Nietzsche, Ethics, Historiography

Nietzsche famously criticized received notions of good and evil, and pointed out the inglorious role of “reactive” and resentful thinking about morals. To negatively frame our notions of goodness and virtue in terms of emotional reactions to bad things done by others is not an auspicious beginning for ethics. It results in a bad order of explanation that puts negative judgments of others before positive consideration of what is right.

Nietzsche pointed out that this occurs more often than we might think. A recurring emphasis on negative, blaming attitudes toward other people over affirmative values is unfortunately all too common not only in ordinary life and actually existing religious practice, but across what passes for the political spectrum. We ought to distance ourselves from this, and develop our values in positive rather than negative terms. We should aim to be good by what we do, not by contrasting ourselves with those other people. As an antidote to resentment, Nietzsche recommended we cultivate forgetfulness of wrongs done by others. I would add that we can have strong concern for justice without focusing on blame or revenge.

Like Aristotle, but without ever mentioning the connection, Nietzsche emphasized a certain sort of character development, and effectively advocated something close to Aristotle’s notion of magnanimity, or “great-souledness” as contrasted with small-mindedness. But in common with some modern interpretations of “virtue ethics”, Nietzsche tended to make whatever a presumably great-souled person might in fact do into a criterion, and consequently downplayed the role of the rational deliberation jointly emphasized by Aristotle and Kant.

Unfortunately, Nietzsche seems to have been so outraged by what he saw as widespread hypocrisy that he sometimes failed to take his own advice to avoid dwelling on the negative. This comes out in his tendency to make sweeping historical generalizations. Thus, he presented all religion in a negative light, and even went so far as to blame the “moralism” of Socrates and Plato for many later historical ills, while failing to note his own partial convergence with Aristotle.

Even at the peak of my youthful enthusiasm for Nietzsche, this negative judgment of Socrates and Plato always seemed wrong to me. Textual evidence just does not support the attribution of primarily “resentful” attitudes to either of them. On the contrary, Socrates and Plato began a completely unprecedented attempt to understand what is good in positive terms, and took great care to avoid prejudice in the process.

Partly as a consequence of his sweeping rejection of Socrates and Plato, Nietzsche looked for alternate heroes among the pre-Socratics, especially favoring Heraclitus. (In the 20th century, with different motivations, Heidegger expanded on Nietzsche’s valorization of the pre-Socratics over Plato and Aristotle, claiming that Heraclitus and Parmenides “had Being in sight” in ways that Plato and Aristotle did not. This seems to me like nonsense. As distinct from poetry and other artistic endeavors (which I value highly, but in a different way), philosophy is not about primordial vision or its recovery; it is about rational understanding and development toward an end, starting from wherever we actually find ourselves. While the pre-Socratics are important in a sort of prehistory of philosophy, the level of rational development they achieved was minimal. Extended rational development first bloomed with Plato, and then was taken to a yet higher level by Aristotle.)

Nietzsche also denied the reality or effective relevance of anything like Aristotelian potentiality, claiming that only what is actual is real. The semantic or expressive category of potentiality underwrites logical and linguistic modality, which among other things in turn underwrites the possibility of expressing objective judgments of “should”, as well as of causality, of which Nietzsche seems to have taken a Humean view. The general role of potentiality and modality is independent of all issues of the correctness or possibly prejudiced character of particular judgments.

Nietzsche’s denial of potentiality is thus related to a denial of any objective good and evil. It is akin to other views that attempt to explain values by facts. He thought mostly in terms of actually occurring valuations, and did distinguish better from worse ones, but mainly in terms of a kind of ad hominem argument from great-souledness or small-mindedness.

In my view, he should have been content to point out that many particular judgments are prejudiced or incorrect, and at any moment we have no sure way of knowing we accurately recognize which these are. Objectivity in ethics cannot be assumed as a starting point, but that does not mean there can never be any. Where it occurs, it is a relative status that is the product of a development. (See also Genealogy.)

Nietzsche’s poetic notion of the Eternal Return does in a way partly make up for his overly strong denial of any objective good or evil. The Eternal Return works especially as an ethical, selective thought that distinguishes purely affirmative valuations from others. I used to want to think this was enough to recover something objective that acts like a notion of good as affirmativeness, but that is contrary to what he says explicitly.

Structure, Potentiality

I now want to say, structure — which statically captures a determinate field of potential inferences — is isomorphic to Aristotelian potentiality. These concepts are mutually illuminating.

This helps clarify how Aristotelian potentiality differs from the Platonic power referenced by the same Greek word, as well shedding light on the association I have made between potentiality and counterfactual inference.

From the other direction, the thing to notice is that for Aristotle, potentiality exists only in a pair with actuality or at-work-ness. Similarly, synchronic structure exists only in a pair with diachronic process. I always read the conspicuous lack of definition of the synchronic/diachronic interface as reflecting something like Aristotle’s principled use of underdetermination in order to focus on what is most essential and clearly justifiable.

A lot of people seem to have been very confused about this latter point during the drama over 1960s French structuralism. What passed for dialogue was often a complete disconnect. “Look at how much can be explained synchronically!” “Oh no, you’re abolishing history, free will, personality, and identity!” If the new viewpoint was forgivably one-sided in its enthusiasm, some of the reaction verged on hysteria. (See also The Dreaded Humanist Debate.)

Another source of confusion seems to be that many people apparently thought of structural causality in terms of a monolithic, complete determination. I think instead that structural causality comes in many separate blocks, in an overall context of less-than-complete determination. (See also Structural Causality, Choice; Values, Causality; The Importance of Potentiality.)

Matter, Potentiality

I’ve suggested nonstandard readings of both Aristotelian matter and Aristotelian potentiality. While traditionally there is thought to be a loose analogy such that matter is to form as potentiality is to actuality, the two concepts as I am reading them are sharply distinct. Matter captures the accumulation of contingent fact. Potentiality captures counterfactually robust inference. Matter particularizes, while potentiality universalizes.

Potentiality seems to me to be a kind of form. This is a bit tricky, because an important classical sense of Aristotelian matter that I have not been emphasizing is associated with a disposition to respond in certain ways when acted upon. This, however, sounds like counterfactual potentiality to me.

Potentiality

Potentiality (dynamis) is yet another great Aristotelian expressive metaconcept. Plato had the intriguing idea of explaining things and states of affairs in terms of power (also dynamis), but left power as an unexplained explainer, and required it to be postulated as pre-existent. Aristotle thoroughly reconceptualized the term to eliminate these weaknesses. Every Aristotelian potentiality begins from actuality or at-work-ness.

Instead of referring to postulated powers behind things or abstract logical possibility, Aristotelian potentiality is a way of talking about the aspects of a conceptual content captured by what Brandom would call modally robust counterfactual inference. Such robustness of inference across counterfactual cases is implicitly central to the most elementary meaning of Aristotelian substance or “what it was to have been” a thing (ousia), as what grounds the weak unity that allows us to talk about the same “thing” persisting through time even though something about it changed.

The semantic importance of counterfactual inference in determining the sense of what things are is a thesis shared by Aristotle, Hegel, and Brandom. It is explicit in Brandom and Brandom’s Hegel, and implicit in Aristotle. We cannot even really form a view of any thing as a thing of a certain kind unless we at least implicitly consider its potentiality.

Aristotle was clear that potentiality is an irreducible ingredient in things, and potentiality clearly captures counterfactuals. Brandom has made the role of counterfactuals in the development of universality more explicit. Facts alone give us at best a very brittle structure of assertions with no real conceptual articulation or interpretation, so perspectives that try to ground things on facts alone are doomed to ultimate failure. (In this light, Nietzsche‘s elimination of potentiality also turns out to have been a very serious error.) Overly strong, question-begging notions of the Identity of things have helped obscure the vital role of counterfactual inference in stabilizing our experience of the world. (See also Modality and Variation.)

Tentatively mapping this to Brandom’s Fregean terminology, I think Aristotle would intend the relation of potentiality to actuality to be one of reciprocal sense dependence paired with asymmetrical reference dependence. That is to say, at a level of determination of meaning, potentiality and actuality are interdependent and equally important, but in the order of logical truth about representations, actuality or the concrete is the starting point in terms of which potentiality is evaluated. Potentialities are potentialities of some actuality. (See also The Importance of Potentiality; Potentiality, Actuality; Structure, Potentiality; Matter, Potentiality.)