9 - Life, virtue, politics

Summary

Having been introduced to the range of Nietzsche's philosophical views, we are in a good position to return to his positive thoughts about ethics and social life. These thoughts are spread across every book he wrote. Of course, as we should expect by now, his views change over time and he nowhere lays out a definitive statement of his positive views, so it is not possible to identify his ethical or political theory. In fact, he does not have theories about these topics at all, if by “theory” we understand a systematic view with reductive principles and derivations from them. Instead, we find a number of comments and extended passages on ethical, social and political topics that, together, add up to something more than a loose collection but something less than a theory. They all presuppose Nietzsche's commitment to a psychology of drives and affects, his commitment to a distinction between health and sickness or decadence, his insistence on the deleterious effects of the herd on some individuals and his hope for liberation from herd thinking.

We shall begin our investigation by looking at Nietzsche's reflections on the relation between ethical values and life and will to power. Despite all appearances to the contrary, this relation is not an instance of a naturalistic fallacy, the fallacy of deriving an “ought” from an “is”. In the second section of the chapter, we expand on the psychological role of drives by focusing on a subset of valuable ones, the virtues, and by showing how those virtues can be ordered so as to augment power in a wide variety of different healthy lives.