The Continental Traditions in Philosophy vs. "Party Line Continentalists"

A brave, anonymous soul posted the following nonsense on the thread about "Myths about Nietzsche," but it represents such a pernicious and widespread bit of self-deception that it warrants its own post. Our commenter begins:

This was an interesting talk, but I was saddned to hear Leiter take a snipe at the Postmodernists.

I did not take a "snipe" at postmodernism, I expressed a scholarly opinion, namely, that many postmodernist readers of Nietzsche (like Derrida and in a different way Foucault) misunderstand his views on truth and knowledge, in part because they rely too much on material Nietzsche did not publish, which expresses views it appears he rejected over time. This is, if anything, the consensus view in the scholarly community. But it is not a snipe. The anonymous author does not even address the scholarly issue. This is minor (though revealing), since the really good stuff is coming:

Like many Analytics, Leiter's attitude towards the Continentals (and especially towards the Postmodernists) is of barely concealed contempt. With few exceptions, Analytics tend to reduce the thought of their Continental/Postmodernist foes to easily dismissed, facile generalizations, instead of sincerely engaging in dialogue. Of course, the same could be said of many Continentals and Postmodernists, in regards to their attitude towards the Analytics. Much of the time the Analytics and Continentals really seem to be talking past one another.

I am not an "analytic." I do not even know what that means. I can certainly tell you the basics of Quine and Kripke, though I've read relatively little David Lewis; I think metaethics deals with important philosophical problems, but find most Anglophone normative theory embarrassing; I could give you a short lecture on the Gettier problem and the responses to it, but I think "analytic metaphysics" is a seriously wrong turn in the field and ignore it. I can also tell you the basics about Habermas, though I am not a fan and much prefer Adorno, Horkheimer, and Marcuse; I think Derrida is a charlatan, and am sorry to see Foucault, whom I think is the most interesting diagnostician of the 'iron cage' of modernity since Weber, associated with him so often; I agree with Deleuze that phenomenology is our "modern scholasticism," but have a soft spot for Sartre. I enjoy Hume and Nietzsche, Spinoza and Marx, but haven't much affection for Leibniz or Hegel.


I am interested in philosophy and philosophical problems that crop up in various traditions, but often have an interest and existence that transcends them. But why is it so important to cabin me off as an "analytic" in contrast to the "Continentals" (who are then, wholly bizarrely, equated with Postmodernists by our commenter)? Who are these "Continentals"? If I have written extensively on Nietzsche, occasionally on Marx and Foucault; if I have taught Hegel, Marx, Nietzsche, Foucault, Adorno, and Horkheimer with some frequency; if I have co-edited The Oxford Handbook of Continental Philosophy, and I am not a "Continental," then who is?

As I have noted before--and as The Oxford Handbook, I think, reflects--we are living in a Golden Age for scholarship on European philosophy after Kant. Someone who thinks there is a lot of "talking past one another" going on can't, obviously, be talking about the current state of scholarship on figures like Hegel, Schopenhauer, Nietzsche, Husserl, and Merleau-Ponty--so what is the commenter talking about? Who are these mysterious "Continentals" since they are not me, Michael Rosen, Taylor Carman, Frederick Beiser, Peter Poellner, Sebastian Gardner, Julian Young, Raymond Geuss, Michael Forster, or any of the others working on and in various Continental traditions of philosophy?

As any actual scholar knows, there is no such thing as a "Continental tradition" in philosophy; rather, as Rosen and I noted in the introduction to The Oxford Handbook,

[P]hilosophy in Continental Europe in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries is best understood as a connected weave of traditions, some of which overlap, but no one of which dominates all the others. So, for example, German Idealism marks the immediate reception and criticism of Kant's philosophy in figures like Fichte, Schelling, and Hegel, who use a comprehensive conception of reason to provide connected answers to a broad range of questions of metaphysics, epistemology, and the theory of value. The breakdown of the German Idealist view was, in turn, of central importance in motivating Marx, Kierkegaard, Schopenhauer, and, more indirectly, Nietzsche. The reactions against Hegel's Idealism in the decades after his death in 1831 were, in fact, manifold; they included: (1) the German Materialism of the 1850s and 1860s in writers like Buchner, Moleschott, Czolbe, and Vogt (though with resonances in better-known philosophical figures like Feuerbach, Schopenhauer, and Nietzsche), who took seriously the development of modern physiology, and advocated...the replacement of philosophy by science; (2) Marx's own repuditation of the domain of philosophy as the attempt to establish doctrines in metaphysics and
epistemology in favor of a political, critical and scientistic conception of philosophical method; and (3) the emergence of neo-Kantian thought in the latter years of the nineteenth century (e.g., Lotze, Helmholtz, Fischer, Cohen, Windelband, and Rickert) as a response to the emergence of psychology as a scientific discipline ...

Most of the major twentieth-century developments in "Continental" philosophy can, in turn, be seen as responses to one or more of the nineteenth-century philosophical currents. Inasmuch as there is a Marxist tradition in philosophy, for example, it is marked by a dissatisfication with Marx's professed ideal of a scientific, historical approach to the study of society from which all philosophical questions have been purged, a dissatisfaction expressed in figures like Lukacs, Gramsci, Adorno, Horkheimer, Marcuse, and, finally, Habermas, who returns Kantian-style questions about justification to center stage. (The analytical Marxists in Anglophone philosophy end up, arguably, with a similar dissatisfaction.) Modern Phenomenology arose, like neo-Kantianism, in reaction to the development of modern psychology, in particular the attempt to reduce issues regarding the nature of thought, meaning, and logic to questions to be answered by an empirical scientific investigation of the facts of mental life....In the hands of Heidegger, however, the tradition is importantly transformed, with a new emphasis on the relationship between structures of meaning and the lived experience of particular individuals that inspired the French Existentialists (like Camus and Sartre) in their belief in the priority of 'existrence' over 'essence.'

Other important developments associated with Continental Europe in the twentieth-century do not map neatly on to the story sketched so far. The philosophical tradition we associate with 'Hermeneutics,' for example, which asserts the centrality and distinctiveness of interpretation for any understanding of language (and, hence, of human beings in whose lives language plays a constitutive role), intersects with both the German Idealist and the Phenomenological traditions and brings to them a distinctive set of issues regarding the relationship between language and thought, the nature of historical and social understanding, and the essential finitude of human
understanding, issues that are manifest in hermeneutically minded writers from the eighteenth through the twentieth centuries, including, Herder, Schleiermacher, Dilthey, and Gadamer.

So, too, 'Structuralism' was a movement initially not in philosophy, but in linguistics and the social sciences--associated with figures like Saussure, Levi-Strauss, Barthes, Althusser, and others--which placed emphasis on the explanatory autonomy of systems in contrast to psychological, historical, or teleological explanations. But once this idea was imported into philosophy and psychology itself (for instance, by Lacan and Foucault) the consequence took the form of the so-called 'death of the subject' out of which in turn the tendencies known as 'post-structuralism' and 'post-modernism' emerged (in figures like Derrida, Deleuze, and Foucault again). In its most radical forms--informed by Heidegger and one (contentious) reading of Nietzsche--post-structurlism is best understood as a modern form of skepticism,
calling into question not just the possibility of objective truth but of determinate understanding.

This brief, introductory survey of positions, doctrines, and thinkers found on the European Continent after Kant should make clear that any unqualified talk of "Continental" as a kind of philosophy (a doctrine, a method, a set of problems) is ludicrous.

So what's really going on here when people, like the anonymous commenter (but many others, of course), speak of "Continental" or "Continentalists"? For sake of clarity and accuracy, we should really call this sociological phenomenon "Party Line Continentalism" since what it actually picks out is a political effort to enforce a certain philosophical orthodoxy, namely, that which arises from a conception of philosophy and its methods that is largely fixed by Heideggerian phenomenology and developments in mostly French philosophy that involve reactions to Heidegger (such as Derrida, but not only him). Since phenomenology, as it began with Husserl, has much in common with the origins of mid-20th-century analytic philosophy in Frege, there is, shall we say, a certain irony in demarcating the philosophical terrain this way, but it is especially ludicrous to denominate phenomenology-plus-poststructuralism "Continental" given that it effectively excludes the Frankfurt School, Marxism, German Idealism, and Nietzsche from the Continentalist camp. (Of course, that is not how the Party Line Continentalists understand what's going on here, but this is at least partly because their command of the history of European philosophy after Kant is often quite weak and idiosyncratic.)

Party Line Continentalists are very exercised about the fact that there are philosophical scholars of the Continental traditions who treat the figures of post-Kantian European philosophy as philosophers, without reading them through the lens and the methods of Heidegger and/or post-structuralism. Heidegger and (most) of the post-structuralists (Deleuze is an exception) were not, however, very good scholars or philosophical expositors, so it is not surprising that those with real training in philosophy and its history would not read the great figures of the Continental traditions in accord with the Party Line.


Now back to our anonymous commenter, who clearly is in the grips of Party Line Continentalists:

It's good that some of the Analytics are finally starting to get exposed to and grapple with some of the early Continentals, like Neitzsche and Heidegger. But, unfortunately, I think many of those Analytics either completely miss the point that the early Continentals are trying to make, or (worse) try to co-opt them in to the Analytic fold. I think the former is the case with Leiter, when he dismisses Thus Spoke Zarathustra as a mere parody.

It is indicative of the intellectual level of too many Party Line Continentals that they are such careless readers and listeners. I did not, in the interview, dismiss Zarathustra as a parody; I pointed out, rather, that Zarathustra is a parody of the Christ-figure (how could this not be obvious?), and the book a parody of The New Testament, with Zarathustra "preaching" an anti-Christian doctrine. I then pointed out that any careful interpretation of Zarathustra has to be alert to the parodic form, and thus careful in attributing what Zarathustra says to Nietzsche--a hermeneutic consideration especially relevant to appraising the meaning and significance of the image of the Overman.


"Analytic" philosophy as a substantive research program has been moribund for forty years or more, yet Party Line Continentalists know so little about the history of even recent philosophy, that they continue to think that there must be Party Line Analytics lined up against them. In fact, it is the entire history of philosophy and almost every major philosophical tradition prior to that launched by Heideggerian phenomenology that is lined up "against them," which is no doubt why Party Line Continentalists are so intent on misappropriating the term "Continental" for their sect and excluding other philosophers and scholars engaged with the Continental traditions from the Party.


Like most philosophers engaged with the Continental traditions in this Golden Age of philosophical scholarship, I am happy to be excluded from the Party. But I am not happy to see the Party Line discredit the philosophical figures I care about by associating them with their sectarian Party Line. But Party Line Continentalism has no business appropriating the name of a place that is the home to such a rich and philosophically interesting array of thinkers, most of whom do not have the all-too-common vices of the Party Line, such as obscurantism, careless reading, dialectical feebleness, and often ignornance of the history of philosophy.

The good news here is that Party Line Continentalism is, ironically enough, increasingly just an Anglophone phenomenon, confined to a handful of departments in the U.S. (e.g., Penn State, Stony Brook, DePaul, Memphis, Vanderbilt, the New School, Dusquesne), the U.K. (e.g., Middlesex and Dundee), and Australia (e.g., New South Wales). (Even these Party Line Continentalist departments are increasingly diverse, which is a welcome development!) On the European Continent itself, Party Line Continentalism is in retreat almost everywhere, as rigorous historical scholarship, that transcends national boundaries, and Anglophone-style philosophical work is increasingly dominant.

I am genuinely hopeful that over the next generation Party Line Continentalists will be exiled entirely to literature departments, where lack of real depth in philosophy and its history does not matter. If, in addition, some of the unfortunate "fads" in Anglophone philosophy--and the trivial intellectual parochialism that often accompanies them--do not intervene, then we may really enter a period of philosophical scholarship in the Anglophone world in which "analytic" and "Continental" as terms of partisan battle are largely uintelligible to those drawn to the problems of philosophy.

UPDATE: Needless to say, comments are more likely to appear if signed.

Nietzsche on Wikipedia

Maybe some ambitious and web-savvy readers can clean up the Nietzsche entries, which are pretty bad!

Revised and Penultimate Draft of "Who is the 'Sovereign Individual?' Nietzsche on Freedom" Now On-Line

Here. It incorporates in the footnotes several references to the very illuminating, but so far unpublished, paper by Donald Rutherford (UC San Diego) on Nietzsche, Spinoza, and the Stoics and their conceptions of freedom, about which I'll write some more before too long.

Clark and Dudrick on BGE 19

Rob Sica and another correspondent (whose name I'm now forgetting, sorry!) had asked about my reply to Clark and Dudrick's reading of BGE 19 in the Gemes & May volume, in which they critique my reading in "Nietzsche's Theory of the Will." I have added a long footnote to the penultimate version of the paper on "Who is the Sovereign Individual?" (which should be on-line in a day or two) about their paper. I post that footnote here. I may write more about this on another occasion, but for those who might be interested:

Clark & Dudrick (2009) challenge my reading of BGE 19, and so I should say something briefly about why I find their alternative unpersuasive. The crux of their argument is to deem Nietzsche’s “phenomenology [of willing] simply implausible” (251), which then opens the door for them to re-read the passage as limited to “actions performed in opposition to temptation,” and thus as implicating “one’s commitments or values” (251). This reading, alas, finds no support in the text at all, and is motivated entirely by the claim that as a phenomenology of willing simpliciter, Nietzsche’s account is implausible, and so must be read otherwise. I do not find the account implausible (phenomenology does require careful introspection!), but even if one concurred with Clark & Dudrick about this, it would not follow that the passage has a meaning not to be found in the text: perhaps it is just bad phenomenology. But the evidence that Nietzsche holds the view of the will I attribute to him (Leiter 2007) is overwhelming, and BGE 19 as I read it fits nicely with the view that Nietzsche articulate elsewhere in his work (Clark and Dudrick confine their attention to this BGE passage). Curiously, Clark & Dudrick make an
issue (251 n. 3) out of my translation of “ich bin frei, ‘er’ muss gehorchen” as “I am free, ‘it’ must obey” instead of “he” must obey. While Kaufmann follows Clark & Dudrick on this point, Judith Norman (in the Cambridge edition) translates it as I do (“it”), and she is surely right to do so, for contrary to Clark & Dudrick’s claim that there is “no masculine noun in the passage for which the masculine pronoun substitutes,” it is, I would have thought, obvious in context that the “er” that obeys is the body (der Körper), which of course is a masculine noun.

"Nietzsche on Mind and Nature" Conference Sept. 11-13

I wanted to write a few comments about the conference--or about the portion of it I managed to attend. For a variety of reasons, my stay in Oxford was a bit compressed, so I missed some of the keynotes that I would have liked to have heard (like Bernard Reginster's, Peter Poellner's and John Richardson's), and also some papers I would have liked to discuss, like Allison Merrick's on "historical sense" in Nietzsche, and Joao Constancio's on "Nietzsche on Freedom and the Unchangeability of Character." (Joao's paper is an interesting critique of my views in the "The Paradox of Fatalism and Self-Creation in Nietzsche" paper, and we had a useful discussion of it in the St. Peter's College bar; he's kindly sent it to me, and hopefully it will be generally available before long at which point we may discuss it here.)

It was very nice to meet in person a number of Nietzsche scholars, including some who regularly contribute comments here, like Charlie Huenemann and Timothy McWhirter. Because the quality of the papers was unusually high for an FNS event, there were, alas, a lot of conflicts. So while moderating a session which included Rex Welshon's illuminating discussion of Nietzsche and the neurosciences of consciousness and Peter Kail's (as always) masterful explication of Nietzsche's naturalism, I had to miss several papers I would have liked to hear in other sessions. So it goes. I did get to hear later Mario Brandhorst's paper on "Naturalism, Genealogy, and the Value of Morality," and due to some confusion about whether the other speakers for that session were there, we managed to have enough time to have a fruitful dialogue about it in Q&A. I caught some, but not all, of Gabriel Zamosc's very provocative argument about autonomy, sovereignty, and guilt. Galen Strawson gave a tour de force keynote on "Nietzsche's Metaphysics," though one that left a number of us wondering what this metaphysical Nietzsche has to do with Nietzsche the brilliant moral psychologist. My own plenary session led to a number of useful questions (and some naughty behavior by my dear friend Ken Gemes, with whom I've quarrelled about this topic for years now), though I am most indebted to Peter Kail for pointing out to me the need to tackle Spinoza--which led me, in turn, to this very good paper by Donald Rutherford, which I hope to discuss before long. (Rutherford, it seems to me, makes a stronger case for N's positive view of freedom, and its philosophical pedigree, than any of the recent contributors to the Gemes & May volume, so I hope he will publish it before too long. He did kindly give me permission to cite it in the final version of my own "sovereign individual" paper, which I'll have on-line before too long.)

Perhaps the philosophical highlight of the conference, though, wasn't on the official program: disputing at 4 in the morning in the St. Peter's College faculty lounge, with obligatory amounts of 'beverage,' whether or not David Wiggins had a good objection to projectivism with Peter Kail, Allison Merrick, and Christopher Sykes.

My congratulations to Peter Kail and Manuel Dries for organizing one of the best FNS events by everyone's appraisal. Others in attendance are welcome to add their comments on particularly notable papers, discussions, etc.

Myths about Nietzsche

I discuss them on Philosophy Bites. They are: the overman is a central idea in his philosophy; will to power is central to his philosophy; Nietzsche is a proto-postmodernist; and Nietzsche is an anti-semite.

I'm sure various Nietzsche scholars will disagree that these are all myths, but such is life in Nietzsche studies!

Who is the "Soverign Individual"? Nietzsche on Freedom

Sorry not to have gotten the draft of my paper for the FNS meeting at Oxford on-line before I left, but here it is. One serious lacuna in the current version (as Peter Kail rightly pointed out to me) is the failure to discuss Spinoza. But other comments are welcome, and soon, as I have to submit the final version by the end of the month for the Cambridge Critical Guide to the Genealogy.

In the discussion session, John Richardson (NYU) suggested that one familiar sense of freedom--not being subjected to the will of another--is in fact important for Nietzsche. I agreed that that sense of freedom is not a revisionary one, but I don't see the textual evidence that when Nietzsche writes about "freedom" it is this that he has in mind. Reader thoughts on this issue are also especially welcome.

I was sorry not to have been able to attend more of the FNS conference, which was an unusually good one, for which thanks and credit go to Peter Kail and Manuel Dries. I'll try to write a bit more about the conference by the weekend.

Abstracts for Papers at FNS Meeting at Oxford Next Week are Now Available

Here. I will post a draft of my own paper on SSRN before I depart for the conference. I also understand that the keynote sessions are likely to be filmed.

Announcing "Nietzsche Grid"

Carlos Ruiz (who uses the pen name Narziss), a student at Berkeley, has put together "Nietzsche Grid", which is potentially a very useful resource, but it also needs input from other Nietzsche students. The idea is to collect references to sections of the corpus that address various themes in his work. Narziss is also maintaining a blog for discussion and suggestions. I corresponded with Narziss about some possible thematic categories, but I am sure he would welcome input from readers of this blog about categories and ultimately about texts that belong under each category.

David Rosenthal on Consciousness

This useful summary of a recent paper by Rosenthal makes clear why students of Nietzsche should want to study Rosenthal's work on consciousness.

What is "the Kantian ethics/epistemology/metaphysics/aesthetics grid"?

Dana Villa is a political theorist in the Political Science Department at the University of Notre Dame. In a review essay of some recent books on Nietzsche, he concludes with the following statement:

Nietzsche’s critique [of Christian-bourgeois civilization], however, fails to fit the Kantian ethics/epistemology/metaphysics/aesthetics grid—the very grid that
guides the analytic re-constructor. The result is that even the best analytic
Nietzsche literature (and Reginster’s book certainly falls into that category)
will tend to leave out the essential.

"Analytic" is, of course, a code word for a commentator who knows some philosophy and treats Nietzsche as a philosopher who has arguments and evidence. But put that to one side: what sense can be given to "the Kantian ethics/epistemology/metaphysics/aesthetics grid" such that it is true that, for example, Reginster or me is committed to it, and that in virtue of that, are missing something "essential"? The answer may be (as I suspect) no sense at all, and that like talk of "analytic" this is really just code for something else. But what?

Signed comments only.

Nietzsche's Philosophy of Action

This is the penultimate draft of an essay for The Blackwell Companion to the Philosophy of Action being edited by Timothy O'Connor and Constantine Sandis, that should be out in 2010. I am still working on the issues here (and have worked on them previously, as some readers will recognize), and welcome comments--especially since there were significant space constraints in this piece, which will be less of a factor in the work-in-progress on these themes.

Draft Program for "Nietzsche on Mind and Nature" at Oxford This September Now Available

Here. A lot of interesting stuff, though I regret I am probably going to miss the Friday sessions. Abstracts are not available yet; I'll post a link when they are.

Two New Books on Nietzsche: One Introductory, One for Scholars and Advanced Students

The introductory volume is Charlie Huenemann's Nietzsche: Genius of the Heart, which he kindly sent me. I've been dipping in and out of different parts of it, and it is written in an inviting way for the novice but at the same time is clearly better-informed about recent scholarly literature than most introductions to Nietzsche. Signed comments from readers who have read more of the book are welcome.


The other is the edited volume by Ken Gemes and Simon May on Nietzsche on Freedom and Autonomy. All the essays are, I believe, new, except my "Nietzsche's Theory of the Will," which has appeared elsewhere. My contribution is unique in another way too in this volume, since it is, I believe, the only one to defend the view that Nietzsche denies the causality of the will, thus denies the autonomy or freedom of the will, and thus denies that people are in any meaningful sense free or morally responsible. The other contributors are Sebastian Gardner, Ken Gemes, Christopher Janaway, Robert Pippin, Simon May, John Richardson, Peter Poellner, Aaron Ridley, David Owen, Mathias Risse, and Maudemarie Clark & David Dudrick. The "Birkbeck-Southampton" axis and its fascination with the "sovereign individual" looms large here; Gemes's paper is probably the best representative of this moralized reading of Nietzsche in the volume, and I will have more to say about it in papers I'm working on. But Clark & Dudrick offer a detailed response to my "Nietzsche's Theory of the Will" paper, Poellner's paper develops a very different (from the Birkbeck-Southampton axis) line about Nietzsche's idea of freedom, Gardner develops his "transcendental" reading of Nietzsche on the self (which is both hugely stimulating and suggestive and yet hugely implausible to my mind), while Risse examines the idea of eternal recurrence through a Freudian lens (Risse's paper is most removed from the main themes of the volume). I will probably write more about the Clark & Dudrick and Poellner papers later this summer as well. Only Katsafanas, of important writers on this topic, is absent from the volume, though his work is much discussed by contributors. In sum, I'm hopeful that this volume, together with the forthcoming Oxford FNS conference on related themes, will lead to some real philosophical progress on these issues in the next few years. (Of course, my hope is that the moralizing readings of Nietzsche will be decisively defeated, but we'll see!)

Again, signed reader comments on the essays in the Gemes & May volume are also welcome.

Riverside and 1st Annual Magnus Lecture by Maudemarie Clark

Last Saturday's event was quite instructive and rewarding, at least for me, though I think others too. Maudemarie Clark offered a new, close reading of section 21 of Beyond Good and Evil, rejecting her earlier claim from Nietzsche on Truth and Philosophy that the skepticism about causation in that passage manifests his continued acceptance of the NeoKantian view that "cause" is a concept we impose upon our experience, and so not a feature of the world as it is in-itself. Instead, Clark argued, the passage manifests an essentially Humean view of causation, which is central to making sense of the reasons he gives for rejecting the idea of "unfree will" in the second half of the passage.

The reading was quite ingenious and provocative, but both Lanier Anderson and I were not convinced (though Anderson agreed with Clark that Nietzsche is something like a compatibilist about free will). We argued, in slightly different ways, that Clark had it right in the 1990 book, that the inescapably Kantian language--"'cause' and 'effect' are pure concepts," "in the 'in-itself' there is nothing of 'causal connections'"--does indeed reflect a NeoKantian (Langean) skepticism about the status of claims about cause and effect. Against the Humean reading, Anderson made I thought the particularly telling point that even in BGE 21 Nietzsche identifies the concept of "sequence" as one we impose upon experience, rather than part of the noumenal world. But "sequence" of course is precisely what Humeans claim is delivered by experience, so allegedly the opposite of a conceptual imposition that structures experience!

At this point, Clark's paper is not slated for publication, though I expect some of these arguments will make their way into hers and David Dudrick's forthcoming book on Beyond Good and Evil. I will probably make use of some of the material from my comments on Clark, and my comments on Gemes and Poellner from last year's Pacific APA session on Nietzsche on freedom, in two essays I'm working on currently: the entry on Nietzsche for the forthcoming Blackwell Companion to Philosophy of Action and my essay for the September "Nietzsche and Mind" conference of the Friedrich Nietzsche Society at Oxford, which will be on the topic, "Who is Nietzsche's 'Sovereign Individual'? Nietzsche on Freedom and Agency," which will eventually end up in the CUP volume on the Genealogy that Simon May is preparing. One or both of these will make it on to SSRN in draft, at which point I'll solicit feedback here.

Bottom line, though, on Riverside was that it was a real treat to participate in such a serious and high-level discussion of Nietzsche. I learned a lot.

"Bernd Magnus Lecture" at UC Riverside by Maudemarie Clark, May 30th

I hope to see some readers there:


The First Annual Lecture in
The Bernd Magnus Lecture Series
Saturday, May 30th

Featured Speakers and Commentators:
The inaugural lecture will be given by Maudemarie Clark (UC Riverside) with commentary from Brian Leiter (University of Chicago) and Lanier Anderson (Stanford University)

University of California, Riverside——HMNSS 1500

Conference Schedule
· 1:00: Welcome by John Fischer
· 1:30: Maudemarie Clark: ‘Nietzsche on Causality and Responsibility’
· 2:30: Break
· 2:45: Brian Leiter
· 3:15: Lanier Anderson’
· 3:45: Break
· 4:00: Q&A Session

For more information, please contact Mark Wrathall (mark.wrathall@ucr.edu)

"Nietzsche and Morality" Now Out in Paperback

I got my actual copies today, though Amazon reports not having it in stock yet, but it should be enroute. The volume contains original essays by Simon Blackburn, Maudemarie Clark & David Dudrick, Thomas Hurka, Nadeem Hussain, Christopher Janaway, Joshua Knobe & Brian Leiter, Peter Poellner, Bernard Reginster, Mathias Risse, Neil Sinhababu, and R. Jay Wallace.

From the reviews on the dustjacket:

"Nietzsche has a tendency to throw out themes and leave us the task of seeing how they cohere. Many of the essays in this book try to tie up apparent loose ends, and make him say what he should have said if he had followed his insights through. We are entering a new era of Nietzsche studies." Roger Caldwell, Philosophy Now

"This collection of essays contains some of the best recent work on Nietzsche and moral philosophy. The editors state that their aim is to present work that advances the understanding of Nietzsche's ethical views and demonstrates the relevance of those views to contemporary debates in normative ethics, metaethics, and moral psychology. In relation to these two ends, the collection is clearly a success. It presents very good historical scholarship as well as some first-rate work in moral philosophy that engages with the issues that concerned Nietzsche. The collection will certainly be of interest to moral philosophers and to those interested in the history of modern philosophy, and many of the essays should be regarded as essential reading for anyone interested in Nietzsche's engagement with morality."--Scott Jenkins, Notre Dame Philosophical Reviews

"This volume constitutes a significant advance in the Nietzsche literature. It is among a handful of volumes that anyone with a serious interest in Nietzsche simply must read. It will also be rewarding for anyone who is interested in the way in which moral psychology and action theory bear on ethics." Paul Katsafanas, Mind

Another Friend of the Naturalist Reading of Nietzsche

Here (in French--a grad student at the Jean Nicod Institute).

The Last "Most Important" Philosopher Poll

Our man is trailing--brace yourself--Augustine! Help him out. More substantive postings coming as the term is coming to an end here.

Another Poll: Vote for Nietzsche!

Here. So far, Hegel is ahead of Nietzsche. Unbelievable!

More Polling Amusement: Rank Order Your Favorite Books About Nietzsche

Here. Obviously the list omits books that some might have included; I've tried to give a decent sampling of English, German, and French literature, though I've no doubt over-represented recent Anglophone literature just because it tends to be better and I follow it more carefully. Worthy candidates not included should be noted in the comment section, but the comment must be signed or it will not appear.

A Useful Review of a New Collection of Essays on Zarathustra

Here, by a former student of mine, Neil Sinhababu. This was skillfully done, given that it obviously was a fairly uneven collection. But the review is informative and generous in finding merit or matters of interest in most of the pieces, and identifying those that are particularly worth reading.

Where Have Readers Had Good Experiences with Language Study?

A question that always comes up for PhD students is where to go for summer programs to develop or improve their German reading, translation, and sometimes speaking skills. Years ago, I found the scholarly reading and translation classes at NYU's Deutsches Haus to be quite valuable, but this was nearly 20 years ago, and I've no idea whether they continue to offer suitable summer classes and whether they remain good. (I did have to pay for them, and obviously information about financial aid for such programs would also be welcome.) In any case, it seemed to me that it might be useful to collect in one place recommendations of good programs in the US or in Germany based on reader experiences.

More Thoughts on the Argument from "Moral Disagreement," Part II

This is a belated follow-up to the earlier post addressing an excellent set of questions and challenges raised by Justin Clarke-Doane (NYU) (hereafter JCD) to my claim that Nietzsche argues for moral skepticism by appeal to the phenomenon of moral disagreement. JCD's first set of objections (discussed earlier, with replies by JCD in the comments) raised worries about the extent to which disagreement in ethics was different from disagreement in mathematics--which might warrant anti-realism about the latter or be thought a reductio of the former strategy of argument (assuming that realism about mathematics seems irresistible). In his second set of comments, JCD raises some more general reductio style challenges to the strategy of argument from disagreement. He raises, it seems to me, two very interesting issues:

1. First, JCD points out that philosophers have had significant disagreements about a range of issues, from common-sense claims about the reality of midsize physical objects, to claims about the structure of spacetime, to meta-philosophical claims about philosophy itself. Should we infer skepticism about the subjects in question from these facts about disagreement? Of course, the argument I am concerned with holds that the best explanation of persistent and intractable disagreement is skepticism that there is any fact of the matter about the subject of disagreement. JCD's examples warrant different treatments depending on the facts of each case.

For example, there was not persistent and intractable disagreement about the non-Euclidean character of spacetime: Kant thought it obviously false, and now everyone realizes that Kant was wrong. Disagreement about (as JCD calls them) "first-order intuitively metaphysical claims" (e.g., the existence of properties or possible worlds) probably does warrant the skeptical inference, so there I am happy to "bite the bullett" (and to do so in Nietzschean terms, e.g., I assume philosophers' metaphysical sympathies track underlying moral commitments, which are themselves explicable psychologically). Disagreement about "intuitively common-sense claims" (e.g., about the existence of table and chairs) does not strike me as either persistent or intractable: skepticism about tables and chairs is now a decidely minority viewpoint (I think I can count the philosophical skeptics on one hand!), and the minority's existence seems more easily explicable sociologically (e.g., there are professional rewards for staking out crackpot positions) than by genuine epistemic uncertainties.

Now JCD acknowledges that there are differing degrees of disagreements about his examples (I have not mentioned all of them, just what I hope is a representative sample). But he makes two points that deserve response. First, JCD notes that "the mere possibility that philosophers have held conflicting views with respect to a given claim in the absence of a cognitive shortcoming seems to me to be just as worrisome as the actuality of this." But this can't be right, since it is central to the argument for moral skepticism that disgareements be persistent and intractable, characteristics that are highly probative of as to what explains the disagreement (e.g., a cognitive shortcoming or the absence of any fact of the matter). Second, JCD notes, fairly enough, that "there has been less disagreement among philosophers with respect to some moral claims" than some of the issues noted above (e.g., the metaphysical and common-sense claims); he gives, though, as an example of a moral claim which has generated less disagreement the following: "the claim that one ought not cause needless harm." This, it seems to me, just obscures the fact that the disagreement here concerns the notion of which harms are "needless," a disagreement which is surely a moral one.

JCD raises a second general issue: namely, whether disagreement among philosophers is really relevant to an explanatory argument for skepticism. As he notes, one might think the "virtual unamity among *physicists* with respect to the claim that spacetime is non-Euclidean" is far more important than disagreement among philosophers about the same subject-matter. Of course, it was precisely developments in physics that put an end to the disagreement among philosophers. But putting that to one side, one might worry that philosophical disagreements about subject-matter X are particularly amenable to non-realist explanations, even when X itself is the object of considerable agreement among non-philosophers. (In any case, that is how I understand JCD's interesting challenge.) As JCD notes, even I concede that philosophical disagreements about morality "often fail to translate into disagreements over what is right or wrong in concrete cases" which might suggest that the philosophical disagreement is "at far remove from the day to day moral discussion." If the "folk" (or the scientific folk) can agree about X, why think philosophical disagreement counts against realism about X? That, I take it, is JCD's worry.

So framed, I think JCD's point is correct: it is part of the reason I do not think skepticism about the non-Euclidean structure of spacetime is warranted. Kant's intuitions about spacetime yielded before work in mathematical physics, as it should. (Mathematical physics has more cognitive content than philosophy, one might suppose.) But does the same general point tell against moral skepticism? Here, I think, the matter is more complex. First, it is not like the 'folk' have the kind of convergence in moral opinion that the physicists have in opinion about the non-Euclidean structure of spacetime. Second, the existence of diagreement among the 'folk' about moral matters is precisely what pushes the issues back one level, to the philosophical realm: the philosophical disagreement tracks, at a more abstract level to be sure, the folk disagreement. And yet the philosophers, despite all their 'advantages' (of time, education, insulation from external pressure etc. etc.), still fail to resolve the foundational issues. To be sure, if there were a "moral physics" converging around certain propositions, then the skeptical argument would face a problem: but the only candidate for the "moral physics" is the work of the moral philosophers, and that is precisely the data on which the skeptical argument from disagreement relies!

Some Old Reviews: of Safranski, Kohler, Conway, among others

I was surprised to discover that the Times Literary Supplement makes available on-line old book reviews, including several of mine. Readers might be amused by the scathing assessment of a comically bad book by Daniel Conway, that seems, not surprisingly, to have had no impact on the subsequent scholarly discussion. This review of three 'biographical' books may be useful for those looking for biographical treatments of Nietzsche: Safranski's is worth reading, Kohler's is a disgrace. They also have on-line an old essay I did for TLS on Nietzsche's naturalism; some of this material was later incorporated into Nietzsche on Morality.

In any case, readers may be pleased to learn of this searchable archive. It has already allowed me to catch up on some reviews I missed since my TLS subscription lapsed several years ago.

Which Anglophone school would you recommend for PhD studies focusing on Nietzsche?

I'm curious to see what readers think about this one.

CORRECTION: The CUNY listing should also include N. Pappas, who works on Plato and on Nietzsche.

UPDATE: So with a mere 22 votes cast, here are the "top seven," which are pretty tightly clustered. No surprises here, I think, though perhaps with more votes things will spread out a bit.

1. University of Chicago (J. Conant, M. Forster, R. Gooding-Williams, B. Leiter, M. Nussbaum, R. Pippin) (Condorcet winner: wins contests with all other choices)

2. University of California, Riverside (M. Clark, P. Keller, M. Wrathall) loses to University of Chicago (J. Conant, M. Forster, R. Gooding-Williams, B. Leiter, M. Nussbaum, R. Pippin) by 11–6

3. University of Southampton (K. Gemes, C. Janaway, D. Owen, A. Ridley) loses to University of Chicago (J. Conant, M. Forster, R. Gooding-Williams, B. Leiter, M. Nussbaum, R. Pippin) by 12–3, loses to University of California, Riverside (M. Clark, P. Keller, M. Wrathall) by 9–8

4. University of Warwick (K. Ansell-Pearson, S. Houlgate, P. Poellner) loses to University of Chicago (J. Conant, M. Forster, R. Gooding-Williams, B. Leiter, M. Nussbaum, R. Pippin) by 10–6, loses to University of Southampton (K. Gemes, C. Janaway, D. Owen, A. Ridley) by 8–6

5. Stanford University (L. Anderson, N. Hussain) loses to University of Chicago (J. Conant, M. Forster, R. Gooding-Williams, B. Leiter, M. Nussbaum, R. Pippin) by 15–3, loses to University of Warwick (K. Ansell-Pearson, S. Houlgate, P. Poellner) by 8–7

6. Brown University (C. Larmore, B. Reginster) loses to University of Chicago (J. Conant, M. Forster, R. Gooding-Williams, B. Leiter, M. Nussbaum, R. Pippin) by 15–1, loses to Stanford University (L. Anderson, N. Hussain) by 7–5

7. New York University (M. Evans, B. Longuenesse, J. Richardson) loses to University of Chicago (J. Conant, M. Forster, R. Gooding-Williams, B. Leiter, M. Nussbaum, R. Pippin) by 14–3, loses to Brown University (C. Larmore, B. Reginster) by 7–5

Best Journals for Nietzsche Scholarship?

Here is a new poll, which may be especially helpful to younger scholars trying to figure out where to submit their Nietzsche work:

Which journals, in your experience, publish the best quality philosophical scholarship on Nietzsche? (I list only journals that publish articles on Nietzsche with some regularity, so exclude those journals which, on occasion, publish something related to Nietzsche [e.g., Ethics, Philosophical Review, Philosophers' Imprint etc.].)

The poll is here. My own view is that European Journal of Philosophy is generally best, though even EJP publishes work below the standard of the best Nietzsche work that makes it into other mainstream journals like the ones that are not part of this poll. But I will be interested to see whether readers agree.

What are your favorite books by Nietzsche?

By reader demand, here's a new poll with which to have some fun. This one I'm quite curious to see the results.

Condorcet, Nietzsche, and Great Philosophers

The final round of this game.

Now Your Votes Are Needed More than Ever...

...as our man goes for the big prize! Seriously, I fear my many good friends in the Anglophone philosophical community are going to embarrass themselves by voting in ridiculously large numbers for Lewis and Rawls. Help save them the embarrassment!

Who was the greatest philosopher of the 19th-Century?

Feel free to vote, even if you're not going to vote for the correct choice!

A Note about the Blog

Despite best efforts, and helpful suggestions from readers, I've not been able to find a way to get recent comments to show up in the sidebar. My apologies. I appreciate the input from readers. One reason I'm going to continue this blog is because the feedback from readers has been genuinely informative and interesting. Thanks.

Nietzsche and Lamarck

So one nice thing about living in Chicago is that I'm now just a train (or taxi) ride away from the Central Division meetings of the American Philosophical Association. I was thus able to attend an unusually substantive session of the North American Nietzsche Society with presentations by Richard Schacht (emeritus, Illinois) and Maudemarie Clark (UC Riverside). Schacht argued forcefully that we need to acknowledge the influence of Lamarck's view that acquired characteristics are heritable on many aspects of Nietzsche's thought, while Clark presented a careful challenge to Schacht's reading of particular bits of textual evidence for his thesis. I expect (though this isn't certain) that the papers will appear in a forthcoming issue of International Studies in Philosophy.

My own view, which I offered in discussion, is something of a middle ground between Schacht and Clark (though perhaps closer to Schacht's view of the matter). Schacht is right to emphasize that it really would be astonishing if Nietzsche--self-educated, as he was, in matters scientific--dissented from the familiar Lamarckian orthodoxy of the era. So we should expect to find some passages in his corpus that just presuppose, as uncontroversial, Lamarckian assumptions.

On the other hand, it did seem to me that Schacht swept far too many passages, including large parts of the Genealogy, into the Lamarckian framework, without adequate evidence. As Clark pointed out, many passages Schacht invoked seemed equally compatible with the idea of cultural (rather than biological) transmission of acquired characteristics. Some of the passages (BGE 264 most strikingly) were ambiguous as between the claim that personality traits are heritable (which we know now to be true: cf. discussion in Knobe & Leiter [2007]) and the distinctively Lamarckian claim that acquired characteristics can be inherited. (There is, to be sure, no reason to think Nietzsche was sensitive to this distinction [between heritability and inheritance], but here at least there's a way to interpret what Nietzsche says in a way that does not make it dependent on a manifestly false view, i.e., the Lamarckian one.) Finally, many of the phenomenona in question--such as the acquisition of bad conscience--seem clearly explicable on the assumption not that acquired characteristics were inherited, but rather that certain kinds of recurrent social stimuli reproduce the same kind of effect across generations. So, e.g., if bad conscience represents the internalization of cruelty in response to the constraints that civilization place on human beings, then we should expect bad consicence to be a recurrent attribute of creatures like us brought up within those contraints. The only 'biological' assumption here is that humans all have some degree of instrinctive cruelty; but insofar as other aspects of their biology drive them towards civilized forms of social intercourse with their fellows, we should expect 'bad conscience' to arise across generations.

"Nietzsche on Mind and Nature" at Oxford in September 2009--Update

The deadline for abstracts for papers is now March 15. This promises to be one of the most philosophically substantial FNS events.

Katsafanas Reviews Leiter & Sinhababu (eds.), "Nietzsche and Morality"...

in Mind. Lots of interesting, substantive discussion, including of Hussain's fictionalist reading of Nietzsche, which we have discussed before.

More Thoughts on the Argument from "Moral Disagreement," Part I

These are some thoughts in response to the excellent set of comments by Justin Clarke-Doane (a PhD student at NYU doing fascinating work on disagreement in mathematics--he has a pertinent paper on his homepage for those interested) in the thread on my paper on "Moral Skepticism and Moral Disagreement in Nietzsche." Clarke-Doane raised so many interesting issues that they deserve their own posts, on which I hope he and others can then comment. (I'll refer to him hereafter as JCD.)

In my paper, I had argued from the fact of "persistent and apparently intractable disaggrement on foundational questions" in moral theory to the conclusion that we ought to be skeptical about the existence of moral facts or properties. JCD claims that we find the same kind of disagreement in mathematics. This might, of course, lead us to skepticism about mathematical facts or it might lead us to worry about this strategy of argument. JCD doesn't take a position on that issue here. He wants, in his first set of comments, to make the case that the situation, when it comes to disagreement, is the same in math as I claim it is in ethics. (His second set of comments raise a different set of issues, to which I'll turn in a second post.)

As an example of "persistent" disagreement in mathematics, JCD notes that, "There has been disagreement over the axioms for set-theory since their formulation."

As evidence that this disagreement is "apparently intractable," JCD notes that "there is not merely disaggrement over the truth-values of mathematical sentences, but also disagreement over what would count as evidence for those sentences' truth or falsity." JCD gives the examples of disagreement over the Choice and Replacement axioms.

As evidence that this disagreement has a "foundational character," JCD notes that disagreement over the axioms for set-theory is "epistemically foundational" for mathematics, since these are "the only serious candidates which might be thought to justify axioms which imply them." Such disagreement is also "metaphysically foundational" since "the axioms of our 'explanatorily' fundamental theory, set theory" are the metaphysical foundation of mathematics.

JCD has the significant advantage here of knowing a lot more mathematics than I do, though I hope to hear from readers also conversant in the underlying mathematical debates. I don't want to take issue with the question of whether the putative disagreements in questions are "foundational" (other readers are welcome to do so); I do want to pose some questions about whether they are "persistent" and "apparently intractable."

Set theory dates from the late 19th-century, so has been subject to about 140 years of development and dispute by mathematicians. How does the state of disagreement today compare to 100 years ago? To 50 years ago? To 25 years ago? Reading the SEP entry on set theory , one is left with the impression of a progressive discipline with gradual agreement on many basic ideas. Why is this? Could any entry on the foundations of morality read like the SEP entry on set theory?

The latter, purely sociological, observations bear on the question of intractability. It appears that many foundational issues in set theory have been resolved since the 1870s. (Is there any foundational issue about the criteria of right action that has been resolved since the 1870s? Or since the 1670s?) Evidence of 'intractability' has partly to do with persistence, but partly to do with the terms in which disagreement is carried out. Foundational debates in ethics devolve into clashing intuitions and accusations of moral corruption and obtuseness rather quickly! What are the terms on which apparently 'intractable' debates about set theory are carried out?

JCD makes the interesting sociological point that "the correlation between relevant mathematicians' views and thsoe of their mentor is impossible to miss." How long does that pattern last? Over multiple generations? Or do we find that the student of X often comes to reject the views of his teacher's teacher?

I don't presuppose answers to these questions. But their answers might well suggest which horn of JCD's dilemma we should embrace (i.e., mathematical skepticism or skepticiam about the argument from disagreement).

I should note that I don't quite understand JCD's reference, near the end of his first set of remarks, to the fact that fictionalists in philosophy of mathematics deny simple arithmetical truths. The argument from moral disagreement appeals to first-order disagreement in ethical theory about the criteria of right action, the nature of moral goodnes, and the relative priority of rightnes and goodness in the evaluatoin of actions and persons, among other considerations. It does not depend on claims about the metaphysics, epistemology, or semantics of these judgments. JCD is obviously skeptical about drawing the line between the meta- and first-order disagreements in mathematics. I would like some further explanation of why, and whether there is any reason for that skepticism to carry over to the meta-ethical case.

My Review of Shaw on "Nietzsche's Political Skepticism"

It is now on-line here.

"Nietzsche and Morality" (OUP, 2007) to be Released in Paperback Later This Year

If any readers have spotted typos or similar errors in the cloth version, I'd be grateful if you would let me know, so that we can ask OUP to correct them for the paperback version. Thanks.

Penultimate (essentially final) version of "Nietzsche's Naturalism Reconsidered" Now On-Line

Here. I am grateful to those who commented on it last year at this blog. This will appear in The Oxford Handbook of Nietzsche (edited by Ken Gemes and John Richardson), due out later this year. There may be a few stylistic or citation tweaks, but this version is final as to substance, and is available for citation and quotation.

Additional comments are, of course, welcome, since these are topics and issues I'm still working on.

"Nietzsche on Mind and Nature" at Oxford in September 2009

Reminder: the deadline for paper proposals is February 1!

New Look for the Blog

Let me know if you prefer this new look to the old one--some readers complained, fairly I think, that the old format was hard to read, and that the links were hard to find. Thanks. Happy New Year to all readers!

Nietzsche's Relationship to Political Philosophy

I've posted my review essay of Tamsin Shaw's book Nietzsche's Political Skepticism (Princeton, 2007), which will appear in Notre Dame Philosophical Reviews in January. Most of the review is given over to a detailed critique of Professor Shaw's argument. Those who have read my work for awhile know that I don't waste time doing detailed critiques of insignificant work, so even though I am skeptical about Shaw's main theses, I think they are very much worth engaging.

Here are the introductory and concluding paragraphs of my review essay:

Nietzsche's Political Skepticism (hereafter NPS) is a serious, learned, and novel contribution to the literature on Nietzsche’s relevance to political theory. Against the two dominant strands in the secondary literature—one attributing to Nietzsche a kind of flat-footed commitment to aristocratic forms of social ordering, the other denying that Nietzsche has any political philosophy at all—Shaw stakes out a new and surprising position: namely, that Nietzsche was very much concerned with the familiar question of the moral or normative legitimacy of state power, but was skeptical that with the demise of religion, it would be possible to achieve a practically effective normative consensus about such legitimacy that was untainted by the exercise of state power itself. Although, as I will argue below, there are reasons to be quite skeptical that Nietzsche was interested in anything like these questions, Shaw has laid down a clear and invigorating challenge to existing scholarship on Nietzsche’s politics, and it is one worth meeting.

=====================

NPS is meticulously footnoted, and Shaw displays a wide and generally deep knowledge of all the pertinent secondary literature. I believe this is the first time I have read a work that cites to book reviews I have written, though in each case the citation was substantive: there was a point made in the review that really was relevant to the issues at hand. Professor Shaw is also quite generous in her treatment of other commentators, even when they are, like Leo Strauss, fairly irresponsible. Her discussions of Burckhardt, Lange, Rankean nationalists, and other contemporaneous intellectual developments were learned, lucid, and helpful. The book is almost always quite well-informed about philosophical issues that affect her reading, and Shaw is particularly good, I thought, in her critique of Nadeem Hussain’s important “fictionalist” reading of Nietzsche (see esp. 92-94). Most books by political theorists on Nietzsche are unreadable for philosophers; this book is the exception that proves the rule. I would not hesitate to say that it is the best book on Nietzsche’s political theory I have ever read, even though I find it unpersuasive. Philosophers interested in Nietzsche’s political thought will have to read this book, and it certainly deserves critical attention and response.

New Preface to the Forthcoming Greek Edition of My "Nietzsche on Morality" Book

Some readers might find this of interest. The publisher was keen for me to talk about how I became interested in Nietzsche, and also to address what he described as the still widespread perception in Greece of Nietzsche as a figure of "the right."

Sorry for the Delay in Comments Appearing

I neglected to change my e-mail address from Texas to Chicago, and the Texas address had stopped forwarding, so there was a backlog. I've just now approved a whole bunch of comments, as well as changing my e-mail address to the current one for comment moderation. Thanks to all those who contributed, and my apologies for the mix up.

"Moral Skepticism and Moral Disagreement in Nietzsche"

I've posted a revised version of the paper I gave at the annual NYU "History of Modern Philosophy" conference in November (which generated an excellent and very helpful discussion). I hope the paper may interest moral philosophers generally, as well as Nietzsche scholars. Here is the abstract for the paper:

This essay offers a new interpretation of Nietzsche's argument for moral
skepticism (i.e., the metaphysical thesis that there do not exist any objective
moral properties or facts), an argument that should be of independent
philosophical interest as well. On this account, Nietzsche offers a version of
the argument from moral disagreement, but, unlike familiar varieties, it does
not purport to exploit anthropological reports about the moral views of exotic
cultures, or even garden-variety conflicting moral intuitions about concrete
cases. Nietzsche, instead, calls attention to the single most important and
embarrassing fact about the history of moral theorizing by philosophers over two
millennia: namely, that no rational consensus has been secured on any
substantive, foundational proposition about morality. Persistent and apparently
intractable disagreement on foundational questions, of course, distinguishes
moral theory from inquiry in the sciences and mathematics (perhaps in kind,
certainly in degree). According to Nietzsche, the best explanation for this
disagreement is that, even though moral skepticism is true, philosophers can
still construct valid dialectical justifications for moral propositions because
the premises of different justifications will answer to the psychological needs
of at least some philosophers and thus be deemed true by some of them. The essay
concludes by considering various attempts to defuse this abductive argument for
skepticism based on moral disagreement and by addressing the question whether
the argument "proves too much," that is, whether it might entail an implausible
skepticism about a wide range of topics about which there is philosophical
disagreement.

Blogging about Nietzsche's Theory of Value

Michael Drake is a lawyer with a philosophy background who has been blogging quite a bit about aspects of Nietzsche's theory of value, touching on many issues and authors noted here in the past. There are also opportunities to comment on his postings at his site.

Call for Papers for Nietzsche Society Conference on "Nietzsche on Mind and Nature" at Oxford, September 2009

Nietzsche on Mind and Nature
11 – 13 September 2009
St Peter’s College, University of Oxford

The Faculty of Philosophy at the University of Oxford will host the 2009 International
Conference of Friedrich Nietzsche Society of Great Britain and Ireland, 11-13
September 2009, at St. Peter’s College, Oxford.

Keynote speakers include:

Prof. Günter Abel, Faculty of Philosophy, TU Berlin, Germany.
Prof. Brian Leiter, Faculty of Law, University of Chicago, USA.
Prof. Graham Parkes, Faculty of Philosophy, Cork, Ireland.
Dr. Peter Poellner, Faculty of Philosophy, Warwick University, UK.
Prof. Bernard Reginster, Faculty of Philosophy, Brown University, USA.
Prof. John Richardson, Faculty of Philosophy, NYU, USA.
Prof. Galen Strawson, Department of Philosophy, Reading University, UK.

This conference seeks for the first time to consider Nietzsche’s philosophy of mind in
relation to his philosophical naturalism. We hope to consider papers by Nietzsche
experts with a background in analytical or continental philosophy as well as from those
working in the fields of philosophy of mind and naturalism with a strong interest in
Nietzsche. Potential topics include:

Nietzsche’s theory of subjectivity
Nietzsche and the body
Intentionality
Memory and self
Consciousness and self-consciousness
Nietzsche and biology
Epiphenomenalism
Nietzsche and psychology
Mind-body problem
Awareness, emotion, cognition
Unconsciousness
Perspectivism and the self
Self and otherness
Self-awareness and self-knowledge
Mind as emergent phenomenon
Nietzsche and neuroscience
Nietzsche’s naturalism
Agency and freedom
Mind, world, brain
Intersubjectivity and value

We invite submissions for 30-minute papers on the above or related topics. Please send
an abstract of a maximum of 400 words and a short CV (no longer than one page) via
email by 1 February 2009 to fnsox /at/ philosophy.ox.ac.uk. Notification of acceptance
will be sent no later than 1 March 2009.

For further details, please visit the conference website at
http://www.philosophy.ox.ac.uk/events/nietzsche_mind_conference
or contact the organizers at
fnsox/at/philosophy.ox.ac.uk

Organization:
Dr. Manuel Dries and Dr. Peter Kail, Faculty of Philosophy, University of Oxford.

Gott ist tot!

But not at this small college in Texas. Pretty pathetic.

UPDATE: Temple College, to its credit, reversed itself.

Life is peachy...

...which, alas, will just encourage mispronunciations of "Nietzsche."

(Thanks to John Turri for this amusing link.)

Nietzsche for your IPhone

Really.



(Thanks to Iain Thomson for the pointer.)

Nietzsche Society Conference at Oxford, September 2009

Details here. I'm not certain yet what I will be talking about, but it will probably concern agency and freedom, in a (no doubt futile!) effort to put a stop to the moralizing misreadings of Nietzsche on this topic emanating from certain corners of Southern England!

Greek Translation of "Nietzsche on Morality" Due Out in 2009

On the off chance this might be of interest to some reader(s), I thought I'd mention that I was pleasantly surprised to learn not long ago that a Greek translation of Nietzsche on Morality (Routledge, 2002) will be published in 2009. The book will be published by Okto (Athens). I have been very impressed by the conscientious work of the translator, Yorgos Lamprakos, who has been checking the citations in the English version, and found a number of errors, which will be corrected in the Greek version (citation errors, e.g., citing to GM I:15 instead of GM III:15, that kind of thing).

Comedian Gervais Offers His Rendition of Hitler Talking to Nietzsche

Here. Slightly amusing, though he, oddly, calls Nietzsche "a political philosopher."

(Thanks to Victor Caston for the pointer.)

Katsafanas Dissertation On-Line

Paul Katsafanas (New Mexico) has put his Harvard dissertation on-line here.  Quite apart from its general philosophical interest to those working in ethics and action theory, about half the dissertation will be of particular interest to Nietzsche scholars.

Shaw on Reading Nietzsche as a Fictionalist

Among the interesting discussions in Nietzsche's Political Skepticism by Tamsin Shaw (Princeton, Politics) is her critique of Nadeem Hussain's thesis that Nietzsche is a fictionalist about value, a subject we have discussed before.   She does not emphasize the anachronism problem, but instead calls attention, correctly I think, to the philosophical implausibility of the view of value at issue.  She proffers two pertinent critiques.   First, she notes that in many of the passages on which Hussain relies in which (as Shaw puts it) "art can be employed to generate knowingly an illusory view of the world" (p. 92), it seems clear that "norms for what would be valuable are already presupposed":  "Art can beautify the world.  But this project of beautification takes for granted existing norms for the way the world ought to be" (p. 93).  So, yes, artistic renderings of the 'terrible truth' about human existence involve a kind of fictionalism, but the fact that this fiction "justifies" existence (per the thesis, e.g., of The Birth of Tragedy, but not only there) presupposes a normative standard independent of the artistic fiction.

Second, Shaw raises doubts about the plausibility that a global fictionalism about value could really suffice for really valuing something.  Here she usefully invokes Frankfurt's idea that (as Shaw puts it) "although modern individuals value the freedom to choose their own ideals, the very espousal of ideals seems to involve a submission to necessity" (93-94).  To really care about what we take to be valuable we have to "believe [it] is worthy to be cared about," but how can we do that about values that we know to be fictions?

How can the fictionalist respond? 

"Nietzsche's Naturalism Reconsidered"

A draft of this paper is here. This is slated for the forthcoming Oxford Handbook of Nietzsche, which will be edited by Gemes and Richardson. Comments would be most welcome. Here is the abstract:

According to one recent scholar, "Most commentators on Nietzsche would agree that he is in a broad sense a naturalist in his mature philosophy" (Janaway 2007: 34). This may come as a surprise to those who think of Heidegger, Kaufmann, DeMan, Kofman, Deleuze, and Nehamas, among others, as "commentators" on Nietzsche. And yet there are, indeed, clear signs that in the last twenty years, as Nietzsche studies has become more philosophically sophisticated, the naturalist reading of Nietzsche has come to the fore, certainly in Anglophone scholarship. In Nietzsche on Morality (2002), I set out a systematic reading of Nietzsche as a philosophical naturalist, one which has attracted considerable critical comment, including from some generally sympathetic to reading Nietzsche as a philosophical naturalist. In this paper, I revisit that reading and respond to various objections. Topics covered include the role of "speculation" in Nietzsche's naturalism; the difference between the Humean and Therapeutic Nietzsches; the role of culture in naturalistic explanations; the status of claims about causation in Nietzsche's naturalism; whether the apparent metaphysics of the will to power is compatible with naturalism; and how Nietzsche's speculative naturalism fares in light of subsequent work in empirical psychology.

My Teaching Next Year at Chicago

A couple of folks have asked, so here's what's on the agenda:

I'll be doing the "Law and Philosophy Workshop" all year on the topic "Toleration and Religious Liberty." This is cross-listed between the Law School and Philosophy Department, and is open to students in either unit, as well as others at the university; all students will need to submit a statement of interest and other information to be considered for admission (there are details at the link, above). Speakers at the workshop will include Joseph Raz, Simon Blackburn, Susan Mendus, Leslie Green, and Martha Nussbaum, as well as various legal scholars and legal theorists.

In the fall quarter, I'll be offering in the Law School the basic Jurisprudence I course (scroll down) covering the nature of law and the theory of adjudication. In the Spring quarter, I'll offer Jurisprudence II (again, scroll down), which will cover "topics in moral, political, and legal theory." I haven't fixed the precise topics yet, but Juris I won't be a prerequisite. JD students get priority for these, though MA and PhD students from other units can take them as cognates.

Michael Forster and I have also been talking about doing some kind of informal reading group on Nietzsche during 08-09; he's on leave a good bit of next year, but we will have sorted out details by fall. (We will probably offer a formal course/seminar for credit on some figures/topics in German philosophy in 2009-10.)

Please feel free to e-mail me with any questions.

"Nietzsche's Moral and Political Philosophy"

Some time in the next year, I mean to update my SEP essay on this topic.
I'd welcome suggestions from readers about topics/discussions that require revision or expansion, or additional topics that might be included. Thanks.

By the way, I have finally added a response to the interesting comments of Scott Jenkins from the Janaway thread from May. I appreciate those and the other comments there, and may have more to say on this.

Nietzsche Conference at Southampton Coming Up...

...I hope to see some readers there.

I may post a draft of my paper on SSRN if I get a chance before my departure.

Janaway Review Now On-Line at NDPR

Here.

Reading Janaway Reading Nietzsche

I've posted on SSRN my review essay (forthcoming in Notre Dame Philosophical Reviews) discussing Christopher Janaway's recent book Beyond Selflessness: Reading Nietzsche's Genealogy (OUP, 2007). Here is the abstract:

Particular attention is given to the question of Nietzsche's style, and the
relationship between his philosophical positions and his therapeutic objectives; to Janaway's critique of my account of Nietzsche's naturalism; and to Nietzsche's conception of agency and the meaning of the image (from GM II:2) of "the sovereign individual."

The essay contains a good deal of critical discussion of Janaway's claims, but I want to emphasize here something I write early on about his book:

Janaway’s book will, without doubt, prove instructive and essential reading
not just to readers sympathetic to the naturalistic reading of Nietzsche I
have defended, and not just to those interested in Nietzsche’s Genealogy, but to
all scholars of Nietzsche, regardless of their philosophical and interpretive
starting points.

I would welcome substantive discussion of the issues raised in the review here. Non-anonymous postings only.

New "Philosophical Topics" Issue Devoted to Nietzsche

The fall 2005 Philosophical Topics (vol. 33, no. 2) devoted to Nietzsche (and edited by Randall Havas and Edward Minar) has finally appeared! My "Nietzsche's Theory of the Will" paper from Philosopher's Imprint is reprinted here, but all the other contributions are new. The other papers are:

"Nietzsche on Language: Before and After Wittgenstein" by Maria Alvarez and Aaron Ridley (both University of Southampton)

"Perspectivism as Ephexis in Interpretation" by Jessica N. Berry (Georgia State University) (this is an important challenge to the treatment of perspectivism favored in earlier work by Maudemarie Clark, myself, and others; Berry offers a new reading of perspectivism linking it to ancient skepticism)

"Nietzsche, the Greeks, and Happiness (with Special Reference to Aristotle and Epicurus)" by Richard Bett (Johns Hopkins University) (it is very nice to see Bett, who has also written a very good piece on Nietzsche and ancient skepticism, writing again on Nietzsche!)

"Our Virtues" by Robert Guay (State University of New York at Binghamton)

"Nietzschean Equality" by Randall Havas (Willamette University)

"On Failing to Be Agents: Freedom, Servitude, and the Concept of 'the Weak' in Nietzsche's Practical Philosophy" by David Owen (University of Southampton [Politics])

"Nietzsche on Pleasure and Power" by Bernard Reginster (Brown University)

"Nietzsche and the Perspectival" by Richard Schacht (University of Illinois, Urbana-Champaign)

"Philosophy and the Politics of Cultural Revolution" by Tracy B. Strong (University of California, San Diego [Political Science])

I've only just perused the volume (apart from Berry's essay, which I've read before and recommend), but the essays by Bett and Reginster look to be especially interesting. A curiosity in the first essay, by Alvarez and Ridley, that caught my attention. They refer (p. 1) to work which "draw[s] connections between Nietzsche's work and issues and thinkers already established within the analytic tradition, in the hope or expectation that light might be shed thereby in one direction or the other." The footnote accompanying this sentence then reads:

A prominent example is Brian Leiter's recent attempt to understand
Nietzsche along the lines suggested by contemporary analytic naturalism.
See Leiter, Nietzsche on Morality (London: Routledge, 2002).

But the first chapter of my book situates Nietzsche's naturalism by reference to Hume, and compares it also to the sense in which Stroud identified Hume, Marx, and Freud as "naturalists." I would not have thought of those thinkers as "contemporary analytic naturalists"!

Some Other Nietzsche Blogs

The Daily Nietzsche Blog

The Mole: Official Blog of the Friedrich Nietzsche Society

List others of note in the comments section.

Katsafanas on Nietzsche on Consciousness

References are to Paul Katsafanas, “Nietzsche’s Theory of Mind: Consciousness and Conceptualization,” European Journal of Philosophy 13 (2005): 1-31. Some other references are to David Rosenthal, “Consciousness and Its Function,” forthcoming in Neuropsychologia (I cite to the MS version).

Katsafanas, as I’ve acknowledged in my “Nietzsche’s Theory of the Will,” Philosophers’ Imprint 7 (2007), is plainly correct to criticize me (and Deleuze) for claiming that Nietzsche views consciousness simpliciter as epiphenomenal. That is not consistent, as Katsafanas shows, with a variety of claims Nietzsche makes, and in retrospect this strikes me as the most serious mistake in my 2002 book Nietzsche on Morality. (There are other interpretive points I would put differently now, but the treatment of epiphenomenalism is the one issue that I now think in error.) Yet it is clear that Nietzsche thinks some aspects of consciousness (e.g., our conscious experience of will) are epiphenomenal: the challenge is to specify the parameters of the epiphenomenalism, and give some principled theoretical account for those parameters. That is not my concern here, though Katsafanas’s paper has interesting suggestions on that score that deserve attention.

Instead, I want to consider critically Katsafanas’s own proposal regarding how Nietzsche demarcates the “conscious” and the “unconscious.” It is an intriguing and subtle discussion, but having taught it recently in my seminar, it strikes me as problematic, both textually and philosophically.

Early on, Katsafanas dismisses the view that the hallmark of consciousness is that it involves “awareness” (2-3). This can’t be right, he says, since there are “unconscious perceptions” (3), and since “a perception is a type of awareness of the world” (3), it follow that unconscious states can involve awareness. That seems right as far as it goes, but it elides a more pertinent proposal (that travels under the general heading of the Higher-Order-Thoughts [“HOTs”] account of consciousness) according to which the hallmark of consciousness is not awareness simpliciter, but rather awareness of being in a particular psychological state, i.e., the one that ergo is conscious. Here is Rosenthal, a leading proponent of the view: “A psychological state is conscious…if one has a thought, distinct from the state itself, to the effect that one is in that state” (15). The HOT need not itself be conscious, indeed, most often it probably is not—unless there is another even higher-order HOT about the original HOT. The details of the view may not matter for our purposes. The point here is that Katsafanas has dealt far too quickly with the intuitive idea that consciousness has something to do with “awareness”: it’s not, contra Katsafanas, awareness of the world that’s at issue, but rather awareness of the state of perceiving or thinking or desiring that we count as conscious. We’ll return to this, below.

Katsafanas dismisses the “awareness” account without citing Nietzsche. But when he turns to claims about Nietzsche’s own view he, quite correctly, assumes a textual burden, as well as a philosophical one. The key passage on which he relies is GS 354, and the key bit (cited at his p. 3) is this (I follow the translation Katsafanas uses, which seems fine for our purposes):

Man, like every living being, thinks continually without knowing it; the thinking that rises to consciousness is only the smallest part of all this—the most superficial and worst part—for only this conscious thinking occurs in words, which is to say signs of communication, and this fact uncovers the origin of consciousness. In brief, the development of language and the development of consciousness…go hand in hand.

This passage comes fairly late in GS 354, and thus obscures the fact that the primary thesis of the section is that, as Nietzsche puts it, “consciousness in general has developed under the pressure of the need to communicate,” which arose for basic evolutionary reasons, i.e., at some point the human animal “needed help and protection.” We will return to this point shortly. Let’s focus, instead, on the passage that Katsafanas makes central to his reading.

What Katsafanas wants to take from GS 354 is the following argument: (1) there is no conscious thinking without language; (2) to think in language is to think conceptually; (3) therefore, conscious thinking is necessarily conceptual or “conceptually articulated.” Here is Katsafanas:

for Nietzsche words and concepts go hand in hand; to think in words is to think by means of concepts. Accordingly, in writing [in GS 354] that conscious thinking occurs in words, Nietzsche is claiming that conscious thinking is conceptually articulated…[I]t follows that unconscious mental states do not have conceptually articulated content; unconscious state must have a type of nonconceptual content (3).

It is one thing to say that “words and concepts go hand in hand,” it is another thing to claim that words are essential to conceptual articulation, which is what Katsafanas needs to support his strong concluding claims, namely, that “It follows that unconscious mental states do not have conceptually articulated content.” Does he have any evidence? Certainly not GS 354. BGE 268, which he cites, tells us that words express concepts, but that is not enough, since it may be that conceptual content can be expressed in other ways (e.g., through images). More on point is a Nachlass passage, WP 506, in which Nietzsche says, in passing that “concepts, possible only when there are words,” though the rest of the passage is silent on that idea and its import. Strikingly, the prior section (WP 505) says, “Consciousness is present only to the extent that consciousness is useful,” which is more in line with GS 354. At the same time, WP 505 makes no claim about consciousness requiring conceptualization or words.

In short, the textual basis for the view Katsafanas ascribes to Nietzsche is exceedingly thin, consisting of a sentence fragment from the Nachlass, which has no analogue I am aware of (Katsafanas cites none) in the published corpus. The absence of real textual support is significant, however, primarly because the view about consciousness Katsafanas wants to ascribe to Nietzsche is extremely implausible on the merits. Since this implausible view is not required by the texts, one should probably not ascribe it to Nietzsche.

Let us now review the details of the view of consciousness that Katsafanas attributes to Nietzsche.

According to Katsafanas, a state has conceptual content when “first, the content is composed of simpler parts, namely, concepts; second, these concepts are structured or composed in a certain way in order to constitute the content” (4). The belief “the cat is white” is “conceptually articulated; the content appears to be composed of two concepts, CAT and WHITE, which are structured in a certain way, namely in a subject—predicate fashion, in order to form the belief” (4). But one could perceive a white cat without having the belief that the cat is white. But to have the belief, you must have the concepts of CAT and WHITE, as well as a grasp of the syntactic form.

Conceptual content is not, however, the only way for a mental state to have determinate content on Katsafanas’s view. Once again, he uses perceptions as the example. “Perceptual content would be conceptualized if the perceived object were represented as an instance of some concept, that is, as a token of some type.” Nonconceptual, but determinate perceptions “represent their objects in a definite way, but do not represent them as instantiating concepts” (7). (To my knowledge, those who think perceptions can involve nonconceptual content do not think this has anything to do with whether or not they are conscious.)

Katsafanas also emphasizes, plausibly, that while both perceptions and concepts require discriminatory abilities, having a concept requires more than this (8). “For Nietzsche, concepts are classificatory abilities; possessing a concept involves the ability to classify various objects as falling under the concept” (8). Thus “concepts are systematically related to other concepts, and concepts can be employed in non-perceptual contexts” (9).

Two points here.

First, the textual evidence proferred for saying this is Nietzsche’s view is misleading in the extreme: footnote #16 (accompanying the last quote) cites BGE 20 as saying that “concepts…grow up in connection and relationship with each other” and involve an “innate systematic structure and relationship” to other concepts. But Nietzsche is not discussing concepts per se—a subject on which, unsurprisingly, he has no views at all as far as I can tell—but rather “philosophical concepts” (philosophischen Begriffe), Katsafanas simply having dropped “philosophical.” In context, it is quite clear that he is making claims about distinctively philosophical concepts—the Cartesian “I think” and the Schopenhauerian “I will”—and not any point at all about Begriffe, at least as philosophers today would understand that idea. So Katsafanas has described a reasonable view of concepts, but there is no reason to say it is Nietzsche’s view.

Second, the fact that “concepts are systematically related to other concepts” has nothing to do with whether they are conscious. Rosenthal has effectively made this point against the view that consciousness is essential for both rationality and intentional action. For the rationality or intentionality of mental states is a matter of their intentional contents, not whether they are conscious; so, too, we might suppose with “systematic relations.” Here is Rosenthal on rationality:

Thoughts and desires are rational in virtue of their having causal connections that reflect rational connections among intentional contents….[S]ince the intentional content of thoughts and desires occur independently of whether those states are conscious, rational connections among them will tend to occur independently of whether they are conscious (9).

And here is Rosenthal on intentional actions:

Actions are intentional when they are initiated by volitions to do those things. And volitions tend to cause the particular actions they do in virtue of the intentional content of those volitions. As with cognitive states, volitions can occur without being conscious; so the property of a volition’s being conscious is independent of its intentional content….So even though we are aware of our own actions as being intentional only when the relevant volitions are conscious, the consciousness of the volitions is not necessary for an action to be intentional (10).

This gets us to the very heart of the difficulty with Katsafanas’s account of consciousness. It may be true, as Katsafanas writes, that “conscious perceptions involve a classifying awareness, whereas unconscious perceptions involve only a discriminatory ability” (9); to be clear, I am not sure it is correct either philosophically or empirically. But even if it is, that does not get us very far in the case of Nietzsche. For Nietzsche, like Freud after him, surely thinks there are unconscious beliefs and desires which figure in the best explanation of observable behavior. But unconscious beliefs and desires must surely have determinate intentional contents! Yet how can they have such contents without their being conceptually articulate contents? How can, per Freud, my unconscious wish to sleep with my mother be anything other than a mental state that deploys the concepts of SLEEP and MOTHER together with some syntactic connectors? The issue of conceptually articulate content seems entirely orthogonal to whether or not the mental state is conscious or unconscious.

Katsafanas, I fear, has obscured the implausibility of the account of consciousness he has ascribed to Nietzsche (an account that no one, as far as I can tell, defends in trying to explain consciousness) by concentrating on the perceptual case—though even here, I don’t take it that those who think perceptions can involve nonconceptual contents think this has anything to do with whether they are conscious or not. But at least in the case of perception, the idea of determinate but non-conceptual content makes some sense. But does it make any sense at all in the case of intentional content that is unconscious? Either Katsafanas has to explain unconscious intentional content without reference to conceptual articulateness or he must claim (how could he claim this?) that there is no such thing as unconscious intentional content.

I am not, needless to say, a philosopher of mind (even though, once upon a time, I published two peer-refereed papers on mental causation!), so it’s possible I’ve made some obvious error in construing the issues about content. I hope Paul Katsafanas or some philosopher of mind with a side interest in Nietzsche (the only kind likely to be reading this!) will set me straight accordingly! I also want to be clear that the only reason I have bothered to write about Katsafanas’s paper is because it is of significantly higher quality than is the norm in Nietzsche studies. I do think one of his central theses is mistaken, but it is interestingly mistaken, and it reflects a degree of scholarly and philosophical seriousness that is far too rare in Nietzsche studies.

Newly Reconstituted "Journal of Nietzsche Studies"

Christa Davis Acampora at Hunter College has taken over as editor of The Journal of Nietzsche Studies, and is making an effort to turn it into a serious scholarly journal. To that end, I accepted her kind invitation to serve on the journal's new editorial board. (The gushing bios of the members of the editorial board are slightly ridiculous, I'm afraid.) Some readers will know that I am rather skeptical about the "Nietzsche specialist" journals, but Professor Acampora has indicated that her ambition is to do better, and certainly there are enough able people on the editorial board that one may hope this will be possible. We'll revisit things in a year or so to see how JNS has been doing.

Nietzsche's Naturalism Redux: Thoughts on Janaway

Sorry for the dearth of postings, it's been incredibly hectic lately. These are very much thoughts in progress. The main references are to Janaway's Beyond Selflessness: Reading Nietzsche's Genealogy (OUP, 2007) and to my Nietzsche on Morality (Routledge, 2002).

============================

Christopher Janaway claims that most Nietzsche scholars now accept that Nietzsche is a naturalist in what Janaway calls the “broad sense”:

He opposes transcendental metaphysics, whether that of Plato or Christianity or Schopenhauer. He rejects notions of the immaterial soul, the absolutely free controlling will, or the self-transparent pure intellect, instead emphasizing the body, talking of the animal nature of human beings, and attempting to explain numerous phenomena by invoking drives, instincts, and affects which he locates in our physical, bodily existence. Human beings are to be “translated back into nature,” since otherwise we falsify their history, their psychology, and the nature of their values—concerning all of which we must know truths, as a means to the all-important revaluation of values. This is Nietzsche’s naturalism in the broad sense, which will not be contested here. (Janway 2007: 34)

This is less a “broad sense” of naturalism, however, than it is “Laundry List Naturalism.” Janaway seems oddly indifferent to the question why these are a set of views a philosophical naturalist ought to hold, or what it is that makes them the views of a philosophical naturalist at all.

My aim, in earlier work, was to make some philosophical sense of why Janaway’s Laundry List Naturalism, in fact, seems descriptively adequate to many things Nietzsche says. I suggested that underlying this Laundry List Naturalism was, in fact, a kind of familiar “Methodological Naturalism” (hereafter “M-Naturalism”), according to which “philosophical inquiry…should be continuous with empirical inquiry in the sciences” (2002: 3). Many philosophers are and have been Methodological Naturalists, but to understand Nietzsche, everything turns on the precise kind of M-Naturalism at issue. I emphasized two commitments of Nietzsche’s M-Naturalism. First, I claimed that Nietzsche is what I called a Speculative M-Naturalist, that is, a philosopher, like Hume, who wants to “construct theories that are ‘modeled’ on the sciences…in that they take over from science the idea that natural phenomena have deterministic causes” (Leiter 2002: 5). Speculative M-Naturalists do not, of course, appeal to actual causal mechanisms that have been well-confirmed by the sciences: if they did, they would not need to speculate! Rather, the idea is that their speculative theories of human nature are informed by the sciences and a scientific picture of how things work. Here, for example, is Stroud’s influential formulation of Hume’s Speculative M-Naturalism:

[Hume] wants to do for the human realm what he thinks natural philosophy, especially in the person of Newton, had done for the rest of nature.

Newtonian theory provided a completely general explanation of why things in the world happen as they do. It explains various and complicated physical happenings in terms of relatively few extremely general, perhaps universal, principles. Similarly, Hume wants a completely general theory of human nature to explain why human beings act, think, perceive and feel in all the ways they do….

[T]he key to understanding Hume’s philosophy is to see him as putting forward a general theory of human nature in just the way that, say, Freud or Marx did. They all seek a general kind of explanation of the various ways in which men think, act, feel and live….The aim of all three is completely general—they try to provide a basis for explaining everything in human affairs. And the theories they advance are all, roughly, deterministic. (Stroud 1977: 3, 4)

So Hume models his theory of human nature on Newtonian science by aiming to identify a few basic, general principles that will provide a broadly deterministic explanation of human phenomena, much as Newtonian mechanics did for physical phenomena. Yet the Humean theory if still speculative, because its claims about human nature are not confirmed in anything resembling a scientific manner, nor do they even win support from any contemporaneous science of Hume’s day.

Nietzsche’s Speculative M-Naturalism obviously differs from Hume’s in some respects: Nietzsche, for example, appears to be a skeptic about determinism based on his professed (if not entirely cogent) skepticism about laws of nature. Yet Nietzsche, like Hume, has a sustained interest in explaining why “human beings act, think, perceive and feel” as they do, especially in the broadly ethical domain. Like Hume, Nietzsche proffers a speculative psychology, though as I have argued elsewhere (Leiter 2007; Knobe & Leiter 2007), Nietzschean speculations seem to fare rather well in light of subsequent research in scientific psychology. And this speculative psychology (as well as the occasional physiological explanations he offers in passing) appear to give us causal explanations for various human phenomena, which, even if not law-governed, seem to have a deterministic character (cf. Leiter 2002: 5).

But I also emphasized a second aspect of Nietzsche’s M-Naturalism. As I noted, some M-Naturalists demand a kind of “results continuity” with existing science: “philosophical theories,” should they believe, “be supported or justified by the results of the sciences” (Leiter 2002: 4). I argued, however, there is only one kind of “results continuity” at work in Nietzsche, namely, the result that the German Materialists of his day thought followed from advances in physiology, namely, “that man is not of a ‘higher…[or] different origin’ than the rest of nature” (Leiter 2002: 7).[1] Arguably, Nietzsche’s one bit of Substantive (in contrast to Methodological) Naturalism--meaning “the (ontological) view that the only things that exist are natural” [Leiter 2002: 5]--is a consequence of this “results continuity. Here, of course, Nietzsche had in mind the developments in 19^th-century physiology which appeared to support the view that all kinds of conscious experiences and attitudes had physiological explanations. (I discuss this at greater length in my book.)

By introducing Nietzsche’s naturalism within a broader typology of kinds of naturalism, I appear to have sowed confusion among some scholars. Janaway’s recent critique of my naturalist reading is illustrative. He complains, for example, that:

[N]o scientific support or justification is given—or readily imaginable—for the central explanatory hypotheses that Nietzsche gives for the origins of our moral beliefs and attitudes. For a prominent test case, take Nietzsche’s hypothesis in the Genealogy’s First Treatise that the labeling of non-egoistic inaction, humility, and compassion as “good” began because there were socially inferior classes of individuals in whom feelings of ressentiment against their masters motivated the creation of new value distinctions. This hypothesis explains moral phenomena in terms of their causes, but it is not clear how it is justified or supported by any kind of science, nor indeed what such a justification or support might be. (2007: 37)

This challenge, of course, simply ignores my claim that Nietzsche, like Hume, was a Speculative M-Naturalist, as, of course, Nietzsche had to be given the primitive state of psychology in the 19^th-century! A Speculative M-Naturalist simply does not claim that the explanatory mechanisms essential to his theory of why humans think and act as they do are supported by existing scientific results. To be sure, what Nietzsche does do is appeal to psychological mechanisms—such as the seething hatred characteristic of ressentiment—for which there seems to be ample evidence in both ordinary and historical experience, and weave a narrative showing how that simple mechanism could give rise to particular human beliefs and attitudes. It is, moreover, quite easy to see what empirical evidence would bear on this. To start, is there a reason to individuate a psychological like ressentiment for either diagnostic or predictive purposes? And if so, what is the symptomology of those suffering from that emotion? Even in the First Essay of the Genealogy, Nietzsche elicits a variety of kinds of evidence in support of the existence of this psychological mechanism: for example, the facts about the etmology of the terms “good” and “bad”; the general historical fact that Christianity took root among the oppressed classes in the Roman empire; and the rhetoric of the early Church Fathers. Here we see Nietzsche arguing for a characteristically scientific kind of inference: namely, to believe in the causal role of a particular psychological mechanism, for which there is ample independent evidence, on the basis of its wide explanatory scope, i.e., its ability to make sense of a variety of different data points.

Janaway, it bears noting, in fact endorses a weaker version of my reading of Nietzsche as an M-Naturalist, though the weakening seems to derive from his misunderstanding of the role of “results continuity” in my interpretation of Nietzsche’s M-Naturalism. He writes that “Nietzsche is a naturalist to the extent that he is committed to a species of theorizing that explains X by locating Y and Z as its causes, where Y and Z’s being causes of X is not falsified by our best science” (2007: 38). Janaway prefers this account, because of his doubts about whether there are actual scientific results supporting Nietzsche’s actual causal explanations. Since my reading of Nietzsche’s naturalism emphasized its speculative character, Janaway’s formulation serves as a useful way of stating a pertinent constraint on speculative explanations: namely, that they not invoke entities or mechanisms that science has ruled out of bounds. But even so, it may seem an unnecessarily weak a criterion: why not expect, instead, that a good speculative naturalist will rely on explanatory mechanisms that enjoy some evidential support, or that enjoy a wide explanatory scope, of the kind we expect genuine explanations in the sciences to exemplify? I do not think there is text in Nietzsche that settles this matter, and so this is more a matter of giving the most philosophically appealing reconstruction of his actual argumentative and explanatory practice.

---

[1] Janaway (2007: 37) says: “the status of this as a ‘result’ is perhaps debatable: it is hard to say whether the exclusively empirical nature of humanity was a conclusion or an assumption of scientific investigation in the nineteenth century or at any time.”. This I find extraordinary. If one discovers that conscious experiences have a neurophysiological explanation, or an explanation in terms of the biochemistry of the brain, hasn’t one adduced some evidence that bears on whether man is of a “higher or different origin” than the rest of nature? Our consciousness and our capacity for self-reflection, for spirituality, for “inwardness” are all among the typical phenomena appealed to as evidence of our “higher” or “different” nature, perhaps as glimpses of our immaterial “soul” even. If, in fact, they are explicable through processes and mechanisms that are operative in other parts of the natural world, is that not evidence that we are not of “a higher or different origin” than other natural things?

Is Nietzsche a Fictionalist?

References, below, are to Nadeem Hussain’s paper “Honest Illusion: Valuing for Nietzsche’s Free Spirits,” in Nietzsche and Morality, ed. Leiter & Sinhababu (Oxford: 2007) (cited as HI) and the “Postscript” to the same paper in the same volume (cited as HIP).

Given Nietzsche’s explicit “anti-realism” about value—nothing has value “in itself” Nietzsche tells us—what exactly do those Nietzsche calls on to “create” values understand themselves to be doing? Nadeem’s interesting answer: they are engaged in a kind of make-believe—“regarding X as valuable in itself while knowing that in fact X is not valuable in itself” (HI, 166)—similar to what we find when we become engaged with an artistic work, or when children engage in play. “Nietzsche’s free spirits pretend to value something by regarding it as valuable in itself while knowing that in fact it is not valuable in itself” (HI, 170).

Crucial to the question Nadeem sets is his claim that Nietzsche thinks “all claims of the form ‘X is valuable’ are false’” (HI, 159) and thus Nietzsche is committed to “an error theory about moral claims”: “the beliefs expressed by moral judgments are false because they involve believing in moral facts when in fact there are none” (HI, 159).

But does Nietzsche think such judgments express beliefs, i.e., truth-apt propositional attitudes? That is the key question. Nadeem notes in a long footnote my view that “there are inadequate textual resources for ascribing to [Nietzsche] a satisfying answer” to questions about the semantics of moral claims and thus no “adequate grounds for ‘assigning’ Nietzsche a view on such subtle matters as whether ethical language is primarily cognitive or non-cognitive” (HI, 160 n. 6). Yet to motivate his version of the interpretive question, Nadeem needs the claim that evaluative judgments are to be treated as truth-apt: it is because they are truth-apt, and also all false, that those who create values seem to be in a peculiar situation of making evaluative judgments that they know to be false. (Nadeem’s commitment to this assumption also comes out in the fact that the only alternative readings he considers are cognitivist realisms: the “subjective realism” discussed early on, and the Will-to-Power Interpretation discussed at the end. The criticisms of both are apt, but beside the point, for reasons I’ll suggest, below.) This, in turn, generates the relevance of “the examples of art and imaginative play” which “are, according to Nietzsche, supposed to...show us the psychological possibility of regarding things as valuable even when we know that they are not” (HI, 175).

Because of the centrality to the argument of saddling Nietzsche with a semantics of judgments of value, Nadeem added an interesting “Postscript” to the published version of his article responding to my charge of anachronism (in particular, as formulated in my Stanford Encyclopedia entry on Nietzsche, which discusses Nadeem’s work). Nadeem proposes to adduce evidence of “kinds of fictionalism that were present in the nineteenth century” and also evidence that it is reasonable to ascribe fictionalism, meaning “a denial of non-cognitivism,” to Nietzsche (HIP, 179). It is the second kind of evidence that will be decisive in reply to my objection, since no one, to my knowledge, denies that there were views dubbed “fictionalist” in circulation in the nineteenth-century; the worry (as I put it) is that there are not “adequate grounds for ‘assigning’ Nietzsche a view on such subtle matters as whether ethical language is primarily cognitive or non-cognitive.” To put this in contemporary terms suggested by Matti Eklund, the worry is not about “ontological fictionalism” but about “linguistic fictionalism”: Nietzsche (certainly on my account, and most other ones) has views about the metaphysical status of moral properties, and one intelligible possibility is that he views them as having the same ontological status as fictional entities; the question is whether there is any reason to think Nietzsche has a view about the correct or preferred semantics of linguistic or mental content. Nadeem recognizes, correctly, that his interpretation depends on having adequate grounds for ascribing the latter.

Now Nadeem allows (again, at 179) that he has no evidence that Nietzsche was thinking explicitly about the cognitive versus non-cognitive character of moral discourse, but he claims “the historical evidence does suggest precisely what we need for fictionalism, in the sense that needs to be ascribed to Nietzsche, namely an attitude other than belief [e.g., “make-believe” belief] towards the same content—an attitude such that whether the content is false is no longer relevant” (179). I do not find Nadeem’s historical evidence about competing views about “attitude[s]…towards…content[s]” persuasive in the case of Nietzsche. He adduces strikingly good evidence that Bentham held a linguistic fictionalist view, but none that Nietzsche knew anything about this. When Nadeem turns to the authors Nietzsche did know about, it seems apparent that their views are, at best, versions of ontological fictionalism.

The quotes from Bentham (HIP, 180) are so striking precisely because Bentham distinguishes explicitly “the grammatical form of the discourse employed” from the ontological question of what actually exists, and he endorses, again explicitly, the idea of treating the syntactic entites—e.g., “the noun-substantive”—as genuinely referring expressions, but referring to “fictitious” entities. Here is a kind of self-consciousness about distinguishing the meaning and nature of linguistic items (e.g., are they genuinely referential? If so, to what do they refer?) from metaphysical questions about what really exists. Unfortunately for Nadeem’s argument, there is no evidence—Nadeem does not claim otherwise--that Nietzsche had any familiarity with Bentham’s prescience on this score. More problematically, when Nadeem turns to the 19^th-century authors Nietzsche did know something about, they display none of the Benthamite prescience that would warrant ascribing to them linguistic fictionalism.

For example, in the case of David Strauss, Nadeem has good grounds (HIP: 181-183) for saying that Strauss believed religion should be treated as a “myth,” since its claims were false but had some significance when construed metaphorically or mythically. But that view is clearly compatible with differing semantics for religious discourse. One could, for example, think religious discourse is non-cognitive, but that it admits of a metaphorical construal which admits of a cognitive interpretation that does not entail error theory. Or one could think that religious discourse is cognitive, and thus systematically false, but that its metaphorical content is not systematically false. There is nothing in the texts of Strauss to decide between these two subtly different options.

Nadeem’s evidence about Feuerbach and Lange is no better—indeed, some of his evidence creates problems for his preferred view. For example, Nadeem quotes (HIP: 186) Nietzsche reading Lange as follows: “Art is free also in the domain of concepts. Who would refute a phrase by Beethoven and who would find an error in Raphael’s Madonna?” But surely the implication of this comment is that we should treat music and art non-cognitively, as expressing attitudes or feelings of some kind, and thus not susceptible to refutation or error, as they would be if cognitive. When Nadeem turns, finally, to Vaihinger, he effectively acknowledges that Vaihinger has no coherent view about the semantics, when he mentions all the various (and inconsistent) locutions Vaihinger employs (HIP: 187). Nadeem tries to elide this by saying that all the locutions reflect a “concern…to ensure that by changing our attitude we avoid having a false belief.” But that is far too weak for linguistic fictionalism, since there are two ways to avoid having a “false belief” on offer: first, by having a belief that is true (e.g., because it picks out a metaphorical meaning); and second, by not having a belief at all. Vaihinger says things consistent with both possibilities, not surprisingly.

Would it suffice if Nadeem can establish Nietzsche’s commitment to ontological fictionalism? I do not see that it will, since Nadeem consistently casts his interpretive thesis in a semantic idiom and, moreover, he describes his account as attributing revolutionary fictionalism to Nietzsche. But revolutionary fictionalism recommends a revolution in how we conceive of the discourse, i.e., the semantics of the discourse, in order to save it from error theory, and thus ward off the prospect of eliminativism. (If the discourse is cognitive and systematically false, why not just get rid of it altogether?) Given that there is no real evidence that Nietzsche has a clear view about the semantics, it seems extraordinary to think he was recommending a revolution in how we conceive of it.

Nietzsche’s lack of clarity about the semantic content of our judgments about value is reflected in Nietzsche’s texts too, and to an extent that is not really acknowledged by Nadeem. This comes out perhaps most clearly in Nadeem’s critical discussion of Reginster’s book (“Metaethics and Nihilism in Reginster’s The Affirmation of Life”, hereafter, M&N, available on his homepage: http://www.stanford.edu/~hussainn/StanfordPersonal/Online_Papers_files/

HussainReginsterv17.pdf). Nadeem thinks that Reginster’s “nihilism of disorientation”—the disorientation that flows from realizing there are no objective values—involves committing Nietzsche to an error theory, which (as Nadeem candidly admits at p. 7) “is a combination of a semantic claim about what evaluative language purports to be about, namely, objective value facts, and an ontological claim that denies such facts.” Reginster does not frame the nihilism of disorientation this way, and I think he is right not to do so (whatever his unclarities about the notions of “objective” and “subjective” value, with which Nadeem correctly takes some issue). Indeed, Nadeem can adduce no clear textual evidence for ascribing the error theory, and, as in HI, he is silent on the textual evidence in tension with this reading.

So, for example, in M&N (p. 9), Nadeem points to a line from Twilight of the Idols in which Nietzsche declares “there are altogether no moral facts.” Yet, in context, it is clear that Nietzsche is not denying the objectivity of value per se, but rather denying certain descriptive presuppositions about human agency that he takes certain kinds of moral judgments to require. There are “no moral facts” means, e.g., that there is no such thing as a will that is causal, which there would have to be, he thinks, for ascriptions of moral responsibility to be justified. Even if we give that claim a semantic gloss, it would not give us a general error theory about judgments of value.

Nadeem goes on to quote another part of the same passage—in which Nietzsche says “Moral judgments are therefore never to be taken literally: so understood they always contain mere absurdities”—and then says (M&N, 9) these represent “the typical semantic claims of the error theorist.” Yet the claim that “moral judgments are therefore never to be taken literally” could just as well serve as the slogan for the non-cognitivist as the cognitivist error theorist. That Nietzsche is clearly not thinking of the semantic issues seems apparent when we notice that the sentence in question is followed by the claim (not quoted by Nadeem) that the “semiotic” value of moral judgments is as symptoms of “cultures and interiorities.” Indeed, in the very first chapter (“The Problem of Socrates,” section 2) of the same book, Nietzsche tells us that, “Judgments of value…can, in the end, never be true: they have value only as symptoms,” which suggests, to my ear, not error theory, but non-cognitivism.

Consider, too, that in the same and surrounding sections of Twilight of the Idols, Nietzsche repeatedly compares morality to religion, on the grounds that both are committed to the existence of “imaginary causes.” Even if we want to gloss that as an error theory about moral and religious discourse, it would be incredible to think that fictionalism is Nietzsche’s response in the religious case, as opposed to eliminativism. Yet why would the two cases come apart like this? It is more plausible to my mind that Nietzsche simply had not thought, and so had no clear view, about the semantic implications of his thesis.

We may come at the textual problem confronting Nadeem’s ascription of fictionalism to Nietzsche a different way. Nietzsche’s texts, including many that Nadeem quotes, also suggest that the “free spirits” don’t think “having value” means “having value in itself.” The Nietzschean discovery, in other words, is that nothing has value in itself (as he puts it in both The Gay Science [sec. 301] and in Dawn [sec. 3]), but that things do have value, namely, whatever value we project upon them. So evaluative judgments might be cognitive, but they are not false, because they do not involve a commitment to believing that things have value in-themselves. In the Nietzschean world, every evaluative judgment contains within it recognition of what value actually is: namely, a projection.

But we might press this alternative reading in a different direction, one also suggested by the texts. Perhaps the relevant semantics for evaluative judgments in a projectivist world really should be non-cognitivist: moral judgments express our attitudes towards things, and those who “create values” are those who succeed in “projecting” their attitudes on to things (the way, e.g., the slaves in the Genealogy succeeded in projecting their estimation of the masters to the point that even the masters accepted it [to be sure, neither the slaves, nor the masters, recognize the projective nature of value in this story--but unlike “free spirits,” they presumably also don’t recognize that the world in-itself is valueless]). This story certainly resonates with one of Nietzsche’s favorite metaphors for value creators, namely, that they are legislators (Gesetzgeber):

[T]rue philosophers are commanders and legislators: they say “That is how it

should be!”…Their “knowing” is creating, their creating is a legislating, their will

to truth is—will to power. (BGE 211)

Legislators, those who say “this is how it should be,” presumably are not systematically in error: they do not have a false belief that the world conforms to their legislation, but rather express the desire that it should conform to their legislative act—their legislative act expresses their will to power, their will to make the world be as they command it. So legislation might give us a simple, non-cognitivist model of “value creation.”

As far as I can see, the textual evidence adduced by Nadeem is equally well-suited to this reading of the metaethical framework in Nietzsche; indeed, this alternative reading may have the advantage of fitting the “legislation” metaphor more successfully. Because Nadeem is committed, without convincing evidence, to the claim that Nietzsche believes evaluative judgments express beliefs, however, the only alternatives to his reading he considers are cognitivist realisms (such as the “subjective realism” discussed early on in HI). But the real challenges, the one he needs to take up, will come from readings which reject the assumption that Nietzsche is committed to an error theory, either because he is not a cognitivist or because evaluative judgments don’t involve erroneous realistic assumptions about value.

So I am not persuaded, obviously, that Nietzsche is a fictionalist in Nadeem’s sense, but he has posed a powerful challenge to anyone who wants to resist that reading and he has focused scholarly attention on an important interpretive issue that had been relatively neglected in previous work. For all these reasons, HI is one of the most important papers in Nietzsche studies over the last decade.

Obama and Nietzsche

A New York Times article reports that as a college student, Barack Obama, one of the two leading contenders for the Democratic nomination for President, was interested in Nietzsche, Freud, and Sartre. A hopeful sign! I would have been worried if as an undergraduate he had been enamored of Kant or Hegel!

(Thanks to Joe Paxton for the pointer.)

Most Significant Nietzsche Articles in 2007?

So, as I noted on my philosophy blog, The Philosopher's Annual is coming back to life, and now I've been asked to serve as a Nominating Editor. I would be curious to hear from readers whether there were any Nietzsche articles that appeared in 2007 that they thought were really first-rate? I think there are some that might be in contention, but I may also have missed good pieces. Since I'd also like to make sure that excellent articles in post-Kantian Continental philosophy more generally are represented, please feel free to post recommendations there as well. All comments on this thread must be signed. Thanks.

Was Nietzsche Left-Handed?

Charles Huenemann, a philosopher at Utah State University, writes:

I'm wondering whether you could ask, on your Nietzsche blog, if anyone knows whether Nietzsche was left-handed (and what source their knowledge is based upon). I'm asking because I'm working on an article on his illness, and a neurologist I'm consulting thinks it's relevant.

Jenkins Reviews "Nietzsche and Morality"

Scott Jenkins, a philosopher at the University of Kansas, has written a generous review of the book of new essays edited by Neil Sinhababu and myself, Nietzsche and Morality. The review is also quite informative, offering nice capsule summaries of the arguments of each essay, as well as astute questions and criticisms. I plan to take up in subsequent work the question Professor Jenkins poses about my essay with Joshua Knobe. The puzzle, in a nutshell, is this. If, as Knobe and I argue, Nietzschean moral psychology presupposes a more credible psychology than other important philosophical theories (such as Aristotle's and Kant's), what explains this fact, given that Nietzsche's primary methods of psychological investigation--namely, introspection and non-systematic observation (both his own and that of other astute observers of human behavior, from Thucydides to La Rochefoucauld)--are not one that would be considered epistemically robust these days.?Did Nietzsche just get lucky? Or does his success tell us something important about knowledge and truth in the human sciences?

Comments policy

I appreciate the many comments readers have posted the last couple of months. I have generally permitted anonymous comments, and will continue to do so, except when it's important to put a name to something: for example, when praising or criticizing someone's work. Questions or free-standing informational remarks (e.g., with links) can continue to be anonymous, among others.

I hope to post some thoughts on Nadeem Hussain's interesting work on Nietzsche before too long.

Happy New Year to all readers!

"Nietzsche, Naturalism, and Moral Psychology" Seminar

Here is the penultimate draft of the syllabus for my Spring seminar, which some readers might find of interest--and hopefully it will inspire some others to think about Nietzsche in light of contemporary developments in both philosophy and psychology:

NIETZSCHE, NATURALISM, AND MORAL PSYCHOLOGY

Spring 2008

Brian Leiter

3.119D Townes Hall

University of Texas, Austin

(512) 232-1319

bleiter@law.utexas.edu

Class Time: M, 3:30-6:20

Location:

Enrollment:

Enrollment is limited to Philosophy Ph.D. students or J.D. candidates with an undergraduate major or graduate degree (M.A., Ph.D., B.Phil., M.Phil, or D.Phil.) in philosophy. J.D. candidates without a graduate degree in philosophy who want to be considered for enrollment must submit an undergraduate transcript, a law school transcript, and a philosophical writing sample, not later than the first week of class. Ph.D. students from other departments should submit the same materials to the instructor.

Description:

The course has two interlocking aims: (1) to introduce students to Nietzsche’s philosophical naturalism and its role in his moral philosophy; and (2) to critically evaluate some of the philosophical issues about moral psychology that Nietzsche raises—about, e.g., moral motivation, the will, the role of conscious and unconscious mental states in agency, our self-understanding qua agents, the nature and causal import of “character”—in light of recent work in both philosophy and empirical psychology. We shall spend the first few weeks on a careful study of On the Genealogy of Morality (read in conjunction with my Nietzsche on Morality), before turning, first, to critiques of my naturalist reading of Nietzsche and then, second, to a topical study of the issues in moral psychology just noted. Each session will be based on readings from elsewhere in Nietzsche’s corpus and/or work by contemporary philosophers and empirical psychologists.

Grading:

The grade will be based primarily on a term paper, which involves either philosophical exegesis of Nietzsche, or exploration of a problem in moral psychology raised by the readings. Excellent class participation (quantity and quality) will raise the grade one notch (e.g., B+ to A-; A- to A, etc.).

Required texts:

Nietzsche, On the Genealogy of Morality (Hackett, ed. & trans. Clark & Swensen) (cited as GM).

Brian Leiter, Nietzsche on Morality (London: Routledge, 2002) (cited as NOM).

Course reader (CR), including texts by Nietzche, Haidt, Greene, Wilson, Janaway, Wegner, Prinz, Doris, Gemes, Rosenthal, Holton, Katsafanas, Knobe, Nichols, Leiter.

Tenative Reading Schedule

1. January 14: Introduction to Nietzsche’s Critique of Morality. Chapters 1-4 of NOM.

2. January 28: GM, Preface and Essay I; Chapters 5-6 of NOM.

3. February 4: GM, Essay II; Chapter 7 of NOM.

4. February 11: GM, Essay III; Chapter 8 of NOM.

5. February 18: Nietzsche’s Naturalism. Janaway, “Naturalism and Genealogy” in CR; Gemes & Janaway, “Naturalism and Value in Nietzsche,” in CR.

6. February 25: Nietzschean Moral Psychology and the Question of Heritability. Knobe & Leiter, “The Case for Nietzschean Moral Psychology” in CR; perhaps one other reading TBA. [Joshua Knobe (North Carolina) will participate in this session of the class.]

7. March 3: Character, Types, and Fatalism. Excerpts from Doris, Lack of Character, pp. 22-61, 71-75, in CR; Prinz, “The Normativity Challenge,” in CR.

8. March 17: The Will. Leiter, “Nietzsche’s Theory of the Will,” Philosophers’ Imprint (2007), downloadable for free here: http://www.philosophersimprint.org/007007/; excerpts from Wegner, The Illusion of Conscious Will, pp. 3-11, 49-78, 317-342, in CR; Holton’s review of Wegner from Mind, in CR; Nietzsche, Beyond Good and Evil, section 19 and Twilight of the Idols, “The Four Great Errors,” sections 1-8, in CR.

9. March 24: Compatibilism, Incompatibilism, and Moral Responsibility. Gemes, “Nietzsche on Free Will, Autonomy, and the Sovereign Individual,” in CR; G. Strawson, “The Impossibility of Moral Responsibility,” in CR; Nichols & Knobe, “Moral Responsibility and Determinism: The Cognitive Science of Folk Intuitions.” [Ken Gemes (Birkbeck & Southampton) will participate in this class.]

10. March 31: The Illusion of Practical Reason? Haidt, “The Emotional Dog and Its Rational Tail,” in CR; Greene & Haidt, “How (and where) does moral judgment work?” in CR; Greene, “The Secret Joke of Kant’s Soul,” in CR; Nietzsche, The Gay Science, sections 39, 359-360; Beyond Good and Evil, sections 3-6, 187, in CR.

11. April 7: The Unconscious and Self-Knowledge about Agency. Excerpts from T. Wilson, Strangers to Ourselves: Discovering the Adaptive Unconscious, Chapters 2, 3 and 5, in CR; Nietzsche, Daybreak, sections 115-116, 119, 129-130; The Gay Science, sections 333, 335 (and review 359-360 from last week as well); Ecce Homo, “Why I Am So Clever,” section 9, in CR.

12. April 14: Consciousness and Its Nature. Katsafanas, “Nietzsche’s Theory of Mind,” in CR; Rosenthal, “Consciousness and Its Function,” in CR; Nietzsche, The Gay Science, sections 11, 354; The Antichrist, section 14, in CR.

13. April 21: open for now (in case we fall behind from earlier weeks).

14. April 28: Updating the Nietzschean Project. Excerpt from Prinz, The Emotional Construction of Morals, Chs. 6 & 7 (“The Genealogy of Morals” and “The Limits of Evolutionary Ethics”). [Jesse Prinz (North Carolina) will participate in this class.]

Recommended Secondary Literature

M. Clark, Nietzsche on Truth and Philosophy (Cambridge, 1990). An influential account of the evolution of Nietzsche’s views on truth and knowledge; also contains important interpretations of will to power and the ascetic ideal.

B. Leiter & N. Sinhababu (eds.), Nietzsche and Morality (Oxford, 2007). The essays by Risse and Wallace are especially relevant to themes in this course.

P. Poellner, Nietzsche and Metaphysics (Oxford, 1995). As I wrote in my review of this very fine book in Mind: “Poellner's study is less a book, than a collection of loosely related, often quite insightful short essays,” many treating issues in his metaphysics and epistemology, but I also recommended “the lovely, brief analysis of the psychological state Nietzsche calls ressentiment (pp. 128-31; cf. pp. 253-4); the interesting critical discussion of Nietzsche and Freud on the ‘unconscious’ (pp. 216-22); or the useful treatment of Nietzsche's account of the christian's ‘self-deception’, and Poellner's own provocative, if not wholly convincing, critique of this account (pp. 230-6, pp. 240-2).” Chapter V on “The Nature of ‘Inner’ Experience” is probably most useful for this seminar.

B. Reginster, The Affirmation of Life: Nietzsche on Overcoming Nihilism (Harvard, 2007). An intriguing systematic account of Nietzsche’s philosophy as a whole, linking two “global” themes, the problem of nihilism and the doctrine of will to power. Elegant and esp. illuminating on Nietzsche’s debt to Schopenhauer; not as sensitive, though, as one might like to the philosophical or psychological plausibility of the theses ascribed to Nietzsche.

J. Richardson, Nietzsche’s System (Oxford, 1996). A powerful reconstruction of the Nietzschean corpus as organized around the doctrine of will to power—basically Heidegger’s Nietzsche, but grounded in better scholarship and argument. I am skeptical that the robust version of the doctrine of will to power that Richardson attributes to Nietzsche is actually his view; for my doubts, see my review of Richardson’s book, and Poellner’s, in Mind, available via JSTOR: http://www.jstor.org/view/00264423/di015162/01p0061l/0.

J. Richardson & B. Leiter (eds.), Nietzsche (Oxford Readings in Philosophy, 2001). Essays by Foot, Foucault, Geuss, and Nehamas (“How One Becomes What One Is”) are most relevant to this seminar.

R. Schacht, Nietzsche (Routledge, 1983). Comprehensive and attentive to the texts, but does not tell as tightly constructed a systematic narrative about Nietzsche’s philosophy as a whole as Reginster or Richardson--also not as philosophically sophisticated or dialectically probing. Still, Schacht’s book is a valuable check on any interpretive hypothesis given Schacht’s scrupulous attention to all parts of the corpus.

Film Footage of Nietzsche's Sister Caring for Him?

A commenter on an earlier post left this link to a fascinating site which, if you scroll down, has a link to what looks like a film of Elisabeth Forster-Nietzsche caring for her brother. Is this for real?

"the most revolutionary political proposition ever advanced"

That is how Mitt Romney, a Mormon who is one of the contenders for the Republican nomination to be U.S. President, described this idea: "The conviction of the inherent and inalienable worth of every life." Admittedly, in the American context, this is partly code language for opposition to abortion, but putting the parochial peculiarities of American politics to one side, Romney is surely right that the "inherent and inalienable worth of every life" is, indeed, "the most revolutionary political proposition" of modernity (perhaps ever). It is equally clear that the basis he offers for it--namely that "every single human being is a child of God"--is (viewed as a cognitive, rather than an emotive, proposition) false.

But when Nietzsche mocks the "free thinkers" who "oppose the Church but not its poison" (GM I:9) is he not thinking precisely of those who reject the false cognitive proposition but still accept that "most revolutionary political proposition," precisely the one discovered by those Nietzsche calls the "slaves" at the birth of Christianity?

Where should a beginner start with Nietzsche?

A reader writes:

I am a college student out in California and I found your name among many Nietzsche blogs and thought you would be a good source for insight. Many of
my friends have got me very interested in reading Nietzsche but I feel overwhelmed
when deciding where to begin. Could you possibly give me your insight to what I
should read first and who offers the best translations? Thanks so much.

Let's start with translations. The Walter Kaufmann and Kaufmann/R.J. Hollingdale translations are still the most widely available, and they are generally fine. Kaufmann tends to sacrifice literalism in order to capture the "feel" of the German prose, and he does so well and better than most translators. (This makes his translations a bit problematic for scholars, but preferable for those new to Nietzsche.) Hollingdale's solo translations tend to be rather flat-footed, or so it seems to me. Cambridge University Press has been releasing new translations of many of Nietzsche's works, and these are generally pretty good, though I see no reason to prefer them to the Kaufmann translations. There are other translations around, of which the Clark and Swensen translation of On the Genealogy of Morality is probably most notable.

What to read first? The very first thing I read by Nietzsche was the excerpt from "On Truth and Lie in an Extra-Moral Sense" in Kaufmann's edition of The Portable Nietzsche. I was hooked, though as it turns out that little excerpt is not especially representative of Nietzsche's philosophy. A better place to start might be with Beyond Good and Evil, especially the Preface, and Chapters 1 ("On the Prejudices of Philosophers"), 5 ("Natural History of Morals") and 9 ("What is Noble?") (though the whole book is worth reading). That might be followed by Nietzsche's On the Genealogy of Morality, which could be read in conjunction with the chapters of my Nietzsche on Morality discussing each essay.

From there one might go in two directions: backwards to The Gay Science, one of Nietzsche's earlier works, or forward to The Twilight of the Idols. I'd probably recommend the latter: this is a late work, not as overwrought as The Antichrist or Ecce Homo, but philosophically substantial, covering most of Nietzsche's main concerns.

There are two fine biographies of Nietzsche in English: Ronald Hayman's Nietzsche and Rudiger Safranski's Nietzsche: A Philosophical Biography. The latter has the virtue of giving capsule summaries of the themes of each of Nietzsche's books. The summaries aren't bad, though Safranski's philosophical understanding and competence is clearly very limited. But as a place to begin, it is useful, and the narration of Nietzsche's life is interesting.

I don't think there is a reliable and genuinely introductory book on Nietzsche in English. Michael Tanner's Nietzsche, which some people I respect do like, always struck me as neither accurate nor philosophically competent. Kaufmann's old Nietzsche: Philosopher, Psychologist, Antichrist is extremely unreliable, and should be avoided. George Morgan's old What Nietzsche Means may, in some ways, be the best single volume introduction--though perhaps with too much quotation and paraphrase, compared to exposition. If you have some background in philosophy, Chapters 1-4 of my Nietzsche on Morality will introduce you to Nietzsche's moral philosophy.

I'd be curious to hear from readers where they started with Nietzsche, and what they would recommend to someone new to his work.

Ridley on "Nietzsche and the Re-Evaluation of Values"

The article by Aaron Ridley (Southampton) appeared in Proceedings of the Aristotelian Society 105 (December 2005): 155-175 (all citations, unless otherwise noted, are to this article).

The paper tackles the problem I dealt with in "Nietzsche's Metaethics: Against the Privilege Readings," European Journal of Philosophy 8 (2000): 277-297 and, in revised and expanded form, in Nietzsche on Morality (London: Routledge, 2002), pp. 136-161 (cited hereafter as NOM). Ridley chooses to call it "the authority problem" (172), the problem that "Nietzsche's evaluative standpoint, and the re-evaluation that he undertakes from it, need have no authority for us" to the extent that "we are comfortable with our existing values, and with our existing evaluations of them" (172). Here is how I put it:

[I]n offering a revaluation of morality is Nietzsche doing anything more than giving his idiosyncratic opinion from his idiosyncratic evaluative perspective? Is there, in short, anything about Nietzsche's evaluation of morality that ought to command our attention and assent? (NOM, 137)

I am content to follow Ridley in calling this "the authority problem," since it strikes me as an apt name.

Ridley proceeds into a discussion of "types of value" that is a bit unusual. Although he employs the familiar language of "instrumental" and "intrinsic" value, he defines the latter not as "having value as an end in-itself" (or some similar formulation) but rather in terms of a value's capacity to motivate action. So, he says, a value "is intrinstically valuable with respect to a given way of living if, other things being equal, it can, by itself, motivate." We can allow Ridley this stipulative usage of what might ordinarily have been called some kind of "internalism." I'm not sure this will much matter, but we need to bear in mind his non-standard usage lest the subsequent discussion be confusing.

Ridley emphasizes (176) the point made by Clark and myself in our introduction to the 1997 CUP edition of Daybreak, namely, that in this work he became interested in those cases where morality (or MPS--"morality in the pejorative sense"--in my standard terminology) operated as a genuine motive of action. That means, of course, that in Ridley's terms the revaluation of MPS is the revaluation of an "instrinsic" value.

Ridley then distinguishes five different ways of engaging in a revaluation of an intrinsic value (what he refers to as "V"). The first one he puts as follows (177):

Showing that V, although an intrinsic value, is indirectly instrumental in realising ends said to be bad, although not ends that coudl be acknowledged as bad from the standpoint of the relevant way of living.

This is an unlovely formulation, but I think he is correct in arguing (178-181) that this is the conception of revaluation that I ascribe to Nietzsche. Here is one of the ways I put it:

Nietzsche wants to effect a revaluation of values, that is, a new assessment of the value of our "moral" values. He holds that MPS is not conducive to the flourishing of human excellence and it is by reference to this fact that he proposes to assess the value of MPS. This kind of critical project naturally invites the question: what exactly is the value of the flourishing of human excellence, and why does it trump the values served by MPS (e.g., the preservation of the herd)? (NOM, 136)

Ridley quotes (at 178) a similar passage from pp. 128-129 of NOM. As I document in NOM, there is, of course, a massive amount of textual evidence that versions of this charge--that MPS is an obstacle to the flourishing of human excellence--constitute Nietzsche's central and oft-repeated criticism of the value of MPS (see NOM, 113-114, and n. 1 on 114).

Ridley thinks this construal of revaluation won't do, though not (oddly) because he actually considers any of the textual evidence I cite. (His failure to consider any texts should be the first indication that he is not entitled to claim that my account "is certainly not the main plank of [Nietzsche's] approach [to the revaluation], and it is certainly not the key to understanding Nietzsche's critical project as a whole" [180-181].) Rather, he seems dissatisfied with the resolution to "the authority problem" that I defend. Here is Ridley describing (correctly) my reading of Nietzsche:

The point of Nietzsche's re-evaluation...is simply to "alert 'higher' types to the fact" that traditional morality "is not, in fact, conducive to their flourishing," so that they can wean themselves away from its values and realise their potential for human excellence. The authority problem is thus removed by restricting Nietzsche's audience to those for whom his re-evaluations do have some authority. (180)

Again, Ridley does not feel the need to consider any textual evidence. His argumentive posture appears to be this: since the position I have ascribed to Nietzsche is unappealing and also unstable, it could not be Nietzsche's. It does not occur to him that this wouldn't, actually, be an argument against the interpretation, but we can put that issue to one side in any case, since his objection that the position is "unstable"--that it "collapses at once"--fails.

On my interpretation, Nietzsche thinks that nascent higher human being suffer from a certain kind of false consciousness: they accept as binding on (and good for) them a set of values, namely MPS, that are, in fact, inhospitable to their own flourishing. Nietzsche writes with such rhetorical ferocity, and employs various rhetorical tricks (e.g., inviting his readers to commit the genetic fallacy [cf. NOM 176]), precisely in order to overcome the false consciousness that afflicts the nascent higher human beings.

Ridley's response to this interpretive hypothesis strikes me, I must confess, as bizarre. After quoting my observation "that Nietzsche writes with passion and force [because] he must shake higher types out of their intuitive commitment to the moral traditions of two millenia" (NOM 155), Ridley adds "which rather indicates that the members of Nietzsche's 'proper' audience are not 'predisposed' to accept the authority of his evaluative standpoint after all" (180). But it obviously indicates no such thing: indeed, it is fully consistent with the hypothesis that nascent higher men suffer from false consciousness, which is an impediment to their correctly appreciating what is in their interests. One can obviously be "predisposed" to something, without being well-disposed to it occurrently because of cognitive or other defects. After all a disposition is a tendency to, say, act in a certain way under the right kinds of conditions; the disposition may or may not be activated depending on the conditions. False consciousness is one possible obstacle to realizing the disposition. (There is actually a deeper, but related, puzzle about Nietzsche's naturalism and the thesis that higher types suffer from false consciousness insofar as they embrace MPS that I discuss at 156 ff., but about which Ridley, not surprisingly, is totally silent.)

After his initial non-sequitur (quoted above), Ridley continues:

The fact is that, even on Leiter's reading, Nietzsche needs somehow to reach inside traditional morality, and to address those who, whether through some sort of misunderstanding or not, are intuitively committed to its values; and this is hardly likely to be achieved by merely insisting, against those intuitions, that the values in question are indirectly instrumental in realising ends said (by Nietzsche) to be bad, however heatedly he says it. (180)

This is barely recognizable as a paraphrase of my interpretation, which is all the more surprising given that Ridley had been reasonably good at stating my views up until this point. To start, it conflates the question how Nietzsche proposes to overcome the false consciousness of nascent higher human beings with the question why Nietzsche judges MPS to lack a certain kind of value. To use Ridley's somewhat unlovely formulation: "that the values in question are indirectly instrumental in realising ends said (by Nietzsche) to be bad" is first of all an answer to the latter question, not the former.

And yet it is reasonable to suppose that if nascent higher human beings become convinced that MPS is an obstacle to their own flourishing that they will be motivated by that fact to rethink the value of MPS. This is because the thesis that the flourishing of great human beings has value is different from the thesis that "my flourishing has value," which is what is at issue when a nascent higher man discovers that MPS is, in fact, an obstacle to the flourishing of human excellence. The latter is a judgment of prudential value, and those judgments are, on the account I develop in some detail, necessarily objective judgments (see esp. NOM 106-112). They are also, in Ridley's language, "intrinsic" value judgments or, in my more standard usage, internalist judgments, that is, judgments about value that necessarily have motivational force for persons. (That "X is good" for me means that I care or am capable of caring about realizing X.)

But to overcome the "false consciousness" of nascent higher human beings, Nietzsche will employ a variety of other argumentative and rhetorical moves: for example, he will, fundamentally, exploit the "will to truth" of his readers by exposing the falsity of the metaphysics of agency on which morality depends; and he will encourage them to commit the genetic fallacy, by rejecting a morality whose origin is contemptible by their own lights.

All these points are in NOM, and judging from other critical reaction, rather clear themes in my reconstruction of Nietzsche's critique. Given Ridley's failure to either engage or understand the dialectical structure of Nietzsche's argument as I reconstruct it, it is rather remarkable that he concludes by announcing that Nietzsche's revaluation "is a considerably subtler affair than Leiter acknowledges" (181)! I am here reminded of the comments by Ken Gemes (Birkbeck/Southampton) and Christopher Janaway (Southampton) in their review essay about my book in Philosophy and Phenomenological Research (Nov. 2005):

Leiter presents his argument with a high standard of rigour, clarity and scholarship....Nietzsche specialists will disagree with Leiter on various issues; in which case they will need to attend carefully to Leiter's often subtle formulations, and hone their positions against what he actually says rather than easy caricatures of his position. If they do so, they will be surprised by the resilience of his interpretation.

It is a shame that Ridley did not heed this advice of his colleagues.

So what is Ridley's "subtler" version of the revaluation? He identifies (at 177) four other possibilities that certainly occupy logically possible space, though with respect to his possibilities two through four (which he flies through at 181-184), there is not much textual evidence, let alone evidence that they are central to Nietzsche's revaluation of values--so Ridley is appropriately brief with them. It is the fifth formulation to which Ridley is really committed, though its similarity to the first kind of revaluation--the one I treated as central and which Ridley rejected--is striking (Ridley concedes as much at 189). Here they are side-by-side (from 177-178):

1. Showing that V, although an intrinsic value, is indirectly instrumental in realising ends said to be bad, although not ends that could be acknowledged as bad from the standpoint of the relevant way of living.

5. Showing that V, although an intrinsic value, or a set of intrinsic values, is indirectly instrumental in realising ends that can, in principle, be grasped as bad from the standpoint of the relevant way of living.

So it might seem, now, that the entire difference between the reading I argue for in NOM and Ridley's reading comes down to the question whether or not everyone "in principle" might agree that the "end" that MPS brings about is a "bad" one.

But Ridley does have a different view about what the "bad end" in question is: he thinks it is that the values in question (MPS in my terminology) "mak[es] us obscure to ourselves" and thus "has the effect of inhibiting our capacity to experience ourselves, fully, as agents" (185). The idea that Nietzsche is worried about our capacity to "experience ourselves, fully, as agents" strikes me as not a promising interpretive line, and especially since Nietzsche is clear about the need we have to be obscure to ourselves in order to carry on at all! In any case, I leave to the interested reader to consult 185-189 of Ridley's article to assess for him- or herself the textual evidence. (At 188, GM's "sovereign individual" even makes a brief appearance; it will be a subject for a different day to discuss how a group of very able Nietzsche scholars--at Birkbeck and Southampton--convinced themselves to elevate a contentious reading of one minor passage to the center of Nietzsche's corpus--even good Nietzsche scholars, it seems, have trouble reading him "moraline-free"!)

But let's bracket the question about "bad ends": as Ridley eventually acknowledges, his embrace of the fifth version of revaluation puts him with Schacht and Foot as proponents of what I called the "privileged readings" of Nietzsche's metaethics (and which I critiqued in the EJP article and the book). Ridley offers a fair statement of the similarities and differences between his view and that of the earlier writers:

So the account proposed here has in common with Schacht's and Foot's the highlighting of an evaluative standpoint which is in principle accessible to those who are committed to the values [e.g., MPS] whose value is under scrutiny, and who might therefore come to regard the re-evaluation of those values as authoritative. It differs from Schacht's and Foot's, however, in highlighting a standpoint structured by the values of self-understanding and autonomy.... (191).

That means, of course, that my earlier critique of Schacht and Foot is inapposite against Ridley, since that critique turned on the "standpoint" they defended as privileged. The textual implausibility of Ridley's alternative, however, combined with the superficiality of his purported critique of my construal of revaluation, leaves me unpersuaded.

White on Nietzsche on Hellenic Harmony

Nicholas White (Utah), in his learned book on Individual and Conflict in Greek Ethics (Oxford, 2002), attacks the idea that Greek ethical thought (unlike modern ethics) was committed to "a harmony or consistency of worthwhile human aims or goods" (p. xiii). Unlike other major German philosophers, White notes, Nietzsche did not accept "the idea that Classical Greek ethics is substantially different from modern ethics, and that in some way it exemplified aharmony and unity of motivation that modern ethics lacks" (p. 43).

More precisely, Nietzsche simply "did not enter into a discussion of the differences between ancient and modern philosophical writers on ethics" because he took them to be similar at least in the respects that mattered to Nietzsche. As White puts it: "He believed that Socrates marked the beginning of the decadence that was accelerated by Christianity and brought to a contemptible nadir by the anaemic eglitarianism of modern Europe...[T]he mainstream of Greek ethics reprsented the morality of the herd, bent on suppressing the gifts of splendid individuals" (p. 43).

That seems to me roughly right (though I have not taken the time to look back carefully at his lectures on the Greek philosophers), though it perhaps bears emphasizing that this is not so much a denial of the more prevalent view among German philosophers about the ideal of harmony represented by Greek ethics, but a lack of interest in the topic: even if there were such a difference, it would not affect the Nietzschean worry about ancient and modern ethics which White articulates.

White goes on to note, correctly, that Nietzsche's nostalgia for the Greeks was for the pre-Socratic Greek philosophers and poets (p. 44), but then makes the unusual suggestion that Nietzsche celebrates a different ideal of harmony that he finds, in all of places, in Heraclitus (p. 45). White offers the following quote from Nietzsche's early essay Philosophy in the Tragic Age of the Greeks:

Everything that happens, happens in accordance with this strife of [opposites], and it is just in the strife that eternal justice is revealed....

Do guilt, injustice, contradiction and suffering exist in this world? They do, proclaims Heraclitus, but only for the limited human mind, which sees things apart but not connected, which sees things apart but not connected, not for the con-tuitive god. For him all contradictions run into harmony.

White concedes that "this is not a harmony that enters into human affairs" (45). It is also not, as far as I can see, an ideal of harmony for Nietzsche, as opposed to a tendency he notes in Heraclitus. Put aside the question whether Nietzsche has gotten Heraclitus right; is there any evidence that Nietzsche endorses this notion of harmony? Perhaps when the doctrine of will to power is taken systematically, as John Richardson does in Nietzsche's System (Oxford, 1996), we get a similar notion? Is that the thought?

What I'm Reading (or Planning to Read) Related to Nietzsche

In addition to the essays in the Geuss book, Outside Ethics, many of which deal with Nietzsche or Nietzschean themes, here's what's on my reading list that is Nietzsche-related (some of these I've already read some of and may write about, others I haven't started):

Christopher Janaway, Beyond Selflessness: Reading Nietzsche's Genealogy(Oxford University Press, 2007)

Tamsin Shaw, Nietzsche's Political Skepticism (Princeton University Press, 2007)

Julian Young, Nietzsche's Philosophy of Religion (Cambridge University Press, 2006)

Young's book is the one I am likely to write about in the near future.

I'm also still reading around in various essays in The Blackwell Companion to Nietzsche (2006), edited by Keith Ansell-Pearson. This isn't, I have to say, a very good collection, and it is extremely uneven, but (1) there are some worthwhile essays (of the ones I've read, Clark and Dudrick's on naturalism in Beyond Good and Evil is certainly the best, but I hold out hope for some of those I haven't yet gotten to, such as Peter Poellner's, among others), and (2) I'm discussed and criticized more than any other Nietzsche scholar, so that at least makes the volume interesting to me!

What are you folks reading?

Geuss on Nietzsche: Two Quotes

So I have been reading various essays in Raymond Geuss's interesting and iconoclastic collection Outside Ethics (Princeton University Press, 2005). Many of the essays deal with Nietzsche or Nietzschean themes. I'll offer just two samples.

In the essay on "Liberalism and Its Discontents," in the context of considering the liberal ideal of "consensus," Geuss invokes Nietzsche as follows:

Nietzsche sees human society as a field of potential and actual conflict, although the conflict in question may not always be a matter of fisticuffs but may involve only the exchange of arguments and witticisms. In the realw orld, Nietzsche argues, any existing "consensus" can be no more than a momentary truce entered into for pragmatic reasons with and with no moral implications, and to expect anything more is a utopian hope. (p. 19)

Strangely, not a single text of Nietzsche is cited in support of these claims, not even in a footnote. This is Geuss at his Rortyesque worst: attributing views to important thinkers without even the pretense of scholarly apparatus. In some sense, these might indeed be views that could be ascribed to Nietzsche, but it is not obvious to me what texts Geuss has in mind. Maybe readers can supply the pertinent references?

Far more satisfying (at least for the reader interested in Nietzsche) is the essay on "Thucydides, Nietzsche, and Williams," in which, among other things, Geuss gives an excellent account of the "optimism" of philosophers (since Socrates) that Nietzsche rejects:

First of all, traditional philosophers assumed that the world could be made cognitively accessible to us without remainder....Second, they assumed that when the world was correctly understood, it would make moral sense to us. Third, the kind of "moral sense" which the world made tous would be one that woudl show it to have some orientation toward the satisfaction of some basic, rational human desires or interests, that is, the world was not sheerly indifferent to or perversely frustrating of human happiness. Fourth, the world is set up so that for us to accumulate knowledge and use our reason as vigorously as possible will be good for us, and will contribute to making us happy. Finally, it was assumed that there was a natural fit between the excericse of reason, the conditions of healthy individual human development, the demands of individuals for satisfaction of their needs, interests, and basic desires, and human sociability. Nature, reason, and all human goods, including human virtues, formed a potentially harmonious whole. (p. 223)

Geuss suggests that "the basic structure of a philosophy centered around the claim of a harmonious fit between what is rational, what is good for us, and what is good for our society has been very widely retained" in philosophy (p. 224), and that Nietzsche's rejection of this structure figures in why he prefers Thucydides to Plato. This account strikes me as both right and illuminating. (I touched on these themes as well in my Nietzsche on Morality (pp. 47-53).)

Nietzsche Studies: Where the Action Is

ORIGINALLY POSTED NOV. 19, 2005 at www.leiterreports.typepad.com; reposted here with some very minor revisions.
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When I last wrote about Nietzsche studies, it was to grouse about some unhappy developments; here I want to write more constructively.

Last week, I was talking with one of the University of London graduate students participating in the Gemes/Leiter "intercollegiate" seminar on Nietzsche about what kind of work was worth doing in Nietzsche studies. Nietzsche studies in English-speaking philosophy have really flourished over the last 15 years (Clark's book, below, probably marks the turning point), and while there (alas!) continues to be an enormous amount of sophomoric garbage written about Nietzsche, there has emerged, for the first time, a secondary literature on Nietzsche that compares favorably in scholarly seriousness and philosophical quality, with the best work on Kant or Hegel or Marx. While the complete "professionalization" of the discipline of philosophy means that there is now some demand for specialist work on just about any figure in the history of philosophy, quite independent of his merits, in the case of Nietzsche there is an increasing recognition, both inside and outside the realm of specialists in post-Kantian German philosophy, that Nietzsche may really be the philosophical thinker of significance after Kant, and certainly one with at least as much resonance to themes in English-speaking philosophy as Hegel or Heidegger.

So, to return to my discussion with the postgraduate student mentioned above, the question arises what should someone thinking of doing doctoral research on Nietzsche pursue? Where, today, is the "action" in Nietzsche studies: what needs to be done? (A somewhat dated discussion of this topic is here.)

It seems to me there are now three lively and fruitful areas of philosophical research and writing about Nietzsche: (1) studies of the historical context in which Nietzsche was writing attending, in particular, to the historical influences operative on him--work that demands both command of Nietzsche and command of the relevant portions of the history of philosophy; (2) close, philosophically-minded readings of particulars books by Nietzsche; and (3) philosophical studies of particular topics or themes of significance in Nietzsche: his moral philosophy, his theory of mind or action, his metaphysics or epistemology. What has fallen very much out of favor, it seems to me, are the "global" studies of Nietzsche, which attempt to canvass all his famous (if not most important) themes, like will to power, the overman, and eternal recurrence--though, to be sure, there are honorable, and important, exceptions that discharge this ambitious task admirably (if not convincingly!), such as John Richardon's Nietzsche's System (Oxford, 1996) and Bernard Reginster's The Affirmation of Life: Nietzsche on Overcoming Nihilism (Harvard, 2007).

Historical studies aim to illuminate Nietzsche's ideas and arguments by shedding light on the historical context in which he wrote: the intellectual currents of his time, the particular authors he was reading, the philosophers who mattered most to him. Examples of such studies in recent years include: Christopher Janaway's edited collection on Willing and Nothingness: Schopenhauer as Nietzsche's Educator (Oxford, 1998); Gregory Moore's Nietzsche, Biology and Metaphor (Cambridge, 2002); Michael Green's Nietzsche and the Transcendental Tradition (Illinois, 2002); in some respects, John Richardson's Nietzsche's New Darwinism (Oxford, 2004) (though this also develops the ambitious, systematic account of Nietzsche's philosophy from his earlier book [UPDATE: see Jessica Berry's illuminating review of the Richardson book]); Robin Small's Nietzsche and Ree: A Start Friendship (Oxford, 2005); Lanier Anderson's and Nadeem Hussain's articles on the influence of NeoKantianism and positivism on Nietzsche; Jessica Berry's and Richard Bett's articles on Nietzsche and ancient skepticism (Berry's forthcoming OUP book on this topic will, I expect, bring this topic center stage in Nietzsche studies); and, in more modest forms, the portions dealing with Schopenhauer of Reginster's The Affirmation of Life (Harvard, 2007); the portions dealing with Plato in Richardson's Nietzsche's System (Oxford, 1996); and Chapter 2 of my Nietzsche on Morality (Routledge, 2002) surveying the impact of the Presocratics, Schopenhauer, and German Materialism on Nietzsche. This work, to be sure, varies a bit in its philosophical sophistication and competence, but even where this is obviously lacking (as in Moore's book), the historical erudition still provides rich material for the philosophically-minded reader of Nietzsche.

Textual studies aim to elucidate the philosophical structure and arguments of the books Nietzsche actually published. These kinds of projects are probably least suitable for doctoral students, though they increasingly attract the attention of accomplished scholars, and some of the best studies of this kind are still to appear, such as Maudemarie Clark and David Dudrick's forthcoming CUP book on Beyond Good and Evil and Christopher Janaway's recently published book on On the Genealogy of Morality (Oxford, 2007). Earlier examples tend to focus mainly on the Genealogy, such as Mathias Risse's articles, and the relevant sections of my Nietzsche on Morality (Routledge, 2002) and Simon May's Nietzsche's Ethics and his 'War on Morality' (Oxford, 1999).

Philosophical/thematic studies treat Nietzsche as the philosopher he really is, and explore, and evaluate, his views with respect to particular issues in moral philosophy, metaphysics, epistemology, and philosophy of mind and action. Such studies demand both knowledge of Nietzsche and knowledge of the relevant philosophy, and thus mark the most important respect in which Nietzsche has now joined the canon of important historical figures in the history of philosophy. The watershed work was probably Maudemarie Clark's Nietzsche on Truth and Philosophy (Cambridge, 1990), which was followed by Lester Hunt's Nietzsche and the Origin of Virtues (Routledge, 1991), Peter Poellner's Nietzsche and Metaphysics (Oxford, 1995); my own Nietzsche on Morality (Routledge, 2002); and many articles by Mathias Risse, Nadeem Hussain, Bernard Williams, Ken Gemes, Raymond Geuss, Paul Katsafanas, and others (European Journal of Philosophy has published many of these papers). Neil Sinhababu and I have tried to collect a set of new papers of this kind in Nietzsche and Morality (Oxford, 2007) (with contributions by myself and Sinhababu, as well as Clark & Dudrick, Janaway, Risse, Hussain, Reginster, Poellner, Thomas Hurka, Simon Blackburn, Joshua Knobe, and Jay Wallace). Some of the most lively, recent philosophical debates have concerned, on the one hand, Nietzsche's moral psychology, and, on the other, his philosophy of mind and action (his critique of free will, his account of agency, his understanding of consciousness). My "Nietzsche's Theory of the Will" is a contribution to this literature, and it will also appear in a forthcoming OUP volume (edited by Gemes and May) collecting other essays on the general topic of freedom and autonomy in Nietzsche. (Gemes, Poellner, and Reginster will be presenting papers on this topic at the Pacific APA in March 2008, to which I will be responding, and since I tend to resist the moralized readings favored by most of these other folks, this should be an interesting session.)

I'd be interested to hear how specialists and doctoral students perceive the field. Comments are open; no anonymous postings and bear in mind that comments may take awhile to appear, so post only once!

"Nietzsche, Naturalism, and Moral Psychology"

A description of my Spring 2008 graduate seminar follows:

The course has two interlocking aims: (1) to introduce students to Nietzsche’s philosophical naturalism and its role in his moral philosophy; and (2) to critically evaluate some of the philosophical issues about moral psychology that Nietzsche raises—about moral motivation, the will, the nature of conscious and unconscious experience, the role of consciousness in agency, the nature and causal import of “character”—in light of recent work in both philosophy and empirical psychology. We shall spend the first few weeks on a careful study of On the Genealogy of Morality (read in conjunction with my Nietzsche on Morality), before turning, first, to critiques of my naturalist reading of Nietzsche (e.g., many of the essays in the recent Blackwell Companion to Nietzsche), and then, second, to a topical study of the issues in moral psychology just noted. Each session will be based on readings from elsewhere in Nietzsche’s corpus, together with work by contemporary philosophers (e.g., Doris, Pereboom, G. Strawson, P. Strawson, Velleman) and empirical psychologists (e.g., Haggard, Haidt, Libet, Nisbett, Wegner, Wilson).

I'd especially welcome advice about the literature in empirical psychology.

"Nietzsche's Theory of the Will"

This article of mine has now been published by The Philosophers' Imprint and is available for download here. I would welcome discussion in the comments here.

Here is the abstract:

The essay offers a philosophical reconstruction of Nietzsche’s theory of the will, focusing on (1) Nietzsche’s account of the phenomenology of “willing” an action, the experience we have which leads us (causally) to conceive of ourselves as exercising our will; (2) Nietzsche’s arguments that the experiences picked out by the phenomenology are not causally connected to the resulting action (at least not in a way sufficient to underwrite ascriptions of moral responsibility); and (3) Nietzsche’s account of the actual causal genesis of action. Particular attention is given to passages from Daybreak, Beyond Good and Evil and Twilight of the Idols and a revised version of my earlier account of Nietzsche’s epiphenomenalism is defended. Finally, recent work in empirical psychology (Libet, Wegner) is shown to support Nietzsche’s skepticism that our “feeling” of will is a reliable guide to the causation of action.

In addition to Nietzsche scholars (who have been discussing these issues quite a bit lately), I hope the essay will be of interest to philosophers interested in action theory who might not otherwise be interested in Nietzsche.

Nietzsche's Songs in New York

My friend, the philosopher Manyul Im, alerts me to the fact that his sister, the opera singer Jeannie Im, will be performing songs written by Nietzsche in New York in October (there will also be readings from some of Nietzsche's work). Information about the event is as follows:

Wednesday, October 17 at 7:00 pm
Leo Baeck Institute / Center for Jewish History
Forchheimer Auditorium
15 West 16th Street
New York City
Admission: $ 15 - $ 10
Tickets can be bought at the box office of the Center for Jewish
History or by calling (917) 606 8200

Who else employed the idea of the "Superman"?

A friend is looking for information on authors before or contemporaneous with Nietzsche who employed the notion of (and the word) "Superman" (Uebermensch). I came across this article:

Nietzsche's Superman
William M. Salter
The Journal of Philosophy, Psychology and Scientific Methods, Vol. 12, No. 16 (Aug. 5, 1915), pp. 421-438

Do any readers have other information/references?

Rare Film Footage of Nietzsche

Here

Who knew?

Of course, this is really just a digital manipulation of some well-known photographs taken during Nietzsche's final illness. Very strange.

What this blog will do

Starting later this month, I'll post here thoughts and comments on philosophical issues related to Nietzsche, based on whatever I'm reading or working on. This will be "thinking out loud" in the sense that posts won't be polished, and no doubt mistakes will be made. Comments will be enabled, though moderated, and hopefully informed readers will set me straight or illuminate the issues. Thanks for reading.