Tag Archives: Friedrich Nietzsche

Beyond Good and Evil: Prelude to a Philosophy of the Future by Friedrich Nietzsche, translated by R. J. Hollingdale

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After reading Sue Prideaux’s biography of Nietzsche, I Am Dynamite!, I wanted to read something from the philosopher himself. I hadn’t read anything of his since On the Genealogy of Morality — or Morals — seven years ago. I wanted to understand better what was bothering the poor man. And how he thought people should live.

Beyond Good and Evil has nine parts. Each part is composed of aphorisms or sections, sometimes a page or two, sometimes a single paragraph. Overall, it was rough going. I often had no idea what he was complaining about (he mostly complains). There were also passages like this, the meaning of which seems clear at first:

Today, … when the herd animal alone obtains and bestows honours in Europe, when “equality of rights” could all too easily change into equality of wrongdoing: I mean into a general war on everything rare, strange, privileged, the higher man, the higher soul, the higher duty, the higher responsibility, creative fullness of power and mastery — today, being noble, wanting to be by oneself, the ability to be different, independence and the need for self-responsibility pertains to the concept “greatness”; and the philosopher will betray something of his ideal when he asserts: “He shall be the greatest who can be the most solitary, the most concealed, the most divergent, the man beyond good and evil, the master of his virtues, the superabundant of will; this shall be called greatness…. [sec. 212].

Nietzsche’s fundamental idea is that the most important fact about human beings is their will to power — their desire to control and create. He was convinced that Christian morality, the morality of “the herd”, with its ideas like “turning the other cheek” and “the meek shall inherit the Earth”, interferes with humanity’s will to power. In particular, it interferes with the will to power of those blessed with genius, the greatest among us. He was well aware of Goethe, Beethoven, Napoleon and Wagner, all towering figures in his opinion, but he apparently believed there would be more such tremendously accomplished figures if only everyday morality didn’t hold them back. In order to achieve greatness, a person must go beyond the standard ideas of good and evil. If one is to achieve greatness, the transvaluation (or reconsideration) of all values is necessary.

But what values should a genius live by? Is it necessary to ignore the Golden Rule? Sacrifice everything else to one’s art or projects? Ignore common courtesy? Trample other people however and whenever it feels right? After reading Nietzsche’s biography, two of his books and several summaries of his ideas, I still don’t know. I also don’t understand why he was so bothered by everyday morality. He seems to have taken the existence of common beliefs about good and evil as a personal affront.

He offers a clue when discussing what “a born, unavoidable psychologist and reader of souls” is confronted by:

The corruption, the ruination of higher human beings, of more strangely constituted souls is the rule: it is dreadful to always have such a rule before one’s eyes [sec. 269].

If anyone has ever been one, Nietzsche was a born psychologist. Perhaps he was speaking for himself in this passage. He must have viewed himself as “strangely constituted”. After he lost his mind, he suffered from extraordinary delusions of grandeur, describing his frequent contacts with the leading statesmen of Europe and sometimes referring to himself as God.

Scholars have determined that Nietzsche was not a German nationalist or an anti-semite. Some say the notion of the Ăśbermensch was not central to his philosophy. So it was surprising to read some of his strongly-worded views. For example:

… that what is right for one cannot … by any means be right for another, that the demand for one morality for all is detrimental to precisely the higher men, in short that there exists an order of rank between man and man, consequently also between morality and morality [sec. 228].

Every elevation of the type man has hitherto been the work of an aristocratic society — and so it will always be: a society which believes in … orders of rank and differences of worth between man and man and needs slavery in some sense or other [257].

The noble caste was always in the beginning the barbarian caste: … they were more complete human beings (which, on every level, also means … “more complete beasts”) [257].

The essential thing in a good and healthy aristocracy is [that it] accepts with a good conscience the sacrifice of innumerable men who for its sake have to be suppressed and reduced to imperfect men, to slaves and instruments. Its fundamental faith must be that society should not exist for the sake of society but only as a foundation and scaffolding upon which a select species of being is able to raise itself .. to a higher existence [258].

One has to … resist all sentimental weakness: life itself is essentially appropriation, injury, overpowering of the strange and weaker, suppression, severity, imposition of one’s own forms, incorporation and, at the least and mildest, exploitation… Exploitation … pertains to the essence of the living thing … it is a consequence of the intrinsic will to power [259].

There is master morality and slave morality … The noble type of man feels himself to be the determiner of values, he does not need to be approved of, he judges “what harms me is harmful in itself”, he knows himself to be that which … accords honour to things, he creates values [260].

A morality of the rulers [says] that one has duties only toward one’s equals; that towards beings of a lower rank, towards everything alien, one may act as one wishes or “as the heart dictates” and in any case “beyond good and evil” [260].

The grander, more manifold, more comprehensive life lives beyond the old morality; the “individual” stands there, reduced to his own law-giving, to his own arts and stratagems for self-preservation, self-enhancement, self-redemption [262].

Egoism pertains to the essence of the noble soul, I mean the immovable faith that to a being such as “we are” other beings have to be subordinate by their nature, and sacrifice themselves to us … “it is justice itself” [265].

Nietzsche’s ethical theory might be called “aristocratic egoism” — self-centered behavior for the natural aristocrats among us (not the aristocrats with hereditary titles); a reasonable amount of respect for other aristocrats; and everybody else knowing their place. Who knows how many impressionable readers have taken these ideas seriously enough to have acted on them? The man wasn’t joking when he wrote: “I am dynamite!”

In conclusion, the best thing I can say about Nietzsche’s Beyond Good and Evil is that I no longer feel the need to understand its author.

I Am Dynamite!: A Life of Friedrich Nietzsche by Sue Prideaux

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I’m more interested in Nietzsche’s philosophy than his life, but I visited a famous bookstore this summer and wanted to buy a book. I’m glad I bought this one.

It’s an understatement to say that Nietzsche was quite a character. He was an accomplished scholar who left the academy when he was 35, citing his poor health. He had enough income (partly from his academic pension) to travel about Europe, develop various friendships, propose marriage a couple times, spend lots of time with Richard Wagner and his wife Cosima, do a great deal of hiking, compose music nobody cared for and write philosophy books hardly anyone bought when they were published. He suffered terribly from unspecified ailments and wrote short bursts of text in order to protect his eyesight.

Although Nietzsche was a fairly normal, although brilliant, young man, he became more eccentric as the years passed, until he totally lost his mind at the age of 55. He lived another eleven years, being watched over by his horrible sister, Elisabeth, one of the nastiest people I’ve ever read about. Being a great admirer of Hitler (who admired her in return), Elisabeth used her control of Nietzsche’s writings to give him a reputation as a proto-Nazi, when in fact he wasn’t a German nationalist or anti-Semitic at all. He was a cultured, mild-mannered European with interesting, vividly-expressed ideas about how to live in a world without using religion as a crutch. (This is the positive, revisionist view of Nietzsche that’s become widely accepted among scholars in the last 70 years.)

I Am Dynamite! won a prize in Britain as the best book of 2019. From the prize’s announcement:

… this magnificent biography of a very strange and difficult subject is wonderfully well-written, lucid and clear-headed. It is full of sharp and stylish turns of phrase, it gallops along at an energetic pace, and it is often extremely and surprisingly funny, with a great gift for characterisation….

Friedrich Nietzsche’s work rocked the foundation of Western thinking, and continues to permeate our culture, high and low – yet he is one of history’s most misunderstood philosophers. Sue Prideaux’s myth-shattering book brings readers into the world of a brilliant, eccentric and deeply troubled man, illuminating the events and people that shaped his life and work. I Am Dynamite! is the essential biography for anyone seeking to understand Nietzsche: the philosopher who foresaw – and sought solutions to – our own troubled times.

Not everyone has been so enthusiastic. Brian Leiter, a philosophy professor at the University of Chicago, wrote a review in the Times Literary Supplement (which is mostly behind a paywall):

Prideaux is an especially vivid and engaging writer, who covers the facts of Nietzsche’s life well, although sometimes in soap-operatic detail….If Hollywood were to produce a movie of Nietzsche’s life, this book could provide the blueprint. Hollywood ought, however, to consult some philosophers if the movie is to do better than the book in conveying Nietzsche’s ideas.

Leiter argues briefly that Nietzsche wasn’t skeptical about science — he merely doubted science could teach us how to live. He says Prideaux gives too much importance to Nietzsche’s concept of the Ăśbermensch and too little to his opinion that “human excellence, and the aesthetic pleasure it provided (think Beethoven or Goethe), made life worth living”. Leiter criticizes Prideaux for implying Nietzsche believed the universe has purpose, when he clearly didn’t, and that he was in pursuit of a “universal morality”, which is more debatable. The professor concludes:

Prideaux has the correct sense that Nietzsche is profound; but it is not clear she has much idea why.

I very much enjoyed this biography, but it is not for those wanting to learn something about the philosophy. Prideaux’s discussions of his ideas are at best superficial, at worst wrong.

I think the professor is a bit harsh in his assessment (as professors often are when a non-specialist writes about one of their particular specialties). I Am Dynamite! explains what it was like to be Friedrich Nietzsche and provides an introduction to his distinctive philosophy. If you want to understand more of what he thought, there are plenty of other books and articles to read, many of which feature opinions from experts who don’t always agree with Professor Leiter. As Nietzsche himself would say, his philosophy, as with most everything else in the world, is open to interpretation.

Meaning Is a Many-Splendored Thing, Part 2

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Roy Scranton’s “We’re Doomed. Now What?” begins with a different premise than Charlie Hueneman’s “Everything Is Meaningless – But That’s Okay” (which I went on about two weeks ago). Scranton thinks that global warming, escalating violence or a combination of the two will one day put our species out of its misery:

Today, as every hour brings new alarms of war and climate disaster, we might wish we could take Nietzsche’s place. He had to cope only with the death of God, after all, while we must come to terms with the death of our world….

We stand today on a precipice of annihilation that Nietzsche could not have even imagined. There is little reason to hope that we’ll be able to slow down global warming before we pass a tipping point….The West Antarctic ice sheet is collapsing, Greenland is melting, permafrost across the world is liquefying, and methane has been detected leaking from sea floors and Siberian craters: it’s probably already too late to stop these feedbacks, which means it’s probably already too late to stop apocalyptic planetary warming. Meanwhile the world slides into hate-filled, bloody havoc, like the last act of a particularly ugly Shakespearean tragedy.

It’s fair to say that without a major technological breakthrough on one hand or the collapse of the carbon-based global economy on the other, the amount of carbon dioxide in the atmosphere will continue to increase. That could have horrific consequences. A “runaway” greenhouse effect may have given Venus its thick atmosphere of carbon dioxide and average surface temperature of 842 degrees.

Scranton implies that we’re doomed because four common responses to the global warming crisis are seriously misguided. He says “denialists” deny the problem exists, “accelerationists” think more technology is the answer, “incrementalists” favor the kind of modest changes already being made, and “activists” argue that “we have to fight, even though we’re sure to lose”. He thinks “we respond according to our prejudices”.

He then calls attention to what could be thought of as a fifth type of response, except that it’s closer to no response at all. Scranton thinks nihilism “defines our current moment”. Too many of us believe that “if all is already lost, nothing matters anyway”. What he apparently has in mind is the point of view sometimes referred to as “existential nihilism”. That’s the idea that life, whether individual lives or human life as a whole, lacks meaning, purpose or value.

What evidence is there for this increasing nihilism? Scranton mentions four television programs (I’ve watched two of them – they’re very good). Maybe more convincingly, he says “you can see it in the rush to war, sectarianism and racial hatred”. There is also the advance of “scientific materialism”, which has been undermining religious beliefs since at least the 17th century.

But war, sectarianism and racial hatred aren’t examples of nihilism. Nobody goes to war because they think everything is meaningless. People don’t divide into sects because they lack purpose. Racists value some people more than others for no good reason. That’s stupid, but not nihilistic. Science conflicts with some religious doctrine, but people who take science seriously aren’t generally amoral. So, putting aside the issue of nihilism for the moment, what does Scranton say we should do?

Oddly, by the end of the article, Scranton has declared himself to be a kind of “activist”. He believes some of us will survive global warming. Our species isn’t due for extinction. Therefore:

…it’s up to us … to secure the future of the human species. We can’t do it by clinging to the progressivist, profit-seeking, technology-can-fix-it ideology of fossil-fueled capitalism. We can’t do it by trying to control the future. We need to learn to let our current civilization die, to accept our mortality and practice humility. We need to work together to transform a global order of meaning focused on accumulation into a new order of meaning that knows the value of limits, transience and restraint.

In other words, we need to find meaning in taking care of the planet, not in the all the stuff we can get from burning carbon. We can’t wait for the global carbon-based economy to collapse. If we want to keep the planet habitable for human beings (a few of us anyway) and other living things, we need to immediately cut back our use of fossil fuels.

I’m sure Scranton would like to explain how we can accomplish this. How will it come to pass that so many people will change their way of looking at the world, of valuing what oil and coal do for us? Global warming isn’t such an obviously imminent crisis that the powerful or the mass of humanity will quickly reorient their thinking. It’s not as if a planet-destroying asteroid is heading our way. Nor are we in danger of running out of fossil fuels in the foreseeable future. There are billions of tons of the stuff just waiting to be extracted.

But all that Scranton offers as a way forward is to cite Nietzsche. The German philosopher set forth a position known as “perspectivism”. It’s not exactly clear what he meant by that (clarity wasn’t one of his strengths), but the general idea is that we each have our own perspective on the world; none of our perspectives give us access to the world as it really is; so the best we can do is view the world from as many points of view as possible. Adopting more and more perspectives can get us closer to the truth, even though we can never attain absolute, completely objective, non-perspectival truth about anything at all.

At least that’s how Scranton interprets Nietzsche. Life may be meaningless. The planet is probably doomed. But human beings have a tremendous capacity to find meaning in all kinds of situations. We need to use that capacity to view the planet’s future from as many perspectives as possible, human and non-human:

We need to learn to see not just with Western eyes but with Islamic eyes and Inuit eyes, not just with human eyes but with golden-cheeked warbler eyes, coho salmon eyes and polar bear eyes…

If we can manage that, difficult as it may be, we may be able to stop the Earth from becoming another Venus.

Perhaps you agree about adopting new perspectives, but I think it’s highly unlikely that the world’s leaders or the mass of humanity will ever stop finding most of life’s meaning in the here and now, based on their own particular points of view. Denialists will continue denying there’s a problem. Technologists will continue looking for technological solutions. Incrementalists will advocate or settle for incremental change. Activists like Scranton will propose new ways of finding meaning, while nihilists won’t think it matters what happens.

My own view is that the human race may get lucky but probably won’t. We should, however, still make intense efforts to stop burning so much carbon, while making life as decent as possible for those of us who are already here, including the fish of the sea, the fowl of the air, and everything that travels or grows upon the earth (except maybe mosquitoes and poison ivy). We have to balance the near future in which life is hard for so many and the more distant future in which life may not be possible at all. We will probably fail, but it’s the right thing to do.

Nietzsche on Morality by Brian Leiter (2nd Edition)

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Leiter concentrates on Friedrich Nietzsche’s On the Genealogy of Morality. He argues that Nietzsche was a naturalist and his primary goal was to convince the best people that they shouldn’t pay so much attention to standard Christian morality. It’s time for the revaluation of all values! But only for the strongest, most able among us. They’re the ones who can understand Nietzsche’s message and achieve great things if they can rise above the morality of the herd. Although it’s fine to be nice to less talented people. Just don’t let it hold you back if you’re especially strong and talented.

Getting a Handle on Nietzsche

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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].