Simply Nietzsche

Peter Kail

• Publisher: Simply Charly
• Year: 2019
• ISBN:
  9781943657513
• Topic: Philosophy
• Subtopic: Philosopher Biographies

"This is the best introductory text on Nietzsche in English, German or French, and in three respects: it is genuinely introductory without being superficial; it reflects good philosophical judgment; and it stakes out interesting and plausible hypotheses on some vexed questions of interpretation. The writing is also crisp and engaging throughout."
—Brian Leiter, Karl N. Llewellyn Professor of Jurisprudence, Director of the Center for Law, Philosophy, and Human Values, TheUniversity ofChicago

Born and raised in a small town in Prussia, Friedrich Wilhelm Nietzsche (1844-1900) began his career in philology (the study of language), and served as a professor at the University of Basel. In 1879, he was forced to leave due to health issues, which afflicted him throughout his life. Supported by his university pension and aided by friends, he spent the next decade as an independent author, writing the books for which he would become famous, including Thus Spake Zarathustra, Beyond Good and Evil, and On the Genealogy of Morals. In 1889, at the age of 44, Nietzsche had a mental breakdown from which he never recovered, dying in 1900. Yet in just ten years, he produced a body of work that would mark him as one of the most influential philosophers of all time.

In Simply Nietzsche, Professor Peter Kail traces the development of Nietzsche's thought through the various phases of his life. Emphasizing the philosopher's critique of modern morality and his revolutionary conception of the self, he also discusses key motifs of Nietzsche's thought, such as the death of God, the will to power and the eternal recurrence.

Even those who have never read Nietzsche or are unsure of why he's important have heard his name. With Prof. Kail as a guide, Simply Nietzsche provides an unparalleled and accessible introduction to the life and ideas of this most remarkable thinker.

5

Truth, Selves and the Truth about Selves: Beyond Good and Evil

I mentioned in Chapter 3 that the fifth book of The Gay Science seems to fit in best with the two works published after Thus Spoke Zarathustra, namely Beyond Good and Evil (BGE) and On the Genealogy of Morality (GM). This is true in a pedestrian sense, namely, that the fifth book was published a year after BGE and in the same year as GM. But, more importantly, some of its key content fits well with BGE and GM. It opens with a restatement of the Death of God, but one that is redolent with possibility and optimism. The next section of the book—to which we shall return in the context of discussing GM—examines the relationship between the high value placed on truth on the one hand, and Christian morality on the other, a key theme in GM’s third essay. The following section takes morality as a problem and, among other things, suggests that a history of morality is required to reassess the value of morality. This is precisely what GM offers. This list of themes from GS book 5 could continue, though I would not like the reader to go away with the impression that there is nothing in the fifth book of GS that isn’t in either BGE or GM: there is plenty that is unique to it. But I shall occasionally refer to some materials in this book in this and the next chapter.

Beyond Good and Evil

Like many of Nietzsche’s works, BGE touches on many subjects. Part 8, “Peoples and fatherlands,” discusses various conceptions about national character in insightful, and often very funny, ways (he is particularly amusing about the English). Part 4, “Epigrams and entr’actes,” is Nietzsche at his most “aphoristic” (the French “entr’actes” or “a performance between the acts” is not, therefore, surprising). This part comprises many, often single-sentence, observations. Some, unfortunately, reflect his nastiness about women—animosity that was born of his disappointment with Lou Salomé (“Where neither love nor hate are in play, woman is a mediocre player” (BGE 115)). Some express philosophical theses: BGE 117 states that the “will to overcome an affect is, in the end, itself only the will of another, of several other, affects.” Others seem to embody practical wisdom: “Sensuality often hurries the growth of love so that the root stays weak and is easy to tear up” (BGE 120). Part 6, “We scholars,” discusses philosophy and philosophers—old, present, and those of the future capable of creating values.

There is much more information in BGE, which we do not have space to mention, let alone discuss. It is a book, as I said, that touches on almost everything. But what lies behind the title Beyond Good and Evil? As is usual with Nietzsche, things are not immediately evident from the work’s preface, its opening sections, or, indeed, from his own account of BGE in Ecce Homo. It is not really until the final part of the work—Part 9, “What is noble?”—that an answer is forthcoming to what it might mean to go “beyond good and evil.” Now, Nietzsche described himself as an “immoralist” in BGE, and because he did so, it would be easy to form the superficial impression that going “beyond good and evil” means the abandonment of morality, leaving a world without values. But it would be a total mistake to interpret going “beyond good and evil” and “immoralism” in that way. One reason for this error is the assumption that morality is a single thing (or that there is a single morality), either to be embraced or abandoned. A key motif of the central Part 5 of BGE, “On the natural history of morals,” is that we—philosophers and ordinary people—are blind to the fact that there are many types of morality, and that the one which predominates today is only one of many, even though it seems to present itself as the only possible option. As Nietzsche put in BGE 202, modern morality “stubbornly and ruthlessly declares ‘I am morality itself and nothing else is moral!’” In GM, Nietzsche will try to show that our present morality both differs from, and emerges from, another morality. Our present morality turns on a contrast between good and evil (böse), which differs from an earlier morality, which turns on a contrast between good and bad (schlecht). To go “beyond good and evil” is to go beyond the morality we now inhabit.

The good/evil and good/bad moralities are discussed in BGE 260, which will form the basis of his subsequent discussion in GM. The distinction between the good/evil and good/bad moralities is closely related to another important distinction in Nietzsche, namely the distinction between “master” and “slave” moralities. Very roughly, Nietzsche argued that the morality marked by the good and bad contrast was—and is—viable. What is good is marked by fortune. A “good” person is of noble birth, confident, independent, and full of power and strength and lives by a set of honor relations that hold only between equals. Actions are called “good” only secondarily, they are simply things that are done by noble (i.e., “good”) people. Those who live in accordance with the “master” morality resemble the Overman mentioned in the previous chapter in the sense that they express a unity of purpose and relative indifference to others. They set their own goals and pursue them single-mindedly, expressing a unitary direction to their drives. The contrasting term “bad” applies to the masses of persons who are not so fortunate. The German word “schlecht” here means base or lowborn. These people are the sick, the timid, the poor, the ugly, the conquered, and the dispossessed. They cannot acquire what they want, they are weak, and not merely in the physical sense, but in the psychological one as well: they are timid, self-doubting, needing the comfort of others. The elites are the superior types, and the lowly ones are those who fail to have all the naturally good things on earth, like power, health, etc. This, to Nietzsche, was the “rank order of values” of the ancient world of the Greeks and Romans. But this morality has been displaced by a morality marked by a contrast between good and evil. What was previously thought of as bad—weakness, poverty, and so forth—is somehow interpreted as morally praiseworthy. The key concept here is that the morally good person is one who is essentially selfless—giving of himself or herself to others, not taking one’s self to be better or more valuable than others, which is the opposite of the noble who pursues goals with at the very least an indifference toward other human beings. Furthermore, the fiction of free will as being able to do otherwise is added. The “masters” are not only terrible in what they do, but also because they could have chosen to do otherwise. To “go beyond good and evil” is to go beyond this morality, but not to go beyond a contrast between good and bad. Human beings are essentially evaluating creatures and cannot live without values.

We shall return to this when we get to GM, where Nietzsche gave his best articulation of this contrast between two moralities. Now let us turn instead to the very beginning of BGE. The preface begins strangely: “Suppose that truth is a woman—and then what?” The first section of Part 1 asks two questions about truth, namely, why pursue the truth in the way that we do? And what is the value of this will? “Granted we will truth: why not untruth instead?” These questions open the discussion of Part 1, entitled “Of the prejudices of philosophers,” which comprises 23 sections critiquing various philosophical positions. This is the densest and most complicated sequence of writings in Nietzsche’s entire corpus. It is followed by Part 2, “The free spirit,” but the division between the two parts seems somewhat artificial because many of the topics of Part 1 are revisited in Part 2. It is impossible to convey much sense of the complications that lurk below the surface here, so I can only provide a tiny taste of the key themes.

Nietzsche claimed that most philosophy doesn’t know how to approach the truth. When truth is supposed to be a woman, it should be understood as the idea that philosophy’s approach is dogmatic. Its investigations start with some stubborn preconceived conceptions of what the world must be like and fail to question those presuppositions. Philosophy’s advances are “clumsy” and have been “spurned,” he posited. These presuppositions are not, as philosophers pretend to themselves, timeless insights into the nature of reality, but instead a “seduction of grammar or an over-eager generalization from facts that are really very local, very personal, very human all too human.” Indeed, Nietzsche believed that philosophical systems are not the result of a disinterested pursuit of the truth, but expressions of the particular drives that the philosopher possesses. Every “great philosophy so far has been: a confession of faith on the part of its author, and a type of involuntary and unself-conscious memoir” (BGE 6). The great philosophical systems, those of Plato or Kant, to choose two very famous examples, are, Nietzsche suggested, expressions of the kinds of drives and interests that constitute those individuals, and particularly the sets of drives comprising their moral outlooks. Their philosophical systems, which are purportedly objective descriptions of reality, are, in fact, conceptions of the world that best suit the moral inclinations of their inventors. Kant, for example, believed in a morality where ultimate responsibility rests on the spontaneous free choices of individuals, and his metaphysics reflected this moral belief: there is a second world where our will is free and unconstrained.

But what makes Nietzsche’s philosophy different? Why is his philosophy not merely a reflection of the “order of the rank of the innermost drives of his nature stand with respect to each other” (BGE 6)? Isn’t Nietzsche’s philosophy just an expression of his own drives? Nietzsche himself was aware of this danger, and attempted to guard against it by pointing, in the final sentence of Part 1 of BGE, to a difference between his philosophy and other philosophies: “[F]rom now on, psychology is again the path to the fundamental problems” (BGE 23). His approach to philosophy was not to build a metaphysical system, but instead to understand human beliefs and behavior, including those of philosophical system builders. This is an aspect of what I referred to in Chapter 2 as Nietzsche’s “naturalistic” philosophy. His approach is oriented around a theory of the nature of human beings, a theory built on empirical observation informed by the sciences of the day. It is part and parcel of his project to “translate humanity back into nature” (BGE 230). The metaphysical pictures of nature, and of our place in nature, need to be replaced. We need to “gain control of the many vain and fanciful interpretations and incidental meanings that have been scribbled and drawn over that eternal basic text of homo natura so far.” Humans have false conceptions about just what kinds of things they are, false conceptions that both philosophy and Christianity have invented and perpetuated.

Truth and Perspectives

As we have noted, Nietzsche opened the preface to BGE with a question about truth, also mentioning something he referred to as “perspectivism.” This is a term that has become strongly associated with Nietzsche, so this is an appropriate place to discuss it.

One—thoroughly mistaken—view is to say that when Nietzsche talked about “perspectives,” he meant to suggest that there is no such thing as truth. This idea has some textual backing. As I mentioned in the Preface, in an early unpublished essay, Nietzsche wrote that truth is a “mobile army of metaphors, metonymies . . . illusions of which we have forgotten that they are illusions.” During the early part of his career, he thought our beliefs are “falsifications”—beliefs that somehow involve distortions, and so are false. He did eventually abandon this claim, and I will explain why. Nietzsche insisted that knowing is from “a perspective.” Knowing something is not the same as something being true, since there can be lots of truths we don’t know—for instance, nobody knows whether there is an odd or even number of blades of grass in the world, but there is a fact of the matter—though what we do know must be true. But what does it mean to say that all knowing is from a perspective?

Let us begin by thinking of a visual perspective. Anything we see is seen from a particular point of view, and, because of this, one’s view of anything is only ever partial. I am sitting at my laptop, but I only see part of it. If I change my position, I adopt another perspective and see a different part of the computer. I then move again, and again, until I have a total view of it. All that seems straightforward, but Nietzsche believed everything is known or viewed from a perspective. Why? This is a little complicated, but I hope the following sketch will bring some clarity. When we know something, we are correctly representing the world to be a certain way.^[1] Consider a map: it is a representation of a certain area. But what do we include in that map? Well, it depends on what one’s interests or needs might be. If one is interested in camping, such a map will depict flat areas, footpaths, water features, etc. Other things that are not germane to hiking, like the location of guitar shops, for example, will be left out. If one’s interests lie in architecture, then the map would show architectural landmarks, leaving out hiking features. Thus, a map can be an accurate representation but a partial or selective one. It is a representation of something from the perspective of certain kinds of interests. If we included every interest, the map would be complete, but such a representation is impossible.

Maps are, of course, human inventions. But all creatures operate with representations. A frog, for example, can represent a fly in its environment, so it can catch it. But its set of representations—its map—will be a very limited or partial one, one geared solely to its environment. The difference between quartz and granite makes no difference to the frog, and so it is not something that is represented from the frog’s perspective. Instead, and to simplify somewhat, the frog carves up the world into “flies” and “not flies.” Human beings, too, are natural creatures—t...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Title Page
• Copyright
• Dedication
• Table Of Contents
• Praise for Simply Nietzsche
• Other Great Lives
• Series Editor's Foreward
• Preface
• Beginnings: The Birth of Tragedy and Untimely Meditations
• Turning New Ground: Human, All Too Human and Daybreak
• The Demon and the Madman: The Gay Science
• Nietzsche’s Bible: Thus Spoke Zarathustra
• Truth, Selves and the Truth about Selves: Beyond Good and Evil
• The Invention of the Sick Animal: On the Genealogy of Morality
• Coming to an End: Twilight of the Idols, The Anti-Christ, Ecce Homo, and Wagner Revisited
• Nietzsche’s Legacy
• Sources
• Suggested Reading
• About the Author
• A Word from the Publisher