Strange Doctrines

Nietzsche on Power, Punishment and Mercy

As its power increases, a community ceases to take the individual's transgressions so seriously, because they can no longer be considered as dangerous and destructive to the whole as they were formerly: the malefactor is no longer "set beyond the pale of peace" and thrust out; universal anger may not be vented upon him as unrestrainedly as before--on the contrary, the whole from now on carefully defends the malefactor against his anger, especially that of those he has directly harmed, and takes him under its protection. A compromise with the anger of those directly injured by the criminal...; attempts to discover equivalents and to settle the whole matter (compositio); above all, the increasingly definite will to treat every crime as in some sense dischargeable, and thus at least to a certain extent to isolate the criminal and his deed from one another--these traits become more and more clearly visible as the penal law evolves. As the power and self-confidence of a community increase, the penal law always becomes more moderate; every weakening or imperiling of the former brings with it a restoration of the harsher forms of the latter. The "creditor" always becomes more humane to the extent that he has grown richer; finally, how much injury he can endure without suffering from it becomes the actual measure of his wealth. It is not unthinkable that a society might attain such a consciousness of power that it could allow itself the noblest luxury possible to it--letting those who harm it go unpunished....

The justice which began with, "everything is dischargeable, everything must be discharged," ends by winking and letting those incapable of discharging their debt go free: it ends, as does everything good thing on earth, by overcoming itself. This self-overcoming of justice: one knows the beautiful name it has given itself--mercy; it goes without saying that mercy remains the privilege of the most powerful man, or better, his--beyond the law.

Genealogy of Morals, Second Essay, sec. 10.

Consolation of the Imperilled

The Greeks, in a way of life in which great perils and upheavals were always present, sought in knowledge and reflection a kind of security and ultimate refugium. We, in an incomparably more secure condition, have transferred this perilousness into knowledge and reflection, and we recover from it, and calm ourselves down, with our way of life.

Nietzsche, Daybreak 154.

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 would probably bring on some kind of 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, then 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 you 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. Look: if it's 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.

If That's an Answer, What Was the Question?

From the moral idiots at Answers in Genesis:

I can't think of a starker proof of Nietzsche's dictum: "The Christian resolve to find the world evil and ugly has made the world evil and ugly."

(Via Will Wilkinson, via Andrew Sullivan.)

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:

Philosophy Isn't Pretty

From Thomas Hurka, "Nietzsche: Perfectionist," in Leiter-Sinhababu's Nietzsche and Morality (at 19):

I would have thought that if Nietzsche uses [the German] Exemplar to refer to ordinary blades of grass he is not using it to refer only to Kantian creative geniuses, but perhaps [James] Conant thinks that in interpreting Nietzsche's use of a word it is less important to look at Nietzsche's own repeated use of that word a half-page earlier than at its use by another philosopher in another book published eighty years before.

And from the associated footnote:

Conant has the good taste to associate antiegalitarian interpreters of Nietzsche with Hitler. His own interpretation reduces Nietzsche to a writer of banal self-help books, a kind of Deepak Chopra of the nineteenth century.

Enough that it is a single taste!

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.
______________

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'.

ÜberTube

Spindlework has a nice channel on the YouTubes. Among the clips there you'll find lectures by Robert Solomon on Nietzsche, Sartre, Heidegger, Camus, Husserl and Kierkegaard. Pretty cool.