Nietzsche and Ethics
So I was reading Nietzsche's Beyond Good and Evil this morning between mouthfuls of tuna straight from the can (my latest bachelorette breakfast). He raised an interesting point of which I'm sure everybody is aware but doesn't really pay any attention to (much like my friend's disconcerting msn name: "The greatest trick the Devil ever pulled was to convince the world he doesn't exist").
Throughout the linear thread of time human beings have done things and observed the results. This is the basis of all scientific reasoning (hard determinism, cause and effect), and our ethical framework. So far we've evolved from wearing skimpy strips of fur, grunting moronically and seeing how certain actions produce either beneficial or harmful results, to actually being able to rationalise prior to an event and thus creating rules, laws and morals from our centuries-old knowlege. However, Nietzsche says, we've reached a point in mankind's history where our ethics are pre-packaged and given to us by the Church, the government, and our peers, producing a teeming mass of lazy, quasi-civilised pigs.
What apparently needs to be done now is to BREAK THAT SKIN which clothes all our actions and decisions. We need to revolutionise our personal system and EXPERIMENT in order to question, explore, and reassess our belief systems.
Personally I don't really believe in a static form of ethics or morals - they're all culturally/socially relative, right?
There's a game on the Philosopher's Magazine Online which attempts to break down our moral intuitions: Taboo.
4 comments:
I came across your blog via iqons...I'm so pleased to find someone one the net with an interest in philosophy too!
I'm reading On the Genealogy of Morals at the moment...still on the first essay.
I'm reading On the Genealogy of Morals at the moment...still on the first essay.
I'll gladly lend my voice to that chorus, however any experiment must know its subject properly. And I think Nietzsche is perhaps either a little premature and finds himself outpaced today by other forms of understanding.
I think we should temper Nietzsche's critique with an understanding that he is often quick to neglect - biology. (not that I'd portend to chide our moustached maestro)
For this I think we need to examine moral behaviour with a firm mind for its type. Namely those behaviours that appear to us culturally determined, that is either; practices we might locate as culturally unique or novel - politics - and behaviours we are genetically hardwired with.
And while its seems that to distinguish between these in a manner that allows for clarity of any kind is probably not possible we might still look for the lines of developement.
Chomsky proposes a universal grammar, a cognitive structure by which language is taken on, a genetic element before the relativity of the magnificently diverse range of human language and its antecedent culture. And there has also been talk of a universal moral grammar, a set of behavioural traits we have acquired over our evolution, what may have been favoured for its facilitation of our survival. Whether much of our morality is a kind of knowledge rather than an intuitive type of behaviour is a question that when approached is certain to evade any easy analysis as it crosses so many boundaries, tempts so many disciplines, a problem that requires the sort of intellectual co-ordination that is quite obviously lacking today.
But If this is the case we might want to look at our cultural practices, definite mutations of emergent trends, as points of departure for moral experimentation. I think of everything i've either read by or on Nietzsche the most righteous and incisive thing is probably Gilles Deleuze's epigraphy "Nietzsche and Philosophy" particurlarly this qoute -
"The aime of critique is not the ends of man or of reason but in the end the Overman, the overcome, over-taken man. The point of critique is not justification but a different way of feeling: another sensibility"
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