Which of the following was not mentioned by mackinnon as an example of the focus of virtue ethics?

477

Chapter Ten

Contemporary Perspectives

In the introduction to Chapter 8, I mentioned that the idea of a good character as one of the key elements in a moral theory was eclipsed by the general notion that all that matters is doing the right thing. With the advent of Christianity, virtue ethics was rejected in favor of an ethics of conduct —asking the kinds of questions explored in Chapters 3–7. As we saw earlier, that was in part a result of a greater social awareness: There is more fairness in asking everybody to follow rules of conduct than there is in trying to make people adapt to vague principles of how to be, and there is a greater chance of developing rational arguments for your position regarding rules of conduct than there is of getting others to agree with your viewpoint concerning what is virtu- ous. In recent years, though, philosophers have turned their attention to the ancient thoughts about character building, and virtue theory is now experiencing a revival. (See Box 10.1 for a brief overview of virtue ethics and character.) This trend has been hotly contested by scholars such as J. B. Schneewind, who believe the original reasons for adopting ethics of conduct are still valid. The revival of virtue theory has been primarily a British and American phenom- enon, and we will look at some of the proponents of this new way of approaching ethics. In continental philosophy (European philosophy excluding the British tradi- tion), there was a separate renewal of interest in Aristotle and his virtue theory in the twentieth century, but in a sense a version of virtue theory has been in effect in con- tinental philosophy ever since the nineteenth century, and we will take a look at that tradition too. Because virtue theory is now associated with the new British∕American theory, we will call its continental counterpart the “Quest for Authenticity.”

Ethics and the Morality of Virtue as Political Concepts

As we have seen, there is a subtle difference between morality and ethics, and in the debate about virtue that difference becomes very clear. In an ethics of virtue the issue is to ask yourself what kind of person you want to be, to fi nd good reasons to back up your view and to listen to possible counterarguments, and then to set forth to shape your own character, all the while being ready to justify your choice of virtue rationally or to change your mind. An ethics of virtue doesn’t specify what kind of virtue you should strive for, although it is usually assumed that it will be something benevolent or at least nothing harmful. The important thing is that you realize you can mold your character into what you believe is right. The question of whether your chosen virtue really is a morally good choice is not necessarily part of the issue.

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However, a morality of virtue focuses precisely on this issue: Which virtue is de- sirable to strive for, and which is no virtue at all? Parents of young children generally know that telling stories can be an excellent way to teach moral virtues, but lately politicians as well as educators have also taken notice. The politician and writer William H. Bennett has published several collections of stories with morals— didactic stories—meant to be read to young children; the best known of those collections is simply titled The Book of Virtues and contains stories from the Western cultural heritage, as well as from other cultures, all with a short added moral explanation. (Box 10.2 discusses stories that warn against following nonvirtuous role models.) In the latter half of the twentieth century, virtue ethics made another entrance on the stage of British and American philosophy. For some thinkers it was an abso- lute necessity to make the switch from an ethics of conduct to virtue ethics because, as virtue ethicists say, you can do the right thing and still be an unpleasant person; however, if you work on your character, you will become a good person and do the right thing without even having to think about it. For others, virtue ethics has be- come a much-needed supplement to an ethics of conduct. Some see virtue ethics as a way for people to explore the issue of a good character; others view it as a way to teach what a good character should be all about.

The Political Aspect of Conduct Versus Character

In the last decade of the twentieth century, the political debate in the United States became polarized in a new way—which actually turned out to be a polished and updated version of the older polarization between conduct and character. Republican politicians brought up the issue of character: Is the candidate trustworthy? Does he or she have integrity? Does he or she keep promises? In short, is the candidate a virtuous person—in his or her private life as well? Democratic politicians responded by pointing to the public policies of the candidate: What has he or she accomplished politically so far? What social policies does the candidate support, and with what

Opponents of virtue ethics often claim that for people to be praised for what they do, or blamed for it, it must be assumed that they are responsible for their actions. But are we respon- sible for our character and disposition? Virtue theory asks us to look primarily at people’s character. Suppose we ask someone to give to charity, and she doesn’t have a generous dispo- sition. Can we then blame her for her lack of virtue? If we can’t, then virtue ethics is useless as a moral theory. It may praise people for dis- positions that they already have, but it doesn’t

tell us how to improve ourselves. Virtue theo- ry’s response to that is that certain people have certain dispositions, and in that respect some are more fortunate than others, morally speak- ing; some people are just naturally thoughtful and generous, or courageous, or truthful. The rest of us have to work on these things. Just because we lack a good disposition doesn’t mean we can’t work on improving it, and just because we have a tendency toward a certain disposition doesn’t mean we can’t work on controlling it.

Box 10.1 C A N W E C H A N G E O U R S P O T S ?

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ETHICS AND THE MORALITY OF VIRTUE AS POLITICAL CONCEPTS 479

success rate has he or she had them implemented? This is not just an interesting revival of the philosophical question of conduct versus character; it goes to the heart of how we view the importance of values. Do we think the question of personal character and integrity is the most important form of ethics—perhaps even the only form of ethics? Or do we believe that the personal standards of someone who serves the public are less important than his or her social conscience and efforts to change things presumably for the better? For some politicians, the question of character has in itself become a matter of a person’s outlook on social policies rather than a question of personal values: A person of good character is a person who supports certain social policies. Regardless of how one feels about national politics, it is philo- sophically interesting that the revived debate between ethics of conduct and virtue ethics is not always a partisan story—the virtue concept is not in itself a Republican

Virtue theory usually focuses on heroes and saints who are to be emulated, but little atten- tion is given to those characters who perhaps teach a deeper moral lesson: the negative role models. Whether we look to real-life fi gures or fi ctional characters, moral lessons can be learned by observing the destiny of “bad guys,” provided that they don’t get away with their misdeeds. (Twisted souls can, of course, learn a lesson from the evildoer who does get away with it, but that is another matter.) From child- hood we hear of people who did something they were not supposed to do and suffered the consequences. Most of these stories are issued as a warning: Don’t “cry wolf,” because in the end nobody will believe you. Look what hap- pened to Adam and Eve, who ate the fruit of the one tree they were not supposed to touch. Look what happened to the girl who stepped on a loaf of bread so she wouldn’t get her feet wet. She was pulled down into the depths of hell (in a Hans Christian Andersen story). When we grow up we learn the lesson of politicians who turned out to be crooked, of televangelists who didn’t practice what they preached, of rich and famous people who have serious drug problems. Movies and novels also bombard us with negative mod- els: Darth Vader ( Star Wars ) sells out to the Dark Side, so we learn to beware of people who have

lost their integrity. Charles Foster Kane ( Citizen Kane ) forgets his humanity and dies lonely, his heart longing for the time when he was a small boy. The Count of Monte Cristo loses his own humanity through an obsession with revenge. And Smeagol loses not only his self but even his identity as a “halfl ing” when he becomes Gol- lum through allowing the Ring to take over his spirit ( The Lord of the Rings ). Through exposure to such characters we get a warning; we live their lives vicariously and fi nd that bitterness lies at the end. Films such as Money for Noth- ing, A Simple Plan, Goodfellas, and Fargo show us that the life of selfi sh pursuits carries its own punishment. There are, however, works that fail to bring home the moral lesson because they are either too pompous or simply misin- formed. Such a fi lm is Reefer Madness, which is now a cult classic depicting the life of crime and madness that results from smoking marijuana. Another antidrug fi lm but with a far superior story and impact is Requiem for a Dream. It real- istically describes the downward spiral of drug addictions, in this case from diet pills as well as heroin. (If you remember your fallacies from Chapter 1, you’ll be able to identify Reefer Mad- ness as an example of the slippery slope fallacy, whereas Requiem depicts an actual, chilling slip- pery slope.)

Box 10.2 N E G A T I V E R O L E M O D E L S

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480 CHAPTER 10 CONTEMPORARY PERSPECTIVES

issue, and the policy issue is not by nature Democratic—it all depends on the politi- cal needs of the moment. As with so many of the moral issues we have looked at, an extreme either∕or turns out to be a bifurcation∕a false dichotomy —a false dilemma with other possible alternatives. If we assume that character is important, why should we assume that a person’s stand on social issues is less important? And if we assume that social views count, then why shouldn’t character count as well? A person can have a perfectly squeaky-clean character and yet be completely ineffective as a decision maker or a negotiator or even have little grasp of or interest in social policies and the needs of society. And a highly effective politician, well liked and radiating understanding of social and economic problems in the population, can turn out to have a personal life that is in shambles because of a lack of character. At times, though, it does seem all-important that a political leader have character and integrity—even if there is disagreement about his or her policies. The emerging pattern shows that each group focuses on what it considers most important: Conservatives have typically focused on character and liberals on a vari- ety of social policies, such as the right to abortion, affi rmative action, gun control, welfare, and other causes related to the general question of what to do. Interestingly, in the 2008 presidential campaign and the following years of the Obama presidency Conservatives often talked about policies, while some Democrats focused on the character of the candidates.

ZITS © 1997 Zits Partnership, King Features Syndicate

Virtue ethics recommends that we emulate role models; however, in this culture we also encourage individuality and the characteristics that make people unique and natural. Immanuel Kant warns about holding siblings up as role models, because that may create resentment rather than inspira- tion to be good. In Zits, the teen Jeremy is inundated with confl icting advice to be like someone else but also to be himself—is it any wonder he is confused?

Zits by Jerry Scott and Jim Borgman

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HAVE VIRTUE, AND THEN GO AHEAD: MAYO, FOOT, AND SOMMERS 481

Have Virtue, and Then Go Ahead: Mayo, Foot, and Sommers

Bernard Mayo

In 1958 the American philosopher Bernard Mayo suggested that Western ethics had reached a dead end, for it had lost contact with ordinary life. People don’t live by great principles of what to do (“Do your duty” or “Make humanity happy”); instead, they measure themselves according to their moral qualities or defi ciencies on an everyday basis. Novelists have not forgotten this, says Mayo, because the books we read tell of people who try hard to be a certain way—who sometimes succeed and sometimes fail—and we, the readers, feel that we have learned something. An ethics of conduct is not excluded from virtue ethics, says Mayo—it just takes second place, because whatever we do is included in our general standard of virtue: We pay our taxes or help animals that are injured in traffi c because we believe in the virtues of being a good citizen and fellow traveler on Planet Earth. In other words, if we have a set of virtues we believe we should live by, we will usually do the right thing as a consequence. However, an ethics of conduct without virtue may not be benevolent at all; it is entirely possible to “do your duty” and still be a bad person— you do it for gain or to spite someone. (A good example of such a person is Dickens’s Ebenezer Scrooge in A Christmas Carol, who may appear to be a pillar of society but only because it is profi table to him.) You can do something courageous without actually being courageous, says Mayo (although Aristotle would insist that if you do it often enough you actually become courageous, and utilitarians would insist that it doesn’t matter why you do something, as long as it has good results). So how should we choose our actions in an everyday situation? Mayo says we shouldn’t look for specifi c advice in a moral theory (Do such and such); we should, instead, adopt general advice (Be brave∕lenient∕patient). That will ensure that we have the “unity of character” which a moral system of principles can’t give us. Mayo advises us to select a role model, either an ideal person or an actual one. Be just, be a good American—or be like Socrates or Buddha, or choose a contemporary role model (fre- quently mentioned by my students) such as Angelina Jolie or Oprah Winfrey. There are heroes and saints throughout history we can choose from, not necessarily because of what they have done, but because of the kind of people they were. So when Mayo suggests that we learn from factual exemplars such as Martin Luther King, Jr., Mother Teresa, or perhaps our parents, he is not saying we should emulate their actual doings but, rather, that we should live in their “spirit” and respond to everyday situations with the strength that a good character can give. This is a much more realistic approach to morality than is refl ected in the high ide- als of principles and duty that an ethics of conduct has held up for people. People have felt inadequate because nobody can live up to such ideals, says Mayo, but everyone can try to be like someone he or she admires. Critics of this enthusiasm for role models have pointed out that just emulating someone you admire doesn’t in itself solve your moral dilemmas: (1) What if your idea of a role model doesn’t correspond to what other people consider models of decent behavior? This is one of the traditional problems with virtue ethics: Who gets the fi nal word about what is to count as virtue? It provides no easy method for solving moral disputes. (2) What

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482 CHAPTER 10 CONTEMPORARY PERSPECTIVES

if your role model turns out not to be so perfect after all? We have seen famous people, role models for many, take dramatic falls from the pedestal of admiration because of personal less-than-admirable choices: Golf champion Tiger Woods and politician John Edwards come to mind, both having presented themselves as fam- ily men, and then revealed to have had extramarital affairs. And even if your role model is a historical fi gure (who can’t make any new mistakes), there is always the risk that new material will surface, showing another and less virtuous side to that person. Are you then supposed to drop your hero or fi nd ways to defend him or her? (3) The most serious complaint may be the one that comes from several phi- losophers (from different time periods) who fi nd fault with the very idea that one can be virtuous by just imitating someone else. (Mayo, of course, didn’t invent that idea; he just made it part of a modern philosophy of virtue.) One is Kant, who didn’t think virtue was a character trait as such, but rather the strength of one’s good will to follow a moral principle (see Chapter 6), and you can fi nd his thought-provoking criticism in Box 10.3. Another is the French philosopher Jean-Paul Sartre, who insisted that we ought to take responsibility for every single thing we do in order to be true to ourselves and become authentic human beings. Taking such respon- sibility precludes settling for just copying what others do, because that approach would give us a false sense of who we are and a false sense of security—by making us believe we can go through life and be good persons just by imitating others. In Sartre’s terminology, we would then be living a life of inauthenticity. We look more closely at Sartre’s moral philosophy later in this chapter.

Bernard Mayo points out that Kant rejected the idea of imitating others as a moral rule and called it “fatal to morality.” Kant deplored holding up an example of an ideal, rather than striving for the ideal itself. Mayo thinks striving for the ideal itself is too much to ask of ordinary people. If we read Kant’s Lectures on Ethics, we fi nd an interesting argument for why it is not a good idea to point to people as worth emulat- ing: If I try to compare myself with someone else who is better than I am, I can either try to be as good or try to diminish that other person; this second choice is actually much easier than trying to be as good as the other person, and it invariably leads to jealousy. So when parents hold up one sibling for the other to emulate, they are paving the way for sibling rivalry; the

one who is being set up as a paragon will be re- sented by the other one. Kant suggests that we should recommend goodness as such and not proffer individuals to be emulated, because we all have a tendency to be jealous of people we think we can’t measure up to. So the Kantian rejection of role models is not merely an ab- stract preference for an ideal but also a realistic appreciation of family relationships and petty grudges. It may even serve as a valid psycho- logical explanation for why some people have a profound dislike for so-called heroes and make consistent efforts to diminish the deeds of all persons regarded as role models by society. Such an attitude may just be another reaction against being told that someone else is a better person than you are.

Box 10.3 K A N T ’ S R E J E C T I O N O F R O L E M O D E L S

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HAVE VIRTUE, AND THEN GO AHEAD: MAYO, FOOT, AND SOMMERS 483

Philippa Foot

Opponents of virtue theory ask how we can call benefi cial human traits “virtues” when some humans are born with such traits and others don’t have them at all. In other words, human responsibility for those dispositions doesn’t enter into the pic- ture at all. Good health and an excellent memory are great to have, but can we blame those who are sick and forgetful for not being virtuous? The British philosopher Philippa Foot—who invented the famous Trolley Prob- lem which you read about in Chapter 1—counters that argument in her book Virtues and Vices (1978) by stressing that virtues aren’t merely dispositions we either have or don’t have. A virtue is not just a benefi cial disposition but also a matter of our inten- tions. If we couple our willpower with our disposition to achieve some goal that is benefi cial, then we are virtuous. So having a virtue is not the same as having a skill; it is having the proper intention to do something good—and being able to follow it up with an appropriate action. For Foot, virtues are not just something we are equipped with. Rather, we are equipped with some tendency to go astray, and virtue is our capacity to correct that tendency. Human nature makes us want to run and hide when there is danger; that is why there is the virtue of courage. And we may want to indulge in more pleasure than is good for us; that is why there is the virtue of temperance. Foot points out that virtue theories seem to assume human nature is by and large sensual and fearful, but there actually may be other character defi ciencies that are more prevalent and more interesting to try to correct through virtue—such as the desire to be put upon and dissatisfi ed or the unwillingness to accept good things as they come along. But what about people who are naturally virtuous? The philosophical tradition has had a tendency to judge them rather oddly. Suppose we have two people who make the decision to lend a hand to someone in need. Person A likes to do things for others and jumps at the chance to be helpful. Person B really couldn’t care less about other people but knows that benevolence is a virtue, so he makes an effort to help in spite of his natural inclination. For Kant the person who makes an effort to overcome his or her inclination is a morally better person than the one to whom

Philippa Foot (1920–2010), a British ethicist, is credited with being one of a handful of 20th century philosophers who have revived and modernized the concept of virtue ethics. For years she held the position of Griffi n Professor of Philosophy at the University of California, Los Angeles. Her works include Virtues and Vices and Other Essays in Moral Philosophy (1978), Natural Goodness (2001), and Moral Dilemmas: And Other Topics in Moral Philosophy (2002).

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virtue comes easily. But surely there is something strange about that judgment, be- cause in real life we appreciate the naturally benevolent person so much more than the surly one who grudgingly tries to be good for the sake of a principle. As a matter of fact, those are the people we love, because they like to do things for the sake of other people. Many schools of thought agree that it takes a greater effort to over- come than to follow your inclination, so it must be more morally worthy. Aristotle, however, believed that the person who takes pleasure in doing a virtuous action is the one who is truly virtuous. Foot sides here with Aristotle: The person who likes to do good, or to whom it comes easily, is a morally better person than the one who succeeds through struggle. Why? Because the fact that there is a struggle is a sign that the person is lacking in vir- tue in the fi rst place. Not that the successful struggler isn’t good, or virtuous, but the one who did it with no effort is just a little bit better, because the virtue was already there to begin with. Foot’s own example, in Virtues and Vices, is honesty:

For one man it is hard to refrain from stealing and for another man it is not: which shows the greater virtue in acting as he should? . . . The fact that a man is tempted to steal is some- thing about him that shows a certain lack of honesty: of the thoroughly honest man we say that it “never entered his head,” meaning that it was never a real possibility for him.

In addition, Foot offers a solution to another problem plaguing virtue ethics: Can we say that someone who is committing an evil act is somehow doing it with virtue? Say that a criminal has to remain cool, calm, and collected to open a safe or has to muster courage to fulfi ll a contract and kill someone. Is that person virtuous in the sense of having self-control or courage? Foot borrows an argument from the one ethicist who is most often identifi ed with an ethics of conduct, even though his work also includes the topic of virtue—Kant: An act or a disposition can’t be called good if it isn’t backed by a good will. Foot interprets it this way: If the act is morally wrong, or, rather, if the intentions behind the act are bad, then cool-headedness and courage cease to be virtues. Virtue is not something static; it is a dynamic power that appears when the intention is to do something good. The “virtue” value is simply switched off when the good intention is absent. And here we have an answer to the study question raised at the end of Chapter 9, after Aristotle’s text on courage p. 468: Can a terrorist be courageous? Should we acknowledge that the September 11 hijack- ers were somehow brave, in spite of their evil intentions? Foot would probably say no: A virtue is nullifi ed if it is done with an evil intention. The hijackers may have experienced some kind of spiritual fortitude, but it doesn’t deserve the name courage if we view courage as a virtue. And saying that their intention may have been to do something good for somebody other than the victims doesn’t count, in any moral theory: not in the religion of Islam, which forbids the killing of innocents; nor in Christianity and Judaism, which forbid the same thing; nor in utilitarianism, which sees the immensity of the massacre and psychological turmoil that followed through- out the world as unjustifi ed by any local cause the hijackers may have had; nor in Kant’s theory, which says we should never use any other person merely as a means to an end; nor in virtue theory, which, as we can now see, holds that it is motivation that determines whether or not a character trait can be called virtuous.

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HAVE VIRTUE, AND THEN GO AHEAD: MAYO, FOOT, AND SOMMERS 485

We fi nd parallels in other situations in which there may not be any evil or crimi- nal element. Hope, for example, is generally supposed to be a virtue, but if someone is being unrealistic and daydreams about wish fulfi llment, hope is no longer a virtue. And temperance may be a virtue, but not if a person is simply afraid to throw herself into the stream of life. In that case it is a shield and not a virtue. Critics of Foot’s positive attitude toward the person who is naturally good with few selfi sh inclinations often point to Kant’s argument against the storekeeper who decides not to cheat customers (similar to the version of the argument you know from Chapter 6): To say you like your customers so much that you would never cheat them is not enough, because what if you stopped liking your customers? Similarly, the per- son who has never been tempted because susceptibility to temptation is not in her or his nature may seem a higher moral person to Foot; but perhaps it is just because that person has never come across temptation before, and in that case it is easy enough to be virtuous. True virtue, say Kant’s followers, shows itself precisely in the face of temptation—and not in its absence. However, when we have the choice between a store where they have a strict policy against cheating but the personnel are cold and grumpy and the store where they’ve known us for years and ask us how we’re doing, don’t we prefer to shop at the friendly place rather than at the unfriendly, but morally correct, place? Kant may think we should choose the unfriendly place, but Foot disagrees: We prefer friendliness, not principles. But what makes being friendly morally superior to being principled, in Foot’s view? Remember, Kant rejected the storekeeper’s third option because someone who wouldn’t cheat his or her customers because of a sunny disposition toward them is really just doing what he or she wants, out of self-gratifi cation, not out of principles. Of course, it is possible to be of a sunny disposition and be principled, but that is not the issue here. The issue is whether a sunny disposition is enough to make someone a moral person or whether having a character that isn’t tempted is morally superior to being a person who encounters temptation and fi ghts it. Foot says yes: The storekeeper who wouldn’t dream of cheat- ing her customers is a better person than the one who has had a moment’s temptation and rejected it, because temptation simply wasn’t a factor. Foot’s assumption is that it takes a weak character to be tempted. But, realistically, perhaps all that was missing was exposure and opportunity. So perhaps Kant has a point after all.

Christina Hoff Sommers

Which, then, are the virtues to which we should pay attention? Foot left the question open to an extent, because people tend to differ about what exactly is good for others and desirable as a human trait. Another ethicist, however, prefers to be more direct; her aim is not so much to defend virtue ethics as such as to focus on specifi c virtues and moral failings in our Western world. Christina Hoff Sommers tells of the woes an ethics professor of her acquaintance would experience at the end of a term. In spite of the multisubject textbooks they had read and the spirited discussions they had engaged in, the professor’s students somehow got the impression that there are no moral truths. Everything they had studied about ethics had been presented in terms of rules that can be argued against and social dilemmas that have no clear solutions.

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486 CHAPTER 10 CONTEMPORARY PERSPECTIVES

More than half of the students cheated on their ethics fi nals. The irony of cheating on an ethics test probably did not even occur to those students. What is lacking in our ethics classes? asks Sommers. It can’t be good intentions on the part of instructors, because since the 1960s teachers have been very careful to present the material from all sides and to avoid moral indoctrination. (Even this text, as you have noticed, contains sporadic mention of the difference between doing ethics and moralizing. ) Somehow, though, students come away with the notion that because everything can be argued against, moral values are a matter of taste. The teacher may prefer her students not to cheat, but that is simply her preference; if the student’s preference is for cheating as a moral value (“Cheat but don’t get caught”), then so be it. The moral lesson is learned by the student, and the chance for our society to hand down lessons of moral decency and respect for others has been lost because of a general fear of imposing one’s personal values on others. See Box 10.4 for a student “blog” discussion on the issue of cheating. Sommers suggests that instead of teaching courses on the big issues such as abortion, euthanasia, and capital punishment, we should talk about the little, ev- eryday, enormously important things, such as honesty, friendship, consideration, respect. Those are virtues that, if not learned at a young age, may never be achieved in our society. Sommers mentions that in ethics courses of the nineteenth century, students were taught how to be good rather than how to discuss moral issues. When asked to name some moral values that can’t be disputed, Sommers answered,

It is wrong to mistreat a child, to humiliate someone, to torment an animal. To think only of yourself, to steal, to lie, to break promises. And on the positive side: it is right to be considerate and respectful of others, to be charitable and generous.

For Sommers, it is not enough to investigate virtue ethics—one must practice it and teach it to others. In that way virtue theory becomes virtue practice. If we study virtue theory in school, chances are we will fi nd it natural to seek to develop our own virtues. Sommers believes a good way to learn about virtues is to use the same

Christina Hoff Sommers (b. 1950), American philosopher, coeditor of Vice and Virtue in Everyday Life (1985), and author of Who Stole Feminism? (1994) and The War Against Boys (2000), argues for a re- turn to virtue ethics in order for people in modern society to regain a sense of responsibility rather than leave it to social institutions to make decisions on moral issues.

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HAVE VIRTUE, AND THEN GO AHEAD: MAYO, FOOT, AND SOMMERS 487

method that both Bernard Mayo and philosopher Alasdair MacIntyre (see Box 10.5) advise: to read stories in which someone does something decent for others, either humans or animals. Through stories we “get the picture” better than we get it from philosophical dilemmas or case studies. Literary classics can tell us more about friendship and obligation than a textbook in moral problems can. For Sommers, there are basic human virtues that aren’t a matter of historical relativism, fads, or discussion, and the better we all learn them, the better we’ll like living in our world

Christina Hoff Sommers brings up the question of cheating students and sees it as a problem of students being able to connect personally with the moral theories they have studied. In 2011 seven high school students were ar- rested in Long Island for cheating on their SAT scores. One student was accused of taking the tests for the others, with fake IDs, and charg- ing up to $2,500 per test. His lawyer claimed that “Everyone knows that cheating is going on. We’re not proud of it, but in some way we’ve all done it.” Another blatant case of cheating was revealed in the spring of 2007 at Duke University, where thirty-four out of thirty-eight students in the graduate business school were disciplined for plagiarism. Your author had oc- casion to blog about this matter, and the com- ments were profound. One student, “Charlette,” wrote, “When a student makes the decision to cheat, their desire to gain whatever they may gain from cheating is greater than their desire to be ‘morally right.’ It seems to me that all you can do is infl uence how much people value being the latter. In this society, I’m sure most people know that cheating is considered ‘wrong.’ Sim- ply ‘teaching values’ doesn’t appear to greatly af- fect how a person would make decisions if they have already developed most of their values.” Another student, “Evan,” responded, “Clearly these students value a letter grade over the ac- quisition of knowledge. This is perhaps a symp- tom of a dysfunctional academic system rather

than a dysfunctional morality.” “Thea” chimed in: “I think that this is what happens in a society when prestige and money become synonymous. In generations past, prestige could be acquired in myriad ways including benevolence, ethics, special skills and abilities, knowledge. Today, those things do not provide people with pres- tige automatically. Instead, they are relevant only so far as they can be translated to money.” And “Eric” related cheating to theories learned in class: “Students may make a decision to cheat because they don’t agree that doing so would be ‘morally wrong.’ . . . The college environment with its set rules of what cheating is applies Kant’s ideas of ethics. These rules don’t look at the consequences but instead say ‘this is always wrong’ even if there could be a net benefi t to the students and world. If you are a college student who instead prefers Bentham’s hedonistic calcu- lus you might conclude that cheating in some situations is actually the ‘right’ thing to do.” In your view, is it wrong to cheat on a test? Is this a black-and-white issue, or are there shades of gray? After having studied a number of moral theories in this book, do you fi nd that one or more theories can clarify such a question for you, or do you regard it as a matter for one’s moral in- stinct to decide? Your answer may go to the heart of the current debate in value theory: Do our moral principles actually matter at all when we make decisions, or are we guided more by other factors, such as personal needs or feelings?

Box 10.4 T H E I R C H E A T I N G H E A R T S ; O R , D O P R I N C I P L E S M A T T E R ?

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488 CHAPTER 10 CONTEMPORARY PERSPECTIVES

with one another. Those virtues are part of most people’s moral heritage, and there is nothing oppressive about teaching the common virtues of decency, civility, honesty, and fairness. Too often we tend to think that certain issues are someone else’s problem; the state will take care of it, whether it is pollution, homelessness, or the loneliness of el- derly people. For Sommers this is part of a virtue ethics for grown-ups: Don’t assume that it is someone else’s responsibility. Don’t hide from contemporary problems—take them on and contribute to their solution. Do your part to limit pollution. Think of how you can help homeless people. Go visit someone you know who is elderly and lonely. Virtues like those will benefi t us all and are the kind we must learn to focus on if we are to make a success out of being humans living together. This vision of personal virtues is probably the most direct call to a resurgence of moral values that has been produced so far within the fi eld of philosophy. Som- mers, however, is arguing not for a revival of religious values but for a strengthening of basic concepts of personal responsibility and respect for other beings. Her claim is that few ethicists dare to stand by values and pronounce them good in themselves these days for fear of being accused of indoctrinating their students. For Sommers the list of values cited above is absolute: They can’t be disputed. Herein lies one answer to why Sommers today remains one of the most controversial of American contemporary philosophers (another answer can be found in Chapter 12: her ap- proach to feminism): In the intellectual climate of the 1990s, it was considered not

The American philosopher Alasdair MacIntyre believes that our moral values would be enriched if we followed the examples of older cultures and let tradition be part of those values. We don’t exist in a cultural vacuum, he says, and we would un- derstand ourselves better if we’d allow a histori- cal perspective to be part of our system of values. That doesn’t mean that everything our ancestors did and thought should become a virtue for us, but a look back to the values of those who came before us adds a depth to our modern life that makes it easier to understand ourselves. And how do we understand ourselves best? As the tellers of stories of history, of fi ction, and of our own lives. We understand ourselves in terms of the story we would tell of our own life, and by doing that we are defi ning our character. So virtue and char- acter development are essential to being a moral person and doing what is morally good. But

virtues are not static abilities for MacIntyre any more than they are for Philippa Foot. Virtues are linked with our aspirations; they make us better at becoming what we want to be. It is not so much that we have a vision of the good life; rather, we have an idea of what we want to accomplish (what MacIntyre calls “internal goods”), and vir- tues help us accomplish those goals. Whatever our goal, we usually will be more successful at reaching it if we are conscientious and trustwor- thy in striving for it. Whatever profession we try to excel in, we will succeed more easily if we try to be courageous and honest and maintain our integrity. With all the demands we face and all the different roles we have to play—in our jobs, sexual relationships, relations to family and friends—staying loyal and trustworthy helps us to function as one whole person rather than as a compilation of disjointed roles.

Box 10.5 M A C I N T Y R E A N D T H E V I R T U E S

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HAVE VIRTUE, AND THEN GO AHEAD: MAYO, FOOT, AND SOMMERS 489

only customary but even proper to view values as something more or less relative to one’s culture and to one’s personal life experience; we’ve explored the issue in Chapter 3. For Sommers, however, the end result has not been what was presumably intended—an enhanced individual moral responsibility—but, rather, the opposite: no sense of responsibility at all, since morals are perceived to be relative. So Sommers digs deeper into who we are as humans and fi nds a common ground of values. But is she right? Can we just pronounce the virtues of decency, civility, honesty, and so forth the ultimate values without any further discussion? Perhaps Sommers is right that most people would agree her values are good, and perhaps not. For many, what Sommers is doing is just old-fashioned moralizing (and some applaud that effort, but others don’t). In effect, this isn’t just Sommers’s problem—it is a problem inherent in all genuine virtue ethics, as you’ll remember from the previous chapter: When there is a dispute about virtues, among virtuous people, who gets to be right? How do we determine exactly what virtue is, if virtue is its own answer? How can college students be convinced that cheating is a bad thing? How can teens be convinced that downloading copyrighted material from the Internet is wrong? It

CALVIN AND HOBBES © 1993 Watterson. Dist. by UNIVERSAL UCLICK. Reprinted with

permission. All rights reserved.

Here is another stab at doing philosophy from Calvin, who is voicing rare scruples about cheating on an ethics test (scruples that apparently were not shared by the students of Christina Hoff Som- mers’s colleague or the graduate students caught cheating at Duke University). Is Hobbes right that “simply acknowledging the issue is a moral victory”?

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490 CHAPTER 10 CONTEMPORARY PERSPECTIVES

can’t be done by simply teaching them that honesty is a virtue; that might work for young children, but adolescents and adults need reasons. Reasons and reasoning are the key here. A moral story such as Charles Dickens’s A Tale of Two Cities may tell us that self-sacrifi ce is a “far, far better thing” to practice than anything else, and it may make sense to me, but in your ears it may just sound like propaganda. What we need is to add rational argumentation to virtue ethics: give good reasons why something is a virtue, and a value. The stand-off between Sommers and many of her colleagues might, in this respect, be defl ected by seeking an answer in what we’ve called soft universalism and in an approach you’re familiar with from elsewhere in this book: looking for the common ground, plus fi nding good reasons why something is, or should be, a virtue. We return to soft universalism in Chapter 11.

The Quest for Authenticity: Kierkegaard, Nietzsche, Heidegger, Sartre, and Levinas

Within what is called “contemporary continental philosophy”—by and large European philosophy after World War I—one school of thought holds there is only one way to live properly and only one virtue to strive for: that of authenticity. That school of thought is existentialism. Although existentialism developed primarily at the hands of Jean-Paul Sartre as a response to the experience of meaninglessness in World War II, it has its roots in the writings of the Danish philosopher Søren Aabye Kierkegaard and the German philosopher Friedrich Nietzsche. In this section we take a look at Kierkegaard, Nietzsche, Heidegger, and Sartre. In addition we will look at a philosopher, who in more recent years has emerged as a forceful voice for eth- ics as fundamental to human existence: Emmanuel Levinas. Whereas Kierkegaard’s form of authenticity is ultimately conceived as a relationship between oneself and God, Nietzsche’s authenticity focuses on the exact opposite, the self ’s ability to cre- ate a meaning in a world without a god. Heidegger’s authenticity deals with one’s relationship to one’s own form of existence, and Sartre’s authenticity deals with one’s relationship to oneself as a person making moral choices, Levinas focuses on the relation- ship between oneself and the Other —our fellow human beings.

Kierkegaard’s Religious Authenticity

During his lifetime (1813–1855), Kierkegaard was known locally, in Copenhagen, as a man of leisure who had a theology degree and spent his time writing convoluted and irritating attacks on the Danish establishment, including offi cials of the Lutheran church. Few people understood his points because he was rarely straightforward in his writings and hid his true opinions under layers of pseudonyms and irony. The idea that there might be a great mind at work, developing what was to become one of the most important lines of thought in the twentieth century, was obvious to no one at the time, in Denmark or elsewhere. As a matter of fact, Kierkegaard was work- ing against the general spirit of the times, which was focused politically on the de- velopment of socialism and scientifi cally on the ramifi cations of Darwinism. People weren’t ready to listen to ideas such as the value of personal commitment, the psy- chological dread that accompanies the prospect of total human freedom of the will,

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THE QUEST FOR AUTHENTICITY 491

the relativity of truth, and the value of the individual. As it happened, though, such ideas were to become key issues for French and German existential philosophers a couple of generations after Kierkegaard’s death. There are two major, very different ways of approaching the strange writings of Søren Kierkegaard. You can dismiss him as a man who had a diffi cult childhood and as a consequence developed an overinfl ated ego with no sense of proportion as to the importance of events. In other words, you can view his writings as simply the prod- uct of an overheated brain that pondered the “great mystery” of Søren Kierkegaard’s life and times. Or you can view his writings as words that speak to all humanity from a uniquely insightful point of view, which just happens to have its roots in events in Kierkegaard’s own life. Among current scholars this second approach has become the prevailing one. What was so eventful about Kierkegaard’s life? Nothing much, compared with the lives of other famous people; but, contrary to most people, Kierkegaard analyzed everything that happened to him for all it was worth and with an eerie insight. He was born into a family of devout Lutherans (Lutheranism is the state religion in Denmark and has been since the Protestant Reformation) and was the youngest boy born to comparatively old parents. Several of his older siblings died young, and for some reason both Søren and his father believed that Søren would not live long either. His father’s opinion had an extreme infl uence on the boy—an infl uence that Kierkegaard later analyzed to perfection, years before Freud described confl ict and bonding between fathers and sons. When his father was young and a shepherd in rural Denmark, he was overcome by hunger and cold one bleak day on the moors, and he stood up on a rock and cursed God for letting a child suffer like that. Shortly after that incident his parents sent him to Copenhagen as an apprentice, and his hard life was over. That was a psy- chological shock to him, because he had expected punishment from God for cursing him, and he waited for the punishment most of his life. He grew rich while others lost their money, and for that reason he expected God to punish him even more severely.

Søren Kierkegaard (1813–1855), Danish philosopher, writer, and theologian, believed that there are three major stages in human spiritual development: the aesthetic stage, the ethical stage, and the religious stage. Not everyone goes through all stages, but true selfhood and personal authenticity can’t happen until one has put one’s complete faith in God.

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492 CHAPTER 10 CONTEMPORARY PERSPECTIVES

The fi rst tragic thing that happened to him was that he lost his young wife; however, two months later he married their maid, who was already pregnant at the time. When Søren’s older siblings died, his father thought that God’s punishment had struck again, but otherwise his luck held while his guilt grew. It is possible that he then got the idea of letting his youngest son somehow make amends for him—take on the burden and strive for a reconciliation with God. In the Lutheran tradition there is no such thing as making a confession to your minister to “get things off your chest”—you alone must face your responsibility and handle your relationship with God. That means that you have direct access to God at any time, in your heart; you have a direct relationship with God. Your faith is a personal matter, and for Kierkegaard in particular the concept of faith was to become extremely personal. Søren turned out to be an extraordinarily bright child, and his father devoted much time to his education, in particular to the development of his imagination. The two made a habit of taking walks—in their living room. Søren would choose where they were going—to the beach, to the castle in the woods, down Main Street—and his father would then describe in minute detail what they “saw.” It was intellectually and emotionally exhausting for the boy, and scholars have ridiculed the father for his fancy, but today it is recognized by many that the combination of imagination and intellectual discipline is just about the best trait a parent can develop in a child, although one might say that this was a rather extreme way of going about it. At the end of this chapter you can read an excerpt from Kierkegaard’s Johannes Climacus in which he describes his father’s vivid imagination. Kierkegaard was a young adult when his father died, and he understood full well the immense infl uence his father had had on him. He wrote the following in Stages on Life’s Way (1845), though he didn’t let on that he was writing about himself:

There was once a father and a son. A son is like a mirror in which the father beholds himself, and for the son the father too is like a mirror in which he beholds himself in the time to come. . . . the father believed he was to blame for the son’s melancholy, and the son believed that he was the occasion of the father’s sorrow—but they never exchanged a word on this subject.

Then the father died, and the son saw much, experienced much, and was tried in mani- fold temptations; but infi nitely inventive as love is, longing and the sense of loss taught him, not indeed to wrest from the silence of eternity a communication, but to imitate the father’s voice so perfectly that he was content with the likeness . . . for the father was the only one who had understood him, and yet he did not know in fact whether he had un- derstood him; and the father was the only confi dant he had had, but the confi dence was of such a sort that it remained the same whether the father lived or died.

So Kierkegaard internalized the voice of his father; as Freud would say, he made his father’s voice his own Superego. This had the practical effect of prompting Kierkegaard fi nally to get his degree in theology (which his father had wanted him to do but which he hadn’t really wanted himself). Kierkegaard also internalized his father’s guilt and rather gloomy outlook on life. (See Box 10.6 for another event that may have been infl uenced by his father.) Kierkegaard believed that everyone, even a child, has an intimate knowledge of what anguish feels like; he believed that you feel

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An event of great importance in Søren Kierkegaard’s life occurred when he fell deeply in love for the fi rst and only time. The woman’s name was Regine Olsen, and she was the daughter of a minister. Regine and Søren became engaged, and he engaged himself in a new intellectual scrutiny: What was this feeling? Was it constant or a fl uke? What might go wrong? Was it right for him to try to do something “universal” that everybody did, like get married and have children, or would it somehow interfere with his father’s plans for him to be a sacrifi ce to God? Regine, a kind and loving woman, was utterly puzzled at Søren’s reluctance to accept that they were just young people in love. When they were together he was in a good mood and was confi dent about their future together, but when he was alone, the doubts started closing in on him. It appears that he felt he was not quite worthy of her, for some reason—perhaps because in years past he had visited a brothel, or perhaps because he couldn’t quite explain his father’s in- fl uence on him to her. Mostly, though, it was the shock of the physical attraction he felt toward her that distracted him, he thought, from becoming truly spiritual. During this period he began to un- derstand one aspect of the Don Juan character: He realized that he loved Regine the most when he was not with her but was fantasizing about her. Once they were together his ardor cooled consid- erably. Eventually he decided that it was better for both of them if they broke up, but because nineteenth-century mores demanded that the woman, not the man, break off the engagement if her character were to remain stainless, he had to try to force Regine to break the engagement. This he did by being as nasty to her as he could, even though he still loved her. He embarked on a program he himself had devised, alternating be- tween playing the fool and the cynic; once when she asked him if he never intended to marry, he answered as nastily as he could, “Yes, in ten years

when I’ve sown all my wild oats; then I’ll need a young girl to rejuvenate me.” For a long time he persisted in being rude to her, and she contin- ued to forgive him, because she was very much in love with him. In the end he himself broke up with her, however, and she appears to have talked about killing herself. Kierkegaard wanted her to despise him, and a short time later she actually became engaged to a friend of theirs and married him. After that, Kierkegaard never tired of talk- ing about woman’s fi ckle, stupid, and untrust- worthy nature. But here we must remember that

Box 10.6 A K I N D O F L O V E A N D A M A R R I A G E T H A T W A S N ’ T : R E G I N E O L S E N

Regine Olsen, Søren Kierkegaard’s fi ancée, a gentle Copenhagen woman who did her best to understand the intellectual scruples of her boyfriend, who could not reconcile his devotion to God with the idea of physical attraction to a woman and a subsequent bourgeois marriage. This photo was taken a few years after Kierkegaard fi nally broke up with her. (Photo of Regine Schlegel [ née Olsen] courtesy of The Royal Library, Copenhagen.)

THE QUEST FOR AUTHENTICITY 493

(continued)

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494 CHAPTER 10 CONTEMPORARY PERSPECTIVES

dread or anguish when you look to the future—you dread it because you realize you must make choices. This feeling, which has become known by the Danish∕German word, angst, is comparable, Kierkegaard says, to realizing that you’re far out on the ocean and you have to swim or sink, act or die, and there is no way out. The choice is yours, but it is a hard choice, because living is a hard job. Suppose you refuse to make your own decisions and say, “Society will help me,” or “The church will help me,” or “My uncle will help me”? Then you have given up your chance to become a real person, to become authentic, because you don’t accomplish anything spiritual unless you accomplish it yourself, by making the experience your own. Each person is an individual, but only through a process of individuation—choosing to make one’s own decisions and take responsibility for them in the eyes of God—can a per- son achieve selfhood and become a true human individual. The truth you experience when you have reached that point is your truth alone, because only you took that par- ticular path in life. Other people can’t take a shortcut by borrowing “your truth”— they must fi nd the way themselves. We can’t, then, gain any deep insights about life from books or from teachers. They can point us in the right direction, but they can’t spoon-feed us any truths. In the Primary Readings you’ll fi nd a short excerpt from Either∕Or in which Kierkegaard describes the nature of making hard choices. This attitude is refl ected in Kierkegaard’s cryptic and disturbing assertion that truth is subjective, an idea that has been vehemently disputed by scientists and phi- losophers alike. Some philosophers believe Kierkegaard meant there is no objective knowledge at all; we can never verify statements such as “2 ! 2 " 4,” “The moon circles the earth,” and “It rained in Boston on April 6, 2011,” because all such state- ments are, presumably, just a matter of subjective opinion, or what we call cogni- tive relativism. That would mean that we could never set any objective standard for knowledge. Although other philosophers, such as Friedrich Nietzsche, have actually worked toward such a radical viewpoint, Kierkegaard is not among them. He never says that knowledge is subjective, and to understand what he means we have to look more closely at what he says. His actual words are “Subjectivity is Truth,” and Kierkeg- aard scholars believe that to mean the following: There is no such thing as “Truth” with a capital T that we can just scoop up and call our own. The “meaning of life” is not something we can look up in a book or learn from anybody else, because it just isn’t there unless we fi nd it ourselves. There is no objective truth about life, only a personal truth, which will be a little bit different for each individual. It will not be vastly dif- ferent, though, because when we reach the level at which we are truly personal, we

Kierkegaard had multiple author-personalities, and beneath the scorn lurked his love, which ap- parently never died: He approached Regine with the suggestion that they resume their friendship,

but her husband wouldn’t allow it. After Kierkeg- aard died, it was revealed in his will that he had left everything he owned to Regine, but she re- fused to accept the inheritance.

Box 10.6 A K I N D O F L O V E A N D A M A R R I A G E T H A T W A S N ’ T : R E G I N E O L S E N (continued)

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will fi nd that it corresponds to other people’s experiences of individuation too. In other words, the personal experience becomes a universal one—but only if you have gone through it yourself. This is the ultimate meaning of life and the ultimate virtue: to become an authentic human being by fi nding your own meaning. If you settle for accepting other people’s view of life, you are no better than the evil magician Noured- din (or Jaffar, in the Disney movie version) in the story of Aladdin; he has no personal magic or talent himself, so he tries to steal it from the one who has, Aladdin. For Kierkegaard himself, truth is a religious truth: One must take on the concept of sin and responsibility and seek God’s forgiveness directly, as an individual. But that is hard for most people to do because we are born with quite another character. Typically humans are born into the aesthetic stage: the stage of sensuous enjoyment. Children obviously have a very strong interest in the joys of their senses, but if that persists into adulthood it can result in unhealthy character development, symbolized by the Don Juan type who loves to pursue the girl but loses interest once he has se- duced her. She wants to get married, and he wants out. He leaves, only to fall in love with and pursue some other girl, and on it goes. Today we would say this is a person who can’t commit. Kierkegaard makes the same basic observation but explains that this happens because the Don Juan type is steeped in sensuous enjoyment, which sours on itself: Too much of the same is not a good thing, but a person who is stuck in the aesthetic stage doesn’t have any sense of what is morally right or wrong. Such knowledge usually comes as people mature and enter the ethical stage (although some people are stuck in the aesthetic stage forever). In the ethical stage people realize that there are laws and conventions, and they believe that the way to become a good person is to follow those conventions. A fi ctional character from nineteenth-century middle-class Copenhagen becomes Kierkegaard’s prototype for the ethical stage: Judge William, the righteous man who tries to be a good judge and a good husband and father. Scholars don’t quite agree on how to evaluate this good and kind man, because the fact is that we are rarely cer- tain when Kierkegaard is being serious and when he is being sarcastic. Kierkegaard also cites Socrates (whom he greatly admired) as an example of an ethical person. Although Socrates is commonly recognized as a truly courageous and virtuous man who strove to live (and die) the right way, Judge William doesn’t come across as a he- roic person; we even get the impression that he is actually a pompous, self-righteous, bourgeois bore who has his attention fi xed on “doing the right thing” merely because society expects it of him. So it seems Kierkegaard wants to tell us that it isn’t enough to follow the rules and become what everyone else thinks you ought to be; that way you exist only in the judgment of others. You have to take on responsibility for judg- ing yourself, and the way you do that is by making a leap of faith into the religious stage. It isn’t enough to judge your own life in terms of what makes sense according to society’s rules and rational concepts of morality; what you must do to become an authentic person is leave the standards of society behind, including your love for reason and for things to make sense, and choose to trust in God, like Abraham, who made that same choice when he brought his son Isaac to be sacrifi ced, even though it didn’t make sense to him. Reason and the rules of society can’t tell you if the insight you reach as a religious person is the truth.

THE QUEST FOR AUTHENTICITY 495

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496 CHAPTER 10 CONTEMPORARY PERSPECTIVES

So why is Socrates not a perfect person? Why did he stay within the ethical stage and make no leap of faith to the religious stage, according to Kierkegaard? Because the leap was not available to him, since he didn’t belong to the Judeo-Christian tradition. Socrates is an example of how far you can reach if you stay within the boundaries of reason. However, in the religious stage there is no objective measure of meaning. At this stage you take responsibility for yourself, but at the same time you give up your fate and place it in the hands of God. Finally you can become a true human being, a complete individual and person, because only in the religious stage can you realize what it means to say that “Subjectivity is Truth.”

Nietzsche’s Authenticity Without Religion

The German philosopher Friedrich Nietzsche (1844–1900), one of the truly con- troversial fi gures in Western philosophy, is often credited with being one of the contributors to the French existentialism of the twentieth century (see below). He is an extraordinary character in Western philosophy; some would call him an enfant terrible , a “terrible child,” roguish and unruly. In the second half of the twentieth century he was often called far worse things than that, because of an association with a part of history that to most of us stands out as the worst which the century, and humanity, could present: The Third Reich, Hitler’s regime. However, Nietzsche had been dead for over thirty years when Hitler’s theories became popular among the Nazis, and it is still debatable how much of a philosophical kinship there is between them, if any. We return to that question below. Nietzsche was born in Leipzig, Germany, and several of the male members of his family were Lutheran ministers. His father was a minister, too, but he died when Nietzsche was young, and the boy and his sister were raised by their mother and other women in the family. His upbringing was of the Christian Protestant variety, in which pleasures of this life are considered sinful, and life after death is regarded as the true goal of this life; you’ll recognize the infl uence of Plato and St. Augustine (see Chapter 8). As a young man Nietzsche studied theology for a while; he then switched to classical philosophy and philology for which he proved

Friedrich Nietzsche (1844–1900) is one of the most contro- versial philosophers in modern times. Frequently writing in aphorisms, he piles scorn on practically every cherished fi gure and thought in the Western tradition, and an entire post-World War II generation has assumed that his thoughts inspired Hitler’s Nazi regime of terror. However, in recent years another image has emerged: that of a passionate thinker who wanted his readers to tear themselves free of what he thought were the shackles of Christian as well as utilitarian thinking, and strive for individual greatness

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to have a true talent. He was made professor in Switzerland when he was just twenty-fi ve. He served as a medic during the Franco-Prussian war of 1870, but during that time he became ill. He had presumably contracted syphilis a few years earlier, and bad health followed him for the rest of his life. He was forced to retire from his professorship, and in a sense he retired from life, too, living in seclusion with his mother who took care of him. It was during his retirement, while he was still a young man, that he wrote the works that were to shake up the Western intel- lectual world in the twentieth century. When he was forty-fi ve his mental health deteriorated dramatically, although he also seemed to have good days of some mental clarity. He lived on for another eleven years, tended by his mother and when she died, his sister Elisabeth. Some people have tried to dismiss Nietzsche’s works as the ravings of a mad- man. But the fact is that Nietzsche’s mind was quite healthy and vigorous when he wrote most of the works that were to become so infl uential after his death. (Only a few European intellectuals outside of Germany, such as the Danish thinker Georg Brandes, were aware of his philosophy during his lifetime. Brandes tried to introduce Nietzsche to Scandinavian readers, without much success.) Besides, a theory must be able to stand on its own, and if it seems to make sense, or at least make interesting observations, it can’t be dismissed because of the condition of its author. Nietzsche’s works have stood the test of time with eerie brilliance.

Beyond Good and Evil

What is good? What is evil? Nietzsche says that depends on your perspective: If you are a nineteenth-century person, if you belong to the Judeo-Christian tradi- tion, or if you are otherwise inspired by Plato, you might say that a good person shuns physical pleasures, because they are sinful, and concentrates on the after- life, because that is when true life begins. If you are what Nietzsche would call a socialist, you might say that a good person is not offensive, willful, or selfi sh, but subordinates his or her will to serve the community. A good person is meek, help- ful, kind, and turns the other cheek. An evil person is selfi sh, gives orders, thinks he or she is better than others, looks to this life and disregards the afterlife, and wallows in physical pleasures. If this is your view of good and evil, says Nietzsche, then you must reevaluate your values, for their true nature is repressive , and that realization calls for a transvaluation of values. What should be the focus of such a transvaluation? The value system that was common in ancient times, before people began to value weakness: the moral value of strength, of power . This means that we must go beyond the common defi nitions of good and evil toward a new defi nition. We can’t look to Nietzsche’s writings for a systematic account or a point-to-point criticism of the Western value system: His viewpoints are scattered around in his writings, and one must play detective to get the whole picture. Some material is in his speculative work of fi ction Thus Spoke Zarathustra , and some in his Genealogy of Morals , but it is the title and topic of his book Beyond Good and Evil that gives us the clue to the clearest version of his cultural critique.

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Master and Slave Moralities

In Beyond Good and Evil Nietzsche suggests that the old Christian value system of lov- ing one’s neighbor and turning the other cheek must be scrapped, because it is the morality of a weak person, a “slave” who fears his “master,” the strong-willed, self- made individual. For Nietzsche, the “slave-morality” began in ancient times when slaves hated and feared their masters and resented anyone who wielded power over them. Nietzsche’s concern was not the atrocities of slavery; what interested him was the attitude the slaves had toward the masters and each other, and the master’s at- titude toward other masters and the slaves. He saw it as his task to analyze the two moral systems that grew out of the two strictly separated and yet in some ways inter- twined communities of the masters (the warlords) and the slaves (their serfs). In the mind of the feudal warlord, a good person is someone who can be trusted and who will stand by you in a blood feud. He is a strong ally, a good friend, someone who has pride in himself and who has a noble and generous character—someone who is able to arouse fear in the enemy. If the warlord wants to help the weaker ones through his own generosity, he can choose to do so, but he doesn’t have to: He creates his own values. The warlord respects his enemy if he is strong—then he becomes a worthy opponent—and values honor in his friends as well as in his enemies. Those who are weak don’t deserve respect, for their function is to be preyed upon (the resemblance to Darwin’s concept of natural selection and survival of the fi ttest is no accident: Nietzsche had read, and admired, Darwin’s Origin of Species ). Someone who is not willing to stand up for himself, who is weak, and afraid of you, is a “bad person.” The slave, on the other hand, hates the master and everything he stands for. The master represents evil , having the strength, the will, and the power to rule; he inspires fear. Good is the fellow slave who helps out—the nonthreatening person, the one who shows sympathy and altruism, who acts to create general happiness for as many as possible. The slaves feel tremendous resentment toward the masters, and this resent- ment ends in revolt. Historically, says Nietzsche, the slaves eventually gained the upper hand, and deposed the masters. The “master-morality” was reversed to the status of evil, while the “slave-morality” became a common ideal. For Nietzsche a slave morality and a herd morality are the same phenomenon. The meek have indeed inherited the earth already—but the “herd” has retained their feelings of resentment toward the idea of a master, and everything the master stood for is still considered evil, even though there are no more masters. In Nietzsche’s words from Beyond Good and Evil ,

The noble type of man regards himself as a determiner of values; he does not require to be approved of; he passes the judgment . . . he is a creator of values. . . . It is otherwise with the second type of morality, slave-morality. Suppose that the abused, the oppressed, the suffering, the unemancipated, the weary, and those uncertain of themselves, should moralize, what will be the common element in their moral estimate? Probably a pessimistic suspicion with regard to the entire situation of man will fi nd expression, perhaps a con- demnation of man, together with his situation.

For Nietzsche, this dichotomy (either-or) between slave and master attitude can be found in every culture, sometimes within the same individual. The situation initially

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developed in early European cultures as well as in the Christian tradition (described by Nietzsche as the “mass egoism of the weak”), which in Nietzsche’s eyes clearly dis- plays the herd mentality with its requirement that you must turn the other cheek and refrain from doing harm if you want to partake of “pie in the sky when you die.” That mentality has also been prominent in Plato’s philosophy, in the moral philosophy of utilitarianism (see Chapter 5), and in socialism, and it has had the effect of reduc- ing everything to averages and mediocrity, because it advocates general happiness and equality at the cost of the outstanding individual. In Nietzsche’s view it is the downfall of a culture to put restrictions on such gifted individuals, because it stifl es and kills the capacity for individual expression. And for him, that was precisely what Germany and the rest of Europe had become in the late nineteenth century: a population of herd animals who would pick on anyone who dared to be different. The Platonic and the Christian traditions had merged into a world view, and (in Nietzsche’s own day) were joined by socialism and Marxism. And even if Marxism is hostile to religion—Karl Marx called religion an “opiate of the masses”—Nietzsche sees a common denominator in Marxism and Christianity, a catering to the meek for the sake of meekness, and a disrespect for life itself.

The Overman For Nietzsche the slave-morality says nay to life ; it looks toward a higher reality (Heaven) in the same way that Western philosophy inspired by Plato has looked toward a world of ideas far removed from the tangible mess of sensory experience. This Hinterwelt (world beyond) is for Nietzsche a dangerous illusion, because it gives people the notion that there is something besides this life, and thus they squander their life here on earth in order to realize their shadowy dreams of a world to come, or a higher reality. This, for Nietzsche, is to live wrongly, and inau- thentically. But there is, to Nietzsche, a value that stands higher than all others, and that is the attitude that affi rms life : An authentic existence consists of realizing that there is nothing beyond this life, and that one must pursue life with vigor, like a “master” who sets his own value. If one realizes this, and has the courage to discard the traditional values of Christianity, one has become an Overman ( Übermensch ), or “Superman.” The Overman is the human of the future—not in the sense of a biologi- cal evolution, because not everyone in the future will be Overmen, far from it. The Overman is not the result of an automatic, natural selection, but an aggressive seizing of power. For Nietzsche there is one overriding feature of human life: not reason, nor empathy, but will to power . The slave-morality will do its best to control or kill this urge, but the man who is capable of being a creator of values will recognize it as his birthright, and will use it any way he sees fi t. His right lies in his capacity to use the power, because that power is in itself the force of life. In effect, the right of the Overman is in Nietzsche’s philosophy a right created by might, a practical descrip- tion more than any political statement: You have the right if you can hold on to it and use it. (The gender-specifi c use of man instead of human or person is intentional here; Nietzsche—at least judging from his writings—mistrusted women and female capabilities, and did not count women among his future Overmen.) How did readers react to this provocative theory? Aside from the fact that Nietzsche had very few readers in his lifetime, some found it to be an intellectual

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rekindling of the joy of life, even in the face of hard times, and a critical evaluation of the double standard that existed in Western culture in the past: the condemna- tion of physical pleasures, combined with tacit acceptance of those pleasures when experienced on the sly. The Victorian Era (see Chapter 5) was particularly steeped in this type of hypocrisy, and many consider this reaction against hypocrisy a positive legacy of Nietzsche. But even so, there is no denying that Nietzsche’s most apparent legacy was until recently considered extremely negative , because his idea of the Overman was ad- opted by Hitler’s Third Reich as the ideal of the new German Nazi culture. Picking up on Nietzsche’s idea that power belongs by right to he who is capable of grabbing and holding on to it (an idea that was taken out of context), the Nazis saw themselves as a new race of Overmen, destined to rule the world. The weak would have no rights, and their sole purpose in life would be to provide fuel for the power of their masters. Here Hitler completely overlooked the fact that Nietzsche’s Overmen could only arise as individuals, not as a “race” or even a class of people. Would Nietzsche have approved of Hitler? Absolutely not. Nietzsche would have seen in Hitler something he despised: a man driven by the herd mentality’s resentment against others in power. Nietzsche’s writings may be full of acerbic re- marks about the English, about Christians, and about Platonists, but he didn’t spare the German people, either. He had little respect for his own Germanic legacy, which is why he moved to Switzerland. Furthermore, he was a sworn enemy of totalitarian- ism, because he viewed it as just another way to enslave capable people and prevent them from using their own willpower. In addition, Nietzsche had no patience or sympathy for anti-Semitism, and had a profound dislike for his brother-in-law, a known anti-Semite (see Box 10.7). The fact remains, however, that Nietzsche’s writ- ings include elements that seem to lead to the abuse, or at least the neglect, of the weak by the strong. Because of Hitler’s use of his writings, Nietzsche was a closed subject in philosophy for almost thirty years after World War II—he was too con- troversial to touch. Today we can view his ideas with more detachment, but it is still diffi cult to reconcile his enthusiasm for life with the disdain for the weaker human beings—a disturbing mixture of free thought and contempt. But how did it happen that Nietzsche’s ideas became the house philosophy of Hitler and his associates? In Box 10.7 you can read the astonishing story of the role his sister Elisabeth played.

The Eternal Return, and the Authentic Life

One of Nietzsche’s most infamous ∕ famous statements is that “God is dead”; by that Nietzsche did not mean that Christ had died, or that there is no God per se , but that faith in God was waning if not gone altogether, and as a result the guarantees of stable, universal values provided by a faith in God had disappeared. For Nietzsche, there are no absolute values in the absence of God ; there are no values except those we as humans decide on. Box 10.8 explores the question whether everything is permitted if there is no God. For many people that would mean that morality has lost its sanc- tion, so they lose faith in everything and become nihilists . The word nihilism is often mentioned in connection with Nietzsche. As you know from Chapter 3, it comes

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Elisabeth Nietzsche’s role in her brother’s life has long been recognized as an extremely powerful one, and toward the end of his life rather peculiar: She used to invite scholars to “view” her brother who was by then unable to communicate coherently. However, her infl u- ence on him and in particular his philosophi- cal legacy has been far deeper than previously suspected. As children Friedrich and Elisabeth were close, but for a number of years they were not on the best of terms. Elisabeth mar- ried a man whom Friedrich despised, Bernard Förster. Förster was a well-known racist agi- tator, espousing violently anti-Semitic views. He was fi red from his position as a teacher because of his racist politics, and soon after- wards he started recruiting Germans of “pure blood” for an emigration plan. He viewed Germany as having betrayed its citizens of Germanic descent by allowing people of “non- Aryan descent” to fl ourish. (The concept of an “Aryan race” is a misunderstanding, perpe- trated by Förster and others, then by Hitler, and eventually by today’s Neo-Nazis. “Aryan” refers to a group of languages, not a race.) Elisabeth Nietzsche Förster agreed with her husband on his anti-Semitic views, and helped him distribute racist pamphlets. When Förster heard about land being available in a far-away country, Paraguay, he bought the property un- seen and set about to create a “new Germany,” Nueva Germania , where only pure “Aryans” were allowed. In 1886 Elisabeth traveled with her husband to Paraguay with a small group of hopeful colonists: fourteen families, and their life savings. The land Förster had purchased turned out to be a remote swamp, and three years into the social experiment of restarting the “Aryan” race the colony was falling apart: Elisabeth and Förster had mismanaged the colonists’ money, and Förster committed sui- cide. Elisabeth got word that her brother was

ill in Germany and needed her help, so she abandoned the colonists to their own device and traveled home to Germany. While the colony was struggling to sur- vive, Elisabeth was back in Germany tend- ing to her brother. During his fi nal years she proclaimed herself curator of his works, and after his death she took on the task of edit- ing his unpublished works. It now appears that her editing was quite “creative”: The Ni- etzsche Archives in Weimar, Germany, has her original inserts of her own writing into her brother’s works, with simple cut-and-paste methods. She passed it off as her brother’s, giving it an edge of bigotry that would have made Förster proud. Toward the end of her life, in the early years of German Nazism, she managed to get the attention of Adolf Hitler and other prominent Nazis. She inspired them to use Nietzsche’s philosophy (with her own edits) as a blueprint for Nazi ideology. Thus the connection was forged between Nietzsche and the anti-Semitic, totalitarian views of the Nazi regime. Hitler regarded her very highly, and when she died, he gave her the funeral of a “mother of the fatherland.” Because of the presumed connection between Nietzsche’s philosophy and Hitler, it wasn’t until the nineteen eighties that philosophers felt com- fortable researching Nietzsche’s philosophy and writing about him; during this research it became clear that much of the supposed pre- Nazi leanings of Nietzsche were in fact infused into his works by his sister. This doesn’t mean that Nietzsche was beyond bigotry, or that ev- erything that Hitler used from his writings was invented by Elisabeth; Nietzsche had strong feelings against many thinkers, individuals, and population groups, and he did advocate the theory of the Overman, but Nazism would have been entirely unacceptable in his philos- ophy of the strong individual.

Box 10.7 E L I S A B E T H N I E T Z S C H E — H E R B R O T H E R ’ S K E E P E R ?

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But what about the colony in Paraguay? For- gotten Fatherland , a book published by reporter Ben MacIntyre in 1992, sheds light on the fate of the colonists: Abandoned and forgotten by the world, they struggled to stay alive and racially pure in the Peruvian jungle. Over the decades and into the twentieth century, it persisted with dwindling, new generations of pure “Aryan” blood, because the colonists had transferred their racial hatred from Jews to the local Para- guayan Indians, and intermarriage was not an option for them. The result: massive genetic

inbreeding. MacIntyre set out to fi nd the colony in the late 1980s, and found a small German vil- lage frozen in time, with inhabitants so plagued by genetic diseases and mental problems that a healthy child was a rarity. However, this is not the end of the story of the Förster colony: A newspaper article reported in 1998 that the colonist descendants had begun to merge with and marry into the local Indian tribes, and speak their language. With a larger gene pool, the inbreeding problem vanished; social ties ex- panded, and so did commerce.

Box 10.7 E L I S A B E T H N I E T Z S C H E — H E R B R O T H E R ’ S K E E P E R ? (continued)

from the Latin word nihil (nothing), and usually means that there is no foundation for believing in anything, and that existence is senseless and absurd. On occasion Nietzsche himself has been called a nihilist by critics, but is that correct? There seem to be two differing views of what Nietzsche really meant by the con- cept: 1) If God is dead, then everything is permitted, and you soon despair because there are no absolute values, so you become a nihilist, or 2) even if you realize that there are no objective values or truth because there is no God, you must make your own values. By doing so you affi rm life and your own strength as a human being, so you are not a nihilist. Most contemporary Nietzsche scholars believe that is what he means, not that there is nothing to believe in. For Nietzsche a nihilist is someone who has misunderstood the message that God is dead, and has joined the nay-sayers . Above all, as you read above, Nietzsche himself believed in something: In the value of life, and of affi rming life, saying yea to life . How did Nietzsche propose to say yes to life? It is easy enough to “love one’s fate” when things are going well. Anyone can say yes to life when you’re having a good time. The diffi culty is to say yes to life when it is at its worst behavior. Nietzsche wants us to love life even at its worst. And what is the worst that Nietzsche can imagine? That every- thing that has happened to you will happen again, and again, the very same way. This is the theory of the eternal return of the same . There is an anecdote of Nietzsche taking a walk one day and being struck by the awful truth: History repeats itself, and all our fears and joys will be repeated. We have experienced them before, and we will experience them again, endlessly. The idea horrifi ed him, and he was forced to consider the question, Even if you know that you will have to go through the same tedious, painful stuff over and over again, would you choose to, willingly? As with the theory of nihilism, there are two interpretations to this problem: 1) One holds that Nietzsche actually believed that everything repeats itself. We’re doomed to live the same life over and over again, life is absurd, and our existence is pointless. This is the interpretation that also holds that Nietzsche was himself a nihilist. And, to be sure, such

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An intriguing precursor to Nietzsche’s theory of the Overman, and the idea that without God there are no absolute values, was published in 1866 and translated into German: Dostoyevsky’s Crime and Punishment . (Nietzsche’s own books, Beyond Good and Evil and the Genealogy of Morals, were published in 1886 and 1887). This story of moral and amoral behavior follows the young bright student Raskolnikov in St. Petersburg of the nineteenth century, moving inexorably from philosophical thoughts of the brilliant mind being elevated above the morals of the masses to deciding that he himself, a brilliant mind, is not bound by the morals of society— after which he proceeds to commit murder. In effect, Raskolnikov is a harbinger of Nietzsche’s Overman: He sees himself as having special permission to go beyond good and evil, until the magnitude of what he has done brings him back to an appreciation of the common moral law. In a peculiar parallel from the late twenti- eth century, the serial killer Jeffrey Dahmer was interviewed at length after his conviction, while