People often (I can vouch for two or three professors in my philosophical experience alone that have done this) teach Nietzsche as if he advocated an "aesthetic morality," meaning a type of morality that is not based on absolute, universal principles (principles that are true everywhere and always) like in the systems of Kant and Hegel. Instead of this, what grounds an "aesthetic morality" are relative, historically determined principles that hold as right or good or just only in particular instances.
So far these teachers are correct. But they have not yet asserted why this relative, changable morality is "aesthetic." They assert this at the moment when they try to explain the idea of this "relativist" morality, when they try to give a rough sense of it, because thinking of a morality without absolutes is, even to us now, almost impossible to really grasp and think.
What would a morality be if it were based on something that held true only within a particular instance? Well, they say, it would be a lot like if morals were (here the "aesthetic" comes in) works of art before you: what you judge as "good" art would be a lot like sitting in judgement on, say, a killing. The killing of a person can be either tasteful or not, necessary or not. If it isn't tasteful or necessary, just like an extraneous bit of paint on a canvas, it is then judged as "bad" or "evil," and should be done away with--i.e. the person who killed should be put in jail.
Why do they make this comparison? Because judgements based on "relativist" principles are judgements that only hit at the appearance of a particular issue. That is, because a particular moral judgement cannot hold true in all cases according to Nietzsche, the only judgement you can make would be one on the immediate event as it comes before you--the appearance as opposed to what endures, an "essence." At the same time, you could only refer yourself in your judgement to something that also only appears as the right. Since art is the realm of this immediately apparent, and judgements on art only refer themselves to artistic standards as well as the matter to be judged in this immediate way, the term "aesthetic" is used and Nietzsche's morality is elaborated with examples from the art gallery.
But is this really what Nietzsche claims morality is? Let's see what these teachers would cite within Nietzsche's corpus to support this. A passage from Beyond Good and Evil says the following:
People should at least concede this much: there would be no life at all if it were not based on appearances and assessments based on perspectives. And if people, with the virtuous enthusiasm and foolishness of some philosophers, wanted to do away with the entire "apparent world," assuming, of course, you could do that, well then at least nothing would remain any more of your "truth" either! In fact, what compels us generally to the assumption that there is an essential opposition between "true" and "false"? Is it not enough to assume degrees of appearance and, as it were, lighter and darker shadows and tones for the way things appear--different values, to use the language of painters?
The teachers seem vindicated. Nietzsche here says that instead of determining morality like Kant and Hegel using the realm of the absolute, enduring truth of essence as the true and what appears or changes as what is false, we should just assume that truth and falsity both possess "degrees of appearance," or--and here is the crucial phrase, "values, to use the language of painters." Nietzsche, then, is supposedly saying that truth and falsity are simply to be judged like a painter would judge the value of a color--aesthetically, in accordance with appearance and what is immediately at hand, i.e. with reference to the relative adequateness of the color with regard to the rest of a painting. Thus Nietzsche's morality is an aesthetic morality opposed to an unconditional and absolute morality.
No! Nothing could be further from what Nietzsche believes and even says in this passage! This is what usually happens with his teachers--a coherent view of Nietzsche's philosophy is constructed by an effort to inculcate and explain Nietzsche and the profundity of his work, and reads Nietzsche in conformity with this coherent view, overlooking the words themselves!
But--here's the rub--this is the only way Nietzsche can be taught! Nietzsche's statements contradict themselves constantly, because they constantly refer to particular examples, particular instances, and never allow abstraction away from these instances without distortion. Most philosophers (cf. Kant) usually strain to come up with practical examples of the general principles they expound: like Marx, Nietzsche is a thinker in the language of examples and only suffers from a deficiency of general, systematic statements. In order to teach him, you just have to get the sense of his words right--that only comes by being and remaining open to the possibility of his correctness on certain points (as disturbing as that might be). And many do not do this--Nietzsche asks too much of them. And that's okay, but at that point a judgement is not made about the nature of Niezsche's philosophy, but about the nature of philosophy in general--i.e. that it should exclude the possibility that a discourse without universal and systematic pronouncements could be certain of something.
Nietzsche himself is, however, very certain about truth and about morality. He argues always for a highly determined and determinable sphere of the Right--never for what is indeterminate and relative. For evidence of this, let us look again at the passage. Nietzsche never even says that morality is like an aesthetic judgement: does he not say that he is using the "language of painters?" That is, does he not say that he is using the language of someone for whom judging is never an issue but for whom creating is always an issue? The person who goes around judging art has no place in determining what shade or value something should appear to be--Nietzsche would agree with those teachers who lament the relativism of "aesthetic" morality! For judging is just a displacement of that type of evaluation that relies on absolutes into the sphere of the aesthetic: indeed, philosophers are right when they say that an artistic judgement is relative with regard to the part of the piece judged. But the artist, the painter, makes none of these judgements, and engages in none of this relativism. Artists rely on their drives, on their unreason, on their lack of capacity to judge and their excellence in making something appear and manifest itself.
What's more, they are incredibly precise in this creativity: this is the sense in which the word "values" is used here: for the creator, the painter, the value of a particular blotch of color on the canvas is a thoroughly determined, specific thing, an index to its worth and its import that it confers upon all the rest of the painting. Something appears--definitely--on the canvas, in a particular way. It has a value based on what it is, on how it interprets and forms the rest of the painting by its sudden existence within the painting--its emergence creates the painting itself as it is, and its appearance can be commensurate even with a mathematics of color (a numerical index of color values or hues) that calculates what it is, what color it is. This is the sense in which Nietzsche speaks of values--and it is not an "aesthetic" sense. And this is what truth and right would look like if it were historically determined.
In the end, I think it would be better taught as fitting in with a scientific tradition--the tradition of Freud and Comte and more exactly Badiou--someone who believes philosophy as ontology is mathematics, its object being that determinate. Everything for Nietzsche revolves around this: something can be incredibly determinate without reason effectuating this determination. That said, we are left with a striking counterthrust to these teachers: something cannot even appear true or good for Nietzsche if it is as indeterminate as an aesthetic judgement.
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