Abstract
After Nietzsche, we may no longer simply assume that compassionate charity is automatically correct, that is, that it in itself constitutes virtue. This is especially the case if and when, as Nietzsche contends, pity and the helping of others are underscored by feelings of resentment and vengeance. In other words, altruism is insincere when it is performed selectively and excludes those toward whom we do not feel kindly. The call to hear the voice of the other, of the marginal and dispossessed, must also include the aristocratic soul – those people who excel and overcome and surpass themselves. If achievers are rejected out of a childish sense of envy masquerading as righteousness, not only is humanity as a whole impoverished, but also such rejection on the part of herd conformity is immoral.
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Notes
- 1.
Solomon and Higgins (2000: 116).
- 2.
Cameron (2002: 47f).
- 3.
This egoistic pleasure drive is applicable even to such basic and non-sensual needs like procuring water, food, shelter and security since the absence of any of these would by unpleasant and lead finally to death.
- 4.
Solomon and Higgins (2000: 177). Jorge Garcia (Audi 1999: 960) explains virtue ethics “also called virtue-based ethics and agent-based ethics” as “conceptions or theories of morality in which virtues play a central or independent role.” In contrast to deontological ethics as well morality based on subjective preference, the various forms of virtue ethics tend to be more substantial and connected to human nature and culture as they are rather than as wished-for abstractions. Aristotle is most frequently identified with virtue ethics, and Nietzsche, by some, may be as well.
- 5.
See passim York (1995).
- 6.
This list is developed from Solomon and Higgins (2000: 200–15).
- 7.
Ibid. 217.
- 8.
“For Sartre, … Authentic existence is to be found only in a self-conscious awareness of an absolute freedom of choice” (MacIntyre 1998: 269).
- 9.
de Beauvoir (1948: 74–155). http://www.webster.edu/~corbetre/philosophy/existentialism/debeauvoir/ambiguity-3.html (accessed February 20, 2005).
- 10.
Ibid. 156. http://www.webster.edu/~corbetre/philosophy/existentialism/debeauvoir/ambiguity-4.html (accessed February 20, 2005).
- 11.
- 12.
Baudrillard (1983: 157).
- 13.
I would want to add a possibly fifth category, the mnemonic, although, considering that Plato’s reality as the ideal is largely different from what we understand today as reality (Nietzsche’s ‘apparent’ reality), I am not certain that the mnemonic might not be a third fundamental aspect of the real itself – along with eros and death. (Perhaps a fourth component of the real along with love, death and memory might be the inevitability of taxes).
- 14.
I have attempted in develop this understanding of vernacular or behavioral paganism in the third chapter of my Pagan Theology (York 2003).
- 15.
York (2001).
- 16.
Cameron (2002).
- 17.
Grayling (2003: x, xiii, 132, 248).
- 18.
Ibid. 94f.
- 19.
Grayling (2003: 230).
- 20.
Ibid. p. 81.
- 21.
Grayling (2003: 63).
- 22.
Ibid. p. 73. For Grayling (2003: 236), religion is only good or behaves well when it is a minority.
- 23.
Grayling (2003: 187).
- 24.
Ibid. p. 238.
- 25.
Grayling (2003: 96).
- 26.
Ibid. p. 79f.
- 27.
Grayling (2003: 236).
- 28.
Ibid. p. 92.
- 29.
Grayling (2003: 141).
- 30.
Ibid. p. 91.
- 31.
Grayling (2003: 170).
- 32.
Grayling (2003: 226). Sartre’s main work is L’Être et le néant (1943). Also important are his novel La Nausée (1938) and the essay L’Existentialisme est un humanisme (1946). Camus wrote exclusively in the novel/novella and essay form: L’Étranger (1942), La Peste (1947), La Chute (1956), Le Mythe de Sisyphe (1942) and L’Homme révolté (1951).
- 33.
“Only let us remember that more permanent good is done in this world by a beautiful nature giving itself its natural expression, than by precept or denunciation” (Fowler 1971: 405).
- 34.
Grayling (2003: 227).
- 35.
Mackie (1977: 29): Concerning ethics, Mackie’s central thesis is that “there are no objective values,” and this is “specifically the denial that any … categorical imperative element is objectively valid.”
- 36.
Ibid. p. 34. Mackie does concede that if certain theological positions were true, then objective ethical prescriptions could have a foundation. However, he explicitly maintains that, “Since I think that theism cannot be defended, I do not regard this as any threat to my argument” (p. 48).
- 37.
“I have argued that egoism is not immoral, but forms a considerable part of any viable moral system” (Mackie 1977: 190).
- 38.
Ibid. p. 187.
- 39.
Mackie (1977: 167). Mackie, however, specifically excludes from his designation of ‘worthy evils’, upon which to construct a prevailing sense of morality, both ‘adultery’ and ‘apostasy’.
- 40.
Ibid. p. 199. See also pp 23, 29, 40 & 236. Nevertheless, Mackie concedes that the objectification of moral values is both natural and a useful fiction that it might be dangerous to expose (239).
- 41.
Mackie (1977: 232). Mackie refers to Gertrude Elizabeth Anscombe’s argument that moral obligation, duty and the sense of ‘ought’ derive from outside the framework of belief in divine law (45). He also considers the ‘autonomy of ethics’, namely, that it can be investigated and evaluated without reference to religious beliefs (230). Anscombe’s publications include Intention (1957), Ethics, Religion and Politics (1981) and her three-volume Collected Philosophical Papers (1981).
- 42.
Ibid. 111. See further pp 120, 170, 176, 182, 228 & 236f. Warnock’s naturalistic ethics are presented in his Contemporary Moral Philosophy (1967) and The Object of Morality (1971).
- 43.
MacIntyre (1998: 77).
- 44.
Mackie (1977: 140).
- 45.
Ibid. p. 199f. For Mackie’s rejection of rule utilitarianism itself and the myth of the utilitarian calculus, see pp 138f, 146.
- 46.
Mackie (1977: 146).
- 47.
Ibid. p. 193.
- 48.
Mackie (1977: 194f).
- 49.
Ibid. p. 23.
- 50.
York (1995: 342f-n323).
- 51.
For instance, “The Stoic is a citizen of the κόσμος, not of the πόλις” (MacIntyre 1998: 107).
- 52.
Ibid. p. 198. MacIntyre levels similar criticisms against Joseph Butler (1692–1752), Claude-Adrien Helvétius (1751–71) and Denis Diderot (1713–84) and hails the Baron de Montesquieu (1689–1755) and Rousseau – especially the latter – for recognizing the impact of social and political institutions on human ethical behavior. “Men become selfish through the multiplication of private interests in an acquisitive society” (MacIntyre 1998: 187). But instead of attributing such selfishness to the inevitability of original sin, Rousseau seeks to understand human immorality and in so doing opens “the way for sociological hope to replace theological despair” (ibid. p. 189). See further for Butler: Fifteen Sermons (1726) and The Analogy of Religion and Dissertation upon the Nature of Virtue (1736); for Helvetius: De l’esprit (1758) and De l’Homme, de ses facultés intellectuelles et de son education (1172); for Diderot: Lettre sur les aveugles (1749), Le Rêve d’Alembert (1730) and Pensées sur l’interprétation de la nature (1754) as well as his editorship of the prestigious Encyclopédie (1750–65); for Montesquieu: Lettres persanes (1721) and De l’esprit des lois (1748). For Rousseau, see Chap. 6. His major works include Émile (1762), Du contrat social (1762) and Discours sur l’origine de l’inéqualité parmi les homes (1775).
- 53.
MacIntyre (1998: 203). Hegel’s works include Phänomenologie des Geistes (The Phenomenology of Mind, 1807), Encyklopädie der philosophischen Wissenschaften im Grundrisse (1817) and Naturrecht und Staatswissenschaft im Grundrisse (The Philosophy of Right, 1821). Hegel is, of course, and despite the obscurity of his language, one of the giants of philosophy, and his influence extends to Nietzsche, Emerson, Josiah Royce, the American pragmatists, the existentialists, the British idealists, Ernst Troeltsch, Edmund Husserl, Ludwig Feuerbach, Karl Marx, Karl Barth and the Neo-Kantians among others. In fact, as Richard Hoenigswald puts it, “Hegelianism, stripped of its inner confusions and contradictions, and methodologically clarified, is, with all its inherent limitations, one of the classical forms of philosophy” (apud Runes 1956: 257). Its theological implications are twofold and contradictory: a conservative Christian theism, on the one hand, and a self-determining pantheism, on the other – in which “God as the universal substance first achieves complete self-consciousness in mankind” (ibid. p. 242). For Hegel himself, however, according to MacIntyre, he came increasingly to consider his notion of the Absolute Idea or Spirit (Geist) in a manner analogous to the Christian belief in God and ordained providence, confusing symbol and concept, that is, as an invariable logical necessity (MacIntyre 1998: 210). Hegel’s own absolutizing tendency is inherited by Marx and applied to economic forces.
But if Hegel posits a form of absolute idealism – with mind as the ultimate reality, it is arguably one that is not exclusive but rather embracive of materialism. In this manner, as spirit manifests and self-develops and culminates in its own self-consciousness, there is with Hegel an emphasis on a human individualism that is shaped by the changing environment. But it is Marx who transforms and grounds, so to speak, Hegel’s narrative of historical conflict of nations as the striving of absolute, objective spirit/mind into a continual series of economic class conflicts that are to culminate in a totally rational human social order. But as MacIntyre recognizes, “we remain uncertain as to how Marx conceives it possible that a society prey to the errors of moral individualism may come to recognize and transcend them” (ibid. p. 214).
- 54.
MacIntyre (1998: 261).
- 55.
Ibid. p. 266.
- 56.
MacIntyre (1998: 269).
- 57.
Bron Taylor (2010) conceives of earthen spirituality as the common denominator or shared value not only for paganism in general but for a wider coalition that he labels ‘dark green religion’. The sacred for Taylor is the biosphere which provides a “hybridized, evolutionary/ecological worldview [that] is spreading widely and rapidly.” He sees this as essentially secular, “for this worldview does not require beliefs in invisible beings or cosmic processes” (“The Immanent Frame: Secularism, religion, and the public sphere: Civil earth religion versus religious nationalism”: http://blogs.ssrc.org/tif/2010/07/30/civil-earth-religion/ [accessed 29 March 2014]). It is here where I differ from Taylor in what he understands as paganism. While we agree that contemporary paganism is predominantly concerned with bio-cultural evolution as well as maintaining or restoring the natural environmental balance of the planet, paganism is (1) less centered on belief than on what is done (vide Adler 1986: 20, 305 et passim) and (2), while retaining a strong secular element, is nevertheless oriented upon re-enchanting the world following its dis-enchantment through Christianity, market-driven capitalism and scientistically-inspired secularism (e.g., York 2003: 143f). It is the reverence for both the natural and the co-natural that I argue is the dynamic and raison d’être of paganism and, rather than belief in Apollo, etc., it is the related dynamic of doing Apollo, etc. in the active verbal sense that is important. For the Apollo, etc. metaphor, see below, Chap. 16.
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York, M. (2016). Post-Nietzsche. In: Pagan Ethics. Springer, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-319-18923-9_7
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