In Our Time - Nietzsche's Genealogy of Morality

Episode Date: January 12, 2017

Melvyn Bragg and guests discuss Nietzsche's On The Genealogy of Morality - A Polemic, which he published in 1887 towards the end of his working life and in which he considered the price humans have paid, and were still paying, to become civilised. In three essays, he argued that having a guilty conscience was the price of living in society with other humans. He suggested that Christian morality, with its consideration for others, grew as an act of revenge by the weak against their masters, 'the blond beasts of prey', as he calls them, and the price for that slaves' revolt was endless self-loathing. These and other ideas were picked up by later thinkers, perhaps most significantly by Sigmund Freud who further explored the tensions between civilisation and the individual.WithStephen Mulhall Professor of Philosophy and a Fellow and Tutor at New College, University of OxfordFiona Hughes Senior Lecturer in Philosophy at the University of EssexAndKeith Ansell-Pearson Professor of Philosophy at the University of WarwickProducer: Simon Tillotson.

This is the BBC. Thanks for downloading this episode of In Our Time. There's a reading list to go with it on our website, and you can get news about our programs if you follow us on Twitter at BBC In Our Time. I hope you enjoy the programmes. Hello, what price of human animals pay to become civilised? That's one of the questions posed by the German philosopher Friedrich Nietzsche in on the genealogy of morality, a polemic,

which he published in 1887 towards the end of his working life. In three essays, he argues that having a guilty conscience is the price of living in a society with other humans. He suggests that Christian morality, with its consideration for others, grew as an act of revenge by the weak against their masters, the blonde beast of prey, as he calls them, and the price for that revolt is endless self-loathing. These and other ideas were picked up by later thinkers, perhaps most significantly, by Sigmund Freud, who further explored the tensions between civilization and the individual set out in these Nietzsche's essays. With me to discuss Nietzsche's genealogy and morality are Stephen Mulholl, Professor of Philosophy, and a fellow and tutor at New College University of Oxford,

Fiona Hughes, Senior Lecturer in Philosophy at the University of Essex, and Keith Ansel Pearson, Professor of Philosophy at the University of Warwick. Stephen Mulhole, what distinguishing Nietzsche at an early age? Well, at an early age, in many ways, the educational path he was taking up with quite typical of the time. He was born in 1844 in Saxony, a province of Prussia. His family, his father and his grandfather were both Lutheran ministers. They had connections with the royal court and the government. But his father died when he was five, as did his only brother.

And that meant that the family suffered various kinds of financial difficulties. Nevertheless, they put him on the standard track educationally to go to university. And that meant he went to a very reputable, boarding school, which he acquired a great facility with languages. And that led him to an interest in what's called philology, which is a study of language with a particular view to engaging in textual criticism. Which is becoming extremely fashionable at the time. It was very central to the way the German education system was structured at the time. The idea was that the primary purpose of university education was to develop the personality, allow the individual student to become the

individual they are. But what that required was access to ancient culture, and that meant the texts of the ancient Greek dramatists and lyricists, and also the Bible, of course. So when he went to university, first at Bonn and then at Leipzig, he initially was studying philology and theology, partly because his family expected him to become a minister, but he very quickly dropped the theology side and focused on the philology. And that was where his precocity really, became most manifest, because at the edge of 24, which was incredibly early, he was offered a chair in classical philology at the University of Basel in Switzerland, and that was a really unprecedented achievement.

Just one more thing about philology. This is the time of the great exploration of the Bible in terms of who, what is really going on and is Christ divine? If you look at it, no crisis as human being. Oh, that's such a, it's so simplified. But that's sort of, that is what's going on. Yes, and one of the influences in his boarding school and university education was David Strauss, who was notorious for having applied the tools of textual criticism to the biblical texts and to the life of Jesus more generally, and revealed, as one might expect, various sorts of gaps and non-literal modes of literary presentation of that material.

And this was, on a certain level, scandalous, because it suggested that the divine could be treated by means of human tools of understanding. And Darwin's ideas are coming in and so on. But let's stick to one thing. He's there for 10 years. He writes his first important book, and that doesn't go down well and, in fact, puts a stopper in his academic career.

That's right. He was regarded as an extremely promising philologist, and then in 1872 he published his first major work, The Birth of Tragedy, and that received, well, a generally very lukewarm reception, but one very eminent scholar really wrote a ferocious critique of it. And at that point, the possibility of going onward and upward as a philologist was pretty much closed to him. So although he spent a lot of time in Basel, did a regular amount of teaching,

his health got a great deal worse, and he became increasingly disenchanted with academic philology, so he took the chance to retire in 1870, 1979. and then became in effect an independent scholar. Retirement. They gave him a small pension. It became a wandering scholar, really. That's right. Just a tiny thing about the health. The health was bothering him there. It was just a disaster towards the end of his life, poor man. But it was bothering him then. It was quite serious migraines, vomiting, all the things. There were occasional episodes in his childhood, but by the time he was functioning as a university lecturer,

it was becoming increasingly problematic in a variety of ways. Keith Ansel Pearson, how comfortable is Nietzsche with the Lutheran background from which he came? I think initially when he first was developed as a young child, he was very comfortable with it. He seems to have been a very dutiful, obedient young child. His friends, school friends and family called him the little pastor, such was his earnestness. But things begin to change quite dramatically when he goes to Forta, the boarding school. That's between the ages of 14 and 20. And it's in the middle of that period when he's 17, so it's 1861, he has a religious crisis.

a crisis of faith. And this is around the time of his confirmation. So he's quite a serious student at the time of theology and of the Lutheran religion. But he has this crisis of faith. It basically centers on the fact that he's being subjected to an intellectual training, which, as Stevens pointed out, is exposing him to historical, critical methods of analysis.

So he's moving from a fundamentally religious orientation based on belief and imagination to a critical orientation, where the emphasis is put on reason, evidence, and the securing of naturalistic explanations. That is explanations in terms of natural, causes. But having said that, he does go to university in his first year to study philology and theology. So he's still quite committed to the idea of being trained for the ministry.

But it's during that first year that he begins to publicly profess his atheism. And he writes to Elizabeth, his sister at the time, he says, if you want peace of mind and happiness, then believe. If you want to be a disciple of truth, then you should search. And that's the option that he chooses. But there's a point to be added to that, which is that I think the Lutheran religion leaves its mark on Nietzsche's thinking, his subsequent thinking. In one of his mature texts, he says, in the gay science from 1882, he says, what does your conscience say?

And he answers, you should become the one that you are. And that's a sort of Lutheran idea that what's really important is having an individual conscience, having an individual relationship to God and the Bible. And Nietzsche has a secular idea of that ideal, that it's all about cultivating an individual, singular relationship to the universe. And for Nietzsche, the conscience that's at stake

he's not so much a moral conscience. It's what he calls an intellectual conscience, which is a kind of superior form of conscience. It's a conscience behind your moral conscience. Your moral conscience could be something that you've just internalised through a process of socialisation. The intellectual conscience is what leads you to radically question existence.

And each of your thing, you have the duty to question existence, to marvel at the fundamentally enigmatic character of existence and to keep questioning existence and your part in that existence. So it does leave his mark on his thinking, even though he abandons theology and he abandons his faith and becomes an atheist. Over the next years, towards, as it were, towards the genealgia morality,

how is his thinking developing? Can it be called developing? Is it changing? What's happening? It's becoming more polemical, I think. I think there's a break. We can divide Nietzsche's work into three periods. There's the early period, the middle period and the late period. The early period is the Basel years, where, as Stephen said, he's publishing the birth of tragedy, done timely meditations. then there's a break when he quits his job at Basel, he resigns his professorship, and becomes a wandering nomad across Europe. This is the middle and the late period Nietzsche.

This is 1878 to 1888. I can say something briefly about the middle and late periods, if you like. Now, I just want to get to the morality. To the morality. It's the polemical text. It's Nietzsche sort of engaged in these sort of controversial attacks. Sorry to be... On received opinion.

Don't have push in here, but is there anything in that thing which you can pick If you can't, that's fine. I don't know about it. You do. So, look, he is moving in this direction now. He is reading this. This is influencing. And we're getting towards his ideas of morality, which is the burden of this program. Well, Nietzsche says his middle period text of his most congenial text. And I think he's right about that. The text that would be most agreeable to the reader. They're anti-dogmatic, anti-franatical. They're modest and they're measured. The late period text is becoming very aggressive, very polemical. Why has he changed? I think because he's, he's, he's thinking that Europe is about to enter a period of decadence and nihilism, and therefore all the illusions that we suffer from as modern human beings need exposing. They need illuminating, exposing and attacking. Fiona Hughes, can you sketch out the ideas of, say, the first essay on the genealogy of morality? The three essays, they run into each other. But never mind. Could we start

with the first one and give us some broad brushstrokes out, please? Sure. Well, the overall project is to evaluate. morality, its value and worth. And for Nietzsche, that's what's going on throughout the whole book. But in the first book, he focuses on putting forward a contrast between two sorts of morality. On the one hand, noble morality, on the other hand, a slave morality. The noble morality, he means the masters of society. He means the masters of society, which in the first instance are what he also calls the blonde beasts.

these instinctive, powerful individuals who determine their own faiths. But he's reaching back to Homer for them, is reaching back to great tragedy of them, but he says they're also appearing Celtic. Absolutely. Absolutely. He gives various examples of these blonde beasts.

And what do they stand for? Because it's important. This is the starting point. So what are these blonde beasts, which is a sort of, anyway, let's literally do that. You said it's very questionable. What do they stand for?

What is their morality? Their morality is that. that of creating their own values on the basis of their own interests. For them, values come from themselves. They're self-regarding values. They're not really very interested in those who are other than them, those who are not powerful. They want to have power over those other powerless people,

but they're basically interested in what they're about. Which is what? Which is in controlling their own faiths and in order to do that controlling those around them so that they don't get in their way. So they want to make their own impression on the world. They believe the strength is good, force is good, peer recognition is good, and the people, the other people, the weak down there don't matter a bit. They don't take any notice of it at all. They're not really interested. Yes.

How does it develop out any further? or how has that crude generalisation seen to the job for the moment? Well, I think that there's a lot more to be said about about how this noble identity is also projected by Nietzsche as

something that could be returned to and developed in the future. And that the noble type of the future may well turn out to be rather different from the noble type of the past. But perhaps that's something that we could develop.

Noble kind of gets in the way as well because it's a connotation of goodness, isn't it, which is not what he's really on about. No, well, the goodness of the noble as far as Nietzsche is concerned is, although he calls it a noble morality, we might think of it as not particularly moral at all. It's more a value system. And also it is possible to argue

that it doesn't necessarily capture the identity of a particular social class. it may be more to do with a mentality than it is to do with a distinct social class. So we have these as a sort of starting point, as it were, American, acoes and so on. And then what? Can you talk about the slave revolt?

That's the big thing that happens. It seems to me the slave revolt and then things flow from that. So the slave morality is a morality, or it believes itself to be a morality, and it's a reaction against the noble values. And this comes out of judo. Christianity? That's right. So in the

first instance there is a reaction against the powerfulness of the power and a belief that it is good, now good in a new sense to restrain the self, to be self-controlled and so on.

And that is particularly developed within Judeo-Christianity. But it is the slave revolt. I mean, it's magnificent the way that he says that they just inverted. They manage a revolution while pretending to be weak and feeble. They manage one of the biggest psychological revolutions, as they say to these great strong people, no, we are the strong ones because we are weak and humble,

because we are therefore virtuous, and our virtue is bigger than your brute strength. Something like that, is that right? Well, I think it's got two sides to it. On the one hand, yes, there is a negative strength in that redefining of what is good. And the introduction of what, from the slave morality's perspective, is now called evil rather than bad. So the evil, from the slave morality's perspective, is strength, is powerfulness, is exactly what the nobles would have thought of as good. So there's been a reversal of what counts as good.

and in that respect the slaves have a strength but the problem about it which in Nietzsche's view is that that supposed strength is directed in a negative way not only against the nobles but against themselves can we develop that please Stephen Monhole take that idea which thank you very much rightlining it and it was you know it's very difficult to do that sort of thing Anyway, thank you very much. Can we just develop, like stick to this idea of the masters,

let's call on the masters, and the Labour Revolt, which is the mass, and what happened there? Yeah, so the idea is that, according to Nietzsche's analysis of the situation, it's no accident that what slave morality defines as evil is what the master morality defines as good and vice versa, because you just have to look at it from the perspective of the slaves, the weak and feeble. They're in a master morality world where they're incapable of imposing themselves on the world.

They're disdained by the masters. They just get kicked into the gutter while the masters go about their business. If they're going to improve their situation, they don't have the direct physical, natural endowment to do it directly and just, as it were, have a face off with Achilles. What they have to do is redefine the nature of the context within which they're operating. So what they want to do is create an environment in which, of behaviour that are to the advantage of the weak and the feeble are praised, celebrated, affirmed as the good way of living, and all the forms of behaviour that are to the disadvantage

of the weak, they get redefined as evil. But since Nietzsche thinks that master morality is not just historically prior, but in a certain sense a more fundamental expression of what human life is, what vitality is, what it is to be a kind of powerful manifestation of life. life in the world, then that means that slave morality is a kind of negative phenomenon. It's basically expressing a kind of hatred of life, not just a hatred of the individual nobles or masters who manifest this quality, but also a hatred of the life underlying it. So you have a paradoxical situation where on the one hand the slaves are manifesting strength by imposing themselves on the world, redefining it in terms which are to their own advantage.

On the other hand, they do it by presenting a code in which, as it were, life is denied, and a certain kind of negative force, as Fiona was saying, is imposed. So the question is, how can they do that? You know, they're in such a weak position, and within the space of a few decades, the whole world gets turned upside down, values are revalued, and the world is suddenly great for the weak and feeble. And I think Nietzsche's answer to that centers around the role of the priest. because according to Nietzsche's account,

the priests are a branch of the aristocracy. They're a kind of noble. But they're not like Achilles. They don't have big biceps and direct physical force to back them up, but they still want to have power, so they use intelligence. They seek indirect ways of winning the battle against the other branch of the nobles. And the way they do that is by recruiting the slaves to bring a better. this revolution. They put themselves at the head of the revolution. That gives them power. But in

order to achieve that revolution, they need the masses behind them, and sheer volume of numbers is going to allow them to win the battle, but only under the leadership of the priests. So what's happening in effect is that a certain sort of internal fracturing of the nobles leads to a complete inversion of the value system that they were originally living under. Keith, Keith Hansel-Piersson, can we locate this in any time frame? And this is, or this is an abstract survey over the last few thousand years? Is this what Stephen has been talking about, the two or three decades, three or four decades? Does that come with a particular point in Judeo-Christian thought?

I'm not sure of the exact details that Nietzsche would provide. He paints very broad, very broad brushstrove. It doesn't give us any actual historical dates in the text. No, I'm talking about a general time location. I'm not talking about BC, such and such, but it is at that period where Judeo-Christianity becomes important, is that where this big inversion, this extraordinary slave revolt, finds coherence?

Exactly, that's right. And it's fueled by Rizantimo, what Nita calls Rizontimo, which we haven't covered. I can mention something about that. That's what's driving this slave revolt is an attitude or a sentiment of Rizontimo. Nietzsche uses the French word Rizontimo. It's not original to him to use that word.

He'd encountered it in a text of 18th and. by a German thinker called Oiganduring, called the value of life. So the use of the word is not original to Nietzsche, but there's no natural equivalent in German. What's important about the word? What's important about it for Nietzsche, I think we can notice by making a distinction between simple resentment and this more complex feeling of raison tiniere.

Resentment or revenge pure and simple would be the direct hitting back at the source of your hurt. And as such, it would prove cathartic. It would be some immediate direct retaliation, would be cathartic. Once you've expressed or satisfied the feeling of revenge, ideas of vengeance would disappear from you. Resonimo is different.

It's the lingering sentiment of a poisonous revenge. You're impotent, you're powerless. You're not in a position to actually carry out your resentment. So a raisonedimort is a kind of like failed or a frustrated resentment. You're actually incapable of carrying out your resentment. So it poisons your system and you compensate yourself with an imaginary revenge. And this is what Nietzsche says characterizes the slave revolt. that the slave revolt and morality comes into being at that point

that Resonimo becomes creative and gives birth to values. It's the Rizantimo, he says, of natures that are denied, a true reaction that have deeds, and they compensate themselves with an imaginary revenge. So it's all taking place in the imagination, and it poisons the system. Fiona Hughes, how can we, when, and do we see this working into the system and working through the system?

And what does Nietzsche, what does Nietzsche value more highly, the master morality or the slave morality? When is this tilt going on and when are the slaves in the ascendance? Nietzsche sees himself as a psychologist, although he also sees himself as a historian. And I think that the way in which he dates things

as a historian quite often owe a lot to his understanding of himself as a psychologist. So he thinks in terms of periods of ways of things, thinking about things. So when he dates the move to resentment, he talks about the move from prehistory to history. He even says that the point at which this slave morality arises dates back to when we moved out of the sea and moved onto two feet. So I'm afraid I'm afraid his dating is probably going to. leaves something to be desired. What he really wants,

what he, I think he wants to identify are certain ideal types rather than any particular period. But it is true that as you were saying, he looks back to Greek history. He talks about the Celts, who he interestingly claims categorically

were blonde. He also suggests that the Romans were the noble type. I presume they weren't blonde, but perhaps they were in his view. And the Vikings, that would be a little bit more plausible. So the move when exactly had happened

is not easy to determine. Getting back to your question, though, about which he preferred, I think it's absolutely clear, if anything can be absolutely clear in Nietzsche, that he thinks that the noble type, is healthy, whereas the slave type is unhealthy, is sick. But as Stephen was saying, the relationship between these two groups has a certain

amount of ambivalence in it, because the slaves are the interesting human beings. It's once we become resentful in the precise sense of raisontiment that Keith was talking about, that we begin to turn our attention back into ourselves. The Blondies were not really self-reflective. It wasn't even that they believed they were powerful. They just were powerful. They just got out and did it. So the advantage of the slaves is that they are intelligent, reflective beings.

And that I think Nietzsche has a sympathy with, even though he's also critical of it. Stephen Mulhall, in maybe the second essay, in them being more intelligent, is this to do, we can bring in the Christian thing, maybe I'm laboring that too much, please tell me, well, let's he raise it.

But the idea of one of the things is examining your conscience in Christianity, confessing yourself, confessing your sins, saying, I am guilty of this, looking for truth. Is that part of what's going on? Yeah, there are a lot of complicated ideas

that are kind of woven together there in Nietzsche's analysis. But it does go back to the point Fiona was making. It has to do partly with the construction of the very idea of an inner life as something that's distinct from one's external public life. So if you think about someone like Achilles, you don't imagine him having a rich and complex interior life. If he wants to do something, he just does it.

He doesn't brood, he isn't anxious and self-reflective. He just gets out there. He gets very annoyed. sits in his tent when his honor is being insulted. But it's part of Nietzsche's story that a confluence of entry into society and the restructuring of that society by the values of slave morality introduces a much sharper distinction between the inner and the outer in our lives. And one way in which Christianity contributes to that is through the practice of confession.

The idea is that if you want to have the right relationship to God, you have to make sure not just that your actions conform to what's right, but that you don't have evil thoughts either. And the only way you can do that is by developing a form of scrupulous self-examination in which you disclose the furthest reaches of your interior life to the priest in the confessional. So Christianity places a great value on that idea of self-examination, and in a certain way it encourages you to believe that there is this rich interior life for you to explore and perhaps partly to construct as you explore it.

And that means that you're being told that truthfulness is a virtue. You're being told that seeking the truth about yourself is part of being a good person, the only way in which you can establish the right relationship to God. But that's built into a context in which, in effect, you are creating an occasion for punishing yourself and for feeling guilty. Because you could imagine a system of punishment

in which the only thing that matters is whether or not you do something bad. And if you do it, then people address the bad action. They extract some compensation for it, and then the slate is clean. You can just forget about the bad deed. You go back to being an agent in the social world. But in the case of Christianity, things get massively more complicated and challenging. First of all, you have to think not just about the actions you perform,

but whether you had bad intentions. After all, Christ tells us that if you contemplate adultery in your heart, you've committed the sin of adultery. Now, we're kind of used to that idea as a familiar Christian notion, whether or not we agree with it, but it's a radical extension

of the domain of guilt and punishment. Keith Ansel Pearson, I'd like to develop that in terms of the debtor, accreditor. But before that, I wonder if listen to, are quite, have we told them enough about

what this revolt of the slaves really meant? Have we told them enough? Are we, are they, do they walk in the doors of the, I don't know, 100 BC and walk out of the door in 100 AD and it's a different world because of what's happened?

Can you just encapsulate that in some way? That kind of history repeats itself throughout history. So he sees the French revolution as the modern equivalent of another slave revolt and morality. So he says, yes, the slaves have won. The slaves have been successful. The weak have inherited the earth. The French Revolution for him is a great

symbol of that. So that history continues for him, right up to the present day. Ah, so it isn't a historical thing. It's a recurring thing. It's a recurring thing. He thinks these master and slave morality is recurred throughout history. I mean, I've been glad to say it's both. You know, I think on the one hand, Nietzsche is quite tempted at various points to say,

look, certain events, historically datable events, are fundamental in the inception of this revolution. On the other hand, he thinks partly because of the point Keith was making about the poisonous nature of his ontemont, the slaves never

feel as if they've completely won. There's always, as it were, this lingering feeling that things still aren't working in the way they should. It's still, on the pace of it, you have people like Achilles, you have people leading warring tribes, you have the

Caesars of the world and so and so forth. And then the next minute is blessed are the poor inspiration. Blessed humility. It's a huge change. Can you just say a bit about that? I mean, how it bit into the life of people who are living that life and why they won, as it were. I mean, it's a revolution.

How did all these weak people put through a revolution? It's the seduction of Christianity, I think. How powerful Christianity has been as a religion, and it has such a grip on our consciousnesses. But Nietzsche thinks there is some redeeming hope. I mean, he sees a modern figure such as a number, Napoleon as like a Caesar figure. Napoleon for Nietzsche is the great justification of the French Revolution.

We can say the French Revolution was good because it gave rise to Napoleon. And he's the last great historical figure, noble figure, in history for Nietzsche. That's why I think he prizes him so much. Fiona Hughes, how does, let's get back to what, as I'm going to say, how does Nietzsche think that human beings use guilt? Well, in... Stephen was saying. In the first instance, Nietzsche thinks that we use guilt in order to try to make people morally better.

But he considers that that's a mistake. More particularly, we use punishment in order to make people guilty so that they get morally better. But Nietzsche thinks that this is a complete misunderstanding of punishment because punishment actually makes people hard. more resistant, more alienated, rather than making them morally better. And he gives the example of prisons saying that prisons are not full of people with very finely tuned moral consciences. In fact, punishment tends to tame people rather than to reform them. But at a deeper level, he thinks that the ascetic priests use guilt

in order to try to manage our horror in the face of suffering. So that human beings, according to nature, are found it intolerable that not only we suffer, but that our suffering is meaningless. And to introduce the idea of guilt gives us a handle on this in that we can think, well, at least it's explicable that I'm suffering. It may not make it better. It may not make it feel better,

but at least I can understand why I am suffering. I'm suffering because I'm guilty, because I'm sinful. But Nietzsche's rejoinder to that is that suffering just is not explicable in that way. And that all that guilt helps us to do is to deal with the fear of suffering and not with the suffering itself. Stephen, Himala. Nietzsche's idea of the ascetic, the aesthetic idea set out in the third. third essay. He's saying that

he was famous, he said, God is dead, but people taking it too lightly and too soon, he took a long time of dying and he might not ever be dead because what he brought still permeates and particularly moves into the arts, that ideas of altruism and so on

which permeate the arts come from what could be called Christianity without God. Can you talk about that? Sure, yeah. So So Nietzsche introduces the notion of the ascetic ideal, primarily in the third of the three essays that make up the genealogy. And it's his label for the various ways in which slave morality in its Judeo-Christian religious form mutates and evolves and permeates the culture of Western Europe. And it's maybe best to break it down into two stages. So the first crucial point for him is that it's perfectly possible for slave morality to be real and effective in the world.

without any theological trappings attached to it at all. So merely denying that God exists, being an atheist in that formal sense, whilst remaining committed to a value system which privileges altruism, compassion for the weak, and so on as good and evil as all the forms of behavior that the masters naturally manifest, that would be a further form of slave morality,

another form of asceticism. So most of the, as it were, moral structures that inform and shape the development of Western politics and morality right now are just as much expressions, even if non-theistic or theological expressions of slave morality as Nietzsche understands it. So slave morality has its non-theological, its non-religious forms, but it also has forms in which a certain kind of evaluative attitude to the world, sense of what matters in the world and what doesn't, is manifest in parts of culture that aren't obviously moral. And the three areas Nietzsche talks about extensively in the third essay are art, science and philosophy. And he tries to identify in each of those three cases, attitudes to the business of constructing art and modes of art, or constructing scientific theories and developing life as a scientist and also life as a philosopher.

in which a similarly ascetic, life-denying attitude to the world can be seen to be manifest, even though none of the people operating in those environments would recognise themselves as having evaluative commitments by virtue of their activity in them. Keith, there's a sense of Stephen Susser's life-denying. There's a sense in which he thinks science is life-denying. It takes away the senses have no place

because there's the perfect beings right there, like Plato's perfect. and you can't trust your senses which you're becoming your point. And he regrets that, doesn't it? Can you give us the tension that's going on there? Yeah, I think Nietzsche's, it's interesting what's going on in that third essay because I think he's implicating himself in what he's analysing, that Nietzsche himself displays as a philosopher certain acetic practices.

He himself has a certain investment in truth. He wants to find out the truth about our history, the truth about Christianity. And yet he realizes that if it becomes an unconditional value, then it is ultimately acetic and life denying. Why should truth be the unconditional? additional value of life. So he's seeing science and its attention to wanting facts, the little facts of life, the scholars, objectivity. These are all acetic traits, life-denying traits, and Nietzsche is really worried about these developments in terms of what it means for intellectual

activity, and that we're not affirming the sort of great instincts that attach us to life and that lead us to affirm life. So he's implicating, strange laugh, he's implicating science, and even atheism in the acetic ideal. They're not the enemies of the acetic ideal. They're fully implicated in it. But still there's something denying about it, isn't that? He thinks that life is, at this stage,

if we're to take a balance, he seems to be more on the side of the master saying they went out into life, took life empirically as they found it, and lived life as it should be lived, and didn't displace all the great things to abstract thought which you couldn't really touch it or change.

That's right. There's a lack of vitalism, I think, in science. That's why Nietzsche, I think, that thinks that truth is not the sole important value in philosophy. He's quite radical in this respect, since we tend to associate the philosopher with the investment in truth and the concern for truth. And Nietzsche is saying that no, sense or meaning of life or the value of life is what's really important.

And so he wants a knowledge placed in the service of some new future vital life. That's why we should carry out this genealogy. We want to recover a buried and forgotten history for ourselves, to revitalise history. So just to go back to the point about science, as ascetic. I mean, the issue here is not so much that seeking truth is in itself always ascetic. The question is where you find yourself locating the truth and how much self-sacrifice you're willing to impose on yourself in order to achieve it. So quite a lot of modern science

on Nietzsche's account of the matter, which is obviously controversial, locates the underlying nature of reality in realms which transcend the one that is open to our everyday senses, the empirical world, the world that Nietzsche calls the world of Becerns. coming, the world that we're part of because we're embodied animals subject to desire of various kinds. Modern science tells us, you shouldn't believe what the censors tell you because they're misleading. You know, we think things are coloured. Turns out they aren't. We think they have tastes. Well, they don't really have tastes. They just have these primary qualities. And then as science develops, it locates the truth about things in a more and more distant realm.

Mathematical, usually. Essentially mathematical, yes. You can't do modern science. without mathematics. But that's taking it away from the senses. It's taking it away from what Nietzsche thinks of as the immediate empirical world of becoming. His slogan for this is to say that asceticism prioritises being overbecoming. That might come out in Plato, might come out in Newton. Fiona Hughes. So philosophy itself for Nietzsche is an ascetic discipline

that it involves turning away from the senses and cultivating a much more spiritual approach to things. But at the same time, there is a possibility within philosophy, as Keith was saying, for a more vitalistic approach. So that philosophy, in fact, becomes a very productive place to look for the new nobles, the nobles who are the successors of those blonde beasts, but who now have a much more complex internal life. and who are able to be much more playful, to laugh, to dance, to sing.

These are themes that come up in Thus Speak, Zarathustra in particular, but they also come up in genealogy of morals. Keith, Nietzsche describes his work as a polemic. Is it aggressive? Is it pessimistic? In what way is it a polemic? It's a polemic in the sense that it's a sort of concerted attack on our most cherished modern ideals, ideals of equality, of justice, of freedom, of liberty.

All the modern ideals that Nietzsche's attack in are part of this polemic. I think ultimately his analysis is quite optimistic. I think you see this if you draw out of comparison with another thinker, who is Freud, that you mentioned at the start of the programme. Freud publishes an essay in 1930 called Civilizationistice Discontents, and although he doesn't refer to Nietzsche in that essay, the analysis that he offers in it

is uncannily close to some of the things that Nietzsche is highlighted in the genealogy. Freud posits an irredeemable antagonism or conflict between, on the one hand, the demands of instinct, and on the other hands the restrictions of civilization, and he locates guilt as the fundamental problem of civilization. So what Nietzsche and Freud share is the idea that civilization is built

on the taming of our aggressive instincts through their repression and sublimation. But where Freud's a pessimist about the future civilization, I think Nietzsche's a bit more optimistic. Freud's a pessimist because he thinks you have to make a pessimistic choice between, on the one hand, civilization, or instinctual happiness. You can't have both. We can't be happy in civilization.

Nietzsche thinks there's at least a possibility of a form of moral self-determination that would be free of this self-lacerating guilt and self-inflicted cruelty. It's what he calls or signals at the start of the second essay the super moral sovereign individual. He had a short life, and the last 11 years were in sanatoria

and being looked after by his sister. He went what they called then insane. He had a massive nervous breakdown, didn't do any more writing. His sister then looked after his papers, which was a disaster, she was anti-Semitic, and she wanted to establish an Aryan race in Paraguay, was it, Uruguay. Paraguay. Paraguay. And he got mixed up with being pro, anti-Semite and so on, which has now been cleaned away, and his remarks about the Jews that are very complimentary.

So it's now possible to look at him in a, look at him in a different way. Briefly, I'm sorry, said briefly, how is he regarded now, and is he having any influence now? He's having a lot of influence. I think he's been, in a certain way, normalized, regarded as a genuine, intelligible interlocutor, particularly in moral philosophy, and not just in the kind of Franco-German traditions of philosophy, but also in the Anglo-American, the Anglophone traditions. People like Bernard Williams and a number of other major figures in analytic philosophy take him seriously, and broadly, very crudely, that's because of his naturalist inclinations. He's someone who, as Keith said at the beginning, wanted to explain things

without reference to the supernatural. Well, thank you very much. Stephen Mulhall, Fiona Hughes, Keith Ansel Pearson. Next week we were talking about Mary Stewart, Mary Queen of Scots, became that when she was six years old. Thank you for listening. And the In Our Time podcast gets some extra time now with a few minutes of bonus material from Melvin and his guests.

Did we get anywhere? I mean, you did, but did we do? Tell you tell us what you thought of the programme. I thought you handled it really well. I thought the questions were really good. Really? I didn't think we had enough time, to cover some of the things, we glossed over the

creditor-de-de-de-re relationship. I know I saw that. And that's an immensely complex topic. That's why I ducked it. I was quite relieved you did. Another huge issue, which I think it was probably quite wise that we ducked, was the question of truth. It came in within conversations,

but we didn't address it directly, perhaps. And Nietzsche has had a reputation, I think not amongst academic philosophers, but but more generally of being someone who denies rejects truth. And I think that what emerges in, particularly by the time of his genealogy of morals, is that he sees truth as dangerous and deep and problematic rather than that it's something that can easily be dismissed.

And in fact, I think that Nietzsche thinks truth much more seriously and unnervingly than many of the standard accounts of truth, for instance, as correspondence to the facts or as coherence within an interpretive system, something like that. I think all of us would have been interested in maybe considering a bit further what you might think of as the reflexive aspect of all of this material. In other words, what the relation is between Nietzsche and these phenomena he's talking about. And Fiona did briefly touch on it under the heading of truth,

but precisely because Nietzsche is seeking truth about morality and about the ascetic ideal more generally, he has to recognise, and he does recognize that he's coming out of an ascetic profile evaluatively. That doesn't mean that he's

trapped within it, but it means that he does have to acknowledge a certain kind of indebtedness to the very phenomenon that he's engaging in his polemical critique. And so it becomes very important to recognize that he's bound to be ambivalent about most of these phenomena. It's very easy to read him as just a kind of uniformly harsh critic of the phenomena,

but he has an amazing amount of respect in certain ways for what slave morality and the ascetic ideal has made possible for us, the way in which it constructs us as interesting animals. Even the same ways of true of bad conscience, when it says it's an illness only in the sense that pregnancy is an illness. It's got all kinds of possibilities that could come from it. So it's not irredeemably bad. It's a necessary condition of the next stage, if the next stage is the next stage. is ever going to happen. That's right. Right. So what's happening, as it were,

by virtue of the construction of the genealogy of morality, is that the ascetic ideal has kind of fulfilled itself and exhausted itself, because it's turned its interest in truth back on its own nature. I think the mistake that I was making

in the line of questioning sometimes, well, was as if one thing I'd replaced another, whereas it hadn't you're quite ready to run alongside the other, and they still do alongside each other. I mean, Napoleon couldn't be the last, as it were, superheroes

who had super villains in the same way. I mean, people might disagree with me even in this room, but I mean, it does seem to me there's a sense which you walk away from the genealogy thinking that something really important did happen between 100 BC and 180. That's what I tried to point out with it. Yeah, I didn't get any help from any of you.

But there are two further qualifications. I mean, one is that it keeps on happening, again and again. And that's because of the point Keith was making about raison d'amont hanging around. You know, slave morality never feeling as if it's wholly satisfied itself and wholly achieved dominance over the world because you can never be scrupulous enough about these things. But the other respect is the point Fiona was making that there's also a kind of ideal type analysis going on, which is not essentially historical, where you're basically saying, look, look at these different ways of evaluating

life and evaluating the world. What is the same? significance of their differences. And what do you think about the value of those differences? And that can be applied in a more analytic vein without necessarily worrying too much about the historical rights and wrongs. It's just as a philologist

Nietzsche is never going to give up on looking at words and how they function looking at historical dates, however loosely. I hadn't realised how sort of racy and rambustious is style. Oh, his right? It's extraordinary. Yeah. I haven't read much. I'm just... I'm

I bet I read bits of it when I was at university and just afterwards and the usual bits, selections from one. But they read, it's a ronicking. He rolics along, doesn't it? Well, he thought, Nietzsche thought that moral philosophy or philosophy generally was boring. He found philosophy boring, so he wanted to enliven it. Yeah. With really this quite racy prose, as you say.

He wanted to tell stories. It's the singing, dancing. And he also wants to engage his reader. He doesn't want disciples. He wants, at best, companions. people who will ask him difficult questions, who will take him to task. And so he never sets up in, although he's polemical,

he's not dogmatic in the sense that he sets out a series of theses. Has the anti-Semite business being cleared altogether, or does it still linger around? It doesn't, not anymore. I don't think it does. No, I don't think there's any doubt that Nietzsche is an anti-Semite. He says to a friend of Adelaide, This accursed anti-Semitism is the cause of a radical breach between me and my sister.

So it's absolutely... There's one thing in one of your papers saying that he said to Elizabeth, why don't we get rid of all these anti-semites? Exactly. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. I mean, when he goes insane, he writes these postcards to people and he says, I forget who he sends it to.

He says, I'm having all anti-Semites shot. But he really is the least German of German thinkers, I think, in that sense of German nationalism in military. Ah, he is the producer. Our master person. Yeah. Yeah, not even blonde, don't I? Who'd like tea, who'd like coffee? Is that your mobile going off?

Yes, it was, yeah. And for more podcasts on arts and ideas from the BBC, follow the link on our website to the best of BBC Radio 3's Free Thinking programme.