Author Archives: Larry Franz

Getting a Handle on Nietzsche

Posted on by

Nietzsche1882Walter Kaufmann’s Nietzsche: Philosopher, Psychologist, Antichrist is the book that got Anglo-American philosophers to start taking Friedrich Nietzsche seriously. It was originally published in 1950 and has been selling ever since. Some observers think Kaufmann, who was a professor at Princeton and died in 1980, was too easy on Nietzsche, but there’s no doubt that Nietzsche is a classic and Nietzsche is worth taking seriously.

Nietzsche viewed the “will to power” as humanity’s basic motivating force, but didn’t worship violence or the state. Despite what’s commonly believed, he wasn’t a proto-Nazi or an anti-Semite. (That was his sister Elisabeth, who was able to present her version of Nietzsche to the world after she took control of his estate.)

Neither was he a political liberal. Kaufmann suggests it’s best to view Nietzsche as a kind of aristocrat, in the way that Aristotle was an aristocrat when he extolled the virtues of the “great-souled man” (“a person is thought to be great-souled if he claims much and deserves much”).

According to Nietzsche, there is a natural aristocracy of individuals who can control their passions and channel their will to power into the accomplishment of great things. Caesar and Napoleon were natural aristocrats, but so were Socrates, Jesus, Shakespeare, Spinoza, Beethoven and Goethe: 

Quite generally, Nietzsche distinguishes between (a) men whom he admires, (b) the ideas for which they stand, and (c) their followers. Only in terms of some such categories can one understand Nietzsche’s complex attitude toward Jesus, Christianity and Christendom [i.e. he admired the first, criticized the second and hated the third.]

Similarly, Nietzsche admired Schopenhauer; respected but criticized Schopenhauer’s philosophy; and despised his followers. Nietzsche admired Wagner and felt drawn to much of his music, but he abominated the ostentatiously Christian nationalists and anti-Semites who congregated in Bayreuth…

Nietzsche’s fight against Socrates thus takes two forms: denunciations of his epigoni [his disciples] and respectful criticisms of his doctrines… [Socrates] is the very embodiment of Nietzsche’s highest ideal: the passionate man who can control his passions [398-399].

By all accounts, Nietzsche was a kind, considerate person despite his critical nature and his celebration of power (and his apparent misogyny). He even argued that the strong should be considerate of the weak (that’s most of us, the bulk of humanity). I haven’t read much of his work, and have found him paradoxical and hard to understand, so it was a relief to read the passage from Kaufmann above.

It explains how Nietzsche can speak well of accomplished individuals, while evaluating, often negatively, the details of their accomplishments and vigorously attacking their disciples. That makes sense if you cherish leadership and creativity as things in themselves. You can still find fault with the particulars (nobody’s perfect) and see no virtue in being a follower (even a follower of Nietzsche): 

When he had said that, his disciple shouted … : “But I believe in your cause and consider it so strong that I shall say everything, everything that I can find in my heart to say against it.” The innovator laughed … : “This kind of discipleship”, he said then, is the best … ” [The Gay Science, 106].

Nietzsche: Philosopher, Psychologist, Antichrist by Walter Kaufmann

Posted on by

Walter Kaufmann’s Nietzsche is the book that got Anglo-American philosophers to take Nietzsche seriously after World War II. It was originally published in 1950 and has been selling ever since. Some observers think Kaufmann may have been a bit too easy on Nietzsche, but there is no doubt that Kaufmann’s book is a classic and Nietzsche was a great philosopher whose works justify serious consideration.

Nietzsche viewed the “will to power” as humanity’s basic motivating force, but didn’t worship violence. Despite what’s commonly believed, Nietzsche wasn’t a proto-Nazi or an anti-Semite. Neither was he a political liberal. It’s best to view him as a kind of aristocrat, in the way that Aristotle was an aristocrat when he wrote n favor of the “great-souled man” (“a person is thought to be great-souled if he claims much and deserves much”).

According to Nietzsche, there is a natural aristocracy of individuals who can control their passions and channel their will to power into the accomplishment of great things. In Nietzsche’s view, Caesar and Napoleon were natural aristocrats, but so were Socrates, Jesus, Michaelangelo, Spinoza, Goethe and Wagner:

Quite generally, Nietzsche distinguishes between (a) men whom he admires, (b) the ideas for which they stand, and (c) their followers. Only in terms of some such categories can one understand Nietzsche’s complex attitude toward Jesus, Christianity and Christendom [i.e. he admired the first, criticized the second and hated the third.]

Similarly, Nietzsche admired Schopenhauer; respected but criticized Schopenhauer’s philosophy; and despised his followers. Nietzsche admired Wagner and felt drawn to much of his music, but he abominated the ostentatiously Christian nationalists and anti-Semites who congregated in Bayreuth…

Nietzsche’s fight against Socrates thus takes two forms: denunciations of his epigoni [his disciples] and respectful criticisms of his doctrines… [Socrates] is the very embodiment of Nietzsche’s highest ideal: the passionate man who can control his passions [398-399].

By all accounts, Nietzsche was a kind and considerate person despite his critical nature. He even argued that the strong should be considerate of the weak (the bulk of humanity). I’d recommend Kaufmann’s book as a helpful and enjoyable account of Nietzsche’s philosophy, but Kaufmann spends a lot of time responding to old, misleading descriptions of Nietzsche’s positions. That made sense 60 years ago, but it makes Nietzsche (the book, not the philosopher), feel somewhat dated now.

The Fendertones Take Us Back to 1965

Posted on by

The Fendertones are an informal group of white guys from the Philadelphia area who have so far blessed the world with 17 YouTube videos and a Facebook page. They occasionally get together to reproduce the complex sound Brian Wilson created for the Beach Boys. It’s one more win for the Internet.

They posted four videos yesterday, including “Sloop John B” (a big hit for the Beach Boys in 1965) and “Kiss Me Baby” (a relatively unknown but brilliant album track from the same year):

While we’re at it, two performances from a 2004 charity concert: 1965’s “California Girls” and its flip side, one of my favorites, “Let Him Run Wild”:

Them That Has, Gets

Posted on by

A well-known French economist, Thomas Piketty, has written a big book called Capital in the Twenty-First Century. It’s getting a lot of attention, because Piketty is an expert on wealth and income and he’s reached a disturbing conclusion: 

Modern economic growth and the diffusion of knowledge have allowed us to avoid the Marxist apocalypse, but we have not modified the deep structures of capital and inequality – or in any case not as much as one might have imagined in the optimistic decades following World War II.

When the rate of return on capital exceeds the rate of growth on output and income, as it did in the nineteenth century and seems likely to do again in the twenty-first, capitalism automatically generates arbitrary and extreme inequalities that radically undermine the meritocratic values on which democratic societies are based [1]. 

In other words, those relatively happy years in the 20th century, during which economic inequality declined in the developed world, was an aberration, the result of special circumstances. Global capitalism is now returning to its normal state: an extended Gilded Age in which the rich get richer, workers struggle, inequality grows and democracy suffers. It’s not a pretty picture, but it’s based on a great deal of historical data.

Piketty argues that “there are ways democracy can regain control over capitalism and insure that the general interest takes precedence over private interests” (for example, by instituting a tax on wealth), but that’s not going to be easy, since capitalists are so good at screwing with democracy.

They buy up and consolidate media outlets, make the majority of campaign contributions, hire armies of lawyers and lobbyists, fund political action committees, support “think tanks”, pay for advertising campaigns on “the issues” and keep the “revolving door” between government and business revolving. All of which contributes to low taxes on high incomes, minimal taxes on capital gains and large estates, corporations being treated as “people”, feeble campaign finance laws, weak labor unions, political gridlock, vote suppression, voter apathy and lots of average citizens thinking that the accumulation of vast wealth by a tiny minority is inevitable and/or good for the majority. 

If you’d like to read more about Capital in the Twenty-First Century, including some skeptical comments, take a look at this New Yorker article by John Cassidy. If you want to feel even more depressed, pissed off or motivated to work toward political reform, check out Paul Krugman’s less skeptical “Wealth Over Work” column at the New York Times.

A Guide to Reality, Part 12

Posted on by

Chapter 7 of Alex Rosenberg’s The Atheist’s Guide to Reality is called “Never Let Your Conscious Be Your Guide”. A more grammatical title would have been “Never Let Consciousness Be Your Guide”. A longer but more accurate title would have been “Never Let Introspection Be Your Guide to What’s Happening in Your Mind”, because that’s the actual theme of the chapter: “Scientism requires that we give up everything introspection tells us about the mind” [147].

As he often does, Rosenberg overstates his case, apparently for rhetorical effect. After all, is it really true that introspection is a completely unreliable guide to what’s going on in our minds?

He offers as evidence three kinds of phenomena. The first is “blindsight”. Researchers have discovered that people with certain kinds of brain damage can perceive features of the world without being conscious of what they’re perceiving. For example, a person with a particular kind of damage to the visual cortex, who denies seeing anything at all, can “see” colors and shapes and even the expressions on other people’s faces. If asked whether they see something, they answer “no”, but forced to guess, they give the correct answer. Here, then, is a case in which conscious introspection, which indicates that I don’t see anything, is unreliable, because I really do.

Rosenberg’s second piece of evidence concerns our common belief that we have free will. Most of us are quite convinced that we make conscious decisions that result in freely-chosen actions all the time. However, experiments suggest that when we decide to perform a random action like moving a finger a certain way, the physiological process that will inevitably lead to the action taking place is underway before we’re aware of our decision to perform the action. 

The most interesting case he cites is one in which a neuroscientist stimulates a subject’s brain, causing the subject’s finger or wrist to move but also causing the subject, milliseconds later, to claim that the motion resulted from the subject’s conscious decision.The interpretation of these findings and their relevance to the free will problem are controversial, but they do suggest that conscious decision-making may not be as important in making decisions as we think it is.

Finally, Rosenberg argues that the existence of optical illusions shows that consciousness is unreliable. We interpret visual stimuli according to unconscious rules of thumb (mixed metaphor). These rules of thumb, which are probably the combined product of human evolution and our own experience, often mislead us. The circles in the diagram below look different but really aren’t, so here’s another case, according to Rosenberg, in which we shouldn’t let consciousness be our guide. (The book includes some interesting illustrations from the Purves Lab, which are available here.)

download (1)

Chapter 7 is relatively brief, because in this chapter Rosenberg is laying the groundwork for an especially counterintuitive idea he’s going to discuss in the next chapter (that we don’t actually think “about” anything at all). For now, here’s his conclusion:

We have seen that consciousness can’t be trusted to be right about the most basic things: the alleged need for visual experiences to see colors and shapes, the supposed role of conscious decisions in bringing about our actions, even the idea that we [see the world as it is]. If it can be wrong about these things, it can be wrong about almost everything it tells us about ourselves and our minds [162].

An important thing to note regarding Rosenberg’s argument is that he isn’t really claiming that conscious sense perception is completely unreliable (at least that’s not what I think he’s claiming). Although he denies that colors, for example, are mind-independent properties, he clearly believes that we do learn about the world using our eyes and ears. Otherwise, it would be odd to offer evidence that a blind person can perceive the “correct” color of an orange and that optical illusions are illusory (compared to what?). It would also be difficult to explain why most of us navigate the world better when our eyes are open and we’re not wearing headphones.

His principal thesis in this chapter is that certain conclusions we naturally draw from introspection (“the examination or observation of one’s own mental and emotional processes”) are mistaken. Specifically, it’s natural for us to assume that we need to be conscious in order to perceive certain features of the world, that our choices clearly determine our actions, and that (prior to being let in on the secret) we can always tell whether two lines are the same length or two circles are the same color just by looking.

I think Rosenberg is wrong, however, when he concludes that introspection can’t be trusted about “the most basic things”. What are the most basic conclusions we can draw from introspection? I’m not sure about that, but some natural conclusions seem more basic than the ones Rosenberg criticizes.

For example, we are better at perceiving features of the world when we’re relatively conscious (like when we’re awake) than when we’re relatively unconscious (like when we’re asleep). Some people see and hear better than others. Sight is usually reliable, even though there are occasional optical illusions. And when we feel angry or sad, we are generally angry or sad. It’s just wrong to think that introspection is always wrong about the most basic things.

I won’t offer a more basic conclusion about free will, except to say that conscious deliberation seems to help in making some decisions (whether to enroll at a college, get married or buy a house, for example) – whatever the underlying physiological processes are. Rosenberg may be right that conscious decisions are always the aftermath of unconscious decisions. We never really know what decision we’re going to make until it starts to “feel” like the right decision or we actually do something. Maybe our brains always do the necessary work unconsciously right before we discover what we’ve decided.

Coming up (sooner or later), part 13 of “A Guide to Reality”: Is it true that the brain does everything without thinking about anything at all?