I am putting together a collection of seven previously published papers (and three new ones) under the tentative title Nietzschean Studies: From the Death of God to Perspectivism (for Oxford University Press). I also am adding new Afterwords to a few of the papers, including the one on "Bernard Williams's Debt to Nietzsche: Real or Illusory?" My conclusion was that there was a "debt" but it was quite superficial. In the new Afterword I respond to two subsequent attempts to defend the idea that Williams has a real debt to Nietzsche, by Miranda Fricker and David Owen. Here is the typescipt (the Afterword starts at p. 21). If you don't have access to Google Drive, you can get the typescript here. (Citations are a mix of Chicago and Harvard style in this draft.)
And this is from the conclusion of the Afterword:
The “organizing concern” for Williams, as Fricker aptly says, is “how far ethical life could be rendered transparent, so that we might confront its history and, particularly, its contingency in a clear-eyed fashion without experiencing the authority of our ethical convictions as thereby undermined” (231). It is hard to imagine a more unNietzschean “organizing concern,” but it is a concern that puts Williams squarely in the mainstream of Anglophone moral philosophy which is concerned with vindicating the “authority of our ethical convictions,” even if most analytic moral philosophy does not generally try to do so in a historical context. As I said at the start of the original essay, Williams obviously shares with someone like Judith Thomson the “conservative” ambition of vindicating “what makes certain pre-philosophical, or nonphilosophical beliefs true…[namely] those that we rely on in ordinary life”(2013: 54).
So why, in the end, is it so important for Fricker to vindicate Williams’s claimed debt to Nietzsche, given that her own engagement with Nietzsche is obviously slight.[1] Yes, Williams read Nietzsche--but not in a careful, scholarly way--and yes, if we are to credit his testimony, some bits of Nietzsche stimulated his own writings. The differences, however, between the two are so profound, and on precisely the topics where Williams claimed influence, that the puzzle remains why some readers want to say anything more than: Williams read Nietzsche and was provoked by him, but his own work has almost nothing to do with Nietzsche’s.
I suppose it is testimony to Nietzsche’s current prestige that the question of Williams’s relationship to Nietzsche is even thought to matter. But why should it? Perhaps Williams and his philosophical fans recognize that his “critique” of morality is a bit fanciful and of no interest to anyone other than analytic moral philosophers, whereas Nietzsche is read by everyone, even non-academics? So by associating Williams’s unNietzschean ideas about obligation and insulation from luck with Nietzsche, fans of Williams are trying to expand the audience for their own hero, to give him a greater cultural resonance than he has? I am sure that is not anyone’s conscious motivation, but it would at least explain the puzzling effort to ally two thinkers so different. There is, after all, much to admire about Bernard Williams as an analytic moral philosopher quite apart from any relationship to Nietzsche. Williams’s 1973 critique of utilitarianism, for example, or his paper on “Internal and External Reasons,” are deservedly classics in Anglophone moral philosophy of the past sixty years. At the end of the day, however, Williams seems to me to be very much an Anglophone moral philosopher, prone to their philosophically tainted fantasies about what morality is like, as well as the importance of moral philosophy, and sharing in their congenital conservatism and bourgeois moral propriety. Nietzsche shared none of those attributes, and so it should be unsurprising that Williams’s debt to Nietzsche is fairly superficial. Those who prefer Wiliams’s more conservative approach to the criticism of moral philosophy should not be bothered by this fact. Those who care about Nietzsche, by the same token, should not be misled by the alleged affinity.
[1]Her essay references only one text of Nietzshce’s, and all her quotes from Nietzsche come from Williams.
