[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.
First, I'm going to start off with a thought experiment. Remember that we see a red apple as red because of the physical constitution of both the apple and our visual system. So red in a sense exists only in light of the fact that there are perceivers with the right sort of perceptual apparatus. Suppose then that you discover a new way to exercise your color receptors and make them sensitive to light frequencies outside the normal range of human vision. And suppose no other organism was suitably equipped to see bee purple (say). So you start your daily regimen of eye-robic exercise (sorry about that). And lo!, after six weeks, you are able to see bee purple. I want to say that in something close to Nietzsche's sense, you've "invented" bee purple, viz., by becoming the kind of organism capable of seeing it.
To see how how well this modified color vision analogy might fit Nietzschean value creation, I'll now lay out what I see as Nietzsche's Four-Step Program for "creating values." I've included some supporting textual material underneath each step (I'll probably update with other supporting and countervailing material, just to have a place to organize it all [and of course suggestions are welcome]):
1. Explore and inhabit different evaluative "perspectives."
- "There is only a perspectival seeing, only a perspectival ‘knowing’; and the more affects we allow to speak about a matter, the more eyes, different eyes, we know how to bring to bear on one and the same matter, that much more complete will our ‘concept’ of this matter, our ‘objectivity’ be." (GM III:12)
- "Nothing in existence should be excluded, nothing is dispensable—the aspects of existence condemned by Christians and other nihilists rank infinitely higher in the order of values than anything the instinct of decadence is able to approve, to call good." (EH BT:2)
- "[T]here are a hundred ways to listen to your conscience." (GS 335)
- “As adventurers and circumnavigators of that inner world called ‘man,’ as surveyors and gaugers of that ‘higher’ and ‘one upon the other’ that is likewise called ‘man’—penetrating everywhere, almost without fear, disdaining nothing, losing nothing, asking everything, cleansing everything of what is chance and accident in it and as it were thoroughly sifting it—until at last we had the right to say, we free spirits: ‘Here—a new problem! Here a long ladder upon whose rungs we ourselves have sat and climbed—which we ourselves have at some time been! Here a higher, a deeper, a beneath-us, a long ordering, an order of rank which we see: here—our problem!” (HH I Preface 7)
2. Evaluate those perspectives with determined independence, according to their "usefulness for life."
- One must develop "the capacity to have one’s pro and contra in one’s power, and to shift them in and out: so that one knows how to make precisely the difference in perspectives and affective interpretations useful for knowledge." (GM III:12)
- We must "resist[] accustomed value feelings [Werthgefühlen] in a dangerous way; and a philosophy that risks this would be that token alone place itself beyond good and evil.” (BGE 4)
- "Let us...limit ourselves to the purification of our opinions and value judgements and to the creation of tables of what is good that are new and all our own." (GS 335)
- "As for the question whether these fruits of ours taste good to you, what does that matter to the trees! What concern is that of ours, we philosophers!" (GM Prologue II)
- See also HH I Preface 7, under Step 1 above.
3. Incorporate the most valuable perspectives into one's way of life—"embody" new values.
- "'What I went through, he [the free spirit] tells himself, [sic] must be gone through by everyone in whom there is a task that wants to be embodied [eine Aufgabe leibhaft werden] and to come into the world.' The secret power and necessity of this task will rule among and in his particular destinies like an unconscious pregnancy—long before he himself has glimpsed this task and knows its name." (HH I P7 - internal punctuation omitted)
4. "Create" or "give birth" to new values, "present" these values to the world, viz., by becoming the kind of being capable of so valuing. [5]
- "We, however, want to become who we are—human beings who are new,
unique, incomparable, who give themselves laws, who create themselves! To that end we must become the best students and discoverers of everything lawful and necessary in the world." (GS 338) - "Change of values—that means, change of creators. Always he destroys, he who would be a creator.
"Peoples were the first creators, and only in later times individuals; verily, the individual himself is the latest creation." (Z I:15 -- H/T Rob Sica.) - Whatever has value in our world now does not have value in itself, according to its nature—nature is always value-less, but has been given value at some time, as a present—and it is we who gave and bestowed it. Only we have created the world that concerns human beings! (GS 301)
- “Begetting” and “giving birth” are the “two most valuable functions of man.” (BGE 206)
- “the ‘work’...invents the man who has created it, who is supposed to have created it....” (BGE 269)
- “Many a soul one will never discover, unless one first invent it.” (Z I:VIII - "The Tree on the Hill")
- "What [Goethe] aspired to was totality; he strove against the separation of reason, sensuality, feeling, will...; he disciplined himself to a whole, he created himself...." (TI "Expeditions" 49)
I think that this is a good start of an account, but (as I say) it's very sketchy, and leaves at large a number of tensions. For instance, it's not clear how on this account the higher man would “experienc[e] itself as determining values.” (BGE 260) I intend to address these and other tensions, and otherwise fill out this "transformationist" (I might call it) account of value creation, as I go along.
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NOTES
1. See “Honest Illusion: Valuing for Nietzsche’s Free Spirits,” in Leiter and Sinhababu (eds), Nietzsche and Morality, New York: Oxford University Press (2007).
2. "Is Nietzsche a Fictionalist?," Brian Leiter's Nietzsche Blog (visited December 8, 2008). Emphasis is Leiter's.
3. "Nietzsche and Moral Objectivity," in Leiter and Sinhababu (eds), Nietzsche and Morality, New York: Oxford University Press (2007).
4. And I use the word fully alive to its association with the pejorative 'sketchy'.
5. "Becoming who you are"?
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APPENDIX - Countervailing or Extending Passages (or "Stuff That Doesn't Seem to Fit")
- “What…are our experiences? Much more that which we put into them than that which they already contain! Or must we go so far as to say: in themselves they contain nothing? To experience is to invent?" (D 119)
