Toward the end of his effective life, Nietzsche repeatedly claimed that what was really needed was a “re-evaluation of values.”1 In the preface to the Genealogy, he describes this as a “new demand: we need a critique of [existing] values”: “the value of these values must ... be called into question”;2 and in the foreword to Twilight of the Idols, he identifies The Anti-Christ as the first of a projected four-volume set to be called “The Re-evaluation of All Values”—a project that he never competed, and may indeed have abandoned, given that The Anti-Christ, itself originally to have been subtitled “The Re-evaluation of All Values,” was published in the event with the more succinct byline “A Curse on Christianity.” But it would be a mistake to think that Nietzsche never got round to his re-evaluation project, since, in one way or another, and as many commentators have observed, all of his published works are plausibly to be understood as contributions to it. So what is it to re-evaluate values? And what might Nietzsche’s practice of re-evaluation have to tell us about the value of our existing values?
The second of these questions has often been answered in the following way. The re-evaluation of values, it is said, can only be undertaken from some evaluative standpoint or other; in order to be authoritative, that standpoint itself must be somehow immune to re-evaluation (or at any rate to devaluation); Nietzsche, however, gives us no reason to think that his own evaluative standpoint is immune to re-evaluation in the relevant way; therefore the only thing that Nietzsche’s re-evaluation can tell us about the value of our existing values is how they look from the perspective of his own preferred values, values whose superiority he merely asserts, rather than defends or demonstrates. Therefore, if we are comfortable with our existing values, and with our existing evaluations of them, there can be nothing in what Nietzsche says to cause us much anxiety; for at bottom, the answer concludes, we might just disagree with him about which evaluative standpoint is best. Nietzsche’s evaluative standpoint, and the re-evaluation that he undertakes from it, need have no authority for us. This response, or objection, deserves to be treated seriously, I think; and, in trying to say what I take Nietzsche’s re-evaluation of values to be, I shall be trying, inter alia, to assess the strength of that objection, and to assess Nietzsche’s resources for dealing with it.
First, though, some preliminary remarks about Nietzsche’s conception of value. He rejects as incoherent the notion of unconditional value, a notion to which he thinks philosophers have been unduly attached (e.g., BGE 2). A value, V, is unconditional, in Nietzsche’s sense, if (1) the value of V is not conditional upon any other value; (2) the value of V is not conditional upon any contingent matter of fact; (3) the value of V is not retationat—its value is, as it is sometimes put, “absolute”; (4) V has the value it has necessarily: it is valuable “in itself”; and (5) V cannot be defeated by any other value. To describe something as unconditionally valuable, then, is to say that it is valuable no matter what; that its value in this world is wholly independent of any other values or of any fact or facts that are or might be peculiar to this world; that it is valuable, and valuable absolutely, whatever else is or might be the case. It is this conception of value that Nietzsche rejects as incoherent—and with some reason. I won’t review his arguments here, but will simply note that, according to the conception of value that he rejects, any V that is unconditionally valuable would be valuable even in a world in which all valuing beings were united in their denial of, or in their obliviousness to, the value of V, and indeed in a world in which there were no valuing beings at all. I take it that the claim that such a conception is incoherent is at least plausible. Two further points should be made. First, if no values are unconditionally valuable, no values are immune to re-evaiuation—and that includes Nietzsche’s own values, from the standpoint of which his own efforts at re-evaluation are undertaken. This sharpens the question about the authority of Nietzsche’s project that I mentioned a moment ago. And second, the fact that all values are in some sense only conditionally valuable doesn’t by itself mean that no values are or can be objectively valuable, in a perfectly straightforward sense of “objectively.”3 The notion of objectivity does not depend for its sense, that is, on the notion of unconditionaliry. Nietzsche accepts, and indeed emphasizes, both of these points.
How, then, does Nietzsche understand the (conditional) value of values? The answer is that he understands it in either of two ways: as instrumentally valuable or as intrinsically valuable.4 Something has direct instrumental value, I shall say, if its value resides chiefly in its being a means toward some kind of (valuable) end. So, for example, from an act utilitarian perspective, my keeping some particular promise is instrumentally valuable if, and only if, it directly increases utility. Something has indirect instrumental value, by contrast, if its value resides chiefly in its promoting or making more likely the realization of some kind of (valuable) end, even though it does not function directly as a means to that end. So, for instance, from a rule utilitarian perspective, the keeping of promises in general may be instrumentally valuable if it tends to promote utility, even if some particular instances of promise-keeping do not promote it, and even if no instance of promise-keeping is undertaken with the end of utility in mind. Instrumental value, whether direct or indirect, is thus conditional upon the fact of ends that are themselves valuable. Such ends are treated by Nietzsche as intrinsically valuable, where something has intrinsic value if, given what else is the case, its value does not reside chiefly in its being a means or an enabling factor toward some further kind of (valuable) end. Intrinsic value is thus conditional upon facts—natural, social, practical, or cultural—that are or might be peculiar to particular ways of living, as well as (often) upon the relations of the value in question to the other values having a place in some particular way of life.5 The point can also be put like this. A value is intrinsically valuable with respect to a given way of living if, other things being equal, it can, by itself, motivate: so, for example, if the fact that such and such a course of action is an instance of promise-keeping is reason enough by itself for someone to perform it, that shows that promise-keeping is intrinsically valuable with respect to that person’s way of life.” It should be noted that nothing in this conception of intrinsic value entails that an intrinsic value can never, under any circumstances, be trumped by another value: in principle, any intrinsic value is capable of being trumped (depending on what other things are, and aren’t, equal). It is, however, this conception of the intrinsically valuable that, from a perspective deep within some particular way of living, may be, and often is, according to Nietzsche, mistaken for the unconditionally valuable (e.g., BGE 186). The facts and other values upon which an intrinsic value is conditional are so familiar, so taken for granted, as to have become invisible, and as they fade from sight so the condirionality of the intrinsic becomes invisible too.
The earlier Nietzsche reassigns the value of morality as a whole from the intrinsic to the instrumental, and construes the end that it promotes in terms of survival (e.g., HH 40). When he deals with the individual values constitutive of morality, moreover, he tends to side explicitly with thinkers such as La Rochefoucauld, whose claim that the “virtues” are just nice-sounding names that we give to the effects of our passions, so that we can “do what we wish with impunity,” he cites approvingly (HAH 36). At this stage in his thinking, then, Nietzsche’s re-evaluations essentially consist in unmasking a value said to be intrinsic as really directly instrumental and in characterizing the end to which it is a means in some highly unflattering, and usually reductively egoistic, way. The earlier Nietzsche was thus committed to the view that there are no genuinely moral motivations at all, and that the apparently intrinsic values upon which people say that they act, or believe themselves to act, are in fact only instrumentally valuable for bringing about certain kinds of self-centered ends, those ends being the only real candidates for intrinsic value in play.6
By the time of writing Daybreak, however, he had arrived at a considerably subtler and more interesting position. He now accepts that “moral judgments” may be “motives for action,” but claims that, where they are the motives, “it is errors which, as the basis of all moral judgment, impel men to their moral actions” (D 103),7 This is a subtler and more interesting position for several reasons; but the chief one for present purposes is that, in allowing for the reality of moral motivations, it also allows that, with respect to a given way of living, moral values may, genuinely, be intrinsic values, and not merely instrumental ones in disguise. And this means that the project of re-evaluation itself becomes subtler and more interesting, as the emphasis shifts from attempts to re-evaluate, as instrumental, values masquerading as intrinsic, to attempts to re-evaluate intrinsic values as, indeed, intrinsic. And the upshot of that process, as the same section from D makes clear, may not be any sort of debunking at all. Nietzsche puts it like this:
It goes without saying that I do not deny—unless I am a foot—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 108)
Here, then, Nietzsche presents the project of re-evaluation as a critique of the structure of reasons immanent to a given way of living, a structure that the values intrinsic with respect to that way of living hold in place. And that, evidently enough, is a very different project from La Rochefoucauld’s.
So what might a re-evaluation of intrinsic values (as intrinsic) involve? One essential prerequisite, clearly enough, is the adoption of a degree of distance from the way of living whose values are under scrutiny. And the degree at issue may vary between cases. So, for instance, for certain kinds of re-evaluation, the values drawn upon in the re-evaluation may be internal to the same way of living as the value under scrutiny: in which case, while it is certainly true that a degree of reflective distance is essential, there is no need to treat the value under scrutiny as anything other than intrinsic, purely and simply. In other cases, where the values drawn upon in the re-evaluation are not, or may not be, internal to the same way of living as the value under scrutiny, a longer reflective step back may be required, perhaps to a perspective from which the value under scrutiny can be acknowledged as intrinsically valuable to a given way of living, but can at the same time be evaluated for its effects, for its indirectly instrumental tendencies, in terms that may or may not be internal to the way of living in question. With this in mind, I think that there are at least five ways in which one might attempt to pursue the project of re-evaluating intrinsic values (as intrinsic); and of these, at least four can be discerned in Nietzsche’s writings. The five ways can be summarized as follows:
It may seem as if a sixth permutation is missing, namely, showing that V is indeed an intrinsic value, but is held in place by reasons and other values that are bad, although not by reasons and values that could be acknowledged as “bad” from the standpoint of the relevant way of living. This permutation, however, although formally distinct from the first kind of re-evaluation, is always likely in practice to collapse into it, since the badness of the reasons and other values holding V in place is largely going to show up via a critique of the effects of those reasons and values playing the role that they do in the context of some particular way of living. Given which, therefore, this form of re-evaluation slides into the re-evaluation of an inrrin-sic value as indirectly instrumental in realizing ends that, from a perspective excluded by the way of living in question, are said to be bad, that is, into 1.8
The first form of re-evaluation is rather radical in intent, and is also the one with which Nietzsche is, I think, most usually identified. Brian Leiter, for example, regards re-evaluation of this form as the “core” of Nietzsche’s critique of traditional morality: “What unifies Nietzsche’s seemingly disparate critical remarks,” he says, “—about altruism, happiness, pity, equality, Kantian respect for persons, utilitarianism, etc.—is that he thinks a culture in which such norms prevail as morality will be a culture which eliminates the conditions for the realization of human excellence,” where “human excellence or human greatness” is what has “intrinsic value for Nietzsche.”9 From this point of view, Nietzsche’s style of re-evaluation consists in showing that a value such as, for instance, altruism, although perhaps an intrinsic value from the standpoint of traditional morality, is indirectly instrumental in suppressing higher types of human being (or of suppressing “ascending” or “healthier” types of life), and is therefore, from Nietzsche’s own evaluative standpoint, a bad thing; whereas from the standpoint of traditional morality, on the other hand, with its emphasis on values such as equality, such an outcome can only be regarded as welcome. (Leiter sometimes speaks as if traditional morality in fact aims at the suppression of higher types—as if, in other words, its values were directly instrumental in bringing about that end, a claim that he describes as Nietzsche’s “Calliclean-ism.” 10 But this claim, if it reflects Nietzsche’s view at all, does so—at most—only when he is describing the inception of the values of traditional morality (e.g., GM 1:14); it altogether bypasses his recognition in Daybreak, noted above, of the reality of moral motivations once those values have become culturally established.11
To attribute this form of re-evaluation to Nietzsche is to raise, in a very acute way, the authority problem that I mentioned at the outset. From the perspective of traditional morality itself, after all, it is hardly much of an objection to a given value that it indirectly inhibits the emergence of types who, from that perspective, are a bad thing, however much Nietzsche might insist that the types so inhibited are higher and healthier. Indeed, from the traditional perspective, this form of re-evaluation—if it isn’t just discounted outright—is altogether more likely to look like an inadvertent demonstration that a certain kind of fringe benefit attends the intrinsic values apparently under attack—to look, in other words, like an accidental version of 2. There is no common ground here, and, without it, the whole re-evaluation project threatens to collapse into a mere series of disagreements about preferences. Leiter recognizes this problem, and seeks to address it by limiting Nietzsche’s proper audience “to those who share Nietzsche’s evaluative taste, those for whom no justification would be required: those who are simply ‘made for it,’ who are ‘predisposed and predestined’ for Nietzsche’s insights.”12 The point of Nietzsche’s re-evaluation, then, is simply to “alert ‘higher’ types to the fact that” traditional morality “is not, in fact, conducive to their flourishing,” so that they can wean themselves away from its values and realize their potential for human excelietice.13 The authority problem is thus removed by restricting Nietzsche’s audience to those for whom his re-evaluations do have authority.
This strikes me as a somewhat desperate tactic. It is also a tactic that collapses, at once, in the light of what Leiter goes on to say next, about the temperature of some of Nietzsche’s rhetoric: “Given, then, that Nietzsche’s target is a certain sort of misunderstanding on the part of higher men, and given the difficulty of supplanting the norms that figure in this misunderstanding (the norms of morality [in the pejorative sense]), it should be unsurprising that Nietzsche writes with passion and force: he must shake higher types out of their intuitive commitment to the moral traditions of two millennia!”14—which rather indicates that the members of Nietzsche’s “proper” audience are not “predisposed” to accept the authority of his evaluative standpoint after all. The fact is that, even on Leiter’s reading, Nietzsche needs somehow to reach inside traditional morality, and to address those who, whether through some sort of misunderstanding or not, are intuitively committed to its values; and this is hardly likely to be achieved by merely insisting, against those intuitions, that the values in question are indirectly instrumental in realizing ends said (by Nietzsche) to be bad, however heatedly he says it. The authority problem is thus reinstated, with all of its original force.
If it were true, as Leiter claims, that this form of re-evaluation is the “core” of Nietzsche’s critique of traditional morality, then the outlook for that critique would be rather gloomy, it seems to me. But Leiter’s claim is false: whether or not Nietzsche ever does engage in the first form of re-evaluation, it is certainly not the main plank of his approach, and it is certainly not the key to understanding Nietzsche’s critical project as a whole. The re-evaluation of intrinsic values, as Nietzsche practices it, is a considerably subtler affair than Leiter acknowledges, and it revolves chiefly around the remaining four forms of re-evaluation (items 2–5 in the list above), deployed in a continually shifting range of combinations. The fact that Nietzsche hardly ever engages in only one form of re-evaluation at a time does make illustration tricky; but the following examples should be enough to indicate the kinds of distinctions that I have tried to sketch out.
The second form of re-evaluation is, in one way, the mildest and least critique-like of them all, since its main point is, in effect, to bolster the value of a value that is intrinsic anyway. But the results of such a re-evaluation can still be surprising. The clearest instance of it, perhaps, is from the Genealogy, where Nietzsche argues that the ideal of the ascetic priest—which “treats life as a wrong road, ... as a mistake” and produces “creatures filled with a profound disgust at themselves, at the earth, at all life”—is nonetheless a great preserver of life itself: indeed, as he puts it, “it must be ... in the interest of life itself that such a self-contradictory type does not die out” (GM III:11 ). Nietzsche’s diagnosis of this apparent contradiction is, briefly, that the ascetic ideal, in making sense of all suffering as punishment for guilt, thereby prevents the meaninglessness of suffering from functioning “as the principal argument against existence” (GM 11:7). In effect, that is, existence is rendered tolerable—meaningful—precisety on the condition of the sort of self-loathing (as guilty, sinful, and the like) that the ideal produces. From the perspective of this morality, then, self-loathing is intrinsically valuable; but it is also indirectly instrumental in preserving the way of living for which it is intrinsically valuable; and since, from the perspective of that way of living, a life of self-loathing is the only kind of life of any value at all, that indirect effect is itself of value from that perspective. This form of re-evaluation, then, reinforces the value of an intrinsic value for a particular way of living by drawing attention to the fringe benefits that having that value has—benefits that are graspable as such from the perspective of that way of life. A contemporary example of this kind of re-evaluation might be found in a non reductive version of evolutionary ethics—in an account that held that the regarding of such-and-such as an intrinsic value (by us, say) has, or has had, the indirectly instrumental effect of making the survival of the species more likely, a result, or fringe benefit, that we ourselves might welcome or think was a good thing.
Nietzsche’s comments about justice, in the second essay of the Genealogy, can be seen as an instance of the third form of re-evaluation. It is common, he thinks, to regard justice—by which he means, among other things, a legal system empowered to set and exact certain penatties—as, essentially, a formalized system of vengeance, “as if justice,” he says, “were at bottom merely the further development of the feeling of being aggrieved.” From this point of view, which he attributes to “anarchists,” “antisemites,” and the philosopher Eugen Duhring,15 the value of justice is held in place as intrinsic by the “reactive sentiments” of those to whom an injury has been done. But this, according to Nietzsche, is the opposite of the truth: “[T]he last sphere to be conquered by the spirit of justice,” he says, “is the sphere of the reactive feelings!” Justice, he continues, represents
the struggle against the reactive feelings, the war conducted against them ... to impose measure and bounds upon the excess of the reactive pathos and to compel it to come to terms.... [Indeed,] in the long run, [it] attains the reverse of that which is desired by all revenge that is fastened exclusively to the viewpoint of the person injured: from now on the eye is trained to an ever more impersonal evaluation of the deed, and this applies even to the eye of the injured person himself. (GM II:11)
On Nietzsche’s view, then, justice is held in place as a value within a given “system of purposes” (GM 11: 12) precisely by the need to limit and to redirect the reactive sentiments, rather than by the need to give expression to them. And construed in this way, the value of justice, although differently grounded, remains thoroughly intrinsic, as Nietzsche makes clear: true justice, he says, constitutes “a piece of perfection and supreme mastery on earth” (GM II; 11). In this case, then, the effect of the re-evaluation is to resituate an intrinsic value within a given structure of reasons and other values, so that, although still intrinsically valuable, it comes to be understood as a value in that structure “for other reasons than hitherto.”
The fourth form of re-evaluation can be illustrated equally quickly. Nietzsche is famously opposed to what he calls the “morality of pity,” and his critique of it is complex. But one (important) aspect of his opposition emerges fairly clearly from the following two remarks from The Gay Science: “Pity is the most agreeable feeling,” he says: it promises “easy prey—and that is what all who suffer are ... ; [it] is enchanting” (GS 13); or, again, “Pity is essentially ... an agreeable impulse of the instinct for appropriation at the sight of what is weaker” (GS 118). In these and other passages—examples could be given from any of his mature works—Nietzsche is drawing attention, not only to a certain opportunism in the experience of pity, but to a moment of disrespect in (many) of its instances; and he aligns that moment with another value, in this case the negative one, from the perspective of the “morality of pity,” of suffering. Suffering may be useful for one, he insists; but this is
of no concern to our dear pitying friends: they wish to help and have no thought of the personal necessity of distress, although terrors, deprivations, impoverishments ... are as necessary for me and for you as are their opposites. It never occurs to them that, to put it mystically, the path to one’s own heaven always leads through the voluptuousness of one’s own hell.... [F]or happiness and unhappiness are sisters and even twins that either grow up together or, as in [their] case, remain small together. (GS 338)
Nietzsche’s point, clearly enough, is that from the perspective of a way of life in which “respect,” “heaven,” and “happiness” are intrinsic values, and Nietzsche nowhere suggests that the “morality of pity” does not share such a perspective, “pity”—understood as the (disrespectful) obligation to alleviate suffering wherever possibte—can only be held in place as an intrinsic value for bad reasons, for reasons that are bad from the perspective of that way of living itself. In this case, then, the effect of the re-evaluation is to suggest that pity, although an intrinsic value for certain ways of living, ought not to be, and ought not to be in light of other values that are themselves immanent to those ways of living.16
The fifth form of re-evaluarion is a crucial and constant presence in Nietzsche’s later work, although it can be difficult in practice to distinguish from the fourth form, since it is, in the end, really only a deeper version of it.17 It differs from the fourth, however, in this much: while the fourth form of re-evaluation seeks to bring to light an internal inconsistency among values that are already, with respect to a given way of living, explicitly embraced as intrinsic, the fifth form of re-evaluation, in showing that a value or set of values is indirectly instrumental in realizing ends that could in principle be grasped as bad from the standpoint of the relevant way of living, seeks to bring to light an inconsistency between values that are already explicitly embraced as intrinsic and a further value that has not so far, or that has only implicitly, been so embraced, but which could or should be embraced explicitly. To the extent, then, that this latter value is already implicitly acknowledged as intrinsic with respect to the way of living in question, the fifth form of re-evaluation will tend to shade into the fourth.
When Nietzsche engages in the fifth form of re-evaluation, its basic outline shape is this. Commitment to such-and-such a value, or to such-and-such a set of values, intrinsically valuable with respect to a certain way of living, has the effect of making us obscure to ourselves, or—which is a different way of saying the same thing—has the effect of inhibiting our capacity to experience ourselves, fully, as agents; this is bad for us, and the fact that it is bad for us should, in principle, be graspable from the perspective of the way of living in question; therefore we (or they) should no longer be committed to that value, or to those values, at least as it or they have so far been understood.18 Nietzsche’s clearest employment of this form of re-evaluation is, again, to be found in the GM,19 where the re-evaluation is directed, in effect, at a system of vatues—“stave,” or traditional, morality—which is itself, according to Nietzsche, the product of a radical re-evaluation of an earlier, “noble” system of values.20 Indeed, it is partly in proposing that, and in attempting to explain how, traditional morality is the product of such a re-evaluation that Nietzsche’s own re-evaluation consists.
His idea is this. Prior to the “slave revolt in morality,” the slave was constrained to understand and value himself exclusively through the terms set by the noble style of valuation, since that was the only style of valuation available. The nobtes—seizing “the lordly right of giving names” (GM 1:2)—had, in effect, determined the shape of the evaluative landscape, leaving the slaves, as inhabitants of it, with no option but to think of themselves as the nobles thought of them—that is, as “low, low-minded, common and plebeian,” as, in a word, “bad” (GM 1:2). Or, as Nietzsche puts it in Beyond Good and Evil: “the common man was only what he was comidered: not at all used to positing values himself, he also attached no other value to himself than his masters attached to him (it is the characteristic right of masters to create values)” (BGE 261). In this sense, therefore, the slaves were “committed” to the values of noble morality, however much this fact might have compounded the misery attaching to their situation in any case. Specifically, their (necessary) captivity within the noble style of valuation not only provided them with no obvious resources for understanding themselves or their lives as valuable, or for understanding themselves as efficacious with respect to their own lives, it positively conspired to render any such resources invisible. Noble morality, Nietzsche claims, “acts and grows spontaneously, it seeks its opposite only so as to affirm itself more gratefully and triumphantly ...—‘we noble ones, we good, beautiful, happy ones!’” (GM 1:10); and from the perspective of that system of values, which was also the slaves’ perspective, there simply weren’t the means for the slaves to attach those positive terms, and the self-understanding that went with them, to themselves.
Hence the revolt. Consumed with ressentiment at their position, that ressentiment, as Nietzsche puts it, finally turned “creative,” and gave birth to a style of valuation from the perspective of which the slaves could, for the first time, affirm themselves as valuable, as effective agents, in their own right.21 “[P]rompted by an instinct for ... self-affirmation,” the “oppressed”
exhort one another with the vengeful cunning of impotence: “let us be different from the evil, namely good! And he is good who does not outrage, who harms nobody, who does not attack, who does not requite... , like us, the patient, humble, and just”—this ... has, thanks to the counterfeit and self-deception of impotence, clad itself in the ostentatious garb of the virtue of quiet, calm resignation, just as if the weakness of the weak—that is to say, their essence, their effects, their sole ineluctable, irremovable reality—were a voluntary achievement, willed, chosen, a deed, a meritorious act. (GM I:13)
The slaves thus came to see, or to judge, that a set of values—noble values—intrinsic to a certain way of living (their own) was in fact instrumental in realizing ends that could be grasped as bad—as “evil”—from that very same standpoint, namely, the ends of denying the newly “good” ones a sense of their own efficacy and worth. Where before they had been obscure to themselves, seeing themselves only through the nobles’ eyes, they now had a style of valuation that allowed them to understand themselves as their “instinct” for “self-affirmation” required them to. The values that this style of valuation answered to—the senses of efficacy and self-worth—were encoded in the noble style of valuation against which the slaves revolted, but were values to which that same style of morality denied them first-personal access. From the standpoint of that way of living, therefore, these values were, for the slaves, implicit at best.
In the first essay of the Genealogy, therefore, Nietzsche suggests that traditional morality arose not only from a re-evaluation of preexisting values, but from a re-evaluation of such values that depended upon those (or a subset of those) for whom the values in question were authoritative, coming to recognize that such values were, in fact, indirectly instrumental in rendering other, dimly glimpsed, values unrealizable in their own lives. The slave revolt in morality is thus offered by Nietzsche as an exercise in the fifth form of the re-evaluation of values.
In the remainder of the Genealogy, it is a large part of Nietzsche’s concern to show that, in the wake of the death of God, the values of slave, or traditional, morality—once crucial in enabling us to understand ourselves as efficacious, as agents in our own right—now have the effect of making us obscure to ourselves, of undermining our sense of our own agency and, hence, of occluding our sense of the (potential) value of our lives. Nietzsche is insistent on these points. The “good man” of traditional morality, he says, “is neither upright nor naïve nor honest and straightforward with himself. His soul squints” (GM I:10); “one may not demand of [good people] that they should open their eyes to themselves, that they should know how to distinguish ‘true’ and ‘false’ in themselves.... [W]hoever today accounts himself a ‘good man’ is utterly incapable of confronting any matter except with dishonest mendaciousness —a mendaciousness that is abysmal but innocent, truehearted, blue-eyed, and virtuous” (GM III:19). And Nietzsche contrasts the “good man” of traditional morality with the “noble man,” who “lives in trust and openness with himself” (GM I:10) and, above all, with the “sovereign individual”—one
liberated again from the morality of custom, autonomous and supramoral (for “autonomous” and “moral” are mutually exclusive).... The proud awareness of the extraordinary privilege of responsibility, the consciousness of this rare freedom, this power over oneself..., has in his case penetrated to the profoundest depths and become instinct, the dominating instinct. (GM 11:2)
Autonomy—which is to say, agency, the having of “power over oneself”—is thus, on this view, predicated on escaping from the self-misunderstandings engendered by traditional morality once God is dead;22 and these self-misunderstandings, because they are “innocent” and “truehearted”—because they are based, that is, on a certain set of intrinsic values taken as intrinsic—may be very hard to shake free of; and this, in turn, requires that the re-evaluation of the relevant values reach inside traditional morality, and attempt to show from there, as it were, that those values do indeed have the effect of making us obscure to ourselves, of compromising our power over ourselves. It requires, that is, a further exercise of the fifth form of re-evaluation.23
If Nietzsche is right in making these claims, the current effect of the values of traditional morality is unquestionably an indirect one. It is also unquestionably a bad effect—not just from Nietzsche’s perspective, but from the perspective, one is tempted to say, of any recognizably human way of living at all (as his account of the slave revolt in morality indicates). Self-understanding, the sense of having “power over oneself,” is plausibly a value that sufficiently transcends the kinds of parochial consideration that I have concentrated upon, under the label “way of living,” as to have a claim to be an intrinsic value for human beings in general. And, if so, and if it is viotated—even if only instrumentally and indirecdy—by some particular set of values intrinsic to some particular way of living, then that fact constitutes an effective critique of those values, indeed a re-evaluation of them.
The fifth form of re-evaluation is probably the most important, and it is relatively easy to see how, if its critique is to be accessible to those for whom traditional morality is (currently) authoritative, it is more or less bound to go together with, and to some extent to depend upon, versions of the third and fourth. It is also not very hard to see how, taken together with the second form of re-evaluation, the fifth might appear to be really a version of the first, as Brian Leiter in effect conctudes—especially given that Nietzsche’s “sovereign individual” is without question an exemplar of the “higher type” of human being whose interests, we can all agree, Nietzsche has at heart. But the sovereign individual has been “liberated” from morality; he has won back his autonomy from the self-misunderstandings that traditional morality engenders; and that, as I have already argued, is not a result that the first form of re-evaluation has the right kind of authority to achieve. The fifth form of re-evaluation, by contrast, does have the right kind of authority, at least in principle, as do the second, third, and fourth. The third and fourth forms, being internal to the way of life whose values are under scrutiny, pose no difficulties: whether Nietzsche’s re-evaluations succeed or persuade will be a function, quite routinely, of whether his arguments and the considerations he offers are any good. Nor is the second form problematic, even though it is conducted from an external perspective: for it appeals, in the end, only to values that are internal to the way of living in question. And the fifth form brings no special problems with it either: its power is conditional only upon the quality of the arguments it contains, and upon the plausibility of its claim to speak, as it were, from the perspective of, or on the behalf of, values that ought to be, and perhaps implicitly are, intrinsic for any human way of living at all.
The account that I have offered of the fifth form of the re-evaluation of values is a relative of those offered by Richard Schacht and Philippa Foot. Schacht proposes that Nietzsche’s re-evaluation proceeds from a “privileged” perspective, “which an understanding of the fundamental character of life and the world serves to define and establish”;24 and the “availability of this standard,” he suggests, “places evaluation on a footing that is as firm [i.e., as authoritative] as that on which the comprehension of life and the world stands.”25 Foot suggests that the evaluative standpoint from which Nietzsche conducts his re-evaluation is essentially an “aesthetic” one, rooted in “the interest and admiration which is the common attitude to remarkable men of exceptional independence of mind and strength of will”—in “our tendency to admire certain individuals whom we see as powerful and splendid.”26 Again, then, there is nothing in Foot’s position that would render the kind of re-evaluation that she envisages altogether inaccessible to the adherents of traditional morality (indeed, if anything, quite the reverse27), and this is, with respect to the authority problem at least, a point in its favor.28
So the account proposed here has in common with Schacht’s and Foot’s the highlighting of an evaluative standpoint that is in principle accessible to those who are committed to the values whose value is under scrutiny, and who might therefore come to regard the re-evaluation of those values as authoritative. It differs from Schacht’s and Foot’s, however, in highlighting a standpoint structured by the values of self-understanding and autonomy; and it differs, too, in distinguishing the re-evaluation conducted from that standpoint from at least three other forms of re-evaluation in which Nietzsche also engages (often at the same time), and in indicating how the various forms of re-evaluation might be thought to operate together. Collectively, I suggest, these features of the present account give it an explanatory advantage over any of its obvious competitors, and does so in at least two respects: first, the present account gives a much more nuanced analysis of what a (pointful) re-evaluation of the values of traditional morality might (pointfully) involve; and second, it shows that Nietzsche might indeed have been engaged in such an enterprise—that his tactics are at least of the right general sort to deliver the results that he was after. Whether or not he in fact does deliver those results, however, is a question that lies beyond the scope of this essay, and I have not tried to address it here.
My thanks to Maria Alvarez, Alex Neill, David Owen, and Genia Schönbaumsfeld for discussion and for comments on earlier versions of this essay. My thanks, too, to the organizers of and participants in a workshop on Nietzsche and value held at the University of Sussex in December 2002, at which an ancestral version of this essay was read: many of the things said there were very helpful.
I prefer “re-evaluation” to “revaluation,” incidentally, on the perhaps slender grounds that the latter seems to suggest that the result of the process in question will always be the assignation of a new or different value to the value under scrutiny, while the former feels (to me, at least) as if it leaves open the possibility that the value of a given value might emerge from the process unchanged, or perhaps vindicated; and to leave that possibility open is, I think, truer to the spirit of Nietzsche’s project.
GM P:6. For translations I utilize the following: Kaufmann and Hollingdale’s GM; Kaufmann’s BGE; Hollingdale’s HH; Hollingdale’s D; Kaufmann’s GS.
This is a point rightly emphasised by Richard Schacht: see his “Nietzschean Normativity,” in R. Schacht, ed., Nietzsche’s Postmoralism (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2001), 160.
I overlook Christine M. Korsgaard’s insistence that one should keep the distinction between the intrinsic and the extrinsic separate from the distinction between ends and means. Her point is an interesting one, but it does not affect the reading of Nietzsche offered in the present essay: see Korsgaard, “Two Distinctions in Goodness,” in her Creating the Kingdom of Ends (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1996), 249–74.
Or, as Bernard Williams puts it, if a value is intrinsic for someone, then “he can understand this value in relation to the other values that he holds, and this implies ... that the intrinsic good..., or rather the agent’s relation to it, has an inner structure in terms of which it can be related to other goods,” Truth and Truthfulness (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2002), 92.
This conception of (intrinsic) value is consistent with that proposed by Joseph Raz; see his Practical Reason and Norms (London: Hutchinson, 1975), 34. See also Raz, The Practice of Value (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2003), 143–45.
Nietzsche continues: “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.”
Given that the relation between this putative sixth form of re-evaluation and the first precisely mirrors that between the fourth and fifth, it might seem as if these two should be collapsed together as well. I choose not to do this, however. While the first form of re-evaluation, as I argue in the next section, is bound to be ineffective, the fifth need not be; and since part of my interest is to give a nuanced account of the (potential) power of Nietzsche’s project, it makes sense to distinguish more finely between the latter pair (the fourth and fifth) than between the former.
Brian Leiter, Nietzsche on Morality (London: Routledge, 2002), 128–29.
Ibid., 53.
Something that is emphasized, incidentally, in the introduction to Hollingdale’s Daybreak coauthored by Leiter and Maudemarie Clark.
Leiter, op. cit., 150.
Ibid., 155.
Ibid. For a rather subtler account of the role of Nietzsche’s rhetoric in his attempt to re-evaluate values, see Christopher Janaway, “Nietzsche’s Artistic Revaluation,” in J. Bermú-dez and S. Gardner, eds., Art and Morality (London: Routledge, 2003), 260–76.
—and should also have attributed to his earlier self: the position he attacks is precisely the one that he had espoused in HH; see, namely, sections 92 and 629.
The re-evaluation also seeks to have another effect, of course—namely, to show that the structure of values within which pity has been held in place as an intrinsic value actually accommodates suffering as an instrumental value more convincingly; and certainly that it will not accommodate suffering as an intrinsic disvalue.
See footnote 8, above.
For an illuminating discussion of this point, see David Owen, “Nietzsche, Re-evaluation, and the turn to Genealogy,” European Journal of Philosophy 11:3 (2003), section 4. [Ed.—Owen’s essay is reprinted in this volume.]
—which is no coincidence; again, see Owen, ibid., 249–72.
In BGE 46, Nietzsche expressly refers to slave or Christian morality as the product of a “re-evaluation of antique values.”
For an account of the conceptual innovations required for the slave revolt, and of the resources implicit in noble morality that made those innovations possible, see Aaron Ridley, Nietzsche’s Conscience: Six Character Studies from the “Genealogy” (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 1998), chapters 1 and 2.
I here sidestep the interesting question of where, in Nietzsche’s chronology, the sovereign individual is supposed to be situated. Some considerations would appear to place him prior to traditional morality; others suggest a distinctively post-traditional achievement. Either way, though, and I prefer the latter, the sovereign individual’s place in the scheme of things is emphatically not within traditional morality, and that is all that the point I make here requires.
It is this exercise that has, in effect, been taken over and given contemporary expression by Bernard Williams in his various critiques of the “morality system”: see, namely, Ethics and the Limits of Philosophy (London: Fontana, 1985) and Shame and Necessity (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1993), chapter 3. For an excellent discussion of the affinities between Nietzsche and Williams, see Maudemarie Clark, “On the Rejection of Morality: Bernard Williams’s Debt to Nietzsche,” in R. Schacht, ed., Nietzsche’s Postmoralism (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2001), 100–22.
Richard Schacht, Nietzsche (London: Routledge, 1983), 349.
Ibid., 398.
Philippa Foot, “Nietzsche: the Revaluation of Values,” in R. Solomon, ed., Nietzsche: A Collection of Critical Essays (Notre Dame: University of Notre Dame Press, 1973), 163.
As Leiter also notes, op. cit., 145. Leiter goes on to suggest—plausibly, I think—that this is a Haw in Foot’s position: it makes the business of securing an audience for Nietzsche’s re-evaluation too easy.
Actually, Foot seems to have changed her mind about Nietzsche’s re-evaluations: she now appears to espouse a position that is more like an extreme version of Leiter’s. See her Natural Goodness (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2001), chapter 7. For the reasons given earlier, however, I regard any move in this direction as a mistake.