Date: Mon, 26 Jan 1998 11:21:04 -0800 (PST) From: callihan-AT-callihan.seanet.com (Steven E. Callihan) Subject: Re: Darwin Does Not Equal Marx! Randall Albright wrote: >I would need to understand what you mean by that broad tent of >"utilitarianism", Steven. For example, are we talking about... the dry, >warlike Sparta versus the arts-drenched Athens? Or... the evolution from >Locke to Bentham to Stuart Mill's father? John Stuart Mill himself, >although he may be reductionistly called "utilitarian", realized, for >example, the need for time out, for pleasure, for the arts, for the >eccentrics. George Sand was someone he admired, as well as Chopin. People >smoking cigars on horses and playing piano music aren't exactly working the >coal mines. And J.S. Mill looked forward to a time of "socialism", even as >he saw the problems inherent in socialism, much of which is still true. I don't think Nietzsche is slicing the salami particularly thin, nor am I. The problem, I suppose, that the so-called "utilitarians" were facing was how to ground value in some kind of rational fashion. This, it seems to me, is particularly a problem for a capitalist society, and all these thinkers were to one degree or another struggling with this issue. Nietzsche is scathingly negative in his comments on Mill, even calling him a "flathead" in one place (WP 30), although, certainly, Nietzsche's polemic assaults must, themselves, be taken with a certain grain of salt. What he particularly brings up for criticism (WP 925 & 926) is what might be termed Mill's categorical imperative, "Do not unto others what you would not have them do unto you." To this he replies, invoking Machiavelli, "But what if someone holding the _Principe_ in his hand were to say: 'It is precisely such actions that one _must_ perform, to prevent others from performing them first--to deprive others of the chance to perform them on _us_?" The crux of the problem for Nietzsche is the reciprocity and mutuality of actions. Mill's dictum, in other words, already assumes that all actions are reciprocal, exist in some kind of state of equivalency. For Nietzsche, on the other hand, actions at best may only be said to be fictionally equivalent, and forms an imposition upon the sphere of individual sovereignty, if you will: "...here an equivalence of value between my actions and yours is presupposed; here the most personal value of an action is simply annulled..." (WP 926) Where "utilitarianism" comes in here is that it is what presupposes a base equivalency of actions based upon a common utility. Actions may be made equivalent, in other words, on the basis of assuming a valuational position amounting to the "greater good," or the public good, the common weal, etc. To do so, however, opposes society to the individual. The individual as an individual can only be a non-conforming malefactor (or, under the aegis of socialism, a counter-revolutionary). >So fill me in, with your words on what exactly he's disputing. (I have >"Birth of Tragedy", _Thus Spoke..._, _The Gay Science_, and _A Nietzsche >Reader_ by Penguin which covers his whole career on a wide range of issues, >if you want to refer me to any of these, too.) In some instances, Nietzsche would seem to be granting some limited degree of "truth" to the utilitarian thesis: for instance, he asserts that moralities are originally social utilities, but of which we have forgotten that they were utilities. In fact, becoming aware of the utilitarian basis of morality, although it may help philosophically to undergird a capitalist system of exchange values, serves itself, nonetheless, to undercut morality. Utilitarianism is a form of nihilism, in other words. The strength or power of a morality, in other words, exists in its being regarded as something other than a mere utility. The following from _Human, All Too Human_, "The Wanderer and His Shadow," Aphorism 40, speaks to this issue (since you didn't mention that you have this work, I'll quote the section in full): "_The significance of forgetting for the moral sensation._ -- The same actions as within primitive society appear to have been performed first with a view to common _utility_ have been performed by later generations for other motives: out of fear of or reverence for those who demanded and recommended them, or out of habit because one had seen them done all around one from childhood on, or from benevolence because their performance everywhere produced joy and concurring faces, or from vanity because they were commended. Such actions, whose basic motive, that of utility, has been _forgotten_, are then called _moral_ actions: not because, for instance, they are performed out of those _other_ motives, but because they are _not_ performed from any conscious reason of utility. -- Where does it come from, this _hatred_ of utility which becomes visible _here_, where all praiseworthy behaviour formally excludes behaviour with a view to utility? -- It is plain that society, the hearth of all morality and all eulogy of moral behaviour, has had to struggle too long and too hard against the self-interest and self-will of the individual not at last to rate _any other_ motive morally higher than utility. Thus it comes to appear that morality has _not_ grown out of utility; while it is originally social utility, which had great difficulty in asserting itself against all the individual private utilities and making itself more highly respected." On the other hand, for Nietzsche, the value of the individual cannot simply be reduced down to a utility, for one thing, simply because there is no basis that is not, ultimately, founded on individual examples that can be utilized to form such a value standard. The individual as an individual, at bottom, is something incommensurable: "But the 'higher nature' of the great man lies in being different, in incommunicability, in distance of rank, not in an effect of any kind--even if he made the whole globe tremble." (WP 876) Nietzsche, other than perhaps making greater use of the percussion instruments, would seem to sound a good deal like Heidegger here--the value of the individual as an individual is founded in their authenticity (their wholeness?), and not on any relation of utility they may have to other individuals. >There's more to life than this. I know that. That's more than just >utilitarianism. In fact, after J.S. Mill had his nervous breakdown, it was >Romantic poetry that pieced him together again for his next, far more >complicated phase of his career, where he could take one side of the issue >so far, then realize its limitations, and move to the other. (Kind of like >Fred.) As stated above, I think we always have to look beyond El Frederico's polemical targets--he wouldn't be targeting them in the first place if they were entirely dismissable at first glance. The "English" are, of course, a favorite target of his. Still, I think, here we might have the entry point into a Nietzschean critique of capitalist ideology as something, by the way, that is strangely akin to socialist idealogy.... Best, Steve ---------------------------------------------------------------------- =A6 Steven E. Callihan =A6 "The more mistrust, =A6 =A6 =A6 the more philosophy." =A6 =A6 URL: http://www.callihan.com/ =A6 =A6 =A6 E-Mail: callihan-AT-callihan.com =A6-F. Nietzsche, The Gay Science, 346.=A6 ---------------------------------------------------------------------- --- from list nietzsche-AT-lists.village.virginia.edu ---
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