Strange Doctrines

Perspectives on Perspectivism

Mike solicits other views on the similarities (if any) between Nietzsche's perspectivism and the "perspectivism" of Kierkegaard and Dostoevsky. Go lend him your many eyes.

Piety in the Sky

There are many interesting questions concerning the influence of religion on Nietzsche's thought. Whether Nietzsche was "pious" in any useful sense, it seems to me, isn't one.

(Via Arts & Letters Daily.)

Life of the Party

Brian Leiter's post on "party line continentalists" is very good. The first third (which is given over to rebutting some uninteresting comments) can be safely skipped over; the post gets going at the first long block quotation.

You Are Not The Übermensch

Per Brian Leiter, Robert Hockett amusingly speculates that Ayn Rand's success is due to "the way in which she afforded a sort of vicarious self-flattery to narcissistic imbeciles."

True enough, but it also cuts against Brian's point that Ayn Rand has nothing significant in common with Nietzsche! How many self-consciously serious types are walking around with copies of Zarathustra in their hands believing that they just might be the Übermensch? Alas, if only they knew that the highest, Promethean greatness consists in inventing a new type of motor.

Oh, and read all of Brian's post.

Ad-Versity

"The poet presents his thoughts festively, on the carriage of rhythm: usually because they could not walk."
      -Nietzsche, Human, All-Too-Human, sec. 189

I used to think this passage was derogatory of poets, with the idea being that their thoughts were too feeble to withstand presentation in straightforward prose.

But as I read the passage again just now, it occurred to me that Nietzsche's idea might be the opposite: the poet's ideas are so profound that prose is too feeble a mode of presentation to express them.

I still prefer the first reading.

Nihilistic Wisdom

[T]he first perfect nihilist . . . has even now lived through the whole of nihilism, to the end, leaving it behind, outside himself.

I am frequently gripped by the cosmic unimportance of my life. Most people would assume this sort of preoccupation necessarily precipitates an existential crisis. But at least in my experience, no particular kind of attitude seems to follow. I might be foundering in anguished catatonia; or soaring in exhilarated engagement, bounding from wonder into wonder. In fact, sometimes the very knowledge of this profound insignificance itself seems oddly exhilarating. (I'm weird that way.) The point is, if nothing matters, the the fact that nothing matters doesn't matter. So you might as well seize the day.

This is why the standard reaction to nihilism - that nihilism would leave anyone without any reason to do anything - is so deeply misbegotten. Why would anyone need an external inducement to engage in satisfying, fulfilling activity? Once posed, the question can be seen immediately as absurd. It reminds me of the perverse notion (often attributed to Dostoevsky) that without God everything is permitted. If it is only the threat of eternal torment in the Lake of Fire that keeps you continent in your impulses to crude, thuggish violence and debauchery, your problem probably isn't so much the absence of divine punishment as it is an absence of a decent-sized prefrontal cortex. Much the same goes with the relationship between reasons and self-realizing activity - if you find yourself unable to get excited about doing cool stuff, reasons aren't going to help; what you need is therapy.

The best way to overcome nihilism is to accept it. And leave it behind, outside yourself.

UPDATE: Aaron Weingott dissents.

Brief Habits as Brave Ethics

Mike's blog Cliché Reality has been a nice way to reconnect with old, friendly passages in Nietzsche. I like this one.

Bernd Magnus Recap

Brian Leiter has a recap of the Bern Magnus Lecture by Maudemarie Clark, held last Saturday at UC Riverside. Clark herself also comments there.

Wish I had time to comment on all the interesting issues Clark raised, but, well, work and all that you know.

Sad Effects

Sam Munson says a dumb thing:

Given his fundamentally anti-philosophical positioning, and his hard, ironic voice, as well as his unorthodox political views, Cioran has come in for a great deal of comparison to Schopenhauer and Nietzsche, a latter-day representative of corrosive, fearless scepticism. It’s hard to dispute such claims, but they have the sad effect of dating Cioran. In philosophy, the sceptical nihilists have lost. This is to say nothing of that fact that his concern with artful writing by itself places him well outside the scope of our professional philosophers, or that right-thinkers consider Cioran anathema for the fascistic undercurrents in his thought (although this seems both intellectually useless and hypocritical in light of the large number of Stalinists who have managed to pass unhindered into the European canon).

Nietzsche, a dated, skeptical nihilist? An exemplar of garden variety "professional philosophy"? Who knew?

(Via Arts & Letters Daily.)

Lies, Placebos and Prayer: Bad Medicine as "Good" News

An NPR story on the medical effects of prayer has elicited an interesting colloquy among bloggers of the Reality Based Community. Michael O'Hare (from whose post you can link back to the others) makes what for me is the key point:

Prayer for diabetic shock may occasionally have effected a cure. But therapy directed physically at blood sugar levels is a much better bet, almost infinitely better, to the point that not dialing 911 for a comatose child is properly dealt with by the courts as involuntary manslaughter, especially after several hours of prayer not doing the job and the child getting worse.

There's an ocean of difference between a delicate, hard-to-observe, ephemeral effect that might lead to real scientific advance but will probably come to nothing, and treatments and practices that can be shown again and again to have big useful effects. It's cruel to describe the former in a news context so that it might be confused with the latter.

He also makes (in the same post) a nice point about the use and misuse of lies for life:

[P]lacebos of all types raise a perplexing issue for the health system that I have never seen examined. We can't just put them aside, because they do work sometimes, and sometimes when we have nothing else to offer. But they only work to the extent that we lie about them; a hospital that uses placebo treatment whenever it might help should have a sign over the door saying "placebo treatments are never used in this facility" and the health authorities must conspire never to uncover the scandal of this coverup.

But doing this as policy is an intermediate Russian doll; every context outside it has to maintain the same lie; one can easily imagine this leading to a tangled mess of unaccountable mendacity "for our own good" that ensnares an army, for example, to lie about Pat Tillman. If it's OK for us to believe wrong things to maintain certain medical efficacy, is it OK for us to believe wrong things to maintain military effectiveness?

I'd just note that the argument applies beyond the narrow context of social policy. While "[t]he falseness of a judgment is for us not necessarily an objection to a judgment," chances are still high that upon any invitation to believe a falsehood, we should want to decline, because any method you want to cook up for incorporating "healthy" fictions into our lives threatens to degenerate into incontinent, debilitating forms of dishonesty.

Looking Away

Some days I find it impossible to affirm life. And it makes me feel guilty.

Nihilism Isn't All It's Cracked Up To Be

In my critical discussion of Nadeem Hussain's fictionalist reading of Nietzsche's "value creation," I bracketed out Hussain's citation of WP 25, in which Nietzsche admits to having “hitherto [bisher] been a thorough-going nihilist.” I now briefly want to address this issue.

Five points:

Nietzsche and "Determining" Values (Or "Why I Am Not So Clever")

One potential problem I flagged for a transformationist reading (I called it, pending a better name) of Nietzschean value creation was Nietzsche's own contention that "[t]he noble type of man experiences itself as determining values...." (BGE 260) I read this remark [1] as suggesting that the noble type took nothing outside himself as being co-determinative.

Well, had I made the modest effort of recalling the five words that follow those quoted (not to mention just about any other sentence from the section), I would have realized there's no problem here: "[I]t [i.e., the noble type] does not need approval...." The point being that the noble type decides [2] on his own what is valuable, rather than aping received values. This is a recurring theme in Nietzsche's work, and obviously says nothing about whether he takes the objective world to constrain -- to play a part in "determining" -- values.

Thus am I vindicated by my own incompetence.
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NOTES
1.  And read it to myself, unfortunately: Had I made this gloss explicit, I'm sure my friend Rob Sica would have corrected me in short order.

2. BTW, 'decide' is also a suitable translation of 'bestimmen', the word Kaufmann translates as 'determine'. (The original passage: "Die vornehme Art Mensch fühlt sich als werthbestimmend....")

Nietzsche's Four-Step Program for "Creating Values"

[UPDATED: Last update 12.10.2008.]

Nadeem Hussain considers Nietzschean value creation to be a fictionalist enterprise: When we engage in evaluative practices, we take ourselves to be pretending that things really have value "in themselves," fully aware though that in reality nothing has value in itself. [1] For Brian Leiter, Nietzschean value creation is best construed as a form of subjective projectionism, in which though nothing has value in itself, "things do have ...whatever value we project upon them." [2] Maudemarie Clark and David Dudrick argue (pace Hussain and Leiter) that Nietzschean value creation is objective, but they locate the objectivity in certain second-order commitments that flow from norms implicit in the practice of judging rather than in the objects of evaluation themselves. [3]

I want to sketch [4] a rival (or perhaps a complement) to these accounts, one in which the products of value creation are objective roughly in the sense that so-called secondary properties are objective.

Notes on Finding as Invention as Discovery as Creation

I'd earlier flagged the obvious relation between the German finden (find) and erfinden (invent), and mused about a somewhat analogous relation between the English words 'find' and 'invent'.

Why Nietzsche's "In Itself" Does Not In Itself Indicate Antirealism

There are many objective properties φ such that the following statement is true:

(I)    Nothing is φ in itself.

Consider some examples:

Value and Error in Nietzsche (Part III): A note on error theory

(Continued from Part II)

If all that is required to count as an error theory about evaluative discourse is that atomic value sentences [1] systematically contain or are infected by some quantum of error, Nietzsche clearly is an error theorist about value.

But is that a useful construal of error theory? If so, then we might as well all be "error theorists" about scientific discourse. It is well known, for instance, that the two fundamental theories in physics--quantum mechanics and relativity--are mutually inconsistent. Moreover, it is the very discovery of error that drives the entire scientific project. No anomalies ==> no scientific "progress." So the practice of science itself presupposes and anticipates prospective anomalies. But of course any such anomaly once discovered will render a scientific theory "false" to at least some degree. Hence, our "error theory" would apply. Clearly, that's an error theory that disproves too much.

To see how this problem arises in Hussain's paper, we need to look at how he defines the term:

[A]n error theory is a conjunction of two claims, one semantic and the other substantive. The first claim is cognitivism. Moral claims are truth-apt.... Moral judgments are then taken to express beliefs. The second claim is that such moral claims, and thus the relevant beliefs, are systematically false. (160, n. 6)

As we've seen, to be "systematically false" is not necessarily to be false to a relevant degree. What's happening here is that Hussain fixes on the semantic and substantive dimensions of error theory with no eye to the ontological considerations that underlie the substantive claim. This exclusion in turn leads to a lessening of the degree of error that is otherwise logically required by any error theory in specie, namely, 100 percent.

A standard illustrative example for how ontology figures in grounding this logical requirement for complete rather than partial error is the case of phlogiston. Any proposition of the form 'phlogiston is phi' will be completely false. The reason it is completely false, and necessarily completely false, is that there is nothing in the world that satisfies the essential conceptual content of 'phlogiston'. That is, 'phlogiston' fails to refer to anything real. So there is no truth, not even partial truth, to be had about the actual properties of phlogiston (save to say that there are none). Thus, we are all "error theorists" about phlogiston talk.

The very same ontological considerations motivate error theories about moral or evaluative discourse, and so entail the same sort of logical requirement for 100 percent falsity. Thus, if value talk can contain even a quantum of correctness, error theory does not apply.

So again, if I'm right, Nietzsche is clearly not an error theorist about value. Though he does not propound any theory of value (and why this is so is a topic for an upcoming post), he at least seems to believe that some "orders of rank" really are superior to others, and that through various epistemological reforms we can more reliably come by ever better, ever more defensible revaluations. In short, he thinks that talk about value--or at least his talk about value--gets at something real in the world.

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NOTES

1. Appropriating Richard Joyce's terminology, I'll take "atomic value sentences" to be those that "imply or presuppose the instantiation of [an evaluative] property."  See Joyce's "Moral Anti-Realism", The Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy (Fall 2008 Edition), Edward N. Zalta (ed.), URL = <http://plato.stanford.edu/archives/fall2008/entries/moral-anti-realism/>.

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.

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.

Creating as Discovering II: "Inventing" v. "Creating" Values

If you've read Rob Sica's comment to my first post, you'll already know that the German verbs for 'find' [finden] and 'invent' [erfinden] have an immediately apparent etymological relation. Interestingly, the English word 'invent' has a conceptually similar (but noncognate) etymology, from the Latin invenīre, to "come upon," and so too a conceptual relation to "finding" or "discovering."

One way to understand Nietzsche's talk about "inventors [Erfinder] of new values," then, might be to say that such inventors are simply those new philosophers in the advance guard who independently "come upon" -- which is to say, discover -- those (theretofore undiscovered) values.

There are two clear problems with this reading, however. First, as already discussed, Nietzsche elsewhere also talks of "creating [schaffen] values" (e.g., BGE 211). The German verb schaffen, a cognate of the English 'shape' (OE scapan, pp of scieppan, meaning to 'create', 'form' or 'destine'), has none of this connotation of "discovery" as far as I know (though the connection with 'destine' is possibly suggestive).

Second, and more importantly, Nietzsche clearly wants to mark some kind of distinction between finden and erfinden. (See, e.g., sections 11 and 12 of BGE, which Rob cited.) A realist or otherwise normatively privileged reading (cf. Leiter) has to make sense of this distinction such that the relevant Erfindungen ("inventions") are more than merely arbitrary fictions or contrivances.