Moral Psychology with Nietzsche

Brian Leiter's Moral Psychology with Nietzsche draws together seven of his previous papers (one coauthored with Joshua Knobe), expands and updates them, and weaves them together into a unified naturalist line of interpretation. The fundamental positions largely remain the same. The reader already familiar with Leiter's work will thus not be in for major surprises, but will have much to learn from reading the new exegetical and philosophical details in this book.The “moral psychology” indicated in the book's title is construed very broadly to encompass, for example, metaethics in addition to the more familiar questions one might associate with moral psychology. While the book defends and challenges interpretive theses on Nietzsche's work at a number of points, it, as its title indicates, is primarily not a work of Nietzsche interpretation, but instead an attempt to use Nietzsche as a point of departure to think about the underlying philosophical issues, to “articulate and defend [a] moral psychology in a Nietzschean spirit” (14). Leiter is admirably forthright about this orientation, in a way that should serve as a model for others. There are a number of points, textual and philosophical, where I was not persuaded by his case, but the clarity of its presentation leaves one in the refreshing position of having the terms of debate clearly demarcated. As with Leiter's work generally, it is engagingly written and philosophically adroit.The guiding methodological thread across these chapters is naturalism (2–11), of the form that Leiter put forward in his 2002 book Nietzsche on Morality (London: Routledge, 2002) and has defended since. The present book applies that naturalism to thinking about metaethics, epistemology, philosophy of action, and some more familiar issues in moral psychology (such as character, reactive attitudes, and the relation between affects and moral judgment). The title is, to my ear, thus somewhat misleading given the range of material here. Naturalistic Philosophy with Nietzsche might have better represented the breadth of contents. It is now widely agreed that Nietzsche is a naturalist of some kind, as, for instance, an opponent of supernaturalist metaphysics. Leiter has defended the more specific interpretation that Nietzsche is what he calls an “M-naturalist,” one offering and prizing “speculative” philosophical theories that seek to have “continuity with the methods of successful sciences” (2). One idea throughout the book is that Nietzsche anticipates what will be lent further credibility by later psychological investigation, for example, work from Wegner and Libet on willing (141–42) or psychological research about the connection between behavior and avowed attitudes (176–77). As an astute observer of human beings and as a keen, if idiosyncratic, reader of the science of his time, Nietzsche, Leiter contends, formed hypotheses, which have since garnered further empirical support.The first main section of Leiter's book concerns the metaphysics and epistemology of value, and the position attributed to Nietzsche and defended is a form of antirealism about such value. This is the focus of chapters 1 and 2. As Leiter reconstructs Nietzsche's position, Nietzsche reaches this skeptical conclusion through an abductive argument from disagreement. The best conclusion to reach in the face of intractable disagreement among moral philosophers is that there are no “objective moral facts or facts about reasons for acting” (32). Leiter criticizes what he calls “privilege” readings of Nietzsche, those that see him holding that certain values (e.g., power) have a genuine authority or standing. Leiter's Nietzsche rejects the idea of such values. Therefore, “at bottom, Nietzsche,” on Leiter's reading, “has nothing to say to those readers who don't share his evaluative tastes” (65). Leiter turns in chapters 3 and 4 to discussing the relation between moral judgments and affects. If we are not tracking objective facts in making moral judgments, what explains how we reach the moral judgments that we do? Affects, feelings, and drives underpin these judgments, and we are to appeal to the former to understand the latter (69–70). Chapter 4 investigates Nietzsche's perspectivism, and also extends the skepticism about value canvassed in chapters 1 and 2 to a more sweeping form of skepticism about epistemic normativity as well (99–103), which Leiter takes to be a consequence of his thoroughgoing form of naturalism. The next three chapters concern freedom, reactive attitudes, agency, willing, and character. Nietzsche, according to Leiter, is a “Hard Incompatibilist” (117) and, moreover, one who denies that we are actually morally responsible and who rejects the appropriateness of connected concepts such as guilt and blame (119). So too, our conscious experience of feeling efficacious in action through our willing is founded on an illusion (129–32). Leiter's Nietzsche has no truck with the idea that anyone is free, in any philosophically substantive sense. Nietzsche, he concedes, does sometimes draw on the language of “freedom” and “free will,” as characteristics of a select few, but this is merely (in the terms of Stevenson) a “persuasive definition” for a Nietzschean ideal of human excellence that capitalizes on the “emotive valence” of these terms (147). Chapter 7 is a revised version of a piece originally coauthored with Joshua Knobe, considering a Nietzschean version of moral psychology, alongside more familiar Aristotelian and Kantian versions. Nietzschean moral psychology, as characterized by Leiter (and Knobe), gives primacy to, in their terms, alleged “type facts” of a psycho-physiological nature (167). These are crucial, they hold, in explaining the character traits people have, and how people actually behave.For a book that advertises itself as philosophy with Nietzsche, Leiter's book ends up having quite a surprising amount to say about exegetical matters (often in helpfully detailed footnotes). Some of the points are indeed quite philological: Leiter for example looks to the original German source Carl Albrecht Bernoulli for a story that Nietzsche, on leaving Sils Maria for Turin in 1888, discarded and wanted burned many of the notes that would later make it into The Will to Power, but that his landlord preserved these (61). We of course don't know whether this story is true, but it is yet another reason for further hesitation before uncritical reliance on the Nachlaß—Nietzsche's notebooks and other writings he never published.Leiter's book is thus not without a certain historicist component. But much of his best work involves supplementing Nietzsche's ideas by reference to recent philosophical work outside Nietzsche studies. Whether or not one ultimately agrees with Leiter's philosophical positions or interpretations—I myself am unpersuaded by most of them—the quality of argumentation is at a high level throughout. There are a number of critical points that might be made about the claims made in the book, but I shall focus on two.First, Leiter has long maintained the position, now in the minority among Nietzsche scholars, that Nietzsche is not putting forward a positive ideal of freedom per se. In this part of the present book, I found that what was at issue in this debate came more sharply into focus than it had for me previously. It seems to be common ground among Leiter and his opponents (including Ken Gemes, Peter Poellner, John Richardson, and others) that Nietzsche is holding out a certain ideal of human beings: those whose drives are unified and integrated in a certain way. Leiter is willing to concede that this is an ideal of “agency” or of “full personhood” (153), but that it is not a conception of freedom. One wonders, how much is really at stake here? A major point at issue, I take it, is whether this is resonant with a substantive philosophical conception of freedom or merely borrowing the terminology of “freedom” for a persuasive definition of this ideal. Leiter rightly notes that there is not much affinity between this idea of freedom and the most familiar modern options, from the Kantian and the Humean traditions respectively (153), where the concern often tends to be around (moral) responsibility. But he considers arguments from Donald Rutherford about whether there might be anticipations of a proto-Nietzschean freedom in the history of philosophy, notably in the Stoics and in Spinoza. Crucial for these notions of freedom is whether “the inherent power of the agent” is operative in bringing about the agent's actions, rather than “the power of external forces” (Rutherford, “Freedom as a Philosophical Ideal: Nietzsche and His Antecedents,” Inquiry 54.5 [2011]: 512–40; quoted in Leiter, 158). There is, it seems to me, substantial continuity between the ideal of agency or personhood that Nietzsche puts forward and philosophically important and influential ideas of freedom. As with other key philosophical notions, there have been markedly different conceptions of freedom in the philosophical tradition. Nietzsche prefers to capitalize on, develop, and modify some of these strands. Given this apparent connection with the historical tradition, Leiter's continuing insistence that Nietzsche is merely offering a persuasive redefinition of freedom is just not convincing.Second, Leiter's naturalism leads him to a very radical conclusion indeed: that there is no such thing as epistemic normativity (111). There are no “oughts, no “reasons” in the epistemic sphere, with any real (i.e., attitude-independent) normative traction over us. Leiter argues that this position is not self-undermining, and I think I agree that, strictly speaking, it is not. But why should anyone subscribe to this extreme view? If Leiter is right, there is not really any sense to this question. Why then, one wonders, is Leiter so tenacious about this view and the naturalism underlying it? Given Leiter's meta-methodological position, the tenets of such naturalism make no ineluctable claim on the rest of us. Naturalism is a kind of tribal affiliation that certain types of people are affectively disposed toward. The exaggerated paean to it is a way one emotes one's enthusiasm for a methodology that is not rationally mandated. So if Leiter is right, one can, without rational censure, ignore his strong form of naturalism and embrace something more to one's taste—even, say, explanation by augury or astrology. Those might, as a descriptive matter, meet with less predictive success, but there is no epistemic ought saying we should be doing otherwise; indeed, according to Leiter, there is no compelling reason why we ought to believe that they will meet with less predictive success. Leiter initially couched his naturalism in his 2002 book, and does again here, as the key alternative to postmodernism, but ironically they seem to end up—as several others have noted—with the same sort of extreme epistemic relativism, at least concerning reasons and justification, if not truth as such. One might think that there is at least, as a descriptive matter, greater convergence in the epistemic principles people in fact subscribe to, compared with the moral principles they subscribe to. But is this really so? Truthers, birthers, creationists, antivaxxers, and other epistemic eccentrics seem to be legion, and to have very different standards for what constitutes appropriate evidence, for what deference to give to expert scientific opinion, and so on. Oughtn't they conduct themselves in a less epistemically lax way? According to Leiter, there is no solid normative ground from which we can level that charge.We could just leave it there, since the possibility of rational argument, if Leiter is right, has given out. But let me try to motivate (or simply to state) why I would not subscribe to this form of naturalism, and also what implications it has for our thinking about Nietzsche. Insofar as I can work out why we are supposed to go in for this form of naturalism, it is that it puts stock in accurate predictions (101) and causal explanations (106), of the sort that are the supposed mark of successful sciences. Well and good, but why is this the methodological bedrock? I am much more confident that A follows from A & B (and that I ought to believe this) than I am of any sweepingly general, Quine-inspired thesis about methodology of the sort that motivates Leiter's naturalism. If Leiter is right, his naturalism leads to the—to my mind—absurd conclusion that I have no rational obligation to believe that A follows from A & B. So much the worse for his naturalism if it is forced to bite such colossal bullets.The notion of naturalism indeed ends up being rather slippery. Partly that is because it is unclear what exactly the “successful sciences” (2) are that philosophy is supposed to model itself after. These can be construed more or less capaciously: On a less capacious construal, philosophy needs to take its cue from such fields as biology and empirical psychology. On a more capacious construal, in line with the broad German meaning of Wissenschaften, we include the “human sciences,” such as history (see Leiter on Thucydides at 96–97), classics, literary hermeneutics, interpretivist anthropology, and the like. But if one goes this latter way, one struggles to see why the term “naturalism” is still helpfully descriptive, and indeed what a contrasting philosophical methodology would look like. If not naturalism, then what? Leiter cites Heidegger and Derrida as paradigmatically antinaturalist (2), and of course that seems right, but if he allows the hermeneutical Geisteswissenschaften as models for how to do philosophy, one is hard-pressed to see what, in principle anyway, excludes them from the fold. The basic dilemma for naturalism is this: it can retain its methodological distinctiveness at the expense of being unduly narrow, or it can broaden the allowable methods, and thus become more plausible, yet lose it distinctiveness.For my part, I am skeptical that a philosopher as multifarious as Nietzsche is a card-carrying naturalist of Leiter's specific sort, but admittedly, this interpretive claim is hard to assess since it's difficult to pin naturalism down precisely in the first place. I'm not skeptical that Nietzsche gives some penetrating naturalistic psychobiological explanations of things, which Leiter aptly elaborates and defends. But there is, so far as I can tell, no compelling textual evidence for the view that Nietzsche endorses this as a general methodological thesis. Yet regardless of where one stands on these meta-methodological issues, one should agree that there is much of philosophical insight potentially to be gained by philosophical work taking this approach. That lesson is borne out throughout this philosophically rewarding book

Epistemology · Moral psychology · Psychoanalysis · Nietzsche, Schopenhauer, and Hegel · Philosophy · Psychology