Nietzsche Review.pdf

Books Reviews

Nietzsche: The Ethics of an Immoralist

, by Peter Berkowitz. Cambridge,

Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1995. Pp. xiv + 313. H/b £27.95.

When the Dutch critic Georg Brandes ﬁrst introduced European audiences to

Nietzsche in 1888, he concentrated, quite properly, on Nietzsche’s vitriolic

campaign against morality and what Brandes dubbed (with Nietzsche’s sub-

sequent approval) Nietzsche’s “aristocratic radicalism”. Since World War II,

however, the “ethical” dimension of Nietzsche’s thought—his unrelenting

attack on “moral” values like altruism, equality, and happiness, as well as his

positive views about the good life and human excellence—has received far

less attention. The reason is plain. The Nazi misappropriation of Nietzsche

made it hard enough to discuss Nietzsche in polite academic circles, without

delving into his illiberal and disturbing “ethical” views: for example, his oft-

expressed denial of the Enlightenment faith in human potential and equality.

To rescue Nietzsche for scholarly study, it was necessary either to whitewash

his ethics (as Walter Kaufmann did in his famous 1950 study), or to locate

Nietzsche’s primary philosophical concerns outside of ethics: for example, as

a certain sort of philosophical skeptic about truth, knowledge, and meaning

(an approach favored both by “Continental” (generally French) writers like

Jacques Derrida and “analytic” writers like Arthur Danto). This latter

approach, which has dominated Nietzsche studies since the 1960s, received

its most sophisticated articulation in Alexander Nehamas’s 1985 study,

Nietzsche: Life as Literature

. The price of this approach, however, has been

to give us a “Nietzsche” that, one suspects, Georg Brandes would not have

recognized.

Since 1985, we have witnessed a growing backlash to both the Kaufman-

nesque whitewash and the “French” trivialization of Nietzsche. Maudemarie

Clark’s excellent 1990 study,

, should have

put to rest forever the proto-deconstructionist Nietzsche, as well as making a

powerful case that Nietzsche embraces a type of naturalized Kantianism, in

which conceptual space remains for both truth and knowledge. Peter Berkow-

itz’s study, by contrast, belongs to a much larger body of recent literature

which examines Nietzsche’s ethics and his (alleged) political philosophy—

but without making Nietzsche into a liberal fellow-traveller, as Kaufmann

did. Whereas Clark’s study of Nietzsche’s epistemology was informed by an

understanding of the philosophical issues at stake, almost all the recent liter-

ature on Nietzsche’s ethics is marred by a superﬁcial understanding of moral

philosophy. The book under review, unfortunately, is no exception.

Nietzsche on Truth and Philosophy

Mind, Vol. 105 . 419 . July 1996

488

Book Reviews

Berkowitz’s study begins on a refreshing note. In opposition to the “post-

modern” misreadings of Nietzsche, Berkowitz declares his intent to take seri-

ously “the love of truth, the courage, and the yearning for the good that

animate [Nietzsche’s] magisterial effort to live an examined life by giving an

account of the best life” (p. 21). This Socratic-sounding Nietzsche is the cen-

terpiece of the book. In separate chapters, Berkowitz examines

The Birth of

Tragedy, On the Genealogy of Morality,

as examples of

Nietzsche in his role as “genuine historian” (a term Nietzsche coined in one

of his early

and

The Antichrist

): that is, as one who “subordinates the

acquisition of exact historical knowledge to the examination of the truth about

human excellence” (p. 123). The

Untimely Meditations

, for example, merely “exploits

the appearance of historical veracity to win a hearing for its claims about the

higher and lower types of human beings” (p. 98). But according to Berkowitz,

it is not really until Nietzsche introduces the “superman” in

Genealogy

Thus Spoke Zar-

athustra

that we

see the real contours of Nietzsche’s “highest type”, for whom (in a phrase

Berkowitz repeats endlessly) “right making [depends upon] right knowing”

(p. 14). In other words, proper self-creation—Nietzsche, through the mouth

of Zarathustra, allegedly commends an “ethics of creativity”—requires

knowledge of “the metaphysical structure of the cosmos and the rank order of

true or real human needs” (p. 262). Finally, “human excellence” for

Nietzsche, “consists in knowing and mastering the forms of necessity that

condition the will” (p. 266). This is to be done through an embrace of the doc-

trine of eternal return, according to which each moment of our life will recur

eternally. On Berkowitz’s unusual reading of

and the “philosopher of the future” in

Beyond Good and Evil

, such “godlike”

mastery of necessity is not really possible, and so the best life proves beyond

reach. But why can’t “necessity” be mastered through the doctrine of the eter-

nal return? The “explanation” bears quoting to give some ﬂavor of the expos-

itory style of this book:

The doctrine of the eternal return emerges as a metaphysical inter-

pretation of the cosmos, devised by Zarathustra to empower the will

to command past and future by mastering the moment. But the solu-

tion it provides to the problem of mastering necessity is incoherent

… . If the doctrine of the eternal return accurately describes the cos-

mos, then willing the moment would entail mastery over both past

and future; yet precisely under the conditions defined by the eternal

return, willing the moment, indeed willing at all, becomes altogether

impossible. (p. 263)

No doubt there is an argument here, but the reader will be hard-pressed to say

what it is—just as he will be hard-pressed to ﬁnd an explanation of what it

means to “overcome” or “master” or “legislate” “necessity.” Unfortunately,

almost the entire one hundred pages of this book devoted to Nietzsche’s pos-

itive ethical views proceeds at this perplexing level of opacity.

Berkowitz’s path to the conclusion that the best life is unobtainable is orga-

nized around a central theme: an alleged “pervasive tension” in Nietzsche’s

Zarathustra

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489

thought “between his fundamental assumption that morality is an artifact of

the human will and his unyielding conviction that there is a binding rank order

of desires, types of human beings, and forms of life” (p. 4; cf. pp. 26, 41–2,

227, 262). But does this “tension” exist?

Consider, ﬁrst, some simple distinctions. Judgments of

prudential good-

ness

(P-Goodness) concern what is good and bad

for a person

. Judgments of

aesthetic goodness

(A-Goodness) concern what is good and bad

about a per-

son, without regard to the well-being of others

. Judgments of

moral goodness

(M-Goodness) concern what is good and bad

, that is, not as a mat-

ter of either P- or A-Goodness (though, perhaps, as a matter of

simpliciter

P-

Goodness). Judgments about welfare or well-being are typical judgments

about P-Goodness. Our admiring judgment of Gauguin—as rendered

famously by Bernard Williams—is a judgment about A-Goodness: there is

something splendid about Gauguin’s life. Our conﬂicting judgment about

Gauguin, that he was wrong, for example, to have abandoned his family, is a

judgment about M-Goodness.

Nietzsche respects and employs all these conceptual distinctions, roughly

as follows. At the core of Nietzsche’s critique of morality is a claim about P-

Goodness: namely, that “morality” (in Nietzsche’s special sense of the term)

aggregate

certain types of persons—those he calls “higher types” (a point

Berkowitz correctly notes at p. 69). Following certain Presocratics and Soph-

ists, Nietzsche appears to hold that judgments about P-Goodness are objec-

tive. By contrast, judgments about M-Goodness—judgments that are

bad for

not

beyond “good and evil” (

)—appear to be the obvious target of

Nietzsche’s repeated tirades against the objectivity of value (so, e.g., he com-

mends the Sophists for being the ﬁrst to teach that “a ‘morality-in-itself’, a

‘good-in-itself,’ do not exist, that it is a swindle to talk of ‘truth’ in” ethics

(

gut und böse

, §428)). Finally, judgments about A-Goodness—like judg-

ments about “higher” and “lower” human beings, as well as about what is

“good and bad” (

Will to Power

)—also permeate Nietzsche’s writings.

We can now see that the very way Berkowitz frames the issue is confused:

there is

gut und schlecht

tension between holding that judgments of M-Goodness are “arti-

facts of the human will” (p. 4), while judgments of A-Goodness (the judg-

ments ranking “desires, types of human beings, and forms of life” (p. 4)) are

not. There is no contradiction involved in claiming, for example, that “It is an

objective truth that Goethe is a splendid human being”, while denying that it

is objectively true that, “We all have a moral obligation to promote the ﬂour-

ishing of nascent Goethe’s”. The objectivity of judgments of M- and A-Good-

ness do not necessarily stand or fall together. Yet Berkowitz repeatedly

conﬂates the two: e.g. “Although he asserts that good and evil are created by

human beings, he routinely proclaims that there is an order of rank of desires,

human types, and forms of life …” (p. 6). But judgments about good and evil

are the prototypical judgments of M-Goodness for Nietzsche, while it is the

490

Book Reviews

language of “good and bad,” “higher and lower”—the language of A-Good-

ness—that Nietzsche employs in “rank-ordering” human types.

Admittedly, though, it would be strange to deny the objectivity of judg-

ments of M-Goodness, but afﬁrm the objectivity of judgments of A-Good-

ness. Perhaps this is all Berkowitz has in mind. Even so, the discussion is

marred by three further errors.

(1) Berkowitz never explains anywhere in the book why the objectivity of

value (prudential, aesthetic, or moral) is incompatible with value being an

“artifact of the human will”. Indeed, the whole book is predicated on the unar-

ticulated and undefended assumption that there are only two possible posi-

tions here: Platonism

Protagoreanism. It is hardly necessary to remind

readers of this journal that most—perhaps all—modern philosophers who

afﬁrm the objectivity of value are not Platonists, and hardly any would deny

that value is an “artifact of the human will”.

(2) Berkowitz produces two types of irrelevant evidence for the claim that

Nietzsche thinks judgments of M-Goodness are objective: ﬁrst, judgments

about

; and, second, judgments about matters of fact. For exam-

ple, Berkowitz points to Nietzsche’s “boundless conﬁdence that he has pene-

trated to the brute and decisive facts about morality” as in tension with his

“doctrines of radical perspectivism,” presumably as applied to morality (p.

73). Yet the “decisive fact[] about morality” that Nietzsche identiﬁes (as

Berkowitz correctly recognizes at p. 69) is that morality is

P-Goodness

bad for

higher

types of human beings. This putatively objective fact about

prudential good-

ness

plainly does not preclude still thinking that judgments about M-Good-

ness are radically perspectival. As to the second: Berkowitz describes “the

conﬂict between [Nietzsche’s] opinion that values are created by human

beings … and his conviction that historical knowledge is possible and that the

metaphysical structure of the cosmos … [is] intelligible” (pp. 41–2). But

where exactly is the “conﬂict” in thinking that values are created (and thus

[sic] not objective), while admitting that judgments about historical facts or

about natural cosmology are objective?

(3) Finally, Berkowitz regularly takes the fact that Nietzsche makes judg-

ments about A-Goodness to be evidence for the claim that Nietzsche thinks

such judgments are objective. This seems both an unmotivated inference, as

well as inconsistent with what Nietzsche explicitly says. So, for example, Zar-

athustra (whom Berkowitz casts as the chief expounder of human excellence)

tells us that “Good and evil, and rich and poor, and high and low [

hoch und

gering

, Part II,

§7; emphasis added). But if values like “good and evil that are not transitory

do not exist” (

]” are “

all

…

names of values

… ” (

Thus Spoke Zarathustra

., Part II, §12), then why think Nietzsche believes that “val-

ues” like “high and low” do exist objectively?

Having seen correctly, then, that the various “postmodern” construals of

Nietzsche do no justice to Nietzsche’s ethical concerns (as well as misrepre-

senting his views about truth and knowledge

outside of ethics

), Berkowitz

Book Reviews

491

wrongly lurches to the opposite extreme by turning Nietzsche into a crypto-

Platonist who believes in “a rank order [of value] independent of human mak-

ing and willing” (p. 77) and for whom “questions concerning ﬁrst principles

and the greatest good can be clariﬁed and indeed resolved by the human

mind” (p. 48). Yet he can produce no pertinent evidence for these preposter-

ous claims—as is made manifest ﬁnally in the desperation of quoting a letter

by the 21-year-old Nietzsche to buttress them (p. 268)!—all the time ignoring

two more plausible possibilities: either (i) that Nietzsche does, indeed, have

views about human excellence, but recognizes that these are not objective, but

merely

perspectival; or (ii) that Nietzsche perhaps countenances a type of

objectivity weaker than Platonism.

This book does not make for pleasant philosophical reading. Silly mistakes

aside (e.g. Marx is said to have held that the “state” is “the opiate of the

masses” (p. 167)), philosophers will find especially maddening the author’s

lack of clarity and precision, in matters both philosophical and terminologi-

cal. There are, for example, references throughout the book to “the traditional

aspects” of Nietzsche’s philosophy, without any explanation of exactly what

the “tradition” is. Yet Nietzsche plainly repudiates many aspects of “the tra-

dition”: the Aristotelian doctrine of the unity of the virtues; Platonic realism;

the idea that morality admits of rational vindication; and the idea that philos-

ophy could be a purely a priori, as opposed to a naturalized, discipline—to

name but a few! It is a good question how deep Nietzsche’s affinities are with

other aspects of the philosophical tradition (a question well-addressed in John

Richardson’s recent

), but as on almost every other inter-

esting question raised in this ambitious, but poorly executed, book, Berkowitz

fails to shed any real light on the issues.

Nietzsche’s System

School of Law & Department of Philosophy

BRIAN LEITER

University of Texas

727 East 26th Street

Austin, TX 78705

USA

Email: bleiter@mail.law.utexas.edu

Kant and the Mind

, by Andrew Brook. Cambridge: Cambridge University

Press, 1994. Pp. xii + 327. H/b £35.00.

Kant’s account of mind has aroused increasing interest in the past 20 years.

Karl Ameriks, Patricia Kitcher, C. Thomas Powell, and Wayne Waxman,

among others, have published books bearing on Kantian topics like represen-

tation, concepts, categories, synthesis, and self-awareness. Andrew Brook

provides both cognitive-science reconstructions of Kant and textual exegesis.

Although not all his reconstructions or exegeses are to my mind plausible, he

carries the discussion into new territory. His suggestions provoke thought;

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