Beyond Good and Evil

"What did you think of it then? We should talk about your reaction to it! Absolutely, he’s a very shocking figure. There’s something powerfully repulsive about Nietzsche. He’s a figure of rank and of the mountaintops; He’s a thinker who’s for the few. As he’ll say over and over again, he’s a figure who has ‘come too soon’, he is ‘born posthumously’, he says ‘I am not a man, I am dynamite’ in Ecce Homo . The first part of Beyond Good and Evil is called ‘On the Prejudices of the Philosophers’ and I love that part because he shows how ridiculous the philosophical pretension at rendering intelligible through the use of reason is and how preposterous that claim is. Everything you’ve said about Nietzsche is true, but I also see Nietzsche as a kind of sceptical realist: he is someone who is deeply sceptical about what philosophy thinks it’s up to and, indeed, what human beings think they’re up to in moving towards a theory of everything through a mixture of neuroscience and Buddhism or whatever it might be. He wants to claim that we don’t know. All that we can do is to peer through the lens of tragedy as the highest aesthetic experience at what we don’t know. “There’s something powerfully repulsive about Nietzsche” There’s a scepticism and realism in the Nietzsche of that period, in 1886, when he’s no longer the wild Wagnerian Nietzsche of The Birth of Tragedy . He’s a bit more crabby. Nietzsche is at his best when he’s really sticking it to people, as a powerful essayist pointing out the delusions that we have, particularly the way in which he grinds away at the prejudices of philosophers which is that through the activity of the intellect achieve a knowledge of that which is, and from that follows these moral proscriptions. Philosophers’ claims are never just ontological claims, they’re also moral claims. So, it’s Nietzsche’s attack on morality that I find incredibly powerful and in particular on Christian morality as he sees it. He wants to claim that Christian morality is a reactive formation that is at war with affirmation and life, which is what he wants to assert, and that leads him off into some pretty strange directions. Yes, Nietzsche’s project, which he never finished, was the revaluation of values. The claim is not that Nietzsche has no values, but that the values that we have and the values that we’re given, particularly through Christianity – the values of good and evil – that’s what he’s against. We have to revaluate the experience of values. So, Nietzsche is not an amoral thinker at all. He wants a deeper, more sustained experience of ethics which would be based for him on strength and the will to power and things like that which might disturb us a bit. This comes out clearly in The Genealogy of Morals , where he wants to show that the moral categories by which we understand things in our seemingly enlightened ways have this consequence of a history by which human beings have vivisected themselves, as he says. Human beings have lost access to their instinctual force and power and strength and their courageous inner truth. They have lost all of that and that needs to be regained. So, Nietzsche is at war with morality in a very powerful way. I don’t necessarily agree with everything he says, but I think Nietzsche’s negative critical destabilising side is incredibly powerful. It shakes you up. Yes, there’s a kind of realism and a return to the mud, the chaos, the messy complex stuff of what it is to be a human being and not to delude ourselves that we are pure beautiful moral souls, because we’re not."

"Yes, I think that’s right. It touches on almost all Nietzsche’s central concerns – on truth, on the nature of philosophy, on morality, on what’s wrong with morality, will to power. The explanation really comes in the first chapter of the book where Nietzsche tells us that the great philosophers are basically fakers when they tell you that they arrived at their views because there were good rational arguments in support of them. That’s nonsense, says Nietzsche. Great philosophers , he thinks, are driven by a particular moral or ethical vision. Their philosophy is really a post-hoc rationalisation for the values they want to promote. And then he says that the values they want to promote are to be explained psychologically, in terms of the type of person that that philosopher is. The relevance of this is that if this were your view of the rational argumentation of philosophers, it would be quite bizarre to write a traditional book of philosophy giving a set of arguments in support of your view. Because in Nietzsche’s view consciousness and reasoning are fairly superficial aspects of human beings. What really gets us to change our views about things are the non-rational, emotional, affective aspects of our psyche. One of the reasons he writes aphoristically and so provocatively – and this, of course, is why he’s the teenager’s favourite philosopher – is connected to his view of the human psyche. He has to arouse the passions and feelings and emotions of his readers if he’s actually going to transform their views. There’d be no point in giving them a systematic set of arguments like in Spinoza’s Ethics – in fact he ridicules the ‘geometric form’ of Spinoza’s Ethics in the first chapter of Beyond Good and Evil . For funny wickedness I do like Section 11, on Kant’s philosophy . It’s hysterically funny – if you’re familiar with Kant’s philosophy, that is. It’s not a late-night TV concept of hysterically funny! Maybe not the psychology department in its current form! But he would be interested in psychological research. There are a number of themes in contemporary empirical psychology that are essentially Nietzschean themes. There is a large literature suggesting that our experience of free will is largely illusory, that we often think we’re doing things freely when in fact we’re not, that our actions have sources that lie in the pre-conscious and unconscious aspects of ourselves and then we wrongly think we’re acting freely. These are themes familiar to anyone who’s read Nietzsche books and it’s striking that recent empirical work is largely coming down on Nietzsche’s side on these questions. Freud claims to have stopped reading Nietzsche at a certain point – perhaps he thought Nietzsche anticipated his own views to an uncomfortable extent. But they share a very similar picture of the human mind, in which the unconscious aspect of the mind, and in particular the affective, emotional, non-rational part of the mind, plays a decisive role in explaining many of our beliefs, actions and values. Freud came up with a more distinctive and precise account of the structure of the unconscious, but the general picture is very similar. The second essay of Nietzsche’s Genealogy argues that – and this is a crude summary – guilt arose in human beings as a consequence of the internalisation of cruelty. When human beings entered into civilised intercourse they had to repress their cruel instincts, but since the instinct of cruelty is central to human beings that instinct had to be discharged elsewhere and became, gradually, guilt. So guilt is cruelty to ourselves. That’s basically Freud’s story in Civilisation and its Discontents ."