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'An aphorism, properly stamped and molded, has not been "deciphered" when it has simply been read; rather one has then to begin its interpretation, for which is required an art of interpretation.' -- Nietzsche, 'On the Genealogy of Morals'
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'An aphorism, properly stamped and molded, has not been "deciphered" when it has simply been read; rather one has then to begin its interpretation, for which is required an art of interpretation.' -- Nietzsche, 'On the Genealogy of Morals'

Nietzsche, moral crisis, nature « Previous | |Next »
August 16, 2006

Martin Drenthen's paper, Wildness as a Critical Border Concept: Nietzsche and the Debate on Wilderness Restoration makes some interesting remarks on Nietzsche's philosophy of nature. Drenthen says that Nietzsche not only provides us with a fundamental diagnosis of the moral crisis of our culture but, that in his philosophy a new, albeit paradoxical, form of respect for nature can be discerned. According to Nietzsche, there is a fundamental link between the crisis in contemporary morality and our problematic relationship with nature.

Drenthen gives us a standard account of Nietzsche's perspective on the moral crisis, when he says that:

According to Nietzsche, this ambiguity in our relation to nature is a symptom of a more fundamental crisis of our culture: we no longer seem to have commonly accepted criteria that can give us moral orientation, but, at the same time, we do not know how to live our lives without such criteria....We moderns suffer from a total loss of moral orientation, although, most of the time, we do our best to push away this awareness. Nietzsche tries to come to terms with this irretrievable loss of ground, to find a way to cope with it. In Nietzsche's view, philosophers should be like physicians of a culture: they should analyse cultural phenomena as symptoms of underlying natural physiological processes (in terms of weaknesses and strengths, health and disease), and from this diagnosis come up with a treatment for that culture's illnesses.

The reason for our moral crisis is that the traditional foundations of morality no longer function. Interestingly, Drenthen says that Nietzsche criticises the dominant ethics that conceives morality as something that singles out humans from nature. He criticises this interpretation of the nature of morality not just because it is false but also because, in Nietzsche's view, the unnatural morality has become a force that inhibits the flourishing of human nature.

Drenthen says that Nietzsche is motivated by a deep distrust of the anthropocentric idea that humans have a special position in the universe because of their moralityand that he seeks to transcend the all-too-human--what environmental philosophers call an anthropocentric morality. He adds:

Nietzsche criticises our inability to come to terms with the insight that we are no different from the rest of nature: now that we no longer believe in a supernatural miraculous source of morality, our old moral self-understanding is rendered obsolete, and we must dare to go on naturalising ourselves more radically, in an effort to find a new type of ethics that is more in line with (our understanding of our place in) nature. Much of Nietzsche's philosophy can be seen as an attempt to come up with an account of nature that explains how all aspects of human nature are just elements of an all-embracing nature.

The 'will to power ' is the way Nietzsche endeavors to show that humans are part of nature.

| Posted by Gary Sauer-Thompson at 11:56 PM | | Comments (1)
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Much of Nietzsche's philosophy can be seen as an attempt to come up with an account of nature that explains how all aspects of human nature are just elements of an all-embracing nature.

Yes, and I have always thought that most existentialist and postmod types have downplayed if not ignored the more naturalist and physiological aspects of FN"s writings, perhaps because it is thought to be a bit too close to say, Darwinian ideas, and thus contra-dialectic, as well as contra-Descartes. However a better question might be what Nietzschean naturalism--which dispenses even with the search for consensus characteristic of utlitarians (and starting with similar materialist premises, in ways)--actually results in, politically, economically, or ethically. The dictator could never be seen as "evil" per se, but merely Machiavellian, eccentric or poorly conditioned, etc. FN thus runs into the same low-level issues utilitarians or behaviorists do: "goodness" seems purely a matter of some hedonist calculation, but the Nietzschean has dispensed with even the obligation to consider other people's interests: thus FN is in some sense deeply anarchistic, though that anarchism could be read as "rechts" as well as "links."