Nietzsche on Morality

Brian Leiter

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2014
• eBook ISBN: 9781317635857
• Edition: 2
• Topic: Philosophy
• Subtopic: Philosophy History & Theory

Both an introduction to Nietzsche's moral philosophy, and a sustained commentary on his most famous work, On the Genealogy of Morality, this book has become the most widely used and debated secondary source on these topics over the past dozen years. Many of Nietzsche's most famous ideas - the "slave revolt" in morals, the attack on free will, perspectivism, "will to power" and the "ascetic ideal" - are clearly analyzed and explained. The first edition established the centrality of naturalism to Nietzsche's philosophy, generating a substantial scholarly literature to which Leiter responds in an important new Postscript. In addition, Leiter has revised and refreshed the book throughout, taking into account new scholarly literature, and revising or clarifying his treatment of such topics as the objectivity of value, epiphenomenalism and consciousness, and the possibility of "autonomous" agency.

1 IntroductionNietzsche, naturalist or postmodernist?

10.4324/9781315758336-1

A familiar, yet still curious, feature of Nietzsche’s reception over the last century is that figures with radically divergent views and methodologies all claim the mantle of his influence. Thinkers on the political “right” find him attractive for his elitism and anti-egalitarianism; those on the “left” embrace him for his hatred of all the pillars of bourgeois civilization: religion, industrial capitalism, the state. Intellectual movements as diverse as literary modernism, deconstruction in literary theory, psychoanalysis, existentialism, relativism, late nineteenth- and early twentieth-century evolutionary naturalism, and pragmatism have all claimed Nietzsche as their own. Writers as different as the German sociologist Max Weber, the French deconstructionist Jacques Derrida, the British moral philosopher Bernard Williams, and the American pragmatist Richard Rorty have all felt the need to situate their thought with respect to its debt to Nietzsche.

Perhaps the most oddly matched pair of professed Nietzschean “disciples” are the founder of psychoanalysis Sigmund Freud (1856–1939), and the “postmodern” philosopher and historian Michel Foucault (1926–84). Freud famously remarked that Nietzsche “had a more penetrating knowledge of himself than any man who ever lived or was ever likely to live” (Jones 1955: 344) and claimed to have stopped reading Nietzsche’s work for fear that Nietzsche had anticipated too many of his own ideas about human nature and the role of unconscious forces (Freud 1957, vol. 14: 15–16; Gay 1988: 46).¹ Foucault proclaims that “Nietzsche marks the threshold beyond which contemporary philosophy can begin thinking again; and he will no doubt continue for a long while to dominate its advance” (1966: 342). He situates his own “genealogies” of psychiatry, the prison, and sexuality in a Nietzschean tradition, a tradition which allegedly teaches that “behind things” there is “not a timeless secret, but the secret that they have no essence or that their essence was fabricated in a piecemeal fashion from alien forms” (Foucault 1971: 78). In doing genealogy, “one finds not the fixed meaning of a text, or of the world, but only other interpretations … inherent[ly] arbitrar[y]” interpretations (Dreyfus and Rabinow 1983: 107). While for Freud, Nietzsche is the philosopher who anticipates psychoanalysis by trying to discover the deep, hidden facts about human nature which explain who we are and what we believe, for Foucault, Nietzsche is precisely the philosopher who denies that there are any “deep facts” about human nature and who recognizes that all such putative facts are mere interpretations, mere contingent constructs.

1 See L. Anderson (1980) for documentation of Freud’s familiarity with Nietzsche, especially pp. 16–18.

So who can justifiably claim to be heir to Nietzsche’s philosophy, Freud “the naturalist” or Foucault “the postmodernist”? Since the 1960s, the “postmodern” reading of Nietzsche has been dominant, helped along by both its “French” proponents, and even certain Anglophone commentators.² This book joins cause with some recent literature³ in arguing that, rightly understood, Nietzsche belongs not in the company of postmodernists like Foucault and Derrida, but rather in the company of naturalists like Hume and Freud – that is, among, broadly speaking, philosophers of human nature. The Genealogy, in turn, is Nietzsche’s most systematic attempt to give a naturalized account of the phenomenon of morality. Such an account is not, ultimately, presented by Nietzsche as an end-in-itself. Rather, Nietzsche develops a naturalistic account of morality in the service of a very particular normative goal, namely to force us to reconsider the value of morality: naturalism is enlisted in the service of what Nietzsche calls his “revaluation of all values.”

2 See, e.g., Danto 1965; Nehamas 1985; Rorty 1989. The first edition of this book seems to have changed this consensus, at least in the Anglophone philosophical world. 3 See, e.g., Schacht 1983; Gemes 1992; Leiter 1992, 1994, 1998a; Beam 1996; Clark and Leiter 1997; Clark 1998a, 1998b. My goal in what follows is to give a more precise characterization of what is at stake in Nietzsche’s naturalism, compared to some of the vague formulations, esp. in Schacht.

What is naturalism?

What does it mean for a philosopher to be a “naturalist”?⁴ We may start by distinguishing between two basic naturalistic doctrines: methodological (or M-Naturalism) and substantive (S-Naturalism).⁵ Naturalism in philosophy is, typically, in the first instance, a methodological view about how one should do philosophy: philosophical inquiry, on this view, should be continuous with empirical inquiry in the sciences.⁶ Some M-Naturalists (especially contemporary ones) want “continuity with” only the hard or physical sciences (Hard M-Naturalists); others seek “continuity with” any successful science, natural or social (Soft M-Naturalists). Soft M-Naturalism, as we shall see, is the dominant strand in philosophy (and most important for understanding Nietzsche).

4 For a detailed discussion, see Leiter 1998b. 5 Cf. Railton (1990) for one version of this distinction. 6 Although philosophers have never solved the so-called “demarcation problem” – the problem of what precisely demarcates genuine science from pseudo-science – this fact does not undermine M-Naturalism, as long as there are enough clear cases of science on which to draw for methodological guidance.

What does “continuity with” the sciences mean? One view it certainly encompasses is the repudiation (associated, most famously, with Quine [1961, 1969]) of a “first philosophy,” a philosophical solution to problems that proceeds entirely a priori; that is, prior to any experience or empirical evidence. But M-Naturalism requires continuity with the sciences in a more precise sense than this. We may introduce a further distinction, then, between “Results Continuity” and “Methods Continuity.”

The Results Continuity branch of M-Naturalism requires that philosophical theories – e.g., theories of morality or of knowledge – be supported or justified by the results of the sciences: philosophical theories that do not enjoy the support of our best science are simply bad theories. “Methods Continuity,” by contrast, demands only that philosophical theories emulate the “methods” of inquiry of successful sciences. “Methods” should be construed broadly here to encompass not only, say, the experimental method (e.g., the method of testing progressively refined claims against experience), but also the styles of explanation and understanding employed in the sciences, for example, explanation by appeal to causes, and an attempt to find the general causal patterns that explain the particular phenomena we observe.⁷

7 Note that such a view does not presuppose the methodological unity of the various sciences – i.e., that all sciences employ the same methods – only that successful sciences have some methodological uniqueness, i.e., there are distinctive scientific methods, even if those methods differ across the sciences.

Historically, M-Naturalism has constituted the most important type of naturalism in philosophy. Spinoza – whom Nietzsche greatly admired – gives expression to both types of M-Naturalism when he writes in the Preface to Part III of the Ethics as follows:

[N]ature is always the same, and its virtue and power of acting are everywhere the same, i.e., the laws and rules of nature, according to which all things happen, and change from one form to another, are always and everywhere the same. So the way of understanding the nature of anything, of whatever kind, must also be the same, viz. through the universal laws and rules of nature.

Philosophical understanding, in short, must be the same as scientific understanding: it must employ the same methods of understanding that the sciences deploy with good effect elsewhere, and it must heed the result of the sciences that nature is “everywhere the same.”

Unlike the M-Naturalists who draw on the actual results of established sciences, many M-Naturalists drawn to Methods Continuity simply try to emulate a scientific way of understanding the world in developing their philosophical theories. We might call these M-Naturalists, accordingly, “Speculative M-Naturalists.” Hume, for example, constructs a “speculative” theory of human nature – modeled on the most influential scientific paradigm of the day (Newtonian mechanics) – in order to explain various human phenomena, like morality. The speculative theories of M-Naturalists are “modeled” on the sciences most importantly in that they take over from science the idea that natural phenomena have deterministic causes. One commentator has aptly observed that Hume, like Freud and Marx (and, one might have added, Nietzsche), puts “forward a general theory of human nature” in order to “provide a basis for explaining everything in human affairs. And the theories they advance are all, roughly, deterministic” (Stroud 1977: 4). Just as we often understand events in the inanimate world by identifying the natural causes that determined them, so, too, we understand human beliefs, values, and actions by locating their causal determinants in various features of human nature.

M-Naturalists, then, construct philosophical theories that are continuous with the sciences either in virtue of their dependence upon the actual results of scientific method in different domains or in virtue of their employment and emulation of distinctively scientific ways of looking at and explaining things.⁸

8 One possibility, then, is that Foucault himself is an M-Naturalist, just the kind of M-Naturalist who thinks that “human nature” does no useful explanatory work; Nietzsche, by contrast, is just the M-Naturalist who thinks facts about “human nature” do explain things. It is not clear to me that this is how Foucault understood himself, but it is a possible interpretation of what was earlier called his postmodern skepticism about human nature. (I am indebted to instructive comments from Huw Price on this point.)

Many naturalists go beyond methodological naturalism, however, and embrace a substantive doctrine. S-Naturalism in philosophy is either the (ontological) view that the only things that exist are natural (or perhaps simply physical) things; or the (semantic) view that a suitable philosophical analysis of any concept must show it to be amenable to empirical inquiry. In the ontological sense, S-Naturalism historically involved opposition to “supernaturalism,” to “the invocation of an agent or force which somehow stands outside the familiar natural world and so whose doings cannot be understood as part of it” (Stroud 1996: 44). Historical S-Naturalists (including both Hume and Nietzsche) reject, in particular, any explanatory role for God in an account of the world. Contemporary S-Naturalists, however, go well beyond opposition to supernaturalism and advance the more radical view known as physicalism, the doctrine that only those properties picked out by the laws of the physical sciences are real.⁹ There is no evidence that Nietzsche is at all sympathetic to this latter kind of S-Naturalism.

9 In the semantic sense, by contrast, S-Naturalism is just the view that predicates like “morally good” can be analyzed in terms of characteristics (e.g., “maximizing human well-being”) that admit of empirical inquiry (e.g., by psychology and physiology, assuming that well-being is a complex psycho-physical state).

Many philosophers are drawn to some type of S-Naturalism in virtue of their M-Naturalism_ being a philosophical naturalist in the methodological sense sometimes leads a philosopher to think that the best philosophical account of some concept or domain will be in terms that are substantively naturalistic (see Railton 1990). But it is important to notice that a commitment to M-Naturalism does not entail this conclusion: methodologically, it is an open question whether the best philosophical account of morality or mind or knowledge must be in substantively naturalistic terms.

What kind of naturalist is Nietzsche?

Like most of the great philosophical naturalists, Nietzsche’s naturalism is fundamentally methodological.¹⁰ Its central themes are sounded in a famous passage from Beyond Good and Evil, the major work preceding the Genealogy:

To translate man back into nature; to become master over the many vain and overly enthusiastic interpretations and connotations that have so far been scrawled and painted over the eternal basic text [ewigen Grundtext] of homo natura; to see to it that man henceforth stands before man as even today, hardened in the discipline of science, he stands before the rest of nature, with intrepid Oedipus eyes and sealed Odysseus ears, deaf to the siren songs of old metaphysical bird catchers who have been piping at him all too long, “you are more, you are higher, you are of a different origin!” – that may be a strange and insane task, but it is a task – who would deny that? Why did we choose this insane task? Or, putting it differently: “why have knowledge at all?”

(BGE: 230, cf. GS: 109)

10 The point here concerns Nietzsche’s actual philosophical practice, i.e., what he spends most of his time doing in his books. (On Janaway’s [2007] confusions about what this means, see the Postscript.) But it is worth keeping in mind that Nietzsche himself actually reserves the label “philosopher” (“genuine philosophers” he calls them in BGE: 211) for those who discharge a different kind of task than that of the naturalist: namely those who create or legislate values. In this particular usage, “philosopher” is something of an honorific for Nietzsche. We shall return to some of these issues in the following chapters.

Several things about this passage are striking. First, notice that Nietzsche here calls for man to stand “hardened in the discipline [Zucht] of science,” rather than, say, “schooled in particular substantive scientific doctrines.” This is in keeping with a recurring (M-Naturalist) theme in his mature work, namely that what is important about science is scientific method, rather than particular scientific theories: “[S]cientific methods … one must say it ten times, are what is essential, a...

Table of contents

• Cover Page
• Half Title Page
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Dedication
• Table of Contents
• Preface and acknowledgements to the second edition
• Preface and acknowledgements to the first edition
• Abbreviations
• 1 Introduction: Nietzsche, naturalist or postmodernist?
• 2 Intellectual history and background
• 3 Nietzsche’s critique of morality I: the scope of the critique and the critique of moral agency
• 4 Nietzsche’s critique of morality II: the critique of moral norms
• 5 What is “genealogy” and what is the Genealogy?
• 6 A commentary on the First Essay
• 7 A commentary on the Second Essay
• 8 A commentary on the Third Essay
• 9 Nietzsche since 1900: critical questions
• Postscript: Nietzsche’s naturalism revisited
• Bibliography
• Index