It is a commonplace of contemporary Nietzsche scholarship to note that Nietzsche’s turn to, and development of his genealogical mode of enquiry is situated within the overall project of a re-evaluation of values that begins with Daybreak (e.g., Geuss 1994, Ridley 1998a, May 1999, Leiter 2002). But what specifically motivates Nietzsche’s development of genealogy? Given the continuing disagreement concerning the character of genealogy, one might suppose that an analysis of Nietzsche’s reasons for developing this mode of enquiry would be subject to some scrutiny; after all, if we can get clear about Nietzsche’s reasons for turning to genealogy, we will be well-placed to understand what this mode of enquiry is intended to accomplish. These disagreements range over both what genealogy is intended to do and for whom and how it is intended to achieve its work. Thus, for example, Leiter sees genealogy as a form of ideology-critique directed to freeing “nascent higher beings from their false consciousness” about contemporary morality in which Nietzsche’s voice has authority only for those predisposed to accept his values (Leiter 2002: 176 and chapter 5, more generally; cf. Leiter 2000). Geuss, on the other hand, sees genealogy as an attempt to master Christianity by showing Christians in terms they can accept that the perspective composed by Nietzsche’s values can give a better historical account of morality than the Christian perspective (Geuss 1994). Similarly Ridley and May
A version of this chapter previously appeared as “Nietzsche, Re-evaluation and the Turn to Genealogy,” in Europran Journal of Philosophy 11:3 (2003): 249–72. Reprinted with permission of Blackwell Publishing, Ltd.
see genealogy as involving a form of internal criticism that, in principle, speaks to all of Nietzsche’s contemporaries (Ridley 1998a; May 1999). However, Ridley argues that “Nietzsche cannot provide a principled method for ranking competing claims to represent our most basic interests” and so must resort to a peculiar form of flattery (Ridley 1998a: 152–53).1 Yet what remains absent from all of these otherwise impressive accounts, and from contemporary Nietzsche scholarship more generally, is any attention to the claims of a developmental approach that, in elucidating Nietzsche’s reasons for turning to genealogy, provides an interpretative basis for approaching On the Genealogy of Morality itself. In the light of this abiding commitment to the text of the Genealogy, the aim of this essay is to reconstruct the developmental context of the Genealogy and, in so doing, to cast some critical light on the disagreements and debates that characterize the contemporary reception of this work.
I take up this task by identifying three central problems that Nietzsche comes to recognize concerning his initial understanding of the nature and demands of the project of re-evaluation in Daybreak. Nietzsche’s responses to these problems, I argue, provide him with both compelling reasons to develop the mode of enquiry exhibited in On the Genealogy of Morality and the conceptual resources necessary to do so.
It is in Daybreak, as Nietzsche tells us in Ecce Homo, that his “campaign against morality begins” in “a re-evaluation of all values” (EH “D” 1).2 Whereas in Human, All Too Human, Nietzsche had sought to demonstrate that all moral motives (which he identified, following Schopenhauer, as unegoistic) are more or less sublimated expressions of self-interest and, thus, devalued moral values by showing that what are taken as intrinsic (i.e., independently motivating) values should be understood as instrumental values, in Daybreak Nietzsche admits the existence of moral motivations (no longer understood as necessarily unegoistic; cf. Clark and Leiter 1997). This development is accomplished through the proposal of an account of the origin of morality that (a) identifies moral action with conduct according to custom (D 9), (b) argues that customs are expressions of a community’s relationship to its environment that evaluate and rank types of action in terms of their utility or harmfulness with respect to the self-preservation of the community (D 9; cf. GS 116), (c) claims the system of moral judgments that express the evaluation and ranking of types of action structure our human drives in composing a second nature characterized by a system of moral sentiments that govern our moral agency (D 38; cf. D 99), (d) suggests that early societies are characterized by superfluous customs that play the role of inculcating the rule of obeying rules (D 16), and (e) claims that the morality of customs is predicated on belief in imaginary causalities (D 10; cf. D 21 and 24).
This account of the origin of morality provides a way for Nietzsche to reject Schopenhauer’s identification of moral action and unegoistic action as well as Kant’s metaphysics of morals through an argument that looks remarkably like a naturalization of Kant’s account of reverence for moral law. While Nietzsche’s account of the origin of morality does not account for how we have come to be characterized by the “intellectual mistakes” that lead us to identify morality with actions performed out of freedom of will or purely altruistic motives, it supplies a basis on which such an account could be constructed once it is supplemented by the hypotheses on moral innovation,3 on the construction of belief in a metaphysical world (e.g., D 33), and on the historical causes of the spread of the morality of pity (D 132) that Nietzsche adduces. The conclusion that Nietzsche draws from this set of arguments is presented thus:
There are two kinds of deniers of morality.—“To deny morality”—this can mean, first, to deny that the moral motives which men claim have inspired their actions have really done so—it is thus the assertion that morality consists of words and is among the coarser or more subtle deceptions (especially self-deceptions) which men practise, and perhaps so especially in precisely the case of those most famed for virtue. Then it can mean: to deny that moral judgments are based on truths. Here it is admitted that they really are motives for action, but that in this way it is errors which, as the basis of all moral judgment, impel men to their moral actions. This is my point of view: though I should be the last to deny that in very many cases there is some ground for suspicion that the other point of view—that is to say, the point of La Rochefoucauld and others who think like him—may also be justified and in any event of great general application. —Thus I deny morality as I deny alchemy, that is, I deny their premises: but I do not deny that there have been alchemists who believed in these premises and acted in accordance with them.—I also deny immoraliry: not that countless people feel themselves to be immoral but that there is any true reason so to feel. It goes without saying that I do not deny—unless I am a fool—that many actions called immoral ought to be avoided and resisted, or that many called moral ought to be done and encouraged—but I think that one should be encouraged and the other avoided for other reasons than hitherto. We have to learn to think differently—in order at last, perhaps very late on, to attain even more: to feel differently. (D 103)
Thus, Nietzsche conceives of the project of a re-evaluation of values as a project in which, as the concluding sentences of this passage make clear, intrinsic values can be re-evaluated as intrinsic values (rather than as instrumental ones, say, in disguise; see Ridley 2005). On the initial understanding of this project developed in Daybreak, Nietzsche takes its requirements to be threefold. First, to demonstrate that Christianity is predicated on belief in imaginary causalities in order to undermine the epistemic authority of Christian morality (see D 13, 76–80, 86). Second, to mobilize the affects cultivated by Christian morality against that morality in order to undermine its affective power (e.g., D 78, 131, 199). Third, to recommend an alternative (largely Greek) morality (see D 556 and 199). Nietzsche takes himself to be limited to recommending an alternative ideal to that of Christianity on the grounds that while we can all agree (he thinks) that “the goal of morality is defined in approximately the following way: it is the preservation and advancement of mankind” (D 106), he can see no way of specifying the substantive content of this goal that is not tendentious (see D 106 and 139). The second and third requirements are closely related in Nietzsche’s practice in that a large part of his rhetorical strategy in Daybreak involves exploiting the view expressed in Schopenhauer’s morality of pity to the effect that suffering is intrinsically bad in order to argue that Greek morality is superior to Christian morality from this point of view. Thus, Nietzsche advances the claim that Christian morality is objectionable on the grounds that it is characterized by an interpretation of suffering—and, indeed, of existence (since suffering is an inevitable feature of it)—as punishment (D 13). What is objectionable about this moral interpretation of suffering is that it intensifies the suffering to which the agent is subject by treating the occasion of extensional suffering as itself a source of intensional suffering that is of much greater magnitude than the extensional suffering on which it superveties.4 By contrast, Greek morality allows for “pure innocent misfortune” in which the occasion of extensional suffering of the agent is precisely not a source of intensional suffering (see D 78).
The three problems that Nietzsche gradually identifies with this initial understanding of the nature and requirements of the project of re-evaluation are the following:
Addressing these problems will lead Nietzsche to revise significantly his view of the nature and requirements of the project of re-evaluation initiated in Daybreak.
Nietzsche’s perception of the first of these problems is manifest in book III of The Gay Science which famously opens with the announcement “God is dead; but given the way people are, there may still for millennia be caves in which they show his shadow.—And we—we must still defeat his shadow as well!” (GS 108)5 The problem that Nietzsche identifies—what might be called the problem of not inferring (i.e., of failing to draw appropriate conclusions by virtue of being held captive by a picture or perspective)—and dramatizes in section 125 “Der tolle Mensch” is that while his contemporaries are increasingly coming to surrender belief in God, they do not draw the implication from this that Nietzsche insists follows. As he’ll later put this implication in Twilight of the Idols:
When one gives up Christian belief one thereby deprives oneself of the right to Christian morality. For the latter is absolutely not self-evident: one must make this point again and again, in spite of English shallowpates. Christianity is a system, a consistently thought out and complete view of things. If one breaks out of it a fundamental idea, the belief in God, one thereby breaks the whole thing to pieces: one has nothing of any consequence left in one’s hands....—it [the system] stands or falls with the belief in God. (TI “Skirmishes” 5)6
Nietzsche describes this phenomenon as follows:
But in the main one may say: The event [that “God is dead”] is far too great, too distant, too remote from the multitude’s capacity for comprehension even for the tidings of it to be thought of as having arrived as yet. Much less may one suppose that many people know as yet what this event really means—and how much must collapse now that this faith has been undermined because it was built upon this faith, propped up by it, grown into it: for example, the whole of our European morality (GS 343).
The thought is twofold. First, that the character of our morality has been shaped by our Christian faith and its authority underwritten by that faith. Second, that this is not understood by Nietzsche’s contemporaries. As James Conant puts it:
[T]hose who do not believe in God are able to imagine that the death of God marks nothing more than a change in what people should now “believe.” One should now subtract the belief in God from one’s body of beliefs; and this subtraction is something sophisticated people (who have long since ceased going to church) can effect without unduly upsetting how they live or what they value (Conant 1995: 262).
Nietzsche thus recognizes the need for two related tasks. First, to provide an account of this phenomenon of not inferring and, second, to find a way of demonstrating that the inference that he draws is the appropriate one.
In approaching the first of these tasks, Nietzsche has in his sights the example of Schopenhauer who exhibits precisely the stance of combining “admitted and uncompromising atheism” with “staying stuck in those Christian and ascetic moral perspectives” (GS 357; cf. GS 343). Nietzsche’s use of this example suggests that the problem of not inferring arises from the fact that his contemporaries remain committed to a metaphysical stance toward the world that is “not the origin of religion, as Schopenhauer has it, but only a late offshoot of it” (GS 151). This metaphysical stance is to be understood as a product of philosophy conducted “under the seduction of morality” (D P:3; cf. BGE 2 and 5) in that it is commitment to the unconditional authority of (Christian) morality that finds expression in the construction of a metaphysical perspective, that is, a perspective that denies its own perspectival character.7 We do not draw the appropriate implications from the death of God because we are held captive by a metaphysical perspective according to which the source and authority of our values is entirely independent of us.8 In this context, Nietzsche’s second task, that of showing that the death of God does have the implications that he claims, requires that he provide a naturalistic account of our morality that demonstrates how we have become subject to this taste for the unconditional—“the worst possible taste,” as Nietzsche calls it (BGE 31)—and, hence, subject to the allure of this metaphysical perspective. It also requires that he show how it has become possible for us to free ourselves from this picture (and, indeed, this taste) and why we are compelled to do so.
These latter points are closely connected to Nietzsche’s engagement with the second problem that he comes to discern with his understanding of his project in D, namely, the need to give a naturalistic account of our commitment to the unconditional value of truth.
Nietzsche’s engagement with the topic of truth is complex but, for our purposes, the salient points are, first, that Nietzsche, at least in his mature work, is committed to the view that one can have beliefs, make statements, and so forth, that are true or false (see Clark 1990; Gemes 1992; Leiter 1994) and, second, that we are characterized by a commitment to the unconditional value of truth. In respect of Nietzsche’s perspectivism, we may merely note that this doctrine—itself a product of Nietzsche’s naturalizing of epistemology—is compatible with commitment to the concept of truth: a perspective determines what is intelligibly up for grabs as true or false. Our concern, though, is with the issue raised by Nietzsche in response to the shortcomings of D, namely, how we come to be characterized by a commitment to the unconditional value of truth. A tentative approach to this issue is given expression in book III of The Gay Science in which Nietzsche suggests that the concept of knowledge arose originally as a way of endorsing certain basic beliefs that are useful (i.e., species-preserving) errors but that eventually “knowledge and the striving for the true finally took their place as needs among the other needs” and “knowledge became a part of life, a continually growing power, until finally knowledge and the ancient basic errors struck against each other, both as life, both as power, both in the same person ... after the drive to truth has proven itself to be life-preserving power, too” (GS 110). The problem with this argument is that it cannot account for the unconditional character of our will to truth, our conviction “that truth is more important than anything else, than every other conviction”( GS 344). Thus, Nietzsche argues, in book V of The Gay Science added five years later:
Precisely this conviction could never have originated if truth and untruth had constantly made it clear that they were both useful, as they are. So, the faith in science, which after all undeniably exists, cannot owe its origin to such a calculus of utility; rather it must have originated in spite of the fact that the disutility and dangerousness of “the will to truth” or “truth at any price” is proved to it constantly. Consequently, “will to truth” does not mean “I do not want to let myself be deceived” but—there is no alternative—“I will not deceive, not even a-iyself”; and with that we stand on moral ground. (GS 344)
So, if Nietzsche is to give a satisfying account of how we come to be characterized by our faith in the unconditional value of truth, this will have to be integrated into his account of the formation of Christian morality. Notice though that while it is our faith in science that is to compel us to abandon our religious and, more importantly, moral commitments and, hence, to recognize the necessity of a re-evaluation of values, appeal to our faith in science cannot do all the work necessary since this faith in science is itself an expression of the morality whose value Nietzsche is concerned to call into question. As Nietzsche acknowledges:
But you will have gathered what I am getting at, namely, that it is still a metaphysical faith upon which our faith in science rests—that even we knowers of today, we godless anti-metaphysicians, still take our fire, too, from the thousand-year old faith, the Christian faith which was also Plato’s faith, that God is truth; that truth is divine. (GS 344)9
With these remarks Nietzsche both situates his own philosophical activity within the terms of the death of God and acknowledges that if he is to demonstrate the necessity of a re-evaluation of our moral values, this must include a demonstration of the need for a re-evaluation of the value of truth that appeals to nothing more than our existing motivational set in its stripped down form, that is, our will to truth. If Nietzsche can provide such an account, he will have resolved one dimension of the problem of authority that confronts his project since he will have demonstrated that the necessity of the re-evaluation of Christian morality with respect to its claim concerning the unconditioned character of its highest values is derived from the central commitments of that morality itself. However, as Nietzsche acknowledges (see GS 346), accomplishing this task does itself raise a further potential threat, the threat of nihilism, which we can gloss in Dostoevsky’s terms: God is dead, everything is permitted. To avoid this threat, Nietzsche needs to provide an account of how we can stand to ourselves as moral agents, as agents committed to, and bound by, moral values that does not require recourse to a metaphysical perspective. This issue is closely related to the third of the problems that Nietzsche identifies with Daybreak.
In his responses to both of the preceding problems that Nietzsche identifies with his understanding of his project of re-evaluation in Daybreak, Nietzsche has been compelled to recognize that the requirements of this project involve providing a compelling account of how we have become subject to Christian morality as a morality that both involves a particular ranking of values and claims an unconditional authority. In approaching the third problem that he identifies with D, namely, the need for well-grounded naturalistic criteria for evaluating moral values, Nietzsche confronts the other dimension of the problem of authority that bedevils his project. We can put it this way: even if Nietzsche finds a way of demonstrating that we should disavow the unconditional status claimed by Christian morality and, hence, demonstrates that we cannot value Christian morality for the (metaphysical) reasons that we have hitherto, this would not suffice to provide a criterion in terms of which our valuing should be conducted. Moreover, Nietzsche comes to see that this problem is connected to another problem, namely, his inability to give an adequate account in D of the motivation for, and success of, the re-evaluation of the values of antiquity accomplished by Christianity. What connects this explanatory problem to Nietzsche’s evaluative problem is that, at a general and abstract level, Nietzsche’s concern to translate man back into nature (see GS 110 and BGE 230) entails that his account of the motivation for a re-evaluation of Christian morality must be continuous with his account of the motivation for the Christian re-evaluation of the morality of antiquity. Both the re-evaluation accomplished by Christianity and the re-evaluation proposed by Nietzsche need, in other words, to be explicable in terms of basic features of human beings as natural creatures in order to exhibit the right kind of continuity. To the extent that Nietzsche has a candidate for this role in D and the original edition of The Gay Science, it is self-preservation (see GS 116). However, there is a problem with this candidate in that it doesn’t obviously fit well with forms of human activity that risk or, indeed, aim at self-destruction on the part of individuals and communities (or, to put the same point another way, it doesn’t seem well poised to account for forms of growth or expansion on the part of individuals or communities that are not directed to developing resources for self-preservation).10 While Nietzsche acknowledges that self-preservation can be a powerful motive for action, this limitation led him to propose another candidate: will to power.11
The doctrine of will to power is proposed by Nietzsche as an empirical hypothesis concerning life:
Physiologists should think twice before positioning the drive for self-preservation as the cardinal drive of an organic being. Above all, a living thing wants to discharge its strength—life itself is will to power—: self-preservation is only one of the indirect and most frequent conseyuences of this. (BGE 13, cf. also GS 349)
However, while Nietzsche argues that human beings are continuous with other organic creatures in terms of being characterized by will to power, he also stresses that the fact that human beings are characterized by self-consciousness entails that they are distinct from other organic creatures in terms of the modality of will to power that they exhibit. The implication of the fact that human beings are self consciousness animals is that the feeling of power that human beings enjoy as agents need have no necessary connection to the degree of power that they express in their agency. Nietzsche’s point is this: because human beings are self-conscious creatures, the feeling of power to which their agency gives rise is necessarily mediated by the perspective in terms of which they understand themselves as agents and, crucially, the moral evaluation and ranking of types of action expressed within that perspective—but if this is the case, it follows that an expansion (or diminution) of the feeling of power can be an effect of the perspective rather than of an actual increase (or decrease) in the capacities of the agent. A clear illustration of this point is provided in GS 353.
The true invention of the religion-founders is first to establish a certain way of life and everyday customs that work as a disciplina voluntatis while at the same time removing boredom; and then to give just this life an interpretation that makes it appear illuminated by the highest worth, so that henceforth it becomes a good for which one fights and under certain circumstances even gives one’s life. Actually, the second invention is the more important: the first, the way of life, was usually in place, though alongside other ways of life and without any consciousness of its special worth.12
Under such conditions of perspective-change, Nietzsche makes plain, the feeling of power attendant on the exercise of one’s capacities within a given way of life can be wholly transformed without any change in one’s actual capacities or their exercise. Moreover, as Paul Patton points out: “If Nietzsche’s conception of human being as governed by the drive to enhance its feeling of power breaks the link to actual increase of power, then it also dissolves any necessary connection between the human will to power and hostile forms of exercise of power over others” (Patton 2001: 108). The feeling of power can be acquired through the domination of others but it can equally be acquired through compassion toward others, through the disciplining of oneself, and the like, depending on the moral perspective in terms of which agents experience their activity. The central point is that this principle provides Nietzsche with a general hypothesis in terms of which to account for human agency as governed by an architectonic interest in the feeling of power.13 The continuity between the motivation for the Christian re-evaluation of the values of antiquity and for Nietzsche’s proposed re-evaluation of Christian values is, thus, that both are to be understood as expressions of will to power.
But what of criteria for evaluating moral perspectives? This issue also turns on Nietzsche’s stress on the point that an increase in one’s feeling of power need have no necessary connection to an increase in one’s powers of agency. The point for Nietzsche is whether our moral perspective is such that the enhancement of our feeling of power expresses the development of our powers of agency. Thus, for example, Nietzsche’s use of the concept of degeraeration in Beyond Good and Evil (which foreshadows his discussion of decadence in the post-Genealogy works) suggests that the feeling of power enjoyed by human beings who understand themselves in terms of “the morality of herd animals” that Nietzsche takes to be characteristic of modern Europe expresses the diminution, rather than enhancement, of our powers of agency (BGE 202–3).14 It is in this context that we can grasp Nietzsche’s point when he comments:
You want, if possible (and no “if possible” is crazier) to abolish suffering. And us?-it looks as though we would prefer it to be heightened and made even worse than it has ever been! Well-being as you understand it—that is no goal; it looks to us like an end!—a condition that immediately renders people ridiculous and despicable—that makes their decline into something desirable! The discipline of suffering, of great suffering—don’ t you know that this discipline has been the sole cause of every enhancement in humanity so far? (BGE 225, cf. BGE 202–3, TI “Skirmishes” 41)
Nietzsche’s claim is that the desire to abolish suffering is insane just in virtue of the fact that the development of our intrinsic powers is conditional on being subject to the constraints of a discipline that necessarily involves suffering on our part.15 The import of these remarks is to suggest that the criterion of evaluation is to be whether the feeling of power expresses actual powers of agency, where this criterion can be taken to be well-grounded just insofar as the principle of will to power provides a compelling explanation of human agency. This follows because if one accepts the principle of will to power as a principle of explanation, then one has accepted that human beings are characterized by an architectonic interest in the self-reflexive experience of agency, and since it is a necessary condition of the self-reflexive experience of agency that the feeling of power is taken to express actual powers of agency, then one must also accept that moral perspectives and the valuations of which they are composed can be evaluated in terms of the proposed criterion (cf. BGE 19 on willing). But the proposal of this criterion raises two further issues. The first concerns the conditions under which the feeling of power expresses actual powers of agency. The second relates to Nietzsche’s perspectivism in respect of the conditional character of the preceding argument.
Nietzsche’s argument with respect to the first of these topics is to argue that the feeling of power expresses actual powers of agency insofar as it is free, that is, characterized by a certain kind of self relation that he often glosses as becoming what you are (e.g., GS 270) or, as he’ll later put it in Twilight of the Idols, “Having the will to be responsible to oneself” (TI “Skirmishes” 38). This argument relates to his reasons for deploying the deliberatively provocative use of the notions of herd and herd-morality in his depictions of his modern human beings and the Christian moral inheritance that he takes to characterize them. The basic thought here is that there are two necessary conditions of freedom.
The first is that we are entitled to regard our agency (our intentions, values, beliefs, actions, etc.) as our own,16 where a condition of being entitled to regard our agency as our own is that the intentions, beliefs, values, etc. that we express in acting are self-determined. Nietzsche, in common with other advocates of an expressivist understanding of agency for whom “Das Thun ist alles” (GMI:13),17 takes the relationship of an artist to his work as exemplifying the appropriate kind of self-relation, that is, (a) one in which one’s actions are expressive of one’s intentions where this means that one’s intention-in-acting is not prior to its expression but rather is realized as such only in being adequately expressed (the work is his to the degree that it adequately expresses his intentions and his intentions become choate as his intentions only through their adequate expression)18 and (b) one’s activity appeals to no authority independent of, or external to, the norms that govern the practice in which one is engaged. The case of the artist’s relationship to his work is exemplary in virtue of the fact that the artist’s feeling of power is a direct function of his actual powers of agency.19 This is the background against which we can grasp the point of Nietzsche’s recourse to stressing the first person pronoun in talk of “my truths” (BGE 232) and assertions such as “My judgment is my judgment, no one else is easily entitled to it” (BGE 43). The second necessary condition is that we engage in critically distanced reflection on our current self-understanding. Nietzsche’s point is that freedom demands “the ability to take one’s virtues and oneself as objects of reflection, assessment and possible transformation, so that one can determine who one is”:
As Nietzsche pointed out “whoever reaches his ideal in doing so transcends it.” To take ourselves as potentially free requires that we are not merely bearers of good qualities but self-determining beings capable of distanced reflection. So to attain one’s ideal is always that and also to attain a new standpoint, from which one can look beyond it to how to live one’s life in the future.” (Guay 2002: 315)
It is just such a process that Nietzsche sought to give expression in “Schopenhauer as Educator.”20 Notice that the thought expressed here is analogous to the thought that the artist in having completed a work that adequately expresses his intentions can take that work as an object of critical reflection and assessment—and so move on. In the light of this concept of freedom, we can see the point of Nietzsche’s talk of the herd as referring to (and seeking to provoke a certain self-contempt in) those who fail to live up to the demands of freedom, and of his talk of herd-morality as a form of morality that obstructs the realization of freedom by, on the one hand, construing agency in nonexpressive terms such that the feeling of power has no necessary relationship to actual powers of agency—and, on the other hand, presenting moral rules as unconditional (in virtue of their source in an extra-human authority) and, hence, as beyond critical reflection and assessment. Herd-morality, to return to the artistic analogy, is characterized by a relationship to one’s work in which (a) one treats “the medium through which its work is to be done as a mere vehicle for the thought or feeling it is attempting to clarify” (Ridley 1998b: 36), and (b) takes the standards according to which a work is to be judged as external to the artistic tradition. 21 The salience of this discussion for our consideration of Nietzsche’s criterion of evaluation is that the feeling of power expresses our powers of agency just insofar as the moral values according to which we act are our own, are self-determined, that is, are constraints that we reflectively endorse as conditions of our agency.22 We should note further that this account of freedom serves to provide Nietzsche with the account needed to address Dostoevsky’s worry about moral agency per se following the death of God in that it makes the basis on which moral norms are constituted as binding.
Yet, and here we turn to the second issue, this may seem simply to move the problem of authority back one step. Will to power (and the account of freedom that goes along with it) is, it may be pointed out, simply part of Nietzsche’s perspective; the fact that the doctrine of will to power provides Nietzsche with a way of accounting for perspectives (including his own) and, indeed, for perspectivism does not impiy—incoherentiy—that it has a nonperspectival status, merely that it is an integral element in Nietzsche’s efforts to develop a perspective that is maximally coherent. 23 But if will to power is part of Nietzsche’s perspective, a perspective oriented to translating man back into nature, then what authority can it have for those who do not share this perspective? To see how Nietzsche addresses this issue, we need to sketch out his perspectivism in more detail than the hitherto rather fleeting references to perspectives have done.
In common with a number of other contemporary commentators on Nietzsche’s perspectivism,24 I take this doctrine to offer “a deflationary view of the nature of justification: there is no coherent notion of justification other than ratification in the terms provided by one’s perspective” (Reginster 2000: 40). A perspective as a system of judgments denotes the space of reasons “which constitute an agent’s deliberative viewpoint, i.e., the viewpoint from which he forms his all-things-considered judgments about what to do” (Reginster, 2000: 43).25 In endorsing this stance, Nietzsche thus confronts the very issue raised with respect to will to power in its most acute form, namely, how he can justify the authority of his perspective. What Nietzsche needs here is a way of showing those committed to holding another perspective that they should endorse his perspective in the light of reasons internal to their current perspective. Moreover, since (as we have seen) Nietzsche also holds that reasons motivate only insofar as they appeal to values that are part of the motivational set of those to whom the reasons are addressed, then for his argument to be effective, the reasons that he adduces must express values intrinsic to the perspective curreutly held by those he is concerned to persuade. What Nietzsche needs, it seems, is an argument with the following form: insofar as you are committed to perspective A, then reasons x and y provide you with grounds to acknowledge the superiority of perspective B in terms of value z, where z is an intrinsic (i.e., independently motive-ting) value in perspective A.26 But although an argument of this type looks sufficient for the kind of internal criticism needed in that it provides independently motivating reasons to move from perspective A to perspective B, it is not sufficient for this move to be reflectively stable. The problem is this: if it is the case that we are motivated to move from perspective A to perspective B in terms that appeal to value z, then if value z is not an intrinsic value in perspective B, we find ourselves in the position of reflectively endorsing perspective B on the basis of a value that is not an intrinsic value within this perspective, that is, for reasons that do not count as the appropriate (i.e., independently motivating) kind of reasons (if, indeed, they count as reasons at all) within this perspective.27 Consequently, if our reasons for endorsing perspective B are to stand in the right kind of motivational relationship to both perspective A and perspective B, the value to which these reasons appeal must be an intrinsic value not only in perspective A but also perspective B. The implication of these reflections is that Nietzsche’s claims concerning perspectivism, will to power, and freedom have authority for us only insofar as we are provided with reasons that are authoritative for us, given our existing perspective, and stand in the right kind of motivational relationship to both our existing perspective and Nietzsche’s perspective. If the project of re-evaluation is to be coherent, Nietzsche needs to supply an argument that does this work.
Nietzsche’s reflections on the problems with his initial view of the character and requirements of the project of re-evaluation in Daybreak have led to very significant extensions, developments, and refinements of his understanding of this project and its demands. The principal demands that Nietzsche now takes this project to involve are three. First, consequent to his development of the view of Christianity as a perspective expressing a taste for the unconditional, Nietzsche needs an account of how we have become subject to this taste and held captive by this perspective. Second, consequent to his development of the view of our will to truth as internal to the Christian perspective, Nietzsche needs an account of how the will to truth develops that explains how it is possible for us to free ourselves from the grip of the Christian perspective and the taste for the unconditional that it expresses and why we ought to disavow this taste. Third, consequent to his development of, and commitment to, the doctrines of will to power and of perspectivism, Nietzsche needs to develop the account demanded by the first and second requirements such that it secures the authority of Nietzsche’s perspective in a reflectively stable manner. It is the necessity of meeting these demands that motivates Nietzsche’s development of genealogy as a mode of enquiry.
If this argument is cogent, it has significant implications for the current debate concerning genealogy in that it provides a prima facie case for the claim that the philosophical function of genealogy is oriented to providing, contra Leiter, a form of internal criticism of our modern moral perspective that, contra Ridley, rests its authority on an appeal to a value (i.e., truthfulness) that is an intrinsic value in both our modern moral perspective and Nietzsche’s perspective (rather than on flattery and seduction). At the same time, it suggests that Geuss’s contention that Nietzsche’s target audience is Christian as opposed to simply persons who are committed to Christian forms of valuing is mistaken, as is also Geuss’s view that Nietzsche’s perspective is simply an expression of his own substantive moral values. It may, of course, be the case, even if the reconstruction of Nietzsche’s path to genealogy in this essay is compelling, that Nietzsche’s view developed further in the Genealogy itself—but this reconstruction does at the very least shift the onus onto the defenders of views that are incompatible with the reasons reconstructed here to provide an explanation of this incompatibility that is both textually and philosophically satisfying.
Anscombe, E. (1981). “Modern Moral Philosophy,” in Ethics, Religion, and Politics: Collected Philosophical Papers, Vol. 3. Oxford: Basil Blackwell, 26–42.
Cavell, S. (1990). Conditions Handsome and Unhandsome. Chicago: Chicago University Press.
Clark, M. (1990). Nietzsche on Truth and Philosophy. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.
Clark, M., and B. Leiter. (1997). “Introduction,” in Daybreak, vii-xxxvii. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.
Conant, J. (1995). “Nietzsche, Kierkegaard, and Anscombe on Moral Unintelligibility,”
in T. Tessin and M. von der Ruhr (eds.) Morality and Religion. New York: St. Martins Press, 250–99.
Conant, J. (2001). “Nietzsche’s Perfectionism: A Reading of Schopenhauer as Educator,” in R. Schacht (ed.) Nietzsche’s Postmoralism. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 181–257.
Conway, D. (1997). Nietzsche’s Dangerous Game. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.
Danto, A. (1988). “Some Remarks on The Genealogy of Morals,” in R. Solomon and K. Higgins (eds.) Reading Nietzsche. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 13–28.
Gemes, K. (1992). “Nietzsche’s Critique of Truth,” Philosophy and Phenomenological Research 52: 47–65.
Geuss, R. (1994). “Nietzsche and Genealogy,” European Journal of Philosophy 2: 275–92.
Guay, R. (2002). “Nietzsche on Freedom,” European Journal of Philosophy 10: 302–27.
Leiter, B. (1994). “perspectivism in Nietzsche’s Genealugy of Morals,” in R. Schacht (ed.) Nietzsche, Genealogy, Morality. Berkeley: University of California Press, 334–57.
Leiter, B. (1998). “The Paradox of Fatalism and Self-Creation in Nietzsche,” in C. Janaway (ed.) Willing and Nothingness: Schopenhauer as Nietzrche’s Educator. Oxford: Oxford University Press.
Letter, B. (2000). “Nietzsche’s Metaethics: Against the Privilege Readings,” European Journal of Philosophy 8: 277–97.
Leiter, B. (2002). Nietzsche on Morality. London: Routiedge.
Maclntyre, A. (1977). “Dramatic Narratives, Epistemological Crises and the Philosophy of Science,” The Monist 60: 453–72.
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May, S. (1999). Nietzsche’s Ethics and His War on “Morality.” Oxford: Clarendon Press.
Owen, D. (1998). “Nietzsche, Enlightenment and the Problem of the Noble Ideal,” in J. Lippitt (ed.) Nietzsche’s Futures. Basingstoke: MacMillan, 3–29.
Owen, D., and A. Ridley. (2003). “On Fate,” International Studies in Philosophy 35(3): 63–78.
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Reginster, B. (2000). “Perspectivism, Criticism and Freedom of Spirit,” European Journal of Philosophy 8: 40–62.
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Richardson,, J. (1996). Nietzrche’s System. Oxford: Oxford University Press.
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————. (1998b). Collingwood. London: Phoenix.
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I am grateful to Aaron Ridley and James Tully for their comments on earlier drafts of this essay and, in particular, to Aaron, whose article (reprinted in this volume), “Nietzsche and the Re-evaluation of Values,” provided much of the spur to write this essay as well as some of the conceptual resources needed for it. I also received some seemingly small but actually very helpful suggestions from the anonymous referees that have (I hope) improved its clarity and made the conclusion punchier. I owe much thanks to my wife, Caroline Wintersgill, one of whose perfections is the ability to work on improving my prose style without ever (quite) succumbing to the condition of (rational) despair.
Ridley argues that Nietzsche’s authority “is built on that most peculiar form of flattery, the kind that makes welcome even the most unpleasant revelations about ourselves provided that it also makes us feel more interesting (to us and to him).” However it should be noted that Ridley has since rejected this view and he (2005) offers a nuanced account of re-evaluation that informs the argument of this essay and also provides a devastating critique of the view of re-evaluation adopted in Leiter (2002).
For citations of Nietzsche’s writings, I rely upon the following translations: Diethe’s GM; Hollingdale’s A, D, HH, and UM; Large’s Tl; Nauckhoff and Del Caro’s GS; and Norman’s BGE.
See D 14 and 98 for remarks on innovation in general and D 70–2 for comments on Christianity as a successful innovation, whose success is due, not least, to the ways in which it draws on and powerfully synthesizes a number of moral currents and beliefs already present within Jewish and Roman society.
The distinction between extensional and intensional forms of suffering is borrowed from Danto (1988) in which he characterizes intensional suffering as consisting in an interpretation of extensional suffering and goes on to point out—using the example of male impotence in our culture—that while one may be able to do relatively little about the extensional suffering to which those subject to impotence are exposed, it would undoubtedly reduce the overall suffering to which they are subject if sexual potency were not connected to powerful cultural images of masculinity. See in this context D77–8.
By the shadows of God, Nietzsche is referring to the metaphysical analogues of God and, more generally, the deployment of our conceptual vocabulary as expressing metaphysical commitments, namely, to a particular conception of the will. See GS 127.
Cf. Wittgenstein, On Certainty 105. As James Conant (1995) and Michael Tanner (1994: 33–35) have independently observed, Nietzsche’s argument here bears a striking resemblance to the argument advanced by Elizabeth Anscombe (1981) in her essay “Modern Moral Philosophy.”
Hence, within the grip of this metaphysical perspective, as Nietzsche points out in BGE 186, philosophers have understood their task to be that of providing secure foundations for morality, a task that “even constitutes a type of denial that these morals can be regarded as a problem.”
The meaning of the death of God will have become clear to us, on Nietzsche’s s account, once we recognize that “there are no viable external sources of authority,” as Guay (2002: 311) points out. The same point is also made by Gemes (1992: 50).
It is a feature of the lengths to which Leiter is forced in maintaining his claim that genealogy does not involve internal criticism that Leiter (2002: 175n7) argues that the value of truth is not internal to Christian morality although produced by it. This strikes me as a very strained reading of the textual evidence here and in GM III. Leiter is motivated to maintain this view by his commitment to the claim that Nietzsche does not want the majority to change their views, only the exceptional individuals predisposed to the values that Leiter takes Nietzsche to be espousing.
The contrast between Nietzsche and Hobbes is an apposite one here that has been illuminatingly explored by Patton (2001).
It is worth noting that Nietzsche had been edging toward the idea of will to power even when his official line focused on self-preservarion. See, for example, D 23, 112 and 254, and GS 13.
Note that this passage marks an important shift from Daybreak in that it allows Nietzsche to distinguish between the origin of a custom or way of life and its meaning; the importance of this point is stressed in GM II:12 with respect to his genealogical project.
See Warren (1998) for a clear exposition of this view. Notice that this doctrine does not imply that agents aim directly at the feeling of power but, rather, that engagement in action directed at such-and-such ends produces the feeling of power to the extent that in so acting the agent enjoys the self-reflexive experience of agency (i.e., efficacious willing) which, in turn, leads agents to value forms of activity that support and enhance, and devalue forms of activity that undermine and diminish, their self-reflexive experience of agency. This construal of the doctrine of will to power avoids, it seems to me, the worries expressed by Maudemarie Clark concerning this doctrine without requiring that we adopt the rather implausible view to which she comes, namely, that the doctrine of will to power should be read “as a generalization and glorification of the will to power, the psychological entity (the drive or desire for power)” through which Nietzsche expresses his own “moral” values. See Clark (1990: 224) and chapter 7 of her book more generally.
See Conway (1997) chapter 2 for a good discussion of decadence.
The centrality of discipline for Nietzsche is rightly stressed May (1999: 27–29). The issue of constraint with respect to giving style to one’s character has been illuminatingly discussed by Ridley (1998: 136–42) while the relationship between freedom, constraint, and fate in Nietzsche is taken up in Owen and Ridley (2003); see particularly the critical discussion of Leiter (1998) and the defense of the position advocated by Schacht (1983, chapter 5).
This point is already stressed in “Schopenhauer as Educator,” and it remains a prominent theme in Daybreak, esp. D 104.
One can think here of the early Romantics, Hegel (on some readings), Collingwood, Wittgenstein, and Charles Taylor. It should be noted that this aspect of Nietzsche’s thought is closely related to his inheritance, via the Romantics and Emerson, of Kant’s reflections on genius; for an illuminating discussion of this point, see Conant (2001: 191–96).
Notice that it is an implication of Nietzsche’s commitment to this view that the judgment that such-and-such action adequately expresses my intention is only intelligible against the background of practices in which we give and exchange reasons. What is more, I do not stand in any privileged relation to the judgment that such-and-such action adequately expresses my intention.
In the light of the preceding footnote we should note that while an artist’s feeling of power may be based on a mistaken view of his activity, the publicity of his judgment entails that such a mistaken feeling of his power cannot be reflectively sustained.
See Conant (2001) for a demonstration of this claim.
This view aligns Nietzsche’s talk of herd-morality to his processual perfectionism. See Guay (2002) who calls this “meta-perfectionism” to stress the point that there is no end point or telos as such to Nietzsche’s perfectionism and Conant (2001) who suggests that Nietzsche’s stance is akin to the Emersonian perfectionism elucidated in Cavell (1990). A strongly contrasting view is forthrightly argued by Letter (2002). However, it is worth noting that not only had Nietzsche already criticized the elitist understanding of human excellence proposed by Leiter in “Schopenhauer as Educator” but also that Leiter’s failure to address Nietzsche’s concept of freedom entails that he fails to recognize that Nietzsche’s remarks on herd-morality are perfectly explicable in terms thar do not require the elitist understanding of human excellence to which Leiter takes Nietzsche to be committed.
Note “self determined” does not mean “self-imposed”: the constraints may be there anyway. Rather self-determined means affirming these constraints as conditions of one’s agency. In this respect, Nietzsche’s concept of freedom is closely related to his concept of fate. For a fuller discussion of this issue, see Owen and Ridley (2003) and, in particular, the detailed critique of Leiter’s (1998) argument concerning Nietzsche’s understanding of human types (an argument that Leiter deploys to support his claims concerning Nietzsche’s commitment to the elitist view of human excellence).
For a powerfully developed alternative view in which perspectivism with respect to the empirical world is seen as a product of a nonperspectival metaphysics of will to power, see Richardson (1996). For some skepticism—of the right kind—toward Richardson’s view, see Reginster (2001).
Clark (1990) is the principal figure here but other noteworthy advocates of this view include Daniel Conway, David Hoy, Brian Leiter, Bernard Reginster, Aaron Ridley, and Richard Schacht among others.
Note that there are two ways in which we can take Nietzsche’s assertion of perspectivism. On the one hand, we make take Nietzsche to be asserting a tautology. On the other hand, we may take him to be asserting a position that risks a dilemma in which this assertion is either a performative contradiction or a claim from Nietzsche’s perspective. In contrast to Reginster, I incline to the former of these views.
This is the position that I take Reginster (2000: 49–51) to argue for.
They might still be reasons if value z is an instrumental value in perspective B but they would not be the right sort of reasons to play the reflectively stablilizing role that they are called to play. Compare Maclntyre (1977). It is one of the ironies of Maclntyre’s reading of Nietzsche and, in particular, of genealogy (1990) that he fails to see how close Nietzsche’s way of dealing with the issue of authority is to the account sketched out in his own 1977 essay.