Abstract
In this paper, I shall apply the idea of ‘moral relativism’ in the philosophy of Friedrich Nietzsche. The concept of ‘moral relativism’ has been closely related to postmodernism, and in particular proponents of Aristotlian reject Nietzsche’s kind of relativism, yet the issues remained part of Nietzsche’s philosophy and prominently situated in his philosophical works. Nietzsche talks about morality as antinature, he thinks that how morality is repressive ‘relative’ to what we might concern as the unbridled manifestation of wants and needs and appetites. In his famous publications of Beyond Good and Evil (1886) and On the Genealogy of Morals (1887), Nietzsche argues intensively and effectively about morality, his thought undoubtedly has a pronounced relativistic tendencies. Moral values are not universal and absolute, but are therefore conditional constructions of particular group at particular times with particular goals. Nietzsche speaks in the “interpretation” or “perspective” regarding morality or values in particular. According to Nietzsche, no one kind of morality is correct and neither is incorrect nor unacceptable for everyone; it should be noted that Nietzsche considers that each is correct for one type of person and incorrect for others. This makes it possible for Nietzsche to take a more important level on moral relativism.
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Notes
According to the Oxford English Dictionary, the first use of the word ‘relativism’ can be attributed to J. Grote’s Exploratio Philosophica (1865): “The notion of the mask over the face of nature is…what I have called ‘relativism’. If ‘the face of nature’ is reality, then the mask over it, which is what theory gives us, is so much deception, and that is what relativism really comes to.” (See Grote 1865:I.xi:229).
For example, John W. Cook has the following features of meta-ethical relativism: “Because no action can rightly be thought of as (or said to be) wrong in and of itself, that is, absolutely wrong, a moral principle cannot be properly formulated in an entirely general way…rather, a moral principle is properly formulated only when a ‘relativizing clause’ is attached to it, so that you would have something like ‘For Americans headhunting is wrong’ or ‘Americans are morally obligated to do such and such’.” (Cook 1999, p. 14).
Schopenhauer first rejects Kant for accepting modes of idea as his philosophical point of departure, rather than beginning in the world of perception. In the perceptual world of perception, Kant modifies the foundation of his philosophy by missing the dilemma of “all that is empirically apprehended”, with the phrase “it is given.” Kant doesn’t really enquire how this occurs, if either with or without understanding, but with a leap crosses over to abstract reasoning, not so much to having thought in overall, while at the same time to such modes of thought.” (1966a, p. 476) Kant still attaches to Cartesian rationalism as its undisputed destination, while for Schopenhauer here shows the deepening of the of 19th century historical context by flipping his focus to the enquiry of origins. According to Nietzsche, Schopenhauer, in turn, lacks the sense of origins, evolution and development that describes the historical sense in his Human, All Too Human. The distinction here is reflected in Nietzsche’s emphasis about what he considers to be the Schopenhauer's disproportionate disdain of then-current denigration of evolution. For Nietzsche, everything continues to evolve, and from this point of view it seems that Schopenhauer, who had emerged historical with Kant, consists mainly of categories, is completely unconscious of the historical evolution.
In an essay entitled Schopenhauerian Moral Awareness as a Source of Nietzschean Nonmorality, Robert Wicks identifies Nietzsche’s move “beyond good and evil” as an elaboration upon the Schopenhauerian ethics of eternal justice under the veil of the 19th century tendency towards self-conceptions that were “more historically developmental, more temporarily sequential, more individual context-sensitive, and less focused upon timeless and unchanging universal concepts, as had been the prevailing style of the preceding Enlightenment period”.
Dennett considers Nietzsche the ‘second great sociobiologist’, after Hobbes (Dennett, 1995, p. 461). His explanation for this assertion is that the ethics of Nietzsche are naturalistic: rather than just, for instance, founding ethics in a metaphysical realm as Kant had done, Nietzsche thinks that morality transformed out of nature because of the advantages it brought to the species. According to Dennett, Nietzsche attempted to envision a pre-moral environment of people’s lives, as Hobbes does, however, he split his account of the origin of morality into two stages. In the second essay of On the Genealogy of Morals (1887), Nietzsche explores the first phase. He asks ‘… to breed an animal with the right to make promises … is not this the paradoxical task that nature has set itself in the case of man? Is it not the real problem regarding man?’ (1967, Second Essay, sec 1, p. S7).
I would suggest that one should not comprehend Nietzsche’s explanations on the ‘origin’ of morality and punishment as somewhat ‘objective’ in the traditional context. In Ecce Homo, He contends that in order to realize one’s beliefs, these are the subjective aspects of one's life, like “nutrition, place, and climate” (Nietzsche, 1989a, p. 256) that are truly meaningful, not higher, so-called universal notions of ‘truth’. Such ideas are molded by these ‘material’ facts, and do not exist without them.
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Ezung, A. The Idea of ‘Moral Relativism’ in the Philosophy of Friedrich Nietzsche. J. Indian Counc. Philos. Res. 38, 213–227 (2021). https://doi.org/10.1007/s40961-021-00233-x
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/s40961-021-00233-x