How Ree Goes Wrong Right at the Beginning
One can immediately see why Nietzsche says of Ree that 'in his hypothesizing we have [...] the Darwinian beast politely joining hands with the most modern, unassuming moral milquetoast who ''no longer bites'' ' (GM, Preface, 7), and that he 'sees [the altruistic manner of valuation] as the moral manner of valuation in itself' (GM, Preface, 4). However, something else deserves comment. In Ree's title for chapter 1 the topic is the concepts good and evil (bose). But throughout the chapter, and indeed right through the book as a whole, he refers to good and bad (schlecht), without ever addressing the question whether evil is the same concept as bad. Nietzsche's First Treatise capitalizes on this telling piece of inattention by making the opposition 'good and evil' both distinct from 'good and bad' and distinctive of a certain psychology underlying Judaeo-Christian morality. This is the first clue to the complexity of morality's origins to be discovered by Nietzsche's alternative form of genealogy.
In the Preface to the Genealogy we saw Ree singled out for his genealogical hypotheses of'the specifically English sort', for thinking 'like all English genealogists of morality', and for 'English hypothesizing into the blue' (GM, Preface, 4, 7). When the First Treatise opens with its famous casual reference to 'these English psychologists', also known as 'these historians of morality', only a reader who has forgotten the immediately preceding Preface will fail to see Ree as at least included in the description, as typical of the species referred to. However, I shall contend that Ree is the referent of the playful phrase 'these English psychologists'. The Origin of the Moral Sensations is still the only book, apart from his own works, that Nietzsche has named up to this point. And, most importantly, the theory deftly presented and dissected in GM I. 1 — 3 is demonstrably that contained in Ree's book.
According to Clark and Swensen, 'it has been suggested that this phrase [''English psychologists''] refers to the British philosophers of the utilitar-ian—associationist school, perhaps especially Hume, Hartley, Hutcheson,
1° Ree 123; trans. slightly amended.
Bentham, and Mill'." But, although Ree adopts from this tradition the notions of utility, association of ideas, and feelings of approbation and blame, he augments these with the later (though still 'English') notions of natural selection and instinctive drives, and adds the idea that utility is now forgotten in moral judgements—so that for him they are not straightforwardly judgements of utility—and produces out of these materials a somewhat distinctive theory. And this is the theory Nietzsche in fact addresses in GM I. 1 -3. That Ree is under discussion is apparent even at the level of vocabulary. Clark and Swensen note that Nietzsche uses the term 'usefulness' (Nützlichkeit), rather than 'utility' (Utilität), 'although Nietzsche is discussing utilitarianism here'.12 But if Nietzsche is discussing Ree, then Ree's words Nützlichkeit or Nutzen are just right. The rather inelegant central term 'the unegoistic' (das Unegoistische) is also a straight lift from Ree, though Nietzsche has at his disposal altruistisch—a word Ree does not use." Clark and Swensen are right when they say that 'the only thinker specifically associated with an ''English'' account of morality in GM is... Paul Ree'. But arguably they should have left it there: if we are looking for Nietzsche's immediate target, there is no need for any further speculative listing of candidate Englishmen or indeed Scots. Herbert Spencer is mentioned in GM I. 3, but Nietzsche explicitly contrasts Spencer's theory with the one under discussion, as making more sense, though also wrong." The theory under discussion in GM I. 1 -3 is Ree's, pure and simple."
To establish this claim we need only realize that the following statement of the theory by Nietzsche is an accurate paraphrase of Reee, occasionally verging on quotation:
The ineptitude of their moral genealogy is exposed right at the beginning, where it is a matter of determining the origins of the concept and judgment 'good'.
11 Clark and Swensen (1998: 129). Their source is Thatcher (1989: 588).
12 Clark and Swensen (1998: 129). 13 Nietzsche uses altruistisch in GM, Preface, 4.
14 On Ree and Spencer, see Small (2003, pp. xxii-xxv, xliii-xliv).
15 See Small (2003, p. xli). Leiter (2002: 198) and Thatcher (1989: 588) note that Ree's theory is the one criticized and half-quoted here. Leiter states (p. 197) that Nietzsche uses the term 'English psychologists' 'extremely loosely' in GM I. 1, since the primary example discussed is Ree. Thatcher takes 'English psychologists' literally, and speculates that in GM I. 1 Nietzsche refers to W. E. H. Lecky's History of European Morals (1869), of which he possessed a much annotated copy, and of which he wrote in a letter, 'such Englishmen lack ''the historical sense'' and some other things too' (Letter to Overbeck, 24 Mar. 1887, SB viii. 49). Even if we read GM I. 1 more literally as making this general reference, it seems inadequate to say merely that to the list of British thinkers covered by Lecky 'the name of Paul Ree should be added'—for Ree is the chief target for criticism.
'Originally'—so they decree—'unegoistic actions were praised and called good from the perspective of those to whom they were rendered, hence for whom they were useful; later one forgot this origin of the praise and, simply because unegoistic actions were as a matter of habit always praised as good, one also felt them to be good—as if they were something good in themselves.'16
There is also a significant detail here: Nietzsche says 'they' go wrong 'right at the beginning'. At the beginning of what? The passage in quotation marks supplies the answer by giving the gist of Ree's opening chapter accurately in Ree's own vocabulary. The 'beginning' is that of Ree's book. The 'they' is Ree.
Nietzsche raises two argumentative objections against Ree's theory. The second, to which section 3 is devoted, is a crisp internal objection that charges Ree with 'inherent psychological absurdity'. A theory such as Spencer's, which Nietzsche says equates 'good' and 'useful' straightforwardly, so that to judge something good is to make a judgement of its utility, is 'in itself reasonable and psychologically tenable', though still wrong by Nietzsche's lights. Reee, by contrast, thinks the origin of the concept 'good' in social usefulness is forgotten. But for this to be right, Nietzsche replies, either the actions labelled 'good' would have to have ceased to be useful, which is false, or we would have to have forgotten a usefulness that is constantly reinforced by experience, which is impossible (or at least utterly unexplained by Ree).
The other objection against Ree's theory of the origins of 'good and bad' leads straight into Nietzsche's own account in the remainder of GM I. It is that Ree is wrong about the origins of judgements of'good' because of a false assumption about who originally made such judgements. Ree regards his original human community as a group of homogeneous individuals with a single potential benefit in cooperation. He ignores any form of cultural differentiation or power-relation within the community, concentrating
16 GM I. 2. Compare Nietzsche's text with Ree's. Nietzsche: 'Man hat ursprünglich [...] unegoistische Handlungen von Seiten Derer gelobt und gut genannt, denen sie erwiesen wurden, also denen sie nützlich waren; spater hat man diesen Ursprung des Lobes vergessen und die unegoistischen Handlungen einfach, weil sie gewohnheitsmassig immer als gut gelobt wurden, auch als gut empfunden—wie also ob sie an sich etwas Gutes waren.' Ree (1877: 17): 'Das Gute (Unegoistiche) [ist] wegen seines Nutzens, namlich darum gelobt worden, weil es uns einem Zustande der Glückseligkeit naher bringt. Jetzt aber loben wir die Güte nicht wegen ihrer nützenden Folgen, vielmehr erschient sie uns an und fur sich, unabhangig von allen Folgen, lobenswerth. Trotzdem kann sie ursprünglich wegen ihres Nutzens gelobt worden sein, wenn man auch spater, nachdem man sich einmal daran gewohnt hatte, sie zu loben, vergass, dass dieses Lob sich anfangs auf den Nutzen der Gemeinschaft gründete.'
only on survival advantages for the group as a whole vis-a-vis other competitor groups. Nietzsche's fundamental shift is towards differentiating concepts according to the individuals or classes who use them, and who thereby control and create values. So Nietzsche alleges that 'the judgement ''good'' does not stem from those to whom ''goodness'' is rendered'. Rather 'the noble, powerful, higher-ranking, and high-minded' laid claim to the description of themselves as good, and by virtue of the 'pathos of distance' regarded as bad 'everything base, low-minded, common, and vulgar' (GM I. 2). This has two fatal consequences for Ree's theory. First, that the concept of usefulness is out of place in explaining the origins of 'good'; secondly, that there is no original connection between 'good' and the unegoistic at all.
Part of Nietzsche's attack on the present-day idee fixe that associates the unegoistic with the concept 'good' is to untangle the two at the level of origins. So on Nietzsche's account, long before the unegoistic was marked out as especially valuable, and even before there were the concepts egoistic and unegoistic, 'good' and similar evaluations connoted nobility, prowess, and inclusion within a self-confident aristocratic class as someone with the appropriate manners and nature. The aristocrats were aristoi: the best.17 The central narrative of GM I tells how those excluded from this conception of goodness—the slaves, Jews, and early Christians—fuelled by the reactive feeling of ressentiment at the sufferings that the more powerful inflicted upon them with blithe disdain, invented a competitor conception: that to be 'good' was to fail to act as the aristocrats did. 'Good' did indeed come, in Judaeo-Christian morality, to attach to the unegoistic, but only once the notion of being egoistic or selfish was coined as a creative redescription of the powerful.
It is crucial for Nietzsche that that attachment of'good' to the unegoistic occurred at a certain time in history to serve the needs of a certain group who are defined by a reactive psychology because of the power-relation in which they stood to the noble class. The lesson is that 'good' is fixed to the unegoistic neither by nature or essence, nor by empirical universality, nor by first origin. That we think of it this way stems from a particular historical invention of those with a 'slavish' psychology, together with our
17 Nietzsche's etymology of Greek value-words in GM I does not include aristos. Perhaps it seemed too obvious to mention, or perhaps it is implicitly included since it functions as the superlative of agathos (good).
living in a culture that inherited and embellished their mode of evaluation. What Nietzsche calls the 'herd instinct' (GM I. 2) forges the very concept of egoism and propagates the new notion that its opposite is good. When the herd instinct dominates, 'peace' becomes a premium, the individual's ability to harm others must be curbed, and Ree's kind of usefulness becomes plausible as the criterion of value for the human group. But this kind of calculation of utility, where, as Nietzsche says, feelings must be kept at a 'low degree of warmth', simply has nothing to do with the ebullient, creative self-definition Nietzsche attributes to the inventors of the earlier concept of'good'.
Now we can see some justification behind Nietzsche's hyperbolical remark that he could say no to Ree's theory proposition by proposition (GM, Preface, 4). 'Good' did not attach originally to the unegoistic, it was not usefulness that marked out the good from the bad, and usefulness (if it had been relevant) could not anyway have been forgotten. But Nietzsche's shift in method is also significant. 'I distinguished ages, peoples, degrees of rank among individuals; I divided up my problem,' he says in the Preface, accurately. Instead of treating human beings as an undifferentiated and more or less ahistorical biological species, whose values bottom out in mere adaptation and survival (and for whom a 'herd morality' might indeed be appropriate), Nietzsche recognizes that values arise to fulfil psychological functions that are impossible to describe independently of the cultural position occupied by their inventors.
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