Value and Error in Nietzsche (Part II)

(Continued from Part I)

Hussain's subsequent reliance on HH I:P:6 is curiously self-defeating. Here (again) is the relevant passage from Hussain's paper:

[Nietzsche] 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)

All true. But now look what Nietzsche goes on to say immediately thereafter (my emphasis in bold to distinguish from Nietzsche's italics):

You shall above all see with your own eyes where injustice is always at its greatest: where life has developed at its smallest...and yet cannot avoid taking itself as the goal and measure of things and for the sake of its own preservation secretly and meanly and ceaselessly crumbling away and calling into question the higher, greater, richer...."

In other words, while all evaluative judgments entail injustice, some evaluative judgments are more unjust than others. In particular, the worst injustices are those committed by "smaller" valuers who cannot see the "meanness" in their own evaluative derogation of the "higher, greater, richer." So far from lending any sort of support to the error-theoretic interpretation, then, Nietzsche's rhetoric here displays if anything an arguably realist cast, both in its appeal to the very concept of justice [1] and in its explicitly assigning different ranks to different sorts of injustice. In sum, Hussain's reliance on HH I:P:6 is simply inapt. Thus, Hussain's first conclusion--that "[a]ll evaluative judgments involve some kind of mistake necessarily"--though true in a sense, is not true in the sense that would suggest Nietzsche subscribed to an error theory about value.

On then (briefly) to Hussain's second conclusion--that "subjective realism...would have trouble with such passages." On a subjective realist metaethics as Hussain defines it, evaluative claims of the form 'x is valuable' are true in virtue of the fact that x stands in some relation to a particular agent (or type of agent), usually in terms of "some essential reference to [that] agent's states." (161)

As far as I can see, all of the textual material Hussain has gathered is consistent with subjective realism on this definition. The "falsity" that according to these passages infects our evaluative judgment concerns the completeness, stability and (therefore) justice we erroneously impute to it. Clearly, Nietzsche does think we have only woeful, ineliminably incomplete epistemic access to whatever in the world, or in us, could properly answer to the name "value." But that is not quite to deny value as we would deny alchemy. [2] As with the prospective market value of economic goods [3], we might accept Nietzsche's argument here about imperfect information and still think there is a fact of the matter about what values are good-for an agent. And if those values are cashed out only as "fantastic commentary on an unknown, perhaps unknowable, but felt text," [4] it seems fair withal to suppose Nietzsche aims to get at what the writing means.

In my next post I will briefly return to the equivocation lurking here about just what kind of "error" is contemplated by error theory.

(Click here for Part III.)
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NOTES

1. A point of course that also applies to Hussain's earlier appeal to HH I:32, discussed in Part I.

2. Cf. D 103.

3. See Part I.

4. D 119.