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Okay, I'm going to start now. The last time I was talking about the way in which nature in general is very different from other philosophers, and in particular the way in which he thinks about philosophy, which is very different
Prof. Raymond Geuss explores Nietzsche's critique of traditional philosophy and the varied social roles of philosophers across history.
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Key Takeaways
- Philosophy is not a single, unified social role but varies by historical and cultural context.
- Philosophers ask different questions depending on their social function and era.
- Nietzsche critiques the traditional view of philosophy as a fixed set of questions and roles.
- The philosopher’s social role can include adviser, cultural doctor, free thinker, or experimentalist.
- Understanding philosophy requires recognizing its plurality and embeddedness in society.
What the video covers
- Philosophy traditionally viewed as a fixed social role with consistent questions and functions.
- Nietzsche challenges this by arguing philosophers occupy diverse social roles with different functions.
- Examples include philosophers as advisers to rulers, cultural physicians, free thinkers, or experimentalists.
- The philosopher's role varies greatly across societies and historical periods, e.g., medieval philosophers versus Greek philosophers.
- There is no universal set of philosophical questions; questions depend on the philosopher's social context.
- Medieval philosophy focuses on reconciling reason and divine revelation, unlike Greek philosophy.
- Philosophers’ roles can conflict, such as the tension between applying established knowledge and experimenting.
- Nietzsche rejects the idea of a singular, stable philosophical tradition or role.
- Philosophy is deeply embedded in social, political, and cultural contexts rather than being an abstract, fixed discipline.
- The lecture situates Nietzsche’s thought within broader historical and social frameworks of philosophy.
Chapters
- 00:00Introduction to Nietzsche's critique of traditional philosophy
- 03:30Different social roles of philosophers across societies
- 06:55No universal philosophical questions or roles
- 10:20Medieval versus Greek philosophical concerns
- 13:54Tensions within philosophical roles and functions
- 17:16Philosophy as embedded in social and cultural contexts
Full Transcript — Download SRT & Markdown
Speaker A
from the way in which many people thought about philosophy. As I said, one standard way of thinking about philosophy, and I think it's reasonable to call it the traditional way of thinking about philosophy, is to think that philosophy was a very definite kind
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of social role. It was a certain kind of position in society, and it had associated with it a particular kind of activity. So there was a fixed role, which was the role of the philosopher, and the role of the philosopher was to ask a
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fixed kind of set of questions. So the philosopher was a bit like, say, the wheelwright or the cook. So you might say being a cook is a social role. Now, it isn't a social role that occurs in all societies,
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because in some societies you don't have special cooks; just everybody cooks. So there might be a history of being a cook or a history of being a wheelwright, right? Because at certain times you didn't have the social function of being
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a cook. It's just I cooked something and you cooked something. There weren't any cooks; just everybody cooked. And similarly, you might have people wandering around and doing various sorts of things, but then they invent the wheel and they invent the idea of cooking, and
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then somehow you have particular social people who are designated as the cooks. So you have the hunters, and you have the cooks, and you have the people who farm, and you have the people who make wheels. And now once you have that, so there's a
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history, which is a history of the genesis of the social role, and it wasn't always there. But once you have the social role, within that social role there's a kind of continuity. So you might be in a
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society in which everybody cooks; there are no special cooks. But once you have the special social position, which is the position of cook, that changes something. And then, of course, there will be changes in cooking technique, but
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those changes will be, as it were, internal changes in the social position and activity of the person who is the cook. And similarly, once you invent the wheel and you have wheelwrights, the technology of wheelwrights will change,
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but there'll be a kind of internal development within that function. Now, a lot of people think about philosophy that way too. It isn't the case that every society has philosophers. Philosophy has a history, but at a certain point philosophy gets started as, you know, traditionally it's when philosophers ask certain kinds of questions. So at some point you have this social niche that gets established, which is the
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philosopher, and the philosopher is defined by asking certain kinds of questions and trying to answer those questions. And of course, in the course of history, the kinds of questions will change slightly and the kinds of answers will change slightly, and arguments will
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become more complicated, but basically it'll be the same kind of thing. Now, nature does not think that at all. He thinks there is no single social role which is the Platonic role of the philosopher. Rather, different people we call philosophers
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are people who inhabited very different social roles, and associated with those different social roles they had different functions and different kinds of standing. So in some societies, the philosopher is, for example, an adviser of a king. The philosopher Seneca, as you know, was the tutor and the political adviser of the Roman Emperor Nero. Some philosophers are people who try to be the physician of the culture. So he says this in his early period; he very often talks about the
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philosopher as the doctor of culture. The philosopher is the person who knows something about what's good and tries to cure the ills of society. Or the philosopher is the free thinker. He's the person who is free from certain
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prejudices, and by virtue of being free from prejudices can do certain things that other people don't do. Or there's the role of the philosopher as the person who asks questions and experiments. So now note these
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different social roles, and of course for a long period the philosopher is associated with the theologian. For the whole of the Middle Ages, the philosopher is a cleric who lives in holy orders and asks certain questions associated with
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that. So now notice these different social functions don't always have associated—they don't always fit together easily. They don't always fit together naturally. There's a vast plurality of them, and they will have different conditions. So if I think of
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the philosopher as someone like a doctor, and I think of a philosopher as someone like an experimentalist, then it isn't obvious that the role of being a doctor, who is a person who applies relatively well-founded and well-tested remedies to
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relatively well-defined kinds of disease, is the same as the person who tries something different out. You know, if you go to the doctor, if you break your arm and you go to the doctor, you don't necessarily want someone
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who is a great experimentalist. You don't want someone who will say, "Well, look, this break is very lovely. What can I do with this?" You don't want someone who will ask different questions, play around with you. You want someone who will apply a
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routine technique. You know, when my father was dying, they eventually made him an experimental subject, but that was because they'd given up on everything else. I mean, in general, when you go to a doctor, you don't go to a doctor
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to be experimented on and to have people try things out. So there, those two functions are connected to each other, perhaps. And of course, you know, this is a big problem in medicine: do you try to use the
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routine sorts of things that you know will cure people, or do you try to find new things out? But still, there's a tension there. So the social role of the—there's no single social role of the philosopher according to nature. The
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philosopher has a number of different functions. And so associated with this, and this is really important, there is no such thing as a philosophia parva. There's no such thing as a standard basic set of
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philosophical questions that every philosopher must answer or ask. There is no such thing. Nature thinks there are different social roles. Associated with those different social roles, there are different pressing questions, and philosophers don't just all ask the
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question of the nature of causality or all ask the question of the nature of the reference of language to the world or all ask about skepticism. They don't all ask the same questions. They ask very different questions. So if you're a
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medieval philosopher, the really pressing question is one really pressing question: how do you put together human reason and divine revelation? That's a thing that everybody in the Middle Ages is really worried about. Now, that's not a question which is a
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question for any Greek philosopher, because the Greek philosophers don't stand in a religious tradition in which there is any kind of revelation. So for the Greek philosophers, the question, "What's the relation between revelation and reason?" or "What's the relation
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between faith and reason?" is just a non-question. But for a medieval philosopher, it's a really important question. Similarly, if you think about Plato, Plato asks basically a question: we've got an established kind of social hierarchy in Athens. We've got aristocrats who
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basically run this place that calls itself a democracy, and then you've got this new technique that comes in, which is the technique of learning how to speak well—rhetoric. The sophists come in and teach people how to speak well. Now,
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that's really disruptive to the society because the traditional society is a traditional democracy. You follow the people who are the well-known people. You follow the aristocrats. You do wha—
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basically run this place that calls itself a democracy and then you've got this new technique that comes in which is the technique of learning how to speak well rhetoric the sophists come in and teach people how to speak well now
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that's really disruptive to the society because the traditional Society is a traditional democracy you follow the people who are the well-known people you follow the aristocrats you do what they say basically you you talk about it but you basically do what they say and now
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suddenly anybody who has money can buy a technique namely rhetorical training and by virtue of buying that rhetorical training can compete for political office so there's a particular question about that what's the nature of rhetoric what's the nature of sophistry what's
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the nature of the knowledge involved there now that n says is a particular question that comes up at a particular time similarly k of course his big question is what's the relation between Newtonian science and Christian morality right Newtonian science seems to
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presuppose that the world is deterministic Christian morality seems to presuppose that human beings have free will how do you put together a view of the world that is a view of the world that says that the world is essentially
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causally determined with a view of the world that says that human beings are essentially free and morally responsible and then of course has a complicated theory about putting those two things together but of course that too is a
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question that no Greek could have asked because of course in the ancient world there's no Newtonian science and as you know the very idea that there are determinant laws of nature is not present in much of early Greek thought
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they have different conceptions they have some conceptions of necessity they don't have this conception of universal determinism so also of course they don't have Christian conceptions of morality as you also know there's no concept of the will in ancient Greece right the
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concept of the will is invented by the stoics so Aristotle and Plato have no concept of will now you won't be able to tell that by reading the translations because the translators into English are mostly 19th and early 20th century so
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they put the concept of will in but if you actually look at the text there's no concept of the will it's invented by the stoics for a particular reason so so that contan project of asking the question what's the relation between a
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deterministic world and a moral a set of moral eval and evaluative judgments that depend on assuming that people have are not determined they have this thing called Free Will that's a question that can't be asked so now so so there's no
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standard role for philosophy and there's no standard set of questions so one of the things n constantly says is don't fall to don't fall for the for the pro don't fall for the illusion of what he calls Egyptian ISM Egyptian ISM means
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thinking that all the questions are firmly set in stone that philosophy is a sort of discussion of pyramids the pyramids have been there forever they've never changed nothing changes so for nature history is really important it's not just an epip phenomenon and history
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means the history of what the philosopher was supposed to do was he supposed to be a cleric was he supposed to be a prophet was he supposed to be a doctor was he supposed to be an adviser that
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changes and associated with that the questions that philosophers ask a change so it isn't just that philosophy has a history in the sense that they're always the same questions and there are different answers that's one sense of philosophy's history but another sense
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of philosophy's history is it isn't just that they're the same questions and different answers there are different questions so there are questions that and questions don't come from nowhere questions come from real social conflict so uh questions aren't given by some
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kind by the nature of thought or by the nature of our human life questions arise from the Greek situation in which the sophists come to Athens and they claim they can give you a certain kind of knowledge that's a particular social
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thing the 19th century you have Christianity and Newtonian science and mor moral conceptions are so there particular conflicts there his and for n the central idea is historicity and contingency these these questions are historical and there's no hegelian or
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natural logic to the development of them they arise out of the contingent conjunction between different historical forces so if the sophists hadn't come to Athens there might not have been any platonic philosophy uh the the platonic philosophy arises out of that particular
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kind of configuration and there was nothing necessary about that so history is this huge contingent thing now so given that what does n himself think he thinks that you can say something about what is a good philosopher or what is a
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better philosopher what is more a more interesting philosopher that's something that he's saying in his voice so from the fact that you can't have a view from nowhere and say these are the important philosophical questions and they're always philosophical questions it
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doesn't follow from that that I can't say what I find an interesting philosophical question and so he says a number of things about that he says if what I'm interested in really is the good philosopher is not a person who
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finds a new argument or a new answer to the existing questions the really good interesting philosopher is someone who finds a new question to ask so the important thing is not the answer the important thing is asking a new question
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and he thinks he has two questions that he's asked one of them is not completely new he thinks but it's never been as it were posited as sharply as he puts it and the other one he thinks is new and
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the first question he thinks is what is the value of morality he says look a lot of moral philosophy a lot of traditional philosophy operates on a certain assumption it assumes that there is this thing called morality that morality has
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a kind of coherence and once you shown and and morality obviously has value you don't have to ask what the value of being good is being good to be good is to be kind of self ing kind of value so
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now he says it isn't quite the case that no philosopher has asked the question about the value of morality Plato asks it and some medieval people ask it primarily the medieval people ask it because they can compare morality with
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certain religious conceptions and they can ask whether what the value of morality is say for for divine grace or other sorts of things but in general he thinks modern philosophers have simply ignored the question about the value of
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morality and to ask ask the question of the value of morality means to see morality as it were as a whole and to step back from morality and ask what the relation of that whole Enterprise is to something else which is valuable and he
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says that's the thing that's most difficult it's difficult for us not just to say why should I be moral is this moral is that moral is the other thing moral but to look at morality as a whole think about it step back back from it
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not assume that it's obviously valuable in every way and ask the question what is the value of this institution what is the value of of being moral and of the institution of social morality and then what do we mean by Valu so that's the
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first kind of question that he thinks he asks in a way that's sharper than the way in which the the questions have been asked for at least for the past couple of centuries the other thing he thinks and this is what he thinks is his own
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real contribution he thinks he's the first one to have asked the question about the value of truth that is some people in the past have asked about the value of morality so Christians have early Christians asked what's the relation between human
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morality and the salvation of one's Soul so they had access to this other set of values relative to which they could evaluate human morality so they could ask that question but they're not but philosophers tend not to be interested
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in that but the question of the value of Truth he he says he thinks at least this is his claim is his own everyone he thinks has more or less assumed that truth has value truth has value and it
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has value in itself once you come to the conclusion that X is true that's the end of the discussion when we're discussing what to do about some particular political problem once you've decided what's true you don't have to ask what
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the value of knowing the truth about that is so again he says to ask the question about the value of Truth is to be able to stand back from the whole phenomenon of looking for the truth and pursuing the truth and getting the truth
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looking looking at that whole thing from a distance and seeing what the point of that whole Enterprise is and uh and and only if you can do that can you ask this question and so in a way what he says is
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uh his own preferred way of describing what he's doing is that he's asking the general question about the value of morality and asking the general question about the value of Truth and he thinks that this is uh that this is uh this is
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what what distinguishes him from other philosophers okay now what concretely then does n think about the origin of philosophical questions for him I said before for him philosophical questions are not written in the structure of language or the structure of the human
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mind or in some platonic Heaven they arise out of particular concrete problems so what particular concrete problems does he find what does he think how does he think they structure philosophical thought he has a particular analysis of uh a a particular
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philosophical problem and he starts from that and he's got a crude analysis and then he's got a more sophisticated analysis and the crude analysis is essentially an analysis which depends on a diagnosis of the current situation now the current situation of course for him
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is the situation at the end of the 19th century so what is the end of the 19th century like and what are its problems what conflicts are there what problems are there and his first answer to that is that the real threat or the real
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danger or the real problem in the late 19th century is the threat of decadence or the threat of nihilism or the threat of loss of Vitality so there's a certain kind of set of social and political and psychic
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problems that he thinks exist one he sometimes calls it decadence he sometimes calls it lack of Vitality he sometimes calls it nihilism he sometimes calls it any number of things but it's basically the same sort of thing so the
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question from which his philosophizing AR is is this question of what are we to do at the end of the 19th century when our society is faced with a loss of Vitality in some way now of course you
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can deny the Assumption you can say look he had his head on backwards there wasn't a loss of Vitality at the end of the 19th century it only looks like a loss of Vitality because he's focused on certain sorts of things look plenty of
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Vitality in the 19th century people set setting off on expeditions to kill lots of non Europeans uh people doing all sorts of things they weren't to be sure writing Beethoven string quartets but from the fact that they weren't writing
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Beethoven string quartets it doesn't follow that they were lacking in Vitality so there are all sorts of ways in which you can worry about this diagnosis but his project only makes sense if you see it as what he takes to
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be a response to this diagnosed situation a situation in which we we've lost vitality and we're we're we're threatened by a loss of the will to continue to live and continue to do anything that has any kind of sense a
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loss of meaning a loss of Vitality nalism he calls it which he says sometimes means that our values are devaluing themselves so nihilism means we're losing the ability to see the world as meaningful all of these things are part of the same package for him so
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the DI nois is we're in a a situation in which uh we're threatened by this uh and in this situation then what are we supposed to do and his project is to say if we understand the traditional morality and
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the traditional philosophical Concepts that we have that will help us understand why we're in the situation where we find ourselves in so we're threatened by by this loss of Vitality uh what are we to do about that the
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first thing we have to do about that is we have to some or not the first thing one of the things you can do about that if you're a philosopher is you can try to understand how we got into this
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situation in which we were threatened by a loss of Vitality how could you even come to lose Vitality how does that happen how can you even begin to lose the ability to see the world and make it look meaningful to yourself that's how
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how is that H how is that possible possible and the answer to that he thinks is part of a historical story and only if you understand the historical story are you then in a position to understand why we're in the situation
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we're in and then potentially to think about what we might do about that so I'm going to talk so now I'm on my page four of the handout which is in which I try to describe what I'm trying to give in a
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sort of Noman way in my own way uh what I take to be the basic argument here as I said uh n was not n as you know was very very keen keenly opposed to abstractions and keenly opposed to the
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idea that philosophy was profound right so for nature it's really important that the that you're not a better philosopher by asking more general questions and you're certainly not a better philosopher by asking very profound questions what is the nature of being
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how does language refer to the world um what is causality that rather he says the philosopher has to dare to be superficial you remember his biography his autobiography e homo talks about what kind of food he likes what kind of
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temperature he likes and he says at the end well you might think these are trivial things I'm writing my autobiography and I don't talk about My Views about the nature of being I talk about the fact that I like pasta and I
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like a Mediterranean CL ET Etc and he says but you but you're wrong about that philosophy should be redirected away from the purportedly profound to the purportedly everyday and then he says again and again you remember the Greeks were
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superficial they were superficial out of a sense of profundity so philosophy isn't supposed to be abstract and profound the most abstract and profound thing you can do is look at the real world in it multifarious things uh so reorient
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yourself from this this relatively abstract way of thinking about uh abstract structures that are thought to be more basic and more profound to the actual details so I'm going to do exactly what he says you shouldn't do but I'm going to do it for pedagogical
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reasons uh just to get you um to to give you some kind of sense of how you can begin with this so now so what I'm going to say is there's a kind of basic argument then behind a lot of what he
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says and and that argument starts from a kind of Criterion that he posit so he says basically uh the the basic principle or Criterion for judging anything is its Vitality uh that's a that's a kind of assumption in the
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argument uh now now a society is good if it's vital a human being is good if it's vital a work of art is good if if it's an Exemplar of Vitality now note this is not a an assumptionist
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form of beginning it isn't absolutely obvious that the basic way you should look at the world is through the category of Vitality and decadence so so the basic way he says you look to look at the world is through life or lack of
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Life Vitality lack of Vitality decadence lack of decadence there's a series of dichotomies there and and that's the basic evaluative mechanism we should use the world now notice that in itself is an assumption that's not something that you can simply uh accept for no reason
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lots of people have thought that that's wrong if you think of rolls rolls says the basic way of evaluating Society is not by looking at its Vitality it's by looking at Justice right so R says look the basic thing you start with is that a
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good Society is a just Society it's not a vital Society other people have said other sorts of things so this is an assumption that n is making it's not uh an it's not something it's lacking assumption it's not it's not a
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kind of natural starting point it's his assumption he lives in a society in which he sees Vitality as being a problem and so he says I'm going to look at the world through the lens of Vitality or a lack of Vitality Vitality
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or decadence that's the way we're going to start now he then gradually Works himself into a situ situation in which he moves from a relatively lowlevel and biological sense of Vitality to a more complicated and sophisticated sense of
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Vitality that is when we first think of the notion of Vitality we think of it as a biological category perfectly perfectly understandable it's it's a vital thing means the person is still alive the thing is alive it's vital or
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it's dead it's alive it's dead it's vital or it's DEC it's going to continue or it's going to die off so it's natural for us to start with this metaphor of Vitality or life or liveliness and to think of that as a as a as a basically a
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biological phenomenon now what you see in nature is a continuous attempt to move away from that biologistic understanding of of Vitality to move away from it but he never actually succeeds in doing that completely so Vitality starts by some by
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by being defined as some kind of ability to reproduce yourself ability to get what you want ability to uh act in a particularly energetic way gradually it gets uh reinterpreted so that it has a less clearly biological basis and
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vitality comes to mean things like artistic production so in the beginning the idea of vit ity is a society is vital if it has a high birth rate and the people do this and it expands Etc then you have the idea that no real
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Vitality is not this biological category it's the category of productivity so the Renaissance is vital not by virtue of having a very high birth rate and a very low death rate but it's vital by virtue of being culturally productive in a
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certain way so the first thing that happens is this basic notion of Vitality decadence gets reinterpreted the the opposition between vitality and decadence comes it becomes itself something that's up for grabs you start with this natural biological metaphor
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but then you begin to interpret the biological metaphor and you begin to ask is it really vital if you live but you can't produce works of art if you if are you vital if you produce a lot of
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children are you vital if you produce lots of works of art so the notion of Vitality and decadence itself they themselves become empty placeholders that need to be interpreted further second the very opposition between vital and decadent comes to become Pro to seem
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problematic as you know n himself was not a terribly healthy and vital person he suffered as you know from a syphilis he eventually uh died of uh syphilitic uh infection most of his life he spent in a in in a dark room uh throwing up uh
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in in in gulin in in in Switzerland uh he did he knew so so he knew that if you use the Criterion of biological Vitality he was a loser right because he wasn't anywhere on that scale but of
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course he thought so there's a move from that notion of Vitality to a different notion of Vitality and then an understanding that different kinds of non Vitality may be inherently connected with different kinds of Vitality so you start with a simple
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dichotomy you see the the two contrasts in the simple dichotomy as up for grabs and then eventually you come to see that the two things which you started by contrasting with each other are actually implicated ated in one another so you
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start so this is a typical nichan thing nich constantly says we tend to dmize the world in situations in which it's inappropriate to dichotomize it so we tend to think there's hot and there's cold and there's hot and there's cold
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and one excludes the other but in fact hot and cold is a is a spectrum uh between these two opposing things and similarly we think good and bad are sort of natural categories that EX include each other but if you begin to think
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concretely you'll see that the good and the bad are implicated in each other so there's a kind of development in all of his books from a naive beginning to a more sophisticated thing the naive beginning is here I am I know what's
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good that's Vitality that means having a lot of children beating people up on the head and doing things and anything else is decadence and then you gradually see one that there are more sophisticated ways of understanding Vitality it isn't
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just biological reproduction it's social reproduction or cultural reproduction so instead of having a lot of children you have a lot of disciples right so you have successive interpretations of the two categories then you also see that not everything that's
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vital can exist without some things that are not vital you come to see that the two kinds of categories that you started by by opposing are actually more intricately connected with each other than you thought and that's a the a
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typical structure of his of of his work furthermore of course and connected with that you come to see that there will be various different levels of analysis and that the level of analysis that you pick will make a big difference into the kind
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of result that you have when I say the Criterion is Vitality do I mean the human soul do I mean the individual do I mean a group or do I mean the species of of humanity altogether what's the level of analysis at which I'm
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operating am I talking about a healthy vital individual or a healthy vital Society now of course Plato tries to say the two of them are the same or are connected with each other but nich is very keen on the fact that you can have
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vital individuals who are not necessarily part of a vital society and you can have vital societies that are not necessarily comprised exclusively of vital individuals so the level of analysis at which you do this is going to be important too so you
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start with this notion of Vitality or health how do you interpret it philosophically you interpret that philosophically then first step is you understand health or Vitality not as a biological category but as some category like the 19th century category of
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self-affirmation this is a very very common 19th century move uh Hegel marks a lot of people think this the really important thing is not whether you're biologically healthy or not the really important thing is whether you can affirm yourself that is whether you can
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value yourself whether you can come to see yourself as good that's a really Central 19th century thought and Marx of course thought you could affirm yourself only if you were actually acting in a certain context and affirmation was a
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was a was a subordinate thing to that but other people thought other things about it so you start with this idea that health or Vitality or whatever you want to call it is really really if you understand unhealthy if I can find my
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own life good roughly speaking I'm Health what the basic form of health is that I can value my own life and my own uh Li living that's a way of being healthy being self affirmative being self uh valuing and now again since this
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is philosophy you can interpret that that's an empty position and you can interpret that in a number of different ways what does it mean to say self- valuing does it mean self-affirming or self-rising or self U self-loving or what what exact L does it mean but it
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it's some there's some form of self-directed valuation that's involved there basically I'm vital if I can affirm myself in my action if I can see what I'm doing if I can see that the life that I'm living is a good life
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that's what it is so a healthy Society is not a society that hits a lot of people on the head or produces a lot of children a healthy Society is a society in which socially the people act in such
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a way that they can see that the life they are living is valuable they can see that life as valuable in it in itself in in the living of it that's what it is that's n's interpretation of this notion
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of Vitality that he starts with and as I said that is not original really because you find that in Hegel you can find that in Marx you can find that in other people so some notion of valuation self
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valuation now what nature adds to that though is this now he says think about what valuation means think about what it means for me to find something to be good some find something to be good what does it mean
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for me to find something to be good something that I can affirm and now comes a substantive move from some of the earlier thinkers in which he says valuation is always inherently differential that is the model that we have is if I
Speaker A
find something good that's sort of a oneplace predicate that or that's one place I find you good that's there there it is I find you good n says but to find anything good it has to be that you find
Speaker A
that thing good in comparison to something else there's always a tacit differentiation involved in valuing anything I can only find tea to be good if I find it to be better than coffee what would it mean to say that I felt I
Speaker A
Fel I thought tea was good what would it mean to say that I valued tea inherently Nisha says it must be the case not just that I sort of slurp some tea just drinking some tea just drinking some tea
Speaker A
and having some kind of mental image about the Tea that's not valuing the tea that's just a physiological process if if you pour some tea down my throat and I have a reaction to it that's not valuing tea valuing tea is going through
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the world and differentially seeking out tea rather than wine or beer or coffee that is I I'm I'm always tacitly saying that this is good as opposed to that or this is good this is better than that now this
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is a substantive addition that he makes that the internal structure of valuation is inherently comparative or differential or discriminating I'm not valuing something if I just have a POS if I just get a positive jolt from it that might be a nice thing to do you
Speaker A
might be might might be pleased to get a positive jolt but that's not what we mean when we say uh that that you're that I'm valuing something to say that I'm valuing something is I prefer you another way to think about it is
Speaker A
valuation is always preference it and PR preference means preferring X to some y now it doesn't mean that it's always a preference of one particular thing to some other particular thing that is it doesn't he's not saying to Value T you
Speaker A
have to say t is better than coffee and you have to be able to specify what the opposition is that would be a pretty silly Theory it isn't that you have to be able to say what it is that you value
Speaker A
less but you're only engaged in valuation if you're committing yourself to a kind of hierarchical relation that's the crucial thing the nature of the hierarchical relation will be complicated what will be lower in the hierarchy will be complicated I to say
Speaker A
that so I may say that I like tea I value tea and you might not know whether I'm actually thinking about tea relative to coffee or tea not or or drinking tea as opposed to not drinking tea or tea V
Speaker A
wine but whatever it is there's a tacd the structure of valuation is a structure of discrimin that's another way of thinking about it structure of valuation is inherently a structure of discrimination a structure of preferring one thing to another a structure of uh
Speaker A
of of preference and now that's a really important thing for him now notice he uh then has a further idea which is that valuation we you can think of so he then talks about so now what what what can
Speaker A
you what can you say about the process of valuation one thing is uh I can value something that I know second I can produce new objects of value and third I can produce new ways of valuing so one thing is we've got the
Speaker A
Spectre of tea and coffee I prefer tea to coffee I can only value tea if I'm valuing it if I'm preferring it to Coffee the second thing is I like for example uh an good essays I prefer good so I like short concise
Speaker A
essays essay perhaps I prefer short concise essays to Long PRX essays and now another way of saying I value it is to say I I don't just respond actively and posit positively when it's presented to me in a discriminating way I don't
Speaker A
just passively value it but I actively value it in that I produce it so n wants to connect passive valuation and active valuation so the passive valuation is roughly speaking the idea that I value something if it's presented to me and I
Speaker A
can see that it's good and I can see that it's good so you all offer me a cup of tea you offer me a cup of unon tea and you offer me some kind of ghastly coffee and I am able to Value the tea
Speaker A
second case is um it isn't that you give me uh tea and uh you offer me coffee it's that I'm asked to write an essay and I have to produce something which instantiates certain kinds of values so you're the supervisor and you say to me
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make sure that this essay has the following properties it treats all the topics it's concise Etc and I can produce something which satisfies those criteria now that he says is an instance of a kind of active valuation I'm not
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just responding to something that's presented to me I'm producing something which has certain properties then the third sort of scenario is a scenario in which I don't actively produce something of value to specification from outside but I produce
Speaker A
new ways of valuing things so as you know at the beginning of the 19th at the end of the 19th century the beginning of the 20th century there's a lot of discussion in art about the fact that new forms of art aren't roughly speaking
Speaker A
uh better attempts to satisfy the existing ideals but they attempts to find new ideals so think of it this way in the ancient world there was the idea that you had certain genres there was a genre which was a genre of Epic and you
Speaker A
had Homer and you had uh you had um Virgil and you had various people who did epics and to write an epic was to give a good instance of the same kind of thing that Homer did so the idea was the
Speaker A
genre had associated with it certain kinds of desiderata and so Milton can try to write an epic and to try to write a good epic is to try to write something which satisfies the same kinds of desiderata that Virgil and Homer did but
Speaker A
to a higher degree so in the ancient conception uh literary composition is like is a bit like a a a race you you have a goal and everybody starts starts out and maybe Homer gets there first and Virgil gets there second and Milton gets
Speaker A
their third but it's the same race the rules are the same the goal is the same some are better some are worse but now notice that changes in Romanticism when people begin to think about it differently they begin to say no no no
Speaker A
no no literature is not about having pre-existing genres with pre-existing desiderata and people aren't you the the the Epic poet is not trying to do just the same thing as as uh Homer did but doing it better the the property of art
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is to change the boundaries change the rules do something which isn't just better in that it's a better way of doing what everyone has been doing before but do something different right so instead of everyone running to the
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goal and one man one person gets there first you uh you change the rules of the game while you're moving so you begin to have uh as you know there's a long discussion of this in uh Harold Bloom the anxiety of influence
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the discussion of ways in which poets after Milton were terribly afraid of being influenced by their predecessors and therefore wanted to do something completely different and of course then at the end of the 19th century you get a
Speaker A
you get an out an outpouring of all of this you don't it isn't as it were as if Picasso is trying to be a renaissance painter right the Renaissance painter has certain rules of perspective certain rules of uh visibility certain rules of
Speaker A
how paintings have to be active it isn't as if Picasso is trying to do that and failing it's that he's he's he's changing the rules he's trying to write do a kind of painting that is not good by those standards but changing the
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standards of what's good that's what I'm trying to say so one idea is you do something which is good by by pre-existing standards another idea is you do something which is good by new standards you change the standards so so
Speaker A
again in the 19th century remember a PR says about Beethoven's late string quartets Beethoven's late string quartets were not attempting to be hiding quartets rather it was the case they were intended to be Works which would which would generate
Speaker A
for the first time an audience who would then be able to appreciate them so you have have a series of movements here there's a minimal notion of valuation which is I'm presented with something and I reactively or passively can value
Speaker A
it the second thing is I'm not reacting to it I'm producing something but I'm producing something that I can see a value relative to relatively pre-existing standards and the third thing is I'm producing something that satisfies these modernist standards
Speaker A
namely I'm producing not just new works good works I'm producing new works that are good by virtue of instantiating new kinds of valuation and now the thing about nature is he wants to connect those three Notions of valuation he basically wants
Speaker A
to think you really are only able to appreciate things if you're capable of producing new things yourself uh think for example about a dorno analysis of uh of art you know you can't so this is the opposite of the
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classicist view it isn't that well Beethoven is there and you can always appreciate Beethoven you can really value it the idea is you can only really value Beethoven if you are yourself capable of producing completely different kind of
Speaker A
music so the only person who's who so the only person who's capable truly of of appreciating Beethoven is not The Pianist who plays the Beethoven but it's schernberg who play who creates a completely different kind of music and
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all and so that's why ad says the latest Productions in art throw their sh are the light which allow us to understand the past so simply going about your business valuing things uh nature things is a deadend project you're never you
Speaker A
can't understand really what it would be like like to so you can't understand what would be like to affirm yourself and value yourself if your model of affirming and valuing is this passive Model T is presented to me and I like
Speaker A
that better you can only if you really want to understand what it is for a person or a society to Value themselves the process of valuation has to be one in which that one of the components of that process is not just a passive
Speaker A
reception of things and not just an active production of things but actually a production of things that represent new kinds of values so the only good Society is a society that can produce new art roughly speaking you can't now
Speaker A
that is an assertion of course that's that's a thesis that's not a that's not a an obvious thing and in fact it's contrary nature thinks to the way in which a lot of philosophers have thought about things a lot of philosophers have
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thought about things in a way that he thinks is deeply conservative namely we can go you know we have democracy that's a value it's presented to us we keep on affirming we keep on affirming we just go on just as every day you bring the
Speaker A
cup of tea I like the cup of tea I like the cup of tea therefore I affirm my life because every day a cup of tea arrives and I like it that's not what he thinks he thinks you can only really
Speaker A
like the cup of tea that comes in if you're capable actually of producing new something else uh think for example of the uh of the disagreement between n and vogner about the louva during the Franco Prussian War as you know there was a
Speaker A
story it turned out it was false that was told that the prussians right the Prussian Army had surrounded Paris there was a story that the prian Army had bombed the lva and all the paintings in the lra had been burnt down and niches
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was talking to Vagner and N was horrified said this great cultural thing that's been lost out it's terrible and Vagner says if the French aren't able by themselves now to paint their own pictures that are at least as good if
Speaker A
not better than those that were lost they don't deserve to have the originals uh because they can only appreciate they could only appreciate the originals if they were themselves capable of actually producing paintings that were better than the paintings
Speaker A
there so in that context note Nicha is on the wrongs nich is not what what I'm trying to say is that that was a very young nich nich eventually goes vogner's position on this namely the position that any minimal way of thinking about
Speaker A
yourself which will see yourself as being good will require you to be the sort of person who can invent new things uh change the standards of what is good so if they couldn't redo these not redo these paintings they couldn't do other
Speaker A
paintings that were just as good then they weren't really seeing the old ones correctly so uh now whatever you think about the example um think about the what Vagner says there as the position that the mature NRA takes himself okay
Speaker A
so so valuation is differential and valuation has this active component now n basically then thinks that this process of valuation cannot therefore depends on a kind of psychic tension in the human soul the human soul can can find the
Speaker A
world good only if it differentiates if it differentiates that means it's in a state of tension then he thinks that that psychological tension can only really be maintained in a society that's hierarchically organized so you can't simply have people who are in the
Speaker A
appropriate psychological state of tension so that they can produce that which is new W with that and with that as a kind of freestanding structure that structure has to be embedded in a hierarchical structure I can so I can only find te in
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better in a new way if I stand in a society of ranks where there are people who are qualitatively who are who are classified as qualitatively distinct he calls this the P of distance so he draws from this the conclusion that we need
Speaker A
slavery so remember n has a completely different view of slavery from Aristotle Aristotle thinks slavery is necessary because who's going to do the work n says slavery is important because we need people to have to hold in contempt
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we what what's really important about slavery is not what the slaves do what's really important about slavery is it's a social recognition of distance between the Masters and the slaves and that's important so that the master Masters can
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despise the slaves because only by despising the slaves can they maintain the kind of internal psychological tension which is a necessary condition for them to engage in the activity of valuing and therefore valuation requires slavery so so the result of this is as
Speaker A
he says all forms of egalitarianism social egalitarianism are essentially decadent because any form of social egalitarianism is a way way of doing away with hierarchical organization of society but if the hierarchical organization of society is necessary for there to be the internal tension which
Speaker A
is the tension which is the necessary condition for creation then if you have a society with no internal hierarchical structures a society of egalitarianism that Society will definitely sooner or later become decadent it will lose the ability to discriminate and
Speaker A
differentiate in the way that's necess necessary for it to be able really to see itself as a value as as a value as a value and that's the central idea the one thing we know about NRA is the thing
Speaker A
he always hated was democracy we know from the very beginning he he he as a young man he um re he withdrew from a student uh fraternity because the student fraternity was insufficiently hierarchically organ organized he says I'm I'm not going to now the student
Speaker A
fraternity were themselves already Elite organizations and he said I'm withdrawing it because it's becoming too Democratic so from the very very beginning he's against this and this is and now I'm not U as I'm as I said I'm
Speaker A
putting this argument in a structured way that n himself wouldn't have preferred but I'm giving giving it to you in this form because I think although he wouldn't have preferred it to be presented in this way it might be
Speaker A
make it easier for you to see what the structure is so that's what the uh that's what the central structure is now next time I'm going to start going through the genealogy of morality so if you want actually to follow what's going
Speaker A
on you might begin to read the genealogy of moraly I'll start with the first essay and go through okay thank you
Topics:Nietzschephilosophysocial rolesphilosophershistory of philosophymedieval philosophyGreek philosophyphilosophical questionsRaymond Geussphilosophia
