ETHICS AFTER NIETZSCHE: SOME THOUGHTS ON NATURE, CHARACTER, VIRTUE

This was originally posted on a Nietzsche discussion group.

How fixed are our natures? Is there such a thing as a universal “human nature”? Are our natures conditioned more by genetics or the environment? On the other hand, are they at all malleable? Can we work with them as at a potter’s mould? Can we "become what we are"? Does this art of overcoming become more difficult as we get older, as suggested below? When, if at all, do we lose the skill?

The ideas below are tentative, and derivative. I offer them for comment.

I am fairly convinced by the "hardwired" school of evolutionary psychology; we are born with certain capacities and limitations. This I call our individual nature. Then the individual's early upbringing and family environment triggers/activates certain capacities while others are left dormant, yet not atrophied. I call the resulting product (or rather, "climate" - see last post) our character. I suspect that we can change our characters very little after adolescence, and only by degrees, but there is probably individual variation in this.

As part of their characters, some individuals have a stronger tendency to suppress their basic drives, and conform. All men (& women?) have to do this to some extent - i.e. suppress the most violent drives - to exist within society. Whether we tend to resist or conform, it is all utterly deterministic. Different social circumstances vary the the opportunity for pre-existing elements of our characters to be expressed; this is why we appear to change as we move from place to place, geographically or in a hierarchy. The appearance is greater than the reality of the underlying change, although of course new behaviour can become habitual.

Often, and more often than not in the truly great and the criminally insane, the basic drives run contrary to external pressures; we call this Will. Our ethical systems - after Nietzsche, “fragments” would be a better word - were socially evolved systems of drive-suppression, conditioning by means of sticks and carrots. Incredibly useful to have in society, but the stronger-Willed sceptics, as well as the merely cynical, have always been able to reinterpret, reinvent or else junk them to suit themselves. The weaker-Willed castigate themselves for not following these dictates; as Nietzsche pointed out, guilt is indeed one of their strongest feelings, the characteristic manifestation of drives suppressed.

"One must follow the instincts, but persuade reason to aid them with good arguments." Beyond Good And Evil, 191

Within this post-Nietzschean world, it is still possible to construct a system of virtues, although the final ones individuals choose to aspire to, and teach their children, need not be Nietzschean ones! To be credible, they do need to be rooted in a good grasp of evolutionary psychology.

Compassion is arguably a virtue, though it was utterly contemptible to the Nietzsche we find in print. (Perhaps not in all cases. He was marvellously inconsistent. And where's the virtue in consistency?)