Idealism and the Higher Morality versus Democracy

Idealism and the Higher Morality versus Democracy: Using Nietzsche’s Genealogy of Morals to Revisit Bradley’s Ethical Studies Charles D. Tarlton (bio) Perhaps I have never read anything to which I would have said to myself No, proposition by proposition, conclusion by conclusion, to the extent that I did to this book: yet quite without ill-humour or impatience . . . I made opportune and inopportune reference to the propositions of that book, not in order to refute them — what have I do to with refutations! — but, as becomes a positive spirit, to replace the improbable with the more probably, possibly one error with another (N-18). 1 Introduction The purpose of this essay is to scrutinize the implications of some of Friedrich Nietzsche’s most characteristic conjectures in his Genealogy of Morals for our re-reading of that other nineteenth-century English philosophical classic, Ethical Studies, by F. H. Bradley. Kenneth Burke has drawn attention to the heuristic device he terms “perspective by incongruity,” in which we deliberately generate angles, slants, and hunches regarding a text by discussing it in terms borrowed from another unfamiliar or radically different text. Something of that sort is what I want to do here. Nietzsche’s political ideas stand out starkly; the style of the Genealogy of Morals is typically dramatic, rousing, and impetuous. Nietzsche’s account of the origin of morality, his explanations of guilt, duty, and conscience, his hostility toward democracy, and his idealization of specially gifted and perceptive individuals are all stated boldly, whereas in Bradley, similar ideas lie more in shadow, hiding at the end of long chains of delicate reasoning, or are merely implied in subtle and guarded phrases.2 Nietzsche’s more freely drawn images and arguments will guide us through the intricacies of Ethical Studies, to illuminate aspects of Bradley’s text that might otherwise go unnoticed altogether. The moral philosophy of Nietzsche is stylistically provocative and ethically outrageous by all conventional standards: it extols cruelty, inhumanity, and the ability to endure great pain; it ridicules generosity, pity, and love. The Genealogy of Morals, in particular, is filled with expressions of contempt for most of the rest of the world and their moral sentiments and traditions. The moral philosophy of Bradley is bourgeois, stylistically academic, arcane, and eccentric, and given to a kind of self-congratulation in which he, and those with whose thoughts he instinctively agrees, regret how easily other mere “thinkers” and hairsplitters are led into moral error. He nods in casual agreement with such conventional moral values as truth, generosity, kindness, reliability and the like, saving his real moral energies for describing how the self folds and refolds itself in search of its place within the absolute. Nietzsche craves the rebirth of a violent and instinctive moral aristocracy; Bradley celebrates and then abandons the ordinary moral achievements of the dutiful and turns his efforts toward those who represent a higher ideal. Nietzsche’s ideal human being finds his moral guidance within, despising those who require comfort, social closeness, and the surety of rules; he rages at a mindless modern conformity. Bradley’s ideal human being searches among his guilts and pleasures for genuine self-expression, finds the means surest at hand in submission to the voice of the community, from which, finally and necessarily, a special few reach toward an unachievable ideal. Nietzsche concludes that most of human raw material is worthless. What hope there is comes, first, from the existence of a remnant of superior individuals who manage the masses, and, second, from the willingness of the masses to submerge everything under a paradoxical religious terror. In words of unbounded irony, Nietzsche grasps at this combination as the great hope for the future: “the basic fact of the human will, its horror vacui, it needs a goal — and it would rather will nothingness than not will. — Am I understood? ... Have I been understood?” (N-97). Bradley leaves morality behind, self-devoured by its “impulse to transcend its existing reality” (313). The “ideal” that haunted Bradley’s ethical endeavors, the despair implicit in the ultimate self-contradictory nature of morality and its hopelessness, returns at the end of his text to defeat morality completely

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