β Scribed by Hans Seigfried
No coin nor oath required. For personal study only.
Nietzsche's plan for a revaluation of all values is well known. It was conceived as a "naturalization of morality," that is, as an attempt to replace all moral values with naturalistic ones. 1 The compilers of The Will to Power believed that this idea was revolutionary and published some of the items mentioned in the plan under the heading: "fundamental innovations. ''2 However, on the face of it, this belief appears to be completely mistaken, for two reasons: First, moral naturalism is one of the oldest and most common beliefs in our Western tradition. And second, naturalism as such is incompatible with the "aesthetic" philosophy developed by Nietzsche. Against these objections I will argue that something is truly innovative and philosophically promising in Nietzsche's naturalism, but only insofar as it is understood as a radically experimental morality, to be developed with the philosophically transformed experimental method used in the natural sciences.
The influence of other writers on Nietzsche has been recognized for some time. But lately George J. Stack has argued that most of Nietzsche's central ideas were lifted into his own writings from the works of others, mainly from those of Lange and Emerson. 3 These borrowings and similarities have been painstakingly documented, but it seems to me at the expense of radical differences. I would like to discuss what Nietzsche did with the naturalistic basis of morality that he took from others in his discussions of good and evil. By carefully scrutinizing his generous borrowings we can learn what is really new in Nietzsche.
Consider, then, the notion of a naturalistic morality found in the writings of both Emerson and Nietzsche. It has been argued that it is basically the same, and that Nietzsche simply adopted Emerson's idea without adding anything except hyperbole. 4 For Emerson, such a morality assumes the existence of two worlds, that of nature and that of culture. Unlike brutes, we belong to both worlds; our natural traits, drives, and instincts tie us to nature and the ready-made order of things and fixed ends, while our sublimations
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