‹ Samuel Scheffler on “Immigration and the Significance of Culture” •
I am teaching Nietzsche (Beyond Good and Evil) for the first time this term, and I have run into some puzzles I am hoping some of the more experienced Nietzsche scholars on this list can help me work through. The points are two; these have come out in class discussions and I’ve been uncertain how to respond. I’ll put them as tendentiously, contentiously, and ignorantly as I can, and plan on backtracking as quickly as I can once knowledge is imposed upon me.
1. Nietzsche seems to suggest contradictory things as to what sort of social arrangements his view would prescribe (if it would prescribe anything; more on this next). On the one hand, he indicates that the oppression of the “free spirits” by the moral codes of the herd (”one long coercion”) are necessary for the development and fruition of the greatness of spirit and exfoliation of the will to power in those spirits. On the other hand, he also indicates that hierarchical societies — with abundant sacrifice of the lower forms of human life for the sake of the development of the higher forms — are a precondition for the highest development of the type “human being.” These seem like contradictory prescriptions. The best I can do with them is to think that his view is analogous to Marx’s on the communist revolution. The idea in that case is that capitalist societies overproduce to a point at which, after the revolution, the superabundance of material goods “launches” the new communist arrangements successfully. Here, the idea would be that the “long coercion” does likewise for the development of free spirits or “philosophers of tomorrow” — in effect the hierarchical societies would build on the obstructive “capital” of the long period of “rule of the rabble” under the usual run of moral codes. Beyond this, I am stuck.
2. I wonder what prescriptive force the view has for individuals at all. Suppose, on the one hand, you are (or take yourself to be) one of the free spirits. Then what the hell do you care what Nietzsche thinks? You are in the business of creating your own values, you accept no one’s rules or values but your own, etc. Nietzsche is just another source of noise; in fact, his is just another will for yours to overcome. So there’s no normative point to his view if you’re one of the free spirits.
On the other hand, if you’re not a free spirit — if you’re one of the herd — Nietzsche has, so far as I can see — given you absolutely no reason to accept any of his ideals. It may be that some ideal of human greatness is possible only through your exploitation and slavery, but on the other hand by hypothesis such ideals get no grip on you (if you could appreciate them, you would be noble, not despicable). So, once again, who the hell cares what Nietzsche has to say?
So: is there any prescriptive point to the view at all, by its own lights?
You must be registered and logged in to post a comment. Public Reason welcomes participation from members of the academic community with an interest in political philosophy and theory. Your registration as a participant is subject to approval. Please specify your academic institutional affiliation on the registration form.
8 comments
Comments feed for this article
1 - Friday, 9 November 2007 at 10:37 pm
Nicholas Smyth
Mark,
As far as I can tell, You’ve hit on two major problems that Nietzsche scholars have been tackling for a while now, but there are even more, especially centred around the prescriptive question. In my 120 ethics course, we teach Nietzsche as a perfectionist-consequentialist, and this is Thomas Hurka’s (U of Toronto) view (see http://www.chass.utoronto.ca/~thurka/docs/Nietzsche_perfectionist.pdf).
But as you note, there’s something odd about saying that Nietzsche HAS a prescriptive theory at all. He holds that what is valuable for a type of person is just what enables the expansion of their power, which means that what is valuable for one type of person will not be for another. So, it seems like the Herd are under no obligation to respect the abilities of the “higher types” to create human perfection, for the power of the herd is explicitly opposed to that type of flourishing.
Furthermore, the higher types are those who RESPOND to resistance and create their own values in the face of opposition from without… so, it would seem that Christianity is to be praised, not blamed, for presenting those types with the greatest obstacle to overcome that history has ever presented anyone! It would be incoherent for N. so reccomend a society that was easier on the higher types, for it is precisely they, imbued with an excessive will to power, who allegedly thrive on resistance (the will to power being a will to overcome resistence). He takes himself and Goethe to be paradigmatic instances of the ‘higher type’, but surely the repressiveness of Christianity was a necessary condition for reactionary greatness of Nietzsche and Goethe!
These considerations, combined with his general fatalism (and perspectivism about truth!), make me extremely suspicious of anyone who claims that Nietzsche HAS a proposal for a “true” theory of value, right action or social order. One of the most useful things I ever heard a professor say about him was: “Understand this: Nietzsche says what he wants to say when he wants to say it.” This is not to argue that his insights can’t be seen (at least in some areas) as systematic and consistent, but that if you’re looking for clear-cut, cross-the-board prescriptions in Nietzsche, you may not find them.
As an aside, I don’t think it’s any coincidence that Bernard Williams, whose work echoes many Nietzschean themes, is similarly deflationary about our usual prescriptive attitudes. As one moves closer to subjectivism and fatalism, the notion of “ought” becomes more and more difficult to explicate. Nothing embodies this difficulty more than the almost logically comical Nietzschean slogan: “Become what you are” (derived from the subtitle to Ecce Homo, meant ironically by N. but taken by many of his followers to be an actual prescriptive statement).
2 - Saturday, 10 November 2007 at 12:01 am
Mark LeBar
Thanks, Nicholas, though I guess that’s a sort of good news/bad news sort of response! I think that deflationism is especially tough on undergraduates, whom I’ve just barely (if at all) weaned from thinking my job is to give them the right answers and theirs is to write it down. This picture of what N is doing casts doubt on the questions — or the need to ask them — which animate much of the moral theory they’ve struggled to assimilate. That’s a good reflective task for them to take on board, and for me to press on them.
3 - Sunday, 11 November 2007 at 9:17 pm
Tom Hurka
Since Nicholas links to my (one) Nietzsche article, do you mind if I come in on the other side?
Nicholas says that ‘what is valuable for a type of person is just what enables the expansion of their power,’ but Nietzsche doesn’t speak only, if he speaks at all, of what is ‘valuable for a person.’ He speaks of what is simply valuable, as when he says that the life of a higher type is (simply) more valuable than that of a lower type.
In present-day philosophy, claims about what is simply valuable are read as prescriptive for everyone, so everyone has reason to prefer the more to the less valuable. And around p. 16 of my paper I cite a number of passages where Nietzsche seems to draw that very conclusion, saying that lesser types ought to sacrifice themselves to higher types, that fairness demands this sacrifice, and that the (simple) value of egoism in a person depends on the (simple) value of that person, so the less valuable should not act egoistically.
Of course Nietzsche doesn’t formulate these ideas explicitly, but I think he does express them sometimes and, equally importantly, also makes claims about (simple) value that imply them. Isn’t a large part of Zarathustra about preparing the way for the Uebermensch, even at the cost of ‘going under’ oneself?
4 - Monday, 12 November 2007 at 1:28 am
Mark LeBar
So if I understand you, Tom, we could think of him as proposing a certain sort of agent-neutral value, namely something like the highest egoistic value of which human beings are capable. Then, unless he were to espouse some sort of internalism about reasons for action, he could accept that even lower types have reason to sacrifice themselves for the sake of this value; the fact that they cannot see that, or be motivated thereby, would be irrelevant (in fact, that would just be a further manifestation of their baseness). Presumably that sort of value would be the object of recognition of a certain sort of intuition, though he no doubt is not interested in making such a claim. He’d still have a view that prescribes reasons for action for both lowest and highest sorts.
5 - Monday, 12 November 2007 at 7:04 pm
Nicholas Smyth
Hi Tom,
Thanks for joining in here, it’s quite an opportunity for me to discuss a few of these vexing (for me, anyway) questions.
“My philosophy aims at an ordering of rank: not at an individualistic morality. The ideas of the herd should rule in the herd-but not beyond it: the leaders of the herd require a fundamentally different valuation for their own actions, as do the independent, of the ‘beasts of prey,’ etc.” (WP 287)
Passages like this, when combined with his biological fatalism about types (I draw here on Leiter’s interpretation, one which seems to have been recieved reasonably favourably) seem to imply that he is not prescribing anything to the herd. Slave-morality is “the prudence of the lowest order” (GM I:13), and thus it seems at least plausible to believe that Nietzsche’s commands were simply not directed at “lower types”.
I will certainly review your paper (I found it extremely helpful when studying Nietzsche this past summer) but I just wanted to note for now that there is at least some textual evidence for my interpretation. More later!
6 - Monday, 12 November 2007 at 8:00 pm
Mark LeBar
But Nicholas, your post revives the first of my original questions. N does seem to have contradictory ideas about the value of the contribution of the herd to the sort of ideal Tom is pointing to. At one point in BGE (188) he claims that the oppression of the herd is absolutely necessary for the “cultivation of the spirit.” Yet he also holds (257) that the rejection of the herd morality and the realization of hierarchy and slavery is also necessary. So at the level of social orders, I am also not sure what to make of the prescriptive force of at least that work.
7 - Monday, 12 November 2007 at 9:29 pm
Kevin Klipfel
Maybe one way to read the claim at BGE 188 is precisely as a claim about prudential value: aristocratic societies create the best possible conditions for the flourishing of so-called “higher” types. So it would seem to follow that Nietzsche endorses such societies, on the assumption that all that matters is the flourishing of higher types.
This especially seems to be the case at BGE 257:
“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, and that needs slavery in some sense or other … ”
This kind of claim also seems to suggest that such societies are at least instrumentally valuable insofar as they promote the best conditions for the flourishing of higher types.
Yet if we consider Nietzsche’s critique of morality as a whole, instead of some isolated claims, it becomes clear that such claims are not really necessary. It would be sufficient if potentially great individuals merely gave up their belief in equality and endorsed an evaluative scheme in which individuals were assessed according to merit. It is the “pathos of distance”, i.e., an evaluative attitude, that seems to be necessary here (C.f. BGE 287), not a particular organization of society.
If it’s true that Nietzsche is fundamentally concerned that certain individuals will internalize certain values (that is, moral values) that are not conducive to their flourishing, all Nietzsche need concern himself with are the normative standards that such individuals adopt in the here and now, not the kind of society in which such individuals would flourish. That would be a further concern that seems to get relatively little attention in the published works. So maybe Nietzsche does endorse radically inegalitarian political societies insofar as they’re conducive to the flourishing of higher men. I don’t know. But he doesn’t really need to: a change in the attitudes of certain types of people would suffice for his critique of morality to have the kind of effect he wants it to.
What I’m suggesting is that, contrary to Professor LebBar’s claim, “the rejection of the herd morality” is sufficient and “the realization of hierarchy and slavery” are not necessary. This might not exactly square with BGE 257, but it at least seems to be in line with the vast majority of what Nietzsche says. So one way to deal with the contradiction is simply to reject Nietzsche’s claim (or to take him to have overstated his case) that the “herd” has something necessary to contribute to the flourishing of higher men, as it is not necessary for Nietzsche’s overall project.
8 - Tuesday, 13 November 2007 at 12:55 am
Mark LeBar
Kevin, I can see that your response might be plausible for 257 (whether it is right or not, I don’t have enough grasp of Nietzsche to determine). But it doesn’t take care of 188, which I do not have in front of me, but which as I recall claims something like this: the “long bondage of the spirit” is necessary for the realization of anything worthwhile in life. In context, I took that to be a requirement that the free spirit be bound by the constraints of “herd morality” (Stoicism, Christian, what have you). His language is strong: it does not seem the language of sufficiency but of necessity. That’s my puzzle.