24 posts tagged “nietzsche”

Bored at work, I'm doing some reading on my buddy, Nietzsche. It's been a while since I've actually been able to read something thought provoking. Today I actually found something interesting.

First, I found this great quote:

There is in general good reason to suppose that in several respects the gods could all benefit from instruction by us human beings. We humans are -- more humane. Beyond Good and Evil, aph. 295 (1886)

Second, I'm pretty familiar with Nietzsche's philosophy, but every now and then I'll read something and my reaction is, "Wow, now I actually get it." This happened with the following two paragraphs.

With the PARABLE OF THE MADMAN, Nietzsche has established that Christian morality is dead and we ourselves are responsible. There are no higher worlds, no morality derived from God or Nature because "God is dead." There are no natural rights and the idea of progress is a sham. All the old values and truths have lost their vitality and validity. Such an opinion is called nihilism. There are no moral values. Nietzsche said man could rise above nihilism. How could this be done? Well, first, one had to recognize the nihilism produced by everyday life. One had to become a nihilist. One could then rise above and go beyond nihilism by creating new values: man could then become his own master and be true to himself rather than to another. "Du sollst werden, der du bist." Man can overcome uniformity and mediocrity, he can overcome socialism, democracy, trade unionism, progress, enlightenment and all the other ills so consistent with western civilization.

According to Nietzsche, man could be saved by a new type of man, the "Übermensch," the Superman. These are the men who will not be held back by the hogwash of modern-mediocre-industrial-scientific-bourgeois-Christian civilization. The superman creates his own morality based on human instincts, drive and will. He affirms his existence not by saying, with the Christian, "thou shalt not." No. Against the Mosaic law, the new man shouts, "I will." The new man dares to be himself and as himself, traditional, Christian ideals of good and evil have no meaning and he recognizes them as such. His "will to power" means, for Nietzsche, that he has gone "beyond good and evil." The enhancement of the will to power brings supreme enjoyment. The Superman casts off all established values and because he is now free of all restraints, rules and codes of behavior imposed by civilization, he creates his own values. He lives his own life as one who takes, wants, strives, creates, struggles, seeks and dominates. He knows life as it is given to him is without meaning -- but he lives it laughingly, instinctively, fully, dangerously.

 

So I finished Robert Solomon's Living with Nietzsche a few weeks ago. I haven't digested the book completely because there is just so much to dig into and remember. However, over the past day or so, I've been going over certain passages that I've outlined. I’ve been trying to find the main difference between Aristotle’s virtue ethics and Nietzsche virtue ethics in an attempt to understand what makes Nietzsche's take on virtue ethics unique.

Aristotle is essentially the face of virtue ethics; when one wants to understand virtue ethics, one goes straight to Aristotle. This is mainly because Aristotle actually gives us an extensive list of virtues, whereas Nietzsche does not, not to mention, Nietzsche and his philosophical hammer have a bad reputation. Most people think of Nietzsche as this philosopher that destroys people’s beliefs and as an immoralist that taints the youth’s minds. But it’s important to note that Nietzsche called himself an “immoralist” only because he rejected the morality of his day, namely absolute Christian morality and Kant’s abstract principles, not because he advocated unethical behavior.

Aristotle defines a virtue as the "means between the extremes." To this day, this criterion is used as the basis of our virtuous behavior. We all pretty much agree that between two extremes, the middle is the best place to be. Take my post on pride, for example. I think pride and humility must have a balance. In other words, the best place between the two is the middle. Nietzsche took a different take on things. At the heart of all of his virtues is this since of overflowing or abundance. So, I think the main difference between the virtue ethics of Aristotle and Nietzsche is that Aristotle is focused on having the right amount of something (the virtue), whereas Nietzsche wants no limits. The right amount is an overabundance of the virtue. To illustrate this difference, let’s take the virtue we call courage.

Both Aristotle and Nietzsche consider courage to be their main virtue, but their concepts and applications of the virtue are extremely different. Aristotle sees courage as a function of fear, having just the right amount of fear. Thus, courage resides between recklessness (not having any fear) and cowardice (having too much fear). This is the type of courage that would do one good in the battlefield. Nietzsche, on the other hand, is more concerned with a concept of courage that can be applied to, as Solomon says, “one’s convictions or one’s willingness to go on in the face of pain and illness.”

This is how Solomon describes Nietzsche concept of courage:

For Nietzsche, it seems that having courage means not so much overcoming fear (the standard account) or even having “just the right amount” of fear (the overly quantitative Aristotelian account.) Rather, as in so many of his conceptions of virtue, Nietzsche’s model (or metaphor) is “overflowing.” In the case of courage, I would suggest, it is overflowing with a sense of mission, even duty (but emphatically not in the Kantian sense.) It is a sense of something-to-be-done no matter what (within the bounds of the appropriate context), in the face of obstacles to be overcome, no matter what (within bounds).

Nietzsche’s courage isn’t a function of fear. It’s a function of one’s abundance of determination to complete a grueling task or to say “Yes!” to life, despite all the pain and suffering and the reality of the Absurd. It’s a type of existential courage, one that can be applied directly to your life and not just the battlefield. So, in the end, courage isn’t about having the right amount of fear. It’s about having determination that overwhelms fear. As Solomon puts it, “courage, in other words, is not overcoming fear. It is an overflowing of determination, constituted by an overwhelming and yet skillfully directed cascading of emotion.”

Personally, I find Nietzsche’s take on virtue ethics to be refreshing. Virtuous behavior should be about overflowing action based on one's enthusiasm and style, not some type of restraint. In particular, Nietzsche's concept of courage is more positive, more the way I think courage should be. More on Nietzsche’s virtues later.  

A friend and I were talking about the seven deadly sins the other day. As a nonbeliever, he even found the bad element in these "sins" to be valid. Needless to say, he was surprised when I said, "Um, I don't think pride is a bad thing."

Pride is all too often associated with stubbornness, arrogance, and conceitedness. If we are talking this type of pride, then I agree with my friend: Pride is not a good thing. But, for me, and for my good buddy Nietzsche, pride means something completely different and need not be associated with the above terms.

I think pride primarily deals with one's sense of self-worth, the feeling that one means something in this world, that in a group of people, one has something to add or bring to the table. This is the healthy, life enhancing type of pride that I think we all need, to some extent. This sense of pride can be perverted, but this reason is not enough to call pride a vice. In its healthy form, pride is very much a virtue.

In my earlier study, I argued that I did not see any conflict (much less a “paradox”) between Nietzsche’s fatalistic and self-making themes but rather an excellent example of his “perspectivism.” Fatalism and self-making represent two complementary perspectives on ourselves and on human life. On the one hand, there is our familiar view of ourselves as (more or less) autonomous beings, deliberating, making choices, acting on our desires, sometimes reflecting on and weighing our desires, sometimes conscientiously denying our desires (or refusing to be motivated by them). It is from this perspective that we normally hold people (and ourselves) responsible for their (our) actions and declare them (and ourselves) to be the “authors” of their (our) actions. On the other hand, we cannot but recognize that we are all “thrown into” our circumstances, born with (or without) certain talents and abilities to varying degrees and with or without dispositions to certain physical liabilities and limitations. We are all products (“victims” some would say) of our upbringing, our families, our culture. Even without bringing in such spooky words as “fatalism,” we recognize in  ourselves and in others the heavy baggage of our backgrounds and the fact that our choices and our socalled autonomy are both quite limited. We take up one or the other of these perspectives, often sequentially, even simultaneously, but I do not see this as a problem or a “paradox.” It is rather just “the human condition.” We see ourselves as both free and constrained, which is not quite (yet) to say “fated.”

-Robert Solomon

Gratitude, I want to suggest, is not only the best answer to the tragedies of life. It is the best approach to life itself. This is not to say, as I keep insisting, an excuse for quietism or resignation. It is no reason to see ourselves simply as passive recipients and not as active participants full of responsibilities. On the contrary, as Kant and Nietzsche among many others insisted, being born with talents and having opportunities imposes a heavy duty on us, to exercise those talents and make good use of those opportunities. It is also odd and unfortunate that we take the blessings of life for granted — or insist that we deserve them — but then take special offense at the bad things in life, as if we could not possibly deserve those. The proper recognition of tragedy and the tragic sense of life is not shaking one’s fist at the gods or the universe “in scorn and defiance” but rather, as Kierkegaard writes in a religious context, “going down one one’s knees” and giving thanks. Whether or not there is a God or there are gods to be thanked, however, seems not the issue to me. It is the importance and the significance of being thankful, to whomever or whatever, for life itself.

-Robert Solomon, in Spirituality for the Skeptic

So, I graduate tomorrow (Saturday). Yay me! I have a year of graduate school left, but graduating with my undergraduate is pretty cool (I guess). As part of graduation weekend, my parents made me attend the baccalaureate service tonight. I didn''t really want to go. Singing hymns, reading scripture, and listening to a sermon--not my cup of tea. Nevertheless, seeing how my graduation seems to be more of a thing for my parents, I went ahead and attended.

The service was interesting. As a nonbeliever, I somewhat felt out of place: what they were doing (singing hymns, reading scripture) aren't things I find any meaning in whatsoever. Part of me enjoyed the community that the service brought, but the other part of me just thought of Nietzsche's herd concept. But these things didn't bother me as much as they annoyed me. What bothered me what was the bishop said in his sermon.

His sermon was about the ABC's of life. A stands for attitude. Basically, we should have the right attitude throughout life. Cool, I can agree with that. C stood for committment, committment to one's self and others. Cool, I dig it. What bothered me was B--belief. He said it was extremely important that one have belief in God. Naturally, I started asking questions in my mind: "Why does one need God? What type of person needs God? How does belief in God help me in my search for truth?" Most importantly, "Why is belief *so* important?"

It isn't. It isn't if you find the highest level of value in yourself. It isn't if you don't believe in the fear doctrines of heaven and hell. It isn't if you see that you are both the problem and solution to everything. It isn't if you have confidence in yourself and your abilities. It isn't if you reject a degrading concept of human beings. Most importantly though, it isn't if you are strong. Strong in the sense that you realize that living life means positively dealing with uncertainty, fear, cosmic nothingness, and maintaining the highest level of responsibility for one's actions.

If only we were stronger...