The significance of Thus Spoke Zarathustra in terms of Nietzsche’s moral philosophy‒ignoring whether we are allowed to introduce his overall accounts regarding and seemingly focusing on moral values under the unified title of “his moral philosophy” or not‒is that along with the journey of Zarathustra, Nietzsche actually attempts to provide one with the qualifications of the Übermensch, the concept that can be defined as the highest stage of the moral development of a human being, or the concept designating the one who “shall be the meaning of the earth”[1] to explain it in Nietzschean way. In fact Thus Spoke Zarathustra is centered around the notion of eternal recurrence, which is crucial for his conception of life, and which is also significant as it is held by him that only by the affirmation of this eternal recurrence one can more fully develop oneself in terms of morality along the way to Übermensch (This affirmation is also depicted by Nietzsche as the third and utmost stage of metamorphoses of soul, the child, with “a holy Yes”[2]). Thus, to investigate the intelligibility and the possibility of creation of moral values in Nietzsche who claims to break up with the previous metaphysical accounts to describe morality, one should make it first intelligible the relation between the concept of life and the moral agent in Nietzsche. The fact that his making rather naturalistic account of life in relation with the morality depicts an attempt to seek non-metaphysical explanations for morality unlike the previous accounts for it. Interpreted in this way, one can question whether this escape of him from metaphysics is sucessful or not, which I will evaluate in comparison with the notion of autopoiesis as it introduced in social systems in 20th century philosophy. Yet first, the analysis of notion of life in Nietzsche will be given, and the meanings of “affirmation of life” or “eternal recurrence” will be discussed with reference to master and slave morality of Nietzsche.
The eternal recurrence is in its general sense defined as a concept that the universe will recur in a self-similar form an infinite number of times across infinite time or space. As a criterion of morality in Nietzsche, one can judge the value of one’s life according to whether one can affirm to live the whole this-worldly life of oneself without any change for an infinite times. To make one’s conception of it more clear regarding how the eternal recurrence and the affirmation of life are burdensome notions regarding the life and building one’s moral values, one can compare this account with the existential morals of Sartre. For Sartre, human beings are free to choose (in fact they are left with no external criterion to choose other than their own subjective valuations) what to act in any given situation regardless of the situation’s potentiality of affecting other humans than oneself. Yet, by acting according to one’s choice, one takes the burden of this freedom to decide not only his own life, but also the lives of others around them. In both cases, the realization of the fact that there are no external authorities for an agent to develop moral values and ability of taking the burden of one’s affirmation of an action one commits, with his will to power, in the domain of other agents in a way affecting the all humanity are the main ideas about emergence of morals.
This highest form of affirmation can be found in the description of the metamorphoses of the soul in three stages, in Thus Spoke Zarathustra, namely the camel, lion and child stage of the soul. According to this analogy, the camel represents the most inferior stage of one’s attitude towards his life and values in which one adopts the burden of moral valuations that are posited from outside of himself artificially without any need to question them. For Nietzsche, this stage of moral development is not enough for the achievement of the Übermensch, he also closely associates this stage with the prevailing moral theories that seek to understand morality as a science of which the grounds are to be sought, or as something given from outside. Nietzsche refutes these theories in Beyond Good and Evil as for him with these theories, “many a moralist would like to exercise power and creative arbitrariness over mankind.”[3]. For Nietzsche, taking these arbitrary moral values as absolutely valid for all humans, these moralists attempt to create artificial way of life to justify their stand as the declarers of “the despisers of life” as highest good in terms of morality. To achieve this creation of moral theories from Plato to Kant, they ground their moral values with the metaphysical claims, almost all of which are based on the existence of the noumenal world beyond our this-worldly existence. This view of the world which now emposes the humanity its objectivist moral values is internally conflicting for Nietzsche for they ignore the two types of creative forces active in all human activities, metaphorised by him in The Birth of Tragedy as Dionysian and Appolonian forces, first of which is related more to life and the second to rationality. For Nietzsche, only with the combination of these two forces one can get a proper understanding of the world. Other than claiming those theories refute life, in The Birth of Tragedy, Nietzsche goes on to give etymological examples from ancient languages in which they praise the moral states that are considered harmful in his times as they are held to destroy the common life of the humanity. In Christian belief, the uprising of the demanded moral values such as pity, respect for one’s neighbor are all artificial for Nietzsche for they ignore how the life activities‒also creation of moral values as a life activity‒of humans are performed in accordance with the two mentioned life forces. One may find, at first sight, this claim childish and unimplementable in real world (or even though implementable, one may probably refrain to do so), because it seems leaving no grounds for proper common life of human beings which is the main aim of practical philosophy to achieve. Yet, this comment is not valid; because, by refuting the previously artificial grounds, belonging to the outside domain of all human activities, of moral values Nietzsche is not claiming that the morally higher humans in his account will not act in a way to show pity to the poor and so on; rather he claims that even the Übermensch commits an act in which he shows pity towards the others, he commits this act not for the reasons outside of himself and of moral domain which is the life itself (such as the instutions of religions which pose constant fear upon him while he makes his decisions), but rather for he validates this particular action considering his will to power in that situation towards life, i.e. whether he will be able to affirm this act constantly for all instances of his this worldly-existence. That is the higher human’s moral actions come from the excess of power, which is a claim that is in accordance with the explaining morals in terms of the notion of life, as the power is always praised in any form of life more than weakness to secure the energy to preserve itself.
The aim of self-overcoming of man in his moral development through the Übermensch, can only be achieved by returning one’s attention to the most basic of human drives or instincts: the will to power. This condition is satisfied only in the type of morals that Nietzsche calls the master morality, and humanity owes its overall enhancement to the noble class of society who are ready to implement power via their moral actions, as a signifier of life, thus they are in affirmation with the basic principle of life that is appropriation, overpowering what is alien and weak, as well as exploitation as Nietzsche explains in Beyond Good and Evil. Nietzsche overturns the slave morality as he regards it as the morality of utility, meaning that it does not describe the domain of moral action truly but it is only adopted as an artificial and external reference point to evaluate actions to conceal the true meaning of life from humans (for Nietzsche, this type of morality is emposed by the weak people of previous societies in which the power was the main virtue, as it is in reality for Nietzsche, to secure themselves from the exploitation of the master class by turning down the real nature of life).
To make the value-creation process in such an account which emphasises the this-worldly existence and leaves the attempt of explaining moral values with the grounds that are external to the practical domain and of basing them on the noumenal world; Nietzsche commits himself to the overcoming of metaphysics. Whether he has achieved this overcoming is a huge topic of disagreement in Western philosophy; yet, even though I am not elligible to decide the concluding comment on this discussion, I can say that one can encounter the similiar attempts to declare autonomies of distinct domains of human activities in modern era, rather than explaining the sciences, economy, art, politics, ethics on the grounds external to their domains, namely the religion. Even in Derrida’s attempt to overcome Western metaphysics of presence, one can witness to the attempt of rejecting all priviliged unsignified signifiers such as God, or concepts belonging to so-called noumenal world in the explanation of signs we use in language and communication in general. Derrida, in this attempt, owes very much to the Nietzschean positive affirmation of life as a whole explicated above, because this affirmation posits no truth as the meaning or value, rather it is open to subjectivity for it inherits the nearly magical nature of becoming, making such an approach a good starting point for the deconstruction of language as well as of any other domains of human activity.
Yet, before this positive affirmation stage of the development of the soul‒which I started to explain with the stage of the camel‒, there comes the metaphoric stage of lion. One can regard it as a refutation of previous external metaphysical grounds for moral actions, in this perspective, the soul at the stage of lion refutes the moral values emposed on him, and adopts the motto “I will!”, leaving the previous outside commands like “You shall!”. However, “to create new values‒that, even the lion cannot yet accomplish,”[4] thus there is needed one more stage to develop and realize one’s moral values one acts in accordance with one’s instincts to will the power. It is the stage of child described by Nietzsche as, “Innocence is the child, and forgetfulness, a new beginning, a game, a self-rolling whell, a first movement, a holy Yes.”[5]. The significance of affirming such a playful and rather unserious stage into the development of emergence of moral values tells one about the process of performing philosophy in Nietzsche is very different from his predecessors. It is a metaphilosophical attitude to mainly deal with and to celebrate what human beings are left with: constant world of becoming, rather than seeking other-worldly grounds to impose on humans which makes one’s theory more serious but less in accordance with the true nature of the life.
At the end of these considerations, we are left with a conception of life as Nietzsche explicates to provide the possibility of moral values and to make them intelligible to oneself. This notion of life creates moral values with the self-reference of the components of this life, not with reference to the outside domain (like religion, instutions etc.). Also this notion of life has a capacity for self-regulation insofar as our deeds commited in the practical domain possess the normative closure and they cannot be judged according to the criteria outside of this domain. This standpoint reveals the closeness between the autopoietic systems and Nietzsche’s notion of life as it is applied to our practical domain to create the moral values. Originally a biological concept coined by Maturana and Varelo in 1960s and early 1970s, autopoiesis is an answer to the question of “What is the distinguishing feature of the living from the non-living?” as “A living system that reproduces itself.”[6]. This self-reproduction is achieved by the system through using its own elements. Luhmann is the first to argue that this notion of life not only applies to the biological organisms, but also to the non-biological systems such as society, economy, law etc. Yet, this attempt to implement such a notion to other domains is already familiar from Hegel in which the self-development of a concept is achieved in a system, the fuel of which is the negativity or the power of life in this context. As I mentioned before, the attempt to deliver the respective autonomies to each body of human knowledge and of human activity in the modernism made it crucial to get rid of previous metaphysical or irrelevant notions such as the suppression of religious instutions (which claimed the relevance to every domain of human activity before, and for Nietzsche having its basis in the Western metaphysics of priviliged signs) to that particular activity. This appeal to the autopoietic systems as they are introduced in the social domain is intelligible at first sight to serve the common idea of overcoming metaphysics by abolishing the priviliged signs/reference points (because the notions of self-reference and self-regulation avoids the internal components to refer irrelevant signs outside the threshold of life). Then comes the doubts that by overcoming metaphysics, whether or not it posits the notion of “system” as the essence of any autonomous field in which every field has internal closure and interaction to other fields under certain conditions. Yet, in terms of Nietzsche, due to the notion of eternal recurrence being so central to his overall account, and also due to the fact that the field that gains the autonomy is the practical domain in which our moral values are emerged, one can be more flexible on the system assumptions. That is, one is not considering here the economy the definition of which is the exchange activity of humans in a social context, as an instance of a unity possessing life; but rather the morality is at stake here, the content of which is itself the life for Nietzsche, not needed to be expressed something possessing life.
To conclude, it is inevitable to consider the Nietzsche’s emphasis on the notion of life to understand the process of creation of moral values in his account. To the degree this account is an attempt to escape traditional metaphysics and relies on the notions of self-reference to a great degree, it may be likened to the autopoietic systems introduced in social context, yet with a doubtful explanation to the investigation of whether this account get completely away with the metaphysics, including the dubious essence of a system.
References
Nietzsche, F. (1917) Thus Spake Zarathustra, translated by Thomas Common, New York: Boni and Liveright The Modern Library.
Nietzsche, F. (1997) Beyond Good and Evil, translated by Helen Zimmern, New York: Dover Publications.
Seidi, D. (2004) “Luhmann’s Theory of Autopoietic Social Systems”. Munich Business Research Paper 2004-2. Munich: Ludwig-Maximilians-Universitat Munchen.
[1] Nietzsche (1917, p.28).
[2] Ibid., 44.
[3] Nietzsche (1997, p. 57).
[4] Nietzsche (1917, p.44).
[5] Ibid.
[6] Seidi (2004, p.1)
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