Professor Gary Jason, PhD



Reading Lecture #3:

Nietzsche

Recommended readings:

1. “Friedrich Nietzsche” in the Internet Encyclopedia of Philosophy.

I. Nietzsche brief bio:

• Nietzsche is a puzzling but fascinating philosopher, one of the most influential in the 20th century. Let’s timeline him.

• 1844: Nietzsche born in a small German town.

1. His father and both his grandfathers were Protestant ministers.

2. When he was only 4, his father died from brain disease, and two years later his only brother died.

3. His mother moved to a nearby small town with Nietzsche and his sister, to live with his two aunts.

4. For the next 8 years he lived with his mother, his grandmother, his aunts and his sister.

5. During his teenage years he attended an excellent boarding school, where he was an excellent student.

• 1864: Nietzsche enters the University of Bonn, where he studies philology.

1. Philology is no longer an academic discipline—it studied language in general (which is now a separate discipline called linguistics), but ancient Greek and Roman in particular, along with studies of classical and Biblical texts (now done in departments of classics, Bible Studies, and Religious Studies).

2. He early on made a name for himself publishing essays on Aristotle and other ancient writers. In his sophomore year he happened upon the works of Schopenhauer, a German philosopher who wrote gloomy, atheistic philosophy, but who loved music as an art form.

3. Nietzsche was attracted to philosophy in general and Schopenhauer in particular.

• 1867: Nietzsche enters the military (obligatory at the time), but shortly after enlisting he was severely injured in a horse riding accident, so he was discharged.

• He enrolled at the University of Leipzig, where he met the famous composer Wagner. Wagner was strongly influenced by Schopenhauer, too, and was the age Nietzsche’s father would have been, so it’s no surprise Nietzsche formed an attachment to Wagner.

• 1869: A Swiss university—University of Basel—offers a teaching position to Nietzsche, so at the very unusual age of 24, and he begins to teach.

• 1870: Nietzsche briefly serves as a hospital attendant during the Franco-Prussian war. He contracted diphtheria and dysentery, not to mention the stress of tending to horribly mangled patients, all of which affected his health for the rest of his life. He returned to Switzerland to teach.

• 1872: 1st book: The Birth of Tragedy. Briefly described, BoT:

1. Set out to combat the prevalent notion that Greek culture was nobly simple, ultra-rational, and calm.

2. Nietzsche’s view, very German romantic, Schopenhauer influenced, was that the non-rational forces were what lead to the incredible creative flourishing. He called this “Dionysian” energy, and said that it was overcome by the “Apollonian” forces of logical linear thinking and sober living.

3. He extended this analysis of ancient Greek culture to European culture which he felt had remained under the unhealthy influence of Apollonian Greek rational thought, and needed to let loose the wild, healthy Dionysian energy to make creativity blossom.

4. The book was not well-received by scholars.

• 1873: Key early unpublished essay, “On Truth and Lies in a Non-moral Sense”.

1. Nietzsche sketches out an epistemology. His view is that arbitrariness pervades human experience, and what we call “truth” is an imposition of concepts on it for practical purposes.

2. This is an early statement of Nietzsche’s epistemology, called “perspectivism” (or “perspectivalism”) which holds that (in Nietzsche’s later phase) there are no facts, only perspectives or interpretations.

• 1878: Nietzsche publishes Human, All Too Human.

1. The book contains a thinly-veiled attack on Wagner, and their friendship ends.

2. The book is novel in style for a philosophy book—it consists of hundreds of aphorisms, short saying (from a line or two to a page or two).

3. The book advances two more themes Nietzsche was found of: explaining the cultural and psychological in terms of people’s physiological natures, and the idea of power as a motivation for behavior shows up.

4. Nietzsche’s health started getting bad.

• 1879: He resigns from the University of Basel—he has migraines, vomiting, exhaustion.

• 1880: He starts an odd life of wandering around. He is officially stateless—he surrendered his German citizenship, and didn’t apply to become a Swiss citizen. He moved around Northern Italy, Switzerland, and Germany, never living in any place for more than a few months.

• 1882: Nietzsche meets and falls in love with exotic Russian émigré Lou Salome, offers to marry her. She passes. During this period, his nomadic years, he produces his main works.

• 1881: Daybreak. This book really explores the notion of the will to power, the feeling or desire for power as opposed to pleasure in understanding human behavior, especially “moral” behavior. He also begins to develop his critique of Christianity.

• 1882: The Gay Science.

1. Nietzsche sets out some of key “existentialist” ideas:

a. “God is dead”

b. The doctrine of “eternal recurrence”:

2. Very reminiscent of later existentialist movement (in vogue in Europe in 1930s-1960s).

3. Along with Kierkegaard and Dostoyevsky, he is considered one of the early founders of existentialism.

• 1883: Thus Spoke Zarathustra.

1. One of Nietzsche’s most famous works, it describes the spiritual development of an “Ubermensch” or superhuman—that is, an extraordinarily psychologically healthy individual.

2. Zarathustra—Zoroaster, the name is of an ancient Persian prophet—is portrayed as a solitary, strong willed, laughing and dancing sage.

3. The German government—30 years after its initial printing—printed 150k copies and gave them to its troops in WWI along with the Bible for inspirational reading (how’s that for irony).

• 1886: Beyond Good and Evil.

1. A book more focused on philosophy as such. Nietzsche attacks notions such as self-consciousness, free will, and the law of bivalence (every statement is T or F).

2. He urged philosophers to value things like creativity, self-assertion, imagination, and creation of new values from a life-affirming perspective, not just dry scholarship.

3. Also has a fuller statement of the will-to-power, the energy that leads to power and growth, but also can lead to danger, lies, game-playing and manipulation of others.

4. He denies a universal morality—your moral principles are appropriate for your situation in life.

5. Dominant people hold certain moral values—master-morality, while submissive people hold their values—slave-morality.

• 1887: On the Genealogy of Values.

1. Nietzsche pushes his criticism of Christianity further, claiming that Christian values are slave-morality, sold to the slaves of Rome, unfit for masters (supermen).

2. Slave-morality is formed by such unhealthy emotions as resentment, hatred, impotence, envy, and cowardice. Attacks priesthood in particular.

3. Also contains his clearest statement of perspectivism.

• 1888: Twilight of the Idols. Nietzsche attacks not only his old enemies (Socrates, Plato, Kant, Christianity), but also contemporary German culture, along with attacks on many of the scholars of his day: Mill, Rousseau, Marx, Zola and especially Darwin.

• 1889: He publishes his last major work, Ecce Homo. In it he examines his own works. He viewed himself as providing the tools for blowing away the old, corrupt morality, and creating new, exciting values.

• 1890: While in Turin, Nietzsche saw a horse being whipped by a coachman. He threw his arms around the horse’s neck and collapsed in a complete mental breakdown. He never regained sanity, and remained in asylums for a while, then his mother and later his sister took him into their care until he died in 1900. Nobody knows exactly what caused this breakdown, which left him completely silent and withdrawn. Recent (2008) article by 3 neurologists who studied his life, letters and so on say he died of CADISIL—essentially, disease where brain arteries get blocked causing stroke and dementia—probably inherited from father.

• Nietzsche was hugely influential in the 20th century.

1. He directly influenced Freud and other figures in the psychoanalytical movement.

2. He influenced the later school of existentialists (whom we will discuss soon).

3. He certainly influenced the recent so-called post-modernist or deconstructionist movement.

4. He may have influenced Ayn Rand and the objectivist/libertarian movement.

5. More ominously, Hitler probably read Nietzsche during his time as soldier in WWI, and certainly used some of his ideas: the Superman, master morals, etc. in promulgating Nazism.

II: Your Nietzsche selection:

➢ From Beyond Good and Evil:

• §257: The improvement of man as a species has and will always occur in aristocratic, elitist societies, not in democratic ones. This truth is a hard one for us with our humanitarian (i.e., altruistic) illusions. But higher civilizations have always arisen when barbarous, strong men of prey conquered weaker or more peaceful races, or toppled old civilizations that had lost their vital forces. These strong men, these beasts, were strong not just physically but psychologically.

• §258: Aristocracies that worry about the ordinary folk, or give up privileges to them or develop humanitarian emotions, are corrupt, psychologically unhealthy. (Notice here the theme of critical systems as indicators of psychological health or lack thereof). Healthy aristocracies—or better, elites—understand that the ordinary people—i.e., society as a whole—doesn’t exist for its own sake, but as the support structure for the elite. The masses are there for use by the elite to elevate itself to higher duties, to a higher existence.

• §259: Nietzsche grudgingly concedes to Hobbes that people who are roughly equal in strength or power or status may refrain from aggression against each other. But, contra Hobbes, it would be life-denying, corrupting and psychologically sick to take this as the basis for society at large. The elite consists of superior people who are far stronger and more forceful than the ordinary folk, so to refrain from using their power against the inferior people would be life-denying. We get a typical statement of the will to power on p. 274—swipe at Marx.

• §260: Nietzsche says that if you look at all the moral philosophies that have ever been formulated, they boil down to two basic patterns: master-morality and slave-morality. To try to reconcile these two moralities, which some philosophers try to do, is just confused. Master-morality originates in the healthy ruling elite, who enjoy knowing they are superior to the ruled. Slave-morality originates in the ruled, the slaves, the dependent, and the weak. The master elite are proud, and despise the slaves. Good vs Bad really means just noble vs. despicable. Slave morality is for the cowardly, the humble, the envious, the weak, the lying suck-ups. P. 275 swipe at Mill and Bentham...

• The noble man creates his own values, and doesn’t look for approval from others. The noble man feels a superabundance of power, and he glorifies himself. He knows how to control himself, and takes pleasure in testing himself in hard situations. He has a hard heart, he’s not given to sympathy or working for the interests of others, he despises selflessness. He’s an egoist and damned proud of it, too.

• By the way, notice here the different flavor of egoism from Hobbes. In Hobbes, we are all egoists, and all roughly equal in innate power, but this is a mighty dangerous thing, so dangerous that we control it by agreeing to submit to authority. In Nietzsche, we are all egoists, but we aren’t all equal in power, and having the elite agree to be governed by the inferior would destroy their creativity and strength, so the powerful should just frankly exult in their power and force the inferior to submit to their authority.

• Anyway, those of master morality revere their great ancestors, and only within the circle of equals is it appropriate to have friends and even enemies.

• Slave morality, to the extent the weak, the abused, the oppressed, the enslaved ever enunciate it, is what you would expect. It is a morality that views the condition of man as naturally bad, a negative view of the successful, and a strong support for compassion, hard work, humility, and love of others.

• The upshot is that what is good from the point of view of master-morality is evil from the point of view of slave-morality, and vice versa. Analogy—compare the morality of sheep and wolves.

• NB: in Johnson 11th edition, sections 261 through 265 are omitted.

• §261: The noble man will naturally seem vain to the ordinary folk—he will be very strong in self-esteem, and rightly so. But the noble man won’t truly be vain, i.e., always trying to get people to view him as great. No, it is the inferior person who worries about his image—the truly noble person cares only for his own opinion, and maybe those of other superior people. He is not a slave to others opinions.

• §262: Ironically, Nietzsche strikes a Darwinian note here. Species that have to struggle to survive in unfavorably circumstances tend to become simple, hardened and hardy, and survive. Species that face a surplus of nutrition and protection tend to produce lots of weak and degenerate offspring. Societies that live in conditions where they struggle against others for survival produce an aristocracy of severe, warlike, reserved and wise men. In modern democratic, prosperous states, average people become soft, degenerate, and comfort-oriented. Such modern societies become societies for the mediocre, and start to decay. In such societies, the daring individualists have to overcome the dominant slave-morality of mediocrity and create new, elevating morals, in competition with other noble, daring individuals.

• §263: Rather unclear to me. The aristocratic soul understands rank—rank of accomplishment, say, and reveres what is truly great. Reveres, but doesn’t have to be kept away from the great. The masses are best trained to keep away from things that are above them or nobler than they are, such as great books or great works of art. What’s really offensive is to see mediocre people who have a few bucks or a few years education think that they can appreciate great art or literature. They are shameless. The masses are asses.

• §264: Nietzsche argues that superiority, nobility, is in the blood: low-grade plebeians only produce low-grade plebeians. People who think that universal education will elevate the masses to nobility are fools: the best education and culture will only mask the underlying base nature of the kids, deceiving us into thinking that we are dealing with something other than human garbage. You’re just putting lipstick on a pig.

• §265: A frank statement of Nietzsche’s egoism. The superior egoist of course recognizes other superior people as equals, and he—out of his egoism—treats them with respect—after all, he sees himself in them, and exchanges honors and privileges with them. But upon his inferiors he just looks down.

• UPSHOT: Picture of the elite, the superman, given in Beyond Good and Evil, has the characteristics:

1. solitary—views others as means not ends (anti-Kant);

2. seeks burdens, challenges, in pursuit of grand life project;

3. healthy, resilient, mentally and physically;

4. affirms life—Dionysian Spirit;

5. self-reverence, the way you carry yourself, you strut your stuff—no shy, self-loathing, self-doubt.

• Nietzsche consistently mentions only four actual people he considers to have been supermen: Caesar; Goethe, Beethoven—and Nietzsche himself!!!!

➢ From The Genealogy of Morality

➢ Preface

• §1: Nietzsche starts by calling for a critique of standard moral values (especially the value of compassion), one that starts by looking at where these values came from originally (hence “Genealogy” of morality). Up till now, standard morals have been unquestioned, but what if they hinder the growth of future people?

➢ First Treatise: Good and Evil v. Good and Bad

• §1: Nietzsche starts by criticizing the British psychologists (he has Hobbes in mind here, I suspect) for dwelling on the strange and the petty in the human soul as the sources of our actions. Nietzsche wants to see what really motivates us, no matter how ugly or frightening it is. NB: Freud admitted to being highly influenced by Nietzsche...

• §2: Nietzsche that most philosophers have tended to be unhistorical in pursuing their work. They think that people first applied the word “good” to altruistic behavior from which the benefitted, because such actions were socially useful. But Nietzsche replies that historically, it was the elites—the aristocracy—that coined the term “good,” and applied it to themselves. “Good” meant noble, as opposed to base, vulgar, or common. It certainly did not mean—here’s another swipe at the utilitarians—social usefulness or utility. And “bad” was used for the lower classes. P. 280 another swipe: “good” didn’t mean “not egoistic” or “altruistic.”

• §3: Probes further. Equating “good” with “altruistic” and hence useful is absurd. If it originally meant that, why would we have forgotten that fact? At least more tenable is the theory of Herbert Spencer, that that which is good is what has proved itself useful from time immemorial.

• §4: Nietzsche now uses his training in philology. He claims that when you look at the origins in every major language of the word “good,” it descends from “noble” and “aristocratic,” “bad” from “base,” “common,” or “vulgar.” He gives an example from German.

• §5: More philosophical analysis to prove the same point.

• §6: Nietzsche takes up the special case when the upper class is a priestly class. The “good” derives from “pure” (avoidance of certain food, skin disease, blood, and sleeping with “dirty women”), “bad” from “impure.” This became psychologically unhealthy. (pp. 282-3.

• §7: Nietzsche elaborates: the priestly values branched off from the warrior/aristocratic ones and mutated into their opposites, especially as these two classes struggle for dominance. Warrior aristocratic value is based in physical strength, beauty, and health. The priestly value is based in weakness, powerlessness. Out of that weakness comes hate—“The truly great haters in the history of the world have always been priests.”

P. 283 bottom to top of p. 284: Nietzsche takes up the specific priestly turn in the West, which he attributes to the crucial role of the Jewish people.

• §8: Nietzsche elaborates further: the Jews originated a new set of values, a re-evaluation of values, and Jesus built the new values into the new religion, precisely by being taken by the Jews as their enemy. In Nietzsche’s view, this was almost some kind of clever conspiracy (p. 284). The result was the rise of Christianity (p. 285).

• §9: Nietzsche imagine a person saying bluntly: “why are you pining away for the ideals of the old nobility (think—pre-Christian Greek conquerors). The slaves, the mob, the herd as you call them won. If this happened through the Jewish people, great, so the values of the common man won out!” Nietzsche certainly despises this thought: he calls it toxifying, poisoning, and mobifying.

• §10: Nietzsche names this phenomenon (i.e., the revaluation of warrior aristocratic values into weak slave ones) the slave revolt in morality. Slave morality is characterized by “ressentiment”—the resentful envy of the impotent slave, the low class weakling who cannot take direct revenge for injuries, but must have recourse to imagining revenge. Noble morality grows out of a strong, healthy egoism; but slave morality grows out of an envious, sick, low, cowardly and impotent reaction to the strength of nobility. He dilates on this at great length e.g., p. 286. We come to the end of this section to the distinction between “bad” and “evil”. The noble man only has enemies among the nobility, and he respects them even hors them. Only the resentful losers—the slaves—hate their enemies, because they are too weak to fight, so they view those enemies as evil.

• §11: Nietzsche elaborates on the difference between “bad” and “evil”. The noble morality views true enemies as being worthy opponents, they are “bad.” The slave morality views opponents as oppressors—they are “evil.” So it is that the slave comes to view as evil the strong—the noble—the powerful—the distinguished. And the strong nobility—we get that superman flavor here—has within it fearsome ferocity. P. 288.

• §12: Nietzsche intensifies his criticism of modern European Judeo-Christian culture—it literally stinks, stinks of complacency, mediocrity, apathy, and weakness.

• §13: More calls for a return to the ethics of nobility, good vs bad, and more condemnation of slave morality, the ethics of good and evil. P. 290 has his famous description of eagles and lambs.

• §14: He imagines a person daring enough to look at Judeo-Christian culture clearly. Again, the image is of the smell of decay. The people—the masses—view weakness as merit; powerlessness as virtue, with talk about “loving your enemies;” misery taken to be a sign of God’s favor; the desire to hurt the stronger turned into hope for God to come to Earth and bring [perfect justice with him. Slave morality is in charge, and the result is cultural poverty.

III. Critical remarks on Nietzsche

• I confess that I don’t share the wild admiration for Nietzsche that many of my colleagues have. In particular, many of his central claims I find—if I may parody him here—beyond true or false, into the realm of the incoherent or daffy.

1. Consider his claim—or what seems to be his claim—that cultural achievement always comes from aristocratic, not democratic, society. Now, that claim was a dicey claim to make in the 19th century, because Athens in its heyday was the most democratic state known in the Ancient world, and most of the countries in Nietzsche’s time were democratic, although aristocracies had considerable power.

2. But that claim is clearly daffy in the 20th century. What cultural achievements came of Hitler’s Germany, Stalin’s Russia, Mao’s China, Pol Pot’s Cambodia, Fidel’s Cuba or Mussolini’s Italy? Precious little. In Stalinist Russia, only the dissidents wrote great literature.

3. What have modern democracies created? A hell of a lot—indeed, virtually all, great science, useful technology, fine literature, great art, memorable movies, and so on. Yes, a lot of dreck, too—but much good stuff.

• Nietzsche floats a view that a lot of existentialist philosophers loved: the strong, authentic person makes or chooses his own values. But how does that work? Choose = choose something on the basis of preexisting values. How can you choose your values de novo? I find that incoherent.

• When I teach intro logic or critical thinking, one of the things I teach are fallacies, or common mistakes in reasoning. One is the genetic fallacy, which is the view that you can prove something is false by showing that its origins are flawed or bad. E.g., it would be silly to oppose the building of a new freeway, say, to relieve congestion on the 57, by arguing that freeways are evil because they originated in Nazi Germany. Ideas are different from the groups or individuals who originate them (genesis = origin): evil people can occasionally have good ideas, and good people often have bad ideas, so to figure out whether an idea is good or correct, you have to evaluate it, not the people who originated it.

• Well, it seems to me Nietzsche commits this fallacy big-time when he disparages Judeo-Christian ethics (and more generally any ethics based upon compassion) as being “slave morality.” Let’s say that Christianity and Judaism before it was first a religion of slaves (a very dicey historical claim). Still, so what? The ethical principles may still be quite correct.

• Nietzsche claims that low-grade plebeians produce only stupid, slavish, uncreative low-grade plebeians. But that seems false to me—you see all the time children of immigrants and poor and middle-class folk do great things all the time—start major enterprises, become writers, artists, poets, scientists, inventors, great sports heroes. E.g., immigrant Andy Grove and Intel.

IV. Portrayals of Nietzschean Egoism in film

• This is the final part of class notes 9: egoism in film.

• Great public controversy regarding the sort of person Nietzsche meant as “Superman” (“over-man”).

• One take: Compulsion (1959).

• Precise.

• A more accurate portrayal is The Moon and Sixpence (1942).

• Precise.

• Complex conclusion: Strickland not a psychopath, just totally focused on his art. And he is a genuine genius. But the impartial spectator (speaking for the author, pretty clearly) judges him negatively:

Such was Strickland. He trod roughshod over his obligation as husband and father, over the rights and sensibilities of those who befriended him.

Neither the skill of his brush nor the beauty of his canvas could hide the ugliness of his life, an ugliness that finally destroyed him.

................
................

In order to avoid copyright disputes, this page is only a partial summary.

Google Online Preview   Download