36 posts tagged “philosophy”

I found this today. Pretty interesting quote, imo. Looks like I've found another book to read. :)

"My intention was not to deal with the problem of truth, but with the problem of truth-teller or truth-telling as an activity … Who is able to tell the truth? What are the moral, the ethical, and the spiritual conditions which entitle someone to present himself as, and to be considered as, a truth-teller? About what topics is it important to tell the truth? … What are the consequences of telling the truth? … And finally: what is the relation between the activity of truth-telling and the exercise of power, or should these activities be completely independent and kept separate? Are they separable, or do they require one another?"

-Michel Foucault, Discourse and Truth: the Problematization of Parrhesia (1983)

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.  

I've been reading Robert Solomon's The Joy of Philosophy for the past two weeks. In this book, he discusses a multitude of topics, ranging from the too-analytic nature of contemporary philosophy to rationality and the emotions. I've entered the chapter in which he discuss tragedy. Naturally, the problem of evil comes up. To me, he has an interesting take on the so-called "problem", yet a practical one. I like it.

Contrary to the way it is usually framed, I want to suggest that the Problem of Evil has little to do with belief in the existence of God or in an afterlife. Camus was an atheist, and yet it was the Problem of Evil, the presence of human suffering, that violated his innate sense of justice and fairness, that evoked his dramatic concept of "the Absurd." Nietzsche was also an atheist ("by instinct," he tells us in Ecce Homo), but it is neither God nor Heaven as such that draws his heaviest fire. It is rather the cheap and petty use of theology to deny or rationalize suffering rather than face up to it and, like the ancient Greeks he adored, make something of it--if not something beautiful, then at least something meaningful. To challenge the Problem of Evil, we must, rather, remind ourselves of the contingency of our good fortune and how unreasonable we are to deny the inevitability of misfortune and the finitude of our lives. As Bernard Williams writes, "There is a problem of evil only for those who expect the world to be good." We thus call into question those abuses of God and the idea of an afterlife that block our deepest emotional responses by assuring us, against all evidence, that our suffering is well worthwhile.

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