DOI: 10.1111/j.1468-0378.2008.00338.x
Responses to Commentators Christopher Janaway
1. Disinterestedness The four papers I am responding to1 address different aspects of Nietzsche and of my discussion in Beyond Selflessness: Reading Nietzsche’s ‘Genealogy’, but a topic to which they all might be said to relate, closely or more loosely, is Nietzsche’s treatment of disinterestedness. The most obvious instance is his reaction to the aesthetic theories of Schopenhauer and Kant, a topic that, as Daniel Came remarks, has tended to be neglected by recent writers on Nietzsche. Came’s prime thesis is that Nietzsche’s criticisms of the view that aesthetic experience is characterized by disinterestedness are misplaced. Some philosophical assumptions govern Came’s response to Nietzsche, namely (1) that ‘disinterestedness just is the distinguishing characteristic of the experience of beauty’ (99), (2) that ‘my attitude towards an object is disinterested, if and only if, in attending to it, I focus only on the object and not on any relations that obtain between the object and anything apart from the object itself’ (95), and (3) that ‘it seems nearly self-evident that in aesthetic experience one’s desires temporarily abate, and it is difficult to imagine a kind of aesthetic experience in which this is not the case’ (95). These claims are representative of a recognizable tradition in aesthetics, of which Schopenhauer is regularly seen as a prime exponent. However, the correctness or otherwise of such assumptions has been much debated in recent aesthetic theory. Claim (1) is surely not true of all experiences of beauty. I suppose Blake had physical beauty at least partially in mind when he wrote: What is it men in women do require? The lineaments of gratified desire. What is it women do in men require? The lineaments of gratified desire. Experiencing the beauty of another human being very often bears relations— various and possibly complex (though often pretty straightforward)—to his or her perceived desirability. With this in mind Nietzsche quotes Stendahl’s idea that beauty is ‘une promesse de bonheur’ (GM III: 6) and against Schopenhauer he enlists other authorities: . . . he thinks that the drive to procreate is negated by beauty . . . Bizarre saint! Someone is contradicting you, and I am afraid that it is nature. Why are the tones, colours, smells, and rhythmic movements of nature European Journal of Philosophy 17:1 ISSN 0966-8373 pp. 132–151 r 2009 Blackwell Publishing Ltd., 9600 Garsington Road, Oxford OX4 2DQ, UK and 350 Main Street, Malden, MA 02148, USA.
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beautiful in the first place? What does beauty bring out?—Fortunately, a philosopher contradicts him too. No less an authority than the divine Plato (—as Schopenhauer himself calls him) asserts something else: that all beauty incites towards procreation,—that is precisely the proprium of its effect, from the most sensual all the way up to the most spiritual . . . (TI, ‘Skirmishes of an Untimely Man’: 22, translation adapted) There are stronger and weaker claims at stake in this discussion. The stronger, with which Nietzsche here allies himself, is that all beauty is experienced in some desire-involving manner, perhaps via processes such as sublimation when it reaches the ‘most spiritual’ level. A less ambitious point is simply that some beauty is not experienced disinterestedly. Now a characteristic move in some modern aesthetic theory will be to discard as irrelevant those uses of the terms ‘beauty’, Scho¨nheit, beaute´ that do not exclude the desirability of the object, on the grounds that admiring someone for their desirability is not an aesthetic experience. This move clearly relies on assumption (3), that desires self-evidently abate in anything that can be called an aesthetic experience. With some of its other common uses safely out of the way, ‘beauty’ can then stake its claim to be solely a matter of aesthetic disinterestedness. Nietzsche’s reasonable query at this point would be: why have theorists in the history of aesthetics made this move? Something, he alleges, must valorize for them the notion of a pure, desire-free experience and motivate their attempt to wed ‘beauty’ solely to it. We shall touch on some of his allegations in this regard below. The aesthetic theorists Nietzsche fastens upon are, understandably, Kant and Schopenhauer. I have argued elsewhere that the aesthetic theories of these two thinkers should not be too closely assimilated.2 Despite the way he is often portrayed by later theorists, Kant does not speak of any ‘disinterested attitude’ and does not require any kind of mental episode in which desires are absent from a subject’s ‘consciousness’, let alone one devoid of conceptual thought. ‘Without interest’ in Kant qualifies ‘pleasure’ or ‘liking’ (Wohlgefallen): only if my liking for the experience of an object is not grounded in the satisfaction of a desire is the related judgement a judgement of taste. Schopenhauer, by contrast, has more reasonably been claimed as a prominent contributor to the ‘aesthetic attitude’ tradition in modern aesthetics.3 He it is who posits an out-of-the-ordinary state, a mind whose consciousness is temporarily cleared of the will, of all desire, emotion, and felt need, even of conceptual thought and the ability to individuate oneself as something existing separately from the object of contemplation.4 It has been questioned in aesthetics whether there is any state of mind that deserves the label ‘aesthetic attitude’. George Dickie (1964) is among those who have argued that it is a mistake to believe in any ‘disinterested’ attitude, since that qualification applies to motives for doing things, not to any identifiable mode of attention; at most taking an ‘aesthetic attitude’ would mean simply concentrating properly on the object one is experiencing. But suppose we are able to counter such criticisms and make it plausible that there do occur disinterested episodes that exhibit, in Came’s words, ‘the phenomenology of aesthetic r
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experience as described by Schopenhauer, or something like it’ (95)—perhaps something not requiring the absence from consciousness of conceptual thought and the capacity for self-identification—then, still, some large questions remain. Does the occurrence of this phenomenology characterize every state of mind that we regard as relevant to the appreciation of aesthetic value? Is such a phenomenology essential to, or definitive of, the aesthetic? We could stipulate this to be the case, thereby giving a partial explanation of what we mean by ‘aesthetic’. But this seems to parallel the restriction of the use of ‘beauty’ discussed above. Once again there is a suspicion that the stipulation might leave out experiences we would wish to include under the heading ‘aesthetic’, particularly if we think of art as a prime arena of the aesthetic. In a recent book Noe¨l Carroll gives some representative examples: . . . many artworks are produced with religious and political purposes in mind. They are not designed to be contemplated disinterestedly, but are connected to practical affairs. A feminist novel might be intended to rouse readers—both women and men—to change their lives. . . . A disinterested reading might subvert the intention of the novel. . . . Surely, a sympathetic response to a social protest fiction about racism—like a dramatization of Cry the Beloved Country—involves being moved to indignation. . . . So in what sense can the sympathetic viewer also be disinterested? (Carroll 1999: 177–8) Do we want to call such responses aesthetic responses, or at least responses relevant to the appreciation of the aesthetic value of their respective works? If so, then that version of the aesthetic that would tie it uniquely to a phenomenology of disinterested contemplation risks appearing arbitrarily narrow. Hence, again, Nietzsche’s psychological question: Why would a theorist of the aesthetic be drawn to privilege this version of the aesthetic over others? However, the refusal to equate the aesthetic with disinterested contemplation, plausible though it is, is not in fact essential to Nietzsche’s case. Even if we were persuaded to revert to something like the Schopenhauerian account of will-less consciousness as definitive of the aesthetic as such, Nietzsche’s fundamental question would remain: why is this kind of experience valued, wanted, aspired to? Answers at different levels can be constructed from materials available in the Genealogy. Here are some of them: Schopenhauer’s investment of such moment in his aesthetic theory can be explained by his (self-confessed) need to escape from sexual desires that he experienced as tormenting, a wish to be able to become the ‘pure, will-less subject’ the theory posits (GM III: 6); philosophers as a breed tend to embrace the ideal of ascetic self-denial and are typically rancorous towards the sensuous and the bodily because they instinctively strive after favourable conditions in which their particular nature can thrive (GM III: 7); philosophers have a recurrent temptation to portray the self as a pure rational or contemplative intellect to which the affects are alien (GM III: 12); Christian morality has taught modern human beings to feel guilt, a form of internalized cruelty, concerning the r
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very existence of ‘natural’ desires that arise out of their ‘inescapable animal instincts’ (GM II: 22); theorists who try to explain the nature of morality are prey to an ide´e fixe that equates value with disinterestedness and self-suppression (GM Preface: 4, 5; GM I: 2); the ascetic ideal, in which the individual affirms something ‘higher’ of supposedly unconditional value but negates his or her own value in the process, is a way of giving meaning to human existence, and the only such way that has yet been found (GM III: 28). In the light of such claims Nietzsche can suggest that the idea of an aesthetic experience in which a pure, will-less self escapes from desires might well exert some pull on Schopenhauer, on philosophers in general, on modern inhabitants of the Christian cultural world, or on the human being as such. All of these diagnoses stand in need of much scrutiny, but none of them would be falsified by the truth of the claim that aesthetic experience is what Schopenhauer says it is. Came’s verdict is that Nietzsche is not justified in interpreting ‘disinterestedness qua disinterestedness’ as an ascetic notion (94). There is a case for saying that Schopenhauer himself makes this connection: his pessimistic assessment of the life to which the will condemns human individuals leads him to regard aesthetic disinterestedness as a brief resting point on the road towards the will’s selfnegation. Imagine the aesthetic state prolonged without end, he says, and you will glimpse the dying away of the will, the complete ‘being rid of’ oneself, that is the only true salvation a human being can hope for.5 However, as Came rightly says, ‘the use to which Schopenhauer puts ‘‘disinterestedness’’ does not entail that disinterestedness itself is ascetic or life-denying’ (94). Perhaps, then, a plausible charge against Nietzsche is that he takes a pattern of connections and extreme consequences that genuinely obtains in Schopenhauer’s philosophy, and incautiously generalizes outwards to other schools of thought and Western culture as a whole, imagining that he finds the same connections and extremes almost wherever he looks. At the beginning of the Genealogy, for example, he moves from ‘the instincts of compassion, self-denial, self-sacrifice, precisely the instincts that Schopenhauer had gilded, deified, and made otherworldly until finally they alone were left for him as the ‘‘values in themselves,’’ on the basis of which he said ‘‘no’’ to life, also to himself’ straight to ‘the great danger to humanity . . . the most uncanny symptom of our now uncanny European culture, as its detour to a new Buddhism? to a Buddhism for Europeans? to—nihilism?’ (GM Preface: 5). Nietzsche regards Schopenhauer’s philosophy as the most blatant symptom of a systemic condition awaiting detection and cure. Had he been closer to thinkers other than his ‘great teacher’ Schopenhauer, the patterns he discerned in Christianity, morality, art, politics, and everyday moral psychology might have assumed a less lurid aspect. But in the end his critical reflections on disinterestedness do not depend for their plausibility on any argument by analogy or generalization from Schopenhauer, but on the degree to which Nietzsche’s particular psychological insights resonate with his reader. A final point in response to Came’s paper. Came points to Nietzsche’s conception of Rausch or intoxication, and suggests that it is relevantly similar to r
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Schopenhauer’s own conception of aesthetic experience. Rausch is a key concept for understanding the Dionysian artistic impulse in Nietzsche’s The Birth of Tragedy, and there, it is true, Nietzsche adopts certain distinctively Schopenhauerian ideas in the attempt to describe it: seeing through the principium individuationis, feeling oneself united with all others, and tearing up the veil of maya, the illusory world of appearance that shrouds the thing in itself. This is supposed to be an experience characterized by a loss of the sense of one’s individuality, and in that respect an element of similarity exists with Schopenhauer’s account of aesthetic experience. As Came himself points out, however, Rausch is hardly a state of disinterestedness, or indeed of contemplation. It is supposedly a state of heightened emotion, and is more concerned with the dissolution of the conscious distinction between subject and subject than with that between the subject and object of its perception. Nor is it plausible that Nietzsche’s critique of the ascetic ideal in the Genealogy is impugned by an attachment to anything like Schopenhauer’s aesthetic theory, since by that time Nietzsche has jettisoned most of the remnants of Schopenhauerian doctrine he had been clinging to in the earlier period. There are later passages on intoxication and art, which Came refers to,6 but they are intended to characterize artistic activity (not passive contemplation), and could scarcely be more at odds with Schopenhauer given their proclamation that Rausch is ‘strongest in the mating season’, embodies ‘sexuality and voluptuousness’, and that it ‘is precisely an exalted feeling of power’, ‘the expression of victorious will’ and ‘a harmonizing of all the strong desires’.
2. Affects, Drives, Perspectives and Selves It is agreed by many that GM III: 12 is the definitive published text that presents Nietzsche’s ‘perspectivism’. When Nietzsche announces that ‘there is only a perspectival seeing, only a perspectival ‘‘knowing’’‘he is opposing the conception of ‘objectivity’ championed by Schopenhauer in his aesthetic theory, the objectivity allegedly attained by a ‘pure, will-less, painless, timeless subject of knowledge’. In Schopenhauer’s view ordinary consciousness is in thrall to the will, with its host of ‘passions and affects’, which are constantly ebbing and flowing movements of the will for and against, but in the consciousness of the artistic genius, and to a lesser extent in all of us, a purer kind of cognition is attainable in which all affects and passions are switched off or suspended and the subject comes as close as it can to being a passive mirror of what is objectively there. Nietzsche takes this account of ‘objectivity’ beyond its aesthetic context, and portrays it as emblematic of a wider temptation for philosophers, that of positing an ideal cognitive state in which we may attain true knowledge, unpolluted by emotions, desires, and personal or bodily attachments. Nietzsche uses the metaphor of seeing, which he says can only be perspectival, in order to say something about ‘knowing’. And what makes the ‘knowing’ perspectival for Nietzsche is its connection with the affects. In the last four r
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sentences of the section, which contain all the relevant remarks about objectivity, knowledge, philosophers, and the nonsensical non-perspectival eye, the only literal cashing-out given to the seeing metaphor is the linkage of ‘knowing’ with the affects: ‘the difference in perspectives and affective-interpretations’ can be made useful for knowledge; we stand to improve our ‘concept’ and ‘objectivity’ of something ‘the more affects we allow to speak . . ., the more eyes . . . we know how to bring to bear’; ‘to eliminate the will altogether, to disconnect the affects one and all’ is neither possible nor desirable, and one should have ‘one’s pro and contra (Fu¨r und Wider, For and Against)’ in one’s power. This is our text. And on its basis I suggest that Nietzsche puts forward two hypotheses: (1) that there is only knowledge that is guided or facilitated by our affects, (2) that the more different affects we allow to guide our knowledge, the better our knowledge will be.7 The perspectivist claims of this passage are not accurately captured by saying that knowledge is always guided by ‘interests’ (such as ‘the interests we employ in knowing the object’ or ‘practical interests . . . in particular the interests in control and survival’);8 it is true that Nietzsche opposes as absurd the notion of ‘disinterested contemplation’, but the formulation of this (interesselose Anschauung) and the direct quotation from Schopenhauer show that ‘without interest’ must be taken in the sense of disinterestedness discussed above, namely absence of desire, will, and all the ‘affects and passions’ that Schopenhauer embraces under the heading of willing.9 Nietzsche’s claims about the affects and knowledge here appear somewhat startling. I do not presuppose that they yield any clearly defensible position, but I do claim that they can throw light on Nietzsche’s aims and practices in writing the Genealogy itself—of which more later. Ken Gemes has specific doubts about the two hypotheses itemized above. First, he argues that it makes sense to conceive of drives as the locus of interpretation, but that despite Nietzsche’s talk of Affekt-interpretationen and the snappy phrase in his notebooks ‘Who interprets?—Our affects’,10 affects are simply not the right kind of state to bear this role. Secondly, Gemes argues that hypothesis (1) can be read as asserting either a causal relation between affects and knowing, yielding what turns out to be a banal claim, or a constitutive relation, making for a claim so strong as to be implausible. That Nietzsche made a banal or implausible claim here would in my view be something we could live with, and would not in itself be sufficient to counteract the textual evidence that supports my reading. However, if we can read Nietzsche’s claim as either more credible or more pointed, the passage will obviously gain in philosophical significance. On the basis of thirty instances where Nietzsche uses the term Affekt in the Genealogy and Beyond Good and Evil11 I maintain that affects must be regarded as ‘feelings of one sort or another’, ‘ways in which we feel’.12 But the resulting list of states is extremely varied. Gemes equates ‘feelings’ with qualia: . . . a feeling, a ‘what it feels like’ does not seem to have the right temporal spread or active character to do interpreting. Does, for instance a feeling of pain do any interpreting? . . .. The problem here is related to the qualia/ r
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cognitive state distinction advanced by such modern philosophers as Wilfred Sellars. Feelings, qualia, don’t have cognitive content or aboutness. (Gemes 2009: 104) But these points arguably leave a great majority of Nietzsche’s Affekte unaffected. He refers to affects of love, hatred, hope, envy, revenge, and such states as a feeling of looking down on someone and a feeling of wanting to justify oneself in the eyes of others. I take it that there is no prospect of equating any of these with bunches of qualia, however complex. Gemes’ two considerations are whether affects ‘have the right temporal spread’, whether they persist for long enough to play any role in interpretation; and whether affects can have ‘cognitive content or aboutness’. But someone’s love, hope, hatred, or feeling of wanting to justify themselves could last a long time, while still being in ordinary parlance something that they felt. And each of these states must have cognitive content in order to exist: one cannot love without loving someone, presumably in the light of some qualities one believes them to have, one cannot have a feeling of wanting or taking revenge without quite specific beliefs concerning the past actions of a certain party towards whom one experiences a certain kind of desire, and so on. Gemes’ objections arise from my use of the term ‘feelings’, a term that suffers from some imprecision (Schopenhauer incidentally complained over the ‘immeasurably wide sphere’ of the parallel concept Gefu¨hl).13 I speculate that ‘an affect . . . is what it feels like when a drive is active inside oneself’,14 which formulation may misleadingly point towards qualia. But if we forget about qualia and concentrate on the kinds of affects that, I think, primarily concern Nietzsche, the latter seem quite likely to be cited in common-sense psychology as having the sort of interpretive role Gemes looks for, perhaps using metaphors similar to Nietzsche’s. For instance: ‘You’re seeing him through the eyes of your hatred’, ‘His feeling of superiority did not allow him to understand my predicament’, ‘Her love spoke louder than her feelings of vengefulness’, ‘He only ever sees things from a hopeful perspective’. Gemes’ further objection to construing affects as ‘what interprets’ is that there is a better candidate: drives—better both because of what we can infer about the nature of drives in Nietzsche’s conception, and because he more often talks of drives as explaining beliefs, arguments and intellectual projects, and as being constitutive of the self. These points I concede without objection. In GM III: 12 we might have expected Nietzsche to say that there are only ‘drive-interpretations’, and that the more drives we allow to speak about a matter, the better we will understand it. He does not do so, but it is not implausible to construe his elusive idea about ‘pro and con’ (or ‘for and against’) as equivalent to ‘having one’s opposing drives in one’s control and being able to shift them in and out’— especially since he elsewhere he writes: ‘It is our needs that interpret the world: our drives and their for and against’.15 ‘The will’ here is a Schopenhauerian locution (pointedly opposing Schopenhauer in his own language) for what Nietzsche would properly describe as ‘the order of rank [among] the innermost drives’ of one’s nature (BGE: 6). Finally, when Nietzsche encourages us to think of the soul r
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as a multiple ‘society constructed out of drives and affects’ (BGE: 12), who is to say that ‘drives and affects’ is not meant as an emphatic way of referring twice to the same sort of thing? Nietzsche’s term ‘drive’ (Trieb) has a wide extension and can be characterized only as something like a relatively enduring disposition to behave in certain ways, which is not within the full rational or conscious control of the agent or organism to which it is attributed. But if the affects Nietzsche has in mind are also relatively enduring, if they are not just occurrent episodes but rather dispositional in character (as a long-lasting love, hatred and so on presumably are), and if he refers to drives and affects more or less interchangeably, then despite its not mentioning drives as such the text of GM III: 12 licenses a reading close to the one Gemes recommends. We might still wish to detect some point in differentiating between, say, a drive towards revenge and affects of revenge. The affects of revenge could be many—the pain and humiliation of being attacked, the pleasurable prospect of harming the attacker, a building frustration as the attacker eludes one’s power, a mixture of fulfilment, shame, and incipient lack of purpose once the longed-for harm is inflicted. All these affects could be explained by a single coherent drive towards revenge, and could be considered different aspects of how it can feel to be someone driven to revenge. Conversely, what someone may regard as their enduring feeling of love might be given an explanation in terms of the confluence of many drives—as it might be, drives to sexual gratification, to being cared for, or to being depended upon by someone weaker. The second of Gemes’ objections concerned the nature of the connection claimed between affects and knowledge. If that connection is causal and the claim is that ‘what affects we have will, to some degree, determine the knowledge we have’ (105), then Nietzsche would seem to be saying something merely trivial in his hypothesis (1). If, on the other hand, affects are supposed to play a constitutive role in cognition (a view I attribute to Nietzsche),16 then this is both unexplained and implausibly strong: ‘It entails for instance, that a highly developed but unfeeling robot, or a person who due to brain bisection has lost the ability to have feelings, would be incapable of having any knowledge’ (106). There were two motivations for attributing the stronger, constitutive view to Nietzsche. First, once again, fidelity to the text. Nietzsche denies that there is any non-perspectival ‘knowing’ and says that a non-perspectivally knowing subject would be an ‘absurdity and non-concept’—not just that, as a matter of fact, affects always impinge causally on cognition. Secondly, we should consider the relation between hypotheses (1) and (2). If (1) were Gemes’ weaker causal claim, it would not lend support to (2)’s assertion that maximizing the affects improves cognition. That affects have a causal impact on the gaining of knowledge is eminently compatible with the view that one should seek to minimize their impact. It would make better sense to think that increasing knowledge goes hand in hand with increasing one’s affects if one held that (somehow) experiencing affects is an essential part of knowing. However, I must agree that, if read as a generalization across all instances of knowing and all subject matters, the stronger claim looks under-defined and implausible. r
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So is Nietzsche giving us a general theory of knowledge here? Gemes argues that he is not, seeking thereby to free him from the bind of making either the weak causal or the implausible constitutive claim about knowledge and the affects. For Gemes Nietzsche’s primary aims are therapeutic—to remedy the sickness of the human animal which consists in our having become split off from many of our natural drives—and the perspectivist utterances pronounce not so much a theory as an injunction: ‘let as many drives as possible be expressed’ (106). This is in some ways an attractive proposal. The saying ‘there is only perspectival ‘‘knowing’’’ comes after two sentences in which Nietzsche issues exhortations: ‘Let us . . . not be ungrateful toward such resolute reversals of the familiar perspectives and valuations . . .’, ‘Let us guard ourselves better . . . against the dangerous old conceptual fabrication that posited a ‘‘pure, painless, will-less, timeless subject of knowledge’’‘. If the same vein of exhortation continues, we might hear Nietzsche as offering us not a theory but an encouraging slogan: ‘Let us say to ourselves ‘‘There is only a perspectival knowing’’’. I am sympathetic to the idea that this portion of Nietzsche’s rhetoric seeks to enjoin a certain outlook and is primarily therapeutic in its aim. This is close to what I meant in stating that this passage ‘does not . . . read as if its first purpose is to make some authoritative contribution to epistemology’.17 To see where I nonetheless differ from Gemes, we must consider who it is that Nietzsche’s injunctions are addressed to, and what it is they would have to gain from heeding them. It is ‘as knowers’ that we are to be grateful to perspectivereversals, and ‘gentlemen philosophers’ who are urged not to believe in the pure subject of knowledge. Gemes tends to play down the significance of Nietzsche’s address to ‘we knowers’, the mode in which the Genealogy opens (Preface: 1) and to which it periodically reverts.18 For Gemes the target for therapy is sick human animals as such, or, elsewhere, ‘we moderns’.19 I agree that for Nietzsche most philosophers or scholars suffer from the sicknesses of the modern human being. Nietzsche thinks that ‘knowers’ require therapy to become more healthy and that such health concerns properties of, and relations between, their drives. But there is—vitally for Nietzsche, I think—such a thing as being a philosopher in a more healthy way or seeking after knowledge in more healthy way, and these are arguably his concerns here. If philosophers could actually become the kind of pure perspectiveless subject they aspire to be, they would be (in the final words of GM III: 12) ‘castrating’ their intellects. Nietzsche is seeking to motivate a therapeutic re-orientation specifically in our method of enquiry, a change in our conception of ourselves as investigators. Before leaving Gemes’ paper, a brief word on the questions he raises concerning the notion of a unified self. Nietzsche repeatedly states that there is no ‘I’, no ‘subject’, and that the self or soul is a collectivity of drives standing to one another in relations of dominance, subservience, competition and co-operation— the ‘social construction’ of drives (and affects) mentioned above. A point I strive to make is that something more must be said about a human being if it is to make sense to address injunctions to him or her, such as ‘allow as many affects as possible to speak’, ‘let as many drives as possible be expressed’, ‘have affects in r
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your control, and shift them in and out’, or the rallying-call of the whole Genealogy ‘call your moral values into question’. For Nietzsche any organism is a collectivity of drives relating to one another as described, a kind of teleological unity among drives. But most organisms, including higher mammals, human infants and some other human beings, are not such that one could meaningfully exhort them to undertake these kinds of re-conception of themselves. So being an organized collection of drives is not sufficient for being the kind of being Nietzsche assumes can become more healthy by heeding his injunctions. What more is required? Can it be simply some additional properties of some of the drives themselves, or some facts about their relation to one another? Nietzsche tends to portray self-reflective resolves as a ‘struggle’ between drives in which one drive ‘complains about’ another, and the ‘more vehement’ drive wins out.20 Gemes (103–4) describes something not so different from this (only simpler) in the case of a hyena facing a boar: drives in the hyena struggle against one another and the fight- or flight-drive proves the more vehement. But one could not encourage a hyena to adopt any attitude towards its drives or affects. I suggest that to make sense of the therapeutic injunctions Nietzsche makes, one must presuppose in those he addresses a unity of self-consciousness, of roughly the kind Kant talks about in the Critique of Pure Reason and Schopenhauer portrays more crudely as the ‘subject’ we each inescapably ‘find ourselves as’.21 Despite Gemes’ invocation of Descartes, this is not to say that a substantial, ontologically robust, causally efficacious thinking thing should find its way into Nietzsche’s (or anyone’s) picture. Nietzsche is principally, and rightly, concerned to oust any self of this kind from his naturalistic psychology. Just as for Schopenhauer the ‘real self’ is not the subject we find ourselves as, but the will expressing itself an organic life-oriented body, so for Nietzsche the real self is a multiplicity of physiologically realized drives. But questions still linger, I have suggested, as to whether Nietzsche must deny, or whether he can or should accept, a unity in selfconsciousness that would enable a distinction between those organisms one can enjoin to become more healthy and those one cannot.22
3. Genealogy and Psychology According to my reading, Nietzsche’s perspectivist claim, that to understand a subject-matter fully one must multiply and master one’s ‘affect-interpretations’, can be illuminated by, and can in turn illuminate, his own investigative procedure in the Genealogy. His provocative rhetoric is not a mere optional exercise in ‘style’, but rather an integral part of his persuasive strategy, directed towards making explicit the acquired habits of feeling that he regards as the genuine basis of our moral evaluations, and towards the end of enabling us to ‘feel differently’ rather than merely acquire different beliefs about our values.23 Nietzsche’s former associate Paul Re´e is cast in the role of a would-be genealogist who fails, allegedly in part because of his weddedness to ‘impersonality’ as an enquirer. Peter Kail raises questions about the notion of disinterestedness in r
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genealogical enquiry and in particular about this contrast between the methods of Re´e and Nietzsche. Does Re´e, as I suggest, go wrong in his historical endeavour because he is (or tries to be) disinterested? Or is it rather that he is not disinterested enough, ‘insufficiently detached from his own moral beliefs’ (115)? ‘It makes the most telling difference’, says Nietzsche, referring almost certainly to Re´e, whether a thinker has a personal relationship to his problems and finds in them his destiny, his distress, and his greatest happiness, or an ‘impersonal’ one, meaning he is only able to touch and grasp them with the antennae of cold, curious thought. In the latter case nothing will come of it, that much can be promised. (GS: 345) But what is the criticism of Re´e’s method supposed to be? Kail writes: . . . presumably the methodological point is that either Re´e’s disengaged approach encourages him either to ignore or suppress any affect or drive presenting itself to his consciousness, or he is in fact deluded in thinking that he is so disengaged from his evaluative stance. . . . But is disinterestedness here to blame? Or is it rather that thinkers are insufficiently disinterested? (Kail 2009: 115) Let us make the case a little more concrete by way of an example. In Re´e’s account moral values originate deep in the human past when, by natural selection of one kind of community over others, a sentiment of disapprobation becomes habitually attached to egoistic behaviour and a sentiment of approbation to its opposite.24 Nietzsche counters that a particular stage in history and a particular re-interpretation of power-relations (the so-called ‘slave-revolt in morality’) is required before something called egoism is routinely found worthy of disapprobation, but that we miss this if we proceed as Re´e does—we make the mistake of taking the equation of ‘good’ with ‘unegoistic’, which is in fact a residue of much subsequent history, as something that was present at the origin of all morality. For Nietzsche (as I construe him), if we become aware that our own distaste for egoistic behaviour plays a role in warping our grasp of the past, we may be able to see beyond it and apprehend a historical situation in which our kind of distaste was absent, or valued differently, or at least not given the moral interpretation we now give it. Nietzsche claims that not every value system in which some human beings are marked out as ‘good’ is founded upon negative feelings towards seeking one’s own ends and positive feelings towards promoting the well-being of others or protecting them from suffering. Our value system is founded on such feelings—but adopting the posture of investigative disinterestedness stops us from recognizing ourselves as part of what is to be investigated, and from seeing feelings we regard as universal or timeless for what they are in Nietzsche’s view, namely feelings that have acquired a salient role in our modern, post-Christian morality in particular. r
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Kail’s intervention reveals a complexity involved in applying Nietzsche’s affect-perspectivism and critique of disinterestedness to his own genealogical methods. On the one hand, our account of the origins of morality is liable to be inaccurate if we aspire to impersonality and thereby fail to become alive to the host of feelings we may have invested in our account; on the other hand, once aware of those feelings, unless we are able to distance ourselves sufficiently from them, we shall be hampered in our attempt to understand the ‘real history’ of morality in a way that liberates us from the narrowness of our personal and parochial attitudes. Nietzsche’s stated approach demands not just the arousal of affects, but their multiplication and diversity (‘the more affects we allow to speak about a matter . . .’), and this results in ambivalences of feeling, pros and cons towards the objects of investigation. The most blatant example is in the Genealogy’s First Treatise where the nobles are admirable heroes but disgusting monsters at the same time, while the slaves are despicable weakly specimens yet awe-inspiring in their achievement of a revaluation that overturns noble values. Nietzsche demonstrably heightens the emotional tone of both halves of these responses,25 and miniature parables in the text help us to view the situation from different perspectives: how it would feel to be a lamb, how it would feel to be a bird of prey (GM I: 13). In the Second Treatise (especially GM II: 3 and 6) Nietzsche reminds us how cruelty makes us (‘modern humans’ or ‘tame domestic animals’) wince, and in the same breath tempts us to identify with the great joy in cruelty that for so long was, and may still be, a bedrock of human psychology. Kail in effect suggests that the point of inviting such affective ambivalences is to detach us from unreflective complicity with any one emotional response to the subject matter. This advances us some way towards understanding how Nietzsche can say in GM III: 12 that the more affects we bring to bear, ‘that much more complete will our ‘‘concept’’ . . ., our ‘‘objectivity’’ be’. But it makes sense to envisage an improved grasp of moral phenomena here only if we see Nietzsche’s aim as not just that we undergo many affects but that we adopt reflective attitudes towards them such as approving or disapproving, being amused or disgusted, or regarding them as symptoms for further investigation. Kail urges us to distinguish between a ‘context of discovery’ and a ‘context of justification’ (116). The narratives Nietzsche gives of the origins of our moral values may jolt us out of our complacent sense of being a will-less subject that is not among the phenomena to be studied, reveal to us the richness and complexity of our own evaluative dispositions, suggest that it is in the activities of drives and the resolutions of their power-struggles that values originate, and encourage us to regard a revolution in feeling and a re-alignment of our drives, rather than a change in our judgements, as the ultimate therapeutic aim of the whole exercise; but none of this answers the question ‘What . . . makes for the epistemic correctness of the history in the genealogy?’ (ibid.). If Nietzsche is to shift the reader towards a revised understanding of the nature of his or her own moral values, and thereby open a space in which their value might be ‘called into question’, it is crucial that his psychological explanations of the genesis of our r
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moral values are plausible to that reader. If Nietzsche is instigating a revisionary ‘theoretical description’ of human psychology, his genealogy risks lacking persuasive power. So to what extent are his central concepts, such as ressentiment and will to power, ones we already have reason to acknowledge? For Kail ressentiment simply ‘[does] not figure in folk-psychology’ though it might be an extension of that psychology. Will to power, on the other hand, ‘can only be described as theoretical’ (118). Let us examine them separately. It is arguable that Nietzsche’s concept of ressentiment and the kinds of explanation he undertakes with it can indeed be construed as extensions at least of today’s folk psychology. (Nietzsche was ahead of his time, and arguably played a part (largely indirect) in the popularization of such ideas as the influence of unconscious drives on conscious thought and behaviour, or the repression of unsatisfiable desires.) Even without the term ressentiment, Nietzsche can still make descriptions such as the following: human beings commonly have a drive towards inflicting harm in retaliation for harm they have incurred at the hands of others; when those others are physically or socially more powerful, the desire to harm them may be repressed, but can still cause forms of behaviour that tend to fulfil the drive to retaliate in ways that are partially disguised from the agent; one of these forms of behaviour is the invention of moral categories according to which harming others weaker than oneself is an evil we are all free to refrain from committing; once one applies these moral categories, the resulting feeling of superiority over the more powerful party resolves the unfulfilled drive to retaliate. We may or may not accept that any specific such explanation is true, but the prior question is whether we already have reason to regard the kinds of psychological process invoked as ones that can occur; and I would argue that we should find no special difficulty in this regard. Things look different with Nietzsche’s conception of will to power. Though I shall not rehearse the arguments here, I defend the line that Nietzsche most likely intends his doctrine of a ‘power-will playing itself out in all happening’, alias the claim that ‘all happening in the organic world is an over-powering’ and that will to power is ‘the essence of life’ (GM II: 12), as a serious empirical generalization.26 This doctrine, so construed, may test the nature and degree of Nietzsche’s commitment to giving scientific explanations, or explanations continuous with the sciences. Brian Leiter introduced the claim that Nietzsche’s naturalism is characterized by a commitment to what he calls ‘methods continuity’ and ‘results continuity’ with the natural sciences.27 As a way of trying to cast some doubt on the latter claim,28 I raise the speculative question whether Nietzsche would abandon his commitment to the doctrine of will to power, with its claim that active appropriation pertains at all levels of description in the organic world, if he were to become convinced that it conflicted irreconcilably with the best findings of the sciences. Kail urges us not to assume with any confidence that Nietzsche would stick to his own doctrine at the expense of continuity with the sciences. I agree. Nietzsche was familiar with scientific views of his day that posited internal will-like activity and competition as forces that would explain the functioning of living beings and their organs, for example. He may have been holding out for r
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biological science to come down on this side of the debate and conclude that there is an essence of life irreducible to the mechanistic and adaptationist terms whose domination of science he criticizes in the aforementioned section of GM II. But my question was how confident we should be in the other direction. The prominence Leiter gives to Nietzsche’s commitment to continuity with the results of the sciences could be taken to imply that, were he following his true guiding principles, Nietzsche’s priority would be to fall in line with mechanism and adaptation if these became recognized as providing the best scientific account available. But I do not think there is unequivocal evidence that Nietzsche would consider whatever happened in the natural sciences as the highest court of appeal on such a matter. Nietzsche thinks he has a workable hypothesis about the essence of all happening in the organic world, and since he seeks naturalistic explanations of the attitudes underlying morality, he is inclined to think that they must fit his model of nature as such: if humanity is to be viewed as part of nature, and if nature is in essence will to power, then it is intelligible that he would think human psychological processes are manifestations of will to power. But are the psychological accounts of our values that Nietzsche offers in the Genealogy vitiated by the global will to power theory? Is the presence of that theory sufficient to remove his psychological descriptions from the class of those we ‘already have reason to acknowledge’ and deprive us of the kinds of reason he alleges we have to call our values into question? The answer depends on where we expect the potential effectiveness of Nietzsche’s text to be found. Does Nietzsche’s persuasiveness rest on his first convincing us of the truth of a general theory of nature, or of organic life, or even of a single governing principle of all human psychology? Arguably not; it rests rather on whether his particular psychological narratives resonate with us as plausible accounts of ways in which human minds work, much as we might find resonance in the narratives of a Shakespeare, Proust, or Henry James, whose powers of recognition and description seem to exceed our own capabilities but yet to reveal new aspects of what really happens to some human beings. The chief difference is that for Nietzsche the story is not something fictional, but a shot at the truth about the origin of our own entrenched attitudes. Some aspects of Nietzsche’s narratives will ring truer than others, some will be unwelcome, some will leave readers cold. A case could in principle be made that the greater part of them ought to leave everyone unpersuaded, that Nietzsche was, contrary to prevailing opinion, a bad intuitive psychologist, but it is hard to imagine being convinced of that simply on the grounds that he adhered to a theory of nature, or human nature, as will to power. 4. Re-valuing Christian Values As part of my attempt to explore how the rhetoric of affective provocation may be integral to Nietzsche’s genealogy and his attempt to call values into question, I discuss GM I: 14 in some detail. Nietzsche’s strategy here is to split the narrator’s voice off from that of a character called Mr Rash and Curious whom we follow as r
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he infiltrates the dark cavern where slavish or Christian values are fabricated. Stephen Mulhall takes this section and my reading of it as his point of departure, and offers what is both in some respects a more detailed reading and also a wider take on the significance of the passage for Nietzsche’s overall project. I must thank Mulhall for pointing out an error in my allegedly ‘close reading’. The very last words of this dramatic section are ‘Enough! Enough!’ Whereas I attribute them to the ‘Rash and Curious’ character, Mulhall points out correctly that they are spoken by the voice of the passage’s narrator. Mr Rash and Curious is earlier given the same words, but that does not excuse the mistake. 29 Mulhall suggests that my reading misses certain other dimensions of the interrelation between character, narrator and reader in GM I: 14. Why is the character called Mr Rash and Curious? Mulhall considers it striking that I should regard this character merely as a generic ‘representative of you and me, the present readers of Nietzsche’s text’: his curiosity (Mulhall suggests, 113) marks him out as a philosopher, one of ‘we men of knowledge’, and his rashness indicates that he is in danger of disturbing the ‘unknownness to himself’ that characterized knowers in the very first sentence of the Genealogy. Nietzsche’s focus is indeed often on philosophers, as I emphasize elsewhere (and above in response to Gemes, for example, at p. 140 above). I am not sure how much the point matters in the case of Mr Rash and Curious, but here I would resist narrowing the character’s identity in this way. Nietzsche states that the ‘art of surprise’ governs the construction of each of the Genealogy’s treatises.30 A surprise in the First Treatise is, in effect: ‘When you react against the blatant power-seeking behaviour of the nobles in this narrative, you owe your reaction of disgust and blame to the morality created by equally power-seeking behaviour on the part of resentful slave-types, disguised by them as faith, hope, and love.’ A different surprise occurs in the culmination of the ascetic ideal discussion in Genealogy III: ‘You, as modern anti-metaphysical scientific seeker of knowledge, who consider yourself free of the values of Christianity, embody those values to perfection in your own faith in the value of truth.’ In order to bring off both surprises, it pays Nietzsche not to highlight too early how the values of philosophers in particular are to be called into question, or how their unknownness to themselves is to be breached, even though the seeds for that are being sown from the start. If Mr Rash and Curious dramatizes a reaction of disgust on behalf of the reader, what does that reaction show us about the values it is directed towards and about the evaluative stance that might supersede them? Mulhall alerts us to two specific connections between GM I. 14 and passages in earlier sections. First, the idea that the fabricators of the Christian ideal are ‘turning weakness into an accomplishment’ picks up the account of the origin of the belief in a ‘neutral subject with free choice’ from section 13. Secondly, the discussion of faith, hope and love at the end of section 14 (and beginning of 15) echoes the terms of section 12’s eulogy of a potential human being ‘who is a stroke of luck . . . and for whose sake one may hold fast to faith in man!’ and its lament that ‘with the fear of man we have also forfeited the love of him, the reverence toward him, the hope for him’. r
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For Mulhall Nietzsche’s positive use of ‘faith, hope and love’ suggests that the only way to overcome the influence of (Christian) morality’s ideal is to employ its own terms otherwise, that an ‘emancipatory potential . . . lies hidden within the linguistic fabric of that ideal—. . . one that can be achieved only by going through and beyond its underlying valuation of the world’ (127). I wonder about the ‘only’ here. Is it only by ‘going through and beyond’ Christianity that one can emancipate oneself from it? It depends at least how the rather unspecific ‘going through and beyond’ is explicated. Is it only Christians who can attain the alternative anti-nihilistic values Nietzsche hints at? Admittedly, if we are so steeped in Christian values as Nietzsche alleges, then merely denying Christianity and replacing it with something else is not really an option for us. But is it essential to Nietzsche’s case that he adopt Christian terms of reference? One could perhaps read the situation differently. Nietzsche’s ever-flexible rhetoric sometimes borrows terms from positions he is criticizing and uses them in parodic fashion. Sometimes he hooks his readers by appealing opportunistically to values they would recognize, although he himself rejects them. And finally, are ‘faith’, ‘hope’ and ‘love’ the exclusive property of Christianity anyway: might Nietzsche’s line not be that any set of values short of nihilism must include faith, hope and love, and that the task is to undo Christianity’s particular appropriation of them? Mulhall’s discussion suggests other potential problems. If we are meant to be disgusted by the vengeful thirst for domination on the part of the fabricators of slave morality, are we not cast in the same mould as the powerless reacting against the strong? Does not Mr Rash and Curious then display a ‘gesture expressive of slavishness’ (126)? And does not the idea that the fabricators of morality are in fact power-seekers undermine either the claim that the weak are not free to be strong or the claim that they were genuinely weak in the first place? These questions raise more issues than can adequately be dealt with in a short space. One point is that in the process of fabrication witnessed by Mr Rash and Curious the ‘Kingdom of God’ is a compensatory fantasy that generates a real enough feeling of gaining power, but no real power. For this the weak need not have the freedom to be strong, only to dream of strength. This answer will not ultimately suffice, however, since in the full story Nietzsche is clear that slavish values have been victorious (GM I: 7), or that, as he puts it, Rome has succumbed to Judea (GM I: 16). Any account of the Genealogy must face the question how the weak managed to become stronger than the strong, and it is well known that the First Treatise on its own leaves gaps in that story. I suggest that the disgusted reaction of Mr Rash and Curious capitalizes on a more familiar disgust, nurtured by Nietzsche earlier in the text, towards the dominant behaviour of the nobles. If this is right, then Mr Rash and Curious is indeed reacting as someone who is instinctively repulsed by dominant selfseeking behaviour. But this is precisely the point: his instincts are Christianized, as those of Nietzsche’s predicted readers would be to a large extent. He also reacts with strong feeling against the falseness of the whisperings he hears in the workshop where ideals are fabricated, thereby showing that he cares, Christianr
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like, about truthfulness. As I put it, the object of his disgust is ‘that a system of values which exists to fulfil (in imagination) the drive towards power should falsely pass itself off as in opposition to the drive towards power’ (pp. 105–6). So we have here at least a hint of the ‘internal critique’ that some have argued, and others denied, to be essential to Nietzsche’s project. Here are two recent versions of what an internal critique would be: . . . a critique of [morality] on the grounds that its own proclaimed standards (e.g. ‘love one another’) require a condemnation of [morality] itself given its typical motives (e.g. hatred) on Nietzsche’s account. (Leiter 2002: 174)31 . . . a way of showing those committed to holding another perspective [that of morality] that they should endorse [Nietzsche’s] perspective in the light of reasons internal to their current perspective. . . . [T]he reasons that he adduces must express values intrinsic to the perspective currently held by those he is concerned to persuade. (Owen 2007: 41)32 Does the episode with Mr Rash and Curious enact an internal critique in either of these senses? Does it, and does the whole arc of the master–slave narrative it sits within, suggest that if Christianity originates from a drive to dominate and an untruthful denial of that drive, then anyone with Christian values is required to condemn Christianity? Does Nietzsche give an adherent of Christian morality reasons in light of which, simply by virtue of his or her endorsing the values of that Christian morality, he or she should adopt alternative values? What I object to in such readings is the ‘required’ and the ‘should’. In my view Nietzsche seeks to elicit affective responses that reveal to the reader the nature of his or her instinctive habits of valuation. He counts on his typical reader having some basically Christian instincts. Sometimes he exploits a Christian reaction in order to turn it against Christian presuppositions. At other times he elicits essentially Christian responses with an invitation to question whether those responses are the healthy or appropriate ones for us to have. But Nietzsche also tempts the reader to react in ways that lie outside the evaluative habits of morality. In at least some adherents of the morality he criticizes there lurk dispositions to warm to qualities not inherently valued in morality itself: self-assertion, heroism, strength, greatness, affirmation of life. Nietzsche tests our ability to admire these human traits and be open to the feelings of fear and uncertainty that such admiration brings with it (see especially GM I: 11). So, from somewhere outside the system of values the slaves created, we can admire even them for the immensity of their creative achievement, their strong will and ingenuity, and the huge opposition they managed to overcome. At the same time, as heirs to their values we retain our tendency to recoil from the brutal nobles, to polarize our reactions into approbation or compassion for the slaves, hatred and fear of the nobles. But then if the slaves are mendacious and covertly out for power, the very affective tendencies we have inherited from them can themselves make that polarization begin to feel precarious. In all this there is no requirement that anyone r
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who is used to making moral evaluations should make other evaluations. There is the by now familiar multiplication of ‘affect-interpretations’ for and against, which flings us into a process that for Nietzsche is the best way of understanding what morality is: a re-awakening of those conflicting drives and affects that history has built into us. Towards the end of GM I he writes: The two opposed values ‘good and bad’, ‘good and evil’, have fought a terrible millennia-long battle on earth; and as certainly as the second value has had the upper hand for a long time, even so there is no shortage of places where the battle goes on, undecided. . . . [T]oday there is perhaps no more decisive mark of the ‘higher nature’, of the more spiritual nature, than to be conflicted in that sense and still a real battleground for those opposites. (GM I: 16) Not everyone is of a sufficiently high nature to be such a battleground, or to allow themselves to become it consciously. But, I argue, this consciousness is what Nietzsche seeks to promote in the first instance, and it constitutes a vital element in ‘calling our values into question’. How we progress from being aware of the ambivalence and complexity of our affects to a more decisive change in our values is a further question. At least a start on that question would be to explore better what Nietzsche means by his alternative to the goal of disinterested objectivity, namely ‘to have one’s pro and contra in one’s power and shift them in and out’ (GM III: 12).33 Christopher Janaway Philosophy School of Humanities University of Southampton Southampton SO17 1BJ UK
[email protected] NOTES 1
Came 2009, Gemes 2009, Kail 2009, and Mulhall 2009. See Janaway 2003; and Zangwill 2003. 3 See, e.g. Stolnitz 1978; Fenner 1988: 151. 4 See Schopenhauer 1969, vol. 1, §34: 178–9. 5 See Schopenhauer 1969, vol. 1, §68: 390–1. 6 WP: 798, 799, 800: notes from spring of 1888 (see KSA: 13: 235–6, 240, 293–5). Similar points to those I make about these passages apply to the published passages on Rausch in TI, ‘Skirmishes of an Untimely Man’: 8–11. 7 Compare Janaway 2007: 206. 8 See Leiter 1994: 345; Clark 1990: 133. 9 See Schopenhauer 1999: 10; and Schopenhauer 1969, vol. 2, ch. 30: 373. 10 WP: 254 (note from 1885–6, see KSA: 12, 161). 11 See Janaway 2007: 205–6. 2
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Janaway 2007: 206. See Schopenhauer 1969, vol 1, §11, 51. 14 Janaway 2007: 214. 15 WP: 481 (note from 1886–7, see KSA: 12, 315). 16 Janaway 2007: 212. 17 Ibid.: 211. 18 See, e.g. GM III: 24 on ‘we knowers today, we godless ones and antimetaphysicians’. 19 Gemes 2006: 191. I argue against this wider reading of ‘we’ in Janaway 2007:18, n.6. 20 See D 109. 21 See Kant 1998: B131–6, 157–9; Schopenhauer 1969, vol 1, §2, 5 22 There may ultimately be no real disagreement here, as Gemes concedes that a ‘minimally unified self’ is not incompatible with Nietzsche’s other claims (000). 23 See D 103. 24 See Re´e 2003: 89–99. 25 See Janaway 2007: 100–2. 26 See ibid., ch. 9. 27 See Leiter 2002: 3–11. 28 See Janaway 2007: 34–9. 29 I also thank Brian Leiter, who independently points out the same error in Leiter 2008. 30 In EH, ‘Genealogy of Morals.’ 31 See also Leiter 2002: 76. The original has ‘MPS’ (Morality in the Pejorative Sense) for ‘morality’. 32 See also Owen 2007: 6, 137–8. 33 I am grateful to the four commentators for their attention to my book and for their apposite and challenging comments. I would like to thank Peter Kail for proposing and organizing the Symposium in Oxford, March 2008, at which the four papers were first presented, and Robert Stern for accommodating the results in this journal. Thanks also to Ken Gemes for comments on drafts of the present paper. 13
REFERENCES Works by Nietzsche: BGE Beyond Good and Evil, ed. R.-P. Horstmann and J. Norman, trans. J. Norman. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2002. D Daybreak, ed. M. Clark and B. Leiter, trans. R. J. Hollingdale. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1997. EH Ecce Homo, in The Anti-Christ, Ecce Homo, Twilight of the Idols and Other Writings, ed. A. Ridley and J. Norman, trans. J. Norman. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2005. GM On the Genealogy of Morality, trans. M. Clark and A. J. Swensen. Indianapolis: Hackett, 1998. GS The Gay Science, ed. B. Williams, trans. J. Nauckhoff and A. del Caro. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2001. KSA Kritische Studienausgabe, ed. G. Colli and M. Montinari. Munich: Deutscher Taschenbuch Verlag and Walter de Gruyter, 1988, 15 vols.
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TI Twilight of the Idols, in The Anti-Christ, Ecce Homo, Twilight of the Idols and Other Writings, ed. A. Ridley and J. Norman, trans. J. Norman. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2005. WP The Will to Power, ed. W. Kaufmann, trans. W. Kaufmann and R. J. Hollingdale. New York: Vintage Books, 1968.
Other Works: Came, D. (2009), ‘Disinterestedness and Objectivity’, European Journal of Philosophy, 17: 91–100. Carroll, C. (1999), Philosophy of Art: A Contemporary Introduction. London: Routledge. Clark, M. (1990), Nietzsche on Truth and Philosophy. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Dickie, G. (1964), ‘The Myth of the Aesthetic Attitude’, American Philosophical Quarterly, 1: 56–65. Fenner, D. (1988), ‘Aesthetic Attitude’, in M. Kelly (ed.), Encyclopedia of Aesthetics. NewYork/Oxford: Oxford University Press, vol. 1, 151–3. Gemes, K. (2006), ‘We Remain of Necessity Strangers to Ourselves: The Key Message of Nietzsche’s Genealogy’, in C. Davis Acampora (ed.), Nietzsche’s ‘On the Genealogy of Morals’: Critical Essays. Lanham, MD: Rowman and Littlefield, 191–208. —— (2009), ‘Janaway on Perspectivism’, European Journal of Philosophy, 17: 101–112. Janaway, C. (2003), ‘Kant’s Aesthetics and the ‘‘Empty Cognitive Stock’’, in P. Guyer (ed.), Kant’s Critique of the Power of Judgment: Critical Essays. Lanham, MD: Rowman and Littlefield, 67–86. —— (2007), Beyond Selflessness: Reading Nietzsche’s ‘Genealogy’. Oxford: Oxford University Press. Kail, P. J. E. (2009), ‘Naturalism, Method, and Genealogy in Beyond Selflessness’, European Journal of Philosophy, 17: 113–20. Kant, I (1998), Critique of Pure Reason, P. Guyer and A. W. Wood, ed. and trans. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Leiter, B. (1994), ‘Perspectivism in Nietzsche’s Genealogy of Morals’, in R. Schacht (ed.), Nietzsche, Genealogy, Morality. Berkeley: University of California Press. —— (2002), Nietzsche on Morality. London: Routledge. —— (2008), ‘Review of Christopher Janaway, Beyond Selflessness: Reading Nietzsche’s ‘Genealogy’, Notre Dame Philosophical Reviews, 2008.06.03. Mulhall, S. (2009), ‘Nietzsche’s Style of Address: A Response to Christopher Janaway’s Beyond Selflessness’, European Journal of Philosophy, 17: 121–31. Owen, D. (2007), Nietzsche’s ‘Genealogy of Morality’. Stocksfield: Acumen. Re´e, P. (2003), Basic Writings, R. Small, ed. and trans. Urbana–Chicago: University of Illinois Press. Schopenhauer, A. (1969), The World as Will and Representation, E. F. J. Payne, trans. New York: Dover, 2 vols. —— (1999), Prize Essay on the Freedom of the Human Will, E. F. J. Payne, trans., G. Zo¨ller, ed. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Stolnitz, J. (1978), ‘‘The Aesthetic Attitude’’ in the Rise of Modern Aesthetics’, The Journal of Aesthetics and Art Criticism, 36: 409–22. Zangwill, N. (2003), ‘UnKantian Notions of Disinterest’, in P. Guyer (ed.), Kant’s Critique of the Power of Judgment: Critical Essays. Lanham, MD: Rowman and Littlefield, 63–6.
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