Chapter 5 - Socializing Nietzschean Virtues

Summary

In this chapter, Alfano argues that Nietzschean virtues are deeply and inextricably social. Moreover, their socialization has multiple dimensions. First, there is the external, community-referencing constraint on a drive's being a virtue, discussed in the previous chapter. Second, the shaping and sharpening of an agent's drives is social in at least two additional ways. Some agents shape their own drives by labeling themselves with various traits and having those labels echoed back to them as social proof. They become what they say they are. Other agents have their own drives shaped by the labeling of others that they come to accept. Nietzsche associates the former process with the second-order disposition of masterliness and the latter process with the second-order disposition of slavishness. However, both dispositions are essentially social. Alfano concludes with a discussion of what he calls "Nietzschean summoning," which occurs when someone finds a generic label attractive enough to identify with it and take it on board as a self-description.