Nietzsche on Nature, God and Ethics

For The Wake County Physician

http://www.wakedocs.org/Publications.html
By David Frost

Ethics, and philosophical reflection on ethics, are of paramount importance to any

thoughtful person practicing medicine. We want to do the right thing and make the right
decision. But what is the morally right thing? And what makes it morally right? Traditionally,
these questions have belonged to the discipline of philosophy. So what is the thoughtful
reader of The Wake County Physician to make of the philosophical school of thought that
undermines the whole enterprise of philosophical ethics? After all, there are some strong
arguments for skepticism about morality, for relativism about morality, and even for the
harmful effects of morality. How does one accommodate, for example, the arguments and
exhortations of Friedrich Nietzsche?
Nietzsche (b. 1844 d. 1900) is perhaps most widely known for having written,
God is dead, and for the dubious distinction of having been Hitlers favorite philosopher.
However, the interpretation of Nietzsche put forth by Bertrand Russell, the historian Paul
Johnson, and many others, that sees him as a proto-Nazi was thoroughly debunked by
Walter Kaufman in the 1960s. It need not delay us today. (See What Nietzsche Really Said by
Robert Solomon and Kathleen Higgins, 2001, for a recent treatment.)
It is true that many readers interpret Nietzsche as an amoralist. People think that his
claim that God is dead is of a piece with this genealogical attack on Christianity. However,
he only made a limited critique of Christian morality and his critique was a psychological
one in which he argued there were more life-affirming ways to live. Nietzsche had a picture
of people as instantiating different psychological and physiological types; and he suggested,
famously, that he could explain any particular philosophers philosophy as a product of the
philosophers neurosis or another psychological aspect of the philosopher. Nietzsches
critique and genealogy of Christian morality is most interesting as an illustration of his theory
of human nature. I think he thought so too. He wanted to illustrate among other
psychological insights of his that resentment is an extremely powerful drive. And he
wanted to explain the rise and spread of Christian morals psychologically.

So, what does Nietzsches having said God is dead have to do with? When Nietzsche said
it he was explicit that his intention was not to kill God, but just to make the observation that
modernity had explained God away, or had replaced a theistic picture of the cosmos with a
non-theistic scientific one. God is dead. God remains dead. And we have killed him, (The
Gay Science, section 125).
The way Nietzsche saw it, all the old ways of distinguishing a superior humanity
from an inferior bestiary had been taken away. Darwins non-teleological explanation of the
characteristics of animal species played an important role. As Nietzsches colorfully puts it in
Daybreak (section 49):
Formerly one sought the feeling of the grandeur of man by pointing to his divine
origin: this has now become a forbidden way, for at the portal stands the ape,

together with other gruesome beasts, grinning knowingly as if to say: no further in

this direction!
Was there any direction for humanity to turn for answers, or for what Nietzsche sometimes
called metaphysical comfort? Gods death implies a no as answer to that question. This
can be called nihilism.
It would be misleading to suggest Nietzsche advocated nihilism as an end in itself.
Indeed, he saw the death of God as a danger to individuals and to society. In a relatively
early work he wrote that if
the lack of any cardinal distinction between man and animal a doctrine which I
consider true but deadly is thrust upon the people for another generation... no one
should be surprised if the people perishes of petty egoism, ossification and greed,
falls apart and ceases to be a people; in its place systems of individualist egoism,
brotherhoods for rapacious exploitation of non-brothers (Untimely Meditations, Essay
II, section 9).
More than contemporary moral skeptics, Nietzsche has an idea about what to do
next, what to do in the face of nihilism. Far from being the source of Gods death, Nietzsche
merely makes the diagnosis. Nietzsches books, then, would be his prescription for what to
do and how to think in light of this fact of modern life.

Naturalism for Nietzsche is both the cause of nihilism and the only path to take as we
struggle on after the death of God. It is from a naturalistic perspective that we will best
understand some of Nietzsches otherwise strange exhortations about how to go on living in
the face of nihilism his advocacy for a certain diet and climate, for instance. What is
dispositive for humanity, is not theology and philosophy, but physiology and psychology.
For example, Nietzsche says he is interested in one question
on which the salvation of humanity depends far more than on any theologians
curio: the question of nutrition (Ecce Homo, Why I am So Clever).
This set of interests puts Nietzsche squarely within a naturalist tradition which includes
Hume and Darwin.
Indeed, the most interesting recent literature on Nietzsche interprets him as a
naturalist with plausible if provocative insights about human nature and human psychology.
(See Brian Leiters Nietzsche on Morality, 2002 and Peter Kails Nietzsche and Hume:
Naturalism and Explanation, in Journal of Nietzsche Studies volume 37, 2009.) Nietzsches
insights are very much consonant with, and even anticipatory of, research in the last 10 or 20
years in social psychology, psychology and behavioral neuroscience.
Nietzsches doctrine of drives or wills to power is a naturalistic doctrine in
which unconscious drives are the basic explanatory unit for almost all aspects of human
behavior and psychology. (If this looks proto-Freudian, its because it is. Freud said he had
to stop reading Nietzsche for fear of finding his own idea presaged there.)

In contemporary terms, Nietzsche is more or less in line with the automaticity literature
and with Kahneman and Tverskys theories of our cognitive biases. Plus, theres the
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contemporary dual-process theories of judgment and action, a Nietzschean school of

thought if ever there was one, according to which humanitys conscious intellect is like a
small monkey on the back of an elephant. The elephant would be our evolved, affective,
intuitive, quick and strong System 1, and the monkey would be our conscious, effortful,
slow, relatively weak System 2. What System 1 wants it gets, even if it has to co-opt
System 2 to find reasons for the things System 1 has already decided we will do. (See
Steven Slomans, The empirical case for two systems of reasoning, in Psychological Bulletin,
1996; Keith Stanovich and Richard Wests, Individual Differences in Reasoning:
Implications for the Rationality Debate? in Behavioral and Brain Sciences 2000; and Kahneman
2003 for the monkey-elephant dual-process theories.) Perhaps with considerable effort,
the weak System 2 can resist the desires or drives or wills of System 1. But more often, our
reasoning is co-opted and directed to find a justification, post-hoc, for what we already want
to do or already have done. This post-hoc rationalization phenomenon is recognized by
Nietzsche as one system of wills or drives co-opting another.
If we wish for the monkey to be more successful, Nietzsche says, then the monkey
needs to trick the elephant into putting its momentum in a different direction. If we wish
to do better, to live better, to flourish, then we might succeed if we keep in mind that most
of our thinking and actions are caused by the elephant, which itself is not responsive to
reasons, but only to other System 1 interventions, for example, on the affect. Nietzsche has a
passage in Daybreak (that Leiter highlights) listing six ways to combat a drive thats getting
the best of your concentrated (System 2) will power. One way he suggests is to over-satiate
the drive and produce disgust at the thought or perception of what the drive wants. So for
example, if you wish to quit smoking but you are addicted, then a good strategy is to smoke
a whole carton of cigarettes in one sitting so that your elephant will forever in the future
be disgusted by smoking and this emotional repugnance will overpower the addiction in a
way that conscious effort and will power could not. Antabuse, the first medicine approved
by the FDA for treatment of alcohol abuse, worked by causing disgust whenever alcohol was
consumed, essentially starting the hangover immediately.
But, as Nietzsche points out, even the conscious decisions we make to resist our
elephant are most often driven themselves by unconscious wills or drives. Nietzsche
says:
that one desires to combat the vehemence of a drive at all, however, does not stand
within our own power; nor does the choice of any particular method; nor does the
success or failure of this method. What is clearly the case is that in this entire
procedure our intellect is only the blind instrument of another drive which is a rival of
the drive whose vehemence is tormenting us. While we believe we are
complaining about the vehemence of a drive, at bottom it is one drive which is
complaining about another (Daybreak, 109)
The elephant goes where it wants and the monkey says, I meant to do that. In this
Nietzsche presages Jonathan Haidts application of the dual-process theories in his The
Emotional Dog and its Rational Tail and Daniel Wegners The Illusion of Conscious Will.

Nietzsches descriptive theory of humanity is thoroughly naturalistic; and so is his prescription

for humanity. Nietzsche, indeed, has a positive (not merely critical) project for us a project
for how to live and flourish. Nietzsches autobiography, Ecce Homo, is, on my reckoning, a
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discussion of how to learn to recognize the psychological type that you are (basically to learn
to recognize the psychological properties of your System 1) and to manipulate their energies
towards doing what your System 2 (the monkey and the conscious part of us with which we
identify) wants to do.
In Ecce Homo he talks (heretofore incomprehensibly) about the diet and weather that
is best for him.
I, an opponent of vegetarianism from experience, just like Richard Wagner, who
converted me, cannot advise all more spiritual natures earnestly enough to abstain
entirely from alcohol. Water is sufficient.
A few more hints from my morality. A hearty meal is easier to digest than one that is
too small. That the stomach as a whole becomes active is the first presupposition of
a good digestion. One has to know the size of ones stomach. Everyone has his
own measure, often between the narrowest and most delicate limits (Why I am So
Clever).
His ethics is one of self-realization and a flourishing unique to each individual. Its bottom
up, not top down.
In a world without values (a situation he diagnoses, not brings into being) Nietzsche
suggests we make our own values, make those values that will lead to our own individual
unique flourishing based on our unique unconscious personalities and psychological
characteristics. The otherwise obscure subtitle to Ecce Homo is How one becomes what one
is.