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MORALITIES ARE A SIGN-LANGUAGE OF THE AFFECTS*

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  12 February 2014

Brian Leiter
Brian Leiter*
Affiliation:
Law, Philosophy, & Human Values, University of Chicago
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Abstract

This essay offers an interpretation and partial defense of Nietzsche's idea that moralities and moral judgments are “sign-languages” or “symptoms” of our affects, that is, of our emotions or feelings. According to Nietzsche, as I reconstruct his view, moral judgments result from the interaction of two kinds of affective responses: first, a “basic affect” of inclination toward or aversion from certain acts, and then a further affective response (the “meta-affect”) to that basic affect (that is, sometimes we can be either inclined towards or averted from our basic affects). I argue that Nietzsche views basic affects as noncognitive, that is, as identifiable solely by how they feel to the subject who experiences the affect. By contrast, I suggest that meta-affects (I focus on guilt and shame) sometimes incorporate a cognitive component like belief. After showing how this account of moral judgment comports with a reading of Nietzsche's moral philosophy that I have offered in previous work, I conclude by adducing philosophical and empirical psychological reasons for thinking that Nietzsche's account of moral judgment is correct.

Type
Research Article
Information
Social Philosophy and Policy , Volume 30 , Issue 1-2 , January 2013 , pp. 237 - 258
Copyright
Copyright © Social Philosophy and Policy Foundation 2013 

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Footnotes

*

I have benefited from discussion of the issues treated in this paper with the participants in the Spring 2011 seminar on “Nietzsche and Moral Psychology” at the University of Chicago: Nir Ben-Moshe, Jaime Edwards, Roger Eichorn, Guy Elgat, Michael Forster, Simon Gurofsky, Peter Kail, Alex Langlinais, and David Showalter. Teaching Nietzsche's Genealogy with Peter Kail at Oxford in autumn 2011 was also very helpful in clarifying my thoughts on several issues treated here. An earlier version of this paper was presented as the Bernd Magnus Lecture to the Department of Philosophy at the University of California at Riverside on March 7, 2012. I am grateful to the audience there for helpful questions and discussion; I should mention in particular David Glidden, Pierre Keller, Samantha Matherne, Jozef Müller, and Howard Wettstein. The current version benefited from critical discussion with João Constâncio and his colleagues and students at the Nietzsche International Lab at the New University of Lisbon; from discussion with Justin Coates and with the other contributors to this volume; from the comments of an anonymous referee for this journal and from the editor, David Schmidtz; and from written commentary by Maudemarie Clark and David Dudrick, and discussion with them and the audience at an invited session on “Nietzsche, Moral Psychology and Empirical Psychology” at the Central Division meeting of the American Philosophical Association in February 2013.

References

1 Leiter, Brian, Nietzsche on Morality (London: Routledge, 2002)Google Scholar.

2 I have drawn on English translations of Nietzsche's works by Walter Kaufmann, R. J. Hollingdale, or Maudemarie Clark and Alan Swensen and then made modifications based on Nietzsche, Friedrich, Sämtliche Werke: Kritische Studienausgabe in 15 Bänden, ed. Colli, G. & Montinari, M. (Berlin: de Gruyter, 1980)Google Scholar; where there is no existing English edition, the translation is my own. Nietzsche's works are cited as follows, unless otherwise noted: roman numerals refer to major parts or chapters in Nietzsche's works; arabic numerals refer to sections, not pages. I use the standard Anglophone abbreviations for Nietzsche's works, as follows: The Antichrist (A); Beyond Good and Evil (BGE); The Birth of Tragedy (BT); Daybreak (D); Ecce Homo (EH); The Gay Science (GS); On the Geneology of Morals (GM); Thus Spoke Zarathustra (Z); Twilight of the Idols (TI); The Will to Power (WP).

3 Nietzsche, D, 119.

4 Nietzsche, GS, “Preface,” 2.

5 Nietzsche, BGE, 6.

6 Nietzsche, GM, “Preface,” 2.

7 Nietzsche, TI, “Problem,” 2.

8 Nietzsche, WP, 258.

9 See Leiter, Nietzsche on Morality, 63–71.

10 He acknowledges as much in the “Note” at the end of GM I when he calls for a prize to encourage physiologists and doctors to study the effects of different values on persons.

11 Leiter (2002: 24–25).

12 There are nonrepresentationalist views of semantic content (think Robert Brandom or Huw Price, for example), but there is no reason, of course, to think Nietzsche had such a view in mind, or, indeed, that he had loyalty to any particular theory of meaning. It is thus best to interpret his remarks in the most natural, “ordinary-language” way that still allows us to make sense of his terminology.

13 I will thus assume that to the extent a symptom or sign expresses a meaning, it does so in virtue of how it is caused by the underlying item of which it is a sign or symptom.

14 There are occasional exceptions, e.g., Nietzsche, BGE 19, but these are somewhat anomalous.

15 Katsafanas, Paul, “Nietzsche's Philosophical Psychology,” in A Handbook of Nietzsche, ed. Gemes, Ken and Richardson, John (Oxford: Oxford University Press, forthcoming 2013)Google Scholar.

16 Of course, many different things might be symptomatic of our affects: e.g., our facial expressions, our behaviors. Nietzsche thinks, however, that moralities reveal things about our affects and drives that are especially important and which we would not otherwise recognize unless we interpreted moral judgments as expressive of affects. This will become clearer in the discussion that follows, below.

17 Nietzsche, D, 34.

18 There is a certain affinity here to aspects of Stoic moral psychology, with which Nietzsche, as a classicist, was certainly familiar, though he rejects the ultimately rationalist elements of the Stoic view. Brennan, Tad, “Stoic Moral Psychology,” in The Cambridge Companion to the Stoics, ed., Inwood, B. (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2003)Google Scholar is a useful review.

The relationship between Nietzsche's view and that of the Stoics requires independent treatment.

19 Cf. Deigh, John, “Cognitivism in the Theory of the Emotions,” Ethics 104 (1994): 824–54CrossRefGoogle Scholar.

20 Prinz, Jesse, The Emotional Construction of Morals (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2007), 57Google Scholar.

21 Ibid., 52.

22 Cf. Prinz, ibid., 60ff.

23 Goldie, Peter, The Emotions: A Philosophical Exploration (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2002), 19CrossRefGoogle Scholar.

24 As I discuss below, I actually think we should resist ascribing any semantic view to Nietzsche, so the claims in this paragraph should, strictly speaking, be treated as explanatory of moral judgment, rather than as part of a semantics of moral judgment.

25 Katsafanas, “Nietzsche's Philosophical Psychology.”

26 The discharge of that drive would then involve acting on the sexual arousal or urge, but the drive can manifest itself in an affective response, even when it is not satisfied.

27 Nietzsche, D, 38.

28 Ibid., 35.

29 Recall Nietzsche, GM I, 13: “When out of the vengeful cunning of powerlessness the oppressed, downtrodden, violated say to themselves: ‘let us be different from the evil ones, namely good! And good is what everyone is who does not do violence, who injures no one, who doesn't attack, who doesn't retaliate, who leaves vengeance to God, who keeps himself concealed, as we do, who avoids all evil, and in general demands very little of life, like us, the patient, humble, righteous’—it means, when listened to coldly, and without prejudice, actually nothing more than: ‘we weak ones are simply weak; it is good if we do nothing for which we are not strong enough.’”

30 Nietzsche, D, 99.

31 Cf. Haidt, Jonathan, “The Emotional Dog and Its Rational Tail: A Social Intuitionist Approach to Moral Judgment,” Psychological Review 108 (2001): 814–34CrossRefGoogle ScholarPubMed.

32 Nietzsche, D, 103.

33 Leiter, Brian, Nietzsche on Morality (London: Routledge, 2002), 87–101Google Scholar.

34 Leiter, Nietzsche on Morality, 8–10,

35 Nietzsche, BGE, 6.

36 Nietzsche, D, 38,109.

37 See, e.g., Nietzsche, D, 104: “[W]e arrive [at our evaluation, which causes actions] as children, and rarely learn to change our view; most of us are our whole lives long the fools of the way we acquired in childhood of judging our neighbors (their minds, rank, morality, whether they are exemplary or reprehensible) and of finding it necessary to pay homage to their evaluations.”

38 Leiter, Nietzsche on Morality, 26.

39 Nietzsche, GM, I:13.

40 Nietzsche, GS, “Pref.,” 2.

41 Cf. Nietzsche, GS, 143; BGE, 213.

42 Knobe, Joshua and Leiter, Brian, “The Case for Nietzschean Moral Psychology,” in Nietzsche and Morality, ed. Leiter, Brian and Sinhababu, Neil (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2007)Google Scholar.

43 Typically, these studies are conducted either by looking at twins (comparing monozygotic to dizygotic) or by looking at adopted children. One study, for example, using 1,523 pairs of twins found a heritability of aggressive antisocial behavior of 70 percent (Eley, Thalia, Lichtenstein, Paul, and Stevenson, Jim, “Sex Differences in the Etiology of Aggressive and Nonaggressive Antisocial Behavior: Results from Two Twin Studies,” Child Development 70 [1999]: 155–68CrossRefGoogle ScholarPubMed.) Other studies yield percentages that are lower but still surprisingly high—for example, 60 percent (Edelbrock, C., Rende, R. D., Plomin, R., and Thompson, L. A., “A Twin Study of Competence and Problem Behavior in Childhood and Early Adolescence,” Journal of Child Psychology and Psychiatry 36 [1995]: 775–85CrossRefGoogle ScholarPubMed, and 49 percent (Deater-Deckard, K., and Plomin, R., “An Adoption Study of the Etiology of Teacher Reports of Externalizing Problems in Middle Childhood,” Child Development 70 [1999]: 144–54CrossRefGoogle ScholarPubMed.) These huge effect sizes cannot plausibly be ascribed to experimental artifacts or measurement error, as opposed to genetic influences.

44 And a memorable one, which I owe to Jesse Prinz.

45 A different kind of question can also be raised about Nietzsche's picture of moral psychology: namely, why should we think drives exist in the first place? In many passages, after all, Nietzsche notes how ignorant persons are about the drives that constitute them: “However far a man may go in self-knowledge, nothing however can be more incomplete than his image of the totality of drives which constitute his being,” as he puts it in Daybreak (119). Since drives are not identified directly by their conscious, qualitative feel, the grounds for positing their presence must amount to something like an inference to the best explanation of observable behavior and conscious feelings. Yet Nietzsche is notoriously promiscuous with his ontology of drives; in Daybreak alone he refers to “the drive to restfulness, or the fear of disgrace and other evil consequences” (D 109); the hunger drive (D 119); “moral … drives” (D 119); “our drive to tenderness or humorousness or adventurousness or … our desire [Verlangen] for music and mountains” (D 119); “the drive to praise or blame” (D 140); the drive to feel sorrow or sadness (when triggered by music) (D 142); and “the drive to attachment and care for others (the ‘sympathetic affection’)” (D 143). On top of that, Nietzsche also claims that drives vary in their degree of strength or vehemence (Heftigkeit) (D 109)—that is, how badly they need to be satisfied—and that this quality of drives is important to their role in explaining moral judgment and action (cf. D 119).

How are we to appraise Nietzsche's promiscuous ontology of drives? There is not even the pretense of demonstrating the explanatory need for some of the drives he posits, many of which are on a par with Moliere's doctor's explanation that opium makes one sleep because of its dormitive power! It is worth bearing in mind, however, that the interest of Nietzsche's hypothesis about the role of drives in moral judgment does not depend on any specific hypothesis about particular drives; it turns, rather, on the correctness of the basic model of the mind. We may view some of the specific claims simply as “placeholders” for a more adequate psychology, and it is reasonable to think some of the specific drives Nietzsche posits are explanatorily otiose and would drop out of a more systematic account. (I am indebted here to Roger Eichorn.)

Drives for Nietzsche are (per Katsafanas's formulation) “dispositions that induce affective orientation in the agent.” These affective orientations structure how the world appears to us evaluatively: they influence, for example, “perceptual salience,” the features of a situation that come to the fore for the agent (because the drive focuses attention on them). (Cf. D 119. Humeans also have a similar view: see, e.g., Sinhababu, Neil, “The Humean Theory of Motivation Reformulated and Defended,” Philosophical Review 118 [2009]: 465–500; 469–70CrossRefGoogle Scholar, discussing the “attention-direction” aspect of desire.) Katsafanas also argues that Nietzschean drives share two features of drives on the Freudian view (unsurprisingly given Freud's interest in Nietzsche). First, drives have a kind of constancy that particular desires do not. The music you desired to listen to in your twenties may no longer appeal in your forties; but the hunger drive keeps coming back whether you are twenty or forty. Second, drives do not depend on an external stimulus to be aroused. External stimuli can give rise to a desire to eat or to have sex, to be sure, but those same desires can simply arise in the absence of any stimuli. It is particularly useful to distinguish, as Freud does (33), between the Ziel (aim) of the drive (e.g., sex, eating) and the Objekt of the drive (e.g., this woman, this bit of food). Insofar as a drive is aroused not by an external stimulus, it will then seek out an object for its realization—and in so doing impose a “valuation” on the object.

46 Leiter, Brian, “Nietzsche's Metaethics,” European Journal of Philosophy 8 (2000): 277–97CrossRefGoogle Scholar.

47 For doubts about these, see Schroeder, Mark, “Hybrid Expressivism: Virtues and Vices,” Ethics 119 (2009): 257–309CrossRefGoogle Scholar.

48 Wright, Crispin, “Realism, Antirealism, Irrealism, Quasi-Realism,” Midwest Studies in Philosophy, ed. French, P.et al. (Notre Dame, IN: University of Notre Dame Press, 1988), 31Google Scholar.

49 Wright, Crispin, Truth and Objectivity (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1992)Google Scholar is the locus classicus for this kind of view.

50 Leiter, Nietzsche on Morality, 146–150; Leiter, Brian, “Moral Skepticism and Moral Disagreement in Nietzsche,” in Shafer-Landau, Russ (ed.), Oxford Studies in Metaethics, volume 9 (forthcoming 2014)Google Scholar.

51 I concede it is possible that someone might claim that affective responses are epistemically reliable ways of tracking the truth about what morality requires. That is plainly not Nietzsche's own view, and, given the overwhelming evidence of the ways in which emotional responses are epistemically unreliable in so many other contexts, it would be surprising, indeed, were they to turn out to be epistemically superior in this domain.

52 Nietzsche, D, 3.

53 Ibid., 100.

54 The contrast is with what Kail calls “feature projection,” which he also finds in Hume, and which is central to the Freudian concept of projection: “In features projection, features of our mentality become represented as features of some other object (I project my hate in thinking that someone else hates me).” (Kail, Peter, Projection and Realism in Hume's Philosophy [Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2007], xxix–xxxCrossRefGoogle Scholar.)

55 Nietzsche, D, 2.

56 Nietzsche, GM, III, 12.

57 Nietzsche, GS, 354. [W]ir ‘wissen’ (oder glauben oder bilden uns ein) gerade so viel als es im Interesse der Menschen-Heerde, der Gattung, nütlizch sein mag: und selbst, was hier “Nütlizchkeit' gennant wird, ist zulezt auch nur ein Glaube, eind Einbuildung. …”

58 Putnam, Hilary, The Collapse of the Fact/Value Dichotomy and Other Essays (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2004)Google Scholar, on the fact-value distinction is a good example.

59 Duhem, Pierre, La Theorie Physique:Son Object et sa Structure, (Paris: Marcel Riviera et Cie, 1914)Google Scholar; Quine, W. V. O., “On Empirically Equivalent Systems of the World,” Erkenntnis 9 (1975): 313–28CrossRefGoogle Scholar and “Three Indeterminacies,” in Perspectives on Quine, ed., Barrett, R. B. and Gibson, R. F. (Cambridge, MA: Blackwell, 1990)Google Scholar.

I acknowledge that the inveterate dogmatic realist may think this is merely an epistemic point, not a metaphysical one: there could still be real epistemic values, after all, we just do not know what they are or how to apply them. That is a logically possible position, but I am with Quine in thinking that if the actual successful sciences do not disclose such epistemic values, then it is dubious that reality demands any particular set of them.

60 Cf. Quine, W. V. O. and Ullian, Joseph, The Web of Belief, 2d ed. (New York: Random House, 1978)Google Scholar.

61 Railton, Peter, “Facts and Values,” Philosophical Topics 14 (1986): 5–31CrossRefGoogle Scholar.

62 Nietzsche, BGE, 3–9.

63 Nietzsche,WP, 428.

64 Nietzsche, D, 34.

65 Haidt, “The Emotional Dog and Its Rational Tail.”

66 Cushman, Fiery, Young, Liane, and Greene, Joshua D., “Multi-System Moral Psychology,” in The Moral Psychology Handbook, ed., Doris, John M. and the Moral Psychology Research Group, (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2010), 53–54Google Scholar.

67 Greene, Joshua, “The Secret Joke of Kant's Soul,” in Moral Psychology, Volume 3, ed. Sinnott-Armstrong, W. (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 2007): 35–117Google Scholar.

68 Cushman et al., “Multi-System Moral Psychology,” 54; 62.

More precisely, “affect supplies the primary motivation to regard harm as bad. Once this primary motivation is supplied, reasoning proceeds in a currency-like manner [“currency emotions are designed to participate in the process of practical reasoning”]” (Cushman et al., “Multi-System Moral Psychology,” 63.) “[A]larm-bell emotions are designed to circumvent reasoning” (id. at 62) and, arguably, this is “the origin of the welfare principle,” namely, “Parkinson disease appears to show that intrinsic desires are necessary to the production of motivation in normal human beings, and this would seem to put serious pressure on the cognitivist position” (93).

69 Timothy Schroeder, Adina L. Roskies, and Shaun Nichols, “Moral Motivation,” in The Moral Psychology Handbook, ed. Doris et al., 77; 98; 94.

70 Leiter, Brian, “Nietzsche's Theory of the Will,” Philosopher's Imprint 7 (2007): 1–15Google Scholar; Knobe and Leiter, “The Case for Nietzschean Moral Psychology.”