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Abstract
This paper examines the status of value judgements in Nietzsche’s philosophy. It argues that although Nietzsche often adopts the subjectivist position that human values are projections onto the world this conclusion does not follow from his other philosophical commitments. Rather, value non-objectivism follows only if we take correspondence or verisimilitude as our standard of objectivity. However, Nietzsche’s perspectivism points to an alternative account of value. In order to demonstrate this, the paper examines two contrasting arguments in his writings regarding the status of human values. The first, articulated in Human, All Too Human, adopts a non-objectivist account of value. This account further supports the subjectivist reading by treating objectivity and perspectivity as mutually exclusive. However, Nietzsche’s articulation of the subjectivist account in Human, All Too Human gives rise to a particular existential dilemma, the alleviation of which demands a second, alternative account, that offers a significant reconsideration of the status of our value judgements. This second account, which is reconstructed using the conceptual resources available throughout Nietzsche’s writings, entails a re-examination of what constitutes objectivity. It reveals that objectivity must after all include perspectivity, which far from divorcing us from objects, marks the seal of our unavoidable engagement with them.
Notes
1 The following abbreviations of Nietzsche’s writings are employed throughout: TL: ‘On Truth and Lies in a Nonmoral Sense’, in Philosophy and Truth: Selections from Nietzsche’s Notebooks of the Early 1870s, ed. D. Breazeale (London: Humanities Press International, 1990). SE: ‘Schopenhauer as Educator’, in Untimely Meditations, trans. R. J. Hollingdale (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1994). D: Daybreak, trans. R. J. Hollingdale (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1993). HAH: Human, All Too Human, trans. R. J. Hollingdale (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1996). GS: The Gay Science, trans. W. Kaufmann (New York: Vintage Books, 1974). BGE: Beyond Good and Evil, trans. M. Faber (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1998). GM: On the Genealogy of Morality, trans. M. Clark and A. J. Swensen (Indianapolis: Hackett, 1998). TI: Twilight of the Idols, trans. D. Large (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1998). A: The AntiChrist, in Twilight of the Idols/The Anti-Christ, trans. R. J. Hollingdale (London: Penguin, 1990). WP: The Will to Power, trans. R. J. Hollingdale and W. Kaufmann (New York: Vintage Books, 1968). CW: The Case of Wagner, trans. W. Kaufmann (New York: Vintage Press, 1968).
2 See, for example, TL.
3 Evaluative concepts, for Nietzsche, form the basis of prescriptive ones. We must consider something ‘good’, for example, if it is to be considered a motive for action. See, for example, BGE: section 197.
4 For a recent discussion of Nihilism and despair, see Reginster, Citation2006: Ch. 2.
5 Hume, Citation1978: p. 469.
6 Cf. GS: section 301; HAH: section 1; WP: sections 12, 260; D: sections 3, 35; BGE: section 108.
7 In HAH, Nietzsche refers to the Schopenhauerian division of the world into representation and Will, although he undermines the notion of a metaphysical world by demonstrating that it is a superfluous idea. Whether a thing-in-itself exists or not, he tells us, we cannot have knowledge of it (HAH: section 9). However, from within the context of the world as representation, science, he suggests, captures how things really are. It is in this sense that I claim that HAH captures the world from a non-evaluative point of view (HAH: section 34). According to Nietzsche, although science works with ‘errors’, these errors are heuristic maxims only, and are abandoned if shown to be incompatible with the findings of empirical investigation (HAH: section 19). Scientific, unlike evaluative, discourse, therefore, is ‘capable of detaching us from this ideational world – and, for brief periods, at any rate, lift us up out of the entire proceeding’ (HAH: section 16). The reason for this is that science is governed by the intellect, whilst evaluation is dominated by the will. See HAH: section 29 for Nietzsche’s view that science gives us theoretical knowledge of the ‘true nature of the world’, which can be distinguished from the ‘practical’ concerns of evaluative discourse.
8 Schopenhauer, Citation1969: p. 178.
9 I am not suggesting that this problem is raised only in HAH. As Nietzsche makes clear in GS: section 110, for example, the tension between life and knowledge defines the predicament of modernity. However, the difficulty is particularly acute in HAH as it follows from presuppositions that Nietzsche makes in this text, which are not in evidence in other texts to the same degree. For example, in HAH, Nietzsche makes a sharp demarcation between the objectivity of science and the non-objectivity of evaluative discourse. In contrast, at GS: section 335, he argues that knowledge of physics is a precondition for the creation of value.
10 Nietzsche suggests that we must believe fictions to be true when he writes that ‘what is needed is that something must be held to be true – not that something is true’ (WP: section 507). He proposes self-conscious fictions when he refers to ‘art, in which precisely the lie is sanctified and the will to deception has a good conscience’ (GM: III, section 25). Bernard Reginster (2006: pp. 86–97) contends, for example, by appealing to the example of a child at play, that Nietzsche can support the fictionalist proposal by appealing to the notion of imagining in a belief like way. He illustrates his point by appealing to the example of a child who in the context of a game believes for the purposes of the game that he is a Trojan warrior. The child is motivated by the fictional belief whilst knowing all the while that he is not in fact a Trojan warrior. However, it is difficult to appreciate, how this notion can motivate outside the narrow context of self-consciously created games. The child is motivated in the context of the game but would arguably fail to be so motivated if asked to live his life as if it were such a game. Within the context of the game the child can overcome and defeat all sorts of enemies and be a hero but life throws in the child’s way real obstacles, which resist these efforts. Such resistances thus pose a problem for the realizability of our ideals. Outside the game we arguably require some assurance in the form of objective reasons that some of our ideals are realizable and not just unconstrained imaginings. Therefore, our values are arguably meaningful only if they have objective realizability. For a further discussion of Nietzsche as a fictionalist, see Hussain, Citation2007.
11 Nietzsche rejects the idea of self-imposed delusions in D: section 249. See also GS: section 2 where he emphasizes the importance of intellectual conscience.
12 David Wiggins, ‘Truth, Invention and the Meaning of Life’, in Needs, Values, Truth (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1998), p. 94.
13 Taylor, cited by Wiggins, ‘Truth, Invention and the Meaning of Life’, pp. 94-5.
14 Wiggins, ‘Truth, Invention and the Meaning of Life’, section. 100.
15 Ibid., p. 105.
16 See Mackie, Citation1977, for the classical account of the erroneous character of the phenomenology of value.
17 See Lovibond, Citation1983: p. 9 for a similar argument.
18 Poellner, Citation2007: pp. 231–2.
19 Ibid., p. 233.
20 Ibid., p. 255n.
21 Ibid., p. 256.
22 Ibid., pp. 254-5.
23 Locke, 1975: Book II, Ch. viii, section 10.
24 For a similar argument, see Han-Pile, 2009.
25 Nietzsche criticizes this idea in GS: section 344.
26 Heidegger, 1991: p. 197.
27 It might be objected that Nietzsche rejects the objective applicability of the concept of causality (BGE: section 21). However, whilst he rejects the mechanical account of causality (GS: section 112; BGE: section 12), he does not reject the concept of causality per se (BGE: section 36), but rather construes causality on the model of a continuum (GS: section 112).
28 Nietzsche emphasizes the interconnection of affect and rationality when he denies, contrary to what he calls the ‘misunderstanding of passion and reason’, that reason is an ‘independent entity’, and argues instead, that it is properly understood as ‘a system of relations between various passions and desires’ (WP: section 387). He makes a similar point in GS: section 333, when he denies that ‘intelligere’ is extra-evaluative (‘something conciliatory, just, and good’) and ‘opposed to the instincts’. Rather, reason is, he claims, ‘a certain behaviour of the instincts toward one another’.
29 Cf. TI, ‘Improvers’, 1; WP: sections 1, 5, 114, 228, 254, 258, 270. Putnam also denies that scientific judgements are non-affective or non-commendatory. See Putnam, 1990: p. 138. Additionally, Putnam contends that there is no intrinsic difference between scientific and evaluative judgements (1990: p. 171).
30 Maudemarie Clark and David Dudrick (2007) have recently argued that perspectivity and objectivity, for Nietzsche, are not mutually exclusive. However, their interpretation adopts a strong distinction between the status of scientific and evaluative discourse. Whilst they correctly, in my view, take justification in the sphere of value to entail a connection to the drives (Clark and Dudrick, 2007: p. 216), it is my contention that Nietzsche holds, at least some of the time, that justification in science also entails a relation between the drives. For example, in GS: section 333, he denies that knowledge is opposed to the instincts. This follows from his claim that scientific investigation is perspectival and directed by our interests. It is for this reason that I have refrained from discussing Nietzsche’s account of science and value in the context of the debate between cognitivism and non-cognitivism. Nietzsche’s rejection of philosophical oppositions in general militates against such a distinction in kind and points instead to a distinction of degree. See also Clark’s and Dudrick’s 2006 discussion of these issues.
31 Kant, 1999: A137/B176, p. 256.
32 For Nietzsche’s explicit identification of perspective with value, see, for example, the 1886 preface to Human, All Too Human, where he writes of ‘the sense of perspective in every value judgement – the displacement, distortion and merely apparent teleology of horizons’ (HAH: section 6).
33 According to Nietzsche, feelings of ressentiment must be released, and for this to happen, they must have an object. The object is that which causes suffering, such as the masters or the world that is inhospitable to the ressentiment subject’s efforts at self-empowerment (GM: III, section 15).
34 According to Nietzsche, suffering gives rise to ressentiment (GM: III, section 15) and the ascetic ideal gives a meaning to suffering (GM: III, section 17).
35 The reason for this, according to Nietzsche, is that the reactive viewpoint considers only its own viewpoint as valid, failing to consider opposing or alternative perspectives seriously. Nietzsche writes of what he calls ‘justice’ or objectivity that it is ‘in the long run the opposite of what all revenge wants, which sees only the viewpoint of the injured one, allows only it to count – from now on, the eye is trained for an ever more impersonal appraisal of deeds, even the eye of the injured one himself (although this last of all, as was mentioned at the start).’ (GM: II, section 11). In contrast, the ‘precondition’ for the education of the philosopher or creator of values, is the ability to consider multiple perspectives (BGE: section 211).