Between Cynicism and Idealism: Nietzsche and the Slanderers of Human Nature

Abstract

This paper is a response to what I see as an important and hitherto unresolved tension in the Nietzsche corpus. In many contexts, Nietzsche seems quite cynical about human nature. Whether or not Nietzsche is a psychological egoist is debatable. But at the very least, he displays a deep suspicion of ostensibly altruistic or idealistic motivations. At the same time, Nietzsche clearly rejects the economic view of human nature which has come to inform our understanding of egoism, the picture of homo economicus inexorably striving to maximize his gains. Indeed, Nietzsche often lauds the idealism of free spirits and other admirable personages, while scorning the more calculating attitudes of the bourgeois. Finally, Nietzsche often expresses his uneasiness with egoism as a concept, suggesting that it is a historically contingent idea that obscures the nature of human agency.Having describing this tension, I argue that Nietzsche‘s penchant for cynicism is best understood as but a tool by which to expose the limitations of slave morality, and does not reveal his most basic views on human nature. Nietzsche‘s anti-teleological conception of human action, I argue, forbids the easy assimilation of the will to power to psychological egoism. With this in mind, I seek to demonstrate that the Genealogy of Morals is intended to illustrate how the concept of egoism could only have arisen out of, and is only intelligible within the context of, slave morality, which wielded suspicion about human egoism as a mechanism through which to caricature the hated masters and slander human nature in general. Nietzsche‘s brand of cynicism, therefore, is to be understood as a means of undermining a cynicism of another sort. As the secular heirs of slave morality, modern cynics are less perspicuous and hard-nosed than they imagine. In praising egoism at the expense of altruism, Nietzsche is actually encouraging self-realization, not endorsing the caricature which slave morality has been made of it. Nietzsche‘s view of human nature and is far from rosy, and his morality may be difficult to swallow. But given Nietzsche‘s views on human agency, it would be a mistake to interpret him as a psychological or ethical egoist, for these views raises questions about the basic philosophical premises that underlie these positions.