Jonathan Miller: Moral Theory Formative - Word Count: 1775 words

How plausible is Nietzsche’s critique of conventional morality?

Nietzsche, in his unconventional critique, is undertaking a hugely ambitious

project: the understanding of our moral evolution using a combination of
psychological and historical evaluation of humanity. His aim, as I have
interpreted it, is to challenge our most basic instinctive beliefs and to transform
the pernicious, dispassionate rationality, which he believed had killed man’s
spirit and caused him to ‘forget how to dance.’ He felt that the traditional
enlightenment morality of his day, especially the Kantian and Utilitarian values
had severed humanity from its proper roots.

The Enlightenment project that he was targeting refers specifically to the

Kantian ‘thou shalt’ rules and the utilitarian emphasis upon the intrinsic
goodness of happiness and badness of suffering. It is plausible to say that if these
values are adopted by society, they will indeed impact on the way in which
individuals will evaluate their own lives. If those individuals have within them a
disposition for achieving greatness, and if it is true that a certain degree of
suffering is in fact a precondition for attaining greatness, then it follows that they
will not achieve their full potential. Instead, these individuals with which
Nietzsche is primarily concerned, will have been comatosed by society into
following a strict set of Kantian rules or pursuing their own happiness, which he
phrased as ‘wretched contentment.’ In Daybreak he writes:

‘Are we not, with this tremendous objective of obliterating all the sharp edges of life, well on our the
way to turning mankind into sand?...Is that your ideal, you heralds of sympathetic affections? 1

His critique is deliberately provocative in its aphoristic and rhetorical style. Yet it
is this unconventional almost prophetic use of emotive language, which I think
reflects his desire to appeal to the irrational side of his readers. For him every
idea has a life, a skin wrapped around it through which it is presented to the
world and by which it is created.
It would be would be misleading to look at his critique of morality without taking
into the context in which they were written. This morality, in Nietzsche’s eyes,
contains three pillars, which describe aspects of humanity: (I) that all agents
possess an entirely free will and autonomous choice, thus they may be held
responsible for their actions, (II) that each human ‘self’ is transparent enough
that any agents motives can be distinguished on the basis of their respective
motives and that these motives may be evaluated and (III) that all human agents
are sufficiently similar that one moral code is appropriate for all and so has
universal applicability. Nietzsche asserts that in fact none of the above
descriptions of morality are true.

(I), the claim that that we are sufficiently free to be held morally responsible for
all actions, he calls:

“A contradiction… a sort of rape and perversion of logic” 2

He claims that each person has defining fixed attributes, which control the
unconscious drives. In the ‘Genealogy of Morality’ he compares our thoughts to
fruits borne on a tree. In the same manner that we may explain facts about the
tree through knowledge of its fruits, we can derive an explanation of the values
and actions from that person’s physiological and psychological attributes. We
like to think of the ‘will,’ as being in control of our actions, depending upon our
beliefs and desires. According to Nietzsche however, our ‘will’ is nothing but the
effect of our physiological and psychological attributes. He postulates:

‘The inner world is full of phantoms…the will is one of them. The will no longer moves anything,
3
hence does not explain anything either — it merely accompanies events; it can also be absent.’

He believes that we have greatly overestimated the impact of our consciousness,

saying that we cannot be made accountable for anything. As evidence, he uses
the example:
‘A thought comes when ‘it’ wishes, and not when ‘I’ wish.’ 4

If this is to be believed and our actions are indeed caused by our unconscious
beliefs and desires then it follows that the first pillar of modern morality (I), that
of conscious free will is therefore false.

Against (II), the concept of the transparency of the self, Nietzsche writes that we
all believe we can pick apart our motives and ‘inner motions’ that precede action
and call by its name every moral possibility. He claims that the self is merely the
battleground where our unconscious drives wrestle with themselves; our
observable actions are nothing more than the outcome.

Against the final claim (III), that all humanity is similar to a sufficient degree,
Nietzsche uses the analogy of Cornaro’s recommendation for a slender diet as
means of promoting a long life. Cornaro’s mistake, so says Nietzsche, was in his
absolutism. Cornaro assumed that everyone else had similar physiological and
psychological attributes to himself, in this case a slowness of metabolism, and
therefore wrongly assumed that eating little amounts would do everyone the
same good. As with diets, so too with moralities, which he says ‘sin against taste.’
His point is that individuals with different attributes will not all benefit from the
same ‘moral diet.’

In the critique outlined above, Nietzsche effectively dismisses such objective

morality and knocks down the Enlightenment project’s threefold wall, which was
built upon rational foundations. He then goes on to confront the wreckage of
these destroyed values. This monumental task is nothing less than constructing
an entirely new moral guideline and set of values by which individuals may
‘create themselves’. In ‘The Gay Science’ he writes:

“To that end we must become the best learners and discoverers of everything that is lawful and
necessary in the world: we must become physicists in order to be creators in this sense…our
opinions, valuations, and tables of what is good certainly belong among the most powerful levers in

the involved mechanism of our actions.’ 5

My interpretation of this slightly ambiguous passage is that Nietzsche is
suggesting that we should form our own ‘tables for what is good,’ with help of
science and psychology, to identify the patterns of value-inputs and action-
outputs, which seems to me a thoroughly reasonable suggestion to make.
However, Nietzsche also writes extensively about what he calls the ‘higher man.’
A large portion of his contempt towards conventional morality lies in his belief
that it thwarts the flourishing of these rare higher individuals. In ‘Thus Spoke
Zarathustra’ he creates a rhetorical ‘overman’ as a kind of ideal higher type of
being. This higher type,

‘Wants no sympathetic heart, but servants, tools; in his intercourse with men he is always intent on
making something out of them. He is incommunicable: he finds it tasteless to be familiar; and when
one thinks he is, he usually is not. When not speaking to himself, he wears a mask. He rather lies
than tells the truth: it requires more spirit and will. There is a solitude within him that is

inaccessible to praise and blame, his own justice that is beyond appeal.’ 6

Specifically, a higher type has what he termed a Dionysian outlook on life and
would embrace the doctrine of eternal recurrence, which is to say that he would
will the repetition of his life throughout eternity. I think this vision of an ideal
higher type is a touch ironic since it is almost utopian in its structure, which is
precisely the line of thought he was attacking. MacIntyre’s criticism of ‘the
overman’ is straightforward: if the evolved human being rises above other people
to arrive at a place where he can create values, he removes himself from the
human relationships within which values emerge, and therefore can know
nothing about value. He goes on to say that because the ‘great man’ removes
himself from the relationships involved in learning and engaging in the practices,
he is condemned to moral solitude. Such a man could be accused of being aloof,
with delusions of self-grandeur, with no capacity for intimacy, surely such a life
would be one of lonesome misery.

However, in the Genealogy of Morals Nietzsche sketches what I view as a more

plausible, but nonetheless vague, alternative to the overman. He tells the story of
the ‘three metamorphosis of the spirit’, saying how,
‘…the spirit shall become a camel, the camel a lion, and the lion at last, a child.’ 7

These metaphors describe various stages in the transformation of human

consciousness. The camel is a beast of burden and seems to possess a sense of
duty in bearing heavy loads and going for days without water. However the
camel then comes to understand that there are no absolute foundations for truth
or knowledge and takes it upon itself to ‘flee into a desert of solitude.’ It is in this
desert that the camel transforms into a lion for ‘it wants to capture freedom and
be lord in its own desert.’ (Ibid) The Lion’s enemy is the great dragon called ‘Thou
Shalt’ that sparkles with the ‘values of a thousand years.’ The dragon believes
itself to be supreme because it possesses one truth concerning all existence. The
might of the lion says, ‘I will’ and opens the road to the will to power which is
Nietzsche’s phrase for the instinct for freedom and power to create new realities.
But now that there is no external authority, the lion is truly alone and
responsible for itself, the final transformation must now take place: the lion must
become a child,

‘…the child is innocence and forgetfulness, a new beginning, a sport, a self-propelling wheel, a first

motion, a sacred Yes.’ 8

The child has broken free from the ‘Thou Shalts’ of the herd and now possesses
the will to power and the potential to create new values. My interpretation is
(and I could be accused of overly reading in between the lines here) that we
should pass beyond the dualities of good and evil (the lion) and then take the risk
and struggle into the ‘dirty water of truth,’ adopting not the values of the
overman, but embrace a child’s perspective and question the value of everything
again - sparking the creation of new values which are not static and universal but
constantly in flux. His critique of static conventional mornality, at the very least,
does succeed in opening the door to deeper self exploration and further moral
study. He writes in ‘the Gay Science’:
‘Whoever now wants to make a study of moral things opens up for himself an enormous field of
work…all that has given colour to existence…are the moral effects of food known? Has the dialectic

of marriage and friendship yet been presented? There is so much in them to be thought over!’ 9

References:

1
Daybreak 174
2
Beyond Good and Evil 21
3
Human all too human 39
4
Beyond Good and Evil 17
5
The Gay Science 335
6
Ecce Homo 1:2
7
Thus spoke Zarathustra 1: Of The Three Metamorphoses
8
Ibid
9
The Gay Science 7

Bibliography:
After Virtue, Alasdair MacIntyre – 3rd edition 2007

Beyond Good and Evil, Nietzsche, translated by Walter Kaufmann. New York: Vintage Books, 1989.

Daybreak: Thoughts on the Prejudices of Morality, Nietzsche, translated by R. J. Hollingdale. New

York: Cambridge University Press, 1991.

Human, all too Human: a Book for Free Spirits, Nietzsche, Translated by R.J. Hollingdale. New York:
Cambridge University Press, 1991.

On the Genealogy of Morals and Ecce Homo, Nietzsche, translated by Walter Kaufmann and R. J.
Hollingdale. Edited by Walter Kaufmann. New York: Vintage Books, 1969.

On the Genealogy of Morals and Ecce Homo, Nietzsche, translated by Walter Kaufmann and R. J.
Hollingdale. Edited by Walter Kaufmann. New York: Vintage Books, 1969.

The Gay Science, Nietzsche, translated by Walter Kaufmann. New York: Vintage Books, 1974.

Thus Spoke Zarathustra: A Book for All and None, Nietzsche, translated by Walter Kaufmann. New
York: Penguin Books, 1988.

Twilight of the Idols, Nietzsche, edited and Translated by Walter Kaufmann. New York: Penguin
Books, 1984.
http://plato.stanford.edu/entries/nietzsche-moral-political/

http://www.scrye.com/~station/dissertation.html