Leiter Reports: A Philosophy Blog

Nietzsche: Channelling McDowell on Consciousness?

Perhaps.

A Nietzsche Journal with Scholarly and Philosophical Standards?

It may be possible.

Was Nietzsche a Fictionalist?

I know you were wondering!

It's Tough to Spell "Nietzsche"!

Proof.

Obama is a Nietzsche Man!

Details here.

Where should someone new to Nietzsche begin?

Discussion here.

Nietzsche in Cyberspace

For those who might be interested:

Discussion of Aaron Ridley (Southampton) on "Nietzsche and the Re-Evaluation of Values"

Discussion of Nicholas White (Utah) on Nietzsche on Hellenic Harmony

Discussion of Raymond Geuss (Cambridge) on Nietzsche:  Two Quotes

Plus what I'm reading in the Nietzsche literature.

Comments and discussion are welcome at the Nietzsche blog.

"Nietzsche's Theory of the Will"

UPDATE:  I gather the link was not working earlier, but it seems to be fine now. 

This article of mine has now been published by The Philosophers' Imprint and is available for download here.  I would be pleased to have discussion of the essay in the comments section at my Nietzsche blog.

Here is the abstract:

The essay offers a philosophical reconstruction of Nietzsche’s theory of the will, focusing on (1) Nietzsche’s account of the phenomenology of “willing” an action, the experience we have which leads us (causally) to conceive of ourselves as exercising our will; (2) Nietzsche’s arguments that the experiences picked out by the phenomenology are not causally
connected to the resulting action (at least not in a way sufficient to underwrite ascriptions of moral responsibility); and (3) Nietzsche’s account of the actual causal genesis of action.  Particular attention is given to passages from Daybreak, Beyond Good and Evil and Twilight of the Idols and a revised version of my earlier account of Nietzsche’s epiphenomenalism is defended.  Finally, recent work in empirical psychology (Libet, Wegner) is shown to support Nietzsche’s skepticism that our “feeling” of will is a reliable guide to the causation of action.

In addition to Nietzsche scholars (who have been discussing these issues quite a bit lately), I hope the essay will be of interest to philosophers interested in action theory who might not otherwise be interested in Nietzsche.

Scholarly Help Sought in Nietzsche Land

Here.

Nietzsche on YouTube!

More information here.

Nietzsche Blog

Folks occasionally ask about this blog.  I do plan to get it going (finally) in September, though probably more on the model of the legal philosophy blog, i.e., as a place for "thinking out loud" about what I'm reading related to Nietzsche at any given time.

Did Nietzsche Use a Typewriter? (Leiter)

Nigel Warburton (Open U) reports my skepticism about a contrary account.  Those with more information should post there.

UPDATE:  So two informative comments at Warburton's site reveal that Nietzsche did, indeed, have a typewriters, and did type some odds and ends with it, though not, it appears, any of his philosophical work.  But did Nietzsche have a laptop?  On that point, I'm more confident....

"Nietzsche and Morality"...

...will be published February 15 in Europe, and available a bit thereafter in the U.S.  The volume should be of interest not only to Nietzsche scholars, but to moral philosophers who, understandably, probably find much literature on Nietzsche unsatisfying.  All the newly commissioned essays here are by either moral philosophers with an interest in Nietzsche, or by philosophically sensitive and adept Nietzsche scholars.  The essays cover the major interpretive and philosophical issues related to his critique of morality, his positive ethics, his moral psychology, and his metaethics.  The essays are by Simon Blackburn (Cambridge); Maudemarie Clark & David Dudrick (Colgate); Thomas Hurka (Toronto); Nadeem Hussain (Stanford); Christopher Janaway (Southampton); Joshua Knobe (North Carolina) and Brian Leiter (Texas); Peter Poellner (Warwick); Bernard Reginster (Brown); Mathias Risse (Harvard); Neil Sinhababu (Texas); and R. Jay Wallace (Berkeley).

Draft paper on Continental "Morality Critics": Comments Welcome! (Leiter)

MOVING TO THE FRONT FROM DECEMBER 20:  There is a slightly revised version on-line now (changes primarily in the Marx and Foucault sections).  I'd still gratefully receive comments, since I can still make changes at the copy-editing stage.

===========================

You can download the working draft here.  Comments in the next week would be especially welcome, though I will be able to make more minor edits thereafter.  Here is the abstract:

What could be wrong with morality?  Popular, including religious, thinking has long proceeded on the assumption that “morality” as a system of norms deserves our allegiance and that “moral conduct” should earn our praise and admiration.  Modern philosophy has, on this (as other matters) not been far away from the popular consensus.   Hume “discovered,” happily, that “by nature” human beings were disposed to have the sentiments and dispositions constitutive of sound morality; Kant sought to vindicate the deontological moral intuitions of the ordinary German peasant; while Sidgwick found that the “unconscious” morality of the English “peasants” was utilitarian, not deontological (and locked in hopeless conflict, alas, with egoistic considerations).  Most of moral philosophy of the past one hundred years—from Habermas and the adherents of “discourse ethics” (descendants of the Kantian project), to the proliferating Anglophone Kantians, to the earnest utilitarianisms of J.J.C. Smart, R.B. Brandt, Peter Singer, and others--has proceeded on the assumption that morality and a moral life are worth understanding because they are worth having and leading.

==============================

One striking feature of post-Kantian philosophy in Europe has been the emergence of morality critics, philosophers who, contra the popular consensus, dispute the value of morality and the moral life.  Their views find a faint echo in the work of some Anglophone moral philosophers (Philippa Foot and Bernard Williams are the main exemplars), but, as we will see, the “Continental” criticisms of morality generally cut far deeper and more radically.  Whereas the Anglophone skeptics take issue with, for example, the “demandingness” of utilitarian moral theory, or the purported “overridingness” of moral obligations as Kantians understand them, the Continental critics pitch their concerns less at the level of academic theory than at the level of social, political, and cultural life.  These Continental morality critics object that morality in practice is an obstacle to human flourishing itself.

================================

So understood, this attack on morality raises two immediate questions.  First, the Continental morality critics are plainly not without ethical views of their own—namely, views, broadly, about the good life for (some or all) human beings—since it is on the basis of these views that they criticize “morality.”  Therefore, we need to understand the contours of the “morality” to which these critics object—for ease of reference, we will call it “morality in the pejorative sense” (MPS)—since it must be distinguished from the normative considerations that inform their critiques.  We will refer to this as the “Scope Problem” about morality criticism.  Second, we can usefully divide Continental critics of morality into two camps:  those who see morality as a direct threat to human flourishing; and those who see morality as an indirect threat.  In the first camp are those thinkers who see the individual’s acceptance of morality as such as an obstacle to the individual’s flourishing; in different ways, Nietzsche and Freud are these kinds of morality critics.  In the second camp are those philosophers who see morality as among the “ideological” instruments that sustain socio-economic relations that are obstacles to individual flourishing.  On this second account—most obviously represented by Marx and perhaps some of his descendants associated with the Frankfurt School—it is not allegiance to morality per se that thwarts individual flourishing, but rather the role such allegiance plays in sustaining certain socio-economic relations, the latter of which constitute the immediate obstacle to flourishing.  We will call the former “Direct Morality Critics” and the latter “Indirect Morality Critics.”  (Foucault straddles both approaches, and so we will discuss him in a transitional section.) 

Biblical Stories Told Via Lego Blocks (Leiter)

Via The Virtua Stoa, I discover this rather charming website in which Biblical stories are illustrated with lego figures and scenes.  Having been with the kids to Legoland in California last summer, I knew there was a lot you could do with legos, but this is a new one!

Although I'm sure this was not the intention of the site's creators, I am brought in mind of some passages from Nietzsche's The Antichrist.  From sec. 39:

The very word "Christianity" is a misunderstanding:  in truth there was only one Christian, and he died on the cross....It is false to the point of nonsense to find the mark of the Christian in "faith," for instance in faith in redemption through Christ:  only Christian practice, a life such as he lived who died on the cross, is Christian.

And, relatedly, from sec. 38:

Where has the last feeling of decency and self-respect gone when even our statesmen, an otherwise quite unembarrassed type of man, anti-Christians through and through in their deeds, still call themselves Christians today and attend communion?

"Nietzsche Family Circus" (Leiter)

Here:  curious and mildly amusing.  (Thanks to Nicholas Daum for the pointer.)

How Not to Write About Nietzsche (Leiter)

Here is a skillful review of what appears to be a not very good book on Nietzsche.

Reginster on Nietzsche (Leiter)

I want to commend to the attention of those interested in Nietzsche a new book by Bernard Reginster on The Affirmation of Life:  Nietzsche on Overcoming Nihilism (Harvard University Press, 2006), which I had the privilege of reading for the press some time ago.  This is certainly a book that all students and scholars of Nietzsche will want to read.  As I said to HUP:

Heidegger suggested a half-century ago that the problem of nihilism and the doctrine of the will to power were central to Nietzsche's philosophy, but only now, thanks to Reginster's elegantly crafted study, do we have a penetrating and systematic philosophical exposition of these themes and their interrelation. A particularly welcome feature of this new study is the way in which it situates the Nietzschean doctrines against the background of Schopenhauer's ideas and arguments; in so doing, it teaches the reader quite a lot about Schopenhauer and, in the process, sheds interesting new light on well-known ideas of Nietzsche's.

I am not sure I find Reginster's treatment of the doctrine of will to power more persuasive than John Richardson's in Nietzsche's System (OUP, 1996), but Reginster does a lovely job linking his reading to the problem of nihilism, and thus bringing out a different kind of "systematicity" to Nietzsche's views than that developed by Richardson. 

Nietzsche "Pen-Pal" Sought (Leiter)

Tim Daniel writes:

I enjoyed your article posted in the Standford Encylopedia of Philosophy on Nietzsche's moral and political philosophy.  It is a very useful survey - thank you.

I am a new enthusiast of Nietzsche.  I come to his writings very ready, but I suspect, later in life than many.  I am a 46 year old sucessful business man.  I do not have the luxury or inclination to return to school full time to pursue my new found passion. 

I am looking for a resource to find someone with whom I might dialogue by email as I work through Nietzsche's works.  I would want to find someone of similar level.  I have an extensive background in the social sciences and theology, Greek and German from grad school.  On the other hand, I am not a professional academic.  I work everyday with top executives who possess and wield real power.  I am very interested in the implications and applications of Nietzsche's thinking in the real world.   So I fall between the cracks in terms of finding a community of thought. 

If you can help, please contact Mr. Daniel at tjdaniel at earthlink-dot-net.

"The Case for Nietzschean Moral Psychology": Penultimate Version...

...here.  This is quite a bit revised from last fall's version, on which many readers kindly commented.  The paper, we hope, will be of as much, perhaps more, interest to moral philosophers and those interested in the intersection of moral psychology and empirical psychology, as it will be to Nietzsche scholars.

Nietzsche Studies: Where the Action Is

When I last wrote about Nietzsche studies, it was to grouse about some unhappy developments; here I want to write more constructively and also to inaugurate an on-going series on different areas of philosophy, where I'll invite different philosophers to address "where the action is" in their subfield. 

Last week, I was talking with one of the University of London graduate students participating in the Gemes/Leiter "intercollegiate" seminar on Nietzsche about what kind of work was worth doing in Nietzsche studies.  Nietzsche studies in English-speaking philosophy have really flourished over the last 15 years (Clark's book, below, probably marks the turning point), and while there (alas!) continues to be an enormous amount of sophomoric garbage written about Nietzsche, there has emerged, for the first time, a secondary literature on Nietzsche that compares favorably in scholarly seriousness and philosophical quality, with the best work on Kant or Hegel or Marx.  While the complete "professionalization" of the discipline of philosophy means that there is now some demand for specialist work on just about any figure in the history of philosophy, quite independent of his merits, in the case of Nietzsche there is an increasing recognition, both inside and outside the realm of specialists in post-Kantian German philosophy, that Nietzsche may really be the philosophical thinker of significance after Kant, and certainly one with at least as much resonance to themes in English-speaking philosophy as Hegel or Heidegger.

So, to return to my discussion with the postgraduate student mentioned above, the question arises what should someone thinking of doing doctoral research on Nietzsche pursue?   Where, today, is the "action" in Nietzsche studies:  what needs to be done?  (A somewhat dated discussion of this topic is here.) 

It seems to me there are now three lively and fruitful areas of philosophical research and writing about Nietzsche:  (1) studies of the historical context in which Nietzsche was writing attending, in particular, to the historical influences operative on him--work that demands both command of Nietzsche and command of the relevant portions of the history of philosophy; (2) close, philosophically-minded readings of particulars books by Nietzsche; and (3) philosophical studies of particular topics or themes of significance in Nietzsche:  his moral philosophy, his theory of mind or action, his metaphysics or epistemology.  What has fallen very much out of favor, it seems to me, are the "global" studies of Nietzsche, which attempt to canvass all his famous (if not most important) themes, like will to power, the overman, and eternal recurrence--though, to be sure, there are honorable, and important, exceptions that discharge this ambitious task admirably, such as John Richardon's Nietzsche's System (Oxford, 1996) and Bernard Reginster's The Affirmation of Life:  Nietzsche on Overcoming Nihilism (Harvard, forthcoming).

Historical studies aim to illuminate Nietzsche's ideas and arguments by shedding light on the historical context in which he wrote:  the intellectual currents of his time, the particular authors he was reading, the philosophers who mattered most to him.  Examples of such studies in recent years include:  Christopher Janaway's edited collection on Willing and Nothingness: Schopenhauer as Nietzsche's Educator (Oxford, 1998); Gregory Moore's Nietzsche, Biology and Metaphor (Cambridge, 2002); Michael Green's Nietzsche and the Transcendental Tradition (Illinois, 2002); in some respects, John Richardson's Nietzsche's New Darwinism (Oxford, 2004) (though this also develops the ambitious, systematic account of Nietzsche's philosophy from his earlier book [UPDATE:  see Jessica Berry's illuminating review of the Richardson book]); Robin Small's Nietzsche and Ree:  A Start Friendship (Oxford, 2005); Lanier Anderson's and Nadeem Hussain's articles on the influence of NeoKantianism and positivism on Nietzsche; Jessica Berry's and Richard Bett's articles on Nietzsche and ancient skepticism; and, in more modest forms, the portions dealing with Schopenhauer of Reginster's The Affirmation of Life (Harvard, forthcoming); the portions dealing with Plato in Richardson's Nietzsche's System (Oxford, 1996); and Chapter 2 of my Nietzsche on Morality (Routledge, 2002) surveying the impact of the Presocratics, Schopenhauer, and German Materialism on Nietzsche.  This work, to be sure, varies a bit in its philosophical sophistication and competence, but even where this is obviously lacking (as in Moore's book), the historical erudition still provides rich material for the philosophically-minded reader of Nietzsche.

Textual studies aim to elucidate the philosophical structure and arguments of the books Nietzsche actually published.  These kinds of projects are probably least suitable for doctoral students, though they increasingly attract the attention of accomplished scholars, and some of the best studies of this kind are still to appear, such as Maudemarie Clark and David Dudrick's book on Beyond Good and Evil and Christopher Janaway's book on On the Genealogy of Morality.  Earlier examples tend to focus mainly on the Genealogy, such as Mathias Risse's articles, and the relevant sections of my Nietzsche on Morality (Routledge, 2002) and Simon May's Nietzsche's Ethics and his 'War on Morality' (Oxford, 1999).

Philosophical/thematic studies treat Nietzsche as the philosopher he really is, and explore, and evaluate, his views with respect to particular issues in moral philosophy, metaphysics, epistemology, and philosophy of mind and action.  Such studies demand both knowledge of Nietzsche and knowledge of the relevant philosophy, and thus mark the most important respect in which Nietzsche has now joined the canon of important historical figures in the history of philosophy.  The watershed work was probably Maudemarie Clark's Nietzsche on Truth and Philosophy (Cambridge, 1990), which was followed by Lester Hunt's Nietzsche and the Origin of Virtues (Routledge, 1991), Peter Poellner's Nietzsche and Metaphysics (Oxford, 1995); my own Nietzsche on Morality (Routledge, 2002); and many articles by Mathias Risse, Nadeem Hussain, Bernard Williams, Ken Gemes, Raymond Geuss, Paul Katsafanas, and others (European Journal of Philosophy has published many of these papers).  Neil Sinhababu and I have tried to collect a set of new papers of this kind in Nietzsche and Morality (Oxford, 2006) (with contributions by myself and Sinhababu, as well as Clark & Dudrick, Janaway, Risse, Hussain, Reginster, Poellner, Thomas Hurka, Simon Blackburn, Joshua Knobe, Jay Wallace, and Donald Rutherford).   Some of the most lively, recent philosophical debates have concerned, on the one hand, Nietzsche's moral psychology, and, on the other, his philosophy of mind and action (his critique of free will, his account of agency, his understanding of consciousness).

I'd be interested to hear how specialists and doctoral students perceive the field.  Comments are open; no anonymous postings and bear in mind that comments may take awhile to appear, so post only once!

"The Case for Nietzschean Moral Psychology"

MOVING TO THE FRONT from Sept. 29--comments are still welcome.

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A working draft of this paper co-authored with Joshua Knobe (Philosophy, North Carolina) is now available for download on SSRN.  (Joshua's name should appear first on the SSRN page, but the SSRN program wouldn't cooperate, I guess because I have the existing SSRN account--the names appear correctly on the paper itself, which is a genuinely joint effort.)  The final version of the paper will appear in B. Leiter & N. Sinhababu (eds.), Nietzsche and Morality (Oxford:  Oxford University Press, 2007), which will also include new papers by Simon Blackburn (Cambridge), Maudemarie Clark & David Dudrick (Colgate), Thomas Hurka (Toronto), Nadeem Hussain (Stanford), Christopher Janaway (Southampton), Peter Poellner (Warwick), Bernard Reginster (Brown), Mathias Risse (Harvard), Donald Rutherford (UCSD), Neil Sinhababu (Texas), and R. Jay Wallace (Berkeley).

Here is the abstract:

Contemporary moral psychology has been dominated by two broad traditions, one usually associated with Aristotle, the other with Kant. The broadly Aristotelian approach emphasizes the role of childhood upbringing in the development of good moral character, and the role of such character in ethical behavior. The broadly Kantian approach emphasizes the role of freely chosen conscious moral principles in ethical behavior. We review a growing body of experimental evidence that suggests that both of these approaches are predicated on an implausible view of human psychology. This evidence suggests that both childhood upbringing and conscious moral principles have extraordinarily little impact on people's moral behavior.

This paper argues that moral psychology needs to take seriously a third approach, derived from Nietzsche. This approach emphasizes the role of heritable psychological and physiological traits in explaining behavior. In particular, it claims that differences in the degree to which different individuals behave morally can often be traced back to heritable differences between those individuals. We show that this third approach enjoys considerable empirical support -- indeed that it is far better supported by the empirical data than are either the Aristotelian or Kantian traditions in moral psychology.

This volume will be going to OUP in the next month or month-and-a-half, but we are still revising this paper and welcome comments.

Who is William T. Vollmann and Why Did the NY Times Invite Him to Write about Nietzsche?

A review of a Nietzsche book in The New York Times is rare, and even rarer, it seems, is the decision to enlist a reviewer competent in the material.  Although Curtis Cate's biography of Nietzsche appeared nearly two years ago, just today the Times has run a lengthy review of the book by the writer and novelist William Vollmann, who, best I can tell, has no expertise in the subject, and who certainly displays none in the review.

The review--predictably, I suppose, for the Times--concentrates mostly on gossip about Nietzsche's personal relations, and although there are breathless references to Nietzsche's "bravery," his "savagely independent intellect," and "his incomparable mind," there is almost no actual discussion of his philosophical ideas.  The one exception comes towards the end, where Mr. Vollmann bizarrely ascribes to Nietzsche "a 'realism' which asserts that cruelty, being innate, can be construed as moral," a view which Nietzsche does not hold (and, of course, no text or passage is referenced in support).  Is it really too much to expect that a lengthy review of a biography of a philosopher might say something (accurate) about the philosopher's ideas?

Our first hint that Mr. Vollmann is well out of his depth comes early on, when he praises Cate's summary of "the relevant aspects of Schopenhauer, Aristotle and others by whom Nietzsche was influenced and against whom he reacted." 

Aristotle? 

Many figures from antiquity--Thales, Thucydides, Socrates, Plato, Pyrrho--loom large for Nietzsche (as both targets and inspirations), but as every serious student of Nietzsche knows, Aristotle is notable for his almost total absence from the corpus.  There are a mere handful of explicit references to Aristotle in Nietzsche's writings (even in the unpublished notebooks), and no extended discussion of the kind afforded Plato or Thales.  And apart from some generally superficial speculations in the secondary literature about similarities between Aristotle's "great-souled man" and Nietzsche's idea of the "higher" or "noble" man--similarities nowhere remarked upon by Nietzsche himself--there is no scholarship supporting the idea that Aristotle is a significant philosopher for Nietzsche in any respect.

Perhaps aware that the waters he has entered are too deep and turbulent for his feeble stroke, Mr. Vollmann declares immediately after this peculiar Aristotle reference that Mr. Cate's summaries are "asking the world to pick nits.  Nits will be picked.  No matter."  But thinking Aristotle matters for Nietzsche is no nit:  it's the difference between knowing something about the subject matter (about the formative intellectual influences on the philosopher) and knowing next to nothing.  Nits do not matter, but having some idea what one is talking about does in the life of the mind.

Lack of real familiarity with the subject is manifest at other places in Mr. Vollmann's review, in between the People magazine speculations and meaningless philosophical name-dropping (the silliest instance of the latter follows upon Mr. Vollmann's quoting Lou Salome accusing Nietzsche of wanting a physical menage-a-trois with her and Paul Ree; Mr. Vollmann adds:  "Well, why not?  Nietzsche would ultimately reject Plato.").  Mr. Vollmann repeats the standard story about Nietzsche's syphilis, apparently unaware of the detailed (and rather convincing) debunking of that explanation of Nietzsche's final collapse by a medical doctor, Richard Schain, in his 2001 book The Legend of Nietzsche's Syphilis.  On the question of anti-semitism, Mr. Vollmann says, oddly, that "Nietzsche was plentiful in his praise of individual Jews," though such references to individuals are few and far between by comparison to Nietzsche's praise not for individuals, but for the Jewish people and Jewish culture.   

Thus Spoke Nietzsche

Our highest insights must--and should--sound like stupidities and sometimes like crimes when they are heard without permission by those who are not predisposed and predestined for them....

What serves the higher type of men as nourishment or delectation must almost be poison for a very different and inferior type. The virtues of the common man might perhaps signify vices and weaknesses in a philosopher. It could be possible that a man of a high type, when degenerating and perishing, might only at that point acquire qualities that would require those in the lower sphere into which he had sunk to begin to venerate him like a saint. There are books that have opposite values for soul and health, depending on whether the lower soul, the lower vitality, or the higher and more vigorous ones turn to them: in the former case, these books are dangerous and lead to crumbling and disintegration; in the latter, heralds' cries that call the bravest to their courage. Books for all the world are always foul-smelling books: the smell of petty people clings to them. Where the people eat and drink, even where they venerate, it usually stinks.

--Beyond Good and Evil, sec. 30 (Kaufmann translation, with some tinkering).

Thus Spoke Schopenhauer

[A]bove all, anonymity, that shield of all literary rascality, would have to disappear. It was introduced under the pretext of protecting the honest critic, who warned the public, against the resentment of the author and his friends. But where there is one case of this sort, there will be a hundred where it merely serves to take all responsibility from the man who cannot stand by what he has said […]. Often enough it is only a cloak for covering the obscurity, incompetence and insignificance of the critic. It is incredible what impudence these fellows will show, and what literary trickery they will venture to commit, as soon as they know they are safe under the shadow of anonymity. Let me recommend a general Anti-criticism, a universal medicine or panacea, to put a stop to all anonymous reviewing, whether it praises the bad or blames the good: Rascal! your name! For a man to wrap himself up and draw his hat over his face, and then fall upon people who are walking about without any disguise—this is not the part of a gentleman, it is the part of a scoundrel and a knave.

--Parerga und Paralipomena, Ch. 23

(Thanks to Pablo Stafforini for the timely pointer.)

A moratorium on "public intellectuals" opining about Nietzsche?

Might we declare a moratorium on "public intellectuals" with no relevant scholarly competence opining about Nietzsche?  The latest to embarrass himself is John Gray in the pages of the New Statesman.  While Gray (on the Politics Faculty at the London School of Economics) may be most notorious among philosophers for his spectacular hostility towards John Rawls, it seems, on the evidence of this review, that he may be more qualified to talk about Rawls than Nietzsche.  The parade of errors packed in to just a couple thousand words is quite remarkable; I'll single out just five examples, ones that suitably betray the breadth and depth of Professor Gray's ignorance of the subject matter:

(1)  Professor Gray says the "aim" of Nietzsche's Genealogy of Morality "was to consider what became of morality once its support in religion was taken away."  One would had to have not actually read the book to describe that as its aim, and not only because Nietzsche specifically denies (GM II:  21) that the absence of religious faith would have any impact on the moralized guilty conscience of we moderns.  The book's aim, as Nietzsche himself says, is to contribute to a critique of morality, and to do so by examining the various psychological mechanisms (ressentiment, internalized cruelty, and the desire for feelings of power) that account for its development into its modern form.

(2)  Professor Gray notes, correctly, that "Nietzsche's prinicpal achievment as a thinker lies in his contributions to moral psychology," but then describes that achievement as "developing the introspective method of French moralists such as La Rochefoucauld and Chamfort [in order to] analyse[] and unmask[] the Christian virtues, showing them to be sublimations of other, often "immoral" passions."   It is true enough Nietzsche sometimes employs the method of La Rochefoucauld on this score, but it is equally true, and more important, that he specifically distinguishes (Dawn 103) La Rochefoucauld's approach to morality from his own.  The significance of that is nowhere in evidence in Professor Gray's presentation.

(3)  Professor Gray says Nietzsche's "natural mode of expression was the aphorism."  Perhaps, depending on what "natural" means, but it was not his primary mode of expression, as Alexander Nehamas correctly emphasized twenty years ago in calling attention to Nietzsche's multiple styles and rhetorical devices.  If the "aphorism" was, in fact, his "natural mode of expression," it is surely odd that it almost completely ceases to be his mode of expression in his final, major works:  On the Genealogy of Morality, Twilight of the Idols, The Antichrist, Ecce Homo.  Were these works "unnatural"?  What would that even mean?

(4)  According to Professor Gray:

Nietzsche rejected his first mentor, Schopenhauer, claiming that the latter was too much influenced by Christianity. In truth, Schopenhauer turned his back on Christianity more decisively than Nietzsche ever did, and it was partly for this reason that Nietzsche was compelled to break with him. For Schopenhauer, deeply soaked in Indian philosophy, it was self-evident that - contrary to the secular version of the Christian belief in providence propagated by Hegel - history as a whole is without meaning. If there is such a thing as salvation, it lies outside time, and presupposes shedding the illusion of personal identity.  For Nietzsche, as for anyone who retains the humanist faith bequeathed to the world by Christianity, this vision of human life was intolerable.

It would be hard to imagine what text Professor Gray thinks could be cited on behalf of ascribing the views in question to Nietzsche.   Nietzsche certainly did not think history had a meaning, and he recognized, correctly, that Schopenhauer shared with Christianity and Buddhism the view that human suffering presented a fundamental objection to and problem for existence in this world.  It was in Nietzsche's revaluation of this attitude towards suffering that Nietzsche broke decisively with Schopenhauer and Christianity--points that are well-explicated in Bernard Reginster's forthcoming Harvard U Press book on Nietzsche (which I recently had the pleasure of refereeing and which I highly recommend to anyone interested in the issues that Gray is mangling here).

(5)  Professor Gray, however, is attached to his distinctive idea, and so concludes:

Like innumerable, less reflective humanists who came after him, Nietzsche wished to hold on to an essentially Christian view of the human subject while dropping the transcendental beliefs that alone support it.

A "Christian view of the human subject"?  Nietzsche denies that people's wills are causal, that they have free will or choice, and that they are morally responsible for their actions, and he claims that their conscious life is a largely epiphenomenal manifestation of their unconscious lives and their physical natures.  Which teachings of Christianity on the subject does Professor Gray think shares these views?  (There may be an answer here, though it is evident from what Gray says he is not thinking of this particular possibility:  namely, aspects of Lutheranism, which Nietzsche knew intimately.  That is a scholarly topic that still awaits thorough treatment, and even then I expect we will find that the similarities are not as extensive as might first seem.  In any case, it is clear Nietzsche himself thought of his view of the subject as a repudiation of the Christian one, which, for most major Christian denominations, it plainly is.)  Professor Gray continues:

It was this impulse to salvage a religious conception of humankind, I believe, that animated Nietzsche's attempt to construct a new mythology. The task set by Nietzsche for his imaginary Superman was to confer meaning on history through a redemptive act of will. The sorry history of the species, lacking purpose or sense until a higher form of humanity came on to the scene, would then be redeemed. In truth, Nietzsche's mythology is no more than the Christian view of history stated in idiosyncratic terms, and a banal version of it underpins nearly all subsequent varieties of secular thought.

Unfortunately for Professor Gray, the "imaginary Superman" never appears again in Nietzsche's corpus after Thus Spoke Zarathustra, except briefly in Ecce Homo when Nietzsche discusses the former book.  That means the "imaginary Superman" and his "mythology" Professor Gray presents as central to Nietzsche's thinking, in fact, plays no role in any of his major mature works:  Beyond Good and Evil, On the Genealogy of Morality, Twilight of the Idols, The Antichrist.  (It is not a significant presence in earlier works either, but we'll leave that aside for purposes here.)  It plays the role it does in Zarathustra precisely because--as Professor Gray apparently doesn't recognize--that book is a parody of The New Testament, with Zarathustra preaching an anti-Christian gospel.  That the requirements of the parodic form dictate the construation of an anti-Christian mythology for paralellism with the Christian mythology Nietzsche rejects simply doesn't show, in the absence of further textual evidence, that Professor Gray's ascription to Nietzsche of a Christian view of history is correct.  In fact, the crucial issue, as noted above (and as is well-explicated by Reginster), is the revaluation of the Christian attitude towards suffering.  That central theme, somewhat remarkably, never captures Professor Gray's attention.

At one point in his review, Professor Gray says, "It is received wisdom among philosophers that writers such as Nietzsche are best understood by breaking down their thought into a number of discrete propositions and arguments.  Of dubious value in the history of ideas [where lack of argument is preferred???], this conventional methodology is completely inept when applied to Nietzsche."  In fact, of course, Professor Gray's wide-ranging confusions illustrate the opposite.  Perhaps if he tried to tie his discrete propositions to actual texts of Nietzsche's, and had actually paid any attention to Nietzsche's many arguments, he might have managed to make fewer errors in so little space.

Nietzsche, Montaigne, and Ancient Skepticism

I was pleased to discover that this first-rate, and groundbreaking, article by a former student, on the influence of ancient skepticism on Nietzsche via Montaigne, is now available on-line via Muse; it has recently appeared in the Journal of the History of Ideas.  Anyone working on Nietzsche should read it.

Thus Spoke Nietzsche

"The vanity of others offends our taste only when it offends our vanity."

--Beyond Good and Evil, sec. 176.

"What is noble?  What does the word 'noble' still mean to us today?  What betrays, what allows one to recognize the noble human being, under this heavy, overcast sky of the beginning rule of the plebs that makes everything opaque and leaden?...

"It is not the works, it is the faith that is decisive here, that determines the order of rank--to take up again an ancient religious formula in a new and more profound sense:  some fundamental certainty that a noble soul has about itself, something that cannot be sought, nor found, nor perhaps lost.

"The noble soul has reverence for itself."

--Beyond Good and Evil, sec. 288

Some Thoughts on Nietzsche and Foucault

These are "discussion notes" I prepared for a seminar recently; perhaps they will be of interest to others. Bear in mind: they are merely discussion notes, not a draft of a scholarly paper! (One side note: I take up, below, the topic of Foucault, Weber, and the "iron cage of modernity" alluded to in an earlier posting, which prompted some reader queries.)

"NOM" is a reference to my Nietzsche on Morality, FR to Rabinow's The Foucault Reader collection.

=============

I. Nietzsche and Foucault: Why read them together?

A. Nietzsche is one of Foucault’s most frequent, and positive, reference points (see NOM, p. 2 for an example from The Order of Things). Foucault suggests (sometimes only implies) that he is developing Nietzschean themes, continuing Nietzschean lines of inquiry, etc.. I would like to understand both (1) why Foucault thinks this, and (2) whether he is right.

B. I begin from a position of some skepticism about whether Foucault is right. Here is an outline of the skeptical case:

1. Nietzsche is a philosophical naturalist: he thinks there are facts about human beings (type-facts, I call them, i.e., facts about the physiology and unconscious psychology of human beings) that explain much of their conscious life, in particular, their moral and philosophical beliefs. Nietzsche proffers a somewhat speculative account of how these type-facts figure in the explanation of beliefs, and embeds this naturalistic account in the context of a critique of morality (how an account of the genesis of the beliefs figures in a critique of the beliefs is a topic to which we’ll return at length).

2. This is not Foucault’s kind of project: Foucault takes “facts about human nature” to be artifacts of particular discursive regimes, i.e., structured discourses conceptualizing human selfhood that are propounded by the various human sciences. If “human nature” is a “construct” (a key notion, to which we’ll have to return), then there would be no special interest, beyond an historical or sociological one, in understanding how those facts about human nature figure in the explanation of, e.g., moral beliefs. We wouldn’t, in other words, understand anything about the real cause of moral beliefs, only about how a certain discursive regime—itself without any special epistemic standing—conceptualizes those causes.

3. The problem, in short, is that Nietzsche, on this rendering, is interested in first-order theory, i.e., an account of what human beings are really like, an explanation of our moral beliefs, and so on. By contrast, Foucault is interested in meta-theory, i.e., some account of the status or nature of our first-order theories. Here is a typical Foucault formulation (from “Truth and Power” in FR, 60): he describes his project as “”seeing historically how effects of truth are produced within discourses which in themselves are neither true nor false.”

(a) “Effects of truth” are, I take it, the various first-order discourses or practices in which people make claims of the form, “It is true that X,” or “It is false that Y,” e.g., “It is true that our morality has its origin, in part, in the slave revolt in morals described in GM I.”

(b) An “historical” understanding of these “effects” aims to understand both (i) when these discourses or practices came about, i.e., when did it develop that, at a particular moment, under particular socio-economic conditions, people started talking about “the unconscious,” “the insane,” “the deviant,” etc; and (ii) how these discourses are structured (i.e., what are the “rules” for making “true” claims in these various discourses—this is the legacy of structuralism, which becomes less important in Foucault’s work after the 1960s).

(c) The claim that the “discourses which in themselves are neither true nor false” suggests that the first-order theories, whose historical origins are to be traced, are themselves non-cognitive, i.e., non-truth-evaluable. That is, to ask whether, e.g., the psycho-analytic theory of the mind is true or false is--syntactic appearances notwithstanding—on a par with asking is the yumminess of chocolate true or false? One can ask, of course, within the rules of psychoanalysis, whether it is true or false that homophobia is a kind of defense mechanism, i.e., a reaction formation (it is true); but it makes no sense to ask whether the psychoanalytic theory as a whole is true or false. (There is a curious resonance here with Rudolf Carnap’s old distinction between “internal” and “external” questions in “Empiricism, Semantics, and Ontology”—one of the distinctions Quine purported to repudiate in “Two Dogmas” and subsequent work. An “internal” question, per Carnap, is internal to a “linguistic framework,” which is a conventional practice in which the criteria for truth or falsity of particular ontological claims are set [it is true that “there is a table in the seminar room” within the framework of things and the “thing-language”]. By contrast, an “external question” would be a question about the truth or reality of the framework itself [is the “thing-language” true, is it genuinely and successfully referential?]; this question can’t be answered; whether to adopt a framework is settled on pragmatic grounds. [Carnap thinks this because he thinks that “to be real in the scientific sense means to be an element of the framework” and therefore we can’t ask the question about reality or truth of the framework itself])

C. Is the skepticism too hasty? Here’s some reasons why it might be:

Nietzsche's Moral and Political Philosophy

My essay for the Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy on this subject is now available here. Much of this will be familiar to readers of my book Nietzsche on Morality; the material in section 2 (on Nietzsche's positive ethics, and, in particular, his perfectionism) and 3.1 (on Nietzsche's moral anti-realism and why "will to power" is not his objective criterion of value) goes most beyond arguments in the book. Comments are welcome, since SEP is an on-line, regularly revised, resource.

The State of Nietzsche Studies

I recall once reading a paper in which the author adduced as evidence of the vibrant state of Nietzsche studies the fact that there are now three specialist journals for Nietzsche articles--Nietzsche-Studien, Journal of Nietzsche Studies, and New Nietzsche Studies--not to mention three English-speaking professional organizations: the North American Nietzsche Society (NANS), the Friedrich Nietzsche Society of Great Britain (FNS), and the Nietzsche Society, another American-based Nietzsche group, aligned with the Society for Phenomenology & Existential Philosophy.

My reaction to this evidence, by contrast, was the opposite: the reason there is a proliferation of specialty Nietzsche forums is because the field is populated with mediocrities and incompetents, who can't perform in ordinary scholarly and philosophical contexts. Because the majority of those who write on Nietzsche don't do work that is publishable in legitimate journals that feature important work on Nietzsche--European Journal of Philosophy, Philosophy & Phenomenological Research, Journal of the History of Philosophy, History of Philosophy Quarterly, Journal of the History of Ideas (not to mention Philosophical Review and Ethics!)--it is necessary to create "specialty" journals that have almost no scholarly or philosophical standards in which the vast amount of rubbish on Nietzsche can find a place. The field of Kant studies, a robust scholarly field, provides a striking point of contrast: most of the leading Kant scholars publish in the journals just mentioned, and the up-and-coming young scholars try to do the same. One does not find in Kant studies a proliferation of "specialized" Kant journals that publish nothing but (third-rate) work on Kant. There is, to be sure, one specialty journal, Kant-Studien, about which I know little, though I hope it is better than Nietzsche-Studien, which apart from publishing occasional, useful philological and intellectual history pieces, rarely features anything philosophically substantial. (One philosopher who submitted to them tells me his piece was rebuffed because it featured that "Anglo-Saxon" tendency to focus on "coherence" and "arguments." Imagine that!)

Harsh talk, I know, but readers of this blog are used to it. I am particularly incensed by what's become of the North American Nietzsche Society (NANS) under the direction of Richard Schacht of the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign. Schacht's 1983 book on Nietzsche (Routledge) did much to raise the level of Nietzsche studies in English-speaking philosophy--kudos and gratitude to Professor Schacht for that important contribution--but as the de facto dictator of NANS, he has, for mysterious reasons, pandered to mediocrities, putting them on committees, including their papers in NANS programs, and so on. Since I know that Schacht's view of this work is not much different from my own, I have found his posture peculiar: instead of using NANS to advance philosophically substantial Nietzsche studies, he has, in the service of "inclusiveness," legitimized weak work and promoted the careers of scholars who do not do work up to the high standards he has set.

What's worse is that the effort has been pointless. During the 1990s, New Nietzsche Studies was launched by "the Nietzsche Society," the other group for American Nietzsche "scholars" [sic] affiliated with SPEP, the primary organization for those interested in European philosophy who aren't very good at philosophy. (Anyone with doubts on this score should take a look at, e.g., Babette Babich's Nietzsche's Philosophy of Science, a book apparently written on the premise that it is not necessary to have any knowledge of philosophy of science to nonetheless explain Nietzsche's. Babich is a key figure in the Nietzsche Society and its journal New Nietzsche Studies; she was also the target of Samuel Wheeler's recent, amusing remarks in a NDPR book review: "Babette Babich’s [essay] consists largely of assertions about analytic philosophy and citations of other people’s assertions. A reader somewhat familiar with both traditions will be puzzled as to why some of these assertions are taken to be true.")

Don't misunderstand the point of this little polemic: obviously a professional organization must represent both the very best and the solid laborers in the field. The problem with NANS is that it has also chosen to "include"--indeed, gone out of its way to include--"scholars" who, if they worked on Kant or Descartes or Plato, wouldn't be able to get on a professional program at a scholarly meeting.

The straw that broke this camel's back, however, was the latest announcement from "on high" that Jim Conant of the University of Chicago is to be the new head of the Program Committee. (It appears that Professor Schacht makes these decisions unilaterally.) Conant replaced Alan Schrift, who at least had written a lot on Nietzsche. Conant, by contrast, has published only one substantial paper on Nietzsche since beginning his teaching career 15 years ago--in a book edited by none other than Dick Schacht! The paper, a reading of Nietzsche's Schopenhauer as Educator, was part of Conant's doctoral thesis, so it's one he's been working on for more than 15 years. Yet this one paper is, itself, a problematic piece of work. As I wrote in my review of the Schacht collection in Mind:

Thus Spoke Nietzsche

"To put up with people, to keep open house with one's heart--that is liberal, but that is merely liberal. One recognizes those hearts which are capable of noble hospitality by the many draped windows and closed shutters: they keep their best rooms empty. Why? Because they expect guests with whom one does not 'put up.'"

--Twilight of the Idols, "Skirmishes of an Untimely Man," sec. 25.

The Task of Higher Education in Blairite Britain

The quote from Nietzsche on the "task of higher education"strikes rather too close to home in Britain. Michael Ostuska (Philosophy, University College London) writes:

"Nietzsche's is a depressingly accurate description of the task of higher education in Blairite Britain. In response to pressure from government ministers and civil servants, PhD students at one fairly well-known British University are now duty-bound to keep a 'Graduate School Research Student Log' which is obsessively devoted to the 'self-audit' of their 'development of appropriate skills'. At the end of each year PhD students are supposed to describe and 'where possible, provide evidence for' their level of development of skills such as the following:

'Record Keeping: ability to keep accurate and comprehensive records in a systematic fashion which demonstrate academic purpose and probity'

'Time management: ability to schedule multiple personal and research specific tasks within a designated work period and monitor progress'

'Team work: ability to work in co-operative partnerships with supervisors, team leaders, peers and support staff, ability to contribute towards the achievement of common goals'

'Personal communication: ability to converse effectively with individuals, to appreciate their viewpoint and to act appropriately, ability to give and receive constructive feedback'

'Career planning, CV development: ability to take effective ownership for your career progression by setting realistic and achievable goals and to demonstrate awareness of the transferable nature of research skills to other work environments'"

Thus Spoke Nietzsche

"'What is the task of all higher education?' To turn men into machines. 'What are the means?' Man must learn to be bored. 'How is that accomplished?' By means of the concept of duty. 'Who serves as the model?' The philologist: he teaches grinding. 'Who is the perfect man?' The civil servant. 'Which philosophy offers the highest formula for the civil servant?' Kant's: the civil servant as a thing-in-itself raised up to be judge over the civil servant as phenomenon."

--Twilight of the Idols, "Skirmishes of an Untimely Man," sec. 29.

(Note: Nietzsche was trained as a classical philologist, and so treats, throughout his career, philology as the paradigm instance of scholarly activity, in both its good and bad senses.)

Thus Spoke Nietzsche

"Where solitude ceases the market place begins; and where the market place begins the noise of the great actors and the buzzing of the poisonous flies begins too.

"In the world even the best things amount to nothing without someone to make a show of them: great men the people call these showmen.

"Little do people comprehend the great--that is, the creating. But they have a mind for all showmen and actors of great things.

"Around the inventers of new values the world revolves: invisibly it revolves. But around the actors revolve the people and fame: that is 'the way of the world.'"

--Thus Spoke Zarathustra, Part I, "On the Flies of the Market Place"

The Metaphysics of Free Will in The New York Times

Here is David Brooks commenting on Dylan Klebold, one of the two high school students who shot up the Columbine High School in Colorado in 1999, killing many classmates, before killing himself:

"My instinct is that Dylan Klebold was a self-initiating moral agent who made his choices and should be condemned for them. Neither his school nor his parents determined his behavior."

So Brooks is a "libertarian" incompatibilist about free will: he thinks free will is incompatible with determinism, but believes we can be self-caused in some sense. Has Brooks been reading my colleague Robert Kane? Or perhaps he is more attracted to Timothy O'Connor's version of agent-causation theories? Or maybe he's a retrograde Chisholmian?

Or maybe, just maybe, he hasn't thought about the issue at all, couldn't make a coherent argument on the subject if his life depended on it, but knows this is what his stinking right-wing sanctimony requires?

Nietzsche, happily, had the Brooks-type pegged long ago:

"The longing for 'freedom of the will' in the superlative metaphysical sense (which, unfortunately, still rules in the heads of the half-educated), the longing to bear the entire and ultimate responsibility for your actions yourself and to relieve God, world, ancestors, chance, and society of the burden--all this means nothing less than...pulling yourself by the hair from the swamp of nothingness into existence." (Beyond Good and Evil, sec. 21)

But, of course, Brooks is ascribing responsibility to others, not claiming it himself, and Nietzsche also had "the psychology of all 'making responsible'" diagnosed:

"Wherever responsibilities are sought, it is usually the instinct of wanting to judge and punish which is at work...: the doctrine of the will has been invented essentially for the purpose of punishment, that is, because one wants to impute guilt...Men were considered 'free' so that they might be judged and punished--so they might become guilty: consequently, every act had to be considered as willed, and the origin of every act had to be considered as lying within consciousness...."

The metaphysics of free will, Nietzsche concludes, is the "metaphysics of the hangman" (Twlight of the Idols, "The Four Great Errors," sec. 7).

How nice that the hangman writes twice a week for The New York Times.

Program/Abstracts for "Nietzsche and Ethics" Conference (Sussex, Sept. 10-12) Now Available

I just discovered that the program of the "Nietzsche and Ethics" conference--which is the subject of the 14th Annual Meeting of the UK's Friedrich Nietzsche Society, which will be at the University of Sussex this year, September 10-12, 2004--is now on-line here: click on "programme" for the schedule, and "abstracts" for short summaries of many of the papers to be presented.

The conference has shaped up rather well, it seems to me. Several papers look to be very interesting (I just hope they don't conflict on the final schedule!): Daniel Came (Oxford) on "Art and Morality in Nietzsche's Birith of Tragedy," Edward Harcourt (Kent) on "Nietzsche and Eudaemonism," Christopher Janaway (Birkbeck) on "Nietzsche and Paul Ree on the Origins of Moral Feelings," and James Wilson (Birkbeck) on "Nietzsche and Equality" all caught my attention. I am looking forward, as well, to spending time with some Nietzsche scholars whose work I've read, but whom I've never met, including Keith Ansell-Pearson (Warwick), Aaron Ridley (Southampton), Robin Small (Auckland), Henry Staten (Washington), and Volker Gerhardt (Humboldt). And, of course, there is a special interest for me in the various papers that will take issue with my views on Nietzsche: Ken Gemes (Birkbeck) on "Nietzsche on Free Will, Action and Morality," Paul Loeb (Puget Sound) on "Finding the Ubermensch in Nietzsche's Genealogy of Morality," Thomas Meyer (Temple) on "Declining Decadence: On Fatalism and Self-Creation in the Later Nietzsche," and Barry Stocker (Yeditepe [Turkey]) on "Nietzsche's Moral Lessons," which looks to be a sustained attack on my Nietzsche on Morality (Routledge, 2002). And I'm sure that for many, myself included, the plenary address by Maudemarie Clark (Colgate)--who has done more than anyone to make Nietzsche studies philosophically substantial--on "Nietzsche on Moral Objectivity" will be a highlight of the conference.

For those interested, my own plenary address will be on "Nietzsche's Theory of the Will" (which I expect will be my contribution to Ansell-Pearson's Blackwell Companion to Nietzsche); here is the draft of the opening paragraphs, which can serve as an abstract:

Philosophy Talk

Many thanks to what appears to have been an unusually large number of callers from around the country phoning in to the Philosophy Talk show on Nietzsche today. I'm sorry I didn't get to speak with more of you, but I'm grateful to those who called, and to John Perry and Ken Taylor for having me on the show. You can hear the show via the archives at the Philosophy Talk web site, linked above.

On the Radio Tomorrow Discussing Nietzsche

For interested readers: tomorrow, (Tuesday, March 16), I'll be on Philosophy Talk radio to discuss Nietzsche with John Perry and Ken Taylor. The show airs live at noon in San Francisco (so that's 2 pm here in Austin, and 3 pm in New York), but you can also pick it up on Oregon public radio (Thursdays at 8 pm), or via live streaming from the KALW website, or, aftewards, from the Philosophy Talk archives .

On the Radio

A week from today (Tuesday, March 16), I'll be on Philosophy Talk radio to discuss Nietzsche with John Perry and Ken Taylor. The show airs live at noon in San Francisco (so that's 2 pm here in Austin, and 3 pm in New York), but you can also pick it up on Oregon public radio (Thursdays at 8 pm), or via live streaming from the KALW website, or, aftewards, from the Philosophy Talk archives . I'm looking forward to it.

The Diary of Samuel Pepys...

...in "blog" form. A charming idea, and obviously a labor of love, since the site is full of helpful links explaining references and the like.

More John Edwards

I'm glad to see The Atlantic understands why John Edwards will win, and John Kerry will be a disaster. The Sophists understood this nearly 2500 years ago: rhetoric.

Nietzsche Myths #2

(Myth #1 is here.)

Myth: Nietzsche was anti-science, a Rortyesque debunker of the epistemic pretensions of science for the 19th-century.

Reality: In the mid-1870s, Nietzsche went through a phase of unabashed "science worship," viewing natural science as the paradigm of all genuine knowledge; the culmination of this period came with Human, All-too-Human. This gave way, however, in the early 1880s to a NeoKantian skepticism (inspired by Schopenhauer and Friedrich Lange) about whether science could plumb the depths of reality, of the world-as-it-is-in-itself. Once Nietzsche repudiated, however, the metaphysical distinction between a noumenal and phenomenal world on which this skepticism rests, the skepticism about science vanishes and in his later works he repeatedly endorses a scientific perspective as the correct or true one (in contrast to, e.g., religious and moral interpretations of phenomena).

Thus Spoke Nietzsche

"[A]t our foundation, 'at the very bottom,' there is clearly something that will not learn, a brick wall of spiritual fatum, of predetermined decisions and answers to selected, predetermined questions. In any cardinal problem, an immutable 'that is me' speaks up."

--Beyond Good and Evil, sec. 231.

Thus Spoke Nietzsche

"Where solitude ceases the market place begins; and where the market place begins the noise of the great actors and the buzzing of the poisonous flies begins too.

"In the world even the best things amount to nothing without someone to make a show of them: great men the people call these showmen.

"Little do the people comprehend the great--that is, the creating. But they have a mind for all showmen and actors of great things.

"Around the inventors of new values the world revolves: invisibly it revolves. But around the actors revolve the people and fame: that is 'the way of the world.'

...

"Far from the market place and from fame happens all that is great: far from the market place and from fame the inventors of new values have always dwelt."

--Thus Spoke Zarathustra, Part I, "On the Flies of the Market Place"

Thus Spoke Nietzsche

"There is an instinct for rank that more than anything else, is itself the sign of a high rank; there is a pleasure in nuances of respect that indicates a noble origin and noble habits. The subtlety, quality, and stature of a soul is put dangerously to the test when something of the first rank passes by before the shudders of authority are there to protect it from intrusive clutches and crudeness....Anyone whose task and exercise is the investigation of souls will use this very art, in a variety of forms, to establish the ultimate value of a soul, the unalterable, inborn order of rank it belongs to: this sort of investigator will test out the soul's instinct for respect.

Nietzsche Myths #1

Myth: The "overman" or "superman" (the Ubermensch [note: umlauts are unavailable on MovableType]) is one of Nietzsche's most important ideas, an organizing theme of his work.

Reality: After Zarathustra, the "overman" drops out of the published corpus, except for two brief references: once in the Genealogy, where he describes Napoleon as a synthesis of "Unmensch [inhuman] und Ubermensch...." (GM I:16) and once in Ecce Homo, in the course of discussing Zarathustra. Rather than being a central idea for Nietzsche, it plays a major role only in Zarathustra, but in none of the major works thereafter (Beyond Good and Evil, the Genealogy, Twilight of the Idols, Ecce Homo, etc.). Since Zarathustra is a parody of the New Testament, in which Zarathustra himself plays the role of Christ figure preaching an anti-Christian message, the rhetoric of "teaching" the anti-Christian message lends itself naturally to the image of the Ubermensch. Once the paradodic form is dropped in subsequent works, there is no need for this rather exagerrated image.

To be sure, Nietzsche is very interested in the fate of those he calls higher human beings--as I argue in Nietzsche on Morality, his central charge against morality is that it thwarts their flourishing--but it is quite clear that Nietzsche's paradigm case of a higher human being is Goethe, who receives more--and more positive--references in the Nietzschean corpus than any other figure (as Thomas Brobjer has shown). Acknowledging this plain fact is hardly to sanitize or democratize Nietzsche, since it is equally plain that he assigns great weight to the flourishing of Goethes and none at all to the misery of the multitude that might be required for the former. But this is a far cry from the cartoon Nietzsche who promotes the mythical superman.

Thus Spoke Nietzsche

"When stepped on, a worm doubles up. That is clever. In that way he lessens the probability of being stepped on again. In the language of morality: humility."

--Twilight of the Idols, "Maxims and Arrows," sec. 31.

Thus Spoke Nietzsche

Americans' "breathless haste in working--the true vice of the new world--is already starting to spread to old Europe, making it savage and covering it with a most odd mindlessness. Already one is ashamed of keeping still; long reflection almost gives people a bad conscience. One thinks with a watch in hand, as one eats lunch with an eye on the financial pages--one lives like someone who might always 'miss out on something.' 'Rather do anything than nothing'--even this principle is a cord to strangle all culture and all higher taste....

"For life in a hunt for profit constantly forces people to expend their spirit to the point of exhaustion in continual pretence or out-smarting or forestalling others: the true virtue today is doing something in less time than someone else....

"More and more, work gets all good conscience on its side; the desire for joy already calls itself a 'need to recuperate' and is starting to be ashamed of itself. 'One owes it to one's health'--that is what one says when caught on an excursion in the countryside."

--The Gay Science, sec. 329. (This was written more than 120 years ago.)

UPDATE: A student from Boston University has pointed out to me another, complementary passage from the same book:

How often I see that blindly raging industriousness does
create wealth and reap honors while at the same time depriving
the organs of their subtlety, which alone would make possible
the enjoyment of wealth and honors; also th