Has anyone made a truly profound and meaningful contribution to the study of ethics and morality post-Nietzsche...

Has anyone made a truly profound and meaningful contribution to the study of ethics and morality post-Nietzsche? Not even memeing or being condescending.

it depends.

Derek parfit

Unironically, no.

All the post-modernism/structuralism that followed since, has been nothing more than an exercise in naval-gazing that no one outside of a university's Humanities department will ever notice - minus the occasional piece of social engineering.

Philosophy needs another Copernican revolution, but more than that - because we now live in a largely post-philosophical society. I mean 'philosophical' in a meaningful sense - modern morality/philosophy is an exercise in metaphorical Epicureanism. As opposed to praising that which tastes/feels good, modern man loves what 'sounds' good. Hence the surge of 'progressivism'/etc.

The next 'giant' will not only have to change the game - he will have to get people to play the game again in general.

I think the realization that nihilism is edgy trash kinda is a bigger contribution than nihilism itself.
The meaning of life is to experience the most you can experience, and fight off the mundane

It's a good thing Nietzsche was anti-nihilism then, you fucking underman.

Of course: Foucault and Derrida.Ethics and morality are pompous idiocies until their contingencies and underlying construction are examined.

>All the post-modernism/structuralism that followed since, has been nothing more than an exercise in naval-gazing that no one outside of a university's Humanities department will ever notice

Very much this.

Philosophy needs to make itself relevant again. I think Nietzsche was among the last to recognize that for this to be the case, it has to be written in a literary/prosaical fashion.

Autists who insist upon logic equations/etc have got it all wrong.

He was anti nihilism but he still contributed to the expansion of the concept itself.
Honestly you should just gas yourself, my man.

Nietzsche's 'transvaluation of all values' was interpreted by Ludovici as a eugenic policy which would reverse the Socratic idea of man as two parts (soul and body), and essentially combat the Christian view that the needy/weak/invalided need to be cherished, but most other translators didn't adhere to this interpretation.

>Foucault and Derrida

>he still contributed to the expansion of the concept itself.

Back that up.

Nietzsche's whole shtick was life-affirmation: the context being that even one whose existence was as miserable/painful at Nietzsche's, should still stay 'yes' to life.

I don't know how anyone could read Nietzsche and think he promoted nihilism.

...

Smh.

That is only half of the equation, at best.

I never said he "promoted" it, just that he expanded on the idea.

I agree. I think the point about the next giant having the task also of getting people to play the game again is insightful.

I think we need to make new systems, that can do for individuals what religion has been able to do for the masses. Systems based not on bullshit. Nietzsche called for this in one way or another already. I love one of his aphorisms that says something like wouldn't it be great if we had temples like the religious people have temples, places designated as sacred and for the purpose of gathering to think deeply and discuss life, without the false veil of God and made up stories of what things are. New systems to foster new stronger kinds of human beings.

New kinds of human beings are already happening, but few who actually have power over themselves. What we have is humans being born out of the insane new world we're heading towards; they are more advanced in some ways but also way fucked up and not in control and still influenced by a lot of the shitty ideologies that shaped their environment.

Does that make sense? I have an 18 year old sister who spends most of her time online, takes for granted that religion is silly, seems to know life has no inherent meaning, and yet is immensely curious about the world, is not nihilistic, and seems to have a lot of energy and desire for life and experience. She is very smart. Those qualities of hers make me hopeful for her and her generation. She is like this without having ever read Nietzsche or any philosophy that I know of. The bad part is that she spends most of her time online watching and reading trash basically, and she cares about fame, and material stuff. She is studying film, but her ambition is to be liked, I think, more than it is to create something great. I hope this changes, and I kind of think it probably will. She's still young. She and a few other young people I've met who are like her make me hopeful. A little at least. That new, more resilient humans are on the way in the post-post-industrialized world.

Tangent. But yeah, the majority of so-called philosophers that came after N have basically just made careers out of analyzing and criticizing (contextualizing) his stuff, but not many have actually built past it. I think the pugilists are more onto something than the more serious academic people. I'm thinking Paglia or like Zizek even, though he's a nut. At least he's shaking western thought, a bit.

That's exactly what Nietzsche did. He took apart ethics and morality and basically laid bare why we need to get rid of the fucking concepts, or at least the weight we've attributed to them thus far.

He identified nihilism as a condition of modern times, but didn't contribute to or expand the "concept"

There is no conceptual basis for nihilism, it's the very negation of concept

If you're on board with Sartre you should check out Simone de Beauvoir's ethics of ambiguity, as well as Robert C. Solomon's conception of the passions as constitutive judgments.

If you don't like Sartre, then no not really.

Nice b8

"I teach you the overman. Man is something that shall be overcome. What have you done to overcome him?
All beings so far have created something beyond themselves; and do you want to be the ebb of this great flood and even go back to the beasts rather than overcome man? What is the ape to man? A laughingstock or a painful embarrassment. And man shall be just that for the overman: a laughingstock or a painful embarrassment...
Behold, I teach you the overman. The overman is the meaning of the earth.Let your will say: the overman shall be the meaning of the earth! I beseech you, my brothers, remain faithful to the earth, and do not believe those who speak to you of otherworldly hopes! Poison-mixers are they, whether they know it or not. Despisers of life are they, decaying and poisoned themselves, of whom the earth is weary: so let them go.
Once the sin against God was the greatest sin; but God died, and these sinners died with him. To sin against the earth is now the most dreadful thing, and to esteem the entrails of the unknowable higher than the meaning of the earth...
What is the greatest experience you can have? It is the hour of the great contempt. The hour when your happiness, too, arouses your disgust, and even your reason and your virtue.
The hour when you say, 'What matters my happiness? It is poverty and filth and wretched contentment. But my happiness ought to justify existence itself.'
The hour when you say, 'What matters my reason? Does it crave knowledge as the lion his food? It is poverty and filth and wretched contentment.'
The hour when you say, 'What matters my virtue? As yet it has not made me rage. How weary I am of my good and my evil! All that is poverty and filth and wretched contentment.'

Man is a rope, tied between beast and overman--a rope over an abyss...
What is great in man is that he is a bridge and not an end: what can be loved in man is that he is an overture and a going under...

"I say unto you: one must still have chaos in oneself to be able to give birth to a dancing star. I say unto you: you still have chaos in yourselves.
Alas, the time is coming when man will no longer give birth to a star. Alas, the time of the most despicable man is coming, he that is no longer able to despise himself. Behold, I show you the last man.
'What is love? What is creation? What is longing? What is a star?' thus asks the last man, and blinks.
The earth has become small, and on it hops the last man, who makes everything small. His race is as ineradicable as the flea; the last man lives longest.
'We have invented happiness,'say the last men, and they blink. They have left the regions where it was hard to live, for one needs warmth. One still loves one's neighbor and rubs against him, for one needs warmth...
One still works, for work is a form of entertainment. But one is careful lest the entertainment be too harrowing. One no longer becomes poor or rich: both require too much exertion. Who still wants to rule? Who obey? Both require too much exertion.
No shepherd and one herd! Everybody wants the same, everybody is the same: whoever feels different goes voluntarily into a madhouse.
'Formerly, all the world was mad,' say the most refined, and they blink...
One has one's little pleasure for the day and one's little pleasure for the night: but one has a regard for health.
'We have invented happiness,' say the last men, and they blink."

Yes.
Anscombe
Philippa Foot
Bernard Williams.
Michael Thompson.
Nomy Arpaly.
Chris Korsgaard.
etc.

But what could possible follow Nietzsche? I mean obviously that's rhetorical, if anybody could answer it, they sure as shit wouldn't be sitting here twiddling their thumbs, but Nietzsche just seems to have really hit upon a dead end. Did anyone else before Nietzsche ever hit such a dead end in ethical philosophy?

The 'overman' was more of a state of being that we need to achieve, and so for now it can serve as a goal.

That is only half the battle, however. If/when we actually become overmen, then we come to that part of the quandrary that Nietzsche didn't really address - Humanity's goal(s), and what they should be (if anything).

That's unfortunate, because our society seems much closer to one of the last man than one of the overman.

Protagoras hit a harder dead end two thousand years before Nietzsche with his relativism. E.g. "Man is the measure of all things."

>“Too bad! What? Isn’t he going – backwards?" – Yes! But you understand him badly if you complain about it. He is going backwards like someone who wants to take a great leap. – –

hey look that rare Veeky Forums poster who actually reads

>Mention a bunch of names that no one's heard of
>Get recognized as literary

Now I know.

Is this a troll?

what? Why would I be a troll.

hi user

>most famous moral philosophers of the last century
>'names nobody has heard of'

okay, user....

>Why would I be a troll.
By giving female, married, English, analytic, academic answers in response to the OP question. It's like you badly wanted to answer the question without accepting its premise.

What the fuck are you getting at? OP asked if thee have been any significant contributions made to ethics/moral philosophy since Nietzsche, so in the last 120 years or so. I listed some of the people who have made significant contributions.

Your objection is that....a lot of them are married? or women?

I guess that's true. It just seems like the 18th and 19th centuries were such a golden age for ethical philosophy.

One would hope

you people think philosophy ever had any relevance "outside of the academy?" just because you've heard of nietzsche and kant doesn't mean they're relevant to the guy pumping gas on the corner.

>OP asked if thee have been any significant contributions made to ethics/moral philosophy since Nietzsche, so in the last 120 years or so. I listed some of the people who have made significant contributions.
His exact words were "Has anyone made a truly profound and meaningful contribution to the study of ethics and morality post-Nietzsche?", what he means that can be discerned by reading the complete works of Friedrich Nietzsche, which would also happen to answer your next question:
>Your objection is that....a lot of them are married? or women?


You should also keep your mouth shut in future.

Nietzsche is more than relativism though. He realises that the men who measure should be measured and ranked themselves. That alone makes him vastly more profound than Protagoras.

I am beginning to suspect you don't know what you are talking about at all...

jesus you kids could really benefit from a little formal education.

And what makes the guy pumping gas on the corner so important? He sure as shit isn't relevant to anything that matters.

>You should also keep your mouth shut in future.

why can't you just answer my question? why should "postmodernism" (scare quotes because I'm not sure what you mean by this but i am sure it has no basis in academic theory on the topic) strive to make itself relevant outside of the academy if philosophy never was to begin with?

well then what is your rubric for relevance? because i promise you investment bankers determining your life right now aren't trying to determine if synthetic a prior propositions exist

Nietzsche in fact decries relativism. But I don't think that perspectivism and immoralism have any more epistemic worth or any more explanatory power.

philosophy ALWAYS had relevance "outside of the academy". The fact that the guy pumping gas on the corner has a right to vote, the fact that he works for a salary in a private company, the way he is dressed, the language he uses, the way he celebrated July 4th with his family, all these reflect the political and financial status of his society, the social rules and the ideals of the western civilization, of which philosophy was the cornerstone, from the ancient greeks to the modern philosophers

That is projection on your part, and in a Nietzsche thread others can see that you completely missed the obvious reference to what is problematic about your choices.

You yourself suggest why you rudely ignored the context of the question:
>Undergrad finally spots something he actually learned about in his job school last year, time to take part!

You don't feed these children, you tell them to keep their mouth shut. Stop encouraging.

But since you've already done it...

Looked at more closely, it is not the alphas who make the rules but the philosophers. The alphas merely put them into practice, as the Han dynasty did with Confucius' philosophy, Alexander with Aristotle's, the Roman emperors with the Stoics' and the Epicureans', Lenin and Mao with Marx's, Hitler, Stalin, Mussolini and Franco with Nietzsche's, and even the democratic pseudo-leaders, to an extent, with the pseudo-philosophers' liberal claptrap. It is only subhumans who think that philosophy is superfluous and causes nothing, but as the fascists' and communists' millions of victims discovered (a little too late for their liking), not only is philosophy (which is to say thought) not superfluous, but it makes the world go round.

where are you getting this from? none of what you said has anything to do with philosophical problems. "political philosophy" is really just sociology prior to the fragmentation of disciplines. no one's life was ever meaningfully altered by Nietzsche's discovery of the will to power unless they happened to be a philosopher, employed by an academy.

>he alphas merely put them into practice, as the Han dynasty did with Confucius' philosophy, Alexander with Aristotle's, the Roman emperors with the Stoics' and the Epicureans', Lenin and Mao with Marx's, Hitler, Stalin, Mussolini and Franco with Nietzsche's, and even the democratic pseudo-leaders, to an extent, with the pseudo-philosophers' liberal claptrap.

very interesting deployment of historical narrative. it will do to fast-forward probably 5 or 6 back-and-forth's to my real point: why is it that the problems philosophy dealt with in the 19th century were "real philosophy," but that the problems "discovered" (not quite the right word but it'll suffice) in the late 20th, argued on the authority of nietzsche, are invalid? instead of fabricating an ethical system on the basis of a fantasied nostalgia, why not ask the more important question, namely, what has changed about social life that has made questions about the metaphysics uninteresting for engaged academics, turning their attention to more "postmodernist" questions, presumably to do with power relations, the status of this or that marxian concept, the relationship between the signifier and the signified, etc?

1. i'm not an undergraduate
2. if you think it's inappropriate to recommend a woman or bernard williams you have no idea what you are talking about

Honestly I just find you and your replies very puzzling. Perhaps you could say something a bit more explicit about what was wrong with my choices. As far as I can see I recommended some profound ethical naturalists, skeptics about morality, moral psychologists etc. Anyone interested in philosophy (and I assume that a Nietzsche thread consists of people interested in philosophy) would be quite well served by reading them.

Do you honestly think that the ruling class never reads philosophy, and is somehow completely uninfluenced by it?

>no one's life was ever meaningfully altered by Nietzsche's discovery of the will to power unless they happened to be a philosopher, employed by an academy.

Except, y'know, that whole fascism thing.

oh user, please go away.

you know full well that's not what I'm talking about, nor what op is talking about. you're talking about "the study of ethics and morality." that is only advanced by philosophers, and the discourse is so abstracted at this point that unless its your job you aren't swinging down to the local book shop to grab the latest ethical treatise.

>1. i'm not an undergraduate
My condolences.
>2. if you think it's inappropriate to recommend a woman or bernard williams you have no idea what you are talking about
Both your response and interpretation of what I said are hilarious. Read Nietzsche, no one is here to be transparent and encouraging to those who clearly haven't.

>Anyone interested in philosophy (and I assume that a Nietzsche thread consists of people interested in philosophy) would be quite well served by reading them
I'm not going to dispute that, people have different conceptions of what is profound or not, but I insist that the thread was not asking for that type of recommendation. I honestly thought you were trolling, having read Nietzsche thoroughly and assuming a different interpretation of the OP. I'm puzzling because I purposefully want to point out something to the people this thread seems intending for, and at the same time I don't want you to receive that same point, in case you derail the thread with it. If you are just playing naive then 10/10 but by this point I think you are genuine.

This is correct, most of Veeky Forums is too far up their own ass with early modern philosophers to realize it's still an active field. There's also Philippa Foot, JJV, Singer, and de Beauvoir (arguably all the french existentialists had some sort of moral theory, although de Beauvoir is the one who sticks out) to name a few.

You honestly can't understand Nietzsche at all if you have a reading that makes my suggestions incompatible with OP's question. This is fine, he is a difficult philosopher. But quit with this esoteric bullshit. You look like a moron to anyone who knows anything about philosophy.

Nietzsche studied ethics and philosophy, and his philosophy was influential dynamite.

Maybe you confuse the specialised state-sponsored self-titled "study of ethics and morality" for being the totality of philosophy, but even the most boring specialised philosophical labourer would tend to admit that within the tradition they are nothing compared to those canonical greats.

>outside of a university's Humanities department
Which is a status Nietzsche holds tenuously. I don't consider the adoration of a few teenaged edge lords with a weak grasp on his actual work to be a significant addition to his relevance.

The fact that people didn't realize this was a joke is just sad.

I do think Derrida is a really important philosopher, even if he is mega-edgy

yeah, and N's whole project was to show how ethics and metaphysics are completely bunk and historically determined, thus leading to "postmodern" problems of historicity which you loathe for some uneducated reason. my points stand, thank you for proving them.

lol

yes they are

t. investment banker

You seem awfully sure of yourself. I feel like the one on home soil yet I still treat your naivety courteously. You would regret complaining about esotericism if I were to rape you like that other clueless pleb.

>I feel like the one on home soil

This is your problem. You shouldn't.

>thus leading to "postmodern" problems of historicity which you loathe for some uneducated reason
Stop conflating different posters. You were wrong about how influential philsophy is.

What? It's pretty common knowledge that the Nazis and fascists both appropriated and misinterpreted concepts from Nietzsche.

Well yeah your average university academic is pretty useless. But to say that someone like Nietzsche was somehow completely uninfluential in the real world is nonsense. His idea of a Will to Power with no regard to morals was extremely influential in the Futurists and later Fascists and Nazis. You're right, Joe the gas pumper isn't going to pick up and read Nietzsche and have a life-changing epiphany, but then I don't think anybody ever said he would. Philosophy has been and always will be a hobby of the patricians, the bourgeois, the people in charge who change the course of history.

Oh, of course. It's just important to emphasize that it was a severe misinterpretation/misrepresentation. Also fuck his sister.

I am not the one who came into a thread about Nietzschean ethics and posted this and remained clueless about why those were bizarre answers in that context.
>But who cares? I was taught about these at least

Næss

I guess then it would be more accurate to say that what people thought Nietzsche wrote was more influential than what he actually wrote.

I mean I don't think 's argument goes through at all but I really don't think there's any meaningful action taken by the truly powerful ruling group in the western world that's determined or even meaningfully influenced by the academic philosophical tradition.

Okay, just humor me then and offer a few examples of what an appropriate suggestion might have been

I think this is a good point. It's probably true of most philosophers, but is certainly true of Nietzsche.

philosophy? or "ethical and moral problems?" i maintain that no one - rightly - gives a shit about these unless it's their job to. for the professions, ethics is pretty much codified.

>hashtag goalposts
>teach me china

>>Mention a bunch of names that no one's heard of
>>Get recognized as literary
Have you honestly not even heard of these people? I haven't read original works by all of them but honestly I'm not sure how you could exist in philosophy for any real amount of time without at least having come across their names and general status as moral philosophers and all I did was minor in phil.

Wait, so you're saying you think the chinese both control enough (abstract) capital to be the primary constituents of the "ruling class" and that their decisions are significantly impacted by academic philosophy, western or otherwise?

The example I've been using all thread is Nietzsche's influence of early 20th century political movements like the Futurists, Fascists, and Nazis.

I came in at . But to respond, I'd say yes, sure, and not really insofar as you consider that group distinct from the former. None of the three of them really remain relevant today beyond in their capacity as boogeymen (to which degree nazis and fascists might as well have been the "pro-evil for arbitrary values of evil" party, their philosophical underpinnings are functionally irrelevant today, they simply are that which it is undesirable to be)

>None of the three of them really remain relevant today beyond in their capacity as boogeymen
But isn't that immensely influential? I mean imagine if Hitler and Mussolini hadn't been portrayed as the literal faces of evil for the last 75 years. I mean hell, nowadays fascist is basically a synonym for evil instead of a legitimate political ideology.

your a dorable

th...thanks? what do you mean by this tho, user?

>I mean hell, nowadays fascist is basically a synonym for evil instead of a legitimate political ideology.
I totally agree! But in transforming the popular concept of fascism from valid political position to epitome of evil we've stripped it of any philosophical foundations it may have had. No one gives a fuck if there's a good argument for fascism anymore, if Nietzsche would have supported it or not, it's just bad. That's not influence, that's influencing something that got smeared by a widely successful smear campaign. I'm not pro-fascism but I can recognize that it's unpopularity is a product of social forces rather than the intrinsic reasons for which I think it fails

Fascism makes fascistic philosophy relevant, fascistic philosophy does not create the relevance of fascism. Fascism can be justified by religion or ideology, it doesn't need philosophy.

Anal-ytic will be the future when happiness and suffering become formalized and resources become thoroughly quantified and behavioral sciences become as precise as particle sciences.

Then we will all be ruled by ethical-calculations by super computers that command world-creating machines, ultimately leading to a Utopia.

That's so completely and utterly contradictory with Nietzsche's texts that I sincerely doubt these people even read them. Nietzsche is very critical towards science and the scientific way of thinking. He very certainly never thought that anything was ever "proven", let alone anything relating to God, including his (non-)existence. Fucking fedoras.

>Nietzsche is very critical towards science and the scientific way of thinking.

He also has tremendous reverence and respect for it. He is mostly just critical of the idea that science could play a role in the life of an individual or group that religion once played. Or....he doesn't think it can, but he thinks its something of a perversion and psychically unhealthy.

Makes sense. Science shouldn't be this "hip" thing that people use to make an identity of themselves. It should be a tool for furthering human understanding of our universe. The moment you want science to do something for you, you allow your own biases to cloud your findings, essentially invalidating any results you get from it.

We already had this problem with religion/God. If people hadn't let their own confirmation bias get in the way when exploring the nature of God, the soul/consciousness, and the universe, there really wouldn't be any distinction between religion and science right now.

Agreed. And it should say above "he doesn't think it can't", not "he doesn't think it can". I think Nietzsche believed science had already come to play the role that christianity used to play in some peoples lives.