‘There are no facts, only interpretations.’ (Nietzsche).
Scientist friends have discovered Nietzsche. Whereas in the past, he could be dismissed, people are feeling vulnerable in an age of ‘culture wars’ and people using ‘critical’ terms that they don’t quite understand. In the first instance, I seek to calm such folk down. That ‘critical’ ‘theory’ is not theory at all, it is a movement and worldview, and more herd-like and conformist than critical. It is the kind of ersatz collectivism that Nietzsche feared would seek to take the place and do the work of the discarded God. Nietzsche didn’t see the metaphysical void opening up in the absence of God, because he didn’t see God as anything that existed in the first place. Interesting that people keep trying to pick up God’s baton, all the same.
My concern here, however, is with the attempts to understand Nietzsche, with people arguing that ‘we’ need to live by our own created values/gods. That sounds fine until we ask who the "we" are who are doing the creating here. There are as many of these "truths" as there are human beings, with no way of deciding between them. Hence truth reduces to power, miring us in the unwinnable wars of irreducible subjective opinion. I am the anti-Nietzsche! I am everything that caused Nietzsche a fear and a trembling unto madness: Platonist, Aristotelian, Christian, Catholic, Thomist, Dantista, Rousseauvian, Kantian, Hegelian, Marxist, socialist, eco-socialist, feminist, eco-feminist, communist, trade unionist, democrat, vegetarian, Liverpool football supporter. People go in fear of Nietzsche and his sharp tongue. He intimidates people and they cow in fear. He is very good as exposing the hypocrisies of an empty morality, and nearly all modern moral theories are vulnerable to his assault. But beyond that, Nietzsche is a real woos. He called Socrates a ‘weakling.’ Socrates, a soldier, a mason, a man of action in the public sphere, would have eaten Nietzsche for breakfast.
Nietzsche is challenging, but a dead-end. The modern world is only just catching up with the implications of Nietzsche’s ‘death of God.’ Many were happy to accept that there is no such thing as moral truth, that morality is merely a series of value judgements in which each chooses the good/projects the good as they see fit. They were more than happy to dispense with God and religion. But now we are starting to see Nietzsche’s acid being poured on science and the notion of objective truth and reality. People are getting uneasy. The people who were once happy to see morality as nothing more than personal preferences, likes, and dislikes are not raising objections to the notions of "his truth" and "her truth," the idea that humans are entitled to choose the truth in the same way that they choose the good. It's a package deal in Nietzsche, and most unsound, both for science and ethics.
Nietzsche is good at calling out the emptiness of modern moral theories, but his "death of God" begs the question: now what? I tread warily in the company of Nietzsche. In The Antichrist, he condemned the mass of humanity as ‘the weak and the botched.’ He scorned Christianity as a slave morality - he saw it (and Judaism) - as the root of socialism and democracy, and he loathed all of it. He argued for a pitiless nature eliminating the poor and the weak. Care for the deficient is a religious morality, he argued, and contrary to nature. His words in The Will to Power are chilling:
"The biblical prohibition 'thou shalt not kill' is a piece of naivete compared with the seriousness of the prohibition of life to decadents: 'thou shalt not procreate'. Life itself recognizes no solidarity, no 'equal rights', between the healthy and the degenerate parts of an organism: one must excise the latter - or the whole will perish. - Sympathy for decadents, equal rights for the ill-constituted - that would be the profoundest immorality, that would be anti-nature itself as morality!"
Nietzsche’s statements can be so extreme as to drive any atheist retaining any concern for others back into the arms of Christianity! That said, Nietzsche is well worth engaging with, for the way he challenges the attempt to project and employ objectivity and objective truth as an authoritative standard, much as people who say "follow the science" do, we can pursue science as the ever-refining method of discovering the truth about reality, but "the science" as authoritative standard is just reification. This is precisely what the quote from Nietzsche above refers to, science, religion, claims to knowledge as projections of power bound up with social perspectives and positions. It is a view that has found its way into the contemporary culture wars, and leaves us without objective standards of truth and justice – only war settled by power remains.
A rather provocative piece of work I did two years ago (third volume of my Marx studies) has just taken off and hit the top 4% on Academia for some reason. I suspect the reason it is being discovered is that it anticipates the explosion of conflict and antagonism this past year. Having presented a very good case for Marx in the first two volumes, I subject the modern "death of God" to religious critique. Chapter five (20 pages) is on Nietzsche, facts, and interpretation.
Simply put, either there are transcendent standards of truth or justice or there are not. If there are not, then we are mired in an endless power/resistance, with no rational way of arbitrating between competing claims, only power. We choose our sides according to preference, interest, and ideology. But there are no rational grounds for that choice. It is a return to Thrasymachus’ 'justice is the interest of the strongest.' That power/resistance is merely a Hobbesian/Foucaultian world that leads nowhere, merely a self-cancellation. I don't care if people take their stand on science or religion here, or on both, as I do. What matters is that we continue to affirm the idea of truth and not conflate it with social construction and mediation (which does of course take place, any 'transcendent' truth is only known through its unfolding in reality, and that reality is always in some way social and constructed. I see it as a sub-creation. Mediation must take place. Transcendent standards are only ever known, experientially, in time and place. I don't have a term for what it is I am describing; it is something between and beyond disclosure and imposure, recognizing the role of human agency within the ceaselessly creative universe.
I engage with Nietzsche. He is a challenging figure and exposes projectionist fallacies. He has many insights. He is good at exposing the moral emptiness of terms, concepts, and theories in the metaphysical void. But he's a dead-end. So long as the void remains in place, human beings will carry on attempting to fill it with their self-created gods/values/truths. It was in coming to realize this a decade or more ago that my work took the oddish turn it did. I'm still working on it my view of rational freedom. But the fact remains that, down this route, first morality falls, then science. People like Max Weber accepted the fall of the former, arguing for an existential ethic of responsibility, but could never accept the latter. Whilst Weber's position was incoherent, it has been the position of modernity. And it is now unravelling. We are now seeing the challenge being mounted to science that was pressed against morality a century ago. It's an unsound mode of thought and has damaging political and social implications. I try to turn that tide, and have been swimming against it my entire life. I don't want to live in an anarchy of the powerful. (But I simplify, in many respects Nietzsche's position could be considered a lived morality, beyond rationalized codes, as in the manner of Marx and Wittgenstein, so I would advise engagement and a closer reading rather than dismissal. Nietzsche is an important figure).
I hate to sound like I am pushing religion here. I know the arguments against religion. I was an atheist until around 2013. But I was led in this direction by a lot of hard thought and experience. I saw the threat to truth, and how science needs metaphysics to support, justify and frame itself (the big questions of value, meaning, significance). If there are only our concepts and categories, then reality is lost to an anthropocentrism that is vulnerable to Nietzsche's assault. Nietzsche is a sharp critic, capable of cutting all that we hold dear down with respect to truth, justice, and equality. People loved the way that he overthrew God and dissolved religion. They didn't notice that he did the same to science. They are noticing now:
"Science, along with morality and religion, is to be understood, not in terms of objective truth and falsity, but in terms of the aspirations, projects, hopes and fears of its proponents. The scientific picture of the world is an expression of a particular kind of will to power, and to seek objective guarantees of its veracity is a timid evasion."
I never cared for his view, but have been accused of being anti-science for trying to recover morality and a religious sensibility against his assault. Not so. I saw the threat coming and have long sought to check it.