I believe it is basically irresponsible to offer interpretations of Nietzsche without using Thus Spoke Zarathustra as a starting point. In a later work, Ecce Homo, Nietzsche described his Zarathustra not just as his best work, but as the "greatest gift ever given to mankind". Leaving aside this unfortunate grandoise rhetoric, we nonetheless get a clear sense that any interpretation which does not take Zarathustra seriously is not going to capture what Nietzsche was trying to tell us.
The very first substantial section of Zarathustra is called "On the Three Metamorphoses of the Spirit". This text does not make an appearance in many "analytic" readings of Nietzsche (Brian Leiter's Guidebook to Nietzsche on Morality is silent on the significance of this passage, for example). Nor does it offer much help to a philosopher who is trying to make Nietzsche into a standard ethical theorist. In this passage, Nietzsche describes what he takes to be the best and highest life, and what is most interesting about this life is that it is a process. In contrast to ethical theorists who specify a list of goods which human beings are standardly called upon to honor and promote, Nietzsche suggests that what one ought to pursue or honour is radically dependent on where you are in this process, on how far you've progressed along a certain path.
While a strong majority may never even start this process, those who do begin by becoming a "weight-bearing spirit", a person Nietzsche describes as a camel. The camel wanders alone in the desert, seeking the most troublesome and difficult burdens. This spirit is laden with the guilt, shame, self-sacrifice and suffering of conventional morality. The camel suffers illness, a "hunger of the soul" for the knowledge it acquires about life and values, and many such spirits are crushed under the combined weight of these burdens.
Yet, once the spirit has endured this "illness", it may become a lion: lord of its domain, seeking its greatest enemy. This enemy (embodied in the dragon whose scales read "thou shalt") is morality, Good and Evil, the tablet of laws that a culture holds sacred. It is the lion's task to defeat the dragon of "thou shalt" by genuinely confronting the hypocrisy, contingency and even the malice contained in his culture's values. He sees them for what they are: creations, and in seeing them in this way he devalues them. He gives "the sacred NO" to these highest values.
The third stage is perhaps the most interesting: Nietzsche tells us that we have not lived the highest life until we pass from the stage of the lion to a kind of renewed childhood. The child, for Nietzsche, is a being that lives in total joyous authenticity, who can replace the lion's "sacred NO" with his own "sacred YES", his own affirmation of life. A child does not submit its will to the validation of external moral standards. The child can simply play without asking for some justification, some "thou shalt" that sanctions its own will, and this is the most extraordinary ability that any person can posess. It is the ability to say YES to life in the most pure and unadulterated fashion.
I want to suggest that quite a few major interpretive problems surrounding Nietzsche's work begin to evaporate when we think about what he is trying to do here. Scholar after scholar has wondered exactly what Nietzsche thinks a gerat person (or "higher type") ought to pursue, specifically. What ends are good, and why are they so?
Well, let's take "Three Metamorphoses" at face value. Can I, an ordinary person, live the truly good life by becoming authentically playful like the child? Should I stand up and attempt to destroy my culture's values as the lion does? Absolutely not. At no point does Nietzsche suggest that this road contains a "shortcut". One must first do as the camel does, and take extraordinary psychological burdens on one's back. These burdens involve the kind of penetrating honesty and devotion to truth that will make your life extremely difficult, but enduring the guilt, shame, loneliness, social alienation and "illness" of Nietzsche's camel is clearly a prerequisite for becoming a lion, just as the titanic task of the lion is a prerequisite for being reborn as a child.
This is something we don't see a lot of in moral philosophy: an ethic of process. It does not suggest a set of admirable ends, values, character traits or moral rules. Rather, any end, goal or purpose is sanctioned so long as it can survive the psychological process I've just described. If you emerge from the most brutally honest and scathing self-criticism, if you've sincerely and truthfully confronted your culture's highest values and subjectively devalued them, and if you've had the playful strength to replace those values with new ones forged in the depths of your newly authentic will, then anything goes.
Here's the thing, though: Nietzsche clearly believes that some ends, goals, or purposes cannot survive this process. The first and second stages in particular involve the kind of penetrating, destructive truthfulness that must destroy, for example, a person's belief in an afterworld, their hatred of the body and of bodily pleasure, or their pursuit of money for money's sake. The important thing to remember is that Nietzsche does not think that a good or higher life simply involves coming to accept certain"correct" values. Indeed, two people may value precisely the same thing, but how they come to value it makes all the difference in the world.
We can contrast this notion of process-relative value most easily with ethical consequentialism. Under consequentialism, if a person acts in ways that reliably produce the most good, they're living the moral life. It doesn't matter much how they come to hold their values, nor does it matter what their state of mind is when they act on those values (except insofar as those states have some bearing on their ability to produce good effects). For Nietzsche, on the other hand, you must come to values in the right way.
This idea is not so strange. Consider a an ex-soldier and a protesting pacifist, both of whom firmly believe in the value of peace. When asked about this, both will give a direct, unqualified answer: "yes I believe that peace is good", "yes we should promote peace". Yet, there is something more admirable about the soldier's evaluative belief, something that seems to give him a right to it. He has lived through war, through blood and fire and the death of friends, whereas the protester has perhaps only read news reports and books. It is not at all mysterious to think that the soldier's belief carries a certain authority that the protester's does not, even if both individuals are equally effecacious in promoting it.
When we take the first section of Thus Spoke Zarathustra seriously, we realize that a Nietzschean can't just have values, goals or ends, he or she must to earn them. We may dispute the importance or characterization of the process Nietzsche recommends, but this idea is surely a fascinating one. What would it mean for moral philosophy, or for a culture in general, to take seriously the idea that a person must earn the right to express and display their convictions?
The very first substantial section of Zarathustra is called "On the Three Metamorphoses of the Spirit". This text does not make an appearance in many "analytic" readings of Nietzsche (Brian Leiter's Guidebook to Nietzsche on Morality is silent on the significance of this passage, for example). Nor does it offer much help to a philosopher who is trying to make Nietzsche into a standard ethical theorist. In this passage, Nietzsche describes what he takes to be the best and highest life, and what is most interesting about this life is that it is a process. In contrast to ethical theorists who specify a list of goods which human beings are standardly called upon to honor and promote, Nietzsche suggests that what one ought to pursue or honour is radically dependent on where you are in this process, on how far you've progressed along a certain path.
While a strong majority may never even start this process, those who do begin by becoming a "weight-bearing spirit", a person Nietzsche describes as a camel. The camel wanders alone in the desert, seeking the most troublesome and difficult burdens. This spirit is laden with the guilt, shame, self-sacrifice and suffering of conventional morality. The camel suffers illness, a "hunger of the soul" for the knowledge it acquires about life and values, and many such spirits are crushed under the combined weight of these burdens.
Yet, once the spirit has endured this "illness", it may become a lion: lord of its domain, seeking its greatest enemy. This enemy (embodied in the dragon whose scales read "thou shalt") is morality, Good and Evil, the tablet of laws that a culture holds sacred. It is the lion's task to defeat the dragon of "thou shalt" by genuinely confronting the hypocrisy, contingency and even the malice contained in his culture's values. He sees them for what they are: creations, and in seeing them in this way he devalues them. He gives "the sacred NO" to these highest values.
The third stage is perhaps the most interesting: Nietzsche tells us that we have not lived the highest life until we pass from the stage of the lion to a kind of renewed childhood. The child, for Nietzsche, is a being that lives in total joyous authenticity, who can replace the lion's "sacred NO" with his own "sacred YES", his own affirmation of life. A child does not submit its will to the validation of external moral standards. The child can simply play without asking for some justification, some "thou shalt" that sanctions its own will, and this is the most extraordinary ability that any person can posess. It is the ability to say YES to life in the most pure and unadulterated fashion.
I want to suggest that quite a few major interpretive problems surrounding Nietzsche's work begin to evaporate when we think about what he is trying to do here. Scholar after scholar has wondered exactly what Nietzsche thinks a gerat person (or "higher type") ought to pursue, specifically. What ends are good, and why are they so?
Well, let's take "Three Metamorphoses" at face value. Can I, an ordinary person, live the truly good life by becoming authentically playful like the child? Should I stand up and attempt to destroy my culture's values as the lion does? Absolutely not. At no point does Nietzsche suggest that this road contains a "shortcut". One must first do as the camel does, and take extraordinary psychological burdens on one's back. These burdens involve the kind of penetrating honesty and devotion to truth that will make your life extremely difficult, but enduring the guilt, shame, loneliness, social alienation and "illness" of Nietzsche's camel is clearly a prerequisite for becoming a lion, just as the titanic task of the lion is a prerequisite for being reborn as a child.
This is something we don't see a lot of in moral philosophy: an ethic of process. It does not suggest a set of admirable ends, values, character traits or moral rules. Rather, any end, goal or purpose is sanctioned so long as it can survive the psychological process I've just described. If you emerge from the most brutally honest and scathing self-criticism, if you've sincerely and truthfully confronted your culture's highest values and subjectively devalued them, and if you've had the playful strength to replace those values with new ones forged in the depths of your newly authentic will, then anything goes.
Here's the thing, though: Nietzsche clearly believes that some ends, goals, or purposes cannot survive this process. The first and second stages in particular involve the kind of penetrating, destructive truthfulness that must destroy, for example, a person's belief in an afterworld, their hatred of the body and of bodily pleasure, or their pursuit of money for money's sake. The important thing to remember is that Nietzsche does not think that a good or higher life simply involves coming to accept certain"correct" values. Indeed, two people may value precisely the same thing, but how they come to value it makes all the difference in the world.
We can contrast this notion of process-relative value most easily with ethical consequentialism. Under consequentialism, if a person acts in ways that reliably produce the most good, they're living the moral life. It doesn't matter much how they come to hold their values, nor does it matter what their state of mind is when they act on those values (except insofar as those states have some bearing on their ability to produce good effects). For Nietzsche, on the other hand, you must come to values in the right way.
This idea is not so strange. Consider a an ex-soldier and a protesting pacifist, both of whom firmly believe in the value of peace. When asked about this, both will give a direct, unqualified answer: "yes I believe that peace is good", "yes we should promote peace". Yet, there is something more admirable about the soldier's evaluative belief, something that seems to give him a right to it. He has lived through war, through blood and fire and the death of friends, whereas the protester has perhaps only read news reports and books. It is not at all mysterious to think that the soldier's belief carries a certain authority that the protester's does not, even if both individuals are equally effecacious in promoting it.
When we take the first section of Thus Spoke Zarathustra seriously, we realize that a Nietzschean can't just have values, goals or ends, he or she must to earn them. We may dispute the importance or characterization of the process Nietzsche recommends, but this idea is surely a fascinating one. What would it mean for moral philosophy, or for a culture in general, to take seriously the idea that a person must earn the right to express and display their convictions?
2 comments:
GAMMABLIXT
Develop this into a conference submission and ground your critique in a specific scholar. This would be a very strong presentation.
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