## 1. The Critique of Morality


### 1.1 Scope of the Critique: Morality in the Pejorative Sense



Nietzsche is not a critic of *all* "morality." He
explicitly embraces, for example, the idea of a "higher
morality" which would inform the lives of "higher
men" (Schacht 1983: 466-469), and, in so doing, he employs
the same German word -- *Moral*, sometimes
*Moralitat* -- for both what he attacks and what he
praises. Moreover, Nietzsche aims to offer a revaluation of existing
values in a manner that appears, itself, to involve appeal to broadly
"moral" standards of some sort. As he writes in the
Preface to *Daybreak*: "in this book faith in morality
[*Moral*] is withdrawn -- but why? *Out of
morality* [*Moralitat*]! Or what else should we call
that which informs it -- and *us*?....[T]here is no
doubt that a 'thou shalt' [*du sollst*] speaks to
us too" (D 4). This means, of course, that morality as the
object of Nietzsche's critique must be distinguishable from the
sense of "morality" he retains and employs.



Yet Nietzsche also does not confine his criticisms of morality to some
one religiously, philosophically, socially or historically
circumscribed example. Thus, it will not suffice to say that he simply
attacks Christian or Kantian or European or utilitarian morality
-- though he certainly at times attacks all of these. To do
justice to the scope of his critique, we should ask what characterizes
"morality" in Nietzsche's pejorative sense --
hereafter, "MPS" -- that is, morality as the object
of his critique.



Nietzsche believes that all normative systems which perform something
like the role we associate with "morality" share certain
structural characteristics, even as the meaning and value of these
normative systems varies considerably over time. In particular, all
normative systems have both *descriptive* and
*normative* components, in the sense that: (a) they presuppose
a particular descriptive account of human being and human agency, in
the sense that for the normative claims comprising the system to have
intelligible application to humans, particular metaphysical and
empirical claims about human beings and agency must be true; and (b)
the system's norms favor the interests of some people, often
(though not necessarily) at the expense of others. Any particular
morality will, in turn, be the object of Nietzsche's critique
(i.e., MPS) only if it:


1. presupposes three particular descriptive claims about the nature
of humans pertaining to free will, the transparency of the self, and
their essential similarity in morally relevant respects ("the
Descriptive Component"); and/or
2. embraces norms that harm the "highest men" while
benefiting the "lowest" ("the Normative
Component").



While Nietzsche offers criticisms of both the Descriptive and
Normative Components of MPS, what ultimately defines MPS as against
unobjectionable normative systems is the distinctive normative agenda.
Thus, while Nietzsche criticizes the description of agency that is
part of many versions of MPS, he also holds that "[i]t is
*not* error as error that" he objects to fundamentally in
MPS (EH IV;7): that is, it is *not* the falsity of the
descriptive account of agency presupposed by MPS, *per se*,
that is the heart of the problem, but rather its distinctive normative
commitments. Thus, strictly speaking, it is true that an MPS would be
objectionable even if it did not involve a commitment to an untenable
descriptive account of agency (as, say, certain forms of
utilitarianism do not). Because Nietzsche's two most common
-- and closely related -- specific targets are, however,
Christian and Kantian morality, the critique of the descriptive
component of MPS figures prominently in Nietzsche's writing, and
any account of the logic of his critique that omitted it would not do
justice to his concerns.


### 1.2 Critique of the Descriptive Component of MPS



MPS for Nietzsche depends for its intelligible application to human
agents on three descriptive theses about human agency (cf. BGE 32; GM
I:13; TI VI; EH III:5; EH IV:8):



> 
> 
> (1) Human agents possess a will capable of free choice ("Free
> Will Thesis").
> 
> 
> 
> (2) The self is sufficiently transparent that agents' actions
> can be distinguished on the basis of their respective motives
> ("Transparency of the Self Thesis").
> 
> 
> 
> (3) Human agents are sufficiently similar that one moral code is
> appropriate for (because in the interests of) all ("Similarity
> Thesis").
> 
> 
> 



These three theses must be true in order for the normative judgments
of MPS to be intelligible because the normative judgments of MPS are
marked for Nietzsche by three corresponding traits; namely, that
they:



> 
> 
> (1') Hold agents responsible for their actions.
> 
> 
> 
> (2') Evaluate and "rank" the motives for which
> agents act.
> 
> 
> 
> (3') Presuppose that "morality" has universal
> applicability (MPS "says stubbornly and inexorably, 'I am
> morality itself, and nothing besides is morality'" [BGE
> 202]).
> 
> 
> 



Thus, the falsity of the picture of human beings would affect the
intelligibility of moral judgments in the following three ways:



> 
> 
> (1'') If agents lacked "free will" they could not be
> held responsible for their actions.
> 
> 
> 
> (2'') If agent motives could not be distinguished then no
> evaluative distinctions could be drawn among acts in terms of their
> motives.
> 
> 
> 
> (3'') If humans were, in fact, different in some overlooked but
> relevant respect, then it would, at least, not be *prima facie*
> apparent that one morality should have universal application.
> 
> 
> 



It is the burden, then, of Nietzsche's critique of the
Descriptive Component of MPS to show that, in fact, none of these
latter theses about the nature of agency hold. A brief review of these
arguments follows (a more detailed treatment is in Leiter 2002: 81-112
and Leiter 2019: 115-146)



Against the Free Will Thesis, Nietzsche argues against both the modern
attempts to vindicate free will and moral responsibility. On
libertarian views, a free agent (that is, one sufficiently free to be
morally responsible) would have to be *causa sui* (i.e.,
self-caused, or the cause of itself); but since we are not *causa
sui*, no one can be a free agent. Nietzsche often takes for
granted -- not implausibly -- that our moral and religious
traditions are incompatibilist at their core: causally determined
wills are not *free* wills. But Nietzsche also argues against
compatibilist views of free will and moral responsibility according to
which (1) we are free and morally responsible as long as we do what we
desire or we "identify" with the desires on which we act;
or (2) we are free and morally responsible as long as we are
responsive to relevant reasons for acting. (Rutherford 2011 suggests
Nietzsche has more in common with the Stoics and Spinoza when it comes
to "free will": free actions are just ones arising from
our real inner nature, but we can not choose to be the type of person
whose actions arise from their real nature, since that too is a matter
of fate.)



Nietzsche offers two kinds of arguments to show that we are not
*causa sui*: that it is logically impossible to be *causa
sui*; and that human beings are not self-caused in a sense
sufficient to underwrite ascriptions of moral responsibility. (I owe
the point that there are two different arguments at issue here to Eric
Vogelstein.) He says relatively little about the first point, other
than claiming that "the concept of a *causa sui* is
something fundamentally absurd" (BGE 15), and that it is
"the best self-contradiction that has been conceived so
far...a sort of rape and perversion of logic" (BGE 21),
such that this,



> 
> desire for "freedom of the will" in the superlative
> metaphysical sense...the desire to bear the entire and ultimate
> responsibility for one's actions oneself, and to absolve God,
> the world, ancestors, chance, and society involves nothing less than
> to be precisely this *causa sui* and...to pull oneself up
> into existence by the hair, out of the swamps of nothingness. (BGE 21)
> 



But we cannot, needless to say, pull ourselves up "out of the
swamps of nothingness," and so we cannot have ultimate
responsibility for our actions.



Nietzsche quickly moves from the claim that being *causa sui*
involves a contradiction, however, to an argument that depends on his
picture of human agency. Nietzsche accepts what we may call a
"Doctrine of Types" (Leiter 1998), according to which,



> 
> Each person has a fixed psycho-physical constitution, which defines
> him as a particular *type* of person.
> 



Call the relevant psycho-physical facts here "type-facts."
Type-facts, for Nietzsche, are either *physiological* facts
about the person, or facts about the person's unconscious drives
or affects. The claim, then, is that each person has certain largely
immutable physiological and psychic traits that constitute the
"type" of person he or she is.



Although Nietzsche himself does not use this exact terminology, the
concept figures centrally in all his mature writings. A typical
Nietzschean form of argument, for example, runs as follows: a
person's theoretical beliefs are best explained in terms of his
moral beliefs; and his moral beliefs are best explained in terms of
natural facts about the type of person he is (i.e., in terms of
type-facts). So Nietzsche says, "every great philosophy so far
has been...the personal confession of its author and a kind of
involuntary and unconscious memoir"; thus, to really grasp this
philosophy, one must ask "at what morality does all this (does
*he*) aim" (BGE 6)? But the "morality" that a
philosopher embraces simply bears "decisive witness to *who
he is*" -- i.e., who he *essentially* is --
that is, to the "innermost drives of his nature" (BGE
6).



This explanation of a person's moral beliefs in terms of
psycho-physical facts about the person is a recurring theme in
Nietzsche. "[M]oralities are...merely a sign language of
the affects" (BGE 187), he says. "Answers to the questions
about the *value* of existence...may always be considered
first of all as the symptoms of certain bodies" (GS P:2).
"Moral judgments," he says are, "symptoms and sign
languages which betray the process of physiological prosperity or
failure" (WP 258). "[O]ur moral judgments and
evaluations...are only images and fantasies based on a
physiological process unknown to us" (D 119), so that "it
is always necessary to draw forth...the *physiological*
phenomenon behind the moral predispositions and prejudices" (D
542). A "morality of sympathy," he claims is "just
another expression of ... physiological overexcitability"
(TI IX:37). *Ressentiment* -- and the morality that grows
out of it -- he attributes to an "actual physiological
cause [*Ursache*]" (GM I:15).



Nietzsche sums up the idea well in the preface to *On the Genealogy
of Morality* (hereafter simply "*Genealogy*" or
"GM"): "our thoughts, values, every
'yes,' 'no,' 'if' and
'but' grow from us with the same inevitability as fruits
borne on the tree -- all related and each with an affinity to
each, and evidence of one will, one health, one earth, one sun"
(GM P:2). Nietzsche seeks to understand in naturalistic terms the
*type* of "person" who would necessarily bear such
ideas and values, just as one might come to understand things about a
type of *tree* by knowing its fruits. And just as natural facts
about the tree explain the fruit it bears, so too type-facts about a
person will explain his values and actions. 



We typically locate the "will," as the seat of action, in
various conscious states: for example, our beliefs and desires.
According to Nietzsche, however, the "will" so conceived
is nothing but the effect of type-facts about the person. This means
that the real story of the genesis of an action begins with the
type-facts, which explain both consciousness *and* a
person's actions. Here is how Nietzsche puts it, after
suggesting that the "will" is related to, but conceptually
prior to, the concepts of "consciousness" and
"ego":



> 
> 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. The so-called *motive*: another error. Merely a surface
> phenomenon of consciousness -- something alongside the deed that
> is more likely to cover up the antecedents of the deeds than to
> represent them....
> 
> 
> What follows from this? There are no mental [*geistigen*]
> causes at all. (TI VI:3)
> 
> 
> 



In the last line, Nietzsche must mean only that there are no
*conscious* mental causes. Indeed, in other passages, he is
explicit that the target of this critique is the picture of conscious
motives as adequate to account for action. (For competing views of the
scope of Nietzsche's epiphenomenalism about consciousness, see,
on the one hand, Katsafanas 2005 and, on the other, Riccardi 2019,
Fowles 2019 and Leiter 2019: 135-139; more generally, on how Nietzsche
views consciousness, see Abel 2001 and Welshon 2014). As he writes in
*Daybreak*, "we are accustomed to exclude all [the]
unconscious processes from the accounting and to reflect on the
preparation for an act only to the extent that it is conscious"
(D 129), a view which Nietzsche plainly regards as mistaken, both here
and in the passage quoted above. Indeed, the theme of the
"ridiculous overestimation and misunderstanding of
consciousness" (GS 11) is a recurring one in Nietzsche.
"[B]y far the greatest part of our spirit's
activity," says Nietzsche, "remains unconscious and
unfelt" (GS 333; cf. GS 354).



Apart from the general evidence on behalf of the Doctrine of Types,
Nietzsche's strongest targeted argument for the epiphenomenality
of consciousness depends on a piece of phenomenology, namely,
"that a thought comes when 'it' wishes, and not when
'I' wish" (BGE 17). If that is right and if actions
are apparently "caused" by thoughts (by particular beliefs
and desires), then it follows that actions are not caused solely by
our conscious mental states, but rather by whatever it is (i.e.,
type-facts) that determines the thoughts that enter consciousness.
Thus, it is the (autonomous) causal power of our conscious mental life
that Nietzsche must be attacking. Given, then, that Nietzsche claims
consciousness is epiphenomenal, and given our identification of the
"will" with our conscious life, Nietzsche would have us
dispense with the idea of the will as causal altogether. (This gives
Nietzsche a novel argument against hierarchical accounts of free will
favored by some compatibilists: see Leiter 2002: 93-96. It also
undermines more recent forms of compatibilism based on
reasons-responsiveness: if deliberation, or conscious reasoning,, is
epiphenomenal, then why should an antecedent but non-causal
correlation between antecedently consciously experienced reasons and a
subsequent action ground responsibility? Barometers drop before
storms, after all, but they do not cause them and are not blameworthy
for them. See Leiter 2019: 144-146). Since the conscious will is not
causal, the Free Will Thesis is false.



Against the Transparency of the Self Thesis, Nietzsche claims that
"every action is unknowable" (GS 335; cf. WP 291, 294); as
he writes in *Daybreak*:



> 
> The primeval delusion still lives on that one knows, and knows quite
> precisely in every case, *how human action is brought
> about*.... "I know what I want, what I have done, I am
> free and responsible for it, I hold others responsible, I can call by
> its name every moral possibility and every inner motion which precedes
> action; you may act as you will -- in this matter I understand
> myself and understand you all!" -- that is
> how...almost everyone still thinks....[But] [a]ctions are
> *never* what they appear to us to be! We have expended so much
> labor on learning that external things are not as they appear to us to
> be -- very well! the case is the same with the inner world! Moral
> actions are in reality "something other than that" --
> more we cannot say: and all actions are essentially unknown. (D 116)
> 



Actions are unknown because "nothing...can be more
incomplete than [one's] image of the totality of *drives*
which constitute [a man's] being" (D 119). One "can
scarcely name even the cruder ones: their number and strength, their
ebb and flow, their play and counterplay among one another, and above
all the laws of their *nutriment* remain wholly unknown"
(D 119). But as Nietzsche argues elsewhere (e.g., D 109), the self is
merely the arena in which the struggle of drives plays itself out, and
one's actions are the outcomes of the struggle (see Leiter 2002:
99-104; cf. Riccardi 2015b; for a general account of
Nietzsche's philosophical psychology of drives, see Katsafanas
2013a).



Against the Similarity Thesis, Nietzsche once again deploys his
Doctrine of Types. Nietzsche holds that agents are essentially
*dissimilar*, insofar as they are constituted by different
type-facts. Since Nietzsche also holds that these natural type-facts
fix the different conditions under which particular agents will
flourish, it follows that one morality cannot be good for all.
"*Morality in Europe today is herd animal
morality*," says Nietzsche, "in other
words...merely *one* type of human morality beside which,
before which, and after which many other types, above all
*higher* moralities, are, or ought to be, possible" (BGE
202). Nietzsche illustrates the general point with his discussion of
the case of the Italian writer Cornaro in *Twilight of the
Idols* (VI:1). Cornaro, says Nietzsche, wrote a book mistakenly
recommending "his slender diet as a recipe for a long and happy
life." But why was this a mistake? Nietzsche explains:



> 
> The worthy Italian thought his diet was the *cause* of his long
> life, whereas the precondition for a long life, the extraordinary
> slowness of his metabolism, the consumption of so little, was the
> cause of his slender diet. He was not free to eat little *or*
> much; his frugality was not a matter of "free will": he
> became sick when he ate more. But whoever is not a carp not only does
> well to eat properly, but needs to.
> 



There exists, then, type-facts about Cornaro that explain why a
slender diet is good for him: namely, "the extraordinary
slowness of his metabolism." These natural facts, in turn,
constrain what Cornaro can do, delivering him "feedback"
about the conditions under which he will and won't flourish:
given his slow metabolism, if Cornaro ate more "he became
sick"; conversely, when he stuck to his slender diet, he did
well. In sum, "[h]e was not free to eat little *or*
much." Cornaro's mistake consists, in effect, in his
absolutism: he thought the "good" diet was good for
everyone, when in fact it was only good for certain types of bodies
(namely, those with slow metabolisms). As with diets, so too with
moralities, according to Nietzsche. Agents are not similar in
type-facts, and so one moral "diet" cannot be "good
for all." As he writes:



> 
> [T]he question is always who *he* is, and who the
> *other* person is...Every unegoistic morality that takes
> itself for unconditional and addresses itself to all does not only sin
> against taste: it is a provocation to sins of omission, one
> *more* seduction under the mask of philanthropy -- and
> precisely a seduction and injury for the higher, rarer, privileged.
> (BGE 221)
> 



This point sets the stage for his core critique of morality.



### 1.3 Critique of the Normative Component of MPS



All of Nietzsche's criticisms of the normative component of MPS
are parasitic upon one basic complaint -- not, as some have held
(e.g., Nehamas [1985], Geuss [1997]), the universality of moral
demands, *per se*, but rather that "the demand of one
morality for all is detrimental to the higher men" (BGE 228).
Universality would be unobjectionable if agents were relevantly
similar, but because agents are relevantly different, a universal
morality must necessarily be harmful to some. As Nietzsche writes
elsewhere: "When a decadent type of man ascended to the rank of
the highest type [via MPS], this could only happen at *the expense
of its countertype* [emphasis added], the type of man that is
strong and sure of life" (EH III:5). In the preface to the
*Genealogy*, Nietzsche sums up his basic concern particularly
well:



> 
> What if a symptom of regression lurked in the "good,"
> likewise a danger, a seduction, a poison, a narcotic, through which
> the present lived *at the expense of the future*? Perhaps more
> comfortably, less dangerously, but at the same time in a meaner style,
> more basely? -- So that morality itself were to blame if the
> *highest power and splendor* [*Machtigkeit und
> Pracht*] possible to the type man was never in fact attained? So
> that morality itself was the danger of dangers? (GM Pref:6; cf. BT
> Attempt:5)
> 



This theme is sounded throughout Nietzsche's work. In a book of
1880, for example, he writes that, "Our weak, unmanly social
concepts of good and evil and their tremendous ascendancy over body
and soul have finally weakened all bodies and souls and snapped the
self-reliant, independent, unprejudiced men, the pillars of a
*strong* civilization" (D 163). Similarly, in a
posthumously published note of 1885, he remarks that "men of
great creativity, the really great men according to my understanding,
will be sought in vain today" because "nothing stands more
malignantly in the way of their rise and evolution...than what in
Europe today is called simply 'morality'" (WP 957).
In these and many other passages (e.g., BGE 62; GM III:14; A:5, 24; EH
IV:4; WP 274, 345, 400, 870, 879.), Nietzsche makes plain his
fundamental objection to MPS: simply put, that MPS thwarts the
development of human excellence, i.e., "the highest power and
splendor possible to the type man" (for more on the
"higher man," see section (2)).



There is another, competing reading of Nietzsche's central
complaint about MPS: namely, that it is "harmful to life"
or, more simply, "anti-nature." Geuss, for example, says
that, "There is little doubt that 'Life'...in
Nietzsche does seem to function as a criterion for evaluating
moralities" (1997: 10). So, too, Schacht claims that Nietzsche
"takes 'life' in this world to be the sole locus of
value, and its preservation, flourishing, and above all its
enhancement to be ultimately decisive for determinations of
value" (1983: 359). Thus, the question of the value of MPS is
really the question of its "value for life" (1983: 354).
But what does that mean? After all, it is obvious that Nietzsche has
nothing but contempt for most forms of human life, from St. Paul to
Bismarck to the modern "herd." So the real question has to
be: what does "life" refer to? Schacht, following a
suggestion of Nietzsche's from the *Nachlass* (WP 254),
suggests that life is will to power, and thus degree of power
constitutes the standard of value. (We shall return to this suggestion
in detail in section 3.1, below.) But this involves no gain in
precision. Nietzsche may, indeed, have thought that more
"power" -- in his sense -- was more valuable
than less, but that still leaves us with the question: power of
*what* or of *whom*? The only plausible candidate
-- given especially his other remarks discussed above -- is
power *of people*; just as the only plausible candidate for the
"life" that Nietzsche considers it valuable to preserve
and enhance must be the *lives of people* and, in particular,
the lives of the "highest men."



That this is what Nietzsche means is revealed by the context of his
actual remarks about the "value for life." For example, he
comments that "a higher and more fundamental *value for
life* might have to be ascribed to deception, selfishness, and
lust" (BGE 2, emphasis added). But what sort of
"life" is, e.g., "selfishness" valuable for?
As Nietzsche writes elsewhere (e.g., GM Pref:5-6), it is simply
that life which manifests "the highest power and splendor
actually possible to the type man." And similarly, when
Nietzsche says that a "tendency hostile to life is therefore
characteristic of morality," it is clear in context that what
"life" refers to is "the type man" who might
be "raised to his greatest splendor and power" (that is,
but for the interference of MPS) (WP 897). In short, then, the things
Nietzsche identifies as "valuable" for life are those he
takes to be necessary for the flourishing of the highest types of life
(or human excellence), while those that he identifies as harmful to it
are those that he takes to be things that constitute obstacles to such
flourishing. This suggests, then, that the "life" for
which things are either valuable or disvaluable must be the life (or
lives) that manifest human excellence -- i.e., the lives of
"higher men."



Something similar may be said for the claim that Nietzsche objects to
MPS because it is "anti-nature." For example, when
Nietzsche says in *Ecce Homo* (IV:7) that "it is the lack
of nature, it is the utterly gruesome fact that *antinature*
itself received the highest honors as morality" that he
centrally objects to in a morality, his claim will remain obscure
unless we can say precisely what about MPS makes it
"anti-natural." Nietzsche, himself, offers guidance on
this in the same section when he explains that a MPS is anti-natural
insofar as it has the following sorts of characteristics: it teaches
men "to despise the very first instincts of life" and
"to experience the presupposition of life, sexuality, as
something unclean"; and it "looks for the evil principle
in what is most profoundly necessary for growth, in *severe*
self-love" (EH IV:7).



But from this it should be apparent, then, that it is not
anti-naturalness itself that is objectionable, but the consequences of
an anti-natural MPS that are at issue: for example, its opposition to
the instincts that are "profoundly necessary for growth."
This point is even more explicit in *The Antichrist*, where
Nietzsche notes that Christian morality "has waged deadly war
against this higher type of man; *it has placed all the basic
instincts of his type under ban*" (5, emphasis added). In
other words, the anti-naturalness of MPS is objectionable because the
"natural" instincts MPS opposes are precisely those
necessary for the growth of the "higher type of man."
Thus, underlying Nietzsche's worries about the anti-naturalness
of MPS -- just as underlying his worries about the threat MPS
poses to life -- is a concern for the effect of MPS on
"higher men."



So Nietzsche objects to the normative agenda of MPS because it is
harmful to the highest men. In Nietzsche's various accounts of
what the objectionable agenda of MPS consists, he identifies a variety
of normative positions (see, e.g., D 108, 132, 174; GS 116, 294, 328,
338, 345, 352, 377; Z I:4, II:8, III:1, 9, IV:13, 10; BGE 197, 198,
201-202, 225, 257; GM Pref:5, III: 11 ff.; TI II, V, IX:35,
37-38, 48; A: 7, 43; EH III:D-2, IV:4, 7-8; WP 752). We may
characterize these simply as "pro" and "con"
attitudes, and we may say that a morality is the object of
Nietzsche's critique (i.e., it is an MPS) if it contains one or
more of the following normative views (this is a representative, but
not exhaustive, list):




|  |  |
| --- | --- |
| **Pro** | **Con** |
| Happiness | Suffering |
| Altruism/Selflessness | Self-love or self-interest |
| Equality | Inequality |
| Pity/Compassion | Indifference to the suffering |



The various possible normative components of MPS should, of course, be
understood construed as *ideal-typical*, singling out for
emphasis and criticism certain important features of larger and more
complex normative views. Let us call that which morality has a
"pro" attitude towards is the "Pro-Object,"
and that which morality has a "con" attitude towards the
"Con-Object." Keeping in mind that what seems to have
*intrinsic* value for Nietzsche is human excellence or human
greatness (see the next section), Nietzsche's attack on the
normative component of MPS can be summarized as having two parts:



> 
> (a) With respect to the Pro-Object, Nietzsche argues either (i) that
> the Pro-Object has no *intrinsic* value (in the cases where MPS
> claims it does); or (ii) that it does not have any or not nearly as
> much *extrinsic* value as MPS treats it as having; and
> 
> 
> (b) With respect to the Con-Object, Nietzsche argues *only*
> that the Con-Objects are *extrinsically* valuable for the
> cultivation of human excellence -- and that this is obscured by
> the "con" attitude endorsed by MPS.
> 
> 
> 



Thus, what unifies Nietzsche's seemingly disparate critical
remarks -- 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 -- the latter requiring, on Nietzsche's view,
concern with the self, suffering, a certain stoic indifference, a
sense of hierarchy and difference, and the like. Indeed, when we turn
to the details of Nietzsche's criticisms of these norms we find
that, in fact, this is precisely what he argues. One detailed example
will have to suffice here.



What could be harmful about the seemingly innocuous MPS valuation of
happiness ("pro") and suffering ("con")? An
early remark of Nietzsche's suggests his answer:



> 
> Are we not, with this tremendous objective of obliterating all the
> sharp edges of life, well on the way to turning mankind into
> *sand*? Sand! Small, soft, round, unending sand! Is that your
> ideal, you heralds of the sympathetic affections? (D 174)
> 



In a later work, Nietzsche says -- referring to hedonists and
utilitarians -- that, "Well-being as you understand it
-- that is no goal, that seems to us an *end*, a state
that soon makes man ridiculous and contemptible..." (BGE
225). By the hedonistic doctrine of well-being, Nietzsche takes the
utilitarians to have in mind "*English* happiness,"
namely, "comfort and fashion" (BGE 228) -- a
construal which, if unfair to some utilitarians (like Mill), may do
justice to our ordinary aspirations to happiness. In a similar vein,
Nietzsche has Zarathustra dismiss "wretched contentment"
as an ideal (Z Pref:3), while also revealing that it was precisely
"the last men" -- the "most despicable
men" -- who "invented happiness
[*Gluck*]" in the first place (Pref:5).



So happiness, according to Nietzsche, is not an intrinsically valuable
end, and men who aim for it -- directly or through cultivating
the dispositions that lead to it -- would be "ridiculous
and contemptible." To be sure, Nietzsche allows that he himself
and the "free spirits" will be "cheerful" or
"gay" [*frolich*] -- they are, after all,
the proponents of the "gay science." But the point is that
such "happiness" is not *criterial* of being a
higher person, and thus it is not something that the higher person
-- in contrast to the adherent of MPS -- aims for.



Yet why does aiming for happiness make a person so unworthy of
admiration? Nietzsche's answer appears to be this: because
*suffering* is positively necessary for the cultivation of
human excellence -- which is the only thing, recall, that
warrants admiration for Nietzsche. He writes, for example, that:



> 
> The discipline of suffering, of *great* suffering -- do
> you not know that only *this* discipline has created all
> enhancements of man so far? That tension of the soul in unhappiness
> which cultivates its strength, its shudders face to face with great
> ruin, its inventiveness and courage in enduring, persevering,
> interpreting, and exploiting suffering, and whatever has been granted
> to it of profundity, secret, mask, spirit, cunning, greatness --
> was it not granted to it through suffering, through the discipline of
> great suffering? (BGE 225; cf. BGE 270)
> 



Nietzsche is not arguing here that -- in contrast to the view of
MPS -- suffering is really *intrinsically* valuable (not
even MPS claims that). The value of suffering, according to Nietzsche,
is only extrinsic: suffering -- "great" suffering
-- is a prerequisite of any great human achievement. As Nietzsche
puts the point elsewhere: "Only great pain is the ultimate
liberator of the spirit....I doubt that such pain makes us
'better'; but I know that it makes us more profound"
(GS Pref:3). Nietzsche's attack, then, conforms to the model
sketched above: (i) he rejects the view that happiness is
*intrinsically* valuable; and (ii) he thinks that the negative
attitude of MPS toward suffering obscures its important extrinsic
value. (There is reason to think that, on this second point, Nietzsche
is generalizing from his own experience with physical suffering, the
worst periods of which coincided with his greatest productivity.
Indeed, he believed that his suffering contributed essentially to his
work: as he writes, admittedly hyperbolically, in *Ecce Homo*:
"In the midst of the torments that go with an uninterrupted
three-day migraine, accompanied by laborious vomiting of phlegm, I
possessed a dialectician's clarity *par excellence* and
thought through with very cold blood matters for which under healthier
circumstances I am not mountain-climber, not subtle, not *cold*
enough" (EH I:1).)



Even if there is no shortage in the history of art and literature of
cases of immense suffering being the spur to great creativity, there
remains a serious worry about the logic of this line of Nietzschean
critique. Following Leiter (2002), we may call this the "Harm
Puzzle," and the puzzle is this: why should one think the
general moral prescription to alleviate suffering must stop the
suffering of great artists, hence stop them from producing great art?
One might think, in fact, that MPS could perfectly well allow an
exception for those individuals whose own suffering is essential to
the realization of central life projects. After all, a prescription to
alleviate suffering reflects a concern with promoting well-being,
under some construal. But if some individuals -- nascent Goethes,
Nietzsches, and other geniuses -- would be *better off*
with a good dose of suffering, then why would MPS recommend otherwise?
Why, then, should it be the case that MPS "harms"
potentially "higher men"?



This seems the natural philosophical question to ask, yet it also
involves an important misunderstanding of Nietzsche's critique,
which is not, we might say, about *philosophical theory* but
rather about *the real nature of culture*. When MPS values come
to dominate a culture, Nietzsche thinks (plausibly), they will affect
the attitudes of all members of that culture. If MPS values emphasize
the badness of suffering and the goodness of happiness, that will
influence how individuals with the potential for great achievements
understand, evaluate and conduct their own lives. If, in fact,
suffering is a precondition for these individuals to do anything
great, and if they have internalized the norm that suffering must be
alleviated, and that happiness is the ultimate goal, then we run the
risk that, rather than -- to put it crudely -- suffer and
create, they will instead waste their energies pursuing pleasure,
lamenting their suffering and seeking to alleviate it. MPS values may
not explicitly prohibit artists or other potentially
"excellent" persons from ever suffering; but the risk is
that a culture -- like ours -- which has internalized the
norms *against* suffering and *for* pleasure will be a
culture in which potential artists -- and other doers of great
things -- will, *in fact*, squander themselves in
self-pity and the seeking of pleasure.



So Nietzsche's response to the Harm Puzzle depends upon an
empirical claim about what the *real effect* of MPS will be.
The normative component of MPS is harmful not because its specific
prescriptions and proscriptions explicitly require potentially
excellent persons to forego that which allows them to flourish (the
claim is not that a conscientious application of the
"theory" of MPS is incompatible with the flourishing of
higher men); rather, the normative component of MPS is harmful because
*in practice*, and especially because of MPS's commitment
to the idea that one morality is appropriate for all, potentially
higher men will come to adopt such values as applicable to themselves
as well. Thus, the normative component of MPS is harmful because, in
reality, it will have the effect of leading potentially excellent
persons to value what is in fact not conducive to their flourishing
and devalue what is in fact essential to it.



In sum, Nietzsche's central objection to MPS is that it thwarts
the development of human excellence. His argument for this, in each
case, turns on identifying distinctive valuations of MPS, and showing
how -- as in the case of norms favoring happiness and devaluing
suffering -- they undermine the development of individuals who
would manifest human excellence. (For discussion of other examples,
see Leiter 2002: 134-136; Leiter 2015: 108-110.)


## 2. Nietzsche's Positive Ethical Vision



While Nietzsche clearly has views about the states of affairs to which
*positive intrinsic value* attaches (namely, the flourishing of
higher men), there is more disagreement among interpreters about what
kind of ethics arises from the latter valuation so central to his
critique of morality. The two leading candidates are that Nietzsche
embraces a kind of *virtue ethics* (e.g., Hunt 1991, Swanton
2005) and that he is a kind of perfectionist (Hurka 1993, Hurka 2007).
These accounts turn out to overlap -- the *perfections* of
the latter account are often the *virtues* of the former
-- though the perfectionist account will prove to have certain
other advantages, discussed below.



Any account of Nietzsche's "positive ethics"
confronts a threshold worry, namely, that Nietzsche's
naturalistic conception of persons and agency -- and, in
particular, his conception of persons as constituted by non-conscious
type-facts that determine their actions -- makes it unclear how
Nietzsche could have a philosophical ethics in any conventional sense.
If, as Nietzsche, says, we face "a brazen wall of fate; we
*are* in prison, we can only *dream* ourselves free, not
make ourselves free" (HAH II:33); if "the single human
being is a piece of *fatum* from the front and from the rear,
one law more, one necessity more for all that is yet to come and to
be" (TI V:6); if (as he says more hyperbolically in
*Nachlass* material) "the voluntary is absolutely
lacking...everything has been directed along certain lines from
the beginning" (WP 458); if (again hyperbolically) "one
will become only that which one is (in spite of all: that means
education, instruction, milieu, chance, and accident)" (WP 334);
then it is hardly surprising that Nietzsche should also say, "A
man as he *ought* to be: that sounds to us as insipid as
'a tree as he ought to be'" (WP 332).



Yet a philosopher reluctant to talk about "man as he
*ought* to be" is plainly ill-suited to the task of
developing a normative ethics, understood as systematic and
theoretical guidance for how to live, whether that guidance comes in
the form of rules for behavior or dispositions of character to be
cultivated. (There is an additional, and special difficulty, for those
who think Nietzsche is a virtue ethicist, namely, that he also thinks
genuine virtues are specific to individuals, meaning that there will
be nothing *general* for the theorist to say about them [see,
e.g., Z I:5].) This means we must approach the question of
Nietzsche's "positive" ethics in terms of
explicating (1) what it is Nietzsche values, (2) what his criteria of
evaluation are, and (3) what evaluative *structure*, if any, is
exhibited by the answers to (1) and (2). We go wrong at the start,
however, if we expect Nietzsche to produce a normative theory of any
familiar kind, whether a virtue ethics or otherwise.



Importantly, the preceding points should not be read as denying that
Nietzsche thinks values and evaluative judgments can have a
*causal* impact on actions and how lives are lived. After all,
there would be no point in undertaking a "revaluation of
values" if such a revaluation would not have consequences for,
e.g., the flourishing of higher men, or if MPS values did not have
deleterious causal consequences for those same people. Values make a
causal difference, but, given Nietzsche's epiphenomenalism about
consciousness (discussed, above, in 1.1), they do not make this
difference because of free, conscious choices individuals make to
adopt certain moral rules or cultivate certain dispositions of
character.



We can better appreciate Nietzsche's unusual views on this score
by looking more closely at the popular, but mistaken, idea that
Nietzsche calls on people to "create themselves" (on the
general topic, see Leiter 1998). Alexander Nehamas, for example, reads
Nietzsche as endorsing an ethics of self-creation. For Nietzsche,
Nehamas says, "The people who 'want to become those they
are' are precisely 'human beings who are new, unique,
incomparable, who give themselves laws, who create themselves'
(GS, 335)" (1985, p. 174). Nehamas, however, truncates the quote
from *The Gay Science* at a misleading point. For Nietzsche, in
the full passage, continues as follows:



> 
> To that end [of creating ourselves] 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 [*wir mussen Physiker sein,
> um, in jenem Sinne*, *Schopfer sein zu konnen*]
> -- while hitherto all valuations and ideals have been based on
> *ignorance* of physics ... . Therefore: long live physics!
> (GS 335)
> 



Creation "in this sense" is, then, a very special sense
indeed: for it presupposes the discovery of what is "lawful and
necessary" as revealed by physical science. The passage begins
to make more sense in context. For in this same section, Nietzsche
claims that "every action is unknowable," though he
adds:



> 
> ...our opinions, valuations, and tables of what is good certainly
> belong among the most powerful levers in the involved mechanism of our
> actions, but...in any particular case the law of their mechanism
> is indemonstrable [*unnachweisbar*].
> 



This observation leads Nietzsche immediately to the suggestion that we
should create "our own new tables of what is good,"
presumably with an eye to effecting the causal determination of our
actions in new ways. However, we need help from science to identify
the lawful patterns into which values and actions fall; even if the
mechanisms are indemonstrable, science may at least reveal the
patterns of value-inputs and action-outputs. So to create one's
self, "in this sense," is to accept Nietzsche's
basically deterministic picture of action -- as determined by
sub-conscious causes (type-facts) that are hard to identify --
but to use science to help identify those "values" which
figure in the causal determination of action in new, but predictable,
ways.



Values, then, have a causal impact upon how people act and thus also
on their life trajectories; but we cannot expect these impacts to flow
from free, conscious choices that persons make. This would explain, of
course, why we find so little in Nietzsche by way of argumentative or
discursive support for his evaluative judgments: such intellectual
devices are precisely the ones that would appeal to our conscious
faculties, and thus would be idle with respect to the desired
outcomes. Nietzsche's often violent rhetorical style, by
contrast, might be expected (or so Nietzsche presumably thinks) to
have the requisite non-rational effect on his desired readers --
those "whose ears are related to ours" (GS 381). (More on
this issue in Section 4, below.)



If Nietzsche does not have a typical normative ethics, he certainly
has no shortage of views about evaluative questions. For example, it
is clear from the earlier discussion of Nietzsche's critique of
morality that he assigns great intrinsic value to the flourishing of
higher men. But who are these "higher men" and why does
Nietzsche assign value to them? (Note that while Nietzsche speaks in
*Thus Spoke Zarathustra* of the "superman" as a
kind of ideal higher type, this concept simply drops out of his mature
work (except for a brief mention in EH in the context of discussing
*Zarathustra*). "Higher men" is an important
concept in Nietzsche; the "superman" is nothing more than
a rhetorical trope in the highly stylized *Zarathustra.*)



Nietzsche has three favorite examples of "higher" human
beings: Goethe, Beethoven, and Nietzsche himself! What makes these
figures paradigms of the "higher" type for Nietzsche,
beyond their great creativity (as he says, "the men of great
creativity" are "the really great men according to my
understanding" (WP 957))? Following Leiter (2002: 116-122;
Leiter 2015: 92-100), we can identify five characteristics that
Nietzsche identifies as distinctive of "higher men": the
higher type is solitary, pursues a "unifying project," is
healthy, is life-affirming, and practices self-reverence. Taken
together, they are plainly sufficient to make someone a higher type in
Nietzsche's view, though it is not obvious that any one of these
is necessary, and various combinations often seem sufficient for
explaining how Nietzsche speaks of higher human beings.



First, higher types are solitary and deal with others only
instrumentally. "Every choice human being," says
Nietzsche, "strives instinctively for a citadel and a secrecy
where he is saved from the crowd, the many, the great
majority..." (BGE 26). "[T]he concept of
greatness," he says in the same work, "entails being
noble, wanting to be by oneself, being able to be different, standing
alone and having to live independently
[*auf-eigne-Faust-leben-mussen*]" (BGE 212). Indeed,
the higher type pursues solitude with something of a vengeance, for he
"knows how to make enemies everywhere,...[He] constantly
contradicts the great majority not through words but through
deeds" (WP 944). Unsurprisingly, then, the great or higher man
lacks the "congeniality" and
"good-naturedness" so often celebrated in contemporary
popular culture. "A great man...is incommunicable: he finds
it tasteless to be familiar..." (WP 962). More than that,
though, the higher type deals with others, when he has to, in a rather
distinctive way: "A human being who strives for something great
considers everyone he meets on his way either as a means or as a delay
and obstacle -- or as a temporary resting place" (BGE 273).
Thus, "a great man...wants no 'sympathetic'
heart, but servants, tools; in his intercourse with men, he is always
intent on *making* something out of them" (WP 962). The
great man approaches others instrumentally not only because of his
fundamental proclivity for solitude, but because of another
distinguishing characteristic: he is consumed by his work, his
responsibilities, his projects.



Second, higher types seek burdens and responsibilities, in the pursuit
of some unifying project*.* "What is noble?"
Nietzsche again asks in a *Nachlass* note of 1888. His answer:
"That one instinctively seeks heavy responsibilities" (WP
944). So it was with Goethe: "he was not fainthearted but took
as much as possible upon himself, over himself, into himself"
(TI IX:49). But the higher type does not seek out responsibilities and
tasks arbitrarily. "A great man," says Nietzsche displays
"a long logic in all of his activity...he has the ability
to extend his will across great stretches of his life and to despise,
and reject everything petty about him" (WP 962). This is the
trait Nietzsche sometimes refers to as having "style" in
"character" (GS 290). (Note that this famous passage (GS
290) merely *describes* those -- "the strong and
domineering natures" -- who are able "'to
give' style" to their character; it does not presuppose
that just anyone can do so and it is not a recommendation that
everyone try to do so.) Indeed, Nietzsche understood his own life in
these terms:



> 
> [T]he organizing "idea" that is destined to rule [in
> one's life and work] keeps growing deep down -- it begins
> to command; slowly it leads us *back* from side roads and wrong
> roads; it prepares *single* qualities and fitnesses that will
> one day prove to be indispensable as means toward a whole -- one
> by one, it trains all *subservient* capacities before giving
> any hint of the dominant task, "goal," "aim,"
> or "meaning."
> 
> 
> Considered in this way, my life is simply wonderful. For the task of a
> *revaluation of all values* more capacities may have been
> needed than have ever dwelt together in a single individual....I
> never even suspected what was growing in me -- and one day all my
> capacities, suddenly ripe, *leaped forth* in their ultimate
> perfection. (EH II:9). 
> 
> 
> 



Earlier in *Ecce Homo*, Nietzsche describes himself as a higher
type, "a well-turned-out-person" (EH I:2), and thus we may
conclude that it is a characteristic *only* of the higher type
that he is driven in pursuit of a project in the way described here.
Indeed, it turns out to be precisely this kind of instinctive
drivenness that Nietzsche has partly in mind when he praises
"health."



Third, higher types are essentially healthy and resilient. One
essential attribute of the "well-turned-out-person" is
that he "has a taste only for what is good for him; his
pleasure, his delight cease where the measure of what is good for him
is transgressed. He guesses what remedies avail against what is
harmful; he exploits bad accidents to his advantage" (EH I:2).
But this is just to say that a higher type is *healthy*, for
health, Nietzsche tells us, means simply "instinctively
cho[osing] the *right* means against wretched states" (EH
I:2). This permits us to understand Nietzsche's own declaration
in *Ecce Homo* that he was "*healthy at
bottom*" (EH I:2), a seemingly paradoxical claim for a
philosopher whose physical ailments were legion. Yet
"health," for Nietzsche, is a term of art, meaning not the
absence of sickness, but something closer to *resilience*, to
how one deals with ordinary (physical) sickness and setbacks.
"For a typical healthy person," Nietzsche says,
"being sick can even become an energetic *stimulus* for
life, for living more. This, in fact, is how [my own] long period of
sickness appears to me *now*...it was during the years of
my lowest vitality that I *ceased* to be a pessimist; the
instinct of self-restoration *forbade* me a philosophy of
poverty and discouragement" (EH I:2). To cease to be a pessimist
is to reject MPS, for only under the color of MPS does life appear to
lack value. Thus, being healthy, in turn, entails a distinctive
non-pessimistic attitude towards life -- which is yet a fourth
mark of the higher type.



Fourth, higher types affirm life, meaning that they are prepared to
will the eternal return of their lives*.* In *Beyond Good
and Evil*, Nietzsche describes "the opposite ideal" to
that of moralists and pessimists like Schopenhauer as "the ideal
of the most high-spirited, alive, and world-affirming human being who
has not only come to terms and learned to get along with whatever was
and is, but who wants to have *what was and is* repeated into
all eternity" (BGE 56). Put more simply: the higher type
embraces the doctrine of the eternal recurrence and thus evinces what
Nietzsche often calls a "Dionysian" or
"life-affirming" attitude. A person, for Nietzsche, has a
*Dionysian attitude* toward life insofar as he affirms his life
unconditionally; in particular, insofar as he affirms it including the
"suffering" or other hardships it has involved. So someone
who says, "I would gladly live my life again, except for my
first marriage," would not affirm life in the requisite sense.
Thus, we may say that a person affirms his life in Nietzsche's
sense only insofar as he would gladly will its eternal return: i.e.,
will the repetition of his entire life through eternity. In fact,
Nietzsche calls "the idea of the eternal recurrence" the
"highest formulation of affirmation that is at all
attainable" (EH III:Z-1; cf. BGE 56). Higher men, then, are
marked by a distinctive Dionysian attitude toward their life: they
would gladly will the repetition of their life eternally.



Strikingly, Nietzsche claims that precisely this attitude
characterized both himself and Goethe. Speaking, for example, of the
neglect by his contemporaries of his work, Nietzsche writes: "I
myself have never suffered from all this; what is *necessary*
does not hurt me; *amor fati* [love of fate] is my inmost
nature" (EH III:CW-4). Regarding Goethe, Nietzsche says that,
"Such a spirit...stands amid the cosmos with a joyous and
trusting fatalism, in the *faith...*that all is redeemed
and affirmed in the whole....Such a faith, however, is the
highest of all possible faiths: I have baptized it with the name of
*Dionysus*" (TI IX:49).



Finally, the higher type of human being has a distinctive bearing
towards others and especially towards himself: he has self-reverence.
"The 'higher nature' of the great man," says
Nietzsche in a striking *Nachlass* note of 1888 "lies in
being different, in incommunicability, in distance of rank, not in an
effect of any kind -- even if he made the whole globe
tremble" (WP 876; cf. GS 55). This is perhaps the most unusual
feature of Nietzsche's discussion of the higher type, for it
suggests that, at bottom, being a higher type is a matter of
"attitude" or "bearing." In a section of
*Beyond Good and Evil*, Nietzsche once again answers the
question, "What is noble?", this time as follows:
"It is not the works, it is the *faith* that is decisive
here, that determines the order of rank...: some fundamental
certainty that a noble soul has about itself, something that cannot be
sought, nor found, nor perhaps lost. *The noble soul has reverence
[Ehrfurcht] for itself"* (BGE 287). Self-reverence --
to revere and respect oneself as one might a god -- is no small
achievement, as the proliferation of "self-help" programs
and pop psychology slogans like "I'm OK, you're
OK" would suggest. Self-loathing, self-doubt, and
self-laceration are the norm among human beings; to possess a
"fundamental certainty" about oneself is, Nietzsche thinks
quite plausibly, a unique state of affairs.



Allied with this posture of self-reverence are other distinctive
attitudes that distinguish the bearing of the higher man. "The
noble human being," says Nietzsche, "honors himself as one
who is powerful, also as one who has power over himself, who knows how
to speak and be silent, who delights in being severe and hard with
himself and respects all severity and hardness" (BGE 260). (The
higher man, unsurprisingly, is no hedonist: "What is
noble?" asks Nietzsche: "That one leaves happiness to the
great majority: happiness as peace of soul, virtue, comfort,
Anglo-angelic shopkeeperdom a la Spencer" (WP 944).) In an
earlier work, Nietzsche explains that:



> 
> [T]he passion that attacks those who are noble is peculiar....It
> involves the use of a rare and singular standard cold to everybody
> else; the discovery of values for which no scales have been invented
> yet; offering sacrifices on altars that are dedicated to an unknown
> god; a courage without any desire for honors; self-sufficiency that
> overflows and gives to men and things. (GS 55)
> 



Indeed, the ability to set his own standard of valuation is one of the
most distinctive achievements of the higher type, as we saw already in
the discussion of solitude. And "the *highest* man"
says Nietzsche is "he who *determines* values and directs
the will of millennia by giving direction to the highest
natures" (WP 999).



Considered all together, it becomes clear why creatives geniuses like
Goethe, Beethoven, and Nietzsche himself should be the preferred
examples of the higher human being: for the characteristics of the
higher type so-described are precisely those that lend themselves to
*artistic* and *creative* work. A penchant for solitude,
an absolute devotion to one's tasks, an indifference to external
opinion, a fundamental certainty about oneself and one's values
(that often strikes others as hubris) -- all these are the traits
we find, again and again, in artistic geniuses. (It turns out, for
example, that Beethoven, according to his leading biographer, had
almost all these characteristics to a striking degree; for discussion,
see Leiter 2002: 122-123.)



If "the men of great creativity, the really great men according
to my understanding" (WP 957), men like Goethe and Beethoven,
are Nietzsche's paradigmatic higher types, whose lives are
models of flourishing excellence, is there anything systematic to be
said about the theory of value that undergirds these judgments and
informs, in turn, Nietzsche's critique of morality (MPS) on the
grounds that it thwarts the development of such men?



One popular idea (e.g., Schacht 1983, Richardson 1996) is that higher
men exemplify "power," which is claimed to be
Nietzsche's fundamental criterion of value. Such readings, alas,
have to employ the concept of "power" rather elastically,
since the conglomeration of traits of higher human beings noted above
don't seem to be, in any ordinary sense, instances of
"power" or its manifestation. (Treating Nietzsche's
fundamental criterion of value as "power" confronts even
more serious textual and philosophical obstacles: see Section 3.1,
below.)



More illuminating is Hurka's view (1993 and Hurka 2007) that
Nietzsche's evaluative posture conjoins perfectionism with
maximizing consequentialism: what has value are certain human
excellences (or perfections), and states of affairs are assessed in
terms of their maximization of these excellences. As Hurka helpfully
observes (1993: 75), Nietzsche seems to operate with the opposite of
Rawls's maximin principle, what Hurka calls appropriately
"maximax." Hurka states this as a rule for conduct
("each agent's overriding goal should be not a sum or
average of lifetime value, but the greatest lifetime value of the
single most perfect individual, or, if perfections are not fully
comparable, of the few most perfect individuals" [1993: 75]),
but given the earlier caveats about reading Nietzsche as a
conventional normative theorist, it is better to treat maximax as
reflecting the implicit structure of Nietzsche's revaluation of
values: he rejects MPS because it fails to maximize the perfection of
the highest human beings, and he does so without, it appears, any
regard for the costs to the herd of such a rejection (see Section
4).



This leaves the question whether there are (formal or substantive)
criteria of "perfection" for Nietzsche? Many writers
(e.g., Hurka 2007; Nehamas 1985; Richardson 1996) are attracted to the
idea that "style" or "unity" is a criterion of
excellence or perfection for Nietzsche, and, indeed, as noted above,
the pursuit of a unified or coherent life project is a characteristic
feature of those Nietzsche deems to be higher men. Whether such style
or coherence suffices is a vexed interpretive question, since it is
not entirely clear that the formal criterion of style or unity is
available only to Goethes and Beethovens: did not Kant, that
"catastrophic spider" as Nietzsche unflatteringly calls
him (A 11), exhibit an extraordinarily coherent style of creative
productivity over many years?



Others (e.g., Magnus 1978) take Nietzsche's idea of eternal
recurrence (the hallmark of life-affirmation, as noted above) as the
criterion of a well-lived life: perfection is a matter of living in
such a way that one is ready to gladly will the repetition of
one's life, in all its particulars, in to eternity. This, too,
seems both too thin and too severe as a criterion of perfection
standing alone: too thin, because anyone suitably superficial and
complacent might will the eternal return; too severe, because it seems
to require that a post-Holocaust Goethe gladly will the repetition of
the Holocaust.



Nehamas (1985), who shares some of Magnus's view, adds a
surprising twist to this account: he claims that Nietzsche does not
*describe* his ideal person -- his "higher
man" -- but rather "exemplifies" such a person
in the form of the "character" that is constituted by and
exemplified in his corpus. Nietzsche, however, *describes* at
great length and in many places (e.g. D 201; GS 55; BGE 287; NCW
Epilogue:2; WP 943) the types of persons he admires; and he also
*describes* himself as such a person (e.g., EH I:2) In any
case, Nehamas's view would have the odd consequence that for
Nietzsche to have had a positive ethical vision at any point earlier
in his career he would have had to anticipate writing the series of
books he actually wrote, such that his ethical ideal would be properly
exemplified in them! Needless to say, there is no reason to think this
was Nietzsche's view.


## 3. Nietzsche's Metaethics



Nietzsche holds that moral (i.e., MPS) values are not conducive to the
flourishing of human excellence, and it is by reference to
*this* fact that he proposed to assess their value. The
enterprise of assessing the value of certain other values (call them
the 'revalued values') naturally invites the metaethical
question: what status -- metaphysical, epistemological -- do
the values used to undertake this revaluation (the 'assessing
values') enjoy? (It is doubtful Nietzsche has a definite
semantic view about judgments of value: cf. Hussain 2013, esp. 412.)
Following Leiter (2019: 49-50), we may distinguish "Privilege
Readings" of Nietzsche's metaethics -- which claim
that Nietzsche holds that his own evaluative standpoint is either
veridical or better justified than its target -- from those
readings which deny the claim of privilege. (Note that defenders of
this latter, "skeptical" view need not read Nietzsche as a
global anti-realist -- i.e., as claiming that there are no truths
or facts about anything, let alone truths about value -- a
reading which has now been widely discredited. There is, on the
skeptical view at issue here, a *special* problem about the
objectivity of value. For an argument that Nietzsche is a global
anti-realist about value in particular, see Leiter 2019: 84-111.)


### 3.1 Privilege Readings



Privilege Readings of Nietzsche come in two main varieties: Realist
and Privilege Non-Realist (P-Non-Realist). The proponents of these
views would hold the following:



> 
> 
> (i) According to the Realist, there are normative facts.
> 
> 
> 
> (ii) According to the P-Non-Realist, there are no normative facts, but
> some normative judgments still enjoy a privilege by virtue of their
> interpersonal appeal or acceptance.
> 
> 
> 



To say that there *are* 'normative facts' will
mean, for purposes here, that norms are (in some sense)
*objective*, i.e., mind- or attitude-independent features of
the world. Wilcox (1974), Schacht (1983) and Katsafanas (2013b), among
many others, have defended a Realist reading, while Foot (1973) has
defended a P-Non-Realist reading. We consider the difficulties
afflicting these Privilege Readings in turn.



Realist readings assign a special place to power (or will to power) in
explaining the objectivity of normative facts. On these views,
Nietzsche holds, first, that only power *really* has value and,
second, that power is an objective, natural property.
Nietzsche's evaluative perspective is privileged, in turn,
because it involves assessing (i) prudential value (value
*for* an agent) in terms of degree of power, and (ii)
non-prudential value in terms of maximization of prudential value
(i.e., maximization of power). 



According to Schacht, for example, Nietzsche's account of
"the fundamental character of life and the world" *as
will to power* is supposed to "ground" his own
evaluative standpoint (1983: 348-349). As Nietzsche writes (in a
passage Schacht quotes): "assuming that life itself is the will
to power," then "there is nothing to life that has value,
except the degree of power" (WP 55). Nietzsche's
revaluation of values, then, assesses moral values on the basis of
their "degree of power," something which constitutes an
"objective measure of value" (WP 674). Hence the privilege
of his view: it embraces as an evaluative standard the only thing in
life that (in fact) has value (namely power), and employs this
"objective measure of value" in the revaluation (e.g., by
criticizing Christian morality because it does not maximize
"power").



What exactly is Nietzsche's *argument* on the N-Realist
reading? Schacht writes:



> 
> Human life, for Nietzsche, is ultimately a part of a kind of vast
> game...[which] is, so to speak, the only game in town....The
> nature of the game, he holds, establishes a standard for the
> evaluation of everything falling within its compass. The availability
> of this standard places evaluation on footing that is as firm as that
> on which the comprehension of life and the world stands. (1983, p.
> 398)
> 



Talk of "the only game in town" is far too metaphorical,
however, to bear the philosophical weight demanded. From the fact that
"life itself is the will to power," how does it follow
that *power* is the only standard of value? From the fact, for
example, that all life obeys the laws of fundamental physics, nothing
follows about the appropriate standard of value. What Schacht and some
others seem to have in mind is something like John Stuart Mill's
argument for utilitarianism, which proceeds from the premise that
since happiness is the only thing people desire or aim for, it follows
that happiness is the only thing that possesses intrinsic value. This
argument, though, is famously unsuccessful: from the fact that only
happiness *is* desired, nothing at all follows about what
*ought* to be desired. Attempts to construe Nietzsche's
argument in an analogous way encounter similar problems (Leiter 2000
explores the analogy in detail).



On Mill's well-known and oft-criticized 'proof' of
the principle of utility from his 1861 *Utilitarianism*, to
show that something is visible, we must show that it is seen; and to
show that something is audible, we must show that it is heard;
analogously,



> 
> (P) to show that something is desirable (i.e., valuable), show that it
> is desired.
> 



Millian hedonism holds that only happiness or pleasure is
intrinsically desirable or valuable ('Prescriptive
Hedonism'). Let us call 'Value Nihilism' the view
that there is nothing that has value or is valuable (or desirable). To
get Prescriptive Hedonism from (P), then, plug in 'Descriptive
Hedonism' -- the thesis that people do in fact desire
*only* pleasure as an end. If (P) is valid, Descriptive
Hedonism true, and Value Nihilism false, then the truth of
Prescriptive Hedonism follows. ((P), of course, is not valid, a point
to which we will return.)



Notice, now, that the same type of argument seems to capture what the
N-Realist construal of Nietzsche has in mind. That is, to get the
N-Realist Nietzschean conclusion that what is valuable is power, take
(P) and plug in a strong form of Nietzsche's descriptive
doctrine of the will to power -- the doctrine, roughly, that all
persons intrinsically 'desire' only power. If (P) is
valid, Value Nihilism false, and the descriptive doctrine of the will
to power is true, then the normative conclusion about power, which
Schacht is after, seems to follow. (Note, of course, that the Millian
Model argument as formulated so far would show only that power is what
is non-morally valuable or good for an agent. Of course, if the
Millian Model argument for prudential value or non-moral goodness does
*not* work, then that provides a very strong (if defeasible)
reason for supposing that there is no further argument for the related
account of non-prudential value as consisting in maximization of
power.)



What are the problems with this "Millian argument"? The
first problem, of course, is that (P) is not valid. While from the
fact that *x* is heard, it follows that *x* is audible,
it does not follow from that fact that *x* is desired that
*x* is desirable *in the sense necessary for the
argument*. For while 'audible' can be fairly rendered
as 'can be heard,' 'desirable,' in the context
of Prescriptive Hedonism, means '*ought* to be
desired' (not 'can' or 'is' desired).
Thus, while it follows that:



> 
> If *x* is heard, then *x* can be heard ('is
> audible'),
> 



it does not follow that,



> 
> If *x* is desired, then *x* ought to be desired
> ('is desirable').
> 



Yet in claiming that pleasure or power are valuable, Mill and the
N-Realist Nietzsche are advancing a normative thesis. The truth of
this normative thesis, however, simply does not follow from the
corresponding descriptive thesis.



Many, of course, have thought this too facile a response. Supplement
the argument, then, by adding an 'Internalist Constraint'
(IC), one that many philosophers have found plausible in the theory of
value:



> 
> (IC) Something cannot be valuable for a person unless the person is
> capable of caring about (desiring) it.
> 



The (IC) is motivated by the thought that it cannot be right to say
that 'X is valuable' for someone when *x* is alien
to anything a person cares about or *could* care about: any
plausible notion of value, the (IC) supposes, must have some strong
connection to a person's existing (or potential) motivational
set.



How does the (IC) help? Recall (P):



> 
> (P) To show that something is desirable (i.e., valuable) show that it
> is desired.
> 



Now the (IC) puts a constraint on what things can, in fact, be
desirable or valuable: namely, only those things that agents can, in
fact, care about or desire. This suggests that we might reformulate
(P) as follows:



> 
> (P') To show that something is desirable (i.e., valuable), show
> that it is or can be desired.
> 



(P') now is simply a different formulation of the (IC): if we
accept the (IC) then we should accept (P'). But what happens,
then, if we grant the truth of Descriptive Hedonism: namely, that only
pleasure is, in fact, desired. In that case, it would now follow that
only pleasure is desirable (ought to be desired) (assuming, again,
that Value Nihilism is false). That is, since something ought to be
desired only if it can be desired (internalism), then if only
*x* *can* be desired, then only *x* ought to be
desired (assuming that Value Nihilism is false).



Will this argument rescue the N-Realist Nietzsche? Two obstacles
remain. The first, and perhaps less serious one, is that we must have
some reason for accepting the (IC) -- or, more modestly, some
reason for thinking Nietzsche accepts it. It is not clear, however,
that there are adequate textual grounds for saying where Nietzsche
stands on this question. Since the (IC) does, however, seem to be
presupposed by the Nietzschean remarks from the *Nachlass* that
support N-Realism -- in the sense that such remarks do not
constitute a good argument without the (IC) -- let us grant that
Nietzsche accepts the (IC), and let us simply put aside the
contentious issue of whether we ought to accept the (IC) as a general
philosophical matter.



A second difficulty will still remain: namely, that the argument for
N-Realism still depends on the truth of the relevant descriptive
thesis, in Nietzsche's case, the doctrine of the will to power.
This presents two problems. First, in the works Nietzsche chose to
publish, it seems clear that he did not, in fact, accept the doctrine
in the strong form required for the N-Realist argument (namely, that
it is only power that persons ever aim for or desire). Second, it is
simply not a plausible doctrine in its strong form.



For the Millian Model argument for N-Realism to work in its new form
(that is, supplemented with the (IC)) it must be the case that that
which *ought* to be desired ('is valuable') are the
only things that are, in fact, desired. Since the N-Realist
Nietzschean conclusion is that only power is valuable, power must be
the only thing that is, in fact, desired (assuming, again, that
*something* is valuable, i.e., that Value Nihilism is false).
Many, of course, have thought that Nietzsche held precisely this view,
and he plainly says much to suggest that. Zarathustra states that,
"Where I found the living, there I found will to power" (Z
II:12); Nietzsche refers to "the will to power which is the will
of life" (GS 349); he says "the really fundamental
instinct of life...aims at *the expansion of power*"
(GS 349); "life simply *is* will to power," meaning
a striving "to grow, spread, seize, become predominant"
(BGE 259); he refers to his "theory that in all events a
*will to power* is operating" (GM II:12); he claims that
"[a] living thing seeks above all to *discharge* its
strength -- life itself is *will to power*" (BGE
13); and so on.



The difficulty is that Nietzsche says other things which might suggest
that the stronger remarks are misleading; for example:



> 
> Life itself is to my mind the instinct for growth, for durability, for
> an accumulation of forces, for *power*: where the will to power
> is lacking there is decline. It is my contention that all the supreme
> values of mankind *lack* this will.... (A 6)
> 



But if all actions manifested this *will*, then this
*will* could never be found lacking. Yet Nietzsche thinks it
can be lacking, which means he must countenance the possibility that
not everyone aims for ('desires') power.



This passage is not atypical. Later in the same work, he returns to
the same theme concerning "[w]herever the will to power declines
in any form" (A 17). In the immediately preceding work he claims
that the "effects" of liberal institutions are
"known well enough: they undermine the will to power" (TI
IX:38). And in the immediately subsequent work (his last), Nietzsche
refers to "the terrible *aspects* of reality (in affects,
in desires, in the will to power)..." (EH IV:4), which
certainly sounds as if will to power is simply one among various
characteristics of reality -- *alongside* affects and
desires, rather than the essential core of them all.



Three other general textual considerations count against attributing
the strong doctrine of the will to power to Nietzsche. First, if, as
the defenders of the strong doctrine believe, "his fundamental
principle is the '*will to power'*", then it
is hard to understand why he says almost nothing about will to power
-- and nothing at all to suggest it is his "fundamental
principle" -- in the two major self-reflective moments in
the Nietzschean corpus: his last major work, *Ecce Homo*, where
he reviews and assesses his life and writings, including specifically
all his prior books (EH III); and the series of new prefaces he wrote
for *The Birth of Tragedy*, *Human, All Too Human*,
*Dawn*, and *The Gay Science* in 1886, in which he
revisits his major themes. That this putative "fundamental
principle" merits no mention on either occasion strongly
suggests that its role in Nietzsche's thought has been greatly
overstated.



Second, the view at issue presupposes an unusually strong doctrine of
the will to power: a doctrine, to the effect, that *all* life
(actions, events) reflects the will to power. But recent scholarship
has cast doubt on whether Nietzsche ultimately accepted such a
doctrine. The single most famous passage on will to power in the
Nietzschean corpus, for example, is the concluding section (1067) of
*The Will to Power*, where he affirms that, "*This
world is the will to power -- and nothing besides*! And you
yourselves are also this will to power -- and nothing
besides!" Although a favorite of commentators for many years,
the passage has now been conclusively discredited by the leading
scholar of the *Nachlass*, the late Mazzino Montinari.
Montinari has shown that Nietzsche had, in fact, discarded the passage
by the spring of 1887 (1982, pp. 103-104)! It was, as Montinari
notes, made part of the Koselitz-Forster compilation of *The
Will to Power* (the basis for the English-language edition by
Kaufmann and Hollingdale) notwithstanding "Nietzsche's
literary intentions" (1982, p. 104).



Finally, Maudemarie Clark has argued that Nietzsche could not have
accepted the very strongest form of the doctrine of the will to power
-- namely, that all *force*, animate and inanimate, is
will to power -- given the putative argument he gives for it.
Clark points out that the *only* *argument* for this
doctrine of the will to power in Nietzsche's published works
-- in Section 36 of *Beyond Good and Evil* -- is cast
in the conditional form: if we accept certain initial hypotheses,
then, Nietzsche thinks, the strong doctrine of the will to power
follows. But one of the antecedents of this conditional is the
"causality of the will," and Clark argues that Nietzsche
clearly *rejects* such causality elsewhere in his work (e.g.,
GS 127, TI II:5, TI VI:3). Therefore, this section cannot constitute
an argument for the strongest doctrine of the will to power that
Nietzsche, himself, would actually accept! Rather than embracing the
strongest form of the doctrine, Clark argues that Nietzsche is,
somewhat ironically, illustrating the very flaw of philosophers he
warns against in the surrounding passages: namely, their tendency to
propound theories of the essence of reality that are just projections
of their own evaluative commitments (Clark 1990, pp. 212-227).
Thus, Nietzsche says of the Stoic talk of living "according to
nature" that "while you pretend rapturously to read the
canon of your law in nature, you want something opposite....Your
pride wants to impose your morality, your ideal, on
nature..." (BGE 9). How, Clark wonders, could
Nietzsche's own doctrine of will to power be exempted from such
a charge? (Note, too, that Montinari claims that the one surviving
relic of 1067 of *The Will to Power* in the published works is
precisely the ironic Section 36 of *Beyond Good and Evil*
(1982, p. 104).)



What, then, does Nietzsche believe about will to power? There are, to
be sure, competing views in the secondary literature. Reginster 2006
treats will to power as a will to overcome resistances; Richardson
1996 treats will to power as the tendency of every drive to redirect
every other drive towards its own ends. As others have noted (e.g.,
Clark 1990: 209-212), Nietzsche's doctrine of will to
power, in its original deployment and most of its later occurrences in
the published work, is *psychological* in character: the will
to power is posited as the best psychological explanation for a wide
variety of human behaviors. Here Richardson's account seems to
fare somewhat better than Reginster's. (Katsafanas 2013b follows
Reginster, and tries to develop a "constitutivist" account
of objective value based on the idea that all actions aim to overcome
resistances; Huddleston 2017 offers a trenchant critique of the
plausibility of such a view.) Yet Richardson's account has
difficulty with some of Nietzsche's claims, as when he says that
"every animal...instinctively strives for optimal conditions
under which it can...attain its maximum in the feeling of power"
(GM III:7), which seems to propose desire for power as a competitor
with psychological hedonism. But a universal desire for either
pleasure or power feelings is not especially plausible, even if both
motives are important ones. Indeed, as the preceding passages and
considerations make clear, Nietzsche could not have believed that will
to power was the exclusive explanation for all human behavior. To the
extent he sometimes seems to embrace this stronger claim (see the
example, above), we must simply take Nietzsche to have overstated his
case -- something which his penchant for hyperbolic rhetoric and
polemics often leads him to do -- or to be engaged in the kind of
ironic move described by Clark, above. That would, of course, be quite
fortunate, since it is hardly plausible that will to power is the
exclusive explanation for all human behavior



There is an additional, textual worry for the argument that will to
power provides an objective criterion of value lurking here as well.
Nietzsche only makes the remarks that seem to suggest that power is an
objective criterion in passages from the *Nachlass*, work that
Nietzsche never published during his lifetime. Thus, even if one
thought that Nietzsche really held the strong descriptive doctrine of
the will to power -- the doctrine that all animate force (perhaps
*all* force) is will to power -- in his published works,
it is still the case that he only uses this doctrine to argue for the
normative conclusion in *Nachlass* material. Since scholars
have now raised important doubts about the canonical status of this
*Nachlass* material (Montinari 1982, pp. 92-104;
Hollingdale 1985, pp. 166-172, 182-186), this might
suggest that a view ought not to be attributed to Nietzsche
*solely* on the basis of its articulation in these notebooks,
which is exactly what the N-Realist reading requires. (For more recent
debate about the relevance of the *Nachlass* material to
understanding will to power, see Katsafanas 2013b, pp. 248-250 and
Leiter 2019, pp. 60-62.)



Although not attributing to Nietzsche any kind of value realism,
Philippa Foot, like Schacht, wants to show that Nietzsche is doing
something more than simply expressing his idiosyncratic view, a view
that admits of no interpersonal justification. While agreeing that
Nietzsche's intention is, in part, "to present us with a
clash of interests -- the good of the strong against that of the
weak," Foot adds that "this is not all he wants to
suggest" (1973: 162). Noting that Nietzsche "seems to want
to say that anyone who is strong, independent, and so on --
anyone who fits his description of the higher type of man -- is
one who *has value* in himself" (163), Foot goes on to
explicate this notion of "value" as follows:



> 
> [I]t does make sense to say that *we value* strong and
> exceptional individuals.... We do find patterns of reaction to
> exceptional men that would allow us to see here a valuing rather
> similar to valuing on aesthetic grounds.... I am thinking of the
> interest and admiration which is the common attitude to remarkable men
> of exceptional independence of mind and strength of will....
> [Nietzsche] is appealing to our tendency to *admire* certain
> individuals whom we see as powerful and splendid.... [There is] a
> similarity between the way we attribute *value* (aesthetic
> value) to art objects and the *value* that Nietzsche attributes
> to a certain kind of man, both resting on a set of common
> reactions.... (1973: 163)
> 



So Nietzsche, on this account, does not claim that his evaluative
perspective is veridical; he simply claims that it enjoys a certain
sort of interpersonal appeal, owing to our "common attitude to
remarkable men," "our tendency to *admire* certain
individuals," to find them aesthetically appealing. There may be
no fact-of-the-matter as to whether higher men are or are not
*really* valuable, but Nietzsche's evaluative standpoint
is privileged by virtue of its appeal to all of us. We're all
interested, it seems, in the flourishing of higher men.



Yet Nietzsche could not embrace the view that the flourishing of
"higher men" will appeal to "*our*
tendency" to admire such men or to any sort of
"common" attitude, given the logic of his critique of
morality. This follows from what we may call Nietzsche's
'Callicleanism,' after Plato's Callicles in the
*Gorgias*. It has now become something of a commonplace for
commentators to note that Nietzsche did *not* accept one sort
of Calliclean view, namely, the view that "anyone who is to live
aright should suffer his appetites to grow to the greatest extent and
not check them" (*Gorgias*, 419e) (cf. Nehamas 1985:
202-203; BGE 188). Yet there remains a more important respect in
which Nietzsche's view *is* Calliclean: namely, in its
embrace of the Calliclean doctrine that the inferior employ morality
to make "slaves of those who are naturally better"
(*Gorgias*, 491e-492a), that the weaker folk, the
majority...frame the laws [and, we might add, the morals] for
their own advantage' in order to 'frighten [the strong] by
saying that to overreach others is shameful and evil'
(*Gorgias*, 483b-d). In short, Callicles' view is that
morality is simply the prudence of the weak, who unable to do what the
strong can do, opt instead to put the actions of the strong under the
ban of morality. This, of course, is essentially Nietzsche's
view as well. So, for example, Nietzsche describes slave morality as
simply 'the prudence [*Klugheit*] of the lowest
order' (GM I:13), and he observes that "everything that
elevates an individual above the herd and intimidates the neighbor
is...called *evil*" (BGE 201), that "[m]oral
judgments and condemnations constitute the favorite revenge of the
spiritually limited against those less limited" (BGE 219), and
he claims that the "chief means" by which the "weak
and mediocre...weaken and pull down the stronger" is
"the moral judgment" (WP 345).



Recall, now, that Foot wanted to resist the view that in his
revaluation Nietzsche simply "present[s] us with a clash of
interests -- the good of the strong against that of the
weak" (1973: 162); instead, Foot suggests that Nietzsche is
appealing to a 'common' tendency to admire higher men, men
who would otherwise be thwarted by the reign of moral values. But for
a Calliclean like Nietzsche, it is part of the very appeal of morality
that it *does* thwart the flourishing of higher men. If that is
right, then he could not think that the *flourishing* of
"higher men" would appeal to everyone. It is precisely
because it doesn't that morality arises in the first place, as a
means for the low and base to thwart the flourishing of the high. This
is not to deny that higher men may still be admirable in the eyes of
the base and low (hence their envy); it is to deny, however, that
Nietzsche's evaluative perspective -- that it is an
*objection* to morality that it thwarts the high -- could
enjoy a privilege in virtue of this shared admiration. On the
Calliclean picture, there is a fundamental hostility between the high
and low, the strong and the weak, one which will not be bridged by
inviting the low to admire the high, or the weak, the strong.
"The well-being of the majority and the well-being of the few
are opposite viewpoints of value," Nietzsche says in the
'Note' at the end of the first essay of the
*Genealogy*. And in Nietzsche's revaluation, it appears,
there is no evaluative standpoint from which one could successfully
mediate and reconcile the normative claims of the opposing
moralities.


### 3.2 Nietzsche's Anti-Realism



If Nietzsche is not a realist about value, then he must be an
anti-realist: he must deny that there is any objective fact of the
matter that would privilege his evaluative perspective over its
target. (This, in fact, is the most familiar reading outside the
secondary literature on Nietzsche; one finds this view of
Nietzsche's metaethics, for example, in the sociologist Max
Weber and the moral philosopher Alasdair MacIntyre, among many
others.) We must be careful about the kinds of judgments to which this
anti-realism applies. Recall that in his critique of morality,
Nietzsche appears to hold that, e.g., "herd" morality is
*good for* the herd, but that it is *bad for* higher
men. He says, for example, that, "The ideas of the herd
*should* rule in the herd -- but not reach out beyond
it" (WP 287; emphasis added); and elsewhere he describes slave
morality as simply "the prudence of the lowest order" (GM
I:13). It may appear that regarding value judgments pertaining to
welfare or prudential goodness -- what is good or bad for
particular sorts of persons -- Nietzsche believes there is an
objective fact of the matter, though one relative to type-facts about
persons. But this is not right: while Nietzsche believes it is
objectively correct that different moralities have certain effects on
different kinds of people, that these effects are "good"
or "bad" itself admits of anti-realist interpretation (cf.
Leiter 2015: 119 for a revision of the view defended in Leiter 2002).
Even more importantly, though, Nietzsche's anti-realism applies
to the "revaluative" judgment that follows upon these
judgments about the effects of different moralities: that is, the
judgment that *because* herd morality is *good for* the
herd but *bad for* higher men, herd morality (or the universal
reign of herd morality) is bad or disvaluable. (Leiter 2019: 84-111
argues that Nietzsche's anti-realism even extends to epistemic
value, an issue beyond the scope of this entry.)



Nietzsche certainly says much that sounds like he is denying the
objectivity of values. Zarathustra tells us that, "Verily, men
gave themselves all their good and evil [*Gut und
Bose*]" (Z I:15) and that "good and evil that are
not transitory do not exist" (Z II:12). In *The Gay
Science*, Nietzsche explains that, "Whatever has
*value* in our world now does not have value in itself,
according to its nature -- nature is always value-less, but has
been *given* value at some time" (301; cf. D 3). Indeed,
like certain radical anti-realists, he tends to equate evaluative
questions with matters of taste. "What is now decisive against
Christianity is our taste [*Geschmack*], no longer our
reasons" (GS 132), he writes, noting later in the same work that
what counts as "justice...is by all means a matter of
taste, nothing more" (GS 184).



Nietzsche's primary argument for anti-realism about value is
*explanatory*: moral facts don't figure in the
"best explanation" of experience, and so are not real
constituents of the objective world (Leiter 2019: 17-48). Moral
values, in short, can be "explained away." Such a
conclusion follows from Nietzsche's naturalism (on the latter,
see the competing accounts in Janaway 2007 and Leiter 2013). As we saw
in the context of Nietzsche's critique of morality, Nietzsche
thinks a person's moral beliefs can be explained in naturalistic
terms, i.e., in terms of type-facts about that person. Thus, to
explain a person's moral judgments, one needn't appeal to
the existence of objective moral facts: psycho-physical facts about
the person suffice. Thus, since non-evaluative type-facts are the
primary explanatory facts, and since explanatory power is the mark of
objective facts, it appears that there cannot be any value facts.
Moral judgments and evaluations are "images" and
"fantasies," says Nietzsche, the mere effects of
type-facts about agents (D 119).



To describe Nietzsche as a moral anti-realist is so far only to
ascribe to him a metaphysical view: namely, that there are no
objective facts about what is morally right and wrong. It is a
somewhat vexed interpretive question whether we should also ascribe to
Nietzsche a particular view about the semantics of moral judgment, a
topic about which no philosopher prior to the 20th century
had a worked-out view (see again Hussain 2013). For example,
while it seems clear (from the passages quoted above) that Nietzsche
has distinct views on the central metaphysical question about value,
it seems equally apparent that there are inadequate textual resources
for ascribing to him a satisfying answer to the semantic question.
Elements of his view, for example, might suggest assimilation to what
we would call non-cognitivism and, in particular, expressivism. For
example, in describing master and Christian morality as
"opposite forms in the optics of value [*Werthe*],"
Nietzsche goes on to assert that, as opposite "optical"
forms, they "are...immune to reasons and refutations. One
cannot refute Christianity; one cannot refute a disease of the
eye.... The concepts 'true' and 'untrue'
have, as it seems to me, no meaning in optics" (CW Epilogue).
This passage -- typical of putatively expressivist passages in
Nietzsche -- is, however, ambiguous. For the passage could mean
that "true" and "false" are meaningless
*not* because evaluative judgments are essentially
non-cognitive, but rather because competing evaluative views are
*immune* to the effects of reasoning. There may be rational
grounds for thinking one view better than another, perhaps for
thinking one true and the other false, but since reasoning has so
little impact in this context, it is "meaningless" (in the
sense of pointless) to raise issues of truth and falsity.



More recently, Hussain (2007) has argued that we read Nietzsche as a
fictionalist about moral value: granted that Nietzsche is an
anti-realist about value (there *exists* no objective fact
about what has value in-itself), Hussain wonders what it is those who
"create values" can understand themselves to have done?
Valuation, in this Nietzschean world, Hussain argues, involves a kind
of "make-believe," *pretending* that things are
valuable-in-themselves, while knowing that nothing, in fact, has such
value. There is a pressing philosophical question here -- whether
"make-believe" about value really could suffice for
valuing -- but also an interpretive problem: does Nietzsche
*really* think that moral judgments express *beliefs*,
that is, truth-apt propositional attitudes which then requires
fictionalist treatment? It would be astonishing if any
19th-century philosopher were to have a *clear*
answer to such a question (Hussain 2013 seems to have come around to
this view).



While Nietzsche was, to be sure, among the first to recognize the
extent to which linguistic and grammatical practices generate
metaphysical assumptions and problems, he simply did not view
metaphysical questions *themselves* as best framed as issues
about the semantics of a given region of discourse (e.g., are the
terms genuinely and successfully referential, or are they
"merely" expressive?). It is doubtful, then, that there
are adequate grounds for assigning Nietzsche a view on such subtle
matters as whether ethical language is primarily cognitive or
non-cognitive, when it clearly evinces aspects of both descriptive and
prescriptive discourse.



Two aspects of Nietzsche's work may, however, seem to be in
tension with value anti-realism, even understood as only a
metaphysical doctrine: first, his reliance on the distinction between
"higher" and "lower" types of human beings;
and second, the force and seriousness with which he presents his
evaluative judgments.



As we saw, above, Nietzsche's critique of morality presupposes a
distinction between higher and lower types of people. But are there
objective facts about who is "high" and who is
"low"? And if so, would such a view be compatible with
anti-realism?



Suppose there are objective facts about "high" and
"low": Goethe *really* is a higher type, and the
herd animal *really* is a lower type. But there is still no
objective fact about whether MPS is non-prudentially
*disvaluable* just because it has the effect of thwarting the
flourishing of objectively higher types. Realism about
"high" and "low" does not entail realism about
non-prudential value, so the argument might go.



Such a response cannot work for two reasons. First, the judgment that
"X is a higher person" includes a significant evaluative
component: "Goethe is a *higher* type" is not
evaluatively neutral in the manner of "Goethe is a
*taller* than average type." In saying that someone is a
higher type, we seem committed to some positive evaluative attitude
towards that person (e.g., that it is good to have persons like that
around). If there is an objective fact that "X is a higher
type," and it is a fact that MPS thwarts the flourishing of
higher types, then it would seem that at least some objective weight
must accrue to the Nietzschean position that MPS is disvaluable
because of this effect it has.



Second, if it is an objective fact that Goethe is a higher type and,
say, Hitler is a herd animal, then the following counterfactual would
seem to be true:



> 
> (C) If Hitler had been like Goethe, he would have been better off.
> 



He would have been better off because he would have been a higher
type, instead of a lower type -- and it is an objective fact that
the high are *really* high, and the low are *really*
low. But this seemingly objective judgment -- that Hitler would
have been *better off* had he been more like Goethe -- is
a non-prudential value judgment; it is not a judgment about what is
good for Hitler under the circumstances, but rather a judgment about
what would make Hitler better off, but for his circumstances. In
general, it seems that conceding the objectivity of "high"
and "low" permits one to make objective non-prudential
value judgments like: the good of the higher type is superior to the
good of the lower type.



For these reasons, if Nietzsche is an anti-realist about
non-prudential moral value, then he must also be an anti-realist about
judgments of "high" and "low," It may be an
objective fact that MPS thwarts the flourishing of those Nietzsche
*regards* as higher types; but it is not an objective fact that
they are *really* higher.



In fact, there is textual evidence that this is exactly
Nietzsche's view. For example, in *Thus Spoke
Zarathustra*, Nietzsche writes that, "Good and evil, and
rich and poor, and high and low [*Hoch und Gering*], and all
the names of values -- arms shall they be and clattering signs
that life must overcome itself again and again" (Z II:7). Here
Nietzsche is explicit that "high and low" are simply
"names of values," just like "good and evil."
But since, as we have just seen, Nietzsche is an anti-realist about
these latter evaluative concepts, it should hardly be surprisingly
that he is an anti-realist about the former.



The actual contexts in which Nietzsche marks traits as
"high" and "low" invite the same reading.
Consider, for example, the exposition in the *Genealogy* (I:14)
of the sense in which slave morality is the "prudence of the
lowest order" (GM, I:13). According to Nietzsche, slave morality
takes certain typical characteristics of the "lowest
order" and redescribes them in morally praiseworthy lights. So,
for example, their impotence becomes "goodness of heart,"
their anxious lowliness becomes "humility," their
"inoffensiveness" and "lingering at the door"
becomes "patience", and their desire for retaliation
becomes a desire for justice. If Nietzsche were really a realist about
the concept of "lowness", then we ought to be able to
identify the objective facts in virtue of which something is really
low. Yet when Nietzsche tries to describe *all* patience as
nothing more than a "lingering at the door" and
*all* humility as simply "anxious lowliness," it is
natural to think that there is no "objective" fact about
"lowness" here but simply a polemical and evaluatively
loaded characterization. To think that all humility is really
"anxious lowliness" is just to identify oneself as one who
shares Nietzsche's evaluative sensibility, one "whose ears
are related to ours" (GS 381), one "predisposed and
predestined" for Nietzsche's insights (BGE 30). In short,
given the way in which Nietzsche actually speaks of the
"high" and "low," we should understand
Nietzsche's metaethical position as also characterizing these
terms: to say that "X is low" is not to describe an
objective fact, but rather to identify oneself as sharing in a certain
evaluative sensibility or taste.



There remains a final interpretive difficulty: for Nietzsche simply
does not write like someone who thinks his evaluative judgments are
merely his idiosyncratic preferences! On the metaethical position
elaborated here, it seems Nietzsche must believe that if, in response
to his point that "morality were to blame if the *highest
power and splendor* actually possible to the type man was never in
fact attained" (GM Pref:6), someone were to say, "So much
the better for morality!", there would be nothing further to say
to that person: at the best, Nietzsche might turn his back and say,
"Oh well -- doesn't share my evaluative
tastes." Yet there seems to be a substantial amount of
Nietzschean rhetoric (see, e.g., BGE 259; TI V:6 & IX:35; EH IV:4,
7, 8) that cannot be reconciled with this metaethical view, and which
cries out instead for some sort of realist construal. Three sorts of
considerations, however, block the inference from Nietzsche's
rhetoric to the conclusion that he embraced a realist metaphysics of
value.



First, while the rhetoric is forceful, the language of truth and
falsity is conspicuously absent. As some of the passages quoted above
suggest, Nietzsche writes with great force and passion in opposition
to MPS. But it is striking that he does not use the epistemic value
terms -- the language of truth and falsity, real and unreal
-- in this context. This, of course, might not be notable, except
for the fact that in his equally forceful attacks on, e.g., Christian
cosmology, or religious interpretations of natural events, he invokes
the conceptual apparatus of truth and falsity, truth and lie, reality
and appearance, all the time (cf. Leiter 1994, pp. 336-338).
Thus, for example, Nietzsche lampoons Christian cosmology as lacking
"even a single point of contact with reality" and as
"pure fiction" which
"falsifies...reality" ("*die Wirklichtkeit
falscht*") (A, 15). Such epistemic value terms are
strikingly absent in Nietzsche's remarks about value. One
natural explanation for this difference in rhetoric -- natural
especially in light of the substantial evidence for his anti-realism
-- is precisely that in the moral case he does not think there is
any fact of the matter.



Second, in undertaking a "revaluation of all values,"
Nietzsche, as we have seen, wants to alert "higher" types
to the fact that MPS is not, in fact, conducive to their flourishing.
Thus, he needs to "wake up" his appropriate readers
-- those whose "ears are related" to his -- to
the dangers of MPS, a task made all the more difficult by MPS's
pretension to be "morality itself." 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 MPS), 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! Moreover, Nietzsche's naturalism,
and the prominent role it assigns to non-conscious drives and
type-facts, leads him to be skeptical about the efficacy of reasons
and arguments. But a skeptic about the efficacy of rational persuasion
might very well opt for persuasion through other rhetorical
devices.



Third, and perhaps most importantly, a rhetorical tone like
Nietzsche's -- looked at in the context of his life --
does not really suggest realism about the content, but rather
desperation on the part of the author to reach an increasingly distant
and uninterested audience. The Nietzsche who was almost completely
ignored during the years before illness erased his intellect and
deprived him of his sanity might have resorted to more and more
strident and violent rhetoric in frustration over not being heard
-- and not because he was a realist. Indeed, in the absence of
explicit evidence of value realism, this seems the most plausible
explanation for the vast majority of the passages with which we have
been concerned in this section.



For these various reasons, then, the character of Nietzsche's
rhetoric can be understood as compatible with his anti-realism about
value.


## 4. Nietzsche's Lack of a Political Philosophy



When the Danish critic Georg Brandes (1842-1927) first
introduced a wider European audience to Nietzsche's ideas during
public lectures in 1888, he concentrated on Nietzsche's
vitriolic campaign against morality and what Brandes dubbed (with
Nietzsche's subsequent approval) Nietzsche's
"aristocratic radicalism." On this reading, Nietzsche was
*primarily* concerned with questions of value and culture
(especially the value of morality and its effect on culture), and his
philosophical standpoint was acknowledged to be a deeply
*illiberal* one: what matters are great human beings, not the
"herd." The egalitarian premise of all contemporary moral
and political theory -- the premise, in one form or another, of
the equal worth or dignity of each person -- is simply absent in
Nietzsche's work. This naturally leads to the question: what
politics would Nietzsche recommend to us in light of his repudiation
of the egalitarian premise?



A striking feature of the reception of Nietzsche in the last thirty
years years is the large literature that has developed on
Nietzsche's purported political philosophy. Two positions have
dominated the literature: one attributes to Nietzsche a commitment to
aristocratic forms of social ordering (call this the
"Aristocratic Politics View" [e.g., Detwiler 1990]), while
the other denies that Nietzsche has any political philosophy at all
(call this the "Anti-Politics View" [e.g., Hunt 1985,
Leiter 2002/2015]). 



Even the casual reader knows, of course, that Nietzsche has intense
opinions about *everything*, from German cuisine to the
unparalleled brilliance (in Nietzsche's estimation) of
Bizet's operas, not to mention various and sundry
"political" matters. The interpretive question, however,
is whether scattered remarks and parenthetical outbursts add up to
systematic views on questions of philosophical significance about
politics.



Is Nietzsche even interested in political philosophy? Nussbaum (1997:
1) declares that, "Nietzsche claimed to be a political thinker,
indeed an important political thinker", but she can produce no
clear textual evidence in support of that contention. She notes that,
"In *Ecce Homo* he announced that he was 'a bringer
of glad tidings like no one before me,' and that those glad
tidings are political" (1997: 1). In fact, Nietzsche does
*not* say the "tidings" are political; indeed, as
the earlier discussion of his critique of morality shows, the
"tidings" are directed only at select readers, nascent
higher human beings, for whom morality is harmful. That this section
from *Ecce Homo* (IV:1) concludes with the hyperbolic claim
that only with Nietzsche does "the earth [first] know[ ]
*great politics*" does as little to establish that he has
a political philosophy as the claim, *in the very same
passage*, that Nietzsche's "glad tidings" will
cause "upheavals, a convulsion of earthquakes, a moving of
mountains and valleys" does to establish that he has a
geological theory.



Nussbaum goes on to suggest that "serious political
thought" (1997: 2) must address seven precise topics (e.g.,
"procedural justification" ["procedures...that
legitimate and/or justify the resulting proposals" for
"political structure"], "gender and the
family," and "justice between nations") -- most
of which, of course, Nietzsche does not address. (Marx does not
address most of them either.) Instead of drawing the natural
conclusion -- Nietzsche was not interested in questions of
political philosophy -- she, surprisingly, decries his
"baneful influence" in political philosophy (1997:
12).



Those who claim to find a political philosophy in Nietzsche typically
rely on a handful of passages -- most often, sections 56-57
of *The Antichrist*, but also section BGE 257 on
"slavery" -- as the slender evidence on the basis of
which elaborate views about the ideal forms of social and political
organization are attributed to Nietzsche. In particular, Nietzsche is
said to endorse (in A 56-57) the caste-based society associated
with the Hindu Laws of Manu as his political ideal:



> 
> The *order* of castes, the supreme, the dominant law, is merely
> the sanction of a *natural order*, a natural lawfulness of the
> first rank, over which no arbitrariness, no "modern idea"
> has any power...Nature, not Manu, distinguishes the pre-eminently
> spiritual ones, those who are pre-eminently strong in muscle and
> temperament, and those, the third type, who excel neither in one
> respect nor in the other, the mediocre ones -- the last as the
> great majority, the first as the elite. (A 57)
> 



This reading, however, does not withstand scrutiny, as Thomas Brobjer
(1998) has argued. As Brobjer notes, the only other published
discussion of the laws of Manu, in *Twilight of the Idols*, is
highly critical, not laudatory (pp. 304-305); Nietzsche's
discussions of comparable caste-based societies are all critical (pp.
308-309); and Nietzsche's unpublished notebooks contain
numerous entries on the theme "a critique of the Laws of
Manu" (pp. 310-312). The passage from *The
Antichrist* only *seems* laudatory when read out of
context; as Brobjer remarks:



> 
> [Nietzsche's] purpose [in these passages in *The
> Antichrist*] is to make the contrast with Christianity as strong
> as possible, to provoke the reader, to make the reader
> "realize" that even the laws of Manu... is higher and
> more humane than Christianity. Whereas Christianity destroys, the
> intention at least of the laws of Manu was to save and protect. (1998,
> pp. 312-313)
> 



In other words, the *rhetorical context* of the passage is
crucial, though it is typically ignored by commentators defending the
Aristocratic Politics View. Indeed, the passage quoted above from A 57
is specifically introduced to illustrate the use of the "holy
lie" (the lie being, in this case, the claim that "nature,
not Manu" distinguishes the castes). And as even the title of
the book would suggest, Nietzsche's target is Christianity, and
the laws of Manu are invoked simply to drive home that point. Thus,
although Manu and Christianity both depend on lies, *at least*
the Manu lies, according to Nietzsche, are not put in the service of
Christian ends, i.e., "poisoning, slander, negation of life,
contempt for the body, the degradation and self-violation of man
through the concept of sin" (A 56). Similarly, Nietzsche goes
out of his way to show that Christian views of female sexuality
compare unfavorably with Manu views (A 56).



The most balanced and careful defense of the Aristocratic Politics
View, Detwiler (1990), is not able to adduce much additional evidence.
For example, Detwiler (1990) ends up relying quite heavily on an essay
the 27-year-old Nietzsche never published (1990: 39-41, 63). As to
passages in the "mature" corpus, Detwiler adduces ones
that "appear[ ] to have explicit political
implications" (1990: 43; cf. 44), or that "strongly
suggest...political consequences" (1990: 45-46), or
that "raise the issue of troubling political implications of
Nietzschean immoralism" (1990: 49). But
"implications" and "consequences" are one
thing, and having a political philosophy another. (See in this regard
the discussion of BGE 257 in Huddleston 2019: 113 n. 39). The canon of
political philosophers is composed of thinkers (like Hobbes, Locke,
Rousseau, and Mill) who have philosophical views about political
questions -- the justification of state power, the liberty of the
individual, political legitimacy, etc. -- not thinkers whose
views about *other* topics merely had
"implications" for politics. As the conscientious Detwiler
admits: "[t]he political implications of Nietzsche's
revaluation of values are never center stage for long" (1990:
58).



Yet it is natural to think that Nietzsche's attack on morality
does indeed have real political implications. When Nietzsche commends
the laws of Manu for "mak[ing] possible the higher and the
highest types" (A 57), this resonates, all too obviously, with
Nietzsche's central concern that morality is harmful to the
highest types of human beings. Yet the undeniable
"resonance" fails to show that Nietzsche *endorses*
the laws of Manu. Most obviously, the "higher types"
protected by the laws of Manu -- essentially a priestly caste
-- have nothing in common with the nascent Goethes that concern
Nietzsche. Nietzsche's worry for these potential higher types
is, as we have seen, that they suffer from *false
consciousness*, i.e., the false belief that "morality in the
pejorative sense," i.e., MPS, is good for them. MPS is a threat
to the flourishing of nascent Goethes, and it is this flourishing that
interests Nietzsche above all. It would suffice for Nietzsche's
purposes that nascent Goethes give up their faith in MPS -- in
other words, it is individual attitudes not political structures that
are Nietzsche's primary object ("The ideas of the herd
should rule in the herd," says Nietzsche, "and not reach
out beyond it" [WP 287]). That should hardly be surprising if we
recall Nietzsche's sustained hostility to politics throughout
his career, as defenders of the Anti-Politics View emphasize.



Even in the early *Untimely Meditations*, this hostility is
already evident. So, for example, Nietzsche comments:



> 
> Every philosophy which believes that the problem of existence is
> touched on, not to say solved, by a political event is a joke- and
> pseudo-philosophy. Many states have been founded since the world
> began; that is an old story. How should a political innovation suffice
> to turn men once and for all into contented inhabitants of the earth?
> [That people think the answer to existential questions might come from
> politics shows] that we are experiencing the consequences of the
> doctrine...that the state is the highest goal of mankind and that
> a man has no higher duty than to serve the state: in which doctrine I
> recognize a relapse not into paganism but into stupidity. It may be
> that a man who sees his highest duty in serving the state really knows
> no higher duties; but there are men and duties existing beyond this
> -- and one of the duties that seems, at least to me, to be higher
> than serving the state demands that one destroys stupidity in every
> form, and therefore in this form too. That is why I am concerned with
> a species of man whose teleology extends somewhat beyond the welfare
> of a state..., and with [this kind of man] only in relation to a
> world which is again fairly independent of the welfare of a state,
> that of culture. (U III:4)
> 



The same, vaguely anarchistic attitude is apparent in *Thus Spoke
Zarathustra*, where Nietzsche calls the "state...the
coldest of all cold monsters" and remarks, aptly enough, that
"the state...whatever it says it lies...Everything
about it is false" (Z I:11). "Only where the state ends,
there begins the human being who is not superfluous" (Z I:11) Of
course, it is only the latter individual that *really*
interests Nietzsche. And who is that individual? The next section (Z
I:12) tells us: he is the one who values his "solitude,"
which is precisely what the "marketplace" of politics
violates, with its "showmen and actors of great [sic]
things." "Far from the market place and from fame happens
all that is great" (Z I:12): in other words, great things (and
great people) are to be found far from the realms of politics and
economics.



Passages like these seem to support the Anti-Politics View. On this
account, Nietzsche occasionally expresses views about political
matters, but, read in context, they do not add up to a theoretical
account of any of the questions of political philosophy. He is more
accurately read, in the end, as a kind of *esoteric moralist*,
i.e., someone who has views about human flourishing, views he wants to
communicate at least to a select few. "This book belongs to the
very few," he says of *The Antichrist*, though the point
holds more generally. Indeed, Nietzsche is clearly describing his own
work when he writes in an earlier book that,



> 
> It is not by any means necessarily an objection to a book when anyone
> finds it impossible to understand: perhaps that was part of the
> author's intention -- he did not want to be understood by
> just 'anybody.' All the nobler spirits and tastes select
> their audience when they wish to communicate; and choosing that, one
> at the same time erects barriers against 'the others.' All
> the more subtle laws of any style have their origin at this point:
> they at the same time keep away, create a distance, forbid
> 'entrance,' understanding, as said above -- while
> they open the ears of those whose ears are related to ours. (GS 381)
> 



Or similarly: "Our highest insights must -- and should
-- sound like follies and sometimes like crimes when they are
heard without permission by those who are not predisposed and
predestined for them" (BGE 30). Nietzsche, the esoteric
moralist, wants to reach only select individuals -- those nascent
higher human beings who are "predisposed and predestined"
for his ideas -- and alter their consciousness about morality.
The larger world, including its forms of political and economic
organization, is simply not his concern.



Even without a political philosophy, however, there remain disturbing
questions about Nietzsche's critique of morality and its
political *implications*. For example, when Nietzsche objects
that morality is an obstacle to "the highest power and splendor
possible" to man, one is tempted to object that this gets things
perversely backwards. For surely it is the *lack* of morality
in social policy and public institutions -- a lack which permits
widespread poverty and despair to persist generation upon generation;
that allows daily economic struggle and uncertainty to define the
basic character of most people's lives -- that is most
responsible for a lack of human flourishing. Surely, in a more moral
society, with a genuine commitment to social justice and human
equality, there would be far more Goethes, far more creativity and
admirable human achievement. As Philippa Foot has sharply put it:
"How could one see the present dangers that the world is in as
showing that there is too much pity and too little egoism
around?" (1973, p. 168).



Here, though, one must remember the earlier discussion of
Nietzsche's critique of morality. Consider the Nietzsche who
asks: "Where has the last feeling of decency and self-respect
gone when even our statesmen, an otherwise quite unembarrassed type of
man, anti-Christians through and through in their deeds, still call
themselves Christians today and attend communion?" (A 38).
Clearly this Nietzsche is under no illusions about the extent to which
public actors do not act morally. Indeed, Nietzsche continues in even
more explicit terms: "Every practice of every moment, every
instinct, every valuation that is translated into *action* is
today anti-Christian: what a *miscarriage of falseness* must
modern man be, that he is *not ashamed* to be called a
Christian in spite of all this!" (A 38). What, then, is going on
here? If Nietzsche is not, contrary to Foot's suggestion,
embracing the absurd view that there is too much pity and altruism in
the world, what exactly is his critical point?



Recall Nietzsche's paradigmatic worry: that a nascent creative
genius will come to take the norms of MPS so seriously that he will
fail to realize his genius. Rather than tolerate (even welcome)
suffering, he will seek relief from hardship and devote himself to the
pursuit of pleasure; rather than practice what Nietzsche calls
"severe self-love", and attend to himself in the ways
requisite for productive creative work, he will embrace the ideology
of altruism, and reject "self-love" as improper, and so
forth. It is not, then, that Nietzsche thinks people *practice*
too much altruism -- after all, Nietzsche tells us that egoistic
actions "have hitherto been by far the most frequent
actions" (D 148) -- but rather that they *believe*
too much in the value of altruism, equality, happiness and the other
norms of MPS. Even though there is neither much altruism nor equality
in the world, there is almost universal endorsement of the
*value* of altruism and equality -- even, notoriously (and
as Nietzsche seemed well aware), by those who are its worst enemies in
practice. So Nietzsche's critique is that a culture in the grips
of MPS, even without acting on MPS, poses the real obstacle to
flourishing, because it teaches potential higher types to disvalue
what would be most conducive to their creativity and value what is
irrelevant or perhaps even hostile to it. Nietzsche's worry, in
short, is that the man in the grips of MPS becomes
"*imprisoned among all sorts of terrible concepts*
[*schrekliche Begriffe*]" that leave him "sick,
miserable, malevolent against himself: full of hatred against the
springs of life, full of suspicion against all that was still strong
and happy" (TI VII:2, emphasis added).



So, contrary to Foot, Nietzsche is not claiming that people are
*actually* too altruistic and too egalitarian in their
practice; he is worried that (as a consequence of the slave revolt in
morals, etc.) they are now "imprisoned
among....concepts" of equality and altruism, and that this
conceptual vocabulary of value is itself the obstacle to the
realization of certain forms of human excellence. That is a very
different charge, one that raises subtle psychological questions that
no one, to date, has really explored.



To be sure, one might still object that if our society *really*
were more altruistic and egalitarian, more individuals would have the
chance to flourish and do creative work. Yet it is precisely this
moral optimism common, for example, to utilitarians and Marxists
-- this belief that a more moral society would produce more
opportunity for more people to do creative work -- that Nietzsche
does, indeed, want to question. Nietzsche's illiberal attitudes
in this regard are once again apparent; he says -- to take but
one example -- that, "We simply do not consider it
desirable that a realm of justice and harmony [*Eintracht*]
should be established on earth" (GS 377). It is bad enough for
Nietzsche that MPS values have so far succeeded in saying,
"stubbornly and inexorably, 'I am morality itself, and
nothing besides is morality'" (BGE 202); it could only be
worse on his view if more and more of our actions were really brought
into accord with these values. For Nietzsche wants to urge --
contrary to the moral optimists -- that in a way largely
unappreciated and (perhaps) unintended a thoroughly *moral*
culture undermines the conditions under which the most splendid human
creativity is possible, and generates instead a society of
Zarathustra's "last men" (Z P:5):



> 
> "What is love? What is creation? What is longing? What is a
> star?" thus asks the last man, and he blinks.
> 
> 
> The earth has become small, and on it hops the last man, who makes
> everything small. His race is as in eradicable as the flea-beetle; the
> last man lives longest.
> 
> 
> 
> "We have invented happiness," say the last men, and they
> blink....
> 
> 
> 



If we are trained always to think of happiness and comfort and safety
and the needs of others, we shall cut ourselves off from the
preconditions for creative excellence on the Nietzschean picture:
suffering, hardship, danger, self-concern, and the rest.



Consider a particularly powerful statement of this view. Speaking of
those "eloquent and profoundly scribbling slaves of the
democratic taste and its 'modern ideas'" who seek to
promote "the universal green-pasture happiness of the
herd" and who take "suffering itself...for something
that must be abolished" (BGE 44), Nietzsche retorts that when we
look at,



> 
> ...how the plant "man" has so far grown most
> vigorously to a height -- we think that this has happened every
> time under the opposite conditions, that to this end the dangerousness
> of his situation must first grow to the point of enormity, his power
> of invention and simulation (his "spirit") had to develop
> under prolonged pressure and constraint into refinement and
> audacity.... We think that...everything evil, terrible,
> tyrannical in man, everything in him that is kin to beasts of prey and
> serpents, serves the enhancement of the species "man" as
> much as its opposite does. Indeed, we do not even say enough when we
> say only that much. (BGE 44)
> 



At the end of this passage, Nietzsche does hint at a role for morality
as well -- it is just that what morality opposes is equally
important. He, of course, qualifies this by suggesting that even to
concede their equal importance may "not even say enough":
that is, perhaps there will not be much role for morality at all in
the conditions under which "the plant 'man'"
will grow to its greatest heights. But notice that, even in this
passage, what is called for is not a *political*
transformation, but an *individual* one, that of the nascent
higher human being: it is *"his* situation" that
"must first grow to the point of enormity" and it is
"*his* power of invention and simulation" that
"had to develop under prolonged pressure and constraint into
refinement and audacity." As he writes in a *Nachlass*
note of 1887, regarding those "human beings who are of any
concern to me": "I wish [them] suffering, desolation,
sickness, ill-treatment, indignities -- I wish that they should
not remain unfamiliar with profound self-contempt, the torture of
self-mistrust, the wretchedness of the vanquished" (WP 910).
This is not the outline of a political program, but rather a severe
regimen for the realization of individual potential -- at least
for the select few.