Hello.
Welcome to our first week of Nietzsche.
We are reading the genealogy of morals.
Here, I'm going to give you a little bit of a background into some of
the commitments that Nietzsche has, and some of the reasons that it's a
little bit challenging to read him
Nietzsche is a surprisingly tricky thinker and he's tricky in a very
different way from Kierkegaard.
Kierkegaard was a very challenging person to read, right?
He's writing in all these pseudonyms, they have different writing styles,
you kind of can't exactly get what his position is, but it's clear that you
can't get what his position is because he's writing in pseudonyms to begin with.
And so he's like basically telling you my position is less clear than it might seem.
Kierkegaard is also often using really challenging, philosophical
language to get his opinions across.
Nietzsche is different because Nietzsche is a much more
fluid writer than Kierkegaard.
And this means that it's easier to read, but it's also easier to misunderstand
Nietzsche because his position is often more complex than it appears at first.
The genealogy is written in typical Nietzschean style
as a series of aphorisms.
So an aphorism is a short and punchy articulation of a position, and it
often doesn't make a full argument, but rather makes a statement.
Now these aphorisms are relatively long and there is a sort of through
line of argument among them,
and so it's a little bit different from a regular kind of aphorism, but wanted to
flag that for you nonetheless, this style.
Writing in aphorisms is often an indication that a philosopher is
rejecting systematic philosophy.
So, whereas with Kierkegaard, we get the emphasis on pseudonyms as
one indication that he's offering us different perspectives on truth, rather
than an entire system, in Nietzsche, we get the penchant for aphorisms.
That said, this is one of Nietzsche's more systematic.
And so you'll see that actually, a lot of the parts that he's
discussing are working together.
Hence Nietzsche's aim in this text, which is to provide a critique of moral values.
He says that the value of our values themselves have
to be called into question.
That's on page 20.
Basically we've taken for granted that values are good.
But when we take for granted that values are good, we are
using values to evaluate values.
We are involved in a circular argument, or what philosophers
call begging the question.
So what we need to do instead is to bracket our judgements of good and
bad, or good and evil, and try and trace the genealogy of morality.
Nietzsche's method is genealogy in this text.
And genealogy seeks to uncover the origins of things.
But the origins, not just in a sort of empirical sense, like when did
morality first emerge, but in a deeper philosophical, theoretical sense.
What are the conditions of human life that bring about an emphasis on morality?
What sorts of latent philosophical assumptions do we have to bring
to the table in order for moral systems to get off the ground?
Looking for empirical roots is what he sees as a problem of what he describes
is the English psychologists Nietzsche is writing at a time when psychology
for the first time in history is splitting off from philosophy.
So for most of human history, psychology was a branch of philosophy, but in
the 1880s, there is an emergence of psychology as an empirical discipline
psychology labs that start to emerge.
For instance, William James, his lab is the first in the U S and that
comes on the scene in the 1880s.
So Nietzsche is writing in a context where he's worried about the rise
of empirical psychology, because he doesn't think that's the whole
story, and he wants to preserve a place for philosophical genealogy.
For one, he thinks that empirical psychology tends to underestimate the
historical element of the human condition and the way that it becomes over time.
So the folks that Nietzsche calls the English psychologists tend to
think about the origins of morality in terms of the utility of non-
egoistic actions or altruistic actions.
So let's say that I give another person a piece of bread that I have
a psychologist might wonder, what is my motivation for doing that?
Why am I taking away something that could be useful to me?
The English psychologist that Nietzsche criticizes answer this question about the
utility of unegoistic actions by saying that such actions are useful to society.
So perhaps it's useful because I have extra bread, somebody else needs
some bread, and if I give them some of my bread, then I will be helping
to perpetuate the existence of the human species because that person can
then go on to reproduce and so on.
So here the greater good is achieved by people's own self-interest due to
a sort of evolutionary perspective.
And then as we've gone on in human history, the English psychologists
contend, we have forgotten that good ultimately reduces to useful.
And we started to think about good as something in its own right.
Nietzsche thinks that this is just really bad genealogy because
there's no reason that we would have forgotten the origin of good in useful.
He thinks that actually the origin of good is a lot darker, a lot seedier
than the idea that good originated in what is useful to society.
Another thing to be really clear about is that it's important to
resist the idea that whatever nature critiques he's condemning.
A lot of times, Nietzsche will use very charged language that might make
you think, oh, noble morality, good!
Slave morality, bad!
But I won't get to be really careful about making those sorts of value
judgements in this process of genealogy.
Nietzsche is often utilizing description, but he's such a potent writer that
these descriptions often seem like they amount to value judgments.
Nietzsche is concerned with questioning the historical becoming of the concept of
morality and questioning its historical becoming is his version of genealogy.
So I want us to think here about Nietzsche as diagnosing the conditions
of morality's emergence, rather than as condemning morality or in
particular condemning slave morality.
I think that's often a sort of easy read to take here.
There's so many ways to read Nietzsche.
There's sort of left.
wing Nietzsche.
There's a right wing Nietzsche..
There's a moderate Nietzsche.
There are Christian Nietzscheans.Nietzsche's one of those
thinkers that is very mercurial and open to different interpretations, so,
I just want to flag that from the get-go