Cet article offre une vue d’ensemble sur les Éléments pour la généalogie de la morale de Nietzsche. La genèse de l’œuvre est d’abord présentée, puis les sources que Nietzsche a exploitées pour ses réflexions sont examinées. Cet examen des sources est suivi d’une analyse de la conception, de la structure et du contenu de l’« écrit polémique » de Nietzsche. Les sections du livre sont présentées et commentées dans leur succession.

In this edition of two of Nietzsche's late works, Kaufmann has written a short introduction to each work and included indices for each work. There is an appendix to the Genealogy consisting of Kaufmann's translations of the aphorisms from earlier works which Nietzsche alludes to in the Genealogy. Also included is an appendix of discarded drafts of parts of Ecce Homo. In addition to a readable translation, Kaufmann has written a running commentary in the form of short footnotes (...) which become more expansive in one section of the Genealogy which deals with intellectual conscience and with truth. The Genealogy is intended by Nietzsche to be a sequel to and clarification of Beyond Good and Evil. It deals with such themes as master morality as opposed to slave morality, bad conscience, ressentiment, and ascetic ideals. Ecce Homo is Nietzsche's commentary on himself, his books, and his intellectual development. In the introductions, Kaufmann pleas for responsible scholarship when dealing with Nietzsche and rails against what he considers to be a conspiracy of malicious misinterpretations that have sought to discredit Nietzsche. He criticizes views that would disregard Ecce Homo as an insanely disfigured self-portrait. He also rejects interpretations of the Genealogy which suppose that Nietzsche would lump together as evils slave morality, bad conscience, and ascetic ideals. Kaufmann's admiration for Nietzsche is undisguised, and he admits a special fondness for Ecce Homo.—S. O. H. (shrink)

Nietzsche's aims and targets -- Reading Nietzsche's preface -- Naturalism and genealogy -- Selflessness : the struggle with Schopenhauer -- Nietzsche and Paul Rée on the origins of moral feelings -- Good and evil : affect, artistry, and revaluation -- Free will, autonomy, and the sovereign individual -- Guilt, bad conscience, and self-punishment -- Will to power in the Genealogy -- Nietzsche's illustration of the art of exegesis -- Disinterestedness and objectivity -- Perspectival knowing and the affects (...) -- The ascetic ideal, meaning, and truth -- Beyond selflessness. (shrink)

In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:Journal of the History of Philosophy 39.3 (2001) 450-451 [Access article in PDF] Simon May. Nietzsche's Ethics and His War on 'Morality.' New York: Oxford University, The Clarendon Press, 1999. Pp. xi + 212. Cloth, $45.00. When Friedrich Nietzsche reviewed his career during his final year of intellectual activity, he wrote in Ecce Homo (1888) that his "campaign against morality" began with the publication of Daybreak (1880) eight years (...) earlier. With this autobiographical remark in mind, Simon May appropriately develops his study of Nietzsche's ethics, Nietzsche's Ethics and His War on "Morality," by attending to Nietzsche's writings of the 1880's, using the relatively late On the Genealogy of Morals (1887) as his textual keystone.For the sake of his English-speaking readers' convenience, May reiterates Walter Kaufmann's familiar translations of Nietzsche's works in all of his book's citations, and keeps a relatively tight leash on his references to Nietzsche's pre-1880 works and unpublished notebooks. Historical guideposts to authors within Nietzsche's surrounding cultural context are also limited, and the book unfolds around May's reflections on Nietzsche's publications, supplemented by contemporary references to the works of Bernard Williams in matters concerning ethics, and by references to a substantial number of English-speaking Nietzsche scholars in matters concerning Nietzsche's valuation of truth. Such are the book's methodological contours, which are defensible, but which will probably disappoint those who have philosophical sensibilities that are more philologically and historically pronounced.May divides his book in half, the first segment of which reviews a series of familiar Nietzschean thematics, Nietzsche's conception of values, his distinction between master and slave moralities, his analysis of guilt and bad conscience, his conception of life enhancement, and his conception of the ascetic ideal, all with the prospect of suggesting that Nietzsche's ethical ideal is best encapsulated by the phrase, "become what one is." This ideal, as May understands it, is to develop oneself maximally in a life-enhancing way, given the parameters of one's natural capacities. Although one would expect May to associate this prescription with Nietzsche's conception of the "superhuman" (Übermensch), he thought-provokingly sets the ideal of "becoming what one is" directly against Nietzsche's Übermensch, arguing that the latter is, in fact, "unattainable and undesirable." According to May, Nietzsche's discussion of the superhuman type is distractingly unrealistic, chiefly because a perfectly sovereign individual, unlike us, would be an infallible "man-god" (117) and would have nothing left to overcome.The second half of May's study concentrates on Nietzsche's crucial revaluation of the value of truth. May argues that although Nietzsche rejects an unconditional value for truth and its associated ascetic ideal, it is nonetheless consistent to "passionately" value truth and remain a Nietzschean life-enhancer. May respects Nietzsche's perspectivism, but his interpretation clearly runs against the grain of the more extremely relativistic, "anti-truth," readings of Nietzsche.May's short volume contains plenty of food for disagreement. To cite one notable example, May maintains that "with Nietzsche there is not even an attempt to produce a systematic safety net against cruelty... and, to this extent, his philosophy licenses the atrocities of a Hitler" (132). May's fundamental reason is that since unfettered cruelty is consistent with what he understands to be Nietzsche's radically individualist [End Page 450] principle of life-enhancement, the Nietzschean conception of life-enhancement is ethically deficient. Some of Nietzsche's remarks do provoke May's criticism, but common knowledge also tells us that unfettered cruelty often backfires into either physical or spiritual self-destruction. So a wise Nietzschean would not "license" brutality. Neither, however, would such a Nietzschean seek to erect an absolute barrier against unfettered brutality, but would more discriminatingly consider what wisdom dictates in each circumstance, given the interests of life.May's study intends to exclude from the philosophically best interpretation of Nietzsche, what are recognized by most people as ethically undesirable qualities. His study also renders Nietzsche's key ideas workable, accessible, and palatable... (shrink)

The "sovereign individual" (hereafter, the SI) is almost universally held to be part of Nietzsche's positive ethical ideal.1 Focus on this isolated description at the start of the second essay of On the Genealogy of Morality results in a reconstruction of Nietzschean personhood and ethics based on the capacity to make and keep promises. For example, the SI has been used to understand us as "self-conscious beings capable of standing in autonomous ethical relations to ourselves" with a "fundamental (...) duty" to do so and with a duty to act ethically with regard to each other.2 Attempts to reconstruct a Nietzschean ethic based on the SI passage have resulted in uncharacteristically Kantian results, because of the .. (shrink)

The figure of the sovereign individual has stood for about two decades at the center of an exegetical debate concerning its identity and ideality. What is often lost sight of in these debates is the role of the sovereign individual in Nietzsche’s genealogy of guilt and bad conscience in the Genealogy’s second essay. I argue for the following claims. First, that the figure of the sovereign individual is not a singular occurrence in Nietzsche’s published writings (...) but is present in sections from Daybreak and The Gay Science that have not been pursued in this context in the Anglophone literature; sections that shed new light on the sovereign individual. Second, that examination of these texts reveals that the sovereign individual is for Nietzsche embodied by Socrates and the Socratic individual. Third, and most importantly, that with the sovereign individual there emerges individualized conscience – the capacity for self-laceration that concerns one’s misdeeds alone and involves the belief that one’s misdeeds are entirely one’s own individual fault, rather than the fault of the community or the gods. A fourth, rather negative consequence, is that at the end of the day Nietzsche, in the Genealogy, does not manage to provide us with a genealogy of moral guilt. (shrink)

ABSTRACTThe figure of the sovereign individual has stood for about two decades at the center of an exegetical debate concerning its identity and ideality. What is often lost sight of in these debates is the role of the sovereign individual in Nietzsche’s genealogy of guilt and bad conscience in the Genealogy’s second essay. I argue for the following claims. First, that the figure of the sovereign individual is not a singular occurrence in Nietzsche’s published writings (...) but is present in sections from Daybreak and The Gay Science that have not been pursued in this context in the Anglophone literature; sections that shed new light on the sovereign individual. Second, that examination of these texts reveals that the sovereign individual is for Nietzsche embodied by Socrates and the Socratic individual. Third, and most importantly, that with the sovereign individual there emerges individualized conscience – the capacity for self-laceration that concerns one’s misdeeds alone and involves the belief that one’s misdeeds are entirely one’s own individual fault, rather than the fault of the community or the gods. A fourth, rather negative consequence, is that at the end of the day Nietzsche, in the Genealogy, does not manage to provide us with a genealogy of moral guilt. (shrink)

On a postcard to Franz Overbeck from January 4, 1888, Nietzsche makes some illuminating remarks with respect to the three treatises in his book On the Genealogy of Morality.2 Nietzsche says that, ‘for the sake of clarity, it was necessary artificially to isolate the different roots of that complex structure that is called morality. Each of these three treatises expresses a single primum mobile; a fourth and fifth are missing, as is even the most essential (‘the herd instinct’) – (...) for the time being, the latter had to be ignored, as too comprehensive, and the same holds for the ultimate summation of all those different elements and thus a final account of morality.’ Nietzsche also points out that each treatise makes a contribution to the genesis of Christianity and rejects an explanation of Christianity in terms of only one psychological category. The topics of the treatises are ‘good’ and ‘evil’ (first treatise), the ‘bad conscience’ (second), and the ‘ascetic ideal’ (third). The postcard suggests that Nietzsche discusses these topics separately because a joint treatment is too complicated, but that in reality, these ideas are inextricably intertwined, both with each other and with others that Nietzsche omits. Therefore, the three treatises should be regarded as parts of a unified theory and critique of morality. Nietzsche’s remarks on that postcard are important because in the Genealogy itself, he makes little effort to show the unity among the treatises. We shall return to this postcard repeatedly.3 The first treatise has attracted most scholarly attention, but much less work has been done on the second treatise, ‘ “Debts”, “Bad Conscience”, and Related Matters’. This is unfortunate, since it seems that, in Nietzsche’s own view, the central notion of the second treatise, namely, the bad conscience as a feeling of guilt, is a key element of Christian morality. Therefore, understanding Nietzsche’s treatment of this notion is essential to understanding his views on Christianity and the impact of the Christian heritage on non-religious moral philosophy.. (shrink)

This article examines various readings of Nietzsche’s Genealogy of Morality. It treats key issues regarding each of the book’s three essays. The first essay presents slave morality as arising out of ressentiment against masters; Nietzsche thinks that this resentful attitude or affect becomes ingrained and is inherited in later generations. The second essay centers on the phenomenon of “bad conscience.” Nietzsche treats this not just critically, but also as enabling the “artist’s cruelty” which makes possible a new kind (...) of human enhancement. The third essay is about the “ascetic idea,” a “will to transcend” certain essential features of life—such as appearance, change, even willing—from which life suffers. Although Nietzsche finds this ascetic ideal present in the “unconditional will to truth,” this by no means implies that Nietzsche abandons truth as an aim. These three stories should be viewed as “conjectures” and as examples of the kind of thinking needed to understand morality and values. (shrink)

This paper offers a new interpretation of Nietzsche’s “sovereign individual,” which appears in the second treatise of his 1887 On the Genealogy of Morality. I argue that Nietzsche’s presentation of that figure’s sovereignty is much more ambiguous than has hitherto been recognized. In contrast to scholars who argue that he is either completely free from moral conscience or entirely subservient to it, I argue that he is neither completely autonomous nor heteronomous. He surpasses the need for the enforcement (...) of custom only by internalizing it, i. e. by developing a conscience. This positions him as a crucial link in Nietzsche’s understanding of the human being’s dependence on morality. Attending to the sovereign individual’s ambiguities reveals Nietzsche’s skepticism about the possibility of autonomy within the political community. (shrink)

“The genealogy of morals” is, most famously, a pair of genealogies: that of the good/evil dichotomy in the First Treatise, and that of the bad conscience in the Second Treatise. But the straightforward presentation of these two narratives is subverted even before it begins. Nietzsche classifies the book not as a treatise or inquiry but as a “polemic”; voices interrupt the narrative to insist that much is left unsaid; the narratives are framed by, of all things, reflections on the (...) scientific conscience; Nietzsche declares the entire enterprise to be a contribution to the critique of “the value of values”; the two genealogies of the first two Treatises overlap and various points and ultimately converge in a discussion of the “meaning” of the “ascetic ideal.” Whatever one makes of these complications, two tentative conclusions can be drawn. Nietzsche is profoundly concerned with the status of his genealogy. And genealogy does not function as reportage, primarily concerned with the accurate depiction of events; rather, it aims to reveal something about the status of “moral values” and the possibility of an alternative to them. (shrink)

In lieu of an abstract, here is a preview of the article: This essay begins by reviewing the strengths and weaknesses of the developmental strategy adopted in my Nietzsche’s “Genealogy of Morality” in relation to the contrasting approaches of Conway, Hatab, and Janaway in their studies of Nietzsche’s On the Genealogy of Morals. It then turns to take up a topic that, in the light of the readings of Conway, Hatab, Janaway, and myself, I now take to be (...) much more central than any of us has adequately acknowledged, namely, the relationship of GM to the Hellenistic conception of philosophy. I sketch this argument and explore its implications through Janaway’s and Hatab’s different (but not incompatible) reflections on perspectivism, before finally providing an illustration of how Nietzsche’s indebtedness to the themes of freedom and slavery in ancient philosophy illuminates our understanding of the slave revolt in morals, the psychology of the priest, and the interpretation of the sovereign individual. Given the complexity of the rhetorical and argumentative structure of Nietzsche’s On the Genealogy of Morals, any author presumptuousness enough to offer a study of this text needs to have a clear (and defensible) strategy for approaching it.1 Such strategies may be various, and in the cases under consideration, this is the case. Both Larry Hatab and Dan Conway offer textualist interpretations, with Hatab seeking to communicate the intensely radical character of GM by focusing strongly on the agonistic dimensions of its argument and rhetoric, while Conway reads GM as a Bildungsroman and so seeks to track and explicate Nietzsche’s efforts to guide his readers from innocence to experience. (Such readings need not be incompatible since it could be, for example, that it is through his efforts to construct an internal agon within the reader that Nietzsche seeks to overcome their innocence.) By contrast, both Chris Janaway and I offer more contextualist accounts. Janaway’s strategy is to take Nietzsche at his word and to offer a close reading of the argument of GM in relation to the two philosophical figures—Paul Rée and Arthur Schopenhauer—that Nietzsche identifies as his representative opponents. My own strategy is to adopt a developmental approach to considering GM, one that seeks to reconstruct the reasons—internal to his project of reevaluation—that lead Nietzsche to require a genealogical investigation of morality and to use this reconstruction as a way of orienting the analysis of this text. (And obviously there is some overlap here given Nietzsche’s varied relationships to Schopenhauer and Rée in the course of his philosophical development.) Although my own methodological commitments favor a contextualist approach, it is wise to avoid dogmatism on this issue—not least because one might reasonably note that Ridley’s Nietzsche’s Conscience, perhaps the most widely admired recent analysis of GM and one to which all of the authors considered here are indebted, is thoroughly textualist in its strategy of focusing on the central characters of GM.2 In what follows, I will briefly review my reasons for favoring a developmental form of contextualist account and what I take the strength and limitations of this approach (and of my performance of it) to be. I will then turn to consider what I now see as a central issue for understanding GM—namely, Nietzsche’s relationship to ancient philosophy—that has emerged in the light of further reflection on the arguments presented in these four works. I conclude by briefly reconsidering the nature of Nietzsche’s genealogical enterprise. (shrink)

Nietzsche argues in the Genealogy of Morality (GM) that key aspects of modern European morality arose as “cures” for widespread human sickness but are ultimately making us sicker (“poisoning” us). This article provides a systematic overview of how Nietzsche believes morality has functioned as a cure and poison for European humanity. Drawing on my own previous work on Nietzsche’s concept of health, I sketch an overview of the (1) sicknesses, (2) treatments, and (3) pathogeneses discussed in each of the (...) three treatises in terms of a single (and plausible) concept of health. The result is a systematic interpretive overview of the core polemical argument in GM. (shrink)

Aaron Ridley explores Nietzsche's mature ethical thought as expressed in his masterpiece On the Genealogy of Morals. Taking seriously the use that Nietzsche makes of human types, Ridley arranges his book thematically around the six characters who loom largest in that work—the slave, the priest, the philosopher, the artist, the scientist, and the noble. By elucidating what the Genealogy says about these figures, he achieves a persuasive new assessment of Nietzsche's ethics. Ridley's intellectually supple interpretation reveals Nietzsche's (...) ethical position to be deeper and more interesting than is often supposed: the relation, for instance, between Nietzsche's ideal of the noble and the ascetic or priestly conscience does not emerge as a stark opposition but as a rich interplay between the tensions inherent in each. Equally, he shows that certain under-appreciated confusions in Nietzsche's thought reveal much about the positive aspects of the philosopher's moral vision. The only book devoted entirely to the Genealogy, Nietzsche's Conscience offers a sympathetic but tough-minded critical reading of the philosopher's most important work. Delivered in clear and vigorous language and employing a broadly analytical approach, Ridley's commentary makes Nietzsche's reflections on morality more accessible than they have been hitherto. (shrink)

_Beyond Good and Evil_ is Nietzsche's first sustained philosophical treatment of issues important to him. Unlike the expository prose of the essayistic period, the stylized forays and jabs of the aphoristic period, and the lyrical-philosophical rhetoric of the Zarathustra-period, _Beyond Good and Evil_ inscribes itself boldly into the history of philosophy, challenging ancient and modern notions of philosophy's achievements and insisting on a new task for "new philosophers." This is a watershed book for Nietzsche and for philosophy in the modern (...) era. _On the Genealogy of Morality_ applies Nietzsche's celebrated genealogical method, honed in the earlier aphoristic writings, to the problem of morality's influence on the human species. In three treatises that strikingly anticipate insights appearing much later in Freud's _Civilization and Its Discontents_, Nietzsche provides an anthropological psychograph of our species, revealing the origins of the concepts of good and evil, the roles played by guilt and bad conscience, and the persistence of ascetic ideals. Manifesting a hopeful yet unsentimental assessment of the human condition, these books resonated throughout the 20th century and continue to exert broad appeal. (shrink)

A critical discussion of Bernard Reginster's book The Will to Nothingness. The contribution engages with Reginster's interpretation of Nietzschean ressentiment, arguing that it is an essentially interpersonal attitude in two different senses. It is a response to a social situation of structural deprivation, and it involves an element of antagonism toward those who are better off within this social structure. The contribution then discusses Reginster's claim that modern morality restores the sense of power of the masses by adjusting the goals (...) that they aim to pursue. I argue that this interesting interpretation does not do full justice to the themes of hostility or hatred that permeate the Genealogy of Morals, extending from Nietzsche's discussion of the slave revolt to his treatments of the bad conscience and of ascetic ideals. (shrink)

This paper interprets the relation between sovereignty and guilt in Nietzsche's Genealogy. I argue that, contrary to received opinion, Nietzsche was not opposed to the moral concept of guilt. I analyse Nietzsche's account of the emergence of the guilty conscience out of a pre-moral bad conscience. Drawing attention to Nietzsche's references to many different forms of conscience and analogizing to his account of punishment, I propose that we distinguish between the enduring and the fluid elements of a ‘conscience’, defining (...) the enduring element as the practice of forming self-conceptions. I show that for Nietzsche, the moralization of the bad conscience results from mixing it with the material concepts of guilt and duty, a process effected by prehistoric religious institutions by way of the concept of god. This moralization furnishes a new conception of oneself as a responsible agent and holds the promise of sovereignty by giving us a freedom unknown to other creatures, but at the price of our becoming subject to moral guilt. According to Nietzsche, however, the very forces that made it possible have spoiled this promise and, under the pressures of the ascetic ideal, a harmful notion of responsibility understood in terms of sin now dominates our lives. Thus, to fully realize our sovereignty, we must liberate ourselves from this sinful conscience. (shrink)

With the advent of slave morality and the belief system it entails, human beings alone begin to advance to a level beyond that of simple, brute, animal nature. While Christianity and its belief system generate a progression, however, allowing human beings to become interesting for the first time, Nietzsche also maintains in the Genealogy that slave morality is a regression, somehow lowering or bringing them down from a possible higher level. In this paper I will argue that (...) this is not a mere inconsistency in Nietzsche's writing, but is instead an important clue to a correct interpretation of the Genealogy. (shrink)

ABSTRACT Most Nietzsche scholars read the third essay of On the Genealogy of Morals as an account of the development of Christian asceticism after the slave revolution in morals. In this article, I argue that that is a misreading of Nietzsche's argument, the consequence of which is a failure to understand Nietzsche's treatment of the transition from noble morality to slave morality. I contend that we can track this transition only once we understand the role of the (...) ascetic priest in the slave revolution. The third essay's account of asceticism, then, is indispensable in understanding how slave morality grows out of priestly values. With this argument in place I begin to trace the deep lines of asceticism in the slave revolt as described in the first essay. (shrink)

Chulpforta, 1862 -- Napoleon III as president -- Saint-just -- Two-poem cycle two kings -- Louis the sixteenth -- Louis the fifteenth -- Agonistic politics, 1871-1874 -- The Greek state, 1871 -- On the future of our educational institutions, third lecture, February 27th, 1872 -- Homer's contest -- Untimely meditations -- David Strauss : the confessor and the writer, 1873 -- Schopenhauer as educator, 1874 -- The free spirit, 1878-1880 -- Human, all too human : a book for free spirits, (...) 1878 -- Miscellaneous maxims and opinions, 1879 -- The wanderer and his shadow, 1880 -- The campaign against morality, 1881-1885 -- Dawn of day thoughts on the prejudices of morality, 1881 -- The joyful wisdom, 1882 -- Thus spoke Zarathustra : a book for everyone and no one, 1883-1885 -- On the new idol -- On the rabble -- On the Tarantulas -- On old and new law tablets -- Conversation with the kings -- Nachlass fragments, 1883-1885 -- Aristocratic radical, 1886-1887 -- Beyond good and evil : prelude to a philosophy of the future, 1886 -- The joyful wisdom, book v, 1887 -- On the genealogy of morals : a polemical tract, 1887 -- First essay, good and evil, good, and bad -- Second essay, guilt, bad conscience, and related matters -- Third essay, what do ascetic ideals mean? -- Nachlass fragments, 1885-1887 -- The antichrist, 1888 -- Twilight of the idols : or how one philosophises with a hammer, 1888 -- Morality as anti-nature -- The improvers of mankind -- What the Germans lack -- Skirmishes of an untimely man -- The antichrist : a curse on Christianity, 1888 -- Ecce homo : how one becomes what one is, 1888 -- Why I am so wise -- Why I write such good books -- The case of Wagner : a musician's problem -- Why I am a destiny -- Nachlass fragments, 1887-1888. (shrink)

_Ressentiment_—the hateful desire for revenge—plays a pivotal role in Nietzsche’s _On the Genealogy of Morals_. _Ressentiment _explains the formation of bad conscience, guilt, asceticism, and, most importantly, it motivates the "slave revolt" that gives rise to Western morality’s values. _Ressentiment_, however, has not enjoyed a thorough treatment in the secondary literature. This book brings it sharply into focus and provides the first detailed examination of Nietzsche’s psychology of _ressentiment_. Unlike other books on the _Genealogy_, it uses _ressentiment_ as (...) a key to the _Genealogy_ and focuses on the intriguing relationship between _ressentiment_ and justice. It shows how _ressentiment_, despite its blindness to justice, gives rise to moral justice—the central target of Nietzsche’s critique. This critique notwithstanding, the _Genealogy_ shows Nietzsche’s enduring commitment to the virtue of _non-moral_ justice: a commitment that grounds his provocative view that moral justice spells the ‘end of justice’. The result provides a novel view of Nietzsche's moral psychology in the _Genealogy_, his critique of morality, and his views on justice. (shrink)

On the Genealogy of Morals contains the puzzling claim that the will to truth is the last expression of the ascetic ideal. Part I of this essay argues that Nietzsche’s claim is that our will to truth functions as a tool allowing us to take a passive stance to the world, leading us to repress and split off part of our nature. Part II deals with Nietzsche’s account of the sovereign individual and his related, novel, account of (...) free will. Both these accounts hinge on the notion of the self as an integrated whole. In contrasting the integrated sovereign individual, who has genuine free will, and we splintered moderns, Nietzsche aims to unsettle us with uncanny suggestion that we have no genuine selves. Part III shows that the invocation of the uncanny is a central strategy Nietzsche uses to bring home his disturbing message that we are strangers to ourselves. (shrink)

In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:Coward Conscience and Bad Conscience in Shakespeare and NietzscheSandra BonettoGeorge Bernard Shaw once observed that the whole of Nietzsche was expressed in three lines that Shakespeare puts into the mouth of one of his greatest villains, Richard III 1 : "Conscience is but a word that cowards use / Devised at first to keep the strong in awe / Our strong arms be our conscience; swords, our law" (5.6). (...) More specifically, perhaps, these lines invite a comparison between Shakespeare's repeated association of conscience with cowardice in Richard III, 2 and Nietzsche's negative evaluation of bad conscience, notably in On the Genealogy of Morals. 3 The aim of this article is to offer such a comparative analysis in order to demonstrate that Shakespeare's coward conscience anticipates Nietzsche's understanding of the bad conscience (das schlechte Gewissen) as "the consciousness of guilt" (GM, II, p. 67), including its involvement with the notions of debt, sin, punishment, and God.INietzsche devoted the Second Essay of his Genealogy to the discussion of bad conscience, its origins, and related matters, notably guilt (Schuld) and its relation to duty (Pflicht) and debt (Schuld). The German term Schuld denotes both guilt and debt, and both senses are inextricably linked in Nietzsche's analysis. The bad conscience as consciousness of guilt is also [End Page 512] the consciousness of a debt owed—to another individual, society, and above all to the Christian God. The debt owed to God is one that can never be repaid, so that Christian morality necessitates guilt as "eternal punishment" for man's original transgression (see GM, II, pp. 91–92). Thus, Nietzsche argues, the descriptive equivalent of bad conscience, in the language of Christianity, is sin—"this is the priestly name for the... bad conscience" (GM, III, p. 140). In other words, sin is essentially a debt contracted with God. This is evident, for instance, in the substitution of the word "sin" for "debt" (ophéilema) in the formula of the Our Father as found in St. Luke. Even in the more general description, e.g. in the passage of St. Matthew where Jesus is explaining the implications of the petition "Forgive us or debts as we forgive our debtors," where the expressions paràptoma (fault, error) and armatia (aberration, failing, defect in relation to a norm or whole) are the more common terms used to denote sin, the sense of debt is implicit—we only accept our failure in relation to the Christian norm or whole if we accept that we "owe it to God" to live up to that norm in the first place. Moreover, the notion of debt brings with it the debtor's fear of failing to repay the creditor, so that a fear of punishment results from the sense of not living up to the contractual relationship with God.According to Nietzsche, the basis for the bad conscience and guilt, which he further defines as "anger directed against the self" (GM, I, p. 45), is cruelty, a natural human disposition that is displayed unabashedly in punishment. Bad conscience, he argues, is cruelty turned inward and essentially amounts to self-punishment or "psychical cruelty"—a form of subliminal suffering we impose on ourselves. Speaking of the "psychology of conscience," Nietzsche emphasises therefore that conscience "is not 'the voice of God in man'—it is rather the instinct of cruelty that turns back after it can no longer discharge itself externally" (GM, "A Polemic," p. 312). Bad conscience, or sin, is cruelty directed backwards, at oneself. In short, Nietzsche holds that the bad conscience, experienced by us as the "bite" or "sting" of conscience (morsus conscientiae; Gewissensbiss), results from the internalisation of instincts, notably the instincts to cruelty. Rather than acting on natural impulses, man has come to stifle and repress them: "Hostility, cruelty, joy in persecuting, in attacking, in change, in destruction—all this turned against the possessors of such instincts: that is the origin of the "'bad conscience'" (GM, II, p.85).Anticipating Freud's theory of repression and pre-empting his psychological interpretation of conscience as superego (Über-Ich), Nietzsche argues, "all instincts that do not discharge themselves outwardly turn [End Page 513... (shrink)

The book reconstructs the history of Western ethics. The approach chosen focuses the endless dialectic of moral codes, or different kinds of ethos, moral doctrines that are preached in order to bring about a reform of existing ethos, and ethical theories that have taken shape in the context of controversies about the ethos and moral doctrines as means of justifying or reforming moral doctrines. Such dialectic is what is meant here by the phrase ‘moral traditions’, taken as a name for (...) threads of moral discourse, made in turn of other interwoven threads, including transmission of shared codes, appeals to reform of prevailing custom, rational argument about the justification of some precept on the basis of some shared general teaching or principle, and rational argument about the ultimate basis for principles and justification of authoritative teaching. That is, the approach adopted to the reading of ethical texts depends on a firm belief in the fact that philosophers hardly created any ethical doctrine out of nothing. The main point this book tries to highlight is how different philosophical theories emerged and followed each other as a result of attempts at accounting for what was going on in the world of moral traditions. Changes were propelled by controversies between different schools, and highly abstract arguments were the unintended effects of moves made by controversialists forced to transform (and occasionally to turn upside down) their own doctrines in order to face the challenge posed by other arguments. This is the reason why the book examines not only texts that already enjoy pride of place in the history of philosophy (Aristotle, Kant, Hegel), but also other texts usually treated in the histories of religions (the Bible, the Talmud, the Quran), and others considered to be much less philosophical (Plutarchus, Pufendorf). -/- 1. Plato and a response to ethical scepticism. Two different traditions of morality in VI-V century Greece are described. The birth of philosophical questioning of traditional morality and temporal and spatial variation of custom is described within the context of the v century crisis, the demise of traditional aristocratic and tyrannical rule and the birth of democracy. Two conflicting answers to the challenge are reconstructed, namely conventionalist or immoralist theories formulated by the Sophists and the eudemonist and intellectualist Socratic theory. Plato’s own reformulation of Socrates answer to the Sophists is reconstructed. His psychological views, his classification of the four cardinal virtues and his political theory are described as parts of a unitary system, culminating in an extremely realist moral ontology identifying the idea of the good with the essence of the (moral and extra-moral) world itself. -/- 2. Aristotle and the invention of practical philosophy. Aristotle’s invention of practical philosophy as a field separated from first philosophy is shown to be an implication of his break with Plato moral ultra-realism. Aristotle’s agenda in his moral works is arguably dependent on a polemical intention, namely dismantling Socratic intellectualism. The semi-inductive or virtuously circular method of practical philosophy is illustrated, starting with the received opinions of the better and wiser individuals and trying dialectically to sift what is left of mistake and inconsistence in such opinions, finally trying to correct mistakes and make the overall practical science more consistent. The chapter illustrates then the relationship of individual ethics, or ‘monastics’, with the art and the science of the pater familias, or ‘economics’, and the science of the ruler and citizen, or politics. The nature of virtues, or better, excellences of character, is discussed, highlighting the basic role of hexis, or ‘disposition’. Prudence, or better practical wisdom, is the focus of the chapter. Its relationship with bouleusis or deliberation is examined, and its autonomous status vis-à-vis theoretical knowledge is stressed. -/- 3. Diogenes and philosophy as a way of life. The chapter provides an overview of Hellenistic ethics, which almost amounts to Hellenistic schools of philosophy, in so far as ‘philosophy’ became in these centuries primarily the name for a way of life. The typical character of the Cynical movement is highlighted, that of a school of life, not a school aimed at providing any kind of intellectual training was to be provided. -/- 4. Epicurus and ethics as self-care. The peculiar character of the Epicurean school is described, a combination of a science of well-being aiming, more than at pleasure as in the popular view, at reduction of useless suffering, of unnecessary needs, and at a balanced selection of pleasures of the best and most durable kind. -/- 5. Epictetus and ethics as therapy of the passions. The various phases of Stoicism are described, and the shifting place given to ethics in the Stoic system of idea, culminating in the paradoxical view of ethics, its impossibility in principle notwithstanding, as the only truly significant and necessary part of philosophy. Cicero is treated, showing how his own synthesis of various Hellenistic trends is as a truly philosophical enterprise, deserving serious consideration after one or two centuries when he was confined to the role of literate. Epictetus is chosen as the best example of what the Stoic tradition could yield, an art of living based on sophisticated introspection, in turn aimed at making a kind of cognitive therapy possible, dismantling obnoxious passions at their root by systematically correcting false representations. -/- 6. Philo and the reconciliation of Torah and Platonism. A reconstruction of basic ideas from a few books of the Hebrew Bible is provided, starting with the Prophetic tradition and the focus on God’s mercy as the source of motivation and standard for human behaviour. Then a comparative analysis is undertaken of a parallel tradition, namely the three codifications of the Torā (Law or, better, Instruction), highlighting how a core of moral ideas may be recognized as a basis and preamble of codification of civil law, cultural practice, and regulation of ritual purity. The importance of Leviticus is stressed as the turning point when emphasis mercy, typical of the Prophetic tradition, is combined with the legal tradition, yielding the change in sensibility of the Second Temple time. Philo of Alexandria is described as one of the three leading figures – together with Rabbi Hillel and Rabbi Yeshua – at the apex the emergence of the mentioned new sensibility, gradually including mercy as an essential part of justice and establishing the starting point of both the Rabbinic and the Christian tradition. This consists precisely in the precept of one’s neighbour’s love or of the golden rule, two eventually identical precepts whose meaning is arguably more sober and sensible than the long-lasting Christian tradition deriving from John and Augustine has made us believe and no novelty vis-à-vis so-called Ancient-Testament teachings. -/- 7. Augustine and Christianity as Neo-Platonism. The first section examines the moral doctrines of so-called 'ethical Treaties' from the Talmud, a group of treaties, among which the best known is Pirqé Avot, that were left out of the six "orders" of the canon as they did not fit in any of the six groups of issues ritual or legal on which the division was based. According to Maimonides, their peculiar theme is provided by the Deòt, 'opinions', i.e., mental dispositions, that is, the translation of the Greek term hexeis and Arab akhlak (in turn providing in this language the name for ethics as such). The three topics I reconstruct are: i) the notion of Torah: The Torah is understood as the world order itself, or as the ‘Wisdom’ that existed even before creation and was ‘the tool by which the world was built’; however, the Torah is an earthly and human entity, as it was "received" by humans, and from that very moment belongs to them; ii) the relationship between love of God and love of neighbour; the treaties require us to study and practice the Torah ‘for its own sake’, that is, require us to act out of love, not out of fear or hope of reward; iii) the idea of sanctification of daily life: having disappeared with the destruction of the Temple the possibility of any conflict between liturgical service and everyday life, the latter is assumed to be in itself divine service: to give food to the poor has the same value as sacrifices in the Temple, and as an implication, the insistence become recurrent on the goodness of created things in themselves along with a polemic against ascetic currents. The conclusions drawn are: i) the moral teachings of the Talmud and those of Yeshua are, rather than similar, virtually identical; one may safely say that the precept of love and the golden rule are central ones for all Talmudic rabbis, that mercy plays an indispensable role alongside with justice, and the latter is not a different thing from one’s neighbour’s love; ii) a peculiarity of Talmud rabbis facing Yeshua is the idea of study as worship, and knowledge as a source of justice; but this is an idea of Judaism after the Temple's destruction that cannot be attributed to the Pharisees of Yeshua’s time; iii) the relation of study and practice in the Talmud parallels that between faith and deeds in Paul's epistles, that is, respectively faith or learning are a necessary and sufficient condition to be recognized as righteous , but deeds are the inevitable effect of either faith or learning. The sayings ascribed to Yeshua are examined first, yielding the conclusion that a close equivalent may be found for every saying in Talmudic literature and yet the whole is ascribed to one rabbi, with rather consistent stress on God’s mercy and unconditional forgiving as the mark of true imitation of God. Thus, Yeshua’s teaching is pure Judaism. The third section describes briefly the galaxy of Gnostic currents and Manichaeism, trying to sketch the profile of moral teachings resulting from an encounter of Asian spiritual traditions, Hellenistic lore and sparks of teachings from apocalyptic Jewish currents. The last section summarizes the turbulent history of several encounters between Christian currents and Hellenistic philosophical schools. The first one was with late Cynicism. Recent, rather controversial, literature discovered the jargon and a few topics from the Stoic-Cynical popular philosophy in a few books from the New Testament itself. This, far from proving that Rabbi Yeshua had been influenced by cynic preachers, is a proof of the necessity felt by Christian preachers to translate the original ‘Christian’ teaching into a Greek lexicon deeply impregnated with cynic terminology. The second was with Platonism, yielding the mild and temperate moral teaching of Clemens of Alexandria, teaching the sanctity of nature and the human body, the joy of moderate fruition of ‘natural’ kinds of pleasures, and the beauty of the marital life – in short, the opposite of the standard picture of Medieval Christianity. Ambrose of Milan brings about a different kind of synthesis, namely with Middle Platonism, where Stoic themes prevail. The most shocking case is Augustine, where an early Manichean education is overcome in a former phase by a synthesis of Plotinian Neo-Platonism and Christian preaching, yielding a sustained polemic with the Manicheans and rather optimistic views on life and Creation, the body and sexuality, and Hebrew-Judaic tradition not far from Clemens of Alexandria. In a later phase, occasioned by controversy on the opposite front, with such Christian currents as the Pelagians and Donatists, Augustine comes back to heavily anti-Judaic and world-denying ascetic attitudes where is earlier Manichean upbringing seems to emerge again. The tragedy of medieval Christianity will be the later Augustine’s overwhelming influence. A final section is dedicated to the monastic tradition where a curious mixture of world-denying asceticism with an astonishingly penetrating ‘science’ of introspection emerges. -/- 8. Al Farabi and the reconciliation of Islam and Platonism. The Qurān and the qadit, that is, collections of sayings ascribed to the prophet Muhammad contain a wealth of precepts and catalogues of virtues mirroring moral contents from the Jewish and the Christian traditions, among them the basic notion of imitation of the Deity, where mercy is assumed to be its basic trait. An important tradition within Islam, namely Sufism, stressed to the utmost degree the role of mercy, turning Islam into a mystic doctrine centred on retreat from the world, abandonment to God’s will, and a peaceful and fraternal attitude to our fellow-beings. A secular literary tradition originating in the Sassanid Empire, the literature of advice to the Prince had for a time a widespread influence in the newly constituted Arabic-Islamic commonwealth. In a later phase, the legacy of Hellenic philosophy made its way into the intellectual elite of the Islamic world. The first important legacy was Platonic, and the Republic became the main text for Islamic Platonism. Al-Farabi wrote an enjoyable remake of the Platonic Republic, arguing that the citizen’s virtues were the basis on which the political building needs to rest. The secular lawgiver is enlightened by the light of reason in his everyday practice of governance, but room is made for the Prophet as the voice of revealed truth that confirms and completes the rational truth that philosophy may afford. In a second phase also Aristotelian and Stoic influence were assimilated. Miskawayh’s treatise was the masterwork at the time Arabic philosophy reached its Zenith. It is a treatment of the soul’s diseases and their remedies, combining the Aristotelian doctrine of the golden mean with the Stoic doctrine of the passions and elements of Galenic medicine. Towards the eleventh-twelve centuries a war raged among theologians and philosophers, finally won by the former with disappearance of philosophy as such. The newly established mainstream, yet, was no kind of intolerant fanaticism. It drew from the work of mystic theologian Al-Ghazālī, the best heir of Sufism, teaching a tolerant and peaceful attitude to our fellow-beings and a passive attitude to destiny as an expression of the Divine will. -/- 9. Moshe ben Maimon and the reconciliation of Torah and Aristotelian ethics. The encounter between the Talmudic tradition and Hellenic philosophy had taken place a first time in Alexandria at the time of Philo but the two traditions had parted way again. In fact, the kind of Platonic Judaism founded by Philo survived only within Christianity, in the fourth Gospel and then in writings by Clemens of Alexandria. The Talmudic literature had absorbed just less striking traits from the Hellenic Philosophy, namely an idea of ethics as care of the self and a role for the education of character as propaedeutic to theoretical knowledge. In the Arabic-Islamic world, a second round started when Jewish authors writing in Arabic undertook the task to prove the full compatibility of the tradition deriving from Torah and Platonic philosophy. The culmination of this attempt is provided by Moshe ben Maimon who tried to use Aristotelian ethics as a language into which the teaching from the Pirké Avot could be translated. -/- 10. Thomas Aquinas and the reconciliation of Christian morality and Aristotelian ethics. In the first section the fresh start is described of philosophical ethics in Latin Europe at the turn of the Millennium. In a first phase, Anselm and Peter Abelard built on a Platonic and Augustinian legacy. In this phase. remarkable innovations are introduced, including Abelard’s claim of the obliging character of erring consciousness. In a second phase, the rediscovery of Nicomachean Ethics thanks to Latin translation of Arabic versions gives birth to a new wave of ethical studies, recovering the very idea of Aristotelian practical philosophy, with the potential implication of full legitimization of natural morality, i.e. ethics without Revelation. Aquinas’s ethics is a theological ethics out of which it would be vain to try to extract a self-contained philosophical ethics. His treatment of topics in philosophical ethics, yet, does not boil down to repetition of Aristotelian arguments but is rather a creative reshaping of such arguments. For example, he introduces also in the practical philosophy a first principle parallel to the principle of non-contradiction; and he also carries out a synthesis of Aristotelianism, Stoicism, and neo-Platonism. Even though it is essentially moral theology, Aquinas’s doctrine - unlike Augustine – grants full citizenship to "natural" morality, firstly by rejecting the claim that the corruption of human nature due to the original sin is so radical as to leave "pure nature" incapable of moral goodness. The doctrine is presented in a more sophisticated formulation in a few of the Quaestiones, such as De Malo and De Veritate, in the Summa contra Gentes and in the commentaries to Aristotle than in the famous Summa Theologica, but the latter work includes the only or the largest exposition of some decisive part of the theory. Thus, the Summa Theologica should be read for what it is more than criticized for not being what it was not meant to be. It was not meant to be the brilliant synthesis of all that Reason he had been able to produce with what Revelation had added about which the Neo-Thomists used to dream, but rather a manual for the training of preachers and confessors, where theoretical claims are not too demanding and a few serious tensions are left. Besides a jump between the Prima Secundae and the Secunda Secundae, being the former an essay in virtue theory and the latter a handbook for confessors, the most serious tension is perhaps the one between the ethics of right reason presented in most of Ia-IIae and the eudemonistic ethics developed in quaestiones 1-5 of the same part; the alternative ethical theory which also may be found in Augustine, the Stoic view of a cosmic reason eventually coincident with the moral law, was believed by Anselm (followed by John Duns Scotus and William of Ockham) to be incompatible with eudemonism. It is questionable whether Thomas could reduce the tension proving that it is just an apparent tension, in so far as the right reason and bliss derived from knowledge of God tend to coincide, but this is just a conjecture. Thomas’s ethics is a virtue ethic, not a law-based one, and moral judgment focuses on the virtues, particularly charity, not on the commandments and even less on absolute prohibitions; Thomas, however, would not have considered a drastic alternative between law and the virtues such as the one which has been advanced in late twentieth-century philosophy to be justified. Nonetheless, when it discusses ‘special’ virtues, it ceases to be an ethics of virtue and becomes a disappointing and often contradictory discussion of legal and illegal acts. Such a discussion takes most of the time ‘reasonable’ middle positions on controversial issues but not the alternative approach that Aristotelianism would have made possible; even when some occasional Aristotelian claim shows up, such as money’s barrenness as a reason against usury, this seems to be made by an author who apparently ignores the Aristotelian Thomas of the Prima Secundae. It is an ethic of human autonomy which recognizes the binding character of the individual conscience and, potentially, even a duty to disobey unjust laws. It is true that what Thomas writes in his discussion of death penalty and persecution of heretics is simply disgusting, and yet we should blame Thomas the man, not Thomist ethical theory. Finally, Thomas’s ethics is not ethical ‘absolutism’, as both traditionalist Catholic theologians and secularist enemies of dogmatic morality tend to believe. It is instead an ethic of prudential judgment. Exceptions to this approach – or better results of logical fallacies – are such claims as the absolute character of negative precepts and of the existence of "intrinsically evil acts", claims that simply cease to make sense in the light of Thomas’s own distinction between human act and natural act, carrying consequences Thomas did not live long enough to draw or was not consistent enough to dare to draw. -/- 11. Francisco de Vitoria and casuistry. The first topic illustrated is the discussion about the notion of pura natura, namely the human condition after the original sin and before divine revelation. The core notion was already there in Aquinas but was later developed by Caietanus (Thomas de Vio) with a number of interesting implications: firstly a view of human nature as such much more positive than Augustine’s and his followers’ view, including both Calvinists and Jansenists; secondly, the implication that the philosopher’s morality, as opposed to the Christian’s morality, is a quite respectable kind of morality; thirdly, that theocracy and prosecution of the unfaithful lacked justification, with more far-fetching consequences than Aquinas himself had dared to draw. The second topic is casuistry, a new name for a comparatively older way of thinking, which was already there in late Stoicism and Cicero as well as in the Talmudic literature. This is an approach aimed at yielding probable enough solutions for doubtful cases even in absence of completely safe staring points. The genre developed from medieval reference books for confessors and became by the sixteenth-century a sophisticated tool-box for dealing with various fields of applied ethics. Francisco Vitoria, the main authority of Baroque Scholasticism, was a controversial figure, among the proponents of the new discipline of casuistry and a consistent proponent of more separation between the religious and the civil authority, stricter limits to the legitimacy of war, innate rights of non-Christian nations in the New World based on the notion of pura natura, providing a standard of ‘natural’ goodness, previous to revelation, on which the Indian nations were judged to live in a naturally good condition, provided with the institutions of family, justice, and religion had accordingly a right to full respect by Christian sovereigns. Bartolomé de Las Casas, arguing along similar lines, was the leader of a historical battle in defence of the rights of the Indios. -/- 12. Michel de Montaigne and the art of living. A short description of one of the Renaissance Phyrronism, one of the classical philosophies revived in the fifteenth and sixteenth century. Montaigne combines the sceptical epistemology with an understanding of ethics – indeed of philosophy as a whole – in terms of an art of living inspired by two basic ideas, sagesse, that is, practical wisdom as the only kind of rationality available after theology, science, and tradition have declared bankrupt, and an aesthetic ideal of self-transformation through the art of writing and introspection. -/- 13. Pierre Nicole and neo-Augustinianism. The chapter illustrates first the vicissitudes of Augustinianism newly born after the late medieval triumph of Thomist Aristotelianism in the alternative Protestant and Catholic versions processed by the Calvinists and the Jansenists. Then it illustrates the doctrines of Pierre Nicole, Blaise Pascal’s best disciple, on the impossibility of introspection, on the ubiquity of self-deception, on the incurably evil character of the passion of love, and on the two moralities, the one of the man of the world, the morality of honesty which is indispensable for granting peace and order but devoid of any true value for eternal salvation, since the same external behaviour may be prompted by opposite motivations, and the morality of charity, the only true one but also useless to society. The third topic is Pierre Malebranche’s view of self-deception as a ubiquitous phenomenon accounting for human action and responsibility and his reformulated theory of self-love, no less ubiquitous than for Nicole and yet not as incurably evil, given the distinction between morally indifferent and even necessary amour de soi and vicious amour proper, a distinction on which the whole of Rousseau’s moral and political theory rests. -/- 14. Samuel von Pufendorf and the new science of morality. The chapter is dedicated to the discovery of the idea of a ‘new moral science’. Hugo Grotius is discussed first highlighting the real character of his project, much closer to the Thomist idea of a natural law accessible to non-corrupted human reason when human beings are living in a state of pura natura. Then Hobbes’s combination of scepticism, voluntarism, and conventionalism is described and both the continuity with Grotius’s new science, in the search for non-revealed rational morality, and the break with him, in the adoption of voluntarism and refusal of an intellectualist view of natural law, are illustrated. Pufendorf’s work is illustrated as a synthesis of the two previous attempts and the – up to Schneewind underestimated – paradigmatic example of the new science of morality. -/- 15. Richard Cumberland and consequentialist voluntarism. The chapter gives an overview of eighteenth-century Anglican ethics, noticing how the Cambridge tradition gave special weight to natural theology as opposed to positive or revealed theology – and how two Cambridge fellows, John Gay and Thomas Brown, elaborated on Cumberland’s (and Malebranche’s, as well as Leibniz’s) strategy for finding a third way between intellectualist view and voluntarist view of the laws of nature. The result of their elaboration was a kind of a rational-choice account of the origins of natural laws, where a law-giver God chooses among a number possible sets of laws on a maximizing criterion, and God’s maximandum is happiness for his creatures. The chapter notices also how such a solution aimed at solving at once the problem of evil and that of the foundation of moral obligation by proving how God’s choice was justified as far as it was the one minimising the amount of suffering in the world. 16. Richard Price and intuitionism. The chapter describes first the doctrines of the Cambridge Platonists, an example of hyper-rationalist reaction to Calvinism. Secondly it describes the sophisticated and universally ignored – from Sidgwick to Anscombe –version of what was later labelled ‘ethical intuitionism’ – showing how it escapes familiar objections and misrepresentations of intuitionism – from Mill to Rawls – in grounding its argument on transcendental arguments while carefully avoiding recourse to introspection and psychological evidence, which has been taken as a too easy target by critics of intuitionism. Thirdly, the chapter discusses Whewell’s ‘philosophy of morality’, as opposed to ‘systematic morality’, not unlike Kant’s distinction between a pure and an empirical moral philosophy. Whewell worked out a systematization of traditional normative ethics as a first step before its rational justification; he believed that the point in the philosophy of morality is justifying a few rational truths about the structure of morality such as to rule hedonism, eudemonism, and consequentialism; yet a system of positive morality cannot be derived solely from such rational truths but requires consideration of the ongoing dialectics between idea and fact in historically given moralities. Whewell’s intuitionism turns out closer to Kantian ethics than commentators have made us believe until now, and quite different from what Sidgwick meant by intuitionism. -/- 17. Adam Smith and the morality of role-switch. The chapter describes first, Hutcheson’s attempt at basing the ‘new science’ of natural law on different bedrock than Pufendorf and the English Platonists, namely a moral sense, a faculty whose existence is assumed to be proved on an empirical basis. The second step is a reconstruction of Hume’s rejoinder in terms of a new science of man including morality on an ‘experimental’ basis, that is, a ‘Newtonian’ hypothetical-deductive approach, distinguished from Hutcheson’s allegedly uncritical descriptive approach to human nature. The third step is a reconstruction of Adam Smith theory of morality understood as emerging from a spontaneous interplay of exchanges of situations (the most basic meaning of the word ‘sympathy’ as construed by this author). -/- 18. Jeremy Bentham and utilitarianism. The bulk of the chapter is dedicated to the doctrines of Jeremy Bentham. The Enlightenment spirit that suggested the idea of a new morality, free from religion, is illustrated. The notion of utility is illustrated as well as the subsequent formulations of the principle of utility. The idea of felicific calculus is discussed, showing how its inner difficulties prompted several reformulations of the principle of utility in order to avoid undesirable implications of proposed formulations. The role of the thesis of spontaneous convergence between interest and duty is discussed, showing how it left numberless questions open, and the distinction between the virtues of prudence, justice and beneficence is described as a way out of the deadlocks of classical utilitarianism. After Bentham, Mill’s reformed utilitarianism is reconstructed, showing how it is a kind of mixed system – as closer to common sense as it gives up Bentham’s claims to consistency and simplicity – resulting as unintended consequences from the controversies in which Mill was too keen to engage. The hidden agenda of the controversy between Utilitarianism and Intuitionism, going beyond the image of the battle between Prejudice and Reason, is described, showing how both competing philosophical outlooks turn out to be more research programs than self-contained doctrinal bodies, and such programs appear to be implemented, and indeed radically transformed while in progress thanks to their enemies no less than to their supporters. -/- 19. Immanuel Kant, practical reason and judgment. The chapter argues that Kant took from Moses Mendelssohn the idea of a distinction between geometry of morals and a practical ethic. He was drastically misunderstood by his followers precisely on this point. He had learned from the sceptics and the Jansenists the lesson that men are prompted to act by deceptive ends, and he was aware that human actions are also empirical phenomena, where laws like the laws of Nature may be detected. His practical ethics made room for judgment as a holistic procedure for assessing the saliency of relevant moral qualities in one given situation; this procedure yields the same results as the geometry of morals does for abstract cases but does so immediately and without balancing conflicting duties with each other, since what makes for the salient quality of a situation is perceived from the very beginning. Kant's practical philosophy is richer than the received image, making room for an ‘empirical moral philosophy’ or moral anthropology including treatment of commerce, needs, value and price, happiness and well-being; the overall social theory and philosophy of history is less different from Adam Smith's than the received image makes believe; the paradox of happiness is central to Kant's philosophy; a distinction between happiness and well-being is clearly drawn; the distinction plays a basic role in establishing a link between the economic and the moral life. -/- 20. Georg Wilhelm Friedrich Hegel and the critique of abstract universalism. The chapter describes first the Romantic movement and the implications some of its concerns, rescuing passions, community, tradition, the individual as the bearer of a unique destiny, and the longing for organic unity between the individual, mankind and nature. Hegel’s contribution is discussed then, highlighting how, on the one hand, he shared a number of these concerns and on the other he had more rationalist leanings. The notion of morality is the pivotal point of the reconstruction, highlighting how Hegel construes this notion as a key to his own diagnosis of the malaise of modernity – the separation of individual and Gemeinschaft – and how his attack on Kant turns around this very idea. -/- 21. Friedrich Nietzsche against Christianity and the Enlightenment. The chapter illustrates first the idea of deconstruction of the back-world of values. Nietzsche claims to be legitimate heir of the French moralists, Leibniz, Kant and Hegel, in so far as he allegedly carries out to its deepest implications their discovery of what lies behind traditional naïve belief in the existence of an objective realm of values just waiting for description by the philosopher. The two exemplars form which genealogy draws inspiration are the classical philologist’s historical reconstructions of lost meanings and the chemist’s decomposition of elements. Then the genealogy of the notions of good and evil carried out in the first dissertation of Genealogy of morals is illustrated with its paradoxical conclusion that will to power is in fact the only ‘genuine’ kind of goodness. The third point illustrated is the dialectic of ascetism and self-realization with its ambiguous outcome. The suggested interpretation of such outcome is that Nietzsche’s normative ethics is a kind of virtue ethics taking an aesthetic ideal as a normative standard -/- 22. George Edward Moore and ideal utilitarianism. The chapter discusses the ideas of common sense and common-sense morality in Sidgwick. I argue that, far from aiming at overcoming common-sense morality, Sidgwick aimed purposely at grounding a consist code of morality by methods allegedly taken from the natural sciences to reach, also in ethics, the same kind of “mature” knowledge as in the natural sciences. His whole polemics with intuitionism was vitiated by the a priori assumption that the widespread ethos of the educated part of humankind, not the theories of the intuitionist philosophers, was what was worth considering as the expression of intuitionist ethics. In spite of a naïve positivist starting-point, Sidgwick was encouraged by his own approach in exploring the fruitfulness of coherentist methods for normative ethics. Thus, Sidgwick left an ambivalent legacy to twentieth-century ethics: the dogmatic idea of a “new” morality of a consequentialist kind, and the fruitful idea that we can argue rationally in normative ethics albeit without shared foundations. Then it reconstructs the background of ideas, concerns and intentions out of which Moore’s early essays, the preliminary version, and then the final version of Principia Ethica originated. I stress the role of religious concerns, as well as that of the Idealist legacy. I argue that PE is more a patchwork of rather diverging contributions than a unitary work, not to say the paradigm of a new school in Ethics. I add a comparison with Rashdall’s almost contemporary ethical work, suggesting that the latter defends the same general claims in a different way, one that manages to pave decisive objections in a more plausible way. I end by suggesting that the emergence of Analytic Ethics was a more ambiguous phenomenon than the received view would make us believe, and that the wheat (or some other gluten-free grain) of this tradition, that is, what logic can do for philosophy, should be separated from the chaff, that is, the confused and mutually incompatible legacies of Utilitarianism and Idealism. -/- 23. Edmund Husserl and the a-priori of action. The chapter illustrates first the idea of phenomenology and the Husserl’s project of a phenomenological ethic as illustrated in his 1908-1914 lectures. The key idea is dismissing psychology and trying to ground a new science of the a priori of action, within which a more restricted field of inquiry will be the science of right actions. Then the chapter illustrates the criticism of modern moral philosophy carried out in the 1920 lectures, where the main target is naturalism, understood in the Kantian meaning of primacy of common sense. The third point illustrate is Adolph Reinach’s theory of social acts as a key the grounding of norms, a view that basically sketches the very ideas ‘discovered’ later by Clarence I. Lewis, John Searle, Karl-Otto Apel and Jürgen Habermas. A final section is dedicated to Nicolai Hartman, who always refused to define himself a phenomenologist and yet developed a more articulated and detailed theory of ‘values’ – with surprising affinities with George E. Moore - than philosophers such as Max Scheler who claimed to Husserl’s legitimate heirs. -/- 24. Bertrand Russell and non-cognitivism. The chapter reconstructs first the discussion after Moore. The naturalistic-fallacy argument was widely accepted but twisted to prove instead that the intuitive character of the definition of ‘good’, its non-cognitive meaning, in a first phase identified with ‘emotive’ meaning. Alfred Julius Ayer is indicated as a typical proponent of such non-cognitivist meta-ethics. More detailed discussion is dedicated to Bertrand Russell’s ethics, a more nuanced and sophisticated doctrine, arguing that non-cognitivism does not condemn morality to arbitrariness and that the project of a rational normative ethics is still possible, heading finally to the justification of a kind of non-hedonist utilitarianism. Stevenson’s theory, another moderate version of emotivism is discussed at some length, showing how the author comes close to the discovery of the role of a pragmatic dimension of language as a basis for ethical argument. Last of all, the discussion from the Forties about Hume’s law is described, mentioning Karl Popper’s argument and Richard Hare’s early non-cognitivist but non-emotivist doctrine named prescriptivism. -/- 25. Elizabeth Anscombe and the revival of virtue ethics. The chapter discusses the three theses defended by Anscombe in 'Modern Moral Philosophy'. I argue that: a) her answer to the question "why should I be moral?" requires a solution of the problem of theodicy, and ignores any attempts to save the moral point of view without recourse to divine retribution; b) her notion of divine law is an odd one more neo-Augustinian than Biblical or Scholastic; c) her image of Kantian ethics and intuitionism is the impoverished image manufactured by consequentialist opponents for polemical purposes and that she seems strangely accept it; d) the difficulty of identifying the "relevant descriptions" of acts is not an argument in favour of an ethics of virtue and against consequentialism or Kantian ethics, and indeed the role of judgment in the latter is a response to the difficulties raised by the case of judgment concerning future action. A short look at further developments in the neo-naturalist current is given trough a reconstruction of Philippa Foot’s and Peter Geach’s critiques to the naturalist-fallacy argument and Alasdair MacIntyre’s grand reconstruction of the origins and allegedly unavoidable failure of the Enlightenment project of an autonomous ethic. -/- 26. Richard Hare and neo-Utilitarianism. The chapter addresses the issue of the complex process of self-transformation Utilitarianism underwent after Sidgwick’s and Moore’s fatal criticism and the unexpected Phoenix-like process of rebirth of a doctrine definitely refuted. A glimpse at this uproarious process is given through two examples. The first is Roy Harrod Wittgensteinian transformation of Utilitarianism in pure normative ethics depurated from hedonism as well as from whatsoever theory of the good. This results in preference utilitarianism combined with a ‘Kantian’ version of rule utilitarianism. The second is Richard Hare’s two-level preference utilitarianism where act utilitarianism plays the function of eventual rational justification of moral judgments and rule-utilitarianism that of action-guiding practical device. -/- 27. Hans-Georg Gadamer and rehabilitation of practical philosophy. The post-war rediscovery of ethics by many German thinkers and its culmination in the Sixties in the movement named ‘Rehabilitation of practical philosophy’ is described. Among the actors of such rehabilitation there were a few of Heidegger’s most brilliant disciples, and Hans-Georg Gadamer is chosen as a paradigmatic example. His reading of Aristotle’s lesson I reconstructed, starting with Heidegger’s lesson but then subtly subverting its outcome thanks to the recovery of the central role of the notion of phronesis. -/- 28. Karl-Otto Apel and the revival of Kantian ethics. Parallel to the neo-Aristotelian trend, there was in the Rehabilitation of practical philosophy a Kantian current. This started, instead than the rehabilitation of prudence, with the discovery of the pragmatic dimension of language carried out by Charles Peirce and the Oxford linguistic philosophy. On this basis, Karl-Otto Apel singled out as the decisive proponent of the linguistic and Kantian turn in German-speaking ethics, worked out the performative-contradiction argument while claiming that this was able to provide a new rational and universal basis for normative ethics. An examination of his argument is some detail is offered, followed by a more cursory reconstruction of Jürgen Habermas’s elaboration on Apel’s theory. -/- 29. John Rawls and public ethics as applied ethics. Rawls’s distinction between a “political” and a “metaphysical” approach to one central part of ethical theory, namely the theory of justice, is interpreted as a formulation of the same basic idea at the root of both the principles approach and neo-casuistry, both discussed in the following chapter, namely that it is possible to reach an agreement concerning positive moral judgments even though the discussion is still open – and in Rawls’ view never will be close – on the basic criteria for judgment. -/- 30. Beauchamp and Childress and bioethics as applied ethics. The chapter presents the revolution of applied ethics while stressing its methodological novelty, exemplified primarily by Beauchamp and Childress principles approach and then by Jonsen and Toulmin’s new casuistry. -/- . (shrink)

I examine three kinds of criticism directed at philosophical genealogy. I call these substantive, performative, and semantic. I turn my attention to a particular substantive criticism that one may launch against essay two of On the Genealogy of Morals that turns on how Nietzsche answers “the time-crunch problem”. On the surface, there is evidence to suggest that Nietzsche accepts a false scientific theory, namely, Lamarck’s Inheritability Thesis, in order to account for the growth of a new human “organ”—morality. (...) I demonstrate that the passages interpreted by some scholars to prove that Nietzsche is a Lamarckian can be reinterpreted along Darwinian lines. I demonstrate that Nietzsche hits upon the right drivers of phenotypical change in humans, namely, torture and enclosures (e.g., walls of early states), but misinterprets their true impact. Nietzsche believes that these technologies are responsible for producing what I call “culture-serving memory” and the bad conscience by causing emotions that once were expressed outwardly to turn inward causing the “psychological digestion” of the human animal. In reality, however, these mechanisms are conducive to breeding a particular type of individual, namely, one who is docile, by introducing artificial and unconscious selective pressures into the environment of early humans. In showing that Nietzsche’s genealogical account of memory and bad conscience is not underpinned on a false scientific theory and is consistent with Neo-Darwinism, I deflect a potentially fatal blow regarding the veracity of Nietzsche’s genealogies. -/- . (shrink)

Nietzsche’s late writings present a value opposition of health and decadence based in his conception of organic life. While this appears to be a moral ideal that risks the naturalistic fallacy of directly deriving norms from facts, it instead describes a meta-ethical ideal: the necessary conditions for any kind of moral agency. Nietzsche’s ideal of health not only evades but also dissolves the naturalistic fallacy by suggesting that the specific content of morality is irrelevant. If health is measured by power (...) over one’s drives rather than the environment, then the source of moral conflict—organic life’s essential tendency toward domination—is surmounted by successful integration of any moral norms, regardless of content. Nietzsche’s concept of health draws on his characterization of organic life as essentially ‘exploitation’: growth through domination of the environment (BGE 259, GM II: 12). In animals, power coincides with happiness, while health and decadence track the correspondence between instinct and happiness (TI II: 11). This simple picture is complicated by the Genealogy, where Nietzsche depicts human nature as an animal illness caused by civilization’s disruption of the natural correspondence of instinct and happiness. Civilization shapes this ‘sick animal’ into the distinctly human ‘sovereign individual’ (GM III: 13, II: 2), restoring the harmony of instinct and happiness in an internal hierarchy of drives. So, sovereign individuality is a distinctly human model of health. Although life is exploitation, human health does not coincide with greater environmental power, but rather an internal qualitative expansion of power: greater variety and tension among drives, greater ‘wholeness in diversity’ in the ‘social structure’ of the self (BGE 212, 12). Nonetheless, health is not a moral criterion, but instead the precondition of moral agency. The subordination of drives to a commanding hierarchy grounds the ability to uphold any moral principles at all, to make and keep promises to oneself and others. Moral agency coincides, in turn, with overcoming the source of moral conflict in organic life’s drive for growth. The unification of opposing drives provides pleasure in power over oneself rather than one’s environment, the ‘happiness of high tension’ among drives (BGE 260), and in environmental resistance, a need for ‘equal opponents’ (TI IX: 38, EH 1: 7). Consequently, Nietzsche’s meta-ethical ideal supports a moral pluralism that supports any moral content. Moral conflicts arise precisely to the degree individuals are incapable of achieving moral agency, but they dissolve as moral agency of any kind is more widely achieved. (shrink)

In this paper, I suggest reading the Second Essay of Nietzsche’s Genealogy of Morals as a perfectionist critique of Roman law. Roman Law, I argue, relies on the fabrication of a specific subjectivity that structurally undermines the conditions of a good life and thus prevents us from fully exhausting our ethical-aesthetical potential. Citing an important source for Nietzsche’s legal thought, legal scholar Albrecht Hermann Post, I reconstruct how Nietzsche conceptualizes the disentanglement of the individual from the ‘natural’ community, namely (...) as the fabrication of a subjugated-subjugating legal personality in particular through the Roman civil law. This process fundamentally affects the human psycho-somatic structure in a paradoxical way, both as bad conscience and as sovereign triumphalism. However, while Nietzsche formulates an important critique of one of our dominant forms of social integration, his proposed way of overcoming it remains unconvincing, because it is just as hostile to life as is the law. (shrink)

Both an introduction to Nietzsche’s moral philosophy, and a sustained commentary on his most famous work, On the Genealogy of Morality, this book has become the most widely used and debated secondary source on these topics over the past dozen years. Many of Nietzsche’s most famous ideas - the "slave revolt" in morals, the attack on free will, perspectivism, "will to power" and the "ascetic ideal" - are clearly analyzed and explained. The first edition established the centrality (...) of naturalism to Nietzsche’s philosophy, generating a substantial scholarly literature to which Leiter responds in an important new Postscript. In addition, Leiter has revised and refreshed the book throughout, taking into account new scholarly literature, and revising or clarifying his treatment of such topics as the objectivity of value, epiphenomenalism and consciousness, and the possibility of "autonomous" agency. (shrink)

The article provides a commentary on the Second Treatise of Nietzsche's On the Genealogy of Morality, entitled '"Guilt, "Bad Conscience," and Related Matters'. The Treatise's central train of thought is that having a bad conscience or feeling guilty is a way in which we satisfy a fundamental need to inflict cruelty. This is achieved by turning the exercise of cruelty inwards, upon the self rather than others, and by interpreting such a cruelty as a legitimate form of punishment of (...) oneself. (shrink)

In On the Genealogy of Morals, Nietzsche asserts, first, that the transvaluation of values of an original master morality by the slave morality is accompanied by an increasing deepening and differentiation of the human soul and, secondly, that this has led to mental instability and poor self-esteem by maximizing the sense of guilt and bad conscience. This paper argues on the basis of an analysis of the Homeric epics as a paradigm of a master morality, the teaching of (...) church father Augustine of Hippo, and the Platonic psychology and ethics as an intermediate position for the accuracy of the first thesis and critically reflects the pros and cons of the second thesis. (shrink)

Stephen Mulhall traces the development of an ideal of asceticism through Western culture. He shows how influential this self-denying attitude to life has been not just in religion and morality but in aesthetics, science, and philosophy. And he illuminates the role of the ascetic ideal in the thought of Nietzsche, who introduced the concept.

A survey essay exploring Nietzsche's intellectual trajectory and especially his notion of the ascetic ideal and its implications for atheism.

Nietzsche proclaims the second essay of the Genealogy of Morality to be the “long history of the origins of responsibility,” but the immediate context in which this claim is made, coupled with GM II's broader aims and themes, makes interpreting this claim immensely difficult. Not only does Nietzsche endorse an ideal of responsibility in relation to the sovereign individual, while the rest of the essay is concerned with other topics, but also, and more problematically, this ideal appears to (...) be inconsistent with his denial of free will and moral responsibility in other works. Here, I propose a Strawsonian reading of GM II, contending that GM II analyzes the idea of “responsibility” naturalistically in terms of the practice of holding oneself and others responsible, as constituted by what Nietzsche calls the “reactive affects,” namely guilt. A consequence of this interpretation is that libertarian free will is not a condition of responsible agency. (shrink)

In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:The Tragic as an Ethical CategoryRobert GuayTragedy is at the center of Nietzsche's conception of his mature philosophical project as the only alternative to the ascetic ideal, and thus as the only avenue for affirmation. It is not merely an aesthetic category, but one that encompasses the very character of self-determining (or "self-creating") agency. The tragic character of self-determining agency, I shall claim, stems from the conflict between (...) the local, practice-dependent character of our normative commitments and their transcendent purport. My argument will run as such. Becoming what one is, according to Nietzsche, is a matter of taking a particular place in a narrative of self-creation. Such narratives are teleological: they are structured by a kind of directionality (or, more broadly, by "ideals") that cannot, practically, be taken as arbitrary. But these narratives are inevitably incomplete, and so therefore are the norms and selves that depend on them.The very project of a genealogy of morals supports my first claim, that becoming what one is involves a matter of taking a particular place in a narrative of self-creation. 1 The Genealogy of Morals begins with the declaration that we are unknown to ourselves, and the explanation it provides of this shortcoming, that we have never sought ourselves, is expanded by means of a temporal metaphor: the bell-strokes of our life that we do not think to reckon until after they have passed. What we have failed to accomplish, and what the genealogy attempts to recover, is a diachronic account of who we are. This missing story covers the singular as well as the collective "we." The end of the story, Nietzsche [End Page 555] claims, is the "sovereign individual," 2 and this notion is presumably governed by his general claim: "all concepts in which an entire process is semiotically drawn together elude definition; only that which has no history is definable" (GM, 2.13). Of course it does not follow from this that everything indefinable has a history, but the special elusiveness of modern individuality seems due to the complexity of its narrative source. And not only individuality in general, but also the particular individual, seems to have a narrative basis. In the book subtitled "How one becomes what one is," in the section that promises the "real answer to the question, how one becomes what one is" (EH "clever," 9), Nietzsche offers this account of personal development:One must keep the entire surface of consciousness—consciousness is a surface—clean of any great imperatives. Beware even of every great word, every great posture! Sheer danger, that the instinct comes to "understand itself" too soon—meanwhile the organizing "idea" with a calling to rule grows and grows deep down—it begins to command, it slowly heads back from detours and wrong ways, it prepares single qualities and competencies that will one day prove to be indispensable as means to a whole—it in turn trains all subservient faculties before giving any hint of the dominating task, "goal," "end," "meaning."The individual, Nietzsche suggests, cannot be understood in terms of anything available to her consciousness, and not even in terms of any "great imperative" or "great word." Instead Nietzsche accounts for individuality, and in fact his own individuality, in terms of a meaningfulness available in terms of the familiar tropes of journeys and roads, and growing and commanding.This passage from Ecce Homo suggests not merely a narrative, but one with a teleology, even if only a retrospectively apparent one. Narratives of self cannot be random or arbitrary; their meaningfulness depends on the structure provided by some kind of directionality: in Nietzsche's words, a dominant "task" or "goal." This directionality is invoked by Nietzsche, for example, with the "teachers of the purpose of existence" of The Gay Science's opening section and with the famous "formula of our happiness" of The Antichrist's opening section: "a Yes, a No, a straight line, a goal." The Genealogy of Morals provides a general account of this directionality in terms of a "progressus."I would like to say that even partial becoming useless, atrophying and degenerating, loss of meaning and purposiveness, in short... (shrink)

John Stuart Mill, whose relevance for Nietzsche’s late work has been documented by recent research, is not directly mentioned in On the Genealogy or Morality (1887). This article argues that Mill’s On Liberty (1859) nevertheless played a crucial role in the development of the Genealogy. Following a source-based methodology, three major references demonstrate how Nietzsche used On Liberty as a resource as he initiated and developed his own exploration into the origin of morality. After tracing Nietzsche’s reading of (...) Mill through pencil marks in his copy of On Liberty, I discuss the reappearance of Mill’s motives and terminology as well as the explanatory power of Mill as a source for the respective sections in the Genealogy. It becomes clear to what extent Nietzsche adapts Mill and how he turns Mill’s own weapons against him through skillful transformations. The article concludes that instead of delivering the “better” Mill, Nietzsche builds up a fruitful tension between a then-common take on morality and its transgression. (shrink)

In this article, I explore Nietzsche’s account of the origins of the ascetic ideal in his Genealogy of Morality. I offer a reading of his claim that this ideal springs from an instinctive response to the sicknesses he describes as “physiological inhibition and exhaustion”, arguing that these sicknesses are primarily nervous conditions found among the priestly class who come up with the ascetic ideal, and periodically among “large masses of people”. The historical frequency of the latter outbreaks (...) accounts for the popularity of the ideal. But the origin story is very much about the ascetic priest, and it is a story Nietzsche tells in bits and pieces over the course of the Genealogy. This article integrates these bits and pieces into one cohesive account. Finally, I consider how the priest’s more innocent ascetic lifestyle suggestions respond to the twin conditions of inhibition and exhaustion. (shrink)

This paper raises three questions: (1) Can Nietzsche provide a satisfactory account of how the slave revolt could have begun to "poison the consciences" of masters? (2) Does Nietzsche's affinity for "master values" preclude him from acknowledging claims of justice that rest upon a sense of equality among human beings? and (3) How does Nietzsche's story fare when looked on as (at least in part) an empirical hypothesis? The first question is answered in the affirmative, the second in the (...) negative, and the third with the verdict "quite well". Nietzsche's interpretation of Socrates is held to vindicate the affirmative answer to question one; his conception of nobility as spontaneously self-affirming to justify the negative answer to question two, and historical, anthropological and etymological evidence to support the favorable answer to question three. (shrink)

I am a big fan of the Second Essay in Nietzsche's GM. I find it mysteriously rich rather than embarrassingly incoherent. The Rise of Politics and Morality in Nietzsche's Genealogy is the first full-length study of this essay and, as such, is a welcome addition to the scholarship. Metzger's book makes several valuable contributions to the discussion of the Second Essay, but the overall argument of the book is hampered by two main issues: First, Metzger's central argument seems to (...) be that the Second Essay details the morally creative expression of the will to power in bad conscience, but it is not sufficiently nuanced on the meaning or scope of either the will to power or morality. And second, Metzger's... (shrink)

“‘[C]onscience,’” Nietzsche suggests early in Essay Two of On the Genealogy of Morals, “has a long history and variety of forms behind it” (II.3). Glossing over the explicit equivocity and irony of such statements, most commentators presume that the primary ambition of GM is to reconstruct the emergence and in so doing denaturalize and denounce the reign of conscience, which is treated as equivalent to both bad conscience and slave morality. Such presumption has obscured the central claims, operations, (...) and stakes of the text, indeed of Nietzsche’s late work generally. Although they are intertwined, Nietzsche’s genealogy of conscience is textually, substantively, and strategically distinct from his genealogy of bad conscience, which in turn is involved in but distinct from his genealogy of slave morality. Textually, it is not until Essay Two, section four of On the Genealogy of Morals that Nietzsche begins to ask after the emergence and psychosocial (“physiological”) consequences of bad conscience, while the genealogy of conscience proceeds from the first essay. Substantively, the three genealogies are concerned with manifestly disparate objects. Strategically, the addressees of the three genealogies are diverse, thus are their modes of address: genealogy cannot be reduced to a uniform method. (shrink)

This paper raises three questions: Can Nietzsche provide a satisfactory account of how the slave revolt could have begun to "poison the consciences" of masters? Does Nietzsche's affinity for "master values" preclude him from acknowledging claims of justice that rest upon a sense of equality among human beings? and How does Nietzsche's story fare when looked on as an empirical hypothesis? The first question is answered in the affirmative, the second in the negative, and the third with the verdict (...) "quite well". Nietzsche's interpretation of Socrates is held to vindicate the affirmative answer to question one; his conception of nobility as spontaneously self-affirming to justify the negative answer to question two, and historical, anthropological and etymological evidence to support the favorable answer to question three. (shrink)

Given its apparently scholarly form, the Genealogy of Morals is often read as a succinct, relatively systematic, and canonical exposition of Nietzsche’s mature views on morality. This article argues, however, that the work was intended as a parody of a scholarly treatise and examines how this parody is best understood. It begins by surveying some evidence that supports reading the Genealogy as a ‘textbook’ presentation of Nietzsche’s views. It then develops an exegetic case for reading it as a (...) work of parody, based on the third essay’s claims about the ‘self-cancellation’ of truth-directed discourse and how to oppose the ascetic ideal, along with the Genealogy’s internal organization and its place in Nietzsche’s oeuvre. Finally, it examines whether this parody is best interpreted philosophically as having the force of a strong parody that denies the possibility of truth-directed enquiry or that of a weak parody denying the intrinsic value of such enquiry. Although reading it as a strong parody perhaps makes it more radical and potentially appealing, I argue that the Genealogy is best read as a weak parody, because this is both more tenable and suffices for the claims Nietzsche himself makes about the work’s aims and character. (shrink)

While much has been made of the similarities between the work of Nietzsche and Freud, insufficient attention has been paid to their differences. Even where they have been noted, the degree of these differences, which sometimes approaches direct opposition, has often been underestimated. In the following essay, I will suggest that on the topic of conscience Nietzsche and Freud have radically opposed views, with profoundly different moral consequences. Despite superficial similarities, Nietzsche’s conception of conscience is opposed to that of Freud (...) in almost every conceivable way. For Freud, conscience is primarily associated with bad will, repression, subordination to social prohibition, and the feeling of guilt. For Nietzsche, conscience is primarily related to affirmation, memory, individual sovereignty, and the feelings of pride and power. To be sure, Freudian “bad conscience” has its parallel in Nietzsche’s philosophy—but only as a modality of conscience, not as its foundation. Freudian conscience is, on the contrary, an essentially bad conscience. (shrink)

This paper challenges a near universal assumption regarding the third treatise of Nietzsche’s On the Genealogy of Morality : that its main concern is to explain the attraction or power of the ascetic ideal. I argue that GM III’s main concern is normative rather than descriptive-explanatory. An earlier paper argues that GM III’s leading question – What is the meaning of the ascetic ideal? – is equivalent to the question: What is the value of the ascetic (...) ideal? In the present paper, I interpret an aspect of GM III ignored in the earlier paper: the will to power principle of GM III 7, which seems to claim that all human behavior is to be explained in terms of the will to power. I argue that the principle’s true function is normative rather than explanatory: to indicate how philosophers are best or ideally or healthily constituted, in particular, regarding sexuality. I also offer a normative account of what Nietzsche means by ‘interpretation’ in GM III and an argument against the surprisingly well-accepted view that a Nietzschean philosopher would either have little interest in sexual activity or would resist whatever interest he or she had in it. I end with brief suggestions as to the positive contribution Nietzsche thinks sexuality makes to philosophy. (shrink)

In this paper, I offer a new way of reading Nietzsche's second essay in On the Genealogy of Morality. At the heart of my account is the claim that Nietzsche is primarily interested in a persistent or existential form of guilt in this essay and only concerned with locally reactive cases of guilt as a function of this deeper phenomenon. I argue that, for Nietzsche, this persistent form of guilt develops out of a deep feeling of indebtedness or owing (...) that accompanies a fearful sense of dependency on the gods. When this sense of dependent indebtedness mixes with bad conscience, which arises through the shift from prehistoric tribes to state‐like communities, it becomes a moral problem; vast numbers of “slaves and serfs” (GM II.20) start to feel like they are not sufficiently honoring their dependent relationship with the gods. It is this feeling of persistent guilt that Nietzsche thinks metastasizes into Christian guilt. (shrink)

Written at the height of the philosopher's intellectual powers, Friedrich Nietzsche's _On the Genealogy of Morals_ has become one of the key texts of recent Western philosophy. Its essayistic style affords a unique opportunity to observe many of Nietzsche's persisting concerns coming together in an illuminating constellation. A profound influence on psychoanalysis, antihistoricism, and poststructuralism and an abiding challenge to ethical theory, Nietzsche's book addresses many of the major philosophical problems and possibilities of modernity. In this unique collection focusing (...) on the _Genealogy_, twenty-five notable philosophers offer diverse discussions of the book's central themes and concepts. They explore such notions as _ressentiment_, asceticism, "slave" and "master" moralities, and what Nietzsche calls "genealogy" and its relation to other forms of inquiry in his work. The book presents a cross section of contemporary Nietzsche scholarship and philosophical investigation that is certain to interest philosophers, intellectual and cultural historians, and anyone concerned with one of the master thinkers of the modern age. (shrink)

ABSTRACT In this article I show how to integrate nietzsche's apparently conflicting views on the relationship of philosophers to the ascetic ideal of the ascetic priest. in sections 7 and 8 of GM iii, Nietzsche makes philosophers seem fundamentally different from priests; but in sections 9 and 10, he argues that philosophers early on succumb to the ascetic ideal of the priest. the key to understanding how these two aspects of GM iii fit together lies in nietzsche's (...) ideas about the origins of contemplative life. priests and their ascetic ideal come first; philosophers come later. Though the ambitions of philosophers are radically unlike those of priests, the two types of contemplative nature share a common predicament in their earliest days, against the background of which it becomes understandable how philosophers as a class could have become more mixed up in the ascetic ideal than is good for them. (shrink)

Written at the height of the philosopher's intellectual powers, Friedrich Nietzsche's _On the Genealogy of Morals_ has become one of the key texts of recent Western philosophy. Its essayistic style affords a unique opportunity to observe many of Nietzsche's persisting concerns coming together in an illuminating constellation. A profound influence on psychoanalysis, antihistoricism, and poststructuralism and an abiding challenge to ethical theory, Nietzsche's book addresses many of the major philosophical problems and possibilities of modernity. In this unique collection focusing (...) on the _Genealogy_, twenty-five notable philosophers offer diverse discussions of the book's central themes and concepts. They explore such notions as _ressentiment_, asceticism, "slave" and "master" moralities, and what Nietzsche calls "genealogy" and its relation to other forms of inquiry in his work. The book presents a cross section of contemporary Nietzsche scholarship and philosophical investigation that is certain to interest philosophers, intellectual and cultural historians, and anyone concerned with one of the master thinkers of the modern age. (shrink)

I have two aims in this paper. The first is to add to a growing case against reading the sovereign individual, discussed by Nietzsche in On the Genealogy of Morality, as Nietzsche’s ethical ideal. I suggest that the conception of responsibility active in the sovereign individual passage is directly at odds with what, as a second aim, I argue Nietzsche’s positive account of responsibility to be. Thinking that the sovereign individual, a sort of distant and composed (...) individual who stands apart, represents Nietzsche’s ideal fails to appreciate what we can call the social aspects of Nietzsche’s philosophy. Nietzsche’s positive account of responsibility is a conception that sees as central and crucial our place in a community of interpreting and self-interpreting others who figure in the processes by which we, as Nietzsche puts it, become what we are. (shrink)

Nietzsche's harsh attacks on modernity suggest a problem: if the modern age is so diseased, can we overcome it and move on to something higher? Or is the disease too severe? I examine the question by studying Nietzsche's view of spiritual health. Spiritual illness, even in the highest man, is nothing unusual or necessarily debilitating. Even the strongest have been infected since the earliest days of civilization. Indeed, infection with slave morality and bad conscience are requirements for spiritual elevation. (...) And the disease serves life by giving the strong something to struggle against, as well as making possible the spiritual greatness required to revalue all values. The higher man, then, is a mixture of health and disease. The revaluation of values is extraordinarily dangerous, but not impossible. Key Words: great politics • Nietzsche's revaluation of all values • On the Genealogy of Morals • spiritual health. (shrink)

On the Genealogy of Morality is Nietzsche's most influential, provocative, and challenging work of ethics. In this volume of newly commissioned essays, fourteen leading philosophers offer fresh insights into many of the work's central questions: How did our dominant values originate and what functions do they really serve? What future does the concept of 'evil' have - and can it be revalued? What sorts of virtues and ideals does Nietzsche advocate, and are they necessarily incompatible with aspirations to (...) democracy and a free society? What are the nature, role, and scope of genealogy in his critique of morality - and why doesn't his own evaluative standard receive a genealogical critique? Taken together, this superb collection illuminates what a post-Christian and indeed post-moral life might look like, and asks to what extent Nietzsche's Genealogy manages to move beyond morality. (shrink)