Jklint
Actually Nietzsche is one of the best to read regarding morality. His psychological acumen is not to be negated nor his analysis of the moral establishment. It doesn’t mean I agree with all of his views but he certainly has made some major breakthroughs regarding it. The point is he makes one think especially when morality itself became a subject for analysis which was long overdue.
If you think N is the best to read, then you agree with Nietzsche, or, you think his contibution is important, among the most important. You like his perspectivalism on all things, which is why, I'm sure, they call him the historical founder of post modernism. I won't go here where I need too. I've done it too much elsewhere.
But I will say this: IF you are going to have an ethical theory that is not selective but comprehensive, looking at all there is to the issue and not turn away when the going gets rough, theoretically, that is, then you have to look where N simply did not care to look, (and I truly suspect he was not capable, was blinded by his narcissism, his struggles with illness),then you will have to deal with metaphysics, not the “grand narrative” types, but the simple imposing reality that all we know is grounded elsewhere. To me, in the matter of ethics, Nietzsche was little more than a complaining common thinker, and I say this because what he really wanted and admired was to see nature unimpeded in its course. He loved the gladiatorial, admired the statesmen Socrates abused, admired men like Odysseus who would fight against those who spit on his shield. He didn't understand anything about ethics save his insight that it was, and we all are, very much obsessed with our resentments toward others who have when we don't. If you think this is simplistic, then I am listening....
There is a reason why we associate the likes of Ayn Rand and the nazis with Nietzsche, and one can easily suppose the Heidegger's sympathy for the nazis had something to do with Niezsche. N supports a philosophy of strength in the will against the world; he says good things, provocative and startling things. He, and Kierkegaard were right: god was dead in the hearts of people. Here and there, he had interesting ideas; but never, as I have read, puts the meek, the weak, the victims on his list of cares (though no doubt, you will find something that can be so interpreted in Beyond Good and Evil and The Gay Science. These are aphoristic works, loosely constructed). But just look and see yourself. He writes:
“We exercise our power over others by doing them good or by doing them ill - that is all we care for!”
His attack on Christianity is not about issues of justification and metaphysics. He wages war on sympathy, love, gentleness, kindness, compassion—He never writes about any of these!
Do you really think THIS is among "the best to read regarding morality"? Why?
Yes, absolutely he did! Not long ago I read Die Verwandlung (The Metamorphosis). It’s definitely one of the supreme stories of alienation as is also The Trial in its presentation of a bureaucracy that cannot be penetrated in its impermeable power structure. China kinda reminds me of that. They always had a “divine bureaucracy” format to government which is in full display even now.
China? How about the US? Of course, things seem cheery enough if you are middle class and whitem but step outside of this class of normalcy and see how just and reasonable it is. But then, this is not what i am on about at all. Kafka's bureaucratic nightmares are reflections language and its norms, the ones that insist that all is well, when analysis shows there is nothing foundational that is revealed by our empirical inquiries. Human misery is whitewashed within the system of everdayness. Go a little deeper, and it falls apart very quickly. As a basic question, and the ministries of authority regarding who and what we are dismantled. This is because metaethically, empirical theory cannot issue a single defensible idea.
The point of contention would be what “the what of things” actually denote.
It is a question,the what of things, that is like reason itself; it has no explanatory justification save what it reveals in its essence. Reason has no second order of justificatory premises. It just sits there and we, if you will, obey. After all, we don't have reason, we are reason. The what of things: does it have a nature at all? I have long understood that our sense of reality is just a reification of familiarity. The what never penetrates understanding, but the repetition and the subsequent recollection that accrues, this we call real. The Real is accumulative, or, as Kierkegaard would say, quantitative. The what is qualitative, and qualities cannot be spoken save to simply put the consensus of shared observations in play. But who cares about things and their names? It matters not. But then, that is the rub, isn't it?: the caring. Caring, and its objective counterpart, value, this makes the whole affair turn ethical. Now we are in an ethical world. Human dasein is inherently ethical because it cares about the values it encounters. Ethics is, after all, all about the ooh's and ahh's and yums and ughs. It permeates existence, and because of this, it matters wha happens at all. i odn't understand why this is rarely understood, the Levinasian dictum, ethics is first philosophy! All other interests yield to this, for they all beg the question: Why bother? who cares? You say reality is divided into two kinds? why oh why does this matter at all? THIS is where Nietzsche has a geniune appeal, is truly important: he saw, as Kierkegaard did, that reason, as Hume announced much earlier, did not care one jot about anything! Reason is an empty vessel. Where Nietzsche went wrong was where he celebrated the natural world of struggle, which he got from Schopenhauer, I find. He did not see that ethics in its final analysis led to only one conclusion: the world is an abomination. Strong words. Open to discussion.
Transcendental implies having reached escape velocity from its factual underpinnings meaning that many different interpretations are possible. If morality were considered to a greater degree factual in its motives it should be encountered more as a genealogy analyzing those motives than any self-serving theory of which there’s a plethora. In effect, it becomes a psychological investigation rather than a transcendental one.
Actually, transcendental. if taken seriously, is the opposite of this. What you have described is the world as we know it, as Heideggarien hermeneutics would have it. Meaning is open and concepts disclose and open vistas of possibilities. Interpretative openness makes truth into something maleable. We have no essence, but the freedom to make ourselves what we will. This comes from Nietzsche and Kierkegaard: freedom in the face of possibilities and the making of a life for ourselves. Facts are possible choices of making present at hand into ready to hand, and it is language, the "house of Being" that makes for the world of self making. As for Nietzsche's Genealogy of morals, there is something to this, I have read. I prefer Foucault on this kind ot thinking, because he champions the weak, those outside of the institution of power who get marginalized and trampled on. Nietzsche has no voice for these.
Transcendental is what must be posited given what is before us, even though it canntp be empirilcally confirmed. Ethics is like this, its good and bad are not seen, but must be posited.
If the meaning of facts remain amorphous than how much more so any transcendental interpretation of how those so-called facts are to be interpreted?
Not that facts are amorphous, but that they do not speak authoritatively when philosophical issues arise. They don't try to. Facts just sit there, but it is in their sitting there that there appears philosophical questions, and these undermine altogether the boring complacency of facts. Inquiry shows that facts are not absolutes; they are contingent things. But we, human agencies of inquiry and value, are not, or so i argue.
Can philosophy? Pain and misery can be described, some descriptions being more potent than others. These linguistic strivings toward empathy are best conveyed in novels and plays the latter understood by the ancient Greeks as being one of its functions. But regardless of the degree of empathy conveyed, suffering is always a uniquely personal experience even if there’s more than one facing the same tribulation.
Novels and plays SHOW the human condition, and can do so poignantly. But only philosophy can undermine thought at its foundation, which is the whole point of philosophy, or so I argue.
All of what precedes is open for argument, which is what philosophy is about: arguing at the level of basic assumptions.
- By Sy Borg
- By Good_Egg