Hello and welcome back.

In this lecture, we make the transition from modern philosophy to postmodern

philosophy.
What is postmodern philosophy? What do we mean when we use that phrase
postmodern philosophy?
There are different ways we can put this.
One of them is this. When we have a theory about reality, when we seek to explain
what reality is like, we could think of it in terms of a story or a narrative we tell
about reality. Postmodernism could be called the view that there are only
narratives. There is no meta-narrative. That is, our whole perception of reality
involves stories we tell about reality, but there's no true story about reality. That
is, there is no meaning or truth out there to be discovered.
Another way we could put this is in terms of Plato's cave.
However, in the algebra of the cave, you make your way from the images to the
people holding the images before the wall of the cave, but in the cave, you can get
outside of the cave and see the forms and the idea of the good. But for postmodern
theory, there's no getting outside of the cave. Everything we know are the images
that we construct or make. Or we can think about this in terms of Kant's Copernican
turn.
Remember in the Copernican turn, the mind is not conformed to reality. Reality
conforms to the mind. Now Kant thought that that conformed to the mind, there
were real structures that were necessary conditions for how we experience reality.
But it's just a short step to say that there are no necessary conditions, that
everything that we see in reality is simply filtered through constructs that we make
up and that could be different.
Nietzsche used the arresting phrase, the death of God, to describe the conditions
that he saw around him. Now, Nietzsche is sometimes misunderstood about this
because Nietzsche is not the one who claims that he killed God. He claims that we
killed God.
What does he mean by this? He doesn't just mean the person God. For Nietzsche,
God means the idea that the cosmos is ordered and intelligible, that there is
something out there to be discovered and understood. And Nietzsche believed that
philosophy and science had destroyed our ability to believe that.
Ultimately, we could say modern science tells us that reality is just matter and
motion governed by mathematical laws. And if that's true, then already implicit in
that scientific view, if that view gives us the right account of reality, then it is a
meaningless universe.
Now, Nietzsche did not celebrate the death of God. Nietzsche saw it as a tragedy
and as a crisis. That is, Nietzsche saw and knew that human beings need to live by
meaning. And what happens when we become aware that the meaning we need to live
by has no support? In this respect, we can see that Nietzsche is, in some sense,
influenced by romanticism.
We've not talked about romanticism, but in general, we might say that romanticism
is a reaction against what it regards as a scientific disenchantment of nature in the
world. We might see romanticism as a reaction to the death of God. The romantics,
therefore, privileged emotion and imagination over reason. They privileged art and
creativity over science. Nature over mechanical constructions.
But the romantics had a confidence and a hope that there was something deeper
behind these things that supported their beliefs. For example, they thought nature
really did have within it some kind of deeper and richer meaning. But Nietzsche
does not accept that.
We might call Nietzsche a jaded romantic. That is, he's severely disenchanted with
what he sees in modern philosophy, but he does not see any grounds for hope in the
direction that the romantics saw. And so, Nietzsche sees that human beings are at
something of a crisis point. And Nietzsche sees that it can go in several directions.
It can result in what Nietzsche called an overman, in which new meanings are
created, or in what Nietzsche called the last man, in which our humanity is lost.
Now, I'm getting ahead of myself a little bit here. Let's go back to Friedrich
Nietzsche.
Why do we start this lecture on postmodernism with Nietzsche? Nietzsche is an
obvious source of the ideas that later get associated with postmodernism. Those
ideas include existentialism, pragmatism, deconstructionism. These are terms you
might hear about from the news or other sources. We're not going to study them
in these lectures, but all of them have their roots in things that Nietzsche wrote.
Nietzsche is a font of these ideas. And what Nietzsche ultimately says is that
reason does not exist. We don't know reality. We create reality. This results in a
crisis of reason that reaches ahead in the 20th century politically.
In our last lecture, we'll address that crisis through C.S. Lewis. But for now, let's
talk about Nietzsche. Nietzsche was born in 1844 and died in 1900. He was from
Germany. He was trained in philology, which is really something like classics. It's a
study of languages. And he taught philology at the university. But Nietzsche's
interest from the beginning was not simply in languages. It was really in culture.
And there's a progress of his ideas that reaches a culmination in the book that we
are going to be treating, Beyond Good and Evil.
Now I know what most of you might be thinking when you hear the name Friedrich
Nietzsche. After all, this is a person who has books with titles like The Antichrist
and Beyond Good and Evil and The Will to Power. This is a scary person and we
probably shouldn't read him. Nietzsche has reputation for being a virulent
Antichristian. And while some of that is justified, I think it's true that Nietzsche
is a much more rich, complex and nuanced thinker than people given credit for who
have not read him. And I think we have a lot to learn from Nietzsche, even if
ultimately he's not right.
So our book is going to be Beyond Good and Evil. Beyond Good and Evil is probably
the most accessible and comprehensive of Nietzsche's writings. It was written in
1886, just four years before Nietzsche had a mental collapse in breakdown, which
left him permanently dependent until the end of his life. He never wrote anything
else after that mental breakdown. So, in Beyond Good and Evil, we perhaps get
Nietzsche at the height of his powers.
Now Nietzsche's style is remarkable. It's very aphoristic. It's very poetic. It's
very personal. And so it makes him difficult to summarize. He was not a systematic
writer, laneforth, premises and making inferences towards their conclusions. He
uses a lot of just colorful terms of phrase and really suggestive comments.
So, I'm going to do my best to just try and organize some of these ideas for you so
that you can make sense of what you read if you look at the reading excerpts that
we've included with the course guide and hopefully if you're having a discussion
group.
So, I've organized these into four classes.
Those classes involve what I think are tensions in Nietzsche's thought. Things that
involve assertions that you find both of the kinds of assertions there in his writing
and they seem to be in conflict with one another. And you have to keep them
together to really understand what Nietzsche is after.
The first tension is between what Nietzsche calls the will to truth and the will to
untruth. Nietzsche begins, beyond good and evil, with a kind of arresting suggestion.
This is a very first sentence of part one. Part one is entitled The Prejudices of the
Philosophers. In part one he writes, The Will to Truth, which will still tempt us to
many a venture, but famous truthfulness of which all philosophers so far have
spoken with respect. What questions has this will to truth not laid before us? What
strange wicked questionable questions.
The will to truth, Nietzsche suggests, forces us to ask the question, why do we
want truth? He asks, why not rather untruth and uncertainty, even ignorance? Why
do we value truth? Nietzsche suggests in the following sections that in fact human
beings live by untruth,
by fictions that they make. An aphorism for, he writes, The Fulseness of a
Judgment is for us, not necessarily, an objection to a judgment. In this respect our
new language may sound strangest. The question is, to what extent is it life
promoting? Life preserving, species preserving, perhaps even species cultivating.
And we are fundamentally inclined to claim that the Fulseness judgments, which
include the synthetic judgments a priori, that's reference to Kant, are the most
indispensable for us, that without accepting the fictions of logic, without measuring
reality against a purely invented world of the unconditional and self-identical,
without a constant falsification of the world by means of numbers, man could not
live. That renouncing false judgments would mean renouncing life and a denial of
life.
To recognize untruth as a condition of life, that certainly means resisting
accustomed value feelings in a dangerous way. And a philosophy that risks this would
by that token alone place itself beyond good and evil. So, Nietzsche thinks that we
live by falsifying the world. Man is the kind of creature that creates fictions or
meanings or horizons by which he lives in the world. That means that by challenging
those fictions and rejecting them as untrue would mean some kind of making of
human life worse and less livable.
Nietzsche further tells us that our fictions can have good consequences. He gives
a striking example in the preface to Beyond Good and Evil. He writes, the
dogmatists philosophy was, let us hope, only a promise across millennia, as astrology
was and still earlier times, when perhaps more work, money, acuteness and patience
were lavished in its service than for any real science so far.
To astrology and its supra-terrestrial claims, we owe the grand style of
architecture in Asia and Egypt. Astrology, completely false view of reality, we make
up this idea that somehow the stars and planets determine our fate on earth. That
belief, which is false, Nietzsche points out, generates a whole body of magnificent
architecture. He writes, it seems that all great things first have to bestry the
earth in monstrous and frightening masks in order to inscribe themselves in the
hearts of humanity with eternal demands.
Okay, so fictions can create be the cause of creating beautiful things. You might
say that the fiction of Christianity results in Gothic cathedrals and magnificent
paintings, the belief that there's a reality out there gives us the fiction of modern
science, which allows us to construct certain kinds of medicines or cures or forms
of technology.
Now, Nietzsche asks what is at the root of the will to truth? And he speculates
that in many cases, what looks like the will to truth is really what he calls a will to
power. And the sixth aphorism, he writes, gradually, it has become clear to me what
every great philosophy so far has been, namely, the personal confession of its
author and a kind of involuntary and unconscious memoir.
Every philosophy is the personal confession of the philosopher. That is, the
philosopher wants to tell a story about reality and persuade other people to believe
in it. That's how Nietzsche describes the will to truth.
Now, that means then that philosophy means creating a picture of reality that we
persuade others by is a kind of escape from the way reality really is. Nietzsche
sees this most damningly in Platonism, going back again to the preface of Beyond
Good and Evil.
Nietzsche writes, let us not be ungrateful to it, although it must certainly be
conceded that the worst, most durable, and most dangerous of all errors so far was
a dogmatist error, namely Plato's invention of the pure spirit and the good as such.
What does he call this the most dangerous of all errors, the most durable and the
worst?
This is a real clue to what Nietzsche is concerned about. In Nietzsche's view, what
Plato does is creates, invents an idea of a good and alternate ideal world, which is
different from this world we are in. And it distracts all of our passion and ideas
and interests away from this world to that world. Nietzsche at times will describe
this as nihilism.
Plato is a nihilist. Nihilism means willing nothingness. That's ironic because
Nietzsche's sometimes accused of being a nihilist for believing there's nothing but
what we make. But his view is that Plato and other philosophers are the nihilists
because they create these fictions which then they prefer to the real world we live
in. Nietzsche further writes that Christianity is Platonism for the people. That's
the phrase he uses in the preface.
That's a striking claim. And you can see what he means. Plato's idea of the good for
Christians becomes heaven. Heaven is our home. Heaven is that place that is our
ultimate desire and our ultimate space of longing and rest. And if we do everything
for the sake of heaven then, we end up displacing all of our interests in this world.
Now you see some of the reason for Nietzsche's hostility to Christianity. He thinks
that it displaces all of our interests, that it's an escape from reality from this
world. And we'll see other reasons in a moment.
Now again, I want to be clear that Nietzsche is not utterly hostile to this. He sees
that Christianity has resulted in many beautiful things like art and architecture.
Moreover, Nietzsche thinks that our resistance to this idea, our attempt to refute
it, to undermine it, to show that its false has strengthened us in some way for
another project. In some, Nietzsche sees a complex interplay between the will to
truth and the will to untruth.
He sees that we need a will to untruth in order to live. But he also sees some deep
impulse in us to see those falsehoods, to see through those false things that we've
made to the ultimate reality of things. And this creates a kind of dilemma. How do
we live in a world that the will to truth has unmasked as unreal? Let's go to the
second issue that we can treat a little more quickly. I will call this attention between
naturalism and autonomy. Nietzsche sometimes writes as though all human thought
and action can be explained reductively in terms of something more basic, more
primary. In some ways, Nietzsche anticipates Sigmund Freud in this way. All of the
elements of our super ego are ultimately rooted in the id, in that chaos of basic
longings, desires and impulses, those are the ultimate source of rational activity.
And he tends to be critical of people who think that they have independent
knowledge of the world or judgment. So, on the one and he gives us a very
reductionistic view of the world. On the other hand, as I pointed out,
Nietzsche is profoundly aware that it is the human condition to make reality, to
create values, as Nietzsche puts it, and beyond good and evil. In fact, Nietzsche
tells us in Beyond Good and Evil that the ultimate philosophical activity is the
creation of values. Nietzsche tells us that all morality is a tyranny against nature
in the same way that poetry is a tyranny against language.
That is, the poet takes language and tries to put it into a controlled form of, say, a
sonnet. In which you have a set number of syllables and lines. It imposes onto
language a structure that then unleashes a kind of beauty and power. Nietzsche
sees morality that way also. So, in some sense, he gives us a reductionistic view of
human nature. On the other hand, he suggests that we are autonomous value
creators. We can be artists. We can make reality what we want it to be.
A third tension in Nietzsche is related to the second one. Nietzsche uses this
language of value. In some sense, he is the originator of this word. And so we should
always be cautious when we use it. Aristotle, in Saint Thomas Aquinas, use the
language of the good. Notice that the word good intentionally tells
us about something out there. We mean to describe that thing when we say, X is
good. We're talking about X. But when you say X is valuable, you're talking about
yourself. I value X. So the language of values by itself suggests that reality is what
we bring to it. Values are subjective. So, Nietzsche suggests a subjective theory
of values. You might even say that he originates the subjective theory of value all
the way down. Where's the tension? Nietzsche also has very firm value judgments.
In fact, that's why he wrote this book. Nietzsche is in fact deeply concerned that
one set of value judgments is going to predominate and ultimately be victorious in
our culture and another kind will be lost. Nietzsche refers to these two systems of
value judgments as forms of morality. He calls them master morality and slave
morality. And each of those forms of morality have a structure of value judgments.
And Nietzsche writes as though one of those is truly superior to the other. How
does he ground his preference for one set of value judgments over another?
Nevertheless, he does.
And it's important for us to understand the core of his critique. For Nietzsche, the
master morality is predicated upon noble value creating kinds of human beings, life
affirming and value creating.
Here is what Nietzsche says about master morality. This is from aphorism 260. The
noble type of man experiences itself as determining values. It does not need
approval. It judges. What is harmful to me is harmful in itself. It knows itself to
be that which first accords honor to things. It is value creating. Everything it knows
as part of itself, it honors such a morality is self-glorification. In the foreground,
there is a feeling of fullness, of power that seeks to overflow the happiness, of
high tension, the consciousness of wealth that would give in bestow. The noble
human being, too, helps the unfortunate, but not or almost not from pity, but
prompted more by an urge begotten by excess of power. Against the master
morality, Nietzsche gives us the slave morality. What he sometimes calls a herd
morality. Here is one of his descriptions. Slave morality is essentially a morality of
utility. Here is the place for the origin of that famous opposition of good and evil.
And to evil, one's feelings project power and dangerousness, a certain terribleness,
subtlety, and strength that does not permit contempt to develop. According to slave
morality, those who are evil thus inspire fear. According to master morality, it is
precisely those who are good that inspire and wish to inspire fear, while the better
felt to be contemptible. Let me paraphrase this. Slave morality is motivated by
fear, in part fear of the power of master morality.
Nietzsche tells a story about this. In his story, the slave morality, in order to
protect itself against the powerful, tries to reverse the values. Nietzsche calls it
transvaluation of values. It inverts what Nietzsche regards as the natural order of
values. In order to protect themselves against the strong, the slaves call power bad
or evil. And they celebrate weakness and servility and humility. And so in that
inversion, they attempt to give themselves power over the strong. Once again, you
see Nietzsche's critique of Christian morality. Look at the Beatitudes.
Blessed are the poor. Blessed are the suffering. The wealthy shall not go to heaven.
Nietzsche sees in this an exemplification of slave morality. What does the slave
morality want?
It wants not to suffer. It's motivated above all by comfortable self-preservation.
And it wants to organize the world around its fear of suffering. This is the key to
Nietzsche's analysis, because Nietzsche tells us that suffering is the condition for
growth. The master morality seeks suffering. The slave morality seeks to avoid it.
Now let's back up for a moment and think about that. Recall that Baconian
philosophy originates in a desire to conquer nature to relieve suffering.
The desire to avoid suffering is a natural one. It makes sense. But what would it
mean to be without suffering? What is the greatest source of human suffering, I
ask you? What is the most terrible thought most human beings have? It's death.
Human beings are aware of their death.
Dogs and cats also die, but they don't dwell on death. They don't think about it.
They don't get depressed worrying about when they're going to die. Nietzsche
thinks that human beings often suffer greatly in their awareness of death. And it's
this awareness of death that creates the horizon in which human beings try to live
and think about meaning in their lives. To escape ultimate suffering for Nietzsche
means to not ever have to think about death. And to never think about death would
require that human beings lack all self-knowledge. That is, it would mean that they
become animals again. Then we don't have to suffer anymore. It's not suffering
that harms us. It's the thought and awareness of suffering and death. Nietzsche
sees in modern culture a special democratic socialism a whole institutional push to
prevent people from ever suffering. And Nietzsche thinks that the end result of
this will be what he calls the last man. The last man is ultimately no longer human.
He's simply an animal concerned about basic biological needs. He's someone who no
longer has to think about anything high. The master morality then, Nietzsche
thinks, is the person who resists that. He is the person who in the face of the
frightening meaninglessness created by the death of God will create some new
values that will give something for human beings to strive for to keep them human.
And this leads to the fourth and final contrast. At times, nature writes, as though
humanity is contemptible, that we vainly project unreal images and pursue them in
a desire to escape our real condition, that ultimately we're pathetic animals like
the rest of the animal world. However, at his core, Nietzsche is defending humanity.
He's worried ultimately that democratic socialism and the modern project is going
to base us will make us no longer human.
I want to read D1 last passage in which Nietzsche describes this. This is from
Aphraesm 62. I'm meant to say Christianity has been the most calamitous kind of
arrogance yet.
Men not high and hard enough to have any right to try to form man as artists. Men
not strong enough and far-sighted enough to let the foreground law of thousand
fold failure and ruin prevail, though it cost them sublime conquest. Men not noble
enough to see the abysmally different order of rank, chasm of rank between man
and man. Such men have so far held sway over the fate of Europe with their equal
before God until finally a smaller, almost ridiculous type, a herd animal, something
eager to please sickly and mediocre has been bred the European of today.
We may not agree with Nietzsche's critique of Christianity or as a count of morality
or of the idea that we only create our own world, but we might see something very
true in Nietzsche's worry about the end result of the modern project, what
Nietzsche calls the last man. We might see in Nietzsche real warnings about
tendencies in our own culture.
In our next lecture, we're going to treat C.S. Lewis who writes a book which is
strikingly similar to what Nietzsche is doing. The title of that book is The Abolition
of Man.