TRUTH vs. truth

Pardon me if this post ends up being obvious to everyone but me, but I’m trying to work out the relation between Nz’s perspectivism and truth, and I need to go back and retrace some steps.

Let’s start with a Kantian/Schopenhauerian division between the phenomenal and the noumenal. In other words, there is the apparent world — what we all take to be real when we’re not engaged in philosophy or religion — and the TRUE world, the real world, the ultimate reality that someone like God would know. Generally, there is a failure of correspondence between our beliefs and TRUTH. Perhaps we get some glimpse now and then, through the logic of pure concepts or through magnificent works of art or genuine moral insights. But on the whole, our beliefs are only metaphors for the TRUTH.

It shouldn’t take long (and historically, didn’t) before we begin to question just how sure we are that there is any TRUTH in this sense. After all, “TRUTH” could be just a concept we have invented, right? It could be a term we came up with in order (for whatever reason) to denigrate our own knowledge, our own experience, and the things we ordinarily value. It also could be a kind of security blanket, since it suggests that the things we love which change and die in our world are not significant in the Big Scheme of Things, and Better Things await when we shuffle off this mortal coil. And so, in this skeptical mode, we may well reject TRUTH.

But what are we left with? We are left with our own experience, and our own values and desires and fears. We may still desire truth, but now this means the kind of truth that we can see confirmed in our experience. And if we delve inward, into truths about the kinds of beings we are, we enter into psychology. Psychology delivers perspectivism. We discover that we, being the creatures we are, orient our beliefs and attitudes around the states we naturally crave — feelings of power, especially. Different people, with different backgrounds and prejudices, will cultivate different perspectives which promote in us the feelings we want to have. “Reason is slave to the passions,” as Hume said. And none of us, not even the scientists, is immune from this condition.

Perspectives are malleable. We can discover that a perspective doesn’t work for us, or no longer works, which means that we are not getting out of it what we want (subconsciously, in nearly every case). We can change perspectives, compare perspectives, and argue over them. As a rule, we take them very seriously, and not merely as perspectives, but as truth or even TRUTH.

But perhaps there are some values in us that are completely intersubjective, meaning all humans have them and try to accommodate them through their perspectives. Nz suggests that we all value truth, and we all value health. The first value, he thinks, leads to perspectives which in the end do not do sufficient service to the value of health. Truth leads to the ideal of asceticism, which both religion and science worship. So, in his revaluation of all values, he proposes that we give the value of health pre-eminent status, and we start building perspectives that encourage us to affirm existence and seek out the means for increasing our own power.

This does not mean there is no such thing as truth, or that truth is not valuable. After all, there are truths about what really is healthy for us and what is not. But it does mean that our intentions and focus needs to shift to something like, “What will this do for us? What effect will this human pursuit have upon our larger pursuit of health?” The result is a radical psychological pragmatism, grounded in a concern for psychological strength. It is rather like urging a new perspective on a suicidal patient, in hopes of giving the patient a reason to live. (And biographically that must have been exactly what Nz himself needed.)

So Nz sees philosophers more as clinicians than as theoreticians. We have seen what valuing truth yields: nihilism and despair. As organic beings, it goes against our nature to want that. So, to serve our nature, we should try out valuing health over truth, and possibly even invent some ideas (like the will to power and the eternal recurrence) with the aim of encouraging in us the great health which says Yes to all things.

But what is the status of Nz’s insights into us as organic beings? It seems like he is broadly accepting a naturalistic, Darwinian account of us, coupled with his own pre-Freudian human psychology, all of which must be regarded as empirical. Are these beliefs merely perspectival? And if so, is there room for an alternative perspective? And if so, does Nz have any reason for preferring his own perspective to another?

My guess is that Nz does not really provide any such reasons. In part 5 of TI (“Morality as AntiNature”), he argues that we cannot ever be in a position to question the value of life/health. We would have to be able to adopt a perspective outside that of being a live animal in order to compare it with our perspective, and we can’t do that. But this all presumes that he has got “the perspective of being a live animal” right. If some one objects that we aren’t live animals, but something else (like incorporeal inhabitants of a body), or that live animals in fact do not value life/health, then it seems to me all he can do is blankly stare at the objector and say, “What peculiar psychological malady is prompting you to say this?” In other words, he can only try to pull them back into his perspective of what human beings are. I’m not sure this puts him in a bad position, since I myself think he’s got our nature right.

Clark’s Nietzsche on Truth and Philosophy (1990)

I should have read this book ages ago. I have read a lot about it — you can count on seeing it cited and discussed by any good recent book on Nietzsche. So I have learned from others what Clark says. But this is my first time reading the book, and I am extremely impressed with her scholarly judgment, her philosophical acumen, and her careful study of Nietzsche.

The focus of the book is on Nietzsche’s attitude toward truth, and the effect it has on his view of the role of philosophy. Some of Nz’s most famous quotes come from an unpublished essay, “Truth and Lie in the Extra-Moral Sense,” written in 1873. It is there we find this shiny gem:

What, then, is truth? A mobile army of metaphors, metonyms, and anthropomorphisms—in short, a sum of human relations which have been enhanced, transposed, and embellished poetically and rhetorically, and which after long use seem firm, canonical, and obligatory to a people: truths are illusions about which one has forgotten that this is what they are; metaphors which are worn out and without sensuous power; coins which have lost their pictures and now matter only as metal, no longer as coins.

That sure sounds like a denial of truth. But Nz seems to be offering his view of the truth, and criticizing others, throughout every page of every major work. So what gives?

According to Clark — and she provides a close argument for this conclusion — Nz’s view of truth shifted over his career. Fairly early on, when he was still messing with Schopenhauer, he had some belief in an ultimate reality, a noumenal world of things in themselves which exist independently of human experience. He believed at the same time that humans are particularly ill-suited toward having any knowledge of such things. And so the best we can manage is some sort of faulty image, a metaphor, for what is really out there.

But then, as Nz gave up Sch and Wagner, and wrote HAH, he dispensed with the notion of things in themselves. They play no role in explaining anything in our experience, and we cannot even conceive them — so why believe in them? But at the same time, Nz inconsistently held on to the idea that our so-called knowledge is at best a pale, insufficient version of what is really true. But you cannot dis our knowledge without affirming some independently-existing thing whose structure is not getting captured by our thinking.

Eventually — after BGE — Nietzsche gave up the “metaphysical correspondence” theory of truth, and believed truth to be immanent to a perspective. Once we give up things in themselves, we give up the idea of a “God’s eye perspective,” i.e., a perspective from everywhere and nowhere, and affirm only particular perspectives. These perspectives overlap with one another and can be compared with one another — we can see the world through this lens and that lens, and evaluate which lens gives us the better picture, given our own interests and concerns. When we’re concerned with predictive accuracy, for example, Einstein’s lens turns out to be better than Newton’s.

Clark’s account continues. Nz was interested in big philosophical lenses, and (principally in GM) argues that humans have throughout history employed the lens of asceticism: that life is to be lived for the sake of higher, unearthly ideals. The basic human concern this lens was trying to satisfy was our interest in finding something worth living for, and some reason not to fall into suicidal nihilism. Nz argues that asceticism, which was originally religious in nature, gradually evolved into science, and science’s will to truth, which ultimately ends in nihilism. So asceticism has played itself out, and it fails. Nz’s constructive project is to provide a new lens, the affirmation of life, the will to power, and the eternal recurrence, which is a new perspective in competition with the old nihilism. He argues that it has the power to succeed where ascetic religion and science have failed.

I need to read the book again. It is patiently argued, and deserves to be read carefully. Right now it seems to me extremely plausible and significant.

The end is nigh

I haven’t been posting as much lately, since I’ve been at the last stages of the Nietzsche book. The end is at hand: just assembling biblio, checking references, etc. I usually regret expressing pride, but I still will say I am damned please with the book. It’s an unusual combo of biography and philosophy, organized like an opera (with an overture and four acts, and an “intermezzo” in the middle, which is a one-act play about Nz encountering the Greek gods). It does really capture my fascination and feelings for Nz, along with my assessment. And I think many will find it an interesting read. Still finding a publisher for it.

Next project: a book with Acumen on Spinoza’s radical theology, ms due in a year!

Volte face

After all these helpful comments, I’ve done more reading and thinking about Nz’s politics. One good collection of essays I recommend is Nietzsche, godfather of fascism? (Princeton). The introduction, and essays by Golomb and Conway were especially illuminating. The volume also includes a partial defense of sister Elisabeth, which will probably make me go back and edit out many of the unkind things I have written about her.

Anyway, I have rethought the way to see Nz’s politics. Now I think it makes sense to look first at what he wants to see emerge from society. He’d like to see an elitist structure of classes, which allows for the “greater in spirit” to be in control, and the “mediocre” to lead happy little lives, providing the wealth and materials for everyone. This is why he hates the liberalism and socialism of his day: he sees that they are both driving toward a classless society, or a class society oriented along the wrong axis (like wealth or, God forbid, public service). Instead he wants some sort of society which will allow for the emergence of classes oriented along an axis of intelligence, strength of spirit, creative vision, and appetite for conflict, change, and challenge.

It may be that a range of different political structures could in fact allow for such an emergence. In the end, though, the structure will be somewhat fascistic in form, inasmuch as the mediocre ones will have no meaningful role in political governance, and will be kept in check by any means necessary. (We wouldn’t want another slave revolt, now, would we?) But, generally, the mediocre will be treated gently, since the drones need to be fairly happy and secure in order to produce. The elite, on the other hand, will be in a state of war among themselves, since that’s what they want and need in order to flourish. They wouldn’t fight over who is in political control, since they all recognize the necessity of the mediocre. But they’d fight over … what? Ideas? Anything, for thrills? Maybe they’d step into the roles vacated by the Olympian gods, playing chess with one another, using the plebs as the pieces. A good war now and then might help production, and it would all be in good fun (for the elites). This, obviously, is the scary part of the vision Nz advocates, the one he boasts about and warns us about.

I find it interesting that Nz’s politics, if this is right, would be based upon the same principle as Plato’s republic: a natural division of labor. Somehow, people need to be sorted out into the two main classes on the basis of their spirit, or nature, or potential. And the plebs need to be kept happy. But the elites look very different. Plato’s are serene, while Nz’s are in turmoil with themselves and one another. And the objectives are different. For Plato, the the state is the way it is for the sake of justice. For Nz, it’s for the sake of producing the highest/strongest specimens.

To the extent that Nz thinks is value of “health” is grounded in some sort of biological structure, his thinking is probably racist — though racist in a unique way. He probably thought that, through eugenics, you could get better over time at producing a race of elites (here again he echoes Plato). I don’t think he thought the races identified in his day or ours (Jewish, Aryan, etc.) were divided along useful lines. Meaning: he probably believed these races really exist, but thought they had evolved under conditions which did not yield anything like the race he wanted to see developed. Under scientific care, such a race could develop.

I think this view fits many of Nz remarks. (Please, shout out again if you disagree.) And it has plenty of gaps in the right places, for Nz did not develop detailed views of political structures. I think he had a hazy vision of what he would have liked to have seen, and it was elitist, scary, and opposed to the morality of liberals.

Nietzsche’s fascism

More bashing of my dear friend. I’m in the last stages of the book ms, and trying to come to grips with his legacy. This following excerpt concerns the seeds he planted for fascism.

It is clear that Elisabeth distorted Nietzsche’s philosophy in serious ways. Nietzsche was of course no German nationalist; he prided himself on being “a good European,” and practically disowned his German nationality (in his autobiography, he claimed bizarrely to be descended from Polish nobility). He was no anti-Semite, and loathed the anti-Semites of his time, including his brother-in-law, Bernhard Förster. (It would be fairer, though, to call him an “anti-anti-Semite,” rather than any devoted defender of Judaism.) He wrote glowingly of wars, and the strength one gains through battle, but he surely would not have approved of the nationalistic swagger that resulted in two world wars.

Nevertheless, there is certainly enough in Nietzsche’s writings to see how fascists might take him as their own philosopher. Perhaps the most startling is found in the first treatise of On the Genealogy of Morality (1887). Nietzsche first describes how the strong and noble men eventually succumbed to the slave morality promoted by the weak and insidious, as if birds of prey were coaxed by lambs into believing that it is a sin to be a predator, and a great virtue to be a prey. These predators internalize the values preached by the lambs, and their behavior is kept in check by customs, social mores, and “mutual surveillance.” But, Nietzsche continues, once those predators are placed in foreign territory, where the rule by lambs is no longer effective, there is a radical change in their behavior:

There they enjoy freedom from all social constraint; in the wilderness they recover the losses incurred through the tension that comes from a long enclosure and fencing-in within the peace of the community; they step back into the innocence of the beast-of-prey conscience, as jubilant monsters, who perhaps walk away from a hideous succession of murder, rape, arson, torture with such high spirits and equanimity that it seems as if they have only played a student prank, convinced that for years to come the poets will again have something to sing and to praise. (GM 1, 11)

He goes on to mention the Romans, Arabs, Germans, Japanese, ancient Greeks, and Vikings as having shown themselves historically to be such jubilant monsters. And, indeed, it is impossible to deny the monstrosity of what is done on battlefields by young men raised to be as civilized, as “moral,” and as restrained and gentle as any lamb. One wonders if some of Nietzsche’s own military experience is surfacing in this passage.

Fair enough: in war, humans reveal themselves to be jubilant monsters. But to what extend is Nietzsche condoning or even extolling the beast-of-prey conscience? Towards the end of this section, he excuses anyone who cannot escape the fear of “the blond beast” — the human propensity to cruelty in war is something worth fearing. But, he continues, who would not prefer both fearing and somehow admiring our beasts of prey to being “unable to escape the disgusting sight of the deformed, reduced, atrophied, poisoned”? In other words: who wouldn’t prefer to see the “student pranks” of the bloody battlefield to the grotesque spectacle of predators pretending to be lambs? Hmm. Two sections later, he counsels his predators to “look on this a little mockingly and perhaps say to themselves, ‘we do not feel any anger towards them, these good lambs, as a matter of fact, we love them: nothing is more tasty than a tender lamb’” (GM 1, 13). This is because it is profoundly unnatural for strength to be disguised as anything other than what it is:

To demand of strength that it not express itself as strength, that it not be a desire to overwhelm, a desire to cast down, a desire to become lord, a thirst for enemies and resistances and triumphs, is just as nonsensical as to demand of weakness that it expresses itself as strength. (GM 1, 13)

A quantum of power, he goes on to explain, just is its expression; it is a philosophical or grammatical illusion to believe in some hidden “doer” behind the action, issuing behaviors according to its conscious control. To be powerful is to do things expressing that power. Thus it is impossible to expect a beast of prey to ever truly be a lamb. Power will out. It is hard to read these passages as anything other than a ringing endorsement of letting the beast-of-prey conscience range freely.

It is but a short step from this endorsement to full-blown fascism. The elements are all in place. A core theme of Nietzsche’s thought is inegalitarianism, or elitism: clearly, some people are better than others (healthier, freer, stronger). He frequently expressed a fundamental distrust of democracy, or majority rule. He did not believe weaker or disenfranchised people should receive the protection of law, since such protection would only preserve or reinforce their weakness. He criticized the principles of liberalism, believing that an individual’s rights are somehow a function of their breed, race, or class; In short, only the superior ones have rights, and their rights are commensurate with their power. What then should the superior ones do, and what is their responsibility to the inferior ones? The Nietzschean answer is, fundamentally, that the superiors have responsibility to one another only to the extent that others can help them to build their own power. To the inferior ones, the superior have no responsibility at all, except to present them with adversity, in the hope of building their strength and fashioning them into worthy opponents.
At the same time, it is true that Nietzsche would not expect the “superior/inferior” division to fall along nationalistic or racial lines. He does, of course, write of races and breeds, and he launches broadsides against types of people (the Germans, the English, women, etc.). But it is hard to see this “racism” or chauvinism as committing him to anything more (or less) than a distinction among people based on their mental, emotional, or spiritual temperament.  This is perhaps enough to distinguish him from any historical fascism. Against the liberals of his day, he resisted any doctrine of “equality” among individuals. Against the nationalists and anti-Semites of his day, he resisted any shallow, ready-made typology of human beings. He insisted upon his own typology, one grounded in the richness of one’s psychology, subtlety of one’s aesthetics, and command of one’s strength. As fascisms go, this has to rank as one of the most interesting ones.

The standard criticism against any political structure in which a few have all or most of the power, and most are relatively powerless, is that there is no effective guarantee that those with the power will yield it benevolently. In Nietzsche’s brand of fascism, there is very nearly a guarantee that the power will not be wielded benevolently, at least upon any intuitive notion of “benevolence.” It would be interesting to try to work out the specific mechanics of a Nietzschean state, in the manner of Plato’s Republic, where it is explained how individuals would enter the ruling class and what sorts of order would be imposed upon the masses. Would it resemble the Spartan state, with warriors who not only fought valiantly but also created nuanced works of art? Would it be a less rigid free-for-all, like a lawless gangland, where the bosses respected not only firepower but also depth of soul? Whatever the details, one thing is clear: no one would wish themselves to be counted among the dispossessed.

My valuation of Nz’s revaluation

(from the book I’m writing)

What are we to make of this bold attempt to revalue our values? A first thing to note is that, in some ways, Nietzsche’s new foundation for value is not unfamiliar. Aristotle (whom Nietzsche rarely mentions) based his ethics upon a science of human nature. He believed that, with broad experience, humans can determine the most natural way to behave in society and the world. He urged temperance or moderation in all things, which simply means gauging the “right” expenditure of effort in any direction. Aristotle’s ethics are similar to Nietzsche’s in that what is right or proper is supposedly determined by what human beings are and what their experience teaches. But Nietzsche departs from Aristotle’s teaching in two significant ways. First, Nietzsche opens the door to individuals having very different natures: what satisfies or thrills one may leave another cold. Aristotle recognized this to some extent, of course, but for Nietzsche the differences among individuals become stark and significant. “I am a law only for my kind,” says Zarathustra, “I am no law for all” (Z 4, “Last Supper”). Second, for Aristotle a major component of finding the “right” expenditure of effort has to do with the attitudes of one’s peers. The right actions are those which would be approved by the people who have been brought up well. Nietzsche, of course, is far more individualistic. The free spirit or übermensch may take societal norms as one consideration, as background information against which to make an informed judgment, but never would such a superior soul take orders from others.

This individualism is at the heart of Nietzsche’s revaluation. Most other systems of moral value are other-oriented: morality, after all, is meant to limit our behavior for the sake of others. But, for Nietzsche, others have value only insofar as they may, in one way or another, encourage our own strength. Indeed, given Nietzsche’s will-to-power psychology, it is hard to see how any genuine concern for others can even arise, except as a kind of sickness. If Nietzschean health is a flourishing of drives, each of which is concerned with its own strength and enhancement, then the only way I can will or desire your own flourishing, for your own sake, is if some of my drives are somehow twisted toward the ends of your drives. In other words, some part of me has to be tricked and turned into a pursuit for your own sake. That, technically, is a Nietzschean sickness. But that, on the other hand, is just what love is: a selfless concern for the welfare of another. Nietzsche is free to redefine love any way he likes, of course, but that would not change the fact that love, as we know it, is a disease, in Nietzsche’s view.

The closest Nietzsche’s philosophy comes to allowing for the possibility of healthy love is when a superior individual is so full of power that it pours out in all directions in a flood of noble generosity. But this again is not quite love as we know it, since it is not at all focused on others. It is accidental, and the lucky recipients of this generous outpouring could easily be replaced by others without affecting the attitude of the great soul. My love for you, we like to think, is more about you than it is about me, and that is simply what should not happen, according to the standards of Nietzschean health.

We can admire this strategy on the part of a man experiencing painful loneliness and heartbreak. But is it a set of values we want to place upon ourselves?

Of course not. What Nietzsche longed for his whole life, and felt he never received, was the fully compassionate fellow-feeling of being in love. No one could stand by him, he felt, except for a short time, in a limited degree. It took incredible strength for him to face this lonely abyss and in fact build a life around it. But this is clearly a case of settling for less. His life would have been better, we are all tempted to say, had he found someone to love. He would not have been as strong, perhaps, and his philosophy would have suffered as a result, and we would not be reading him now, in all likelihood. And yet he would have been loved. Who could say that would have been worse than the life he led?

But even if we acknowledge this major deficiency in Nietzsche’s thought — the lack of any space for love — there is plenty in his new system of values with which we still need to wrestle. Let us agree with him that God is dead, and that the great moral systems of western thought have been based on bad thinking, superstition, and an ill-placed faith in grammar. Let us agree with him that the only real values are the ones life itself encourages us to have, the values we have qua living beings. Where does this lead us?

In short, it leads us into a brave — and frightening — new world of possibilities. Consider the powers we now have over life, or soon will have. Consider the possibility of genetic engineering, of creating new species, of reconfiguring the human genome. Think of slowing or halting the breakdown and decay associated with aging. Think of living forever. Think of the ways we can integrate our biosystems with new technologies, such as (perhaps) immediate links between our brains and the internet. Think of new ways in which we could construct societies, if we have left behind the superstitions which tell us not to depart from tradition. Think of the wars that can be waged, particularly if we are keen to strengthen ourselves through dire challenge. If you learned of a new society which was interested only in achieving what is possible, technologically and physiologically and socially; and in what would strengthen them against all possible threats; and which was completely unfettered by traditional morals; would you cheer them on? Or would you blink?

Nz on Xianity

Nietzsche’s most sustained account of the west’s great death-traditions is in one of his last works, aptly titled The Anti-Christ. The work offers a relatively detailed Nietzschean account of Jesus’s own psychology, and how his teachings were transformed into a means for suppressing life’s instincts. We can provide a brief sketch of the account. Jesus, according to Nietzsche, was timid and over-sensitive by temperament. He found conflict and confrontation deeply disturbing and frightening. So he developed a “turn the other cheek” response to his enemies, yielding anything to everyone, promising that on a day coming soon none of these tribulations would matter and everything would be replaced by a kingdom of heaven. More than that: Jesus found ways to insulate himself from all the pains and horrors of the world, and turn each and every moment into a little miracle, a feeling for the closeness of heaven, which is the permanent refuge from real life. Jesus found a way to keep the arms of the Father around him at all times, protecting him and sustaining him, so that his joy could not be removed by any earthly power. It was, in Nietzsche’s phrase, “an infantilism that has receded into the spiritual” (A, 32).
Of course, Jesus was killed, but his followers did not share his temperament. (“There was only one Christian, and he died on the cross,” Nietzsche writes memorably (A, 39).) They instead, like most human beings, sought after earthly power. But they ran immediately into a problem: Jesus eschewed any pursuit of power, and counseled disengagement with the political world. What to do? In a cognitive flip of values that continually astonishes Nietzsche, the followers of Jesus decided that the way of Jesus was in fact the route to true power, the road to “living abundantly.” Contradictory though it may seem, the life of earthly servitude is in fact the life that God will richly reward. The virtuous life is the one that devalues pursuits of earthly pleasures, wealth, power, and prominence. The “good” person is the one who subordinates all drives to a single drive: the drive to serve the Church and its head, Jesus Christ. Through this servitude, the follower will raise himself higher than earthly powers and principalities, and reap rich rewards in heaven. The servant will be the master. What feels good is really bad. What feels powerful is really weakness. What feels wise is really folly. To live for Christ is to be dead to the world. Indeed, the very symbol for eternal life is a man dying on a cross. It is as perverse as a system of values can possibly be, Nietzsche thought.
This Christian reversal of life’s values did increase the earthly power of a certain class of people — the priests, who were so kind as to take the dangerous temptation of power upon themselves in the interest of instilling true piety among the members of the church. So even in this twisted reversal of life’s values, the will to power continues to flourish, in a somewhat underhanded way. There are individuals who continue to seek and gain power through the church, that is, by promulgating and enforcing the set of values which themselves denigrate the will to power. It is a familiar form of hypocrisy between the message and the motives of those delivering the message. Someone gets rich by selling books which tell people not to be materialistic. Someone manages to attract attention to themselves by appearing not to care if others notice. Someone tries to cause a revolution in his culture by writing books which loudly proclaim their own “untimeliness.” And so on. Life will always find a way to pursue its own agenda, even through a set of values which themselves explicitly devalue life’s values. The church was lead by men who were, by life’s standards, quite strong indeed. “The values of the weak have the upper hand because the strong have taken them over to lead with them…” Nietzsche writes in a note (LN, 15 [79]).
But if this is so, one may object, then what is the problem? Aren’t life’s values being promoted, though in an indirect or even subterranean way? If power and flourishing are the highest values, according to Nietzsche, how can he criticize the advance of Christianity, which in a certain way has enjoyed unparalleled success in gaining power and flourishing throughout western culture? Isn’t it a force Nietzsche should respect and admire?
To some extent he does; just the fact that Nietzsche has selected Christianity as his most important opponent says something about how impressed he is by its power. But at the same time he sees Christianity as the least effective means for promoting the flourishing of life’s values. “Christianity,” he writes, “has cheated us out of the harvest of ancient culture” (A, 60). He is grateful to the men of the Renaissance for attempting to rescue the glorious expressions of power in ancient culture from the suppression of death-worshipping Christian zealots. But Luther and the Reformers rallied to the cause and found new means for strengthening the church’s hold over European culture and, in effect, killed the Renaissance. In doing so, they put a stranglehold on life; Christian morals became if anything even more severe, and the normal and natural ways of expressing life’s flourishing were judged as thoroughly sinful. Nietzsche’s worry was not that Christianity will somehow exterminate the will to power. That could never happen. His worry instead was that the joy and strength that comes from a healthy flourishing of human drives becomes nearly impossible to enjoy, when Christianity has its way. The cost is aesthetic, intellectual, philosophical, political, and even moral, in a Nietzschean sense. Christianity is by its very nature a sickness, a striving against the instinct of life.
It is as if the organizers of a marathon convinced all the runners that speed is evil. You could still have a race — sort of — but what a pathetic bore it would be! Runners would shuffle along, keeping an eye on one another, and chiding those who start to get ahead.  The “winner” would be the one who failed to go slower than anyone else. At some point, an exasperated bystander might cry, “Enough of this! You are built to run! There is no sin in that! What on earth is holding you back?” That person is Nietzsche.

Nietzsche’s values

I just wrote this this morning, and am hoping to get some feedback on it. I think it’s pretty self-explanatory:

This distinction, between the life-affirming and the life-denying, is the basis for Nietzsche’s revaluation of values. To get a sense of how this revaluation works, imagine somehow being put in charge of some intergalactic zoo filled with all kinds of animals, including human beings. It is your job not just to provide natural habitats for the animals, but to showcase each species’ abilities and talents. Your employers, for whatever reason, want to see the most powerful specimens of all the species. When it comes to human beings, what will you do? You will have to examine what capacities for strength each human being has. Your concern is not simply physical strength, but intellectual and emotional as well. You will try to cultivate humans who are cunning, brave, unpredictable, stealthy, creative, tough, patient, and unrestrained by “dos” and “don’ts”. They will be at times violent and mocking. If the exhibit is to showcase all strengths, your humans should be artists as well, creating works that stand as emblems for the species. In all, you will want to know all the capacities humans can have, and find ways to strengthen those capacities in your specimens as much as possible. You will want to diminish and eliminate any signs of weakness, timidity, fear, stupidity, and passivity. Your sole standard will not be “Is this what God or the Church would approve?”, but instead: “Is this a strength?”

Back to Nietzsche

Okay, back to Nietzsche for a bit. In response to a post from Mike, I had to rethink the way I was characterizing Nz as a naturalist. Basically, a naturalist is someone who thinks science has basically the right picture of what humans are and what the world is, leaving some room for future insights and developments. I think Nz is partial to this view, but he adds an important qualification: namely, he thinks that all scientists, being human, are subject to all sorts of psychological traps, illusions, and distortions. His favorite example is the belief in the atom, which he thinks comes from our language and our inclination to think of the world as built from a bunch of identical-type things. He thinks that’s purely fiction, and so atomism is a kind of psychological projection on the world.

He’s getting this, I think, from neo-Kantian philosophers of his day (like Lange and Helmholtz). They were very excited by the idea of tying in Kant’s philosophy to what was being discovered about the physiology of perception — the way that the structure of the eyes, nerves, brain, etc. shape our experience of the world. (Basically, human neuro-anatomy replaces the two forms and twelve categories.)

So, I have ended up characterizing Nz as “a skeptical neo-Kantianesque naturalist,” meaning that he broadly accepts the scientific view of the world, once it has been purged (through skeptical examination) of the add-ons coming from human psychology.

A further interesting thing discovered along the way: in HH, when Nz talks about science, he usually has in mind something like sober, stone-cold skepticism. He has in mind a certain kind of approach to experience — the sort of “Skeptical Inquiror,” Michael-Shermer-type attitude, that always tries to explain away the appearance of magic. At one point (HH1, #256) he says that science is more useful for the attitude it encourages than for any nuggets of knowledge it manages to unearth: it teaches us to be more confident and tough-minded.