Chapter 7

NIETZSCHE

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LECTURE 1: LIFE

Friedrich Nietzsche was of mixed Prussian and Polish origin, and he stressed the Polish side whenever he was particularly disgusted by the Germans.1 He was born on October 15, 1844, at Röcken, near Lützen, in the province of Saxony. For two generations back, all the males on both sides of his family had been Protestant pastors, robust men who lived long lives. An exception was Nietzsche’s father, who died prematurely after falling down a flight of stairs, the blow to his head first driving him mad. Scholars used to debate whether or not Nietzsche’s eventual insanity, which overtook him in 1889 and remained until he died, in 1900, was hereditary; and against the hereditary interpretation it was argued that Nietzsche’s father’s insanity must have resulted from the staircase accident. The whole question exercised the scholars because they thought that if Nietzsche’s insanity was hereditary, then it must have been in some way operative throughout his life, and must therefore always have influenced his thinking. Nietzsche’s thought was scary, and it would have been convenient if the scholars could treat it as a set of lunatic ravings. Today Nietzsche’s thought is no longer so scary. This is either because his then revolutionary ideas and proposals have become more acceptable, or because the sting in his teaching has been interpreted away by many commentaries.

I know little about Nietzsche’s very early years, but I can tell you that upon graduating secondary school, he achieved extremely good results, except in mathematics, at which he was judged “unsatisfactory.” In 1864, at the age of twenty, he became a student in the University of Bonn, and pursued studies in theology and classics. Soon, however, to the consternation of his family, he abandoned theology,2 and devoted himself to classics alone. He also rejected Christianity while still an undergraduate.³

He obtained a professorship at the University of Basle at the precocious age of twenty-four, and soon thereafter met the composer Richard Wagner. Both were passionate Graecophiles,⁴ and their common cultural interests led to a brief but intense friendship, which was intensified further by Nietzsche’s adoration for Wagner’s wife, to whom he addressed ardent love letters after his mind had broken. Nietzsche and Wagner battled together against what they took to be the barrenness of contemporary German culture.

But Nietzsche began to perceive that Wagner was becoming attracted to Christianity, and was throwing in his lot with the nascent proto-Nazi movement. This led to an irrevocable schism between them, finalized by the inaugural operatic festival at Bayreuth in 1876,⁵ where Wagner released his Christianizing works to an audience which was smug and bourgeois, whereas Nietzsche had anticipated a qualitatively fresh cultural explosion at Bayreuth, a sort of Woodstock Festival of Existence. After the estrangement, Nietzsche continued to express to his friends his admiration of Wagner’s achievement, but he felt that Wagner had buckled under the strain of resisting the tide of mediocrity, that he had sold out.

Some sort of break with Wagner was inevitable, if Nietzsche was to live in practice his philosophical teaching, for in Zarathustra and elsewhere he enjoins disciples to reject their teachers: there are always new flames to kindle, new torches to carry. Once the teacher’s creativity has infused you, it is time to abandon his doctrine and forge your own, to make of him an adversary, without forgetting your debt to him. One must not develop or criticize one’s teacher’s thought, but make a bold new beginning, for, Nietzsche says in a letter written in 1868: “One does not write a critique of an outlook on the world; one just either accepts it or does not accept it. To me a third standpoint is unintelligible.”6 In an early work entitled The Future of Our Educational Institutions, he sketches, in the martial language which was to become his hallmark, the right relationship between teacher and student:

[I]f the young man with a thirst for culture stands in need of a philosophical teacher, the teacher stands in no less need of sincere and devoted disciples. Without them he is in danger of succumbing to the hardships and temptations of isolation. [Hardships which, as we shall see, Nietzsche came to know well.] When, however, in spite of all this, leaders and followers, fighting and wounded, have found each other, there is an impassioned feeling of rapture, like the echo of an ever-sounding lyre.⁷

Nietzsche held his professorship at Basle for ten years, giving it up in 1879 partly because of failing health, and partly because he did not enjoy teaching and the academic atmosphere. He was, despite this, much loved by his students. When he refused a handsome offer to go teach elsewhere, they held a torchlight procession in his honor.

Having abandoned his chair, he now embarked on ten years of restless wandering throughout Europe. In this time he suffered long periods of depression, punctuated by spurts of remarkable creative work. The university decently provided him with a small pension, which he spent in northern Italy, the French Riviera, and in his favorite of spots, the Engadine range of lakes and mountains in Austria. He wrote Beyond Good and Evil in 1885–86, and The Genealogy of Morals in 1887. His breakdown occurred early in 1889. He spent the eleven years of his illness first with his mother at Naumburg, and then with his sister at Weimar, where he died on August 25, 1900. His body was taken to his birthplace, Röcken, where he lies buried in the churchyard.

Something must be said about Nietzsche’s sister, before I tell you more about the circumstances in which he composed the two books I have asked you to read.⁸ Elisabeth Nietzsche married a certain Herr Förster, who was an active right-wing nationalist and anti-Semite. She adopted her husband’s poisonous views, and it was she who presided over the publication of Nietzsche’s manuscripts and letters after he had been stricken ill. She pruned and distorted his thoughts, and made them appear proto-Nazi in content. In fact Nietzsche had several times written that the anti-Semites of his day were the lowest grade of humanity, and he regarded the expansionist aspirations of Bismarck’s new German state as a perversion of the drive for power which he constantly extolled. But a doctored Nietzschean corpus reached the public, and Hitler’s scholars were able to claim him as a prophetic precursor, though even they prudently refrained from publishing all of Nietzsche’s works. Many Western scholars, relying on the Försterised version of Nietzsche, and impressed by the amenability to fascist employment of his dicta, also saw him as an episode in the degeneration toward barbarism of Germany, and in recent years he has been regarded in some quarters as a principal cause of the Second World War.

How did Beyond Good and Evil and The Genealogy of Morals come into existence? In 1884 Nietzsche published Thus Spoke Zarathustra, but this long poem, subtitled A Book for All and No One, produced bewilderment and misunderstanding. No one knew what to make of it. At first Nietzsche proposed to rewrite it, for he had never completed it in the first place. But he changed his mind, and decided instead to expound the ideas contained in it in a nonpoetic form. He resolved to explain his philosophy more explicitly.

In June of 1885, after a revitalizing stay in Venice, where he recuperated from the disappointing reception accorded Zarathustra, Nietzsche returned to the Engadine, and set before himself the task of considering European moral values. He suspected that the valuations people made were connected with the type and amount of biological vitality they possessed. Some anticipation of this outlook may be found in the thought of Hobbes and Spinoza. Hobbes believed that “good” and “bad” were just names people gave for what they respectively desired or avoided. And he believed that objects were desired in the measure that they accelerated the motion of the blood, rejected in the measure that they impeded the heart’s functioning. Nietzsche was after a more concrete typology of values, hoping to link particular value judgments with particular aspects of the physiological constitution. He also hoped to judge the value of the values, using as criterion the kind and degree of energy possessed by those who were attracted to them. (Hobbes had not undertaken this, since he merely accepted men’s valuations as an irreducible fact about them which it would be confused to subject to ulterior assessment.) With these projects in mind, Nietzsche studied a book called Biological Problems, by a certain Rolph, in the expectation that he would find out about quanta of bodily energy and the sorts of attitudes they determined. But he found the work difficult, and fell victim to unrelenting insomnia. He never returned to precise physiological investigations. He continued to connect morality with questions of health, but we shall have to ask whether he meant this literally or metaphorically.

Having abandoned these researches, he left the Engadine for Germany, to bid farewell to his treacherous sister, who was departing for Paraguay with her skunk of a husband. After further wanderings, he arrived at Nice in November 1885, aiming to escape the harshness of winter by snuggling up in the Mediterranean climate. He wrote to a friend: “Here I am returned to Nice, that is to say, to reason.”9 But his initial feeling of hope and well-being gave way to disgust with the petty bourgeois surroundings of the little pension where he lived. And in late November, Nice became unusually cold, he couldn’t pay for the fuel he needed to warm himself, and he longed for the stoves of Germany. But somehow, and in conformity with his Spartan teachings, he conquered the suffering his weak frame was undergoing. His depression was displaced by a period of tranquillity, and at the turn of the year he was able to write to his sister, “I have begun to sleep again, without narcotics.”¹⁰

From January to March of 1886, his melancholy dispelled, he arranged his notes and papers, and decided to call his projected work Beyond Good and Evil, subtitling it Prelude to a Philosophy of the Future. But having completed the book, he sought in vain for a publisher. Houses in Leipzig and Berlin refused him, and he wrote to Elisabeth: “There is nothing else for me to do but to tie up my manuscript with a string and put it in a drawer.”¹¹

He went to Venice in the spring of 1886, but even here he continued to suffer. The bright sunshine stung the delicate nerves of his failing eyes. He shut himself up in his room, and could not enjoy the invigorating Italian weather. His thoughts moved to Germany, to the shades of its majestic forests. He began to wish to visit his mother, and to confront the Leipzig publishers who had refused his manuscript. So he left Venice for Leipzig, where he negotiated without success. Feeling it essential that his book should appear, he published it out of his own pocket, a step which entailed additional hardship.

He hurried from Leipzig to Naumburg, where he met his sad and lonely mother, who had lived by herself since her daughter’s departure for Paraguay. His sister had deviously sent his writings to her, and she was distressed by their violent impieties. He gently advised her against reading his work, saying, “It is not for you that I write.”¹² He spent a week at home, and was unable to restrain himself from giving utterance to his iconoclastic ideas, so by the time he took leave of his mother she was sadder still than when he had arrived.

Now he left Germany for the last time, never to return again of his own volition. He fled to the Engadine, whose mountain air had so often been salutary in the past. Here, in late July 1886, he experienced the first symptoms of the disorder which, two and a half years later, would precipitate a complete mental collapse. He stays in a mountain hotel, and the company is pleasant, but it is inadequate compensation for his lack of creativity. So in the autumn of 1886 he takes off again, this time for the Genoese coast.

In August 1886, having despaired of a hearing in Germany, he had sent copies of Beyond Good and Evil to two eminent foreign scholars. These were George Brandes, a Dane, and a follower of Kierkegaard, who responded, but only after a considerable time. The other was the French historian Hippolyte Taine. On October 17, 1886, Taine wrote him a gracious letter, praising the work, and this, a portent of the fame that was to come, gave him a much-needed respite, and filled him with joy. A friend visiting him near Genoa at this time, having not seen him for a year and half, reported that though he was physically emaciated, he was still wonderfully spontaneous and full of affection.

In the winter of 1887, he left Italy for Nice, but returned in the spring to Lake Maggiore. By now his health was in every respect impaired. He required a regime of baths, massages, and mineral waters. These he found at Coire in Switzerland, where he surrounded himself with doctors. In Switzerland he announced a new work. Herr Widman, a certain Swiss critic, had just published an attack on Beyond Good and Evil. Spurred by the welcome existence of an adversary, Nietzsche produced three remarkable essays in fifteen days, and these constitute what we know as The Genealogy of Morals. On the title page he explained that the book was intended to supplement and elucidate Beyond Good and Evil. On July 18, 1887, he wrote to a friend from Sils-Maria, in the Engadine:

I have energetically employed these last days, which were better. I have drawn up a little piece of work, which, as I think, puts the problems of my last work in a clear light. Everyone has complained of not having understood me. And the hundred copies sold [of Beyond Good and Evil] do not permit me to doubt the truth of this. … Perhaps this little book which I am completing today will help to sell some copies of my last book … Perhaps my publishers will someday benefit from me. As for myself, I know only too well that when people begin to understand me, I shall not benefit from it.13

On July 20 he sent the manuscript to the publisher, but recalled it on July 24 to touch it up, and spent the rest of an arduous summer doing so. In September the corrected proofs were dispatched. The Engadine became cold. The wandering philosopher sought a new clime and new labor. Venice carried the day. But he meandered unproductively through lanes and piazzas. I shall not pursue him through the remainder of his travels, which consumed just over another year.

Franz Overbeck was an old friend of Nietzsche’s, a scholar whom Nietzsche had known in the Basle days. On January 9, 1889, Overbeck was sitting with his wife at the window of his house in Basle. Suddenly he noticed that the old historian, Jacob Burkhardt, also a former confederate of Nietzsche’s, was making his way to his, Overbeck’s, front door. He wondered why, because Burkhardt was not a friend of his. Nietzsche was all that they had in common. In a flash Overbeck feared that Nietzsche was in some way the cause of the visit. For some weeks he had had disquieting letters from Nietzsche, who was now at Turin. In the event, Burckhardt showed him a long letter which all too poignantly confirmed Overbeck’s suspicions. Nietzsche was raving mad. “I am Ferdinand de Lesseps,” he wrote, “I am Prado, I am Chambige [two assassins then figuring in the French newspapers]; I have been buried twice this autumn.”14 He also said, “I would rather be a Professor at Basle than God but my ego is not so great that I can ignore the world crisis. I have summoned a meeting of all European chancelleries. Just now I am having all anti-Semites shot.”¹⁵

Some few minutes later Overbeck received a similar communication, and all of Nietzsche’s friends were informed of the tragedy. He had written to each of them. To Brandes, who had eventually responded to Beyond Good and Evil, he said, “Friend George, since you have discovered me, it is not wonderful to find me: what is now difficult is to lose me.” This was signed “The Crucified.”¹⁶ To Peter Gast, a composer, who had taken an interest in musical compositions by Nietzsche: “A mon maestro Pietro. Sing me a new song. The world is clear and all the skies rejoice,”¹⁷ and to Wagner’s wife: “Ariane, I love you.”¹⁸

Overbeck started for Italy immediately. He found Nietzsche banging on a piano with his elbow, wailing. Overbeck managed to bring him back to Basle and introduced him into a mental hospital, to which his mother came. She took him away with her.

The first of his remaining ten years were agony, but he achieved a more tranquil state in time, without becoming less insane. He would from time to time recollect the past. “Have I not written fine books?”19 he inquired pathetically. Upon seeing a portrait of Wagner he said, “Him I loved very much.”²⁰

One day his sister, sitting beside him, burst into tears. “Elisabeth,” he started, “Why do you cry? Are we not happy?”²¹

His intellect was dead, but his disposition, toward the end, was sweet and charming. One day a young man who was publishing Nietzsche’s work went with him on a promenade. Nietzsche noticed a little girl by the side of the road, and she captured his fancy. He walked up to her, stopped, and with his hand drew back the hair which lay low on her forehead. He contemplated her face and asked, in deep contentment, “Is it not the picture of innocence?”²² Shortly after, on August 25, 1900, he died, at Weimar.

LECTURE 2

1. Nietzsche asks us to journey with him to a land beyond good and evil. Before joining him, let us perch on a tower on its borders in order to view the general lines of this foreign terrain.

Nietzsche proposes to do moral philosophy in an unorthodox way. Let us begin with a concise statement of the difference between him and most of the other moral philosophers it will be your privilege or burden to study. I say most, not all, because although Nietzsche differs, in ways I shall specify, very radically from Mill and Hume and Hobbes and Joseph Butler and possibly Kant and contemporary moral philosophers, he is much closer to the Greeks, and to Spinoza. What is the difference I have in mind? Whereas most moral philosophers ask what is the good for man, treating man as their fixed reference point, Nietzsche is asking something quite different: what is the good of man. In the way you might ask, not what’s good for the flowers, but what’s the good of them. The others ask what will satisfy mankind, or what actions, given man’s needs and nature including the needs and nature of his fellows, ought men to undertake, Nietzsche is not taking man’s nature as given, and he is asking, quite differently, what does a man have to be like in order himself to be of value. And he finds paradigms of valuable men in great historical figures, who are great not because they benefit others, but because their constitutions are valuable in themselves. In the Twilight of the Idols (9.44) he says: “The great human being is a finale.”23 To exhibit his greatness, we display not what his presence led to or sponsored, but the majesty that his presence, in itself, was. So that Nietzsche writes in The Will to Power, “The value of a human being … does not lie in his usefulness: for it would continue to exist even if there were nobody to whom he could be useful.”²⁴ The instructions generated by a utilitarian or Kantian moral code could not be followed by a marooned philanthropist or saint, because the instructions presuppose that he to whom they are directed is located amongst other men and called upon to relate himself righteously to them. But the Nietzschean saint or hero could continue to be that in virtue of which Nietzsche honors him in any kind of environment, without adjusting himself to it.

This shift in perspective, from what is good and right for man, to what is the good of man, the concern to make this shift, is prompted by Nietzsche’s sincere and considerable anxiety that contemporary European man is losing his value, is ceasing to be valuable, is being diminished in substance, and precisely because of the supremacy of value systems constructed from the point of view which takes human nature for granted and ministers to it. In an early essay on “The Greek State,” written before Nietzsche had addressed morals in any systematic way, the roots of this anxiety are discernible in his enunciation of an aristocratic political philosophy:

In order that there may be a broad, deep and fruitful soil for the development of art, the enormous majority must, in the service of a minority, be slavishly subjected to life’s struggle, to a greater degree than their own wants necessitate. At their cost, through the surplus of their labour, that privileged class is to be relieved from the struggle for existence, in order to create and to satisfy a new world of want. Accordingly we must accept this cruel-sounding truth, that slavery is the essence of Culture.²⁵

So if we accept people’s requirements, and minister to them, we serve men at the expense of man, at the expense of the development of the genius of the species. In fact the passage I have just recited is the secret teaching of Plato’s Republic, a book which purports to design a community which will satisfy everybody, but in which—it is not difficult to prove—Plato is in fact aiming at a social pattern which will liberate the best human beings as much as possible, at whatever cost to the many. Now in a Europe resonating with ideas of democracy and equality, in a Europe in which the masses are making claims, in Nietzsche’s Europe, the prospect for excellence in the species must, on this view, be limited. Hence the particular urgency of an inquiry into what man can be.

But that was a historical aside. Let me pick up the first theme I was expounding, the formal difference, not just the difference in attitude to society or to contemporary men, between Nietzsche and other moralists. Most moral philosophers take the nature of man as their point of departure, and relate their proposals to this datum. Nietzsche, instead, wants to scrutinize the credentials of the datum. He does not say, “Since men are of this character, this is what is good for them.” He asks whether the way they are is a good way to be. It is perhaps ignoble and base, all-too-human? Must it not perhaps be rejected, replaced, by a different sort of human nature, a superhuman nature? Other philosophers take human interests for granted, and some contemporary philosophers, like Mrs. Foot, do so so extremely that they judge it a necessary truth that if X serves human interests then X is good.26 But what if we find this creature and its interests revolting? Still other philosophers, like Professor Winch, do not believe in permanent historically invariant human interests which underlie the goals men pursue in particular societies: they see their goals as rooted in the life of their society, in what they call its form of life, and once a satisfactory connection with the form of life is made, the practice connected to it is justified, or at least not amenable to criticism.²⁷ Wittgenstein, Winch’s master, said, “What has to be accepted, the given … forms of life.”²⁸ But what if a certain form of life nauseates us when we contemplate it? In either case the Nietzschean response is that the phenomena which for the philosophers ground values require themselves to be grounded, or, if found worthless, then declared incapable of grounding values. So when the moral philosophy of utilitarianism argues from the alleged fact that men are so constituted as to desire happiness, Nietzsche disputed both the necessity and the value of that constitution. He rejects its necessity because he believes that men are concentrations of power which can turn in many direction, happiness being only one of them, and he indeed says, somewhere, that “Man does not desire happiness; only the Englishman does.”²⁹ And he rejects its value because he believes that happiness is not a conspicuously elevated condition. The first riposte to such moralities as the utilitarian is: if the nature of man, as it is at present, can be shown to be worthless, then why strive to minister to its needs? Before developing moral rules adherence to which will satisfy human needs, one must ask whether the needs of this creature deserve to be satisfied.

2. Now that we have acquired a preliminary understanding of the project which occupies Nietzsche, we are entitled and obliged to raise three difficult questions: (A) How do we find out what sort of creatures men are? (B) How do we decide what sort of creature man ought to be? (C) Is it possible for man to transform himself into that sort of creature? These questions lead us beyond good and evil, because to frame them is to undermine the authority of the given structure of humanity, on which judgments of good and evil are based.

3. (A) How do we find out what sort of creatures men are? How do we diagnose the nature of man? In general, diagnoses are based on symptoms. What symptoms does Nietzsche think are relevant to the present inquiry? The symptoms are the moral precepts men affirm. And here is why the metaphor of “symptom” is apt: symptoms both lead the physician to the disease responsible for them, and they are what he seeks to remove in treating the disease. We seek to replace current values by better ones; we seek what Nietzsche calls a transvaluation of values. We must see what human type the values men currently espouse betoken, and we may hope for a salutary change in values as a result of an appropriate change in that type: indeed it is the type we care about, about the values only as its index and its expression.

In a sense, we traverse a route traveled by conventional philosophers, but in the opposite direction. Mill begins with inclinations and desires and ends with values; we begin with values and trace their genesis or genealogy in needs and desires in human strengths and weaknesses, only we feel differently about the strengths than we do about the weaknesses, while for Mill, they are on a par.

4. (B) We have now said something about the answer to the first question, how do we know what man is like? We turn to the second: How can we decide what sort of creature man ought to be or become?

Where do we obtain our new tablets, our fresh standards? On top of what mountain, and in the utterance of which God or lawgiver? Nietzsche does not answer this question directly, but a fairly definite answer is implied, or a set of answers, for he does not always seem to say the same thing. Sometimes the canons are aesthetic: the character and dispositions that would make a man worthwhile are those which it would be rewarding to contemplate, which would fill us with wonder and awe, induce in us the response we feel in the presence of great works of art. Few men give us aesthetic joy: there are the Leonardos, the Caesars, the Napoleons, and in paintings of such men what is painted is itself an aesthetic marvel; but most men offend against our sense of smell, make us turn away, unless we feel we have to stay. As Nietzsche says in The Genealogy of Morals (3.14):

One who smells not only with his nose but also with his eyes and ears will notice everywhere these days an air as of a lunatic asylum or sanatorium. (I am thinking of all the current cultural enterprises of man, of every kind of Europe now existing.) It is the diseased who imperil mankind.30

So in this passage, and in many others, the aesthetic criterion is linked to a conception of health. It is the healthy specimen, and the bounteous overflowing strength of the truly great that provide joy to the onlooker: it is the diseased specimens who stimulate disgust. It needs no emphasizing that this is not health in the NHS sense. In what sense we shall have later to explore. But we can at least say that in some sense the Gods of beauty and health supersede the God of utility. We shall later question whether the marriage Nietzsche has arranged between his two Gods is really consummated in his thought.

5. (C) And now we take up our third question: Is it possible for man to transform himself into the kind of creature that earns Nietzsche’s approval? If you tell men what they ought to be like, can there be any sense in your recommendation if you are unable to tell them how to become like that, if, indeed, it is impossible for them to become like that?

To ask these questions is to raise the status of the time-honored philosophical maxim “Ought implies can,” the principle that sentences of the form “You ought to Φ commit their utterers to sentences of the form “You can Φ.” Now I do not think this principle is, as it stands valid. There may be no point in telling someone that he ought to do something which he is unable to do, but that may not diminish the validity of the ought-judgment. If you have no means of getting to the Costa Brava, it may be futile to tell you that you ought to visit it as a remedy for your illness, but it could still be true. The doctor might say, “Of course, you ought to go to the Costa Brava, but I know you can’t.” Or, in case you think this applies only to so-called nonmoral oughts, here is what would be considered a moral example: a man could say, “You ought to give him a hand, he’s in trouble. Can you?” And if the answer is a truthful no, the adviser’s advice does not become false, just without practical use. To be sure, I cannot accuse you of being foolish or, in a moral case, blame you for what you failed to do, if you were unable to do it. If you fail to do the right thing but couldn’t have helped it, then you are not culpable. But what you are not culpable for is precisely your failure to do what you ought to have done.

So value judgments do not imply the judgments of possibility that are obtained by putting “can” in the “ought”-space. And, significantly, this is abundantly true in the realm of art. The sculpture may be deficient in specifiable respects, we can see that it ought to have been other than it is, although the sculptor’s talent may have been too limited to enable him to do it right. So we might decide, having accepted Nietzsche’s teaching, that most men just are base and ignoble, even if we also decide that this is inevitably so. We might then shrug our shoulders and inefficaciously lament the matter. We might decide that we ought to be other than we are without seeing any way out of the way we are. It might then be pointless to try to realize new values, but we could still understand and affirm them.31

6. Happily, Nietzsche does tell us that we, or at least some of us, can change ourselves, though his explanation how we can do so reflects a pervasive incoherence in his philosophy of mind. Let me first indicate the answer, and then point to its difficulties. You will remember that I said Nietzsche rejects not only the worth of human nature as typically constituted, but also the necessity of that constitution. This suggests that he believes there is an answer to the question how a man can change himself. His answer depends on his notion of power. We are all vested with a fund of force or energy; indeed each of us is nothing more than a quantity of force or energy. This force is differentiated into different dispositions in different people. It is a repository of strength or power which may be harnessed by us to create new dispositions. We are once again confronting an aesthetic turn of thought, but this time we have to do not, as before, with the aesthetics of contemplation, but with the aesthetics of creation. We can regard ourselves as raw material out of which we can fashion something noble. Most of us are infected with petty hatreds and resentments: rancor, or ressentiment, is, for Nietzsche, the mainspring of all-too-human values. But these passions are not stable elements with which our values must come to terms. For they are forms of power, power which can take other forms, and which can be made to take other forms by at least some of us.

His belief in this has made scholars judge Nietzsche as a forerunner of Sartre’s existentialism, though Sartre’s thought is also distinguishable from his. You will have heard of Sartre’s slogan: Existence precedes essence. This announces that we make our own natures, that we are deposited featureless in the world, and that the features we come to have are created by us and last only as long as we sustain them: our creation of self is a continuous creation. Sartre’s proclamation of this doctrine may indeed make it apt to call Nietzsche an existentialist, where we take Sartre as paradigmatic of that point of view. But notice two differences: whatever Nietzsche means by power, his attribution of it to the human substance means that we are not nothing, as Sartre thinks. I am not going to explain what Sartre means by saying that we are nothing, but one thing he means is that we lack the being, the determinacy of quality, possessed by all that is not conscious. This contrasts with Nietzsche, whose assertion that we are formations of power is an application of his somewhat Schopenhauerian doctrine that power is all there is in the universe; a tree, or a rock, or a rainbow is also power. In our case, organization of power is associated with consciousness, but consciousness lacks the central role it has in Sartre’s philosophy. Nietzsche calls it our most fallible and weakest organ, whereas Sartre rests his whole view of man, including his dictum that existence precedes essence, on it.

Sartre’s philosophy has mysteries which this is not the time to unravel. Nietzsche’s philosophy is mysterious in other ways. And now let me justify my complaint that there is incoherence in Nietzsche’s answer to the question, how we may change ourselves. If Nietzsche had really meant that we must redirect the power that we have, that would be all right. But he regards that formulation as a misleading figure, since his literal teaching is not that we have power, but that we are power. And this means that a distinction between the self and its energy cannot be drawn, and hence, so it seems to me, that the self cannot be called upon to rechannel its energy. In one place, and in consonance with what he literally believed, Nietzsche said that to appeal to a conqueror for mercy is like asking a river not to flow. Perhaps by sophisticated moves one could reconcile such teaching with the idea that man may survey and make his nature, but I have not discovered the method. As far as I can see, there is contradiction in Nietzsche’s thought.

Now it is not as though something he says here or there conflicts with his main doctrine. It is not that kind of contradiction. It is a matter of thoroughgoing commitment to two conceptualizations which cannot both be sustained. Nietzsche wants what he says in figure to be literally true, even though taken literally, it contradicts the literal truth of which it is a figure. If we were exploring Nietzsche’s metaphysics, we would concentrate on the pole of his thought at which men and their power are identified. Since we are exploring not metaphysics but morals, I shall, for the most part, ignore the identification doctrine, and allow Nietzsche his answer to our third question. It is sometimes profitable to let mercy season reason. If we insisted on the contradiction I have pointed to, we could lose interest in a lot in Nietzsche that is interesting. Now Nietzsche is not averse to men doing scandalous things. So I shall now commit the scandal, for such it is in a philosophy lecture, of commending to you the poet Walt Whitman’s reply to the criticism that he contradicted himself: “Do I contradict myself? Very well then I contradict myself, (I am large, I contain multitudes.)”32

7. In answering the three questions I adverted to symptoms and diagnoses, and I exercised the concept of health. Let us look into this constellation of images. Nietzsche is, in a manner, setting himself up as a physician, a doctor to the human soul. But he is a special kind of physician. He aims not at providing medicine or therapy for his patients, but at showing them how they can cease being patients, how they can protect themselves against illness. In some ways he is like a physician who proposes exercise. Such a physician is asking the patient to remold his body, Nietzsche, to remold himself entire. The run of moralists tell us only how to deal with ourselves as we are. We are to organize a harmonious life by employing the categories and judgments of good and evil. Nietzsche would rather have us so transformed that we no longer need to reckon with good and evil, to make moral judgments, to reject and recommend. The image of the river about which it makes no sense to suggest an alternative course functions not only as an analogy to his philosophy of mind but also as an ideal of life to be attained.

Now in his attempts to assess human nature, Nietzsche is faced with a problem all psychiatry must face: namely, what is to count as health in the spiritual dimension, when is a soul diseased, what is mens sana? Standards of physical health are comparatively easy to establish. A healthy organism lives long and easily performs its characteristic functions. These criteria can conflict: there may be drugs and regimens which put brakes on performance but perpetuate the life span, and other procedures which bolster the metabolism but carry with their application premature death. But even though the criteria conflict, what they are is clear. And, moreover, conflict is rare. For evolutionary reasons, it must be rare. Creatures bent on using their bodies for life-diminishing purposes will tend to die off.

But where are the analogous criteria for the health of the soul? The first physical criterion was longevity. Unless we believe, as Nietzsche in no relevant sense did, in the possibility but not the guarantee of immortality, which could be won by directing our faculties to certain projects, there can be no psychic criterion comparable to the first physical one. If the soul perishes with the body, we must, as doctors to the soul, look to the other kind of criterion, and ask, what are the soul’s proper functions? But here there is no agreement as there is in the case of what the legs or arms or stomach is for. The limits of the uses of our bodily organs, and the conditions of use under which they prosper, are fairly narrow, a matter, for the most part, of scientific observation. But the energy of intellect and will and feeling can run in many divergent channels, and associated with this fact is the fact that different projects have appeal to different men. It seems impossible to appeal to a notion of psychic health in order to assess human nature, since there is no agreed set of purposes for which our minds are to be used, or which should capture our hearts, from which we could derive what a healthy soul must be like, and even the most smug of psychiatrists are dogmatic only about what condition of mind is bad, unwilling to stipulate in any detail what condition is good.

So because the appeal to health is tenuous, Nietzsche’s values always veer in the aesthetic direction, the two canons of wondrous to contemplate and creative. He continues to cloak his aesthetic norms in the language of hygienic regimen. But in substance the aesthetic orientation takes precedence. The soul is not seen as beautiful or graceful because it is healthy, but simply called healthy because it is experienced as radiating dignity and grace. Indeed, Nietzsche somewhere says that health is not the absence of suffering but the activity of overcoming it, and that activity is valued for its creative aspect. Remember that in my sketch of Nietzsche’s life I reported that he gave up his research into correlations between physiology and moral precepts. There is no soul physiology whose proper alignment dictates valid values. Aesthetics defeats hygiene in the final reckoning. And the moving pronunciation which I shall now quote from Nietzsche’s Birth of Tragedy presides over his entire oeuvre:

For this one thing must above all be clear to us, to our humiliation and exaltation … that we have our highest dignity in our significance as works of art—for only as an aesthetic phenomenon is existence and the world eternally justified: — while of course our consciousness of this our significance hardly differs from the kind of consciousness which the soldiers painted on canvas have of the battle represented thereon.33

Before adding a comment on this passage let me protect you against a silly misunderstanding of it. I would not insult you by suggesting you may be suffering from it if I had not myself suffered from it for about seven years. By consciousness of soldiers Nietzsche means of the living soldiers who are represented in the painting, not of their painted representations. Having cleared that up, all I want to say is that in the passage there is both obviousness and paradox. Now: obviousness because if you demand a justification of the whole shebang, of the entire show, then since there is nothing outside it that it might serve, how but aesthetically, taken by itself in its uniqueness, could it pass muster? And paradox: because to whom is it supposed to afford aesthetic satisfaction, who can even recognize its value? Ex hypothesi not to us as individuals in it—see what is said about the soldiers. And there can be no God outside it not only because Nietzsche didn’t believe in one but also for logical reasons: we are supposed to be justifying all existence here. Were there a God, he would be part of the universe to be justified. So if we pick at this passage there are problems. So let us leave it as it is. And anyway aesthetics functions not only in the mind-splittingly total way but also in the more modest dimension of our evaluation of single people, our theme to which we now return.

8. Men’s judgments of good and evil, the nostra they cling to as medicines of the soul, must be judged according as they are healthy or unhealthy, or, more honestly, as they are beautiful or ugly. Of a judgment about good and evil we must ask from what human disposition does it flow, and what type is its acceptance likely to foster? The health or illness of disposition and type then determines the worth of the judgment. So in The Antichrist Nietzsche asserts that “what is bad … [is] … all that is born of weakness, or envy, or revenge”34 because these are considered ugly and poisonous dispositions.

“All that is born of weakness.” This standard provokes us, patient academics, to ask whether Nietzsche is not committing a famous mistake which pious moral philosophers have called, “the genetic fallacy.” This supposed error involves estimating the worth of a product by reference to the worth of what produced it. It would be committed in declaring a work of music musically poor because it was written by a fascist, where this is the justification, not the explanation of the truth, of the musical judgment. Such a consideration, opponents of the genetic fallacy maintain, can never suffice. A thing must be judged on its own merits, not on the merits of what brought it into being. Now Nietzsche is charged with committing the genetic fallacy because he took as defective judgments which emerged from weak and petty creatures, simply because they emerged from them. I shall defend Nietzsche in two stages: (1) I shall question whether such appeals to origin or genesis are universally fallacious. (2) I shall show that Nietzsche is concerned not only with the genesis but also with the function of value judgments which their genesis may reveal. One remark before beginning this defense: let no academic cretin both attack Nietzsche’s thought because it was produced by a figure who lived on the border of insanity in the land of misery and accuse Nietzsche of committing the genetic fallacy. Plenty of Nietzsche-revilers would like to commit the inconsistency of doing both. The slyest way of doing so would be to say, Nietzsche judges ideas by their genesis, by the type of spirit that produced them; we shall judge his ideas by this standard. I impose on you as an exercise the question how such a devious critic may be rebutted.

Let us take a case where the genetic fallacy is unquestionably committed. I present you with what purports to be a proof of the Pythagorean theorem. I also tell you it was written at 7:00 p.m. yesterday by Wolfgang Bierquaffer. As it happens you were yesterday in the same pub as Bierquaffer, and you noticed that between five o’clock and five to seven he drank ten pints of Guinness. He doesn’t have a prodigious capacity for alcohol, and by 7:00 p.m. he revealed all the signs of inebriation. So you say to me: that proof is faulty, it must have holes in it, because there were holes in the brain of the would-be geometrician who produced it. Obviously, this would be rash. For Wolfgang Bierquaffer may, despite his condition, have hit on a proper demonstration. Indeed a correct proof of the Pythagorean theorem may, through a bizarre ministration of Providence, appear on a piece of paper as a result of a certain coalescence and disaggregation of ink spots, after someone has spilled ink. No account of the origin of the demonstration can settle the question of its validity. That depends on examining the demonstration alone.35

Why was the genetic fallacy committed here? Because there was an independent means of considering the validity of the proof, by reference to the accepted geometry. Its availability guaranteed the ultimate irrelevance of Bierquaffer’s state when he penned the proof. But now let us take another kind of case. Suppose it is discovered that they only believe in God who have had a certain sort of toilet training, or who, as children, were at the mercy of a tyrannical father. Now the content of their belief, to wit that God exists, may, as regards its truth, be independent of the origin of the belief. But here, unlike in the geometrical case, we lack a ready instrument for settling the truth of the claim. It is natural to abridge the significance of imputations of genetic fallacy in this domain. We might declare that even if a belief in God is not proved false by its origin, it is discredited by its origin. The assertor of the claim may, for all we know, have hit on a truth about the universe, but the explanation why he asserted it makes that most unlikely. (Karl Sternian replies to reductive moves against religion prove little.) Moreover, in a domain like the religious, the reasons for holding the belief seem essential to the nature of the belief itself, so that if the genetic story shows the official reasons to be spuriously such, it taints the belief as well. And the case of morals seems more readily assimilable to the case of religion than to matters of geometry. So there seems little trace of the genetic fallacy when a moral philosopher like Nietzsche discredits a moral conviction on the ground that only the weak and sickly tend to hold it. We may surely see sense in what he said in Human, All Too Human (1.10):

Directly the origins of religion, art, and morals have been so described that one can explain them without having recourse to metaphysical concepts either at the beginning or along the way, the strongest interest in [metaphysical problems] ceases.36

One last point. There are many modes of the relation between the derived and the derivation. One mode is the expressive, where we can say of the product that it is an expression of what produced it. Now the relationship between an expression and what it is an expression of is particularly intimate—you cannot place one on one side and the other on the other. They interpenetrate and affect each other’s correct description. Hence insofar as values may be seen as expressive of personality, it is fair to draw conclusions about the values by studying the personality. Studying the personality is, to exaggerate a little, a way of studying the values.

The second point in my defense of Nietzsche is that he is not appealing to genesis alone but also to the function of judgments respecting good and evil. He not only asks, from what disposition do they arise? But also: to what disposition will their acceptance lead? Though, as I shall show in a moment, Nietzsche explicitly separated these questions, they are in fact closely allied. For it is a fair guess that if a man makes a judgment because he has a certain disposition, then following that judgment will reinforce and intensify the original disposition. Unable to cope with sexuality, I judge that it is evil: following my judgment is likely to incapacitate me further in the erotic field, to augment my aversion. So genesis may be a clue to function or effect, and no one says that there is, in addition to the genetic fallacy, a functional fallacy. For it is always appropriate to ask of something when considering its value, “To what use is it put? What does it lead to or result in?” This is a staple of evaluative reflection.

In the preface to The Genealogy of Morals questions about the genesis and the function of values receive separate mention: “Under what conditions did man construct the value judgments good and evil?” That is the genetic question. “And what is their intrinsic worth? Have they thus far benefited or retarded mankind?” 37 That is the functional question. And somewhere near the beginning of the book: “morals as effect, as symptom, as mask, as hypocrisy, as disease, as misunderstanding; but also morals as cause, as remedy, as stimulant, as hindrance, as poison.”³⁸ Finally, Nietzsche asks (preface 3), “Do they betoken misery, curtailment, degeneracy, or, on the contrary, power, fullness of being, energy, courage in the face of life, and confidence in the future?”³⁹ The word “betoken” is conveniently ambiguous here. It means “mean.” When we ask what value judgments mean, what is their import, we ask what constitution they spring from, and what constitution they produce, what constitution springs from them. We ask both the genetic and the functional question. Suppose I say, “Clouds mean rain” and also “People with umbrellas means rain.” In the first case I point to function or result, in the second to genesis or origin. Nietzsche’s questions point to both. As a historian he is mainly interested in genesis. As a moralist he is interested in both, and in function insofar as his ire is aroused by what he thinks clinging to the values we have will lead to.

9. Talking of the function of value judgments seems identical with talking of their utility, and since we know that Nietzsche is opposed to utilitarianism, we must pause and sort things out, to forestall confusion. The difference is this: the utilitarian is interested in what is useful as productive of pleasure, of content, and Nietzsche is interested in what is useful as productive of men who have hygienically and aesthetically praiseworthy dispositions. And a man whose dispositions are bent to the search for pleasure is one whom Nietzsche would condemn as base and all-too-human. All-too-human, because all-too-animal.

It is true that Nietzsche says that values which are connected with miserly dispositions must be repudiated. He believes that they must be rejected in favor of values connected with healthy soul-stuff. But it is important to note that Nietzsche many times evinces a respect for values-as-such. That’s to say, he prefers men who create tablets, even if these are forged out of ugly feelings, to men who fester in their disease and do not engage in the value enterprise at all. Thus he says in The Genealogy of Morals (1.8) first that the vengeance and hatred of the Jews was the deepest and sublimest hatred in human history since it gave birth to ideals and a new set of values. He pays them this tribute, though he rejects the values because they are rooted in hatred.40

Let us now raise once more the question, how can we arrive at standards of good and bad, healthy and diseased, and this time seek a new route for our answer. Let us adopt, for the moment, a linguistic approach to the problem. There are certain things of which we can say that they are good and bad, but not good and evil. An apple, for example, goes bad. We do not say that it goes evil. Now what is meant by calling an apple bad? Well, a bad apple is rotten. It is bad to eat. It is bad for a human being to eat. It is bad for a human being to eat if he wants nourishment and pleasant sensations of taste. These contextual qualifications are required to give sense to the judgment that an apple is bad: otherwise we could not speak of apples going bad, only of becoming more and more ripe. Now Nietzsche’s ethic of good and bad is, in part, an attempt to assimilate people to apples. People are sound, healthy, good, or they are rotten. But what are the other terms in relation to which the health or rottenness of a human being is guaranteed? In the case of the apple, the guarantees were given by what kind of apple it is suitable to eat. What corresponds to edibility when we speak of the soundness or rottenness of a human being? Sometimes it seems that aesthetics gives the answer. A bad or rotten human being is one whose behavior it is disgusting to witness. So a slave, who is good by the standards of good and evil, because he is acquiescent, humble, respectful to his master, may not be good by the standards of good and bad, because his existence affords aesthetic displeasure. But to whom does his existence bring displeasure? We know he is displeasing to Nietzsche, and probably displeasing, aesthetically, to the masters. But he is probably not displeasing to people with equally servile temperaments. The analogy with rotten apples breaks down, since all people find the same apples sound and rotten. It emerges that Nietzsche is merely proposing a new set of values, not revealing a new value plane outside the accepted one from which he can assess the latter. In other words, it seems to emerge that his doctrine of good and bad is simply putting new content into the forms of good and evil. Except that he claims even slaves must reject themselves. And this means he values humanity highly—“he who despises. …”41

10. I shall begin by summarizing what I have said about Nietzsche up to this point. First, I pointed out the radical diversion of perspective his moral philosophy involves. Instead of asking what is valuable for man, he wants to know under what conditions man himself is valuable. He seeks not what is good for man, but asks what is the good of man? He denies that a man has value in the measure that he is useful to others: he rejects utilitarianism. He is loath to take human nature as his starting point. For this, he feels, may be ignoble and base, all-too-human. The human interests which philosophers like Mill take for granted—this is precisely what Nietzsche submits to criticism. He challenges the rights of the physical and emotional needs by reference to which more orthodox moralists justify their proposals.

Utilitarians argue that men by nature desire happiness. Nietzsche questions both the necessity and the value of such a constitution.

Given the intransigence, three difficulties face him: (1) How do we find out what sort of creatures men are? (2) How can we decide what sort of creature man ought to be, ought to transform himself into? (3) How is it possible to undertake this project of self-transformation?

(1) The symptoms which help us to diagnose human nature are the moral precepts men affirm. We find out what men are like by considering what they value. We do not, like Mill, build value on desires and propensities. We dig under the values to disclose these as their foundation. We show how pompous moral assertions originate in and minister to quite detestable traits in the ordinary run of folk.

(2) We answer this by applying fresh standards to men’s needs and desires, instead of treating them as basic. But where do we get these new standards? Sometimes they are aesthetic canons: that man is worthwhile whom it is edifying to contemplate. The appeal to aesthetic canons is connected with an elusive doctrine of soul hygiene. The healthy provide aesthetic satisfaction; the sickly stimulate disgust in the sensitive man. But we showed how the connection between health and beauty is a tenuous one, and how it falls apart on closer inspection.

(3) Having told men what they ought to be like, can we tell them how to become so? First I argued that we might not be able to do so, even though the judgment expressed in answer to the second question was valid. We might decide that we ought to be other than we are, without seeing any way out of being the way we are. It would then be pointless to stress man’s inadequacy; but we could still understand what was intended in doing so.

But Nietzsche offers more hope than this. For he believes that we are all vested with a quantum of power or energy, which can be harnessed so as to develop new dispositions in us. This is an aesthetic idea, though it belongs not to the aesthetics of the spectator, but to the aesthetics of the creative artist. We are to regard ourselves, our selves, as raw material, out of which we can fashion something noble. Most of us are infected with petty hatreds and resentments. We must strive to eradicate these. We are able to do so, because we make our own natures. And because he believed this, Nietzsche was a forerunner of the existentialists, like Sartre. We can distance ourselves from our characters, our selves, assess, review, criticize, and change them.42

In answering the three questions I made use of certain notions of health and sickness. This was necessary because Nietzsche looks on the proper moral philosopher as a kind of spiritual physician. But he does not wish to administer palliative medicaments to relieve our maladies; he wants to show us how to avoid the malady in the first place, by shaping our souls properly; and also, if we have the maladies, how to use them rather than acquiesce and let them use us.

Then it had to be asked, of Nietzsche in particular and of psychiatry in general, what are the criteria of mental health? There seemed no notion of psychic hygiene parallel to that of physical hygiene, because we are not as clear on what we want to use our souls for as we are on what we want to use our bodies for. A healthy liver is one which secretes bile efficiently, etc., but the potentialities of the mental facilities of will, intellect, and feeling are too various to assign to them obvious functions success in the fulfillment of which settles whether or not they are healthy. Because the appeal to health is tenuous, Nietzsche often veers in the direction of aesthetic criteria as a substitute for it, the dual criteria of wondrous to contemplate and creative. He continues to phrase his aesthetic norms in hygienic terms: but the two standpoints are no longer united in substance. The soul is not seen as beautiful because it is healthy, but simply called healthy because it is beautiful, or is experienced as such, and creates beauty. In the final reckoning, aesthetics defeats hygiene.

The judgments of good and evil made by men are themselves to be judged according to the criteria, good and bad. We have seen that the latter denote the healthy and the unhealthy, or, at other times, the beautiful and the ugly. It is asked of the judgment of good and evil, from what human disposition does it flow and what disposition will its acceptance tend to foster? The health or disease of the disposition, its nobility or baseness, will determine whether the value it inspires and/or feeds on is good or bad. Thus in The Antichrist Nietzsche asserts that “what is bad is all that is born of weakness, or envy, or revenge”43 because these are considered ugly or poisonous dispositions.

Given that he believes this, we then considered whether the belief did not involve committing the genetic fallacy, the fallacy of supposing the worth of a product to be determined by the worth of what produced it. I then defended Nietzsche by arguing that the appeal to its genesis as a means of settling the worth of something was not always fallacious. In particular, the genetic fallacy is obviously involved where there is an independent method of assessing the production (as there is in geometry, but as there doesn’t seem to be in religion). A moral conviction could be discredited by showing that only the weak and sickly would appeal to it. I also showed that Nietzsche asked not only the genetic question, but the functional one: what does this value lead to, and that there could be no functional fallacy parallel to the genetic one (although Kant thought there was).

Now talk about the function of value judgments smacks of an inquiry into their utility. And since we know that Nietzsche was antiutilitarian, it was necessary to point out that whereas the utilitarian fixes on what is useful as productive of pleasure, Nietzsche is concerned with what is useful as productive of hygienically and aesthetically valuable men. His is a species interest. A man whose dispositions were oriented to the search for pleasure would be condemned by Nietzsche as all-too-human, close to the animal and far from the übermensch.

Though Nietzsche repudiates values connected with miserly dispositions, he nevertheless often evinces a respect for values-as-such. He prefers men to create tablets, even if out of the stone of ugly feelings, to men who fester in their diseases and do not engage in the value enterprise at all. Thus he says (Genealogy of Morals 1.8) that the vengeance and hatred of the Jews was the deepest and most sublime in human history since it gave birth to new values. His attitude here is governed by his appreciation of creative activity as such.

Finally, I reapproached the problem of establishing criteria of good and bad in a linguistic manner, by considering an object, namely an apple, which could be qualified as good or bad, but not as good or evil. I showed that a complicated context was required in order for an apple to count as bad. I wondered where this context was to be found when a man’s soul is judged to be rotten. A rotten apple repels the eater. If a rotten soul repels the aesthetically oriented onlooker, who are we to choose as a qualified onlooker? All people agree on what makes apples sound or rotten. But what Nietzsche might call an ugly servile temperament would be represented as beautifully humble by others. In short Christians can adopt aesthetic metaphors to describe their value preferences: there where would Nietzsche be? He would simply be proposing a new set of values, a tiresome project which can be executed with but little imagination, whereas he had hoped to reveal a new value plane beyond the accepted one from which he could assess the latter.

Now we can, at least provisionally, rescue Nietzsche by construing the phrase “Beyond Good and Evil” in yet a new sense. To go beyond good and evil is no longer to look for new canons, but to probe more deeply into accepted moral precepts. It is to probe deeply into the people who assert the values, with the aim of exhibiting a discordance between their preachings and their practices, their feelings and the way they respond.44 In other words, the transvaluation of values is not now interpreted—and I warn you that this is only a tentative suggestion, so I stress the “now”—as a new table of moral imperatives. Rather, it is an attack on the claims to authenticity and genuineness of those who subscribe to current values.

Thus the transvaluation of values is undertaken by Nietzsche in his role as dialectician. He sees it as his task to disclose as the hidden prong of an accepted value a tendency quite opposite to what the value itself enjoins. By saying he is dialectical I mean that wherever he sees A, he asserts not-A, not arbitrarily and fancifully, but with arresting psychological acumen. The current values are shown to be the opposite of what they purport to be. People disvalue arrogance: it is because they are afraid of boldness, and are unable to be bold; the wish to be bold is so strong, the incapacity so equally crippling, that boldness must be banished, declared worthless. When they counsel respect, we know it is only fear, which is close to hate, which is nearly the reverse of respect. They claim to be polite and considerate: they are in fact only obsequious.45 They adopt maxims like “love thy neighbor” because they resent and hate their neighbor—these maxims do not flow from the core of their being. Nietzschean thought thrives on opposites such as these. He exploits the linguistic fact that any pattern of behavior which receives a laudatory characterization can equally be described in pejorative terms. How then, confronted by superficially similar modes of conduct, is he able to decide which is noble, which base? When is the positive account, when the negative, in place? When is apparent triumph defeat, when is love hate, when is chastity timidity? The answer is that the positive is in evidence when the conduct flows from and is informed by strength, power, exultation, fullness of being, and the negative is in evidence when the conduct is stimulated by and has the marks of cowardice and weakness. The notion of degrees of power, or, at times, what is quite different, degrees of the exercise of the power which constitutes every man, or the extent, in his later work, to which all human powers are governed by an integrating will-to-power (Nietzsche in his deterministic and libertarian moments—a tension in his thinking)⁴⁶ is the concept which emancipates us from the myopic concentration on good and evil. The powerful man is generous out of an urge to share his delight; he does not lose, he gains by giving: by giving he enlarges the scope of his influence; he embraces more of the universe. (Feuerbach, “Only the absolute, the perfect form, can delight without envy in the forms of other beings.”)⁴⁷ The weak and sickly man is generous out of fear; for him giving involves self-laceration, resentment: he does not take the universe in; he lets himself be swallowed up in it, unable to stand alone. The powerful man is able to be savage and destructive: he is not therefore a ruthless beast, because he disciplines his passion. The weak man cannot be similarly self-assertive: the credit he arrogates to himself for his meekness is well beyond his due.⁴⁸ His laugh is nervous, cringing, self-abasing, while the powerful laugh confidently. The powerful man engages in the project of self-transformation: he joyously shapes his soul into a form which may superficially resemble that of the weak man, but he lacks the rancor of the latter.

In thus explaining how Nietzsche manages to opt between competing characterizations of a single piece of behavior, whose worth is elusive, I have found it necessary to invoke three conceptions which are very important and should receive more extended examination. These are the conceptions of Nietzsche as a dialectician, the idea of power, which pervades his thought, and the notion of rancor, or resentment, or ressentiment, which is the capital Nietzschean sin.

11. Nietzsche’s concern about man is a species-concern. He is not, to his discredit, greatly exercised by the lot of this or that man here or there in the universe. But he is anxious lest the health and worth of humanity-as-such suffers a decline. This worth is measured by the worth of its highest specimens. A single great man redeems the folly of a people, gives point to their existence. Thus he says in Beyond Good and Evil (126), “A people is a detour of nature to get to six or seven great men.”49 From this it would appear that the multitude is given a very subsidiary role to play in history.⁵⁰ But he says immediately thereafter, “Yes, and then to get around them.” And I take this to mean that the ideal of the race must not fixate itself on today’s heroes; it must constantly suffer transformation: so the people must persist, as a breeding place for new heroes, for new supermen, and as a recalcitrant leaven, inhospitable to total molding by its most exalted representatives. So the health of the bulk of men counts as well, and if mankind as a whole wanes, its exemplars will diminish in excellence. (An interesting account of the interplay between great men and the herd is given by Dostoyevsky, in Crime and Punishment.)⁵¹ The great need enemies with whom to engage in battle: the better the enemy, the better the great man can become. Ideally, all men would be courageous warriors of the spirit, spurring one another on, like the pupils in a highly intelligent class.⁵² The achievement of this ideal is, Nietzsche fears, endangered by the acceptance of Judeo-Christian values. In the preface (6) to The Genealogy of Morals he therefore says: “The intrinsic worth of these values was taken for granted as a fact of experience and put beyond question. Nobody, up to now, has doubted that the ‘good’ man represents a higher value than the ‘evil,’ in terms of promoting and benefiting mankind generally.”⁵³ (Note: as opposed to ministering to the satisfactions of this and that man, here and there.) When we reflect on what Nietzsche has to say about suffering, we see this distinction clearly. By palliating the wounds of the sufferer, by giving him the pity he demands, you destroy his will-to-live, his will to discover, discover himself, uncover a new self; you destroy the possibilities of new manifestations, new flowerings of human creativity emerging from his suffering, from a long struggle with it. You help the man but you endanger his dignity, and especially the dignity of the race. But to return to the passage: “suppose the exact opposite were true. What if the ‘good’ man represents not merely a retrogression but even a danger, a temptation, a narcotic drug enabling the present to live at the expense of the future? More comfortable, less hazardous, perhaps, but also baser, more petty—so that morality itself would be responsible for man, as a species, failing to reach the peak of magnificence of which he is capable. What if morality should turn out to be the danger of dangers?”54

Let us now look more closely at Nietzsche’s account of the origin or genealogy of the two competing value-orientations which we can roughly characterize as the ethics of health and the ethics of utility, of relief of suffering. We shall find that they differ not only in content, not only in their bases of power and weakness, respectively, but also in the sense that one is positive, affirmative, and derives a negative from itself; the other knows best how to negate, and only affirms itself indirectly. The one only negates because it posits or affirms; the other can only posit if it negates. The first treat themselves as good—if asked to justify this they would describe themselves. The second can only justify treating themselves as good by describing the evil whom they are unlike. The categories of good and bad can be construed as good and not good, or un-good. The categories of good and evil can be construed as evil and un-evil. If you probe the rejections of the morality of strength, you will find that they are in essence acceptances. Thus Nietzsche says somewhere, “I love the great despisers for they are also the great adorers.”⁵⁵ The powerful exult in themselves and through experiencing the “pathos of distance” expel the weak from the court of worth. The weak have no strong support in themselves: they cringe before the strong, deny them rights, and only derivatively embrace as good their own fragility and pettiness.⁵⁶

Let us see how Nietzsche gives historical content to these abstractions. He begins (Genealogy of Morals, 1.2) by rejecting an account of value concepts which construes them as utilitarian in origin: speaking of those who hold this hypothesis he says:

“Originally,” they decree, “altruistic actions were praised and approved by their recipients, that is, by those to whom they were useful. Later on, the origin of that praise, having been forgotten, such actions were felt to be good simply because it was the habit to commend them.” We notice at once that this first derivation has all the earmarks of the English psychologists’ work. Here are the key ideas of utility, forgetfulness, habit and, finally, error, seen as lying at the root of that value system which civilised man had hitherto regarded with pride as the prerogative of all men. This pride must now be humbled, these values devalued. Have the debunkers succeeded? [He feels that if utility is all, then value-as-such is devalued and even utility is a parasitic value-code.—GAC]

Now, it is obvious to me, first of all, that their theory looks for the genesis of the concept good in the wrong place: the judgement good does not originate with those to whom the good has been done. Rather it was the “good” themselves, that is to say, the noble, mighty, highly placed, and high-minded who decreed themselves and their actions to be good, i.e.: belonging to the highest rank, in contradistinction to all that was base, low-minded and plebeian.57 It was only this pathos of distance that authorised them to create values and name them—what was utility to them? [The implication is that they required no utilitarian ethics since they were superbly self-reliant, needed to join in no lowly mutual aid society. Also what do they need contracts for? (See also 2.17.)—GAC] The notion of utility seems singularly inept to account for such quick jetting forth out of supreme value judgements. [The argument, roughly, is that utility is not something anybody can be expected to get very excited about.—GAC] Here we come face to face with the exact opposite of that lukewarmness which every scheming prudence, every utilitarian calculus presupposes, and not for a time only, for the rare, exceptional hour, but permanently. The origin of the opposites good and bad is to be found in the pathos of nobility and distance, representing the dominant temper of a higher ruling class, in relation to a lower, dependent one. … Such an origin would suggest that there is no a priori necessity for associating the word good with altruistic deeds, as those moral psychologists are fond of claiming.⁵⁸

No a priori necessity. He claims that Judeo-Christian morality can have no monopoly as expressive of the human spirit. Response: the first time the human spirit gave itself shape in values, it did not take on such a mold. But whereas he denies that Judeo-Christian morals are the only morals, he does not say that they are not morals at all. He does not maintain that his genetic account makes such a morality impossible, but only unnecessary. That his contention is often no stronger than this, is proved by a passage in Beyond Good and Evil (212) where he insists only that Christian precepts have been overstressed: “The philosopher must include strength of will, hardness, and ability to make far-reaching decisions, in his ideal of human greatness. To this he has as much right as that with which the opposite teaching and the ideal of an abashed, renouncing, humble, selfless humanity was taught to an opposite era like the sixteenth century, for example, which suffered from a damned up energy of will and from the wildest torrents and flood waters of selfishness.”59 When the waters of selfishness flow over, the canons of good and evil, and the injunction to compassion, are needed to restrain them. Nietzsche only fears that exclusive stress on the latter will cause those waters, the liquid energy of the self, to dry up entirely.⁶⁰

In The Genealogy of Morals, 1.7, it is the Jews who are debited with having inverted the aristocratic valuations, whose origins we encountered in The Genealogy of Morals, 1.2. Particularly through the wily intellects of their priests, they managed to wreak vengeance on their proud oppressors by inverting “the aristocratic value equations good/noble/powerful/happy/favored-of-the-gods and [maintaining], with the furious hatred of the underprivileged and impotent that ‘only the poor, the powerless, are good; only the suffering, sick, and ugly, truly blessed’ … It was the Jews who started the slave revolt in morals.”⁶¹

12. It is in section 10 that Nietzsche reveals the contrast I sketched abstractly between the two sets of opposites, good and bad, good and evil. He also argues that if anyone displays the virtues demanded by slave ethics, the virtues of love and compassion, it is the noble who are despised by adherents of those very ethics. He does not maintain that all their energy is devoted to tending to others, but that more is genuinely so directed than is that of their slaves:

All truly noble morality grows out of triumphant self-affirmation. Slave ethics, on the other hand, begins by saying no to an “outside,” an “other” non-self, and that no is its creative act [which is to say that it is not capable of creativity at all—GAC]. This reversal of direction of the evaluating look, this invariable looking outward instead of inward, is a fundamental feature of rancor. Slave ethics requires for its inception a sphere different from and hostile to its own. [Thus the slaves depend on the masters, cannot get on without them; they can maintain no sense of self, no fixed identity. The masters, on the other hand, wrench their identity out of their own souls, don’t need the souls of the underdogs to guide them to values and feelings.—GAC]. … The opposite is true of aristocratic valuations: such values grow and act spontaneously … in order to affirm themselves even more gratefully and delightedly.62

And here is what I indicated, that only the noble are capable of following even the slave ethics: “Such a man [the powerful man—GAC] simply shakes off vermin which would get beneath another’s skin—and only here, if anywhere on earth, is it possible to speak of ‘loving one’s enemy.’ The noble person will respect his enemy, and respect is already a bridge to love … Imagine, on the other hand, the ‘enemy’ as conceived by the rancorous man! For this is his true creative achievement: he conceived the ‘evil enemy,’ the Evil One, as a fundamental idea, and then as a pendant he has conceived a Good One—himself.”⁶³ The noble man does not have to look at his enemy always as an enemy. He can suspend the antagonism, laugh together with him. He need not fear that by respecting his enemy he is losing his sense of self and his self-respect. But the slavish man cannot enjoy this confidence. For him to compromise his enmity, truly to love his antagonist, would be ethically suicidal: his values could not but crumble, premised as they are on denying all worth to those he resents.⁶⁴

Connected with these opposed value postures are the contrasting uses the noble Greeks and the feeble Christians make of their gods or God.⁶⁵ The Greeks benefit from their gods, use them to still neurosis, not to create it. The Christian God is an instrument of punishment. Even when he is merciful, he punishes any claim to worth the fortunate sinners can hope for. For mercy, to differ from kindness, must presuppose a lack of desert. God’s Grace is required because he is evil. This thought is developed by Nietzsche in The Genealogy of Morals, 2.23:

A single look at the Greek gods will convince us that a belief in gods need not result in morbid imaginations, that there are nobler ways of creating divine figments—ways that do not lead to the kind of self-crucifixion and self-punishment in which Europe, for millennia now, has excelled. The Hellenic gods reflected a race of noble and proud beings, in whom man’s animal self had divine status and hence no need to lacerate and rage against itself. For a very long time the Greeks used their gods precisely to keep bad conscience [of guilt feelings—GAC] at a distance, in order to enjoy their inner freedom undisturbed; in other words they made the opposite use of them that Christianity has made of its God.66

And then he goes on to say that when a Greek has transgressed against a social principle his fellows would ask: “ ‘How can such a thing happen to people like us, nobly bred, happy, virtuous, well-educated?’ … ‘Well, he must have been deluded by a God,’ they would finally say, shaking their heads. This was a typically Greek solution. It was the office of the gods to justify, up to a certain point, the ill ways of man, to serve as ‘sources’ of evil. In those days they were not agents of punishment but, what is nobler, repositories of guilt.”⁶⁷ By contrast, the Christian regards what is good as done by God.⁶⁸

13. Part of our resistance to Nietzsche’s attack flows, no doubt, from a well-grounded unwillingness to certify the lawless energies as much as he did. But part flows from another source: the fact that though we have a concept of morality, and of the moral man, we have almost completely lost a concept of virtue; we do not, in calling someone virtuous, mean anything different from what we mean when we call him moral. When we call someone moral, we usually make reference to the results, or, more sophisticatedly, the intended results of his behavior. If these benefit, he is moral; if they detriment, he is immoral. But the concept of virtue, as classically entertained, related less to the sorts of actions a man undertook and more to the sort of man he was, though the sort of man he was might be exhibited in his actions.⁶⁹ A libertarian might believe that a man’s actions cannot be discovered by examining what sort of man he is: in consequence, the sort of man he is is not finally relevant to a moral evaluation of him. He may be jealous, cowardly, hot-tempered, but if he acts kindly in despite of the proddings of these dispositions, he is moral nonetheless, and some, like Kant, would say, far more conspicuously praiseworthy than the man who effortlessly does the right thing.

The standpoint of virtue is different from this.70 Here the jealous man would be condemned, because of his rotten soul. And Nietzsche holds that his supposedly moral behavior must be a sham anyway, a cover-up, a dialectical distortion of his true nature. The nature underlying the action is what is assessed when we have virtue in mind. And this is a point of view inimical to a society whose orientation is mechanical, a society which places maximum value on getting things done, and confers only minimal import on the condition of the doers. The psychoanalytic orientation is a profound exception to this trend. It is in consequence no accident that Nietzsche is regarded as an anticipator of Freud.

I now want to justify further my frequent characterizations of Nietzsche as an aesthetic moralist. He first appears in this guise in the Birth of Tragedy, which he wrote in 1872. It was his first work, produced when he was a young professor (aged twenty-eight) at Basle. In section 5 he says: “Only as an aesthetic product can the world be justified to all eternity … Only as the genius in the act of creation merges with the primal architect of the cosmos can he truly know something of the eternal essence of art.”⁷¹ The phrase “to all eternity” warrants serious consideration. At the end of the lectures on Nietzsche, I may have time to say something about his doctrine of “eternal recurrence,” a theory which is not to be found in either of the books I have asked you to read.⁷² To put it roughly for the time being, Nietzsche believes that to approach the world in a healthy way is to approach it in a spirit of affirmation, of high optimism. Whether you are affirmative or not is tested by whether you can will that what you are now witnessing, experiencing, and doing be repeated endlessly, to all eternity, whether you can will that it recur forever. And the suggestion in the Birth of Tragedy is that you can only attain to this universe-embracing posture if you regard the universe from an aesthetic point of view. Furthermore it is the creative genius who can come closest to this viewpoint; he can see the universe as a wonderful creation when he himself engages in wonderful creation. Here we have an early seed of the notion of the superman, the man of surpassing strength, as the creative man. It will be recalled that the slavish people of “good and evil” are allowed as their single “creative” act the act of rejecting the powerful men, and this can now be seen as tantamount to rejecting creativity. This is why I suggested that resentment and rancor are Nietzsche’s original sins. They offend against the aesthetic matrix. (An objection or elucidation: If we are only to justify the entire universe, we cannot do this by showing how part of it is valuable for any other part of it, for this would leave the second part unjustified. To justify the entire universe cannot be to show how it is good for something other than itself, because by definition it is everything. So only the aesthetic way is open.)

That Nietzsche is an aesthetic moralist is further supported by the account of aesthetics I gave in the earlier portion of these lectures. I said there could be no rules for judging art, as for judging actions. One of the things I am also anxious to stress is that aesthetic creation, unlike righteous moral conduct, could not proceed according to rules. A man who follows moral precepts rigorously is a moral man, provided only he has fixed on the right moral precepts. But there can be no correct precepts in aesthetics, since, if there were, originality, which is essential to art, would be lost. There can be no rules for producing good paintings as there can be rules for producing good chairs.73 This is just the difference between art and craft. For the expert craftsman is a master of the rules, and there are no expert artists, only brilliant ones. It does not follow that a chair cannot be a work of art: it only follows that such a chair was not produced by following rules. Of course, identical objects are possible, but one would not be an art object.

14. From the fact that no creative artist follows rules, it does not follow that what he creates lacks all order, that no structure can be discerned in or ascribed to it. I am not trying to give a conceptual justification for nonfigurative excesses. But the order or, one might say, rule, discoverable in the work, must not exist antecedent to the creation of the work. The norm does not make the work: the work makes the norm. And this is one reason why the powerful creative man cannot be attacked or criticized: there are no norms to appeal to other than the ones he establishes—he is a law unto himself.⁷⁴ Because a norm, though a self-imposed one, is thus involved in aesthetic creativity, Nietzsche’s certification of power is not a certification of lawlessness, but of power formed and structured. And thus there emerges his aesthetic ideal of humanity, explicitly trumpeted in the following passage from Joyful Wisdom/The Gay Science (290):

One thing is needful. “Giving style” to one’s character—a great and rare art! It is exercised by those who see all the strengths and weaknesses of their own natures and then comprehend them in an artistic plan until everything appears as art and reason and even weakness delights the eye. Here a large mass of second nature has been added: there a piece of original nature has been removed: both by long practice and daily labour. Here the ugly which could not be removed is hidden; there it has been reinterpreted and made sublime. … It will be the strong and domineering natures who enjoy their finest gaiety in such compulsion in such constraint and perfection under a law of their own … Conversely, it is the weak characters without power over themselves who hate the constraint of style … They become slaves as soon as they serve; they hate to serve. [This is so because the only service they know is service to an alien power—they have not the power to serve under, or lord over, themselves. They cannot, dialectically, be servant and master in one.—GAC] For one thing is needful: that a human being attain his satisfaction within himself—whether this be by this or that poetry or art; only then is a human being at all tolerable to behold. Whoever is dissatisfied with himself [to be dissatisfied with oneself is to be unable to find one’s satisfaction in oneself—GAC] is always ready to revenge himself therefore; we others will be his victims, if only by always having to stand his ugly sight. For the sight of the ugly makes men bad and gloomy.75

The final few sentences are important; they link the two moments in the aesthetic orientation which I have hitherto spoken of separately—the contemplative aesthetic and the creative aesthetic. For it now turns out that that which it is rewarding to contemplate is that which creates and has been created through aesthetic labor. Also, if you cannot create, you will be rancorous.

But let us now return to The Genealogy of Morals, which is the principal work we have to consider. In sections 11 and 12 of part 1 Nietzsche associates himself firmly with aesthetic in opposition to moral values. A moral community would be one in which no one menaced anyone else, in which each lent a helping hand to every other, in which all antagonism would be eradicated. Nietzsche questions the value of such a state of affairs, asking (11): “Who would not a thousand times prefer fear when it is accompanied [need it always be?—GAC] by admiration to security accompanied by the loathsome sight of perversion, dwarfishness, degeneracy?⁷⁶ And is not the latter our predicament today? What accounts for our repugnance to man—for there is no question that he makes us suffer? Certainly not our fear of him, rather the fact that there is no longer anything to be feared from him.”⁷⁷

In section 12 this claim is amplified. There is an insistence on the dialectical unity of fear and respect: value attaching only to an object which merits respect, it is impossible for a retiring, unaggressive humanity to be valuable: “The leveling and diminution of European man is our greatest danger; because the sight of him makes us despond … We no longer see anything these days which aspires to grow greater; instead, we have a suspicion that things will continue to go downhill, becoming ever thinner, more placid, smarter, cosier, more ordinary, more indifferent, more Chinese, more Christian—without doubt man is getting ‘better’ all the time … This is Europe’s true predicament: together with the fear of man we have also lost the love of man, reverence for man, confidence in man, indeed the will to man. Now the sight of man makes us despond.”78

One sort of man the sight of whom uplifts rather than depresses is described by Nietzsche in 2.17. They are conquering heroes, and their terrible advent is described, and thereby justified, in thoroughly aesthetic terms:

Such beings are unaccountable; they come like destiny, without rhyme or reason, ruthlessly, bare of pretext. Suddenly they are here, like a stroke of lightning, too terrible, convincing, and “different” for hatred even. Their work is an instinctive imposing of forms. They are the most spontaneous, the most unconscious artists that exist. … They are actuated by the terrible egotism of the artist, which is justified by the work he must do, as the mother by the child she will bear.⁷⁹

Notice that this is different from the characterization of the aesthetic hero we found in The Gay Science. There is an opaque mindlessness about these conquering men; they do not strenuously and subtly establish dominion over themselves—they recklessly establish their sway over others. These are very different uses to which one’s power can be put, and Nietzsche seems to vacillate between them. In the next passage (2.18) he shows what happens when this power is directed against the self, and interpreting Nietzsche freely, we may say that in a more developed stage of humanity, its ideal can no longer reside in the savagery of conquest, but in the self-transformation of the creative artist, in a not very metaphorical sense of artists:

Now the material upon which this great natural force was employed was man himself, his old animal self—and not, as in that grander and more spectacular phenomenon—his fellow man. This secret violation of the self, this artist’s cruelty, this urge to impose upon recalcitrant matter a form, a will, a distinction, a feeling of contradiction and contempt … has it not given birth to a wealth of strange beauty and affirmation? Has it not given birth to beauty itself? Would beauty exist if ugliness had not first taken cognisance of itself, not said to itself, “I am ugly”?80

Thus we see that grandeur can be shaped out of pettiness, if only that pettiness is not certified by, e.g. the Christian religion. And this, again, is a deeply dialectical proposition, followed up by what he says in 3.4: “An artist must resist the temptation to ‘analogy by contiguity’ which would persuade him that he, himself, is what he imagines and expresses. The truth of the matter is that if he were that thing he would be unable to express it: Homer would not have created Achilles, nor Goethe Faust, if Homer had been an Achilles or Goethe a Faust.”⁸¹ Nor could Nietzsche be Zarathustra. Thus Wagner succumbs to the typical velleity of the artist,⁸² failing to be content with portraying Christianity and becoming Christian.

Here Nietzsche is reversing the genealogical approach: for the latter involved assessing the product by examining what produced it; here he is certifying the producer because of the beauty of the product, though in himself, if he had not created something out of himself (a phrase with many meanings), he would be worthless. These issues put on the agenda the question of Nietzsche as dialectician, to which I shall now turn.

More than once I have said that Nietzsche thinks dialectically. Less than once have I explained what the word “dialectical” means. We can elucidate its developed philosophical meaning by considering its crude, primitive meaning. The latter is connected with the word “dialogue” which in turn means two words, or a double flow of words. But dialectic, as we find it in Plato, is not just any dialogue; it is not mere chat, but dialogue with a certain structure. The structure, or rather rhythm, is a series of negations and counternegations. Thus I say, “Political society is best organized in a democratic manner. Thereby everybody has a say.” And you reply, “No, because too many people will be disposed to say the same thing, and so minorities lose their say in thorough democracies. What is wanted is enlightened aristocracy, which permits liberty to everyone.” “Yes, ideally perhaps. But in fact aristocracy will lead to abuse, and curtail the liberty it is supposed to secure against the dangers of democracy. So democracy, while imperfect, is the best we can have.” Now such a discussion has a superiority over solitary contemplation since it is all too easy to jump to a conclusion to which an antagonistically inclined interlocutor may have an insuperable objection. Dialectical thinking consists in internalizing this rhythm, in cultivating the disposition to entertain the opposite of everything you are inclined to say, and then arbitrate somehow between the contending assertions. The dialectician’s faith is that truth will lie in some subtle synthesis of the opposed moments. I say subtle, because the synthesis is not always a case of each being true to some extent but each being totally true but in different ways. A fully dialectical proposition is one which can only be true if its negation is true, exhibitable as P if and only if not P. There can be pleasure if and only if there is pain. There can be liberty if and only if there is authority. There can be surface if and only if there is an interior. And so on.

So far I have shown how dialectic is a method of thinking. Nor can I fully characterize this method by giving its rules. For this itself would be undialectical. The rules of the dialectic must themselves harbor their opposites, and so only training and practice, not appreciation of precept, can teach you to think dialectically. But some philosophers have construed dialectic not as a principle of thought, or not only as that, but as a principle of reality. Not as a kind of quasi-logical sequence of propositions, but as a temporal sequence of events and stages of reality as well. Most clearly associated with dialectic in this more ambitious sense is Hegel. Hegel believed that the essence of reality is mind, which matter, a creation or construct of mind, imperfectly reflects. And since the principle of mind, of the individual thinking mind, is the movement of opposites, this is the principle of the world as well. All action provokes a reaction in physics, all political suppression gives way to political freedom, health stimulates disease, poverty leads to wealth, tranquillity produces explosion. It is not just the concept of each which must be connected with the concept of the other, but the reality of each must generate the reality of the other.83 Later German thinkers who did not accept Hegel’s idealism, his reduction of matter to mind, still accepted the dialectical character of reality. In Marxism, this leads to what is called dialectical materialism. And in Nietzsche it takes a less easily summarized form. But I have referred to instances of dialectic in his work. There is his reversal of values into their opposites, his demonstration that Judeo-Christian morality is fundamentally immoral, by its own lights, at its roots. There is his insistence on the need for both tables of values, on the danger of adhering exclusively to one pole of the value antithesis (here dialectic becomes not descriptive, analytical, but normative). And there is his account of the master and slave ethics as sets of opposites, the former containing an affirmation and a negation, the latter a negation and a negation of the negation (the flower’s development as negation of the negation). And there is the insight that in order for there to be a Faust, there must be a not-Faust, namely Goethe. I want now to give other cases of dialectic in Nietzsche.

In part 1, section 14 of The Genealogy of Morals he gives a picturesque account of how the slaves transform certain of their characteristics into their opposites:

Impotence, which cannot retaliate, into kindness; pusillanimity into humility; submission before those one hates into obedience to One of whom they say that he has commanded this submission—they call him God. The inoffensiveness of the weak, his cowardice, his ineluctable standing and waiting at doors, are being given honorific titles such as patience; to be unable to avenge oneself is called to be unwilling to avenge oneself—even forgiveness … They call the thing they seek not retribution but the triumph of justice; the thing they hate is not their enemy, by no means—they hate injustice, ungodliness; the thing they hope for and believe is not vengeance, the sweet exultation of vengeance … but the “triumph of God who is just, over the godless.”84

15. In part 3, section 2 there is the suggestion that chastity and sinful lust are connected, as are chastity and healthy sensual pleasure. We know who move in the first division, who in the second. And because opposites define one another, because omnis determinatio est negatio, the chastity of the slaves differs from the chastity of the masters. Thus Nietzsche says, “There is no inherent contradiction between chastity and sensual pleasure: every good marriage, every real love affair, transcends these opposites.”⁸⁵ It transcends the opposites, or their opposition, by honoring each, and neither can be honored without honoring the other. The slaves are unable to appreciate the flesh, they can’t manage it, so they have no true understanding of the value of abstention as abstention either: “On the other hand … once those pigs who have failed as pigs (and there are such) come round to the worship of chastity, they will view it simply as their own opposite and will worship it with the most tragic grunting zeal.”86 This can be compared with Hegel’s account in the Philosophy of Right of the abstinence of monasteries, which he rightly saw conferred on the flesh a tremendous importance.⁸⁷

The phenomenon of masochism is inexplicable to the undialectical mind. For it involves a coalescence of the pleasant and the painful. But if you are Nietzsche you can see no unacceptable paradox in the fact that the slaves, and their leaders, the ascetic priests, enjoy their suffering. The self-torture they inflict must, he believes, be a kind of joy to them. The apparently antibiological asceticism of the priest must have some function in the history of the species. So we now see that, in the third section, Nietzsche’s dialectic leads him to reject his own unqualified rejection of slave ethics, though he accepts it not on its own terms, but as partially ministering to health (see 3.11).⁸⁸ The point is put most forcibly in 3.13, which I urge you to read carefully. It ends by saying, “When this master of destruction, of self-destruction, wounds himself, it is that very wound that forces him to live.”⁸⁹ We now see that Nietzsche’s idea of health is as subtly dialectical as all of his other ideas. For health is no bland burping solid stability; it is conquest of disease, not absence of disease. Health thrives on illness. But illness is always only the necessary condition of health: it must be battled against. Goethe cannot remain only Goethe: he must create Faust as well.

It remains to consider and try to tie together topics we have already mentioned: suffering, pity, friendship, enmity, and power. We know that Nietzsche measures value by degree of power, and we also know that he deplored the utilitarian rejection of suffering. We have just seen how these two views are connected: health, or power, requires illness, or suffering. Health is not a fortunate lack of infection, but the active capacity to overcome disease. The self which the powerful man overcomes is the self as passive, as prone, as susceptible. Even the creation of beauty is the response of the potentially healthy individual to the challenge of illness. Thus Nietzsche says in the Twilight of the Idols: “Whatever does not destroy me makes me stronger”⁹⁰ and “One must need to be strong—otherwise one will never become strong.”⁹¹ And in Ecce Homo: “For the healthy type, just sickness may be an energetic stimulant to life, to more life.”⁹²

Because of this valuation of suffering, as necessary for the development of power, compassion is devalued; as I showed, pity, commiseration, speedy aid, palliating medicines, are construed as fundamentally more destructive than helpful to the suffering.93 Pity is rejected for deeper reasons as well, not only because of what it leads to, but also because of what the demand for pity and the willingness to offer it flow from. The sufferer crying out for aid is deviously trying to dominate. The project of arousing pity comes from a wish to hurt, to implicate others in my suffering. The sick, he says in Human, All Too Human (1.50): “still have one power in spite of all their weakness, the power to hurt.”⁹⁴ Pity is also a sign of misallocated power: I commiserate in order to remind myself how well-off I am, comparatively speaking. Pity, he believes, always includes condescension and contempt, and the judgment that the sufferer cannot help himself. The true friend is one who asks and gives no pity, so that he and his friend may both achieve self-mastery.

In point of dialectical fact, your truest friend is your truest enemy, if friends are those who help you to flourish and enemies those who offer you resistance. This is clear from Nietzsche’s account, in The Genealogy of Morals 3.7, of the basis of the philosopher Schopenhauer’s genius: “Schopenhauer absolutely required enemies to keep him in good spirits; … he loved atrabilious words, he fulminated for the sake of fulminating, out of passion; he would have sickened … had he been deprived of his enemies, of Hegel, of woman, of sensuality, of the human will to survival … It was his enemies who kept him alive … His rage was his balm, his recreation, his compensation, his specific against tedium, in short, his happiness.”⁹⁵

So we are told not to pity the weak. But we are not told to step on them either. We are told either to ignore them and let them struggle or to challenge them, but to carefully weigh challenge to capacity to respond.⁹⁶ The powerful man is not to express his power in oppressing others: only the weak man “wishes to hurt and to see signs of suffering.”⁹⁷ (“Wish” is important here, since wishes express what you are more reliably than doings.) True power is self-mastery, and often the urge to conquer is only a token of inadequate power: others may be subdued when I am unable to subdue myself. Nietzsche’s developed and thoroughly humane view can be gathered from a late fragment:

I have found strength where one does not look for it: in simple, mild, and pleasant people, without the least desire to rule—and, conversely, the desire to rule has often appeared to me as a sign of inward weakness: they fear their own slave soul and shroud it in a royal cloak; (in the end, they still become the slaves of their followers, their fame, etc.). The powerful natures dominate, it is a necessity, they need not lift one finger.98

In the last sentence that aspect of Nietzsche which I have occasionally mentioned, is manifest: Nietzsche as determinist, whereas we know that so many of the things he says depend on a libertarian view. I have not been able to find any resolution of this contradiction which does not smack of sophistry.

A necessary condition for the validity of Nietzsche’s teaching is a threefold distinction which is often invoked, by him and many others, but never carefully hoovered conceptually. I mean the distinction between indulging one’s passions, extirpating or suppressing one’s passions, and channeling or organizing one’s passions.⁹⁹ This problem is independent of the free will/necessitation contradiction, because we can put the issue either as three different things you can do to your passions, or three different things that happen to them. Clearly Nietzsche wants us to channel our passions, or, put in the determinist way, regards those passions as best which have been channeled. Though the trichotomy seems intelligible, it becomes cloudy when we try to apply it. Let us take the sexual drive as a paradigm instance of a passion. What would count as indulging it? Clearly it cannot be indulged unless some steps are taken, unless a sex object is sought, and is this not a form of rudimentary channeling? What about suppressing it? Well, this is often known as sublimation: when we suppress our sex drive, it is diverted; it stimulates us to write poetry and undertake chivalrous deeds. Isn’t this a channeling? The problem here is to get the criteria of identity for a passion: are we to say that the sex drive has been directed to an artistic object, or are we to say that the sex drive has been extirpated and an artistic one has replaced it? If we differentiate passions by their objects, then we say the latter, for writing poetry is not an essential, intrinsic object of the sex drive, which could be used to individuate it. But if we do so individuate passions, then are we not already dealing with channeled passions, with drives to which a direction, an end-point, has been given? But if we do not use objects as criteria of individuation, and rely on some vague apprehension of what’s pushing us, then what we vaguely apprehend will itself be vague in its boundaries and it will be impossible to say when it has been suppressed and when it has been given a direction or goal. Are monks to be condemned for suppressing their desires, or applauded for vesting the energy in them in ritual observance? We know that Nietzsche vacillates on this, telling us that the slave cannot realize his energies on the one hand, and on the other congratulating the ascetic priest for bottling up his instincts. (Perhaps the trichotomy is unsustainable without the use of the free will/determinism dichotomy in the form of the distinction “within my control.”)

I commend this problem to your own reflection. One instrument I invite you to use in thinking about it is the Platonic device of illuminating a problem about the individual soul by projecting it on a social canvas. Thus we can think of drives as restless elements in a population, and conceive rulers as faced with the choices of hanging them, giving them what they demand, and encouraging them to seek other goals. Will the latter be partial suppression and partial indulgence, or true channeling? This Platonic technique has many applications. It can, for example, be used in considering part 2, section 10 of The Genealogy of Morals where Nietzsche says:

Whenever a community gains power and pride, its penal code becomes lenient, while the moment it is weakened or endangered the harsher methods of the past are revived. The humanity of creditors has always increased with their wealth. … It is possible to imagine a society flushed with such a sense of power that it could afford to let its offenders go unpunished. What greater luxury is there for a society to indulge in? “Why should I bother about these parasites of mine?” such a society might ask. “Let them take all they want. I have plenty.”100

This can be read, though I am not arguing that Nietzsche intended it so, as an analogue of what is true of individuals, their power, and their unruly desires. Whenever a person gains in power and pride, the degree to which he has to suppress his evil instincts is diminished. The slave cannot afford to give his passions any free rein, for then they would dominate him, not he them. The powerful master mentality can permit himself excess: his reserves of strength allow him to.

And thus ends the account of the moral philosophy of Friedrich Nietzsche, the 121st anniversary of whose birth we celebrate this year.

1 This essay was first written 1965, partially revised 1970. Sections 9 onwards remain in the 1965 version. [It is now widely believed that there is no basis to the claim that Nietzsche was of Polish descent, although he did claim as much toward the end of his life. On this issue see Hollingdale, Nietzsche: The Man and His Philosophy, p. 6. More generally, Cohen did not record what his sources were for his account of Nietzsche’s life, although he explicitly cites, or quotes from, Lea, The Tragic Philosopher; Kaufman, Nietzsche; Danto, Nietzsche as Philosopher; and Morgan, What Nietzsche Means. Cohen’s files include his reading notes on Kaufman and Lea. However, the general narrative and many, but not all, of the cited letters in their particular translations follow Halévy, The Life of Friedrich Nietzsche.—Ed.]

2 Lea, The Tragic Philosopher, pp. 333–50, laments this and claims that it blinded him to the essential Nietzscheanism of Jesus, and also of Paul!

3 [A handwritten note in the text says: “Ritschl said: only und[ergraduate] who could publish in his mag + first on whose success as a prof[essor] he’d stake his reputation.” Friedrich Wilhelm Ritschl was Nietzsche’s teacher of philology at Bonn. This is a paraphrase of part of Ritschl’s recommendation for Nietzsche for his chair at Basle. See Kaufman, The Portable Nietzsche, p. 7.—Ed.]

4 Though see Morgan, What Nietzsche Means, p. 331.

5 [The typed manuscript has the date of the festival, incorrectly, as 1870. I thank Tom Stern for pointing out this error, which is almost certainly a typing mistake.—Ed.]

6 Quoted in Lea, The Tragic Philosopher, p. 57. (This is an early manifestation of Nietzsche’s disbelief in truth, about which Professor Danto has written a stimulating study: Nietzsche as Philosopher.)

7 Quoted in Lea, The Tragic Philosopher, p. 58.

8 [Presumably Beyond Good and Evil and The Genealogy of Morals.—Ed.]

9 Cited in Halévy, The Life of Friedrich Nietzsche, p. 304.

10 Ibid., p. 308.

11 Ibid., p. 309.

12 Ibid., p. 312.

13 Ibid., p. 329.

14 Ibid., p. 360.

15 [Cohen’s source for this quotation is unknown, although the last sentence is widely repeated, for example in Kaufman’s Nietzsche, p. 50. The quotation is added in autograph to the 1970 typescript and so is presumably from a different source than the other material, which appears in the 1966 typescript as well as the 1970.—Ed.]

16 Cited in Halévy, The Life of Friedrich Nietzsche, p. 360.

17 Ibid., p. 361.

18 Ibid.

19 Ibid.

20 Ibid.

21 Ibid.

22 Ibid.

23 Nietzsche, Twilight of the Idols, p. 548.

24 Quoted in Kaufman, Nietzsche, p. 314.

25 Quoted in Lea, The Tragic Philosopher, p. 63.

26 [This view appears in Foot’s “Moral Beliefs.”—Ed.]

27 [This view appears in Winch’s Idea of a Social Science.—Ed.]

28 Wittgenstein, Philosophical Investigations, p. 226.

29 [This is from Twilight of the Idols, Maxims and Arrows 12. For a slightly different translation, see Nietzsche, Twilight of the Idols, p. 468.—Ed.]

30 Nietzsche, The Genealogy of Morals, p. 258.

31 In the above I take “ought” implies “can” in its strongest version. Weaker claims are possible. For instance: you ought to Φ cannot be true unless it is possible for a human being to Φ. I mean, even if, if you ran at 200mph you’d save the damsel in distress, it doesn’t follow that you ought to run at that rate, since nobody can. The act must be in some general sense, if not possible for you here and now, a possible act. And the emendations to the sculpture, if not possible for that sculptor, must be possible for the human activity of sculpting, for the powers of sculpting men define the sculptural form. It would be a work of great complexity to determine the strength of the challenge to Nietzsche of this version of ought-implies-can, if he thinks we in fact cannot. We shall bypass that work, because as we now report, he thinks the transformation that would be desirable is in some sense possible.

32 Walt Whitman, “Song of Myself,” in Whitman, Complete Poems, p. 123.

33 Nietzsche, The Birth of Tragedy (Haussmann translation), p. 50.

34 Nietzsche, The Antichrist, p. 647.

35 So we concede that the fallacy may readily be committed in domains where there are objective standards. But even in such domains care is needed before accusations of genetic fallacy are lodged. Consider the following explication of the fallacy:

[T]here is no reason why sociologists should not investigate the social background of physicists and compare it with that of biologists, nor why psychologists should not enquire whether there is a special type of personality that predisposes men to become scientists. Such enquiries, it will be seen, are quite irrelevant to the truth or falsity of the theories that the scientists put forward. … Whether a scientific theory is true or false is settled by scientific argument, not by reference to the nature of the propounder’s motives. (Acton, The Illusion of the Epoch, 205)

It is possible that this passage evinces a naive conception of scientific argument, as an affair of disembodied unalloyed reason. What kinds of truth or falsehood scientists discover must depend on the nature of the scientific enterprise. This may well be at least partly a sociological question. So much must be pressed against those who would push the genetic fallacy idea too far, especially given the researches of Thomas Kuhn. Those researches would have to be shown to be misguided before we can certify Acton’s remarks without demur. And it would be question-begging to stigmatize his researches as vitiated by the genetic fallacy.

In this connection, we must draw a distinction between what is relevant to the truth or falsity of theories and what is relevant to our decisions about the truth or falsity of theories. Even if background has no essential relevance to the former, we are in a position to treat only of the latter: we can get at truth only through procedures for deciding what is true, and these procedures may, as Kuhn has argued, embody a societal component.

36 Quoted from Danto, Nietzsche as Philosopher, p. 52.

37 Nietzsche, The Genealogy of Morals, p. 151.

38 [This is from the preface, section 6, p. 155. The quoted text is taken from the translation in Morgan, What Nietzsche Means, p. 144.—Ed.]

39 Nietzsche, The Genealogy of Morals, p. 151.

40 Ibid., p. 168.

41 [Possibly a reference to Proverbs 14:21: “He who despises his neighbor sins, but blessed is he who has pity on the poor.”—Ed.]

42 [At this point the text contains the note: “But ‘punctuations’ view subverts fore-going.”—Ed.]

43 Nietzsche, The Antichrist, sec. 57, p. 647.

44 For the view that all morality is immoral, see Morgan, What Nietzsche Means, pp. 170–75.

45 [At around this point in the text a notecard is clipped to the manuscript, reading: “Feuerbach (The Essence of Christianity p. 314) is instructively Nietzschean in justifying approaching Christian wrongdoing and heathen wrongdoing differently: ‘What then, speaking briefly, is the distinction between Christians and heathens in this matter [of sensuality GAC]. The heathens confirmed, the Christians contradicted their faith by their lives. [One might say, that it is part of some Christian faiths that the life must contradict the faith GAC]. The heathens do what they mean to do, the Christians do what they do not mean: the former, where they sin, sin with their conscience, the latter against their conscience; the former sin simply, the latter doubly; the former from hypertrophy, the latter from atrophy of the flesh’.”—Ed.]

46 [At this point the text contains the remark “Expand.”—Ed.]

47 Ludwig Feuerbach, The Essence of Christianity, p. 7n.

48 A passage in Morgan, What Nietzsche Means, p. 135, fully illuminates this.

49 Nietzsche, Beyond Good and Evil, p. 87. See also Morgan, What Nietzsche Means, pp. 78–81, 201, 205.

50 See Lea, The Tragic Philosopher, pp. 60–63.

51 Dostoyevsky, in Crime and Punishment, chap. 5, pp. 308–10.

52 Lea, The Tragic Philosopher, p. 58.

53 Nietzsche, The Genealogy of Morals, p. 155.

54 Ibid.

55 [This is from Thus Spoke Zarathustra, prologue, 4. Cohen has quoted the 1891 translation by Thomas Common. For a slightly different translation see Nietzsche, Thus Spoke Zarathustra, p. 127.—Ed.]

56 On good/bad good/evil see Danto, Nietzsche as Philosopher, pp. 158–59.

57 See Lea, The Tragic Philosopher, p. 233.

58 Nietzsche, The Genealogy of Morals, pp. 159–60.

59 Nietzsche, Beyond Good and Evil, pp. 137–38. [Here Cohen has quoted the 1955 Marianne Cowan translation.—Ed.]

60 See further Morgan, What Nietzsche Means, p. 349.

61 Nietzsche, The Genealogy of Morals, pp. 167–68. [At this point the text includes the remark: “Here interpolate Christian and Nietzschean beatitudes.”—Ed.]

62 Nietzsche, The Genealogy of Morals, pp. 170–71.

63 Ibid., p. 173.

64 [At this point the text contains the remark “Is the temporal priority of good to bad in ‘good and bad’ and of ‘good and bad’ to ‘good and evil’ paralleled by a logical or conceptual priority?”—Ed.]

65 Nietzsche, Human, All Too Human, 1.114, p. 94.

66 Nietzsche, The Genealogy of Morals, p. 227.

67 Ibid., p. 228.

68 [At around this point a typed card containing the following is attached: “Feuerbach (Essence of Christianity, p. 321) The standpoint of virtue is related to the standpoint of determinism, in a way well brought out in this passage: ‘The poet must bring forth poetry, the philosopher must philosophise. They have their highest satisfaction in the activity of creation, apart from collateral or ulterior purpose. And it is just so with a truly noble moral action. To the man of noble feeling, the noble action is natural: he does not hesitate whether he should do it or not, he does not place it in the scales of choice; he must do it’.”—Ed.]

69 See Morgan, What Nietzsche Means, pp. 155–56.

70 See Nietzsche, Human, All Too Human, 1.60, p. 60.

71 Nietzsche, The Birth of Tragedy (Golffing translation), p. 42. [Above Cohen cites from the Haussmann translation, partially overlapping with this passage.—Ed.]

72 [Unfortunately there is no discussion of this topic in the manuscript.—Ed.]

73 “Let us finally consider what a naivete it is in general to say ‘Man ought to be thus and so!’ Reality shows us a ravishing wealth of types, the luxury of an extravagant play and change of forms.” Nietzsche, Twilight of the Idols, “Morality as Anti-Nature,” 6, quoted in Morgan, What Nietzsche Means, p. 120.

74 See Nietzsche, Human, All Too Human, 1.170, p. 129.

75 Nietzsche, The Gay Science, p. 99.

76 [The following remark, which forms part of the typed text at this point, is marked “omit.” However, it is not deleted. It is included here for reference. “Here Nietzsche reveals one of his important pre-suppositions—the assumption that it is impossible to curtail the forces in man which are socially disruptive without diminishing the strength and energy of the possible offenders against society. He is in favour of sublimation, but insists that it must operate on a personal level only, not on a social one.”—Ed.]

77 Nietzsche, The Genealogy of Morals, p. 176.

78 Ibid., pp. 177–78.

79 Ibid., p. 220.

80 Ibid., p. 221.

81 Ibid., p. 235. But cf. Nietzsche, Human, All Too Human, 1.200.

82 [A reference to The Genealogy of Morals, 3.4, p. 236. I thank David Owen for pointing this out.—Ed.]

83 [Around this point in the manuscript a typed card is attached, stating: “Feuerbach, (Essence of Christianity, p 250) is relevant to the question of Nietzsche’s dialecticality. What he said is worth quoting: ‘… the characteristic principle of religion [is] that it changes that which is naturally active into the passive [and thus corrodes man’s power, man’s will GAC]. The heathen elevates himself, the Christian feels himself elevated. The Christian converts into a matter or feeling, of receptivity, what to the heathen is a matter of spontaneity. The humility of the believer is an inverted arrogance,—an arrogance nonetheless because it has not the appearance, the external characteristics of arrogance. He feels himself pre-eminent: this pre-eminence however, is not a result of his activity, but a matter of grace; he has been made pre-eminent; he can do nothing toward it himself. He does not make himself the end of his own activity, but the end, the object of God.’ It is, of course, arrogant, to regard yourself as important to such a being as God.”—Ed.]

84 Nietzsche, The Genealogy of Morals, pp. 180–82.

85 Ibid., p. 232.

86 Ibid., p. 233.

87 [It is not clear what Cohen had in mind with this comment.—Ed.]

88 Nietzsche, The Genealogy of Morals, pp. 252–54.

89 Ibid., p. 257.

90 Nietzsche, Twilight of the Idols, Maxims and Arrows 8, p. 467.

91 Nietzsche, Twilight of the Idols, Skirmishes of an Untimely Man 38, p. 542.

92 Nietzsche, Ecce Homo, “Why I Am So Wise” 2, p. 224. [Here Cohen uses a translation I have not been able to trace.—Ed.]

93 See Morgan, What Nietzsche Means, pp. 177–79.

94 Nietzsche, Human, All Too Human 1.50. p. 54. [Cohen here too uses a translation I have not been able to trace.—Ed.]

95 Nietzsche, The Genealogy of Morals, p. 241.

96 See Lea, The Tragic Philosopher, pp. 234–35.

97 Nietzsche, The Dawn. Quoted in Kaufman, Nietzsche, p. 194.

98 Nietzsche, Will to Power. Quoted in Kaufman, Nietzsche, p. 252.

99 See Morgan, What Nietzsche Means, pp. 99–100, on sublimation.

100 Nietzsche, The Genealogy of Morals, p. 205.