Nature and the Moral Evolution of Humanity In

NATURE AND THE MORAL EVOLUTION OF HUMANITY IN NIETZSCHE’S ON THE GENEALOGY OF MORALS By Jeffrey Metzger A thesis submitted in conformity with the requirements for the degree of Doctor of Philosophy Graduate Department of Political Science University of Toronto Copyright by Jeffrey Patrick Metzger 2009 Nature and the Moral Evolution of Humanity in Nietzsche’s On the Genealogy of Morals Jeffrey Patrick Metzger Ph.D., 2009 Department of Political Science University of Toronto The dissertation begins by discussing recent critical treatments of Nietzsche in the work of Alasdair MacIntyre and Jürgen Habermas, then gives a brief discussion of the broader scholarly reception of Nietzsche’s political thought. The body of the dissertation proceeds through the text of the Second Essay of Nietzsche’s On the Genealogy of Morals, trying to explicate his account of the origin of political society. The dissertation attempts in the first place to show that the historical narrative Nietzsche offers in the Second Essay is coherent, then to illuminate the details of his account of the rise of political society, and thus of civilized morality (what Nietzsche calls “the bad conscience”), and finally to detail the different stages in the development of the bad conscience. The dissertation lays particular emphasis on determining the relation between what Nietzsche calls ressentiment and the bad conscience. The dissertation also attempts to shed light on Nietzsche’s view of the relation between nature and political society and morality, as he expresses it both in his analysis of the bad conscience and in the somewhat more thematic discussion of this question at the beginning of the Essay. ii Acknowledgements For their guidance and helpful comments on various drafts of the dissertation, I would like to thank Thomas Pangle, Ronnie Beiner, and especially my long- suffering advisor, Clifford Orwin. For support of all kinds I thank my family, my mother and father and two brothers. iii Table of Contents Introduction……………………………………………………………….…..1 Chapter One………………………………………..……………..………….30 Chapter Two…………………………..………………………………..…….65 Chapter Three………..……………………………………………..………..79 Chapter Four…………………………………..…………………..…………89 Chapter Five………………………………………………..……………….125 Chapter Six……………………………………...…………………..………172 Chapter Seven………………………………………………………..……..178 Chapter Eight……………………………………………………..…...……245 Chapter Nine……………………………………………...………..……….256 Conclusion……………………………………………………………….….289 Appendix…………………………………………………………………….299 Bibliography……………………………………………………………...…312 iv Introduction Over the past hundred or so years, the teachings of Friedrich Nietzsche have penetrated and transformed every realm of human culture in the Western world. A recent indication of the depth and magnitude of Nietzsche’s influence is Richard Rorty’s claim that the term “post-modern” should be replaced by “post- Nietzschean” when it is applied to European philosophy.1 The length of Nietzsche’s shadow can further be judged by his centrality to the work of two very different, indeed almost diametrically opposed, contemporary political theorists, Alasdair MacIntyre and Jürgen Habermas. Both writers have devoted major works to the history of modern philosophy and its effect upon the current state of political and cultural life.2 These works show Nietzsche’s pivotal place in current discussions of the fate of modernity, the role and status of reason in modern political thought, and the character of postmodernity and its relation to the modern age. Although they differ fundamentally on the viability of the modern project,3 both thinkers agree substantially on the character of that project, 1 Richard Rorty, “Introduction: Pragmatism and post-Nietzschean philosophy,” in Richard Rorty, Essays on Heidegger and Others: Philosophical Papers, Volume Two (New York: Cambridge University Press, 1991), pp. 1-6. See also “Introduction: Relativism: Finding and Making,” in Richard Rorty, Philosophy and Social Hope (New York: Penguin Books, 1999), pp. xix ff. 2 Alasdair MacIntyre, After Virtue, Second Edition (Notre Dame: University of Notre Dame Press, 1984), Jürgen Habermas, The Philosophical Discourse of Modernity: Twelve Lectures, trans. Frederick G. Lawrence (Cambridge, Mass: The MIT Press, 2000 [1987]). In the following paragraphs, parenthetical references are to pages of these two books, using the abbreviations AV and PDM. 3 While MacIntyre argues that the modern, or Enlightenment, attempt to justify morality was intrinsically flawed and doomed to failure from the start (AV 51- 61), Habermas believes that theoretical modernity still has the internal resources 1 and on Nietzsche’s relation to it. MacIntyre and Habermas concur that a novel and constitutive aspect of modernity is its conception of morality as a distinct sphere of human culture. Habermas follows Kant and Hegel in understanding modernity as defined by the threefold division of human culture into morality, science and aesthetics (PDM 16-19 and passim), while MacIntyre speaks of the separation of the moral from the legal, the theological, and the aesthetic (AV 39). Both writers see the real significance of this development in modernity’s break with the past, and in particular with the broader cosmological conceptions that had given moral, political and social life their previous significance and coherence (Habermas focuses on the socially unifying power of religion [e.g., PDM 20, 83- 84], MacIntyre on the teleological moral scheme of Christian Aristotelianism [AV 51-61]). The aim of modern philosophy therefore becomes to fill the void created by this rupture, initially on purely rational grounds, but eventually through a radicalized version of the modern project that denies reason sovereignty. Habermas concentrates first of all on understanding how the concept of subject-centered reason, underpinning modern philosophy since its articulation by Hegel, has unfolded in such a way as to engender the influential criticisms of reason produced by Foucault and Derrida. In Habermas’s narrative, Nietzsche is the pivotal thinker who initiated “postmodernity;” Habermas traces two lines of development running out from Nietzsche’s thought, one through Heidegger to Derrida and the other through Georges Bataille to Foucault. Here I will focus only on Habermas’s account of Hegel’s treatment of the problem of modernity to complete itself through his own theory of communicative rationality (PDM 294-326). 2 and Nietzsche’s revolutionary transformation of that problem (and even then my summary will be extremely selective). Because the modern age (understood as beginning around 1500) is unique in being oriented towards the future, it is faced with the novel problem of generating its own norms solely out of itself: “[m]odernity can and will no longer borrow the criteria by which it takes its orientation from the models supplied by another epoch; it has to create its normativity out of itself. Modernity sees itself cast back upon itself without any possibility of escape” (PDM 7). Hegel was the first to treat this situation as a philosophical problem. Indeed, Hegel saw the resolution of this problem as the guiding or constitutive task of philosophy: “[t]he anxiety caused by the fact that a modernity without models had to stabilize itself on the basis of the very diremptions [or divisions: Entzweiungen] it had wrought is seen by Hegel as ‘the source of the need for philosophy;’” modernity’s need for “self-reassurance” is its need for philosophy (PDM 16). More specifically, this need for normative self-reassurance is “forced on philosophy as soon as modernity conceives itself historically, in other words, as soon as it becomes conscious of the dissolution of the exemplary past, and of the necessity of creating all that is normative out of itself” (PDM 19-20). Modern philosophy, however, cannot generate these norms on the basis of the principle of subjectivity, which thus “proves to be a one-sided principle.” It does possess, to be sure, an unexampled power to bring about the formation [Bildung] of subjective freedom and reflection and to 3 undermine religion, which heretofore had appeared as an absolutely unifying force. But the principle of subjectivity is not powerful enough to regenerate the unifying power of religion in the medium of reason (PDM 20). Habermas is thus particularly concerned with the attempts to replace the power of traditional religion to unify individuals and to provide “the totality of an ethical context of life” (PDM 83). He begins with a writing of the young Hegel according to which “[t]he religion of reason is supposed to deliver itself up to art in order to be shaped into popular religion” (PDM 31), thus making “the people rational and philosophy sensible” (PDM 36).4 Habermas moves eventually to Friedrich Schlegel, who propounded a new mythology which “is to owe its binding force not to some form of art in which all moments of reason are intimately related, but to a divinatory gift of poetry that is distinct from philosophy and science, morals, and ethics” (PDM 90). In proclaiming the autonomy of poetry, or the aesthetic realm of human culture, from theoretical and practical reason, Schlegel radicalized the threefold Kantian division of modern culture, thereby abandoning the earlier Hegelian goal of healing this division. Habermas, like MacIntyre, maintains that Nietzsche not only exploded what had been the core of modernity but, in some decisive sense, did so through purely modern means. According to Habermas, “[w]ith Nietzsche’s entry into the

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