Jonathan Miller: Moral Theory Formative - Word Count: 1775 words

How plausible is Nietzsche’s critique of conventional morality?

Nietzsche, in his unconventional critique, is undertaking a hugely ambitious

project: the understanding of our moral evolution using a combination of

psychological and historical evaluation of humanity. His aim, as I have

interpreted it, is to challenge our most basic instinctive beliefs and to transform

the pernicious, dispassionate rationality, which he believed had killed man’s

spirit and caused him to ‘forget how to dance.’ He felt that the traditional

enlightenment morality of his day, especially the Kantian and Utilitarian values

had severed humanity from its proper roots.

The Enlightenment project that he was targeting refers specifically to the

Kantian ‘thou shalt’ rules and the utilitarian emphasis upon the intrinsic

goodness of happiness and badness of suffering. It is plausible to say that if these

values are adopted by society, they will indeed impact on the way in which

individuals will evaluate their own lives. If those individuals have within them a

disposition for achieving greatness, and if it is true that a certain degree of

suffering is in fact a precondition for attaining greatness, then it follows that they

will not achieve their full potential. Instead, these individuals with which

Nietzsche is primarily concerned, will have been comatosed by society into

following a strict set of Kantian rules or pursuing their own happiness, which he

phrased as ‘wretched contentment.’ In Daybreak he writes:

‘Are we not, with this tremendous objective of obliterating all the sharp edges of life, well on our the

way to turning mankind into sand?...Is that your ideal, you heralds of sympathetic affections? 1

His critique is deliberately provocative in its aphoristic and rhetorical style. Yet it

is this unconventional almost prophetic use of emotive language, which I think

reflects his desire to appeal to the irrational side of his readers. For him every

idea has a life, a skin wrapped around it through which it is presented to the

world and by which it is created.

It would be would be misleading to look at his critique of morality without taking

into the context in which they were written. This morality, in Nietzsche’s eyes,

contains three pillars, which describe aspects of humanity: (I) that all agents

possess an entirely free will and autonomous choice, thus they may be held

responsible for their actions, (II) that each human ‘self’ is transparent enough

that any agents motives can be distinguished on the basis of their respective

motives and that these motives may be evaluated and (III) that all human agents

are sufficiently similar that one moral code is appropriate for all and so has

universal applicability. Nietzsche asserts that in fact none of the above

descriptions of morality are true.

(I), the claim that that we are sufficiently free to be held morally responsible for

all actions, he calls:

“A contradiction… a sort of rape and perversion of logic” 2

He claims that each person has defining fixed attributes, which control the

unconscious drives. In the ‘Genealogy of Morality’ he compares our thoughts to

fruits borne on a tree. In the same manner that we may explain facts about the

tree through knowledge of its fruits, we can derive an explanation of the values

and actions from that person’s physiological and psychological attributes. We

like to think of the ‘will,’ as being in control of our actions, depending upon our

beliefs and desires. According to Nietzsche however, our ‘will’ is nothing but the

effect of our physiological and psychological attributes. He postulates:

‘The inner world is full of phantoms…the will is one of them. The will no longer moves anything,

hence does not explain anything either — it merely accompanies events; it can also be absent.’ 3

He believes that we have greatly overestimated the impact of our consciousness,

saying that we cannot be made accountable for anything. As evidence, he uses

the example:

‘A thought comes when ‘it’ wishes, and not when ‘I’ wish.’ 4

If this is to be believed and our actions are indeed caused by our unconscious

beliefs and desires then it follows that the first pillar of modern morality (I), that

of conscious free will is therefore false.

Against (II), the concept of the transparency of the self, Nietzsche writes that we

all believe we can pick apart our motives and ‘inner motions’ that precede action

and call by its name every moral possibility. He claims that the self is merely the

battleground where our unconscious drives wrestle with themselves; our

observable actions are nothing more than the outcome.

Against the final claim (III), that all humanity is similar to a sufficient degree,

Nietzsche uses the analogy of Cornaro’s recommendation for a slender diet as

means of promoting a long life. Cornaro’s mistake, so says Nietzsche, was in his

absolutism. Cornaro assumed that everyone else had similar physiological and

psychological attributes to himself, in this case a slowness of metabolism, and

therefore wrongly assumed that eating little amounts would do everyone the

same good. As with diets, so too with moralities, which he says ‘sin against taste.’

His point is that individuals with different attributes will not all benefit from the

same ‘moral diet.’

In the critique outlined above, Nietzsche effectively dismisses such objective

morality and knocks down the Enlightenment project’s threefold wall, which was

built upon rational foundations. He then goes on to confront the wreckage of

these destroyed values. This monumental task is nothing less than constructing

an entirely new moral guideline and set of values by which individuals may

‘create themselves’. In ‘The Gay Science’ he writes:

“To that end we must become the best learners and discoverers of everything that is lawful and

necessary in the world: we must become physicists in order to be creators in this sense…our

opinions, valuations, and tables of what is good certainly belong among the most powerful levers in

the involved mechanism of our actions.’ 5

My interpretation of this slightly ambiguous passage is that Nietzsche is

suggesting that we should form our own ‘tables for what is good,’ with help of

science and psychology, to identify the patterns of value-inputs and action-

outputs, which seems to me a thoroughly reasonable suggestion to make.

However, Nietzsche also writes extensively about what he calls the ‘higher man.’

A large portion of his contempt towards conventional morality lies in his belief

that it thwarts the flourishing of these rare higher individuals. In ‘Thus Spoke

Zarathustra’ he creates a rhetorical ‘overman’ as a kind of ideal higher type of

being. This higher type,

‘Wants no sympathetic heart, but servants, tools; in his intercourse with men he is always intent on

making something out of them. He is incommunicable: he finds it tasteless to be familiar; and when

one thinks he is, he usually is not. When not speaking to himself, he wears a mask. He rather lies

than tells the truth: it requires more spirit and will. There is a solitude within him that is

inaccessible to praise and blame, his own justice that is beyond appeal.’ 6

Specifically, a higher type has what he termed a Dionysian outlook on life and

would embrace the doctrine of eternal recurrence, which is to say that he would

will the repetition of his life throughout eternity. I think this vision of an ideal

higher type is a touch ironic since it is almost utopian in its structure, which is

precisely the line of thought he was attacking. MacIntyre’s criticism of ‘the

overman’ is straightforward: if the evolved human being rises above other people

to arrive at a place where he can create values, he removes himself from the

human relationships within which values emerge, and therefore can know

nothing about value. He goes on to say that because the ‘great man’ removes

himself from the relationships involved in learning and engaging in the practices,

he is condemned to moral solitude. Such a man could be accused of being aloof,

with delusions of self-grandeur, with no capacity for intimacy, surely such a life

would be one of lonesome misery.

However, in the Genealogy of Morals Nietzsche sketches what I view as a more

plausible, but nonetheless vague, alternative to the overman. He tells the story of

the ‘three metamorphosis of the spirit’, saying how,

‘…the spirit shall become a camel, the camel a lion, and the lion at last, a child.’ 7

These metaphors describe various stages in the transformation of human

consciousness. The camel is a beast of burden and seems to possess a sense of

duty in bearing heavy loads and going for days without water. However the

camel then comes to understand that there are no absolute foundations for truth

or knowledge and takes it upon itself to ‘flee into a desert of solitude.’ It is in this

desert that the camel transforms into a lion for ‘it wants to capture freedom and

be lord in its own desert.’ (Ibid) The Lion’s enemy is the great dragon called ‘Thou

Shalt’ that sparkles with the ‘values of a thousand years.’ The dragon believes

itself to be supreme because it possesses one truth concerning all existence. The

might of the lion says, ‘I will’ and opens the road to the will to power which is

Nietzsche’s phrase for the instinct for freedom and power to create new realities.

But now that there is no external authority, the lion is truly alone and

responsible for itself, the final transformation must now take place: the lion must

become a child,

‘…the child is innocence and forgetfulness, a new beginning, a sport, a self-propelling wheel, a first

motion, a sacred Yes.’ 8

The child has broken free from the ‘Thou Shalts’ of the herd and now possesses

the will to power and the potential to create new values. My interpretation is

(and I could be accused of overly reading in between the lines here) that we

should pass beyond the dualities of good and evil (the lion) and then take the risk

and struggle into the ‘dirty water of truth,’ adopting not the values of the

overman, but embrace a child’s perspective and question the value of everything

again - sparking the creation of new values which are not static and universal but

constantly in flux. His critique of static conventional mornality, at the very least,

does succeed in opening the door to deeper self exploration and further moral

study. He writes in ‘the Gay Science’:

‘Whoever now wants to make a study of moral things opens up for himself an enormous field of

work…all that has given colour to existence…are the moral effects of food known? Has the dialectic

of marriage and friendship yet been presented? There is so much in them to be thought over!’ 9

References:

1 Daybreak 1742 Beyond Good and Evil 213 Human all too human 394 Beyond Good and Evil 175 The Gay Science 3356 Ecce Homo 1:27 Thus spoke Zarathustra 1: Of The Three Metamorphoses8 Ibid9 The Gay Science 7

Bibliography:After Virtue, Alasdair MacIntyre – 3rd edition 2007

Beyond Good and Evil, Nietzsche, translated by Walter Kaufmann. New York: Vintage Books, 1989.

Daybreak: Thoughts on the Prejudices of Morality, Nietzsche, translated by R. J. Hollingdale. New

York: Cambridge University Press, 1991.

Human, all too Human: a Book for Free Spirits, Nietzsche, Translated by R.J. Hollingdale. New York:

Cambridge University Press, 1991.

On the Genealogy of Morals and Ecce Homo, Nietzsche, translated by Walter Kaufmann and R. J.

Hollingdale. Edited by Walter Kaufmann. New York: Vintage Books, 1969.

On the Genealogy of Morals and Ecce Homo, Nietzsche, translated by Walter Kaufmann and R. J.

Hollingdale. Edited by Walter Kaufmann. New York: Vintage Books, 1969.

The Gay Science, Nietzsche, translated by Walter Kaufmann. New York: Vintage Books, 1974.

Thus Spoke Zarathustra: A Book for All and None, Nietzsche, translated by Walter Kaufmann. New

York: Penguin Books, 1988.

Twilight of the Idols, Nietzsche, edited and Translated by Walter Kaufmann. New York: Penguin

Books, 1984.

http://plato.stanford.edu/entries/nietzsche-moral-political/

http://www.scrye.com/~station/dissertation.html