In Gorgias (S.506) Plato claims that “all good things whatever are good when virtue is present in them.”1 Provided virtue is understood in the Greek sense of arete, or excellence, the claim marks the fact that goodness in things is to be understood through the idea of excellence, as opposed to quantities or amounts of, say, pleasantness or power. This is the key not only to understanding virtue ethics, in general, but to understanding Nietzschean virtue ethics, in particular.
Nietzsche’s rejection of Hedonism (the idea that only pleasure is intrinsically good) is well known; what is less clearly appreciated is that despite certain ambiguities and exaggerations, for Nietzsche goodness (or value) is not to be understood through the idea of will to power (as such) either. It is rather to be understood through the idea of will to power exercised well or excellently, or (as I shall put it) undistorted will to power. Given that a virtue is a disposition of excellent or good responsiveness to items in its domain (such as threatening or dangerous situations, pleasure, friends or potential friends), a Nietzschean virtue ethics based on the idea of will to power will require that an agent not be motivated by will to power as such, but by undistorted will to power.
In providing an account of undistorted will to power, I seek to remove the major obstacle to a Nietzschean virtue ethics, namely, the specter of immoralism. It is interesting that in Natural Goodness Philippa Foot cites Nietzsche as a potential ally with respect to morality’s structure (though not its content), “for what Nietzsche is denying of the supposed virtue of charity is exactly the connection with human good that was earlier said to give a character trait that status.”2 I shall appeal to aspects of Nietzsche’s thought not emphasized by Foot, to question her view of him as an immoralist. However my primary aim is not to defend Nietzsche himself from that charge, but to develop a Nietzschean virtue ethics.
The claim of immoralism stems from two connected sources: (1) an overly narrow understanding of will to power, and (2) a failure to appreciate the aretaic (or excellence related) aspects of Nietzsche’s notion of will to power. To rebut the immoralism charge, but more importantly to develop a Nietzschean virtue ethics, we need briefly to give an account of will to power. That will be done in the next section. Sections 3 and 4 discuss two forms of undistorted will to power: will to power as healthy will to power and will to power as excellent forms of life affirmation. Section 5 attempts to integrate apparent tensions between those two forms by developing a Nietzschean virtue ethics in which the notion of a virtue is relativized to excellence or goodness in “becoming,” as opposed to an end-state of perfection.
Will to power as a genus must be distinguished from various of its species. As a genus, it is a highly general idea, applicable to all life forms. “A living thing desires above all to vent its strength—life as such is will to power” (BGE 44).3 As applied to humans, the need to “vent one’s strength” (or expand) is connected essentially with their nature as active, growing, developing beings, rather than mere receptacles of pleasure or welfare.
On the face of it, this broad notion of will to power is almost devoid of content, and as such seems an unpromising base for a virtue ethics. Maudmarie Clark claims, for example, “that the psychological doctrine of the will to power ... does not deserve serious consideration as an empirical hypothesis.”4 Her reason for this claim is that it does not explain anything, for will to power is “at work everywhere.”5 The will to power hypothesis can survive this objection, in her view, only if it ceases to be monistic. “Will to power” would have to be defined so that at least some possible motives are not instances of it.6 I shall propose an account of the ethical dimensions of will to power that can survive the objection. The account has several aspects. The first is structural. Will to power is understood through the multifarious ways it can be distorted. J. L. Austin’s attack on the notion of real did not eliminate the notion, or restrict the broad range of phenomena to which it could be applied. Further we had to divest ourselves of certain essentialist understandings. We had to focus on the various disparate ways things are not real if we were to secure a substantive contentful understanding. Again, Austin argued, it is unfreedom or lack of freedom, and not freedom, that “wears the trousers.” As far as will to power is concerned, the situation is more complex. We give content to “will to power” not by considering the various ways it can be absent, but by considering the various ways it can be distorted.
This brings us to the second aspect of the account: a relation between the idea of distorted will to power and its ethical dimensions. Distorted will to power underlies vice, whereas virtue is marked by an absence of such distortion. Pity as a vice can thereby be distinguished from virtuous altruism, which Nietzsche frequently calls “overflowing”; laziness as a vice can be distinguished from virtuous “letting things be”; resignation or “willessness” distinguished from sublimation, and (virtuous) solitariness; courage from self-destructive recklessness; and anxiety-ridden fear from proper prudence.
Third, and finally, will to power can have explanatory power only if the disparate forms of distorted will to power can be seen to be related in a theoretically interesting way. That requires that the notion be fleshed out within a psychological framework that gives substantive content to the various virtues and vices. Such a framework, I suggest, may be provided by the development of Nietzsche’s psychology along the lines of Alfred Adler’s views and those of later theorists and practitioners. Maudmarie Clark’s criticism of will to power, I conclude, has bite only if will to power is seen as a simple positive motive without complex nominative dimensions.
The confusion of will to power as a genus with species of will to power (or power) as, namely, augmenting influenced and power over, as well as the neglect of the aretaic, have led to immoralist interpretations of Nietzsche. For example, in Stephen D. Hales’s consequentialist interpretation of Nietzsche,7 the distinction between will to power generally, and unhealthy, distorted will to power is not drawn. On Hales’s s interpretation of Nietzsche, the value to be promoted is power as such, whether or not it expresses or promotes distorted forms. “It appears that his consequentialism ultimately aims at the maximisation of power.”8 By contrast, on my view, Nietzsche distinguishes between “life-affirming” and “life-denying” will to power, a distinction giving some content to the idea of distorted versus undistorted will to power. This idea is present in psychology, where, for example, Erich Fromm contrasts “malignant” and “benign” forms of aggression.9
I have suggested that the idea of will to power, properly understood, can provide a basis for a rich psychologically informed conception of virtue. However, if such an understanding is to be garnered from Nietzsche, some kind of unity in his theory is not easy to find. There seem to be two starting points for an account of undistorted will to power: will to power that is not unhealthy, and will to power that is not life denying. Note, however, that these notions are best understood, not as prescribing a monistic blueprint for a virtuous life, but as permitting multiple options constrained by (nonabsolute and sometimes conflicting) requirements to avoid various forms of distortion.
It is time now to give an account of undistorted will to power, for that account makes for normativity—in short, for an ethics. However, wresting such an account from Nietzsche is difficult. For Nietzsche’s (or a Nietzschean) notion of undistorted will to power has at its heart two central ideas: life affirmation and health. Unfortunately (from the point of view of presenting a unified theory) these two ideas do not appear to pull in the same direction. Of most concern is that what may count as life affirming may be said on depth psychological criteria apparently favored by Nietzsche to be sick. In short, we have two potential criteria for undistorted will to power—will to power that is life affirming or not life denying, and will to power that is healthy or not sick.
Let us now investigate the moral theoretic underpinnings of a morality that is based on life affirmation. The life affirmative aspects of Nietzsche’s thought bear the hallmarks of a value-centered morality. The values in question are the “life affirming” ones of, for example, creativity, self-assertion, spontaneity, overflowing, lightness of spirit, play. Life-affirming value theory may or may not be virtue ethical. It is virtue ethical only if the life-affirming values of creativity, spontaneity, play, and so forth, are to be understood as aretaic; that is, as having excellence or virtue built into them. Nonaretaic value centered moralities rely on the provision of a set of “base-level” values (such as spontaneity, creativity, and play) specified independently of virtue. Such moralities then define virtues as dispositions to respond to these values appropriately—namety, to promote them, honor them, or (as on Thomas Hurka’s view) to love them.10 “Virtue” is thus understood derivatively in terms of certain sorts of responsiveness to, or dispositions to, act favorably toward those values.
A virtue ethics requires by contrast aretaic interpretations of the relevant values—creativity must be creativity that is free from all vice (or more weakly, some relevant vices); play cannot be, for example, mocking, or (in competitive sport) must be competitive without violating standards of fair play. Is an aretaic reading of the life-affirming values a plausible reading of Nietzsche? I think so. A unifying aretaic value central in Nietzsche’s thought is the absence of something described as “the greatest ugtiness”—mediocrity. The absence of mediocrity is inherently an aretaic idea; indeed, it connotes the satisfaction (to a sufficient degree) of standards of excellence. The substantive task, of course, is to provide theories about what constitutes mediocrity in, for example, music, the visual arts, politics, relationships, philosophy, and other areas of human endeavor and culture. The specification of spontaneity, play, self-assertion, as aretaic values cannot be given without having to hand theories of excellence in those endeavors.
If the absence of mediocrity provides the aretaic value that unifies the various “life affirming” values, may it not provide too, the central value that underpins the second understanding of undistorted will to power—that is, the healthy will to power or will to power that is free of sickness? If so, then the two understandings of undistorted will to power can be combined into a single Nietzschean virtue ethics. Unhealthy and life-denying will to power could then be seen as both expressing and promoting mediocrity, for Nietzsche. Much of Nietzsche’s thought does indeed support this idea. Pity, a manifestation of “sick” will to power (for reasons to be explained), is also harmful to life-affirming values, by undermining the achievements of “man’s lucky hits” (i.e., those free of sickness), and by not accepting “meaningful suffering,” so needed for the finest creativity and the avoidance of mediocrity.
However, there are two problems with this unificatory move. First, not all “sickness” and life denial seems connected with mediocrity. There is no doubt that Nietzsche regarded the self-laceration of Christian saints (such as St. Teresa of Avila) as unhealthy and life denying, but it would be hard to describe such saints as mediocre. Rather, their actions and motivations are unhealthy and life denying because of their connection with a sense of individual worthlessness.
It may be replied that I have just cited self-assertiveness as a life-affirming value, and as such, as one of the values unified by the aretaic value of absence of mediocrity. Indeed this is so. But the kind of lack of self-assertiveness that is particularly associated in Nietzsche’s thought with mediocrity, is the passivity of herd-like behavior condemned by Nietzsche in passages such as the following:
For this is how things stand: the withering and levelling of European man constitutes our greatest danger, because it is a wearying sight.... Today we see nothing with any desire to become greater, we sense that everything is going increasingly downhill, thinning out, getting more good natured, cleverer, more comfortable, more mediocre, more indifferent, more Chinese, more Christian—man, there is no doubt, is “improving” all the time. (GM I:12)
Although in Nietzsche’s view one could describe St. Teresa of Avila as suffering from a highly problematic sense of worthlessness, one could not describe her as herd-like or mediocre.
Here is the second problem with the unificatory move. In Nietzsche’s view, it seems, the halting of the slide to mediocrity can be achieved by certain expressions of what, in views recoverable from Nietzsche, could be regarded as sick. Consider the apparently grandiose artist or philosopher living the ethics of creativity. Of such a person, Nietzsche claims: “[H]e is not far from the sinful wish: pereat mundus, fiat philosophia, fiat philosophus, fiam!” (GM III:3) [“Let the world perish, but let there be philosophy, the philosopher, me!”] Such a philosopher “does not deny existence, he rather affirms his existence and only his existence.” (GM 111:3) Even the sickness of bad conscience is lauded by Nietzsche, if it has a creative vigor: if it becomes “active bad conscience” and “[brings] to light much that is new and disturbing in the way of beauty and affirmation” (GM 11:18).
So let us think of life affirmation and health as two somewhat independent aspects of undistorted will to power and move on now to health.
Anticipating psychoanalytic theory, Nietzsche not only largely understands health through the idea of sickness, but also shares that view’s general pessimism. “For man is more sick, more uncertain, more mutable, less defined, than any other animal ... he is the sick animal.” And, “He is ... the most endangered, the most chronically and deeply sick of all sick animals” (GM III:13). The sickness that is at the forefront of Nietzsche’s attention is resentment: a manifestation of what Alfred Adler was later to call the inferiority complex. In this complex, according to Adler, there is a gap between the despised self and the ego-ideal that at an unconscious level are in conflict. In the inferiority complex, the conflict results in various sorts of neurotic resolution with neurotic “symptoms.” The symptom of resentment, at least in its supposed Christian form, is the topic of Nietzsche’s best known discussion, but he is remarkably insightful on two other species of inferiority complex: what Karen Horney was later to call the expansionist solution or the desire for mastery (grandiosity and cruelty) and the solution of resignation.11 The intellectualist version of the latter is the frequent target of Nietzsche’s scorn. He excoriates philosophers who retreat to the world of abstraction and pure reason. I shall concentrate on the Christian version of a resenrment-filled inferiority complex (called by Karen Horney the self-effacing solution of love) that is particularly important for a Nietzschean distinction between virtue and closely allied vices, as we shall presently see.
What, according to Nietzsche, is resentment? As Bernard Reginster puts it, Nietzsche’s person of resentment is inhibited by a feeling of incurable impotence, while retaining “pride” or “arrogance” and a desire at some level to lead a life of nobility and strength.12 Furthermore, the conflict between the sense of weakness and expansionist strivings is not resolved: either by a stoical elimination of desire or by a full (self-loving) acceptance of one’s objectively based weakness.
The conflict between a desire to lead a life of strength, nobility, or achievement and a sense of being impotent and worthless creates a need for resolution. As a manifestation of this conflict, resentment consists in a certain sort of distorted resolution of this conflict, one that valorizes the welfare of the weak, and thereby the altruistic virtues, while at the same time failing to overcome a sense of impotence. This results in externalized self-hate. Hence the manner in which the altruistic virtues are expressed is one of repressed hostility and revenge, as is highlighted in Nietzsche’s discussion of pity in Daybreak.
An accident that happens to another offends us: it would make us aware of our impotence, and perhaps of our cowardice, if we did not go to assist him. Or it brings with it in itself a diminution of our honour in the eyes of others or in our own eyes. Or an accident and suffering incurred by another constitutes a signpost to some danger to us; and it can have a painful effect upon us simply as a token of human vulnerability and fragility in general. We repel this kind of pain and offence and requite it through an act of pity; it may contain a subtle self-defense or even a piece of revenge. That at bottom we are thinking very strongly of ourselves can be divined from the decision we arrive at in every case in which we can avoid the sight of the person suffering, perishing or complaining: we decide not to do so if we can present ourselves as the more powerful and as a helper, if we are certain of applause, if we want to feel how fortunate we are in contrast, or hope that the sight will relieve our boredom. (D 133)
In Nietzsche, nonvirtuous ahruism—pity—is characterized by self-referential comparisons masking externalized hostility. By contrast, genuine virtuous altruism is an overflowing expression of self-love, where the distorted will to power of pity is absent. This is clear in the following passage. “In the foreground stands the feeling of plenitude, of power which seeks to overflow, the happiness of high tension, the consciousness of wealth which would like to give away and bestow.” (BGE 260; Kaufmann trans.) This sentiment, even the language, is echoed by Erich Fromm.
For the productive character, giving has an entirely different meaning. Giving is the highest expression of potency. In the very act of giving, I experience my strength, my wealth, my power. This experience of heightened vitality and potency fills me with joy. I experience myself as overflowing, spending, alive, hence, as joyous.13
The overflowing and, indeed, passional nature of many of Nietzsche’s virtues is a phenomenon approvingly discussed by Robert Solomon.14 But there is a problem with Nietzsche’s valorizing such virtues on the grounds that they are life affirming. Grandiosity and grandiose self-destructiveness are, in Horney’s view, one of the faces of the neurotic “expansionist” solution. This is what Horney calls a “streamlined” neurotic solution to the problem of dynamic conflict between the “superior” self (the “ego-idea)”—to use Adler’s term) and the despised self, in the inferiority complex. In this version of streamlined solution, the interior self is ruthlessly suppressed, in contrast to the self-effacing solution in which the superior setf—the ego-ideal—is suppressed. I am not suggesting that all “overflowing” is sick as opposed to expressing a genuine “plenteousness”: a Nietzschean term favored also by Fromm and C. S. Lewis to describe genuine agapeic love. But certainly some kinds of overflowing favored by Nietzsche seem, on the face of it, to be suspect. Consider the following from Thus Spoke Zarathustra: “I love him whose soul squanders itself, who wants no thanks and returns none: for he always gives away and does not want to preserve himself. I love him whose soul is overfull, so that he forgets himself, and all things are in him: thus all things spell his going under” (Z:I “Prologue” 4).
In this section, I shall claim that the apparent tensions revealed in the previous two sections between ideals of health and life affirmation can be resolved by the development of a Nietzschean virtue ethics based on Nietzsche’s ideas of “self-overcoming” or “becoming who you are”: an ethics that does not presuppose the idea of an individual end state of perfection. In brief, in this resolution, we are not to see health and life affirmation as end-states of perfection. There are two broad possibilities for resolution. First, one could imagine that those who are to become “who they are” are a select few, for this is the means to realize the perfectionist-consequentialist goal of cultural excellence. This does not entail that individuals have, or should have, a definite goal in mind when they improve themselves in “self-overcoming.” Second, one could reject consequentialism while maintaining the aretaic value of avoiding mediocrity. “Becoming who you are” is an injunction for all to follow, by exemplifying worthwhile achievement in one’s own life and not destroying or undermining the achievements of others.
I shall adopt the second of these strategies. The central idea is that the tensions can be resolved if we conceive of Nietzschean virtue as essentially tied to self-improvement (self-overcoming) that does not presuppose an end-state of individual perfection, in contrast to Aristotelian conceptions of virtue as end-states of perfection. If both health and life affirmation are seen as end-states of perfection, and virtue as exemplifying both these ideals, then a virtue ethics based on them would appear to have an incoherent conception of virtue, since, it seems, they are conflicting ideals of perfection. By contrast, if norms of health and life affirmation are to be embedded in a virtue ethics of self-improvement, the tensions between these norms can be resolved. I shall claim that one can do this by recognizing that their function as norms is constrained by norms of development, such as “do not be virtuous beyond your strength.”
Both the consequentialist and nonconsequentialist strategies for overcoming the tensions between health and life affirmation as ideals presuppose that we can speak of excellence in a process of betterment—in a process of what Nietzsche calls “overcoming.” For we can attempt to improve ourselves in ways that fall short of satisfying norms of development by, for example, running before we can walk (emulating the supremely virtuous), seeing an analyst when we should not be, or not seeing an analyst when we should, being overly reflective or insufficiently reflective, and so on. However, how this idea features in the consequentialist strategy is quite different from the way it figures in nonconsequentialist views.
Before developing the nonconsequentialist alternative, let us take a quick look at the consequentialist strategy, for this has been a dominant interpretation of Nietzsche. Many commentators have understood Nietzsche as a particularly nasty exemplar of perfectionistic consequentialism. Perfectionism, whether consequentialist or nonconsequentialist, is the view that goodness or value is to be understood as “the realization of human excellence in the various forms of culture.”15 Perfectionism in this sense is virtue-theoretic, if these excellences include, in a central way, the virtues (however they are conceived in that theory). However, a virtue-theoretic form of perfectionism may be consequentialist, in which case it would not be virtue ethical on normal understandings. In fact, John Rawls ascribes to Nietzsche what Conant calls “excellence-consequentialism,” which means “(1) that the perfectionist is concerned with optimizing the conditions which promote the achievement of excellence in the arts and sciences, and (2) that the goodness of an action is to be assessed in accordance with the degree to which it maximises such forms of excellence.”16
There is some textual evidence that Nietzsche supports this view. An example of such evidence occurs in Beyond Good and Evil:
The essential thing in a good and healthy aristocracy is, however, that it does not feel itself to be a function (of the monarchy or of the commonwealth) but as their meaning and supreme justification—that it therefore accepts with a good conscience the sacrifice of innumerable men who for its sake have to be suppressed and reduced to imperfect men, to slaves and instruments. Its fundamental faith must be that society should not exist for the sake of society but only as foundation and scaffolding upon which a select species of being is able to raise itself to its higher task and in general to a higher existence: like those sun-seeking climbing plants of Java—they are named sipo matador—which clasp an oak-tree with their tendrils so long and often that at last, high above it but supported by it, they can unfold their crowns in the open light and display their happiness. (BGE 258)
Insofar as this passage suggests a perfectionist consequentialism, norms of self-improvement, whether relating to health or life affirmation, are subservient to the promotion of the goal of overall cultural excellence understood in the following way. The measure of cultural excellence is given by the overall achievement of the best or most talented members of society. Tensions between ideals of health and life affirmation are resolved by understanding them in an instrumental way. If “sick” grandiosity in a talented artist enhances the realization of cultural achievement, such “sickness” is to be tolerated, even applauded. However, the consequentialist understanding does not sit well with a central theme in Nietzsche: the requirement on all of us to “become who you are”; to work at discovering and expressing the genius within you. Let us now elaborate the second, nonconsequentialist strategy for overcoming the tensions revealed in the previous section.
The dynamic features of a nonconsequentialist Nietzschean ethics are captured in the aphorism, “Become who you are” where the injunction is intended to apply to all, and virtues are understood as expressive of an individual’s living this maxim in her own life as opposed to their being seen as traits whose status as virtues is wholly dependent on their systematically promoting the consequentialist-perfectionist goal. The aphorism, however, is on the face of it mysterious, suggesting that there is a final state (of perhaps perfection) that is your true self and that you have a duty to reach. However this reading seems un-Nietzschean: as Alexander Nehamas points out, for Nietzsche, “becoming does not aim at a final state.”17 A less problematic reading is suggested by the expanded version of the aphorism in “Schopenhauer as Educator”: “The human being who does not wish to belong to the mass needs only to cease being comfortable with himself, let him follow his conscience, which calls to him: ‘Be yourself! All you are now doing, thinking, desiring is not you yourself.’”18
As Conant puts it, “All one need do is become uncomfortable with the discrepancy between oneself and one’s self—between who we are at present, and the self that is somehow ours and yet presently at a distance from us.”19 This does not entail that there is an end-state of “arrival” where the self, or one of the selves, presently at a distance from us, is the terminus of our endeavors. Self-improvement should be the basis of our endeavors, but that does not mean that we should have definite productive goals such as being a great artist, which now drive all our actions. Nor is there an end-state of perfection that one can reach such that one can say on reaching it that “I have arrived.” Rather, improvement is a continuous matter of overcoming obstacles, becoming stronger, while dealing with the world and achieving worthwhile goals. These goals may themselves change as one becomes stronger and faces new obstacles and circumstances. John Richardson puts the point well.20 Having argued that “will to power,” or power, is not itself an end but is constituted by improvement, growth, or development in “patterns of effort” in achieving the various internal ends of “drives,” he claims that
[t]his makes the connection between power and a drive’s internal and even less direct than we expected: not only does power not lie in this end’s achievement, it doesn’t even lie in progress toward it but in improving this progress. Moreover, the criteria for this “improvement” aren’t set by the end—it’s not just an improvement in the route’s efficiency for achieving the end. Rather ... it lies in an enrichment or elaboration of the drive’s activity pattern.21
Although there need he no final state to which we should aspire, that constitutes a norm of perfection, there do need to be norms of self-improvement if the idea of becoming who you are is to make sense as an injunction for self-improvement.
How are norms of life affirmation and health constrained by developmental norms of self-improvement? Given that improvement is something that occurs step by step, what norms govern the steps we take? In Zarathustra, Nietzsche claims: “Do not be virtuous beyond your strength!” (Z:IV “On the Higher Man”) Clearly this is not a recipe for complacency or timidity: it has to be given a dynamic reading. The point of the injunction is to warn us against directly emulating the supremely virtuous. For such emulation is not appropriate to one in a state of “convalescence.” According to this view, a conception of a virtue such as generosity may be understood not merely as a threshold notion (such that it is possible that one is both virtuous and capable of improvement) but also as a continuum, relativized to the strength of the agent. Hence (virtuous) generosity for the self-improver may not be overflowing bounteousness, for attempts at such bounteousness in the relatively weak may constitute self-destructive, resentment-filled, self-sacrifice that is ultimately harmful to others as well as oneself. A core virtue, or core component of virtue, such as self-love, will not have the same features at different points along the self-improvement path. Just as a truly self-confident society will be able to dispense with punishment according to Nietzsche, so the strongest individuals will be able to say: “Of what concern are these parasites to me?” (GM 11:10) In other words, turning the other check is a virtue of the strong. By contrast, such behavior in the weak is likely to be a sign of regressive self-abasement. Though self-love in the strong can manifest itself in a form of forgetfulness, in the weak, forgetfulness may be a form of repression in which anger is driven inward and surfaces in various distortions: secretive revenge, bitterness, manipulativeness, jealousy. Better for the weak to display assertiveness, even of a retaliatory kind, to lessen their tendencies to be wounded. Nietzsche puts the point this way in Ecce Homo: “[The sick person] does not know how to get loose of anything, to become finished with anything to repel anything—everything injures. Human being and thing obtrude too closely; experiences strike one too deeply, memory is a festering wound.” (EH “Wise” 6)
Again, to use another example of Nietzsche’s, solitude as a disposition is a virtue of the strong; otherwise, it is loneliness, the escape of the sick as opposed to escape from the sick (Z:III “Upon the Mount of Olives”). In solitude, whatever one has brought into it grows—also the inner beast. Therefore solitude is inadvisable for the many” (Z:IV “On the Higher Education of Man”). In other words, though (proper) self-sufficiency is a virtue, the proper cultivation and nature of that virtue is not straightforward—it will have different manifestations according to one’s level of strength. The cultivation of solitude and a desire for such is not advised for the weak.
We are now in a position to see how a dynamic, nonconsequentialist, Nietzschean virtue ethics resolves the tensions revealed in section 4. Rather than health and life affirmation being seen as somewhat independent states of perfection, norms of health and life affirmation interact in differing ways in different contexts of self-improvement or “self-overcoming.” Progress is not understood simply in terms of realizing an already given end, for the end itself is re-created more or less continuously, and in a variety of ways for a variety of reasons. First, one’s “pattern of activity” is enriched and modified as one reshapes one’s ends in the light of circumstances and developing desires and interests. Second, improving one’s strength or health is not a smooth progress, for in a sense one must be careful not to overreach one’s (current) strength. However, this is not to say that Nietzsche regards this as a universal injunction as opposed to a general warning. At times he appears to admire such overreaching. It would be a mistake to regard Nietzsche’s norms as absolute and nonconflicting. Finally, virtue itself is shaped by norms of self-improvement. Though virtue rather than an amount of power, say, is at least a necessary condition of goodness in human beings, goodness should not be understood in terms of realizing an end-state of perfection.
The proposed understanding of a Nietzschean virtue ethics poses a problem. For is it not the case that building self-improvement into the very fabric of virtue is an oxymoron? Is not a virtue a stable trait of character? Answering this question fully presupposes an account of character traits—their robustness and malleability. My own view, which cannot be defended here, is that virtues are more or less robust depending on where the threshold of virtue is set in different contexts. Second and more important, since practical wisdom is at least characteristically an aspect of virtue, virtue involves self-knowledge, including knowledge of where one is placed on the self-improvement path, and of how large or small are the steps one should take. Relative robustness had better not be confused with rigidity, incapacity to develop further, and imperviousness to changing contexts. However, this is not to deny that virtue, at high levels, is constituted by a solid core of incorruptible integrity, honesty, and so forth: a core of virtue not readily undermined by corrosive social forces and institutions.
Let me now summarize the main features of a Nietzschean virtue ethics. I began this chapter with the claim that Nietzsche’s ethics is aretaic in the sense that goodness in things is to be understood as having excellence built into then. Where excellence in things is characteristically understood as their either being handled virtuously (say, virtuously handled money, honors, play, friendship, pleasure), or their being themselves virtuous (virtuous human beings), such an ethics is a candidate for being a virtue ethics.
The content of Nietzschean virtue ethics is to be understood in terms of undistorted will to power, which has two aspects: life affirmation and health. However, these are not to be understood as end-states of perfection, but as norms of self-improvement. The idea of undistorted will to power enables us to distinguish between virtues and closely allied vices, such as the forms of altruistic virtue and vice.
A Nietzschean virtue ethics can be seen as a nonconsequentialist version of perfectionism in the sense defined above. However, Nietzschean virtue ethics is a nonstandard form of perfectionism insofar as the road traveled seems more important than the destination. Self-improvement is a process, itself having norms of excellence, but (1) those norms do not presuppose that there is a single goal suitable for all, for we are all different in strength, threats, interests, and circumstances of life, (2) in a process of “self-overcoming” we do not necessarily have in mind a long-term destination, for the good life may involve much experimentation, and (3) virtue itself should not be understood as an end-state of perfection. Rather, insofar as “self-overcoming” is at the core of virtue, it is a dynamic process-notion, relativized to the strength of individuals as well as to their roles and circumstances.
I owe grateful thanks to Steve Gardiner for his helpful suggestions for improvement, and for organizing the conference in Christchurch, New Zealand, for which this was originally written. Thanks also to the participants, especially Robert Solomon.
Cited in Michael Store, Morals From Motives (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2000), 155.
(Oxford: Clarendon Press, 2001), 107.
Ed. Note—For translations of Nietzsche’s works the author uses Hollingdale’s translations of BGE, D; Smith’s translation of GM; Kaufmann’s translations of BGE (where noted), EH, and Z.
“Nietzsche’s Doctrines of the Will to Power,” in Nietzsche, ed. John Richardson and Brian Leiter (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2001), 139–49, at 140.
Ibid., 141.
Ibid.
“Was Nietzsche a Consequentialist?” International Studies in Philosophy 27 (1995): 25–34.
Ibid., 32.
Erich Fromm, The Anatomy of Human Destructiveness (London: Penguin Books, 1977).
See Thomas Hurka, Virtue, Vice, and Value (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2001).
Karen Horney, Neurosis and Human Growth: The Struggle Toward Self-Realization (New York: Norton, 1970).
Bernard Reginster, “Ressentiment, Evaluation, and Integrity,” International Studies in Philosophy 27 (1995): 117–24, esp. 118.
Erich Fromm, The Art of Loving (London: Unwin Paperbacks, 1975 [1957]), 26.
See his “Nietzsche’s Virtues: a Personal Inquiry,” in Nietzrche’s Postmoralism: Essays on Nietzsche’s Prelude to Philosophy’s Future, ed. Richard Schacht (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2001), 123–48.
James Conant, “Nietzsche’s Perfectionism: A Reading of Schopenhauer as Educator,” in Nietzsche’s Postmoralism.
Ibid., 187.
Alexander Nehamas, “How One Becomes What One Is,” in Nietzsche, ed. Richardson and Leiter, 255–80; at 261.
SE cited in James Conant, 197.
Ibid.
See his “Nietzsche’s Power Ontology,” in Nietzsche, 150–85.
Ibid., 158.