7 posts tagged “robert solomon”

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.

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

I'm currently reading Living with Nietzsche by Robert Solomon. It is a great book on Nietzsche's philosophy. One concept of Nietzsche's that I find to be extremely interesting is his notion of the "will to power."  Nietzsche's will to power is perhaps one of his most famous concepts, one that is most often misunderstood. To be honest, I didn't fully understand it until I read the following excerpt.

"Power" (Macht) serves as a powerful label for the ambitious and aggressive motives that Nietzsche sees operating in most human behavior, although it has often been pointed out the many ways in which such a term (as opposed to "strength" or "vitality," for example) is misleading. The Will to Power would seem to negate both Nietzsche's admirable psychological pluralism and the enormous richness and variety of his various diagnoses. Nietzsche displays considerable confusion as to whether power is an expression of strength or the desire for strength, whether it is the motive (the source of the drive) or the goal, whether it is the feeling of power of the achievement of power, as well as whether it is power over others or power over oneself that is at issue. Nietzsche's warrior metaphors certainly make it seem as if it is power over others that is at issue, but the whole of Nietzsche's campaign for a rich passionate life make it clear that it is power over oneself, self-mastery, that is at stake. But as I suggested above, this does not mean mastery over one's passions, master-slave style. It rather refers to the cultivating, enriching, and heightening of one's passions. Thus i think that we would do much better to understand the Will to Power as the Will to Vitality, the Will to Life, the Will to Live, or, even better, not as a kind of Will at all. It is, instead, an odd and unfortunate name for what Nietzsche really wants to defend, the passionate life, living with passion and therefore not an aspiration to do so.

After watching this video, I sincerely wish I would've had the chance to meet or take a class with him. What a cool guy.

If you are lonely when you're alone, you are in bad company

-Jean-Paul Sartre

Are you afraid of being lonely? I think most people are. It is natural, of course, to want to have a companion. to want to be around others, and to want to be accepted by others. I'm not an extrovert by any means, nor am I really an introvert, but I find that I do like to be alone, to be lonely. My solitude allows me to do a lot of thinking about life and the person I wish to become. My solitude allows me to learn and read about philosophy and religion. Also, my solitude allows me to express myself through mediums such as Vox. Being alone really isn't a horrible thing. Don't get me wrong, I would really like to find a companion, but I just don't have the urge to really find one right now. I'm still trying to figure out myself.

I'm currently learning about Nietzsche by watching a series of DVD's by Robert Solomon and Kathleen Higgins, and I find it interesting how Nietzsche found one's fear of solitude to be a major problem. Nietzsche thinks that solitude is a very important aspect of human existence, according to Solomon. Further, Solomon states that "to be shunned is just that kind of motivation we need to be able to tell the truth." To be lonely is to question all that the masses do not wish to question. Because we fear being lonely, we fail to question the thoughts and beliefs of the masses. We stop our search for truth because of our fear of being shunned. Nietzsche saw the effects of the fear of loneliness as problematic.

With regards to the fear of being lonely, Nietzsche was most concerned about morality and Christianity. What really drives us to be moral is the fear that we will lose our friends and that people won't talk to us if we do not act morally. Nietzsche, as well as Solomon, claim that if you really analyze your reasons for being moral, you will find that your fear of being lonely is your dominant motivation for being moral. This type of morality, is the type Nietzsche termed herd morality: we are moral because we wish to be accepted; we do not question the morals that we have been given. I haven't gotten to the lecture on Nietzsche's views on morality in detail yet, but I found Nietzsche's view on this type of morality to be quite interesting. (There are two types of morality identified by Nietzsche: master morality and slave morality. I'll be sure to blog about them later).

For Nietzsche, and for Kierkegaard as well, Christianity had becoming nothing but a herd religion. To Nietzsche, Church was just a social institution, an exclusive club of sorts. The "real" reason you go to Church is because you get to be around other people and communicate with them. You accept their herd mentality and follow the herd's path towards truth. Once you are in this social club, you do not wish to leave it because you are fearful of being shunned; thus, you fail to question the herd's mentality and its version of truth. You just follow. I found this to be a very accurate observation. I remember going to church because my friends went....and for the donuts. I didn't really go to church because I actually believed in what I was being taught. Rather, I knew it was taboo to not go to church, and my father had always taught me that good Christians go to church, so I went. I wonder how many people go to church because of their fear of being shunned?