I had wanted to also post a Nietzschean review using the medium of the Simpsons, as presented in an essay from the book The Simspons and Philosophy: The D’oh! of Homer but having just re-read it I think it would be detrimental to this particular dialogue, so I will save it for another day. The author of the essay Thus Spake Bart: On Nietzsche and the Virtues of being bad presents a very coherent overview of Nietzsches work and applies it to the character of Bart Simpson, asking us is Bart the bad boy Nietzsche is talking about?

Two particular themes emerge, and in order to avoid this becoming a review, these are all I shall mention of it.

The first theme is about appearance versus reality, it outlines how Nietzsche developed his thoughts from a Schopenhaueren dualism (appearance masks reality) to eventually disregard that ideal and embrace a chaotic singular ideal.

The world is a chaotic, meaningless flux of becoming, and to be real, to be a part of the world, to be a part of the flux, is to appear. The appearance doesn’t mask reality, the appearance is reality.

The author of the essay tells us that The Simpsons is perhaps the perfect embodiment or metaphor for what Nietzsche is saying about the fiction of the “doer” being projected behind the “deed”. I shall not go into this in any great detail as it is dangerous and anti-Wittgensteinian territory and thus not according to my tastes :)

Suffice then to describe it thus:-

in a show like The Simpsons there truly is no being behind the doing. What you see is what you get. Homer, Bart, Lisa, Marge and Maggie are indeed no more than the sum of their actions. There is no substance, no ego, no being behind the phenomena, which then causes those actions.

This of course is unsatisfactory to a Wittgensteinian like myself, where the deed must precede the word, the noun precede the verb, the I precede the I do. I would point to Matt Groening as the sub-creator (to use Tolkiens metaphor). As the doer behind the deed. And would then explain the beings who occupy the Simpsons world as being subects to the Matt Groening sub-creating language game. Anyhow I digress.

The second major theme was exploring whether Bart, who is the ultimate bad boy and who does what he wants is the embodiment of the Nietzschean ideal. To cut a long story short the answer is no he is not. He is in fact one of two things, either a member of the slave-morality insofar as how Lisa twice explained to him (in Sweet Seymour Skinner’s Baadasssss Song and in Bart’s Inner Child) that he defines himself through his rebellion against authority, thereby causing him a crisis of identity if that authority is removed, or if everyone behaved like Bart. Or if not a member of slave-morality Bart is an example of the pitfalls of the post-Nietzschean world, an anti-hero to the Ubermensch, a nihilist.

The most extreme form of nihilism would be the view that every belief, every considering-something-true, is necessarily false because there simply is no true world. The Will To Power; section 15, p14

What was that? Did I really just read that? Indeed Nietzsche appears to be rejecting the very nihilism that he is sometimes credited with championing. An opinion in fact implied in my question concerning what authority (on grounds of taste) does Nietzsche have to tell us that might is not right. Nietzsche warns us against the uncultivated tastes, and although he does not explicitly state that might is not right, he does seem to imply as much in his account of the origins of slave-morality in his On the Genealogy of Morals:-

It was “the good” themselves, that is to say, the noble, powerful high-stationed and high-minded, who felt and established themselves and their actions as good, that is, of the first rank, in contradistinction to al the low, low-minded, common and plebian.

It was as a consequence, we are told, of the nobilities strength and superiority in every aspect, in their ability to take what they wanted from whom and whenever they so wished, that repulsed the weaker, unhealthy, plebian, lower man into forming his own morality. The slave-morality. Reversing good and bad and injecting the term evil into the discussion. This slave-morality emphasised the so called virtues of humility, self-sacrifice, self-control as superceding the goodness of the nobility and the strong, the master-morality. Why did the strong follow? Because as the old Irish proverb goes “He who is not strong must be clever” and the weaker lowlier untermensch suceeded in convincing the proto-ubermensch the nobility that their ways were wrong and that the slave-morality was right.

So remind me, why was Nietzsche opposed to nihilism?

One interpretation has collapsed; but because it was considered the interpretation it now seems as if there were no meaning in existence, as if everything were in vain. The Will To Power s15 p14

In other words Nietzsche had challenged and destroyed the slave-morality as found in for example Christianity, but the vacuum he wishes to create is not an all-consuming nihilistic free for all. It is meant to be a liberating experience, you have become an artist with a blank canvas, and have been freed to create a world of your liking.

But hang on, isn’t that just an escape clause, isn’t he really proposing a vacuum that is inherently nihilistic?

Here comes the criticism

This re-evaluation of Nietzsche using Simpsonology caused me to rethink my original criticisms and to formulate newer ones.

Once again I am forced to return to question Nietzsches authority, but this time instead of committing an act of rhetorical nihilism and asking why is might wrong if it is according to my tastes, I shall focus on the aesthetic conditions he attaches. And more importantly the lack of clarity he is willing to offer in these aesthetic conditions.

It is clear that if we follow my ‘might is right’ diktum, then although acting in accordance with our tastes, we are not acting in accordance with the cultivated tastes. In other words we have been presented with a canvas with which to paint a beautiful picture and have chosen instead to chew the brush, drink the paint and tear the canvas. We have wasted the opportunity and become no better than the ancient nobility or aristocrats who acted on impulse because they were strong, instead of acquiring our superman status through the best use of our liberation from God and slave-morality.

So what are these ‘ravalued’ values? What are the ‘real’ means by which we become superior? Nietzsche describes the superior man as being ‘integrated’, ‘creative’, ‘life-affirming’ – all terms which if they are evaluative, as it seems they must be, would seem to propose some sort of ‘objective’ criterion. Integrated as compared to what? Creative and life-affirming as opposed to what?

Nietzsche the arch subjectivist… or the proposer of an alternative universal, absolutist moral system?

I am compelled to ask Nietzsche, “Where’s the beef?“