Solomon Robert C Living

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.Great men, like great ages, are explosives in which tremendous force is stored up.What does the environment matter then, or the age, or the ‘spirit of the age,’ or ‘public opinion’!”) But what is also wrong with Morality is what it hides and how it distracts us,even us ordinary citizens.By presuming an utterly minimal self and theimportance of following a set of universal peculiarly “moral” rules, it re-moves all consideration of personal character and virtue (except, of course,as these may be redefined as the principled compulsion to follow the rules).What gets lost is the ancient concept of excellence, which is something much more than doing your duty and not breaking the moral rules.“Submission to morality can be slavish or vain or selfish or resigned orobtusely enthusiastic or thoughtless or an act of desperation, like submis-sion to a prince: in itself it is nothing moral.”Nietzsche is not an “immoralist”—as he occasionally likes to bill himself.He is instead the defender of a richer kind of morality, a broader, morevaried perspective (or, rather, an indefinitely large number of perspectives)in which the gifts and talents of each individual count first and foremost.Nietzsche doesn’t advocate immorality; he rather points out how minimaland inadequate is a Morality of “Thou shalt not.” Ultimately, he says, it isno less than a denial of life, a denial of our best talents, our energies andour ambitions, a denial of what is most admirably human about us.It isnot that we ought to break those standard moral imperatives against steal-ing, killing, and lying.Nietzsche again and again protests that he has nosuch notion in mind.It is rather that we should see how little and howpathetic it is just to obey such rules in the absence of any other virtues of character or excellence.How presumptuous it is for morality to give itself“trump” status at the expense of any number of other “non-moral” virtuessuch as heroism, wit, charm, and passionate devotion.Do we really wantto celebrate the “good” man when we might have a great one instead? LIVING WITH NIETZSCHEGenealogy as ad HominemArgument: Resentment as aDiagnosis of MoralityHow different these words “bad” and “evil” are, although they are both appar-ently the opposite of the same concept “good.” But it is not the same concept“good”: one should ask who is “evil” in the sense of ressentiment.—Friedrich Nietzsche, On the Genealogy of MoralsGenealogy, I want to suggest, is something of a protracted ad hominemargument writ large.Genealogy is not mere history, a search for origins,verbal or material, but a kind of denuding, unmasking, stripping away pre-tensions of universality and merely self-serving claims to spirituality.Nietz-sche presents it as if it were nothing but description, but his language showsit to be anything but that.Walter Kaufmann feels compelled to remind usthat Nietzsche is not here defending noble or master morality and attackingslave morality, but once he has finished describing the difference in terms of “nobility” and “excellence” on the one hand and “misery” and “pathos”on the other, need one doubt “Nietzsche’s preference” for one over theother? It is an ad hominem question: What sort of a person would want tobe a slave and not a master? And what sort of person would look at them as nothing more than a couple of alternative ways of living, “lifestyles”?The argument of the Genealogy, briefly stated, is that what we call “Morality” is in fact nothing other than the development of a special set ofparticularly pragmatic “prejudices” of an unusually downtrodden lot of peo-ple.The twin appeal to history and social psychology is designed to accountfor—rather than to justify—moral principles and moral phenomena.Partof that account is that Morality consists of universal principles in order toimpose some uniformity on a social world of individuals who are anythingbut uniform.It is the process that Nietzsche, after (but not following) Kier-kegaard, calls “leveling.” Who benefits from this procedure? Obviously thosewho are worst off, the weak, but also, and perhaps equally, the mediocre.The system works above all to suppress the drives and the energies of thesuperior, the strong, those who would rather make something of themselvesthat “Morality” does not allow or, in any case, does not sufficiently recog-nize.If what concerns us is not just obeisance to Morality but greatness, hero-ism, and artistry, then Morality falls far short of our ideals.From that per-spective, Morality appears not as a virtue but as an obstacle.Again, this isnot to say that for the sake of great ideals one ought to break the moralrules or abuse others.It is rather to say that most of the demands placedon us by morality are minimal demands.Of course, a Kantian would rightlyreply that this is all that Morality can or should be expected to do, and thefurther desirability of heroic and saintly (“supererogatory”) behavior and ofexcellence in general is simply not what we mean by “Morality.” But whenN I E T Z S C H E ’ S M O R A L P E R S P E C T I V I S Mmoral imperatives are used to insist on uniform equality at any cost to deny or trump any and all non-moral virtues, we see a very different story.It isagainst such “leveling,” as supposedly dictated by the increasingly influen-tial ideologies of democracy and socialism, that Nietzsche wages his cam-paign against Morality.He instead defends Homeric heroic virtues and Aris-totle’s aristocratic morality against Kant’s universalizable (slave) Morality.Greatness is the goal, not just good behavior.Universality, according to Nietzsche, is thus not so much a logical fea-ture of moral judgments, as philosophers from Kant to R.M [ Pobierz całość w formacie PDF ]

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