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.The French bourgeoisie during the French Revolution only looked up at the aristocrats they wanted to replace, but theynever looked down at the rest of the “third estate” who were much worseoff.Justice always begins with the self and the personal passions, but it neednot therefore be selfish.Justice may begin with resentment but resentmentneed not be petty or opposed to a noble sense of generosity and compassion.Indeed, given that we are not Nietzsche’s much fantasized U¨bermenschen,wholly satisfied and in charge of our world, it is hard to even imagine whatjustice—and for that matter morality—would be without resentment.Eu-gen Du¨ hring was right: the home of justice is to be sought in “the sphereof the reactive feelings.”N I E T Z S C H E O N R E S E N T M E N T , L OV E , A ND PI TYChapter N I E T Z S C H E ’ SA F F I R M A T I V E E T H I C SShe told me herself that she had no morality,—and I thought she had, likemyself, a more severe morality than anyone.—Friedrich Nietzsche, On the Genealogy of MoralsThe mad dog image of Nietzsche, snarling at the world—is not so differentin its malicious intent, nor further wrong in its interpretation of Nietzsche,than a good number of scholarly works.This is indeed the traditional por-trait: the unconsummated consummate immoralist, the personally gentle,even timid, arch-destroyer.Of course, Nietzsche himself made adolescentcomments about his own destructiveness not infrequently—“I am dyna-mite” in Ecce Homo, for example.Nevertheless, these give a false impression of his intentions as well as of the good philosophical sense to be made ofhis works.Nietzsche described himself and some of his works as “untimely,” a ratio-nalization, perhaps, for the fact that his books did not sell and attractednegative reaction.But Nietzsche must surely be the most historical andeven “timely” of authors.He has come to define the turn to the twentiethcentury.He captured, as few philosophers did, the new sensibility that wasjust emerging.But just as important, he perfectly culminated the long West-ern tradition in philosophy, a fact recognized by Martin Heidegger but thengrotesquely twisted to suit Heidegger’s own philosophical prejudices.It wasa fact also acknowledged by Alasdair MacIntyre, who saw Nietzsche bring-ing to a close the “Enlightenment project” in ethics and marking the degen-eration of an ethical tradition that dated back to Plato and Aristotle.Butwhere both Heidegger and MacIntyre take Nietzsche to bring the Westerntradition to a close in a quite negative sense—a sense captured by the wordnihilism, I take Nietzsche to culminate the tradition in a very different, “affirmative” sense, recapturing what is best in Western ethics (and, not coin-cidentally, bringing it closer to several of the most illustrious Eastern ethical traditions as well.)To talk about Nietzsche’s “affirmative” philosophy is to begin, above all,with his sometimes near-hysterical emphasis on life-affirmation.RejectingSchopenhauer’s pessimism, which represented one of the most egregious versions of nihilism, Nietzsche insisted instead that life is not meaningless.Life is good, even if it is filled with suffering.The Greeks knew this.That is why, in Nietzsche’s words, “they were so beautiful.” There are seriousquestions about what Nietzsche actually means by “life-affirmation” andwhether he actually succeeded in adopting such an attitude.Contrastedwith the images of the “Dionysian” he so often presents, it must be saidthat Nietzsche cuts a not very convincing gay figure.His laughter oftenseems forced, and his cheerfulness the reach of a desperate man.From allevidence, until his final madness he was incapable of even the uptight ver-sion of dancing propounded by his Zarathustra, and his playfulness seemedlargely limited to the scholarly joke.Lou Andreas Salomeónce describedhim (in ):A light laugh, a quiet way of speaking, and a cautious, pensive way ofwalking.He took pleasure in the refined forms of social intercourse.But in it all lay a penchant for disguise.I recall that when I first spoke with him his formal manner shocked and deceived me.But I wasnot deceived for long by this lonesome man who only wore his mask asunalterably as someone coming from the desert and mountains wears thecloak of the worldly-wise.Nevertheless, it would be both blind and cruel to dismiss Nietzsche’s genu-ine efforts to be life-affirming as no more than a rhetorical counter to Scho-penhauer or the desperate attempts of an unhappy man.I think that weshould take Nietzsche’s affirmative philosophy seriously, and in this and theremaining chapters I will try to do just that.Whether or not he convincedhimself (in any more than an intellectual fashion) of life’s worth, the ques-tion is rather what we can make of his challenge to see life with all of itsunhappiness face-on while at the same time managing to love it.And rather than seeing Nietzsche’s ethics as inconsistent and intermittent bursts of enthusiasm and contempt, we can understand Nietzsche as being very mucha part of the Western ethical tradition and perhaps even as a serious ethical“theorist.”Nietzsche in the Tradition:Nihilism For and AgainstNihilism stands at the door: whence comes this uncanniest of all guests?—Friedrich Nietzsche, The Will to PowerIt is decidedly within the philosophical tradition, typically traced in misleading linear fashion back to Socrates, that I want to try to understand Nietz-sche’s ethics.His reputation as arch-destroyer and philosophical outlaw hasso enveloped Nietzsche, largely at his own bidding, that the kernel of hismoral philosophy—and I do insist on calling it that—has been lost [ Pobierz całość w formacie PDF ]