Walter Kauffman won’t allow me to suggest that Nietzsche was
toying with insanity when he composed his Genealogy of Morals, and Walter
Kauffman is much smarter and more knowledgeable than I, and do make this
suggestion would only serve to avoid the text that must be engaged, so I will
not make it. At the same time, I do hold in the back of my mind the feeling
that if I’m taking seriously the words of a madman, I may not be putting my
time to its best use.
Well,
there are all sorts of reasons for taking Nietzsche seriously even if he was
pulling the wool over our eyes by imitating sanity so convincingly.
Still,
if we allow ourselves at least a little of the irony, just a little of the
sarcasm that Nietzsche allowed himself, what defense does he have? I am in a
bad position. If I reply mock for mock, I will be accused of disengagement, of
private ire, in short of resentiment.
But if I respond with good sense and
sober judgment to the man who mocks me, I run the risk of looking all the more
worthy of mockery.
Despite
his mockery, despite his sarcasm and his own blinding resentiment, one cannot help but have great respect for Nietzsche,
even great sympathy. (Nietzsche noted that “true Christians” always read him
with sympathy.) His insights were profound and important, and he did work out
real cracks in the foundation of his opposition. He found real fault lines, and
these made his job possible. Christianity’s real shame made him possible. If we
see this, we can move forward. If we do not, we are stuck with the same duplicitous,
the same two-sided agony that is the cornerstone of our shame.
Nietzsche
asks the essential question: “What light does linguistics and especially the
study of etymology throw on the history of the evolution of moral concepts?”
The
answer is, not much. Linguistics can reveal the moment at which such concepts
entered language and the development of our understanding of these concepts (“development”
is an apter word than “evolution”), but it cannot say a thing about the
viability—in brief, the truth—of such concepts. “Evil,” “good,” and “bad” have
histories. Those histories are either histories of understanding or histories
of establishment and adornment—or they are, as I believe they are, a single
history of a non-Hegelian dialectic of tension and struggle. In short the words
either apply to “real” things unrelated to contingent history OR they are human
inventions, created and developed to serve specific historical purposes and no
more. The fact that they arose in history does not of itself prove that they
are confined to history.
By way
of analogy: A small child learns the word “fair” before she develops a concept
of fairness (as either each according to his deserts or equal shares for all).
In her first deployment of the word “fair” means only “good for me.” “That’s
not fair,” means “I didn’t get what I want.” (You can all come up with your own
examples.) Later, when the child is matured and corrected, she comes to
understand and, we hope, accept the notion that fair means that you may have to
give up some or all of what you have and want and that not just to keep the
peace, not just to avoid the war of all against all, but because it is fair.
And on an even higher moral plane, she might even want to give up her excess
because she desires fairness above her hoarding personal benefit.
The
question had to be asked, and its answers are of some value, but are not of the
value Nietzsche suggests.
