Brian Leiter
speaker
530 appearances
2 recordings
1 series
first heard Sep 2009
last heard Sep 2010
Brian Leiter’s voice in public audio — every appearance, attributed to the second.
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So a famous example in the Nietzschean corpus is the puzzle that is really central to Nietzsche's book on the genealogy of morality, namely, why is it that the
The ascetic ideal, as he calls it, that is, ideals of sort of self-denial, self-abnegation, selflessness, which he thinks quite plausibly are characteristic of the moral doctrines of all the world's major religions.
His puzzle is why would such an ideal have taken such a powerful hold on the human mind?
How did we become, as he says, the ascetic planet par excellence?
And the
The third essay of the genealogy proposes a very complicated psychological explanation as to why it is ascetic ideals would be very attractive to people given what human beings are are actually like.
And if it makes sense, we can talk about the details of the explanation.
But that's probably one of the most famous cases in the corpus.
Yes, well, this is this is a tricky question.
Let me just add one minor qualification to what you were saying, which is it's a mistake to think of Nietzsche's speculative m uh methodological naturalism as depending only on the hard sciences.
It's true the hard sciences provide sort of a model of the kinds of explanations, a structure of explanation in terms of appeal to deterministic causes.
Right?
Now, put aside quantum physics, which was unknown to both Nietzsche and Hume.
Um so they're a model in that sense.
The only thing I hesitate about is of course you might say, well the hard science is that that they don't include psychology, and of course psychological explanation is the primary terrain on which Nietzsche operates.
But let's go to uh the crux of your question, which is how does Nietzsche propose to disabuse someone who is in the grips of morality in the pejorative sense?
This is a bit tricky on a on a number of levels.
One is, it's my view, and this is part of the reading that I defend, that Nietzsche is not really aiming to get everybody to give up on morality in the Pajardo sense.
As he sometimes says, herd morality for the herd, right?
One of his charming phrases, you know, but don't let it reach out beyond that.
Showing 361–380 of 530 · page 19 of 27
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