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.Per-spectives can be recognized as perspectives just because they differ and theydisagree.We thus demand criteria with which to evaluate our disagreementand order our perspectives.We will use “facts” if we can find them but inmost philosophical matters we will more likely stand on our own sense ofconviction and muster what arguments and rhetorical weapons we can toward off doubt and prevent humiliating refutation (which, however, rarelyundermines our faith in the doctrine at issue.) In other words, we tend tojustify our perspective(s) primarily on the basis of the singular fact that they happen to be our own.(“‘My judgment is my judgment’: no one else iseasily entitled to it—that is what such philosophers of the future may per-haps say of themselves.”)Confessions and Memoirs: A Pleafor the Personal in PhilosophyGradually it has become clear to me what every great philosophy so far hasbeen: namely, the personal confession of its author and a kind of involuntaryand unconscious memoir.—Friedrich Nietzsche, Beyond Good and EvilNietzsche’s philosophy is “the personal confession of its author,” whetheror not it is “involuntary” or “unconscious.” It would be a crass inconsis-tency for him to claim otherwise (though he could, I suppose, try to capital-ize on the “so far” in his comment and claim himself as the first exception).Nietzsche’s philosophy is not merely a confession, of course.(No great phi-losophy could be.) It is, however, irreducibly personal.In every case, Nietzsche argues, philosophy expresses the outlook of the philosopher and defines(sometimes misleadingly, sometimes fraudulently) his or her engagementwith the world and relations with other people.Thus a critique of the phi-losophy entails criticism of the philosopher, and vice versa.But to readphilosophy as “memoir,” to read Nietzsche’s own philosophy as “expres-sion” if not “confession,” is not a reason to ignore the philosophy, nor doesit mean that soundness and persuasiveness of argument are not de rigueuras well.An ad hominem argument, properly understood, appreciates not onlythe profundity of an idea and the effect of an argument but their source andauthor as well. It thus involves a rich conception of the self, as opposed to the minimal, emaciated and merely “transcendental” self—“unencumbered” by emotions, desires, personality, or character—presupposed by somany philosophers from Descartes and Kant to John Rawls.Nietzsche pre-sumes a substantial self, but certainly not in the style of Descartes, as aconfiguration of drives, a psychological self that cannot be distinguished LIVING WITH NIETZSCHEfrom its attributes, attitudes, and ideas.He holds an equally tangible conception of ideas and arguments not as abstract propositions but as part andparcel of the personality or personalities that promulgate them.Thus thefirst person voice is not, for him, a mere presentational device, a rhetoricalanchor (as in Descartes’s Meditations) for a chain of thoughts that could be (and were intended to be) entertained by anybody.Nietzsche’s continuingemphasis on his own uniqueness—one of his more obnoxious stylistic ob-sessions—is important not for its megalomania but for its more modest mes-sage that there is always a particular person behind these words, thesebooks, these ideas.Philosophy, according to Nietzsche, is first of all personal engagement,not arguments and their refutations.The concepts of philosophy do nothave a life of their own, whether in some Platonic heaven or on the black-boards of the philosophy lounge.They are from the start culturally con-structed and cultivated, and insofar as they have any meaning at all, thatmeaning is first of all personal.The does not mean that they are private,much less personally created, but that they are personally felt, steeped in and constitutive of the character of the person in question.So much for thealleged ad hominem “fallacy.” The fallacy, to the contrary, is supposingthat a philosophy or its arguments can be cut away from their moorings inthe soul of the individual and his or her culture and treated, as they say,under the auspices of eternity.That is precisely what Nietzsche refusesto do.N I E T Z S C H E A D H O M I N E MChapter N I E T Z S C H E ’ S M O R A LP E R S P E C T I V I S MWandering through the many subtler and coarser moralities that have so farbeen prevalent on earth, or are still prevalent,.I finally discovered two basic types and one basic difference.There are master morality and slave morality.The moral discrimination of values has originated either among a rulinggroup whose consciousness of its difference from the ruled group was accompa-nied by delight—or among the ruled, the slaves and dependents of every degree.—Friedrich Nietzsche, Beyond Good and EvilNietzsche’s On the Genealogy of Morals, perhaps together with Beyond Good and Evil, is one of the five or six seminal works in secular ethical theory.It is also the most outrageous of those seminal works in ethics.Plato gives usthe perfect society; Aristotle gives us a portrait of the happy, virtuous life;Kant provides an analysis of morality and practical reason; John Stuart Millgives us the principle of utility with its benign insistence on collective high-quality happiness.Nietzsche, by contrast, offers us a diagnosis in whichmorals emerge as something mean-spirited and pathetic.What we know asmorality is in fact “slave morality,” so named not only because of its histori-cal origins but because of its continuing servile and inferior nature.Thebasis of slave morality, he tells us, is resentment (he uses the French ressentiment), a bitter, reactive emotion based on a sense of inferiority and frustrated vindictiveness [ Pobierz całość w formacie PDF ]