Nietzsche’s Meta-Axiology

Chapter 7 considers the status of the underlying values by which Nietzsche celebrates the flourishing of culture and rates certain kinds of lives highly. Does he regard this simply as his idiosyncratic preference, or does he take it to stand on a more secure foundation? The interpretation offered cuts against the grain of much of the best recent scholarship on Nietzsche, which sees him as doubtful that any values, including his own, might have privileged standing. For this reason, the approach taken in this chapter is primarily negative in character: it tries to undermine the basis for thinking that Nietzsche pulls the rug out from under his perfectionistic value commitments. The arguments for blanket value skepticism that have been attributed to Nietzsche, arguments that would undermine the pretensions of any values to enjoy meta-axiological privilege, are simply not anchored in decisive textual evidence.

The Great Individual in Culture

Chapter 4 explores the question of how individuals and great cultures interrelate. There can indeed be great individuals without great cultures surrounding them. But even when this happens, the great individuals and their cultural surroundings (however lackluster or degraded) remain interestingly interdependent. Likewise, even when the surrounding culture is, by Nietzsche’s lights, problematically unhealthy, great individuals can still potentially profit from its influence. In its long history, Christianity, and its attendant morality, have been as much a benefit as a curse by Nietzsche’s reckoning. Indeed, given the way Nietzsche understands great individuals, as those able to make do handily with what they are faced with and become stronger, there is reason to doubt how serious such a threat from a noxious surrounding culture could actually prove.

The Uses and Disadvantages of Bildung for Culture

Chapter 2 discusses Nietzsche’s relationship to the Bildung tradition in German thought, a tradition running, in its heyday, from Weimar classicism through the German Romantics and beyond. The chapter investigates two texts primarily, Nietzsche’s “David Strauss” essay and his lectures “On the Future of Our Educational Institutions.” A key theme from the “David Strauss” essay, and elsewhere in the Untimely Meditations, is that true Bildung will not be a mere accumulation of cultural experiences, but rather will involve a kind of inner transformation. The chapter charts the way this ideal continues into Nietzsche’s later work as a model of self-shaping for individuals to undertake. Nietzsche, in “On the Future of Our Educational Institutions,” is pessimistic that such genuine Bildung is possible for most people.

The Existential Conception of Culture

Chapter 1 considers the idea of culture, as described in The Birth of Tragedy and beyond, where it is understood in terms of its existential functional role. A culture, in this sense, is a worldview seeking to provide people with a form of spiritual sustenance. The most important unifying thread in Nietzsche’s discussion is that this sort of culture serves as a way for human beings to cope with existence. Although the terms in which Nietzsche thinks about these cultures change, basically the same picture continues into his later work. What these various forms of culture (Apolline, Dionysiac, tragic, Socratic) did for the ancient Greeks, he sees Christianity and its offshoots as doing for most people in the Western world. It provides them with a series of reassuring narratives and ways of viewing things that lend meaning and intelligibility to their lives.

Afterword

The Nietzsche I have tried to bring into view in this book is not primarily an exponent of certain philosophical doctrines that we can neatly bring into dialogue with contemporary discussions in meta-ethics, metaphysics, philosophy of mind, and the like. This book’s Nietzsche is instead a philosopher of culture, concerned with diagnosing how Western culture has gone wrong and with putting forward an alternative ideal of what it could become. Although Nietzsche has a number of important philosophical insights for the former sort of contemporary debates, my interest is in Nietzsche in this role as a cultural critic. He offers a withering take on the Christian-moral tradition and the specter of the “last man” that we find ourselves caught between. However overblown his attack is, it is something to be taken seriously, if with several grains of salt. We should take even more seriously his guiding idea in the background that our ideals, institutions, and practices stand in need of such genealogy and critique. This is not to say, as a result of this reflection and scrutiny, that we will abandon these commitments entirely, but instead that we may come to treat them with greater suspicion and ambivalence than we hitherto have. This genealogy and critique—and style of genealogy and critique—is to my mind Nietzsche’s greatest contribution to philosophical thought....

Introduction

In 1872 the young Basel Professor Friedrich Nietzsche, then among the most promising philologists of his day, shocked the scholarly community with the publication of The Birth of Tragedy. In his first book, filled with more fervor than footnotes, Nietzsche dispensed with the cautious, measured claims that were expected of works in Classics and spun a bold narrative about the origins and decline of Attic Greek tragedy. However striking Nietzsche’s historical story was, classical history for its own sake was never Nietzsche’s aim. Modern cultural health was at this point his paramount concern, and he looked to the ancient world for lessons about the modern one. In the person of Richard Wagner, to whom the book is effusively dedicated, Nietzsche saw someone who might bring together a fragmented and directionless modern society through the creation of a new mythology. Such a mythology would give renewed meaning and purpose to human life, and revitalize a flagging culture, where religious belief was on the wane. The centerpiece of this revival would be a new festival, modeled on the Greek tragic festival of yore. With these great, almost absurd, ambitions for Wagner, and for a renewed form of high culture with the potential to transform modern society, it is little surprise that Nietzsche’s hopes were dashed....

Cultural Criticism

Chapter 8 considers Nietzsche’s important work as a cultural critic. This is approached by way of a case study, considering one of the cultural phenomena that occupied Nietzsche most—namely, the Christian-moral outlook—and looking to his critique of it. One interpretation of this critique would be causal in nature, holding that Nietzsche criticizes this outlook on account of its deleterious effects. But, as this chapter argues, we also find in Nietzsche’s work a strenuous objection to the Christian-moral outlook that is leveled on different grounds. Nietzsche will, it is suggested, see the cultural practices and institutions—those of morality foremost among them—as being replete with content, which can be philosophically unearthed, interpreted, and criticized. For Nietzsche, the Christian-moral outlook insidiously enshrines what by his lights are deeply objectionable values and ideals—and these are objectionable independently of their pernicious (and sometimes beneficial) effects.

“Consecration to Culture”

Chapter 6 looks to Nietzsche’s deeply troubling remarks about “slavery in some sense or other” (BGE, 257). The best sort of life for most people, he maintains, is one of “slavery,” in which a person serves a flourishing culture, even just by making a lowly contribution—whether lugging the stones to build the cathedral or sweeping Beethoven’s floor. For by Nietzsche’s paternalistic lights, this is what truly ennobles most people and, according to Nietzsche, grants their lives their highest worth and dignity. Although Nietzsche is hostile to the idea of innate human dignity and its egalitarian trappings enshrined in Christianity and Kantianism, he offers his own revisionary conception of human dignity—a respect merited by what one is able to accomplish and thus possessed in radically different degrees by different people.

The Collectivist Conception of Culture

Chapter 3 considers a certain collectivist idea of culture, which is the sort relevant when Nietzsche thinks about a culture as something potentially valuable for its own sake. The chapter outlines Nietzsche’s conception of such a culture. It argues that it is wrong to read Nietzsche as giving up on culture after his early works and placing all his stock in isolated great individuals instead. For even at the very end of his career, Nietzsche, the chapter argues, views not just great individuals, but entire cultures (e.g. the Roman Empire) as potential bearers of value in their own right as well. Great cultures should not be understood as simply a means to great individuals, nor for that matter great individuals understood as simply a means to great cultures. Both are independent sources of value.

Nietzsche on the Decadence of Individuals and Cultures

Chapter 5 explores Nietzsche’s discussion of decadence. In addition to the encompassing and vague notion of decadence that amounts to a state of decline or the failure to flourish, Nietzsche also uses the idea, especially in his late works in connection with the French term décadence, to pinpoint a particular kind of malady. After explicating this quasi-technical notion, the chapter discusses the relationship that Nietzsche sees between the décadence of individuals and the decadence of whole cultures. It suggests that the connection should not be seen as simply aggregative, but is rather a relation of microcosm to macrocosm. The analogy to individual décadence suggests that when a culture seeks to remedy decadence through extremist measures, that may in fact itself be a telling sign of the culture’s decadence. The great culture can, on the contrary, integrate its decadents, not eliminate them.