ETHICS
Chapter 11. Existentialism
Section 3. Nietzsche

Nietzsche

http://users.aol.com/lrdetrigan/index4.html

Nietzsche in the Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy, and a really super Nietzsche Page at USC.

Nietzsche’s anti Ethics 

Nietzsche submits this idea of morality to radical critique.  He believes both that the idea is philosophically insupportable and that when we understand its genealogy, we will see that what actually explains our having it are profoundly negative aspects of human life.  Morality is an ideology.  We can believe it only if we ignore why we do.  Central to Nietzsche’s thought is a fundamental distinction between the ideas of good and bad, on the one hand, and those of (moral) good and evil, on the other.  (Notice the title of Essay I.) The natural form ethical evaluation first takes, he believes is that of excellence or merit.  People who excel, who have merits we admire and esteem, thereby have a kind of natural nobility. 

A.  These are “rank-ordering, rank-defining value judgments.” 

We naturally look up to, we respect and esteem, those with merit.  He calls them “knightly aristocratic values”

B. The “primary” half of the pair is good.  Bad is what is not-good.  What is not worthy of esteem and respect.

C. The “good” features are naturally “positive”:  they affirm and sustain life, vigor, strength, etc., e.g. openness, cheerfulness, creativity, physical strength, agility, grace, beauty, vigor, health, wit, intelligence, charm, and friendliness. 

On the other hand, the “primary” half of the good/evil pair is evil.  The idea of evil is reactive.  It comes from the negation of good.  Indeed, Nietzsche believes that it derives from negating good (natural merit).  And the idea of  moral good is simply the negation of that negation.  It is what is not evil.   The original negation is due to resentment—a psychological process  through which the naturally weak suppress their anger at being slighted by  the strong who consider them of little merit.  Unable to express their anger honestly, they suppress it to an unconscious level, in the “dark workshop” of the human psyche.  It then comes to be expressed not as personal anger, but in an alienated, impersonal form, namely, as moral indignation and resentment.  The strong who disrespect the weak are seen, by virtue of their disrespect, as deserving moral disapproval—as being evil.  

We can see how this process is supposed to work in Nietzsche’s parable of  the lambs and the birds of prey .  The birds see the lambs as their  natural inferiors, as meat.  The lambs are angered by this, but can’t do  anything about it directly by expressing personal anger.  So they express their anger in an impersonal way.  They reproach the birds; they hold them morally responsible for what they lambs see as their evil conduct.  They project the ideology of morality, which is just the impersonal expression of their personal anger and hatred.  Nietzsche is saying that morality is born in denial. 

The problem from Nietzsche’s perspective is that, unlike the birds of prey, the naturally strong have been taken in by this ideology.  Through Judaeo-Christian religion, a “priestly caste” has taken over culture to such a degree that the ideology of morality is now the dominant view.  But in addition to being born in hatred and denial, Nietzsche believes both that the idea of morality is philosophically insupportable (for example, in its assumption of free will) as well as one that has terrible consequences for human culture—it is an ethic of weakness and illness that chokes off genuine human achievement.  

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READ: http://www-philosophy.ucdavis.edu/phi001/nietzlec.htm  by G. J. Mattey U.C.Davis

Now we turn to a philosopher who was in no way delicate, but said that he wanted to philosophize with a hammer. Friedrich Nietzsche is a philosopher much misunderstood in his own time and especially in the first half of the 20th century, when he was adopted by the Nazis as having given the theoretical basis to National Socialism. This came about largely because his philosophy was distorted by his sister, who was married to a notorious racist activist. In the latter half of this century, he has been rehabilitated and is now one of the hottest philosophers around. I will mention a couple of reasons for his current popularity in the course of the discussion of his views.

One of the themes of the ethical theories of the Greeks was that moral goodness is a kind of healthy functioning of the human being. In Niezsche's view, the human condition is one of profound illness. Its symptoms are to be found everywhere, but nowhere more prominently than in the world's religions. Eastern religions, such as Buddhism, have as their ultimate goal emptiness, nothingness. They are nihilistic, seeking only release from life. Western religions, led by Christianity, are even worse, according to Nietzsche. So hostile are they to life that they hold before us the promise of eternal torture. So the modern condition is one in which the masses of people say "No" to life.

Nietzsche attempted to account for the modern condition through an explanation of its development. In the pre-human condition (compare Hobbes' state of nature), people distinguished by their strength, vitality, courage form a kind of natural nobility or aristocracy. They get their own way through the exercise of power. (One reason for Nietzsche's recent popularity is the widely-held view that power-relations are at the basis of all social institutions.) Even if he were to grant with Hobbes that these noble ones were themselves vulnerable to sudden death, Nietzsche would say that they would laugh at the prospect, for putting a value on one's own life is a later development.

Eventually the masses were subdued by the nobility and civil society began. A necessary condition of society is a system of exchange, which requires that values be placed on things. Here is the origin of human rationality, in the reckoning of values and equivalences. The placing of things in equivalent categories is the basis of the use of general concepts, which therefore is always practical, on Nietzsche's view.

Though now subdued, the human community could hardly have lost its animal instincts overnight. The discharge of the urges of power remains a necessity, but bound by obligations and prohibitions, social man is unable to continue in his wild ways. The pent-up vitality must be directed somewhere, and the only place it can go is inward. Thus the "human soul" is refined as the target of our own aggression. Thus the sickness of the modern human being is self-inflicted. We tear ourselves down in the way a caged animal rubs its skin raw chafing at the cage which confines it.

The cure for this sickness is not to be found in the human race as it presently exists. The product is fatally flawed: we have made ourselves what we are, and there is no turning back to the days before the rationality leveled the chief distinctions among us. The only hope is the development of a new form, an "overman," to go beyond the rigid moral categories of good and evil which have grown up around, and are inextricable from, the human race. Incidentally, this shows why the Nazi notion of the German (more broadly, "Aryan") people as a master race finds no basis in Nietzsche. Whatever their virtues or vices, the German people share in the basic sickness of the modern human being. To this day, Nietzsche's readers identify themselves as the nobility, as the powerful ones to whom the categories of good and evil do not apply. I suspect this is another reason for Nietzsche's popularity. But this distorts Nietzsche's meaning grotesquely.

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The Ethics of an Immoralist

READ: http://www.leaderu.com/ftissues/ft9602/reviews/nietzsch.html

PROBLEMS:

a.      Some people feel that the will to power advocated by Nietzsche encourages people to be callous and cruel, ignoring humanity for the sake of gaining power.


b.      Theists argue that it is not the individual who obtains power according to to them; power is something dished out by God.  It is not up to man as to whether or not he will be powerful.  Additionally, God gives rewards for following His ways, not as a result of a power struggle.

c.      Theists can also argue that the will to power can be seen as merely a response to helplessness, as Nietzsche's method for wishing to attain control of a life that is really left up to God.

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© Copyright Stephen O Sullivan and Philip A. Pecorino  2002. All Rights reserved.

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