The Will to Nothingness: An Essay on Nietzsche’s On the Genealogy of Morality

One might imagine making a rough division between two different modes of modern European philosophy. In one, the way that the world seems to proceed belies the actual ground of things; the task of philosophy is to uncover the sources of our misunderstanding and identify the categories that account for genuinely real processes. The other mode of philosophy questions the determinacy and stability of the categories through which we make sense of the world. Here the task of philosophy is not to settle on the right categories or the actual ground, but to gain some purchase on our confusions and self-deceptions when we try to make sense of things. There may be some philosophers (Hegel and Wittgenstein, perhaps) who try to straddle the divide here. But in general the divide is great enough that if an interpreter mistakes one mode for the other it would be costly: no matter how circumspect the particular claims are, all the interpretive results will be misguided. Something like this, I want to claim, is the case with Bernard Reginster's The Will to Nothingness.There are many detailed discussions in Reginster's book. For the purpose of this review, however, I want to focus on the general critical argument, in part because there is already at least one excellent review of the book (Mark Migotti's in Notre Dame Philosophical Reviews, June 1, 2022), and in part because I think it goes wrong at the level of its entire approach. On Reginster's account GM is composed of a series of "psychological studies" (3) of a version of Christian morality and its central aspects. These psychological studies treat moral judgments as symptoms of affective states, and in this way uncover the functional role that moralities play in the affective lives of agents. Moralities are "designed" (12), as it were, for emotional regulation. Christian morality, in particular, expresses the ressentiment of those beset by feelings of impotence and serves their will to power. Genealogical critique proceeds by uncovering the actual function of morality and then showing how well (or rather poorly) morality fulfills its proper function. Moral beliefs are supposed to enhance the agents' feeling of power, but instead work to sicken and enervate them, and indeed morality "incites" (46) such a pernicious functioning.While I am sympathetic to the idea that genealogy offers a functional assessment of morality, I think that Reginster has taken the wrong approach here. So now I want to draw a broad contrast between Reginster's approach and an alternative one, and then offer six sets of reasons for favoring the alternative approach.On Reginster's account, Nietzsche is interested in specifying and analyzing a precise conception of morality, with all of its attendant normative judgments, metaethical commitments, characteristic beliefs about moral psychology, and so on. These features were all, as constitutive of the morality in question, familiar to the believers in that morality. The purpose, then, of a historical account of origins is to give a unitary explanation for the adoption of the morality in terms of a single underlying affective condition and drive. Agents adopt moralities because, whether they realize it or not, holding moral beliefs facilitates a form of emotional self-regulation. To criticize these beliefs Nietzsche makes a sort of inverted teleological argument. He identifies the essential function of the beliefs and shows that they work against the fulfillment of their own function.Here, by contrast, is a different way of thinking about what Nietzsche is doing. He is not interested in explaining the moral beliefs of reflective, fully developed agents. Instead, he wants to explain how the semantic resources that contribute to morality could have become available at all. The puzzle, for Nietzsche, is how the basic terms of morality could ever even seem to make sense. So the historical account of genealogy is meant to suggest social and psychological contexts out of which some sense could gradually emerge. The metaphysical commitments and tales of moral psychology that have agglomerated onto morality are not an inherent feature of it: they are clumsy, post-factum attempts to fill out the meaning of confused notions. In fact, there is nothing inherent to morality, no core sense, no common element. People just used words (such as "evil" or "sin") and not only did they not know what those words meant, but those words didn't have any meaning outside of the strategic purposes that they were taken up for. Genealogy tells stories about new vocabularies, and the appropriation of old vocabularies, and about the dynamics that these vocabularies have with social practices and human psychology. But there are no fixed notions or ultimate definitions. Rather than trying to give a definitive account of anything, Nietzsche wants to give an account of the continual transformation of ideas and ourselves along with purposes and social contexts. The critique of morality is not of a specific conception, but rather that this process of reappropriating and renewing a sense of purposefulness has exhausted itself; its meanings have emptied out, and it offers no way forward.1. Here is the first of six sets of interconnected considerations in favor of taking Nietzsche's approach to be the latter one. This is what Reginster writes about his "pragmatic approach": "What explains why a person adopts a certain value judgment is what it does for her: it serves a certain emotional need. . . . This form of explanation thus explains moralities in terms of natural facts about human beings, specifically facts about their emotional needs" (33). This seems innocuous enough: there is something to be explained, namely morality, and some proposed explanandum, namely emotional needs. Consider, however, the way that the explanatory challenge is structured: there are individuals, each of whom could presumably adopt any of a wide range of beliefs, and the sole explanatory factor is something subjective about the individual. But Reginster is explaining the wrong sort of thing. Compare what it might mean to explain marriage. One approach would be to explain how the institution came about, what made it successful and entrenched it, how various social factors affected it, what its contemporary standing is, and so on. A small part of the account of the institution would presumably be that (some) individuals participate in it because it serves their affective needs. But appealing to affective needs, by itself, presumes that the institution, with its specific character, is already in place; it does nothing to explain what the participants can respond to. Reginster's approach is more like explaining why, say, Renzo and Lucia want to get married. It's hard to imagine that anyone needs to generalize so much, but in any case, it addresses a questions about what entices individuals to participate in a particular, fully formed institution.2. What is the genealogical critique of morality a critique of? Here is Reginster: "The primary target of Nietzsche's genealogical inquiries appears to be a cluster of framing beliefs, including evaluative beliefs . . . and descriptive beliefs about the character of moral agency. . . . I will generally assume that Nietzsche's genealogies have moral beliefs as their target" (11). We can connect this to the previous point: if what you are trying to explain is something particular to individuals, produced by their emotional needs, then it will make sense to treat the "target" as individual belief (or lots of individuals' beliefs). But what are the beliefs that comprise morality? It's not at all clear, but here is one likely candidate, from Reginster's discussion of the ascetic ideal: "What is most valuable in life transcends and therefore excludes in whole or in part the well-being that consists in the satisfaction of natural human 'instincts'" (153). And we can presumably add to this some claims about guilt and free will and so on. But then we arrive at a set of beliefs that no one actually has. Nietzsche, then, would be offering a critique of a very specific morality that doesn't exist. Characterizing morality in terms of belief requires directing the critique toward a specific morality, and even if it exists, that morality can escape criticism simply by avoiding any of the targeted beliefs. It leaves little to say about morality per se, and, furthermore, it diminishes the significance of the ascetic ideal. Reginster recognizes that no one believes a straightforward, literal form of the ascetic ideal, so he finds only "attenuated forms" (8) in the world today, whereas Nietzsche insists that what remains is the very "core Kern" (GM II:27) of the ideal.3. Reginster's account depends on being able to identify an essential function of morality: the critique turns on how this function is carried out. Here is his account of essential function: "To say that it is the function of an object to produce certain effects is to explain why the object is there. . . . If the very reason of being of the object is that it is especially well-suited to produce these effects, then this suitedness must be rooted in properties that are essential to it" (31). I want to question how we can attribute the idea of an essential function to Nietzsche and what good it could possibly do. Here is a familiar passage from GM: "Everything happening in the organic world is an overpowering, a becoming master, and all overpowering and becoming master is a new interpreting, an adaptation in which the previous 'meaning' or 'purpose' must be obscured or even obliterated . . .. All purposes are only signs that a will to power has mastered something less powerful and stamped it with the meaning of a function" (GM II:12). This suggests that there can be no essential functions, but at most provisional embossings of a function on something that can later take on a new function. Even if there were essential functions, why would that matter? I take it that Reginster wants to say something like: morality is bad not like a dull knife is bad at being a knife, but tout court bad because it harms in its essential functioning. Let's imagine an overpowerful hair dryer that, however, is used for thawing frozen water lines. It seems fine for use in its alternative purpose. Or imagine a bread knife that somehow "invites" (186) use for slicing bagels. It would be reasonable to say: Don't use this to slice bagels in your open palm. But then your critique is of a particular usage and a potential result, and not of the thing itself or anything essential about it. And moral beliefs, I suspect (and Nietzsche suspects), function in many different ways in different people.4. Reginster offers lots of definitions and accounts that he attributes to Nietzsche. For example, according to Reginster, Nietzsche "defines guilt as the affective registration by the agent of his failure to keep faith with his evaluative commitments" (7; cf. 122–23). There are also accounts of slave morality (89, 98), the sense of self (69), the basis of promissory obligation (127), personhood (78), the concept of personal worth (139), equality (89), ressentiment (5, 59), freedom of will (94), and so on. These accounts are integral to Reginster's approach. He wants to be able to theorize each thing in some other terms, so that ressentiment is an affective orientation generated by the will to power, or slave morality involves a core commitment to a certain conception of equality, for example. And he needs to do this in order to make his explanatory claims—for instance, that ressentiment-driven moral beliefs impede well-being—that move through all these terms. Nietzsche insists, however, that "only what has no history is definable" (GM II:13). This is no mere quibble. One might think that it's always valuable to sharpen ideas, even when in their typical usage they don't have theoretical clarity. But it's central to Nietzsche's approach that guilt, sin, punishment, and so on aren't anything specific at all: he recounts histories of emergence as a way of presenting what is indefinable in terms of roles they could have played in human lives. Nietzsche's approach is not to make determinate claims about clearly defined things, but on the contrary to claim that we have no idea what we're doing or who we are when we describe ourselves. So it's not just that Reginster is offering, as Nietzsche's, accounts of things that Nietzsche didn't actually have accounts of (as if one were trying to give Kant's theory of pinball). It's that Reginster is offering accounts of things that Nietzsche is explicitly warning against giving accounts of (as if one were trying to give Kant's theory of existence as a predicate).5. Here is another statement of Reginster's general approach: "the genealogies explain moral values in terms of their functional usefulness in serving some of the moral believer's emotional needs" (13). What I want to call attention to in this case is the single form of explanation: moral believers have beliefs because it serves their emotional needs. This form of explanation presumably applies to the present and also the past and future. It provides an account of origins, emergence, why a belief "persisted" (34), and what purpose will continue to obtain. All this would seem to conflict with Nietzsche's warnings about origins (e.g., BGE 32), about purposes (e.g., GS 360), or about conflating origins and purposes (e.g., D 37, GM II:13). It also seems to wash away history: if there is no significant difference between how moral values originally came about and their subsequent history, then everyone effectively reinvents morality in their mind every day, to satisfy the same affective interests. There is no real difference between creating the most basic forms of value, taking up later iterations, and internalizing the most refined forms.6. My final criticism is that the personae in Reginster's account are complex selves with reflective capacities. Here, for example, is Reginster on will to power: "My conjecture is this: the will to power is a drive toward psychological self-preservation, which expresses a fundamental need to have, and to preserve, a sense of self, and more precisely a sense of the reality of one's self. . . . The sense of self refers to your consciousness of your self as a certain sort of entity" (69). One could argue the will to power is characterized by Nietzsche as a subpersonal or nonpersonal drive, and that the conjecture is false on that basis. But I find it more problematic that the protagonists of Reginster's genealogies already have capacities that need to be accounted for in the genealogies. Will to power seems to require fully formed subjects with developed self-conceptions, who are conscious of these conceptions, can see certain harms as threats to their conceptions, see these threats in terms of an appearance–reality distinction, see these threats as challenging a view of themselves as substantial entities, and place their response to these threats as among their most urgent needs. Reginster's subjects are always reflective individuals with modern psychological concerns. Nietzsche, by contrast, depicts processes in which bare self-assertion, being accountable to oneself, gaining a measure of oneself by comparison to others, and relating oneself to "any ideal and imaginative events" (GM II:18) all require radical innovation.I suspect that some criteria of interpretive success would be that the object of Nietzsche's critique is sufficiently general that it includes a wide range of social practices (at least widely accepted moral positions, but also epistemic and cultural practices that Nietzsche takes to be implicated); Nietzsche's interest in the historical emergence of morality should be reflected in the critique; and the critique shouldn't depend on contingencies of what makes individuals feel less weak or on essentialist claims about function. I do not think that The Will to Nothingness satisfies these criteria.