Transcript Nietzsche 2006-07

Nietzsche’s Genealogy as
Enlightenment
Lecture Two
Dr. Peter Kail
St. Peter’s College, Oxford
The Preface of the Genealogy
• Two questions
• ‘Under what conditions did man invent those value
judgments good and evil’
• ‘And what value do [those judgments] themselves
have? Have the inhibited or furthered human
flourishing until now?’ (GM Preface 3)
The Preface of the Genealogy
• Nietzsche offers brief autobiographical remarks about
his thoughts concerning the ‘origins of moral
prejudices’(GM 2-3)
• Earlier non-natural accounts see morality as
something ‘behind the word’
• Nietzsche’s own Human, All too Human
• A question about the ‘invention’ of ‘good and evil’
‘Morality’
• A question: What is the ‘morality’ that Nietzsche
supposedly explains?
• Note Nietzsche recognizes different kinds of morality
• Both historically and culturally
‘Morality’ II
• ‘Morality itself…was thought to be
“given”…[but moralists] poorly informed
about peoples, ages and histories completely
missed out on the genuine problems…that
emerge from a comparison of many different
moralities’ (BGE 186)
‘Morality’ III
• Morality in a narrow and wider sense
• Wide sense - any recognizable pattern of the
evaluation of kinds of human being,
characters, actions etc. Nietzsche recognizes
many moralities in this sense
• Narrow sense is the morality of ‘good and
evil’ (Gut and Böse)
‘Morality’ IV
• ‘Christian morality’ and Nietzsche’s atheist
forebears
• Two categories of distinction
• A characteristic view of human agency
• A certain core of ascetic values
Morality and Agency
• ‘Libertarian’ freewill. Human beings capable of
undetermined and spontaneous choice.
• Morality is centrally concerned with
responsibility connected with choice and
motive for which the notions of punishment
and reward are appropriate.
• Human motives as sufficiently transparent to
merit reward and punishment
Morality and Values
• A set of values centered on ‘selflessness’ or asceticism
• Three Great Words: Poverty, Humility and Chastity
(GM III 8)
• Generic: involves negative valuation of:
• Material goods (charity, frugality, generosity)
• Pride and self-interest (altruism, self-sacrifice,
modesty)
• Bodily gratification (Fasting, sobriety, rejection of
gluttony, anti-sexual desire)
• Interlock to form an ideal that structures modern
Western life
Genealogy and Method
• At a general level of abstraction, Nietzsche offers
conjectural explanations of the emergence of morality
by appeal to a generic psychology placed in a
particular environment
• The ‘English psychologists as naturalists
• Not ‘cold tedious frogs’ but ‘explorers and
microscopists of the soul… brave, magnanimous and
proud animals’ (GM I 1)
Genealogy and Method II
• The ‘English’ account of the origins of morality
(Preface 4)
• English?? Paul Rée and the History of Moral
Sensations, and Nietzsche’s own Human All Too
Human
• English as a style of genealogy that exhibits certain
kinds of fault. They are “are no good” (GM, II, 4),
“don’t amount to much” (GS, 345), and are “back-tofront and perverse” (GM, Preface, 4) but still a search
for origins
Foucault
• Foucault claimed genealogy “opposes itself to the search
for ‘origins”’ (2001: 342).
• But Herkunft as “pedigree” or “provenance”, “stock”
opposed to Entstehung as ‘emergence’
• Nietzsche clearly not tracing a pedigree but is
nevertheless explicitly asking questions about ‘origins’
in the second sense
English Genealogies
• Insufficiently historical (e.g. Preface 4)
• Insufficient suspicious (GS 354)
• They mistakenly think that the present
function of some moral phenomenon is what
explains its origin (GM II 12)
‘Real History’
• The ‘colour’ of genealogy
• The ‘grey’ of what ‘can be documented, which
can be actually confirmed and has actually
existed” (GM, Preface, 6) opposed to the ‘staring
into the blue’ of English speculation
• Foucault ‘grey, meticulous, and patiently
documentary’ (2001: 341)
‘Real History’ II
• However, Nietzsche’s GM is far from being
grey!
• It is historically informed by its contrasts but
its largely psychological and explanatory
• NB many genuine British psychologists not as
historically naïve as is suggested here
Suspicion
• English genealogies take the moralities they
seek to explain to be correct and this distorts
and biases their accounts
• They ‘unsuspectingly stand under the command of
a particular morality, and without knowing it,
serve as its shield-bearers and followers…’ (GS,
345)
Origin and Purpose
• Nietzsche distinguishes between the
Sinn(meaning) and Brauch (practice) of human
behaviours
• Brauch is the behavioural practice Sinn the
interpretation of the function it serves.
• Practices are subject to different and changeable
senses (e.g. punishment as rehabilitation)
• Present Sinn need not be explanatory of the
practice
First Treatise ‘Good and Evil’,
‘Good and Bad’
• Two Contrasts
• ‘Gut and Schlecht’ = Good and bad; noble,
privileged versus base, low or common
• ‘Gut and Böse’ = Good and evil; selfless,
caring, versus selfish, ill intentions, linked with
freedom
• The second evaluative orientation emerges as
a reaction against the first.
‘Masters and Slave’
• Described as the emergence of ‘Slave’ morality from
‘Master’ morality but various senses (BGE 260)
• Historical: Homeric heroes, roman generals, Samurai
knights, as opposed to mass of poor
• Traits: Well-born; healthy; powerful; confident;
independent; opposed to ill; sickly; deformed; low
born;
• Psychological; ‘masters’ and ‘slaves’ as expressive of
drives
• Moralities
Master Morality
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•
•
•
•
•
Gut and evaluation
Gut understood in terms of the traits of the masters -nobility,
aristocratic, power, control, wealth, health, and independence
No reliant on comparison with the majority
Schlecht as the contrast - unhealthy, weak, impotent - a negation
of the good = the slave
Notice this view of values depends not on intention or desert
(luck, or being ‘well-born’)
Evidence for this - etymological and historical
Slave Morality
• Gut and böse = good and evil
• A negation of aristocratic values and a positive
interpretation of slave’s character traits
• ‘Weakness is being lied into something meritorious’
• Patience, altruism, love of fellow man, anxious
lowliness as ‘humility’, inability to revenge
forgiveness, love of one’s enemies - common theme
here is incapacity to act as masters
• Similar practices given a new meaning
• Böse unlike schlecht is linked to intention and the
capacity to have done otherwise (GM I 13)
Ressentiment & Nietzsche’s
Explanation
• The postulation of a pre-moral psychological
stance
• Slave-types suffer ressentiment. An unpleasant
reactive attitude occasioned by incapacity to
surmount obstacles to command of environment
• Its object - the masters
• Ressentiment and ‘imaginary revenge’ - a strategy
for coping with deep discomfort
• The reinterpretation of ‘order of rank’
Imaginary Revenge
• The imaginary revenge - a strategy of
coping with ressentiment
• The evaluative downgrading of the
object of ressentiment as psychological
relieving
• A reinterpretation or sublimation of
ressentiment as a moral response
Functions of Genealogy
• ‘There are absolutely no moral
phenomena - only a moral interpretation
of the phenomena’ (BGE 108)
• Moral ‘intuitions’ reflect only our
present concepts, rather than reflecting
timeless moral facts
Functions of Genealogy
• But the ‘shameful origins’ explanatory account
does not by itself show morality to be rejected
• No genetic fallacy (BGE 2)
• But not justified by its origins (we are not
detectors of morality that is ‘there anyway’)
• Exposes such concepts as contingent and brings
‘a feeling of diminution in value of the thing that
originated thus and prepares the way for critical
mood and attitude toward it’ (WP 254)