c.12 Ethical Readings

The most readily available realm to address Nietzsche’s challenge in “inter-human relations” is, of course, that of moral philosophy. It is not unusual to find remarks about the self-proclaimed immoralist and the author of Jenseits von Gut und Böse along the lines such as these: the fundamental defect in

Nietzsche’s thought is that it “fails to recognize the need for universal ethical principles by which to distinguish between good and evil”⁹⁴⁹. Early on, Nietzsche was said to stand for “the philosophy of heartlessness”, “the power exertion of the individual” and “the master rights of the genius”⁹⁵⁰.

This kind of atmosphere is probably a necessary condition for understanding what, for instance, A.

Campbell Garnet have to say: ”Nietzsche and Marx, Schweitzer and Gandhi, as well as Robespierre, were thoroughly conscientious men”⁹⁵¹. It also explains the way Martha C. Nussbaum pronounces her conclusion after examining “the most widely known” aspect of Nietzsche’s “critique of morality”: ”I hope to have shown that Nietzsche’s presentation of pity [...] is very much subtler and not that much tied to heartlessness and hardness than has so far been believed”⁹⁵².

Nietzsche’s considerations of morality, too, have, sometimes, been contextualized in his acquaintance with the ancients. In a recent book, Francis Snare discusses Nietzsche’s notion of ’noble morality’ by comparing its ideals with both those of the Homeric heros and, thereby, of the Greeks, and those of modern athletes. Snare remarks, in the passing, the subtlety and complexity, in Nietzsche’s descriptions of this type of morality and of its counterpart, ’slave morality’, before ending on the ambiguous character of “debunking” morality by relating its unfolding. Snare also claims that Nietzsche does assume a moral position himself, as he opposes, say, egalitarianism or antisemitism.⁹⁵³ In fact, it has been a common technique of criticizing Nietzsche to try and show how he, first, asserts the overcoming of morality as the primary goal and, then, fails to avoid promoting a morality of his own⁹⁵⁴.

Joel J. Kupperman, has attempted at an alternative analysis in his The Foundations of Morality (1983).

He identifies “two countenances” of morality, the one of “strict demands on oneself” and the other of

“outward-directed censoriousness”. Whereas the former can be seen as leading to guilt, the latter

engenders repression of the unconventional. Kupperman says that this latter “countenance” along with its complex problematic is Nietzsche’s home ground, since his “hostility to morality did not prevent him from having a vision of what kinds of life are worth leading and what kinds are contemptible”. For Kupperman, Nietzsche is not a “moral philosopher”, but an “ethical philosopher” who offers “an elaborate guide towards what he thinks would be a life of the highest quality”.⁹⁵⁵

Bernard Williams tries to capture “a distinctively Nietzschean route towards the naturalization of moral psychology”. He says it is about layers of explications that begin from “a supposed psychological phenomenon”, such as willing. In examining action, this phenomenon is “tied to morality” by “a certain conception of blame”. According to Williams, it is a “fit between the special psychological conception and the demands of morality” that “enables us to see that this piece of psychology is itself a moral conception”. He says that the things Nietzsche describes as ’ressentiment’ “certainly lead out of the

ethical altogether, into the categories of anger and power, and it cannot be a matter simply for philosophy to decide how much those categories will explain”.⁹⁵⁶

Yet, where Williams sees, cautiously, “some measure of agreement” or, ironically, a “happy and enduring consensus”⁹⁵⁷, Michael J. Matthis writes that ”while there may well be a tendency in Nietzsche to express himself in terms that have traditionally come to be associated with ethical naturalism, this terminology and the phases that contain it, should not be confused with the conceptual basis of thinking about ethics and values”. More precisely, Matthis’s Nietzsche “is not naturalizing value by identifying it with

becoming and the will to power, but is in fact showing how value is distinct from fact, as the active is from the passive, as the creative from that which merely is.” Based on this conviction, he feels himself free to compare Nietzsche to G. E. Moore who warned of the dangers of naturalistic fallacy. Matthis says that Nietzsche’s position in ethics is “so essentially new that understandably he would employ the words and concepts of the discarded traditions”.⁹⁵⁸

Although “ethical” readings are typically anti-aesthetical, often apolitical and nonmetaphysical, they sometimes mirror treatments of other sorts. Alasdair MacIntyre’s comment, in the “Postsricpt” to the second edition of his After Virtue, could be taken as molding Nietzsche in the Heideggerian way of reading. MacIntyre writes, namely, that Nietzsche’s critique of morality is to be seen as but another aspect of the “moral culture” he fought.⁹⁵⁹ It is due to MacIntyre, Williams and other theorists, that Nietzsche’s critique of morality is, recently, taken into consideration in making sense of contemporary Anglo-American ethical criticism⁹⁶⁰.

In Lester H. Hunt’s monograph, Nietzsche and the Origin of Virtue (1991), Nietzsche is presented as the relativist avatar of modern ethics of virtue. Despite his critique of justice and his neglect of the role of community, his emphases on character and on the integration of the self, make his thought open for comparisons to Aristotle and for further refinements in this tradition.⁹⁶¹ Hinrich Fink-Eitel claims that

“Nietzsche accomplished in the field of the critique of morality what Marx did in the theory of society and Freud in the science of the sick soul. He demonstrated the all too simple, idealized self-understanding of moral philosophy”. Yet, just as contemporary social theory is, so Fink-Eitel, as if untouched by Marx, so is it with today’s moral criticism and Nietzsche. According to Fink-Eitel, there are six options: 1) ancient teleology of good life, 2) post-renaissance agreement theory, 3) Kantian deontology, 4) Benthamian utilitarism, 5) Rousseau’s and Schopenhauer’s ethics of pity and 6) Nietzsche’s ethics of radical self-realization.⁹⁶²