel,
Marx, and Mill.4 So attributing to Nietzsche a moral-ethical distinction is not
anachronistic. This section introduces two versions of the distinction and explains how Clark thinks Nietzsche fits in.
We can regard both the moral and ethical spheres as normative realms of
thought and practice.5 In the first instance, they fall into or overlap with the
practical normative sphere, concerning what one ought and has reason to do.
Plausibly they extend beyond this, to include those aspects of the epistemic and
affective that bear on action—what there is reason to believe one ought to do,
what it is reasonable to feel, which dispositions of character and sentiment there
are reason to cultivate, and so forth. There are also non-moral (for instance,
prudential) elements within the practical normative sphere; whether these count
as part of the ethical depends on how we characterize the latter.
On one wide construal, ethical enquiry seeks to answer Socrates’ question ‘how
should one live?’, a question that goes beyond ‘what should one do?’ and, given the
4 Hegel (1991: parts II and III), for example, distinguishes Moralität and Sittlichkeit. Sittlichkeit,
in his hands, typically (again not ideally) translated ‘ethical life’, signifies both the concrete social
order of which individuals are a part and individuals’ harmonious identification with the
institutions and persons comprising it. Moralität, meanwhile, Hegel associates with an excessively
narrow, abstract, formalistic, and individualistic Kantian vision of morality—a standpoint that
views individuals in abstraction from the socio-ethical order they live in and which, therefore, when
taken to represent not just an element in ethical life but its entirety, distorts self-understanding and
undermines our prospects of self-actualization. Nonetheless, Moralität for Hegel is an essential
component of well-rounded ethical life. With Marx (1959), morality is something to be displaced
(on grounds that it is bound up with economic forces that alienate) by a mode of life more
conducive to human flourishing. Mill’s approach is less revisionary than Hegel, Marx, and
Nietzsche: morality is one ‘department’ of Practical Reason, which ‘in combination with “laws of
nature”, produces the Art of Life . . . the others being Prudence and Aesthetics (the “Right, the
Expedient, and the Beautiful or Noble”)’ (Skorupski 1999: 139; see Mill 1963–91: VI, xii, 6 and 7).
Nietzsche shares Hegel’s view of morality as excessively narrow but doesn’t think it one component
of the good (or excellent) life, at least not for all. Although Nietzsche thinks morality is to be
overcome, he doesn’t aim to replace it with an ethical vision like that of Marx. And Millian morality
is of course one of Nietzsche’s targets (e.g. GS 4; BGE 225, 228). More recently, moral-ethical
distinctions have played a part, explicitly or otherwise, in the thought of e.g. Anscombe (1958),
Mackie (1977), MacIntyre (1981), Williams (1985), and Taylor (1995); and less subversively in
Gibbard (1990), Scanlon (1998), and Skorupski (1999).
5 Some terminological clarification: Throughout, I treat the normative realm as that sphere of
thought characterizable via the paradigmatically normative concepts ought and a reason. Oughts
specify conclusive overriding normative verdicts, whereas (pro tanto) reasons need not; nevertheless,
true ought claims entail true reason claims. Much of what Nietzsche writes focuses on the evaluative
realm (i.e. that domain central to which are narrowly valoric concepts like good, bad, etc.).There are
many controversies over how the evaluative and normative realms connect, both in general and for
Nietzsche (on the former see Robertson 2009a; for some tentative suggestions about the latter, see
Robertson 2011a. What I say in Section 2 will suffice for purposes of this paper.
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impersonal pronoun, presupposes a degree of generality in its answer (specifying
more than how I, but only I, should live) (see Williams 1985: ch. 1). Consonant
with this is what we might call the ‘compartmental’ model of the ethical. On this
model, the ethical sphere encompasses the whole domain of normative thinking as
it bears on conduct and is in turn comprised of distinct compartments—including
the regulatory compartment of morality, as well as prudence, self-interest and the
aesthetic.6 Note that, on this construal, even the baldest forms of normative
egoism—those that offer no checks on how different people’s potentially conflicting
interests might be coordinated and regulated—count as ethical.
On a narrower construal, which we may call the ‘regulatory’ model, the ethical
is not divided into compartments including the regulatory department of morality; it is itself a regulatory sphere. This is how Williams presents things. He
characterizes an ethical scheme as ‘any scheme for regulating the relations
between people that works through informal sanctions and internalized dispositions’ (1995b: 241). This highlights two sets of conditions. An ethical scheme has
an essentially social character: it regulates relations between people. And it does
so via informal sanctions and internalized dispositions (which may in turn
distinguish the ethical from other regulatory enterprises, including the legal).
Such sanctions serve to regulate ethical relations in a number of ways—for
instance, by generating expectations and dispositions to live up to them and by
checking violations through penal emotions. For Williams, morality is one
particular form or instance of ethical outlook distinguishable from others by
the way it structures relations between people and the sanctions it employs. He
characterizes morality as, in part, a system of categorical obligations the violation
of which incurs or merits blame (e.g. Williams 1985: ch. 10).
When it comes to demarcating the narrow notion of morality, the compartmental and regulatory models are not incompatible. Both can treat morality as an
essentially regulatory practice, and they may agree that it is not the only such
practice, at least insofar as they agree that ethical life could be organized in such a
way that gives specifically moral concepts (moral obligation, blame, guilt, say) a
less emphatic role or even does away with them entirely. The principal difference
between the models instead concerns how broadly they construe the ethical and,
consequently, how they view the relation between it and morality. However, the
regulatory model gives a better account of this in two respects, both of which
Clark picks up on in attributing it to Nietzsche.
First, it helps keep in mind that if morality is not the only possible regulatory
practice, its rejection does not entail that all we are left with is the pursuit of
unmediated self-interest. Although the compartmental model doesn’t mandate
the view that morality is the only regulatory option, many of its advocates have
6 Skorupski (1999: 138ff ) attributes to Mill, and elaborates a version of, the compartmental
model. Other proponents include Sidgwick (1907), Mackie (1977), Gibbard (1990), Scanlon
(1998: 171ff ).
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treated it as such. On the compartmental view, if morality were rejected, we may be
left with no disciplinary ethical constraints at all. The regulatory model meanwhile
makes clear that, if there can be non-moral ethical practices, morality and egoism
are not the only alternatives. Thus, as Clark maintains, Nietzsche’s rejection of
morality is compatible with his endorsing a non-egoistic, regulatory outlook.
Second, there is an implicature to the term ‘ethical’ by which an ethical
practice serves to coordinate the needs and interests of people aside from their
own self-concern. Self-interest can be morally or ethically relevant, of course;
indeed, a complete ethical theory would clarify how individuals’ self-interests are
to be coordinated within a regulatory practice. Nevertheless, if we were to include
ruthlessly self-interested normative judgements as ethical (as the compartmental
model does), then even the crudest egoisms—those that place no constraints on
self-interest no matter how costly to others, or that do not think conduct should
be regulated at all—would count as ethical. Whether to discount them is partly
terminological. But not only does doing so track elements of common usage, a
benefit of the regulatory model is that it allows us to see that the rejection of
morality does not (perhaps contra Foot) entail unmediated egoism.7
Clark (2001) suggests that Nietzsche’s critique of morality presupposes a
version of the regulatory model. She indicates three attractions of this reading.
First, it licenses the theoretically tidy claim that Nietzsche attacks all morality,
whilst allowing for a precise characterization of that target as one particular form
that ethical life might take. Second, it makes sense of passages in which Nietzsche
objects to morality’s presenting itself as the only way ethical life might be
structured—an assumption encouraged by the compartmental model. Thus
Clark cites Nietzsche’s objecting to the idea that ‘morality defends itself with
all its might: it says, obstinately and stubbornly, “I am morality itself, and
nothing is morality besides me!”’(BGE 202). Third, it preserves space for a
non-moral yet ethical alternative that avoids the ruthlessness of Foot’s Nietzsche.
7 The regulatory model, though excluding from the ethical realm crude forms of egoism, need
not thereby exclude more sophisticated or ‘enlightened’ egoisms (like those explored by Baier 1958,
Gauthier 1967). Nor does it preclude outlooks trading on a positive conception of freedom or
human flourishing, so long as these are disciplined by regulatory constraints. Often, such
conceptions already involve regulatory dimensions, so that individuals’ pursuits are both
motivated and checked by interpersonal ideals (of character, honour, the avoidance of shame, and
so on). Aristotle’s ethics, which is in part concerned with human flourishing, has clear regulatory
elements, even if, as frequently noted, it does not fit easily into modern moral categories. So the
regulatory model is quite flexible. In fact it may be thought insufficiently restrictive by extending to
practices that are not socially pervasive. An ethical system may be more or less inclusive, though.
While modern morality is strikingly inclusive, seeking to make everyone fall within its scope (see
Section 4), there can be norms and practices peculiar to affiliated members of designated groups
(professional or religious groups, the Mafiosi, and so on). These need not be full-blown ethical
schemes in the fashion of morality so much as ethical subsystems. Subsequently, there may be ethical
subsystems whose norms and ideals conflict with more pervasive ethical norms—just as there may
be conflicts between full-blown ethical outlooks. Insofar as they satisfy Williams’ conditions, they
can be understood as (sub-)ethical in this extended sense.
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I agree that Nietzsche deploys a moral-ethical distinction of the sort Clark
canvasses; I am also sympathetic to the first two rationales by which Clark
motivates it. But, I shall argue later (Section 5), the third putative attraction
misplaces the distinction. To appreciate how, we first need to clarify the narrow
notion of morality Nietzsche attacks.
4 . NIETZSCHE’S CRITICAL TARGET
Leiter’s account
Much has been written about how to characterize Nietzsche’s target. I will not
rehearse the various prominent proposals here (for useful critique of them, see
Leiter 1995: 114–17) but shall instead focus on Leiter’s ‘formal account’. This is
for two main sets of reasons, one methodological, the other substantive. First,
such an approach has several theoretical benefits. Leiter suggests that ‘Nietzsche
believes that all normative systems which perform something like the role we
associate with “morality” share certain structural characteristics’ (2002: 78).
Whether or not Nietzsche explicitly believed this, if we can identify the features
these normative systems have in common, we can give a unified characterization
of Nietzsche’s object(s) of critique that applies across the range of otherwise
diverse-looking outlooks he officially cites (and that may extend to relevantly
similar positions that he would attack in virtue of such commitments). Not all
such outlooks need be committed to all the relevant features in the same ways or to
the same degree, of course. A formal account here offers a welcome degree of
elasticity: so long as an outlook endorses at least some of the specified features in
relevant ways, it falls prey to Nietzsche’s objections. Furthermore, if we can show
that the visions of morality Nietzsche attacks do share certain features, this may
provide the basis for an explanation of why he attacks them. The second reason for
focusing on Leiter’s account is that, despite its methodological appeal, it can usefully
be supplemented. In fact, I shall argue, in one crucial respect it needs to be.
Leiter assembles the ‘structural characteristics’ that ‘all normative systems
which perform something like the role we associate with morality share’ into
two categories. They involve both ‘a descriptive and a normative component’
(1995: 122). On the one hand, he writes, all moralities ‘presuppose a particular
descriptive account of human agency—in the sense that for the normative claims
to have intelligible application to human agents, particular metaphysical and
empirical claims about agency must be true’ (1995: 122). On the other, all
moralities ‘embody a normative agenda which promotes the special conditions
under which certain types of human agents enjoy success’ (ibid.).8 Leiter then
8 The term ‘agenda’ may suggest that all normative outlooks intentionally aim to promote such
conditions. One worry with that, to which Nietzsche seems privy (e.g. GM I, 2; II, 12), is the
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suggests that any particular morality is the object of Nietzsche’s critique (or, as he labels
it, an instance of ‘morality in the pejorative sense’ or ‘MPS’) if, and/or only if, it:9
(1) presupposes three particular descriptive claims about the nature of human
agents pertaining to free will [necessary for moral responsibility], the
transparency of the self [due to which agents can be evaluated on the basis of
their motives], and the essential similarity of all people [whereby ‘one moral
code is appropriate for all’],
and/or
(2) embraces norms that harm the ‘highest men’ while benefiting the ‘lowest’
(see e.g. BGE 62, 228; GM P3, 6; WP 400).10
We can explicate the normative component (2) with reference to a cluster of
specific values (their opposites being disvaluable)—notably:11
Other-regarding values: altruism and Mitleid (compassion or pity; HAH 50,
103; D 134, 148; GS 99; BGE 20, 225; GM P5, P6; TI ‘Expeditions’ 35);
concern for the wellbeing and welfare of others (BGE 225); the alleviation of
suffering in those around us (BGE 225) (as well as some first-personal
corollaries of these: alleviating one’s own suffering (GS P3; GM III; EH
I, 1); concern for own one’s well-being or welfare (Z P3, P5; BGE 225)—
the happiness of ‘English comfort’, as Nietzsche puts it in allusion to some
utilitarians (BGE 228)).
Socially useful personable traits: extirpation of socially harmful or antagonistic
(especially aggressive and licentious) instincts (GM II; EH III–D2).
Wider social values: equality and associated notions of impartiality and justice
as fairness (Z IV, 13; GS 377; BGE 202, 257; A 43; WP 752); general utility
(BGE 201, 202).
difficulty in inferring from morality’s supposed effects anything about an intended aim. While
Nietzsche may accept that an early objective of slave morality (via the slave revolt) was indeed the
accession of power over nobles, Leiter’s argument requires only that modern morality continues to
thwart the excellence of nascent higher individuals (whether this effect is strictly intended or not, by
whoever).
9 (a) Leiter (1995: 122) says ‘if ’, Leiter (2002: 78) ‘only if ’. I return to this in the main text
shortly. The characterisation to follow comes from Leiter (2002: 78), with parenthetic additions
glossed from Leiter (1995: 122–4, 2002: 80ff ). (b) Leiter uses the label ‘MPS’ to denote the
normative systems that have in common the features Nietzsche criticizes; I use Leiter’s acronym
where this aids clarity.
10 Note that neither Leiter nor I seek a strict definition of ‘morality’ in the sense familiar to
contemporary moral philosophers (though we do want our account of Nietzsche’s critical target to
resemble mainstream conceptions of morality). Nor need we construe our accounts of Nietzsche’s
critical target definitionally. In my case, at least, the goal is to supply an informative and
extensionally adequate explication, via the features (including purported errors) that its diverse
incarnations have in common. So, even if Clark (2001) is correct to attribute to Nietzsche the view
that there is no single homogenous enterprise ‘morality’ to be defined, this doesn’t matter.
11 This is a slight extension and reordering of the lists at Leiter 1995: 134–5, 2002: 128.
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Nietzsche’s predominant concern, Leiter emphasizes, is the normative component, his main objection being that morality is detrimental to the flourishing
of higher individuals, the criticisms of moralized accounts of agency subservient
to this more important normative agenda (1995: 123).12 Indeed, Leiter adds,
‘strictly speaking, it is true that a morality could be an MPS even if it did not
involve a commitment to an untenable descriptive account of agency’ (ibid.).
Two preliminary points concern the logical connectives Leiter employs when
elucidating morality (MPS) via its descriptive and normative components. First,
given his dual aims of both committing Nietzsche to a critique and limiting the
scope of that critique, we require a biconditional. Second, an oddity of Leiter’s
account is the following conjunction of remarks: ‘for the normative claims to
have intelligible application to human agents, particular metaphysical and empirical (i.e. descriptive) claims about agency must be true’, and ‘a morality could
be an MPS even if it did not involve a commitment to an untenable descriptive
account of agency’.13 I agree with Leiter that Nietzsche’s animating critical
concern is morality’s putative effects, as represented by (2). However, if a
morality could be an MPS without commitment to the allegedly problematic
notions of agency represented by (1), and if the normative component (2) has
‘intelligible application’ only in light of (1), Leiter’s account leaves unexplained
how and why an instance of MPS that does not exhibit the descriptive features
represented by (1) would or could have the effects represented by (2). This is not
to say that an instance of MPS which has the effects represented by (2), but which
does not exhibit the features represented by (1), would have no descriptive
features serving to explain (2). However, Leiter’s account of the descriptive
component (focusing as it does on claims about agency) doesn’t specify what
these features would be. It would at least be theoretically more satisfying if we can
supply a necessary condition (in addition to (2)) that provides an explanation for
why Nietzsche thinks morality has objectionable effects—or, more modestly, a
cluster of conditions that are not only extensionally adequate for capturing
Nietzsche’s critical target but that also do the required explanatory work.
Leiter’s bipartite characterization therefore needs supplementing, even by its
own lights. However, I shall argue, the difficulties it faces run quite deep: for even
12 Leiter refers to EH IV, 7 where Nietzsche claims his main concern ‘is not error as error’
(cf. BGE 4), i.e. ‘not the falsity of the descriptive account of agency presupposed by MPS, per se’
(Leiter 1995: 123, 2002: 79). While I agree that Nietzsche’s principal concern is morality’s effects,
this passage in EH is less obviously concerned with agency than Leiter claims; as I read it, it concerns
morality’s presenting its laws as categorically binding.
13 I thank Ken Gemes for reminding me why Leiter says the latter (which in turn explains Leiter’s
circumspection in presenting the descriptive component as necessary for MPS; see Leiter 1995: 123,
n.26, 2002: 79, n.9): amongst Nietzsche’s targets are certain forms of utilitarianism that needn’t
endorse the conception of agency to which Leiter’s Nietzsche objects. The alternative
characterisation I go on to offer (Section 2) does place most utilitarianisms within the scope of
Nietzsche’s critique and provides a principled rationale for why he would object to them. See also
n.16.
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when (1) captures the relevant outlooks Nietzsche attacks, it fails to adequately
explain why he objects to them. In the next subsection I offer an alternative
characterization. In the following subsection I add some textual support before,
in the final subsection, showing how it supplies a better explanation than Leiter’s.
Morality’s normative authority
Those who criticize morality generally do so on (at least one of) two sets of
grounds: its dubious metaethical presuppositions and foundations (that is, any or
all of the metaphysical, empirical, epistemological, or conceptual commitments
by which its normative claims are justified) and/or the disvalue of the normative
commitments themselves. Nietzsche denounces morality on both scores. I agree
with Leiter that Nietzsche attacks those conceptions of morality committed to
(1). But I think we should supplement the account as follows:
(I) Nietzsche objects to various descriptive presuppositions of morality (as we
might continue to call them), including (a) the metaphysical and empirical
claims underlying some views of agency to which Leiter draws attention. But
Nietzsche also conceives of morality as embodying a commitment to objectivity, such that (b) there are objective moral facts, truths and values, (c) morality
is normatively authoritative, in that compliance with it is categorically required, and (d) morality is universal in jurisdiction.
(II) Nietzsche objects to the content of the specific ideals and values he attributes
to traditional moral outlooks (notably, those covered in explication of Leiter’s
condition (2)), as well as the normative claims taken to flow from them.
This is not intended as an exhaustive characterization of either the commitments
Nietzsche associates with his critical target(s) or the features he objects to. But let
me explain the intended logical structure. I am inclined to assert the following—
admittedly bold—thesis: that the combination of (Ic) and (Id) is necessary for an
outlook falling amongst Nietzsche’s critical targets, with the conjunction of these
and (II) being both necessary and sufficient. If this proves too bold, we could
instead fall back on a ‘cluster account’: so long as an outlook is committed to any of
(Ia)–(Id) in conjunction with (II), it would fall within the scope of Nietzsche’s
critique. In what follows I will push the bolder thesis. But either way, the
combination of (Ic) and (Id) provide a crucial (yet largely unnoticed) part of the
explanation for why the values represented by (II) have the effects indicated by
Leiter’s condition (2). It is therefore these that I focus on in the rest of Section 4.14
14 On Nietzsche’s opposition to (Ib), see esp. D 103; BGE 108; GS 301; TI ‘Improvers’ 1 (also
HH 39–40, 56; D 3, 119; Z :I ‘Of a Thousand and One Goals’; GM P:3; TI ‘Errors’ 3; WP 590).
For some further detail about (Ib), including why I give it less weight than (Ic) and (Id), see
Robertson 2009b: 68–9 (and, outwith the context of Nietzsche, Robertson 2008). Regarding (II),
not everyone agrees that Nietzsche does object to the content of moral values. David Owen and
Aaron Ridley have both suggested (in conversation) that Nietzsche instead objects to the way we
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The notion of normative authority, presented in (Ic), is notoriously complex.15 But the basic idea is that, if compliance with morality is categorically
required, then one ought to comply with morality irrespective of whether doing
so serves or conflicts with one’s subjective desires, aims, ends, evaluative commitments, interests, and the like—or, as we may collectively call these, one’s
‘motives’. Motives include any item within an agent’s existing psychological
repertoire that does or could contribute to the agent’s being motivated to act.
And compliance can here be understood broadly to include doing whatever is
appropriate (that is, doing whatever one ought or has reason to do) in light of
relevant moral norms, values, ideals, obligations, prohibitions, and so forth. Four
further points need to be made.
First, morality is both normatively authoritative and universal in jurisdiction
to the extent that everyone is categorically required to comply with it. Claims
about normative authority and universality are conceptually distinct, neither
entailing the other. Nonetheless, it follows from the normative authority thesis
that one does not escape morality merely if or because compliance with it
conflicts with one’s motives. In this sense, how universal morality is does not
depend on agential motives; the categoricity of morality thereby contributes as
one key part of the explanation for its supposed universality.
Second, the normative authority thesis incorporates the traditional thought
that particular moral obligations are categorical, such that: if A has a moral
obligation to ç, A ought to ç irrespective of whether çing serves A’s motives.
Third, there are many different accounts of the source of, and justification for,
morality’s authority. In theistic traditions, moral requirements are authoritative in
virtue of whatever it is that God commands what he commands. For Kant, agential
rationality is the source of normative authority: moral requirements are requirements of pure practical rationality; and any rational agent is therefore capable of
recognizing moral requirements (as rationally authoritative and binding), whatever
her subjective motives. Many utilitarians, in contrast, hold that value is the source of
normativity and that we all ought to promote the good impartially; but because the
value of a person’s action does not depend on whether it serves that person’s
motives, impartial values can generate categorical oughts. Some virtue theorists
meanwhile claim that what you ought to do is determined by what a virtuous person
would be motivated to do, even if you lack the motives characteristic of the virtuous
person. And traditional moral sense theorists and many rational intuitionists hold
relate to those values (in light of the conceptions of agency and normativity that propagate them)
rather than their content as such. Although I disagree (see Robertson 2011b on how the content of
moral values may be disvaluable), addressing this issue requires more extensive analysis, textual and
philosophical, than there is space for here. But either way, since my main focus in this paper is the
role of (Ic) and (Id), this disagreement will not matter.
15 The following provides only a brisk outline of some main features, though the general idea
should be familiar enough. Although the account draws upon the Kantian paradigm, it applies more
widely (and connects with contemporary externalist conceptions of normative reasons for action).
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that we have some special faculty by which to recognize moral truths (and/or sui
generis moral facts), these being independent of agential motives. Despite these
differences, each account has in common that the source of morality’s authority is
independent of, or external to, agential motives.16
Fourth, it is by presenting itself as normatively authoritative and universal that
morality holds in place the specific values it advances. Crucial to Nietzsche’s
critique is that complying with morality can conflict with, and be inimical to, the
highest forms of human flourishing and excellence. And he thinks that those
higher types whose flourishing morality does systematically thwart ought not
comply with it. Yet that would not be possible if morality were normatively
authoritative. So he needs to deny that it is. To further motivate this interpretative thesis, it will be useful to situate it with reference to three themes.
Textual support
The first emerges from Nietzsche’s observation that the ‘death of God’—the
decline of faith in religious authority—has failed to prompt a parallel weakening
of faith in the authority of morality and its values (GS 108, 125). Part of his point
is that morality has long been thought authoritative in virtue of the authority of
religion, but since the authority of religion is no longer accepted, there are
grounds to question the authority of morality and the currency of moral
16 What about Schopenhauer, one of Nietzsche’s critical targets? Does he think of morality as
categorically binding? He clearly opposes Kant’s specific attempts to vindicate the categoricity of
moral obligation (2009: ch. II), and he sometimes seems to suggest that we should jettison the
notion of moral obligation entirely (2009: section 4). However, it’s unclear either way whether he
thinks that we can retain a non-Kantian conception of categorical (moral) oughts. Would he agree,
for instance, that the fact that some specific act would be morally good (qua displaying compassion
[Mitleid], say) can make it the case that one ought (or has some reason) to do it, irrespective of
whether so acting on this specific occasion serves or conflicts with one’s other (predominantly selfinterested) motives? I suspect that he would and that he would therefore countenance categorical
oughts (see e.g. 2009: ch. III, esp. } 17). Furthermore, if he does not, it becomes less clear why
Nietzsche spends so much time criticizing not just Schopenhauerian Mitleid itself but the wider
‘moral’ outlook of which it is a part. For if displaying Mitleid on a given occasion is normatively
optional, it is hard to see how it could come to dominate our practical thought and actions in the
ways to which Nietzsche objects (see the rest of Section 4 for why). But what if Schopenhauer
doesn’t accept some notion of categoricity? One option is to weaken the bold claim that (Ic and d)
are necessary conditions for any outlook (resembling morality) to fall within Nietzsche’s critical
target, retreating to a ‘cluster account’ (Schopenhauer is committed to both Leiter’s essential
similarity thesis and some version of (Ib)). We could nonetheless maintain that, across a wide
range of outlooks we ordinarily label ‘morality’, (Ic and d) do play a crucial explanatory role with
respect to why Nietzsche attacks them. Another option is to deny that Schopenhauer’s outlook
sufficiently resembles something we associate with ‘morality’. For if he really denies a legitimate role
to deontic concepts, plus imposes no non-optional normative constraints on conduct, what he really
presents us with is (just) a theory of value, not a (normative) ethical outlook. This mirrors a
common complaint levied against some recent scalar consequentialists—and so is not, I think, ad
hoc. Nonetheless, I suspect that Schopenhauer does accept some notion of categoricity. I am very
grateful to Chris Janaway for raising these issues and for the lengthy (albeit, I think it fair to say,
inconclusive) discussions we have had about Schopenhauer’s views on them.
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values (see Owen 2003: 253ff , 2007: 2–5, 27ff for useful discussion). Thus, he
observes:
They have got rid of the Christian God, and now feel obliged to cling all the more firmly
to Christian morality: that is English consistency . . . With us it is different. When one gives
up Christian belief one thereby deprives oneself of the right to Christian morality. For the
latter is not self-evident . . . Christianity is a system . . . If one breaks out of it a fundamental idea, the belief in God, one thereby breaks the whole thing to pieces: one has nothing
of any consequence left in one’s hands. (T IX, 5; cf. GS 343)
There is a strong and a weaker way to read this passage. The strong version,
indicated by its final sentence, concludes that without faith in Christian religion
the moral values we have inherited from it lack any justification or authority.
However, this rests on the dubious premise that faith in received morality can
consistently or rationally persist, and morality be held authoritative, only in the
context of the religious framework from which it is derived. (This may commit a
version of the fallacy of division by assuming that none of a thing’s parts can be
accepted if the whole is not.) Elsewhere Nietzsche himself gives reason to doubt
the underlying form of that assumption. For instance, he allows that ‘anything
which exists . . . can be reinterpreted in the service of new intentions, repossessed,
repeatedly modified to a new use by a superior power . . . in the course of which
the previous “meaning” and “aim” must necessarily be obscured or completely
effaced’ (GM II, 12). While Nietzsche is sceptical that any attempt (secular or
otherwise) to ‘furnish the rational ground of morality’ (BGE 186) will succeed, he
should not (and does not always) deny the intelligibility of such attempts. There
is nonetheless a weaker and more stable reading, drawing upon the claim that
‘when one gives up Christian belief one thereby deprives oneself of the right to
Christian morality’: without the religious framework upon which morality and
its values were originally held justified, one is not entitled merely to assume that
morality is authoritative or that moral values should be retained. Nietzsche of
course believes they should not be retained (at least not by all). But he too must,
and does, argue for that conclusion. Thus (part of) his project in the Genealogy is
to call into question the value of moral values, working on the premise that ‘we
stand in need of a critique of moral values’ (GM P6) precisely because they
continue to exercise a deep hold (see BGE 186, GS 345). For despite what might
be expected in light of the death of God, faith in the authority of morality and its
values remains largely unshaken.17
17 Parallels are sometimes drawn between Nietzsche’s views here and those of Anscombe (1958).
In one respect there are similarities (this is a correction to my 2009a: 87, n7). Both think that a law
conception of ethics, centred around deontic notions like ought and obligation (understood as
expressing normatively authoritative requirements), is insufficiently intelligible without belief in a
law-giver and hence outwith the theistic worldview from which it is derived—even if, in fact, we
moderns have failed to heed its unintelligibility. Nietzsche offers several strands of explanation for
why we haven’t questioned its intelligibility, including: that we have inherited a vision of morality as
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Second, the Genealogy provides not only a critique of the value of moral values
but also a naturalistic18 debunking account of the structures holding them in
place as objective and authoritative. Essay II, for instance, traces the ‘moralization’ of the ‘concepts of “guilt” and “duty”’ (GM II, 21) back to both the
material sphere of ‘legal debt’ and the morality of custom or Sittlichkeit (GM
II, 6)—a transformation that comes to fruition with Christianity but is the result
of distinctively un-transcendental processes. Clark (1994: 26ff , 2001: 107ff )
argues that primitive social life according to Nietzsche comprised a system of
hypothetical imperatives, obedience to which was conditional upon one’s desires
to avoid punishment and procure ‘the advantages offered by society’ (GM II, 3).
The initially positivistic notions of debt (Schulden) and guilt (Schuld) become
gradually moralized, via both their internalization (resulting in the ‘bad conscience’ of first-personal ethical sanction (GM II, 4–10, 16–18)) and their
objectification whereby debts are owed as duties to external authorities (GM II,
19–22). But with the emergence of Christianity—and hence belief in an omnipresent deity hitherto unsurpassed in the power attributed to him—duty becomes
fully moralized. Duties are justified with recourse to a God whose commands are
authoritative, unconditional, and universal in jurisdiction (GM II, 19–22).
Nietzsche seeks to account for this transformation, and with it faith in an authoritative morality, via a variety of socio-psychological processes. The implication is
that moral values, as well as the belief in morality’s authority that holds these values
in place, are no more than contingent products of a complex array of sociohistorical forces. Whatever the ultimate plausibility of his account and its methodological assumptions, this cursory sketch (see again Clark 1994 for more detail)
supports the thesis that part of Nietzsche’s critique is directed against the errors he
believes are woven into the conceptual features through which morality operates,
including its commitment to normative authority.
Third, it is worth drawing attention to a number of passages where Nietzsche
explicitly considers categoricity. Overt references typically come in the context of
discussions of Kant and the categorical imperative (e.g. BGE 5, 187; GM P3, II 6;
the only option (BGE 202); that the moral values we have internalized have become so deeply
ingrained in our cultural-psychological economy; that they express ideals of submissiveness and
obedience (GM I, 14), allegiance to which fosters an unquestioning herd-like mentality (BGE 199),
in turn breeding automata dependent on authority (GM III, 1; BGE 199; GS 347) rather than
agents able to create, and independently will, their own goals (GS 290, 347). In another respect,
though, Anscombe and Nietzsche differ: whereas Anscombe concludes that we would do better (if
psychologically possible) to jettison various deontic notions from our ethical outlook, I see little in
Nietzsche to suggest that (although see Railton, Ch. 2, this volume). His aim, rather, is to question
whether, absent an external law-giver, normative claims deploying those concepts have the
normative authority traditionally supposed. Indeed, Nietzsche continues to frame his own
positive claims via deontic notions (e.g. D P4, 103, 104; GS 290, 335; BGE 187, 202, 262; A
11, 57) and, I suggest in Sections 5–6, construes the individual as the self-legislating law-giver.
18 For contrasting accounts of Nietzsche’s naturalism, cf. Williams 1995a; Leiter 2002: ch. 1;
Acampora 2006; Janaway 2007: ch. 3; Kail 2009; Schacht, Ch. 10, this volume.
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A 11; EH IV, 7). Nietzsche’s driving complaint is again with the effects of a
Kantian vision of morality: ‘Kant’s categorical imperative’, he writes, ‘should
have been felt as mortally dangerous’ because antagonistic to conditions of
‘preservation and growth’ (A 11; EH IV, 7). But he also clearly rejects the
conceptual presuppositions underlying Kantian morality, describing Kant’s notion of the good will, plus the ‘impersonal and universal’ conception of obligation supposedly derived from it, as ‘phantoms’ (A 11). A recurring theme is that
moralities ‘are only a sign-language of the emotions’ (BGE 187), neither the result
of pure impersonal rational deliberation, nor binding independent of one’s deepseated motives (see also GM III, 12). Kant’s conception of morality and its
supreme principle is a ‘Moloch of abstraction’ (A 11), little more than an abstract
representation of Kant’s own ‘innermost drives’ (BGE 6). Nietzsche thinks it
should be discarded along with the entire range of synthetic (and supposedly) a
priori judgements Kant aligns them with (BGE 11). He often expresses this via
resistance to the idea that oughts and ought judgements are unconditioned by a
group’s or an individual’s drives and driving interests—and hence resists the
conclusion that oughts are unconditionally binding because authorized by one’s
purely rational nature or some higher external authority (GS 5, 345, 347; BGE
46, 199). (BGE 187 and EH IV, 7 connect an unconditional notion of duty
directly with categoricity.) Thus, when he suggests that ‘each one of us should
devise his own categorical imperative’ (A 11; cf. GM P3),19 the partly parodic
phrasing conceals a more serious point. Although Nietzsche agrees with Kant
that first-personal normative conclusions are in one sense self-legislated, he
thinks they necessarily reflect one’s motives and, as a result, denies that oughts
yielded by practical reasoning are categorical. The plausibility of, and arguments
for, these claims I leave for another occasion; the present point is that categoricity
is one of Nietzsche’s central targets.
Explaining Nietzsche’s normative agenda
Even if I am right about that, the promise was to show how this explains why
Nietzsche criticizes moral values, understood in terms of Leiter’s condition (2)
and my condition (II). To see how it does, and how it does this better than
Leiter’s condition (1), we need to first sketch Leiter’s explanation.
Leiter argues that, for Nietzsche, a person is constituted by various psychophysical facts, or ‘type-facts’, which determine the type of person one is. What is
good for a person then depends on the type one is; this may vary across persons
(Leiter 2002: 105ff ). Morality, however, claims that all people are ‘essentially
similar’ in relevant respects, whereby ‘the [morality] that is good for one will be
good for all’ (Leiter 2002: 80, 104ff ). It is on this false premise that morality
19 Cf. Norman’s (2005) translation: ‘everyone should invent his own categorical imperatives’.
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presents itself as universally applicable, since it claims to be ‘appropriate [or
good] for all’ (Leiter 2002: 80). Since morality has succeeded in so presenting
itself, nascent higher types think morality good for them; they thereby come to
accept and internalize moral values (Leiter 2002: 28, 104ff, 176, 195). But such
‘values’ are antagonistic to their flourishing and the realization of the excellences
they are capable of (Leiter 2002: 113ff ). Central to Nietzsche’s conception of
excellence is an ideal of creativity (Leiter 2002: 129ff ), the pursuit and achievement of which require a readiness to suffer, prioritizing one’s own goals, standing
apart from others, channelling one’s instincts creatively, and so on. Most of us
may be unable to achieve genuine excellence; but someone who is, if he has also
internalized moral norms (promoting the alleviation of suffering, altruism,
equality, extirpation of instincts, say), will devalue and hence avoid conditions
necessary for great achievement. Thus morality ‘is harmful because, in reality, it
will have the effect of leading potentially excellent persons to value what is in fact
not conducive to their flourishing and devalue what is, in fact, essential to it’
(Leiter 2001: 243, 2002: 133). And, Leiter believes, Nietzsche’s primary aim is to
‘free these nascent higher types from . . . their false belief that the dominant
morality is, in fact, good for them’ (2002: 28; cf. 176, 195).
I agree with Leiter’s guiding interpretative motif—that Nietzsche’s central
objection is that morality thwarts the highest forms of human excellence amongst
those capable of it (see also Robertson 2011a). I also agree on all the following
points: that morality has the effects it does, according to Nietzsche, because
nascent higher types internalize values (and associated norms, general obligations, prohibitions, etc.) detrimental to their flourishing and excellence; that
Nietzsche attributes to morality a universality thesis; and that he denies that all
people are relevantly similar. But I want to raise two worries.
First, we should query Leiter’s attribution to morality of the claim that
morality is appropriate for all (or, as I prefer to frame things, universal in
jurisdiction) because all people are relevantly similar. Leiter usually presents
the explanans as a descriptive thesis: all people are ‘essentially’ similar because
characterized by the same basic type-facts, due to which they have the same
generic interests. Thus ‘the general applicability of [morality] is predicated on
the assumption about similarity among persons and their interests: people are
essentially similar’, whereby morality infers that ‘the [morality] that is good for
one will be good for all’ (Leiter 2002: 104). An implication of Leiter’s account,
though, is that according to morality on Nietzsche’s conception of it, whether a
person falls under its jurisdiction is conditional upon that person’s interests. It
just so happens, according to morality, that everyone has the right sorts of
interests—namely, those served by morality—and so falls within its jurisdiction.
However, I doubt that either traditional moralists or Nietzsche regard morality
like this. Rather, one is required to comply with morality, and thus one falls
within its jurisdiction, irrespective of whether doing so serves one’s interests and
motives. In other words, morality claims to be normatively authoritative. That is
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precisely why on most views morality claims to apply even to those whose
interests it conflicts with, and traditional moralists are keenly aware that an
individual’s interests are not guaranteed to harmonize with morality. (Nietzsche’s
account of the slave revolt in GM I suggests that an original motivation behind
morality was to constrain those whose interests were, and were recognized as,
antagonistic to the slaves’ good.) Yet this implies that morality does not claim
that all people are essentially similar; nor, then, as Leiter’s account requires,
would morality claim itself universally applicable on that basis. However, if
compliance with morality is not (by morality’s lights) conditional on agential
interests, the descriptive claim central to Leiter’s argument—that all people are
essentially similar—seems redundant with respect to explaining how morality
constrains nascent higher individuals. For if compliance is not conditional on
agential interests, then whether people have essentially similar generic interests is
irrelevant to whether they fall under morality’s jurisdiction. It is instead the
normative authority thesis that explains how morality constrains such higher
individuals: they cannot escape morality and are required to comply with it,
irrespective of whether doing so conflicts with those motives which are directed
towards, or which would otherwise be served by, pursuing relevant non-moral
excellences. In response Leiter might concede to morality that people can have
significantly different interests but, he might add, according to morality such
differences are not normatively relevant—that is, not relevant to whether a person
falls under morality’s jurisdiction and so ought to comply with it (cf. 2002: 105).
Yet this effectively concedes the normative authority thesis. So either Leiter must
deny morality’s commitment to the normative authority thesis—a claim I have
been arguing there is good reason to think Nietzsche attributes to morality—or
he can accept it but render the relevant similarity thesis, and hence that element
of his condition (1), surplus to the explanation of how morality’s claim to
universality constrains nascent excellent individuals.20
A second doubt is that, on Leiter’s account, nascent higher individuals
internalize moral norms because they mistakenly believe morality good for
them or in their interests. Without denying they may think this (though it’s
surely an over-generalization to insist that every nascent higher individual thinks
it), there remains a question of how they come to this mistaken belief and why
20 The other two components of Leiter’s condition (1)—pertaining to freewill and selftransparency—also seem to make sense only in light of morality’s commitment to normative
authority. For when agents are evaluated by morality—for instance, blamed—partly on the basis
of the motives from which they act, what they are being held responsible to and blamed for is the
violation of categorical requirements they have (supposedly) freely and knowingly chosen to flout.
Were such requirements not (presented as) categorical, not only would we be permitted by
morality’s own lights to violate its supposed demands when it suits us, the idea central to
morality that wrongdoers are blameworthy—i.e. legitimate targets of sanction in virtue of having
done something objectively wrong—collapses. See Owen and Robertson (forthcoming) for some
further detail on the relation between categoricity, freewill and blame as these feature in Nietzsche’s
critique.
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they internalize moral values (especially given that morality may conflict with
their interests in quite obvious ways). A full explanation is beyond the present
scope. Nevertheless, a central part of it on my account is that nascent higher types
internalize moral values because, despite the death of God, they continue to
accept morality as normatively authoritative.21 Given morality’s success, such
individuals (through upbringing, socialization, moral education, etc.) simply
think that moral values are to be complied with (even when such compliance
conflicts with their own interests). In fact it may be doubted whether Nietzsche’s
critique makes adequate sense without this. For if morality were not presented
and accepted as authoritative and thus non-optional, nascent higher types would
not be or feel subject to, and constrained by, it. In which case, morality would
not have exercised the power and influence over them which Leiter’s argument
assumes; morality would not then need to be overcome. The normative authority
thesis therefore provides a deeper explanation for why nascent higher individuals
internalize moral values, one that does not depend on whether they also think
that moral values are good for them.
5 . NIETZSCHE’S ETHICAL STANCE?
Let us now return to Clark’s invocation of a moral-ethical contrast—in particular, her suggestions that ‘Nietzsche’s immoralism is a rejection of what Williams
calls morality’ and that Nietzsche instead ‘embraces and urges us towards an
ethical orientation in the broader sense’. If part of Nietzsche’s target is morality’s
normative authority, there are indeed strong affinities between him and
Williams. (Clark 2001: 105ff explores further resonances, including their association of morality with blame, guilt and a deeply voluntarist view of agency; see
also Owen and Robertson forthcoming.) Furthermore, a conception of the
ethical may play an important part in Nietzsche’s thought. Recall Williams’
characterization of the ethical: any scheme regulating relations between people
via informal sanctions and internalized dispositions. This is the conception Clark
herself uses (2001: 101–2). She argues that the noble/master morality of GM I is
an instance of the ethical but not morality (2001: 102, 107ff ). It goes beyond
more primitive versions of Sittlichkeit whose legalistic notion of obligation was
enforced through threat of, and desire to avoid, punishment (2001: 107). A more
mature form of ethical life and agency involves being able to discharge one’s
duties as a matter of conscience and the possession of dispositions which, when
internalized and integrated with conscience, may upon ethical violation manifest
21 GM III explains how morality may initially have got a grip on those whose interests it thwarts:
roughly, Christianity gave suffering meaning. But with the death of God, that explanation will have
limited application now. For some suggestions on why morality continued to exert power and
influence after its inception, see n.17.
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themselves in penal emotions serving as first-personal sanctions.22 However,
obligation and sanction, to the extent they figure in master morality, are as yet
un-moralized. It is only through the emergence and triumph of slave morality
that moral obligations become (regarded as) categorical and universal, their
violation meriting conceptions of blame and guilt linked to various suppositions
about agency and freewill.
In these respects I agree with Clark that Nietzsche plausibly deploys a moralethical distinction of the kind Williams canvasses. However, the positive ideal
Nietzsche himself advocates is not well-understood as an ethical outlook—if by
that we mean, as Williams and Clark do, a scheme for regulating relations between
people. I take it as uncontroversial that Nietzsche is, in some suitably broad sense,
a perfectionist: he advances a conception of the good consisting in, or significantly involving, the realization of excellence—indeed the highest forms of
human excellence.23 This much leaves open whether Nietzsche’s positive ideal
counts as ethical in the Clark–Williams sense. However, if it is then we would
expect at least three things.
First, an ethical scheme assumes a high degree of uniformity across persons
with respect to the norms that guide and constrain conduct; in particular, each
person is subject to the same basic regulatory constraints. Second, we would
expect a regulatory system to rule out as unacceptable actions generally deemed
objectionable and/or inimical to the regulation of relations between people.
Third, we would expect a relatively systematic account of how interpersonal
relations are to be regulated, with reference to relevant norms, say, as well as
various structural features like obligation, plus the internalized dispositions and
sanctions that enforce it. (Even Williams, despite his anti-theoretic leanings,
sketches a demoralized conception of ethical obligation that supplies the basis for
an outlook meeting these minimal criteria; see e.g. 1985: ch. 10.) Nietzsche,
however, falls short on all three scores.
First, his predominant, if not exclusive, focus when presenting his favoured
ideal falls not on how interpersonal relations are to be regulated—let alone
regulated uniformly across all people—but on what it would be to be an ideal
type of person (EH III, 1). He designates this type via a number of epithets:
22 (a) Clark indicates a non-moralized version of guilt, perhaps akin to shame, that may be
available to modern ethical life and that was operative in the master morality of GM I–II (though, at
Clark 2001: 122, n.22, she also notes a reservation Nietzsche himself has with shame). See also May
1999: ch. 4 and Appendix. (b) Clark’s account appeals to the notion of a categorical ought, which
Williams calls that of ‘practical necessity’ (Clark 2001: 112; Williams 1985: ch. 10). It should be
emphasized that this use of ‘categorical’, to denote an ‘I must’ that springs from the desires
constitutive of one’s identity, differs from the sense in which Williams and Nietzsche deny the
categoricity of moral obligation as unconditioned by desire (though Williams thinks that many
moralists, Kantians in particular, conflate them).
23 For further taxonomy of possible Nietzschean perfectionisms (plus an overview of issues that
any perfectionist reading must address), see Robertson 2009b: 76–81. The form of perfectionism
I go on to attribute to Nietzsche is glossed mainly from his later works, of 1886 onwards.
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‘higher type’ (BGE 62; A 4; EH III 1, IV 4), ‘free spirit’ (GS 347; BGE ch. 2),
‘noble’ person (GS 55; BGE ch. 9, 287), ‘great’ individual (BGE 72, 212, 269;
WP 957), arguably also ‘Übermensch’ (Z P3; A 4; EH IV, 5). And he repeatedly
cites a selection of capacities and/or qualities of character that can variously be
understood as preconditions for, or in some cases partially constitutive of, being
such a person. These are uniformly ‘self-oriented’ qualities: an independent selfdetermining will (BGE 29, 60; GS 290, 347), self-mastery (D 109; BGE 200,
260; TI ‘Expeditions’ 49; WP 46), self-sufficiency and readiness for solitude (GS
55; BGE 44, 212, 260, 274, 284), self-discipline needed to endure suffering
(BGE 212, 225, 260, 270), and self-reverence (GS 287, 290, 334; BGE 287).
Higher types create their own goals and values (HH 225; BGE 29, 60, 260; GS
290, 347; A 11), stand apart from the herd-like majority (GS 55; BGE 44, 212,
260, 274, 284), and seek to perfect themselves under a law of their own (GS 290,
335). As prospective exemplars he cites (often in association with such qualities)
rare and outstanding individuals (notably Julius Caesar, da Vinci, Goethe,
Beethoven). Nonetheless, Nietzsche nowhere infers from the picture of an ideal
type anything about how the majority—the decidedly ignoble and the mediocre—ought to be or act.24 It is of course good that there are, have been, and
perhaps will be, higher men; but no positive normative (ought and reason) claims
follow for those of us incapable of relinquishing morality or effectively realizing
Nietzschean excellence. Indeed, the scope of Nietzsche’s positive normative
claims always seems focused on those who, firstly, can relinquish morality and,
secondly, are capable of effectively pursuing the highest excellences. Furthermore, a recurring theme is that ‘The ideas of the herd should rule in the herd—
but not reach out beyond it’ (WP 287). This implies not just that different
persons can be subject to different evaluative ideals but, moreover, given that
Nietzsche nowhere pronounces on how the herd should live, that he is generally
indifferent to what they do, so long as that doesn’t impede the excellence of
higher types. All this makes it difficult to see how Nietzsche could be concerned
with supplying a code of conduct uniformly regulating relations between people.
Second, Nietzsche sometimes countenances a higher type’s treating others as
mere means, contra central ethical tenets. He suggests, for example, that a
‘human being who strives for something great regards everybody he meets on
his way either as a means or as a hindrance—or as a temporary resting place’
(BGE 273). And, in the Nachlass, ‘A great man . . . is colder, harder, less hesitating, and without fear of “opinion” . . . he wants no “sympathetic” heart, but
24 It is sometimes assumed that, for Nietzsche, any person is straightforwardly either a higher
type (nascent or otherwise) or irredeemably a member of herd morality. Matters are more complex,
though. Most obviously there may be people who, having relinquished morality’s grip, either do not
pursue excellence or else do but fail to realize it. Even the latter are not Nietzsche’s higher types,
since they fall short of the idealized picture he depicts (see Section 6). This (slightly) more finegrained taxonomy accommodates the thought that higher types comprise only a subset of the
readership Nietzsche hopes will, and thinks can, query morality (contrast e.g. Leiter 2002).
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servants, tools’ (WP 962). It is not that the pursuit or realization of excellence
justifies relevant means on consequentialist grounds. Rather, Nietzsche typically
seems flatly unconcerned with the kinds of justification and interpersonal regulation of conduct that are staples of ethical thought. Indeed, a great man has ‘his
own justice that is beyond appeal’ (WP 962).
Third, Nietzsche offers no account of how interpersonal relations would best
be regulated. He doesn’t seek to reinstate the type of ethical community he
identifies with the master moralities of antiquity (see e.g. GS 377). The closest he
comes to an ethical alternative to morality is a virtue-based outlook, though it is
hard to maintain that he offers a theory of the virtues that is ethical in the specific
sense of a systematic account delivering normative claims of wide-ranging
applicability that would serve to regulate conduct.
In short, it is doubtful that Nietzsche’s positive idea is well-understood as
ethical in that specific sense. This is in part a terminological matter. Yet insofar as
Clark means something fairly specific by ‘ethical’—contrasting it to Foot’s quasiaestheticism—the disagreement is also substantive.25
In light of the preceding characterization of Nietzsche’s higher types, I think
we can attribute to Nietzsche a fairly radical individualist perfectionism, the basic
tenets of which can be more systematically reconstructed via the following theses:
(i) Achieving the highest final value involves realizing the highest forms of
excellence.
(ii) Nietzsche’s primary normative-evaluative agenda is to promote the highest
excellences amongst only those capable of them, i.e. amongst higher types.
(iii) Higher types set their own ends; they aim, and ought to aim, only at their
own perfection.
(iv) The highest value lies in higher types, regardless of whether they or their
achievements benefit others.
(v) Nietzsche is generally indifferent, evaluatively speaking, to what the nonexcellent do, except insofar as their conduct or values impede excellence.
(vi) The non-excellent generally have no reason to promote the good of higher
types.26
25 Is Nietzsche’s positive outlook ethical in the wider sense identified in Section 3? To the extent
that we expect answers to ‘How should one live?’ to deliver a high degree of generality across people,
and to specify ideals to which many should aspire and that many can attain, perhaps not.
Nonetheless, the broad area of enquiry to which Nietzsche’s normative-evaluative proposals give
an answer certainly overlaps with traditional ethical concerns. To that extent, I have no problem
labelling it ‘ethical’.
26 Both Leiter and Foot, I believe, would be sympathetic to the spirit of this interpretative
reconstruction (see Leiter 1992: 284, 2002: 115ff ; Foot 1994, 2001). Thomas Hurka (2007:
16–18), though, has recently and provocatively argued that Nietzsche advances a consequentialist
perfectionism structured through a maximax principle combined with an agent-neutral conception
of the good and right—whereby ‘all agents are assigned the same [ethical] goal’, namely ‘maximising
the perfection of the best’ (2007: 21). In effect, this denies [v] and [vi]. Hurka’s reading deserves
more careful treatment that I can offer here; but I shall make two brief points. First, the clearest
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These theses present the barebones structure of Nietzsche’s perfectionism. In the
next section, I supplement it with a final main thesis: that Nietzsche’s individualist perfectionism is a quasi-aesthetic one.
6 . NIETZSCHE’S QUASI-AESTHETICISM
The label ‘quasi-aesthetic’, as I use it, is intended to suggest an analogy with
aesthetic evaluation and activity. As ever, there may be disanalogies; and analogies can be pushed too far. But to give some initial traction on why the label
seems appropriate, here are two general remarks. First, many of Nietzsche’s stock
evaluative concepts are paradigmatically aesthetic, rather than narrowly moral—
beauty, ugliness, sublimity, creativity. Second, in much the way that artistic
activity for Nietzsche—focused on the creation of art, qua art—stands beyond
and is unfettered by moral and other-regarding concerns, so too is a life fully
pursuing greatness. (Also note that, while a ‘quasi-aesthetic’ ideal might seem to
implicate some overly-romanticized or bohemian vision, the reality for
Nietzsche’s higher types—as with serious artists—involves single-minded selfdiscipline and is really rather demanding.)
Central to Nietzsche’s quasi-aestheticism is an overarching imperative to
perfect oneself (GS 290) by ‘becoming what one is’ (e.g. GS 270, 335).27 This,
we will see, involves creativity (see e.g. Nehamas 1985; Leiter 115–16; Reginster
2007; Ridley 2007). Indeed, the ‘really great men’, Nietzsche urges, ‘are men of
great creativity’ (WP 957). Nietzsche presents his positive ideal at the level of
persons and modes of activity, rather than specific actions. Great creativity is
predicable of great individuals and their activities quite generally (it is not
confined to the kinds of narrowly artistic endeavour via which Nietzsche often
analogizes it). Crucially, a great individual is someone who creates himself. This
involves (at least) four things.
First, it requires uncompromisingly honest self-scrutiny (GS 335; BGE 39;
A 50): veridical assessment of the kind of person one already is (‘surveying all
the strengths and weakness of [one’s] nature’ (GS 290)), in turn yielding enhanced
self-understanding. And the self-assessment a nascent higher type undergoes would
reveal morality as inimical to his flourishing and excellence.
textual support for it comes from Nietzsche’s earlier works (esp. SE), whereas his later works (1886
and on) point in a more individualistic direction of the kind I have outlined here. Second, given
Nietzsche’s emphases on higher types perfecting themselves self-sufficiently and independently of
the herd, it is doubtful that this would involve assigning (all or perhaps any) non-excellent persons
the goal of maximising the excellence of higher types.
27 See also Lanier Anderson’s contribution to this volume (Ch. 9), which connects self-becoming
to agency as achievement. Since writing the original version of this section I read Ridley (2007:
ch. 5), which says many of the things I had in mind but with far more insight and panache than
I could hope for. I owe much to Ridley’s chapter.
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Second, self-understanding involves realistic appraisal of one’s future potential—realistic in that the agent’s assessment of what counts as a genuine practical
possibility must be sensitive to facts about the kind of person he already is, since
those facts shape and constrain the potentialities he could actualize and hence
what he is able to become.
Third, creating oneself involves setting one’s own ends (in light of realistic selfassessment) and pursuing them. This involves choosing for oneself what to do,
rather than blindly submitting to pre-established, externally legislated ‘authorities’. Thus, ‘a free spirit . . . thinks otherwise than would be expected . . . He is the
exception: bound spirits are the rule’ (HH 225). Many or most of us, even if we
engage in self-evaluation, may find it psychologically impossible to relinquish
traditional socio-moral roles and norms, or hence to be moved by some alternative conception of oneself. Thus we will remain as we are, part of herd morality.
But Nietzsche’s higher type is someone with the disposition, courage, and
wherewithal to set and pursue some alternative ideal. Nietzsche urges that the
‘noble type of man feels himself to be the determiner of values . . . he creates values’
(BGE 260). Although not entirely obvious what it is to ‘create values’, three
things Nietzsche must mean are that: a higher type sets his own ends; that his
realizing those ends can be valuable; and that he ought to pursue the ends he sets
himself. Thus, a higher type is someone who pursues a self-styled life: he is the
author of his own imperatives (A 11).
Fourth, the mark of a great individual is someone who realizes the ends he sets
himself (GS 335)—thereby actualizing his potential and in that sense creating
who he is (or is to become).
These four elements, though conceptually independent, may be intertwined in
various ways, each in principle open to critical reassessment at any point. Even in
combination they may not be sufficient for being a fully-fledged higher type; that
may also require realizing genuinely valuable ends. It is well known that Nietzsche
says conspicuously little about which determinate ends are worth pursuing or
what a great person’s life and activities will involve—reflecting, one suspects, his
emphasis on its being a self-styled life lived by individuals who think and feel
otherwise than is expected. Nonetheless, he does offer more on the structure of
such a life. At one point he likens it to the effective pursuit of an artist’s plan: ‘To
“give style” to one’s character—a great and rare art! It is practised by those who
survey all the strengths and weaknesses of their nature and fit them into an artistic
plan’, it being ‘the strong and domineering natures that enjoy their finest gaiety
in such constraint and perfection under a law of their own’ (GS 290). Developing
the analogy, just as an artist creates a vision of his intended artwork and then sets
about actualizing it, a person can forge a plan of (parts of) his life and set himself
subsidiary goals whose achievement is instrumental to or constitutive of realizing
that plan. The overall project shapes and constrains the nature of the specific
activities. Nonetheless, both the overall plan and its constituents may be revised
in light of changes to the other (realistically, one cannot fully determine how to
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execute one’s life project in advance of actually pursuing it—see BGE 188 for a
further artistic analogy here). In further elucidation of the basic idea, we can
emphasize three additional ingredients.
First, fitting one’s life into an artistic plan requires an ‘enduring will’ (GM II,
1–3), not just the common ability to intend the means to one’s proximal ends
but to do so on a grander scale. ‘A great man’, Nietzsche writes, has ‘a long logic
in all his activity . . . he has the ability to extend his will across great stretches of
his life’ (WP 962).
Second, this in turn requires self-mastery—a capacity to order and direct one’s
often contradictory drives into a coherent whole:28
The man of an era of dissolution . . . contains within him . . . contrary and often not
merely conflicting drives and values which struggle with one another . . . If, however,
the contrariety and war in such a nature should act as one more stimulus and enticement to
life—and if . . . in addition to powerful and irreconcilable drives, there has also been
inherited and cultivated a proper mastery and subtlety in conducting a war against oneself,
that is to say self-control, self-outwitting: then there arise those marvellously incomprehensible and unfathomable men, those enigmatic men predestined for victory . . . the fairest
examples of which are Alcibiades and Caesar . . . amongst artists perhaps Leonardo da Vinci.
(BGE 200; cf. TI, ‘Skirmishes’ 49; WP 966)
Such ability, Nietzsche thinks, is not available to all (as a result, few may have
reason to do, or even try, what the great have reason to do and try). One
explanation he offers for this is that few people have sufficiently conflicting
drives to harness in the first place. Those who form the herd, who obediently
conform to a pre-established authority whose demands they have internalized
and unquestioningly made their own, do not. An attitude of submission towards
moral demands accepted as definitive and authoritative not only requires minimal independence and ingenuity of thought or will, it gradually stifles whatever
capacity for them one might have. For those with conflicting drives, on the other
hand, self-mastery is needed to harness them in a unified direction; and, unless
one eliminates or otherwise represses drives antithetical to the norm, the ordering
of conflicting drives generates for oneself a new—one’s own—direction.
Third, achieving self-perfection requires a combination of the self-oriented
qualities mentioned in Section 5: an independent and creative will that determines its own ends in light of the person one is; self-sufficiency by which to
execute one’s projects for oneself; the self-reverence, self-assurance, and selfdiscipline needed to pursue those projects alone and to persevere in the face of
opposition.
This is little more than a bare outline of some large themes. But it suggests a
direction which, far from being ethical in Clark’s fashion, is more individualistically and aesthetically orientated. It nonetheless leaves unanswered a number of
28 See also Chapters 8 and 9.
The Scope Problem
107
pressing questions. In particular, since the account so far does not rule out
creating oneself in ways Nietzsche himself would not value, we may need some
further criteria by which to discriminate genuinely valuable from disvaluable lives
and achievements. On the one hand, a plausible account needs to distinguish
excellence from mediocrity. This is a substantial task that I cannot begin here.29
On the other, and in line with Foot’s suspicion, the account thus far seems to
license all sorts of abhorrent activities in the name of self-creation. This section
concludes with some remarks on this.
There are two relevant aspects to Nietzsche’s thought that seem to stand in
tension. First, there are the passages cited in Section 5 describing Nietzsche’s
higher type as someone prepared to treat others as mere means. Second,
Nietzsche at several points denounces conduct we would ordinarily regard as
morally objectionable. He suggests, for example: that hurting others ‘is a sign
that we are still lacking power’ (and thereby suboptimal) (GS 13); that ‘the noble
human being too aids the unfortunate but not, or almost not, from pity, but
more from an urge begotten by superfluity of power’ (BGE 260); and that ‘When
an exceptional human being handles the mediocre more gently than he does
himself or his equals, this is not merely politeness of the heart—it is simply his
duty’ (A 57). Although such suggestions offer the glimmerings of materials by
which to avoid the unencumbered immoralism about which Foot is understandably cautious, there remains the question of how to reconcile these two, seemingly disparate, elements in Nietzsche.
The beginnings of a response might appeal to an aspect of Nietzschean selfsufficiency not considered so far: the more self-sufficiently one achieves one’s
goals (e.g. without using or hurting others as means), the more excellent one is.
Even so, doing so (despite exhibiting lack of power (GS 13)) may sometimes be
necessary for achieving one’s ends, for which the great man must be ‘colder,
harder, less hesitating’ (WP 962). Nietzsche emphasizes that single-minded
pursuit of one’s goals requires the ‘virtue’ of or capacity for ‘solitude’, of being
away from and working independently of others (BGE 273, 284). But when a
noble type does encounter others, to the extent that he is able to treat them gently
without compromising his own projects, he expresses a ‘superfluity of power’
(BGE 260), ‘a self-sufficiency that overflows’ (GS 55). We might thereby understand self-sufficiency as (a formal condition) partially constitutive of what it is to
be an excellent individual. It in turn yields a (defeasible) constraint on conduct:
higher men have good reason not to hurt others (GS 13), since doing so stains
their character by showing them suboptimally self-sufficient and hence less
excellent (see also Z II ‘The Pitiful’). Much more needs to be said here; but it
29 Hurka (2007), Reginster (2007), and Janaway (this volume, Ch. 8) develop (at least partly)
‘formal’ accounts of Nietzschean value. I agree that there are elements in Nietzsche indicating
formal criteria of value, but I am sceptical that these will do all the work required to distinguish
excellence from non-excellence (see Robertson 2009b: 78–9).
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indicates a line of thought by which, contra Foot, there are constraints on the
pursuit of excellence, whereby Nietzsche’s quasi-aestheticism may be less monstrous than she supposes.30
7 . CONCLUDING REMARKS
The paper has sought a resolution to the scope problem by distinguishing
‘morality’, the object of Nietzsche’s critique, from the ‘quasi-aesthetic individualist perfectionism’ that I have argued comprises Nietzsche’s positive program. It
is worth emphasizing one additional point that should serve to further distinguish them and hence show that the objections informing Nietzsche’s critique of
morality’s foundations do not also apply to his own positive project.
Nietzsche’s critical target was characterized in part as a system of values
and obligations, compliance with which is categorically and universally required.
I argued that opposing this commitment is central to Nietzsche’s critique. His
perfectionism, in contrast, is not an ideal everyone ought to pursue: rather, it
makes a constitutive claim about what a higher type is and how such an
individual ought to be. Moreover, Nietzschean oughts are non-categorical.
I suggested (Section 6) that higher types set their own ends and that (it can be
the case that) they ought to pursue the ends they set themselves. However, as
suggested in Section 3, the ends one sets (and that one is able to set oneself) are
shaped and constrained by one’s motives. Thus what a higher type ought to do
depends on his motives and such oughts are therefore non-categorical.
Nietzsche’s objections to categoricity, then, do not reapply to his own perfectionist ideal.
Again, much more needs to be said about how such non-categorical oughts
work within the Nietzschean framework, as well as how philosophically defensible the resulting view is.31 Here, though, my more modest aim has been to take
the first step to that bigger task by showing that the scope issue is not really a
problem.32
30 Such constraints are not sufficient to render Nietzsche’s ideal ethical in Clark’s sense: they
apply only to the excellent few whose projects conflict with the rest of us.
31 I begin these tasks in Robertson 2011a and in ‘Nietzsche and Practical Reason’ (unpublished).
32 An earlier version of this paper was presented in December 2007 at the first workshop forming
part of the AHRC funded Nietzsche and Modern Moral Philosophy Project, at the University of
Southampton. I am grateful to its participants for useful discussion—especially Simon Blackburn,
Ken Gemes, Chris Janaway, David Owen, John Richardson, Aaron Ridley, and Henry Staten, with
additional thanks to Chris and to Keith Ansell-Pearson both of whom provided useful additional
comments on the penultimate draft. The paper was written during my tenure of the Nietzsche
project’s postdoctoral research fellowship, for which I thank both the AHRC and Discipline of
Philosophy at Southampton.
The Scope Problem
109
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The Gay Science, trans. Walter Kaufmann London: Vintage Books, 1974.
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1968.
Twilight of the Idols, trans. R. J. Hollingdale. London: Penguin, 1990.
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Acampora, Christa Davis (2006). ‘Naturalism and Nietzsche’s moral psychology’, in
K. Ansell-Pearson (ed.), The Blackwell Companion to Nietzsche. London: Blackwell.
Anscombe, G. E. M. (1958). ‘Modern moral philosophy’, Philosophy 33: 1–19.
Baier, Kurt (1958). The Moral Point of View. Ithaca: Cornell University Press.
Clark, Maudemarie (1994). ‘Nietzsche’s immoralism and the concept of morality’, in
R. Schacht (ed.), Nietzsche, Genealogy, Morality. Berkeley: University of California
Press.
——(2001). ‘On the rejection of morality: Bernard Williams’ debt to Nietzsche’, in
R. Schacht (ed.), Nietzsche’s Postmoralism. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.
Foot, Philippa (1994). ‘Nietzsche’s immoralism’, in R. Schacht (ed.), Nietzsche, Genealogy,
Morality. Berkeley: University of California Press.
——(2001). ‘Nietzsche: the revaluation of values’, reprinted in J. Richardson and
B. Leiter (eds), Nietzsche. Oxford: Oxford University Press.
Gauthier, David (1967). ‘Morality and advantage’, Philosophical Review 76: 460–75.
Gibbard, Allan (1990). Wise Choices, Apt Feelings. Oxford: Clarendon Press.
Hegel, G. W. F (1991). Elements of the Philosophy of Right, trans. H. B. Nisbet.
Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.
Hurka, Thomas (2007). ‘Nietzsche: perfectionist’, in B. Leiter and N. Sinhababu (eds),
Nietzsche and Morality. Oxford: Clarendon Press.
Janaway, Christopher (2007). Beyond Selflessness. Reading Nietzsche’s Genealogy. Oxford:
Oxford University Press.
Kail, Peter (2009). ‘Nietzsche and Hume: naturalism and explanation’, Journal of
Nietzsche Studies 37: 5–22.
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Leiter, Brian (1995). ‘Morality in the Pejorative sense: on the logic of Nietzsche’s critique
of morality’, British Journal for the History of Philosophy 3: 113–45.
——(2001). ‘Nietzsche and the morality critics’, reprinted in J. Richardson and B. Leiter
(eds), Nietzsche. Oxford: Oxford University Press.
——(2002). Nietzsche on Morality. London: Routledge.
MacIntyre, Alastair (1981). After Virtue. London: Duckworth.
Mackie, John (1977). Ethics: Inventing Right and Wrong. Harmondsworth: Penguin.
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May, Simon (1999). Nietzsche’s Ethics and his War on ‘Morality’. Oxford: Oxford University
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Works of John Stuart Mill. Toronto: Toronto University Press.
Owen, David (2003). ‘Nietzsche, re-evaluation and the turn to genealogy’, European
Journal of Philosophy 11: 249–72.
——(2007). Nietzsche’s Genealogy of Morality. Stocksfield: Acumen.
——and Robertson, Simon (forthcoming). ‘Nietzsche’s influence on analytic philosophy’, in K. Gemes and J. Richardson (eds), The Oxford Handbook of Nietzsche. Oxford:
Oxford University Press.
Reginster, Bernard (2007). ‘The will to power and the ethics of creativity’, in B. Leiter
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——(2011b). ‘A Nietzschean critique of obligation-centred moral theory’, International
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Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.
5
Nietzsche and Non-cognitivism
Nadeem J. Z. Hussain
1. INTRODUCTION
Maudemarie Clark and David Dudrick have recently defended an interpretation of Nietzsche according to which he has a non-cognitivist metaethics
(Clark and Dudrick 2007). I will argue that they have failed to show that
Nietzsche was committed to non-cognitivism. This will require laying out
their argument for the non-cognitivist reading in some detail since I will in
part have to show that much of the complicated story this article tells about
Nietzsche can be set aside for the purposes of assessing whether Nietzsche is a
non-cognitivist.
2 . ARTICULATING NON-COGNITIVISM
Let me begin however with emphasizing that we need to agree on what we mean
by calling a metaethical theory a non-cognitivist theory. The term ‘non-cognitivism’ is not exactly ordinary English and the requirement that there be some
kind of rejection of something called cognitivism—itself a rather non-ordinary
term of course—hardly constrains legitimate applications of the term. I will be
assuming that Clark and Dudrick do intend to use the term ‘non-cognitivism’ to
pick out the kind of theories that have come to be so identified in recent ‘analytic’
metaethics. I take this to be clearly implied by the repeated references in their
work to the writings of Simon Blackburn and Allan Gibbard.
Non-cognitivist theories of this kind are essentially theories about the semantics of normative language. The meaning of normative language is given by the
role of such language in expressing certain non-cognitive states. A non-cognitive
state is contrasted with a cognitive state, a state that purports to represent the
world as being a certain way—a belief as we would normally put it. This, then, is
the kind of non-cognitivism I take Clark and Dudrick to be ascribing to
Nietzsche.
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I have defended elsewhere the claim that Nietzsche is committed to an error
theory about existing ethical discourse.1 I also argued that we should see
Nietzsche as suggesting a replacement fictionalist practice (Hussain 2007).
Others have ascribed to Nietzsche forms of cognitivist subjectivism, at least for
claims of prudential goodness (Leiter 2002). I mention these alternatives just to
remind you that, in the first instance, the interpretive task currently facing us is
one of deciding which metaethical position, if any, fits best with Nietzsche’s texts
as opposed to, for example, finding Nietzschean proof texts that might be
consistent with any particular metaethical position. In order to carry out this
task then, we need a clear picture of the essential, but sometimes subtle,
differences between these metaethical views and an idea of what kind of texts
would support ascribing one metaethical view to Nietzsche over another.2
Some examples will help here. Consider the following simple-minded metaethical error theories. When people say things of the form ‘killing innocents is
wrong’ they are expressing a belief. They believe that the act of killing innocents
has a special property of wrongness. This property—indeed this kind of property—
is so special that it cannot be a natural property. As John Mackie put it, it is a very
queer property. Unfortunately, to cut a long story short, science tells us there are
only natural properties. Thus these beliefs are all false, or at least the positive, atomic
ones are.
Or imagine that our metaethicist tells us that as a matter of semantic fact
believing that killing innocents is wrong is just believing that God commanded
us to not kill innocents. Unfortunately, our metaethicist continues, God does not
exist and so did not command anything. Again all our moral beliefs—positive,
atomic ones at least—are false. Again we have an error theory.
Now the first crucial thing to note for our purposes is that there are certain
claims about the expression of non-cognitive states that our error theorist can go
on to make that do not make him or her into a non-cognitivist in the sense under
consideration here.
Take our first error theorist, the one who thought that moral properties were
special, very special—indeed so special they did not exist or were not instantiated. Now we might raise the following challenge to this error theorist: if these
properties do not exist, then why do people go around calling things wrong?
What is the point of this practice? Our error theorist might respond as follows:
killing innocents causes lots of pain and suffering. It is hardly surprising, for all
the obvious reasons evolutionary and otherwise, that humans have negative
feelings towards killing innocents. These negative feelings partly explain why
they call such killings wrong. Indeed, they express these negative feelings towards
the killing of innocents by calling such killings wrong.
1 As opposed, that is, to the normative and evaluative discourse Nietzsche is recommending for
the future—or so I argue.
2 Or, of course, deciding that no metaethical view is appropriate.
Nietzsche and Non-cognitivism
113
Now when this error theorist uses the word ‘express’ in this context she means it
in a very straightforward, ordinary sense of the term. If you ask me whether
Professor Smith is a good pedagogue and I reply by saying, ‘He’s never around to
help his students’, then, under most normal circumstances, I will have expressed a
negative attitude towards Professor Smith. However this expression of a negative
attitude is in addition to the expression of a straightforward, non-evaluative,
cognitive belief, namely, the belief that Smith is never around to help his students.
The sentence is straightforwardly about a certain descriptive fact: the fact that
Smith is never around to help his students. The semantics for judgements like this
is not given by reference to the non-cognitive attitude of disapproval that it can
also be used to express. Thus that a claim is sometimes used to express emotions
does not give us reason to give a non-cognitive account of the semantics of that
claim in the manner of contemporary metaethical non-cognitivisms.
Indeed, even if a particular sentence always seems to be used to express, in the
everyday sense, a non-cognitive attitude, we are not required to give a noncognitivist account of its semantics. In contemporary society, a sentence of the
form ‘John is short’ may always be expressing—however slightly—a negative
attitude towards the relevant person’s height. The negative attitude seems to be
expressed even when there may be an explicitly positive claim about the height being
made. Take the example of the leader of the pack of thieves who looks at John and
says: ‘He’s short. He can get through the air duct’. Some positive non-cognitive
attitude is also being expressed, but it is hard not to hear the negative one.
Of course this is why the traditional emphasis has been on necessity: the
judgement necessarily expresses a non-cognitive attitude. And this, so the noncognitivist argues, can only be explained if the very role of the judgement is to
express the non-cognitive attitude. The judgement’s meaning is to be given by
reference to its role in expressing this non-cognitive attitude. The upshot should be
clear: believing in non-cognitivism requires thinking that the expression of a noncognitive attitude is, in the relevant sense, necessary and requires thinking that the
role of the judgement in question is to express the relevant non-cognitive attitude.
Thus we can only ascribe non-cognitivism to a theorist if we think that he or she
has these quite specific semantic commitments as part of his or her theory.
Recall that our error theorist posited an explanation for why we go around
making evaluative and normative claims, such as ‘killing innocents is wrong’,
even though such claims are false: we use these claims, he would say, to put
psychological pressure on each other. I have already mentioned how we might do
this by expressing negative feelings, but the error theorist could also suggest that
we do it by implicitly issuing prescriptions or commands. Thus, again, though
talk of prescription in metaethics is associated with the non-cognitivisms of both
R. M. Hare and Allan Gibbard, our error theorist does not have to be committed
to anything like their distinctive semantic views. Think, as usual, of the wonderfully annoying comment that the kindergarten teacher makes to the new pupil:
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Nadeem J. Z. Hussain
‘We take our shoes off in the hallway’. Despite its prescriptivist use, it does not
need to get a non-cognitivist semantics.
Again, the point is that ascribing non-cognitivism to someone will require
ascribing very specific semantic claims.
3 . PARING DOWN CLARK AND DUDRICK’S ARGUMENT
With these preliminaries in hand—preliminaries that were meant to emphasize the
kind of interpretive work that will need to be done in order to ascribe contemporary
metaethical non-cognitivism to someone—I will now turn to Clark and Dudrick’s
argument for ascribing non-cognitivism to Nietzsche. As the title of the article
indicates, ‘Nietzsche and moral objectivity: the development of Nietzsche’s metaethics’, Clark and Dudrick tell a developmental story. They grant that Nietzsche
was an error theorist about all evaluative and normative judgements in Human, Alltoo-Human, but they claim that by the time of the first edition of The Gay Science, he
gives up his error theory because he gives up cognitivism (Clark and Dudrick 2007:
193). The positive evidence for this is essentially a proposed reading of certain
passages from The Gay Science including, centrally, 1, 7, 299, and 301.
As presented, though, their full theory of what is going on in Nietzsche’s texts
is rather more complicated. In this section I am going to argue that much of this
additional complexity can be put aside for the purposes of assessing whether
metaethical non-cognitivism should be ascribed to Nietzsche. We will be able to
put it aside because the additional complexity is driven by a failed attempt to
provide Nietzsche with a form of non-cognitivism that would supposedly provide normative judgements with more objectivity than they have according to
standard, contemporary, metaethical non-cognitivisms. Once we have put aside
this attempt, and the interpretive complexities it brings in its wake, we will be
able to assess in the next section in a more straightforward manner the degree to
which the relevant passages support a non-cognitivist reading.
We will work our way towards their more complicated interpretive story, and
the kind of objectivity they aspire to on the behalf of Nietzsche, by beginning
with their attempt to provide a new reading of a passage that seems to them to
support their competitors. The passage is GS 301:
(NQ1) What distinguishes the higher human beings from the lower is that the former see
and hear immeasurably more, and see and hear thoughtfully . . . But [the higher man] can
never shake off a delusion: He fancies that he is a spectator and listener who has been placed
before the great visual and acoustic spectacle that is life; he calls his own nature
contemplative and overlooks that he himself is really the poet who keeps creating this
life. . . . We who think and feel at the same time are those who really continually fashion
something that had not been there before: the whole eternally growing world of valuations, colors, accents, perspectives, scales, affirmations, and negations . . . Whatever has
value in our world now does not have value in itself, according to its nature—nature is
Nietzsche and Non-cognitivism
115
always value-less, but has been given value at some time, as a present—and it was we who
gave and bestowed it. Only we have created the world that concerns man ! (GS 301)
They grant that this passage naturally suggests a subjectivist reading. Indeed I also
granted this in my defence of interpreting Nietzsche as an error theorist and a
fictionalist (Hussain 2007: 160–1). There I spent some time arguing against a
subjectivist reading of this passage (161–3). In my response to Reginster’s book,
‘Metaethics and nihilism in Reginster’s The Affirmation of Life’, I consider in
detail the pairwise comparison of an error-theoretic/fictionalist interpretation
and a subjectivist interpretation of Nietzsche and argue that the error-theoretic/
fictionalist reading comes out ahead (Hussain 2012). Clark and Dudrick, however, want to provide an alternative to both error theory and subjectivism by
giving us a non-cognitivist reading of this passage. What they are most concerned
about is avoiding what they consider to be a philosophically implausible subjectivism. They want to ensure that according to Nietzsche ‘things are objectively
valuable, that their value does not depend on our attitudes toward them’ (207).
Now there is a standard and obvious way in which a contemporary noncognitivist in metaethics would interpret GS 301 were she concerned to show
that this passage was actually a presentation of a non-cognitivist view like her
own. The contemporary non-cognitivist would read this passage as just making
the basic non-cognitivist point—the point on which he or she agrees with the
error-theorist—that the fundamental ontology of the universe is one of natural,
descriptive properties. There are no normative or evaluative properties out there
in nature that humans have learnt, somehow, to track just as they have learned to
track size and shape and mass and so on: ‘nature is always value-less’ (GS 301).
When we call something good, for example, we are not—I simplify away from
some of the complexity of contemporary non-cognitivism—ascribing some
property to the thing, not even a relational property to my psychological states
as the subjectivist would have it. Rather I am expressing some non-cognitive
attitude of mine. Of course, once I am in the business of using normative
language—and thus in the business of expressing these attitudes—I can certainly
say that such and such is good. However, again, all that is going on when I say
that is that I am expressing some positive non-cognitive attitude towards the
object. My judgement is not about some evaluative fact independently out there
in the world. In this sense, then, the non-cognitivist would grant that we have
‘given value’ to nature and ‘created the world’ of valuations.
Why is this not subjectivism? The standard non-cognitivist line is two-fold:
first, there is no reduction of normative or evaluative facts to subjective, psychological facts. The non-cognitivist is simply doing away with normative facts and
so can hardly be accused of reducing them.3 Second, for the non-cognitivist, the
3 Again contemporary forms of non-cognitivism are more complex; they allow for talk of
normative facts, but they give a non-cognitivist account of what one is saying when one says that
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form of subjectivism that they really want to avoid is one in which the following
kind of conditional is true:
(1) If S desires/approves of/likes x, then x is valuable/right/good.
Recall Clark and Dudrick’s phrase for the kind of objectivism they want: the
value of things ‘does not depend on our attitudes toward them’ (207). The
conditional in (1) is thus one possible statement of the kind of subjectivism that
Clark and Dudrick want to avoid. In any case, it is certainly the kind of denial of
objectivism that contemporary non-cognitivists are concerned to avoid.
What is crucial to see is how they avoid it. Recall that we had our noncognitivist suggesting that GS 301 could be read as making the grand metaethical
non-cognitivist point that nature is valueless. This is a descriptive claim and not a
normative one and—again simplifying away from some of the complexities of
contemporary non-cognitivism—this claim is then not one to which the distinctively non-cognitivist account of normative or evaluative language applies. It is
not using normative language and so it is a matter of stating straightforward
truths. However, to avoid the charge of subjectivism they will point out that (1)
does use normative or evaluative language—see the ‘valuable/right/good’ in the
consequent—and so it is a normative claim and so the non-cognitivist analysis
does apply to it. Thus a sincere utterance of (1) is not the making of some
descriptive claim. It is not reporting some truth, let alone any truth entailed by
the collection of descriptive truths that constitute the non-cognitivist’s metaethical theory. Rather it is the expression of some non-cognitive attitude. Which
non-cognitive attitude? Well, the details vary with the form of non-cognitivism,
but basically it is a relatively complex, higher-order, non-cognitive motivation to
acquire the non-cognitive states expressed by claims of the form ‘x is valuable’
when one desires or approves of x.
Note that usually the non-cognitive state of desiring x and the non-cognitive
state expressed by judgements of the form ‘x is valuable’ are different. The second
non-cognitive state usually has a more complicated functional role. So, for
example, it could include a tendency to avowal. It includes a tendency to
extinguish a ‘conflicting’ state, say the state expressed by claims of the form ‘x
is not valuable’, and so on. See, for example Gibbard (1990) for extended
discussions of the differences.
Returning to our conditional (1), the non-cognitivist takes this to be a
normative claim and so susceptible to the non-cognitivist account. As we have
seen, what such accounts usually say about it is that it expresses a particular kind
of higher-order attitude. Crucially it is not a descriptive claim, straightforwardly
true or false. Also, crucially, it does not follow just from the descriptive claims
that comprise a non-cognitivist theory—including the descriptive claim that
it is a fact that murder is wrong. To put the point crudely, one is either just saying murder is
wrong—the minimalist move—or one is saying murder is wrong with emphasis.
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nature is, in the intended sense, valueless. Accepting it or not is a matter of
normative debate, not a matter of metaethics. Most contemporary non-cognitivists—good, moral agents as they tend to be—will then proceed to take off their
metaethical hats, put on their ordinary, moral agent hats, and happily reject (1).4
Thus, says our non-cognitivist, GS 301 expresses the general descriptive metaphysical world view lying behind non-cognitivism, but there is no reason to read
it as making anything like the normative claim (1). The kind of subjectivism we
want to avoid, she continues, is the one expressed by the normative claim (1).
That there is some sense in which a non-cognitivist is committed to the fundamental ontology of the world being valueless is just part of the basic metaphysical
commitments of the non-cognitivist, but not, they would insist, a dangerous
form of subjectivism.
It is certainly true that there are many who think that the basic metaphysical
views of the non-cognitivist do comprise an unacceptable form of subjectivism
and that subjectivism has not been avoided just because we have shown that
conditionals like (1) do not follow from the non-cognitivist’s theory. I have
merely repeated the standard non-cognitivist line on this matter. In all likelihood, nothing I have said here will convince anyone who did not already accept
that standard line. The point was rather to show what the standard noncognitivist strategy would be because, as we shall see, Clark and Dudrick do
not seem to take this standard route.
As far as I can tell, their implicit reason for telling a far more complicated
story—a story whose details we will see below—is that they think the more
complicated story gets them more objectivism and less subjectivism than the
standard, relatively simple story I just gave. Here are some hints of this. First,
after presenting a version of the simple reading I just gave above, they write:
(CDQ1) this would do nothing to show that ethical discourse isn’t a subjective affair in
which individuals express their own personal preferences [‘attitudes, emotions, and
sentiments of approval or disapproval’]. (204)
The puzzle of course is what to make of the adjective ‘personal’. If personal just
means a non-cognitive attitude I have as opposed to one that you have, then any
standard form of non-cognitivism will indeed involve expressing my own noncognitive states. Your standard-issue non-cognitivist does not think this is a
problem, would be quite surprised by the suggestion that it is, and would be
quite interested to hear how something I sincerely say could express attitudes that
are not mine. Most importantly, he or she would be interested to hear how any of
that would help with objectivity.
Another hint that Clark and Dudrick think the simple story will not give you
objectivity—or sufficient objectivity—turns up a page later when they write:
4 Rejecting it is not required by non-cognitivism.
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(CDQ2) But one factor that makes non-cognitivism implausible to many is its apparent
implication that values are dependent on the contingent affective responses of human
beings. Is there a way of interpreting Nietzsche’s metaethical position without taking it to
have this implication? (205)
The puzzle here is what to make of the use of the term ‘non-cognitivism’ in that
first sentence. If we take it as referring to standard-issue contemporary noncognitivism, then we would expect a rehearsal of the initial standard response to
such worries, namely, the discussion above of conditionals of the form (1).
However, since Clark and Dudrick do not rehearse that standard response,
I take it that the worry being raised here is supposed to be one that is not satisfied
by that standard move. The suggestion seems then to be that the particular
version of non-cognitivism Nietzsche is going to have is somehow going to
provide resources for easing worries about dependency on ‘contingent affective
responses’, resources that somehow go beyond the standard non-cognitivist story.
I have presented the simple story first because I want to eventually argue that if
the simple story is still too subjectivist for one’s taste—and as I said I suspect it is
too subjectivist for Clark and Dudrick’s taste—then the more complex story that
follows below does not actually get one any additional objectivism.
What is the more complex story? The first complexity that Clark and Dudrick
add is an important one. As they point out, it seems implausible to interpret the
creators of value mentioned in GS 301 as referring to ‘humans in general’.
My simple reading on the behalf of non-cognitivism can be modified to
accommodate this. The fundamental non-cognitivist ontological point being
made remains the same: nature itself is valueless. Some individuals, however,
play a distinctive role in getting people to have the distinctive non-cognitive
attitude expressed by particular bits of normative language and even, perhaps,
playing a distinctive role in generating this linguistic practice. Consider the
normative term ‘cool’—as in ‘that car is cool’ or, as my students used to say,
‘he’s a cool dude’. A non-cognitivist account of such judgements seems quite
tempting—tempting I should say even to those who are not otherwise tempted
by non-cognitivism. To judge that x is cool is just to express a distinctive positive
non-cognitive attitude towards x. The distinctiveness of the attitude is a function
of the unique functional role it plays in the psychological economy of the
relevant agents. Now we can imagine crucial historical figures as playing an
essential causal role in generating this new non-cognitive attitude in a particular
culture and in forging the linguistic connections needed in order for the use of
the term ‘cool’ to express the attitude. This would then be a natural way in which
we could then say that these individuals made possible the practice of calling
things cool (OED suggests this happened near the end of the nineteenth century,
but no doubt there are more detailed histories written). And thus, in a sense
allowable by non-cognitivism and not in violation of our crucial conditional (1),
they created the value of coolness.
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So far there is no difference in objectivity. However, we have hardly scratched
the surface of the additional complexity that Clark and Dudrick want to add.
I will only be able to give the highlights (I will return to some of these claims
later). They are as follows:
(C1) The value creators of GS 301 include the ‘ethical teachers’ of GS 1 (208).
(C2) The ‘ethical teachers’ of GS 1 established the ‘capacity’ to ‘consider reasons
for and against attitudes, beliefs, or actions . . . and to act on these reasons’
(210).
(C3) We can now see how the value creators of GS 301 can create values without
this meaning that ‘that they have . . . made murder wrong or friendship
good’ (213), i.e. without a problematic form of subjectivism.
(C4) ‘[B]y instituting the practice of reason-giving, [they] bring into existence
the space of reasons, and . . . it is only this space that makes it possible for
anything to be a bearer of normative properties, e.g. to be good or bad,
right or wrong’ (213). ‘[T]his makes it possible for there to be reasons and
therefore values’ (213).
(C5) ‘[O]nce this space of reasons comes into existence, the normative
properties there discerned are determined not by [the value creators of GS
301] or by anyone else, but rather by what reasons there are to act and feel
in certain ways’ (213). Thus the value creators ‘create the world of value,
even though they do not determine which things in that world bear which
normative properties’ (213).
(C6) This is not a form of cognitive realism because Nietzsche is committed to a
non-cognitive account of judgements about reasons. A judgement that P is
a reason to ç is just an expression of a particular kind of non-cognitive
attitude (214).
There are many puzzles about this story, in particular interpretive ones—that is,
puzzles about how the story fits Nietzsche’s texts. I will return to some of these
interpretive puzzles in the next section. For now I will to continue to argue that
these additional complexities should be set aside because they are motivated by a
misplaced attempt to provide Nietzsche with a level of objectivity that supposedly contemporary non-cognitivisms cannot achieve. For that purpose the
following is the crucial point: what we have in effect here is a reduction of talk
of values to talk of reasons. And we give a non-cognitivist account of both by
giving a non-cognitivist account of reasons. This is a standard-issue strategy:
reduce all normative concepts to one normative concept. Apply your metaethical
account to that one concept. The metaethical account will then automatically
apply to the others through the reductive links you have already established. Peter
Railton reduces rightness to goodness and then gives his naturalist realist account
for goodness, which automatically spreads, so to speak, to rightness (Railton
1986). Allan Gibbard reduces all normative concepts to the concept of rationality
and then gives his non-cognitivist account for judgements of rationality and thus
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for all the other normative concepts (Gibbard 1990).5 Here, however, is the
crucial point: if one did not think my simple interpretation of GS 301 on behalf
of the non-cognitivist avoided subjectivism, the interpretation that directly gave a
non-cognitivist reading of evaluative claims, then one should not be any more
convinced by the version that first reduces the evaluative concepts to the concept
of being a reason and then gives a non-cognitivist account of being a reason.
One way of putting this point is as follows. Recall that in (C5) above, Clark
and Dudrick wanted to emphasize that according to their account the value
creators ‘do not determine which things in that world bear which normative
properties’ (213). If the standard non-cognitivist account of conditionals like (1)
were to be accepted, then we would have already taken care of this worry. If it is
not, then the worry must not be a worry that the metaethical account implies any
particular normative conditional of the form (1), but rather just the general,
always-tricky-to-make-stick worry that in the non-cognitivist worldview all we
have is a disenchanted nature plus some creatures with non-cognitive attitudes
and a penchant to express them to each other. Values, in such a picture, someone
might try to say, seem ‘dependent on the contingent affective responses of human
beings’ (205). What is tricky of course is putting that point in a way that does not
succumb to the standard non-cognitivist responses to (1). But, again, if that
standard response does not satisfy one at this point, then nothing about the
additional talk of non-cognitivism about reasons should help.
Here is one more way of putting the point. Take the other quote (CDQ1) in
which Clark and Dudrick meant to express disquiet with non-cognitivism: they
worried that a simple non-cognitivist reading like mine ‘would do nothing to
show that ethical discourse isn’t a subjective affair in which individuals express
their own personal preference’ (204). Recall that I worried about what ‘personal’
meant here. Now consider their more complicated story. From within the
normative practice I get to reason as follows:
(2) a is valuable because P is a reason to ç(a),
where to ç(a) is, as they put it, ‘to take certain actions and attitudes towards’ a
(213). However, claims of the form ‘P is a reason to ç(a)’ are also expressions of
the agent’s non-cognitive attitudes. For all that has been said, they are just as
‘personal’. They are the attitudes of the agent making the judgement, which may
or may not be shared by others.
So far, then, the additional levels of complexity of the story add nothing when
it comes to objectivity. The piece that I believe is supposed to officially do the
work of ensuring objectivity is the following:
5 This is a simplification but the simplification does not undermine the essential point being
made here.
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(C7) According to Nietzsche, ‘one is more objective in holding the values that
one does’ to ‘the extent one’ ‘appreciate[s] other value perspectives “from
the inside”’ by bringing ‘into focus the features of objects that give rise to
affective responses that involve or lead to a different appraisal of them than
one’s own’ (221–2). They emphasize that this requires seeing how others
would take these features as reasons for their judgements (222).
Finally:
(C8) This is not a form of cognitivism about judgements of objectivity: for S to
judge that a person’s normative judgement is objective is just to express a
non-cognitive state in favour of the (kind of) procedure—non-normatively
described—that led to the person’s judgement (222–3).
Again, I find the textual evidence for ascribing this picture of objectivity to
Nietzsche about values—as opposed, that is, to non-normative, descriptive
claims—rather thin, and some of the interpretive moves made rather strained
(I will come back to one of those moves in the next section). But I first want to
emphasize that the position is just the standard, contemporary non-cognitivist
one. Again, if the standard non-cognitivism satisfies one philosophically, then
one should not have any new philosophical problems—as opposed to interpretive problems—with the story just told. However, if one were concerned about
objectivity in non-cognitivism in general, then one should not think that
Nietzsche has provided one with any additional resources.
A brief reminder of worries about non-cognitivism and objectivism might help
here. Consider straightforward descriptive truths and let us assume we are also
straightforwardly realist about them. When it comes to judgements about such
matters, then, we can tell relatively easy stories about why different perspectives
might help one come to a more objective judgement and, importantly, why
objectivity is a good thing: in the simplest case looking at an object from both
sides provides more information. When there is no such fact, as the noncognitivist about the normative domain claims, then it can seem much harder
to see what the point is. Consider an example tailored to get one concerned about
the view of objectivity for normative judgements ascribed to Nietzsche by Clark
and Dudrick.
Imagine, plausibly enough, that there are no truths about which ice cream
flavours are better and which are not. As it happens, I prefer chocolate ice cream
to strawberry ice cream but you prefer strawberry over chocolate. Non-cognitivism happens to be true for ‘betterness’ claims about ice cream flavour and so
I express my preference by saying that chocolate ice cream is better than
strawberry and you yours by saying strawberry is better than chocolate. Now,
obnoxious person that I am, I proceed to claim that my judgement is more
objective than yours. Why you ask? Well, because I have talked to a lot of people
about their responses to chocolate and strawberry ice cream. I know that some of
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them respond to the hint of bitterness in the chocolate. Some find strawberry
sweeter. Some get turned off by the pink of the strawberry. And so on. Now, if
you thought there was a fact about the matter about what the correct reasons for
liking chocolate actually were, then you might think that my additional knowledge might increase the likelihood that I have somehow managed to latch on to
the correct reason for liking chocolate. But, by hypothesis, there is no such fact
that my liking is supposed to track. So when I say my judgement is more
objective, I’m just expressing a non-cognitive attitude, a preference, in favour
of having whatever likings emerge from or survive the process of seeing what
leads other people to like what they do in ice cream.
The temptation is to cook up stories that make it seem as though more is going
on here, but the key is to find a story that does not implicitly turn on a form of
realism about ice cream betterness facts. And that, I submit, is not easy.
All this is not surprising since a non-cognitivist will be tempted to treat any
claim about objectivity for normative claims as a normative claim and so just an
expression of a non-cognitive attitude. And any defence of a particular view of
objectivity is also going to be a further string of first-order normative claims all of
which, of course, will just be further expressions of non-cognitive attitudes.
The fundamental point, then, is that much of the extended elaboration that
occurs in Clark and Dudrick’s story does not really add anything to the basic
standard non-cognitivist story we began with.
4. INTERPRETIVE MATTERS
So far I have not directly addressed the question of whether some form of noncognitivism should be ascribed to Nietzsche. After all, even if one were not
satisfied by the degree or kind of objectivity provided by non-cognitivism, one
might still think that it provides a good interpretation of the texts. No doubt we
should grant that if non-cognitivism and the kind of objectivity it gives us is
implausible enough, then we should hesitate to ascribe it to Nietzsche on
grounds of interpretive charity. But surely if the view is sane enough for us to
ascribe it to the likes of Allan Gibbard and Simon Blackburn, then whatever
philosophical implausibility the view may suffer from is not by itself sufficient to
rule out ascribing it to Nietzsche. The question of course is whether the
interpretation proposed actually fits the texts. And, crucially, does it fit the
texts better than the alternative subjectivist, error-theoretic, or fictionalist readings mentioned already?
I do not think it does, and for two basic reasons: first, I do not think the texts
support the supposed radical shift in Nietzsche’s metaethical views from error
theory to non-cognitivism that, according to Clark and Dudrick, occurs after
Human All-too-Human. Seeing this in part will require emphasizing the crucial
and distinctive differences between non-cognitivism and other metaethical
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options. Second, the specific passages that are supposed to have a non-cognitivist
flavour to them do not, it seems to me, have such a flavour. They are either,
actually, far more friendly to an error-theoretic or fictionalist reading or merely
point to the kind of harmless everyday expression of non-cognitive attitudes that
I began by reminding you does not support non-cognitivism. After making the
case for these two claims, I will turn to the supposed parallels between Nietzsche
and Hume and the suggestion that this supports the non-cognitivist reading.
5. FROM ERROR THEORY TO NON-COGNITIVISM?
The evidence for a shift from an error theory about evaluative and normative
judgements to a non-cognitivist theory comes in two parts: first, the claim is that
in Human, All-too-Human, at least part of what leads Nietzsche to accept an error
theory is a particular view of what is required for objectivity. It is this view about
objectivity that is supposedly given up in later work and this raises the question
about whether Nietzsche may have changed his metaethical views (201). Second,
there is the supposed direct evidence of, on the one hand, error-theoretic
commitments in HH and, as I have already mentioned, non-cognitivist commitments in GS.
Now, I suspect that to the degree one thinks that there is a radical shift
between HH and later works one might be more primed to read non-cognitivist
commitments into the passages from GS—at least, one will be more primed to
see some change in Nietzsche’s metaethical views. I am going to try to undermine
any appeal the textual evidence might have by following a slightly complicated
path of presentation, but one that is forced on me for reasons of space. I will first
just survey the supposed error-theory supporting passages in HH. I will then skip
over the GS passages that Clark and Dudrick appeal to and instead present
passages that are just as error-theory supporting as the HH passages but that
come from later stages of Nietzsche’s writing career. My initial argument will just
be that it is very hard to see any dramatic shift of the kind postulated by Clark
and Dudrick. What is important is that accepting this claim of mine, I believe,
does not require that one agree with me on what metaethical view, if any, should
be ascribed to Nietzsche. Though, of course, I will still end up saying some things
in favour of my error theory/fictionalism combination. I will then return to the
details of the GS passages that Clark and Dudrick want to read as expressing a
commitment to non-cognitivism.
Here are some standard passages from HH that they and others, including
myself, have appealed to as evidence for ascribing an error theory:
(NQ2) Astrology and what is related to it. It is probable that the objects of the religious,
moral and aesthetic sensations belong only to the surface of things, while man likes to
believe that here at least he is in touch with the world’s heart; the reason he deludes
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himself is that these things produce in him such profound happiness and unhappiness,
and thus he exhibits here the same pride as in the case of astrology. For astrology
believes the starry firmament revolves around the face of man; the moral man, however,
supposes that what he has essentially at heart must also constitute the essence and heart of
things. (HH 4)
Note the title; morality and religion are being equated with astrology as involving
claims that are clearly just false. Here is another one:
(NQ3) Injustice necessary. All judgements as to the value of life have evolved illogically and
are therefore unjust. The falsity of human judgement . . . is so with absolute necessity . . .
Perhaps it would follow from all this that one ought not to judge at all; if only it were
possible to live without evaluating, without having aversions and partialities! – for all
aversion is dependent on an evaluation, likewise all partiality. A drive to something or
away from something divorced from a feeling one is desiring the beneficial or avoiding the
harmful, a drive without some kind of knowing evaluation of the worth of its objective,
does not exist in man. (HH 32)
Note that though this passage begins with what might seem like a more restricted
class of judgements—judgements about the value of life—judgements that for
reasons I will not go into here really are quite special for Nietzsche—by the end
of the passage it is clear that the target is all value judgements. They all involve
error.
Or consider:
(NQ4) [M]ankind as a whole has no goal, and the individual man when he regards its
total course . . . must be reduced to despair. If in all he does he has before him the ultimate
goallessness of man, his actions acquire in his own eyes the character of useless squandering. (HH 33)
But now take a look at passages from much later in Nietzsche’s career. Here is
a passage from Twilight of the Idols written after The Gay Science in 1888:
(NQ5) My demand upon the philosopher is known, that he take his stand beyond good
and evil and leave the illusion of moral judgment beneath himself. This demand follows
from an insight which I was the first to formulate: that there are altogether no moral
facts. Moral judgments agree with religious ones in believing in realities which are no
realities. Morality is merely an interpretation of certain phenomena—more precisely, a
misinterpretation. Moral judgments, like religious ones, belong to a stage of ignorance
at which . . . ‘truth’ . . . designates all sorts of things which we today call ‘imaginings.’
(TI ‘Improvers’ 1).
This certainly looks like a commitment to cognitivism and error theory or at least
as much as anything in HH does. Notice that like the passages in HH, particularly given the similar comparison to religion, the point is not just that some
moral claims are false—a position all of us would agree to. The point is rather
that they are systematically false precisely in the way an error theorist would
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claim, namely, that the kind of facts that they are supposed to be about do not
exist.6
Now it may seem as though there is some restriction here to a narrowly
conceived domain of specifically moral judgements. There are a couple of points
to be made in response. To start with, the context of the passage makes clear that
a vast range of positions is included: Manu, Confucius, Plato, Judaism, and
Christianity. It is an interesting question whether Nietzsche too is included
among the improvers of mankind. Thus at least for all these normative and
evaluative judgements Nietzsche is still a cognitivist and an error theorist.
Therefore the purported change to non-cognitivism must only have occurred
for some subset of current evaluative terms.
However, first, no such restriction of domain by Nietzsche is actually defended
on interpretive grounds by Clark and Dudrick. Second, there is evidence that no
such restriction exists in Nietzsche’s mind. Consider the following passages from
the Nachlass which show no such restriction (note the dates):
(NQ6) All the values by means of which we have tried so far to render the world estimable
for ourselves . . . all these values are, psychologically considered, the results of certain
perspectives of utility, designed to maintain and increase human constructs of domination—and they have been falsely projected into the essence of things. (WP 12; November
1887–March 1888)
Or elsewhere: (NQ7) ‘In the entire evolution of morality, truth never appears: all
the conceptual elements employed are fictions’ (WP 428; 1888).
Again, there is no sign in his notes of error theory being applied to most
current evaluative and normative judgements, while the non-cognitivism is
restricted to some subset. Furthermore, such mixed views are hard to motivate
and defend philosophically, and this should be treated as a defeasible reason not
to ascribe a mixed view to Nietzsche.
Notice in this context that it is important to bear in mind a potential
distinction between one’s metaethical account of existing practices of evaluative
and normative judgement and one’s metaethical account of some practice of
judgement that one might be recommending. Thus, according to the kind of
interpretation I have defended elsewhere, Nietzsche is committed to something
rather similar to what sometimes gets called revolutionary fictionalism (Hussain
2007). That is, according to this interpretation, he posits an error-theoretic
account of existing evaluative and normative judgements but suggests a practice
in which we continue to make them but in a spirit of pretence. Thus the label
fictionalism.
Now the label ‘fictionalism’ can be misleading here. The label is often taken to
suggest a view on which the requisite fictions are quite easy to come by: just
pretend, we might say, while explaining the laws of cricket to someone, that the
6 I am setting aside the usual controversies about negative facts.
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salt shaker is the batsman and the pepper mill the bowler. However, I defend a
view according to which the aim of Nietzsche’s revaluations is to create honest
illusions of value. Illusions are different from mere pretences. Merely pretending
that the fork in the glass in front of me is bent is different from experiencing the
illusion of a bent fork created by filling the glass with water. Such an illusion is
honest for the vast majority of us since we know that the fork is not in fact bent.7
Creating an honest illusion of value thus involves much more than merely
pretending that something is valuable. Or so I have argued.
In any case, I have committed myself to ascribing to Nietzsche two metaethical
views: one that applies to the current practice and one that applies to the
replacement practice. I mention this because we can imagine a modification of
Clark and Dudrick’s view in which instead of arguing that Nietzsche is committed to non-cognitivism for all evaluative judgements, they claim instead that
he accepts an error theory for the judgements of existing practices but is
recommending a replacement practice of which non-cognitivism will be true.
This would be an interesting position to consider but it is not obvious what the
textual evidence for such a view would be.
Now, finally, let us take a look at the GS passages Clark and Dudrick appeal
to. We have already seen GS 301. I take it that all hands agree that it is not at all
obvious which metaethical view that passage supports. But let us take a closer
look at GS 299, which Clark and Dudrick do think attracts a non-cognitivist
reading (202):
(NQ8) What one should learn from artists. How can we make things beautiful, attractive,
and desirable for us when they are not? And I rather think that in themselves they never
are. Here we should learn something from physicians, when for example they dilute what
is bitter or add wine and sugar to a mixture—but even more from artists who are really
continually trying to bring off such inventions and feats. Moving away from things until
there is a good deal that one no longer sees and there is much that our eye has to add if we
are still to see them at all; or seeing things around a corner and as cut out and framed; or
to place them so that they partially conceal each other and grant us only glimpses of
architectural perspective; or looking at them through tinted glass or in the light of the
sunset; or giving them a surface and skin that is not fully transparent—all that we should
learn from artists while being wiser than they are in other matters. For with them this
subtle power usually comes to an end where art ends and life begins; but we want to be the
poets of our life—first of all in the smallest, most everyday matters. (GS 299)
Now, I have to say that this passage does not seem to me to be an expression of
non-cognitivism, in the contemporary metaethical sense, at all. That is not to say
that it is easy to know what metaethical view might lie behind it. But notice one
7 This is why Clark and Dudrick’s comment that ‘[one] reason to consider the fictionalist
account of Nietzsche’s metaethics implausible is that it is difficult to see how it could cohere with
the importance he accords to the will to truth’ (206 n.6) is not as powerful an objection as they seem
to think: honest fictions are compatible with striving for the truth. See also Hussain (2007: 168–70).
Nietzsche and Non-cognitivism
127
essential, dominant feature of this passage, namely, the crucial role that various
kinds of concealment or deception play: making sure there are things we do not
see, making sure we give them some kind of non-transparent covering and so on.
Why would any of this be central to a non-cognitive practice of valuing? After all
the non-cognitivist’s point is precisely that there is no mistake, deception, or
confusion involved in valuing—non-cognitivists see themselves as saving us from
having to posit errors or deception as essential to valuing.
Of course, I suspect there is a reason for the emphasis on deception and I think
the best way to bring it out is to focus, in opposition to Clark and Dudrick, on
the continuity between passages such as these and what Nietzsche says in HH. In
his 1886 preface to HH, Nietzsche reiterates the point he had made in the body
of HH about the ‘necessary injustice’ involved in evaluative judgements.
Nietzsche admits that his looking ‘into the world’ with his uniquely ‘profound
degree of suspicion’—the suspicion that makes one think that everything including of course our evaluations are human, all too human—was psychologically
difficult:
(NQ9) [I]n an effort to recover from myself, as it were to induce a temporary selfforgetting, I have sought shelter in this or that—in some piece of admiration or enmity or
scientificality or frivolity or stupidity; and . . . where I could not find what I needed, I had
artificially to enforce, falsify and invent a suitable fiction for myself (—and what else have
poets ever done? And to what end does art exist in the world at all?) (HH P:1)
What I want to emphasize is the connection between poetry and art and the
generation of fiction. It is this connection that I want to say Nietzsche is again
harping on about in GS 299. That is why we are learning from artists. That is
why, as in the passage just quoted from HH, we need to be poets. And now it
should come as no surprise that the passage I quoted already from HH 33
continues as follows:
(NQ10; continuation of NQ4) [M]ankind as a whole has no goal, and the individual man
when he regards its total course . . . must be reduced to despair. If in all he does he has
before him the ultimate goallessness of man, his actions acquire in his own eyes the
character of useless squandering. But to feel thus squandered . . . is a feeling beyond all
other feelings.—But who is capable of such a feeling? Certainly only a poet: and poets
always know how to console themselves. (HH 33)
Poets can console themselves because they do what they have always done, as he
says in the preface, namely, create fictions.
Clark and Dudrick take GS 299’s message to be that we create value by
evoking non-cognitive reactions such as preferences and attitudes. Note first
that in GS 299 there is hardly anything about non-cognitive preferences and
attitudes. All the metaphors, except for the first one about taste, are visual
cognitive ones and Nietzsche clearly emphasizes that the latter metaphors, the
ones involving artists, are the important ones. We could take the first one as
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emphasizing that generating a certain kind of non-cognitive reaction is an
important part of making something valuable. But note, as I tried to emphasize
in my introduction, not any old connection between non-cognitive motivations
and value judgements gives you non-cognitivism. What we need evidence for is
the very specific semantic thesis that the contemporary non-cognitivist is committed to. And whatever else may be going on here, it is hard to see evidence for
that semantic thesis.
Clark and Dudrick bring in GS 7 at this point as support. The opening of this
passage reads as follows:
(NQ11) Something for the industrious. Anyone who now wishes to make a study of moral
matters opens up for himself an immense field for work. All kinds of individual passions
have to be thought through and pursued through different ages, peoples, and great and
small individuals; all their reason and all their evaluations and perspectives on things
have to be brought into the light. So far, all that has given color to existence still lacks a
history. (GS 7)
Clark and Dudrick write that this passage (CDQ3) ‘implies that the passions
constitute “all that has given color to existence”’ (203). Talk of colour is then
taken, plausibly enough, as a metaphor for value. Would some such constitution
claim support the non-cognitivist reading? Again, it will not cut much ice
against, say, the subjectivist unless you can defend the ascription of the specific
semantic claim that is at the heart of non-cognitivism. In any case, the passage
does not give passions any such specific role. Evaluations, for example, and
crucially, seem to also be part of what colours the world.
Furthermore, this passage actually plays against Clark and Dudrick. After
emphasizing the vast amount of work that would be required for laying out the
history and variation of ‘moral matters’, Nietzsche writes:
(NQ12) The same applies to the demonstration of the reasons for the differences between
moral climates . . . And it would be yet another job to determine the erroneousness of all
these reasons and the whole nature of moral judgments to date. (GS 7)
The continuities with HH and the suggestions of systematic error are, I think,
obvious.
6 . THE COMPARISON TO HUME
At this point in their discussion of the GS passages, Clark and Dudrick also
appeal to the similarities between Nietzsche’s writings and those of David Hume.
They clearly take such similarities to be part of their argument for ascribing noncognitivism to Nietzsche. They sum up their discussion of the passages from
GS as follows:
Nietzsche and Non-cognitivism
129
(CDQ4) This gives us strong reason to conclude that Nietzsche’s metaethical position in
GS is the basically Humean one that values are projections of passions and feelings. That
is, we take ourselves to be talking about what has value . . . precisely when we mix our own
reactions with the object, seeing it in terms that are borrowed from our own reactions
to it. (203)
Despite Simon Blackburn’s recent use of the metaphor of ‘projection’ for his
non-cognitivism it is not at all clear that metaethical views that seem to commit
themselves to something worthy of calling ‘projection’ should naturally be
construed as non-cognitivist metaethical views. And the similarity to Hume
does not really provide much defence of an ascription of non-cognitivism to
Nietzsche since, as I shall briefly remind you, it of course is not obvious what to
make of Hume’s views.
To see the general point about the metaphor of projection it will help to return
to the tinker-toy error theories I sketched in my introduction. Recall then that
I pointed out that the error theorist is happy with there also being expressions of
non-cognitive attitudes and prescriptions as long as these expressions do not play
the semantic role the non-cognitivist claims for them. Now our error theorist
pointed to such expressive and prescriptive happenings in order to explain why
we make claims like ‘killing innocents is wrong’ even though such claims are
false. The answer was in part to express and prescribe our non-cognitive attitudes
towards things. But we might press harder. Why use cognitive language for such
non-cognitive work? After all we do have non-cognitive language that can do this
work: ‘Boo the killing of innocents!’ or ‘Don’t kill innocents!’8 Here the error
theorist responds with some variation on a single theme: it is useful to ‘project’
our emotive responses onto the world. If it were completely transparent to us that
we were only expressing our own negative attitudes then it would be hard for our
statements to have much authority—or at least they would only have whatever
authority we already have.
Consider in this context a similar schema for an error theory about witches—
the purportedly broomstick-flying kind. For whatever reason, people had various
negative attitudes towards certain women in their community—perhaps they
were herbal healers challenging the dominant patriarchal order. But if you just
say, ‘Boo herbal healers!’ you don’t get very far. However, if you claim that they
can do magic, are evil, etc., then there seems to be an objective basis for the
negative non-cognitive attitude. Your negative non-cognitive attitude is a warranted response to some feature that the person has. By calling someone a witch
you attempt to get others to have your negative attitude but not just by letting
them know that you have that attitude—they will not come to share your
attitude on that basis unless for some reason they are committed to having
8 I am ignoring the complexities generated by the fact that term ‘innocents’ is hardly a
normatively innocent term.
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whatever attitudes you happen to have—but rather by claiming that the world is
such that it demands that negative attitude. You are just asking your community
members to be responsive to the authority of the facts, not simply to your
authority. All this of course is not usually posited in general as any kind of
attempt at conscious manipulation, but rather a process that happens, so to
speak, behind the backs of the participants.
Or at least so the standard error-theoretic story traditionally goes: we have
all heard versions of such stories about the belief in witches, God, or gods, and,
of course, morality. Whether these are good stories is of course a very good
question—I have argued elsewhere that there are systematic dialectical weaknesses that such stories always face (Hussain 2004). What is crucial for
our purposes, however, is the notion of ‘projection’ deployed in such stories.
Our non-cognitive attitudes are ‘projected’ onto the world, according to these
stories, as part of an attempt to ground them in something objective. In
this sense of ‘projection’—the sense in which a ‘projector’ projects an image
on the screen—the thing projected is not really there.9 I emphasize all this
because contemporary non-cognitivists, like Simon Blackburn, also talk of
‘projection’. But, as we have just seen, there is a standard usage of the term
‘projection’ that is natural to the error theorist. Indeed this seems to be
Nietzsche’s own usage:
(NQ6) All the values by means of which we have tried so far to render the world estimable
for ourselves . . . all these values are, psychologically considered, the results of certain
perspectives of utility, designed to maintain and increase human constructs of domination—and they have been falsely projected [projicirt] into the essence of things. (WP 12)
Thus showing that a view involves the projection of passions and feelings does
not yet yield non-cognitivism.
Neither does a purported similarity with Hume. Clark and Dudrick give the
famous quote on gilding and staining (204). Here, however, are some other
famous ones:
(HQ1) . . . the mind has a great propensity to spread itself on external objects, and to
conjoin with them any internal impressions, which they occasion, and which always make
their appearance at the same time that these objects discover themselves to the senses.
Thus as certain sounds and smells are always found to attend certain visible objects, we
naturally imagine a conjunction, even in place, betwixt the objects and qualities, tho’ the
qualities be of such a nature as to admit of no such conjunction, and really exist no
where.10
9 I should emphasize that I am not at all claiming that this is the only or dominant sense of
‘projection’ in English—that would be a crazy claim—but it is an old one: 1687 at least says the
OED. Cf. Kail 2007: xxvi–xxvii, 3.
10 Hume 1978: 167.
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131
Notice of course the apparent claim of error. He puts this even more clearly later:
(HQ2) Thus supposing we consider a fig at one end of the table, and an olive at the other,
’tis evident, that in forming the complex ideas of these substances, one of the most
obvious is that of their different relishes; and ’tis as evident, that we incorporate and
conjoin these qualities with such as are colour’d and tangible. The bitter taste of the one,
and sweet of the other are suppos’d to lie in the very visible body, and to be separated
from each other by the whole length of the table. This is so notable and so natural an
illusion, that it may be proper to consider the principles from which it is derived.11
Notice, again, the suggestion of error. Hume then proceeds as promised to
explain our propensity to this illusion (and, recall, to argue why in fact the belief
that the taste must be in the visible body must be false on pain of absurdity).
None of this is to deny that interpreting Hume as committed to error theory
brings its own very serious interpretive puzzles. These puzzles with reading
Hume’s projection-like metaphors in terms of an error theory, and the resulting
pressure to read him as a non-cognitivist in something like the contemporary
sense, are well brought out in Peter Kail’s recent book Projection and Realism in
Hume’s Philosophy. Kail, however, also emphasizes the interpretive puzzles raised
by reading him as a non-cognitivist.12 The point is that it is not at all obvious that
analogies to Hume show that Nietzsche is a non-cognitivist since it is quite
controversial what to make of Hume’s own views.
7 . CONCLUSION
I have focused on criticizing one particular attempt to defend a non-cognitivist
interpretation of Nietzsche’s metaethics—non-cognitivist in the contemporary
sense dominant in ‘analytic’ metaethics—namely that of Clark and Dudrick.
Once we have managed to get clear on what would be required in order for
Nietzsche to be a non-cognitivist in this contemporary sense, the texts do not
support such an interpretation over various competitors. Or so I have tried to argue.
I do believe the general lesson can be drawn from this particular instance that
defending a non-cognitivist interpretation of Nietzsche’s metaethics will be very
difficult. Contemporary non-cognitivism essentially involves certain particular strategies of explaining the semantics of moral language and thought, and textual
support for ascribing such strategies to Nietzsche simply does not exist.13
11 Hume 1978: 236.
12 For a brief summary of the pressures towards, and challenges facing, both error-theoretic and
non-cognitivist readings of Hume, see the introduction of (Kail 2007). Of course, there is a vast
Hume literature that is relevant to all this.
13 A version of this paper was originally presented at a conference on Nietzsche, Naturalism and
Normativity at the University of Southampton in the summer of 2008. I am most grateful for
helpful comments from the audience.
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BIBLIOGRAPHY
In Nietzsche
Human, All Too Human, trans. R. J. Hollingdale. Cambridge: Cambridge University
Press, 1986.
The Gay Science, trans. W. Kaufmann. New York: Vintage Books, 1974.
‘Twilight of the idols’, trans. W. Kaufmann, in The Portable Nietzsche. New York: Viking
Penguin, 1982.
Other sources
Clark, M. and Dudrick, D. (2007). ‘Nietzsche and moral objectivity: the development of
Nietzsche’s metaethics’, in B. Leiter and N. Sinhababu (eds), Nietzsche and Morality.
Oxford: Clarendon Press.
Gibbard, A. (1990). Wise Choices, Apt Feelings: A Theory of Normative Judgement. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press.
Hume, D. (1978). A Treatise of Human Nature, 2nd edn. L. A. Selby-Bigge and
P. H. Nidditch (eds). New York: Oxford University Press.
Hussain, N. J. Z. (2004). ‘The return of moral fictionalism’, Philosophical Perspectives 18:
149–87.
——(2007). ‘Honest illusion: valuing for Nietzsche’s free spirits’, in B. Leiter and
N. Sinhababu (eds), Nietzsche and Morality. Oxford: Clarendon Press.
——(2012). ‘Metaethics and nihilism in Reginster’s The Affirmation of Life’, The Journal
of Nietzsche Studies 43: 99–117.
Kail, P. J. E. (2007). Projection and Realism in Hume’s Philosophy. Oxford: Oxford
University Press.
Leiter, B. (2002). Routledge Philosophy Guidebook to Nietzsche on Morality. London and
New York: Routledge.
Railton, P. (1986). ‘Moral realism’, The Philosophical Review 95: 163–207.
6
Nietzsche and Moral Fictionalism
Alan Thomas
This paper has three aims.1 First, it will assess Nadeem Hussain’s well-known
moral fictionalist interpretation of Nietzsche (Hussain 2007). Secondly, it will
do so in part by evaluating moral fictionalism as a free-standing metaethical view.
Its third aim is to distinguish different forms of ‘subjective realism’ and to
contrast one version of that view from another that Hussain discusses and rejects
in the course of his argument. This will prove important, as Hussain establishes
his conclusion by eliminating alternative interpretations of Nietzsche’s metaethics. I will suggest that there is one alternative that he dismissed too hastily. I will
further suggest, in contrast to Hussain, that Nietzsche’s influence on contemporary metaethics is not that of a pioneer of a novel metaethical approach to our
ethical commitments such as fictionalism. Instead, Nietzsche directs our focus to
the ‘subject’ aspect of a defensible form of subjective realism in a way that
connects with his primarily normative interests. I will argue that he is interested
in the subjective conditions for valuation on the part of the judger, not necessarily a scepticism about value, with the ultimate aim of diagnosing a nihilism that
fails to take any existing values as worthwhile ends.
The argument of this paper is intended to be cumulative. Section 1 establishes
that interpreting Nietzsche as a global ‘error theorist’ about all values would fail
to capture one important dimension of what he means by ‘revaluation’ and
seems, in fact, to fail to do justice to his actual practice of vindicating some of our
existing values as potentially life-enhancing. (It is dialectically important that
Hussain recognizes this fact about how we are best to understand the ‘revaluation’ of values.) Section 2 establishes that, given the independent implausibility
of fictionalism as a free-standing view, we have good reason not to find that view
in Nietzsche, particularly not when construed as a form of a global replacement
for those values entirely discredited by an error theory. Section 3 distinguishes
1 This paper originated as a contribution to the conference ‘Nietzsche and Approaches to Ethics’
at the University of Southampton. The basis on which this paper was invited was that it was
intended to be contribution to Nietzsche studies from the perspective of contemporary metaethics.
Its aims, then, are not directly to contribute to Nietzsche scholarship but to appraise contemporary
interpretations of Nietzsche’s metaethics from the perspective of current work in metaethics.
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conditions on value from conditions on the valuer, and further distinguishes
values from the process of valuing, with the overall aim of describing a form of
subjective realism about value that Hussain does not consider. Section 4 concludes by examining an independent line of argument to the conclusion that
Nietzsche has to be a fictionalist; this is an argument that differs in important
respects from Hussain’s.
1 . HUSSAIN’S FICTIONALIST READING OF NIETZSCHE
Hussain is the main exponent of the fictionalist understanding of Nietzsche in a
deservedly influential paper (Hussain 2007). His argument works by eliminating
the alternatives so that fictionalism remains as the only plausible interpretation of
Nietzsche’s views on values. He sets up the interpretative issue as follows:
Nietzsche’s ethical ideal of the free spirit produces people who both revalue
existing values and create new ones.2 Such men are also deeply committed to
truthfulness; they aim to be able to bear the truth.3 However, Nietzsche is an
error theorist: all first-order claims about value are strictly speaking false. That set
of views is inconsistent.
It is inconsistent in this way: by the first assumption, the higher men both
revalue and create new values, but they have to be truthful about the process.
However, the truth about values is that there are not, in fact, any values about
which one can be truthful (that is the truth of error theory). By the elimination of
alternatives only one view can explain all these facts. That view is moral fictionalism. This is the view that, as Hussain puts it, ‘Nietzsche’s free spirits [are]
engaged in a fictionalist simulacrum of valuing’ (Hussain 2007: 158). The moral
fictionalist understands values to be the product of a self-conscious and honest
attempt to act as if one’s final ends had the kind of normative authority for
oneself that our intuitive conception of objective value possessed. But the key
qualifier here is ‘as if’, and that is the basis for Hussain’s fictionalist understanding of Nietzsche:
The central thought in my solution to the interpretative puzzle is that valuing, in
Nietzsche’s recommended practice, involves the generation of ‘honest illusions’. It can
be thought of as a form of make-believe, pretending, or, the non-Nietzschean phrase
adopted here, ‘regarding . . . as’: S values X by regarding X as valuable in itself while
knowing that in fact X is not valuable in itself (Hussain 2007: 166).
2 In the sense that the ideal both produces such people and that the ideal involves these free
spirits in the activity of revaluation. I am grateful to the editors for clarification of this point.
3 Where being able to bear the truth is an important pre-condition of a commitment to
truthfulness. Hussain, in his discussion, focuses on the former.
Nietzsche and Moral Fictionalism
135
This is the view that I will examine in this paper. My disagreement with
Hussain will take the following form: I will first argue, entirely ad hominem, that
Hussain’s solution cannot solve the problem that he has described. I will then
argue that moral fictionalism is inherently implausible as a free-standing view, so
it would be desirable if we could avoid attributing the view to Nietzsche. That
gives us good grounds to contest the way in which Hussain has set up the issues.
I will then return to one of the positions that Hussain discusses and sets aside as
an alternative interpretation of the evidence, namely, ‘subjective realism’ (Langsam 1997). I will present a subjective realist understanding of Nietzsche that
reconciles the tensions that Hussain find in his views.
I shall begin with the ad hominem argument.4 One of the reasons that Hussain
gives for making sense of Nietzsche’s continued commitment to evaluative
thought and talk is that his free spirits both revalue existing values and create
new ones. I concede immediately that the fictionalist, like the projectivist, has no
problem with the idea of creating new values. If the psychological origin of value
is in games of make-believe, or in projection, or is based upon whatever
psychological mechanism the fictionalist draws upon to substantiate the idea of
fictionality, then it would seem straightforward to explain what we can mean by
creating new values by appealing to that mechanism. We set up a new game, or
we project a new attitude, such that within the game of make-believe or
projection we respond ‘as if’ we were responding to new intrinsic values.
What, though, of the separable idea of the revaluation of existing values? It is
widely accepted that what Nietzsche means by the revaluation of values is
ambiguous between several very different projects, which Simon Robertson
helpfully distinguishes as follows:
Nietzsche’s ‘revaluation of all values’ [is] a multifaceted project, both critical and positive,
normative and metaethical. Negatively, it involves a critique of prevailing morality, which
in turn has two elements: one evaluative, in which the value of morality and of moral
values is called into question; the other metaethical, by which Nietzsche challenges the
objectivist foundations underpinning morality’s claim to authority. The positive component then presents some alternative demoralized ideal (Robertson 2009: 66).
4 I want to be clear by what I mean in calling this argument ‘ad hominem’. I mean two things.
The first is that Hussain partly argues by eliminating alternatives to his fictionalist interpretation of
Nietzsche; my counter-argument works partly by describing an overlooked alternative position to
those that he considers. The second, however, is that Hussain sees that it would be an interpretative
mistake to view Nietzsche as a global error theorist who takes revaluation to involve the global
replacement of all our existing values with a set of fictionalist simulacra of those values. My
argument is ad hominem in that I do not think he meets the constraints that he places on any
plausible solution—his included. But I agree with him about the constraint and in that sense my
argument here generalizes. Hussain is right both that Nietzsche cannot plausibly be read as a global
error theorist and that such a reading would be one way of misunderstanding what he can plausibly
have meant by ‘revaluation’.
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I can see how a fictionalist understanding can help with the project of
developing a metaethical challenge to the ‘objectivist foundations’ of morality.
However, I do not see how it can help with the revaluation of our values. That is
my first objection to the fictionalist reading of Nietzsche.
We are, in fact, reasonably clear what Nietzsche means by this critical scrutiny
of our existing values (as far as we are clear about anything he says): as part of the
rejection of a ‘life-denying’ traditional morality, and as part of the goal of
developing a ‘life-enhancing’ ethic for the few of us able to attain it, existing
concepts are subject to a critical scrutiny that many of them survive. As Simon
May argues:
Nietzsche accepts many of the values, concepts, and attitudes which feature in traditional
Christian or secular morality—such as ‘altruism’ and ‘truthfulness’, ‘responsibility’ and
‘soul’, ‘asceticism’ and ‘guilt’, ‘pity’ and ‘god’—provided they can have life-enhancing
functions (May 1999: 5).
Revaluation, then, is central to Nietzsche’s ethical critique. It consists in examining the functional profile of a value and whether it contributes to a project that is
life-enhancing, in which case the value is vindicated, or life-denying, in which
case the value is discarded.
How can a fictionalist make sense of that project? The issue is how we are to
understand, in fictionalist terms, the prefix ‘re-’ in the word ‘revaluation’.
Hussain clearly recognizes that there is a challenge here:5
These free spirits are supposed to revalue the old values—revaluing, as is clear from the
texts, is not simply to remove the old values from circulation. (Nietzsche uses ‘umwerten’
and not ‘entwerten’)—and they are supposed to create new values (Hussain 2007: 157).
That seems to me exactly right: revaluation is not the decommissioning of our
values but their re-interpretation, such that the very same values survive the
process of re-interpretation, but also take a different form.6 But I do not see how
Hussain’s fictionalist reading of Nietzsche can successfully explain this process. It
cannot simply be that we naı̈vely held a realist understanding of values, came to
accept a reflective explanation of them that takes the form of an error theory, and
addressed that loss by replacing those values with a set of fictions. That is indeed
not revaluation, but replacement. Hussain recognizes that point in the quotation
above, but my further concern is that this process is not a reinterpretation of the
5 It is slightly puzzling then when, in his Appendix on responses to his paper and critically
discussing contemporary forms of fictionalism, Hussain describes Nietzsche as engaged in a
‘revolutionary fictionalism’ that proposes fictionalism ‘as a reform’(Hussain 2007: 181). That
construes fictionalism as a successor discourse, which, as I have argued here, might make sense of
new values but cannot make sense of the task of re-interpretation involved in revaluing.
6 This process is, of course, compatible with the loss of some of our existing values; there would be
little point to Nietzsche’s critical project otherwise. But it is clear that Nietzsche does not believe
that the eventual verdict will be that none of our existing values survive the process of revaluation.
Nietzsche and Moral Fictionalism
137
values either. Fictionalism is here presented by Hussain as a change in our
metaethical beliefs about those values and not as a reinterpretation of the values
themselves. Nietzsche is, of course, profoundly interested in the psychological
and social consequences of coming to accept a change in a reflective explanatory
view about value, but that cannot be all that he means by revaluation.7
It seems to me that Hussain’s fictionalist reading can only capture a part of
what Nietzsche means by the revaluation of our values. If the idea is that we are
now truthful about the status of our prior values as fictions, then we are flying in
the face of the fact that that was not our prior understanding of the values
concerned. Furthermore, it was internal to our understanding of the original
values at that prior time, in our naı̈ve condition, that they were not analogous to
fictional creations. My concern, summarily, is that fictionalism can be seen only
as a successor discourse to how we used to think and speak, and one that is not a
re-interpretation of how we used to think and speak, but a global replacement of
it. The creation of new values is not a problem for the fictionalist, but their
revaluation is. In summary, to revalue is to re-interpret, and that brings minimally realist interpretative constraints that the fictionalist cannot capture.8
Hussain clearly sees the problem here, and his response is to appeal to the
nature of aesthetic creation. Precisely what art involves is honest illusion:
It is the example of art that (i) shows us the psychological possibility of regarding things as
valuable even when we know they are not, and (ii) provides a source for techniques that,
suitably refined, could help us in regarding things as valuable outside the domain of art
proper (Hussain 2007: 172).
But that cannot be entirely correct. I interpret the aspect of aesthetic experience
that Hussain cites as an exemplary reconciliation of putative error to be its
‘twofold’ nature as Richard Wollheim uses that term (Wollheim 1987: 360n).
‘Twofoldness’ captures the phenomenological fact that one can simultaneously
see the peasant’s shoes in a van Gogh painting while being reflectively aware that
one is perceiving a marked surface. But I do not think that this very basic aesthetic
phenomenon can work as Hussain’s paradigm for an honestly held illusion.
7 I will suggest, in Section 3 below, that his primary interest is in fact in the psychological and
social consequences of failing to be able to set values as our final ends. (In that sense his concerns are
not ‘metaethical’ in the sense in which contemporary debates in metaethics formulate the issue
between realism, error theory, fictionalism, and projectivism.)
8 These are the kind of minimally realist constraints that I take to be established in the course of
Richard Moran’s insightful discussion of Charles Taylor’s version of ‘hermeneutic realism’ in
Moran (2001: 38–40, 43–4). It is a consequence of this realism about interpretation that the line
between a re-interpreted value and a created value is indeterminate. But Moran’s point is that we
have to be able to make sense of a stable object of interpretation in the former case, even if we
conclude that some re-valuations become ‘creations’ instead precisely when that constraint falls
away. For a plausible account of how one might see such ‘creation’ on the part of the free spirits as
proceeding see footnote 20, below.
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That is because twofoldness marks off this kind of case precisely as involving
illusion, not delusion; that is why I described the error as ‘putative’.9 There is, in
fact, no error at all as there need be no false belief in this case. This exactly
parallels the fact that there is no false belief caused by the perception of a visual
illusion that one knows to be such. (I might be deceived by a trompe l’il
painting on the wall of a gallery but, typically, I am not.) The cost that this
imposes on Hussain’s fictionalist interpretation is that aesthetic experience does
not seem to involve belief. What, then, is it that one is honest about?
Honesty has to be directed to a truth-apt content; one is honest as to the truth
of that content. Hussain’s analogy with aesthetics does not support that claim,
but a slightly different one that subtly re-defines the problem in the course of
solving it. Honesty is no longer directed to the content of one’s commitment, but
rather towards the commitment itself. But being honest about the fact that one is
committed to an illusion is not an honest illusion in the sense required to
understand Nietzsche’s claims and solve the original interpretative puzzle. It is,
rather, knowing that you are pretending. That takes us back to where we started:
this is a reflective stance towards an attitude that is, in turn, directed to an
embedded content. However, the fictionalist stance of entertaining an honest
illusion does not take as its object the content itself, but, rather, the attitude in
which the content is embedded. So we still have no explanation of what it is for a
fictionalist to revalue those values referred to in the content of an evaluative
judgement. Once again, I do not see how fictionalism can make sense of the
revaluation of values.
It is, indeed, an essential part of moral fictionalism as a free-standing metaethical
view that the acceptance of the content of an ethical judgement is not a cognitive
process. In the most basic sense of ‘cognition’ it is a non-cognitive (but not nonfactualist) view in that acceptance of a judgement is not acceptance of a belief
(Kalderon 2006: chapter 1).10 Hussain draws attention to the point:
The historical evidence does suggest precisely what we need for fictionalism, in the sense
that needs to be ascribed to Nietzsche, namely an attitude other than belief towards the
same content (Hussain 2007: 179).
He later approvingly cites David Hills’s distinction between a ‘presented
thought . . . entertained in the spirit of assertion’ and ‘the presenting thought
entertained in the spirit of pretence’ (Hills 1997: 147; cited by Hussain 2007: 180).
However, this does not identify the intentional content that is the object of one’s
honesty in the case of an honest illusion. Honesty is towards one’s performance, not
9 Hussain concedes the point by describing the case as one of ‘evaluative illusion’(Hussain 2007:
171).
10 Kalderon makes this important distinction: his fictionalism is non-cognitivist but it is not
non-factualist. The theory of what it is to accept the content of an ethical utterance does not take
such contents to be beliefs, but this is not a non-factualist understanding of the subject matter. ‘Fact’
goes with ‘true representation’ and that is a concept available to the fictionalist.
Nietzsche and Moral Fictionalism
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the thought contents that one entertains as a result of that performance. Furthermore, as Simon Robertson notes, it is also opaque quite why this fictionalist account
restores the phenomenological reality of value, as that is not quite that to which the
free spirits need to take themselves to be related. They can, instead, merely pretend
to be taking certain values to be their final ends.11 (This point draws on Christine
Korsgaard’s distinction between the intrinsic/extrinsic value distinction and the
instrumentality/final ends distinction that I will discuss further below.)
Hussain notes, in passing, Bernard Yack’s alternative interpretation that a
consistent Nietzschean view would have to be that the higher man engages in a
willed self-forgetfulness of the truth of error theory (Yack 1986: 352–3; Hussain
2007: 167–9). But while both Yack and Hussain are uncomfortable with this view,
at least it removes the inconsistency involved in simultaneously taking up an honest
stance towards an illusion while knowing it to be an illusion. It does so by
relativizing the honesty about the object of one’s commitment, and reflective
awareness of its illusory nature, to different times. Both Yack and Hussain register
scepticism about whether such a thing as willed forgetting is so much as possible.
I would simply note that it is a species of the genus of alienated action control,
exemplified by mundane examples like placing your alarm clock out of reach.
My own view is that the idea of putting in place external mechanisms that increase
the probability that something that is not under the direct control of your agency is
more likely to happen than not is far from unintelligible. (Saying that someone
joined the Foreign Legion in order to forget may well be overly romantic but it is not
unintelligible.) From an interpretative perspective, then, Yack’s suggestion seems to
me to have something to be said for it.12 But for present purposes I conclude overall
that there is a serious problem with understanding how a fictionalist account of our
values can explain what it is to revalue them, and that this is a pressing problem for
the fictionalist reading of Nietzsche. Perhaps that is all to the good given that there
are further problems with the view itself that I will now describe.
2 . A CRITIQUE OF HERMENEUTIC
MORAL FICTIONALISM
Interpretative charity, even towards as notoriously difficult a set of texts as
Nietzsche’s own, asks us to avoid attributing views to him that are false. Clearly,
when the view is a philosophical view and subject to persistent controversy, it is
11 Robertson (2009), 83–4.
12 I suggest a different strategy for reconciling the truth of error theory and the evaluative
practices of Nietzsche’s free spirits in Section 3. I simply note, for completeness, that there is one
interpretation of Nietzsche that is at least consistent with the claim that he is a global error theorist.
But this paper as a whole argues that a better overall explanation is available of all of Nietzsche’s
putative commitments.
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difficult conclusively to establish that a view is false. It would also be grossly
anachronistic to read back into Nietzsche any anticipation of the recent intense
focus on the prospects for a fictionalist understanding of morality (Joyce 2001;
Hussain 2004; Kalderon 2005).13 But if we can come to some tentative evaluation of the prospects for moral fictionalism then it gives us something to work
with in seeing whether or not we should try to attribute the view to Nietzsche.
Mark Kalderon has recently described a hermeneutic moral fictionalist understanding of morality with exemplary clarity and rigour.14 I will now describe some
of my misgivings about Kalderon’s worked-out version of the view. But I would
also like to generalize my discussion somewhat, as Kalderon explicitly argues for
one kind of fictionalism, one that takes the idea of fictional truth as a basic notion,
and I think there are more general problems with the view. As the discussion is at
one remove from Nietzsche’s texts I will be both brief and, perforce, too dogmatic
in both my exposition and my criticisms. I will begin by discussing Kalderon’s
non-reductive moral fictionalism before turning to reductive views that offer an
explanation of fictionality and fictional truth. Hussain appeals to a view of the
latter kind, basically inspired by Kendall Walton, in his fictionalist reading of
Nietzsche (Walton 1990; Hussain 2007: 181). So I think it is important to discuss
both reductive and non-reductive forms of moral fictionalism.
First, I will assess Mark Kalderon’s view, a view that takes the idea of fictional
truth as basic and unanalysable. It is helpful to begin with two paradigms that he
cites as inspiration for the kind of view he develops. The first paradigm is an
unlikely one: Alasdair MacIntyre’s dystopian description of emotivism as not
what it seems to be, a reflective metaethical account of ethical discourse, but as an
account of what our moral discourse has become (MacIntyre 1981). Kalderon
interprets MacIntyre’s proposal as follows:
There is another way to understand the realist fiction . . . the subject matter of morality is a
fiction that stands in no need of debunking but is rather the means by which attitude is
conveyed. Perhaps moral sentences express moral propositions, just as the realist maintains, but in uttering a moral sentence competent speakers do not assert the moral
proposition expressed but rather convey by means of it the relevant noncognitive attitudes
(Kalderon 2006: vii).
At the highest level of generality, and put in terms wholly anachronistic to
Nietzsche’s own work, the moral fictionalist hopes to sidestep the expressivist’s
problem with the Frege-Geach problem of unasserted contexts by taking ethical
13 Brian Leiter has observed that ‘there are simply not adequate grounds for “assigning” to
Nietzsche a view on such subtle matters as whether ethical language is primarily cognitive or noncognitive’(Leiter 2000: 279). That has to be correct and I think all parties to this dispute have to take
themselves to be explicating a more determinate interpretation of Nietzsche than the texts
themselves present to us.
14 Nadeem Hussain and others have also evaluated the view as a free-standing metaethical
position. See Hussain (2004).
Nietzsche and Moral Fictionalism
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utterances to embed truth-apt and, indeed, true, representations. However, the
moral fictionalist also sidesteps the moral realist’s allegedly embarrassing metaphysical and epistemological commitments because of the comparative sparseness of her ontology. These representations are true, but merely fictionally true,
and known in whatever way we know truths established by fictions. The overall
package deal looks very attractive if it can be made to work.
The inspiration for moral fictionalism is the successful use of the fictionalist
strategy for other problematic domains, such as talk of abstracta, theoretical
unobservables, or modality. The second paradigm that is helpful for understanding Kalderon’s project is the fictionalist understanding of van Fraassen’s constructive empiricism (van Fraassen 1980). The basic idea is that our commitment
to physical theory seeks the goal of theoretical insight, and a scientific realist takes
the truth-conditions of theoretical utterances in physics to commit us to the
existence of theoretical unobservables. The constructive empiricist, however,
does two things. First of all, he asks us to reconsider the goals of a physical
theory: it suffices, the constructive empiricist argues, that such theories are
empirically adequate rather than (correspondence) true. Secondly, with our
understanding of the aims of physical discourse revised, we can see that those
aims could be secured if, in the theory of what it is to accept a sentence of a
physical theory, that which one is accepting is not a belief. It is, rather, a case
where embedded contents are not asserted, but quasi-asserted, in such a way that
the content that they display is, when accepted, a way to secure the re-interpreted
goal for physical enquiry proposed by the fictionalist (Rosen 2004; van Fraassen
2004).
Kalderon aims to develop a precisely analogous view for ethics. On his view,
fictionalism helps to explain particularly tractable moral disagreements by
showing how a person’s sense of relevance and salience is shaped, phenomenologically, by background affect. This is not a passing mental state, but an
attitudinal colouring of how one sees the world and that which is ethically salient
within it. This component of ethical judgement is carried by the fictional content
of utterances; overall, such utterances are fictionally true, but there is no further
illuminating explanation of that fact. Metaphorical language is simply a basic,
unanalysable and pervasive aspect of language. It works, ethically, to shape the
fictional content of utterances in a discourse whose overall point is to coordinate
action via the background role of affective response.
I have two main concerns about Kalderon’s view: my first focuses on the
circularity implicit in his description of the overall point of ethical discourse and
practice. In order to emulate the successful paradigm of the constructive empiricist the moral fictionalist has to convince us that what we are really doing, at the
level of ethical discourse as a whole, is securing various effects, notably the
coordination of action via the regulation of affect. Notwithstanding my general
scepticism as to whether there is any identifiable overall point to ethical discourse, my concern is that the fictionalist is stacking the deck in his or her favour
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by adopting this functional specification (Thomas 2006: 122–3). It certainly
seems to lack the independent appeal of van Fraassen’s suggestion that the
epistemic goods secured by physical theorizing is empirical adequacy, not correspondence truth.15 That is something that one can appreciate prior to the
acceptance of a fictionalist understanding of such theorizing; that is not so in
the ethical case as Kalderon presents it.
My second concern extends to that which Kalderon actually takes ethical contents to be. It can be brought out by comparing the moral fictionalist’s proposal to
the MacIntyrean critique of emotivism that inspired it. The comparison highlights
one form of a ‘wrong kind of reason’ problem: we are not just concerned with the
outcomes of rational discussion in ethics, but with how those outcomes are brought
about. A situation in which we have co-ordinated action via the regulation of affect
must, we think, be brought about in the right way and for the right reasons.
In MacIntyre’s dystopian description of an emotivist culture this is clearly not the
case. Given the total degeneration of social relations in that scenario, language is
being used wholly manipulatively. If one does succeed in realizing the point of ethical
language as a whole that will be for the wrong reasons. Indeed, in the MacIntyrean
case we can go a step further: the rational relations between the content of utterance,
what is said, and what is brought about by what is said, have been entirely replaced by
causal relations and no more. Language is merely an instrument for securing certain
effects, and if other means were more effective, such as putting a drug in the water
supply, all well and good. That is not how we ordinarily think of communicative
action as the giving of reasons, and of communicative uptake as involving the
recognition of reasons. That may be a causal process, but it is not merely a causal
process to which rational relations are epiphenomenal.
I do not mean to suggest that Kalderon’s fictionalist vision is dystopian too,
but my point is that from a realist perspective the role played in his account by
the fact that the embedded contents of ethical assertions are true is wholly
epiphenomenal to the practices in which they are embedded. That is what
makes his view look opportunistic: the grounds on which ethical contents are
produced and accepted are not connected to the fact that they are (fictionally)
true, but their fictional truth is invoked to evade the Frege-Geach problem that
plagues standard non-cognitivism and non-factualism. In the fictionalist account
the disciplinary norms internal to ethical practice are merely instrumental. They
can be captured wholly by what it is to deliver the epistemic goods of ethical
practice, namely, co-ordination of action via the regulation of affect.
Kalderon is sensitive to this charge and revises his account to deal with it in an
interesting way. As I have described, in his view the main explanatory motivation
15 This is important, because I do not want the criticisms that I present here of moral fictionalism
to extend automatically to other forms of fictionalism by parity of reasoning. It would be an
objection to my critique of moral fictionalism if it generalized beyond this case, but the criticisms
that I present here seem to me restricted to moral fictionalism alone.
Nietzsche and Moral Fictionalism
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for moral fictionalism is to accommodate a certain kind of deep ethical disagreement that goes beyond the under-determination of practical verdicts by the norm
of reasonableness. Certain deep disagreements suggest the diagnosis that two
competent, reasonable people can be in an epistemically symmetrical situation,
such that the only difference between them that explains the fact that they accept
different verdicts is that their entire sense of relevance and salience is coloured by
affect (Kalderon 2006: 44–50). The key issue is exactly what, then, Kalderon
takes the fictional content of an ethical utterance to be. He argues:
If the argument from aspect shift is sound, then not only is moral acceptance noncognitive, but
it centrally involves a certain affect, a desire in the directed attention sense. While the fictional
content of moral acceptance is the moral proposition expressed by the accepted moral sentence,
its real content is plausibly limited to representing morally salient features of the
circumstance . . . Moral acceptance not only involves thoughts or perceptions with real
content, a proposition that represents the morally salient facts about the relevant
circumstances, but also crucially involves a phenomenologically vivid sense of the
moral reasons apparently available in the circumstance as the real content represents it
to be (Kalderon 2005: 129).
On this view, comparable to that defended recently by the ecumenical expressivist, ethical utterances have both a fictional and a real content such that
attitude and descriptive properties interact in a single judgement (Ridge 2006).
However, just as in ecumenical expressivism, attitude and description are so
intertwined that the resulting view is in my opinion deeply irrationalist.
The view inherits this defect from its historical predecessor, Hare’s prescriptivism. Geoffrey Warnock objected to Hare’s view on the grounds that its
presupposed evaluative attitudes determined which beliefs constituted evidence
for the basis of one’s prescriptions (Warnock 1967, 1971). Prescriptions, in the
form of universal rules that entail imperatives, are grounded on the evidence that
the object commended has certain properties. Warnock pressed the question of
what makes this set of considerations the relevant evidence. Is the epistemic
principle that articulates this relevance itself an ethical commitment, or an
epistemic one? The answer, it seems, is that on Hare’s view the principles of
what counts as relevant evidence is itself an ethical commitment. This gives the
overall view the unhealthy ability to bootstrap its own evidence by determining
what counts as the relevant evidence for the truth of its principles.
The problem is even worse for Kalderon’s non-reductive fictionalist, who has
tightened the connection between the real content of the fictional representation
and affect (where ‘affect’ is ‘desire in the directed attention sense’) within
the content of each judgement.16 In Hare’s view, the connection works
16 Exactly the same problem faces the ecumenical expressivist, such as Michael Ridge. His
counterpart to Kalderon’s claim is this: ‘Someone who approves of actions insofar as they
maximize utility will count as thinking that charity is morally right only if she believes that
charity maximizes utility. However, this is the relevant content only because of the person’s
attitudes’ (Ridge 2006: 309, emphasis added).
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pragmatically: if you know you share an evaluative outlook with another speaker
then you can infer from her commendations what non-evaluative features have a
bearing on the truth or falsity of her judgement. But this connection is tightened
into one that is guaranteed by the semantics in both Kalderon’s view and the
parallel view of the ecumenical expressivist. Both the fictionalist and the ecumenical expressivist believe that ethical utterances express both beliefs and attitudes
where the attitude serves to fix the content of the belief. This is an irrationalist
view, because we usually understand attitudes and beliefs to be content types
whose tokens can be independent relata of the reason-giving relation. On this
alternative view, the very content of the belief is fixed by its constitutive
connection to the attitude with which it is combined. That, in brief summary,
represents my concerns about Kalderon’s view. It is a subtle view that requires
deeper consideration than, for reasons of space, I can give it here. But for full
generality I also want to discuss those forms of moral fictionalism that do accept
the challenge of explaining fictional truth as opposed to Kalderon’s strategy of
taking that idea to be basic.
Kalderon is sympathetic to the Davidsonian line that metaphors can be
elucidated as simply causally effective, non-cognitive, uses of language (Reimer
2001). By contrast, I have noted that Hussain appeals to the views of Kendall
Walton in explaining what he (Hussain) means by the fictional status of a
content. Walton has developed the most plausible and detailed account of
fictional truth. Fictional truths are generated by games of prop-oriented makebelieve, such that we can interpret fictional truth as truth in a fictional world
(Walton 1990).
In this reductive account of fictional truth the concept of truth is relativized to
a fictional world. This relativization is presupposed in the evaluation of particular
utterances. This explains, for example, why one need be aware of this suppressed
relativization to a world when one comes across sentences like these:
I should like just to remember the order of the houses here. It is a hobby of mine to have
an exact knowledge of London. There is Mortimer’s, the tobacconist, the little newspaper
shop, the Coburg branch of the City and Suburban Bank, the Vegetarian Restaurant, and
MacFarlane’s carriage-building depot (Conan Doyle 2004: 55).
Without the background knowledge that this sentence is to be appraised
relative to a fictional world, a competent user of a language simply does not
know what the appropriate context of evaluation is, so cannot assign a truth
condition to the sentence. This looks like an advantage that this kind of
interpretation of fictional uses of language has over a purely pragmatic account
in which fiction involves a distinctive use of language, comparable to the use of
‘mock speech’.17
17 I have in mind here solely pragmatic explanations: in his seminal discussion, Frege describes
fictional speech as mock speech, but on his view that is correlated with a fictional content.
Nietzsche and Moral Fictionalism
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There seems, therefore, to be a straightforward and theoretically welldeveloped way in which the fictionalist can treat the proposition expressed by a
moral utterance truth-conditionally: it is truth within a fictional world. When
I claim, truly, that Sherlock Holmes kept his tobacco in a Persian slipper, I do not
need to look in the actual world for the truthmaker for the proposition expressed
by the sentence ‘Sherlock Holmes keeps his tobacco in a Persian slipper’. Instead
I uncover a suppressed relativization to a world, such that it is true in a specified
fictional world that Sherlock Holmes keeps his tobacco in a Persian slipper.
It might seem to be a disadvantage of this treatment of the truth of fictional
sentences that we need to justify identifying a suppressed relativization to a world
in the utterances of fictionally true sentences. However, as Stephen Yablo has
pointed out, the justification is the same as in any case in which an analysis of the
truth conditions of a class of sentences ‘uncovers’ in its deeper semantic structure
a suppressed parameter that seems not explicitly marked by speakers of the
language (Yablo 2002). We are capturing inferential relations by modelling
them in our account of the underlying structure of the interpreted sentences.
If one’s limited focus is solely on the proper treatment of fictional uses of
language, then the reductive form of fictionalism seems to have advantages over
its rivals. However, it leads to a very serious problem when the attempt is made to
develop a form of moral fictionalism. To set up the problem, begin by noting
that fictions very often contain sentences that are true evaluated relative to the
actual world, in addition to sentences that are evaluated as true relative to a given
fictional world. This fact, noted explicitly by Tamar Gendler, means that a
person might learn historical facts about nineteenth-century London by reading
fictions about Sherlock Holmes (Gendler 2000). We can formulate import/
export rules between fictional and actual worlds. However, as is well known,
Gendler also noticed that a problem in the formulation of such rules is that we
seem, precisely, resistant to fictions in which moral truths are violations of moral
truths in the actual world. We are happy with two-way, symmetrical import/
export rules for the sentence ‘Simpsons is on the Strand’ but not, for example, a
claim like ‘In killing her baby, Giselda did the right thing; after all, it was a girl’
(Walton 2008: 36).
The falsity of this claim in the actual world is such that we are resistant even to
setting up a fictional world in which it is true.18 I think that this mere
‘Assertions in fiction are not to be taken seriously, they are only mock assertions. Even the thoughts
are not to be taken seriously as in the sciences, they are only mock thoughts’ (Frege 1979: 130).
18 At this point my argument might seem to beg the question against the fictionalist construal of
Nietzsche. The problem of imaginative resistance is generated by our refusal to accept certain moral
claims but, on my view, that resistance is grounded on the falsity of those claims as judged by our
substantive ethical commitments in the actual world. Simon Robertson has suggested to me that
those sympathetic to the fictionalist reading of Nietzsche will diagnose the falsity of these claims in
another way: it stems from a global error theory that takes all such claims to be false. I think this
point overlooks the relation between the objection to fictionalism here and the constraint on a
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phenomenological fact is enough to pose a problem for moral fictionalism and,
interestingly, a problem with no counterpart for the fictionalist treatment of
other discourses. The problem that I am describing here is the well-known
problem of imaginative resistance, first noticed by Hume and re-introduced
into contemporary discussion by Richard Moran and Gendler (Moran 1994;
Gendler 2000). It is important to emphasize that my aim here is not to solve this
problem. My argument is, rather, that the mere existence of the problem suffices
to undermine moral fictionalism. After all, the fictionalist can hardly deny that
there is a problem, even if he or she can contest any particular solution of it.
The issue, as I see it, is this: the existence of the problem of imaginative
resistance shows that our prior moral beliefs determine the accessibility relation
to fictional worlds. The moral fictionalist aims, precisely, to analyse the content
of our moral beliefs by appealing to the idea of fictional truth. However, fictional
truth is, on this proposal, truth in a fictional world where such a world is
generated by a game of prop-oriented make-believe. That implies that we can
set up such worlds, and explain our access to them, independently of our
analysandum. The mere existence of the problem of imaginative resistance
shows that that is precisely what we cannot do. This is a problem facing the
moral fictionalist that has no analogue in fictionalism for other domains.19
In summary, my claim is that there is no analogue of the accessibility relation
that is standardly appealed to when we offer an explanation of the modal status of
truths (as opposed to their fictional status) by invoking a semantic model that
uses the idea of possible worlds. When we explain modality, we explain the
modal operators as quantifiers over a set of possible worlds and then go on to
introduce an accessibility relation over those worlds. There is no analogous
process when we explain fictional truth as truth in a fictional world in the course
of developing moral fictionalism. Interestingly, this fictionalist strategy fails
solely for our moral beliefs. The analogous accessibility relation is, in the moral
case, shaped by prior moral commitments. The cognitivist claims that those
commitments are themselves truth-apt representations, objects of belief, that are
often known to be true (Thomas 2006). Thus there is a hidden circularity in the
moral fictionalist’s treatment of moral truth as truth in a fictional world generated by a game of prop-oriented make-believe. To preserve semantic orthodoxy,
and a truth-conditional model for moral utterances, the fictionalist has to treat
truth in fiction as analogous to a reductionist account of modal truth. Whatever
plausible interpretation of Nietzsche’s account of revaluation. My argument poses a dilemma: the
global error-theoretic interpretation of Nietzsche can evade my objection to fictionalism, but only at
the cost of failing to give a plausible account of what Nietzsche can mean by ‘revaluation’ as opposed
to ‘global replacement’ (a constraint that, as I have noted, Hussain accepts).
19 It seems to me an advantage of the view defended here that those who find fictionalism about
other domains plausible do not have to object to this critique of moral fictionalism. The moral case
raises special issues that do not carry over to, for example, fictionalism about modality.
Nietzsche and Moral Fictionalism
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the merits of the latter view, my argument is that the former view simply will not
go through in the ethical case. The putative analogy breaks down.
I have argued that the mere existence of the phenomenon of imaginative
resistance works for my purposes. I do not have to solve that problem (fortunately), but I can offer some commentary on that which generates the problem. It
seems to me that the problem for the reductive moral fictionalist is one of
presupposition. The fictionalist has to assume that all the relevant moral truths
are truths in a fiction, where the setting up of, and import and export rules for,
that fiction does not itself raise a moral issue. But on any understanding of our
relations to fiction we can see why that is not so.
On a pragmatic understanding, fictions are derived from games of makebelieve or pretence. Pretending and making believe are things that we do and are
thus subject to moral appraisal. A parent who tells a nervous child a bedtime
story about monsters is inconsiderate and cruel. A friend who pretends to you
that your seriously ill mother has in fact died, only to end her performance with
the words ‘Surprise! Just kidding!’ is no friend. If the nature of fiction is called
upon to explain the pragmatics of what we do with moral language then the
account is circular, as pretending is one of the things that we do and hence is
open to moral appraisal.
That is why I have not focused here on the pragmatics of ethical utterance, but
rather on the underlying semantic model that any such view will presuppose. But
the structurally identical problem recurs: one cannot suspend, at the level of
presupposition, those moral claims that one knows to be true and leave open
whether their truth is explained by how truths are distributed amongst a set of
objects (the fictional worlds). The issue turns once again on how best to explain
the interpenetration of fictionality and the real world, the very phenomenon that
generates the puzzle of imaginative resistance in the first place.
I have not, then, focused on the problems facing pragmatic explanations of
fiction that explain the latter solely in terms of uses of language. However, my
concerns about any such view converge with those of Bernard Reginster. Discussing Hussain’s fictionalism, Reginster writes:
The fictionalist’s ability to interrupt his engagement in the game of evaluative makebelieve must involve the ability to ask whether this is a game worth playing in the first
place (and whether, in particular, it warrants curbing the ‘will to truth’ to allow the
illusion to persist) (Reginster 2006: 96).
This parallels my point about pragmatic reductive fictionalism: make-believe
is an activity. As something practical it should be regulated by ethical norms.
However, if it enters into the generation of such norms, it seems beyond any
capacity to regulate itself.20 I conclude that no version of hermeneutic moral
20 Simon Robertson has put to me a defence of Hussain’s position along the following lines: the
freedom of the free spirits is precisely that their value formation is not subject to ethical norms but
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fictionalism is successful, either when it takes the idea of fictional truth as
explanatorily basic or when it attempts to explain the idea of fictional truth.
All the more reason not to find the idea in Nietzsche’s metaethics, and it is to that
issue that I now return.
3 . HUSSAIN’S ‘ARGUMENT BY
ELIMINATION’ REVISITED
I think that the previous considerations have given enough reason to go back to
the way in which Hussain sets up his options to see if it is true that the
elimination of the other alternatives leaves us only with fictionalism. At the
very least I am under an obligation, given my doubts about Hussain’s solution, to
offer a different solution to the interpretative puzzle from which Hussain derived
his fictionalist resolution.
The puzzle, recall, is the prima facie inconsistency between the commitment
to truthfulness of Nietzsche’s free spirits, the truth that there are no values, and
their positive project of revaluation and the creation of new values. A different
resolution of that inconsistency is going to have to focus on Nietzsche’s apparent
commitment to error theory. I will suggest that there are three possible responses
to this apparent commitment: first, Nietzsche can be interpreted as error theoretic about values construed in a certain local way, but not all values; secondly,
that one can usefully distinguish, within a broadly subjectivist realism about
values, conditions on the subject from conditions on the associated value; finally,
one can draw an important distinction between values and valuing.21
The first point puts to use a local/global contrast: Nietzsche is locally sceptical
about some of our inherited ideas, notably Platonism. That directly connects his
concerns with those of contemporary metaethicists, as both John Mackie and
Christine Korsgaard have similarly argued that the only moral realist there has
ever been in the history of philosophy was Plato (Thomas 2006: 17). That is on
the ground that Plato is the only metaethicist who has ever understood what
moral realism would have to be to discharge its explanatory obligations. Platonism postulates a structure of the world that is inherently evaluative and nonperspectival. It is non-perspectival in that it is not particularly attuned to our
rather answerable to their own motivational and emotional constitution. My (predictable) response
is that this is a mechanism of revaluation as creation, not an account of revaluation, as no stable
interpretative object underpins the process. See note 8.
21 On the first point see the extensive bibliographic references given by Robertson (2009), 82 in
his account of ‘objective value realism’. I have already noted, and discussed, Bernard Yack’s strategy
for reconciling the truth of error theory and the evaluative practice of Nietzsche’s free spirits. It
would represent an additional strategy for avoiding the argument by elimination that Hussain
presents; the strategy I present in this section is an alternative to Yack’s, not complementary to it. See
note 12.
Nietzsche and Moral Fictionalism
149
human perspective and its peculiarities. However, cognitive contact with that
reality is inherently motivational for a fully rational agent.
On this interpretation, Nietzsche would be rightly sceptical of Platonism on
the grounds that it is itself life-denying. However, that is clearly to use an
alternative criterion of value to judge the merits of Platonism. That in turn
reflects the fact that his scepticism is not a global form of scepticism about all
kinds of value but is relativized to the kinds of commitment that Platonism
exemplifies. So Nietzsche’s apparent commitment to error theory is better interpreted as a local scepticism about some, not all, of our inherited ethical ideas.
That leaves the way open for a positive account of other values that do not
depend, directly, on a Platonic form of vindication that they could not survive.22
That positive account presupposes that facts about the valuer, and what it is for
him or her to flourish, enter into the reflective explanation of the truth conditions
of ethical claims, making them radically perspectival.23
That leads to the second response to Hussain’s initial argument by elimination:
the description of a plausible form of subjective realism that evades the objections he
makes to that general kind of view. I will describe such a view here. It seems to me
that a plausible subjective realism would begin from the claim that ethical values are
highly perspectival and tied in to the human perspective and its distinctive peculiarities, in marked contrast to the Platonic view. All values are eudaimonistic and
constitutively connected to human flourishing. This form of subjective realism need
not be interpreted as reductively subjectivistic such that the mental states of the
valuing subject constitute the truth conditions of ethical claims in a way that permits
a reduction of the latter to the former.24 The idea is rather that there are no values
that do not stand in a constitutive relation to a mental subject. Nothing is valuable
from ‘the point of view of the universe’; value enters into that universe from the
perspective of rational agents who are sensitive to, and responsive towards, values.
Their response is an exercise of the practical intellect via the exercise of virtue that is
internally connected to the agent’s being eudaimôn, or not. In this general picture
the connection between values and relations enters into at least two different kinds
of explanation (Thomas 2006: 47–9).
First, value as a whole presupposes a human standpoint. But the correct way to
conceive of this value is, indeed, presuppositionally. It does not enter into the
truth conditions of an evaluative claim that such claims are relativized to the
22 Paradigmatic of a Platonic view that does not survive vindication of this kind is Christian
morality (as Nietzsche conceives of it). As Harold Langsam comments ‘The legitimacy of Christian
morality is supposed to be derived from its objectivity: Christian moral values are the only objective
values, and therefore we are obliged to act in accord with them. Now that the claim that Christian
moral values are objective values is beginning to be exposed as a lie, Christian morality loses its
legitimacy in the eyes of its erstwhile followers . . . They have come to the realization that there are no
objective values, Christian or otherwise, and so they conclude that there are no legitimate values;
hence, nihilism’ (Langsam 1997: 238–9).
23 In the sense explained by A. W. Moore (2000: 15ff ).
24 A view decisively refuted in Moore (1922).
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human standpoint any more than it enters into claims about secondary properties, such as colour. Postboxes are not red for humans; postboxes are red. In the
latter claim the perspectivalness of colour discourse as a whole is presupposed,
just as the perspectivalness of value relative to our human perspective ought to be
handled presuppositionally.
Secondly, for the class of eudaimonistic values taken alone, we are both
responding to value and yet everything relevant to our subjective perspective
can bear on the process of evaluation and hence what those values mean to us.
Nietzsche’s distinctive focus is on the conditions that enter into our response to
values. In our response to value we are not merely passive. The point was
insightfully made by Robert Nozick:
What is worth exploring is worth responding to. In a response, some action, emotion or
judgement is contoured to the valuable panoply that is encountered, taking account of
intricate features and fitting them in a nuanced and modulated way. A response differs from
a reaction. A reaction focuses upon and takes account of a constricted, standard, and pre-set
group of features, and it issues as one of a limited number of pre-set actions . . . In a full
response, a large part of you responds to a large part of the situation by selection from a large
range of non-stereotyped actions (Nozick 1989: 44; quoted also in Thomas 2006: 44).
Nietzsche believed that our responsiveness to value is conditioned by our
biological type, our surrounding culture, our past history and context of choice.
Each of these conditions bears on the interpretation of a value for a particular
valuing subject in a particular context at a particular time. There is no denial of
objectivity in arguing that the same set of values can be good for one set of
judgers or a particular judge and bad for another set of judgers or a particular
judge, if there are further contextual parameters that explain the difference.
Indeed, the basis of comparison requires the relevant values to be the same.
It might seem that this view has to collapse into a reductive form of subjectivism. But I think that would be a mistake: it is a familiar point from discussion of
secondary property, or sensibility, forms of moral realism that it has the flexible
resources to accommodate thought experiments in which, for example, a freak
physical singularity causes a gas to appear in the earth’s atmosphere that makes
everyone on the planet blue/green colour blind. That would not mean, on a
secondary property view, that the distinction between blue and green would no
longer exist. The provisoed biconditionals used to capture the relevant propertyresponse pairs are indexically tied to the best responses in the actual world,
rigidifying the claim to our actual circumstances (Davies and Humberstone
1980; Thomas 2006: 40). We can think counterfactually about what it would be
to vary the subjective conditions for valuation without implying that it is possible
to reduce the latter to the former as in a dispositional theory of value.25
25 For an example of the latter view see Brower (1988, 1993).
Nietzsche and Moral Fictionalism
151
That distinction permits the formulation of the third promised response to
Hussain’s initial argument by elimination: a distinction between values and what
it is to evaluate or to take values as one’s goals. I do think this is a point where it
would be anachronistic to expect more determinacy on this point than is
available. I am not sure Nietzsche ever clearly distinguishes the eudaimonistic
nature of values from this further distinction between values and valuing. The
third claim is that even within the broadly eudaimonistic perspective that I have
described one can make a distinction between values and the process of evaluation, the setting of values as one’s final ends.
Consideration of the issue directly relates back to something Hussain says in
the course of his discussion about the nature of Nietzschean nihilism. He
discusses Harold Langsam’s subjective realist interpretation of Nietzsche where
a subjective realist ‘takes the truth conditions of evaluative claims as involving
some essential reference to an agent’s mental states’ (Hussain 2007: 161). That is
clearly a very general claim, which applies both to Langsam’s view and the kind
of eudaimonistic realism presented here.26
Hussain has three objections to a general view of this kind: that it cannot
accommodate Nietzsche’s remark that his nihilism is practical as well as theoretical, that it cannot accommodate a general critique of our evaluations in
Nietzsche, and that according to this ‘subjective realism’ there is no such thing
as ‘getting the world wrong’ (Hussain 2007: 161–2; Langsam 1997). Indeed,
Hussain seems to imply that if that latter claim is true, we can go back to the
passages in Nietzsche that seem to sustain a subjective realism. We can then reinterpret them in error-theoretic terms: we can interpret them as claiming that
we falsely attribute value to things that do not have any value.27 But that only
follows on a reductionist view in which values can be reduced to subjective states
of the agent. Langsam is not, it seems to me, committed to that view and neither
is the view I defend as a more plausible alternative interpretation of Nietzsche
than that of the fictionalist.
Hussain argues that it is a problem for any ‘subjectivist realist’ treatment of
Nietzsche’s views that he is explicitly a nihilist: this whole family of views cannot
26 The view that Langsam actually presents is more precise than this: his view (Langsam 1997:
235) is that a Nietzschean free spirit creates values (a view convergent with the defence of Hussain’s
position suggested by Simon Robertson in note 20). A complete assessment of Langsam’s insightful
paper lies beyond the scope of this one, but I note that this kind of aestheticism faces similar
problems in describing the revaluation of values to those that I have attributed to the fictionalist.
Nietzsche certainly thinks that aesthetic creation on the part of a great artist exemplifies a valuable
activity that represents an aspect of a Nietzschean ethical ideal. But that ideal is not restricted to the
aesthetic cases: overcoming great difficulty in a way that gives rise to feelings of powerful mastery
may be exemplified by great artists but is not restricted to them. And while life may be analogous to
an aesthetic phenomenon it is not literally an aesthetic phenomenon. For some cautionary remarks
on pressing the analogy with aesthetics too far in interpreting Nietzsche’s ethical views see Edward
Harcourt, ‘Nietzsche and Aesthetic Ideals of Character’(Harcourt 2008).
27 On that view our only two interpretative options are indeed error theory or projectivism/
quasi-realism.
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accommodate this point. But I note that in the course of his argument Hussain
draws attention to an important distinction within Nietzschean nihilism between
theoretical and practical nihilism:
The proposed subjectivist realist reading does not, however, square with certain themes in
Nietzsche’s texts. At work in Nietzsche’s texts is a distinction between theoretical and
practical nihilism. Theoretical nihilism is the belief in valuelessness, or, as Nietzsche often
puts it, goallessness (Hussain 2007: 161, emphasis added).
Hussain continues:
Practical nihilism is the practical consequence in most agents of the belief, usually only a
tacit belief, in valuelessness or goallessness. Practical nihilism consists of a range of
psychological and sociological phenomena. Now it is certainly true that Nietzsche is
extremely concerned about the rise of practical nihilism, but theoretical nihilism is
something that he does indeed seem to endorse (ibid.).
The argument seems to run as follows: Nietzsche is concerned to identify a
problem of valuelessness. The problem of valuelessness is a theoretical issue.
Nietzsche then goes on to consider the psychological ramifications of the theoretical issue, the consequent psychological issue of ‘practical nihilism’. The
former issue is an embarrassment to the subjective realist interpretation of
Nietzsche in a way the fictionalist can exploit: as Nietzsche treats the theoretical
issue of valuelessness, it represents a commitment on his part to the global truth
of error theory (to the exclusion of subjective realism).
However, there seems to be a conflation here on Nietzsche’s part in the
identification of the theoretical issue; he describes it in such a way that it seems
to be identical to the practical issue. The conflation involves an illegitimate
crossing of the two categories of the ‘intrinsic versus extrinsic value’ distinction
with the ‘for its own sake/instrumental’ distinction. When Nietzsche identifies
‘valuelessness’ with ‘goallessness’ he conflates terms from two sets of opposites.
As Christine Korsgaard points out, while it is very common in moral philosophy
to see a putative contrast in values between the ‘intrinsic versus the instrumental’,
that cannot make sense even on the dictionary definitions of the terms
(Korsgaard 1983). The dictionary tells you that the opposite of ‘intrinsic’ is
not ‘instrumental’ but rather ‘extrinsic’. Admittedly it will take an encyclopaedia
rather than a dictionary to identify the opposite of ‘instrumental’, such as the
expression ‘for its own sake’.28 But if Korsgaard is right—and I think she is—
then the two distinctions, one between the intrinsic and the extrinsic and one
between the ‘for its own sake’ and the instrumental, clearly apply to different
cases. The former applies to values and what makes something a value, the latter
28 Simon Robertson has, as I have noted, already shown the role that this conflation plays in
Hussain’s account of how the free spirits interpret their fictionalising (Robertson 2009: 84, 88 n.18).
Nietzsche and Moral Fictionalism
153
applies to how agents set values as their ends or goals in the course of deliberation
about what to do.
With Korsgaard’s distinction in place, one can note that even in the formulation of Nietzsche’s ostensible theoretical nihilism Hussain still describes this, for
Nietzsche, as a problem for how practical agents set themselves ends, or ‘goallessness’.29 Thus, it seems from our interpretative perspective that Nietzsche does
not clearly distinguish that issue from the one with which Hussain is primarily
concerned, namely, whether or not values exist that could function as such
ends.30 The alignment that Nietzsche perceives is not, as Hussain suggests,
between an ontological thesis about values and a thesis about the subjective
impact of this first truth on the agent. It is, rather, a distinction between what it is
to fail to find anything valuable, on the one hand, and the impact of that on the
agent, versus the broader set of personal and social conditions that might explain
that impact on the agent at a further reflective level. The first question is this:
how might a reflective agent, in a world of response-dependent values, fail to find
any of them worth setting as ends? That question does not presuppose the global
truth of error theory; on the contrary, it assumes the continued existence of some
values.
If that is how Nietzsche construes the first question, then we can now combine
that interpretation with the local/global contrast that has restricted his error
theory to some of our values. A subjective realist can consistently maintain that
Nietzsche is only an error theorist about some values, that other responsedependent or ‘subjective’ values continue to exist, but that for Nietzsche there
is still an issue as to whether any of them are worth setting as ends. So the
subjective realist is not embarrassed by Nietzsche’s commitment to nihilism, but
can in fact explain its two distinct aspects. As an ontological thesis Nietzsche’s
error-theoretic nihilism is merely local; as a practical thesis it is compatible with
the truth of subjective realism about some values.
That leaves a second question that can be independently characterized: what
explains how this ‘goallessness’ has come about in a particular culture at a
particular time? As Harold Langsam notes, Nietzsche has a distinctive answer
to the second question:
We misinterpret Nietzsche’s strategy if we think he is interested in rational debate; he is
not interested in persuading the believers in morality to reject morality, by rational means
or otherwise. The point of Nietzsche’s critique is not to bring about the rejection of
29 So I am not implying that Hussain is confused about this distinction between theoretical and
practical nihilism, merely that it is not one to which Nietzsche is always sensitive. If I am right, then
he need not be sensitive to it; given his interests, then, for Nietzsche, valuelessness and goallessness
amount practically to the same thing. It is Hussain who has to make a sharp distinction here if his
argument from the elimination of alternatives is to remain a sound one.
30 I take it that something like this distinction also informs Langsam’s distinction, throughout
his discussion of Nietzsche’s nihilism, between ‘objectivity’ and ‘legitimacy’ (Langsam 1997:
throughout).
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morality, for according to Nietzsche’s diagnosis, the rejection of morality has already
begun and is proceeding apace, without any help from Nietzsche . . . But although
Nietzsche takes the perishing of morality to be inevitable, he takes the consequences of
this ‘great spectacle’ (GM III:27) as still up for grabs (Langsam 1997: 238–9).31
In summary, the subjective realist can develop three distinct responses to the
way in which Hussain sets up his argument by elimination. First, there is the
local versus global contrast that restricts an ‘error-theoretic’ diagnosis to some of
our values.32 The second response is a subjective realist thesis about values that
constitutively ties values to human responses (flourishing), but does not reduce
evaluative facts to facts about the subject. All Nietzsche’s distinctive virtue
theoretic claims about relativization to biological type, or to the nature of the
individual person and his capacity for excellence, can feature in this part of the
theory. Finally, there is the distinction between values and valuation. Valuesensitive creatures set themselves ends or purposes. It is a conflation to run
together one distinction about valuing—the ‘for its own sake’ versus ‘instrumental’ distinction—with the entirely separate distinction about that which constitutes value: the ‘intrinsic’ versus ‘extrinsic’ distinction. With that distinction
between values and valuing in place, one can complement Nietzsche’s concern
with the ‘subject’ end of his subjectivist realism with a further account of the
conditions in which we might, as a culture, not fail to find values but, rather, fail
to find any values worth setting as our goals or ends. In explaining the latter claim
evaluative realism is not repudiated but rather presupposed. However, it is a
subjective realism in which conditions on the subject are allowed to enter into an
account of the nature of value in a non-reductive way.
Hussain’s understanding of subjective realism is too restrictive: he takes the
view either to be a reductive subjectivism or a projectivism. But there are
alternative forms of subjective realism in which one can reconcile realism about
value with a reflective acknowledgement of the role of the subject in placing
conditions on value, distinguish value from evaluations, and distinguish theoretical from practical nihilism. I have already noted that I am not sure that
Nietzsche was always sensitive to the distinction between a eudaimonistic
account of values and the distinction between values and valuing. However, if
one did want to draw such a distinction the resources are there to make it.
31 In this passage Langsam refers to the Kaufmann and Hollingdale edition of On the Genealogy
of Morals in Nietzsche (1968).
32 The reason for the scare quotes is that one of the definitive features of the error theory of
morality is its global character. Its most puzzling feature is that it finds an entire way of thinking and
speaking to be designed for a certain purpose (all its sentences are truth-apt) and yet they are all false.
This highlights the disingenuous use of the word ‘error’ in the phrase ‘error theory’ as the error here
is not inadvertent failure in an otherwise sound practice but a global failure by the standards built
into the point of the practice itself. This, of course, puts considerable pressure on the initial
diagnosis of the nature of the practice. For further discussion see Wright (1995: 210), Grice
(1991: 45), and Thomas (2006: 14–18, 21).
Nietzsche and Moral Fictionalism
155
With that point established one can go on to offer a more satisfactory account of
the distinction between theoretical and practical nihilism in a way that does not
conflate Korsgaard’s distinction between the intrinsic and the extrinsic, and the ‘for
its own sake’ versus the instrumental. One could consistently maintain that a set of
values exists for a culture or an individual, even if conditions on valuing are such
that no-one is socially or psychologically capable of setting themselves those values as
worthwhile ends. Nevertheless, I concede that there is a genuine ambivalence in
Nietzsche’s texts as to whether he is discussing the second issue—the nature of
conditions on the subject as he or she figures in a response-dependent realism—or
the third issue, namely, what it is for a value-sensitive creature to find any values
worth setting as a final end with which one can be identified.
4. FICTIONALISM AND GENEALOGY
I would like briefly to consider an argument for a fictionalist interpretation of
Nietzsche that is independent of anything Hussain says but which seems to me
independently interesting. It is an argument grounded on Nietzsche’s distinctive
methodology of genealogy. In order to motivate the kind of argument I have
in mind, consider the following passage from Bernard Williams’ Truth and
Truthfulness:
I suggest that it is in fact a sufficient condition for something . . . to have an intrinsic value
that, first, it is necessary (or nearly necessary) for basic human purposes and needs that
human beings should treat it as an intrinsic good; and, second, they can coherently treat it
as an intrinsic good. This means that it is stable under reflection . . . What is essential for
this to be so is that the agent has some materials in terms of which he can understand this
value in relation to the other values that he holds, and this implies, in turn, that the
intrinsic good . . . or rather the agent’s relation to it, has an inner structure in terms of
which it can be related to other goods. If these conditions do hold, then I claim we have
not simply adopted an illusion or a pretence of there being an intrinsic good. In fact, if
these conditions hold, that would be a very odd thing to say, implying as it does that there
is something further which counts as its really being an intrinsic good, of which these
conditions offer only a surrogate or mock-up. If these conditions are satisfied then we
shall have constructed an intrinsic good (Williams 2002: 91–2).
One immediate reaction to this passage is that it involves some kind of crosscategorical error.33 Genealogies work by identifying function in that which was not
suspected to be functional. It is, indeed, part of the genealogy to explain why some
of our ideas, which are actually functional, work better if they hide that fact; as
33 I am grateful to David Owens for pointing out to me that Williams seems, in the quoted
passage, to conflate the intrinsic versus extrinsic distinction with the ‘for its own sake’ versus
instrumental distinction in just the way I have cautioned against. The reading I would prefer
would substitute ‘for its own sake’ for ‘intrinsic’ throughout.
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Edward Craig puts it, they are good at covering their tracks (Craig 2007). But when
an idea has been revealed to be functional, the question is what standing interests or
purposes it serves, and whether it can continue to serve those interests or purposes in
the light of our now fully transparent understanding of it.
I take it that it is no longer controversial to argue that such genealogical
accounts, even in Nietzsche’s hands, can be vindicatory as well as critical and
can show that some of our ideas, such as our commitment to truthfulness, are
stable under reflection. That seems to be the task in which Williams is engaged in
the passage cited. But what troubles my imagined critic of Williams is that if
genealogies work by drawing up a task specification, then two consequences
follow from identifying which values can meet that specification. The first is
that those ideas will receive a distinctively practical vindication. The second is that
they will be valued merely instrumentally as a good means of filling the allotted
role. But that makes Williams’ mention of ‘intrinsic value’ seem inappropriate.
His criticism of an alternative fictionalist understanding of values seems too hasty.
More specifically, the concern is this: if our aim is to identify ideas that fit a
task specification, that of meeting a presupposed need or interest, we may very
well end up with more than one candidate. But if more than one candidate idea
can be equally valid, then we can no longer be talking about truth, but rather an
idea better suited to judgements that aim not to fit the world but to get the world
to fit them. And because our focus is on a functional role, we are evaluating those
ideas merely extrinsically in terms of their relational properties: how well they
discharge a function. So all that a successful genealogy can do is offer the kind of
practical and functional vindication that is best explained by taking it to vindicate useful fictions as opposed to truth-apt and true commitments.
That is a different path from Hussain’s to a fictionalist interpretation of those
ideas that Nietzsche takes to be stable under reflection. Ultimately, however, I do
not think it is any more successful as an argument for fictionalism. The non
sequitur is to argue that because genealogy is concerned with function, it
evaluates ideas wholly extrinsically and finds them to be of merely instrumental
value. But Williams’ point is precisely that both intrinsic and extrinsic values can
receive genealogical vindication, but they will be distinct genealogies (Thomas
2008: 358–60). Unless a value does indeed ‘conceal its tracks’ and come to be
regarded as an intrinsic value, the genealogy will reveal precisely that it is unstable
under reflection or incompatible with the value of transparency.34 Furthermore,
certain ideas, such as truthfulness, typically work as they do only because they are
regarded as intrinsically valuable and thereby worth valuing for their own sake.
The enterprise of genealogy itself presupposes that we want a transparent
understanding of how these ethical ideals work. That rules out ‘vindications’
that are inherently non-transparent, such as those forms of opaque indirect
34 Assuming something that both Williams and I take to be true, but which I cannot argue for
here, which is that transparency is one of our most important liberal values.
Nietzsche and Moral Fictionalism
157
consequentialism that work by dividing explanation and justification. Given
transparency, the details of the genealogy work to refine the task specification
for truthfulness (to stick with our example), such that only an intrinsic value
valued for its own sake could discharge that role. I conclude, then, that there is no
inherent tension between the method of genealogy and the truth aptness of
judgements that use the concepts that are vindicated by such a method.
5 . CONCLUSION
In this paper I have primarily focused on the interpretation of Nietzsche’s
metaethic as an anticipation of contemporary moral fictionalism. I have argued
that the moral fictionalist interpretation of Nietzsche cannot adequately explain
the idea of a revaluation of existing values. I have examined the view as a freestanding ethical view, in both its non-reductive and its reductive versions, and
have offered arguments against both. The failure of moral fictionalism gave good
grounds for returning to Hussain’s argument from the elimination of alternatives, and a consistent, subjective realist understanding of Nietzsche’s metaethical
views has been put forward in a tentative spirit. The details of the view are
certainly for others to work out, but given the problems that I have highlighted in
the fictionalist reading of Nietzsche, this seems to me a much more promising
approach for future investigation.35
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Moore, G. E. (1922). ‘The nature of moral philosophy’, in Philosophical Studies. London:
Routledge.
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Review 103: 75–106.
—— (2001). Authority and Estrangement. Princeton: Princeton University Press.
Nozick, Robert (1989). The Examined Life. New York: Simon & Schuster.
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Press.
7
Compassion and Selflessness
Bernard Reginster
Schopenhauer’s ‘morality of compassion’ is a target of explicit substantive criticism
throughout Nietzsche’s works (see, for instance, HH I 103–4; D 133–4, 142; GS
99; BGE 186; GM Preface 5; A 7; WP 366–7). Considered closely, his critique of
Schopenhauer’s morality of compassion appears to follow two very different lines.
The most salient line of objection bears on the devaluation of suffering Schopenhauer takes to underwrite the morality of compassion: it is because suffering in all its
forms is considered evil that compassion, which he defines as ‘the prevention and
elimination of it’ (BM }16, 144), is valued. Nietzsche rejects the morality of
compassion precisely on the grounds that it indiscriminatingly devalues suffering
(GS 338; BGE 225).1 According to another line of objection, the problem with
Schopenhauerian compassion is that it fosters selflessness, understood as a kind of
self-devaluation.2 This paper focuses on this second line of objection.
The precise nature of the objection is quite elusive. Its target appears to be the
claim that the altruistic character of compassion requires the selflessness of the
agent. Thus, Schopenhauer argues explicitly that ‘if my action is to be done
simply and solely for the sake of another’ (BM }16, 143), I must devalue my own
interests, at least relatively to those of others. Nietzsche dismisses this view as
‘thoughtlessness’: ‘Out of compassion: at that moment, we are thinking only of
the other person—thus says thoughtlessness . . . Out of compassion: at that
moment we are not thinking of ourselves—thus says the same thoughtlessness.’
(D 133) Although Nietzsche initially appears to reject the possibility of altruism
on the ground that the selfless motivation it requires is impossible for human
beings (especially in Human, All Too Human—see HH I 1, 57, 103, 133), he also
seems later inclined to a different and more subtle objection, concerning now the
nature of altruism, namely, that altruism does not require selflessness, which
might even be incompatible with it (D 148; see also 103, 133; GM Preface 5;
WP 296, 362, 388). This is the line of thought I propose to examine here:
1 I examine this line of objection in detail in Reginster (2006: 185–190).
2 I examine this line of objection in Reginster (2000a,b). The general claim that selflessness is the
primary target of Nietzsche’s critique of morality, including the Schopenhauerian ‘morality of
compassion’, is defended in detail in Janaway (2007).
Compassion and Selflessness
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Nietzsche objects that the selflessness Schopenhauer takes to be essential to
altruism is actually incompatible with it.
I shall suggest that a good deal of the difficulty in sorting out and specifying
this line of objection is the consequence of an assumption, shared by many
commentators, that both Schopenhauer and Nietzsche operate with a single
conception of selflessness, which would be common to conditions as different
as altruistic compassion and ascetic self-denial, and so would provide a unified
and circumscribed object for Schopenhauer’s praise and for Nietzsche’s criticisms.3 As I shall attempt to show, this assumption does not withstand close
scrutiny, and I suspect that the ambiguity and obscurity of the Schopenhauerian
concept of selflessness accounts in no small measure for the tentative and
unwieldy character of Nietzsche’s critique of it. However, I shall also suggest
that, this difficulty notwithstanding, the dispute between Nietzsche and Schopenhauer over selflessness and altruism ends up revealing a fundamental opposition over the significance, psychological and ethical, of the fact that each
individual experiences his interests as his own.
It is in connection to this theme, which will emerge progressively throughout
the paper, that one particular connection between naturalism and normativity
comes into play. We shall see that selfishness is a natural tendency to grant greater
importance to my own interests, which is rooted in certain features of the
experience of those interests as being mine. Neither Schopenhauer nor Nietzsche
challenge the connection between interest and evaluation, but they do disagree
on the role played by the experience of an interest as my own in the determination of its normative significance.
1. SCHOPENHAUER’S CONCEPTION
OF COMPASSION
As Schopenhauer defines it, the fundamental ‘problem’ of the analysis of compassion is to account for its altruistic character:
But now if my action is to be done simply and solely for the sake of another, then his weal
and woe must be directly my motive, just as my weal and woe are so in the case of all other
actions. This narrows the expression of our problem, which can be stated as follows: How
is it possible for another’s weal and woe to move my will immediately, that is to say, in
exactly the same way in which it is usually moved by my own weal and woe? . . . Obviously
only through the other man’s becoming the ultimate object of my will in the same way as
I myself otherwise am . . . But this requires that I am in some way identified with him, in
other words, that this entire difference between me and everyone else, which is the very
basis of my egoism, is eliminated, to a certain extent at least. (BM }16, 143–4)
3 Janaway (2007: 28, 69, 197) makes this assumption explicitly.
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This passage is remarkable not in taking the possibility of altruism to be a
problem, but in the particular manner in which it formulates, and proposes to
solve, this problem. The problem of altruism, as Schopenhauer conceives of it, is
to determine how I could be ‘moved’ by the weal and woe of another as ‘directly’
as I am by my own. This is remarkable because it rules out, from the outset, two
natural ways of understanding altruism: according to one, the altruist is motivated by his recognition of the intrinsic goodness of the well-being of others;
according to the other, the altruist is motivated by a desire to make others happy
that is not motivated by the agent’s belief that their happiness is instrumentally
necessary to his own. Schopenhauer’s rejection of both of these conceptions of
altruism turns out to rest on his rejection of the notion of intrinsic goodness.
An action is altruistically motivated if it is done ‘simply and solely for the sake
of another’. This implies that the compassionate agent must somehow find the
well-being of others to be good independently of its contribution to the satisfaction of his own desires.4 However, Schopenhauer rejects any notion of goodness
beyond what contributes to the satisfaction of one’s desires: ‘we call everything
good that is just as we want it to be’ (WWR I }65, 360). That is to say, something
can be ‘good’ only in relation to satisfying someone’s desire, and cannot therefore
be good intrinsically (see PP II }146, 287). This implies that there are, in fact, no
desires based on the recognition of the intrinsic value of their objects: all desires
manifest endogenously arising ‘needs’, much like the desire for this loaf of bread
manifests hunger. This means that their objects have value for the agent whose
desires they are only insofar as their possession (in a broad sense of the term)
eliminates the pain associated with his wanting or needing them (WWR I }57,
312–4; }58, 319). It follows that even if I have a desire to make other people
happy, their happiness will matter to me only insofar as it gratifies my desire for it
and not for its own sake—it will be, so to speak, only a scratch to my itch.
If my beneficence is motivated by one of my desires, including the bare desire
to make others happy, it cannot be altruistic for Schopenhauer, because the
purpose of pursuing its satisfaction is for me to eliminate the discomfort its
presence creates in me, much as pursuing my desire for some food aims at
eliminating the pangs of hunger. My beneficence will be altruistic, therefore,
only if it is not motivated by any of my desires (‘my weal and woe’), but is
motivated ‘directly’ by the desires of the other (‘another’s weal and woe’). And
this, Schopenhauer claims, ‘requires that I am in some way identified with him, in
other words, that this entire difference between me and everyone else, which is the
very basis of my egoism, is eliminated, to a certain extent at least’.
4 There might be cases in which the well-being of others requires that I satisfy my own desires:
for instance, my spouse might not be happy unless my desires are satisfied. But in this case, it is not
that the well-being of others contributes to my own well-being as much as the other way around—
i.e. my reason for being happy remains their happiness.
Compassion and Selflessness
163
Following Schopenhauer’s own suggestion, we might begin our analysis of the
concept of identification with an examination of the concept of egoism. Schopenhauer defines it as the condition in which an individual ‘makes himself the
center of the world, and refers everything to himself’ (BM }14, 132). This
definition is ambiguous. On the one hand, the egoist simply is the individual
whose practical perspective on the world is dominated by the ‘unqualified desire
to preserve his existence, to keep it absolutely free from pain and suffering, which
includes all want and privation’ (BM }14, 131). Egoism, in this case, simply
describes a psychological condition of obnubilation: the unqualified desire for
existence and well-being is so powerful that it blinds the individual to any other
consideration, and fosters a certain perspective on the world, where everything in
it is interpreted in terms of its impact on his existence and well-being. On the
other hand, the egoist is also someone who takes his own existence and wellbeing to be more important than anything else: ‘he finds himself to be the holder
and possessor of all reality, and nothing can be more important to him than his
own self ’ (BM }14, 132). What relation, if any, do these two claims about egoism
bear to one another?
It might be tempting to conceive the egoist as one who explicitly judges that his
interests are more important than those of others. Such a conception of egoism
would involve a number of substantial assumptions. In the first place, the egoist
would be assumed to grasp fully the reality of other individuals with their own
interests and to judge his own interests to be more important. Moreover, he
would presumably have to judge his own interests to be more important solely
because they are his own, and not because of their particular content: for there
would be nothing distinctively egoistic in placing my interest in the advancement
of knowledge, for example, above your interest in collecting obscure sports
memorabilia because I judge knowledge—the particular content of my interest—
to be the more valuable end. I am an egoist insofar as I regard my interests to be
more valuable than yours simply in virtue of their being my own.
Schopenhauer agrees that the egoist overvalues his own interests, but he rejects
the idea that he does so on the basis of an explicit comparison between his
interests and those of others in which the fact that his interests are his is the
decisive consideration. In Schopenhauer’s way of thinking, rather, the egoist
‘regards himself alone as real, at any rate from the practical point of view, and all
others to a certain extent as phantoms’ (BM }14, 132). In other words, it is
because ‘he finds himself to be the holder and possessor of all reality’ that ‘nothing
can be more important to him than his own self’. The self-overvaluation of the
egoist is thus explained by a certain perspective he has on himself and his world:
he cares only about his own interests because he fails to recognize or appreciate
fully the reality of others with interests of their own.
Schopenhauer takes this peculiar blindness to be rooted in a fundamental
feature of our psychology:
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This is due ultimately to the fact that everyone is given to himself directly, but the rest
are given to him only indirectly through their representation in his head; and the
directness asserts its right. Thus in consequence of the subjectivity essential to every
consciousness . . . everything is always closely associated with self-consciousness. (BM }14, 132)
In Schopenhauer’s view, I bear a special ‘direct’ conscious relation to those
mental states, such as a desire or an interest, that are mine. This is a particular
application of a fundamental distinction he draws between the consciousness of
‘things’ in the ‘external world’ and ‘self-consciousness’, or consciousness of something as me or mine. This distinction arises paradigmatically in relation to the
experience of my own body: ‘this body is given in two entirely different ways. It is
given in intelligent perception as representation, as an object among objects,
liable to the laws of these objects. But it is also given in quite a different way,
namely as what is known immediately to everyone’ (WWR I }18, 100). I can be
conscious of my body as a portion of space, an ‘object among objects’, but this
consciousness is not yet self-consciousness, or a consciousness of this body as my
body: ‘it has become clear to us that something in the consciousness of everyone
distinguishes the representation of his own body from all others that are in other
respects quite like it. That is that the body occurs in consciousness in quite
another way, toto genere different’ (ibid.; first emphasis mine).
Schopenhauer thus follows a venerable Cartesian tradition in supposing that
I have a privileged epistemic access to my own self. However, he does not appear
to conceive of this epistemic privilege primarily in terms of immunity to error. It
consists rather of the fact that I have a special ‘immediate’ or ‘direct’ knowledge
of myself; that is to say, a knowledge that is not based on observation or
inference, and cannot be ‘deduced as indirect knowledge from some other
more direct knowledge’ (WWR I }18, 102). Insofar as I know my body merely
as ‘an object among objects’, my access to it is no more immediate than the access
others have to it, or than the access I have to their bodies. But I also have an
immediate epistemic access to my own body, which gives me a particularly
intimate acquaintance with it:
It is just this double knowledge of our own body which gives us information about that
body itself, about its action and movement following on motives, as well as about its
suffering through outside impressions, in a word, about what it is, not as representation,
but as something over and above this, and hence what it is in itself. We do not have such
immediate information about the nature, action, and suffering of any other real objects.
(WWR I }18, 103; last emphasis mine; cf. II xxii, 281)5
5 Schopenhauer unfortunately assumes that the kind of immediate, non-inferential, and not
‘purely’ representational experience I have of my own body must also be an experience of it as it is ‘in
itself’, since it does not answer to the strictures of the principle of sufficient reason. This appears to
confuse the manner of knowing (‘immediately’) with its content (the ‘thing-in-itself’). The value of
his insight, however, can be separated from this particular way of formulating it.
Compassion and Selflessness
165
A similar distinction may be applied to the experience of mental states. I may
sometimes have an ‘indirect’ or ‘objective’ experience of one of my desires, for
example: I become acquainted with it much as I would become acquainted with
the desire of someone else (as when I infer it as the best explanation of a
behaviour that, although it is my behaviour, appears otherwise unintelligible to
me); most commonly, my experience of my desires is ‘direct’ rather than
inferential, and so ‘subjective’, insofar as I have an especially intimate experience
of them as my desires. This ‘direct’ acquaintance I have with my own self,
particularly my own interests and desires, is manifested in two respects relevant
to the explanation of egoism.
In the first place, it indicates an epistemic proximity that gives them a
vividness and urgency that is denied to my merely ‘indirect’ representation of
the interests and desires of others. It is this vividness and urgency that explains
my overvaluation of my desires and interests by granting them their special ‘right’
in my eyes. In other words, in Schopenhauer’s view, the egoist overvalues his own
interests because he fails to recognize or otherwise fully appreciate the ‘reality’ of
others with interests of their own.
In the second place, the epistemic proximity that gives my interests their
vividness and urgency also accounts for the special role they play in my consciousness generally. As Schopenhauer puts it, ‘in consequence of the subjectivity
essential to every consciousness . . . everything is always closely associated with
self-consciousness’ (BM }14, 132). In speaking of the ‘subjectivity essential to
every consciousness’, Schopenhauer refers to the fact that my own interests shape
the consciousness I take of the surrounding world: everything in that world is
represented in relation to my ‘self-consciousness’; that is to say, in terms of its
impact on the pursuit of my interests.
This suggests that the distinctive blindness of the egoist is not simply that he
fails to recognize the ‘reality’ of others with interests of their own. In fact,
Schopenhauer calls this stance ‘theoretical egoism’, and dismisses it as requiring
‘not so much a refutation as a cure’ (WWR I }18, 104). It is only ‘in a practical
respect’ that the egoist ‘regards and treats only his own person as a real person,
and all others as mere phantoms’ (ibid.). It is not altogether clear what this
distinction between theoretical and practical egoism amounts to.6 The most
promising suggestion is that, although the egoist recognizes the existence of
others with interests of their own, his view of them remains fundamentally
framed by his interests: others and their interests appear only as potential
6 The distinction is important in Kant, where it assumes a particular significance: the ‘practical
point of view’ is the point of view of agency and deliberation, from which I must regard myself as
free (see his Groundwork for a Metaphysics of Morals, 448); by contrast, the ‘theoretical point of view’
is the point of view from which I consider myself an object in the world, subject to the laws
regulating it. It is doubtful that Schopenhauer would use this distinction in the same way since, in
his view, the ‘practical point of view’ is one from which I regard myself as the only person, and it is
hard to see how such a point of view could be constitutive of agency.
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obstacles or instruments for the satisfaction of his interests; that is to say, as mere
objective complications, which his deliberations about how to achieve his ends
have to take into account. Thus, the egoist may well be aware that those others
whose interests conflict with his own will suffer from their frustration, but this
fact is granted a purely practical—that is to say, from this perspective, instrumental—significance. In the last analysis, Schopenhauer notes, the egoist ‘ultimately regards only his own person as truly real, looking upon others virtually
only as phantoms, attributing to them only a relative existence insofar as they
may be a means or an obstacle to his ends’ (BM }22, 213).
Schopenhauer appears drawn to this conception of egoism—on which the
overvaluation of his interests by the egoist does not rest on an evaluative
comparison with the interests of others, in which the decisive consideration is
that his interests are his—because he assumes that the bare fact that my interests
are mine, and those of others are theirs, could not make any meaningful ethical
difference. This assumption appears in turn to rest on the notion that the
personal significance my interests have for me is ultimately nothing more than
an effect of my epistemic proximity to them; that is to say, a kind of illusion.
Though left implicit, this assumption is fundamental to Schopenhauer’s conception of compassion and will be the target of Nietzsche’s deepest criticism of it.
It should be no surprise, in view of the preceding discussion, to find Schopenhauer define compassion as a condition in which I manage to have as direct an
acquaintance with the interests of others as I have with my own, which gives me a
different appreciation of the sufferings of others. They no longer are merely
objects of indirect acquaintance, which are apprehended as instrumental complications in the pursuit of my own interests, but they rather move me as directly
as my own interests do. The distinctive mark of compassion, for Schopenhauer,
is that ‘another’s suffering in itself and as such directly becomes my motive’:
compassion thus consists of a ‘wholly direct and even instinctive participation in
another’s sufferings’ (BM }18, 163; my emphases). This view of compassion
elicits the following question:
But how is it possible for a suffering which is not mine and does not touch me to become
just as directly a motive as only my own ordinarily does, and to move me to action? As
I have said, only by the fact that although it is given to me merely as something external,
merely by means of external perception or knowledge, I nevertheless feel it with him , feel it
as my own, and yet not within me, but in another person . . . But this presupposes that to a
certain extent I have identified myself with the other man, and in consequence the barrier
between ego and non-ego is for the moment abolished; only then do the other man’s
affairs, his need, distress, and suffering, directly become my own. I no longer look at him
as if he were something given to me by empirical intuitive perception, as something
strange and foreign, as a matter of indifference, as something entirely different from me.
On the contrary, I share the suffering in him, in spite of the fact that his skin does not
enclose my nerves. Only in this way can his woe, his distress, become a motive for me;
otherwise it can be absolutely only my own. (BM }18, 165–6)
Compassion and Selflessness
167
The difficulty is to understand what this ‘identification’ amounts to. The most
common view is that Schopenhauer invokes the ideality of the ‘principle of
individuation’ (the transcendental forms of space and time) to make room for the
possibility of an insight into the essential identity of all individuals. The required
sort of identification with others would consist of precisely this insight (BM }22,
209–10; see WWR I }66, 372). According to this common interpretation,
Schopenhauer’s reasoning would go as follows: I cannot be moved by anything
other than my own weal and woe; when I am egoistic and pursue my own
interests without regard for those of others, I am duped by the illusion of
individuation, which leaves me indifferent to their weal and woe; on some
occasions, I manage an insight into the identity of all beings and come to
recognize that the weal and woe of others is also my own; my egoism is then
replaced with genuine compassion.
There are well-known difficulties with this reasoning. For example, it rests on
what Nietzsche calls ‘the unprovable doctrine of the One Will ’ (GS 99), a false
inference from the ideality of space and time to the unity of the world as it is in
itself.7 But the most damaging objection denies that compassion so construed
can be genuinely altruistic. This objection comes in two versions.
Nietzsche develops the first version of the objection in his early works. He
observes that if compassion were to rest on a numerical identification with the
sufferer, then the pain felt by the compassionate agent at the sight of the pain of
another would have to be identical with it. But, as Nietzsche stresses repeatedly, this
simply misdescribes the phenomenology of compassion: ‘That compassion . . . is the
same kind of thing as the suffering at the sight of which it arises, or that it possesses an
especially subtle, penetrating understanding of suffering, are propositions contradicted by experience’ (D 133). For instance, ‘what a difference there nonetheless
remains between a toothache and the ache (compassion) that the sight of a
toothache evokes’ (HH I 104). If we concede to Schopenhauer that our compassionate acts can only be motivated by the pain caused in us by the pain of another, it
follows that our compassion can be really nothing more than covert egoism:
It is misleading to call the suffering (Leid) we may experience at such a sight, and which
can be of varying kinds, compassion (Mit-Leid), for it is under all circumstances a
suffering which he who is suffering in our presence is free of: it is our own, as the suffering
he feels is his own. But it is only this suffering of our own which we get rid of when we
perform deeds of compassion. (D 133; see HH I 103, 133)
According to the second version of this objection, compassion can amount to
nothing more than enlightened egoism precisely insofar as it rests on the
recognition by the compassionate person of his (numerical) identity with the
sufferer. As one recent commentator puts it, ‘after all, the altruist does act for
the sake of his own interests, the only difference between him and the egoist
7 See Simmel (1986: chapter 3).
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being that he acts for the sake of the interests of his metaphysical rather than his
empirical self, so, we might put it, the empirical altruist turns out to be a
metaphysical egoist’.8
Both versions of the objection of egoism might seem too quick, however,
when we consider an important passage in which Schopenhauer criticizes the
conception of compassion proposed by Cassina.9 According to Cassina, compassion rests on a peculiar ‘deception of the imagination’ whereby ‘we put ourselves
in the position of the sufferer, and have the idea that we are suffering his pains in
our person’ (BM }16, 147). Schopenhauer rejects this view on the ground that
compassion requires that ‘at every moment we remain clearly conscious that he is
the sufferer, not we; and it is precisely in his person, not in ours, that we feel the
suffering, to our grief and sorrow. We suffer with him and hence in him; we feel
his pain as his and do not imagine that it is ours’ (BM }16, 147).
The rejection of Cassina’s view bears on both versions of the objection of
egoism. In rejecting this view, Schopenhauer at least implicitly agrees that the
pain the sight of another’s pain evokes in me when I feel compassion is not
identical with it.10 And he at least implicitly recognizes that if I were to take the
pain of another to be to my own, my response to it would become inevitably
egoistic. More concrete cases of internalization of the interests of others vividly
illustrate the problem. For example, an over-anxious mother can instil in her
child a strong aversion to danger, which may not have been there to begin with.
In this case, the interest of the mother acquires for the child the same vividness
and urgency as his own, simply because, through a process known as internalization, it actually becomes his own. But when the interest of the mother, once it is so
internalized, motivates the child to avoid some perceived danger, the resulting
action can hardly be thought to be motivated by his altruistic concern for her
well-being. For his action to be altruistic, he would have to recognize that the
interest from which he acts is hers, and not his own.
Schopenhauer’s rejection of Cassina’s view seems to imply that compassion
cannot be thought to rest on a numerical identification with others. And in fact,
several of his other formulations suggest that compassion actually rests on a
qualitative type of identification: ‘compassion . . . would consist in one individual’s again recognizing in another his own self, his true inner nature’ (BM }22,
209); or: ‘virtue must spring from the intuitive knowledge that recognizes in
another’s individuality the same nature as in one’s own’ (WWR I }66, 368).
Although I am numerically different from others, I share the same nature with
them. At first glance, qualitative identification looks to provide a promising
8 Young (2005: 183).
9 Ubaldo Cassina (1736–1824), a professor of moral philosophy at Parma, published in 1788
the Analytical Essay on Compassion, in which he argues that ‘compassion originates in a momentary
deception of imagination by which we ourselves take the place of the sufferer and then imagine
ourselves to experience his pain’.
10 See Cartwright (1988: 562).
Compassion and Selflessness
169
account of compassion. For to be moved by the sufferings of another, I must first
see him as a being whose nature is identical to my own; that is to say, a being with
interests of his own, and a susceptibility to suffering when they are frustrated.
But such a qualitative identification is certainly not sufficient for compassion.
For one thing, I remarked earlier that on any plausible account of egoism, even
the egoist is capable of recognizing that others are susceptible to suffering. And
for another, cruelty, which consists in taking pleasure in the sufferings of others,
would simply not be possible without such recognition. And even when such
qualitative identification elicits a sense of solidarity with those beings who are,
like me, susceptible to suffering, it is still not evident that the resulting concern to
alleviate their sufferings will necessarily be genuinely altruistic.11 As Nietzsche
subtly observes, I could, out of what plausibly looks like solidarity with them, be
motivated to alleviate the suffering of those beings with whom I share a condition
not because I am concerned for their well-being but because I wish to alleviate my
own anxiety about my condition by convincing myself that it is not as fragile and
vulnerable as their plight might make it appear to be (D 133).
The insufficiency of qualitative identification to account for it may well
explain why Schopenhauer continues to insist that compassion also requires
numerical identification, the insight that ‘we are all one and the same entity’,
and that to the compassionate individual, ‘the others are not a non-ego for him,
but an “I once more”’ (BM }22, 210–1; see WWR I }66, 372). Since the cruel
individual is able to take pleasure in the sufferings of others only if he sees these as
similar to his own, but located in some numerically different individual, then
numerical identification, which would make him see the sufferings of others as
his own, would undercut cruelty and leave compassion as the only possible
response (see BM }22, 204–5). The problem is that, as we saw earlier, by
Schopenhauer’s own lights, numerical identification has unwelcome consequences: it deprives compassion of its essential altruistic character.
We might find one way out of this difficulty by reconsidering the objection of
egoism and the manner in which Schopenhauer’s critique of Cassina bears on it.
The objection simply assumes that what I have called here ‘numerical identification’ turns compassion into a form of ‘metaphysical egoism’; that is, for all
practical purposes, similar to the ordinary ‘empirical egoism’ Schopenhauer
denounces. But it is possible to read in the critique of Cassina a challenge to
this very assumption.
One possible way of construing Schopenhauer’s challenge is that, in his view,
Cassina would take the ‘deception’ of the compassionate individual to consist of
an expansion of the boundaries of his individual empirical ego so as to encompass
those others who are the objects of his compassion. By remaining mired in the
illusion of individuation, he would therefore also remain an egoist of the
11 Cartwright (2008) proposes to think of Schopenhauerian compassion in terms of solidarity.
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ordinary ‘empirical’ kind. By contrast, in the view Schopenhauer advocates,
compassion rests on a dissolution of the boundaries of individuation: it is not
that I mistakenly take others to be a part of me, it is rather that there is no me and
them any longer. For Cassina, compassion involves an expansion of my sense of
self—it is far more encompassing than the narrow view of the ordinary egoist
suggests. For Schopenhauer, meanwhile, compassion requires dissolution of my
sense of self, and his insistence that when we feel compassion for another we must
‘remain clearly conscious that he is the sufferer, not we’, is only meant to apply to
our ordinary empirical view of things, a view which we also recognize to be
illusory.12 As a consequence, there would be something fundamentally wrong in
the suggestion on which the objection rests, that compassion is a kind of
‘metaphysical egoism’, which is nothing more than ‘empirical egoism’ under a
different guise.
In the terms of Schopenhauer’s metaphysics, the distinction between expanding the boundaries of one’s individual ego and dissolving them is permissible.
But what a dissolution of the boundaries of individuation precisely amounts to is
less than clear. Schopenhauer’s view is that it essentially consists of an insight: ‘He
perceives that the distinction between himself and others, which to the wicked
man is so great a gulf, belongs only to a fleeting, deceptive phenomenon’ (WWR
I }66, 372). Although Schopenhauer officially bases this insight on his own
version of transcendental idealism—the ‘deceptive phenomenon’ is the transcendental forms of space and time—we might also suppose that it results from a
certain appreciation of the roots of egoism. I overvalue my own interests because
I stand in a close epistemic proximity to them and because they frame my
representation of others and their interests in a way that is bound to limit my
appreciation of them. Since I am naturally obnubilated by the interests with
which I am ‘directly’ acquainted, and thus represent others and their interests
only in terms of their impact on the realization of those interests, I am naturally
unable to see the well-being of others as an object of independent concern.
The recognition of these epistemic facts at the root of my egoism would
presumably contribute to disabling it by inducing me to deny any special
importance to the fact that those interests are my own. And it does so, presumably, by suggesting that the personal significance of those interests—of the fact
that they are mine—is nothing more than an illusion created by the fact that
I happen to stand in a special epistemic proximity to them. For my ‘direct’
acquaintance with my own interests certainly explains why they would have a
special vividness for me and why I would be in a particularly good position to
12 I can rightly suspect that there is something wrong with my perception if I fail to see the stick
in the water as bent, even though I know this perceptual impression to be an illusion. Likewise, I can
rightly suspect that something has gone wrong if I confuse (empirically) my suffering with the
suffering of others, even though I also know the distinction between me and them to be a
transcendental illusion.
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171
attend to them, but it cannot justify my giving them a higher standing than
interests with which I am not so directly acquainted.
Schopenhauer’s preferred example of compassion—the man who dies for his
country out of an identification with it (BM }22, 212–13)—hardly sheds light on
the idea of a dissolution of the boundaries of individuation. For it might certainly
be taken to suggest that identification is in fact the expansion of one’s sense of
self, so as to include in it an identity as citizen of a country. Arguably, the point of
the analogy is rather to evoke a condition where the concern for suffering remains
as strong as it is for the egoist but where the spatio-temporal location of this
suffering, or its epistemic proximity to the individual, has become insignificant.
2. COMPASSION AND RESIGNATION
Schopenhauer declares that ‘from the same source from which all goodness,
affection, virtue, and nobility of character spring, there ultimately arises also what
I call denial of the will-to-live’ (WWR I }68, 378). This might be taken to suggest
that the altruistic selflessness achieved in compassion is similar to the ascetic
selflessness achieved through ‘complete resignation’. Although it is Schopenhauer’s ‘official’ view, it does not withstand close scrutiny.
Both forms of selflessness involve a devaluation by the individual of his own
interests, but the nature of the devaluation differs significantly from one to the
other. The devaluation involved in altruistic selflessness is relative: it is only
insofar as they are his own that the compassionate individual devalues his interests;
that is to say, comes to regard them to be no more important than the interests of
others. The devaluation involved in ascetic selflessness, by contrast, is absolute: it
is insofar as they are interests of a certain kind, namely, for example, sensual or
bodily or natural interests, or simply, as is ultimately the case for Schopenhauer,
insofar as they are interests, that the ascetic individual devalues his interests. For
ascetic selflessness is a condition of ‘disinterestedness’, or a condition in which
one no longer takes an interest in anything.
In contrast to the ascetic, the altruist continues to value these interests, at least
in others, since his altruism consists in preventing or eliminating their frustration. It might therefore be tempting to assume that, in Schopenhauer’s eyes, the
altruist’s selflessness consists in the sacrifice of his own interests to those of others,
and that compassion has this self-sacrifice in common with asceticism. But this
would be a mistake. If the basis of altruistic compassion is identification with
others then the valuation of the interests of others must consistently also apply to
one’s own interests. Recognizing the identity, whether numerical or qualitative,
of the suffering of another with my own gives me no reason to attend to it unless
I regard my own suffering as worth attending to. If I do not, then I must consider
that the sole fact that the suffering is the other’s and not my own to be a reason to
attend to it. But it is hard to see how that could be a reason.
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The ascetic individual, by contrast, devalues his interests insofar as they are
interests at all. Having interests is objectionable, for Schopenhauer, because they
are the source of suffering. And freeing ourselves from suffering ultimately
requires achieving a condition of ‘disinterestedness’ or ‘will-lessness’ (WWR
I }65, 360). If ascetic resignation rests on a devaluation of one’s interests simply
because they are interests, and not on the ground that they are one’s own, then in
what sense does it produce selflessness? The answer to this question must be found,
once again, in Schopenhauer’s conception of the self. Ascetic resignation, Schopenhauer suggests, provides an ‘opportunity no longer to be I’ (WWR II xli, 507).
This indicates that my self, in the present context, designates not a particular
kind of being—such as a coherent organization of traits, states, and dispositions—of which I may or may not be conscious, but a certain kind of conscious
experience, a sense of self, or a representation of something as me or mine.
Schopenhauer calls it ‘the I or ego proper’ (WWR II xxxi, 377) or simply
‘subjectivity’ (WWR II xxx, 368). The relation between the will and this sense
of self depends on a particular thesis, which he calls ‘the primacy of the will in
self-consciousness’ (WWR II xix, 201): it is as will that I become conscious of
myself. The following passage describes his main argument for this thesis:
Not only the consciousness of other things, i.e., the apprehension of the external world,
but also self-consciousness, as already mentioned, contains a knower and a known, otherwise it would not be a consciousness. For consciousness consists in knowing, but knowing
requires a knower and a known. Therefore self-consciousness could not exist if there were
not in it a known opposed to the knower and different therefrom . . . Therefore, a
consciousness that was through and through pure intelligence would be impossible.
The intelligence is like the sun that does not illuminate space unless an object exists by
which its rays are reflected. The knower himself, precisely as such, cannot be known,
otherwise he would be the known of another knower. But as the known in self-consciousness we find exclusively the will. (WWR II xix, 201–2; cf. FR 207–12)
Schopenhauer’s argument rests on a certain conception of consciousness as
‘illumination’. Light cannot itself be perceived, even though it makes perception possible: I cannot see light, I can only see the objects that reflect it, yet
I would not be able to see these objects without the light they reflect. If I were
only ‘intelligence’, then, I could never become conscious of myself: my consciousness would be filled with the objective world since I would only be the
light shining on it. I must therefore be something more than a pure intellect to
become conscious of myself. That something is the will: it is as will that I become
conscious of myself. The will is therefore, according to Schopenhauer, ‘the I or ego
proper’ (WWR II xxxi, 377).
This view departs from the Cartesian view, according to which I could be
conscious of myself as the bearer of mental states other than the ‘affections of the
will’, such as simple perceptions; that is to say, as a ‘pure knowing subject’, or
thinking thing. But Schopenhauer’s appeal to the metaphor of illumination
Compassion and Selflessness
173
explains why, on his view, the consciousness of my own perceptions could not
produce self-consciousness, or why I could not be conscious of myself as a pure
knowing subject. If to perceive is to be conscious, and if such consciousness is
merely the illumination of an external object, then there is nothing to my
consciousness of my perceptions over and above my consciousness of their
objects. There is, in particular, no self I can apprehend as the subject of that
consciousness. This is not to say that I cannot be aware of the existence of
knowing subjects who are filled with such perceptions, but it is to say that
I cannot be conscious of myself as such a knowing subject. As Schopenhauer
says in the passage: ‘The knower himself, precisely as such, cannot be known,
otherwise he would be the known of another knower’ (second emphasis mine).
If I can be conscious of my self only as ‘will’, then ‘will-lessness’ is indeed
appropriately characterized as a condition of selflessness; that is to say, a condition in which there is no sense of self or subjectivity left. Selflessness, in this case,
designates a certain kind of experience, in which an individual loses his sense of
self to become absorbed in the pure contemplation of a world in which he has
lost all interest: ‘[w]e lose ourselves entirely in this object, to use a pregnant
expression; in other words, we forget our individuality, our will, and continue to
exist only as pure subject, as clear mirror of the object, so that it is as though the
object alone existed without anyone to perceive it’ (WWR I }34, 178–9; cf. }36,
185–6; }68, 390; cf. }38, 199; PP II }205, 416).
3. NIETZSCHE’S CRITIQUE OF COMPASSION
Nietzsche’s critique of the Schopenhauerian conception of altruistic selflessness
often looks scattered and tentative, I believe, because he has understandable
difficulties in circumscribing precisely what Schopenhauer means by it. His
main challenge, as I noted, is to the notion that altruism requires selflessness.
Nietzsche’s earliest version of this challenge is based on psychological egoism, the
view that human agents are incapable of selfless motivation. His argument goes
roughly as follows: he would grant that some actions are altruistically good, deny
that actions can ever be selfless, and conclude that altruistic goodness cannot
depend on selflessness. As he puts it, ‘our counter-reckoning is that we shall
restore to men their goodwill towards the actions decried as egoistic and restore
to these actions their value’ (D 148). His arguments for psychological egoism
look dubious,13 but they gain greater appeal if we locate them in the context of
his critique of Schopenhauer. Given that Schopenhauer rejects the notion
of intrinsic goodness (and the associated notion of desire based on a recognition
of the intrinsic value of an object), his difficulties in supplying a compelling
13 I review some of these difficulties in Reginster (2000a: 179–84).
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account of compassionate identification plausibly invite the conclusion that
compassion should be construed as a covert form of ‘self-enjoyment’ (HH
I 104; see 133).
Nevertheless, Nietzsche soon adopts a different strategy, which consists in
granting the possibility of selflessness, examining the various guises it might
assume, and asking whether selflessness is, under any of these possible guises,
actually consistent with, let alone necessary for, altruism:
There is no other way: the feelings of devotion, self-sacrifice for one’s neighbor, the whole
morality of self-denial must be questioned mercilessly and taken to court . . . There is too
much charm and sugar in these feelings of ‘for others’, ‘not for myself’, for us not to need
to become doubly suspicious at this point and to ask: ‘are these not perhaps—seductions?’
(BGE 33)
In one way of understanding it, selflessness is the attitude of the individual
who has a determinate sense of self, in the form of specific interests and desires,
which he deliberately ignores or denies. This is selflessness as self-denial, the
devaluation of one’s own self, of one’s interests and desires. I noted earlier that
I can regard my interests as worth less than those of others either because of their
content, or because they are mine. There is nothing particularly selfless about
favouring the ends of others when I judge their content more valuable than that
of my own ends. Sacrificing my interests for the sake of others just because they
are mine, by contrast, comes closer to one plausible way of understanding
altruistic selflessness. But it also highlights the strangeness of this attitude,
which Nietzsche describes as ‘the apparently crazy idea that a man should esteem
the actions he performs for another more highly than those he performs for
himself’ (WP 269).
The strangeness of this idea inclines Nietzsche to suspect that hidden ulterior
motives must animate those whose valuation of the well-being of others is
directly linked to a devaluation of their own. Here are two representative
examples. Nietzsche sometimes takes this type of self-devaluation to be a narcissistic pathology, apparently caused by a disruption of the individual’s self-esteem.
Vitiated as it is bound to be by this pathology, the motivation for benevolence is
itself narcissistic—the need to restore the disrupted self-esteem:
Let us for the time being agree that benevolence and beneficence are constituents of the
good man; only let us add: ‘presupposing that he is first benevolently and beneficently
inclined towards himself ! ’ For without this—if he flees from himself, hates himself, does
harm to himself—he is certainly not a good man. For in this case all he is doing is
rescuing himself from himself in others: let those others look to it that they suffer no ill
effects from him, however well disposed he may want to appear! (D 516)
I say to you: your love of the neighbor is your bad love of yourselves. You flee to your
neighbor from yourself and would like to make a virtue out of that: but I see through your
‘selflessness’ . . . You cannot endure yourself and do not love yourselves enough: now you
want to seduce your neighbor to love and then gild yourselves with his error. (Z I 16)
Compassion and Selflessness
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On other occasions, Nietzsche argues that the compassionate service of others
should be seen not as a consequence of self-denial, but as a deliberate cause of it.
In this view, ‘self-sacrifice’ or ‘self-denial’ are opportunities for the gratification of
the agent’s ‘will to power’, though in circumstances in which this gratification is
significantly constrained by his ‘weakness’ (GM II 16; III 14). In the terms of the
Genealogy, the will to power is ‘a desire to overcome, a desire to throw down, a
desire to become master, a thirst for enemies and resistances and triumphs’ (GM
I 13); that is to say, a desire for the overcoming of resistance. Unable to overcome
resistance outside themselves, the ‘weak’ turn their will to power inward, by
creating in themselves, through the deliberate frustration of their desires (‘cruelty
turned against oneself ’), the very resistance they proceed to overcome (GM II 16;
see III 10; HH I 141). This would show that the ‘seduction’ of ‘self-sacrifice for
one’s neighbour’ has nothing to do with an altruistic concern for his well-being:
This hint will at least make less enigmatic the enigma of how contradictory concepts such
as selflessness, self-denial, self-sacrifice can suggest an ideal, a kind of beauty; and one thing
we know henceforth—I have no doubt of it—and that is the nature of the delight that the
selfless man, the self-denier, the self-sacrificer feels from the first: this delight is tied to
cruelty. So much for the present about the origin of the moral value of the ‘unegoistic’,
about the soil from which this value grew: only the bad conscience, only the will to selfmaltreatment provided the conditions for the value of the unegoistic. (GM II 18)
In Schopenhauer’s view, however, ascetic self-denial is not motivated by the
agent’s will to power, but by his desire to achieve a condition of painlessness.
This he undertakes by denying his desires and interests as such, since they are the
source of pain (WWR I }65, 360). But if, following Schopenhauer’s own
suggestion, we take altruistic selflessness to bear a close connection to ascetic
selflessness, further difficulties arise. The problem is not simply that there is a
difference between seeking to deny desires as such and seeking to deny them a
special status in virtue of their being one’s own. The problem is rather that ascetic
selflessness is actually incompatible with altruism. For ascetic selflessness is a
condition in which one has become indifferent to suffering, whereas altruistic
selflessness is a condition in which one’s concern for that suffering arguably grows
greater since the compassionate agent is supposed to care not only about his own
suffering but about the suffering of all beings susceptible to suffering.
That the concern for suffering, including one’s own, must persist is implied by
Schopenhauer’s view that our altruistic compassion essentially rests on an identification with the sufferer, whereby his suffering moves us as ‘directly’ as our own.
It follows that the attitude we have towards our own suffering determines the
attitude we take towards the suffering of others. If compassionate selflessness is
similar to ascetic selflessness, we would therefore expect the compassionate agent
to be as indifferent to the sufferings of others as he has become to his own. Of
those ‘more accustomed to enduring pain’, Nietzsche observes that ‘since they
themselves have suffered, it does not seem to them so unfair that others should
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suffer’ (D 133). Nietzsche raises a similar objection against the Christian antecedent to Schopenhauer’s compassionate identification—the claim that one
ought to love others as one loves oneself: ‘If man is sinful through and through,
then he ought only to hate himself. Fundamentally, he would have to treat his
fellow men on the same basis as he treats himself ’ (WP 388; cf. D 146).
These obvious problems afflicting the attempt to conceive of altruistic selflessness in terms of self-denial lead Nietzsche to consider a different concept of
selflessness in connection with altruism (if only because, as I noted above, on
Schopenhauer’s considered view, altruistic selflessness actually precludes taking
one’s well-being to be worth less than that of others). It is no longer the attitude of
the individual who has a sense of self, in the form of specific interests and desires,
which he deliberately ignores or denies. It is rather the peculiar psychological
condition of an individual who lacks, or has lost, a sense of self. For Schopenhauer, aesthetic contemplation and ascetic resignation are supposed to produce a
species of this condition. I have noted how, in virtue of involving indifference to
one’s interests and the sufferings caused by their frustration, it bears no plausible
connection to altruism, and indeed looks incompatible with it. For this reason,
Nietzsche focuses on a different species of this condition, which is more plausibly
associated with altruism and which is apparently inspired by Schopenhauer’s
own characterization of compassionate selflessness.
Schopenhauer’s most common and most compelling example of compassionate identification is the case of the individual who sacrifices himself for the sake of
his country out of an identification with it (BM }22, 212–13): ‘when Arnold von
Winkelried exclaimed, “Comrades, true and loyal to our oath, care for my wife
and child in remembrance thereof”, and then clasped in his arms as many hostile
spears as he could grasp, some may imagine that he had a selfish intention, but
I cannot’ (BM }15, 139). If this identification were construed as an expansion of his
sense of self so as to include in it, in addition to his identity as husband and father,
an identity as citizen of a fatherland, Nietzsche observes, it would undermine the
altruistic character of his sacrifice. His sacrifice would not be ‘self-sacrifice’ but
only the sacrifice of one portion of his self for the sake of another:
A soldier wishes he could fall on the battlefield for his victorious fatherland; for his
supreme desire is victor in his fatherland’s victory . . . But are these all unegoistic states?
Are these deeds of morality miracles because they are, in Schopenhauer’s words, ‘impossible, yet real’? Is it not clear that in all these instances man loves something of himself, an
idea, a desire, an offspring, more than something else of himself, that he thus divides his
nature and sacrifices one part of it to the other? (HH I 57)
For this reason, Nietzsche focuses on the peculiar case of an individual who has
no sense of self outside of his identification with another, or with a group of
others: he thinks of himself only as a ‘function’ or extension of others, or of a
group of others (GS 116). Even so conceived, the selfless individual is, in
Nietzsche’s mind, incapable of genuine altruism. Here is a relevant passage:
Compassion and Selflessness
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No altruism!—In many people I find an overwhelmingly forceful and pleasurable desire to
be a function: they have a very refined sense for all those places where precisely they could
‘function’ and push in those directions. Examples include those women who transform
themselves into some function of a man that happens to be underdeveloped in him, and
thus become his purse or his politics or his sociability. Such beings preserve themselves
best when they find a fitting place in another organism; if they fail to do this, they become
grumpy, irritated, and devour themselves. (GS 119)
As Nietzsche defines it in the preceding sections (GS 116–17), a selfless
individual is one who lacks a ‘sense of self’ (GS 117), insofar as he does not
think of himself as a full-blown individual, but sees himself only as a ‘function’ of
another individual, or of a group of individuals, with whom he has identified.
Nietzsche insists that the attitudes and actions of such a ‘selfless’ individual
cannot be regarded as altruistic. He sometimes favours, in this connection, the
image of the parasite: ‘In many cases of feminine love, perhaps including the
most famous ones above all, love is merely a more refined form of parasitism, a
form of nestling down in another soul, sometimes even in the flesh of another—
alas, always decidedly at the expense of “the host”!’ (CW 3).
Leaving aside the misogynistic allusions in both passages, we should ask in
precisely what way this selfless individual fails to be altruistic. For thinking of
oneself as a ‘function’ of another certainly seems to imply that one will be
motivated to do everything in what one believes to be their interest. It seems as
though this selfless individual would be the quintessential altruist. Indeed,
inasmuch as he lacks a sense of self, this individual cannot have selfish or selfinterested motives for the assistance he brings others in the way the ordinary
egoist does. Since he has no sense of self other than that of being a ‘function’ of
some other or group of others, he cannot think of the only interests he recognizes
as his—they are only the interests of the other, or the group of others, with whom
he is identified.14 We can make some progress by considering further characterizations of this species of selflessness: the selfless ideal is an ‘ideal slave’, a
psychological type Nietzsche describes in the following terms: ‘The ideal slave
(the “good man”).—He who cannot posit himself as a goal, nor posit any goals
for himself whatever, bestows honor upon selflessness—instinctively’ (WP 358).
Such an individual, he adds elsewhere, ‘can be only a means, he has to be used, he
needs someone who will use him’ (A 54).
14 Nietzsche declares that the individual who turns himself into a ‘function’ of another, or of a
group, manages, in this way, to ‘preserve himself’ (GS 119). This is odd given that the individual in
question precisely lacks the sense of a self to preserve in the first place. The statement is odd only if
we think of self-preservation in the customary way, which assumes an individual with a determinate
sense of self whose attitudes and actions aim at preserving it. But in the sense in which Nietzsche
uses it in this context, self-preservation might be a matter of maintaining any sense of self at all: the
selfless individual manages to have a sense of self only through his association or identification with
the other or group of which he makes himself a function. This also suggests that, even though
gaining and preserving a sense of self is the aim of identification, it is not necessarily its motivation.
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We are now in a position to understand why this condition would make him
incapable of genuine altruism. Though Nietzsche offers no clear, fully articulated
view on this matter, some clues he tosses our way inspire the following conjecture. To begin, we must note that, for him, altruism is a matter of both
motivation and competence. The altruistic agent must act out of a concern for
the well-being of others, but he must also possess certain competences, including
in particular a certain kind of knowledge or experience, without which he will
not be able to appreciate what that well-being requires, and so will be unable,
despite his best intentions, to contribute to it adequately.
Since the particular kind of selfless individual Nietzsche is inviting us to
consider here cannot really act out of self-interest as the ordinary egoist does
(for, to repeat, he has no sense of self other than that of being a ‘function’ of some
other or group of others), his defect must be found in the lack of some basic
competence essential to altruism. Consider an agent who is unable to ‘posit goals’
for herself, or herself as a goal. Following Nietzsche, let us imagine, as an instance
of such a self-less character, the blandly devoted wife who selflessly works for the
sake of her husband’s happiness.15 For whatever reason (early on, Nietzsche often
mentions the relentless conditioning of the ‘morality of customs’; see D 9, 107;
GS 116), she has no sense of self outside her association with her husband and so
cannot posit ends of her own, which means that she is unable to attach any
personal significance to the ends she does pursue. Having no ends of personal
significance, she is bereft of a certain sort of capacity: she has no appreciation of
the personal significance their ends have to those others she wants to help.
But, Nietzsche objects, the ability to appreciate the personal significance the
interests of others have for them is a necessary condition of genuine altruism. And
a selfless agent who has no interests of personal significance to her, and co-opts the
interests of others as a way of achieving a sense of self, is unable to acknowledge
and appreciate the fact that the interests of others are actually theirs. She may
appear single-mindedly devoted to the fulfilment of their interests, but she has no
appreciation for the personal significance these interests have for them. This explains
why those of us who have received help from such self-less care-givers frequently
resent and feel violated by the help: it is as if our own interests have been taken
away from us by these ‘altruists’ who insist on pursuing them for us.16
Think, for example, of the overbearing wife who identifies too closely with her
husband’s achievements and in this way might very well successfully help him to
15 This is an example proposed by Hampton (1993).
16 Consider this observation by Hampton (1993) about such a character: ‘he and others like him
not only have a poor sense of self-worth and a poor grip on what they owe to themselves . . . but also
a dearth of plans, projects, and goals that are uniquely their own. Thus, they decide to satisfy the
ends of others because they have so few ends of their own to pursue. This explanation accounts for
why those of us who have received help from such obsessive care-givers frequently resent and feel
violated by the help: it is as if our own ends of action have been seized and taken away from us by
these “helpers” when they insist on pursuing them for us’ (149).
Compassion and Selflessness
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become, say, a virtuoso. But if she fails to appreciate, in the process, the basic fact
that becoming a virtuoso was her husband’s interest, we will rightly suspect that
her efforts in fulfilling this interest possess no altruistic value. And the husband
himself might grow uncomfortable with this sort of help, even if it proves most
useful, and not feel properly cared for, as he senses that he, or his happiness
insofar as it is his, is not the proper focus of his wife’s concern.17 This interpretation of Nietzsche’s objection sheds some light on otherwise elusive statements
like the following:
It is richness in personality, abundance in oneself, overflowing and bestowing, instinctive
good health and affirmation of oneself, that produce great sacrifice and great love . . . and
if one is not firm and brave within oneself, one has nothing to bestow and cannot
stretch out one’s hand to protect and support (WP 388; cf. EH III, 5: ‘that gruesome
nonsense that love is supposed to be something “unegoistic”. One has to sit firmly upon
oneself . . . otherwise one is simply incapable of loving.’).
How does the discussion of this peculiar form of selflessness bear on the
critique of Schopenhauer? If compassionate identification is to consist of a
dissolution of the boundaries of individuation rather than an expansion of
them, then the selflessness of the Schopenhauerian altruist may well bear a
close resemblance to the self-lessness under consideration in Nietzsche’s discussion. If the man who sacrifices himself for his countrymen is not simply acting
out of an expanded understanding of his own interests, then he would have to be
an individual who does not think of himself as a full-blown individual, but sees
himself only as a ‘function’ of his countrymen, with whom he has identified. And
what he does for them could not be, for the reasons Nietzsche lays out, genuinely
altruistic.
Whether or not this construal of selflessness adequately captures Schopenhauer’s elusive conception of compassionate selflessness, it does point to a
potential deep problem with it. For at least the following seems clear about
this conception. Through identification, the compassionate individual ceases to
see himself and the other as separate individuals. It is not that he takes the two of
them to form a single individual, as Cassina had supposed—the other is part of
me, or I am part of the other—but that there really is no ‘me’ and no ‘other’
anymore. All that remains, and all that matters, in this perspective, is suffering. In
deploring and seeking to relieve this suffering, as the compassionate individual
does, it matters not at all that it is located in this or that region of time and space:
his sole concern is with de-individuated suffering. But we may wonder whether
deploring and seeking to relieve the sufferings of others with no thought of the
17 In fact, the kind of identification I have been considering also makes the kind of qualitative
identification Schopenhauer regards as an essential condition of compassion impossible, at least in
the following respect: to appreciate the frustrations of others, one must also appreciate the personal
significance the frustrated interests have for them, something impossible to do for someone who has
no interests of personal significance to begin with.
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individuals whose sufferings they are still captures something that remains
recognizable as altruistic compassion.
Nietzsche’s repeated emphasis on the capacity to posit ends ‘for himself’, or
‘himself’ as an end, or on the importance of ‘affirmation of oneself’, for the very
possibility of love strongly suggests that genuine altruism requires for him an
appreciation of the personal significance to the agent of his own interests. It also
points to a possible diagnosis of the fundamental defect of Schopenhauer’s view.
It would misrepresent the personal significance to the agent of his interests, and
therefore fail to recognize its importance.
Schopenhauer appears to suppose that the special personal significance assumed by my own interests is nothing more than a peculiar illusion created by
the fact that I stand in close epistemic proximity to them. Nietzsche, by contrast,
believes that there must be more to the special significance my own interests have
for me than their epistemic proximity (which would itself be at most a necessary
consequence of the fact that those interests are mine, and not what their being
mine consists of ). That Nietzsche holds such a view is at least implied by his
project to restore the value of ‘the actions decried as egoistic’, or by his endorsement of an ideal of ‘becoming oneself’. For to value egoism or self-becoming is to
assume that my interests are worth pursuing simply in virtue of their being mine.
And such an assumption would be hard to understand, let alone justify, if there
was nothing to their being mine over and above the fact that I happen to stand in
close epistemic proximity to them.
Nietzsche’s fundamental objection to Schopenhauer’s conception of compassion would thus be that it underestimates the importance of the personal
significance an individual’s own interests have for him. Schopenhauer’s own
critique of Cassina may help to bring out this point. This critique essentially
supposes it to be a requirement of altruistic compassion that the interests of
others be regarded as theirs. Schopenhauer insists on this requirement, we have
noted, because he wants to rule out an empirical interpretation of the identification compassion requires, which would turn compassion into a covert form of
egoism. But there is another possible interpretation of this requirement, which
Schopenhauer himself overlooks entirely, namely, that the genuine altruist is not
one who simply seeks to fulfil the interests of others, but one who helps others to
fulfil their interests. The altruist’s focus should not be on the interests themselves
but on the well-being of others, and on their interests only insofar as their
fulfilment contributes to it. The altruist, in other words, is required to appreciate
the fact that others value their interests at least in part because they experience
them as their own. And he can be so required only because such experience must
amount to more than the mere fact that they are more intimately acquainted with
their own interests than they are with the interests of others.
In contrast, by Schopenhauer’s own lights, the compassionate agent should
arguably not show any appreciation for the personal significance the interests of
others have for them. Showing such appreciation would only perpetuate the
Compassion and Selflessness
181
notion that the personal significance of his interests does matter, and this notion
is the very illusion that constitutes the basis of egoism, and so the fundamental
cause of immorality. In the final analysis, the deep philosophical stake of
Nietzsche’s dispute with Schopenhauer over the relevance of selflessness to
compassion concerns the nature and importance of the personal significance
each agent’s interests have for him; that is to say, of the fact that he experiences
them as his own. In conceiving of it as nothing more than an effect of their
epistemic proximity, Schopenhauer discounts its importance. In insisting on its
importance, Nietzsche must conceive of it as more than an effect of their
epistemic proximity, even if he offers few clues to the precise manner in which
he understands this richer notion of personal significance.
BIBL IO GR A PHY
In Nietzsche
Reference edition of Nietzsche’s works: Kritische Studien-Ausgabe, ed. Giorgio Colli and
Mazzino Montinari, 15 vols. Munich: Deutscher Taschenbuch Verlag and Walter de
Gruyter, 1988.
Beyond Good and Evil, trans. Walter Kaufmann. New York: Random House, 1966.
Daybreak, trans. R. J. Hollingdale. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1982.
Ecce Homo, trans. Walter Kaufmann. New York: Random House, 1969.
Human, All Too Human, trans. R. J. Hollingdale. Cambridge: Cambridge University
Press, 1986.
On the Genealogy of Morals, trans. Walter Kaufmann. New York: Random House, 1969.
(See also: On the Genealogy of Morality, trans. Maudemarie Clark and Alan J. Swensen.
Indianapolis: Hackett Publishing Company, 1998.)
Selected Letters of Friedrich Nietzsche, ed. and trans. C. Middleton. Indianapolis: Hackett
Publishing Company, 1996.
The Anti-Christ, trans. R. J. Hollingdale. Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1968.
The Case of Wagner, trans. Walter Kaufmann. New York: Random House, 1967.
The Gay Science, trans. Walter Kaufmann. New York: Random House, 1974.
The Will to Power, trans. Walter Kaufmann and R. J. Hollingdale. New York: Random
House, 1968.
Thus Spoke Zarathustra, trans. W. Kaufmann. Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1978.
In Schopenhauer
Reference edition of Schopenhauer’s works: Hübscher. Sämtliche Werke, ed. Arthur
Hubscher. Wiesbaden: Brockhaus, 1949.
BM On the Basis of Morality, trans. E. F. J. Payne. Providence, Oxford: Berghahn Books,
1995.
FR On the Fourfold Root of the Principle of Sufficient Reason. trans. E. F. J. Payne. La Salle,
IL: Open Court, 1974.
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PP I, II, Parerga and Paralipomena, vols. I and II, trans. E. F. J. Payne. New York: Oxford
University Press, 1974.
WWR I, II, The World as Will and Representation, vols. I and II, trans. E. F. J. Payne.
New York: Dover, 1969.
Other sources
Cartwright, David (1988).‘Schopenhauer’s compassion and Nietzsche’s pity’. SchopenhauerJahrbuch 69: 557–67.
——(2008). ‘Compassion and solidarity with sufferers: the metaphysics of Mitleid ’.
European Journal of Philosophy 16: 292–310.
Cassina, Ubaldo (1788). Saggio analitico sulla compassione. Parma: Stampa Reale.
Hampton, Jean (1993). ‘Selflessness and the loss of self’, in E. F. Paul, F. Miller, and
J. Paul (eds), Altruism. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.
Janaway, Christopher (2007). Beyond selflessness. Reading Nietzsche’s Genealogy. Oxford,
New York: Oxford University Press.
Kant, Immanuel (1958). Groundwork of the Metaphysic of Morals, trans. H. J. Paton.
New York: Harper & Row.
Reginster, Bernard (2000a). ‘Nietzsche on selflessness and the value of altruism’, The
History of Philosophy Quarterly 17: 177–200.
——(2000b). ‘Nietzsche’s “revaluation” of altruism’. Nietzsche-Studien Jubiläumsband
29: 199–219.
——(2006). The Affirmation of Life. Nietzsche on Overcoming Nihilism. Cambridge, MA:
Harvard University Press.
Simmel, Georg (1986). Schopenhauer and Nietzsche, trans. H. Loiskandl, D. Weinstein,
and M. Weinstein. Cambridge, MA: University of Massachusetts Press.
Young, Julian (2005). Schopenhauer. London: Routledge.
8
Nietzsche on Morality, Drives,
and Human Greatness
Christopher Janaway
1. A FORMULA FOR HUMAN GREATNESS
Especially in his later works Nietzsche makes a point of idealizing a kind of
attitude towards oneself. The attitude in question is sometimes wanting or
willing, sometimes loving, sometimes affirming or saying ‘Yes’. Nietzsche’s
formula for human greatness in Ecce Homo is, familiarly enough, ‘amor fati:
that you do not want anything to be different, not forwards, not backwards, not
for all eternity. Not just to tolerate necessity, still less to conceal it . . . but to love
it . . . ’ (EH, ‘Why I am so clever’, 10). And in Beyond Good and Evil he describes
‘the ideal of the most high-spirited, vital, world-affirming individual, who has
learned not just to accept and go along with what was and is, but who wants it
again and again just as it was and is through all eternity’ (BGE 56). This alludes to
the affirmation of eternal return, an attitude you might imagine yourself having if
you were so ‘well disposed to yourself and to life’ that when faced with ‘the
question in each and every thing, “Do you want this again and innumerable
times again?”’ you would want nothing more fervently (GS 341). The possibility
of glimpsing this ideal is granted to someone positioned ‘beyond good and evil,
and no longer, like Schopenhauer and the Buddha, under the spell and delusion
of morality’ (BGE 56). So in Nietzsche’s eyes it is a non-moral or supra-moral
ideal. Elsewhere Nietzsche makes clear the incompatibility between holding the
values of morality and being able to affirm the eternal recurrence of one’s life: ‘To
endure the idea of recurrence one needs: freedom from morality’.1
When he presents his test of ‘How well disposed you would have to become to
yourself and to life’, by means of the thought of eternal return (entertained in a
brief moment of isolation and vulnerability), Nietzsche mentions only two
extreme reactions: either gnashing of teeth, cursing, and being crushed, or
tremendous elation and longing. However, it is not clear that the well- or
1 KSA 11, 224 (publ. as WP 1060).
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Christopher Janaway
ill-disposedness in question must be simply a matter of either/or; it may be that
what is tested is the degree of your well-disposedness to yourself and to your life.2
Read in this way, the ideal will be that of attaining such well-disposedness to the
highest degree possible. Notice also that this ideal is not put in the form of an
imperative or injunction. Nietzsche does not here say how one ought to live. The
force of the passage is not ‘Live in such a way that you take this attitude to
yourself’. Rather, Nietzsche proceeds by questions and conditionals: if you were
confronted with the thought of eternal recurrence, how would you feel? If you
felt a tremendous elation, and if you adopted the practice of asking about each
and every thing ‘Do I want this again and again?’, and if you could manage to
answer ‘Yes’ every time, what degree of well-disposedness to yourself and life
would that confirm in you? There is of course an implied assertion: it would
show that you were well-disposed to yourself to the highest degree possible. But
Nietzsche does not here enjoin us to live in some way, nor does he even say that
this is how all of us or any of us should live, or ought to live, or ought to regard
our life. The text allows us, I think, to jettison the idea of imperatives here, and see
Nietzsche’s ideal as differing in this respect from morality, or at least morality as
Nietzsche tends to portray it. Here, I suggest, he is trying to describe what it would
be to be this ideal type of individual. Loose parallels might be to ask: how great a
specimen of physical prowess would you have to become to succeed in winning the
London Marathon ten times in a row? How great a composer would you have to
become to sustain consistent style, expressiveness, and narrative through writing a
cycle of four substantial operas? In these cases I do not enjoin you to do anything
but, by way of a question and a conditional, I make an implicit evaluative claim to
the effect that you would be excellent in one respect if you could do those things.
I simply say what a certain kind of greatness would consist in.
On the other hand, what is an ideal? Can there be an ideal that has no
normative implications? If some state is an ideal one to be in, that implies an
evaluative claim: the state is a good state to be in; it is also a better state to be in
than other relevant states (such as being sufficiently well-disposed to oneself only
to affirm selected parts of one’s life, or being so ill-disposed as to negate it all, or
being indifferent about most parts of it). An ideal state must also be, I take it, the
best state to be in relative to such a range of competitor states. It could perhaps
be argued that Nietzsche’s ideal must have some kind of normative force, if one
thought along the following lines: if a state is describable as good, better, or the
best to be in, it follows that someone would have reason to be in such a state, or
reason to want to be in such a state. And if this entailment were thought to hold
in general, then, if a state were the best to be in, someone would indeed have
more reason to be in it, or want to be in it, than any other relevant state, and
Nietzsche’s ideal would be at least implicitly normative. This is not the place to
2 Possibly also to ‘life’ as such in some wider sense that I shall not discuss here.
Morality, Drives, and Human Greatness
185
debate whether that general entailment from evaluative to normative status
holds, nor is it easy to see how we would show whether Nietzsche conceives
value in such a way that the entailment holds. If it does not hold, then Nietzsche’s
ideal of being so well-disposed to oneself and to life that one could affirm the
eternal return of each and every thing can be the best state for someone to be in,
without that someone having any reason to be in it or want to be in it. If the
entailment does hold, then someone would have reason to be in or want to be in
such a well-disposed state. But we should also think about the extension of the
‘someone’. One of the objections Nietzsche frequently throws at morality is its
assumption that all human agents ought to do, to feel, to be such-and-such or
have some reason to do, feel, or be such-and-such, and one of the relatively
uncontentious points in the interpretation of Nietzsche is that he wants to eschew
making any specific prescriptions that are binding on all agents.3 Part of the
explanation for this is his view that there is no one condition that is good for all
individuals. Another is that in his view only a restricted number of individuals are
capable of greatness. Must a good state be good for me if I can attain it? Can a
state be good for me only if I can attain it? The ground is somewhat tricky, but
here is one intelligible position: it would be good for someone to attain the state
of total self-affirmation, if, but only if, they are capable of total self-affirmation. If
this is accepted, then given Nietzsche’s view that only a few are capable of
attaining the ideal, any implicit normativity, any reason to be, or want to be,
totally self-affirming, would apply at most to a few human individuals.4
However, note that on this reading it is attaining or sustaining the state of
affirmation that is excellent, not what is affirmed. Nietzsche does not speak of
assessing or judging the amount of good that a life contains. Rather his question
seems to be: given the amount of suffering, lack, boredom, and triviality in a life,
how well-disposed can you be towards it? Elsewhere he talks of ‘Saying Yes to life
in its strangest and hardest problems’.5 So his stance would appear to be: life has
not fulfilled all my desires, it is not perfect, I cannot change that, but can I still
love it? That is the greatest test: to want, love, or say yes to what is strange and
hard, what is painful, harmful, or perhaps just tedious or meaningless (‘even this
spider and this moonlight between the trees’ in GS 341, ‘the small human being’
in Z, ‘The Convalescent’, 2)—to affirm what goes against one’s will or eludes its
scope. The notion of wanting even what goes against one’s will may sound
3 See, for example, GS 335: ‘Sitting in moral judgment should offend our taste. Let us leave such
chatter and such bad taste to . . . the many, the great majority! We, however, want to become who we
are—human beings who are new, unique, incomparable, who give themselves laws, who create
themselves!’
4 I am ignoring here the question whether other agents would have reason to promote the
greatness of the few capable of it. For an argument that this is Nietzsche’s position, see Hurka
(2007).
5 TI, ‘What I owe to the ancients’, 5. Nietzsche also quotes this passage again in EH, ‘The birth
of tragedy’, 3.
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Christopher Janaway
troubling, but elsewhere I have suggested that affirming the whole of one’s
unalterable life makes sense if one operates with a distinction between firstand second-order willing: ‘Numerous events in any life will be undergone,
remembered, or anticipated with a negative first-order attitude; but that is
compatible with a second-order attitude of acceptance, affirmation, or positive
evaluation towards one’s having had these negative experiences. If in some course
of events one is, say, humiliated, one’s experience is as such unwelcome, painful,
and so on: . . . Nietzsche poses [the] question: would you be well enough disposed
to want your life again, where that (second-order) wanting would embrace
among its objects the particular hateful and excruciating humiliation from
which you suffered?’6 So the most excellent human being would not be someone
who found everything in his or her life perfect, or even good or desirable, but
someone who could affirm his or her life, yawning imperfections and all, without
flinching. It also sounds as if the harder and stranger the life, the greater the
excellence manifested in affirming it.
2 . THE HIGHEST HUMAN BEING:
INTERNAL CONDITIONS
Nietzsche often expresses an ideal of greatness in a different way, in terms of the
state of the internal constitution of a human being’s drives and instincts. Here is a
passage from Nietzsche’s notebooks of 1884 (in my translation):
The human being, in contrast with the animal, has bred to greatness in himself a plenitude
of opposing drives and impulses: by way of this synthesis he is master of the earth. Moralities
are the expression of locally restricted orders of rank in this multiple world of drives: so that
the human being does not perish from their contradictions. Thus one drive as master, its
opposing drive weakened, refined, as impulse that yields the stimulus for the activity of the
chief drive. The highest human being would have the greatest multiplicity of drives, and
also in the relatively greatest strength that can still be endured. Indeed: where the plant
human being shows itself as strong, one finds instincts driving powerfully against one
another (e.g. Shakespeare), but bound together (KSA 11, 289).
There seems to be an implication in this passage that ‘drive’ (Trieb) and
‘instinct’ (Instinkt) are more or less equivalent. I shall, at any rate, accept this
as a working assumption.7 But we need some conception of what a drive is for
Nietzsche. A great diversity of things are called drives by Nietzsche from time to
6 Janaway (2007: 257–8). Bernard Reginster’s analysis of will to power as Nietzsche’s criterion of
value gives it a similar structure: ‘the structure of a second-order desire: . . . a desire for the overcoming
of resistance in the pursuit of some determinate first-order desire’ (2006: 132).
7 Paul Katsafanas argues that Trieb and Instinkt are in general terminological variants for
Nietzsche, and that the English ‘instinct’ as currently used is a misleading translation of the latter
term (Katsafanas forthcoming).
Morality, Drives, and Human Greatness
187
time. What unites them, by way of a minimal characterization, is that they are
relatively8 enduring dispositions to behave in certain ways, which are not within
the full rational or conscious control of the agent. Paul Katsafanas9 has recently
given a more detailed set of conditions that Nietzschean drives satisfy. He argues
that a drive is a disposition that manifests itself by informing an agent’s perception of objects, generating an evaluative orientation towards them, and thereby
bringing it about that the agent’s action, conscious reflection, and thought takes
place in the service of a goal of which the agent is ignorant. Katsafanas draws a
parallel with Schopenhauer’s account of sexual desire. Here the human individual consciously desires and pursues the individual beloved for his or her personal
attractiveness and in the hope of a unique satisfaction for him- or herself with
that individual. But all this conscious motivation obscures from the individual
the genuine goal of sexual activity, which is the most favourable reproduction of
the species. I am sympathetic overall to Katsafanas’ account of Nietzschean
drives, but would raise a question about the last part of it: that a drive provides
an agent with a structuring goal of which he or she is ignorant. Need this be the
case? Take another plausible kind of drive for Nietzsche: a drive whose goal is
artistic self-expression. Must it be the case that, in order for me to have this drive,
I remain ignorant of its goal? Is it not probable that I will be able to figure out, by
examination of my behaviour, that this goal permeates many of my actions? Nor
does it seem necessary to think that, once I recognize this about myself (and
perhaps start consciously pursuing an artistic career because I recognize my
drive), the drive to artistic self-expression must cease to operate in me. It might
indeed be that such a drive structured my behaviour without my knowledge, but
it does not seem constitutive of something’s being a drive that I be ignorant in the
way described. It does seem constitutive, by contrast, that I cannot fully control
the drive to artistic self-expression by conscious thought or rational decision.
That is to say, I cannot decide not to have this disposition, or choose not to have
it structure my perceptions and evaluations. A drive is a disposition of the agent
that the agent cannot switch on or off at will. If someone has a sex drive, then
they are disposed to episodes of sexual desire and sexualized perception, not
because they want to be or have decided to be so disposed, or because they have
grounds or reasons to be. Hence I would prefer to say that a drive is a relatively
enduring disposition of which the agent may be ignorant, but which, even when
the agent has some awareness of it, operates in a manner outside the agent’s full
rational or conscious control, and which disposes the agent to evaluate things in
ways that give rise to certain kinds of behaviour.
Much can be extrapolated from the notebook passage quoted above.10 Thus
one factor concerning a drive is its own degree of strength or weakness. A drive
8 The inclusion of ‘relatively’ will be discussed below.
9 Katsafanas (forthcoming).
10 Richardson (1996: 48) gives a similar account of the aspects and relations of drives, drawing
on many other sources in Nietzsche.
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Christopher Janaway
that is comparatively strong will presumably have a resilient tendency to persist,
structure experiences, and give rise to motivational states in many different contexts
over time. A sex drive, for instance, will be strong if it makes its agent persistently
seek out objects of attraction and frequently gives rise to relevant occurrent desires,
and it will be weak if it rarely does so. Another obvious way in which drives may be
weaker or stronger is in relation to one another. An individual may find his or her
desires or perceptions on many occasions shaped by one drive at the expense of
another, which can motivate the individual but fails to do so when the dominant
drive is activated. For instance, a sex drive may be present in someone, but be
consistently weaker in its expressions than a drive to self-denial that is also present
(if we may posit such a drive)—or the opposite may be the case. Considering
individual drives on the axis weak–strong, Nietzsche regards the presence of strong
drives as characteristic of the greatest or healthiest type of human individual.
Another valuable feature in Nietzsche’s picture of the highest human individual is the multiplicity, fullness (Fülle) or (as I translated it) plenitude of his or her
drives. The more numerous the drives that can be sustained in one individual, the
greater that individual will be. This helps to rule out some examples that it would
be rather ridiculous to consider paradigms of human greatness. For instance,
someone who has a strong, even domineering drive towards collecting stamps,11
together with a few more mundane drives, say, to sleep and to eat, is an oversimplified individual who does not approach Nietzschean greatness, however
fervent and dominant his chief drive may become. And even someone whose only
strong drive was to philosophize or to compose music would not satisfy this
model of plenitude.
In addition, Nietzsche requires that this internal multiplicity of strong drives
must be unified, united: they must in some way make up a single whole. In
stating the philosopher’s ideal in Beyond Good and Evil Nietzsche writes: ‘Only
this should be called greatness: the ability to be just as multiple as whole, just as
wide as full’ (BGE 212). We may also mention here his later idealization of
Goethe: ‘What he wanted was totality; he fought against the separation of reason,
sensibility, feeling, will . . . he disciplined himself to wholeness’ (TI, ‘Skirmishes’,
49). We might describe the requirement here as one of organic unity.12 So we
have the following as aspects of the ‘internal’ ideal of greatness: strength of
individual drives, multiplicity of the range of drives, and wholeness or organic
unity within that multiplicity. But this unity (as yet still in some respects an
11 Ken Gemes’ example. See Gemes (2009: 57). Gemes argues that such an individual would not
be expressing the full range of his or her drives, and so would not count as a unified self, on the
assumption that ‘Nietzsche as a naturalist believes that as humans we come with a rich panoply of
inherited drives’. I argue below that for Nietzsche such inherited drives could die out in the case of
some individuals, in which case there could theoretically be an individual with just one such masterdrive. My position is that even were this possible, it would not be a case of greatness because of the
lack of fullness in the range of drives that exist in the person.
12 A term used by Hurka (2007: 24).
Morality, Drives, and Human Greatness
189
obscure notion) must satisfy a further condition: it must be a unity between
elements that conflict. We might perhaps call it a Heraclitean unity (bearing in
mind such fragments as ‘in differing, it agrees with itself—a back-turning
harmony [or connection, harmoniê]’ and ‘justice is strife, and . . . all things
come about in accordance with strife’13). One way to describe it is in terms of
the strength of the system of drives as a whole. The elements of the system tend in
different directions and threaten to overpower one another, or to destroy organic
unity. But when the whole system is strong, rather than falling apart, the drives
function together towards ends that are those of the individual as such.14 In
Beyond Good and Evil 200, Nietzsche gives this characterization of great individuals who can occur in ages of ‘disintegration’:
. . . a human being will have the legacy of multiple lineages in his body, which means
conflicting (and often not merely conflicting) drives and value standards that fight with
each other and rarely leave each other alone . . . and if genuine proficiency and finesse in
waging war with himself (which is to say: the ability to control and outwit himself) are
inherited and cultivated along with his most powerful and irreconcilable drives, then what
emerges are those amazing, incomprehensible, and unthinkable ones, those human
riddles destined for victory and seduction; Alcibiades and Caesar are the most exquisite
expressions of this type (BGE 200).
Note (returning to our previous passage) that human beings in Nietzsche’s
picture have ‘bred’ the plenitude of drives into themselves. This alerts us that the
relations that obtain between what Nietzsche calls drives or instincts are not
necessarily immutable givens of human nature, even of an individual’s nature,
but are responsive to modification by cultural means. I want to argue further that
the same applies to the presence of the drives and instincts themselves: according
to Nietzsche’s use of ‘instinct’ and ‘drive’, such things need not be built
unchangeably into human beings—neither generically into humans qua humans,
nor into the constitution of any human being considered individually. How an
individual’s drives operate over time, and even what drives an individual continues to have, is open to change. But take a weaker point first: at the very least
the relative strengths and weaknesses of drives are alterable over time—Nietzsche
thinks of them as constantly ebbing and flowing. In a particularly rich passage in
Daybreak he presents drives as continually waxing and waning in response to
ordinary experiences:
. . . our daily experiences throw some prey in the way of now this, now that drive, and the
drive seizes it eagerly . . . Every moment of our lives sees some of the polyp-arms of our
being grow and others of them wither, all according to the nutriment which the moment
does or does not bear with it . . . [T]he drive will in its thirst as it were taste every condition
13 Heraclitus, fragments B51, B80, trans. in Barnes (2001: 50, 71).
14 For a good account of how we might conceive the various interactions among drives, see again
Richardson (1996: esp. 16–72).
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into which the human being may enter, and as a rule will discover nothing for itself there
and will have to wait and go on thirsting: in a little while it will grow faint, and after a
couple of months of non-satisfaction it will wither away like a plant without rain (D 119).
This raises the possibility that a drive, if not nourished, may simply disappear.
‘Withering away’ need not, I suppose, strictly be interpreted as connoting ceasing to
exist or operate, and Paul Katsafanas has suggested15 that here Nietzsche may mean
instead that the drive loses its power and ceases to influence us for some time, not
that we lose the drive entirely. In his recent paper Katsafanas (forthcoming) states
that ‘drives cannot be eliminated’. I agree that a drive is such that it cannot be
eliminated at will by the agent it manifests itself in. By wilfully abstaining from
sexual activity, I do not eo ipso rid myself of my sex drive. Also it is the case that a
drive is not eliminated by its being discharged, however often, in occurrent
motivational states. By engaging in sexual activity, I do not cease to be disposed
to sexual activity either. But the passage just quoted seems clearly to allow that some
drives, at least, may disappear from the agent through lack of ‘nourishment’ by their
environment. Some plants that wither for lack of rain obviously do die rather than
just ‘growing faint’, and I am not persuaded of any reason why Nietzsche would not
accept the transfer of this part of his simile to drives.
Conversely, for Nietzsche, drives can come into existence, or at any rate
something that was at some time not a drive in some individual can come to
be a drive for that individual. In The Gay Science he says that, through education,
a way of thinking can ‘become habit, drive and passion’ and rule over an
individual (GS 21). Elsewhere Nietzsche talks of a wide variety of things having
‘become instinct’ for people of certain types: ‘Knowledge of the privilege of
freedom’ or ‘consciousness of freedom’ (GM II, 2); ‘an incapacity for resistance’
(A 29); ‘refinement, boldness, foresight, measuredness’ (KSA 13, 314); ‘noble
coolness and clarity’ (KSA 13, 582) and even—most importantly for my overall
concerns in this paper—‘morality’ itself (KSA 8, 434). Hence the inclusion of
‘relatively’ in my characterization of a drive: a drive is a relatively enduring
disposition of which the agent may be ignorant, but which, even when the
agent has some awareness of it, operates in a manner outside of the agent’s
rational or conscious control, and which disposes the agent to evaluate things in
certain ways and to behave in certain ways.
The range of Nietzschean drives is also surprising. In Daybreak 109 there is a
‘drive to restfulness’; and in the same place ‘fear of disgrace and other evil
consequences’ and ‘love’ are both called drives. In Daybreak 119 we learn of
idiosyncratic drives to ‘tenderness or humorousness or adventurousness or to our
desire for music and mountains’ and also that everyone will have more striking
examples of their own. This suggests that some drives, at least, are not common
15 Private communication.
Morality, Drives, and Human Greatness
191
to all human beings. And if a drive can in principle wither away, it becomes
unsafe to assume of any drive that it must be present in all human beings at all
times or that it must always be present in some individual if it ever is. There may
be extremely common drives, such as the drive to sexual satisfaction, or to selfpreservation. Some such drives may be not just common but universal to all
human beings. Some may even be innate. But even if, for whatever reason, a
number of such apparently generic drives are in fact found in all human beings—
and Nietzsche indeed talks of ‘all the basic drives of human beings’ (BGE 6)—
they need not have an equally prominent explanatory role in all humans or even
be immune to disappearance in all human beings. The examples Nietzsche gives
also make it impossible to circumscribe what counts as a drive by saying, for
example, that all drives are biological or physiological in any sense that would
exclude their being acquired by learning or cultural conditioning. And despite
our likely expectations for the word ‘instinct’, the evidence does not suggest that
what Nietzsche calls Instinkte are different from drives in this respect.
So greatness in human beings, like health or strength, is not an all-or-nothing
affair, either at one time, or across times. It looks now to be a matter of degree
across all of its parameters: individual drives can be weaker or stronger, there can
be more or fewer of them, they can conflict more or less, and be better or worse
bound together. And time and circumstance can shift the drives in either
direction along these different dimensions, even to the point of creating new
drives and destroying old ones. The highest human being, then, will be such in
virtue of attaining a state in which he or she has a multiplicity of conflicting but
unified, relatively enduring, strong dispositions, which dispositions structure his
or her perceptions and give rise to motivational states, without being under his or
her full rational control.
So far our description of internal conditions specifies only that the drives be
individually strong, as multiple as possible, in conflict, and bound into a unity,
thus characterizing a type of person as the ‘greatest human being’. Nothing is said
concerning what the drives composing that type of human being are drives
towards. If we read it this way, this statement of internal conditions will be
both necessary and sufficient for greatness. Yet it is not beyond dispute that
Nietzsche intends it in that way. It might be that greatness is to be measured
more conventionally in terms of achievement, for which there are some implicit
‘external’ criteria of value: on that reading one would be great only if one writes
great operas, founds great empires or republics, invents great cures for illnesses,
and so on. But Nietzsche can still hold that the internal conditions are necessary
for any kind of greatness, and that they, in a sense, specify the essence of
greatness, the one common factor that is to be found in all cases of great
achievement, of whatever kind. He might also hold that no one who satisfied
the internal conditions could fail to achieve something great, so that even if
greatness must be partially constituted by achievements, the internal conditions
are sufficient for there to be great achievements, and in that sense still sufficient
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for greatness. But we have already become very speculative here. It is unclear
what ‘external’ criteria of great achievement Nietzsche would accept. I shall
continue to concentrate on the internal conditions, which are the common factor
in all greatness, even if not wholly constitutive of it.
3. GREATNESS AND SELF-AFFIRMATION
We have seen that when looking for a ‘formula of greatness’ Nietzsche thinks on
the one hand of an ideal evaluative attitude towards oneself: rather than being
someone who has a great or good life, one is great because one is, to a high
degree, positively disposed towards oneself, seemingly whatever one’s life has
contained. On the other hand he says that human greatness has as its condition
certain internal properties and relations of drives and instincts that pertain
whether one knows it or not. How do the attitude of self-affirmation and the
internal condition relate to one another? A discussion of similar issues by John
Richardson suggests one possible answer. His answer is framed in terms of the
Übermensch or ‘overman’, a notion I am avoiding in this paper, but here I simply
want to replicate Richardson’s point in terms of the notion ‘greatest human
being’ without, for now, presupposing anything about how those two notions
relate. Richardson is opposing the view (expressed by Bernd Magnus) ‘that the
Übermensch is not an ideal type, but stands for a certain attitude toward life (and
especially toward the thought of its eternal return)—an attitude that implies no
specifiable character traits’. In opposition to this Richardson states ‘I agree that
the overman has this attitude, but I argue that he can have it only because of a
certain structuring of his drives—so that Nietzsche does have in mind a type of
person’.16 On this view, one’s being a certain type of human being, a type
characterized by states of the drives, explains one’s ability to be well disposed
to oneself to a great degree. So human beings internally constituted in the right
way will be the ones capable of the ideal attitude of self-affirmation. Or: one’s
being able to pass the test for holding the attitude of maximum self-affirmation is
explained by one’s having a constitution with a strong, full, conflicting but
unified set of dispositions of the kind Nietzsche calls drives and instincts. I am
sympathetic to this thought, but do not think it tells the whole story.
4 . UNITY, AGENCY AND CHANCE
One large and (I think) troubling question in the interpretation of Nietzsche is
this: what, for Nietzsche, brings about or constitutes the unity among drives that
16 Richardson (1996: 67, n.104). For the contrasting view of the Übermensch as solely ‘standing
for an attitude’ see Magnus (1983) and Magnus (1986).
Morality, Drives, and Human Greatness
193
is requisite for greatness in a human being? We have the idea that drives or
instincts are ‘bound together’ (gebändigt), and that there is ‘synthesis’ of them
within the single human being. Is this a harnessing together of functions that
requires no conscious agency because it is literally organic? In other words, does a
human being whose drives are unified to any degree have the same kind of unity
as a healthy octopus or oak tree whose unity consists in their functioning
sufficiently well to persist as organisms? Is the human case simply one of greater
multiplicity and greater internal tension, but still the same kind of functional
unity? Nietzsche’s phrase ‘the plant human being’ (die Pflanze Mensch) carries
this connotation. However, the passage on Goethe perhaps points elsewhere.
Goethe’s wholeness is said to be something he wanted or willed (wollte) and
something he did or made: ‘he disciplined himself’. That does not sound like the
kind of thing non-human organisms could do. According to this passage, Goethe
brought elements of himself into new relations with one another. He brought
about, by will, a synthesis within himself. What that consists in seems pretty
unclear, but it would at least appear to be something one does, as an agent, some
kind of action. The rest of the passage on Goethe is compatible with this: he ‘said
Yes to everything related to him’, he ‘conceived of a strong, highly educated human
being . . . ’—presumably willing to turn himself into such a being—‘ . . . who could
dare to allow himself the entire expanse and wealth of naturalness, who is strong
enough for this freedom’.
‘Saying Yes’, ‘conceiving’, and ‘allowing oneself’ are agency words, and the
whole exercise is even said to be one of ‘freedom’. So we have to face a question
about these states of wholeness, totality, or unity among conflicting elements that
Nietzsche tends to associate with being a great or a higher human being: are they
ever, or to any extent, brought about by self-awareness, intention, and action
(details still to be specified), or are they formations of drives and instincts that
come about independently of any agency, in the manner of ‘the rare cases of
powerfulness in soul and body, the strokes of luck among humans’ he mentions
in the Genealogy (GM III, 14)? Or do they somehow occur in both ways? It must
be said that many passages favour the view that detaches consciousness and
agency from any role in affecting the state of the drives. The rich section 119
of Daybreak discussed above is a prime example. Nietzsche’s leading point there
is that no one can fully know the totality of drives that constitute his being, and
that ‘their number and strength, their ebb and flood, their play and counterplay
among one another, and above all the laws of their nutriment [Ernährung] remain
wholly unknown to him. This nutriment is therefore a work of chance [Zufall ]’.
Recall also the famous line ‘Becoming what you are presupposes that you do not
have the slightest idea what you are’ (EH, ‘Why I am so clever’, 9). And a
forthright notebook passage says ‘The multiplicity of drives—we must assume a
master, but it is not in consciousness, rather consciousness is an organ, like the
stomach’ (KSA 11: 282). Following this line of interpretation, then supposing we
are right to think that Goethe went through a process of ‘becoming what he was’,
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then all of his self-disciplining, conceiving himself a certain way, willing to be
a certain way, saying ‘yes’ to parts of himself, was just redundant as far as the
core of that process was concerned. His ‘self-mastery’ occurred outside of his
own conscious activity. But then the problem of interpretation is this: why
would Nietzsche make so much of all this supposed activity if it really were
redundant?
We have here, I suggest, two pictures of wholeness or unity: an ‘agency’ picture
and a ‘chance’ picture. Some commentators would favour pushing one or
other picture into the background as something Nietzsche did not really mean.
(Brian Leiter, for instance, would remove all the agency talk as a mere aberration
from what he considers Nietzsche’s genuine position, which is a kind of fatalism.17) But we might pause to consider other interpretive approaches to the
issue. One possibility is that Nietzsche is in tension and fails to disentangle these
two positions with sufficient clarity. It could be argued that no peculiar culpability need attach to that, since to stumble over problems in reconciling agency
and consciousness with a naturalistic psychology is likely enough in any theory,
and hence only to be expected in an unsystematic, multi-layered exercise
of rhetorical provocation and critique such as Nietzsche’s. However another
more generous construal is that states of greatness, specified in terms of the
necessary internal conditions of the drives, may be differently realizable: some
great human beings may turn out that way by chance, others, because of their
different cultural context, may need to attain it by action and conscious hard
work.18 For example, a member of an ancient aristocratic warrior caste may
simply be a case of well-attuned powerful drives without having to perform
any work of ‘unification’ upon himself.19 We moderns, with our developed
inner life, reflectiveness, and learned self-denying tendencies, may well, like
Goethe, require some kind of demanding work as agents, some self-disciplining
or self-governing, before our drives behave in the right way to satisfy the internal
condition for greatness.
A bold interpretation would be that an attitude of self-affirmation might be
what constitutes the unified functioning of conflicting strong drives in the latter
kind of human being. It could be that, in a surprising parallel to Kant’s synthetic
unity of apperception, the ‘synthesis’ of my drives is brought about from the top,
as it were, by my very attitude of affirmation, my ‘owning’ all the drives as mine;
or, to parody Kant, that the ‘I will’ must be able to accompany all the expressions
of my drives, since otherwise they would not one and all be my drives. Clearly an
organism such as a cat has some kind of functional unity of drives, for Nietzsche.
17 Leiter, (2002: esp. ch. 3).
18 A suggestion made by Ken Gemes.
19 Such an individual might, however, score relatively low on the parameters of multiplicity and
internal conflict of drives. In this respect, modern complexity is more conducive to greatness for
Nietzsche—though simultaneously imprisoning us in a condition that makes greatness harder to
attain and harder even to conceive.
Morality, Drives, and Human Greatness
195
But the cat cannot take the second-order attitude of affirming its drives as its
own: it cannot accept or reject its drives, cannot be pleased or displeased by their
presence or by their particular expressions, cannot try to extirpate or promote
some drives rather than others, and so on. No human being has complete
knowledge of his drives, and no one is in full rational control of their presence
or mode of expression. But these factors are not sufficient to put cat and human
exactly on a par with respect to their drives. In the human case there is the
possibility of attaining a greater degree of unity in the process of taking attitudes
to oneself. Consider once again someone with a strong sexual drive or a strong
drive to artistic self-expression. While these drives persist, the agent might be
continually striving to disown them, having set him- or herself to be abstinent
and socially conforming. Might not the human being who willed themselves to
Goethean wholeness be someone in whom, by contrast, such conscious striving
against drives was absent, and whose will aligned itself with as many of the drives
as possible, thereby constituting the drives as more of a unity?
This constitutive proposal will not quite do, however. Nietzsche’s official story
about striving against one’s drives is that given in Daybreak 109: ‘at bottom it is
one drive which is complaining about another’. There is no ‘will’ that can stand
apart from the drives, in the following sense: ‘that one desires to combat the
vehemence of a drive . . . does not stand within our own power’. We should not,
then, posit any separate ‘self’ that has full knowledge of and full control over the
drives: that I strive to accept or resist one of my strong drives is not a fact about an
‘I’ that exists independently of my set of drives. My set of drives is one that is
capable of forming self-conscious attitudes towards some parts of the set. But
Nietzsche will say that the fact that I can take a self-affirmative attitude is really
just a fact about my drives: a state of my drives manifests itself in self-consciousness as an attitude I take towards my drives.
Finally, however, I want to argue for a different account of the linkage between
self-affirmation and the constitution of the drives, with the causality running the
other way round from that suggested by our earlier discussion of Richardson.
There, the ability to be self-affirming was explained as a symptom of the internal
structure of the drives. I want to suggest that in Nietzsche’s picture our attitudes
of self-affirmation or self-negation might in addition cause alterations to our
drives and their relations to one another in such a way as to move them nearer to
a state in which they satisfy the internal conditions for human greatness.
The excellence of the affirmative attitude to self might play a role in making
one’s mutable set of drives become richer or stronger. But can the causation run
in the right direction to make this in principle possible for Nietzsche? To see that
it can, let us turn to the question of what difference morality makes to the
attainment or non-attainment of the kind of internal conditions for greatness we
have described.
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5 . MORALITY AS SYMPTOM AND DANGER
Nietzsche’s causal stories about morality run in two directions. In many prominent instances the state of the drives causes conscious or self-conscious attitudes.
Nietzsche says ‘Moralities are the expression . . . of orders of rank among these
drives: so that the human being does not perish from their contradiction’. For
‘expression of’ I suggest we might substitute the highly Nietzschean notion
‘symptom of’. A morality is at least a set of values of some kind, and to adhere
to such a set of values is to adopt attitudes, which include evaluative beliefs and
affects—for instance the belief that stronger human beings ought in general not
to harm others, the belief that human beings are essentially free to act in certain
ways, the feeling that it is blameworthy and in some cases shocking if someone
rejects compassion in favour of self-interest, the feeling of guilt over our tendencies to self-assertion, the outrage felt over an act of cruelty, judgements as to why
such outrage is justified, and so on. According to Nietzsche, our feeling these
feelings, having these beliefs, and giving these justifications is a symptom of the
way certain human drives are or have been ordered. Let me exemplify what I take
to be the shape of Nietzsche’s position here by giving an over-simplified sketch
based on parts of the discussion in the Genealogy. People who Nietzsche calls ‘the
weak’ or ‘slaves’ have certain drives that tend towards discharging themselves.
They have a drive towards retaliation against those who abuse them, but cannot
express this drive directly because they lack the power to do so. Drives are
opposed by other drives, so let us posit in them a drive to self-protection or
self-preservation that inhibits the drive to retaliation. Still, the drive to retaliation
persists in latent form and eventually produces the feeling of gaining power over
the more powerful, a feeling attained by re-describing the powerful as ‘evil’ and
describing harmlessness as ‘good’. Thus a configuration of drives gives rise to a
resolution of the conflict within itself by producing the conscious attitudes we
have mentioned above: the beliefs that there is free will, that the strong are free to
act weakly, that all deserve equal treatment, that suffering is always to be avoided,
and their associated affective responses.
An interesting feature of Nietzsche’s account, however, is that our resulting
moral conception of what we are—our conception of what about us has positive
value and what has negative value—and the attitudes that it leads us to take
towards ourselves also cause us to become beings with fewer, weaker, less coordinated drives, and with less tolerance of their internal conflict. According to
morality’s conception, a human being ought not to express a whole range of
desires that are regarded as selfish, unruly, and liable to increase suffering and
inequality. Humans who adopt the attitudes characteristic of morality then come
to hate or disown parts of themselves: they feel guilt about the very existence of
many parts of the psyche and seek to identify themselves with a (supposed) pure
good-seeking will that is free of the appetites and instincts and stands in
Morality, Drives, and Human Greatness
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opposition to them. And in Nietzsche’s view the set of beliefs and other evaluative attitudes we consciously hold as adherents of morality, as well as being a
symptom of a certain state in which the drives stand, is also a force that shapes
and perpetuates the state of our drives. Thus it is that morality—moral attitudes—can be both a symptom and a ‘danger’, a decidedly causal notion when
one thinks about it.20 And Nietzsche could scarcely be more explicit about this
duality of causal direction: ‘Precisely here I saw the great danger to humanity . . . I
understood the ever more widely spreading morality of compassion . . . as the
most uncanny symptom of our now uncanny European culture’, he says in the
Preface to the Genealogy (GM P, 5: my emphasis). Hence we need a knowledge of
‘morality as consequence, as symptom, as mask, as Tartuffery, as sickness, as
misunderstanding; but also morality as cause, as medicine, as inhibitor, as poison’
(GM P, 6). So for Nietzsche morality is not simply other than, or contrasted with,
the supposed greatness that human beings can attain in the constitution of their
drives. It inhibits the attainment of that greatness. And the relation between
morality and the drives has a certain circular or self-perpetuating structure. People
in whom drives are already impoverished, weakened, or reduced in number have
these drives ordered and contradictions among them resolved when they adopt
moral attitudes; the having of moral attitudes also impoverishes, weakens, reduces
their drives, or acts to preserve them in such a state.21
As we argued earlier, what drives and instincts there can be is variable between
individuals and variable over time within an individual. Drives or instincts are
mutable, they ebb and flow, can be newly acquired, and can die out altogether.
They respond to their day-to-day environment, thriving if nourished, declining
or ceasing altogether if starved. Now take the instincts that Nietzsche polemicizes
against in the Genealogy, ‘the instincts of compassion, self-denial, self-sacrifice’
(GM P, 5). If these instincts are influential on my behaviour, it is not that
I describe myself as someone in whom an instinct of self-denial has come to be
dominant, weakening and perhaps shutting down drives to creative self-expression, adventurousness, or whatever else. Yet by my conscious activity I may
nonetheless be continually providing for this instinct of self-denial an environment that nourishes it at the expense of other drives and instincts: I have acquired
the belief that it is always right to put the interests of others first, I sometimes act
on it and think I ought to act on it more often, I feel passionately that all human
20 See Katsafanas (2005: 1).
21 Since some of our conscious beliefs about ourselves act as dangers, inhibitors, nourishers of
our drives, they cannot be epiphenomenal, at least in the sense of not being causes at all.
(Incidentally, the prominent passage where Nietzsche apparently announces ‘there are no mental
causes!’—‘Es giebt gar keine geistigen Ursachen! ’ (TI, ‘The four great errors’, 3)—does not have to be
interpreted as saying that no conscious mental states cause anything. In context, Nietzsche’s point is
that there is no Geist, no subject or I that is the cause of thoughts and actions: he is diagnosing the
error of positing ‘the will, the Geist and the I’ here.) On the issue of epiphenomenalism in Nietzsche
see Katsafanas (2005) and Leiter (2002: esp. 92).
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beings are intrinsically equal in value, I feel guilty if I hurt anyone else, I am
outraged if someone hurts others and does not feel guilty, I like reading Schopenhauer’s essay On the Basis of Morals because I warm to the idea of compassion
being the source of moral goodness, and so on. In other words, a major shaping
influence on the environment that nourishes my instinct of self-denial and starves
other drives is found in my own consciously held attitudes; that is, my morality,
my acquired set of moral beliefs, feelings and such. Nietzsche makes also the
more subtle point that drives that do not ebb away or die out may have their
nature and value modified by being harnessed by already moralized drives. In
another passage from Daybreak he says that one and the same drive may be
‘attended by either a good or a bad conscience’; for example a drive to avoid
retaliation may evolve into a feeling of cowardice or of humility, but ‘In itself it
has, like every drive, neither this moral character, nor any moral character at all,
nor a definite attendant feeling of pleasure or displeasure: it acquires all this, as its
second nature, only when it enters into relations with drives already baptised
good or evil’ (D 38).
Nietzsche places great emphasis on his claim that the origin of moral attitudes
lies in the drives of the weak and powerless, and as a result it is sometimes
wondered how these moral attitudes could come to be inculcated in someone
who is not similarly weak or powerless. Part of the answer, we can now suggest,
lies in our degree of ignorance of our drives and their inter-relations with one
another, combined with the power of conscious attitudes to be part of the
environment that causes changes to our drives. Without intentionally setting
out to weaken one’s drives, reduce their number, or change their order of rank,
one may affect one’s drives in such ways through day-to-day behaviour in a
certain milieu of evaluative attitudes. So someone who is not in need of resolving
their ressentiment, not in a master-slave relation, not a lamb at the mercy of birds
of prey, can, by virtue of consciously inhabiting the moral milieu, be caused to
become someone whose drives keep being impoverished. The genesis of this
milieu is to be explained by its suiting the slavish and ressentiment-prone, but
the milieu of consciously held attitudes, once stabilized, can in turn have effects
on diminishing the drives of the average unremarkable modern Mensch, the
diligent, comfortable scholar, and also of any potentially higher, potentially
great ‘strokes of luck’ among humanity who happen to be around. Returning
to our earlier question—How does an attitude of self-affirmation relate to human
greatness conceived in terms of the strength and unity of drives?—we can say that
self-affirmation is not only a symptom of internally constituted greatness but a
facilitator of it.
As we have seen, Nietzsche issues frequent admonitions about the redundancy
or non-importance of consciousness. This sits somewhat awkwardly with some
aspects of his re-evaluative project. The calling into question of moral values is
for Nietzsche a prelude to a revaluation of values, and that—some evidence
suggests—is an act of free choice of some kind. But never mind that much, which
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is contentious. Leave it at this: revaluation incorporates acts. ‘Doing’ words are
everywhere in Nietzsche’s conception of how new values will, or might, come
about: invention, discovery, creation, law-giving, tasks, attempts;22 affects are not
just undergone, they are used, brought to bear on topics, allowed to speak (GM
III, 12). But suppose that we are especially impressed by the admonitions about
the redundancy of consciousness, and we think in consequence of a Nietzsche
whose one and only re-evaluative end is to enable the development of stronger,
more multiple, more synthesized conflicting drives below the level of consciousness,23 then my point is that even this Nietzsche would nonetheless have good
reason to use as a means the attempt to detach us from our present conscious selfevaluations, and good reason to use as a means anything that might enable people
to cultivate conscious self-affirmation.
Nietzsche’s persuasive process consists, very roughly,24 of showing up a variety
of psychological origins for our judgements, inducing many ambivalent and selfcritical feelings, shocking, embarrassing, and wooing us in any and every way that
may help detach us from our confidence in our assumed values, and inviting us
into a space where each of us can, if we are the right kind of person to be affected
by any of the foregoing, use feelings and reflections as yet unknown to us to
explore whether there might not be other, healthier evaluative attitudes for us
to adhere to. Nietzsche seeks to activate dispositions to affective response that
manage to co-exist in us alongside those fostered by morality: our admiration for
heroes and creative geniuses who succeed by being a law unto themselves, our
almost imperceptible delight in cruelty, our disgust at having responses that turn
out to be slavish, our dismay at our own wish to make others feel guilty, our
embarrassment at being overwhelmed by compassion, and our doubts about our
squeamishness towards suffering. These reactions, if we have them, intimate that
there is more to us than the shape that morality moulds us into: other drives coexist with those that morality nourishes, and can be provoked into action. If we
do not have any such responses—and nobody can really predict how any
individual will feel in all this—then we will not have been given any reason to
change our values. Nietzsche’s characteristic mode of persuasion will leave us
22 ‘The most basic laws of preservation and growth require . . . that everyone should invent his
own virtues, his own categorical imperatives’ (A 11); ‘You haven’t yet discovered yourself or created
for yourself an ideal of your very own . . . We, however, want to become who we are—human beings
who are new, unique incomparable, who give themselves laws, who create themselves’ (GS 335);
‘The total degeneration of humanity . . . anyone who has ever thought this possibility through to the
end knows one more disgust than other men,—and perhaps a new task as well!’ (BGE 203);
‘A reverse attempt would in itself be possible—but who is strong enough for it?—to wed to bad
conscience the unnatural inclinations’ (GM II, 24).
23 Brian Leiter argues that what matters is that Nietzsche ‘shake higher types out of their intuitive
commitment to the moral traditions of two millennia!’ (2002: 155), and that ‘a critique of moral
values . . . requires only that Nietzsche’s writings cause the requisite non-rational and non-conscious
responses that lead to a loosening of the conscious allegiance these subjects feel towards morality’
(2008). (See also 2002: 159.)
24 As I have argued at greater length in Janaway (2007).
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unmoved. Imagine a reader whose Christian sympathies are provoked or
strengthened by reading the Genealogy. He or she feels overwhelming compassion
and approval for the ‘slaves’, is appalled, purely and simply, by the prospect of
the ‘masters’ and their so-called morality and feels guilty at the slightest temptation to admire them, warms to the idea of unrequiteable guilt before God, is
grateful for the image of sinners being punished, recognizes but laughs off the
implications in Nietzsche’s ironic portrayals of Christians, and so on. Such a
person is not persuaded to change, or to want to change his or her values; they see
no reason to do so. The harder question is whether there is a reason for them to do
so. I think it plausible that for Nietzsche, who so often portrays himself as writing
to be heard only by the few, there is no reason to change one’s values or to want
to change them unless one’s affective responses approximate to something like
those others described above. Only if one is the kind of human being whose
internal constitution allows one to have the self-challenging and ambivalent
kinds of response Nietzsche calls for is one in a position to understand the nature
of moral values and their effects on their psyche in a way that motivates one to
look for healthier values, values that are liable, in Nietzsche’s view, to take one
some step closer to greatness. Chiefly, such individuals might have reason to
aspire to an ideal of self-affirmation, to being well-disposed to themselves as a
totality. If they did aspire towards that ideal, then instead of having conscious
attitudes and goals that are symptoms of, and causes of, weakness, paucity, and
disunity in their drives, they might have conscious attitudes and goals that are
symptoms of, and a cause of, an increase towards that plenitude of strong,
conflicting but synthesized drives that Nietzsche sometimes describes as greatness. The attitude of self-affirmation could be both a result of that greatness and a
means towards attaining it.25
BIBLIOGRAPHY
In Nietzsche
Beyond Good and Evil, ed. Rolf-Peter Horstmann and Judith Norman, trans. Judith
Norman. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2002.
Daybreak, ed. Maudemarie Clark and Brian Leiter, trans. R. J. Hollingdale. Cambridge:
Cambridge University Press, 1997.
‘Ecce homo’, in The Anti-Christ, Ecce Homo, Twilight of the Idols and Other Writings, ed.
Aaron Ridley and Judith Norman, trans. Judith Norman. Cambridge: Cambridge
University Press, 2005.
25 Thanks are due to audiences who posed questions when versions of this paper were delivered,
at the University of Southampton (as part of the research project ‘Nietzsche and Modern Moral
Philosophy’ funded by the Arts and Humanities Research Council), at the Universities of Calgary,
Sussex, Ghent, Oxford, and Princeton. I would also like to thank Simon Robertson and Paul
Katsafanas for detailed comments on earlier drafts.
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201
Kritische Studien-Ausgabe, ed. Giorgio Colli and Mazzino Montinari, 15 vols. Munich:
Deutscher Taschenbuch Verlag and Walter de Gruyter, 1988.
On the Genealogy of Morality, ed. and trans. Maudemarie Clark and Alan J. Swensen.
Indianapolis: Hackett, 1998.
‘The Anti-Christ’, in The Anti-Christ, Ecce Homo, Twilight of the Idols and Other Writings,
ed. Aaron Ridley and Judith Norman, trans. Judith Norman. Cambridge: Cambridge
University Press, 2005.
The Gay Science, ed. Bernard Williams, trans. Josephine Nauckhoff and Adrian del Caro.
Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2001.
Thus Spoke Zarathustra, trans. R. J. Hollingdale. Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1969.
‘Twilight of the idols’, in The Anti-Christ, Ecce Homo, Twilight of the Idols and Other
Writings, ed. Aaron Ridley and Judith Norman, trans. Judith Norman. Cambridge:
Cambridge University Press, 2005.
Other sources
Barnes, Jonathan (ed.) (2001). Early Greek Philosophy. Harmondsworth: Penguin.
Gemes, Ken (2009). ‘Freud and Nietzsche on Sublimation’, Journal of Nietzsche Studies
38: 38–59.
Hurka, Thomas (2007). ‘Nietzsche: perfectionist’, in Brian Leiter and Neil Sinhababu
(eds), Nietzsche and Morality. Oxford: Clarendon Press.
Janaway, Christopher (2007). Beyond Selflessness: Reading Nietzsche’s Genealogy. Oxford:
Oxford University Press.
Katsafanas, Paul (2005). ‘Nietzsche’s theory of mind: consciousness and conceptualization’, European Journal of Philosophy 13: 1–31.
——(forthcoming). ‘Nietzsche’s philosophical psychology’, in Ken Gemes and John
Richardson (eds), The Oxford Handbook of Nietzsche. Oxford: Oxford University Press.
Leiter, Brian (2002). Nietzsche on Morality. London: Routledge.
——(2008). ‘Review of Christopher Janaway, Beyond Selflessness: Reading Nietzsche’s
Genealogy’, Notre Dame Philosophical Reviews, 3 June 2008.
Magnus, Bernd (1983). ‘Perfectibility and Attitude in Nietzsche’s Übermensch’, Review of
Metaphysics 36: 633–59.
——(1986). ‘Nietzsche’s Philosophy of 1888: The Will to Power and the Übermensch’,
Journal of the History of Philosophy 24: 79–93.
Reginster, Bernard (2006). The Affirmation of Life: Nietzsche on Overcoming Nihilism.
Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press.
Richardson, John (1996). Nietzsche’s System. New York, Oxford: Oxford University
Press.
9
What is a Nietzschean Self ?1
R. Lanier Anderson
1. INTRODUCTION: NIETZSCHE
AND KANTIAN ETHICS
I am among those who see the history of nineteenth-century philosophy largely as a
story about Kantianism. German thought of the period was dominated by strands
occupied with working out the challenges Kant posed and exploring the resources of
his system. Moreover, these lines of thought put German philosophy for the first
time really on the map, indeed arguably at the centre of the map, of the European
intellectual world. The point is perhaps clearest in theoretical philosophy, where
even avowed positivists at least frame their programs by reference to Kantian
problematics—witness Ernst Mach’s anecdote about being pulled into philosophy
by the Prolegomena or Richard Avenarius’s use of the title ‘Kritik der reinen
Erfahrung’.2 The parallel point on practical philosophy’s side of the street is perhaps
more controversial. Kant’s shadow can seem short if one focuses on the emergence
of utilitarianism as a strong competitor to Kantian theory, and even to the
underlying deontological intuitions at its basis. But on the side of Kantian influence,
one can cite—well, first of all, the fact that Kant’s distinction between theoretical
and practical philosophy substantially informs this very way of distinguishing the
two sides of the street—but also the academic spread of German idealism and its
1 This paper was written for Christopher Janaway’s workshop on ‘Nietzsche and Kantian Ethics’
at the University of Southampton (April 2009). It benefited greatly from the discussion and from
written comments of the workshop participants, to whom I am grateful. I also received helpful
audience feedback from the Aesthetics Workshop and the William James work-in-progress group
(both at Stanford), the Philosophy Colloquium at the University of Illinois, and the audience at the
University of New Mexico graduate philosophy conference. I benefited from especially detailed
written comments by Elijah Millgram, and by my colleague Allen Wood, who saved me from some
errors, but who will doubtless find that many more survived into this version. Finally, the paper was
improved through conversations with Will Beals, Chad Carmichael, Ken Gemes, David Hills, Chris
Janaway, Paul Katsafanas, Joshua Landy, Elijah Millgram, Alexander Nehamas, Peter Railton,
Simon Robertson, Richard Schacht, Tamar Schapiro, Ben Wolfson, and Katherine Preston.
2 For Mach’s statement about Kant’s influence on his development, see the long note at Mach
(1910 [1886]: 23–4). See also Avenarius (1888, xi–xiii, et passim).
What is a Nietzschean Self ?
203
broader reception in romanticism, the influence of its ‘left Hegelian’ and other early
critics, the mid-century popularity of Schopenhauer’s pessimism, the variegated
‘back to Kant’ movement, and the gradual emergence from Kantian roots of
something very like our own philosophical problem about the place of normativity
in a naturalistic worldview.3
Nietzsche’s place in this landscape remains seriously contested. At first glance,
it might seem strange that there is any occasion for debate here. Nietzsche
obviously rejects core principles of Kant’s moral theory, particularly its account
of the categorical imperative and the moral argument for God, freedom, and
immortality as postulates of practical reason (see GS 335; BGE 5, 11, 187; GM II,
6, and III, 12, 25; A 11; et passim).4 In this case, moreover, Nietzsche’s criticisms
are not restricted to mere name-calling or hyperbole, but cut to the core of his
philosophical concerns. Whereas Kant accepts at face value the normative force of
ordinary moral intuition—and indeed, takes it as a sufficient basis for a regressive
argument to establish the fundamental principle of morality—Nietzsche, by
contrast, offers a debunking genealogy of the same intuitions, designed to expose
our attachment to them as so much (unattractively) motivated believing. In
addition, Nietzsche raises sceptical objections against the underlying moral psychology needed to make sense of Kantian moral theory, attacking notions like the
will, pure practical reason, the alienating effects of inclination, etc.5 Thus it is
important to acknowledge Nietzsche’s anti-Kantian sensibilities from the outset.
All that said, there remain noteworthy parallels between key ideas of the
Kantian tradition in ethical thought and apparently fundamental commitments
of Nietzsche’s. Perhaps the most striking point of contact concerns the value of
autonomy.6 Autonomy, for many Kantians, is not only important as an idea
of our freedom, but also serves as an ideal. Autonomous agency itself is what
carries value beyond any price, demands respect in our dealings with others, and
3 For discussion of the Kantian roots of discussions of the problem of naturalism and
normativity, see Hatfield (1991) and, for neo-Kantianism specifically, Anderson (2005b).
4 Citations to Nietzsche’s texts will be made parenthetically, using standard abbreviations as
noted in the references; I have made use of the translations and editions detailed there. I also cite
Kant’s Critique of Pure Reason using the standard A/B format to refer to the pages of the first (=A)
and second (=B) editions.
5 As Williams (2006 [1993]) points out, these two forms of criticism are deeply connected.
Nietzsche defends a minimalist moral psychology by first identifying the respects in which the
apparently implied psychology of ordinary moral intuitions makes commitments in ‘excess’ of what
a cold-eyed ‘realistic’ apprehension of human behaviour in other domains would require (Williams
2006 [1993]: 302); he then deploys a genealogical ‘hermeneutics of suspicion’ to undermine
confidence in the moral intuitions. The argument thereby suggests that the psychological
commitments are rationalizing fantasy, rather than necessary postulates of reason. For further
discussion, see Section 3.
6 For discussion of the relation between normativity and autonomy in nineteenth-century
thought and a particularly intriguing discussion of Nietzsche’s conception of autonomy, see
Reginster (2012). At a more abstract level, Hill (2003: 196–229) argues for Kant’s influence on
Nietzsche’s conception of the general structure of the problem space for moral theory, in addition to
more substantive parallels like the agreement about the value of autonomy mentioned here.
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so on. It is both the source of morality’s authority over our actions and the basic
value that morality strives to protect. While Nietzsche denies that autonomy comes
built in as standard equipment along with humanity or rationality as such, he
nevertheless seems to share the Kantian (or anyway, post-Kantian) emphasis on its
value. Autonomy is central to the rare form of strong individuality he praises: the
free spirit he idealizes is supposed to be independent from custom and tradition;
she ‘creates herself’ precisely in the sense of giving herself values or laws of her own;
she has ‘independence of the soul’ (see GS 98, 99, 335, 347; BGE 29, 41, 43–4,
203; GM II, 1–3; et passim). Of course, Nietzsche does not conceive autonomy
along orthodox Kantian lines, and he consequently rejects the Kantian claim that
recognizing the value of autonomy by itself constrains us to accept the full content
of altruistic morality. But just here, even Nietzschean immoralism can be understood as indebted to the post-Kantian tradition. After all, Nietzsche’s complaint
sounds a note remarkably similar to the famous Hegelian objection that Kant’s
moral theory is a ‘mere formalism’, lacking sufficient content to entail the substantive demands of morality. In fact, I have always thought that the ‘mere formalism’
objection offers a surprisingly illuminating way to sketch one key aspect of
Nietzsche’s normative stance, along lines like this: Kant successfully identified
what should have basic value for us, namely autonomy, but Hegel was right that
such a ‘merely formal’ value cannot possibly entail all of traditional altruistic
morality, and (now contra Hegel) that is a good thing too, since the ‘un-selfing’
tendencies of such morality are fundamentally bad for us. What Hegel saw as a bug
is actually a feature, indeed the real and deep insight, of Kantian moral theory.
With this, we come face to face with a difficulty. How can we reconstruct the
philosophical shape of a value theory that seems at once fundamentally antiKantian but also built on a core of broadly Kantian ideas? I will explore one way
this dilemma plays out in certain details of moral psychology.
2 . NIETZSCHEAN MORAL PSYCHOLOGY: NATURALISM
VERSUS TRANSCENDENTALISM
Kantian ethical theory in general, and its conception of autonomy in particular,
rests on a crucial assumption about moral psychology. For Kantians, there is a
fundamental difference between two types of motivational incentives—those of
reason and those of inclination—and in any context of action or decision, reason
is supposed to have the basic capacity to ‘stand back’ from the biddings of
inclination and decide independently whether the inclination is to be endorsed
by the self or not.7 Our autonomy depends on this capacity to ‘stand back’ from
7 Of course, Kant need not, and does not, deny that reason and inclination may interact in the
same attitude, e.g. to form passions in which our inclinations are informed by influence from our
power of choice. The key point for my purposes is just that the separation of two sources of
What is a Nietzschean Self ?
205
desires and assess them, so that the self can follow reason’s law even when it
stands completely athwart the demands of all our inclinations. But just here we
might worry, from a Nietzschean point of view, since it is a matter of controversy
whether there is even any such thing, for Nietzsche, as a self capable of ‘standing
back’ from our conative attitudes in this fashion.
Naturalist readers of Nietzsche such as Brian Leiter (2002, 2009; also Leiter
and Knobe 2007) and Matthias Risse (2007) insist that there is not.8 They
emphasize the many texts that express Nietzsche’s sceptical, or perhaps even
eliminativist, position about the self.9 According to this strand of thought, our
belief in a unified conscious self over and above our desires, drives, or inclinations
is an illusion. In fact, the self is nothing but a ‘social structure of the drives and
affects’ (BGE 12), and we ‘deceive ourselves’ about this multiplicity when we take
it as a unified, substantial thing ‘by means of the synthetic concept “I”’ (BGE
19). When it appears to us that our conscious self or intellect has taken some
basic decision against a drive or other conative attitude within us, in reality what
occurs is merely that another drive, which is opposed to the first and, more
dominant, has seized the place of speaking for the self (D 109). While we often
suppose that the intellect is ‘something that is essentially opposed to the instincts’, in fact (contrary to the Kantian assumption) ‘it is actually nothing but a
certain behavior of the instincts toward one another’ (GS 333). On this picture, so
far from there being a self capable of standing back from all the drives, what
speaks for ‘the self’ is nothing but the strongest or dominant drive itself.10
motivation allows Kantians to claim that it is always (motivationally) possible for an agent to ‘stand
back’ from inclinations altogether, assess them from the standpoint of reason alone, and act in a way
that is motivated by pure reason. See Reginster (2012) for additional discussion. (Thanks to Allen
Wood for clarifying exchanges.)
8 Of course, many of Nietzsche’s French post-structuralist readers (e.g. Foucault, Derrida) are
equally keen to emphasize scepticism about any substantial notion of the self. Given the notable
differences between the naturalist and post-structuralist camps in background philosophical
motivations, it is remarkable in its own way that they share such a prominent investment in this
interpretation of Nietzschean doctrine.
9 Just to provide a hint of the domain, here is a quick and dirty, radically incomplete selection of
Nietzsche’s comments in this vein: ‘But there is no such substratum [the ‘doer’]; there is no “being”
behind doing, effecting, becoming “the doer” is simply fabricated into the doing—the doing is
everything’ (GM I, 13). ‘To indulge the fable of “unity”, “soul”, “person”, this we have forbidden:
with such hypotheses one only covers up the problem’ (KSA 11: 577). ‘We enter a realm of crude
fetishism when we summon before consciousness the basic presuppositions of the metaphysics of
language . . . Everywhere it sees a doer and a doing; it believes in will as the cause; it believes in the
ego, in the ego as being, in the ego as substance . . . that calamity of an error’ (TI III, 5). ‘And as for
the ego! That has become a fable, a fiction, a play on words: it has altogether ceased to think, feel, or
will!’ (TI VI, 3). ‘We suppose that intelligere must be . . . something that stands essentially opposed
to the instincts, while it is actually nothing but a certain behavior of the instincts toward one another’
(GS 333).
10 This last interpretive position—that the Nietzschean self is just the strongest drive—is widely
endorsed by commentators even outside the naturalist and post-structuralist camps; see e.g.
Reginster (2003).
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By contrast, Kantian-inspired readers such as Sebastian Gardner (2009) insist
that, notwithstanding the sceptical strand of texts just canvassed, Nietzsche’s own
practical philosophy commits him to a conscious self capable of ‘standing back’
from the drives in a broadly Kantian sense. For Gardner, Nietzsche’s thought
contains ‘a buried transcendental dimension’ (Gardner 2009: 19) with substantial implications for moral psychology. Consider, for example, the preconditions
for the ‘creation of values’ central to Nietzsche’s value theory. In order for the
individual to create values of her own, the thought goes, she must have a
conception of herself as a unified practical agent who is the source of those
values. Even if the values she posits are influenced by the drives within her, the
individual self must (first-personally) think of them as her own—and not merely
the demands of some dominating drive—on pain of a ‘profound self-alienation’
(Gardner 2009: 9) which would undermine the very autonomy Nietzsche sought
to secure by appealing to the creation of values in the first place. I confess that this
argument strikes me as potentially question-begging against the Leiter-style
naturalist. (It seems that the naturalist can simply deflate the autonomy
Nietzsche sought along with the notion of selfhood, insisting that when
‘I’ speak the values of the dominant drive in the voice of my (more or less
illusory) self, that is all the autonomy, and all the ‘first-personalism’, that
Nietzsche wants or needs.) In any case, the result seems to be based primarily
on an a priori argument identifying alleged presuppositions of Nietzschean
positions, rather than any direct argument from Nietzsche’s texts.11 As such, it
might be thought to tell us more about the shape and force of Gardner’s postKantian commitments than it does about Nietzsche’s own view.12
11 The same basic form of argument, which posits an autonomous self as a precondition of
practical agency quite generally, is a widespread move in the Kantian tradition. For a classic
example, see the well-known response to Parfit in Korsgaard (1996: 363–97).
12 I should note, in addition, a second kind of argument for the transcendentalist conclusion in
Gardner, to which I have a similar reaction. The second argument focuses on whether a mere
collection of drives could even generate the requisite idea of a unified ‘I’ without actually being a
unified transcendental self of the sort in dispute. Gardner writes ‘So the question arises, how, except
in the perspective of an I, of something that takes itself to have unity of the self ’s sort, can a
conception of unity sufficient to account for the fiction of the I be formed? (As it might be put: How
can the ‘idea’ of the I occur to a unit of will to power or composite thereof—or to anything less than
an I?)’ (Gardner 2009: 69). I am puzzled by Gardner’s puzzlement here. Three ideas suggest
themselves. Perhaps, first, the worry is just a version of the problem of (the unity of)
consciousness—that is, a doubt that the collection of subpersonal attitudes Nietzsche postulates
in the self could ever give rise to any (unified) conscious state at all. But this worry has nothing
special to do with the representation ‘I’; it would apply in the same way to any representational
content accompanied by reflective consciousness. Since Nietzsche seems to be willing to assume
fairly substantial representational capacities for his drives and affects, he is perhaps better positioned
with respect to this general problem than other radically naturalistic positions. If, second, there is
supposed to be a specific problem about a collection-self coming up with a particular content of
representation, the ‘I’, then I confess that the argument strikes me as being parallel to Descartes’
Med. III proof of God’s existence, and subject to similar problems. Some representation (<God>,
<I>) is supposed to be so special that a representational system could not reach it by any kind of
extrapolation or invention, so we must conclude that the object of the representation really exists,
What is a Nietzschean Self ?
207
But a similar point is raised by Chris Janaway (2009) in an explicitly textbased context that does tie the result to distinctive Nietzschean doctrine and not
just general Kantian principle. As Janaway insists, Nietzsche’s perspectivist
conception of objectivity requires the cognitive self to ‘stand back’ from its
affects in much the sense under discussion. Objectivity is to be seen:
not as ‘contemplation without interest’ (which is a nonsensical absurdity), but as the ability to
control one’s Pro and Con and to dispose of them, so that one knows how to employ a variety
of perspectives and affective interpretations in the service of knowledge . . . [T]he more affects
we allow to speak about one thing, the more eyes, different eyes, we can use to observe one
thing, the more complete will our ‘concept’ of the thing, our ‘objectivity,’ be (GM III, 12).
Here the cognitive self that does the ‘controlling’ cannot plausibly be identified with some dominant affect or drive. For if the self were just the dominant
affect, then that affect, at least, would not be ‘controlled’ and ‘disposed of’ by an
independent cognitive self, and the wanted objectivity would not be achieved.
Perspectivist objectivity thus apparently requires a capacity on the part of the
cognitive self to detach itself from its constituent drives and affects so as to take
up attitudes towards them—even to control and manipulate them. Arguably,
similar implications attach to other central Nietzschean ideas such as his ubiquitous emphasis on self-mastery and self-overcoming, or the ‘sovereign individual’
praised at GM II, 2.13
and has provided the representation’s content through being perceived (or in some other way?). But
what is so special, really? Supposing that the Nietzschean bundle-self could represent at all, why
couldn’t it manufacture for itself an illusory ‘synthetic concept “I” ’ (BGE 19), and (falsely) think of
itself under that concept? Perhaps, third, there is supposed to be a deep Kantian reason that all
representation (or at least reflective representation) necessarily presupposes a transcendental ego. For
example, a Kantian might insist that representations can only come together and count as a
judgement by being synthesized, and thereby brought into a unity through the activity of a single,
conscious cognitive agency. This point, however, strikes me as more Gardnerian/(post-)Kantian than
Nietzschean in flavour. That is, if some such thing is true, why should we receive the point as an
interpretation of Nietzsche, rather than a criticism that he has overlooked a deep and important
insight of transcendental philosophy? (Thanks to Christine Lopes and Allen Wood for clarifying
exchanges on this last point.)
13 Nietzsche’s discussion at GM II, 1–3 provides fairly decisive evidence for the point, it seems to
me. For recall, the distinctive capacity of the ‘sovereign individual’, promising, abrogates the normal
forgetfulness that characterizes the experience of others, and the individual does this precisely by
means of an act of will that persists across arbitrary psychological changes in which other drives are
activated, and thereby instantiates a form of active self-control that is not interrupted by those other
drives: ‘a promise . . . is thus by no means simply a passive no-longer-being-able-to-get-rid-of the
impression once it has been inscribed, not simple indigestion from a once pledged word over which
one cannot regain control, but rather an active no-longer-wanting-to-get-rid-of, a willing on and on
of something one has once willed, a true memory of the will: so that a world of new strange things,
circumstances, and even acts of will may be placed without reservation between the original
“I want”, “I will do”, and the actual discharge of the will, its act, without this long chain of the
will breaking’ (GM II, 1). Thus, the sovereign individual is a possible type defined by the capacity of
a whole self to assume a diachronically stable attitude of commitment, which persists through the
alterations of the individual drives and controls action even in the face of their vicissitudes. That is,
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Our understanding of Nietzsche’s moral psychology thus faces a genuine
dilemma. On the one hand it is impossible to ignore the texts expressing
scepticism about any substantial notion of the self, and even suggesting a
reduction of the self to subpersonal drives and affects. But on the other, core
Nietzschean ideas like self-overcoming and perspectivist objectivity seem to
require some notion of a self separate from the drives.
To lay some of my cards on the table, this paper aims to carve out a ‘third way’
between naturalist and transcendentalist readings. One idea in the background
will be the thought—pushed already by Nehamas (1985) and Schacht (1983:
306–9), but recently developed by others, including Janaway (2009), Gemes
(2006, 2009b), and myself in earlier work (Anderson 2006)—that the
Nietzschean self is not simply given as standard metaphysical equipment in
every human, but is rather some kind of task or achievement.14 My strategy will
be to surround this suggestion with enough moral psychological details to fill out
a viable competitor to the naturalist and transcendentalist conceptions of selfhood that have received greater development in the philosophical tradition, e.g.
from Hume, Kant, and their followers.
3 . HOW MINIMALIST IS NIETZSCHE’S
MORAL PSYCHOLOGY?
The tendency in the literature to identify the Nietzschean self with its strongest
drive has become increasingly pronounced since Bernard Williams’ enormously
influential 1993 paper ‘Nietzsche’s minimalist moral psychology’ (Williams
2006 [1993]).
Let me note immediately that Williams’ paper itself took no firm position on
the general nature of the Nietzschean self or its relation to the drives. His agenda
was shaped not by the reductionist aim to identify the self with some subpersonal
constituent(s), but rather by an Edward Craig-inspired program of reconfiguring
central philosophical notions in light of connections to their genuine social
function and the needs they fulfil (Craig 1990).15 In line with that program,
Williams emphasized Nietzsche’s broad suspicion against the ‘excess of moral
content’ (Williams 2006 [1993]: 302)—i.e. content beyond what is justified by
their core function—carried by many moral psychological notions. In particular,
what characterizes the type is precisely that there is a difference between the self as a whole and the
variable drives.
14 Allen Wood (personal communication) rightly points out that this idea is not unique to
Nietzsche, but also has a well developed life in the post-Kantian tradition going all the way back to
Fichte.
15 Thanks to Elijah Millgram for reinforcing to me the importance of this context, and to David
Hills for discussion.
What is a Nietzschean Self ?
209
he focused on the will, construed as a simple faculty capable of causing results by
prescription (i.e. simply by issuing an imperative that things should be so).
Williams traces the ‘moral excess’ built into this notion to the way it is finetuned to match our need to assign moral blame. As he notes, ‘Blame needs
an occasion—an action—and a target—the person who did the action and who
goes on from the action to meet the blame’ (Williams 2006 [1993]: 307). The
faculty of will nicely supplies these requirements, since its conceptual form
includes an occasion (the willed action) and a subject/target, who caused the
action by prescription, and who can therefore be assessed with blame to the exact
degree that the outcome was in his power. In this sense, it is plausibly ‘the needs,
demands, and invitations of the morality system . . . [that] explain the peculiar
psychology of the will’ (Williams 2006 [1993]: 307), and that is enough to raise
the suspicion that belief in the will arises not in response to general theoretical
demands of psychological explanation, but instead from certain desires (or other
pro-attitudes) rooted in ‘the morality system’. If so, then it counts as a motivated
belief, and deserves to be stripped out of a more realistic psychology.
Just here, though, more reductionist motivations can enter the picture, and in
my view, such motivations have decisively shaped the paper’s reception by
Nietzsche scholars. Williams’ approach clearly captures something important
about Nietzsche’s procedure, and it is natural to seek to generalize it—the will,
after all, is only one example of the (allegedly) widespread effects of ‘moralisation’ (GM II, 7, 21) within commonsense psychology. The most tempting
generalization strategy leaps from the rejection of the will, to the rejection of
any specially posited power or faculty that seems to have a distinctive or
important role in moral affairs, to the conclusion that ‘minimalism’ in this
context should amount to something like modern-day ‘Humeanism’—i.e. a
general restriction of moral psychological explanations to a suitably austere
ontological basis that permits appeal only to the (morally neutral) psychological
attitudes of belief and desire. Such a strategy looks to have direct implications for
the core capacity of the self at issue between transcendentalist and naturalist
readings, namely the capacity to ‘stand back’ from our attitudes and endorse or
reject them. Since that capacity fills a rather substantial moral role, it looks to be a
reasonable target of Williams-inspired suspicion. Either it should be explained in
terms of the minimal belief/desire apparatus or we should suspect that it, just like
the will, is a fabrication of moral consciousness. The result lends substantial aid
and comfort to reductionist or eliminativist readings of Nietzsche’s sceptical
remarks about any soul or self that would be separate from the drives: such
readings answer to a minimalist demand by eliminating the self, or at least
reducing it to the strongest conative attitude.
While tempting, a full-dress ‘Humean’ interpretation of what ‘minimalism’
requires cannot possibly be true to Nietzsche’s intentions (nor, one last time, was
that conclusion ever advanced by Williams). Compared to the ontologically
stripped down, austere, well-nigh parched landscape of belief/desire psychology,
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Nietzsche’s own moral psychological apparatus gives off a positively steamy air of
tropical luxuriance. It is populated by an impressive array of attitude-types—
drives, affects, instincts, desires, wills, feelings, moods, valuations, sensations,
concepts, beliefs, convictions, fictions, imaginings, cognitions, and so on—and
Nietzsche liberally appeals to the full range without evincing any noticeable
concern about reducing apparently more complex attitudes (e.g. valuing) to
simpler ones (e.g. desiring). In addition, in Nietzsche’s actual usage, each
attitude-type displays prodigious internal variety and complexity. For instance,
Janaway (2009: 52) identifies at least thirty different affects playing explanatory
roles in BGE alone, many of which are themselves identified in terms that appeal
to further attitudes (e.g. the affect of demanding respect, the affect of the feeling of
command). To consider another dimension, these attitudes can take very different kinds of objects as complements—from propositional contents, to individual
objects, relations (e.g. ‘rule over’), other attitudes, and even apparent abstracta
(e.g. ‘power’). Moreover, as I will argue below, the standard complement
requirements for at least many of these attitude-types are themselves essentially
more complex than those for ordinary beliefs and desires.16 Finally, it is worth
noting that Nietzsche himself takes the psychological reality constituted by these
attitudes to be so nuanced and fine-grained as to outstrip (and by far!) the
distinctions marked within his highly ramified explanatory apparatus—and
indeed even all those available in principle to the capacity of conscious reflection
(GS 335).
It appears, then, that the potential explanatory resources of Nietzsche’s moral
psychology are far greater than those we typically attribute to (or exploit within) a
contemporary naturalist belief/desire psychology. Moreover, the added complexity to which Nietzsche helps himself seems entirely likely to survive the sort of
minimalist program proposed by Williams. The postulated attitudes and their
contents and objects are so luxuriantly complex precisely in the service of
Nietzsche’s efforts to capture the subtle variations of non-moral (and even
immoral) psychological life. Thus they are highly unlikely to carry the sort of
‘excess moral content’ that Williams-style minimalism strives to remove.
We are now in a position to advance a more informative version of our
problem: the question is whether Nietzsche’s complex psychological apparatus
provides the materials for a conception of the self that is separable from its
constituent attitudes, in the sense of having the capacity to stand back from them
16 We can at least begin to understand the kind of increase in complexity involved here by
comparing it to the way some contemporary philosophers take valuing to be essentially a more
complex attitude than desiring—valuing is often supposed to be some higher order attitude built out of
and referring to desires, and therefore essentially more complex. See Michael Smith (1994: 130–47) for
a helpful discussion of some of the options for understanding the relation between valuing and
desiring in recent literature. Smith himself rejects the analysis of valuing in terms of desiring and
argues (1994: 147–81) for an analysis resting on beliefs about normative reasons.
What is a Nietzschean Self ?
211
to assess them, endorse or reject them, ‘control’, and ‘dispose of’ them (GM III,
12) in the way that seems to be involved in the achievement of autonomy.
4 . IS NIETZSCHEAN SCEPTICISM ABOUT THE SELF
REDUCTIONIST? A READING OF BGE 12
I propose to make a preliminary assessment of Nietzschean scepticism about the
self through a relatively close reading of one17 of Nietzsche’s most famous
sketches of what a demystified conception of the ‘soul’, or self, might look like:
As for materialistic atomism, it is one of the best refuted theories there are . . . thanks
chiefly to the Dalmatian Boscovich . . . Boscovich has taught us to abjure belief in the last
part of the earth that ‘stood fast’—the belief in ‘substance,’ in ‘matter,’ in the earthresiduum and particle-atom: it is the greatest triumph over the senses . . . so far. One must,
however, go further, and also declare war . . . against the ‘atomistic need’ which still leads a
dangerous afterlife in places where no one suspects it . . . : one must also, first of all, give
the finishing stroke to that other and more calamitous atomism which Christianity has
taught best and longest, the soul atomism. Let it be permitted to designate by this
expression the belief which regards the soul as something indestructible, eternal, indivisible, as a monad, as an atomon: this belief ought to be expelled from science! Between
ourselves, it is not at all necessary to get rid of ‘the soul’ at the same time, and thus to
renounce one of the most ancient and venerable hypotheses—as happens frequently to
clumsy naturalists who can hardly touch on ‘the soul’ without immediately losing it. But
the way is open for new versions and refinements of the soul-hypothesis; and such
conceptions as ‘mortal soul’, and ‘soul as subjective multiplicity’, and ‘soul as social
structure of the drives and affects’, want henceforth to have citizens’ rights in science
(BGE 12).
This passage is well known from its frequent starring role in support of
naturalist readings that aim to reduce the Nietzschean self (in broadly Humean
fashion) to a mere bundle of drives. On closer inspection, however, the text seems
peculiarly miscast in that particular role. Four points are worth noting.
First, the official target of Nietzsche’s attack is not the soul per se, but the
atomistic theory of the soul, i.e. the view that the self is simple (i.e. without parts),
and therefore indestructible or immortal. The argument from simplicity to
17 For the purposes of this paper, I will focus on BGE 12 as a paradigmatic text, and I will not
even attempt to interpret (or disarm) all of the textual evidence that Nietzsche held some
eliminativist or reductionist view of the self. In fact, I think that many (though not all) of the
texts, and very nearly all of the published texts, usually cited in support of such readings are quite a
bit more equivocal than they seem to those who cite them. But treatment of the full range of textual
evidence must await another occasion. Furthermore, I hasten to concede that at least some texts and
notes in Nietzsche do suggest the sort of stronger reduction or elimination of the self that I fail to
find in BGE 12, D 109, BGE 17 and 19, etc. My line on those texts will be that they are hyperbolic
and do not reflect Nietzsche’s considered position.
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immortality goes at least all the way back to Plato, but it was a particular staple of
early modern metaphysics, and that early modern version of the idea was the
central result of rational psychology that Kant undermined in his ‘paralogisms’.
Nietzsche likewise rejects the conclusion of the traditional argument (hence his
interest in the concept ‘mortal soul’ among the ‘new refinements of the soulhypothesis’). But what is more interesting for our purposes is Nietzsche’s concomitant rejection of the argument’s premise. The Kantian critique had already
delegitimized the inference from the unity of consciousness to a simple, incorruptible, subjective substance, but Kant, followed here by the broad consensus of
nineteenth century philosophical common sense, still insists on a very strong,
logico-transcendental notion of the unity of consciousness, which, indeed, he
takes to have far-reaching philosophical consequences (including inter alia
blocking materialism in philosophy of mind).18 By organizing his argument as
an attack on atomism in psychology, Nietzsche clearly means to reject not just the
inference to immortality, or to a substance underlying subjective consciousness,
but also this strong notion of the unity of consciousness itself.19 The main idea of
18 Of course, Kant’s position here must be qualified. In his view, the unity of consciousness does
not permit any inference to the conclusion that the soul is a substance, nor that it persists beyond life
(or outside the bounds of possible experience). That said, the ‘merely logical’ transcendental ego—
i.e. the conception implicated in the ‘I think’ that plays such a key role in underwriting the unity and
possibility of experience—is in fact simple and unified in a strong and consequential sense. In
particular, its simplicity is part of the critical argument designed to cut off all materialism. Consider:
‘Apperception is something real, and its simplicity lies in its very possibility. Now there is nothing
real in space that is simple; for points (which constitute the only simple entities in space) are mere
bounds, and not themselves something that serves to constitute space as parts. Thus, from this
follows the impossibility of explaining how I am constituted as a merely thinking subject on the
basis of materialism’ (B 419–20). (Any spiritualist explanation is equally ruled out by critical
strictures, of course; B 420.) The first edition ‘Paralogisms’ featured a much more indirect
version of the view, but the argument still ultimately relies (albeit very indirectly, I admit) on the
unity of consciousness, and consequent simplicity of the logical ‘I think’; see A 383. But it was the
more straightforward argument from the B edition that carried such enormous influence in
nineteenth-century philosophy. (It is perhaps also worth noting, with a view towards note 20
below, that unlike Boscovich, Kant commits himself here to a continuum mechanical view of
matter, which is constituted, not by points, but by the force exercised through space from points,
and is therefore divisible/composite in principle in a way that makes it incompatible with the
simplicity of apperception.)
19 This result is the whole point of bringing up the opening discussion of physical science in the
first place. Nietzsche’s premise is that atomism qua doctrine has been definitively refuted in physical
science (by insights of Boscovich, et al.), but that the underlying explanatory pattern persists, having
spread to other theoretical domains such as psychology (the theory of the soul). He then argues from
this premise to the conclusion that, in the absence of any support from analogy to a credible strategy
of physical explanation, the overall atomistic way of thinking cannot claim to be driven by data or
demanded by any principled a priori argument. On the contrary, it owes its plausibility solely to an
‘atomistic need ’, rooted perhaps in the thought-pattern’s familiar similarity to our everyday
representations of colliding stones, billiard balls, and the like. Now that the theoretical value of
atomism as doctrine has been undermined in its core home area (physics), Nietzsche suggests, we
should also ‘go further’ and reject its extension into psychology, which was always based more on
atomism as need than on any substantial theoretical merits. The fact that the idea’s main
deployment in rational psychology was in the proof of immortality only increases the suspicion
that it is so much motivated believing.
What is a Nietzschean Self ?
213
BGE 12 is to replace that notion with the hypothesis that even the basic self is
essentially a complex (‘soul as subjective multiplicity’, ‘soul as social structure of
the drives and affects’).
This result is quite problematic for any Gardner-style transcendental reading
of Nietzsche’s moral psychology, at least as an interpretation of Nietzsche. So far
from accepting (what a Kantian would insist are) the transcendentalist implications of his commitments about human practical and cognitive capacities—as a
‘buried transcendental dimension’ of his thought (Gardner 2009: 19)—
Nietzsche himself is determined to reject any such conception of the self.
When he insists that the theoretical work of psychology could be done by a
notion of the soul as a ‘subjective multiplicity’ (BGE 12, my ital.), he means to
deny, contra Kant, Gardner, et al., that whatever is subjective at all must exhibit a
strong and essential unity proper to consciousness as such, and thus to deny that
there is any need to postulate a unified transcendental ego.
But second, the same thoroughgoing rejection of atomism from BGE 12 has
striking implications that make trouble for a reductionist or eliminativist reading
of his theory, as well. These implications concern the relation between the self
and its drives and affects, given the sort of anti-atomism Nietzsche suggests.
Consider, first, that as Richardson (1996: 44–52) points out, it is a basic feature
of Nietzsche’s theory of drives that they are capable of combining with one
another to form larger, encompassing structures that count as drives in their own
right, possessed of distinct aims and roles in the psychological economy, and thus
some independence from their constituent sub-drives. (To take one of his
examples, my drive for food and my drive to socialize can be integrated into a
‘social eating’ drive, which produces and governs its own distinctive pattern of
behaviour (Richardson 1996: 47).) Note, secondly, that Nietzsche’s rejection
of the ‘soul atomism’ is meant to be conceptually parallel to a definite sort of
criticism of materialistic atomism, which replaces indivisible atoms with a
Boscovich/Kant system of point masses that fill space by exercising repulsive
force through it. Following Lange, Nietzsche is relying on a dynamical, continuum mechanical interpretation of such a system, and it is that interpretation that
has the radically anti-atomist implications. On this picture, matter consists
essentially of attractive and repulsive forces operating from points; therefore it
must be divisible ‘all the way down’,—division can simply reallocate the quantities of force (in which matter itself consists) along a continuum of geometrically
available points.20 Thus there are simply no material atoms. Now putting our
20 In fact, Nietzsche’s Lange-descended, continuum mechanical version of the view is not a good
interpretation of Boscovich’s actual theory. Boscovich does resolve matter into point-centres of
force, but for him, matter itself consists in the point-centres, not the forces that operate from them. As
a result, Boscovich does not in fact dispense with ‘particles’ in the sense Nietzsche intends. On the
contrary, he explicitly treats these centre-of-force points as indivisible precisely because they are
perfectly simple. Thus the ultimate constituents of matter (for Boscovich) are explicitly supposed to
be just what Nietzsche says they are not, namely ‘indestructible, eternal, indivisible’ (BGE 12), and
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two points together, the physics/psychology parallel implies that drives are no
more to be taken as psychological atoms than the soul itself, and in principle
every drive or affect is open to analysis that would reveal a complex internal
structure composed of further drive- or affect-shaped substructures.21
Note the anti-reductionist consequence. The anti-atomist point—that the self
is a complex multiplicity of psychological substructures—might have been
thought (by a reductionist) to undermine the reality of a self independent from
the drives, because such a self is just a collection, and collections are nothing over
and above their members. But that simply cannot be Nietzsche’s view, on pain of
the same argument’s likewise eliminating the reality of all drives whatsoever (none
Boscovich even compares them to Leibnizian monads (see Boscovich (1922 [1763]: 17, 35, 83, 113,
and also Article 398). Moreover, he denies that there is a continuum of such real, material points
(Boscovich 1922 [1763]: Articles 391, 393), and expressly countenances the hypothesis that there
may even be physically indivisible collections of point-elements playing the role of extended atomic
corpuscles (Boscovich 1922 [1763]: Articles 393, 398). (The idea is that the compound coheres due
to attractive forces, and that the resulting cohesion is too strong to be broken by any physically
possible repulsive force, because any repulsive force great enough would have to be located at such a
distance from the collection that it would act on all its parts together, and so could not divide them.)
Nietzsche apparently knew Boscovich in the original (he borrowed Boscovich’s Theoria philosophiæ
naturalis from the Basel library for four semesters running in 1873–5; see Crescenzi 1994), but the
basic argument of BGE 12 shows that he fundamentally misunderstood these aspects of the theory.
After all, without the continuum mechanical (mis)interpretation, Nietzsche’s inferences in BGE 12
simply do not follow. Nietzsche clearly means his argument to deny that there is any simple,
indivisible thing serving as the basic object of psychology. The reference to Boscovich was supposed
to promote this conclusion by suggesting that such simple indivisibles have no credible explanatory
role even in physical theory, which ought to be the best case for their use (see previous note, for the
pattern of reasoning). Thus the analogy can go through only if Boscovich is (wrongly) taken to be
offering a continuum theory of matter that rejects any ‘particle-atom’ (BGE 12) in the specific sense of
simple, indivisible, and therefore indestructible physical particles. Probably Nietzsche misunderstood
(or, in 1885–6, misremembered ) Boscovich because the composition of BGE 12 was guided by Lange’s
Geschichte des Materialismus (Lange 1902 [1873–5]). While Lange does not actually make the mistake
Nietzsche does, he does encourage, or at least, suggest it by describing a quick and all-but-inevitable
logical progression from Boscovich’s denial that the atoms are extended to the fully dynamical,
continuum mechanical view of force-centres, which he attributes to Faraday (see Lange 1902
[1873–5]: 192–3). Lange’s complaints against materialists in this passage—(they unjustifiably hold
onto the material atom just because it satisfies a ‘need of the mind’ for sensible objects, i.e. objects
analogous to perceptible billiard balls and such, in physics)—clearly marks it as Nietzsche’s proximal
source (recall from BGE 12 Boscovich’s ‘triumph over the senses’!). I hypothesize that as he thought
through the ideas of BGE 12, Nietzsche had Lange’s account of anti-atomism and Boscovich in mind
(or in front of him), and he simply did not bother to check whether Boscovich’s actual theory was in
fact analogous to his intended defense of anti-atomism in psychology. (Thanks to David Hills for
extremely helpful discussion.)
21 Richardson himself denies this consequence, and continues to treat (some) drives as atoms (see
1996: 44–5, et passim), but I do not see how the anti-atomist result can be avoided. After all, on the
side of physics, anti-atomism is supposed to be a consequence of the basic conceptual structure of
thinking in terms of forces rather than particles, and it is the identity of that conceptual structure
across physical and psychological explanation that is supposed to underwrite the basic notion of will
to power as an explanatory device proper to both domains. I defend a particular account of the kind
of theoretical unification the will to power doctrine is supposed to provide in Anderson (1994). For
a further, and somewhat independently motivated, defence of anti-atomism about the drives in the
context of moral psychology specifically, see Anderson (2006).
What is a Nietzschean Self ?
215
of which are atoms). Ironically, the tendency to draw eliminativist or reductionist
conclusions from the argument of BGE 12 turns out to be itself a symptom of the
very ‘atomistic need’ Nietzsche criticizes, which appears here in the guise of a
latent assumption that only the psychological atoms could be truly real!
A third observation about BGE 12 is that, even though the passage makes
problems for transcendentalism, one might still have expected the naturalist
interpreters of Nietzsche to have been more put off by its explicit treatment of
naturalism itself. Not only does Nietzsche mention naturalists in a dismissive
tone, but he also makes it rather clear that the position he would like to dismiss is
precisely the kind of naturalist reading that concerns us—the view that there is
nothing to the soul, or that ‘the self ’ is in reality just some lower-level, more
naturalistically respectable entity, like the material brain, or a bundle of impressions and ideas, or the strongest drive. To remind ourselves, while Nietzsche is
keen to get rid of the soul atomon and the inference to immortality, ‘Between
ourselves, it is not at all necessary to get rid of “the soul” at the same time, and
thus to renounce one of the most ancient and venerable hypotheses—as happens
frequently to clumsy naturalists who can hardly touch on “the soul” without
immediately losing it’ (BGE 12). This third point thus reinforces the antieliminativist moral of the second. Nietzsche’s agenda is to change our conception
of the soul, not to get rid of it as an identifiable object of psychology over and
above its subpersonal constituents.22
Fourthly, it is worth paying attention to the hypotheses about the soul that
Nietzsche takes to be worth exploring. From the perspective of the atomism
problem, the most important new ‘soul-hypotheses’ are the conceptions of the
‘soul as subjective multiplicity’ and of the ‘soul as social structure of the drives
and affects’ (BGE 12). While emphasizing (against atomism) that the soul is
something complex, both of these formulations tell against any strong eliminativism, or any reductionist position about the relation between the self and its
constituents. After all, a social structure is something that goes beyond the
individuals who participate in it—a more or less definite group reality that
may or may not characterize those individuals and their relations.23 Thus, the
22 Of course, ‘naturalism’ is a term of remarkable plasticity, and what Nietzsche means to dismiss
under the name ‘naturalism’ is probably different from, and possibly quite a bit cruder than, the
naturalism advocated by his current-day interpreters. But as I argue in the text, the point crucial for
our purposes is shared by both versions of naturalism. The ‘clumsy naturalists’ of BGE 12
presumably are—or at least include—popular mid-nineteenth-century German materialists who
were determined to make the reductionist point that the soul can be nothing but an aggregation of
matter (see Leiter 2002: 63–71). For the purposes of atomism, however, the key reductionist move is
shared by a more current naturalist program (or interpretation) purporting to reduce the self to
some aggregation of constituent attitudes (e.g. drives, affects), or a Humean ‘bundle’ of
psychological states (be they impressions and ideas, or beliefs and desires). In both cases, the basic
idea is to get rid of anything that deserves to be called a ‘self’, or ‘soul’, and Nietzsche’s comment in
BGE 12 clearly aims to resist that impulse. (Thanks to Elijah Millgram for discussion.)
23 Or at least, so Nietzsche himself clearly believes. His commitment to the reality of social level
phenomena is clearly on display, for example, in the Genealogy’s description of what was
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social structure of drives and affects, though it admittedly incorporates the
subpersonal attitudes and could not exist without them, is still presented as
something more than just the drives and affects themselves. Likewise in the first
formulation, Nietzsche presents the self not merely as a multiplicity of attitudes,
but as a subjective multiplicity—that is, I take it, as a structure with the subjective
capacity to inhabit attitudes of its own, including, potentially, attitudes towards
its constituent drives and affects. Thus the specific hypotheses Nietzsche proposes
about the soul tend to support the thought that the self has some emergent reality
over and above its constituent drives and affects, and thereby to cut against
eliminativist or reductionist naturalisms, just as BGE 12’s cutting dismissal of
naturalism would suggest.
Finally, I note in closing that Nietzsche presents the self not as identical to the
strongest drive, nor as a bundle of drives, but as an ordered structure of drives and
affects. It has been tempting for readers to take Nietzsche’s frequent talk of ‘drives
and affects’ together as pleonastic, such that ‘affect’ does not add anything to talk
of ‘drives’. But as our quick survey of the complexities of Nietzsche’s moral
psychological apparatus suggested, drives are not affects, and this assimilation is
likely to be too quick. I will argue below that some real illumination can come
from careful attention to their differences and interactions.
I concede that this reading of BGE 12 offers only a set of textual indications
that Nietzsche (even in his anti-transcendentalist moments) accepted some
notion of a self existing over and above its constituent attitudes. There is not
yet any real argument showing how Nietzsche justified that commitment, why he
needed it, or what philosophical work it does for him. In the next section, I will
offer the beginnings of such an argument, based on a bit of (more-or-less) firstphilosophizing about Nietzschean drives and affects, and their place within his
larger moral psychology.
5 . DRIVES AND AFFECTS: AN INITIAL FORAY INTO
NIETZSCHEAN PSYCHOLOGY
The complexity of Nietzsche’s moral psychology noted in Section 3 puts a quick
end to any hope for a comprehensive treatment here. As an initial stab, I propose
accomplished by those who formed the first states: ‘Their work is an instinctive creating of forms,
impressing of forms; they are the most involuntary, unconscious artists there are:—where they
appear, in a short time something new appears there, a ruling structure that lives, in which parts and
functions are delimited and related to one another, in which nothing at all finds a place that has not
first had placed into it a “meaning” with respect to the whole’ (GM II, 17, first italics mine). Here,
obviously, social organization has its own reality, separate from the individuals it organizes and
depends on. Otherwise, there would be nothing ‘new’ to appear, with its own ‘life’, and the artists of
state formation would not have introduced something new into the world.
What is a Nietzschean Self ?
217
to follow the suggestion of BGE 12 and focus on two of the most central
attitudes: drives and affects.
Drives, affects, and their complements
I begin from an important result due to Paul Katsafanas (2008, ch. 4; and
forthcoming). Based on a far-ranging and penetrating analysis of Nietzsche’s
(and wider nineteenth-century) uses of the closely related terms ‘drive’ and
‘instinct’, Katsafanas shows that Nietzschean drives are importantly different
from desires. The crucial point concerns relative complexity with respect to the
complements of the different attitude types. On one commonly assumed conception, desire takes a one-place complement: for example, I desire an object (that
Burdick’s chocolate truffle, say), or I desire some (propositionally structured) state
of affairs (e.g. that I arrive home safely from a trip). Indeed, this simple, one-place
structure contributes to the plausibility of counting desire as the fundamental
conative attitude, out of which further attitudes with world-to-mind direction of
fit should be constructed. But, so Katsafanas shows, drives take a two-place
complement. A drive not only has a particular (propositional or individual) object
that it tracks, but it also, and separately, pursues a more abstract aim—a characteristic pattern of activity of which the pursuit of this or that object of current
attention is merely an instance.24 For example, my drive for food can take any
number of particular objects (e.g. the Burdick’s chocolate truffle, the five-course
meal I am in the midst of preparing, or simply that I am no longer hungry), but all
these are merely particular occasions, suitably shaped for the object position, for
the expression of the drive’s broader aim, namely, the pattern of activity towards
which it teleologically tunes my behaviour (in this case, eating).
To see the importance of this aim/object distinction, just reflect on the case
where I am a compulsive eater: in such circumstances I cannot of course do
without appropriate objects for my drive—indeed, seeking them is the main focus
of my compulsive attention—but at the same time, no such objects actually satisfy
me; as soon as I have eaten them, the drive reasserts itself (i.e. its pursuit of its aim),
and I am off in search of a new object.25 As Katsafanas nicely puts the point:
24 Of course, this sort of aim/object distinction for drives gets substantial development in Freud’s
theory of drives, but Katsafanas shows that the same distinction is present and important
throughout the tradition, going all the way back to the key early philosophical deployments of
the notion of drives around the turn of the nineteenth century, e.g. in Fichte, Schiller, and
Schopenhauer.
25 From this point of view, it should be immediately apparent why drive psychology was so
appropriate for Schopenhauer’s purposes. It nicely generates a ‘how-possible’ explanation for the sort
of futility of conation that is at the heart of his pessimism. According to that explanation, we are
never satisfied, because what a drive really seeks is its aim, but all it can ever get is an object. Thus
desiring reasserts itself (with its attendant suffering) almost as soon as it is satisfied. (Needless to say,
not every form of drive psychology need be committed to this sort of pessimism about conation; the
point is just that drive psychology crisply explains how the pessimistic theory is possible.)
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Drives are constant motivational forces that incline one to engage in certain activities or
processes. Drives are not satisfied by the attainment of their objects, since their objects are
just chance occasions for expression. In other words, the object serves as nothing more
than an opportunity for the drive to express itself, by inclining the agent to engage in
some activity or other. What the drive seeks is just this expression; the drive is satisfied26
only when being expressed, when the process that it motivates is in progress. Accordingly,
an activity that is motivated by a drive aims at the performance of the activity itself
(Katsafanas 2008: 150).
Katsafanas goes on to outline a number of other important features of drives
(they include or induce evaluative outlooks; they affect our perception of reasons
(see Katsafanas, forthcoming: 31–2); they are continuous, diachronically persistent forces in a moral psychology; etc.). While I will make a bit of weather out of
these characteristics, for the most part it will be enough for my purposes if we
bear in mind the added complexity introduced by the observation that drives
admit of the aim/object distinction.
What about affects? I think there a parallel point to be made for that other core
Nietzschean attitude. ‘Affekt’ is a fairly common technical term in moral psychology. It refers to a class of attitudes that combine a passive, receptive responsiveness to
the world with a reactive motivational output; these are states—standardly with a
prominent feeling component—through which we detect the saliences of things and
find ourselves motivated to respond. But even though it is a technical category,
‘Affekt’ tends to get ostensive rather than stipulative definition. As Janaway (2009:
52) observes, the affects Nietzsche talks about are very often inclinations or aversions, and at least the core paradigm affects are attitudes we nowadays think of as
emotions: love, hate, anger, fear, resentment, joy, contempt, glorying, etc.
Like drives sensu Katsafanas, I submit, affect qua attitude takes (at least) a twoplace complement.27 In place of the aim/object structure characteristic of drives,
affects are completed by a stimulus object and something like a default behavioural
response. The attitude itself colours the salience and evaluation of the stimulus
object and it governs both the pattern and the manner of the agent’s default
response.
26 Note that for drives, at least for Nietzsche, being ‘satisfied’ and being ‘activated’ are not really
distinct. This marks another fundamental difference between drives and desires, since drive
satisfaction is something fundamentally different from desire satisfaction. (In normal cases, of
course, when a desire is satisfied, it is extinguished.) Nietzsche makes use of this feature of drives
to avoid the pessimistic inferences Schopenhauer derives from the moral psychology of satisfaction,
discussed in the previous note.
27 I introduce the qualification ‘at least’ because, in fact, recent discussions of the emotions suggest
that matters are likely to be substantially more complicated. Emotions (at least often) have much more
complex and ramified complements (see following note). But the two-factor complement structure
I go on to identify in the text captures at least an important part of the story. It identifies a basic
organizing structure exhibited by the complements of paradigmatic affects/emotions; still more
complex complements can then be fitted into and/or around the two aspects I emphasize. Thus, the
story below can serve as an adequate, albeit highly simplified, idealization for present purposes.
(Thanks to Elijah Millgram for discussion.)
What is a Nietzschean Self ?
219
These three elements—stimulus object, default response, and the emotional
‘colouring’ of each—emerge clearly in paradigm cases of affect. For example, the
affect of ressentiment is standardly activated by an appropriate stimulus object
(another agent, or agent-like object, who does injury or stands athwart the agent’s
will), and it issues in a default tendency to respond by seeking revenge. The
distinctive affective/emotional character of the attitude emerges both in the way
it colours our perception of and attention to the stimulus object (recall here
ressentiment ’s perception of the noble man, ‘but dyed in another colour, interpreted in another fashion, seen in another way by the venomous eye of ressentiment ’ (GM I, 11)), and also through the manner in which its evaluative framework
shapes the pursuit of revenge (e.g. with ‘hatred’ of ‘monstrous and uncanny
proportions’, ‘the most spiritual and poisonous kind of hatred’ (GM I, 7)—as
opposed to vengefulness that ‘consummates and exhausts itself in an immediate
reaction, and therefore does not poison’ (GM I, 10)). To take another example, the
affect of joy will arise in response to some stimulus object (e.g. the long desired
friend finally arrived, one’s state of well-being, the fact that an enterprise has turned
out successfully), and prompts a default expressive (re)action (an embrace, exaltation, celebration), where both the perception of the object and the manner of the
reaction are governed by the distinctive emotional colouring of the affect. Or
consider Nietzsche’s frequent exploration of the affect of disgust, which for him so
often takes the ‘last man’ as its stimulus object and proposes some cleansing or
purifying reaction (recall the ‘export’ proposal of GM III, 26, among many other
examples), all the while creating an evaluative perspective that governs both the
perception of the stimulus (the ‘hopelessly mediocre and insipid’ ‘maggot “man’’’
(GM I, 11, etc.) and the manner of the desired response (e.g. the spirit of
Nietzsche’s fantasized Anacreontic chair-kicking in GM III, 26).
I hope these few examples are sufficient to motivate the plausibility of a broadly
two-factor account of affect complements. To sum up the point at the abstract,
structural level, instead of taking a one-place complement such as perception (of an
object) or desire (for an object), an affect is completed by both (a) some stimulus
object that activates the affect, and (b) a default response upon which the affect
primes us to act.28 Finally, affects are like drives in that they come already
‘evaluatively pre-loaded’. The feeling component of affect carries evaluative baggage
28 I adopted this talk of emotions’ ‘priming us to act’ from suggestions (in conversation) of Tim
Bloser and David Hills. Again, the two-factor analysis I propose here is self-consciously offered as a
simplifying idealization (see previous note), and I do not mean to deny that there may be further
distinctions to be drawn as part of a fuller account of the structure of affect complements. For
example, it has been proposed that we should distinguish the target object of an emotion (that
towards which the emotion directs my thoughts and feelings) from its formal object (a relevant
property ascribed to the target) and from the focus of the emotion. Many further distinctions have
also been proposed in the literature. Here, I purport only to draw one fairly coarse-grained and
general distinction meant to explain the peculiar combination of passive and active elements
exhibited by affects/emotions.
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that shapes and colours our perception of the stimulus and governs the manner
characteristic of the default action path it suggests to us.29
The presence of two different types of complement helps to explain the
curious combination of passive and active elements characteristic of affects.
Affects seem to be essentially passive attitudes through which we are responsive
to evaluatively salient features of the world, but at the same time fundamentally
active motivational attitudes; as Janaway (2009: 52) points out, they are largely
inclinations and aversions. Affects can play both roles because of their different
complements: they show up as attitudes of passive sensitivity when we are
focusing on their stimulus objects, but as motivational when we are focusing
on the default action for which they prime us.
It is worth noting one final contrast to drives. The main object place of an
affect is filled by its stimulus or cause, and is not necessarily the focus of the
emotion or the target of the behaviour for which the affect primes us. Consider,
for example, my fear of some danger threatening my loved one. Here the
stimulus object (the danger) is distinct from the focus that orients the emotion
(my loved one) and, in addition, it is not at all some target that I ‘go for’ in my
fear-induced behaviour; on the contrary, I am trying to flee it or block it, and
thereby teleologically pursuing some other goal like ‘safety’. (Admittedly, we do
attend to a feared stimulus object if it is specific enough, but precisely in order to
get away from it. Perhaps the goal of our fearful behaviour is defined in terms of
the stimulus, but negatively; we reach our goal when the object is gone.) For these
reasons, affectively motivated action often seems relatively unfocused, or not
under tight teleological control: my disgust at some spoiled food primes me to
shove it away, but the impulse to fling it away or simply to close the door of the
fridge as quickly as possible may well be a much less effective plan for removing it
from the range of sensation than a behaviour that (temporarily) moves me
towards it (e.g. opening the container and getting it all down the disposal).
Drives and affects working together
These structural observations cast interesting light on the relation between drives
and affects, which turns out to be crucial to the main questions of this paper. The
key points I will be emphasizing follow from the morphological features of drives
and affects just canvassed, together with Nietzsche’s anti-atomism, the evaluatively loaded character of both attitude types, and what I just called the unfocused character of affect-driven action.
29 The fact that the manner of the default response is so directly governed by the feeling
component of the affect is itself a compelling reason to insist that the response pattern really is
part and parcel of the affect as an attitude, and does not arise from elsewhere (for example, from the
affect’s having recruited a separate drive, with which it acts in concert). Thanks to Elijah Millgram
for pressing me to think through the motivations for this aspect of my analysis.
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Note, first, the extent to which the general structural features of drives and
affects tailor them to work together. Perhaps the most obvious source of this
‘niceness of fit’ is the difference between the targets, or pursuit objects, taken by
drives and the stimulus objects taken by affects. By associating with an affect, a
drive acquires sensitivity to a stimulus and thereby ‘knows’ when to activate;
conversely, an affect can give better shape to its pattern of behavioural response
by taking up a pursuit object from a drive.30
We can go further, however. In general, a drive represents its object and pursues
its aim under the influence of some broad evaluative perspective, but for most
drives the ‘built-in’ evaluative perspective proper to the drive itself is not sufficiently nuanced to explain the range drives exhibit in adjusting their expression to
variation in the evaluative circumstances. To return to the Richardson example,
my drive for food may always represent eating as a good, but I can eat lustily and
with relish, or curiously, or sensuously, or with finicky particularlity, or dutifully
under a ‘food as fuel’ mentality. This ‘adverbial’ variation—or anyway a great deal
of it—is explained by the drive’s recruiting an affect to further specify its evaluative
perspective. Since the affect will have a prominent feeling component, it will add
nuance to both the manner of the drive’s aim-expression and its value-laden
perception of its object. So, for instance, my drive for food might recruit the
affect of greed and express itself gluttonously, or it might get caught up in
my affect of despair or of slight disgust and express itself through a correspondingly inflected version of dutiful eating. Even better, think here of the way the
presentational strategies adopted by a great restaurant conspire to slow us down
and thereby induce more attentive eating that encourages a special focus on
subtleties of flavour; tellingly, we call this ‘setting a mood’.
A parallel point can be made for affects. As I noted, the ‘unfocused’ character
of affect-driven action creates a natural opening for the affect to recruit a relevant
drive to lend focus and firmer telic shape to the action for which it primes us. To
take the most prominent Nietzschean example, the affect of ressentiment, under
the right conditions, recruits the drive for power to hammer its vague impulse to
get back against the happy into the incredibly subtle, highly structured, longterm, plan-shaped program of activity Nietzsche describes as the global revaluation of the noble pattern of values, or for short, the ‘slave revolt in morality’ (GM
I; BGE 260, 262; et passim).
30 In these and similar ways, the cooperative partnering of drives and affects suit them for roles in
the sort of rationalizing explanations of behaviour with which we are familiar from the belief/desire
folk psychology. That said, drives and affects do not always work together in this way. For example,
drives need not partner with an affect so as to activate in environmentally appropriate circumstances,
and in fact they often activate ‘on their own’, when circumstances are not especially appropriate.
Thus, a drive psychology is particularly well suited to offer non-rationalizing explanations of
behaviour that is not very rational. This sort of explanatory pattern (and its advantages) are well
explored in Katsafanas’ work on drives. (Thanks to Paul Katsafanas for illuminating discussion of
this point.)
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As the last example indicates, this kind of close interaction of drives and affects,
based on mutual recruitability, is a basic and incredibly widespread feature of
Nietzsche’s actual explanations in moral psychology. In the interest of space,
I won’t try to discuss many specific instances; instead I will just gesture at three
broad patterns of explanation that will be familiar. Consider first the force of
Nietzsche’s frequent classification of drives into the ‘aggressive, form-giving’ drives
and ‘reactive’ ones (GM II, 12; I, 10–11; et passim). What separates the two classes?
Among the important factors, as it seems to me, must be counted the characteristic
differences in the affects they recruit to inflect their expression. Drives in the first
class typically recruit the affect of aggression (or one of its many constituent affects
or more specific versions); drives in the second class inflect themselves with
ressentiment and its relatives, or else with a more general affect of reactivity.31
Second a similar point can be made about the explanatory strategy Nietzsche
sums up with the observation, ‘Regarding all aesthetic values I now avail myself
of this main distinction: I ask in every instance, “is it hunger or superabundance
that has here become creative?”’ (GS 370). This question allows Nietzsche to
separate the aesthetic drives he takes to be fruitful from destructive ones by appeal
to the affects they tend to recruit, and also vice versa, to distinguish positive/
affirmative affects from negative ones in terms of the drives they recruit. Thus
Nietzsche insists that the artistic drive to destroy can be good (if it preferentially
recruits ‘Dionysian’ affects of overflowing joy, hence expressing ‘superabundance’) or bad (if it tends to recruit vengeful affects and expresses ‘hunger’).
Likewise, the artistic drive to immortalize can be of the (good) type that recruits
affects of gratitude or love (superabundance) or of the (bad) type, recruiting those
of self-torture, e.g. in the case of Schopenhauerian ‘romantic pessimism’ (hunger). Conversely, the affects of gratitude and love themselves count as selfaffirmative largely because they tend to recruit outwardly oriented drives of
superabundance, whose aims conduce to the strengthening and integration of
the agent and expanding the sphere of her power.32
A third class of cases involves the invidious distinction between ‘natural’ and
‘unnatural’ instincts (GM II, 24; TI V, 4–5; et passim). Nietzsche’s official
31 A related point might be made about a similar distinction between classes of drives in BGE
201; there Nietzsche separates a dangerous, aggressive, high-spirited class, characterized by affects
tied to elation, the feeling of elevation, etc., from a class of drives promoting quiet, pro-social
behaviour, which recruit affects related to timidity.
32 It might seem tempting to reject any such analysis of affects, and instead take the distinction
between affirmative affects such as gratitude and negative ones such as self-hatred as basic and
irreducibly intuitive. After all, the positive affects do not (as it were) negate or attack the self. But the
insufficiency of that simple, intuitive thought emerges quickly. For it is just not true that, for
Nietzsche, all negative self-directed attitudes count as self-destructive like the ones he is trying to
identify and relegate to this second (self-denigrating, hungry) class. Recall, for example, the
importance for him of the inwardly directed affects crucially involved in self-discipline; contrary to
intuitive appearances, those must surely also belong on the self-affirming side of the ledger for
Nietzsche’s purposes, despite their critical or even self-punishing attitude towards the self as it is.
What is a Nietzschean Self ?
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position has to be that even the ‘unnatural instincts’ (to embrace the Beyond,
etc.) are still expressions of some interest of life (see GM III, 13). They can count
as ‘against life’ or ‘anti-nature,’ therefore, only in light of the configuration of the
drive/affect interaction: natural drives are those that recruit self-affirming affects
and unnatural instincts recruit affects of self-denial—mutatis mutandis for the
case of life-affirming and life-negating affects.
I conclude that the drives and affects form a cross-hatched, mutually supporting structure of attitudes, whose integration rests on the way they are structurally
tailored to recruit one another—e.g. with drives supplying a target object for
affect-motivated action and affects supplying activation cues and also valueladen, nuanced specification to a drive’s object perception and manner of
expression. What follows from this picture?
The emergence of the (minimal) self
As a first consequence, consider that such a cross-hatched structure must routinely generate one–many relations between drives and affects. The entire explanatory apparatus depends on the availability of the same affect to be recruited to
inflect the expression of many different drives. Think of all the different drives
that recruit ressentiment to determine the manner of their expression—and the
same goes for timidity, or joy, or hatred, or the affect of command. The same
affect of love may be mobilized to modify the deployment of the erotic drive in
one context, the artistic drive to immortalize (GS 370) in another, and the
sociality drive in yet a third. Likewise, the same drive will often be recruited by
many different affects. To cite the most central case, the will to power can be
recruited by any number of affects to guide the pattern of their default response
actions. The same goes for more specific first-order drives, such as erotic drive,
which can enter to specify the responses of any number of affects: love, jealousy,
fear, hope, curiosity, exuberance, and so on. For almost indefinitely complex
treatment of the possibilities, recall Proust!
Perhaps surprisingly, this point yields a fairly strong implication for the
Nietzschean self. If many drives can share the same affect, and many affects the
same drive, then the drives and affects cannot be completely ‘loose’, ‘distinct
existences’ in the sense made famous by Hume’s ‘bundle theory’ of the self. If
different drives depend for their own completion on being able to recruit one and
the same affect, then they must be non-accidentally, functionally bound to each
other in the same self, where that affect is available to be recruited. Similarly,
different affects are bound to the self by their reliance on the recruitability of the
same drive. The Nietzschean self is therefore not merely a Humean ‘bundle’ of
instrinsically unrelated ‘distinct existences’, nor even a mere ‘stage’ upon which
they enter and exit for one-off causal interactions. Instead, Nietzsche’s conception of the relations between drives and affects forces the posit of a thicker notion
of the self, existing as a repository of recruitable drives or affects that are always
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available to complete any of its given active drives or affects, such that (for
example) the same affect of joy is ready to be recruited by my knowledge drive
today, and my competitive drive tomorrow.
What is this ‘repository self’, presupposed by the one–many interactions of
drives and affects? We can start by making clear what it is not. First, as we have
just seen, such a self is not a mere aggregate, or ‘bundle’, of subpersonal attitudes,
impressions and ideas. I hasten to concede that this minimal Nietzschean self is,
in an important sense, built out of the drives, affects, and other attitudes, and
could not be what it is without them. But the drives and affects could not be what
they are without the whole Nietzschean self either, in that, for example, the
typical complements and contents, and hence the functional capacities, of a given
attitude will depend on which other drives and affects are available for it to
recruit. Since the dependence relations between the self and its attitudes are
mutual, the minimal self retains a real form of independence from the drives and
affects. Moreover, even though the particular drives and affects are themselves
standing attitudes that persist, rather than fleeting, occurrent states à la Hume,
the minimal self must have its own separate, diachronic identity, which persists
across changes of drives and affects. After all, the use of training or other forms of
self-management to remove some drive or affect from the domain of recruitable
attitudes (and the persistence of the self through the change) is a ubiquitous
Nietzschean theme. Thus instead of a mere ‘bundle’ of individually fleeting
attitudes, the minimal self is a diachronic, structured whole within which
enduring drives and affects stand in causal and functional relations with identifiable patterns.
Second, however, it is equally important to emphasize—against various forms
of Kantian transcendentalism—that the self in question is really quite minimal.
When drives and affects recruit one another, the resulting patterns of relations
among them (both causal and content/complement-based relations) emerge
from the interactions of the drives and affects themselves; they are not relations
(like that among the terms in a judgement) that would have to be established by
an explicit or implicit act of ‘synthesis’ on the part of some unified agency
separate from the drives. Moreover, the boundaries of the minimal self, unlike
those claimed for the transcendental ego, are not identical with those of consciousness. In fact, the boundary mismatch obtains in both directions: the
minimal self encompasses drives and affects it is not aware of, and it may have
apparent conscious awareness of powers (e.g. the will) that are illusory. Thus,
there can be no a priori argument from the alleged unity of consciousness to a
strong, transcendental unity proper to the minimal self. In fact, the ‘boundaries’
of the minimal self are porous in principle; there is nothing to prevent my
forming and acquiring new drives and affects, nor driving some of the ones
I have out of existence. Finally, the degree of unity possessed by the minimal self
is limited, not only in that drives and affects may be unavailable to central
consciousness and completely non-transparent to one another, but also in that
What is a Nietzschean Self ?
225
different constituents of the self may stand in oppositional, even quite conflictual, relations, resulting in weakness of will, and the like. Thus, the Nietzschean self
as a whole is something over and above the constituent drives and affects, but it is
not a simple, essentially unified and conscious, transcendental ego, which is
fundamentally different in kind from the attitudes that compose it.
Is there dry ground to support such an intermediate position, between a
Humean bundle and a Kantian transcendental self?33 Peter Railton offers one
reason to think there had better be, in work that inspired my talk of drives’ and
affects’ ‘recruiting’ one another.34 In several recent projects (Railton 2004; and
this volume Ch. 2), Railton has been concerned to describe and defend a certain
‘automaticity’ that is ineluctably proper to action. As he notes, an action as
simple as walking down the hall to get a drink of water inevitably involves a vast
array of (in principle) identifiable sub-actions, sub-goals, responses, and adjustments—all of them guided by the environmental circumstances (via perceptual
and kinaesthetic awareness) and by the overall goal set by the desire to drink, and
all of them carried out intentionally and skilfully (in the mode Dreyfus calls
‘skilful coping’), but utterly without explicit deliberation or even the formation
of separate intentions. The last point is crucial for Railton’s purposes. If we did
have to form separate explicit, or even implicit, intentions or judgements about
what we have reason to do in order to carry out each of these myriad intentional
activities, we would be caught in an indefinite regress and action would never
happen (Railton 2004). After all, each of those judgements or intention-formations
would also be itself an action, which would require a prior judgement in its turn.
Thus, it cannot be the case that some bit of activity cannot be mine, or cannot
count as an action, unless I (i.e. a self distinct from the subpersonal attitudes and
processes involved in the activity) separately endorse it, or intend it, or judge it to
be good. Just as the ‘regress of rules’ argument demonstrates that there cannot be a
rule for rule-following and thereby entails a basic capacity to apply a rule,35 so
analogously in the context of action the threat of regress demands that we recognize
a prior and basic capacity to be aptly responsive to the circumstances, and (again on
pain of regress) this capacity had better be a feature of our interacting subpersonal
33 My colleague Allen Wood quipped, as a way of summing up the project of this paper, that its
search for a middle way on these issues was most like trying to find a position to defend on dry land
in the English Channel. I have little doubt that he will remain dissatisfied with the solution on offer,
and would meet any riposte about my walking safely down the rue on the Isle of Guernsey by
insisting that I am really well off the cliffs of Dover, and had better be a good swimmer!
34 In his 2000 Kant lectures at Stanford, Railton adopted similar talk to explain the relation
between reason and inclination in Kant, and that is where I first became aware of it. (For example, in
moral motivation, reason first represents the good and then recruits a motivation to pursue it,
whereas in non-moral motivation it is inclination that recruits a bit of instrumental reasoning to
facilitate its pursuit of its object.) But Railton deploys this talk more generally in moral
psychological theorizing (see, e.g. Railton 2004: 198).
35 In his foundational version of the ‘regress of rules’ argument, Kant identified this basic
capacity to apply a rule as the power of judgement, see Critique of Pure Reason, A 132–4/B 171–4.
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attitudes (beliefs and desires) themselves and not something exercised by a separate,
central agency:
Belief and desire can operate without regress to yield intention if intentions can form and
operate ‘automatically’ . . . through a kind of self-organization around ideas. Just as
molecules with a certain architecture and composition can crystallize . . . without needing
any guiding hand, so beliefs and desires with the right architecture and composition can
crystallize into action-guiding intentions by clustering around an idea . . . without any
guiding hand. Indeed, any sort of a guiding hand shaping the process of intention
formation would itself have to be an intentional process. Agency, then, also confronts a
regress problem . . . It had better be possible for intentions to emerge without being
intended, their formation guided directly by beliefs and desires themselves (Railton
2004: 198).
When our attitudes potentially ‘crystallize’ in this way, they come together in a
self that forms ‘a structured, functional whole’, and not just a Humean bundle
(Railton 2004: 200).
In the Nietzschean minimal self, drives and affects are self-organizing in very
much this sense. This possibility should not be surprising. As Richardson already
noted, it is a basic feature of Nietzschean drives that they can combine to form
larger units, in the relations he calls drive ‘mastery’ and ‘tyranny’ (Richardson
1996: 32–5, et passim). What we are now in a position to see, however, is that
such combinations are only the beginning of the story. Not only can drives
combine to form more complex drives, and not only can our attitudes coalesce
(or ‘crystallize’) into strictly looser structures around particular intentions and
patterns of action along the lines sketched by Railton, but further, there is a still
looser whole into which the standing drives and affects organize themselves for
the purposes of recruiting one another to secure their contents and complements.
This larger, looser structure is the minimal self, a functional grouping of drives
and affects that permits such mutual recruitability.36
Given Nietzsche’s general anti-atomism and his views about drive/affect
interaction, it makes sense to treat each of the things contributing to the self—
i.e. each drive, affect, higher-order attitude, etc., up to and including the self as a
whole—as a psychological object in its own right, even though they all stand in
relations of mutual dependence. The minimal self is but one psychological
structure among the others. It acquires the right to the name ‘self’ simply in
virtue of being the emergent structure that encompasses all of the substructures
36 Coalescing around a particular action or intention is a ‘strictly looser’ (self-)organization than
drive mastery, since it is an occasional and repeatable (if temporally extended) cooperation among
drives and affects, which remain distinct standing attitudes with their own characteristics. The drives
and affects involved would normally exist, complete with their own life and effects within the self,
both before and after the ‘crystalization’ event(s). By contrast, in drive mastery, one drive subsumes
another, which loses its separate identity and has its defining aim reshaped by the new whole. The
minimal self is a still looser whole, in that its constituents are not interrelated by their having been
(actually) recruited by one another, but by their mutual availability for (possible) recruitment.
What is a Nietzschean Self ?
227
available for recruitment by one another.37 It does also thereby gain a distinctive
relation to the constituent psychological structures, based on the very looseness of
its internal organization. Unlike a mastering drive, or even a ‘crystallized’
complex of drives and affects, the self—qua the emergent structure encompassing
all the co-recruitable attitudes—can suffer from a ‘gap’ between its own activity
and that of some constituent(s). Just because an attitude is recruitable, it does not
follow that it will successfully be recruited in the appropriate circumstances. But
such a recalcitrant drive or affect remains part of the totality, since it can still
activate itself on its own and recruit (or be recruited by) the self ’s other attitudes.
In this sense, the minimal self can remain ‘responsible’ for a recalcitrant attitude
as something that belongs to it—by contrast to a mastering drive or a ‘crystallization’, wherein any attitude that is not presently and actually functionally
integrated is simply not a part of the emergent whole, but a separate factor.
Suppose, then, we have successfully identified an emergent, complex psychological object built out of the constituent attitudes. Still, does Nietzsche have any
right to think of such an object as a self, as a ‘subjective multiplicity’ (BGE 12)?
Some significant evidence in Nietzsche’s favour on this point emerges from
consideration of overarching moods. More or less global moods such as depression
or standing (as opposed to occurrent) joy are best understood, I submit, as
higher-order affects. They involve standing dispositions for some first-order
affect (or characteristic range of affects) to be activated, coupled with a systematic
attention- and sensitivity-bias towards the stimulus objects appropriate to those
affects. But moods are not merely dispositions of first-order affects to be activated.
A mood is also itself a particular (higher-order) attitude, which represents the
world and the other affects within the self as being a certain way. Even though my
mood may not be a sharply defined self-conscious attitude expressly owned by a
unified ‘I’—after all, I can be strongly in the grip of a mood without even being
consciously aware of it—still, the mood operates as a kind of collective condition
within which my other attitudes have to operate and with which they have to
contend—a kind of ‘weather system’ influencing my other attitudes. Because of
its global character and its self-referential features as a higher-order attitude, a
37 Elijah Millgram (personal correspondence) offers the intriguing objection that, on
Nietzschean grounds, this move ought to be insufficient to delineate the self, since Nietzschean
drives are always seeking mastery over one another without any discrimination between potential
targets of appropriation ‘inside’ and those ‘outside’ the ‘self’. To put it colourfully, for Nietzsche the
drives are always trying to ‘eat the world’ and so there is no usable sense available of ‘all’ the drives
and affects that make up myself. I think a view like mine should concede that the boundaries of the
Nietzschean self are not fixed in advance in some permanent, principled way; indeed, this was one of
the features we saw distinguishing it from Kantian, transcendentalist conceptions above. That said,
at any given time, there will be a (more or less) clear answer to which elements belong within my
self, based on which ones are in fact potentially available for easy recruitment. If some new drive or
affect later becomes a recruitable participant in the self’s activity, then the self has expanded to
encompass a new element. (I believe that some fuzziness around the edges and ambiguity about
borderline cases is tolerable, here, and indeed should count as a feature, not a bug, from the point of
view of Nietzsche interpretation, but a fuller discussion will have to wait for another occasion.)
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mood like depression or joy counts as an attitude inhabited by the whole minimal
self and not just an outgrowth of some particular constituent drive or affect. For
just that reason, Nietzsche places heavy emphasis on mood-like higher-order
affective responses when, as in the thought experiment of eternal recurrence, he
looks for indicators relevant to the evaluative assessment of the whole self, or
individual life. But now, given such higher-order affects, we can say in a serious
way that the Nietzschean minimal self is a genuinely ‘subjective multiplicity’
(BGE 12, my ital.)—a self that inhabits attitudes of its own, including ones
directed at itself.
We now have everything we need to provide a preliminary answer to our main
question. Nietzsche’s moral psychology provides materials for, and indeed forces
him to postulate, a self that is something over and above its constituent drives
and affects. Moreover, despite remaining fairly minimal, the self so understood
does have the capacity to take up attitudes (including evaluative attitudes)
towards the world and also towards itself and its drives and affects. These
reflexive attitudes may include consciously reflective or even deliberative attitudes
such as the control of affective interpretations involved in perspectivist objectivity
or the more or less explicit attitudes of self-management involved in Nietzschean
self-overcoming, self-mastery, and so on. But as we have just seen, they can also
take the form of moods and comparable higher-order attitudes, which lack any
such reflective, deliberative character. For just that reason, the postulation of the
minimal self is warranted even for agents who lack the more deliberate or
reflective reflexive attitudes (e.g. because they are catastrophically weak-willed,
deeply divided against themselves, etc.). Not only slaves, Christians, and ascetics,
but even those chaotic wantons ‘who stand in dire need of being ascetics’ (TI V,
2) still have a minimal self, separate from the drives and capable of expressing
telling attitudes towards them, attitudes which Nietzsche takes to be symptomatic indicators of the value those selves manage to instantiate.
6. CONCLUSION: THE NORMATIVE CONCEPTION
OF THE SELF, OR SELFHOOD AS A TASK
My aim was to work out some details of Nietzsche’s moral psychology, and
thereby to assess the prospects for a conception of selfhood that is genuinely
Nietzschean, but also plausibly possessed of one distinctively Kantian faculty: the
capacity to ‘stand back’ from one’s own attitudes and assess them. This capacity
was of particular interest because it makes possible autonomy, a value whose
importance Nietzsche often seems to endorse right along with Kant. In conclusion, I should make at least a gesture in the direction of connecting our results
about the self to the larger issues about autonomy.
What is a Nietzschean Self ?
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I have argued that Nietzsche rightfully posits a minimal self possessing
evaluative attitudes about its drives and affects, and perhaps even a self-conception. But while this might be a capacity needed for anything like autonomy, it
certainly falls far short of achieved autonomy. As we just saw, even desperately
weak-willed individuals who are wholly at the mercy of their drives—that is,
people who are deeply unfree and certainly incapable of ruling themselves autonomously—have a minimal self with this capacity for reflexive self-assessment. In
fact, if they lacked that capacity, we could not understand them as weak-willed at
all; the drive that actually determined their behaviour would ipso facto count as
the ruling drive (and therefore as their self in the only meaningful sense), and
there would be no sense in which the agent/wanton was acting against her own
values, will, or considered assessment.
(Let this count as one final broad-brush textual reason for rejecting extreme
naturalism. Criticism of weakness of will and related forms of evaluative inconsistency are central to Nietzsche’s core philosophical stances, including the key
arguments of the critique of Christianity. Eliminative naturalism about the self
lacks the resources to make sense of these complaints; hence the reading is not
adequate to Nietzsche’s purposes.)
But now, if the minimal self with its capacity to stand back from the drives is
insufficient for autonomy, where does that leave Nietzsche’s apparent valuation
of autonomy? Is that notion, and/or whatever notion of selfhood is needed to
underwrite it, still loaded with ‘moral excess’ and therefore in need of Williamsstyle purification? I think not, and we can see why by returning to the normative
conception of selfhood as a task or achievement.
As I noted above, Nehamas (1985) and Schacht (1983), followed by several
others more recently,38 all observe that Nietzsche often deploys the concept of
selfhood not to capture some descriptive structure or property of a person’s moral
psychology, but instead as a norm, thereby treating selfhood as a kind of task that
is set for us, or an achievement made by some people but not others. For example,
such a conception is needed to underwrite Nietzsche’s ideal of self-creation,
which gains typical expression in his famous praise of Goethe:
What he wanted was totality; he fought the mutual extraneousness of reason, senses,
feeling, and will (preached with the most abhorrent scholasticism by Kant, the antipode
of Goethe); he disciplined himself to wholeness; he created himself. [TI IX, 49]
The notion of self-creation deployed here is superficially paradoxical: the
activity in question could not be self-creation unless one did it oneself, but that
very self (namely, oneself) is the thing that is supposed to be created, and thus
should first come into existence only through the process. Obviously, Nietzsche
38 Notable treatments I am aware of include Gemes (2009) and Janaway (2009). I/we make
similar suggestions in Anderson (2006), and earlier (in a version that closely follows Nehamas) in
Anderson and Landy (2001).
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assumes that Goethe was already some kind of self before he ‘disciplined himself
to wholeness’; indeed he was himself, in a sense sufficient for the self-disciplining
activity to count as his own. But Goethe became more truly himself—he realized
his selfhood in some stronger sense—by attaining the wholeness he sought, and it
is this truer self that he ‘created’. The paradox is dissolved, therefore, by a
distinction between two conceptions of selfhood: one descriptive conception
that includes the moral psychological capacity of the person to frame and carry
out the plan of self-creation (or any other plan), and a second, normative
conception of the ‘true self ’, which encapsulates the ideal being pursued.
The same normative sense of selfhood is also in play in Nietzsche’s ubiquitous
praise of genuine or ‘strong’ individuals, most famously in his encomium to the
‘sovereign individual’:
If we place ourselves at the end of this tremendous process, where the tree at last brings
forth fruit, where society and its morality of custom at last bring to light to what they have
been only the means: then we will find as the ripest fruit on its tree the sovereign
individual, like only to himself, liberated again from morality and custom, autonomous
and supramoral (for ‘autonomous’ and ‘moral’ are mutually exclusive), in short, the
human being with his own independent, long will, who is permitted to promise—and
in him a proud consciousness, quivering in every muscle, of what has finally been
achieved and made flesh in him, a real consciousness of power and freedom, a feeling
of the completion of man in general. This emancipated one, who really may promise,
this master of a free will, this sovereign—how should he not be aware of his superiority . . . ? (GM II, 2)
Here, clearly, individuality is not merely a thin, descriptive property possessed
automatically by every single human being; on the contrary, it is a rare and high
achievement, attained by a few especially great people at the cost of the sacrifice of
untold ordinary mortals who are not even aware of the kind of greatness
exemplified by those special individuals.
Tellingly, in both these cases Nietzsche tightly ties the normative conception
of selfhood, or individuality, to the value of autonomy. Genuine selves realize
that value: by creating himself, Goethe emerges from self-creation as ‘a spirit who
has become free’ (TI IX, 49); the sovereign individual is ‘autonomous’ and
‘liberated from custom’.
In my view, the connection Nietzsche wants to find between self-creation and
autonomy, and indeed his conception of autonomy itself, finds a natural moral
psychological basis in the distinction between this normative conception of
selfhood and the minimal self. The minimal self is just a certain moral psychological structure among the drives and affects, no matter how conflictual and
disunified they may be. One must attain something further to become a self in
the stronger, normative sense. I have argued elsewhere (Anderson 2006) that
Nietzsche operationalizes the relevant norms largely via appeals to strength, where
strength is understood, in turn, as strength of will (as opposed to weakness of
What is a Nietzschean Self ?
231
will) and thus in terms of a certain kind of unity, or greater integration, among
the drives and affects. So much is clearly envisioned in the description of
Goethe’s achievement, for example. But what makes such unity count as one’s
own is precisely its having been self-generated—that is, the unity among my drives
and affects arises from regulating control over them that is exercised by and
through the attitudes proper to the emerging self: to be noble is ‘to have and not
have one’s affects . . . at will; to condescend to them . . . to make use of [them] . . . ’
(BGE 284). In just such circumstances, attaining the normative self counts as
self-creation, and it also realizes a recognizable form of autonomy. The self here
follows values and laws it gives to itself.
But this stronger conception of autonomous selfhood, no matter how normative it is and however far it outstrips minimal selfhood, is no more plausible a
target for a Williams-style critique of ‘moral excess’ than is Nietzsche’s complex
moral psychological apparatus. For even when achieved, autonomous selfhood is
not anything fundamentally different in (psychological) kind from the minimal
self: the normatively ideal self is still a structure of drives and affects; it is just a
more unified, more harmoniously ordered, more internally disciplined and
effective ‘social structure’ or ‘subjective multiplicity’—one last time, it was
‘totality’ that Goethe wanted; ‘he disciplined himself to wholeness’ (TI IX, 49).
As far as I can tell, Nietzsche adopts an ‘empiricist’ attitude towards normative
selfhood, in the following sense. He is not claiming that there must be some
special, morally relevant psychological faculty in all persons which automatically
suits them a priori to be targets of his evaluative judgement about whether they
are autonomous. On the contrary, he merely articulates an ideal for the relation
that ought to obtain among whatever drives and affects we happen to have.
Whether any individual person attains that ideal or not is an empirical question,
to be settled by the best interpretation of the person’s life. We may dispute with
Nietzsche about the suitability of his ideal, fair enough. But the psychology it
relies upon remains innocent of any suspicion of ‘excess moral content’, precisely
because the relevant notion of selfhood is not a fact but a norm—either someone
exemplifies it (in which case its reality is conceded) or not (in which case
Nietzsche’s theory never claims that autonomy, or indeed any self in the normative sense, was present in the first place).
To conclude, neither transcendentalist nor naturalist readings can satisfactorily account for Nietzsche’s conception of the self. Nietzsche need not endorse a
transcendental role for the unified consciousness, for his moral psychology
affords materials sufficient to explain how a self over and above the various drives
and affects can emerge from the interactions of the drives and affects themselves.
Such a self is essentially complex and not co-extensive with consciousness, so it
does not carry the strong properties of the transcendental ego with which readers
like Gardner would saddle the Nietzschean self. At the same time, even this
internally complex, minimal self is something over and above its constituent
attitudes, so naturalistic reduction or eliminativism about the self is equally
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inadequate. The insufficiency of such readings for Nietzsche’s purposes is especially glaring when we turn to the autonomous self he idealizes, which exhibits a
stronger, self-generated form of unity that far outstrips a mere ‘bundle’ of drives
and affects.
Of course, a determined naturalist might simply try to deny that Nietzsche
intends to repose any such value in the self, but such a position increasingly
strikes me as incredible. The self ’s relation to itself and its attitudes towards itself
ground the central normative judgements of Nietzsche’s philosophy, a fact
underlined by the powerful recent strand of readings advocating essentially
‘practical’ interpretations of the eternal recurrence doctrine,39 as well as by
attention to core Nietzschean concerns such as the creation of values, self-overcoming, and self-mastery. Even the urgency of Nietzsche’s hope for ‘new philosophers’ rests on the same valuation of reflective self-control; they are important
precisely because they will ‘teach man the future of man as his will, as dependent
on a human will’ (BGE 203; emphasis in original). While such self-control can
threaten to turn ascetic if overdeveloped (see GS 305), it nevertheless remains,
when suitably deployed to promote the self ’s autonomy, absolutely central to
Nietzsche’s conception of the good life:
A free human being can be good as well as evil, but . . . the unfree human being is a blemish
upon nature and has no share in any heavenly or earthly comfort . . . [and] everyone who
wishes to become free must become free through his own endeavor . . . [for] freedom does
not fall into any man’s lap as a miraculous gift (UM IV, 11; quoted in GS 99).
BIBLIOGRAPHY
In Nietzsche
For Nietzsche’s German, I used KSA. I also made use of the following translations, cited
by abbreviations. Date of first publication appears at the end of each reference. Parenthetical citations in the text refer to Nietzsche’s section numbers, which are the same in all
editions.
Beyond Good and Evil, trans. Walter Kaufmann. New York: Vintage, 1966.
Daybreak, trans. R. J. Hollingdale. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1982.
On the Genealogy of Morality, trans. M. Clark and A. Swensen. Indianapolis: Hackett,
1998.
The Antichrist, trans. Walter Kaufmann. New York: Viking, 1954.
The Gay Science, trans. Walter Kaufmann. New York: Vintage, 1974.
Twilight of the Idols, trans. Walter Kaufmann. New York: Viking, 1954.
39 Here, see especially Clark (1990: 245–86) and Reginster (2006: 201–27, et passim), but there
are many other important contributors, including Löwith (1997 [1935]), Soll (1973), and Nehamas
(1985). I advocate a minimal version of this broadly practical interpretation in Anderson (2005a:
196–203), and Anderson (2009).
What is a Nietzschean Self ?
233
Untimely Meditations, trans. R. J. Hollingdale. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press,
1983.
Other sources
Anderson, R. Lanier (1994). ‘Nietzsche’s will to power as a doctrine of the unity of
science’, Studies in History and Philosophy of Science 25: 729–50. Reprinted in Angelaki
(Special Issue: Continental Philosophy and the Sciences: the German Tradition, ed.
Damian Veal) 10 (2005): 77–93.
——(2005a). ‘Nietzsche on truth, illusion, and redemption’, The European Journal of
Philosophy 13: 185–225.
——(2005b). ‘Neo-Kantianism and the roots of anti-psychologism’, The British Journal
for the History of Philosophy 13: 287–323.
——(2006). ‘Nietzsche on strength, self-knowledge, and achieving individuality’, International Studies in Philosophy 38: 89–115.
——(2009). ‘Nietzsche on redemption and transfiguration’, in Landy and Saler (eds),
(2009: 225–58).
——and Landy, Joshua (2001). ‘Philosophy as self-fashioning: Alexander Nehamas’s Art
of Living’, Diacritics 31: 25–54.
Avenarius, Richard (1888). Kritik der reinen Erfahrung. Leipzig: Fues.
Boscovich, Ruggero Giuseppe (1922). A Theory of Natural Philosophy, Put Forward and
Explained by Roger Joseph Boscovich, S.J. Latin–English Edition from the Text of the First
Venetian Edition Published under the Personal Superintendence of the Author in 1763,
with a Short Life of Boscovich. Chicago: Open Court.
Clark, Maudemarie (1990). Nietzsche on Truth and Philosophy. Cambridge: Cambridge
University Press.
Craig, Edward (1990). Knowledge and the State of Nature: an Essay in Conceptual Synthesis.
Oxford: Oxford University Press.
Crescenzi, Luca (1994). ‘Verzeichnis der von Nietzsche aus der Universitätsbibliothek in
Basel entliehenen Bücher (1869–1879)’, Nietzsche-Studien 23: 388–442.
Gardner, Sebastian (2009). ‘Nietzsche, the self, and the disunity of philosophical reason’,
in Gemes and May (2009).
Gemes, Ken (2006). ‘ “We are of necessity strangers to ourselves”: the key message of
Nietzsche’s Genealogy’, in C. Acampora (ed.), Nietzsche’s Genealogy of Morals: Critical
Essays. Lanham, MD: Rowman & Littlefield.
——(2009). ‘Nietzsche on Free Will, Autonomy, and the Sovereign Individual’, in
Gemes and May (2009).
——and May, Simon (eds) (2009). Nietzsche on Freedom and Autonomy. Oxford: Oxford
University Press.
Hatfield, Gary (1991). The Natural and the Normative. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press.
Hill, Kevin (2003). Nietzshce’s Critiques: the Kantian Foundations of his Thought. Oxford:
Oxford University Press.
Janaway, Christopher (2009). ‘Autonomy, affect, and the self in Nietzsche’s project of
Genealogy’, in Gemes and May (2009).
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Kant, Immanuel (1997 [1781/1787 = A/B]). Critique of Pure Reason, trans. P. Guyer and
A. Wood. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Citations are to the pagination of
the first (A=1781) and second (B=1787) editions.
Katsafanas, Paul (2008). Practical Reason and the Structure of Reflective Agency. Ph.D.
Diss., Harvard University. Cambridge, MA. Available online at www.unm.edu/
katsafan.
——(forthcoming). ‘Nietzsche’s philosophical psychology’, in Richardson and Gemes
(forthcoming).
Korsgaard, Christine (1996). ‘Personal identity and the unity of agency: A Kantian
response to Parfit’, in Creating the Kingdom of Ends. Cambridge: Cambridge University
Press.
Landy, Joshua, and Saler, Michael (eds). (2009). The Re-Enchantment of the World:
Secular Magic in a Rational Age. Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press.
Lange, F. A. (1902 [1873–5]). Geschichte des Materialismus und Kritik seiner Bedeutung in
der Gegenwart, 7th edn., following the 2nd, rev. edn. Ed. and Intro., H. Cohen.
Leipzig: J. Baedeker.
Leiter, Brian (2002). Nietzsche on Morality. London: Routledge.
——(2009). ‘Nietzsche’s theory of the will’, in Gemes and May (2009).
——and Knobe, Joshua (2007). ‘The case for Nietzschean moral psychology’, in Leiter
and Sinhababu (2007: 83–109).
——and Sinhababu, Neil (eds) (2007). Nietzsche and Morality. Oxford: Oxford University Press.
Löwith, Karl (1997). Nietzsche’s Philosophy of the Eternal Recurrence, trans. J. H. Lomax.
Berkeley: University of California Press.
Mach, Ernst (1910). Contributions to the Analysis of the Sensations, trans. C. M. Williams.
Chicago, IL: Open Court.
Nehamas, Alexander (1985). Nietzsche: Life as Literature. Cambridge, MA: Harvard
University Press.
Railton, Peter (2004). ‘How to engage reason: the problem of regress’, in Wallace et al.
(2004: 176–201).
Reginster, Bernard (2003). ‘What is a free spirit? Nietzsche on fanaticism’, Archiv für
Geschichte der Philosophie 85: 51–85.
——(2006). The Affirmation of Life: Nietzsche on Overcoming Nihilism. Cambridge,
MA: Harvard University Press.
——(2012). ‘Autonomy and the self as the basis of morality’, in Allen Wood (ed.),
Cambridge History of Philosophy in the Nineteenth Century. Cambridge University
Press.
Richardson, John (1996). Nietzsche’s System. Oxford: Oxford University Press.
——and Gemes, Ken (eds) (forthcoming). The Oxford Handbook of Nietzsche. Oxford:
Oxford University Press.
Risse, Matthias (2007). ‘Nietzschean “animal psychology” versus Kantian ethics’, in
Leiter and Sinhababu (2007: 53–82).
Smith, Michael (1994). The Moral Problem. Oxford: Blackwell Press.
Soll, Ivan (1973). ‘Reflections on recurrence’, in R. Solomon (ed.), Nietzsche: a Collection
of Critical Essays. Garden City, NY: Anchor Doubleday, 322–42.
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Wallace, R. Jay, Pettit, Philip, Scheffler, Samuel, and Smith, Michael (eds) (2004).
Reason and Value: Themes from the Moral Philosophy of Joseph Raz. Oxford: Oxford
University Press.
Williams, Bernard (2006 [1993]). ‘Nietzsche’s minimalist moral psychology’, in
Williams, The Sense of the Past: Essays in the History of Philosophy, ed. M. Burnyeat.
Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 299–310. First published in European Journal
of Philosophy 1: 4–14.
10
Nietzsche’s Naturalism and Normativity
Richard Schacht
It is commonly thought that Nietzsche is nothing but an ‘immoralist’ (as he
himself at times combatively styles himself) with respect to morality and a
nihilist with respect to value—from which it would seem to follow that he
therefore neither has any use for the idea of normativity, nor can have any
positive conception of it. I consider this view of him to be quite mistaken on
all counts, even though he does contend that these matters must be re-thought
and reconceived. If his revisionist thinking with respect to them is dismissed
because it does not accord sufficiently with the meanings commonly attached
to these notions, that would seem to me to display a failure to understand that
he is challenging these very meanings, to understand the seriousness of the
challenge, and to appreciate that his alternatives warrant being taken equally
seriously.
I have long considered Nietzsche to have been a philosophically naturalistic
thinker, who had a significant (constructive as well as deconstructive and
critical) philosophical agenda that is best understood accordingly.1 This is a
characterization with which many—in the analytically-minded part of the
Anglo-American philosophical community, at any rate—have come to agree.
But there are many kinds of things called ‘naturalism’ in the philosophical
literature and it would be a mistake to suppose that all or any of them in
particular happen to be what Nietzsche espoused or was moving towards.
Indeed, there are some kinds of naturalism of which he himself is quite
disdainful, and even scathingly critical. So before taking up his thinking
with respect to naturalism and normativity, we need to consider what kind
of naturalism his is. This is important because it has significant implications
with respect to the kind of conception and account of normativity naturalism
does and does not indicate or preclude.
1 That was the basic thesis and unifying theme of my 1983 book Nietzsche (Schacht 1983),
published in Ted Honderich’s ‘Arguments of the Philosophers’ series).
Nietzsche’s Naturalism and Normativity
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1 . NIETZSCHE AS ‘NATURALIST’
Nietzsche himself makes positive use of the language of ‘naturalism’ to characterize his own philosophical efforts and projects on a number of occasions. So,
for example, at the outset of Book Three of The Gay Science he writes: ‘When
may we begin to naturalize ourselves [uns Menschen . . . zu vernatürlichen] in
terms of a pure, newly discovered, newly redeemed nature!’; that is, a ‘nature’
that we have ‘entirely de-deified [ganz entgöttlicht]’ (GS 109). In Beyond Good
and Evil he similarly proclaims the ‘task’ of ‘translating man back into nature’,
and of seeing to it that ‘man henceforth stands before man as even today,
hardened [hart geworden] in the discipline of science, he stands before the other
nature [der anderen Natur]’, at least in the sense of being ‘deaf to the siren songs
of old metaphysical bird catchers who have been piping at him all too long, “you
are more, you are higher, you are of a different origin [anderer Herkunft ]!”’ (BGE
230). If we have come to differ significantly from the rest of nature around us—
and, for Nietzsche, we do—it is owing to no ‘different origin’.
It is (or should be) beyond dispute that, Nietzsche’s many critical comments
with respect to Wissenschaft notwithstanding, his thinking is far from being
hostile to or dismissive of the sciences. Indeed, from Human, All Too Human
onwards he attaches great importance to scientific sophistication in philosophical
thinking. To make that point, availing myself of an old but still useful English
word, I have taken to characterizing his philosophical thinking generally and his
naturalism more particularly as ‘scientian’, by which I mean precisely that it is
intended to be scientifically informed and sophisticated and that importance is
attached to this intention.
Naturalisms that go further, in which natural-scientific thinking is deemed
unproblematic in the status of its kinds of knowledge, paradigmatic methodologically, and decisive substantively, may be called ‘scientistic’. As I read him,
Nietzsche’s kind of naturalism is by no means of that sort. Indeed, I would say
that he not only stops well short of scientism but also sets himself in resolute
opposition to it. So he strongly objects when scientific thinking is taken to
provide us not only with considerable knowledge of many things, but with the
whole story with respect to human reality. Nietzsche’s naturalism is one that allies
itself with the Wissenschaften but does not simply take its cues from them. It is
determined to take account of scientific inquiry; but it by no means posits
dogmatically—or even simply assumes—that there cannot be anything more to
human reality and the world in which we find ourselves than the natural sciences
can tell us about them.
Some years ago Brian Leiter picked up the banner of ‘Nietzsche as naturalist’,
and sparked a spate of discussion of the topic of Nietzsche’s naturalism. He too
considers Nietzsche to be a kind of naturalist. I am in basic agreement with his
contention, at the outset of his Nietzsche on Morality, that Nietzsche belongs ‘in
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the company of naturalists like Hume and Freud—that is, among, broadly
speaking, philosophers of human nature’ (Leiter 2002: 2–3). But then my problems with his account begin.
Leiter frames his discussion of Nietzsche by ‘distinguishing between two basic
naturalistic doctrines: methodological (or M-naturalism) and substantive (S-naturalism)’. He characterizes the ‘methodological doctrine’ as the view that ‘philosophical inquiry should be continuous with empirical inquiry in the sciences’
(Leiter 2002: 3); that is, ‘continuous with the sciences either in virtue of their
dependence upon the actual results of scientific method in different domains or in
virtue of their employment and emulation of distinctively scientific ways of looking
at and explaining things’ (Leiter 2002: 5; emphases added). By the latter Leiter
means ‘as phenomena with “deterministic causes” of the sort encountered in
natural-scientific theories and explanations’. ‘The bulk of [Nietzsche’s] philosophical activity’, he asserts, was ‘devoted to variations on [the] naturalistic
project’ of ‘naturalistic explanation’ of various human phenomena ‘that is
continuous with both the results and [the] methods of the sciences’ (Leiter
2002: 11). Leiter takes that to make him an M-naturalist. He further considers
Nietzsche to be what he calls a ‘speculative’ M-naturalist, like Hume, who (Leiter
says) ‘constructs a “speculative” theory of human nature . . . modelled on the
most influential scientific paradigm of the day’ (Leiter 2002: 4).
In a recent update entitled ‘Nietzsche’s naturalism reconsidered’, Leiter refers
to what he calls ‘the “ontological” view that the only things that exist are natural ’
as ‘Nietzsche’s main bit of Substantive Naturalism’ (Leiter, forthcoming). He
further places Nietzsche’s speculative naturalism not merely among the ‘speculative theories of human nature’ that ‘are informed by the sciences’, but also among
those that are committed to ‘a scientific picture of how things work’ (Leiter,
forthcoming; emphases added). He concedes that Nietzsche on occasion departs
from this ‘naturalistic project’ of natural-scientifically-modelled ‘explanation’,
and goes off on what he calls the ‘independent undertaking’ of ‘one who “creates”
values’ (Leiter 2002: 11). When it comes to ‘how things work’ and what goes on
in human life (along with everything else), however, Nietzsche’s picture of it all
(according to Leiter) is ‘a scientific picture’.
This is to construe Nietzsche’s naturalism scientistically. I conceive it quite
differently: as a naturalistic alternative and antidote to that very kind of (scientistic) naturalism. In his recent book Beyond Selflessness, Christopher Janaway has
offered a characterization of ‘Nietzsche’s naturalism in the broad sense’ that
I consider to be much closer to the mark:
[Nietzsche] opposes transcendent metaphysics, whether that of Plato or Christianity or
Schopenhauer. He rejects notions of the immaterial soul, the absolutely free controlling
will, or the self-transparent pure intellect, instead emphasizing the body, talking of the
animal nature of human beings, and attempting to explain numerous phenomena by
invoking drives, instincts, and affects which he locates in our physical, bodily existence.
Nietzsche’s Naturalism and Normativity
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Human beings are to be ‘translated back into nature’, since otherwise we falsify their
history, their psychology, and the nature of their value . . . (Janaway 2007: 34)
Janaway rightly observes and emphasizes that Nietzsche’s methods are often
‘discontinuous with those of empirical scientific inquiry’ rather than based or
modelled on it (Janaway 2007: 39, emphasis added); that ‘explanatory facts
about me, even if somehow located in my psychophysiology, are essentially
shaped by culture’ (Janaway 2007: 47); and that ‘If Nietzsche’s causal explanations of our moral values are naturalistic, they are so in a sense which includes
within the “natural” not merely the psycho-physiological constitution of the
individual whose values are up for explanation, but also many complex cultural
phenomena’ (Janaway 2007: 52–3, emphasis added). Janaway here is looking in
the right direction; but it seems to me that we need to move even further in that
direction in order to bring out the full colours of Nietzsche’s naturalism. That is
what I shall be attempting briefly to do in what follows.
2. NIETZSCHE’S NATURALISM:
A PRELIMINARY SKETCH
Nietzsche’s kind of philosophy takes what he sums up in the phrase ‘the death of
God’ as its point of departure: the demise of the tenability not only of the JudeoChristian God-idea but also of any other sort of religiously, metaphysically, or
morally envisioned different, ‘higher’, and ‘truer’ reality underlying or transcending the reality of the kind of world in which we find ourselves and live our lives. It
is thus committed to the view that ‘this world’—what he calls ‘the world of life,
nature and history [die Welt des Lebens, der Natur und der Geschichte]’ (GS 344)
and its transformations—is the only kind of world and reality there is, even if
there is no particular configuration of it that is essential or fundamental to it. And
it is further committed to the general ‘guiding idea’ (as I shall call it) that
everything that goes on and comes to be in this world is the outcome of
developments occurring within it that are owing entirely to its internal dynamics
and the contingencies to which they give rise, and come about (as it were) from
the bottom up, through the elaboration or relationally-precipitated transformation of what was already going on and had already come to be. This, I suggest, is
Nietzsche’s naturalism in a nutshell.
In BGE, speaking of the position he calls ‘sensualism [Sensualismus]’, Nietzsche
writes: ‘Sensualism, therefore, at least as a regulative hypothesis, if not as a heuristic
principle’ (BGE 15). This language (quite independently of the question of what he
means by ‘Sensualismus’ in the context of this passage) can be usefully employed
here. I suggest that for Nietzsche naturalism (construed as I have just sketched it) is
both a ‘regulative hypothesis’ (substantively speaking) and a ‘heuristic principle’
(methodologically speaking). As a ‘regulative hypothesis’, it is the hypothesis that
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this guiding idea will hold up well (in terms of continuing plausibility, viability and
sense-making) as philosophical inquiry, reflection, and interpretation proceed. As a
‘heuristic’, it is the thought that approaching things in this way will be helpful to
interpretive and reinterpretive inquiry.
Nietzsche’s naturalism, on my account of it, is not wedded to the view that
everything that happens in human life and in the development and unfolding of
human reality and experience can be adequately explained and fully comprehended in terms of natural-scientific or natural-scientifically-modelled concepts
and processes, ‘causality’ first and foremost among them. Indeed, he takes the
refinement of and reliance upon causal thinking in the sciences to be at once their
strength and their limitation in their partnership with philosophy in these
matters. He does not doubt for a moment that the developments through
which human reality has come to be as it is, and the many different sorts of
things that go on in human life, are shot through with necessities, influences,
attractions, constraints, reactions, interactions, and power-relations of many
sorts. What he does doubt (and even ridicule) is the idea that natural-scientifically-modelled causal thinking is capable of doing comprehensive justice to all of
them, or even of being appropriate to a good many of them.
Nietzsche’s naturalism is what might be called an extended naturalism. It is one
that not only ‘translates man back into nature’, but also proceeds to take account
of human life as something that has been in significant ways ‘dis-animalized’, and
that has thereby been enabled to become more than merely ‘animal’. It attempts
to understand the various forms of life (experience, activity, objectifications) that
have come to be parts of human reality: not only psychological, but also social,
cultural, political, moral, religious, artistic, scientific, and philosophical as well.
They all, along with ‘der Mensch’ in general, are to be at once ‘translated back
into nature’ in their origins and basic constitution, and also comprehended in
their emergently transformed character—as a kind of ‘higher nature’ (in his
manner of speaking), showing what some of the things are that our originally
merely natural nature had it in it to become.
‘Translating man back into nature’ for Nietzsche thus does not mean conceiving human reality as it now is to be no different than the ‘terrible [schreckliche]’
sort of thing he supposes ‘the basic text of natural man [Grundtext homo natura]’
to have been once upon a time. What interests him most is not simply what this
Grundtext was in the first place and what remains of it, but rather the transformability of which it has proven to be capable, and the further transformations of it
that may yet be possible. And being ‘hardened in the discipline of science’ for
him does not mean dealing with it in a purely natural-scientifically-modelled
way. Rather, it means being ‘redlich’ in the pursuit of this task—intellectually
conscientious, tough-minded, unsentimental, and on guard against wishful
thinking.
Nietzsche’s naturalism is a rather ‘minimalist’ one, committed to little more
than the guiding idea mentioned above. Yet in another respect it is a robust
Nietzsche’s Naturalism and Normativity
241
naturalism (in marked contrast to the austerity of a bare-bones scientistic
naturalism), in the sense that it is attentive and attuned to the full panoply—
social, cultural, and artistic phenomena included—of our human reality and
world, and it is determined to make sense of both its richness and its emergence.
In the language of GS 373, ‘ a “scientific” world-interpretation’—and especially a
Mensch-interpretation entirely of that sort, without supplementation—would be
no better than the strictly ‘scientific’ interpretation and assessment of ‘what is
actually music in a piece of music’ that Nietzsche here ridicules. That sort of
naturalism for him would be ‘a crudity and naiveté’, and indeed ‘one of the
stupidest [dümmsten]’ of interpretations.
Nietzsche’s larger point here is that, while a good deal of knowledge might
well be attained thereby, restricting oneself to that sort of interpretation would be
to take what he calls ‘precisely the most superficial and external aspect of
existence’ to be the whole of it. And that would be a great mistake in the case
of every sort of thing—like music and all of the things mentioned above and so
much of human reality more generally—that is meaning-constituted, even if also
nature-based and incarnate in one way or another. Nietzsche here has ‘mechanistic’ thinking specifically in mind; but his basic point applies to natural-scientific
thinking more generally: such thinking is inherently meaning-blind. It is attuned
to observable aspects of things in which any meanings that may be constitutive of
them are not to be found, and thus a world conceived accordingly would be
‘essentially devoid of meaning [essentiell sinnlose]’. An interpretation of that sort
would tune out all of the layerings and texturings of meaning that make so much
of what exists and goes on in our world and our lives the realities they are.
Nietzsche hammers this point home, using the example of music, in striking
and strong epistemic language: ‘What would one have grasped, understood,
comprehended of it [von ihr begriffen, verstanden, erkannt]? Nothing, really
nothing of what is “music” in it!’ (GS 373; emphasis added.) Nothing, that is,
of what makes it what it is, as the kind of thing that has been made out of what it is
made of. It is precisely that sort of reality, however, and that sort of difference,
where human reality and all that figures in it that is no longer merely natural, to
which Nietzsche considers it most important for us as philosophers to be
sensitive—and for us as developers of a sophisticated philosophical naturalism
to be attentive.
3 . A HISTORICAL-DEVELOPMENTAL NATURALISM
It should already be clear that Nietzsche’s naturalism is centrally concerned with
developmental questions—that is, with respects in which human reality has
become something significantly different from the sort of merely biological affair
he presumes it to have been in the first place. What I would now observe is that
its main focus is upon the emergence and development of various sorts of human
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phenomena that have human-biological and physiological presuppositions and
psychological dimensions, but also have a historical character in which social,
cultural, and circumstantially contingent events may be presumed to have played
roles (upon which Nietzsche delights in speculating). The title he gives to the
third part of BGE is indicative and revealing on this score: ‘Zur Naturgeschichte
der Moral [On the Natural History of Morals]’. It deals with the question of what
the origins and developmental story of various moral phenomena may have been,
supposing them to be historical phenomena that are to be understood in entirely
‘natural’—that is, mundane—terms. Being able to make developmental sense of
such phenomena is important to him, in part to strengthen the case for naturalism itself, by showing its sufficiency to account for even the loftiest forms of our
spirituality. It also contributes importantly to our understanding of what we have
both to work with and to deal with as we concern ourselves with the further
‘enhancement of life’, and address ourselves to the all-important Nietzschean
question of ‘what might yet be made of man’ (BGE 203).
Nietzsche’s conception of our attained human reality is social, cultural, and
psychological as well as biological and physiological; his naturalism is emergentist (rather than scientistically reductionist) in spirit, his surmise of the ubiquity
of the fundamental disposition he calls ‘will to power’ notwithstanding. At times
he makes much of physiological as well as psychological considerations and
conjectures, but he also is quite evidently convinced that human cultural phenomena, while physiologically grounded, are historically developed forms of life,
of a qualitatively different nature from their biological origins and underpinnings. They reflect diversely articulated and elaborated expressions of unevenly
realized aspects of human reality and varieties of human possibility, in differing
social and historical circumstances. His typical procedure (and the ‘methodology’
of his naturalism, such as it is) therefore involves employing and drawing upon a
multiplicity of differing perspectives, ‘optics’ and sensibilities in its interpretive
attempt to broaden and deepen our understanding of ourselves, and of the
human possibilities that have come to be realized and expressed in things as
diverse as differing psychological types and traits, cultures and sub-cultures,
societies and institutions, arts and literatures, morals and values, and kinds of
thinking and knowing.
These features of Nietzsche’s naturalism are already on display, in clearly
programmatic fashion, in Human, All Too Human. In its revealing final section
he writes: ‘Many chains have been laid upon man so that he should no longer
behave like an animal’ (HH II,II,350). And in its first two sections he makes
several fundamental points that are crucial to it. He begins by proclaiming
‘natural science [Naturwissenschaft ]’ to be ‘the youngest of all philosophical
methods’, to which the kind of philosophy he is advocating (and contrasting
with ‘metaphysical philosophy’) needs to ally itself, and from which it ‘can no
longer be separated’ (HH I,1). However, he calls this kind of philosophy
‘historical philosophy’—that is, thinking historically—because he goes on to
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contend that philosophers must ‘learn’ and take seriously something they have
long been reluctant to acknowledge: ‘that man has become [geworden ist]’, as has
the ‘cognitive ability [Erkenntnisvermögen]’ that we employ in all forms of
cognitive inquiry. Indeed, he writes: ‘Everything has become: there are no eternal
facts, just as there are no absolute truths. Consequently what is needed from now
on is historical philosophizing [historische Philosophieren], and with it the virtue of
modesty’ (HH I,2).
‘Historical philosophizing’ for Nietzsche is philosophizing in a way that is
mindful that ‘everything has become’, and is attentive to the historical-developmental character of whatever it deals with. And here he is thinking of human
reality—‘der Mensch ’—in particular. It is significant that he insists upon the
relevance and importance of ‘Naturwissenschaft ’ in this undertaking. It is also
revealing that it is ‘historische’ (rather than ‘naturwissenschaftliche’) philosophizing that he is calling for. The ‘becoming’ or development of things is held to be
crucial to their comprehension and proper assessment; and by his use of the term
‘historische’ Nietzsche is indicating that, while the kinds of development the
natural sciences can deal with must be taken into account by philosophers from
now on, they are not the only kinds of development that may need to be reckoned
with. Where all things human in particular are concerned, the kinds of development we need to be particularly attentive to are developments of a historical
character.
4. MAKING SENSE OF SENSIBILITY
I shall elaborate upon this point in a manner that has significant implications for
the understanding of his kind of naturalism—and also of Nietzsche’s thinking
with respect to normativity—by availing myself of the notion of sensibilities
associated with human cultures and cultural phenomena. My point in doing so
is that his kind of naturalism must be conceived in such a way that it does justice
to and makes sense of this crucially important human phenomenon, which is
central to human life and the key to understanding a good deal about our
attained human reality.
Sensibilities—the phenomenon, even if not the word itself—play a crucial role
in Nietzsche’s philosophical psychology and anthropology. They figure significantly for him in the understanding of how human conduct has come to differ
from ‘behaving like an animal’. They also are what he is getting at in much of his
talk about various human ‘types’, and are what he has in mind when he observes
(in Twilight of the Idols), ‘how naı̈ve it is altogether to say: “Man ought to be such
and such”’, and continues: ‘Reality shows us an enchanting wealth of types, the
abundance of a lavish play and change of forms’ (TI V, 6).
Nietzsche concerns himself from The Birth of Tragedy onwards with the
identification and comprehension of such sensibilities and associated forms of
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experience and activity. He is intent upon doing justice to their diversity and
richness in his interpretation of human reality, and also upon showing that they
can plausibly and convincingly be viewed as human socio-cultural and psychological phenomena that have emerged and developed historically in ways that
may be made sense of in entirely mundane terms.
Sensibilities are complex configurations of dispositions, attitudes, beliefs,
valuations, and interpretive tendencies. They are powered (as it were) by one’s
affective resources, and may be channelled at least to some extent by inherited
but humanly variable traits. However, they are also strongly scripted culturally,
reflecting elements of cultural formations to which one has been exposed and
that one has internalized. They are typically bound up with ‘forms of life’ and
cultural constructs (such as practices, traditions, institutions, artefacts, symbols,
and texts) of which they are the internalization, and yet which in a larger sense are
their expressions and elaborations, each informing and sustaining the other. This
is the two-sided coin that, perhaps more than anything else, is the hallmark of
our attained humanity. It is what has made and continues to make human reality
the historically emergent human (rather than merely animal) reality it is, even
though all such phenomena themselves are the products of transformations of
originally merely natural abilities and traits.
Nietzsche envisions a type of human being able to attain a measure of selfmastery, autonomy, and creativity sufficient to fashion a distinctive sensibility of
one’s own, working with but also transforming the sensibility (or sensibilities)
one had previously acquired, becoming a self-creating ‘artist of one’s own life’,
and giving one’s own ‘style to one’s character’. For the most part, however,
human beings tend to live their lives and conduct themselves in ways reflecting
the sensibilities they come to have by a combination of nature and nurture. It is
always our affects that are expressing themselves in whatever we may do, for
Nietzsche, but they do so through our sensibilities, which not only inform but also
transform our affects in their manner of expression. Such transformations can be
particularly dramatic when other aspects of our human-psychological repertoire
come into play, of which our capacities for what he calls the ‘internalization’,
‘redirection’, and ‘sublimation’ of our basic drives and dispositions are of
particular importance.
Nietzsche delights in exploring the many sensibilities and mentalities that he
notices, many of which relate in significant ways to issues he pursues across the
spectrum of his philosophical interests. His various explorations of them in their
historical and occasionally even biographical specificity are grist for the mill of his
kind of extended naturalism. His attention to the sensibility phenomenon they
exemplify is an important part of it, as is his concern to show that they can all be
made sense of within the framework of its guiding idea: anchored in and
emerging out of aspects of our human-animal nature, by way of historical
developments of a social and cultural nature, and cultivated by associated
forms of human life.
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I emphasize the phenomenon of sensibility because of its ubiquity in
Nietzsche’s writings and thinking with respect to human reality, its resulting
significance for the understanding of his kind of naturalism, and its relevance to
the topic of Nietzsche’s naturalistic normative philosophy. For Nietzsche no
naturalism is worth taking seriously that ignores or cannot do justice to this
dimension and character of human reality. It is for this reason that he is so
scornful of some versions of naturalism. And a naturalism that takes proper
account of it is better equipped than one that does not to address the topic of
normativity, to which I now turn.
5. NORMATIVITY AS PHENOMENON
My topic in what follows is not any particular normative issue, but rather
Nietzsche’s thinking with respect to the idea and phenomenon of normativity
itself. I consider his thinking with respect to normativity to be interesting,
important, sophisticated, complex, and promising, both philosophically and
humanly, as we attempt to learn to rethink this vital matter in a thoroughly
naturalistic way, as Nietzsche and I both believe we must. I further suggest that
the robust kind of naturalism I attribute to him allows for—and has the resources
for developing—a more significant conception of normativity than is possible
within the confines of the sort of austerely scientistic naturalism with which his
should not be confused. Nietzsche of course does not discuss (let alone offer a
developed account of ) ‘normativity’ or ‘Normativität ’ per se; this terminology
was not in use in philosophical discourse in his time. The question rather is: what
can be gathered from his thinking, as expressed in his discussions of various
matters relevant to the concept and issue, that can reasonably be represented as
the sort of critical and constructive intervention he in effect made in advance to
discussion of the topic that has come to be framed in terms of ‘normativity’.
It is important to distinguish between thinking about normativity and thinking
normatively. In speaking of Nietzsche’s ‘thinking with respect to normativity’,
I mean to be focusing upon the former. He does engage in the latter, but it seems
to me that it is essential to view the (substantively) normative thinking he does
do—which is emphatically not intended to be regarded as a new ‘one-size-fits-all’
normative ethic—in the context of his thinking about the nature of normativity
more generally. If one confuses the two, or fails to recognize the implications of
the latter for the former, one is bound to misunderstand him seriously, and will
also fail to appreciate one of the most interesting and significant aspects of his
naturalism and contribution to moral philosophy.
What is ‘normativity’? In contrast to ‘metaethics’, which deals analytically
with the concepts and language of ethics and moral discourse, ‘normative ethics’
is generally understood to have to do with questions of a prescriptive and
proscriptive nature. According to Christine Korsgaard, in her The Sources of
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Normativity, it has to do with ‘obligation’. She writes: ‘Ethical standards are
normative. They do not merely describe a way in which we in fact regulate our
conduct. They make claims upon us; they command, oblige, recommend, or
guide’ (Korsgaard 2004: 8). She construes this to mean that ‘normativity’
pertains to the ‘oughtness’ of what she takes to constitute ‘morality’ (in the
singular—the real thing): that is, whatever it is, ‘if anything, we really ought to
do’ (Korsgaard 2004: 13). So, for her, the ‘normative question’ is that of ‘what
justifies the claims that morality makes on us’ (Korsgaard 2004: 9–10). Furthermore, like most modern moral philosophers, by ‘we’ and ‘us’ she means ‘everyone’: the normativity of ‘morality’, she supposes, must have the character of
‘universality’ (presumably among human or rational agents generally). More
fully, she states: ‘I use the word “normativity” to refer to the ways in which
reasons direct, guide, or obligate us to act, believe or judge in certain ways: to
what we might call their authoritative force’ (Korsgaard 2004: 226 n.10).
Korsgaard contends that there are four basic modern philosophical answers to
the question of ‘what makes morality normative’. One is that its norms are
endowed with ‘authoritative force’ by the ‘legislative will’ of some proper
authority (paradigmatically God—or, as Hobbes famously argued, the absolute
sovereign). Another is the so-called moral ‘realist’ view that some moral principles have their own sort of non-derivative reality and authority because they are
simply true. A third locates the source of the normativity of ‘morality’ in
something about our very nature as human beings that the proper sort of
‘reflection’ reveals to makes it ‘good for us’. And the fourth locates its force in
the autonomy of the will of rational agents as such; that is, in the very nature of
rational autonomous agency (Korsgaard 2004: 19). Korsgaard herself dismisses
the first two answers and opts for a kind of combination of the third and fourth.
Nietzsche parts company not only with all of these answers, but also with this
way of framing the question itself, not only with respect to normativity, but also
with respect to morality. Yet he does so with an intent that is fundamentally
positive, as he does in his challenges to traditional ways of conceiving of truth,
knowledge, and value. I take the upshot for him to be that the viability of a
meaningful version of the idea of normativity can survive the shift to naturalism
if the phenomenon to which it refers is appropriately reinterpreted—as morality
and ethics likewise need to be—in a manner for which his naturalism has the
resources. (He has no patience with a moral realism that is incoherently
simply tacked onto a ‘de-deified’ naturalism on the terms of which one has no
‘right to it’.)
It is commonly supposed—as it is by Korsgaard—that the basic idea of
‘normativity’ is that of ‘oughtness’ (pro or con) with respect to actions of one
sort or another, and that real normativity is a matter of ‘oughtness’ with respect
to those things that one (‘we’, anyone, everyone) really ought or ought not do.
Morality—that is, true morality—is then supposed to consist of whatever makes
the list.
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For Nietzsche, this whole way of thinking—about normativity, and also
about morality—must change. Most fundamentally, he parts company with
Korsgaard’s way of framing ‘the normative question’—as ‘what makes morality
normative?’ or ‘what justifies the claims that morality makes on us?’—because
for him there is no such thing as ‘morality’, simpliciter. Rather, for him there
long have been and are and can be and in all likelihood will continue to be
many moralities, none of which has been or is or will be the thing itself, the
single true or real one, among the many pretenders. The ‘morality’ to which he
refers in the title of Zur Genealogie der Moral—which latter term may be
translated as either ‘morals’ or ‘morality’—lays claim to be ‘morality itself ’, as
he observes, and may have come to be taken for granted and assumed to be
such. However, he rejects that claim: ‘Morality in Europe today is herd animal
morality—in other words . . . merely one type of human morality [Eine Art von
menschlicher Moral ], beside which, before which, and after which many other
types, above all higher moralities, are, or ought to be, possible’ (BGE 202). It is
not only of ‘higher moralities’ that he is thinking:
Wherever we encounter a morality [Moral], we also encounter an evaluation and rankordering of human drives and actions. These valuations and rank-orderings are always
expressions of the needs of a community and herd . . . Since the conditions for the
preservation of one community have been very different from those of another, there
have been very different moralities [Moralen]. In view of [the likelihood of] future
fundamental transformations of herds and communities, states and societies, we can
prophesy that there will be further very divergent moralities. (GS 116)
It by no means follows from this for Nietzsche, however, that there is no such
thing as normativity in or with respect to morality. On the contrary: there is a
great deal of it, precisely because moralities of one sort or another have long been
and continue to be ubiquitous in human life, and because normativity is one of
their fundamental features. The mistake is to suppose that there is some one
‘true’ morality—call it ‘Morality (with a capital M)’—that has a kind of unconditionality setting it apart, and that has a monopoly on ‘true’ normativity.
The task of philosophy with respect to normativity is not to seek this moral holy
grail. Rather, it is to try to understand the phenomenon of normativity as it
relates to the various forms of life that involve norms, and to consider what it is
possible to say with respect to their assessment.
6. NORMATIVITY AND ‘FORMS OF LIFE’
On the face of it, as Korsgaard observes, there are two main issues with respect to
normativity. One has to do with norms, the other has to do with their force. There
can be no normativity except in association with norms that have meaningful,
non-vacuous content. But it takes more than the mere existence of norms with
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such content for there to be what might be called agent normativity; that is, for
the norms to be taken to be sufficiently compelling (or, as Korsgaard puts it,
‘authoritative’) to get actual human beings to take them seriously in their own
lives and actions.
Nietzsche agrees, and then suggests that we need to take a step back and
reconsider what we are talking about. So he begins his ‘On the natural history of
morals’ by asserting that ‘One should own up in all strictness to what is still
necessary here’: namely, ‘to collect material . . . to prepare a typology of morals’;
for, he suggests, ‘the real problems of morality . . . emerge only when we compare
many moralities’ (BGE 186). He thus attempts to restore what Korsgaard calls
‘the normativity of morality’ to the human context that was its original home
(the religious or metaphysical garb with which it has been supplied notwithstanding) and that continues to be its appropriate place and primary context, and
to reinterpret and reassess it accordingly. He thinks that there is nothing more to
either morality or normativity than what he can get a grip on, and that what he
can get a grip on should not be lightly dismissed.
We thus need to begin, for Nietzsche, by taking morality and normativity
down from the pedestal on which they have long been placed. Like knowledge
and art, and norms themselves, they are fundamentally, first and foremost human
phenomena. For him the ideas of morality and normativity are mere empty
abstractions except in association with forms of human life of one sort or another,
through which (as was observed above, in my discussion of his naturalism)
individual human sensibilities are shaped, and in which these ideas acquire
specificity and content.
This notion is aptly applicable to a wide range of things Nietzsche discusses.
So, for example, the ‘master’ and ‘slave’ types discussed in the first essay of GM,
and the ‘predator’ and ‘herd’ types discussed in the second, are depicted as having
very different types of forms of life; the forms of life in which instances of the
‘Sittlichkeit der Sitte’ (the ‘morality of mores’ or ethicality of custom) prevails
differ in content, as do those of the ‘peoples and fatherlands’ he discusses in the
eighth part of BGE, and the forms of life centring upon different forms of
religiousness he discusses. Living (‘natural’!) languages, in conjunction with
their associated cultures, might be considered very large-scale examples as well,
especially in view of the training in normativity they provide to all human beings
who learn to speak them. Pursuits, institutions, and practices of various sorts
have also come to be cases in point, as they have become well established and
developed.
The notion of ‘forms of life’ (or ‘FOL’, as I shall sometimes refer to them) is a
very elastic one, and needs to be; for they are of many different sorts. They might
be thought of as semi-autonomous socio-cultural units with their own developed
and developing identities and structures, which include distinctive and evolving
sets of values and norms—the emergence of which is a virtual criterion of the
appearance or differentiation of a new form of life (or variant thereof ). They take
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shape in different ways: sometimes in the manner in which Nietzsche envisions
dominant populations (such as his ‘master’ types) developing their ways of life,
sometimes in a manner reactive to them (such as his ‘slave’ types) or defensive
against the threat they pose (such as his ‘herd’ types), and sometimes in ways
prompted by their particular circumstances in other respects (examples of which
he considers in GS, BGE, TI and elsewhere).
‘Forms of life’ can be either comprehensive in their compass, framing all
aspects of life in a community or society (as they would seem commonly to
have been in earlier times, and to be in some places still), or partial, pertaining
only to portions of life along with others that do so as well, not only in a society
but in the lives of individuals, whose identities thus reflect and are woven of a
multiplicity of such strands. In the latter case they may be thought of as
something like ‘worlds’ people sequentially or even overlappingly inhabit, in
the ‘life’ of each of which (and, in the modern world, they are often many) they
participate.
As was earlier observed, forms of life shape sensibilities among those who
internalize them. Their endurance depends upon continuing human commitment
to and involvement in them (as in the case of a living language or tradition); and
this means that normativity is their life-blood, since it requires adherence to the
norms associated with them. That involvement also makes possible the realization
of normativity, and thereby the attainment of a partially ‘dis-animalized’ human
reality transformed by means of it. And that, for Nietzsche, is of great importance,
owing to the kind of difference it signifies.
7. NORMATIVITY NATURALIZED
The many types—and instances of types—of norms that human beings live by
have a variety of roots and genealogies and places in human life. They are real, for
Nietzsche, in the same way that moralities are real and vice versa, for moralities
are simply somewhat special cases of this larger phenomenon. Their human
reality notwithstanding, however, ‘there are altogether no moral facts’ (TI IV, 1),
no purely (absolutely, intrinsically, immaculately engendered, extra-mundanely
developed) moral or otherwise normative phenomena. Norms that are embraced
affect human experience, thought, feelings, and conduct. They impinge, collide,
and conflict; they affect and transform each other and other human phenomena.
They do not transcend human reality, however, but rather are part and parcel of
human forms of life.
As Korsgaard rightly observes with respect to ‘ethical standards’, norms quite
generally (and of which such ‘standards’ are a subset) ‘do not merely describe’
patterns of activity; ‘they command, oblige, recommend, or guide’. They exist in
order to guide and direct what goes on, in some form of life or other. Their
naturalistically conceived basic function, for Nietzsche (which they by no means
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always perform effectively), is to express and promote the ‘conditions of preservation and growth’ of the forms of life with which they are associated. In some
instances they perform a kind of advisory function, while in other cases their task
is to bind, aided by a combination of sanctions and acceptance-promoting
practices.
In our case, for Nietzsche, this has meant to assist in our transformation away
from our proto-human animality, in the service of the emergence of that broadscale ‘form of life’ that is ‘the type Mensch ’ as the emergent sort of living creature
we have come to be: ‘Many chains have been laid upon man so that he should no
longer behave like an animal’ (HH II, II, 350). Moral and ethical (as well as legal)
norms and normativities, as Nietzsche naturalistically conceives of them, belong
in this mix rather than standing altogether apart from it. They may be special
cases; but the ‘claims they make upon us’ (in Korsgaard’s language) have no basis
or authority beyond that of the forms of human life and related specific valuations with which they are associated.
Normativity thus involves the guidance or direction of conduct where there
is a real possibility of its proceeding otherwise, as is the case in most of human
life for Nietzsche (now that instincts no longer do the job). Like forms of
human life themselves, the norms that are part of their fabric typically and
paradigmatically have a social and cultural character—and therefore also a
linguistic and historical character—even though they may come to have a
status transcending the parameters of their origins. Life in all forms and at
all levels is dynamically structured. In human life much of what goes on is
structured, guided, and regulated by a vast profusion of norms, among
which—along with a great many others—are those associated with various
types and instances of legality, ethicality, and morality. (Others, for example,
are associated with languages, professions, and games.) There is hardly an
aspect of human life that is not norm-structured. Indeed, Nietzsche considers
the interconnected development of both the capacity and the need to be normguided to be one of the keys to our ‘dis-animalization’.
A normative situation may be broadly characterized as a situation in which
conduct is structured by action-guiding norms (rules, regulations, laws, customs,
expectations, standards, and the like). Forms of life are the contexts that make the
establishment, development, and continuation of such situations possible.
Norms and normativity can be conceived in abstraction from such contexts,
but do not (because, practically speaking, they cannot) for the most part amount
to anything humanly real apart from them; or at any rate they can come to do so,
for Nietzsche, only under quite exceptional human circumstances (HH II, II,
350; GS 335; GM II, 2). Even then they build upon (but also go beyond) the
already substantial transformation of the character of human life and human
reality that the emergence and establishment of shared forms of life represent.
This is a very brief sketch of the larger human context in which, for Nietzsche,
any sort of normativity—and any sort of real-world morality—is to be viewed
and naturalistically reinterpreted. In summary: for Nietzsche, forms of life (FOL)
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and of human life in particular (of which there is a profusion), differ in their
structures and contours, and in the values they at once embody and engender.
Values are FOL-relational, norms are FOL-contextual, and normativity is FOLstructural. Normativity is internal to FOL norm-systems. When norms or normsystems are themselves normatively assessed as candidates for adoption, rejection,
or modification, that assessment can only be carried out by drawing upon other
such resources that make possible the identification of ‘reasons’ that may figure in
such assessments.
This suggests an answer to the question of whether, for Nietzsche, or in what
respect, it makes sense for someone to ask whether they ought to adopt or
continue to adhere to or override or reject some norm. On the present account,
that question can make sense if, within one’s larger form of life of which that
norm is or would be a part, there are values or other norms that might at least
seem to be aligned or at odds with the norm in question, or to warrant limiting or
overriding it in certain circumstances. It can also make a kind of sense if there is
some other form of life to which one is also committed, and within which there
are other norms or values with which the norm in question would be in harmony
or conflict. In the latter case, the conflict would actually be between the two
norm/value-systems and the forms of life in which they figure. In that event the
‘ought’ would not be a normative one, unless one were further committed to
some higher-order form of life and value scheme in which there are principles for
the resolution of such issues (perhaps by way of prioritizing).
That is a possibility that Nietzsche envisions in his setting of ‘the problem of
value and of a rank-ordering of values’ as the most important task of his
‘philosophy of the future’. But as he makes quite clear (for example, in BGE: P
and TI II, 2), he holds that there is no such thing as ‘value’ independent of ‘life’,
and considers all value to be form-of-life-related, with the possible exception of
the idea of ‘the enhancement of life’, which, while life-related, is not (virtually by
definition) internal to any particular form of life. Norms, however, are for
Nietzsche instrumental to values. There are normative constraints aplenty
for him, for constraining is the function of norms. But the only normative
constraints he recognizes are constraints set by norms. In the absence of all
norms, or beyond them or in abstraction from them, there can be no such
constraints. The constraints upon the embrace of norms that he is prepared to
recognize, beyond those of norm-system priority, are constraints of a practical
nature and valuational considerations that for him require a different sort of
analysis, a further topic that must be deferred to another occasion.
8 . FIRST- AND THIRD-PERSON STANDPOINTS
Normativity can be approached from a first-person-singular standpoint, as
Korsgaard suggests that it can and should be. She writes: ‘The normative
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question is a first-person question that arises for the moral agent who must
actually do what morality says’ (Korsgaard 2004: 16). Nietzsche would want to
amend this to say: ‘The normative question, on one level of consideration, is a
first-person question that arises for a norm-sensitive agent in a norm-covered
situation (who may be inclined to do otherwise)’. Or rather: it is a question that
arises with respect to that agent’s first-person standpoint; for it has to do with what
it takes ‘to justify the action from the agent’s own, first-person perspective’
(Korsgaard 2004: 14). Thus, on her view of the matter, ‘a philosopher’s theory
of normativity’ is ‘his answer to the normative question’ that an agent is entitled
to ask with respect to some ‘difficult claim’ that ‘morality is making’ upon the
agent: ‘Why must I do it?’ (Korsgaard 2004: 16).
Nietzsche would agree that normativity is a phenomenon that involves and
requires first-personal engagement on the part of a human agent. He would
undoubtedly observe, however, that the first-personally ‘justifying’ answer to the
‘Why?’ question will typically go no further than the identification and invocation of a norm applying to actions or situations of the sort involved that the agent
feels bound by. It is at this point that normativity theory gets interesting.
On Nietzsche’s view of the matter, the first-person character of normativity is,
in important respects, secondary and derivative in relation to certain features that
must be approached and understood from what might be called certain thirdperson standpoints, pertaining to circumstances external to ‘first-person’ reflection and deliberation. Most importantly, he considers normativity to share in the
social-functional and value-implementational character of the norm-systems and
forms of life with which it is associated. Forms of human life may be thought of
as norm-structured games (and indeed, in a significant sense, ‘language games’, to
make use of another apt Wittgensteinian expression). When one enters into a
norm-governed situation within some norm-structured context, and meets standard criteria of being able to understand the situation, one is third-personally
subject to the norms in question by the very nature of the case. The first-personal
‘I ought’ is a derivative internalization of a third-personal ‘One ought’.
That is obviously true of languages and their rules, games and their rules, of
legal systems and their laws, and of institutions and professions and disciplines
and their practices. For Nietzsche it is generally true of human social and cultural
life as well: with those aspects of it that have come to be subject to what we call
‘ethical’ and ‘moral’ norms and standards being no exceptions, prior to the
emergence of those exceptional individuated sorts of self-direction Nietzsche
models on the autonomy of the self-legislating ‘sovereign individual’ and the
originality of the creative artist. And even these human possibilities are for him to
be understood as modifications and adaptations of developments that proceeded
socially and culturally.
How is it that agents come to consider themselves bound by or committed to
norms, and what does that involve? That, for Nietzsche, is fundamentally a
moral–psychological question, to which I shall turn next. Real normativity, for
Nietzsche’s Naturalism and Normativity
253
Korsgaard, requires that it be a matter of ‘reasons’ rather than ‘causes’. For
Nietzsche, if pressed too far and each term taken too narrowly and simplistically,
that is a false dichotomy. The valid point being made here, with respect to at least
much of the normativity to be found in human life, is that the kinds of ‘reasons’
involved are generally what might be called ‘reasons of the heart’, in which one’s
convictions, values, sensibilities, and underlying dispositions are reflected.
I can now make several further important points. On this account, whatever
the stories may be that people tell each other and themselves about the matter,
what endows norms with force in a general and fundamental way is the forms of
life of which they are a part. But that is already the case when they are considered
third-personally. What activates that force, making it relevant and real for a
human agent, is that agent’s opting into the form of life in question. And what
elevates it to the level of full agent-normativity, is that agent’s coming to know it
well and intimately, from the inside, and buying into it, internalizing it, and
identifying with it to the extent of coming to embrace and experience its normand-value structures as reasons of one’s own for acting in accordance with the
norms in question, so that one would not feel right about acting otherwise, even
when one may be differently inclined. It is precisely the human possibility of
acquiring sensibilities attuned to forms of life that was discussed in connection with
Nietzsche’s kind of naturalism that makes this sort of buy-in and identification
possible. (This is the payoff of that part of my discussion of his naturalism.)
9 . NORMATIVITY, INTERNALIZATION,
IDENTIFICATION
How, more specifically, does Nietzsche think that this works, in moral–psychological terms? Before taking up this final question, a little further stage-setting will
be helpful. The terms ‘ethical’ and ‘moral’ are often taken to be more or less
synonymous. For many German philosophers from Hegel onwards, however,
there is a difference—or at any rate there can be a distinction—between ‘Sittlichkeit ’ and ‘Moralität ’ (or ‘die Moral ’). Nietzsche would seem to be one of them. He
makes considerable use of both notions. He gives major historical-developmental
significance to what he calls ‘die Sittlichkeit der Sitte’—the ethicality of Sitte
(custom)—and he accords no little importance to their contemporary analogues.
He also has much to say—of a generally rather different nature—about
various types of ‘Moralen’ (‘morals’ or ‘moralities’) such as ‘master-morality’,
‘slave morality’, ‘herd-animal morality’, and actual or possible ‘higher moralities’.
Very briefly, the basic model of Nietzschean (and Hegelian) Sittlichkeit is that
of rules that are to be followed. A significant variation of it is that of standards that
are to be met. The kind of normativity associated with Sitten is akin to that which
first attracted Nietzsche’s attention—namely the normativity of language, to
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Richard Schacht
which he calls attention in his discussion of how things commonly come to count
as ‘true’ in ‘On Truth and Lies’: figures of speech, ‘after long usage, seem to be
fixed to a people, canonical, and binding’ (TL, 84). The basic model of Moralität, on the other hand, for Nietzsche (as for Kant), is that of laws that are to be
observed. The interpretation of moral prescriptions and proscriptions as divine
commandments is perhaps the paradigmatic picture of this situation. But this
character or structure is preserved, for Nietzsche, even in the case of the kind of
moral autonomy in which one ‘gives laws to oneself ’.
These differences are not insignificant, and deserve attention that cannot be
given to them here. For present purposes, however, the point to be noted is that
in each case there is—as Nietzsche observes in the case of ‘willing’ (BGE 19)—a
kind of commanding and a kind of obeying. And it is that dynamic that he discerns
at the heart of how normativity works. The key is internalization [Verinnerlichung] in the sense of that term in which Nietzsche uses it in GM II, 16, to refer
to the redirection inward of drives that start out manifesting themselves towards
others, and in the double sense of the term in which it can be used both to refer to
entering into something and incorporating something into oneself. In brief, in the
kind of situation under consideration, individuals both enter into normstructured forms of life and incorporate those structures into themselves,
prompted by the satisfaction of the basic dispositions with which Nietzsche
considers human beings to be endowed both to assert themselves and to obey
(BGE 199), redirected inwardly.
The prototypes of such situations, he suggests, are twofold: cases in which one
identifies with a group whose customs or standards are to be observed and rules
followed, and cases in which one identifies (in the form of allegiance) with an
authoritative human or divine power and thereby with its commands.2 Latterday ethical and moral developments are variations and elaborations building
upon and refining these basic patterns. More exceptionally—but, for Nietzsche,
very importantly—a more individuated sort of identity-formation may become
humanly possible, of the sort that he has in mind in such places as the section of
The Gay Science in which he celebrates the idea of wanting to become ‘human
beings who are new, unique, incomparable, who give themselves laws, who create
themselves’ (GS 335).
Identification and internalization, for Nietzsche, are the pathways to the
endowment of ethical and moral norms with normative efficacy. Valuations in
turn play a crucial role, and remain the key to identification; and if (as Nietzsche
says) moralities are ‘sign-languages of the affects [Affekte]’, it is Affekte not only in
their rudimentary forms but also in their culturally shaped reconfigurations of
which he is speaking. What is going on in the experience of certain norms as
binding (in contrast to others, of which one may be aware but to which one is
2 See Schacht (2001).
Nietzsche’s Naturalism and Normativity
255
indifferent), on the Nietzschean account I am sketching, is that certain of one’s
‘Affekte’ are expressing themselves by way of their valuation-mediated identification linkage with the norms in question.
This moral–psychological account, however, does no more than set the stage
for the further consideration of what can be done with these ‘mechanisms’ (as it
were), as they are employed in the profusion of forms of life they make possible.
Nietzsche’s thinking with respect to norms and normativity is ‘reductive’ in one
sense; that is, in the sense of ‘translating them’ (along with the rest of human
reality) out of their pretence or purport of purity, and back into the realm of the
historically and maculately human. But this does not entail that it is ‘reductive’ in
the more radical, scientistic sense of that term. It does not even mean that there is
nothing more to be said about them than can be said about their experiential and
psychological character.
Nietzsche’s conception of normativity need not and does not reduce simply to
an account of the psychology and phenomenology of normative experience.
Forms of human linguistic, social, cultural, and institutional life are normatively
structured. When one identifies with them, buys into them, and internalizes
them, those structures and the undergirding and surrounding values are parts of
what gets internalized. Thus the ‘oughtness’ that is recognized by one who has
bought into them is not merely subjective. It has a kind of objectivity to it that,
while by no means categorical or universal for all human agents, is nonetheless
humanly real enough that Nietzsche could speak of the ‘discovery’ of a ‘new circle
of duties’ associated with ‘the fundamental idea of culture’ in one of his first
forays into this territory (UM III, 5).
The Nietzschean truth of human maturity that we have to learn to live with,
however, is that however precious to us the fabrics of our forms of life may be,
they are not absolute, but instead are—both modestly and importantly—ours, to
make of what we can, while we can. Or, as Nietzsche has Zarathustra say:
What is good and evil no one knows yet, unless it be he who creates. He, however, creates
man’s goal and gives the earth its meaning and its future. That anything at all is good and
evil—that is his creation. (Z III, 12)
1 0. CONCLUSION
In a note from 1887–88 Nietzsche wrote: ‘I understand by Moral a system of
evaluations that partially coincides with the conditions of a creature’s life’ (WP
256). And in Twilight he writes: ‘Every naturalism in morality [Jeder Naturalismus in der Moral ]—that is, every healthy morality—is dominated by an instinct
of life: some commandment of life is fulfilled by a determinate canon of “shalt”
and “shalt not” [“Soll” und “Soll nicht” ]’ (TI V, 4). But values are at work in
‘slave morality’ and in ‘ascetic ideals’ too; and Nietzsche would seem to think
256
Richard Schacht
that, on the whole, the values with which most moralities are associated are
symptomatic either of ‘life’ in various sorts of distress or of needs and circumstances that no longer exist.
As many of Nietzsche’s ‘case studies’ are intended to show, it is more than
possible for people’s attitudes to be manipulated in such a way that the ‘buyin’ mechanism results in their identification with ideals the attendant values
of which are at great variance with what their flourishing would require,
and consequently in their embrace of attendant moral norms that work to
their detriment. What he concludes from this, however, is by no means that
normativity is something we were better off without. On the contrary, he takes
it to represent an extraordinarily significant human phenomenon and capacity, which if better understood and well utilized is the key not just to a
more healthily flourishing humanity, but to what he calls all ‘enhancements’ of
human life.
As for what Nietzsche means by ‘higher moralities’—for example moralities
that ‘train men for the heights’ (WP 957)—and the normative thinking he
does engage in that, like Zarathustra (in the words of its subtitle) is intended
not for everyone but ‘for all and none’, those will have to be topics for other
occasions.
BIBLIOGRAPHY
In Nietzsche
Beyond Good and Evil, trans. Walter Kaufmann. New York: Vintage, 1966.
Human, All Too Human, trans. R. J. Hollingdale. Cambridge: Cambridge University
Press, 1986.
Nietzsche Werke: Kritische Gesamtausgabe, ed. Giorgio Colli and Mazzino Montinari, 30
vols. Berlin: Walter de Gruyter Co., 1967–.
On the Genealogy of Morals, trans. Walter Kaufmann and R. J. Hollingdale. New York:
Vintage, 1967.
‘On Truth and Lies in a Nonmoral Sense’, in Daniel Breazeale (ed.), Philosophy and
Truth: Selections from Nietzsche’s Notebooks of the Early 1870’s. New Jersey, London:
Humanities Press, 1979.
‘Schopenhauer as educator’, in Untimely Meditations, trans. R. J. Hollingdale. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1983.
The Birth of Tragedy, trans. Walter Kaufmann. New York: Vintage, 1966.
The Gay Science, trans. Walter Kaufmann. New York: Vintage, 1974.
The Will to Power, trans. Walter Kaufmann and R. J. Hollingdale (1967). New York:
Vintage.
‘Thus spoke Zarathustra’, in The Portable Nietzsche, ed. and trans. Walter Kaufmann.
New York: Viking, 1954.
Nietzsche’s Naturalism and Normativity
257
Other sources
Janaway, Christopher (2007). Beyond Selflessness. Oxford: Oxford University Press.
Korsgaard, Christine (2004). The Sources of Normativity. Cambridge and New York:
Cambridge University Press.
Leiter, Brian (2002). Nietzsche On Morality. London: Routledge.
—— (forthcoming). ‘Nietzsche’s naturalism reconsidered’, in Ken Gemes and John
Richardson (eds), Oxford Handbook of Nietzsche. Oxford: Oxford University Press.
Schacht, Richard (1983). Nietzsche. London: Routledge & Kegan Paul.
—— (2001). ‘Nietzschean normativity’, in Richard Schacht (ed.), Nietzsche’s Postmoralism. New York and Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.
Index
Acampora, Christa Davis 96 n.18
aesthetic 9, 12–14, 24, 33 n.13, 34–8, 41–2,
57–79, 84–5, 103–8, 222
appreciation/evaluation 12–13, 24, 33 n.13,
34–8, 60–71, 104, 222
creation/creativity 34–5, 42, 62, 104–8,
137–8, 222, 252; see also self-creation
experience 35–8, 46–7, 60–71
affectivity/affects 13, 17, 29–30, 34, 38,
39–40, 41, 56–61, 63–71, 79, 97, 118,
143, 196, 199–200, 205, 206 n.12,
207–32, 238, 244, 254–5; see also
sensibilities; taste
agency 6–7, 8, 17, 23, 26, 27–33, 90–91,
100–1, 139, 165 n.6, 193–6, 204, 206–8,
224–6, 229–31; see also autonomy; moral
psychology; will
Alcibiades 106, 189
altruism 8, 16, 90, 98, 136, 160–2,
167–81, 204
Anderson, C.H. 39 n.15, 104 n.27
Anderson, Lanier 16, 17
Anscombe, G. E. M 86 n.4, 95–6 n.17
Aristotle/Aristotelian 1, 88 n.7
Arpaly, Nomy 32 n.10
art 2, 33 n.13, 34–9, 41, 46, 58–62, 70, 74,
104–6, 126–7, 137, 151 n.26, 187, 195,
216 n.23, 222, 240–1, 244, 248, 252
ascetic ideal 54 n.4, 255
asceticism 15, 54, 136, 161, 171–2, 175,
176, 228, 232
autonomy 12, 17, 22–3, 26, 30, 46, 55, 62,
203–11, 228–32, 244, 246, 252, 254
Avenarius, Richard 202
Baier, Kurt 88 n.7
Beardsley, Monroe 61 n.12
Beethoven, Ludwig van 49
Blackburn, Simon 111, 122, 129, 130
blame 7, 14, 87, 99 n.20, 100–1, 196, 209;
see also guilt
Bonaparte, Napoleon 49
Boscovich, Ruggero Giuseppe 211–14
Brower, Bruce 150 n.25
Buddha 173
Caesar, Julius 106, 189
Cartwright, David 168 n.10, 169 n.11
Cassina, Ubaldo 168–70, 179–80
Chardin, Jean Siméon 35–8
Christianity 2, 3, 22–3, 54, 85, 95, 100 n.21,
125, 136, 149 n.22, 176, 200, 211,
228, 229, 238
Clark, Maudemarie 7 n.3, 13–14, 15,
48 n.23, 84–6, 87–9, 90 n.10, 96, 100–1,
103, 106, 108 n.30, 111, 114–31,
232 n.39
compassion 15–16, 84, 90, 94 n.16, 136,
160–2, 166–81, 196–200
Conan Doyle, Arthur 144
Confucius 125
conscience 18, 48, 82, 83 n.3, 96, 100, 175,
198, 199 n.22
Craig, Edward 156, 208
Crescenzi, Luca 214 n.20
cruelty 83, 147, 169, 175, 196, 199
culture 2, 6, 17, 18, 52, 54, 60, 63, 71, 72–3,
96 n.17, 150, 153–5, 189, 191, 194, 197,
239, 240–55
Davidson, Donald/Davidsonian 144
Davies, Martin 150
democratic 84
Derrida, Jacques 205
Descartes/Cartesian 68, 164, 172, 206 n.12
DiMaggio, Joe 33 n.11
Dreyfus, Hubert 225
drives 4, 8, 16–17, 28, 53, 97, 106, 124,
186–200, 205–32, 238, 244, 254
Drummond, J. J. 65 n.16
Dudrick, David 7 n.3, 14, 114–31
egoism:
normative 14, 15–16, 66, 87–8, 163–73
psychological, 15–16, 66, 163–81, 196
equality 14, 84, 90, 98, 196
error theory 10, 12, 14, 112–15, 122–8,
131–9, 148, 151, 153–4
eternal recurrence 16, 46–7, 183–4, 228, 232
etymology 25, 83 n.3
eudaimonia 149–51, 154
evaluation, act of 7, 27–45, 55–71, 112–14,
117–19, 123–8, 134–9, 149–51, 186–7,
219–21, 228
excellence 2–3, 7, 8, 11, 26, 30, 31–2, 33 n.13,
90 n.8, 94, 98–9, 102–8, 185, 186; see also
perfectionism
Faraday, Michael 214 n.20
Fichte, Johann Gottlieb 217 n.24
260
Index
fictionalism 11, 15, 112, 115, 122, 125–8,
133–57
flourishing 2–3, 4, 8, 15, 17, 42, 45, 49, 86 n.4,
88. n.7, 91, 94, 98–9, 104, 149, 154, 256
Foot, Philippa 2 n.1, 13–14, 84–5, 88,
103, 107–8
forms of life 242–4, 247–55
Foucault, Michel 205
Frege-Geach point 140–1, 142
Frege, Gottlob 144–5 n.17; see also
Frege-Geach point
Freud, Sigmund 217 n.24, 238
Gardner, Sebastian 7 n.3, 206, 213, 231
Gauthier, David 88 n.7
Gemes, Ken 7 n.3, 188 n.11, 208, 229 n.38
genealogy 21, 49, 96, 155–7, 203, 249
Gendler, Tamar 145, 146
Gibbard, Allan 86 n.4, 87 n.6, 111, 113, 116,
119–20, 122
God 3, 22–3, 93, 94–5, 96, 130, 136, 203,
239, 246
death of 3, 94–5, 100, 136, 200,
206 n.12, 239
Goethe, Johann Wolfgang von 44, 102, 188,
193–5, 229–31
Gogh, Vincent van 137
Goldie, Peter 65 n.16
greatness 2, 8, 9, 11, 16–17, 22, 25, 46–7,
102, 104, 183–6, 188–200, 229–32
guilt 36, 88, 96, 100–1, 136, 196–200
Hampton, Jean 178 n.15, n.16
Harcourt, Edward 151 n.26
Hare, R. M. 113, 143
Hartfield, Gary 203 n.3
Hegel, G. W. F/Hegelian 86, 203, 204, 253
Heraclitus 189
Hill, Kevin 203 n.6
Hills, David 138
historicality 21, 242–3, 255
Hobbes, Thomas 246
Holmes, Sherlock 145
Honderich, Ted 262 n. 1
honesty 11, 15, 18, 83 n.3, 104–5, 126, 134,
137–9; see also illusion, honest;
truthfulness
humanism 13, 73, 77 n.25
Humberstone, Ian 150
Hume, David/Humean 1, 14, 128–31,
208–11, 215 n.22, 223–6, 238
Hurka, Thomas 9, 42 n.19, 103 n.26, 107
n.29, 185 n.4, 188 n.12
Hussain, Nadeem 11, 14–15, 133–9, 140
n.14, 144, 146 n.18, 147 n.20, 148,
151–4, 155, 157
illusion 15, 124, 126, 131, 134, 137–9, 147,
155, 166–70, 180–1, 205–7, 224
honest 15, 126, 134, 137–9
instincts 16–17, 23, 48, 66, 83, 90, 98,
166, 177, 179, 186, 189–93, 196–8,
205, 210, 216 n.23, 217, 222–3, 238,
250, 255
James, William 39
Janaway, Christopher 6, 7 n.3, 16–17, 46
n.21, 82, 96 n.18, 107 n.29, 160 n.2,161
n.3, 207, 208, 210, 218, 220, 229 n.38,
238–9
Joyce, Richard 140
Judaism 125
justice 14, 62, 69, 84–5, 90, 103, 124,
127, 189
Kail, Peter 96 n.18, 130 n.9, 131
Kalderon, Mark 138, 140–4
Kant, Immanuel/Kantian 1, 3, 10, 13, 17, 22,
24, 26, 33 n.11, 38, 54, 61 n.10, 62, 73,
93, 96–7, 165 n.6, 194, 202–8, 212–4,
224–5, 228, 254
Katsafanas, Paul 53, 186 n.7, 187, 190, 197
n.20, n.21, 217–18, 221 n.30
Kaufmann, Walter 11
Knobe, Joshua 205
Korsgaard, Christine 18, 31 n.9, 73,
77 n.25, 139, 148, 152–3, 155,
206 n.11, 245–53
Landy, Joshua 229 n.38
Lange, Friedrich Albert 213–14
Langsam, Harold 135, 149 n.22, 151, 153–4
Leiter, Brian 5–7, 10, 11, 13–14, 22, 31 n.8,
45 n.20, 84, 85, 89–92, 96 n.18, 97–100,
102 n.24, 103 n.26, 104, 112, 140 n.13,
194, 197 n.21, 199 n.23, 205, 237–8
Lewis, David 47 n.22
Löwith, Karl 232 n.39
Mach, Ernst 202
MacIntyre, Alisdair 2 n.1, 86 n.4, 140, 142
Mackie, John 86 n.4, 87 n.6, 112, 148
Magnus, Bernd 192
Manu 125
Marx, Karl 86
May, Simon 7 n.3, 101 n.22, 136
metaethics 2, 8, 9–12, 14–15, 21, 22–7,
34–50, 52–5, 65–9, 92–4, 108, 111–31,
133–57; see also error theory; factionalism;
non-cognitivism; normative authority;
realism
metanormativity, see metaethics
Mill, John Stuart 1, 86, 87 n.6
Index
Moore, Adrian 149 n.23
Moore, G. E. 42, 149 n.24
morality:
contrasted to ethical 13–14, 85–9, 100–3,
136, 253–4; see also Sittlichkeit
critique of 2, 5, 7, 8, 13, 20–4, 30–1, 45–9,
53, 81–2, 88, 89–100, 123–4, 160–81,
183, 185, 196–200, 203–4
origins of 3–4, 5, 49, 55, 94–6, 175, 198, 199
value of 2, 5, 8, 89–92, 196–200
moral psychology 6, 13, 52–5, 75–6, 97,
160–81, 186–200, 203–32, 252–5;
see also drives; will
minimalism 6, 203 n.5, 208–11, 223–8
Moran, Richard, 137 n.8, 146
Mozart, Wolfgang 34
music 13, 33 n.13, 34–5, 41, 58–62, 64–5,
69–70, 188, 190, 241
Musil, Robert 77 n.24
naturalism 1–7, 9–12, 16–18, 22–3, 31, 41,
47, 96, 194, 204–16, 231–2, 236–45;
see also normativity, relation to naturalism;
supernaturalism
explanatory 3–4, 10, 237–40
methodological 4–6, 238–40
reductive 17–18, 205, 209–11, 213–16,
229, 231–2, 255
substantive 4, 5, 10, 11, 238–40
natural science(s) 5–6, 18, 21, 44–5, 49,
112, 145 n.17, 211, 212 n.19, 213–15,
237–43
Nehamas, Alexander 16, 33 n.13, 104, 208,
229, 232 n.39
nihilism 52, 133, 149 n.22, 151–5, 236
non-cognitivism 10, 14–15, 111–31, 140–3
non-conscious 7, 17, 28–30, 33, 34,
39–40, 53, 57, 72, 130, 172, 187,
190, 193–4, 196, 197–200, 205–6,
212–13, 216 n.23, 219, 227; see also
self-consciousness
normative authority 3, 5, 10–11, 14,
18, 21, 31–3, 37–8, 46, 54–5, 62, 65,
72, 92–100, 108, 134, 204, 246–50,
252–5
normative concepts 8–9, 24–7, 34, 86,
119–20, 184
normativity 1–4, 8–9, 21–7, 31, 46–9, 65–9,
86, 92–100, 108, 111–31, 149–55,
161,184–5, 236, 245–56; see also
perfectionism; normative authority;
normative concepts; values
relation to naturalism 4, 23, 31, 96, 203,
245–6, 249–55
relation to value 8, 12, 25–7, 46–8, 65–9,
86 n.5, 102 , 184–5
Nozick, Robert 150
261
Owen, David 2 n.2, 82, 95, 99 n.20
Parfit, Derek 206 n.11
perfectionism 7, 9, 11, 13–14, 16, 78, 101,
103–8
perspectivism 5, 10, 18, 21, 40, 148–9,
207–8, 228
physiology 6–7, 16, 28, 191, 239, 242
Pippin, Robert 6, 7 n.3
Plato/Platonic 1, 3, 125, 148, 149, 212, 238
Poellner, Peter 7 n.3, 13, 15
postmodernism 1, 5, 205 n.8
Proust, Marcel 223
quasi–aesthetic, see aesthetic
Railton, Peter 12–13, 15, 96 n.17, 119, 225–6
realism:
about normativity/value 9–12, 13, 15, 70,
121, 140
and antirealism about morality 10, 11, 246;
see also error theory
subjective 10, 15, 31–49, 65–74, 112, 122,
133–4, 135, 149–55
Reginster, Bernard 9, 15–16, 52–3, 75–6,
104, 107 n.29, 147, 186 n.6, 203 n.6, 205
n.7, n.10, 232 n.39
Reimer, Marga 144
responsibility 7, 22, 33, 90, 99 n.20,
136, 227
ressentiment 70, 71, 198, 219, 221–2, 223
Richardson, John 187 n.10, 189 n.14, 192,
195, 213, 214 n.21, 226
Ridge, Michael 143
Ridley, Aaron 6, 59 n.7, 104
Risse, Mathias 205
Robertson, Simon 2 n.1, 2 n.2, 13–14, 16, 48
n.23, 135, 139, 148 n.21, 152 n.28
Rose, Pete 33 n.11
Rosen, Gideon 141
Sartre, Jean-Paul 61 n.10, 73
Scanlon, T. M. 86 n.4, 87 n.6
Schacht, Richard 6, 11, 17–18, 96 n.18,
208, 229
Scheler, Max 73
Schiller, J. C. Friedrich von 217 n.24
Schopenhauer, Arthur 15–16, 54, 60–1 n.9,
61 n.11, 75–6, 94 n.16, 160–81, 183,
187, 198, 203, 217 n.24, n.25, 218 n.26,
222, 223, 238
science, see natural science(s)
scientism 18, 237–9, 245
self 8, 17, 90, 164–81, 205–32
self-affirmation 16–17, 67, 69, 71, 183–95,
198–200, 223
self-becoming 16, 78, 104–7, 180, 193–4
262
Index
self-consciousness 30, 32, 34, 68,
78 n.26, 134, 164–5, 172–3, 195–6,
219 n.28, 227
self-creation 9, 17, 104–7, 204, 229–32,
244, 254
self-denial 15, 17, 161, 174–6, 194, 197–8
self-discipline 102, 106, 188, 194, 222 n.32,
229–31
self-expression 24, 187
self-governance 17, 102, 104–6, 194, 228
selflessness 15–16, 160–1, 171–81
self-mastery 102, 106, 194, 207, 226 n.36,
227–8, 232
self-reverence 47, 106,
self-sufficiency 74, 102, 104 n.26, 106,
107–8
sensibilities 18, 41–2, 75, 188, 243–5, 249,
253; see also affectivity/affects
Shakespeare, William 186
Shusterman, Richard 61 n.12
Sidgwick, Henry 87 n.6
Simmel, Georg 167 n.7
Sittlichkeit 82 n.2, 83, 86 n.4, 96, 100,
148, 253–4
Skorupksi, John 86 n.4, 87 n.6
Smith, Michael 210 n.16
Socrates 86
Soll, Ivan 232 n.39
Sprigge, T. L. S. 61 n.9
Stanley, Jason 33 n.12
Stein, Edith, 59 n.8
suffering 15, 49, 68, 72, 90, 98, 100 n.21,
102, 160, 163, 164, 166–80, 185–6, 196,
199, 217 n.25
supernaturalism 3, 10
taste 11, 13, 24, 56–7, 61 n.10, 64, 67, 70,
74–5, 127, 131, 185 n.3
Taylor, Charles 2 n.1, 86 n.4, 137 n.8
Thomas, Alan 14,15
Tiberius, 33 n.12
truth 2, 5, 12, 21, 42–5, 49, 133, 246; see also
fictionalism; perspectivism
truthfulness 134, 136–7,148, 155–7
utilitarianism 54, 85, 90, 91 n.13, 93, 94 n.16,
143 n.16, 202
values; see also altruism; compassion; morality;
normativity; perfectionism
attunement to 12–13
creation of 11, 12, 15, 24, 45–9, 55, 63,
102, 105, 114–15, 118–19, 126,
127,134–7, 148, 204, 206, 232, 238
life–enhancing/denying 2, 12, 15, 16, 22,
44, 46, 65, 124, 133, 136, 149, 183–6,
223, 230, 242, 256
order of rank 21–2, 23, 68, 70, 71–2, 79,
245, 251
revaluation of 2–3, 7, 9, 11 n.4, 15, 23, 126,
133, 134, 135–9, 146 n.18, 148, 151
n.16, 198–9, 221
Velleman, David 31 n.9
Vinci, Leonardo da 106
virtue(s) 8, 15, 18, 23–4, 25, 45–8, 73, 88 n.7,
93, 102, 103, 107, 149–55, 168, 171,
174, 199 n.22, 243, 244; see also
excellence
Wagner, Richard 58, 60, 62, 64
Wallace, R. Jay 31 n.9
Walton, Kendall 140, 144, 145
Warnock, Geoffrey 143
Watkins, 25 n.2
Weber, Max 54
will 5, 6–7, 12, 13, 15, 27 n.7, 28, 57, 90, 106,
172–3, 183, 185–6, 194, 195, 203–32
free 22, 30–1, 32, 99 n.20, 100–1, 165 n.6,
196, 198, 203
to power 4, 13, 22, 24, 52–5, 67–8, 75–7,
79, 175
Williams, Bernard 2 n.1, 6, 14, 25 n.6, 85, 86
n.4, 87, 88 n.7, 96 n.18, 100–1, 155–7,
203 n.5, 208–10, 229, 231
Williamson, Timothy 33 n.12
Winkelried, Arnold von 176
Wissenschaft 18, 237, 242–3
Wittgenstein, Ludwig/Wittgensteinian 252
Wollheim, Richard 137
Yablo, Stephen 145
Yack, Bernard 139, 148 n.21
Young, Julian 168 n.8
Zarathustra 56, 255–6