Nietzsche on Morality: If There is No God, Everything is Permitted
Morality, despite its pretenses of something higher, ultimately comes down to self-interest.
Nietzsche was a pluralist and was of the view that there is no one right. He was also a relativist and believed that values are relative to the people, and the times and that morals do not writ large for everyone. They are interpreted and reinterpreted in many different ways as per conditions.
But he also cautioned that relativism becomes nihilism when it is defined as following “any view, any perspective is as good as any other one.”
In this sense, he wasn’t a relativist or so to say a nihilist. He put some positions higher than others, that some forms of morality are far superior to others.
- Nietzsche posited that Morality despite its pretenses of something higher, ultimately comes down to self-interest.
- For him, even self-sacrifice has a hidden sense of selfishness. Nietzsche posited that we weigh what is in our favor and what we can handle b/w selfishness or seemingly self-sacrifice. It is our deep hidden selfishness which makes us choose self-sacrifice and not our piety.
Albert Einstein in his Essay “On Socialism” wrote that one can find happiness only by giving his self to society.”
Building on Nietzsche and Einstein’s thesis we can argue that Social Activists indulge in the public good for their selfish interests, to find happiness. Their social activism is indeed a selfish act, an act to find happiness for themselves.
• Nietzsche gave us psychoanalysis of morals and religious beliefs. He abhorred morality’s divine origins and tried to describe it by explaining the human motivations that underlie it.
• Nietzsche wanted to explain morality, unlike Kant who tried extensively to justify morality. Nietzsche tried to explain why even irrational beings would be moved to accept morality and why would they accept a set of rules which quite contrarily be to their own immediate individual disadvantage.
Freud: Motivation is often unconscious, and it is least accessible to the person who is doing the deed.
Nietzsche had a deep skeptical attitude toward people’s stated motivations. There are certain ways we would like to think of ourselves, and there are certain motives that we would like to think move us but in reality, this is just a cover story.
• Nietzsche pointed out that pity, compassion, sympathy and other seemingly moral actions have in them a search for individual superiority, an assertion of individual power.
• For Nietzsche as for Aristotle, laughter is a malicious expression. It is the expression of the superior man over the inferior man.
• For Nietzsche, if one exercises the virtue of benevolence, in reality, one is asserting and reinforcing a certain amount of power one has over the other person. The same is true on the negative side, if one is cruel to someone, what follows is that one is asserting power. Both cruelty and benevolence are in effect exercises of power and the idea of personal power, asserting one’s strength is something that pervades Nietzsche’s psychology.
In Fyodor Dosteovsky’s Boom Karamazov Brothers he writes that “If there is no god, everything is permitted.”
Philosophers of the 18th century were fond of talking about natural compassion and natural sympathy that motivated us all. Nietzsche, on the other hand, pointed out that what is called natural sympathy can also be called herd morality, and there exists a fear that if members of society deviate from the accepted moral code they might be socially boycotted. Nietzsche argued that in reality mostly it is this social pressure and the fear of solitude and fear of being shunned by society that makes a man behave morally and rarely the fear of god.
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