Nietzsche

In this chapter, a detailed reconstruction of Friedrich Nietzsche’s genealogy of guilt is provided. The following notions are examined: internalization of cruelty, the ethics of custom, the debtor-creditor relationship, the creation of the “sovereign individual,” free will, and the notion of Christian guilt. One of the main claims made is that Nietzsche’s genealogy can be seen to go deeper than Rée’s in that it provides us with a genealogy of social and mental structures that Rée’s genealogy presupposes. On the other hand, as the chapter argues, at various crucial junctions, Nietzsche can be read as helping himself to a Rée-ian form of explanation. Before turning to Nietzsche’s genealogy of guilt in his On the Genealogy of Morals and other writings, the chapter examines his earlier critique of Schopenhauer in Human, All Too Human and his critique of the idea of causa sui in Beyond Good and Evil.

Conclusion

This concluding chapter highlights some criticisms of the virtues. David Hume and Friedrich Nietzsche both challenged the traditional construal of the virtues and their role. Hume’s approach to morality was based upon ‘moral sentiment’ where moral feelings were central to one’s deliberation about ethics and so one’s practical reason was simply a means to best secure the satisfaction of one’s various desires. Nietzsche argues that the traditional virtues are merely terms used and cultivated by the weak to control the strong. He draws up a ‘genealogy of morals’ and concludes that terms like ‘good’ and ‘evil’ have no real meaning apart from self-descriptions of the people who employ them.

Friedrich Nietzsche, On the Genealogy of Morals and Criminology

The writings of Friedrich Nietzsche have much to offer criminology. To date, however, his work has been largely neglected in this scholarship. Taking this lacuna seriously, this article reads Nietzsche’s second essay of On the Genealogy of Morals and explicates its importance to criminology. Specifically, focus is cast upon Nietzsche’s exposition of crime and particularly punishment, pertaining to the production of a calculating and calculable being upon whom pain and suffering can be inflicted and the ways that concerns over excesses of punishment come to be framed as problematic. Via this reading, it is claimed that On the Genealogy of Morals can serve, among others, as an important critique to many of the presuppositions that ground the classical school of criminology, epitomized in the work of Cesare Beccaria and Jeremy Bentham. The article concludes by locating the importance of Nietzsche to penology specifically and criminology more broadly.

The Problem of Value and Other Outstanding Issues in Freud's Sexual Theory

The author takes up Freud's sexual theory and examines several key issues—narcissism, infantile sexuality, heterosexuality, and gender—in order to reassert the radical aspects of Freud's epistemology. These areas are explored in two broad and interrelated themes, which are characterized loosely as a genealogy of morals and a philosophy of the will to power. Although this moves substantially beyond the formulations used by Freud, the underlying issue in all this material is the problem of value, and the author demonstrates the truly radical arc of Freud's thinking in the way he addresses value in his sexual theory.

Nietzsche’s Genealogie der Moral Pro and Contra Distributed Cognition

Nietzsche’s writing and thought about the mind challenge some of the same Cartesian dichotomies that the more recent frameworks of 4E and distributed cognition do. Zur Genealogie der Moral (On the Genealogy of Morals), a highpoint in Nietzsche’s project of the ‘Umwertung aller Werte’ (revaluation of all values), is a proclamation of perspectivism: there is no objective perception and nothing objectively to be perceived, only perspectives on objects. This thesis is expressed through evocations of space and movement that, the chapter argues, promote and depend on readerly cognition in which embodied and enactive imagining is central. In these same passages, however, the equivocations underlying the whole perspectivist enterprise are exposed: the supposed discovery of a new extra-textual moral reality through philosophical agility is undermined by rhetorical structures that turn out to merely simulate movement, and so ask readers’ imaginations not to be too enactive. This equivocation has important consequences for readers’ engagement with the interplay of rhetorical form and conceptual content. Cognitive analysis thus gets us to the heart of a grand paradox of Nietzschean philosophy – absolute assertion of the relativity of language – while also shedding light on current questions about action-based distributed cognition as an intellectual force.

The ‘Slate Ode’

The focus of this chapter is the ‘Slate Ode’ (1922). Widely regarded as one of the greatest poems in Russian, it has been read primarily as a subtextual palimpsest. The reading given in this chapter embeds the poem in a set of overlapping contexts, tracing the poem’s utopian language to the value systems of utopian socialist thought in which Mandelstam was steeped; situating it in the context of the Russian reception of Nietzsche, a key thinker for many Russian revolutionaries whose vision in the Genealogy of Morals of a new morality Mandelstam’s poem enacts; exploring its link to New Economic Policy discussion of the primitive economy and natural communism mirrored in the poem, as well as its connection to other thought systems such as mythical ideas of return and a vision of society that replicates the morality of early Christians. Psychological division marks the voice of the speaker who in these new conditions interrogates the sources of poetry and the poet’s own authority. Far from assuming that he can speak with the vatic certainty of the poet-lawgiver of the nineteenth-century Romantic tradition, the first-person speaker delves into the language of the unconscious and Orphic tradition.

Leaving the State of Nature: Polybius on Resentment and the Emergence of Morals and Political Order

The possibility of cooperation and the stability of political order are long-standing problems. Polybius, well known for his Histories analysing the expansion of Rome and his description of the Roman constitution, also offers an intriguing social and political theory that covers ground from psycho-anthropological micro-foundations to institution-based political order, providing a genealogy of morals and political order that is best understood in game-theoretical terms. In this paper I try to give such an interpretation. Polybius’ naturalistic, proto-game theoretical views show similarities with Hume, Smith and especially Hobbes’ doctrine of sovereignty by acquisition. However, Polybius is original in crucial regards, giving a motivationally plausible account of institutional and especially constitutional solutions to moral and political problems. Constitutional order, for Polybius, embodies and makes possible in the first place a kind of political reason that cannot be had individually. Polybian political theory thus offers interesting solutions to problems concerning moral motivation, collective action, and the conditions for political order, as well as the explanation and character of institutions.

Die Autonomie des ,souveränen Individuums‘ in Nietzsches Genealogie der Moral

The second essay of Nietzsche’s Genealogy of Morals introduces the ‘sovereign individual’ as ‘responsible’, ‘autonomous’ and ‘free’. Does this affirmative use of moral terminology reveal an unexpected affinity between Nietzsche’s thought and philosophical modernity? In the last decades, this issue has been at the heart of a vast and controversial debate. My analysis shows that, rather than throwing light on Nietzsche’s general position, the specific use of Kantian terms in this passage of GM is due to a polemical intention. Implicitly, Nietzsche rejects Eduard von Hartmann’s criticism of the ‘absolute sovereignty of the individual’. The author of the Phänomenologie des sittlichen Bewusstseins (1879) sees the most radical herald of this ‘sovereignty’ in Max Stirner. From Nietzsche’s point of view, Hartmann’s rejection and Stirner’s affirmation share a reductive conception of ‘sovereignty’. Reinterpreting and ‘revaluing’ Kant’s moral terminology, Nietzsche aims to give an interpretation of individual sovereignty that is at the same time antithetical to Stirner’s and wholly at odds with Hartmann’s ethical views. In showing this, the paper gives a new answer to an old question; for already in the 1890s, Hartmann himself, accusing Nietzsche of plagiarizing Stirner, raised the issue of the historical relationship between the two philosophers. More generally, the paper shows that Nietzsche employs a specific textual strategy, which consists in taking Kantian terms in an ‘anti-Kantian’ sense and systematically cultivating the art of using ‘a moral formula in a supramoral sense’.

Secular Formatting of the Sacred

Whereas Samuel Moyn has argued that human rights represent the last utopia, sociologist Hans Joas suggests that the modern history of human rights represents a critical alternative to the common theory of secularization understood as disenchantment (Weber). In Joas’s reading, the political and social emphasis on human rights contributes to a sacralization of the person, not only understood as utopia, but also as societal ideal. Following Durkheim, Joas understands the sacred within the society as the continuous process of refashioning the ideal society within the real society. Although acknowledging Joas’s critique of Weber, the author is more critical of his idealization of universal human rights and his affirmative genealogy of this ideal running back to the so-called Axial Age. Mjaaland argues that the normative and formative functions of human rights are better served by a suspicious genealogy of morals, taking also the problematic aspects of human rights policy into account, including its dependence on new forms of violence and cruelty. He concludes that a more modest and pragmatic understanding of human rights may therefore strengthen rather than weaken their authority and future influence.