Peter Poellner

This chapter seeks to clarify the normative grounds and some of the contents of Nietzsche's evaluative commitments. It is argued that attempts to ground these commitments in the psychology of the will to power are incomplete, since, on the plausible assumption that the will to power is a type of second-order desire, it generates insufficient constraints with respect to first-order evaluation. Nietzsche, however, is clearly committed to evaluative distinctions among first-order ends and values, upon which, in his view, the value of specific instances of will to power partly depends. It is argued that Nietzsche's reasons for evaluative distinctions among first-order values are ultimately to be found in intentional affectivity, more specifically in essentially world-involving affective experiences which are best analysed as _aesthetic_ in a broad, but clearly delimited sense. Nietzsche's ethics can therefore be said to be aestheticist. A number of typical examples from Nietzsche's texts are analysed in order to demonstrate the fecundity of this approach for understanding the contents of Nietzsche's own ethical and other evaluative commitments. The final sections of the chapter seek to show that and why the most significant positive and negative values are, for Nietzsche, essentially associated with human or relevantly similar subjectivity. While his ideas and arguments on this issue warrant the judgement that Nietzsche's ethics is humanist, his humanism differs from mainstream enlightenment humanism — say, of Kantian provenance — in important and illuminating ways.

This chapter argues that Nietzsche's work contains a compatibilist theory of freedom. There are two distinct but complementary conceptions of freedom in Nietsche's later works: (i) freedom or autonomy as a ‘transcendental’ condition of personhood; and (ii) freedom as a substantive ideal (the ‘free spirit’). With respect to (i), it is argued that, for Nietzsche, formal conditions (such as a unified system of desires) are not sufficient for autonomous personhood, but that a proper account of autonomy requires in addition an explanation of what enables an agent to _identify_ with some of her desires and motives. Such identification requires an agent's understanding of her affectivity as being intentional, and as potentially revealing value features of the phenomenal world. This view is consistent with Nietzsche's rejection of a strong realism about values, i.e., with his view that there are no actual values in the world without valuers. With respect to (ii), it is argued that a central component of Nietzsche's ideal of the free spirit is indifference to the metaphysical will to truth and to the metaphysical status of the practical values guiding one's life.

This chapter argues that Nietzsche's work contains a compatibilist theory of freedom. There are two distinct but complementary conceptions of freedom in Nietsche's later works: (i) freedom or autonomy as a ‘transcendental’ condition of personhood; and (ii) freedom as a substantive ideal (the ‘free spirit’). With respect to (i), it is argued that, for Nietzsche, formal conditions (such as a unified system of desires) are not sufficient for autonomous personhood, but that a proper account of autonomy requires in addition an explanation of what enables an agent to _identify_ with some of her desires and motives. Such identification requires an agent's understanding of her affectivity as being intentional, and as potentially revealing value features of the phenomenal world. This view is consistent with Nietzsche's rejection of a strong realism about values, i.e., with his view that there are no actual values in the world without valuers. With respect to (ii), it is argued that a central component of Nietzsche's ideal of the free spirit is indifference to the metaphysical will to truth and to the metaphysical status of the practical values guiding one's life.

A reconstruction of Nietzsche's epistemology and metaphysics aimed at isolating and assessing dominant lines of argument concerning truth, knowledge, and reality in Nietzsche's mature and late period. The book initially focuses on Nietzsche's sceptical remarks, directed at specific metaphysical theories (causation, self, Newtonian force) and more generally at the concepts of knowledge as justified true belief and rational justification. The discussion proceeds to Nietzsche's own historically unprecedented strain of scepticism. This is the argument from utility—maintaining that the pragmatic utility of belief renders it unlikely to be true. Nietzsche's naturalized epistemology is discussed in the context of modern evolutionary epistemology. It is argued that the two kinds of scepticism are not compatible. In addition, Nietzsche's sceptical stance presupposes the intelligibility of a metaphysically realist conception of absolute truth. Yet, he simultaneously doubts the very notion of truth underpinning his sceptical arguments. It is proposed that Nietzsche is not committed to scepticism but employs sceptical considerations in his attempt to discredit the ascetic ideal. He is strategically qualifying his deductions to the extent that even if the notion of metaphysical truth were allowed to pass muster, metaphysical theories about the world would still be demonstrably otiose. The book emphasizes the centrality of his attack on the notion of metaphysical truth, which purports to describe the objective existence and intrinsic properties of a subject‐independent reality as it is ‘in itself’ and from no ‘point of view’, referred to as Nietzsche's anti‐essentialist or anti‐metaphysical thinking. The affinity of Nietzsche's outlook to anti‐realism, idealism, and classic conceivability objections to metaphysical realism is developed along with emphasis on the original form it takes in Nietzsche. For Nietzsche, the perspectival, subject‐implying character of representational content cannot be discounted without rendering the representation meaningless. As the concept of reality refers to recalcitrant patterns of representational contents that affect empirical subjects by ‘resisting’ them, gaining purchase on it involves anthropocentric notions such as interest, concern, and experience. It is only as beings with interests and capable of intentional and volitional agency that we have the concepts of objective reality and the external world. Having thus laid out Nietzsche's anti‐essentialism, it is argued that a difficult problem arises over the incompatibility of anti‐essentialism with Nietzsche's theory of the mind, in particular his concern with psychology and human agency. His analysis of the concepts of self‐deception, ressentiment, and the Christian ideal, and more generally, of the ascetic ideal or ‘will to truth’, imply that there is a realm of metaphysical fact described, at the very least, by his own theoretical pronouncements. This problem is compounded by his views of the nature of inner experience as the domain of ‘ruling drives’ privileged by being the sole causally efficacious movers. Anticipating Freud's theory of the unconscious, Nietzsche argues that the processes of the mind are not necessarily accessible to self‐consciousness. The book concludes with an analysis of the ‘metaphysics of the will to power’ offered by Nietzsche as an explanatory ontology of relational entities. The final chapter illustrates the recurrent problem of reconciling Nietzsche's overt metaphysical assertions with his sceptical and anti‐essentialist objections to metaphysical truth.

This article examines Nietzsche’s metaphysical reflections. Many of these reflections draw upon his rejection of regularity accounts of causation. Nietzsche thinks we cannot adequately understand causation without reference to causal powers, and he accepts a dynamist physics according to which the physical world is exhaustively constituted by powers, so that his ultimate ontology consists of a world of force-like rather than thing-like entities. This metaphysics underwrites his claim of the primacy of becoming over being. The article also suggests a genuine conflict in Nietzsche’s later thought, and that he was alternately drawn towards metaphysical indifferentism and panpsychist metaphysics in his late period.

Argues that Nietzsche's pronouncements on psychology advert to basic facts about the constitution of inner experience and are thus incompatible with his anti‐essentialism. Nietzsche's analysis of non‐egoistic behaviour, his proto‐Freudian presentation of mental life as driven by processes inaccessible to self‐consciousness, and his analysis of the ascetic ideal, ressentiment, and self‐deception amount to a picture of human agency in which all significant aspects of inner experience are ‘in reality’ desires for the experience of power.

Presents Nietzsche's critical reflections directed at traditional metaphysical categories such as the external world, substance, causation, and self. Targeted theories include the doctrine of substance qua substratum for properties; the Lockean ontology of powers inherent in external objects; the construal of the self as either mental substance or transcendental subjects; atomism; and the belief in the explanatory powers of Newtonian force. It is argued that there is a pervasive general line of scepticism in Nietzsche's later thought concerning the possibility of knowledge as rationally justified true belief. The chapter concludes with a defence of Nietzsche's general scepticism against a variety of countervailing arguments.

In contrast with views that attribute the biological utility of beliefs to their truth, Nietzsche maintains that their relative utility renders them proportionately more likely to be idiosyncratic expressions of species‐relative concerns. Nietzsche's sceptical ‘argument from utility’—the inference from the practical utility of beliefs to the improbability of their being metaphysically true—is examined and rejected. It is argued that Nietzsche is an early proponent of naturalized epistemology. His objections to the ‘best explanation’ defence of metaphysical realism are discussed. It emerges that the ‘evolutionary’ strand of thought is incompatible with his other sceptical arguments. The chapter pursues Nietzsche's doctrine that the ‘ruling drives’ representing the dominant manifestation of the will to power in an individual determine the standards for validation, evidence, and truth. The discussion proceeds to an examination of Nietzsche's remarks that the external world is created in a manner depending on the specific form of the will to power instantiated by the empirical subject.

As well as drawing sceptical conclusions, Nietzsche rejects the concept of absolute or metaphysical truth as unintelligible. Nietzsche's views are elucidated by contrasting his arguments with alternative accounts of ‘objective reality’ belonging to the philosophical canon. It ensues that Nietzsche espouses a variety of anti‐metaphysics premised on the mutual determination of reality and interest. He believes that objective reality cannot be conceived without volitional and intentional agency on the part of subjects who experience themselves as acted upon by the contents of their representations. Having elaborated and explained the prominence of Nietzsche's denial of metaphysical fact, the discussion turns to the origin and significance of the desire for metaphysical truth. In identifying the embracing of metaphysical truth for its own sake with the ascetic ideal, Nietzsche intends to contrast practical engagement with the world with a preference for evaluation divorced from the subject's actual experiences and desires. Belief in objective value and ‘the will to truth’ are subsumed under a general psychological disposition designated ‘the ascetic ideal’, characterized by self‐deception or ressentiment.

Examines Nietzsche's anti‐essentialism in the context of the metaphysics of the will to power, which posits an ontology of interactive and causally efficacious quanta of force characterized exclusively by relational properties. It is argued that this ontological model is marred by a fundamental incoherence. The concluding remarks touch upon the problem of relativism of truth and self‐reference. An attempt is made to situate the metaphysics of the will in the context of Nietzsche's whole philosophy.

This chapter argues that _ressentiment_ should be understood as involving a process of intentional, albeit not reflectively strategic, self-deception about one’s own conscious mental states. The values avowedly adopted by the _ressentiment_ subjects are not genuinely internalized by them but are rather adopted with an instrumental aim, the subjects being ignorant about their actual conscious commitments and aims as a result of an intentional project of avoiding reflective self-knowledge. This idea of intentional self-deception has often been thought to be paradoxical. It is argued that we can explain the possibility of self-deception as an intentional project by utilizing a distinction emphasized by phenomenological philosophers between non-conceptualized yet conscious contents and attitudes on the one hand and their reflective conceptualization on the other. The chapter also offers a critical discussion of the sophisticated but in my view unsuccessful deflationist construal of _ressentiment_ proposed by R. Jay Wallace.

Value in Modernity examines a historical paradigm in ethics that has hitherto not been identified as such: existential modernism. Peter Poellner discusses the central claims of this paradigm through detailed examination of the thought of four of its main exponents: Friedrich Nietzsche, Max Scheler, Jean-Paul Sartre, and Robert Musil. In the case of Nietzsche and Sartre, Poellner offers novel interpretations, reconstructing lines of thought in their work that have usually been neglected. He also offers a new assessment of Scheler's subtle phenomenological version of affective value intuitionism, which is a crucial influence on Sartre's existentialism but has so far enjoyed virtually no reception in an anglophone context. Musil's philosophical novel The Man without Qualities is interpreted as contributing a highly original version of ethical perfectionism to the existential modernist paradigm. While Musil's thought on emotions and moods has begun to receive philosophical recognition in recent years, the significance of the philosophical core of his seminal work has so far not been fully appreciated. In Poellner's interpretation, what we find in the existential modernists is an approach in ethical philosophy that combines a qualified form of affective value intuitionism and a kind of ethical perfectionism. This book reconstructs and defends a version of this approach that integrates elements drawn from each of these thinkers, supplemented by an original elaboration of ideas only implicit in some of them.

In recent years there has been a revival of a theory of conscious emotions as analogous in important ways to perceptual experiences. In the standard versions of this view emotions are construed as, potentially, perceptual disclosures of values. The model has been widely debated and criticized. In this paper I reconstruct an early, qualified version of the perceptual model to be found in the classical phenomenological approaches of Scheler and Sartre. After outlining this version of the theory, I examine its prospects against objections prominent in the current debate.

This paper offers a revisionary interpretation of Sartre's early views on human freedom. Sartre articulates a subtle account of a fundamental sense of human freedom as autonomy, in terms of human consciousness being both reasons-responsive and in a distinctive sense self-determining. The aspects of Sartre's theory of human freedom that underpin his early ethics are shown to be based on his phenomenological analysis of consciousness as, in its fundamental mode of self-presence, not an object in the world. Sartre has a multi-level theory of the reasons-sensitivity of consciousness. At one level, consciousness's being alive to reasons is a matter of the affective perception of values and disvalues as features of phenomenal objects. This part of his theory, a development of Scheler's, is, however, situated within a broader phenomenological analysis resulting in the claim that the ultimate reasons acknowledged by consciousness neither are nor justifiably could be values adequately presentable as intentional objects. Consciousness's ultimate reasons are, in this sense, not given by the world but by itself. Section 4 reconstructs and assesses Sartre's argument that consciousness cannot rationally have an ultimate end other than self-transparent freedom itself