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And, in other news, we will not be abandoning this original address (http://camelswithhammers.com).  Soon the archives of old posts, except for Eric Steinhart’s, will be at the new site rather than here.  Soon clicking on all of the older posts (except Eric Steinhart’s, which will remain exclusively at this original Camels With Hammers) will automatically redirect clickers to their new home on the new site.

After that, this, the original Camels With Hammers will remain for exclusively philosophical blogging purposes.  This will become more of a professional philosophy blog and much less of an atheism activism blog.  This will be where I blog more technically rigorous material that may interest casual readers less but advanced philosophers more.  Eric and I still are interested in building this site into a blogging hub for non-theist philosophers.  Ideally we would like to make it a blog with a greater plurality of voices.  It will be less distinctively my personal blog where I write about whatever happens to interest me.

At the new Freethought Blogs Camels With Hammers, I will continue to do atheist activist blogging and continue to write the sorts of philosophical posts you have become accustomed to at Camels With Hammers wherein I attempt to be simultaneously philosophically rigorous and popularly accessible.    

The two versions of Camels With Hammers will not overlap.  They will become separate blogs with separate identities.  I will be the common unifier between them and they will both be blogs for non-theist philosophy.  I will likely draw attention to posts at the original Camels With Hammers on the new site but do not plan to cross post them in their entirety as PZ presently does.  So please add both sites to your RSS readers if you want to automatically keep up with everything I am blogging.  And do not be surprised or think this old site is dead if, at least in the short run, it is updated less frequently than it has been in the past.

As I move on to my new blogging home and begin to reconceive this old one, let me offer my enormous thanks to those of you who have regularly trekked to the outskirts of the internet to read what I have had to write and to offer your comments on it.  One thing about being a relatively low profile blogger that is surprisingly rewarding is finding how much the readers you have tell you about yourself.  You draw people who connect especially well with you in your unique style of thinking and writing and I have been extraordinarily proud to see what kinds of people with what kinds of thoughts have been especially drawn to this blog.  I have put in an enormous amount of time and energy into building this blog over the last two years and the consistent quality of Your Thoughts and the philosophical spirit in which they have been offered have always been the most rewarding pay offs and the motivation to continue.

So, thank you so much and please help me build the new site and, if you are up for it, help this old one find its new purpose.

With that, let me link you all to my first post at Freethought Blogs: http://freethoughtblogs.com/camelswithhammers/2011/08/22/hello-freethought-blogs/

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But before I can spell out Nietzsche’s constructive attitudes about how there can be true judgments in the realm of values and how we could create moralities of any value, we must make sense of what it is he means to tell us about himself and about morality when he refers to himself as an immoralist.  So that is what I want to begin to do with in this post.

In the preface to Daybreak: Thoughts on the Prejudices of Morality, at the beginning of section 3, Nietzsche writes:

Hitherto, the subject reflected on least adequately has been good and evil: it was too dangerous a subject.  Conscience, reputation, Hell, sometimes even the police have permitted and continue to permit no impartiality; in the presence of morality, as in the face of any authority, one is not allowed to think, far less to express an opinion: here one has to–obey! As long as the world has existed no authority has yet been willing to let itself become the object of criticism. and to criticise morality itself, to regard morality as a problem, as problematic: what?  has that not been–is that not–immoral?

Nietzsche refers to morality here in the singular, as though it were simply one thing, even though he knows quite well that there are numerous moralities.  When talking thus about morality, i.e., as though it were a monolithic entity, I interpret him primarily as taking the stance of a dissident under the reign of a specific morality which wants to be, and is assumed by most to be, “morality itself”.  But Nietzsche does not think it is all that can or ought to be considered “morality”.  To this effect, he writes in Beyond Good and Evil, section 202:

Morality in Europe today is herd animal morality—in other words, as we understand it, merely one type of human morality beside which, before which, and after which many other types, above all higher moralities, are, or ought to be, possible.  But this morality resists such a “possibility,” such an “ought” with all its power: it says stubbornly and inexorably, “I am morality itself, and nothing besides is morality.”

So the idea that there is only one kind of morality or that a specific morality can be “morality itself” is actually false, according to Nietzsche.  It is also not the case that Nietzsche is against all moralities—he clearly makes the normative judgment that “higher moralities” ought to be possible.  This means that Nietzsche thinks they would be a good thing that should be brought about.  This argument about what to be can itself be taken as evidence that Nietzsche’s “immoralism” is not an abandonment of all normative or “moral” judgments.  What he is attacking is a specific kind of morality which like an authoritarian ruler insists on never being questioned but only obeyed, and insists upon being seen as “morality itself”.

So, in the original text we are considering (Daybreak 3) Nietzsche adopts the perspective of someone under this authoritarian morality’s rule and who is writing for readers who accept this morality’s rule as well, and he notes that according to the way this morality functions, all questioning and dissent are morally forbidden and, so, according to its standards genuine, critical reexamination of it is “immoral”.  So Nietzsche, in open defiance of such oppressive strictures on investigation and reevaluation, takes this label of “immoral” as a point of pride and provocation.   If questioning the dominant morality is immoral, he will be an immoralist.

In fact, Nietzsche does not think that that questioning received moral precepts is actually a “wrong” or “bad” thing.   He does not actually accept the full legitimacy of the morality which judges him “immoral” for questioning it.   So Nietzsche’s immoralism is not a call to do whatever one genuinely thinks is wrong or bad according to one’s own best reasoned moral judgments.  He is not saying, “Determine what you think is right or good and do the opposite!”  On the contrary, immoralism means being willing to be perceived as immoral for daring to challenge false, dominant moral norms and, therein, challenging the very assumption of those norms’ absolute authority.

Since people regularly conflate their particular moral judgments with morality itself, whenever one promotes an opposing value to one widely held to be moral, one risks being accused of attacking morality itself and the authority of all moral rules whatsoever.  One risks being accused of being an immoralist.  Nietzsche accepts the mantle as a challenging affront to the authoritarian character of morality which challenges its legitimacy.

Implicit in all of this, Nietzsche is targeting “morality” as a powerful institution, not merely as a conceptual ideal.  He thinks of morality as not the merely a referee in struggles for power but as a power player itself.  And specifically he thinks of morality as a tyrannical power which cowers people from challenging itself and which wrongly impresses upon people absolute prohibitions and absolute commands.

If other Enlightenment moral philosophers, like Kant, are correct and morality ideally should be based on autonomy and reason, then it is morally scandalous and the height of all hypocrisies to the extent that Nietzsche is correct and in actual practice moralities dominate individuals and cultures in ways that are heteronomous and which actively discourage vigorous moral questioning and openness to changes of values.

I think this is the core meaning of Nietzsche’s paradoxical charges that “Morality is just as ‘immoral’ as any other thing on earth” (The Will to Power 308) and that “morality is itself a form of immorality” (The Will to Power 308) and that “The victory of a moral ideal is achieved by the same ‘immoral’ means as every victory: force, lies, slander, injustice.” (The Will to Power 306).

Moralities as institutional powers can be critiqued for how they live up to moral ideals in their implementation.  Do moralities (or those actual people and institutions which enforce them) impose and leverage their authority through lies, bullying, or any other manners of coercive force?  Insofar as they do they are probably hypocritical on their own terms and they are definitely immoral on the terms of the Enlightenment autonomy-based morality which Nietzsche implicitly judges them against repeatedly throughout his writings.

There is more to say about the topics above.  In particular, I should note that in the above discussion, I realize did not actually address any of the texts where Nietzsche specifically uses the term “immoralist” or identifies himself directly as an immoralist or explicitly defines his usages of the term for himself.  Those texts will complicate the meaning of the term further and in future posts I hope to do justice to those complexities.

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After years of intense focus on both reading and doing Nietzsche scholarship, towards the end of my dissertation my focus shifted to reading and doing more work on moral philosophy. And in the last two years of blogging at Camels With Hammers my focus has been primarily on continuing to talk about moral philosophy and has expanded to also include a heavy influence on the philosophy of religion and of atheism. I have continued to read Nietzsche but have for the most part been disinclined to blog about him with any frequency, even though this site’s name is an allusion to his philosophy and even though his philosophy is my area of strongest technical expertise.

But last night I was overwhelmed with a strong sense of the potential value of regular blogging on Nietzsche. Nietzsche himself is, to my mind, the 19th Century equivalent of a blogger. Rather than writing traditional books with focused topics and chapter long arguments, Nietzsche wrote most of his books in the form of numerous, numbered, short, several hundred word essays on a variety of loosely-related topics. His sections are self-contained enough that they can often be read profitably in isolation from the larger books they appear in or even from the sections immediately preceding or following them. But for a true and rich understanding of any given section’s full and most nuanced meaning, it must ultimately must be contextualized within the voluminous totality of Nietzsche’s complete writings. The same goes for his short, sentence or two long, aphorisms (or, as they would be called today, his “tweets”.*)

What I want to do therefore is devote blog posts to specific sections of Nietzsche’s writing and both explicate what is going on in each section and give the context which comes from years of studying and systematizing Nietzsche. I want to develop my own reading of Nietzsche by exploring how sections I did not have room to cover in my dissertation exemplify the points I made there (which I will reiterate here for you, since, of course you have not read my dissertation). Along the way I will be leisurely building a fuller and more nuanced textual and philosophical case for my interpretation of both Nietzsche and the philosophical insights he offers which I think deserve a wider hearing. I will be addressing head-on texts where Nietzsche says things I disagree with philosophically and I will be defending my interpretations of Nietzsche in the contexts of texts that on the surface seem to refute me.

Most importantly, I will be mining a rich wealth of insights for both professional philosophers and lay people (especially atheists) alike. Nietzsche is in many ways an under-tapped resource for the atheist community—despite his ubiquitous cultural association with atheism. Unfortunately, he is a provocative writer who says many things which out of context can be exploited by the enemies of atheism (and at least a few things which even in context, we would do best to disassociate ourselves from). I appreciate many atheists’ wariness to be linked to him because of his potential for drawing counter-productive controversy or because they do not have an adequate background in his writings to make sense of what is really going on in his writings. I hope to use more of Camels With Hammers to give such atheists the necessary guidance to properly understand and debate Nietzsche’s ideas for themselves.

Nietzsche is not a prophet to be read as an unquestionable fount of divine revelation. I will often enthusiastically trumpet some things he says as exciting and deserving of influence. I will regularly try to soften some of his more excessive rhetorical blows so they don’t overshadow his more nuanced insights. I will frequently attempt to show the deeper harmonies between his ideas where others see only flat contradictions. And I will give more positive attention to the humane and constructive side to his discussions of morality than one often hears from those who focus only on his harshly negative side.

But for all this I am not arguing that he is inerrant or free of any contradictions whatsoever or that his ideas have authority to which any one must submit categorically, without reasoning for themselves. Sometimes I will encourage running far far away from a given idea he defends. And sometimes we will learn much more from the debate he inspires than from his actual position. And sometimes the dialectic of my defense of him and your vigorous rejection of him will be the most productive aspect of these posts.

Feel free to suggest sections from Nietzsche that you would like me to discuss. Sometimes I may focus on a particular series of sections from one work, other times I may post on several sections that tackle a common theme across different works, and other times I may just discuss something that randomly struck me as worth highlighting. There will be no programmatic approach to the reading and writing schedule. I will just write on one section (or series of sections or group of sections) at a time and over time a fuller and fuller sense of Nietzsche’s philosophy and its value will emerge.

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*Apologies to Eric Steinhart for the Nietzsche/Twitter observation.

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This is probably a minority of Christians who are like this. A significant minority, mind you, not just some extreme fringe, but probably a minority nonetheless.

As to this not being inline with Jesus’ turn-the-other-cheek, man, that’s just for starters. I’m still baffled how these Prosperity Gospel people manage to avoid thinking about that whole thing about the camel and the eye of a needle. The Christian Religious Right in America holds pretty much the exact opposite philosophy as Jesus.

(Please note I am not one of these “Jesus was a great philosopher” atheists. Legitimate doubts about the historicity of Jesus aside, even the Jesus character in the gospels is a clear douchebag a lot of the time. Look no further than the story of the fig tree. Quick summary: Jesus sees a fig tree in the distance and decides he’s hungry. He gets there and there’s no fruit, so he’s all like, “What the fuck, fig tree?!?” And his apostles are like, “Uh, Jesus? Figs are out of season, yo.” So Jesus gets all pissed and he goes, “Ain’t no fucking fig tree gonna mess with THE JESUS,” and he curses the fig tree so that it will die and nothing will ever grow there again. WTF?!?!??)

‘Nuff Said.

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via PZ

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Blair Scott, a spokesman for the American Atheists, Inc., was subjected to over 8,000 death threats and other violent rhetoric after appearing on Fox News. Some examples:

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