[ Pobierz całość w formacie PDF ]
.When we speak of values, we speakwith the inspiration, with the way of looking at things, which is part of life [unterwrites: [L]ife itself is will to power; self-preservation is only one of the indirect and most frequentresults.In short, here as everywhere else, let us beware of superfluous teleological principles one ofwhich is the instinct of self-preservation.Thus method, which must be essentially economy ofprinciples, demands it (BGE, 13).There are two ways of making sense of Nietzsche s view here.Oneis to interpret him as thinking of the claim that life is the will to power as teleological but not as asuperfluous teleological claim.The second option, the one I prefer, is to ascribe to him the view that ageneral tendency to growth, domination, expansion, increase of strength, and so on, is simply toodiffuse to count as having a telos in the relevant sense.Compare, again, the kind of claim about lifethat a contemporary biologist might make.The second objection involves BGE, 9, where Nietzsche mocks the Stoics for the imperative liveaccording to life. As Nietzsche says, how could you not do that? Why make a principle of what youyourselves are and must be? As I hope my discussion of the Benthamite model below will show, thisin fact can be read as supportive of my eventual interpretation rather than undermining it. The role of life in the Genealogy 159der Optik des Lebens]: life itself forces us to posit values; life itself values through uswhen we posit values.From this it follows that even that anti-natural moralitywhich conceives of God as the counter-concept and condemnation of life is only avalue judgment of life but of what life? of what kind of life? I have already giventhe answer: of declining, weakened, weary, condemned life.(TI, Morality as Anti-nature, 5)I suggest that implicit in these Nietzschean texts is a kind of naturalismabout values that was quite widespread among late nineteenth-centurythinkers working in the wake of, as Nietzsche would put it, the death ofGod. Mill is an example, but only one example.And perhaps Mill is not asgood an example as Bentham.The Benthamite model, as I am tempted tocall it, focuses on the inescapability of certain fundamental tendencies ordispositions.Once we really see ourselves as natural creatures once, to useNietzsche s language, we translate man back into nature (BGE, 230) then we have to look for direction from nature.Where else could one look?And nature has constituted us, so the understandable thought goes, incertain ways.One would have reason to act against our natural constitutiononly on the basis of some set of commands or injunctions from beyondnature and that is precisely what we give up in our attempts not to placeGod at the center of things.Instead we affirm, rather than deny, what isessential to life.Bentham writes:Nature has placed mankind under the governance of two sovereign masters, painand pleasure.It is for them alone to point out what we ought to do, as well as todetermine what we shall do.On the one hand the standard of right and wrong, onthe other the chain of causes and effects, are fastened to their throne.They governus in all we do, in all we say, in all we think: every effort we can make to throw offour subjection, will serve but to demonstrate and confirm it.In words a man maypretend to abjure their empire: but in reality he will remain subject to it all thewhile.The principle of utility recognises this subjection.(Bentham 2003: 17)Now one can try, as one can try with Mill, to find a valid argument here.Certainly for using the relevant stretches of Bentham or Mill for purelyphilosophical purposes one would have to determine whether or not therewas a valid argument.However, for the purposes of the history of philos-ophy for the purpose of figuring out the probability that an interpretationreflects what the philosopher was thinking what is more important, atleast here, is the widespread tendency to think along such lines.In addition to Mill and Bentham, I would classify Marx as anotherexample: 160 nadeem j.z.hussainThe theoretical conclusions of the Communists are in no way based on ideas orprinciples that have been invented, or discovered, by this or that would-be universalreformer.They merely express, in general terms, actual relations springing from an existingclass struggle, from a historical movement going on under our very eyes.Theabolition of existing property relations is not at all a distinctive feature ofCommunism.(Marx [1848] 1978c: 484)Communism is for us not a state of affairs which is to be established, an ideal towhich reality [will] have to adjust itself.We call communism the real movementwhich abolishes the present state of things.The conditions of this movement resultfrom the premises now in existence.(Marx [1845 46] 1978b: 162)The working class.have no ready-made utopias to introduce par décret du peuple.They know that in order to work out their own emancipation, and along with itthat higher form to which present society is irresistibly tending by its owneconomical agencies, they will have to pass through long struggles, through a seriesof historic processes, transforming circumstances and men.They have no ideals torealise, but to set free the elements of the new society with which old collapsingbourgeois society itself is pregnant.(Marx [1871] 1978a: 635 36)Such quotes can be multiplied without end and the point comes across evenmore strongly in Engels writings
[ Pobierz całość w formacie PDF ]