How to read Nietzsche badly: by seeing him as a sociopath

 

If we understand the term "moral relativism" as meaning the belief that there is no such thing as good or evil, then it is, in my opinion, too simplistic a description for Nietzsche.

It's true that Nietzsche wrote a book entitled "Beyond Good and Evil".  But don't be too quick to assume that, just because Nietzsche wrote a book with this title, that implies that Nietzsche believed that good and evil don't exist.  It's perfectly possible to believe fully that there is a real difference between good and evil, and, at the same time, to be able to speak of something that is "beyond" this distinction.  In an analogous way, "north" and "south" are real directions, but there are places where this distinction is no longer so clear or relevant - such as, floating in intergalactic space.  Likewise, "port" and "starboard" are meaningfully and usefully distinct, yet they have little applicability outside of a boat or some similar vessel, "stage left" and "stage right" only make sense in the context of a stage, and so on.

Furthermore, one could potentially cease to believe in "good" and "evil," yet still have an ethics - perhaps even a morality.  Aristotle certainly had an ethics - a highly developed one, and a profoundly influential one.  Perhaps he was the most influential ethical thinker of all time.  Yet I don't think it would be entirely accurately the best way of describing Aristotle's ethics to say that he thought in terms of a binary opposition between "good" and "evil".  Instead, he tended to see every action - and every thought - as aimed towards the good - though some of them are ineffective in this pursuit, as he explains on the very first page of his Ethics.  He goes on to identify this ultimate good, that all action aims toward, with happiness (eudaimonia), which is not the same as pleasure.  And he sees many types of virtue, or excellence (arete) which help one achieve happiness, which are usually conceived of as a narrow range - a "golden mean" between two undesirable extremes: for instance, the virtue of courage is conceived as a happy medium between meekness and cowardice at one end, and recklessness and aggression at the other.  The concepts of virtue and vice do come in here, more or less conceived as good and bad habits.  And sometimes, Aristotle allows, if a person becomes too locked up in their bad habits, so that no amount of education, persuasion, or correction can help them, they are deemed "incorrigible" (anatios) and the only alternatives the state has for such a person are exile or death.  But even here, Aristotle does not use a word that is a clear equivalent for "evil".  He seems to view an incorrigible person as a poor wretch who has become addicted to something harmful to himself and others and cannot escape this addiction.  (I see Nietzsche as a deeply Aristotelian thinker, though he may not have agreed with him about everything.)

In fact, as one scans global civilizations through history, one soon discovers that looking at ethics through the categories of "good" and "evil" is a fairly recent development in the hundreds of thousands of years that humans have been on Earth.  The real innovators here were the Zoroastrians, with their cosmic division between Asha and Druj, and it was essentially from Iran that this dualistic division gradually came to spread over the whole world.  Homer writes about the great war between the Achaeans and the Trojans, and we are clearly meant to "root" for the Achaeans, but he does not present either side - or even their tutelary deities, Athena on the Achaean side, Hera, Aphrodite, and Ares on the Trojan side, as purely good or as purely evil.  The historical period in which humans think about ethics exclusively in terms of good and evil has been brief and it was never universal.  But it was a helpful tool, for a while, and it still can be, if used wisely and responsibly.

Anyway, even if Nietzsche really were completely incapable of understanding the meaning of right of wrong, that doesn't mean you have to be.

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