The Philosopher Reviews

'The general timidity and conservatism of English-speaking moral philosophy - its inclination to elucidate and defend morality; its commitment, more often that not, to the moral status quo and to common sense - certain utilitarians notably excepted! - its lack of interest, until relatively recently, in psychological questions - [have]made it generally inhospitable for a critic as radical and as naturalistically inclined as Nietzsche.'

'I regard Christianity as the most disastrous lie of seduction there has ever been, as the great unholy lie. I draw its after-growth and tendrils of ideal out from under all other disguises, I resist all half and three-quarter positions towards it - there must be war against it'

'This is not due to religion, but to nature itself. A deer can never become a wolf, or an ass a deer. If a guiltless rabbit is chicken-hearted and weak, it does not mean it should be hated or despised, but instead loved all the more. This represents a genuine love of the Earth, one which Zarathustra, as Nietzsche's representative of highest wisdom, was unable to see at all - instead he mocked it.'

REVIEWS A selection of the best from recent issues of the Philosopher
	Deconstructing Nietzsche
The Philosopher's verdict: an impossible task?	Nietzsche and Morality, edited by Brain Leiter and Neil Sinhababu, Oxford University Press (2009, paperback edition, hardback 2007) ISBN 978-0-19-956818-5 pp296 The Art of Aphorism and Nietzsche's Blind Passion, by Zura Shiolashvili, King David Publishing (2010) ISBN 978-0-9565175-0-0 pp161 including colour plates
	What are we to make of Nietzsche? Philosophy inhabits the space between fact and fiction, it dwells in ambiguity. Once something is unambiguous it loses its interest for philosophers, yet if something is straightforwardly impossible to be dogmatic about, so too philosophers step quickly aside, and leave such areas to the writers of mere fiction. The writings of Nietzsche fit the ambiguous tradition of philosophy very well. Few philosophers have provoked such different assessments. Is he a mocking monster and two-faced demon, as Zura Shiolashvili suggests, or is he rather a 'maximax agent-neutral consequentialist' as Thomas Hurkha argues? Is he offering an ethics of creativity or merely a barbarian ethic of conquest? It seems that one hundred and fifty years of philosophical debate have shed no light on even the most basic tenets of Nietzsche's philosophy. But some things can be said. Firstly, his influence is considerable. Secondly, if there is little agreement on exactly how to 'interpret' his obscure writings, it can be agreed that he is not saying 'the usual thing'. Often, commentators find in it what they look for, and at its heart, Nietzsche's writings are a prescription for how people should live - a mix of psychology and politics wrapped up in ethical language. Leiter and Sinhababu see this as regrettable, and accuse philosophers of having neglected the ideas of Nietzsche. 'The general timidity and conservatism of English-speaking moral philosophy - its inclination to elucidate and defend morality; its commitment, more often that not, to the moral status quo and to common sense - certain utilitarians notably excepted! - its lack of interest, until relatively recently, in psychological questions - [have]made it generally inhospitable for a critic as radical and as naturalistically inclined as Nietzsche.' Leiter and Sinhababu claim to be redressing his historical omission by assembling what they call various 'talented moral philosophers' - a little puff sits peculiarly in a book about one of the great iconoclasts of philosophy. But then perhaps it is not so odd, as one of their arguments seems to be that Nietzsche is not an outsider at all in the philosophical pantheon, but should sit there in pride of place alongside Aristotle and Kant (their choice of examples…). 'We hope this collection will mark Nietzsche's arrival as a co-equal figure in moral philosophy with the other historical greats,' they explain. Indeed, to help put Nietzsche there, are contributions from a good cross section of the 'philosophy establishment, from full professors at Cambridge in the UK to more junior lecturers at Harvard and Yale in the US, as well as representatives from of the anglo-american tradition in Canada and Singapore. To briefly list the tasty dishes on offer, there are those prepared by Thomas Hurka (Nietzsche: Perfectionist) ; Bernard Reginster (The Will to Power and the Ethics of Creativity); Mathis Risse (Nietzschean 'Animal Psychology' versus Kantian Ethics); Joshua Knobe and Brian Leiter (The Case for Nietzschean Moral Psychology); R. Jay Wallace (Resentiment, Value and Self-Vindication: Making sense of Nietzsche's Slave Revolt); Christopher Janaway (Guilt, Bad Conscience and Self-punishment in Nietzsche's Genealogy); Nadeem Hussain (Honest Illusion: valuing for Nietzsche's Free Spirits); Maudemarie Clark and David Dudrick (Nietzsche and Moral Objectivity: the development of Nietzsche's metaethics); Peter Poellner (Affect, Value and Objectivity); Neil Sinhababu (Vengeful Thinking and Moral Epistemology) and last and by all means least, Simon Blackburn (Perspectives, Fictions, Errors, Play). Perhaps the most significant thing about this comprehensive selection of 'moral experts' from the world of Anglophone philosophy is their enthusiastic endorsement of Nietzsche's ethics. Through a variety of ingenious and scholarly devices, they produce from this obscure and occasionally virulent writings theories of considerable subtlety and sophistication. Thomas Hurkha, for starters, argues thus that 'perfectionism' (which is the view that moral goodness is the same thing as achieving excellence) is the key to making sense of Nietzsche and that this explains his recipe, as enthusiastically adopted by the Nazis, of the untrammelled power of the 'Superman'. 'Hurka reads Nietzsche as being what he calls a maximax agent-neutral consequentialist', the editors explain unhelpfully, in the style of their profession, before adding: 'According to this striking view, agents should act so that the person who is the most excellent will achieve the greatest excellence possible.' Another essay, Reginster's 'The Will to Power and the Ethics of Creativity', also starts with the notion of the 'will to power', but sees Nietzsche as arguing for a kind of aesthetic supremacy (the 'ethics of creativity'), in place of mere animal urges. In 'Nietzschean 'Animal Psychology' versus Kantian Ethics', however, a little au contraire, Mathis Risse says that the problem with traditional ethics (in the style of Plato and Kant) is that it assumes it is better to take decisions from a disinterested standpoint. The Nietzschean insight, Risse ventures, is to make selfishness and subjectivity central to ethics. But if that is true, one might wonder, how is the approach different from common-or-garden utilitarianism? In their join effort, 'The Case for Nietzschean Moral Psychology', Joshua Knobe and Brian Leiter follow this theme by reviewing a range of quasi-empirical studies 'from empirical psychology and behavioural genetics' to argue that Nietzsche offers a rare insight into how the human mind really works - specifically that people are born with certain 'psycho-physical traits' which then largely determine their behaviour and that it is this psychological reality that should guide ethics rather than abstract theories. The final two essays of part one of the collection, by R. Jay Wallace and Christopher Janaway look in more conventional style at some of Nietzsche's arguments. R. Jay Wallace takes up the claim of Nietzsche's On the Genealogy of Morality that conventional morality is born out the desire of the weak and oppressed - the slaves - to gain the upper hand over their masters, to argue that actually Nietzsche's insight is more into the need of the oppressed to come up with theories that justify their situation rather than actually change it. Janaway's essay, 'Guilt, Bad Conscience and Self-punishment in Nietzsche's Genealogy', takes all this a bit further. He reads Nietzsche as revealing a distinctive human desire to inflict suffering on others, which when prevented , turns inwards and becomes a feeling of guilt. And Janaway then brings us rather belatedly to the role of Christianity in Nietzsche's ethics: Christian morality has amplified this guilt by condemning the 'natural' human desire to inflict cruelty on others, that is, to dominate and seek selfish gratification, but Christianity also provides a whole series of new ways that people can and should be punished. Much of this academic debate reappears in rather more elegant form in Shiolashvili's slim and, in places, rather eccentric book, The Art of Aphorism and Nietzsche's Blind Passion. Shiolashvili is clearly fully aware of the conventional arguments, but like Nietzsche himself, prefers to write in a strange blend of literary aphorisms, textual quotation and complex multilayered analysis. In this way, Shiolashvili, an unabashed critic of Nietzsche, is also one of his followers. Secondly, where Anglo-phone commentators operate within a tidy and rational universe, Shiolashvili is a Georgian philosopher from a country with a long and all-encompassing mythic tradition, and one in which the unvarnished and absolute truth of Christianity is central. Perhaps we might say of his book on Nietzsche, ''it takes a certain kind of thinker to know a certain kind of thinker''. Shiolashvili openly starts from the perspective of one seeking to defend Christian truth from the withered aphorisms' of the 'most eloquent Antichrist of the nineteenth century'. But his is not mere partisan rhetoric. Here indeed there is a careful and philosophical argument. Using Nietzsche's own words as a starting point, both from the works usually attributed to him and the invaluable seres of 'Notebooks' recently published by Cambridge University Press as a resource, he highlights aspects of Nietzsche's philosophy that seem to have passed by many of the 'talented' moral philosophers of the elite colleges. Because indeed it is clear from even a cursory glance at Nietzsche's books that he did have the negative motivations that his critics ascribe to him, rather more than the 'positive' aims that his supporters seek to read there. 'I regard Christianity as the most disastrous lie of seduction there has ever been, as the great unholy lie. I draw its after-growth and tendrils of ideal out from under all other disguises, I resist all half and three-quarter positions towards it - there must be war against it' For Shiolashvili, Nietzsche's pronouncement that 'God is dead' states 'the absolute priority of animal desire over the sublime value of mind. Free will, as seen by him, is a virtue wherein consciousness embodies only a tool of man's feeling… In a word, Nietzsche believes the mind should be driven by instinctive emotions relating to the human will' He backs this up with a quote from the Late Notebooks, which says that 'the animal functions are, after all, in principle a million times more important than all beautiful states and heights of consciousness: these are a surplus, except where they have to be tools for the animal functions'. Shiolashvili's book is full of unusual perspectives and arguments. he says, for example, that although Nietzsche is of course right to say that animals do not have any religions, they do have their own characters and among them are both the strong and the weak. 'This is not due to religion, but to nature itself. A deer can never become a wolf, or an ass a deer. If a guiltless rabbit is chicken-hearted and weak, it does not mean it should be hated or despised, but instead loved all the more. This represents a genuine love of the Earth, one which Zarathustra, as Nietzsche's representative of highest wisdom, was unable to see at all - instead he mocked it.' Shiolashvili finds in Nietzsche's prescription a kind of absurdity - how can a roe deer resist the jaws of a wolf, if its fate is to be weak in its beauty? For the existing world is inseparable from sorrow and beauty. This is a pessimistic reality innate to the logic of the natural world, without acknowledgement in Nietzsche… So, 'by Nietzsche's psychological metamorphosis and will to power, a roe deer should turn itself into a wolf to become strong and save its life, denying its tenderness and beauty'. In his 'barbaric ethic', Nietzsche 'did not want to see everything that is weak is not ugly, and everything that is strong is not lovely.' This debate, Shiolashvili correctly relates back to the writings of Schopenhauer (as does Bernard Reginster in Nietzsche and Morality, although he is alone in the collection to do so, and he says rather that Nietzsche 'radically departs from his erstwhile mentor'). Shiolashvili reminds us that the other great German iconoclast wrote that 'My body is the phenomenal form of my will' and of another of, Schopenauer's taunts to the effect that amongst the Christian peoples, 'Christianity is dead and no longer exercises much influence'. Some of the arguments in The Art of Aphorism seem to go too far, off into mere rhetorical assertion. This partisan advocacy of Christian theology is quite strange to readers used to academic values instead. But it is in a way truer to the spirit of Nietzsche - from his opposite perspective. At other times, again like Nietzsche, who he calls a 'Clever Idiot', it remains mere rhetoric. As part of a critique of Freud, which is more sophisticated than this quote will give the impression, Shiolashvili says, for example 'if we accept Freud's ideas regarding the sublimation of libidinous urges in artists, all sexually dissolute men in the lewdness could be called artists'. The parallel of this in Shiolashvili's approaches reflects the contradictions in Nietzsche, the 'two faces in the mirror' one that pretends to be beautiful and one that is ugly but hidden.' Yet for Shiolashvili, Nietzsche's 'demonic impact upon psychology' lies not in his philosophical arguments but in the power of his artistic expressions, phonetic forms and phonology. Sprinkled with varying success throughout the book are various Aphorisms. Sometimes this an effective device. Aphorism 17, for example: 'You stand on the peak, the bottom of the precipice moves your soul even there - this is the emptiness'. The aphorisms do, in a curious way, help to clarify and highlight the Nietzschean idea under examination - the search for meaning in a universe with no meaning, other than that pursuit of power.
Never mind what The Philosopher says - take me twice to the bookshop! - and again!	Reviewed by Martin Cohen