See also the preview for this review.
I read On the Genealogy of Morality by Friedrich Nietzsche as a way to understand the Long Reflection. I think it is a somewhat helpful book for that. I hope my notes give some indication of why that is true. (At least some) EAs (effective altruists) interested in the Long Reflection should read Genealogy of Morality.
Similarly, there is some value for (some) Christians or those concerned with Christianity to read Genealogy of Morality, again, as I hope my notes indicate.
Christianity as a whole and EA as a whole should take into account Genealogy of Morality.
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[Notes:]
p. xiv (Editor's (Keith Ansell-Pearson's) introduction) --The Genealogy is a subversive book that needs to be read with great care.--
p. xiv - xv --The critique of morality Nietzsche carries out in the book is a complex one; its nuances are lost if one extracts isolated images and concepts from the argument of the book as a whole.--
Unfortunately, I do not think I will be able to give this book that much attention. I will read it somewhat superficially.
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Read (Nietzsche's) preface.
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First essay:
up to end of section 4:
Nietzsche makes much of how "vulgar, common" becomes "bad" (the etymology of schlect in section 4). The aristocratic declare things beneath them, and this becomes "bad". But I'm not sure that aristocracy or something enough like it was the original state of human society. I'm much more certain that the family was, and that aristocracy itself arose out of family. I suppose a patriarch (or matriarch) and an aristocrat can be similar, but on a much different scale. In a small tribe, even a patriarch has to negotiate with his wife and (old-enough) kids, and generally can't be socially distant from them, will naturally in a sense love them despite whatever aristocratic leanings he has. Small tribes are effectively somewhat (or very?) democratic, even if explicitly patriarchal (I would think) because of this decrease in distance between rulers and ruled, to borrow Nietzsche's term in section 2. And, also, there were many tribes, and thus multiple different evolutions of morality. Supposing some families / tribes were patriarchal, and some more egalitarian, the genealogy of morality of the egalitarian tribes would be different from that of the patriarchal.
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up to section 5:
I think, for me, personally, it is striking that Nietzsche connects truthfulness, reality, "being" with aristocracy, because I value truthfulness, reality, and "being real". I think if I could take "aristocracy" in a relatively unloaded way, I could be in favor of it, especially insofar as it is reconciled with democracy when all people are (in a sense) aristocratic (at least, truthful, real, "really existing").
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section 7:
Nietzsche talks about the "priestly" vs. "aristocratic" classes. These classes emerge as families grow and become bizarre elaborations of themselves. (This is my theory:) The priestly represents the values of home. (Jacob hanging around the tents and pleasing his mother.) The aristocracy represents the values of not-at-home. (Esau going out to hunt and pleasing his father.) Mother, father, and siblings are a primal situation that is repeated over and over, like waves of the ocean crashing down on society. We have to solve the problems of parents raising siblings over and over, and for much of our early life, it dominates our experience of the world, and affects our later understanding of the world. So there are mother-values and father-values, and the values of raising children, and of children looking after their own interests and putting pressure on the family culture, and perhaps others. Both mother, father, and children/siblings are needed to perpetuate family, which is the bringing of children to adulthood so that they can start their own families. This is the root situation of the survival of the human species.
The "priests" and "aristocrats" take these impulses and run with them, creating the bizarre versions of them. But, to an extent, they still champion the values of mothers and fathers, respectively (maybe of mother-aligned children and father-aligned children, respectively). Nietzsche holds up the Jews as the haters of aristocratic values. I think "hate" is of limited accuracy, and is dangerously loaded, and similarly with saying "the Jews", but I can see in Judaism and its descendants a pressure against Nietzsche-style aristocracy. But, Judaism may be saying something like "You want to survive and flourish? You need 'maternal' values and we are going to champion them." So Nietzsche, if he wants human flourishing, even his version of human flourishing, needs the "maternal" (mothers, mother-aligned, even priests) to do cultural work that materially supports his "paternal" (fathers, father-aligned, aristocratic) agenda, somewhat like how a Democrat screenwriter needs a Republican plumber. A truthful accounting of patriarchy and aristocracy requires it to understand its dependence on the feminine and "lower class".
The Bible is ambivalent about Jacob, and there is a reconciliation between Jacob and Esau. And the Old Testament, and perhaps also the New with Jesus and Paul, is one male hero after another, serving the cause of these "Jewish"/"maternal" values.
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Finished section 7.
To be fair to Nietzsche, there can be people who really hate aristocratic values (or, various values that Nietzsche calls "aristocratic"). It's possible for people to hate truthfulness and "real personality" somehow because they are championing "Jewish"/"maternal" values, or opposing certain aspects of how "aristocracy" oppresses people. Maybe he knew one or two of them personally, and saw the bitterness with how they hated who he was. Nietzsche's hate is a mirror image of the hate he saw in them.
So people who oppose the patriarchy can shoot themselves in the foot epistemically through their bitterness at what representatives of "men" have done to them. They can naively reject "patriarchal" values -- such as "truthfulness", "being real", being brave, being ambitious, not resenting, thus limiting themselves morally.
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up to section 10
Nietzsche describes his noble people as "naive" and "complacent". They sound like big, happy children -- perhaps then they are unaware of reality and can be trolled by Satan. The noble sound sort of unserious to me. But the people of ressentiment are more serious because their hate makes them serious. This drives them to cleverness. And in this, though they are not as "naive" or "complacent", they are also children, more mature children who are in some sense smaller and who are unhappy -- partially aware of reality, but still can be trolled by Satan. The complacent become hardened in the happiness of their complacency and thus are kept from truly having God's heart -- they do not see the need, despite their privilege, to really seriously love. The "resentful" hold onto hate, which prevents them from truly having God's heart. Everyone sees the opposite as being a problem, so they retreat to being themselves as salvation. But that is a mistake, at least in this case, because both the complacent and the resentful are on the wrong path. This "escape from other people's spiritual danger by affirming your own values" move is a way that Satan trolls us.
Perhaps "complacent" vs. "resentful" (or the more positive terms that can be associated with those two terms, like "forgiving" and "loving" respectively) are often enough two aspects of human psychology that each of us has -- no one (or few) are purely "noble"/"complacent" or "humble"/"resentful". We struggle with these conflicting values, in ourselves and each other. Perhaps each value seems called for (whether it really is or not) in its own season.
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section 10 (at the end):
--Against this [the enemy of the noble who is respected by the noble], imagine 'the enemy' as conceived of by the man of ressentiment -- and here we have his deed, his creation: he has conceived of the 'evil enemy', 'the evil one' as a basic idea to which he now thinks up a copy and counterpart, the 'good one' -- himself!--
I feel like a different genealogy of "good" could be, a mother takes care of, comforts, feeds, guides, and disciplines her children, and it makes them feel good (retrospectively in the case of the discipline) and makes their lives go well, which gives them a feeling of gratitude toward her. Gratitude is a feeling that things are good. So they associate goodness with her, and call her good. Her kind of goodness, coincidentally or not, resembles the goodness of Judaism and Christianity, which according to Nietzsche (section 8) grows out of their desire for revenge.
(I wonder if there are theories of developmental psychology on how we think infants and small children come to believe that their parents are trustworthy. It's easy to go from "I trust you" to "You are trustworthy", and for some meanings of the terms, "trustworthy" and "good" are identical. So maybe the genealogy of "good" is "I trust you and generally do not get betrayed through you", and this is "good", and "I trust you and too often get betrayed through you" is "bad" or "evil". That may be a simpler and more elemental genealogy of morality or value.)
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section 12
Nietzsche talks about moral progress, perhaps: --Today we see nothing that wants to expand, we suspect that things will just continue to decline, getting thinner, better-natured, cleverer, more comfortable, more mediocre, more indifferent, more Chinese, more Christian -- no doubt about it, man is getting 'better' all the time... Right here is where the destiny of Europe lies -- in losing our fear of man we have also lost our love for him, our respect for him, our hope in him and even our will to be man. The sight of man now makes us tired -- what is nihilism today if it is not that?... We are tired of man...--
From the perspective of the dominant culture (which to this day is into "better-naturedness", "cleverness", "comfort", perhaps also "indifference", often "Christian" as Nietzsche meant it), we get moral progress by furthering our own values. But from the perspective of Nietzsche, someone with different values, we are actually declining. So how are we supposed to know when we've had moral progress?
I can see both a taste for our dominant / "slave morality" culture in effective altruism (at least the traits mentioned in the previous paragraph as being current values), but also a driving desire for truth and excellence, at least in some sense. Is effective altruism conflicted in a deep way? Is it trying to destroy itself, using greatness to destroy the possibility of greatness (producing a maximally comfortable world)? If EAs recognized this conflict, would they bite the bullet and say that truth and excellence are only instrumental in bringing about comfort, or would they feel uneasy at pursuing comfort in a way that could sacrifice truth and excellence?
[By "truth" and "excellence", I think I mean something like "people value, practice, consciously embody seeking what is real and doing what is best". If you are maximally comfortable, I seem to be claiming, you no longer seek what is real or do what is best. Are EAs really trying to produce a world of maximal comfort? "EAs" is a broad category. I know that when people talk about moral foundations on the Forum, what feels like the most common guiding principle is hedonism. I feel like if you pursue hedonism as your guiding star, you will end up maximizing comfort at the expense of truth and excellence. Not that the world you produce won't in some sense bear the marks of truth and excellence if you are a hedonist. It will have a considerable amount, all the truth and excellence that you had in pulling off the difficult task of optimizing. Optimizing anything in any way takes truth and excellence of some sort in the optimizer. But people will be robbed of the opportunity to pursue truth and excellence themselves by the very success of hedonism as a guiding value. In any case, some EAs very well might already see, or would see as soon as pointed out, the tension between hedonism and altruism, and be uneasy about hedonism. EAs might not, in many cases are not, consciously seeking to end human embodiment of truth and excellence. But, as long as hedonism is a "Schelling point" for moral action, I think in effect the EA "juggernaut" is heading in that direction. EA may simply be embodying the much greater juggernaut of society as a whole, which seems to me to be lumbering toward comfort for all and truth and excellence only for a few, or perhaps for no one.]
Can truth and excellence have a goal other than producing comfort and mediocrity? Perhaps Nietzsche's answer would be "if you conceive of excellence in non-altruistic terms, of course. Altruism forces us to 'make things better' for other people, and lends itself to moral circle expansion, so we end up making things better for everyone, and this needs to be cumulative, so we eventually run out of things to do, and have to sink back into comfort and mediocrity. But, if you go down my path, you can conceive of an eternity of petty warfare that never produces X-risks, in which people can be great by amorally conquering some people but not going so far (so moralistically far) as conquering the whole world)".
I think that an alternative to Nietzsche and what in fairness may not be a universal EA philosophy, but the one that I fear I see in EA or in the culture at large, -- which I suppose is my answer for the time being -- is to say that truth and excellence exist in order to make us true and excellent people, and that is the real altruism. When altruism accomplishes all that it has to accomplish, we will mourn the loss of great action, and in doing so value great action, which will never be ours again. This mourning is part of how we will not be mediocre. We will exist in a comfort, in a sense, but which we will not value as highly as the people who survive, and the people who survive will only be means to the end of loving God, the original person who is the moral truth.
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section 13
Nietzsche uses some metaphysics/ontology to argue that power just wants to be power and do what it wants.
If I were to use metaphysics/ontology in reply, I would say that the most powerful beings are conscious of everything, and thus experience exploitation both as exploiter and exploited. And [I would say] that power comes from legitimacy -- if it were not legitimate, it wouldn't exist. So what Nietzsche thinks of as power, is less than real power. It is a kind of mediocrity, or perhaps a less-loaded word than "mediocrity" [applies,] that conveys a lack of rigorous excellence.
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section 17, note
In this note, Nietzsche gives a sort of manifesto for something somewhat like the Long Reflection, for instance:
--The question: what is this or that table of values and 'morals' worth? needs to be asked from different angles; in particular, the question 'value for what?" cannot be examined too finely. Something, for example, which obviously had value with regard to the longest possible life-span of a race (or to the improvement of its abilities to adapt to a particular climate, or to maintaining the greatest number) would not have anything like the same value if it was a question of developing a stronger type. The good of the majority and the good of the minority are conflicting moral standpoints: we leave it to the naïvety of English biologists to view the first as higher in value as such... All sciences must, from now on, prepare the way for the future work of the philosopher: this work being understood to mean that the philosopher has to solve the problem of values and that he has to decide on the rank order of values.--
Earlier in the note, Nietzsche talks about how the physical sciences (such as physiology) are needed to answer questions about what where morality comes from.
Should the Long Reflection take into account genealogy of morality, or physiology? Nietzsche thinks that doing so helps a philosopher "decide on" (willfully determine?) values. Why know what you're doing when you're making up values? Why do research? If you're discovering values rather than just making them up, I can see a point to doing research. Does genealogy of morality, or physiology, have anything to do with what moral should be? Can we get an "ought" from those "is"es? I think we can get an "ought" from an "is" through the ontology of morality. If morality (I would call it "legitimacy") is a thing which exists, then maybe we can learn its nature and thus have an idea what morality should be. If we know some things that are true of all existing beings, or of the beings in the categories that morality would belong to, then that gives us a clue to the nature of morality, and therefore of what matters.
Can the Long Reflection meaningfully make any progress from another starting point? If morality isn't a "thing out there", isn't it fully made up by people? (In which case research doesn't matter -- it's all a contest of preferences.) Maybe it's programmed into our biology or culture, but those are up for revision, at least they should be in the future.
I guess I would say from those thoughts that the Long Reflection shouldn't bother with any research other than into the ontology of morality, and what follows from that investigation. (Maybe "ontology" is the wrong word, but what I have in mind is the investigation of morality as a being that exists, and how it could be, could have its own particular kind of power, etc.)
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Second essay
(up to end of section 9)
In this essay, Nietzsche describes his theory that morality came out of people punishing other people so that they would pay their debts. The pain of punishment is a reminder to pay back debts. The creditors get to feel sadistic pleasure (a "primitive" and therefore "original" and "natural" thing) in punishing people, being cruel to them. This gets "internalized" as bad conscience.
Supposing Nietzsche is correct (or correct-enough), does this matter? Maybe justice is built up out of this history? But I can see justice, myself, in this moment. The history may have taught it to my ancestors, and how else could they have been taught justice or any other part of morality, if they didn't understand innately? We somehow have to "teach children to care". But when we are taught things, we might be shown a crude sketch of a concept, but then somehow from that our minds can leap to the real concept. The sketch is not what we noetically perceive, but instead, the concept itself. So I, myself, see justice, now, and must grapple with it.
Nietzsche might presuppose that justice couldn't exist in itself (too Platonic or Christian an idea, maybe), but how did he know that? Why couldn't he be wrong, and I be right? I see what I see.
Perhaps I can see wrongly. But to some extent, I live in the world that I live in, and so I have to live with the justice that exists in my world. Ultimately, before any debunking can happen, I have to trust myself and my contact with the world enough to think through the debunking and trust it as true. My relationship to what I directly perceive, whether noetically or with my senses, is my primary reality. It's true that I can see with my sensory eyes a mirage, or with my noetic eyes something equivalent, but I get real evidence by seeing justice, no matter how justice was pointed out to me.
[I guess I'm trying to say that genealogies don't automatically debunk direct lived experience. They both offer some "evidence". These evidences are provisional, they "might be mirages" (which applies to all evidence and all foundations of thinking). But I can viscerally interact with the justice that exists to me, in my lived life, and this gives me reason to believe in that justice, unless there is some kind of defeater. Maybe justice is a cloudy thing, but even then, I may see it truly in my naive life.]
[Another way to look at the genealogy-debunking issue is to say that if we have sufficient evidence that God does (or for a weaker but still somewhat effective version, might with significant likelihood) exist, then this may move us toward, or effectively all the way to, thinking that justice is a thing that existed before human history, and was taught to us, ultimately by God though possibly with others involved, by "whatever means worked", including something "gory" like what Nietzsche talks about, if Nietzsche turns out to be correct (or correct-enough).]
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Finished the second essay.
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Third essay.
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Nietzsche talks about how people turn on themselves, and then become unhealthy and evil. They pretend to be humble, but are actually resentful. They spread their sickness and make the healthy sick.
I think Nietzsche makes a good diagnosis. (But I would amend it by saying that people both pretend and sincerely attempt to be humble, but are actually resentful. And perhaps resentment and dishonesty is not always present, but more generally there is a self-enmity that wants people to be enemies of themselves, which produces unhealthiness.) I can see what he says in the church (or something like it), even to this day, or perhaps among people who are fearful -- even in myself.
Church people might be worried that if they accept Nietzsche's diagnosis, they will have to accept his cure, which would involve atheism. But maybe there is another cure, which is theistic.
Naively, I would say simply reading the Gospels dispels the unhealthiness that Nietzsche disliked. Going to church is a good place to catch the sickness, but reading the Gospels is a cure. I wonder how many unhealthy Christians really sit down to read the Gospels.
But perhaps with a sufficiently committed ideology of sickness, the Gospels can't be read for what I naively think they are: the contact of a healer with people he makes whole, who is on the side of people, and wants them to be on the side of themselves, just as he is on their side. Maybe we always need God in the way that we always need his oxygen, but there is a sense in which God builds us up to not need him -- I would say, so that instead of pursuing (or remaining loyal to) him because we need him, we pursue him (remain loyal) because we love him.
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Up to section 20.
Nietzsche provides an eloquent attack against a certain kind of (often-Christian) culture. He can only speak with such strength (I will say) because he is in a minority, and has his own frustrated desire built up in him, which comes out in a concentrated form.
What would it sound like for someone who was in a minority within a more or less Nietzschean culture? How might such a person criticize Nietzsche? I'm fairly ignorant of past writings, and I bet there are quite a few of these, but I can't think of any off the top of my head. Being opposed to people in power goes back at least as far as the biblical prophets.
(I think aspects of my book How Can We Love? came out of my time in a sort-of-Nietzschean culture. (For instance, the protest against "lovelessness".) Now I would like to side with Nietzsche against certain anti-Nietzscheans. There's something wearying in this -- is there a point to knowing things to the point of having opinions, if you take the opposite side later on? I don't think that my pro- and anti-Nietzschean sides are exact opposites, but there's still a weariness to that. Maybe weariness stops us from going on, maybe without having reached an answer, or it causes us all the more to reach an answer, with the strength we have left.)
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Finished third essay (and the whole book).
In section 27, there's mention made of the questionability of the will to truth. Nietzsche thinks that rigor of thinking is a descendant of asceticism (Christianity). He seems to want to go against truth itself as a value.
Going against truth entirely is not practical, although in some "utopia" of the future it might be possible. But being lax with the truth to some extent could work. We're already lax, in practice, and survive, or even do better for it in some ways.
For the Long Reflection, we could ask "is it a sin to more, or less, intentionally deceive yourself?" If the answer is "no" or "we don't know" (which I think may be the case for atheists, unless they have an atheistic moral realism), then people can hold values completely regardless of reason. Or, all they need is the little bit of reason that says "I don't have to respect the will to truth" and they can believe whatever they like. Can we reject their beliefs for not respecting the will to truth? Maybe -- if we can prove that the will to truth is necessary. Or maybe we would say that correct moral beliefs conform to reality, and we need truth to know reality. But why do we need to espouse correct moral beliefs, and not simply the ones that reflect our wills and preferences? Could we maybe say that truth is particular rather than universal, and so each person has their own particular moral truth, which they know directly through experience, and, "reflection" in some sense?
Nietzsche's argument (I think) includes that the truly atheistic person goes beyond the atheism of his day (which I think he would see in the rationalists / EAs as well) which wasn't thoroughgoingly atheistic, but still sort of held to theistic beliefs without having a good reason for them. So, moral anti-realism which still ends up compelling action -- it sounds like there used to be a God, who compelled action, then we replaced him with morals, then with a moral anti-realism which claims to not be moral realism but which works like moral realism. Similarly with the love of truth. Nietzsche (I think) would say to most modern atheists: you aren't really atheists, you are still infected with theism. But the modern atheist has one foot in the theistic world, and one foot in the atheistic.
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