Spring 2000 Cyberseminar in Objectivist Studies
Nietzsche and Objectivism

Unit Three: March 20 - April 16

David Potts' Review Essay(s)
on Nobility, Civilization, and Breeding
In Friedrich Nietzsche's
The Will to Power and Beyond Good and Evil

To: TOC Cyberseminar <cybersem@objectivistcenter.org>

Sent: Wednesday, April 05, 2000 9:17 AM

Subject: Cyberseminar: 3 part Part 3 Review Essays by David Potts

[From: David L. Potts ]

What follows is really three essays, a longer one followed by two very short
ones. I apologize for their lateness but hope to have made up somewhat in
quality what I have lacked this time around in punctuality.

-David


NOBILITY, HAPPINESS, AND THE MEANING OF LIFE

"[Mr. Darcy's] behavior to us has in every respect been. . .
pleasing. . ." "[Mr. Darcy] is perfectly amiable."
Jane Austen, _Pride and Prejudice_ (272, 316)

I should not like to undervalue the amiable virtues; but
greatness of soul is not compatible with them. Even in the
arts, the grand style excludes the pleasing.
Friedrich Nietzsche (_Will to Power_ 1040)

I would like to begin with the above pair of quotations, since the striking
contrast they bear to one another will help me to develop a point about
Nietzsche that has bothered me almost from the beginning of this
cyberseminar. I imagine that Nietzsche and Jane Austen each have in mind the
same sort of thing by "amiable" and "pleasing," namely such virtues as
friendliness, gentleness, affability, sensitivity, geniality, kindness, and
the like. In Austen's case, at least, no sort of obsequiousness or
ingratiating behavior can be implied, since such qualities are impossible
for Mr. Darcy. In fact, I would say that Darcy _is_ the "great souled man"
of Aristotle's _Nicomachean Ethics_ (bk. iv, ch. 3) transplanted to early
nineteenth century England.

Nietzsche for his part likewise seems to be saying, not that there is
anything exactly _wrong_ with the amiable virtues but only that they are
unsuitable to the highest sort of man (cf. also WP 932, 948). Note in this
connection that politeness and "beautiful gestures," if not geniality, _are_
permitted - even required - of the great man (WP 943, 1033). The amiable
virtues are denied him presumably because the highest, Olympian sort of man
is engaged in self-overcoming, in surmounting and emerging ever stronger
from hardships and deprivations, in revaluing all values, and in looking
down on the contemptible herd. None of these is compatible with making
oneself pleasing to others, which is to grant validity to _their_
evaluations.

We have here the glimmerings of a basic difference in outlook as regards
life and especially a noble life. On the Nietzschean side, which I'm
inclined to think of as romantic even though Nietzsche himself rejects the
term, an essential trait of the great souled man is _creativity_. The great
man establishes values, particularly in the sense of whole new standards of
value, and thereby enhances man, but at the cost of great suffering to
himself (cf. BGE 225, 270). His achievements are seldom understood or
understandable by others; he may even find it convenient to mask his true
self behind some facade to avoid their misplaced sympathy (BGE 270, WP 962).
He certainly does not submit himself to concern over whether his behavior is
amiable. I call this romantic because one familiar exemplar of this concept
of greatness is the cliche of the "starving artist" with unkempt hair and
stormy countenance who sacrifices everything for his art, which nobody else
understands until two generations after he has died unnoticed and in
poverty. Nietzsche has more than just artists in mind, of course - and note
especially that no sort of weakness is supposed to be predicable of the
great man - but the "starving artist" may serve as a helpful image of this
conception of greatness.

On the Austenian side (which I'm going to continue to say is also the
Aristotelian side; for an excellent general discussion of the ways in which
Jane Austen may be loosely termed an Aristotelian moralist, see Gilbert Ryle
(1968)), neither self-overcoming nor radical creation are required for
greatness. Rather, the man of great soul excels on all dimensions of virtue.
Since one such dimension contains the amiable virtues, the great man will
possess them. A person of truly superior understanding, of course, will
weigh others' opinions according to their merits; but this is hardly
incompatible with being pleasant and congenial. On this conception of
greatness, the place of any given "great souled man" in society will depend
on fortune and circumstance, but like as not he will be a solid citizen, and
in any semi-rational society he will be well recognized and appreciated.

* * * * * * * *

"I am only resolved to act in that manner which will, in my own
opinion, constitute my happiness, without reference to _you_, or
to any person so wholly unconnected with me."
Elizabeth Bennet, in Jane Austen,
_Pride and Prejudice_ (300-301)

"The happy man": a herd ideal.
Friedrich Nietzsche (WP 696)

Let me switch the focus now from amiability to happiness. Is the noble soul
a happy one? In the Austenian/Aristotelian view, happiness is certainly not
guaranteed even to a noble soul, but it is an ideal. (For those unfamiliar
with _Pride and Prejudice_, Elizabeth is the heroine and a noble character -
for all that she is a mere herd animal in the world of Nietzsche.) Happiness
consists neither in pleasure nor in getting whatever you want but in
well-being, which might be characterized as the accomplishing of the goals
of a person who wants the right things. As with the Austenian/Aristotelian
conception of nobility, this conception of ideal happiness can be accused of
being a tad prosaic. Nietzsche tars it with the brush of the bourgeois, and
I am going to accept that association and sometimes call it "bourgeois
happiness." Economist D. N. McCloskey (1994) has taken to saying we should
uphold "bourgeois virtue" as an ideal, and she has a point. Besides, the
term "bourgeois" (by which I mean _middle class_) adds a helpful
concreteness to the conception of happiness I am trying to describe. At any
rate, well-being includes such things as health, education, a lively mind,
sound judgment and a good knowledge of the world, good food, shelter, and
clothing, agreeable and capable companions, stimulating activities, and the
respect of one's peers. As a first approximation, let us describe this ideal
of happiness by saying that well-being includes the items just listed as
well as others like them; that to live well is to achieve well-being; and
that, life being an end in itself, happiness qua well-being is the ultimate
end for man, beyond which there is nothing. To the extent you achieve
happiness, you have done what man does; there is no higher rational goal in
life.

I trust it is clear that Nietzsche does not accept bourgeois happiness as an
ideal. We must take care, however, to be precise about what sort of
happiness it is that he rejects. The quote above (WP 696) implies that he
rejects happiness per se, but of course that is not quite right, since it is
easy to find places where he speaks of happiness in a positive way. For
example, "We the noble, the good, the beautiful and the happy!" (GM i.10;
see also WP 94, 195, 868). Where happiness has positive associations in
Nietzsche, it can usually be taken without much strain as an expression of
power (he nearly defines it as such at WP 1023). On the other hand, the
sense of happiness he attacks most forcefully is that of _being
comfortable_, which he derides in one place as "green-pasture happiness,"
namely "security, absence of danger, comfort, the easy life, and . . .
[absence of] any kind of shepherd or bellwether" (WP 957; see also WP 944).
The Nietzschean claim, then, would be that comfort and security may be
happiness, but they can't be fulfillment; therefore green-pasture happiness
cannot be the highest goal of life.

However, comfort and security are not all there is to bourgeois happiness.
Comfort and security must not only be possessed; they must also be
_achieved_. Further, it is not only for retrospective satisfaction that one
must achieve one's well-being; nor only for the knowledge that one earned
it. What is more important is that the achieving itself, the process,
involves an experience of efficacy which is critical to happiness. It seems
to be a fact that _material_ well-being alone, past a certain basic minimum,
is largely incidental to the feeling of happiness (Myers and Diener 1995).
Even lottery winners quickly return to their pre-jackpot level of subjective
happiness. The likely reason is that we adapt to material conditions, such
as wealth, similar to the way our eyes adapt to lighting conditions.
Positive feelings such as elation and gladness require some _change_, some
stimulus. Once the change has been adapted to, the feeling subsides.
Achievement, however, provides such a stimulus. Achievement here means to
accomplish something by means of one's purposeful effort. It is an active
process accompanied by feelings of satisfaction and enjoyment. Moreover,
achievement is something that can occur frequently, taking the smaller scale
sub-tasks of one's career or personal projects into account, perhaps even on
a daily basis.

The point is simply that achievement is necessary to happiness. Moreover,
this is not a surprising conclusion but one which I believe most people
understand. And although I'm not sure whom I might cite as theoreticians of
bourgeois happiness, I doubt whether they would be found to be advocating
mere comfort and security, even though unearned, as the roots of happiness.
Neither Jane Austin nor Aristotle was much for emphasizing the value of work
or the virtue of productiveness. Aristotle does have quite a bit to say
about happiness, however, and it is worth noting that he emphasizes that
happiness requires that one must not merely possess virtue but employ virtue
and do good things. Olympic prizes, he says, are not for the finest and
strongest, but for contestants (NE 1099a4-5). Epicurus might possibly be a
counterexample, since comfort and security were practically his definition
of happiness. However, his ideal called for opting out of society, by any
one of several methods, and it is therefore difficult to see him as an
exponent of bourgeois happiness. Certainly as a philosopher he would have
little to offer tradesmen, entrepreneurs, builders, and the like. Thus
Nietzsche's green-pasture happiness is neither a psychologically accurate
account of "the herd" nor a serious characterization of bourgeois happiness.

Nietzsche seems opposed, however, not just to green-pasture happiness but to
any kind of bourgeois happiness, including the more robust form just
described. Naturally, Nietzsche is scornful of the bourgeois (WP 247, 901,
943). People who are bourgeois are industrious, they are "shopkeepers a la
Spencer," they follow the rules. Mind you, these are meant to be criticisms.
To Nietzsche, they are marks of mediocrity. Again, he constantly disparages
prudence (WP 909, 912, 925, 929, 930). Not only is honor more important,
_no_ decent action results from prudence (WP 925). More significantly, one
who seeks a higher kind of life _wants_ danger (and _not_ of course in the
sense of a calculated risk) (WP 929). In short, Nietzsche is scornful of
several characteristic features of bourgeois life and sine qua nons of
well-being.

In the Zarathustra Prologue (Z Prologue 5), Nietzsche describes the "last
man." It is not wholly clear, to me anyway, what the "last man" is supposed
to be, but it appears that the last man is intended to represent the low
point of mediocrity to which the human race will eventually sink if at least
some of us don't strive for what is higher. The last man doesn't long for
the higher. He is unable to despise himself. He lives long because he avoids
risk and sticks to living in warm places. The last man works for a living,
but not too hard. He is sociable and agreeable. Comfort is his chief value.
Happiness is his goal. These are all supposed by Nietzsche to be bad things,
for the last man is the most contemptible and despicable of men. There is a
certain amount of green-pasture talk here, it is true, but not much, and it
doesn't seem to be the main thrust of his criticism. If the last man were
more active, more ambitious, and if it were clear that he must _achieve_ his
comforts and well-being, would Nietzsche be satisfied? Surely not. For such
a being would still be _man_. The contrast character to the last man is the
ubermensch. In the book's first edition, the Zarathustra Prologue was titled
"On the Ubermensch and the Last Man." The ubermensch is a new, higher
species that will transcend man and be as far beyond man as man is beyond
the ape (Z Prologue 3). (We are probably not supposed to take the ubermensch
literally as a distinct biological species.) And man, it seems, is not a
sufficient end in himself; the life of man is not the aim but the ubermensch
must be the aim (Z Prologue 3, 4; WP 859, 866, 997, 1001).

That a human life is not inspiring enough or meaningful enough to be a final
aim for Nietzsche is confirmed by his discussion of the men of science in
_Genealogy of Morals_ iii.23-28. In GM iii he is discussing "the ascetic
ideal," which makes forms of self denial, such as poverty, humility, and
chastity, into moral ideals. After analyzing the ascetic ideal as
essentially anti-life, he asks what counter-ideal can be found and takes up
the suggestion that the counter-ideal might be supplied by modern science.
"Science" here should be taken broadly to include all rational inquiry. The
suggestion, then, is that the life of reason might supply a satisfactory
alternative to the ascetic ideal. But Nietzsche rejects this suggestion in
no uncertain terms. Most scientists have no sense of science as a passionate
ideal. Beavering away in their laboratories, they are trying to stay active
in order to avoid facing the emptiness and meaninglessness of their lives
(GM iii.23). As for the few passionate rationalists that do exist, their
rationalism is itself an ascetic ideal! For it is based on faith in truth,
and truth is a metaphysical, otherworldly (noumenal) goal (GM iii.24). And
being otherworldly, it is self denying. The will to truth in fact is
asceticism, is Christianity, stripped to bare essentials (GM iii.27). The
counter-ideal, therefore, must lie elsewhere.

Fortunately, the will to truth contains the seeds of its own destruction (GM
iii.27), which results in turn in nihilism - the last item I want to mention
of evidence that Nietzsche rejects happiness in the sense of a human life
well lived as the final aim for man. The rational/moral imperative to seek
the truth about things will destroy itself when it is turned upon itself and
made to ask what is the _value_ of truth (GM iii.27; WP 3, 5, 12). When we
ask about truth, about the world of the categories of reason, we inevitably
discover it is a fiction. That is when we reach the low point of nihilism,
the belief that everything is in vain, meaningless, valueless. Nietzsche
believed when he was writing that Europe was on the brink of a phase in
which nihilism would become a very potent cultural force, a phase that would
occupy the next two centuries (GM iii.27; WP Preface 2). It must be admitted
that the course of Western history after Nietzsche has been discomfitingly
similar to what he predicted. There is a good side to this, though, since
once the old values have been destroyed we will be free to create new ones.
There are places in which Nietzsche talks as though this freedom itself were
the end point, the state of being truly a "free spirit," where it would be
valuable to remain (GM iii.24; WP 14, 15). The broader perspective, however,
is that nihilism is a phase in the process of self-overcoming (GM iii.27).
All values are transitory; we create them, then overcome them and create new
ones in their place; this is the expression of our will to power and mastery
even over our own creations, over or own selves (Z ii: On Self-Overcoming).
Self-overcoming is thus a striving for what is higher that is inherent in
life itself. This is why, and how, man must transform himself into
ubermensch. It is also the process by which the societal "revaluation of all
values" will grow out of nihilism (WP Preface 4). (Nietzsche in some places
claims to have traveled this road himself already and to have emerged on the
other side of the nihilist abyss (WP Preface 3; WP 25).) It follows that
there is no true code of virtue we might discover and live by, and so
achieve happiness. Indeed Nietzsche must reject the very idea of well-being
as I have described it, as something grounded in human nature. For there is
no truth about human nature, any more than about anything else, only
artificial judgments serving the ends of power. So the aim of life cannot
consist in excellence according to any fixed standards of human nature but
must be pursued through constant striving for strength and power, for what
is "noble" and "higher," in being severe and hard with oneself (BGE 260), in
cultivating one's own suffering (!) (BGE 270, WP 910), in making enemies (WP
944), and in general in living a what-does-not-destroy-me-makes-me-stronger
kind of life (TI: Maxims and Arrows 8; WP 934). And the aim of this in turn?
Once again, to reach a higher form of life: the ubermensch.

With this description of the character and activities of Nietzsche's great
man, we have returned to the starting point of this paper, so perhaps we
should stop and take stock of the argument so far. On one conception, which
I have attributed to Jane Austen and to Aristotle and have associated with
the bourgeois, the aim of life - "the meaning of life" - consists in living
well, according to standards set by human nature. What constitutes living
well for a human being presumably is something we can determine empirically,
not unlike the way we determine what constitutes the health of our bodies.
An important component of living well no doubt involves adhering to a
certain code of virtues, which is not easy but also not a matter of
self-denial or mortification. Furthermore, the reward of a life well lived,
barring accidents, is happiness. To live a happy life in this sense could be
said - and _is_ said by Aristotle - to be one's highest moral aim. But
happiness, even in the well-being sense, is not enough according to
Nietzsche. For, to begin with, the whole idea that we can empirically
discover anything about human nature is a mirage. "There are no facts" (WP
481, 556, 604). All our "facts" and values are _created_, not discovered,
ultimately as instruments of someone's will to power. The driving principle
of life is the will to power, through which life reaches higher and higher
forms. It is these higher forms which are the aim and meaning of life. And
so in their service the best among us should strive for mastery and
dominance and nobility of soul.

I believe what I have just said puts Nietzsche's conception on these matters
fairly in a nutshell - though no doubt imperfectly. If anyone sees how my
description could be improved or corrected, I would be very curious to hear
their ideas. In the meantime, I suppose it's obvious that there's not much
to be said in favor of Nietzsche's view. His "arguments" for such key
principles as that truth is a fiction and that the main principle of life is
the will to power, are, as usual for continental philosophers, practically
nonexistent. And, since these principles are not plausible in their own
right, I don't propose to spend much time with them. Rather, what interests
me is the attack on the Austenian/Aristotelian conception that one finds by
implication in his work. For he is claiming as a matter of psychological
reality that the pursuit of well-being is a mediocre, empty existence; that
people cannot find meaning in the pursuit of happiness. His remarks cited
above about most scientists having little passion for what they do and just
keeping themselves busy to cover the emptiness of their lives are to the
point here. Are the lives of people who simply work for a living and try to
do well meaningful? Can such people be truly satisfied?

There is evidence that they are not. For example, there is a correlation
between religiosity and subjective well-being (Myers and Diener 1995).
People who are more religious report higher levels of happiness and
satisfaction with life. They are less likely to be substance abusers, to be
divorced or unhappily married, to commit suicide, or to suffer from
depression. At the same time they are physically healthier, they live
longer, and recover more quickly from the unhappiness associated with
adverse events such as unemployment, divorce, serious illness, and
bereavement. Although Myers and Diener admit that not enough is known to
reasonably infer an explanation for these facts, it is tempting to explain
them by reference to the sense of meaning and purpose that religion
supplies. This would be in line with Nietzsche's argument of GM iii, that
man cannot bear to be without ideals and will accept even an anti-life
"ideal" (asceticism) than have no ideal at all. And Nietzsche's argument
against the Austenian/Aristotelian conception then could be put by saying
that earning a living and enjoying life are not an ideal.

Yet this is the bourgeois conception, isn't it? What can be said in reply to
Nietzsche's criticism? One thing I think should _not_ be said is that the
bourgeois conception only seems unidealistic because it is not being
described idealistically, but if we wrap a philosophy like Objectivism
around earning a living and _treat_ it as an ideal, then it will be one. On
the contrary, I think the ends of life should be meaningful in themselves,
not just declared to be so by some ideology. Witness Epicurus, who tried to
make pleasure the meaning of life by wrapping an ideology around it. It didn
't work, and I submit that the reason is that pleasure (no matter how
defined) is not in fact a very substantial or meaningful goal.

A better answer might be the following. I have said above that material
well-being must be achieved, not just possessed. Now notice that some
projects are more challenging than others. Discovering a scientific law,
establishing a scientific fact, learning a foreign language, raising a
child, managing an office, creating a software system, driving a train,
founding a company, writing a book, brokering a real estate deal - these
projects all have different levels of difficulty and are differentially
suited to persons of different talents, interests, and abilities. If a
person who could be discovering a scientific law is flipping burgers
instead, then peculiar circumstances aside it's a fair bet that that person
does not find flipping burgers a meaningful pursuit. If people do not pursue
projects in life that challenge them, they will be less alert and engaged,
and their lives will likely be less rich and less rewarding. On the other
hand, challenging projects feel meaningful and lead to enhanced subjective
well-being (Myers and Diener 1995; see also Csikszentmihalyi 1990). It is
moreover to be expected that purposeful effort, being the fundamental means
by which all goods are achieved, should be a critical component of an
integrated, actualized life, and hence of feelings of well-being. To have a
philosophy consistent with such a life is important as well, of course, for
many reasons, not least of which being that it helps people to _understand_
the meaning of their lives. But the sense of fulfillment should not be
entirely "top down," and in the well-lived life I am describing, it would
not be.

It does not seem, therefore, that we must accept Nietzsche's criticism of
the pursuit of bourgeois happiness. With regard to Nietzsche's own
conception, on the other hand, I can't resist pointing out a few of its
ironies. I have already pointed out that the apostle of strength and power
seems awfully ready to emphasize that nobility entails suffering. Doesn't
that seem rather ascetic? Is it not also strange that he locates the aim of
mankind in a higher stage, the ubermensch? Why not just say that the final
aim is power? That would seem actually more consistent with his framework,
and after all power is a realizable goal, at least for the strong. I suppose


the reason is that simple power looks ignoble. Whatever the reason, it is a
fact that the ubermensch seems awfully elusive. It is tough to say how we
would recognize this ubermensch if we ever encountered one (WP 876, 886),
and whether there actually are any ubermenschen or ever _will_ be. In view
of these doubts, it is right to ask, why should we undergo all of Nietzsche'
s noble suffering? We already know that "the great majority of men have no
right to existence" (WP 872), but what about the few noble ones? Unless they
are already ubermenschen, which does not seem to be the case, when will they
ever realize the final aim from their exertions? Does it not seem that not
only the great majority, but the few as well, are to be sacrificed to a
phantom? And is this not just one of the things the socialism Nietzsche
hates so much is criticized for? Walter Kaufmann, in an "Editor's Note" to
_Thus Spoke Zarathustra_, claims that for Nietzsche "the meaning of life is
thus found on earth, in _this_ life" (1968, p. 116, emphasis his), but this
does not seem true after all.

I want to conclude this portion by quoting what Ayn Rand has to say about
the place of working for a living in a moral ideal in _Atlas Shrugged_. This
is the scene near the end of the book when society has collapsed and Eddie
Willars is futilely trying to start a broken down train in the middle of
nowhere, and he recalls the time in their childhood when he had said to
Dagny that he wanted to do great and noble things. "Dagny, _that_ is what it
[the best within us] was. . . and you knew it, then, but I didn't. . . you
knew it when you turned to look at the rails. . . . I said, 'not business or
earning a living' . . . but, Dagny, business and earning a living and that
in man which makes it possible - _that_ is the best within us, _that_ was
the thing to defend . . ." (p.1166, emphases and ellipses original).


CIVILIZATION AND CULTURE

Nietzsche makes a telling distinction between civilization and culture,
which he identifies as _contrary_ principles (WP 121, 122, 134).
"Civilization" refers to "the taming of the human animal," presumably
including enforcing the rule of law and civility. "Culture," on the other
hand, presumably refers to great achievements in art and other "high"
endeavors. Culture builds the Parthenon; civilization writes the Magna Carta
and the Declaration of Independence. The societal conditions that enhance
culture are those that promote strength and growth - but _moral_ corruption.
On the other hand the forces that promote civilization are forces of
weakening and disintegration - but _moral_ high-mindedness. (Take a wild
stab at which of the two is Nietzsche's pick.)

Has Nietzsche any alternative but to think that civilization and culture are
opposed? We have seen above how he feels about amiability and sociability.
The "high" is _rare_ and _separate_. Great men and their achievements
require aristocracy and suppression of the masses (WP 866, 901, 902, 936).
These are basic Nietzschean principles. Therefore anything that lubricates
human relationships, or that promotes collective or cooperative action, he
must see as a tendency toward weakness and mediocrity and as harmful to the
interests of culture.

In this light perhaps we can begin to understand Nietzsche's disparaging
attitude to the 19th century achievements of the United States and Great
Britain. Neither country was notable for very high artistic achievements. On
the other hand, they were both very "civilized," in Nietzsche's sense. They
were both at the forefront of establishing "a government of laws and not of
men." They were both very democratic. They both excelled at cooperative
activity, whether commercial or otherwise. Regarding Napoleon versus
Wellington, the British empire was precisely _not_ Wellington's in the same
sense as the Napoleonic empire was Napoleon's. The British empire was not
the achievement of a single man, and I would say that is just the problem
Nietzsche has with it. To appreciate Industrial Revolution England and
America, one has to appreciate cooperative, or rational, individualism; but
Nietzsche's obsession with great men who "create values" and sweep all
before them, not to mention his love affair with power, conflict, noble
suffering, daring risk taking, and contempt for the herd, blinds him to the
value of cooperation and rationality both.


BREEDING

Stephen Hicks wrote, in his kickoff essay for Unit 3: "Nietzsche was widely
mis-read in many of his statements. For example, the 'blond beast' he
admires is a lion, not the Nordic racial type." This cannot be right.
Nietzsche refers to blond beasts two places I know of in GM: i.11 and ii.17.
In both places it is clear that he is talking about people, not animals.
"The deep and icy mistrust which the German arouses as soon as he comes to
power, which we see again even today - is still the aftermath of that
inextinguishable horror with which Europe viewed the raging blond Germanic
beast for centuries . . ." (GM i.11). "I used the word 'state': it is
obvious who is meant by this - some pack of blond beasts of prey, a
conqueror and master race. . ." Obviously, "blond beast" is a metaphor, and
in GM i.11 Nietzsche talks of "the blond beast at the center of every noble
race," making it clear that he is talking about the _spirit_ of noble races.
And lions are blond, and no doubt this is part of the metaphor. But so are
the Germans, especially the old German race, and _this_ is another part, as
the quote from GM i.11 just given makes clear. See also GM i.5, where he
talks about "the blond race which had become dominant, namely the Aryan
conquering race. . .". The context here, by the way, is a discussion of the
etymology of words for good and bad things; Nietzsche's thesis is that words
designating the good, noble, and pure often originally meant _blond_,
whereas words designating the bad originally referred to dark-skinned
and/or -haired people. Notice also in this passage Nietzsche's anxiety to
prove that the Celts were blond. It is clear from the text that he has spent
a certain amount of time poring over ethnological maps of Europe. And don't
forget that his beloved Greeks were blond.

It is obvious that Nietzsche was a racialist. I don't say "racist" because
it doesn't look to me as if he wished to categorize people absolutely on the
basis of their race or derive an automatic, merit-free advantage for one
group over another on the basis of race. Rather, his interest seems entirely
on the strong and noble single person, regardless of origins. When he is
describing the noble, he never includes racial characteristics. Also, he
never reasons that "A is a member of race X, so A is strong/weak." He does,
however, believe that race is an important component in making people what
they are. This may be simply a result of his biological approach to human
nature. He talks constantly about breeding and the importance of
advantageous descent (e.g., WP 47, 995). He even goes so far as to say, in
one place, "There is only nobility of birth, only nobility of blood" (WP
942). And check out the eugenics program sketched at WP 734 and implied at
WP 733. He sometimes blames social decline on the mixing of races (e.g., WP
864). On the other hand, sometimes he suggests that cross fertilization
between races could produce a _stronger_ breed (e.g., WP 960).

In short he has no clear racial program. He just believes in physiology,
including the heritability of character. However, if his view is really so
benign as I have been painting it, then it was irresponsible of him to have
been so free with phrases like "noble races." Talk of noble versus
degenerate races, together with the designation of the Aryans as the master
race and the nasty things he says about some other races, combined with
sentences like "A declaration of war on the masses by _higher men_ is
needed!" (WP 861, emphasis original), and it is obvious what conclusions
superficial readers will draw. Nietzsche's constant jabs at the German
anti-Semites do not prove his innocence in this regard, _pace_ Kaufmann.
German anti-Semitism was a populist movement. When was there ever a populist
movement Nietzsche could stomach? Indeed, his anti-anti-Semitist remarks are
all to the effect that the anti-Semites personally are ignorant and low, not
that they aren't right about the Jews. Was Nietzsche anti-Semitic? I don't
know. But I don't see how he can complain of his use by anti-Semites. He
asked for it.


REFERENCES

Austen, Jane. 1961 (orig. published 1813). _Pride and Prejudice_. New
York: New American Library.
Csikszentmihalyi, M. 1990. _Flow: The psychology of optimal experience.
_ New York: Harper & Row.
Kaufmann, Walter. 1968. _The portable Nietzsche_. New York: Viking
Press.
McCloskey, D. N. 1994. Bourgeois Virtue. _American Scholar_, 63 (2):
177-191.
Myers, David G. and Diener, Ed. 1995. Who Is Happy? _Psychological
Science_, _6_ (1): 10-19.
Ryle, Gilbert. 1968. Jane Austen and the Moralists. In B. C. Southam
(Ed.), _Critical Essays on Jane Austen_ (pp. 106-122). London:
Routledge & Kegan Paul.

NIETZSCHE ABBREVIATIONS

BGE Beyond Good and Evil
GM Genealogy of Morals
Z Thus Spoke Zarathustra
TI Twilight of the Idols
WP Will to Power

[--David Potts]


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Spring 2000 Cyberseminar in Objectivist Studies
cybersem@objectivistcenter.org

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