Tuesday philosophy

*   You know it's my blog keeping contract that I have to diss on Nietzsche at least once every 6 months?   Well, here's a good one, from Philosophy Now;  a review of a book very aligned with my scepticism of modern sympathetic revisionism of him: Dangerous Minds: Nietzsche, Heidegger, & the Return of the Far Right.

Here's the first part:

Searching for ‘Nietzsche’ on YouTube will summon up a slick, insightful clip that has been viewed more than three million times. That’s impressive for a nineteenth century philosopher: Mill is lucky to reach six figures. As well as demonstrating his popularity, the clip tells you how Friedrich Nietzsche (1844-1900) is perceived, closing with praise for “our endearing, fascinating, often lovable” guide.

This is precisely the sort of fawning, soft-pedalling whitewash that Ronald Beiner wants to torpedo. The central message of Dangerous Minds is that there is no reading of Nietzsche that can make him morally acceptable to the political centre or left. Any interpretation that portrays him so is wishful, immature, and dangerous.

I agree with Beiner, and I also think that this is the most urgent discussion we could have about Nietzsche. We live at a time when the far right, sometimes inspired by Nietzsche, is resurgent; where he is revered by influential commentators such as Jordan Peterson; and where populist authoritarian leaders such as Putin, Erdogan, Orban and Duterte have in a Nietzschean manner downplayed the importance of rules and truth in favour of heroic visions of strength and destiny. As for Trump, his post-truth, ‘alternative fact’ reality is such a spooky echo of Nietzsche’s idea that ‘there are no facts, only interpretations’ that it prompted headlines asking whether the German could be blamed for Trump’s rise or whether he merely predicted it. [A question asked by this magazine too, in Issue 122, Ed.]

Beiner cannot get over how Nietzsche, so explicit in his attacks on liberalism and egalitarianism, has become such an influential philosopher to the left. It is not as if Nietzsche tried to conceal his dismissive views about liberal morality or about the general populace. He shouts them from the rooftops. To set up the argument against leftish interpretations of Nietzsche, Beiner simply has to repeat some of Nietzsche’s most repugnant expressions: here is Nietzsche advocating slavery; there an incitement to genocide; and everywhere the contemptuous repudiation of equal human dignity.

Some Nietzsche scholars excuse these extreme outbursts by reading them as metaphorical, rhetorical, or comical, rather than literal, action-guiding imperatives. Although Nietzsche does often leave himself open to interpretation, I can’t see a shred of evidence that Nietzsche was anything but deadly serious about these issues.

There are two key parts of Nietzsche’s philosophy that are unambiguous: he finds egalitarianism disgustingly decadent, and he wants humanity to grow out of the idea of universal morality. Each individual must decide their own moral code. The concepts of good and evil are to be scrapped.

Go read the rest of the review - seems a pretty good and succinct summary of the problems with Nietzche's ideas.

*  And here's a take on John Rawls, whose A Theory of Justice I had to read in university (and I thought it was pretty good.)    It's a review of a book on Rawls, looking at his work from the perspective of the old Catholic fight between Augustinian grace and the Pelagian views that lost out. 

First, a bit of history of Rawls, about whom I knew little, and the key part of one author's argument:

Nelson opens his book by placing Rawls’s recently discovered Princeton University senior thesis, written in 1942, in the long Augustinian tradition of Christianity that denied that sinful humans could save themselves. For Augustine and his followers, Pelagianism—named after a late-antique theologian who was condemned as a heretic by the Catholic Church—overstated the extent to which human beings can earn their salvation. Such a belief verged on an ideology of self-redemption of individual sinners or of humanity itself that (as Rawls put it at age twenty) “rendered the Cross of Christ to no effect.” For Rawls, at the time a committed Christian who planned a career in the Episcopal priesthood before World War II service in the Pacific caused him to lose his faith, it followed that “no man can claim good deeds as his own.” To contend otherwise inflated human capacity and courted sacrilegious idolatry of humanity itself.

Nelson contends that this Augustinian response to Pelagianism lurked in Rawls’s defense of fair distributional justice long after he had moved on to secular philosophy. In A Theory of Justice, Rawls remarked that “no one deserves” their social ascendancy and the natural gifts—intelligence or industriousness—with which they achieved it. The fact that one person was endowed with them and another not was “morally arbitrary.” A theory of justice aiming at fairness rather than fortune would reject any sense that people deserved their class position. Some redistribution from the rich to the rest was therefore just.

Then soon follows an argument that I am not sure is convincing:

“Liberalism,” writes Nelson, “began as a theodicy.” By this he means that for the major liberal thinkers in the early-modern period, the attempt to justify the ways of God to men almost always included the belief that God is unfailingly good. It is their own autonomy that leads humans, if they choose not to conform to God’s plan, to introduce evil into the world on their own. What made for the correlation of Pelagianism with liberalism is that the theological defense of human freedom—including freedom to err—implied that individuals should be allowed politically to seek perfection on their own, without the interference of states or sects. Liberalism was born out of the insistence that, since agents were free enough to save themselves, they had to be left alone enough to have a chance to do it.

Observing that early liberals embraced the very theology that Rawls rejected, Nelson thinks Rawls’s followers are left with a big problem. Liberalism originated in the Pelagian heresy that refuses to saddle human beings with original sin, or to make them utterly dependent on the divine, but instead grants them autonomy, dignity, and (at least potential) self-made perfection. How, then, can Rawls and his followers reject Pelagianism without also rejecting liberalism?

Nelson’s answer: they can’t. Either you adopt the Augustinian line that, while no one earns their gifts and talents, any seemingly unfair distribution is part of God’s mysterious design, whose meaning is to be revealed only at the end of time; or you adopt the Pelagian view that you do earn them—that greater wealth really might reflect greater merit. You can’t have it both ways, as Rawls and his followers want.

I am feeling pretty sure there is some muddled thinking here, and I think it is in seeing too much influence of Augustinian thought on Rawl's post faith philosophising.  Surely Pelagianism leaves open that humans can engage in Rawls's thought experiment to come with a fairer way to view justice;  Augustinian thought, with its sense of human salvation being (to a degree, at least) outside of human control can leave too great a sense of helplessness to change social justice. 

In any case, kinda interesting.