Transcript for Interview with Brian Leiter on Nietzsche's Moral Antirealism

0. Introduction

When you say something like abortion is right or wrong, you think you're stating an objective fact, like that dinosaurs roamed the earth, but Nietzsche thinks you're just expressing a subjective taste: I like vanilla over chocolate. This position is called Moral Anti-realism, that there's no objective right or wrong.

In this interview, we're going to discuss Nietzsche's fascinating arguments for moral anti-realism. But the even more interesting insight is why Nietzsche wants to convince others of this position. Usually anti-realism leads to a position of tolerance. If my views are subjective, then I should be much more accommodating to other positions, because it's not like I'm right and they're wrong. Nietzsche argues for anti-realism so that higher men, creative geniuses, will be less accommodating, and will give less weight to the dominant morals of a society. If all values are subjective, then I might as well create my own. And if Reason is not the ultimate foundation of value, then I have license to use force, rhetorical or physical, to spread my ideas. Nietzsche's hope is that by convincing higher men about the subjectivity of values, it'll empower them to create and forcefully establish their own new value systems.

Brian Leiter is one of the world's top Nietzsche scholars, and we begin this discussion by giving an overview of Nietzsche's moral views, before discussing why Nietzsche thought no morality, including his own, is objective.

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0.1 Nietzsche's Moral Views

Johnathan Bi: Many people find the content of Nietzsche's morality quite disturbing. Some of the disturbing things: He's an anti-egalitarian, as you say, he's very illiberal. He cares primarily about production of higher men and creative geniuses, maybe Napoleon and Caesar as well. He thinks that slavery could be justified if it meant that a smaller class could gain leisure to produce greatness. He exalts severe selfishness. He dislikes moralities that are about altruism and compassion, and that's just the tip of the iceberg. What are your personal views on the content of Nietzsche's morality? 

Brian Leiter: I think there's a few nuances on the positions you described that are worth noting. Nietzsche infamously says slavery in some sense is a condition of every high culture. And I think as a descriptive matter, at least at the time he was writing, that was actually true everywhere. That whether it was the immiserated working classes in Europe, which Nietzsche actually wrote, was recognized had it pretty badly off or the actual slave societies of ancient Greece. So that's kind of a descriptive claim he's making. He certainly doesn't think it's an objection however. So that's certainly right. And the phrase severe selfishness the phrase he actually uses severe self-love. And the emphasis has to be on severe because he contrasts it with what he calls the selfishness of the sick.

Donald Trump is the selfishness of the sick. It's just me, me, me, me, but not for the sake of anything other than pathological narcissism. Whereas Nietzsche, I think, has more in mind people like Beethoven and Goethe, who are examples he himself gives. He does give Napoleon as an example—but not Caesar actually—of a particularly notable higher human being. So if you think of it in the Beethoven case, Beethoven was nominally a Christian and so on, but he did not live a Christian life. Everything in his life was organized around what he needed in order to keep composing. So it was a kind of severe self love, but it wasn't for indulgence. It was because he had this great creative project that he was so committed to pursuing that everything else had to take a backseat to that.

One of Nietzsche's objections to the morality of pity, of altruism, of egalitarianism, is that he thinks it is incompatible with a certain kind of human flourishing. And again, Beethoven is the paradigm case. If Beethoven had actually taken Christian morality seriously, he didn't, he wouldn't be Beethoven, we wouldn't be talking about him. And I think there's an interesting kind of profound observation there about the psychology of great creativity and the kind of extended discipline over a life that is required for that.

The part of Nietzsche that is the most disturbing is the deep anti-egalitarianism, that is, his rejection of the equality of human beings qua human beings. And I don't share that view. I think it would be fair to say that most people don’t share it. The ones who profess to share it usually aren't very attractive people. But I think it also presents a real challenge that philosophers and others have to think about, which is why should we believe in the moral equality of all human beings qua human being? And it turns out philosophically to be very difficult to explain that.

Nietzsche thought Christianity helped do that. Everyone is made in the image of God. We are all equal because we all have a soul that was given to us by God. Nietzsche doesn't believe that. God is dead. We don't have a soul in that sense. And so Nietzsche thinks that without Christianity, belief in this kind of moral equality will fade away. The irony is that Nietzsche seems to have been completely wrong about that. That is, God's been dead for a while now. And that kind of basic egalitarianism is still a very, very powerful commitment.

Johnathan Bi: So that what you take away from Nietzsche i.e. his observations on the type of religious devotion needed for creative genius and what you don't take away from Nietzsche, his egalitarian sentiments helps, I think, answer my next question which is what I found most interesting when preparing for this interview because in addition to being a great Nietzsche scholar, the other thinker that you probably devote most of your time writing thinking about is Marx.

0.2 Nietzsche and Marx

And so the question I want to ask you is how does one of the top Nietzsche scholars find his way to Marx? One thinker is traditionally considered on the left, and the other is traditionally considered on the right. 

Brian Leiter: What I think is interesting about the juxtaposition of Marx and Nietzsche is that they present the most profound challenge to each other as it were. One way I like to put this is by saying Marx has no psychology. He just doesn't think systematically or carefully about the mind, about the unconscious, about the wellsprings of motivation. Everything for him is about structure, social structure, economic structure. And Nietzsche is the opposite. He thinks only about individual psychology and thinks not at all about social structure or economic structure. In this sense, there's something kind of complimentary.

Even though there's this profound moral difference between them over this issue of egalitarianism. But someone who is sympathetic to Marx needs to think about Nietzsche's challenge, because if Nietzsche's challenge is right, then something like the Marxian ideal society in which—this is tricky because I don't think equality is an important moral ideal from Marx, freedom is—the freedom of people to be able to work without regard for how they're going to survive, to work on the things they really want to work on. And that ideal, I think isn't entirely foreign to Nietzsche. But Nietzsche seemed to think that a society that had egalitarian features would be a society in which the greatest kinds of human flourishing would no longer exist.

In that sense, there's a profound tension between them. Marx thinks there's going to be lots of great creativity in the post-capitalist world and Nietzsche thinks that kind of world is, because of its moral culture, going to be incompatible with the next Beethoven or the next Goethe and so on. And to me, that's fascinating. I'm not sure what I think about it at the end of the day, but I've been trying for thirty years to understand it.