Date: Sat, 9 Dec 2000 11:45:39 +0000
Subject: BHA: Nietzsche, Anti-Nietzsche and TDCR -- thoughts for Christmas


Hi all,

A piece by Malcolm Bull in New Left Review 3 May/June 2000 ('Where is
the Anti-Nietzsche?') prompts the following reflections on Bhaskar's
religious turn and its context.

Bull very clearly sets out, inter alia, Nietzsche's [N's] fundamental
immoralism and inegalitarianism, together with his utter contempt for
ordinary working people, socialists, feminists and Christians. He cites
Geoff Waite, *Nietzsche's Corps/e* (1996) to suggest that the twentieth
century has witnessed the comprehensive triumph of the Nietzschean
radical right social and political project. N has served as 'the
revolutionary programmer of ... fascoid-liberal culture and
technoculture' which has not only triumphed over actually exising
socialism but prides itself on having eliminated the socialist project
as such via the Third Way of social democracy (which provides 'the best
ideological shell for neo-liberalism today' Perry Anderson). N's
teachings aimed, with extraordinary success, 'to re/produce a viable
form of willing human slavery appropriate to post/modern conditions
[global wage earners and poor], and with it a small number of (male)
geniuses equal only among themselves' [the corporate super-rich - read
Supermen or Overmen]. We live in the age of the unbridled Uebermensch.

N took on board the nihilistic implications for morality of the theory
of biological evolution, on the assumption that God is dead, evaluating
value in purely biological terms: 'The standpoint of 'value' is the
standpoint of conditions of preservation and enhancement for complex
forms of relative life-duration within the flux of becoming.' (The Will
to Power). This view (nihilism) 'places the value of things precisely in
the lack of any reality corresponding to these values and in their being
merely a symptom of strength on the part of the value-positors.' (ibid.)
The only value is the capacity and power to establish values, including
the conditions in which this can occur.

As I have said in an earlier post, placed in an evolutionary context,
Bhaskar's claim that the good is 'ontologically prior' to evil fares
well at the intra-specific and especially intra-community level, but
can't handle the inter-specific situation, where nature is completely
amoral. Unsurprisingly, N makes a great deal of the amorality of the
inter-specific situation in The Genealogy of Morals (the eagle and the
lamb, etc.)

What is the answer to Nietzschean nihilism? It is of little avail
pointing to N's performative contradiction in accepting the truth of his
own grand narrative if you accept its truth yourself (morality has
evolved to promote evolutionary success under conditions in which life
has been competitively contested), as I do.

Bull, searching for a 'post-Nietzschean anti-Nietzscheanism' ie an
answer that operates on N's own premises of the death of God etc.,
counterposes 'the standpoint of the subhuman' to N's 'superhuman'. -
Since 'N's model for the future of intra-specific relations is based on
that of inter-specific relations' the way to combat Superman is to
rejoin other animals  - 'to give up the idea of becoming more than man
and think only of becoming something less'. (Because N's Superman is
also an artist (an artist-tyrant)  -- for receptivity to the aesthetic the capacity for valuation = the exercise of power -- this means also
becoming philistines (anti-artists), as Gary will tell you). Bull's
counter to Superman is thus in effect Subman (my term; Bull could only
be indifferent to the gender connotations here, to object would be to
value). 

Nietzsche thought he had brought the nihilistic dynamic to an end in an
ultimate nihilism in which the positive valuation of the 'ecological'
conditions for value-positing Supermen to thrive [viz. the modern
market] was the last value. But Subman goes one better: the last value
is the negation of this ecology of value in a negative (or philistine)
ecology which minimizes the possibilities for value positing and so
decreases the numbers of Supermen, bringing a welcome respite from their
cruel predatoriness and 'opening up new possibilities for subhuman
sociality'. 

In support of this prospect, Bull enlists Durkheim's account of the
dynamic of modernisation in *The Division of Labour in Society*,
involving as it does 'the totalization of society to its maximal
inclusiveness and complexity *and* the corresponding elimination of
shared values' (i.e. the dynamic allegedly installs a negative ecology
of value).

Nietzsche's response to this dynamic was in effect a return to the
communal values of Durkheim's 'mechanical solidarity' - but only for the
Supermen; only the detotalisation and redivision of society into the
community of the strong, on the one hand, and 'a mass of abject,
powerless men who have no communal feeling', on the other, could sustain
the conditions for value creation. 

Subman negates this ecology of value by declaring his perfect
willingness 'to exchange an exclusive communality for an inclusive and
indiscriminate sociality'. He embraces Durkheim's 'organic solidarity'
or negative ecology of value, the metaphor for which was an eco-system:
just as an eco-system 'can sustain a higher population the greater the
diversity of the species within it, so society can accommodate more
people if they have less in common and more diversified social roles'.

Subman is therefore committed to the totalization of society - to
extending its boundaries 'in order to decrease the possibility of
value'. This of course means including the great apes and other non-
human species within society. The inclusion of so many 'unregenerate
philistines'  will undermine the capacity of human culture to function
as a shared value, inaugurating a thoroughgoing 'philistine ecology' in
which chimps run the Louvre,  etc....

Apart from the fact that his position seems committed to the truth of
Durkheim's account, and other values secreted by it (why is
'indiscriminate sociality' less a value than 'exclusive communality'?),
Bull's account seems very vulnerable to antinomial critique. When all is
said, it is but the other side of the coin of N's position, a complicit
dialectical antagonist which in no way transcends or goes beyond the
Nietzsche/Anti-Nietsche antinomy. It seems to me the ultimate in POMO
cynicism and nihilism, but it does graphically illustrate what Bhaskar
is up against in trying to elaborate a realist ethics.

As Bull points out, the usual 'progressive' response to N is to argue
that 'the long process of human emancipation has not only been motivated
by the desire to promote [emancipatory] values but has also contributed
to their ecology'. This, however, says Bull, is a difficult argument to
sustain historically and sociologically; and then wheels out Durkheim.
Difficult to sustain it may be, but it is at least arguable along
secular and evolutionary lines on an intra-specific basis (without
rejecting the death of God), and when all is said and done the N/A-N
antinomy can only be overcome in practice, and that's up to us...
'Utopianism of the intellect, optimism of the will.'

In *From East to West*, Bhaskar is no longer content with such a
response (or with its elaboration via the dialectic of desire to freedom
in DPF). Nick and Alan have argued, correctly I think, that FEW is
fundamentally concerned to bridge the gap between the historically real
and the ideally possible by showing that the ideal is necessarily
possible. FEW accordingly rejects N's premises and reinstates God - it
caps N's grand narrative of biological evolution and the flux of
becoming with a grander one which encompasses it, and which is
ultimately God's cosmic purpose.
 
This might look to the non-religiously minded as taking the easy way out
or as 'pulling global salvation out of the critical realist hat' (Andrew
Sayer, cited by Par Engholm, *Alethia* 3:2, p.20), but there is a sense
in which it expresses the truth of our situation as a species: we are
unlikely to survive ecological catastrophe unless we come to see
ourselves, and to act, as part of nature's greater, highly valued whole.
Mystics and the religiously minded have historically been far better at
seeing this whole than the non-reliously minded, and certainly if global
ecological crisis does escalate, people will turn to 'the help of the
helpless' in droves; to this extent, Bhaskar may turn out to be far
sighted and way ahead of his time. 

Both approaches, it seems to me, are progressive and can contribute a
great deal to each other. Their common enemy at this stage of history is
nihilism, whether of the Nietzschean or Anti-Nietzschean (POMO) variety.

Mervyn

 
-- 
Mervyn Hartwig
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CONTENTS of the current issue of ALETHIA (3:2, November 2000):
Theme REALISM & TRANSCENDENCE. Feature, Three views of Roy Bhaskar's *From East 
to West* (Nick Hostettler & Alan Norrie, 'Do You Like Soul Music?'; Jan 
Straathof, 'Logical Meanderings: West and East'; James Daly, 'Dialectical 
Enlightenment').
Pär Engholm, 'Realism, Social Theory, and Theoretical Practice' (review article 
of Andrew Sayer, *Realism and Social Science* Sage 2000).
Derek Brereton, 'Ontic Morality and Human Being'.
Brad Shipway, 'Critical Realism and Theological Critical Realism: Opportunities 
for Dialogue?'
Doug Porpora, 'Quantum Reality as Unrealised Possibility' (review article of 
Chris Norris, *Quantum Theory and the Flight from Realism: philosophical 
responses to quantum mechanics*, Routledge 2000).
Peter Dickens, 'Marx and the Metabolism between Humanity and Nature' (review 
article of Paul Burkett, *Marx and Nature: a red and green perspective*, St. 
Martin’s Press,1999 and John Foster, *Marx’s Ecology: materialism and nature*, 
Monthly Review Press, 2000.)
Dave Taylor, 'Dialectic and Ontology in Critical Realism and Computer Logic'.
Peter Hamilton, 'Thank God for Absence'.
Kathryn Dean, 'Towards a Eudaimonistic Ethics' (review of Sean Sayers, *Marxism 
and Human Nature*, Routledge, 1998.
Jonathan Joseph, 'Realism, Economics and Eurocentrism' (review of Rajani Kanth, 
*Against Economics*, Ashgate, 1997.
PLUS reports on realist conferences, workshops and other activities.
More than 60,000 words of critical realist scholarship and news in all.


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