Value and Error in Nietzsche (Part I)

It is natural enough to read Nietzsche's serial declarations that nothing can have "value in itself" [1] as a denial of intrinsic value in particular rather than a denial of value simpliciter. [2] Similarly, Nietzsche’s deprecation of “morality” or “moral value” can fairly be restricted to “decadent” morality, or what Brian Leiter calls “Morality in the Pejorative Sense” (“MPS”).

Nadeem Hussain argues in his essay “Honest Illusion: Valuing for Nietzsche’s Free Spirits,” [3] though, that Nietzsche’s criticisms of value cannot generally be so restricted—that we should ascribe to him an error theory about all evaluative judgments.

Hussain spells out how Nietzsche “raises problems for evaluation in general,” as follows:

[Nietzsche] says that ‘all evaluations are premature and are bound to be’ (HH I:32). ‘The falsity of human [evaluative] judgments,’ says Nietzsche, occurs with ‘absolute necessity’ (HH I:32). This is because they involve a ‘necessary injustice’ (HH I:P:6). He says, ‘You shall learn to grasp the necessary injustice in every For and Against’ (HH I:P:6): ‘You shall learn to grasp the sense of perspective in every value judgement—the displacement, distortion and merely apparent teleology of horizons…the quantum of stupidity that resides in antitheses of values and the whole intellectual loss which every For and Against costs us’ (HH I:P:6). (162)

From this assembled textual evidence Hussain draws two conclusions. First, for Nietzsche, “[a]ll evaluative judgments involve some kind of mistake necessarily.” Second, “subjective realism about non-moral evaluations would have trouble with such passages.” (162) [4]

Those conclusions in turn, Hussain contends, “force us to reinterpret [passages] that suggest[] subjective realism in the first place,” viz., those in which the apparent qualifier “in itself” appears. (162) Hussain thinks Nietzsche deploys the phrase to bring out the fact that “our evaluations of things [per se] involve judgments that things are valuable in themselves.” (162)

At the threshold I just want to point out what I think is the remarkable omission from this analysis of any attention to Nietzsche’s most conspicuously "realist" rhetoric. Consider the following passage from Daybreak:

[I]t goes without saying that I do not deny—unless I am a fool—that many actions called immoral ought to be avoided and resisted, or that many called moral ought to be done and encouraged—but I think the one should be done and encouraged for other reasons than hitherto. (D 103)

This passage, like many others, [5] at least very clearly seems to signal a commitment to rational justification in respect of our evaluative judgments. Perhaps this is only an apparent and not a real commitment, and can be interpreted away. In which case we would expect at least a summary discussion of why such a commitment is only apparent. What we wouldn't expect is that passages with such a strikingly value-realist character would simply be ignored on the way to assessing whether Nietzsche believes evaluative claims are false tout court. [6]

In any case, I will now focus on whether Hussain’s argument goes through based only on the evidence he has marshaled. [7] I will argue that it does not.

The problem starts with Hussain’s framing of HH I:32, which unfortunately puts the emphasis on the wrong syl-LA-ble. Nietzsche starts the section off by claiming that “[a]ll judgements as to the value of life have evolved illogically and are therefore unjust” (my emphasis). It is in light of this illogical evolution that we incline to view our judgments as complete, when in fact they are systematically incomplete and “premature.” (Could it have been otherwise had the evolution proceeded “logically”? Nietzsche doesn’t say.) Nonetheless, judge we must--which means, Nietzsche believes, that we have to treat our evaluations as effectively complete. In this way all our judgments trade on “false knowledge…with absolute necessity.” So, Nietzsche concludes, “from the very beginning [we are] illogical and thus unjust....” (My emphasis.)

Now, there really is precious little in this line of argument to support an attribution of an error theory to Nietzsche. At its strongest, Nietzsche’s claim here is that evaluative judgments are “false,” or trade on “false knowledge,” to the extent that they purport to be based on complete knowledge. Granting that this “false knowledge” amounts to some kind of error, it is simply not the kind of complete, exhaustive error required by an error theory [UPDATE: I address this issue further in Part III]; Nietzsche is saying that our evaluative judgments are false for casting themselves as complete, not that they are completely false.

Consider an analogy to market transactions. You (a wholesaler) and I (a retailer) are negotiating a price on Weißwurst. (You really should try some.) If each of us knew what price would clear the market I service, we would (given certain other assumptions) independently arrive at the same price for our exchange. But of course our knowledge about demand for my Weißwurst is necessarily, systematically incomplete (if it weren’t, there’d be no reason to negotiate). Thus, the price we agree on will inevitably be (one might say) “false” and “unjust,” in the sense that it will be based on either an over- or underestimate of the average price the Weißwurst will actually fetch at market.

Does any of this mean that there wasn’t a fact of the matter as to what price (or schedule of prices) would clear the market? Would it show we ought to be antirealist (as it were) about the prospective market value of Weißwurst? No. It merely shows that our negotiated wholesale price represented a compromise based on our respective “foreground estimates” and “provisional perspectives” (cf. BGE 2) regarding the market value of Weißwurst; the “truth” of that value could only be gauged later, when the last Weißwurst had been sold and the total revenue tallied.

Thus, while it is true that our evaluative judgment in such cases "involve[s] some kind of mistake necessarily," it would be a far bigger mistake to suppose that our evaluative judgment necessarily involves no kind of evaluative fact.

(Click here for Part II.)
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NOTES

1.See GS 299, 301 and D I.38.

2. Consider by way of analogy that nothing has gravitation “in itself” either. Gravitation exists only as a relation between massive objects (or between a massive object and spacetime). Nonetheless, it's obvious that denying "intrinsic gravitation" in no way entails denying realism about gravity.

3. In Nietzsche and Morality, ed. Leiter & Sinhababu (Oxford: 2007).

4. Hussain defines subjective realism as any metaethical theory in which the truth or falsity of evaluative claims turn on “some essential reference to an agent’s [mental] states." (161) Subjective realism is related to, but I think distinct from, what I call "realist-relativism" (but might just as well have called "relative-realism") here. The issues are complex and confusing, but critical, so I do intend to devote a post to them in the near future.

5. See D 107, EH “BT” 2 and IV 6-8, GM Preface 6 and Prologue II.

6. The objection cannot merely be, as Hussain would have it, that an error-theoretical reading “may seem to be in tension with the fact that [Nietzsche] himself repeatedly makes evaluative judgments....” (163, n.16) In the case of D 103, at least, Nietzsche states not only that some evaluative statements are not to be denied, but (further) that they are not to be denied in light of certain reasons--which is a matter of more than mere accord (or discord) with some evaluative perspective or another.

7. Here I want to restrict myself to evidence drawn from Nietzsche’s published writings, so I set aside or now Hussain’s prior citation of WP 25, in which Nietzsche admits he “ha[s] hitherto been a thorough-going nihilist.” On the other hand, I find Hussain’s related citation (at 162, f. 12) of HH I:33 off-point, since on its face the passage contemplates the “ultimate goallessness of man” only “as a whole” (my emphasis).