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Nietzsche’s Dawn
Sittlichkeit and sittlich, and so on — but it is rare for Nietzsche to distinguish
systematically between them, or to use them in specified ways to mark the many
distinctions he wishes to draw.7 This means that we must pay careful attention to
the various contexts in which Nietzsche treats “morality,” including in Dawn, the
text in which Nietzsche says his “campaign against morality” begins in earnest
(EH “Daybreak”) and also in which he presents his own “audacious morality,”
contending that there is no “absolute morality” (D 139).
In Dawn, Nietzsche asserts that “what is ‘higher’ and ‘lower’ in morality is not, in
turn to be measured by a moral yardstick: for there is no absolute morality” (D 139).
It is important to emphasize from the outset of our discussion that this claim does
not amount to an abandonment of the ethical. Nietzsche acknowledges that his
primary target in the text is a customary ethic or “customary morality” [Sittlichkeit
der Sitte], including the values that exemplify and sustain this particular sort of
morality (D 9).8 Moreover, as he later points out, Dawn “gives notice to trust in
morality” specifically “[o]ut of morality!” (D Preface 4). In the early aphorisms of
the original text, Nietzsche focuses his critical attention on the moral imperatives of
early societies, which reinforced obedience to customs through fear of punishment
by community and/or divine authority. As Simon Robertson has pointed out, while
Nietzsche’s free-spirit writings as a whole attend to the role played by obedience to
customary morality in the development of master and slave morality, his particular
focus in Dawn is on our adherence to moral traditions or customs.9
When Dawn was first published, the book did not include the Preface that we see at
the beginning of the contemporary edition — this Preface was completed by Nietzsche
no later than November 14, 1886, as he remarks in a letter to Franz Overbeck, and was
added to second and subsequent editions of the text. In this chapter, we suggest that
fear plays a particularly important role in Nietzsche’s original analysis of how customary morality sustains its powerful position within communities. Yet in the 1886
Preface to Dawn, as well as in his 1889 treatment of the text in Ecce Homo, Nietzsche
places more emphasis on concerns that he raises about how the perceived immorality
of campaigning against morality undermines the authority of such a campaign, and
on how making an effective challenge is further complicated by the seductive power
of moral language and the primacy of moral feeling over reason (D Preface 3).10 We
assess the strategies that Nietzsche offers to overcome these challenges, and provide
some reasons as to why a positive approach to the ethical remains available in Dawn
in light of Nietzsche’s campaign against customary morality.
The Retrospective Campaign Against Morality
Nietzsche provides an overview of his aims in Dawn in his remarks on this text in
Ecce Homo, which are well worth attending to as a source of Nietzsche’s retrospective thinking about the text, and the place he gives it in his assessment of his work
Nietzsche’s Campaign Against Morality
as a whole. He clearly considers Dawn to be a fundamentally positive work,
describing it as “profound but bright and generous” (EH “Books” GS) and drawing
attention to the “cheerfulness, even exuberance of spirit” that the book reflects (EH
Wise 1). As he also notes, feelings of cheer and exuberance can coexist in him with
“the most profound physiological debility” and “an excessive feeling of pain” — and
these more dolorous feelings, combined with the “sweetening and spiritualization
that are more or less bound to result from extreme anemia” facilitated his writing
of the book (EH Wise 1). As he puts it, he “very cold-bloodedly thought through
things for which, in healthier circumstances,” he was “not enough of a climber”
(EH Wise 1).
When Nietzsche claims to his readers that his “campaign” against morality
begins with Dawn, he emphasizes that we should not smell gunpowder at work
here but rather, provided we have the necessary subtlety in our nostrils, more
pleasant odors (EH Books D1). As well as emphasizing the positive nature of the
book, Nietzsche also draws the reader’s attention to the fact that he wants to open
up the possibility of plural ways of being, including plural ways of being ethical
(EH Books D1). His task in Dawn, he claims, was to prepare a moment of
“supreme coming-to-oneself” for humanity: a “great noontide” (EH Books D2).
Such a moment is necessary for the sake of the well-being of humanity. This underscores the point that Nietzsche’s critical engagement with morality in Dawn is not
one of simple wanton destruction. Yet Nietzsche claims that in the book, morality
[Moral] is not attacked, it just no longer comes into consideration (EH Books D1).
To make sense of this remark, given that so much of the book does consider the
ethical, we should read “morality” as “customary morality” rather than the ethical
as a whole.11 If this is right, then the book retains an ethical — albeit perhaps
immoral — purpose. As Peter Berkowitz has pointed out, challenging morality is a
matter of conscience for Nietzsche, and Nietzsche himself recommended that he
be known as an immoralist of the highest intellectual integrity on this basis in a
letter to Carl Fuchs of July 29, 1888.12 Humanity, Nietzsche suggests, had been on
the wrong path; his particular task in Dawn was therefore to take up “the struggle
against the morality of unselfing,” which he also terms “décadence morality, the
will to the end” (EH Books D2). The “unselfing” component of the morality of
custom discussed earlier is recalled here, insofar as it demands that the individual
must sacrifice through overcoming of the self and its associated needs and interests, so that customary morality is always prioritized (D 9).
These remarks indicate that, even as late as 1889, Dawn remains a text that
Nietzsche not only thought well of, but that he also considers to be a pivotal
moment in the development of his ethics. Even so, Nietzsche’s use of the language
of decadence in these sections of Ecce Homo threatens to direct our attention too
far toward his thinking on the ethical in his later and perhaps better-known texts,
such as On the Genealogy of Morality. There, we find a continuation of the language of self-sublation that we see in the Preface to Dawn: for example, Nietzsche
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Nietzsche’s Dawn
points out that all great things “bring about their own demise through an act of
self-sublation [Selbstaufhebung]: that is the law of life, the law of necessary ‘selfovercoming’ [Selbstüberwindung]” (GM III 27).13 The original five hundred and
seventy-five aphorisms of Dawn were constructed as part of Nietzsche’s thinking
on the free spirit in his middle writings and he described this series of texts as his
“whole free spiritedness [meine ganze Freigeisterei], clearly understanding the
series as forming part of an important unity of concern within his writings as a
whole.”14 Although his remarks in Ecce Homo help to show that for him, Dawn
remains an important text, we need to bear in mind when reading this text that
the reasons why it is important are to be found within its own pages, rather than
in those of later texts.
In 1886, as part of a series of remarks on his earlier writings, Nietzsche wrote a
Preface for the second edition of Dawn. This Preface consists of five long aphorisms. The first aphorism warns us that, in the text, we will find a “subterranean,”
an “apparent Trophonius,” at work (D Preface 1). If we have “eyes for such work
of the depths,” Nietzsche claims, we will see,
how he makes his way forward slowly, deliberately, with calm relentlessness, scarcely betraying the hardship that accompanies every lengthy deprivation of light and air; even in his work in the dark, you could call him
content. (D Preface 1)
Nietzsche suggests that the process of engaging with the depths, like a “mole,”
does impose some considerable hardships upon the “subterranean,” including
darkness, concealment, enigma, and incomprehensibility (D Preface 1) and danger, chance, malice, and bad weather (D Preface 2). However, the ultimate contentment of the “subterranean” is made possible by the consoling knowledge that
he will “become human” again and have “his own daybreak [eignen Morgen], his
own salvation, his own dawn [eigne Morgenröthe]” (D Preface 1).15 As Nietzsche
clarifies, in his mole form, he began to dig away at the “ancient trust” that philosophers have built on without realizing that it constitutes a shaky foundation: “trust
in morality” (D Preface 2).
Nietzsche suggests that morality has consistently proven herself to be the
greatest mistress of seduction, characterizing morality as the philosophers’
“Circe” (D Preface 3). Because of this seduction, Nietzsche proposes, philosophers have built in vain and their constructions either lie in ruins, or are threatening to collapse (D Preface 3). As an example, Nietzsche points to Kant, who
was under the impression that he had developed an objective moral system but
whose thinking was not, Nietzsche contends, as successful in this regard as he
imagines: it is infected not only with the rapturous enthusiasm common to his
century, but also with moral fanaticism courtesy of the influence of Rousseau
Nietzsche’s Campaign Against Morality
and pessimism (D Preface 3). We should not overlook the lack of charity in
Nietzsche’s critical engagement with Kant’s philosophy in this aphorism — for
example, he does not give specific examples from Kant’s writing beyond an
extract from the Critique of Pure Reason, where Kant remarks on the need to
render the ground “level and suitable” for moral constructions, which is hardly
sufficient to ground Nietzsche’s attack.
One reason for engaging in a discussion of Kant as a victim of seduction by
morality might be to shock readers into considering, at least momentarily, what
might be (particularly if they are philosophers) an excessive credence in the correctness of Kant’s thinking. At the least, as Nietzsche suggests, it is to make the
moral realm more approachable and hence more of an accessible target for critique (D Preface 3). Another possible explanation for the lack of charity in
Nietzsche’s remark is that he is drawing on his earlier critique of science’s construction of a “columbarium of concepts” that he characterizes as a “graveyard of
perceptions” in On Truth and Lying in a Nonmoral Sense, because it produces a
“regular and rigid new world” that acts as a prison for the drive to metaphor formation (OTL 2). In the same way that the scientific investigator of On Truth and
Lying seeks shelter beside the tower of science and in so doing, imprisons their
perceptions within conceptual orthodoxy, so too does Kant’s moral investigator
unwittingly fetter his perceptions with moral presumptions that inhibit some facets of investigation. This does not excuse Nietzsche’s uncharitable approach to
Kant’s position, but it sheds some light on why Nietzsche might appeal to Kant in
this way. This appeal illustrates his real target in Dawn: moral presumptions as
key supports of morality, and the deleterious effects of such presumptions on
seeking understanding of ourselves and the world.
More support for this view is evident in the third aphorism of Nietzsche’s
Preface to Dawn, in which he is careful to categorize all philosophers’ judgments
as subject to the seduction of morality. As Nietzsche could potentially have
restricted his remarks to the context of ethical matters, this raises the question as
to why he incorporates all facets of philosophy into this initial critique. A partial
answer to this question is provided when Nietzsche suggests that faith in reason is
fundamentally a moral phenomenon and requires challenge (D Preface 4).
Because of this, he proposes that German pessimism needs to run its full course,
which would entail giving notice to trust in morality “out of morality” (D Preface 4).
It is clear that at least two senses of morality are at work in this phrasing, one of
which is the object of critique, and the other of which is an alternative position
sustaining the critique.16 Even while Nietzsche names giving notice to trust in
morality as the task he takes on in Dawn, he also points to the possibility of
exploring ourselves as “people of conscience” following a last morality that tells us
how to live (D Preface 4). This is so in as far as we still sense an imperative or
“thou shalt” governing our actions, which Nietzsche characterizes as follows:
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Nietzsche’s Dawn
we do not want to go back once more into what we deem outlived and
decayed, into anything at all “unworthy of belief,” call it God, virtue, truth,
justice, or love thy neighbour; in that we allow ourselves no bridges of lies
to old ideals; in that we are inimical to the core to everything that would
like to appease and to interfere with us; inimical as well to every present
type of faith and Christianness; inimical to the half-and-half of all
Romanticism and fatherland-fanaticism; inimical as well to artists’ love of
pleasure and their lack of conscience, which would like to convince us to
worship where we no longer believe — for we are artists — inimical, in
short, to the whole of European feminism (or idealism if that sounds better
to you) (D Preface 4)
Our status as godless ones, “immoralists,” is contingent on a process of ongoing
change in moral matters that he terms the “self-sublation of morality” [Selbstaufhebung
der Moral] (D Preface 4). This is the process in which readers of Dawn are invited to
participate. Nietzsche wants to undermine our confidence in morality, but at the
same time he recognizes that in an important respect such confidence is withdrawn
“out of morality;” and this is because, he says, “here … we too are men of confidence,
in that we do not want to go back again to that which we regard as outlived and
decayed” (D Preface 4). In the Preface to Dawn, Nietzsche appeals to the need for
“more modest words” when it comes to morality and to describing and accounting
for ourselves. The “modest” approach to the phenomenon of morality Nietzsche proposes stands in marked contrast to what he thinks philosophers have accustomed
themselves to doing in the study of it, namely, demanding from themselves something “exalted, presumptuous, and solemn.” He holds that philosophers have been
speaking about morality from a very limited realm of experience and knowledge. In
short, they have not been conscientious enough in their understanding of it.
The process of self-sublation, however, is not a quick one. In the final aphorism
of the Preface, Nietzsche speaks to “friends of the lento” including himself as well
of the text of Dawn as such; he suggests that while this Preface has come “late, but
not too late,” its timing is unproblematic because “a book, a problem” like this
one — the question of morality — “has no hurry” (D Preface 5). He points out
that it is unnecessary to proclaim “what we are, what we want and don’t want”
loudly and with fervor (D Preface 5). Instead, the circle of friends that comprise
himself, the book, and other slow readers and writers “go aside, take time” and
become still and slow (D Preface 5). He admits this is likely to drive to despair the
type of person who is always in a hurry; however, he suggests that nothing will be
achieved if it is not achieved “lento” (D Preface 5). As a philologist, he explicitly
states he wants careful readers who adopt the precepts of reading well as philologists think of so doing: “which means to read slowly, deeply, backward and
forward with care and respect, with reservations, with doors left open, with
Nietzsche’s Campaign Against Morality
delicate fingers and eyes” (D Preface 5). It is with this injunction to careful reading
in mind that we turn to consider Nietzsche’s campaign against morality in the
original five hundred and seventy-five aphorisms of the text.
Nietzsche’s Original Campaign Against Morality
Might Nietzsche plausibly be taken to go about the task of campaigning against
morality effectively, and if so, how? One way to begin to respond to this question
is to attend to Nietzsche’s differentiation between two possible ways of denying
morality (D 103). First, someone might deny morality on the basis that the ethical
motivations that people claim drive their actions do not in fact do so, and are nothing more than words (D 103). Second, someone might deny morality by denying
that ethical judgments are based on truths (D 103). While Nietzsche points out
that the “sensitive mistrust” of the first approach is worthwhile, he acknowledges
the second approach to be his own view on the matter (D 103). He points out that
“errors operate as the foundation for all ethical judgements” and that these are
what “drive human beings to their moral actions” (D 103). He therefore denies
“immorality” on the basis that feeling immoral according to the presumptions of
customary morality is not justified (D 103). His point is not to deny that anyone
could ever be judged to be immoral according to the terms of customary morality,
which would clearly be implausible. Rather, the feeling of immorality — the feeling that one has done something wrong according to the customary traditions and
norms of moral behavior — is itself problematic. What is at issue is why, precisely,
such a feeling could be deemed problematic. As Nietzsche puts it:
I don’t deny that it is best to avoid and to struggle against many actions that
are considered immoral; likewise that it is best to perform and promote
many that are considered moral — but I maintain: the former should be
avoided and the latter promoted for different reasons than heretofore. We
must learn to think differently— in order finally, perhaps very late, to
achieve even more: to feel differently (D 103)
Under the conditions of customary morality, we assume that we have made a
mistake and have acted unethically. Nietzsche’s claim about error being the foundation for ethical judgment opens up the possibility that falsifications or errors are
not intrinsically or absolutely wrong, and may be necessary or useful. Customary
moral successes and failures may not count as such, at least not for the same reasons, from a non-customary moral perspective. It is also important to notice here
that Nietzsche’s expressed aspiration is to promote a change in feeling, not simply
in moral reasoning or judgment: we shall have more to say on feeling later.
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Nietzsche’s thinking on error is perhaps why, when he speaks of retroactive
rationality in the first aphorism of the text, he directs our attention to the emergence of seemingly rational things out of unreason; as he suggests, exact histories
of emergence might strike us as “feeling paradoxical and outrageous” (D 1).
Nietzsche adds contradiction to outrage as the “constant” contribution of the
good historian and suggests that these two components might frame how we currently understand “morality” (D 1). In the second aphorism, Nietzsche raises an
initial question of morality: he points out that while scholars are correct that
humans of every historical epoch “thought they knew what was good and evil,
praise- and blameworthy,” they make a presumption if they suggest that “we know
it better now than in any other epoch” (D 2). In these first two aphorisms, Nietzsche
suggests not only that there are presumptions or presuppositions about morality,
but also that these presuppositions may be false: and if so, then there are grounds
to call morality into question.
Nietzsche embarks on the process of questioning customary morality in the
next aphorism, by claiming that just as humans have, without justification,
assigned genders to things in language, so too have they mistakenly “conferred on
everything that exists a relationship to morality [zur Moral] and have laid upon
the world’s shoulders an ethical [ethische] significance” (D 3).17 With this in mind,
Nietzsche explicitly describes the type of morality that he aims to challenge as
constituting: “nothing other (therefore, above all no more!) than obedience to customs, no matter what ilk they might happen to be” (D 9).18 For Nietzsche, customs
are “the traditional manner of acting and evaluating” (D 9). Where unfree human
beings are constrained by their obedience to customary morality, Nietzsche suggests that free human beings would be “unaccustomed and immoral” by the
standards of the morality that he is calling into question, because such individuals
want to depend on themselves “and not upon a tradition” that “commands” (D 9).
He further suggests that primitive societies treat anything individual as equating
to evil; actions that are performed out of any other motive than tradition or custom, such as the seeking of individual advantage, are not only said to be immoral
but are perceived as such, including by their perpetrators (D 9).
In the same aphorism, Nietzsche contends that one of the key aspects of human
flourishing and development that is inhibited by customary morality is the capacity for independent law-giving (D 9). The most moral person, from the perspective
of customary morality, is the person who sacrifices the most to custom (D 9).
Ultimately, the person who sacrifices the most is the person who overcomes the
self in order that custom will triumph, even including over benefit to individuals
(D 9). Any individual who fails to acquiesce to customary morality’s demand for
sacrifice may be subject to a demand for compensation or even to revenge exacted
by the community (D 9). Nietzsche illustrates the deleterious effect of the sacrificial demand of customary morality, both on the sick and the weak members of
Nietzsche’s Campaign Against Morality
society who “do not have the courage to get healthy” — and on a few others who
may perhaps possess this courage, or come to possess it — when he explains how
societies based on customary morality are filled with “little revenge addicts” and
“their little revenge-acts,” which have an “immense” impact on society (D 323).
As he points out, the situation is toxic: “the whole air is constantly buzzing from
the arrows and darts launched by their malice such that the sun and sky of life are
darkened by it — not just for them but even more so for us, the others, the remaining ones” (D 323). The effects of customary morality are sufficiently sickening that
these “remaining ones” may end up denying the sun and sky of life; hence, for the
sake of health, Nietzsche recommends that they seek solitude (D 323). Nietzsche
further suggests that those with the courage to do so should take responsibility for
their health and become their own physicians: this would, he thinks, help those
able to do so to ponder their own health in better conscience, and to “abjure and
adjure” themselves — in short, to self-legislate — more effectively than would be
accomplished if they simply followed doctor’s orders (D 322). Hence, while a customary moral agent follows rules for health promotion that are laid out by others,
a non-customary moral agent breaks with custom and takes responsibility for promoting their own health. To return to the phrasing of the 1886 Preface, such a
person gives notice to morality out of morality (D Preface 4). This non-customary
moral agent is immoral by the lights of customary morality — but is not necessarily unethical because of this.19 This is the kind of human being that Nietzsche’s
campaign against morality in Dawn seeks to make possible and sustain, for reasons of health, as we have seen.
This raises a new question: why exactly do we remain customary moral agents,
rather than becoming non-customary ones — and how might we change to
become non-customary moral agents? In pursuit of a response, we can first consider Nietzsche’s examining of the possibility that our adherence to and appreciation of customs is based on how old the custom is, rather than on what is perceived
to be useful or harmful about a particular custom — the persistence of customs
over time lends them “sanctity” and “inscrutability” (D 19). We therefore tend to
abide by moral customs, Nietzsche argues, in significant part because the longer
that a custom or tradition has been present within society, the greater the taboo
that exists against contravening it (D 9). A tradition is to a certain extent its own
justification: we obey a traditional source of authority “because it commands,” not
because it “commands what is useful to us” (D 9). Habit is a partial, but not a sufficient, explanation for our customary moral agency; in addition to habit,
Nietzsche also examines how individuality factors into moral behavior.
Individuality, he contends, is a threat to customary morality — the individual
must sacrifice their own preferences, desires, and needs in order for customary
morality to be sustained (D 9). This is because in the past, our “traffic with one
another and with the gods” had been a part of “the domain of morality”; Nietzsche
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Nietzsche’s Dawn
contends that one of the key demands of this domain is that we must “observe
rules and precepts” without thinking of ourselves as individuals (D 9). According
to him, if everything is originally a matter of custom, then the creation of any new
custom requires that an individual elevate themselves above custom (D 9). The
mere prospect of someone becoming a “lawgiver” through creating customs is
“terrifying” and “life-threatening” from the perspective of customary morality,
because of the risk of negative consequences that it entails (D 9).
Someone might well point out here that Nietzsche’s characterization of fear in
response to independent acts of legislating seems too extreme. To mitigate this
worry, it is important to keep in mind that when compared with other feelings of
fear, Nietzsche identifies the kind of fear that promotes obedience to customary
morality as being of a particular kind. He describes what is special about this kind
of fear as follows:
It is that fear of a higher intellect that commands through tradition, fear in
the face of an inexplicable, indeterminate power, of something beyond the
personal — there is superstition in this fear (D 9)
The fear in question is of inexplicable and indeterminate power, and it is not
entirely rational. The aspect of it that is an intuitive response to the possible wrath
of an unknown power is superstitious, as Nietzsche identifies. We might imagine
that it is easy to dismiss the inexplicable unknown, but as Nietzsche points out, a
fearful person is never truly alone; such a person intuits an enemy “always standing behind his chair” (D 249). That a fear is irrational superstition does not make
it less powerful: a phobia about flying, for instance, may be irrational yet may still
prompt someone to utterly constrain their behavior and feelings, for example, by
not flying to see much-missed loved ones living overseas. And Nietzsche adds
further support to this by showing how by virtue of our capacity for empathy —
literally the capacity to reproduce the feelings of others in ourselves — humans
are “the most timorous of all creatures” and their timidity is self-reinforcing
because we see in “everything alien and alive a danger” (D 142).20
However, there is also a rational component to the kind of fear under discussion in D 9, and this lies in the threat of exclusion from the customary moral
community for contravening a moral custom or law, and bringing down
possible retribution upon the community. Regardless of whether or not the
“inexplicable, indeterminate power” amounts to much, it is rational for an
individual to be concerned about exclusion from their community, especially
if that community follows customs that are formed to appease such a power.
Every person experiencing both the irrational superstitious fear and this more
rational fear contributes to the broader pervasiveness of fear within the
broader social environment. It is worth noting that this account of fear as
Nietzsche’s Campaign Against Morality
reinforcing obedience to customary morality is not unique to Dawn: Nietzsche
similarly discusses the production of fear through social reinforcement in
later works such as Beyond Good and Evil, where he builds on this account by
contending that fear is taken as the determinant of the power relations within
a specific community as well as across different communities, and how moral
values become established according to how certain actions will affect the
well-being of the group (BGE 201).21
An important example of the kind of error-laden scrutiny that arises among
people in such a community context, and which recalls Nietzsche’s earlier remarks
on error in Dawn 103 discussed earlier, is given in Dawn 102. In this aphorism,
Nietzsche asks us how we respond to the behavior of someone in our presence,
and notes the errors that are involved in our responses. First, we view behavior
with an eye for what emerges from it for ourselves, and thus see behavior only
from our own point of view; second, we take this effect to be the real intention of
the behavior; and finally, third, we ascribe the holding of these intentions to the
other person as if this constituted their most fundamental character trait — for
example, we decide to label the person injurious. Nietzsche wonders whether the
origin of all morality might reside in such “petty inferences,” and whether it is an
inheritance from animals and their power of judgment: whatever injures me is
something evil or injurious per se and whatever benefits me is something good or
advantageous per se (D 102). The fundamental error is in turning another person’s
accidental relation to us into their essence, ascribing to them some kind of essential core self in the process. Alongside this “genuine folly,” Nietzsche says, is
another arrogant and misleading motive that compounds the existing error: “that
we ourselves must be the principle of good, because good and evil are apportioned
according to us” (D 102).
Customary morality is problematic, Nietzsche proposes, not simply because it
involves error, deceit, and falsification, but because it does so without owning up
to this — thus undermining its own presumptions about its truth and its absolute
rectitude. As he puts it:
To accept a faith merely because it is the custom — that is certainly tantamount to: being dishonest [unredlich], being cowardly, being lazy! — And
so that would make dishonesty [Unredlichkeit], cowardice, and laziness the
preconditions of morality? (D 101)22
Moreover, customary morality operates in ways that are either directly harmful
to individuals and communities, including to their health, or that are uninterested in the usefulness of customs and the needs of individuals or communities.
But at root we do not challenge customary morality, Nietzsche thinks, because
we are afraid.
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Problems with the Campaign Against Morality
The basic problem with the campaign against morality that Nietzsche pursues in
the original aphorisms of Dawn can be developed in greater depth by examining
evidence from its 1886 Preface, which illustrates Nietzsche’s awareness of the
challenge that his campaign against morality faces. One challenge is that campaigning against morality is — by the standards of the kind of morality in question — immoral. The degree of authority that customary morality holds makes it
exceptionally difficult to subject it to critical question:
As with every authority, in the presence of morality one precisely should
not think or, even less, speak one’s mind; here, one--obeys! As long as the
world has existed, no authority has ever willingly permitted itself to become
the object of critique; and even to think of criticizing morality, to consider
morality as a problem, as problematic: what? was that not--is that not--
immoral? (D Preface 3)
Notice that this is both a psychological point and a philosophical one.
Psychologically, it is difficult to challenge a near-supreme authority, especially
one that most of us have spent most of our lives recognizing as such, both individually and in social contexts, and being rewarded for so doing. Philosophically,
the difficulty arises because there is an apparent lack of sufficient epistemic as
well as ethical grounds on which to base a challenge to morality. One concern,
then, is how to engage critically with a form of authority that can immediately
dismiss such a critical project from a sufficient foundation.
Nietzsche provides a way to overcome this challenge by developing a new, psychological, foundation for his campaign against morality.23 He moves the campaign against morality from the overground of rationality to the underground,
identifying the “moral mine” of human drives as the framework for his campaign
(D Preface 1; D 119). The “ebb and flow” and “play and counter-play” of drives
allows us to challenge customary adherence to the notion of a singular authoritative basis for moral judgments and actions, and to disrupt mindless faith in
reason.
The second challenge facing Nietzsche’s campaign is that morality seduces us,
because it knows how to “inspire” [begeistern] each of us (D Preface §3). In notes
on his translation of Dawn, Brittain Smith points out that begeistern may be translated as “to inspire,” “to enthuse,” and “to breathe spirit [Geist] into.”24 The chief
method by which morality seduces us is through the medium of language: moral
language can overpower us without our consent, and even without our noticing.
This is supported by Nietzsche’s remarks on how language reinforces error; he
argues that language and its governing prejudices develop words only for
“superlative” degrees of processes and drives, not for their more subtle variations
Nietzsche’s Campaign Against Morality
(D 115). For example, we have words for extreme states such as “[w]rath, love,
compassion, pain” but not for intermediate, milder states or lower states; we are
wholly unaware of these lower states, yet even so, they still form our characters
and direct our actions (D 115). If we were to develop words by which to name and
enumerate these lower states, doing so may not help us; as Nietzsche points out,
“perpetually petrified words” form substantial impediments to solving problems,
and indeed count as problems, including morality (D 47). As he puts it, “[t]he
words get in our way!” (D 47).
Hence, trying to campaign against customary morality can lead us back into
supporting customary morality. We are likely to fall into using customary moral
terminology and concepts to discuss extreme states of being; where words are
lacking for less extreme states, Nietzsche claims that we “tend no longer to engage
in precise observation because it is painfully awkward for us to think precisely at
that juncture” (D 115). As a further piece of evidence in support of this explanation of the second challenge to his campaign against customary morality, consider
Nietzsche’s example of anarchist discourse, in which he draws to our attention
“how morally [anarchists] evince in order to convince” (D Preface 3). Even though
anarchists logically should not ally themselves to moral authority, they still, as
Nietzsche points out, end up describing themselves as good and just in order to
gain authority for their position — in short, they borrow the authority of moral
language (D Preface 3). Nietzsche had already developed this point on the seduction of moral language in his original version of the text, arguing that even when
we develop insights into the development of morality, such insights “stick to our
tongue and don’t want out: because they sound coarse!” (D 9). The example of
anarchists provides a practical context in which to observe the significance of this
challenge to Nietzsche’s project in Dawn.
We can take this concern in concert with the third challenge to Nietzsche’s
project — overcoming the fear of contravening custom (D 9). Each of us is afraid
that we might perform some non-customary action just as much as we fear the
negative consequences for society of our performing such an action. As we saw,
part of this fear is rational and part is the product of superstition. For Nietzsche,
individual fears give rise not simply to a community fear as the sum of individual
concerns, but to a social mood of fear that forms part of the fabric of customary
action in the social context, and which further compounds the difficulty of
campaigning against customary morality.25 Nietzsche explicitly calls attention to
a climate of fear in terms of mood at the end of Dawn 9, using the metaphor of
weather to characterize this mood. He suggests that because of the fear induced
by customary morality, “any form of originality has acquired an evil conscience;
accordingly, the sky above the best of humanity continues to this very minute to
be cloudier, gloomier than necessary” (D 9). He also introduces the concept of
mood as argument in Dawn 28, contending that mood is used in place of argument by customary morality, making it harder for us to countermand it.
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Nietzsche’s Dawn
As Christopher Janaway has pointed out, rhetoric is used by Nietzsche to
facilitate change in our moral thinking not only through linguistic analysis but
also through the affective power of writing, as this works in and through each
individual.26 Nietzsche suggests that it is possible to use mood strategically in
order to challenge the authority of customary morality (D 28). Doing so would
help us move past the seduction of morality by campaigning against morality
through the medium of feelings instead of solely through language or reasoning.27
Moreover, this would enable alteration or replacement of the social mood of
fear — or at least, disruption of this mood that may be beneficial to Nietzsche’s
campaign. In putting forward this possibility in Dawn 28, Nietzsche compares two
possible ways of explaining the experience of a “joyous resolve to act.” The first
way identifies God as the cause of all actions; the feeling of joyous resolve is God’s
way of letting us know that our intention to act in some particular way has
received God’s approval. The second way focuses on the feeling of joy inherent to
the resolution to act. According to the second way, an agent unsure of how to
proceed may consider several possible actions — but according to Nietzsche, the
agent will ultimately choose to proceed in the way most likely to bring about the
feeling of joyous resolve to act. Producing the desired feeling is most important:
Good mood was laid on the scales as argument and outweighed rationality:
because mood was interpreted superstitiously as the workings of a god who
promises success and allows his reason to speak through mood as the highest rationality (D 28)
Hence Nietzsche shows that, while superstition animates both ways of explaining
the feeling of joyous resolve to act, in the case of the second possible explanation, an
argument beyond the creation of a mood is actually absent. Nietzsche goes on to
suggest that “clever and power-hungry men” make effective use of mood as, or in
place of, argument; by creating the mood, he says, “you can supplant all argument,
vanquish any counter-argument!” (D 28). As Paul Franco has pointed out, even
while Nietzsche does think that knowledge plays a role in action, such knowledge is
directed at changing our “value-feelings” rather than at changing our goals or reasoning.28 With this account of Nietzsche’s strategic appeal to mood, in concert with
the sustained criticism of customary morality, in place, we turn our attention to the
question of what scope there is for a positive approach to the ethical in Dawn.
Toward a Positive Ethics
We have discussed how customary moral agents are conditioned by fear, individually
and socially, and that their behavior and thinking is further conditioned by moral
language whose conceptual and affective force is difficult to resist. In contrast, the
Nietzsche’s Campaign Against Morality
people comprising the “we” to whom Nietzsche sometimes addresses himself in
Dawn are emerging non-customary ethical agents, in two ways. First, their agency is
not fixed or static — they are entities that are part of a process of development and
change. Nietzsche’s thinking on drives, especially as developed in Dawn 119, is an
important source of support for this point and will be discussed in more depth in our
later Chapter 6 on subjectivity in Dawn. Second, the kind of approach to the ethical
that these developing agents adopt is distinctive, because it not only involves throwing
off old values but also experimenting with new ones.29
While the book creates a space for non-customary moral agents to come to
know of themselves, Nietzsche does not provide a complete new ethical system in
Dawn, and indeed he does not seek to do so. Making such an attempt would
undermine the emphasis he places on the importance of perceiving, experiencing,
and experimenting with ways of living and associated values as tools for challenging customary morality. Someone who seeks a set of rules to govern moral conduct might therefore find the positive dimension of Nietzsche’s approach to the
ethical in Dawn to be dissatisfying. More seriously, such a person might also claim
that Nietzsche’s ethical approach in Dawn is irresponsible, on the basis that, if we
call customary morality into question without replacing it, we leave ourselves
with no clear way to determine how and why our actions can be ethical or
unethical.
Nietzsche could, we think, make two replies to these concerns. First, the dissatisfied reader might consider whether they have sufficient grounds on which to
demand a fixed set of rules in place of the kind of ethical opportunity Nietzsche
opens up, namely to critically examine customary morality and to pursue possible
new alternatives to it, exploring non-customary moral agency in the process.
These grounds would have to be supremely compelling in order to render
Nietzsche’s position inferior; short of affirming the existence of knowledge of an
absolute truth about moral systems, such compulsion is not readily available.
Nietzsche’s psychological argument concerning fear of questioning customary
morality is the more likely explanation behind the dissatisfied reader’s demand.
Second, the reader attributing irresponsibility to Nietzsche cannot base their
claim on the assumption that Nietzsche’s account must bear the burden of proof
with regard to a question that is relevant to all proposed approaches to responding
to moral dilemmas, namely how we can know whether or not we act ethically. All
approaches to ethical dilemmas may be flawed, and the phenomenon of moral
luck illustrates that the correct application of a particular moral rule may not
result in a satisfactory moral outcome.30
It is critical to understanding Dawn to attend to the point that the campaign
against morality is conducted in aphoristic form. Graham Parkes has pointed out
that there are both practical and philosophical reasons for Nietzsche’s aphorism
use in the free-spirit writings, including Dawn. Beginning with Nietzsche’s composition of Human, All Too Human, increasingly poor eyesight made it impossible
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for Nietzsche to spend extended periods of time in writing extended prose, while
philosophically, use of aphorism best supports philosophical work that is
“resolutely unsystematic and psychologically experimental.”31 Aphorism supports
Nietzsche’s experimental disruption of the social and emotional systemic functioning of customary morality in this text, and allows for exploration of alternatives to the mood of fear that, as we observed earlier, Nietzsche shows to be
pervasive to customary morality. Notice that in the aphorisms, readers are explicitly encouraged to engage in exploring the affects involved in adopting the role in
question. Nietzsche links this affective approach to understanding values to his
conception of the ethical as a way of living:
To be in possession of a dominion and at the same time inconspicuous and
renouncing! To lie constantly in the sun and the kindness of grace and yet
to know that the paths rising to the sublime are right at hand! That would
be a life! That would be a reason to live, to live a long time (D 449)
The aphorism is a powerful transformation tool: through it, readers can access the
possibility of such a positive ethic and engage with it for themselves. Hence, the
incompleteness of Nietzsche’s positive alternative to customary morality in Dawn
is a sign of his commitment to the view that values in thinkers — moral values or
other types of value — are works in progress. Nietzsche encouraged his friend
Peter Gast to use the text of Dawn as a means to transformation of feeling; as he
writes in a letter of June 23, 1881, “When you receive the copy of Dawn, please do
me the honour: take it with you to the lido one day, read it as a whole and try to
make it into a whole for yourself — in other words, a passionate state. If you don’t
do that, nobody will.”32
We see this same commitment in later free-spirit writings, for instance in talk
of “future philosophers” who will be very free spirits — freed not least from prejudices and rules (BGE 44). But such claims have an important grounding in
Dawn. Values, on Nietzsche’s account in this text, are not static. As an example,
consider Nietzsche’s examination of four cardinal ways of being virtuous —
probity [Redlich], brave, magnanimous, and polite (D 556). Of these, he claims
that probity or worthiness [Redlichkeit] is the youngest, most immature, and
most misunderstood and mistaken, and points out that it is among neither the
Socratic nor the Christian virtues (D 456). Probity or worthiness [Redlichkeit],
Nietzsche suggests, is a virtue in the process of becoming (D 456).33 It gives us a
kind of device — a thumbscrew — that we could use to torture anyone wishing
to impose their beliefs on the world; yet as he cautions, having tested this thumbscrew on ourselves, we should take care when directing it toward others (D 536).
Nietzsche supports his claim for values as constant works in progress by using an
allusion to water. While he claims to love people who are “transparent water”
and who “do not hide from view the turbid bottom of their stream,” he also
Nietzsche’s Campaign Against Morality
cautions against vanity in hiding transparency (D 558).34 In a discussion of dissimulation, Nietzsche points out that the more customary version of the relevant
virtue, honesty [Ehrlichkeit] has “been reared to maturity on the requirement
that one seem honest and upright” (D 248). In contrast, as Melissa Lane points
out, for Nietzsche probity [Redlichkeit] is “something in the making” that we can
“advance or retard” as we wish.35
Nietzsche uses the example of tranquility (both domestic tranquility, and tranquility of the soul) to claim that “[o]ur customary mood depends on the mood in
which we manage to maintain our surroundings” (D 283). He indicates that an
alternative mood, which may motivate us in our campaign against customary
morality, might be that of powerful kindness — which he likens to the kindness
of a father [Machtvolle Milde, wie die eines Vaters] (D 473). The imagined father is
no traditional authoritarian. In a previous aphorism, Nietzsche suggested the
model of a father confessor who works as a humble “doctor of the spirit” to the
benefit of himself and others, embodying virtues such as helpfulness, humility,
and love, yet at the same time, virtues such as self-interest, and self-enjoyment
(D 449). Readers are encouraged to engage in exploring the affects involved in
adopting the role in question:
To be able to be humble so as to be accessible to many and humiliating to
none! To have experienced much injustice and have crawled through the
worm tunnels of every kind of error in order to be able to reach many
hidden souls along their secret paths! Always in a type of love and a type
of self-interest and self-enjoyment! (D 449).
While Nietzsche has to balance possibility against the present, grim, reality of a
customary morality rooted in fear, his description of such a possible life is strikingly positive. The construction of the aphorism and the image that it presents of
an emotionally rich and constructive social climate are compelling.
The written aphorism becomes a feature of the environment and, as such, is
able to facilitate Nietzsche’s campaign to counter the prevailing mood of superstitious fear on individual and social levels.36 We can see why this is important when
we consider the possibility of the failure of Nietzsche’s campaign against morality.
Nietzsche contends that freethinkers, and more specifically freedoers, who can
“break the spell of a custom with a deed,” have an important role to play in history
(D 20). As he points out, such freedoers are often — wrongly — described as evil
and subjected to abuse (D 20). To resist the seduction of moral language in their
self-assessments as well as in society’s assessments of them is not easy, as mentioned earlier. But if the reader, or Nietzsche himself, falters in commitment to the
campaign against morality, the text remains available as a vital external component of the cognitive work involved in campaign participation. Because of the
sheer difficulty of campaigning against morality as a single individual, we might
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consider the aphoristic text of Dawn — to borrow from an account by Mark
Rowlands — as an environmental structure that, having been constructed to
manipulate and transform our mental processes, intervenes in relevant mental
processes when either Nietzsche or ourselves, or indeed groups such as classes of
students, engage in reading it.37
Nietzsche further encourages exploration of a possible new approach to the
ethical through new ways of being. He uses the example of pregnancy to support
this point:
Is there a more consecrated condition than that of pregnancy? To do everything one does in the unspoken belief that it must be for the good of the one
who is coming to be in us! This has to enhance its mysterious value upon
which we think with delight! One thus avoids a great deal without having
to force oneself too hard. One thus suppresses a violent word, one offers a
conciliatory hand: the child must emerge from the mildest and best of conditions. We shudder at the thought of our sharpness and abruptness: what
if it poured a drop of calamity into our dearest unknown’s cup of life!
Everything is veiled, full of presentiment, one has no idea how it will go,
one waits it out and seeks to be ready (D 552)
But while Nietzsche suggests here that we take responsibility for determining the
outcome of the pregnancy, he also points to the importance of our irresponsibility
and lack of complete control:
In which time there reigns in us a pure and purifying feeling of profound
irresponsibility, rather like a spectator has before the closed curtain: it is
growing, it is coming to the light of day: we have in our hands nothing to
determine, either its value or its hour. We are thrown back solely on that
mediate influence of protecting. “It is something greater than we are that is
growing here” is our innermost hope: we are preparing everything for it so
that it will come into the world thriving: not only everything beneficial but
also the affections and laurel wreaths of our soul. — One ought to live in
this state of consecration! One can live in it! (D 552)
On the one hand, Nietzsche claims that we care for the “one who is coming.” On
the other hand, he acknowledges that we cannot be wholly responsible for determining the value or the time of this “one.” Nietzsche works to bring to our attention the limitations of our control over ourselves as well as of our control over
others. We are pregnant with ourselves, and we do not have complete (or even,
necessarily, particularly good) self-knowledge: we are always already in an expectant state. While we might try to explain ourselves in terms of consciousness and
Nietzsche’s Campaign Against Morality
will, Nietzsche suggests, we can legitimately claim to “have no relationship other
than pregnancy,” which logically holds, in the context of these aphorisms, for relationships of self-identity as well as relationships with others and with the broader
natural world (D 552).
We may meaningfully pursue the “mediate influence” of protection in an
expectant state. Hence, Nietzsche advocates a mood of ideal selfishness for ourselves and others (D 552). When we are seized by a beneficial mood that promotes
fruitfulness, we may adopt the relevant social setting in which the mood is produced (D 473). Being ideally selfish, Nietzsche claims, involves quite a different
mood to the mood of the superstitious fear that is generated and reinforced by
customary morality:
the mood in which we live, this proud and tempered mood, is a balsam that
extends far and wide around us even onto restless souls (D 552)
We can, in other words, carefully observe our own and others’ reactions to natural
and social environments in order to identify, exemplify, and inhabit behaviors and
locations that help us to flourish. The mood of ideal selfishness is in part ecological, not purely individual.38 By attending to our flourishing in these ways, we can
gradually shift ourselves out from the fetters that keep us locked within the pervasive mood of superstitious fear.
Nietzsche’s appeal to this ideally selfish mood also opens up more support for
the possible replies to the objections of potential dissatisfied and irresponsibilityattributing readers discussed earlier. Nietzsche acknowledges that the pregnant
“are strange,” that pregnant persons should not find it problematic to be strange,
and that we “should not be annoyed with others if they need to be so!” (D 552).39
On the same basis that he defends and indeed celebrates being “strange,” Nietzsche
highlights the importance of the intellectual conscience (D 149). Nietzsche considers that a rational person of conviction might think a compromising action on
their part with regard to social custom does not matter overmuch in the broader
scheme of things. He gives several examples of compromise: an atheist having
their child baptized in a Christian church; a pacifist completing military service
“like everybody else”; and a “shameless” man marrying the woman with whom
he is in a sexual relationship solely because her pious family expect a marriage to
take place (D 149). In all three cases, it seems easier for everyone concerned simply to go along with custom. The point is that all such compromise achieves is to
lend greater credence to the custom as a rational form of behavior. Deviance — even
slight and seemingly insignificant deviance — contributes to Nietzsche’s campaign against morality by sustaining the mood of ideal selfishness.
This mood also sustains two other important aspects of Nietzsche’s engagement
with the possibility of a positive ethics in Dawn: (i) nourishment and (ii) the feeling
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of power. In his detailed discussion of drives in Dawn 119, Nietzsche attributes
importance to our diet; because “laws of alimentation” are largely unknown to us,
nourishment is essentially a matter of chance. Yet our diet and health are important, not least because they are not yet receiving the attention they require. As
Nietzsche points out, “we lack above all the physicians for whom what up until this
point we have called practical morality will have been transformed into a part of
their science and art of healing” (D 202). As yet, he notes, instructions on the body
and diet do not form part of the regular school curriculum, and such considerations have yet to be applied to our thinking about criminal justice (D 202). He rails
against the customary diet of the “well-to-do class” on the basis of its unsuitability
for promoting health (D 203). And in the same vein, he looks ahead to a future in
which the modern human, whom he characterizes as “homo pamphagus,” will
become incapable of digesting everything that they encounter, and will develop a
“more refined” taste (D 171).
As well as aiming to develop a more refined taste in what we incorporate,
Nietzsche also indicates that our health would be benefited if we learned to seek
out and promote the feeling of power (D 112, 113). Assessing rights and duties on
the basis of power, he identifies duties as rights that others have over us, and our
own rights as the part of our power that others concede to us and wish us to keep
(D 112). Rights arise as degrees of power that are recognized and guaranteed to
the extent that the power relationships on which they are based are stable; when
these power relationships shift, rights disappear and new ones are established,
both interpersonally and with respect to relations between nation states (D 112).
Because of this “transitory nature of human affairs,” Nietzsche points out that
fair-mindedness will take a great deal of practice and is difficult to achieve (D 112).
This is especially the case with the striving for distinction, which Nietzsche identifies as the striving for domination of the other “be it very indirect and only sensed
or even only imagined” (D 113). In a claim that prefigures his thinking on the
ascetic in On the Genealogy of Morals, Nietzsche conceives of the striving for distinction as a ladder from barbarian to ascetic or martyr, in which the individual
moves from torments, blows, and terror, to joy and serenity, to inflicting torments
(D 113). The climbing of the ladder ends in tragedy:
The ascetic’s triumph over himself, his eye trained inward throughout,
beholding the human being cloven asunder into sufferer and spectator and
henceforward only glancing into the exterior world in order, as it were, to
gather from it wood for its own funeral pyre, this the last tragedy of the
striving for distinction whereby there remains only a Single Character who
burns to ash inside (D113)
As Nietzsche points out, happiness — understood as “the liveliest feeling of
power” — is perhaps greatest in the souls of ascetics (D 113).
Nietzsche’s Campaign Against Morality
But, as he also considers, it might be possible to pursue this process once again
from the beginning, hurting others in order to hurt oneself, and thereby to triumph
over oneself and one’s pity, hence enabling us “to luxuriate in utmost power!”
(D 113). He reimagines the tragedy of the ascetic as a moment of necessary
destruction, in a message brought by a phoenix:
Poet and bird. — The bird Phoenix showed the poet a flaming scroll turning
to ashes. “Do not be terrified!” it said, “it is your work! It does not possess
the spirit of the times and still less the spirit of those who are against the
times: consequently it has to be burned. But this is a good sign. There are
many types of dawn” (D 568)
Nietzsche had earlier claimed that in the feeling of power, humans have developed their most refined taste and “subtlety”; as he puts it, “in this regard humans
can now compete with the most delicate balance that measures gold” (D 23).
Pursuing the feeling of power may involve pain, but it is, he thinks, the route most
clear to us to develop the kind of taste that would facilitate our development from
out of the unrefined, all-consuming, state of the modern human (D 171). If we
listen to the message of the phoenix then we can seek the feeling of power without
needing to be afraid.
The image of the flaming scroll should remind us that Nietzsche’s campaign
against morality in Dawn incorporates a campaign against the presumptions of
moral philosophy. Although human beings of every epoch have believed they have
known what is “good and evil, praise- and blameworthy,” Nietzsche points out that
contemporary scholars are under the impression that they know this “better now
than in any other epoch” (D 2). Yet this impression is a presumption — one that
Nietzsche claims is a particular problem for the German approach to morality,
because German scholars, according to him, are “the most German of Germans” in
their tendency to obey, and to idealize obedience (D 207). Teachers of morality
have had poor success in their work, because they have been over-ambitious in
laying down “precepts” for everyone; the “animals” advised by teachers of morality
to turn into “humans” find their lessons “boring” and unamenable (D 193).
If scholars were able to retain their “proud, straightforward, and patient manner”
and their independence of mind, then it might be possible to expect “great things”
of them (D 207). Such scholars would be, Nietzsche suggests, “the embryonic state
of something higher” (D 207). This embryonic scholar will find a more complete
expression in Beyond Good and Evil, where Nietzsche counts the philosophers of
the future as “very free spirits” because “they will not be free spirits merely, but
something more, higher, greater, and fundamentally different” (BGE 44).
Nietzsche’s prompting of human (and indeed scholarly) development and flourishing is the core purpose behind his mounting of a campaign against customary
morality, and his pursuit of the possibility of a fresh approach to the ethical.
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Yet there is one further major barrier to his campaign: the significance of the virtue
of compassion within customary morality. In Dawn, as we show in Chapter 3,
Nietzsche develops a sustained set of criticisms of compassion in order to advance
his campaign against morality. In his critical engagement with compassion, we
suggest that Nietzsche displays a certain indebtedness to Kant and Schopenhauer,
while also differentiating his approach to the ethical from these historical influences upon him.
Notes
1 Earlier versions of some parts of the material in this chapter were developed in
Rebecca Bamford, “Daybreak,” in A Companion to the Works of Friedrich
Nietzsche, ed. Paul Bishop (Rochester, NY: Boydell & Brewer [Camden House]),
139–58; Rebecca Bamford. 2014. “Mood and Aphorism in Nietzsche’s Campaign
Against Morality.” Pli: The Warwick Journal of Philosophy 25: 55–76; and in
Rebecca Bamford, “Dawn,” in The Nietzschean Mind, ed. Paul Katsafanas
(London: Routledge, 2018), 27–43.
2 Clark, “On the Rejection of Morality: Bernard Williams’s Debt to Nietzsche,” in
Nietzsche’s Postmoralism, ed. Richard Schacht (Cambridge: Cambridge
University Press, 2001), 100–22.
3 See Bernard Williams, Ethics and the Limits of Philosophy (London: Fontana,
1985), especially chapters 1 and 10.
4 See e.g. Foucault, “On the Genealogy of Ethics,” in Ethics: the Essential Works 1,
ed. Paul Rabinow (London: Penguin, 1997), 253–81.
5 Richard Schacht, Nietzsche (London: Routledge and Kegan Paul, 1983), 417.
6 Schacht, Nietzsche, 417.
7 Schacht, Nietzsche, 418.
8 See Robertson, “The Scope Problem — Nietzsche, The Moral, Ethical, and
Quasi-Aesthetic,” in Nietzsche, Naturalism, and Normativity, ed. Christopher
Janaway and Simon Robertson (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2012), 81–110.
See also Smith’s note in Dawn: Thoughts on the Presumptions of Morality, trans.
Brittain Smith (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 2011), 291; and Franco,
Nietzsche’s Enlightenment (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2011), 59, 64,
199. We use customary morality throughout for the sake of clarity and
consistency.
9 Robertson, “The Scope Problem,” 83; Smith, Dawn, 291.
10 Paul Franco suggests that Nietzsche draws his concept of customary morality
[Sittlichkeit der Sitte] (D 9) from Walter Bagehot’s notion of the “yoke of custom,”
and also emphasizes the irrationality of morality’s primitive origins according to
Nietzsche in Dawn. See Franco, Nietzsche’s Enlightenment, 59, 63–64. In their
Nietzsche’s Campaign Against Morality
essay on Dawn, Maudemarie Clark and Brian Leiter point out that for Nietzsche,
customary morality includes the philosophical-moral sensibility of later societies
as well as the custom-following superstitions of earlier societies, both of which
are grounded in feelings. See Clark and Leiter, “Introduction,” in Daybreak:
Thoughts on the Prejudices of Morality (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press,
1997), xxxii–iii.
11 Robertson, “The Scope Problem,” 83.
12 See Berkowitz, Nietzsche: The Ethics of an Immoralist (Cambridge, MA: Harvard
University Press, 1995), 280; Smith, Dawn, 291.
13 Katrina Mitcheson draws attention to Nietzsche’s connection in GM between
self-sublation and self-overcoming and the Hegelian inheritance that grounds
this connection in Nietzsche, Truth and Transformation (London: Palgrave
Macmillan, 2013), 3.
14 Christine Daigle finds that Nietzsche makes this claim twice: on the back cover of
the first edition of The Gay Science, and in a letter to Lou Salomé of March 7, 1882,
where he writes of “the work of 6 years (1876–1882), my whole ‘free-spiritedness’!”
See Daigle, “The Ethical Ideal of the Free Spirit in Human, All Too Human,” in
Nietzsche’s Free Spirit Philosophy, ed. Rebecca Bamford (London: Rowman and
Littlefield International, 2015), 33–48, 33.
15 The emphasis on “dawn” in this aphorism from the Preface to Dawn illustrates
why we think the standard translation of the title of the book in common use
should ideally be “Dawn,” which we use consistently throughout this volume,
and not “Daybreak,” as in some of the available scholarship.
16 Robertson, “The Scope Problem,” 82.
17 The gendering of language is clearly evident in modern languages such as
German, French, Spanish, and Russian, and ancient languages such as Greek
and Latin, but is not so obvious in English. As an example, note that in German,
“time” is feminine (die Zeit), “day” is masculine (der Tag), and “writing” is
neuter (das Schreiben).
18 Translation amended from “mores” to “customs.”
19 Robert C. Solomon makes this point of the general trajectory of Nietzsche’s
thinking on morality: Nietzsche does not advocate immorality; instead, he argues
that a morality based on imperatives such as “thou shalt not” is inadequate as it
ultimately leads to life denialism. See Solomon, Living with Nietzsche: What The
Great “Immoralist” Has To Teach Us (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2003), 50.
20 As one of us discusses in greater depth elsewhere, this theory of empathy is
consistent with Nietzsche’s broader drive-based psycho-physiological explanation
for the way in which customary morality consistently reinforces a social mood of
superstitious fear. See Bamford, “Dawn.” See also later chapters in this volume.
21 David E. Cooper, Authenticity and Learning: Nietzsche’s Educational Philosophy
(London: Routledge and Kegan Paul, 1983), 31.
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22 We will discuss the importance of probity or Redlichkeit in more depth later in
this chapter.
23 Carl B. Sachs has shown that it is the drive psychology in Dawn that enables
Nietzsche to explain the “material conditions of subjectivity,” including
historical, social, psychological, and biological conditions. See Carl B. Sachs.
2008. “Nietzsche’s Daybreak: Toward a Naturalized Theory of Autonomy.”
Epoché 13(1): 81–100.
24 Smith, Dawn, 288.
25 Lars Svendsen argues that low-intensity fear — which he defines as fear that
“surrounds us and forms a backdrop of our experiences and interpretations of
the world” — has the nature of a mood, rather than of an emotion. See Lars
Svendsen, A Philosophy of Fear (London: Reaktion Books, 2008), 46 (originally
published 2007 as Frykt, Universitetsforlagt, Oslo). See also Stanley Corngold.
1990. “Nietzsche’s Moods.” Studies in Romanticism 29(1): 67–90; Bamford,
“Mood and Aphorism,” and Bamford, “Dawn.”
26 Christopher Janaway, Beyond Selflessness: Reading Nietzsche’s Genealogy (Oxford:
Oxford University Press, 2007).
27 On morality and feeling, see also Franco, Nietzsche’s Enlightenment, 76–77.
28 Franco, Nietzsche’s Enlightenment, 77.
29 We discuss the account of subjectivity that underpins this dimension of
Nietzsche’s critical engagement with morality, and his critical reflection on
compassion, in later chapters.
30 On forms of moral luck, including resultant and causal luck see, for example,
Thomas Nagel, “Moral Luck,” in Moral Luck, ed. Daniel Statman (Albany: State
University of New York Press, 1993), 57–71.
31 Graham Parkes, Composing the Soul: Reaches of Nietzsche’s Psychology (Chicago,
IL: University of Chicago Press, 1994), 116. See also the letter of March 30, 1881
to Peter Gast in the Appendix to this volume, where Nietzsche writes:
The bad condition of my eyes is pronounced, now. For example, after this winter’s work I have to let pass many days, without reading or writing a word; and
I can hardly grasp how I managed to finish this manuscript. Full of desire to
learn something and knowing perfectly well where the precise thing I wanted to
learn was lodged, I have to let my life drift — as demanded by my miserable
organs, head and eyes! And there is no question of a recovery! Everything
becomes more wretched, and the darkness grows!
32 See the full letter in the Appendix to this volume.
33 Robert C. Solomon and Clancy Martin both agree that honesty is a Nietzschean
virtue, although while Solomon thinks it is an emotion, Martin treats honesty as
a drive or impulse. If emotions, feelings, moods, and related phenomena are
drive-based, however, then neither of these accounts needs to be in conflict.
Nietzsche’s Campaign Against Morality
Robert C. Solomon, Living with Nietzsche: What the Great “Immoralist” Has to
Teach Us (New York: Oxford University Press, 2003); and Clancy W. Martin.
2006. “Nietzsche’s Homeric Lies.” Journal of Nietzsche Studies 31: 1–9.
34 Nietzsche alludes directly to Alexander Pope in making this remark, but it is not
clear to which work of Pope he refers. As one of us has shown in an earlier essay,
it is most likely that Nietzsche is referring here to Pope’s letter to Congreve of 16
January 1714–15, in which Pope writes:
Methinks, when I write to you, I am making a confession, I have got, I cannot
tell how, such a custom of throwing myself out upon paper without reserve.
You were not mistaken in what you judged of my temper of mind when I writ
last. My faults will not be hid from you, and perhaps it is no dispraise to me that
they will not. The cleanness and purity of one’s mind is never better proved
than in discovering its own fault at first view; as when a stream shows the dirt
at its bottom, it shows also the transparency of the water.
See Pope, The Works of Alexander Pope, volume 6; Correspondence, volume 1, ed.
John Wilson Croker (London: John Murray, 1871), 411. See also Bamford,
“Daybreak,” 153.
35 Melissa Lane, “Honesty as the Best Policy?: Nietzsche on Redlichkeit and the
Contrast between Stoic and Epicurean Strategies of the Self,” in Histories of
Postmodernism: The Precursors, The Heyday, The Legacy, ed. Mark Bevir, Jill
Hargis, and Sara Rushing (New York: Routledge, 2007), 25–51. See also Herman
Siemens and Katia Hay, “Ridendo Dicere Severum: On Probity, Laughter and
Self-Critique in Nietzsche’s Figure of the Free Spirit,” in Nietzsche’s Free Spirit
Philosophy, ed. Rebecca Bamford (London: Rowman & Littlefield International,
2015), 111–35.
36 In a previous paper, Rebecca Bamford pointed out that in previous analyses there
are individual and social aspects to be balanced. In his book, Christopher
Janaway focuses on the individual’s mood being changed by rhetoric, while in
her essay, Bamford emphasizes that the environment (social, but also natural)
not only plays a role in producing the individual’s mood but also actively
contributes to the mood of social groups. See Janaway, Beyond Selflessness, 98,
and Bamford, “Dawn,” 30.
37 Mark Rowlands describes his active externalist view as “a thesis of constitution”
involving that “[a]t least some mental processes are literally constituted, in
part, by the manipulation, exploitation, and transformation of appropriate
environmental structures; that is, some mental processes contain these operations
as constituents.” See Mark Rowlands. 2009. “The Extended Mind.” Zygon 44(3):
628–41, 630. Daniel Conway has defended a related claim concerning Nietzsche’s
texts as constituting a training ground for continuous self-improvement and
self-development. See Daniel Conway “Nietzsche’s Perfect Day: Elegy and
69
70
Nietzsche’s Dawn
Rebirth in Ecce Homo” in Nietzsche’s “Ecce Homo,” ed. Duncan Large and
Nicholas Martin (Berlin and New York: de Gruyter, in press).
38 For further discussion of this claim as based on extended cognition, see Bamford,
“Mood and aphorism,” 70; and Bamford, “Dawn.”
39 Carl Sachs differentiates between heteronymous subjectivity as an internalization
of domination, and an autonomous subjectivity that is capable, at least to some
degree, of organizing itself. He claims that, “heteronomy and autonomy are
characterized by attitudes of avoidance or acknowledgement with respect to the
totality of conditions and relations which make them possible” (“Nietzsche’s
Daybreak” 2008, 93). According to the terms of this argument on mood, we may
classify heteronymous subjects as fearful and autonomous subjects as capable of
moderating fear by means of sustaining different mood(s) such as ideal
selfishness.