[ Pobierz całość w formacie PDF ]
.(For example, sociobiologists haveargued that incest and certain other sexual preferences are not sex practicesbecause—on the basis of their alleged universality—they can be shown tobe genetically inherited traits.) Some practices are based upon principles, of course, but not all are; and principles help define a practice, though theyrarely if ever do so alone.Hegel and Aristotle, of course, emphasize collec-tive social practices, in which laws may be much in evidence.Nietzsche isparticularly interested in the “genealogy” of social practices in which princi-ples play a central if also devious role, but he too quickly concludes thatthere is but one such “moral type” and one alternative “type,” which hedesignates “slave” (“herd”) and “master” moralities, respectively.In fact,there are as many moral “types” as one is willing to distinguish, and todesignate as “master morality” the historical and anthropological gamut ofrelatively lawless societies is most unhistorical as well as confusing philo-sophically.We need only add that for Nietzsche character and mastery neednot be on display at all but rather refer to the “inner” integrity of one’s ownrich experience.The monolithic image of Morality, divorced from particular peoples andpractices, gives rise to a disastrous disjunction: either Morality or nothing.If Nietzsche often seems to come up emptyhanded, obscurely calling for “thecreation of new values,” it is because he finds himself rejecting principleswithout a set of practices to fall back on.If only, like his predecessor Fichte, he had a world like the world of the French Revolution where he could say,“Here is where we can prove ourselves!” But what Nietzsche finds insteadis the hardly heroic world of nineteenth-century democratic socialism andhis own lonely life traveling from one Alpine town to another.In the ab-sence of such heroic practices, Nietzsche celebrates “life,” and turns copingwith his own personal suffering into a kind of heroic campaign.And in theabsence of any community in which he could play a useful role with others,he often ends up defending a crude notion of self-assertion, generalized toall Nature as “the will to power,” reducing the popular view of Nietzsche’sethics to a combination of aggressive banality and energetic self-indulgence.(Would it be unfair to again mention Leopold and Loeb here? They werenot the least literate of Nietzsche’s students.) What we find in appearances,N I E T Z S C H E ’ S A F F I R M A T I V E E T H I C Saccordingly, is not an “affirmative” philosophy at all.Assertiveness and aggression are not “affirmative.” Rejecting Morality in favor of life is not yet an affirmative philosophy.But morality is not Morality, and there are all sorts of ethe´ left over once Morality has been investigated and found wanting.Moreover, moral philosophy need not be primarily—or even secondarily—the quest for justifica-tion.Rather, the apparent need for justification may itself indicate some-thing unconvincing and thus lacking in ethics.Aristotle, for instance, didnot endeavor to “justify” his ethics.He simply assumed that anyonebrought up well and enjoying the enormous benefits of Athenian societywould accept what he described without question—that is, without anychallenge asking “Why should I be ethical?” A proper ethics, properly de-scribed and presented, needs no justification.And Nietzsche, in his rejectionof Morality, turns out to be very much like Aristotle in his pursuit of anethics.Virtue Ethics:Nietzsche and AristotleNietzsche or Aristotle?—Alasdair Macintyre, After VirtueIn After Virtue, Alasdair MacIntyre gives us a choice, enten-eller: Nietzsche or Aristotle. There is, he explicitly warns us, no third alternative.MacIntyre sees Nietzsche’s philosophy as purely destructive, despite the fact thathe praises the arch-destroyer for his insight into the collapse of morals thathad been increasingly evident since the Enlightenment.MacIntyre choosesAristotle as the positive alternative.Aristotle had an ethos: Nietzsche leavesus with nothing.But Nietzsche is nevertheless the culmination of thatwhole tradition—which we still refer to as “moral philosophy” or “eth-ics”—which is based on a tragic and possibly irreversible error in both the-ory and practice.The error is the rejection of ethos as the foundation of morality with a compensating insistence on the rational justification of morality.Without a presupposed ethos, no justification is possible.Within an ethos, none is necessary.And so after centuries of degeneration, internalinconsistencies and failures in the Enlightenment project of transcendingmere custom and justifying moral rules once and for all, the structures ofmorality have collapsed, leaving only incoherent fragments.“Ethics” is thefutile effort to make sense of the fragments and “justify” them, from Hume’sappeal to the sentiments and Kant’s appeal to practical reason to the con-temporary vacuity of “meta-ethical” theory.Here is the rubble that Nietz-sche’s Zarathustra urges us to clear away.Here is the vacuum in whichNietzsche urges us to become “legislators” and “create new values.” But outof what are we to do this? What would it be, “to create a new value”? Ifthe early Hebrews did so (in reaction against their aristocratic betters) what LIVING WITH NIETZSCHEwould be the target of our reaction? Wouldn’t this be another version of slave (“reactive”) morality? Isn’t the virtue of Nietzschean ethics preciselyits individualistic and fragmentary nature—its pluralism?MacIntyre, by opposing Nietzsche and Aristotle, closes off to us the basisupon which we could best reconceive morality: a reconsideration of Aris-totle through Nietzschean eyes
[ Pobierz całość w formacie PDF ]