Chrisopher Janaway on Nietzsche’s Genealogy
Nietzsche persuades us that morality’s various tenets and constitutive attitudes are historical constructions, to which there have been (and may still be) genuine alternatives. Placing high value upon compassion, guilt, and the suppression of our more aggressively expansive instincts, believing everyone’s well-being to be of equal kind and importance, expecting everyone to be a subject of rational free choice capable of acting similarly and blameable for failure to do so—these are not absolute, eternal, or compulsory attitudes for human beings to hold, but attitudes invented and perpetuated to fulfil a host of functions and needs.
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The moral attitudes that we now take for granted as the values, as the ‘values in themselves’, were brought into existence and sustained through enormous cultural ingenuity by specific types of human beings, standing in specific power-relations to others, and governed by specific internal drives both innate and learned.
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The fact that moral values are not the values überhaupt does not exclude their being the best ones for us to have. That they are a historical construct does not show that their construction was in any way a bad thing, nor does the manner of their construction, whatever its details, decide whether it is good for us to continue having them as ours.
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The creation and elaboration of Judaeo-Christian values, centred around the promotion of selflessness, brought about the development of man as an ‘interesting’ animal with a proper history, gave rise to an inner life, expressed an unparalleled form-creating will on the part of humanity, brought forth cultural products of the highest order, and enabled us to value truthfulness, the very instrument Nietzsche uses in his project of revaluation. However, none of this negates his central charge that morality has caused us to be ill, self-conflicted, self-hating, and deluded in ways that are ugly and unnecessary for us. Morality has fostered weak and reactive tendencies in humans, elevated self-punishment to a supreme good, taught us to loathe and fear large parts of the psyche, inclined us to conform to the lowest common denominator, discouraged creativity and fullness of life, systematically deceived us about the true nature of ourselves, and subordinated the human to spurious ‘absolutes’ and ‘beyonds’ posited primarily for the gratification of blaming ourselves over our constitutional inability to live up to them. If there is such a thing as progress in values, in Nietzsche’s eyes we have not come nearly as far as we might, and only if morality withers away is there hope of our going further.
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Nietzsche has a radical message for philosophers and ‘scientific’ investigators: your conception of your own activity is at fault because you picture yourselves falsely. There is no primary drive towards knowledge and truth. We philosophers are composed of many affects and drives, and the notion of a rational self or knowing subject engaged in a self-validating exercise of pure dialectical truth-seeking is as much an insidious illusion as the notion of a realm of timeless objects waiting to be discovered. Disinterested, detached knowing is a fiction, but a persistently tempting one that we must struggle to guard ourselves against.
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That philosophers pursue the truth for its own sake, that they succeed in speaking with a universal voice freed from the influence of non-rational drives and prejudices, that pure impersonal dialectic will reliably reach an answer to the question how best to live—these are self-serving distortions. The metaphors of universality, impersonality, and purity with which they have liked to portray themselves also arise out of the valuations peculiar to morality, and philosophy in turn can function as a source of rationalizations with which morality defends itself. Along with the values of morality, philosophers need to put themselves in question. If they understood how enquiry is beholden to valuations, and valuations to affects and drives, if they enquired more into themselves and made their many affects ‘useful for knowledge’ instead of trying to evade them, they might be less estranged from themselves and not detach knowledge from ‘life’.
quote nietzsche christopher janaway metaphilosophy pragmatism metaethics