19. NIETZSCHE'S MORAL BREAKTHROUGH





    We saw last time how Kant tried to intensify the rational significance

of acting morally by arguing that morality is based on an internal sense

of freedom and moral duty.  His idea that there is a universally valid

"voice" inside of us, telling each person the difference between right and

wrong, may seem odd to many of us who have been raised in a modern western

culture, so thoroughly immersed as it is in relativism.  As a quick review

of Kant's moral philosophy, and in order to point up some of the

differences between Kant's view that moral ends (or aims) are "objective"

and the common view that they are all "subjective", I have summarized some

of the main differences in Figure 19.1.  Ever since Kant proposed his

radical distinction between the standpoints of moral action and empirical

knowledge, philosophers have been attempting various ways of overcoming

the limitations he proposed.  (More often than not, the ways Kant himself

tried to reconcile these two realms have, unfortunately, been completely

ignored.)  In today's lecture we will examine the main ideas of one such

philosopher:  a man who foresaw many of the changes in ways of thinking

and acting that have occurred in the twentieth century, and who, in some

respects at least, was responsible for them; for he started, as it were, a

new cycle in the history of western philosophy (cf. Figure 6.3).



[Figure 19.1: The Contrast between Subjective and Objective Ends]



    Friedrich Nietzsche (1844-1900) was a German philosopher who believed

the traditional values of the society of his day had cut religion and

philosophy-- and indeed, humanity itself--from their proper roots.  As a

response to the impending disaster he saw looming on the horizon, he

called for a thoroughgoing "transvaluation of values"--that is, a complete

rethinking of the whole philosophical and religious tradition that

produced those traditional values. The theories he developed in carrying

out this task set up something like a new myth, replacing the myth of

dispassionate rationality, established by Socrates and popularized by

Plato, with a myth of passionate irrationality, whose implications are

only now beginning to be understood.  (Nietzsche claimed, incidentally,

that his philosophy would not be fully understood until two hundred years

after it was written.)  The problem with understanding his ideas is that

he intentionally wrote in an unsystematic way (since constructing systems

was part of the old set of values).  Not only do some of his ideas

contradict his other ideas, but many of his books do not even pretend to

develop a single, well-argued set of ideas.  Rather, they contain

collections of his various ideas, often expressed in the fragmented form

of "aphorisms". In other words, Nietzsche would simply write a bunch of

insight papers, and then publish them whenever he had enough to make a

book!  He viewed himself more as a poet or even a prophet than as a

philosopher in any conventional sense.  Nevertheless, many of his insights

are directly addressed to philosophical issues; so if we do our best to

arrive at a general understanding of his main ideas, we should be able to

appreciate his significance for the philosophical tradition.



    Nietzsche himself (whose name, by the way, is pronounced as if it were

spelled "Neecha") was the son of a Lutheran pastor.  He was so intelligent

that he finished his formal education early and became a professor of

classics at the University of Basel when he was only 24.  In his youth he

developed a friendship with the musician, Richard Wagner, out of which

many of his early ideas developed.  After teaching for ten years, however,

he became disillusioned with the game of academia, and retired to a hut in

the mountains, where he spent the next ten years of his life as a recluse,

writing some of the most passionate and challenging books in the history

of western philosophy.



    Nietzsche's transvaluation of values, the goal around which all of his

other ideas revolved, was primarily an attempt to break through the

traditional understanding of the boundaries that limit our moral and

intellectual life, and to establish in its place a new set of higher

values.  The old values, as represented especially by Christianity and the

philosophical tradition culminating in Kant, were, he argued,

"life-denying"; they must therefore be replaced by "life-affirming"

values, the best examples of which are to be found in the pagan religions

and philosophies of ancient Greece.  Science, with its narrow field of

vision, interpreting the world as basically dead, is not solely

responsible for this faulty world view.  For the traditional Christian

morals accepted by the vast majority of the western world, and defended in

Kant's philosophy, also support notions such as love, humility, and

self-sacrifice; and such values, according to Nietzsche, have killed the

human spirit itself, and caused modern man to forget how to dance.



    Looking back to ancient Greek mythology, Nietzsche chose names for

these two types of outlook on life:  the traditional, life-denying outlook

he called "Apollonian" (after the God of the sun, named "Apollo"), while

the life- affirming outlook which Nietzsche hoped to put in its place he

called "Dionysian" (after the God of wine, named "Dionysius").  Whereas

the Apollonian outlook is conscious, rational, and calm, the Dionysian is

unconscious, irrational, and passionate.  The former gives rise to a

"slave morality", in which people adopt a "herd mentality" and view

themselves as determined by a fixed boundary line defining good and evil;

in politics this attitude gives rise to democracy (rule by the masses),

thus encouraging everyone to be alike in mediocrity.  By contrast, the

latter gives rise to a "master morality", in which people adopt a "hero

mentality" and view themselves as free to break out of the conventional

ways of interpreting right and wrong; in politics this attitude gives rise

to aristocracy (rule by a few people), thus encouraging the greatness of

the human spirit to be expressed.



    In these and other ways the Dionysian outlook enables us to go "beyond

good and evil", and live on a higher plane, characterized by what

Nietzsche called "the will to power".  The will to power is a form of

radical freedom, which solves the problem posed by Kant's distinction

between nature and freedom by demolishing both sets of boundary lines:

"we must ... posit hypothetically the causality of the will as the only

causality."  We can truly master ourselves, according to Nietzsche, only

by courageously taking hold of a freedom that refuses to be enclosed

within any boundary, for only in so doing can we affirm life as it

actually is.  Following these guidelines, we can picture Nietzsche's

transvaluation of values with the following map:



[Figure 19.2:  Nietzsche's Transvaluation of Values]



    The problem Nietzsche faced was that the society of his day was

thoroughly entrenched in the Apollonian way of thinking.  Hence, his own

attempt to balance this with a Dionysian message inevitably came across as

madness.  This is at least one of the points of Nietzsche's famous story

of the madman in the market place:



    Have you not heard as yet of that mad-man who on one bright forenoon

lit a lantern, ran out into the market-place and cried out again and

again, "I seek God!  I seek God!  --Because there were standing about just

at that time many who did not believe in God, the mad-man was the occasion

of great merriment. Has God been lost? said one of them.  Or is He hiding

himself?  Is He afraid of us?  Has He boarded a ship?  Has He emigrated?

Thus they cried and laughed.



    But the mad-man pierced them with his glance:  "Whither has God gone?"

he cried; "I am going to tell you.  We have killed Him--you and I!  We all

are His murderers.  But how have we accomplished this?  How have we been

able to empty the sea?  Who gave us the sponge to wipe off the entire

horizon?  What were we doing when we unchained this earth from its sun?

Whither does the earth now move?  Whither do we ourselves move?



    "Are we not groping our way in an infinite nothingness?  Do we not

feel the breath of the empty spaces.  Has it not become colder?  Is there

not night and ever more night?  How do we manage to console ourselves, we

master-assassins? Who is going to wipe the blood off our hands?  Must not

we ourselves become gods to make ourselves worthy of such a deed?  (The

Joyful Wisdom, section 125)



This famous passage not only explains the problem--that our lifeless,

Apollonian personalities have killed God--but it also gives a clue as to

Nietzsche's solution.  The only beings capable of killing God are those

who can themselves become gods.  Out of this arises Nietzsche's theory of

Superman.



    When Nietzsche talked about man transcending himself and becoming


bermensch (the German word usually translated as "Superman", but also

sometimes as "overman"), he was not thinking of the strange man in the red

suit who flies around "faster than a speeding bullet" fighting the powers

of crime and defending the American Way!  On the contrary, the imaginary

hero from Krypton was first dreamed up long after Nietzsche died, and

bears little similarity with Nietzsche's ideal.  The Superman whose coming

Nietzsche proclaimed was far more important, for he is the very purpose of

the earth. Thus, the "future hope for man" lies entirely in the emergence

of this man of power from the otherwise hopelessly lost conditions of

modern society: whereas ordinary people are all like "polluted streams",

"we need to become oceans". In order to bring on the Dionysian outlook of

the Superman, we must, for example, love our fate (called "amor fati" by

Nietzsche) so thoroughly that we could will each and every moment of our

life to be endlessly repeated in a continuous cycle of "eternal

recurrence".



    Nietzsche's best description of this ideal Superman, and of how his

character is to emerge, comes in his book, Thus Spake Zarathustra.  The

Prologue to this book tells a story about a man named Zarathustra

(actually the name of the founder of the ancient Persian religion called

Zoroastrianism), who lived alone in the mountains for ten years.  One day

he meets an "old saint in the forest" and is surprised to find that this

man "hath not yet heard of it, that God is dead!"  Zarathustra then goes

to the market-place of the nearest town, where many people are assembled

to watch a tight-rope walker whose performance is about to begin, and

begins to preach to them, saying:



    I teach you the Superman.  Man is something that is to be surpassed.

What have ye done to surpass man?  ...



    What is the ape to man?  A laughing-stock, a thing of shame.  And just

the same shall man be to the Superman:  a laughing-stock, a thing of

shame.



    Ye have made your way from the worm to man, and much within you is

still worm....



    Lo, I teach you the Superman!



    The Superman is the meaning of the earth.  Let your will say:  The

Superman shall be the meaning of the earth!



    I conjure you, my brethren, remain true to the earth, and believe not

those who speak unto you of superearthly hopes!  Poisoners are they,

whether they know it or not.



    Despisers of life are they, decaying ones and poisoned ones

themselves, of whom the earth is weary:  so away with them!



    Once blasphemy against God was the greatest blasphemy; but God died,

and therewith also those blasphemers.  To blaspheme the earth is now the

dreadfulest sin, and to rate the heart of the unknowable higher than the

meaning of the earth!  ...



    Verily, a polluted stream is man.  One must be a sea, to receive a

polluted stream without becoming impure.



    Lo, I teach you the Superman:  he is that sea; in him can your

greatest contempt be submerged.



Someone in the crowd, getting impatient with Zarathustra's strange words,

then asks to be shown this "rope-dancer" (meaning the Superman).

Zarathustra responds by saying:  "Man is a rope stretched between the

animal and the Superman--a rope over an abyss."  After suggesting with

this metaphor the picture of mankind shown in Figure 19.3, Nietzsche told

how, after another speech by Zarathustra, the tight-rope walker then

started his act, but was disturbed by someone else on the rope, who, "like

a buffoon", caused the tight- rope walker to fall to the ground.  The

story ends by telling how Zarathustra helps the injured and dying man.



[Figure 19.3:  Nietzsche's Tight-Rope]



    Although we do not have time to discuss the interpretation of this

story in detail, I should at least add that in the first section of the

book itself, Nietzsche told a story about "three metamorphoses", in which

a spirit is transformed into a camel, the camel into a lion, and the lion

into a child.  If we treat this as symbolizing three stages in the

development of humanity, this could be used to argue that for Nietzsche

the Dionysian ("lion") outlook was not to be part of the ideal man, but

was merely a necessary compensation for the over-rational bias of the

contemporary Apollonian ("camel") outlook.  The ultimate ideal of

Nietzsche may well have been the person who transcends the distinction

between the Apollonian and the Dionysian, by adopting neither the

servant-based outlook of a camel nor the power-based outlook of a lion,

but the instinct-based outlook of a child.



    In any case, the final aspect of Nietzsche's philosophy which I would

like to present to you today is his theory of perspectivism.  Nietzsche

was the first philosopher to use the word "perspective" as a technical

term in his philosophizing.  And this, as you may have noticed, is a

practice I believe can be of utmost value to the philosopher.  However,

for Nietzsche, the implication of saying that everything we "know" is

limited to some perspective is that there are actually no facts, only

interpretations.  Indeed, he went so far as to suggest that everything is

false; in other words, language falsifies reality.  This is a view which

is similar in some respects to both Kant and Wittgenstein, as well as to

the ideas of many other philosophers who wished to distinguish between

what is and what we can say about what is.  Unlike Kant, but like

Wittgenstein, he was very critical of all metaphysical theories

(especially dualism).  For the very idea of a "true world" beyond this one

is, he believed, the root of all life-denying outlooks. This radical

rejection of all truth, metaphysical and otherwise, is an aspect of what

is often called "nihilism".  For the true nihilist there are no real moral

limitations whatsoever, so all values can be rejected as meaningless.

Understood in this way, there is some debate as to whether or not

philosophers such as Nietzsche, whose ultimate goal was to reach a Higher

Value (namely, Superman), ought to be called a "nihilist" in the strict

sense.



    What are we to conclude, then, about Nietzsche's philosophy?  How are

we to respond to such a passionate plea for a new breakthrough?  How can

we cope with his scathing criticisms of religion and the modern scientific

world view?  Has man "killed God" with the very rationality which

virtually all philosophers from Socrates to Kant believed points us beyond

ourselves to that God?  Can we truly become God through the force of our

own will? Surely these and the many other questions raised by Nietzsche's

philosophy cannot be answered in any satisfactory way in this introductory

course.  However, I would like to point out that, above all else,

Nietzsche's writing is calculated to evoke some response.  Nietzsche would

regard his task as a success if he has managed to shock us into rethinking

our entire system of values and beliefs.  The last thing he ever wanted

was to found a new "school" of thinking, called "Nietzschean philosophy"!



    With this in mind, I would like to make several comments about

Nietzsche's ideas.  First, the mythical character of his philosophy should

be clear by the very fact that he refused to see or to accept any

boundaries.  Nietzsche's world was a world with no limits--or at least,

the limits it had were arbitrary, and could not be used to determine the

truth.  (This is partly due to the fact that he had no clear recognition

of the difference between analytic and synthetic logic.)  This is why I

have suggested that we regard his philosophy as having started a new

revolution in the cycle of western philosophy (cf. Figure 6.3), replacing

Plato's Socrates as the foundation for a new philosophical age, often

called the "post-modern" era.



    Of the current movements in western philosophy that look back to

Nietzsche as the father of this new era, "deconstructionism" is one of the

most influential.  Deconstructionism originated as a method of

interpreting literary texts, but has now grown into a distinct

philosophical school, based on the assumption that the world has no "deep

structure" whatsoever, so that the search for the foundations of anything

is necessarily futile and counterproductive.  My opinion is that the life

of this movement will be short- lived, because, like logical positivism

(cf. Lecture 13), it attempts the impossible task of growing a tree

without any roots whatsoever.  While rightly claiming that the belief in

metaphysical foundations is all too often used to close off the

possibility of alternative explanations, and can therefore be misused as a

tool of oppression, deconstructionists themselves, in effect, close off

the possibility for any communication whatsoever, by their belief that

there is no common ground upon which we all stand.  For this reason, I

will not devote any further attention in these lectures to the insights of

the deconstructionists (most of which can be found in a less extreme form

in the writings of other, more traditional philosophers).



    Another interesting point is that the relationship between Kant and

Nietzsche is comparable in some ways to the relationship in ancient

Chinese philosophy between Confucius and Chuang Tzu.  The former in each

case developed a massive philosophical system revolving around the

principle of inwardly legislated moral action, whereas the latter in each

case tried to break through the rigid ways in which that system was too

often interpreted, by living a wanderer's life and urging us all to be

guided by the passionate "Way" that is in some sense the essence of life

itself.  Unfortunately, we do not have time to pursue this parallel

relationship in the context of this class.  So it will suffice merely to

note that, like Nietzsche, Chuang Tzu's radical destruction of traditional

values often makes him look like a nihilist; yet we can avoid this error

by keeping in mind that the Way serves as an ineffable, but nonetheless

real limit for human activity.



    Furthermore, it should be clear by now that our modern tendency

towards relativism stems to a large extent from (or at the very least, was

foreseen by) Nietzsche.  However, "relativism", as referring to the view

that no opinion is any better than any others, is not identical to

"perspectivism".  For Nietzsche, as we have seen, the latter means that

everything is false.  Yet, if we really take this seriously, we are left

with a tree without roots--and perhaps even without a trunk!  Throughout

this course I am trying to defend a rather different version of what could

be called "perspectivism".  Instead of concluding from the perspectival

nature of all knowledge (as demonstrated by Kant) to the falseness of all

language, we can regard each well-defined perspective as an opportunity to

gain "truth within boundaries".  Thus, for example, I have argued for a

philosophy of perspective in which truth does exist, but can be known as

such only within the boundary lines of a distinct perspective.  In this

way we can say truth is relative, without saying it all boils down to

individual opinions:  once we realize that the love of wisdom requires

first and foremost a search for the proper perspective from which to

interpret ideas such as "truth" and "goodness", then and only then will we

be able to affirm that opinions (sometimes even the majority opinions!)

can be wrong.  But rather than saying, with Nietzsche, that all views of

the world are wrong, we can affirm that many of them can be right.

Indeed, even when two views appear to conflict with each other, they may

both be right, if they are assuming different perspectives.



    We may want to ask, then, which is truly life-denying: Nietzsche's

interpretation of man as either purely Apollonian or purely Dionysian; or

a confession of the inevitable tension between these two aspects of human

nature (as in Kant)? The person who crosses the tight-rope and is

successfully transformed into Superman (i.e., into the Dionysian hero)

will be just as one- sided as the one who sits back as remains satisfied

to be a mere animal (i.e., part of the Apollonian herd).  In either case,

if we try to regard life in terms of either one of these outlooks on its

own, we will surely end up denying life:  this can be visually represented

by noting that the tight-rope of man in Figure 19.3 would fall to the

ground if either building supporting it were to be taken away.  This

surely suggests that the only truly life-affirming view is the one that

regards man as both Apollonian and Dionysian.  Whether the tension be

between love and passion, consciousness and unconsciousness, knowledge and

ignorance, or any other pair of Nietzschean opposites, it is in each case

the tension itself which keeps us alive.  Indeed, this is simultaneously

the greatness and the tragedy of human life:  that we are capable of

taking great risks in the pursuit of high ideals; and yet, that we cannot

reach those ideals without losing our very life.  And the good life, just

as the good tight-rope walker, will be the one that exhibits the best

balance (e.g., by integrating the opposites).



    Finally, I should mention that, for the last eleven years of his life,

Nietzsche was insane.  Trying to explain what caused his insanity can only

be a matter of speculation.  Some people believe it was the result of a

physical illness.  Others interpret his suffering as that of a true

prophet, almost as if he were accepting the punishment on behalf of those

who could not see mankind's tendency towards self-destruction so clearly.

Still others regard his final fate as a natural outcome of his

philosophical outlook.  In the latter case his example could certainly

serve as a warning to anyone who wishes to experiment with a philosophy

cut off from its natural roots in metaphysics. In any case, because of her

brother's insanity, Nietzsche's sister ended up taking charge over the

publication of his writings and the promotion of his ideas.

Unfortunately, she perverted his ideas in such a way that Hitler was able

to use what looked like Nietzsche's ideas as a philosophical support for

his own fascist political regime.  Political philosophy will, in fact, be

the subject of our next two lectures.  But for now we can end by noting

that the use Hitler (and others) made of Nietzsche is now generally

recognized to be a gross misrepresentation.  For Nietzsche was no

anti-semitic fascist, but truly a philosopher unto himself--a new Socrates

(or anti-Socrates) if ever there was one.





QUESTIONS FOR FURTHER THOUGHT



1. Is it ever right to do something which is "life-denying"?



2. Is a "breakthrough" always good?



3. Could a human being kill God?



4. Is philosophy without reason really possible at all?





RECOMMENDED READINGS



1. Friedrich Nietzsche, The Joyful Wisdom, tr. Thomas Common (London:

George Allen and Unwin, 1910), especially section 125.



2. Friedrich Nietzsche, Thus Spake Zarathustra, tr. Thomas Common (London:

George Allen and Unwin, 1909), especially the Prologue.



3. Friedrich Nietzsche, Beyond Good and Evil:  Prelude to a philosophy of

the future, tr. R.J. Hollingdale (Harmondsworth, Middlesex:  Penguin

Books, 1973).



4. Walter Kaufmann, Nietzsche:  Philosopher, psychologist, anti-Christ4

(Princeton:  Princeton University Press, 1974[1950]).