Blogosophy

Leiter's Nietzche on Morality

Leiter's Nietzche on Morality turns out to be pretty good. ("Turns out", because as I recorded before, I had some qualms based on Leiter's blogging persona.) I don't think I buy his contention that Nietzche was an anti-realist when it comes to values (i.e. he would deny that there are any "objective facts about non-prudential value") . I find the objections to this interpretation that Leiter lays out much more convincing than his attempts to deal with those objections. In particular, I just can't read Nietzche as someone who "thinks his evaluative judgements are merely his idiosyncratic preferences"--as Leiter admits, he just doesn't write like someone who believes that. He goes on to adduce some reasons for supposing so, but to me they ring hollow. For example, he argues that Nietzche's rhetoric about value is only rhetoric, and "the language of truth and falsity is conspicuously absent" (emphasis in the original). He constrasts this with Nietzche's critique of e.g. Christian cosmology, which is loaded with epistemic terms.

First recall Nietzche's goal: to free nascent higher types from the grip of [Morality in the Pejorative Sense]. That being his ultimate aim, there seems to be no reason why he should not want to employ all the rhetorical resources available--including resources that depend on the fact that most readers will find falsity to be an objection to a view. Insofar as most readers still think truth has "absolute value" (the view that Nietzche attacks in GM III), then Nietzche can take advantage of that fact in trying to dissuade them from accepting MPS.

It seems like there would be every reason not to employ such rhetorical tricks. The problem with this, as I see it, is that if the force of Nietzche's argument is intended part of a rhetorical trick, then as soon as the very types that Nietzche is trying to reach and get to reconsider the value of the herd morality (in Leiter's account) come to understand what he's driving at, the force of the argument is spent. The Nietzche as anti-realist about values interpretation seems to me to make Nietzche a closet nihilist: Nihilism (at least about values) is true, but one should pretend that it isn't for aesthetic reasons.

I'm more inclined to believe that Nietzche was indeed a realist about values, and in particular that he believed that there was an objective fact about whether certain men were of a "higher" or "lower" type (a single passage in Zarathustra that lumps higher/lower with other created value distinctions notwithstanding), and further objective facts (which mostly need to be determined empirically) about what was good or bad for producing such types and allowing them to flourish, and that the flourishing of higher types was objectively desirable, mostly for reasons that Leiter lays out quite well despite his attempts to undercut them. In fact, I lean towards thinking that it parallels and is tied in with his whole line of thought about health: healthy and unhealthy, and things being good for one's health or bad for one's health are objective facts about the world, even though they might be idiosyncratic (the health regimen that works for Cornaro, as Nietzche points, doesn't necessarily work for everyone else even though Cornaro doesn't hesitate to recommend it universally). I don't really have time to talk about exactly how close this parallel is today, but I find it very telling so maybe I'll get back to it later.