Abstract

In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:Reviewed by:Nietzsche’s Ethics by Thomas SternMattia RiccardiThomas Stern, Nietzsche’s Ethics Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2020. 69 pp. ISBN: 9781108713320. Paper, $22.00.Thomas Stern sets out his approach in this “Cambridge Element” on Nietzsche’s ethics in a bold and straightforward way: “My own intention is to stay very close to the texts, to read them in light of what we know about Nietzsche’s intellectual background, and to present the philosophical ideas found in them as clearly, neutrally and thoroughly as possible” (3). As a result, Stern guesses, the “Nietzsche on display in these pages may seem, in places, dated, wrong-headed and extremely unappealing.” In my case, the guess is mostly correct. Fortunately, there are reasons to doubt that Stern’s Nietzsche is also the “real one,” contrary to what is claimed. (I don’t mean to suggest Nietzsche is never “dated,” “wrong-headed,” or “extremely unappealing.”)Stern, who focuses on the ethics of the late Nietzsche—roughly, from BGE onward—claims it consists of two basic claims. The first claim is a descriptive one—the “Life Theory”—to the effect that striving for power is an essential feature of life as such: “Living and power seeking cannot be pulled apart” (6). Power seeking, in turn, is manifested in behaviors that could be generically described as aggressive. A suggestive passage: “life itself is essentially a process of appropriating, injuring, overpowering the alien and the weaker, oppressing, being harsh, imposing your own form, incorporating, and at least, the very least, exploiting” (BGE 259; if not otherwise indicated, Nietzsche’s works are quoted from the Cambridge University Press translations). The second claim—the “Normative Command”—is directly derived from the descriptive one: “it is ethical to further the goals of Life and it is unethical to impede them” (11). On this reading, Nietzsche turns out to defend a version of metaethical realism: the very nature of (biological) reality gives us an objective criterion for what is ethical. As Stern puts it, “His ethics track what he takes to be a deep, fundamental fact about living things, the Life Theory, which applies at all times and in all places” (23). [End Page 226]In my view, there are many problems with this reading, both interpretive and conceptual. To start with, although Nietzsche often supplies characterizations of life like the one in BGE 259, it is not clear that they should be understood as (merely) descriptive. BGE 22 makes explicit that a claim to the effect that nature (considered here as the object of physics) is a “tyrannically ruthless and pitiless execution of power claims” cannot count as part of a description of the (physical) world. Of course, Nietzsche is not talking here about life. But that he explicitly classifies a will to power claim as “interpretation,” and not as part of (physical) nature’s “text,” should warn readers from taking such claims to be (merely) descriptive (even if they often look like that)—a point already made by Maudemarie Clark in Nietzsche on Truth and Philosophy ([Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1990], 222–23). A similar worry also applies to the idea, at the heart of the Normative Command, that life has certain goals. For although there are passages where Nietzsche talks of life’s goals, the problem is again whether they are about “goals” that “life” really has. Sometimes Nietzsche writes that nature lacks any goal whatsoever—it is “indifferent without measure, without purpose and regard” (BGE 9). And sometimes he writes that goals (and values) are a human product. (See, for instance, TI “Errors” 8: “We have invented the concept of ‘purpose’: there are no purposes in reality”; on values, see Z I “Thousand and One Goals.”) Thus, the very status of Nietzsche’s claims about the essence of life and its goals is not as straightforward as Stern suggests.Another kind of textual evidence points in the same direction. For although it is true that Nietzsche often describes life as such as power seeking, as in BGE 259, this is not always the case. In the very late writings from which Stern draws a great deal of the textual evidence to back up his...