1. Life and Works Nietzsche was born on October 15, 1844, in Röcken (near Leipzig), where his father was a Lutheran minister. His father died in 1849, and the family relocated to Naumburg, where he grew up in a household comprising his mother, grandmother, two aunts, and his younger sister, Elisabeth. Nietzsche had a brilliant school and university career, culminating in May 1869 when he was called to a chair in classical philology at Basel. At age 24, he was the youngest ever appointed to that post. His teacher Friedrich Wilhelm Ritschl wrote in his letter of reference that Nietzsche was so promising that "He will simply be able to do anything he wants to do" (Kaufmann 1954: 8). Most of Nietzsche's university work and his early publications were in philology, but he was already interested in philosophy, particularly the work of Arthur Schopenhauer and Friedrich Albert Lange. Before the opportunity at Basel arose, Nietzsche had planned to pursue a second Ph.D. in philosophy, with a project about theories of teleology in the time since Kant. When he was a student in Leipzig, Nietzsche met Richard Wagner, and after his move to Basel, he became a frequent guest in the Wagner household at Villa Tribschen in Lucerne. Nietzsche's friendship with Wagner (and Cosima Liszt Wagner) lasted into the mid-1870s, and that friendship—together with their ultimate break—were key touchstones in his personal and professional life. His first book, The Birth of Tragedy out of the Spirit of Music (1872), was not the careful work of classical scholarship the field might have expected, but a controversial polemic combining speculations about the collapse of the tragic culture of fifth-century Athens with a proposal that Wagnerian music-drama might become the source of a renewed tragic culture for contemporary Germany. The work was generally ill-received within classical studies—and savagely reviewed by Ulrich Wilamovitz-Möllendorff, who went on to become one of the leading classicists of the generation—even though it contained some striking interpretive insights (e.g., about the role of the chorus in Greek tragedy). Following the first book, Nietzsche continued his efforts to influence the broader direction of German intellectual culture, publishing essays intended for a wide public on David Friedrich Strauss, on the "use of history for life", on Schopenhauer, and on Wagner. These essays are known collectively as the Untimely Meditations. Although he assisted in early planning for Wagner's Bayreuth project and attended the first festival, Nietzsche was not favorably impressed by the cultural atmosphere there, and his relationship with the Wagners soured after 1876. Nietzsche's health, always fragile, forced him to take leave from Basel in 1876–77. He used the time to explore a broadly naturalistic critique of traditional morality and culture—an interest encouraged by his friendship with Paul Rée, who was with Nietzsche in Sorrento working on his Origin of Moral Sensations (see Janaway 2007: 74–89; Small 2005). Nietzsche's research resulted in Human, All-too-human (1878), which introduced his readers to the corrosive attacks on conventional pieties for which he became famous, as well as to a style of writing in short, numbered paragraphs and pithy aphorisms to which he often returned in later work. When he sent the book to the Wagners early in 1878, it effectively ended their friendship: Nietzsche later wrote that his book and Wagner's Parsifal libretto crossed in the mail "as if two swords had crossed" (EH III, HH, 5). Nietzsche's health did not measurably improve during the leave, and by 1879, he was forced to resign his professorship altogether. As a result, he was freed to write and to develop the style that suited him. He published a book almost every year thereafter. These works began with Daybreak (1881), which collected critical observations on morality and its underlying psychology, and there followed the mature works for which Nietzsche is best known: The Gay Science (1882, second expanded edition 1887), Thus Spoke Zarathustra (1883–5), Beyond Good and Evil (1886), On the Genealogy of Morality (1887), and in the last year of his productive life Twilight of the Idols (1888) and The Wagner Case (1888), along with The Antichrist and his intellectual biography, Ecce Homo, which were published only later. At the beginning of this period, Nietzsche enjoyed an intense but ultimately painful friendship with Rée and Lou Salomé, a brilliant young Russian student. The three initially planned to live together in a kind of intellectual commune, but Nietzsche and Rée both developed romantic interest in Salomé, and after Nietzsche unsuccessfully proposed marriage, Salomé and Rée departed for Berlin. Salomé later wrote an illuminating book about Nietzsche (Salomé [1894] 2001), which first proposed an influential periodization of his philosophical development. In later years, Nietzsche moved frequently in the effort to find a climate that would improve his health, settling into a pattern of spending winters near the Mediterranean (usually in Italy) and summers in Sils Maria, Switzerland. His symptoms included intense headaches, nausea, and trouble with his eyesight. Recent work (Huenemann 2013) has convincingly argued that he probably suffered from a retro-orbital meningioma, a slow-growing tumor on the brain surface behind his right eye. In January 1889, Nietzsche collapsed in the street in Turin, and when he regained consciousness he wrote a series of increasingly deranged letters. His close Basel friend Franz Overbeck was gravely concerned and travelled to Turin, where he found Nietzsche suffering from dementia. After unsuccessful treatment in Basel and Jena, he was released into the care of his mother, and later his sister, eventually lapsing entirely into silence. He lived on until 1900, when he died of a stroke complicated by pneumonia. During his illness, his sister Elisabeth assumed control of his literary legacy, and she eventually published The Antichrist and Ecce Homo, as well as a selection of writing from his notebooks for which she used the title The Will to Power, following Nietzsche's remark in the Genealogy (GM III, 27) that he planned a major work under that title. The editorial work was not well founded in Nietzsche's surviving plans for the book and was also marred by Elisabeth's strong anti-Semitic commitments, which had been extremely distressing to Nietzsche himself. As a result, The Will to Power leaves a somewhat misleading impression of the general character and content of the writings left in Nietzsche's notebooks. That writing is now available in an outstanding critical edition (KGA, more widely available in KSA; English translations of selections are available in WEN and WLN.) Nietzsche's life has been the subject of several full-length biographies (Hayman 1980, Cate 2002, Safranski 2003, Young 2010, Prideaux 2018), as well as speculative fictional reconstructions (Yalom 1992); readers can find more details about his life and particular works in the entry on Nietzsche's Life and Works and in the articles comprising the first three parts of Gemes and Richardson (2013), as well as in Meyer (2019), which treats the publication strategy of Nietzsche's "middle period" works (HH, D, GS). 2. Critique of Religion and Morality Nietzsche is arguably most famous for his criticisms of traditional European moral commitments, together with their foundations in Christianity. This critique is very wide-ranging; it aims to undermine not just religious faith or philosophical moral theory, but also many central aspects of ordinary moral consciousness, some of which are difficult to imagine doing without (e.g., altruistic concern, guilt for wrongdoing, moral responsibility, the value of compassion, the demand for equal consideration of persons, and so on). By the time Nietzsche wrote, it was common for European intellectuals to assume that such ideas, however much inspiration they owed to the Christian intellectual and faith tradition, needed a rational grounding independent from particular sectarian or even ecumenical religious commitments. Then as now, most philosophers assumed that a secular vindication of morality would surely be forthcoming and would save the large majority of our standard commitments. Nietzsche found that confidence naïve, and he deployed all his rhetorical prowess to shock his readers out of complacency on this score. For example, his doubts about the viability of Christian underpinnings for moral and cultural life are not offered in a sunny spirit of anticipated liberation, nor does he present a sober but basically confident call to develop a secular understanding of morality; instead, he launches the famous, aggressive and paradoxical pronouncement that "God is dead" (GS 108, 125, 343). The idea is not so much that atheism is true—in GS 125, he depicts this pronouncement arriving as fresh news to a group of atheists—but instead that because "the belief in the Christian God has become unbelievable", everything that was "built upon this faith, propped up by it, grown into it", including "the whole of our European morality", is destined for "collapse" (GS 343). Christianity no longer commands society-wide cultural allegiance as a framework grounding ethical commitments, and thus, a common basis for collective life that was supposed to have been immutable and invulnerable has turned out to be not only less stable than we assumed, but incomprehensibly mortal—and in fact, already lost. The response called for by such a turn of events is mourning and deep disorientation. Indeed, the case is even worse than that, according to Nietzsche. Not only do standard moral commitments lack a foundation we thought they had, but stripped of their veneer of unquestionable authority, they prove to have been not just baseless but positively harmful. Unfortunately, the moralization of our lives has insidiously attached itself to genuine psychological needs—some basic to our condition, others cultivated by the conditions of life under morality—so its corrosive effects cannot simply be removed without further psychological damage. Still worse, the damaging side of morality has implanted itself within us in the form of a genuine self-understanding, making it hard for us to imagine ourselves living any other way. Thus, Nietzsche argues, we are faced with a difficult, long term restoration project in which the most cherished aspects of our way of life must be ruthlessly investigated, dismantled, and then reconstructed in healthier form—all while we continue somehow to sail the ship of our common ethical life on the high seas. The most extensive development of this Nietzschean critique of morality appears in his late work On the Genealogy of Morality, which consists of three treatises, each devoted to the psychological examination of a central moral idea. In the First Treatise, Nietzsche takes up the idea that moral consciousness consists fundamentally in altruistic concern for others. He begins by observing a striking fact, namely, that this widespread conception of what morality is all about—while entirely commonsensical—is not the essence of any possible morality, but a historical innovation. To make the case for historical change, he identifies two patterns of ethical assessment, each associated with a basic pair of evaluative terms, a good/bad pattern and a good/evil pattern. Understood according to the good/bad pattern, the idea of goodness originated in social class privilege: the good were first understood to be those of the higher social order, but then eventually the idea of goodness was "internalized"—i.e., transferred from social class itself to traits of character and other personal excellences that were typically associated with the privileged caste (for example, the virtue of courage for a society with a privileged military class, or magnanimity for one with a wealthy elite, or truthfulness and (psychological) nobility for a culturally ambitious aristocracy; see GM I, 4–5). In such a system, goodness is associated with exclusive virtues. There is no thought that everyone should be excellent—the very idea makes no sense, since to be excellent is to be distinguished from the ordinary run of people. In that sense, good/bad valuation arises out of a "pathos of distance" (GM I, 2) expressing the superiority excellent people feel over ordinary ones, and it gives rise to a "noble morality" (BGE 260). Nietzsche shows convincingly that this pattern of assessment was dominant in ancient Mediterranean culture (the Homeric world, later Greek and Roman society, and even much of ancient philosophical ethics). The good/evil pattern of valuation is quite different. It focuses its negative evaluation (evil) on violations of the interests or well-being of others—and consequently its positive evaluation (good) on altruistic concern for their welfare. Such a morality has universalistic pretensions: if it is to promote and protect the welfare of all, its restrictions and injunctions must apply to everyone equally. It is thereby especially amenable to ideas of basic human equality, starting from the thought that each person has an equal claim to moral consideration and respect. These are familiar ideas in the modern context—so familiar, indeed, that Nietzsche observes how easily we confuse them with "the moral manner of valuation as such" (GM Pref., 4)—but the universalist structure, altruistic sentiments, and egalitarian tendency of those values mark an obvious contrast with the valuation of exclusive virtues in the good/bad pattern. The contrast, together with the prior dominance of good/bad structured moralities, raises a straightforward historical question: what happened? How did we get from the widespread acceptance of good/bad valuation to the near universal dominance of good/evil thinking? Nietzsche's famous answer is unflattering to our modern conception. He insists that the transformation was the result of a "slave revolt in morality" (GM I, 10; cf. BGE 260). The exact nature of this alleged revolt is a matter of ongoing scholarly controversy (in recent literature, see Bittner 1994; Reginster 1997, 2021; Migotti 1998; Ridley 1998; May 1999: 41–54; Janaway 2007: 90–106, 223–9; Owen 2007: 78–89; Wallace 2007; Anderson 2011; Poellner 2011; Leiter 2015: 155–77; Snelson 2017; Jenkins 2018; Huddleston 2021), but the broad outline is clear enough. People who suffered from oppression at the hands of the noble, excellent, (but uninhibited) people valorized by good/bad morality—and who were denied any effective recourse against them by relative powerlessness—developed a persistent, corrosive emotional pattern of resentful hatred against their enemies, which Nietzsche calls ressentiment. That emotion motivated the development of the new moral concept evil, purpose-designed for the moralistic condemnation of those enemies. (How conscious or unconscious—how "strategic" or not—this process is supposed to have been is one matter of scholarly controversy.) Afterward, via negation of the concept of evil, the new concept of goodness emerges, rooted in altruistic concern of a sort that would inhibit evil actions. Moralistic condemnation using these new values does little by itself to satisfy the motivating desire for revenge, but if the new way of thinking could spread, gaining more adherents and eventually influencing the evaluations even of the nobility, then the revenge might be impressive—indeed, "the most spiritual" form of revenge (GM I, 7; see also GM I, 10–11). For in that case, the revolt would accomplish a "radical revaluation" (GM I, 7) that would corrupt the very values that gave the noble way of life its character and made it seem admirable in the first place. For Nietzsche, then, our morality amounts to a vindictive effort to poison the happiness of the fortunate (GM III, 14), instead of a high-minded, dispassionate, and strictly rational concern for others. This can seem hard to accept, both as an account of how the valuation of altruistic concern originated and even more as a psychological explanation of the basis of altruism in modern people, who are far removed from the social conditions that figure in Nietzsche's story. That said, Nietzsche offers two strands of evidence sufficient to give pause to an open-minded reader. In the Christian context, he points to the surprising prevalence of what one might call the "brimstone, hellfire, and damnation diatribe" in Christian letters and sermons: Nietzsche cites at length a striking example from Tertullian (GM I, 15), but that example is the tip of a very large iceberg, and it is a troubling puzzle what this genre of "vengeful outbursts" (GM I, 16) is even doing within (what is supposed to be) a religion of love and forgiveness. Second, Nietzsche observes with confidence-shaking perspicacity how frequently indignant moralistic condemnation itself, whether arising in serious criminal or public matters or from more private personal interactions, can detach itself from any measured assessment of the wrong and devolve into a free-floating expression of vengeful resentment against some (real or imagined) perpetrator. The spirit of such condemnations is disturbingly often more in line with Nietzsche's diagnosis of altruism than it is with our conventional (but possibly self-satisfied) moral self-understanding. The First Treatise does little, however, to suggest why inhabitants of a noble morality might be at all moved by such condemnations, generating a question about how the moral revaluation could have succeeded. Nothing internal to the nobles' value system gives them any grounds for general altruistic concern or any reason to pay heed to the complaints of those whom they have already dismissed as contemptible. The Second Treatise, about guilt and bad conscience, offers some materials toward an answer to this puzzle. Nietzsche begins from the insight that guilt bears a close conceptual connection to the notion of debt. Just as a debtor's failure to repay gives the creditor the right to seek alternative compensation (whether via some remedy spelled out in a contract, or less formally, through general social or legal sanctions), so a guilty party owes the victim some form of response to the violation, which serves as a kind of compensation for whatever harm was suffered. Nietzsche's conjectural history of the "moralized" (GM II, 21) notion of guilt suggests that it developed through a transfer of this structure—which pairs each loss to some (punishment-involving) compensation—from the domain of material debt to a wider class of actions that violate some socially accepted norm. The really important conceptual transformation, however, is not the transfer itself, but an accompanying purification and internalization of the feeling of indebtedness, which connect the demand for compensation to a source of wrongful action that is supposed to be entirely within the agent's control. The condemnation of the violation thereby attaches a negative assessment to the guilty person's basic sense of personal worth. The highly purified character of moralized guilt suggests how it might be a powerful tool for moral revaluation and simultaneously indicates some of Nietzsche's reasons for skepticism against it. As Williams (1993a) observes, a purified notion of guilt pertaining to what is completely under the agent's control (and so entirely immune from luck) stands in a particularly tight fit with blame: "Blame needs an occasion—an action—and a target—the person who did the action and goes on to meet the blame" (Williams 1993a: 10). The pure idea of moralized guilt answers this need by tying any wrong action inextricably and uniquely to a blamable agent. As we saw, the impulse to assign blame was central to the ressentiment that motivated the moral revaluation of values, according to the First Treatise. Thus, insofar as people (even nobles) become susceptible to such moralized guilt, they might also become vulnerable to the revaluation, and Nietzsche offers some speculations about how and why this might happen (GM II, 16–17). But Nietzsche's main concern in the Second Treatise is the danger he takes moralized guilt to pose to psychological health. These criticisms have attracted an increasingly subtle secondary literature; see Reginster (2011, 2018, 2021), as well as Williams (1993a, b), Ridley (1998), May (1999: 55–80), Risse (2001, 2005), Janaway (2007: 124–42), Owen (2007: 91–112), Migotti (2013), and Leiter (2015: 178–95). One salient thought is that guilt's very purity makes it liable to turn against the agent herself—even in cases where it plays no legitimate role in self-regulation, or in ways that outstrip any such role. For example, given guilt's intense internalization, no connection to an actual victim is essential to it. Any observer of the violation (whether real or ideal/imagined) can equally be entitled to resent the guilty party, and that fact makes space for religious or ideological systems to attach guilt to practically any kind of rule violation, even when no one was harmed. In such cases, free-floating guilt can lose its social and moral point and develop into a pathological desire for self-punishment. Dear Fellow Investor, On May 15, Warren Buffett disclosed that he sold all shares of Taiwan Semiconductor. When asked why he only held the stock for a few months, Buffett said: "I don't like its location, and I've reevaluated that.
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I wish it weren't sold, but I think that's a reality."Here's what YOU can do to protect YOUR portfolio."The Buck Stops Here," | The aim of this page is to give a brief introduction to the career of Sir Winston Churchill, and to reveal the main features of both the public and the private life of the most famous British Prime Minister of the twentieth century. The Child Winston Churchill was born into the privileged world of the British aristocracy on November 30, 1874. His father, Lord Randolph Churchill, was a younger son of the 7th Duke of Marlborough. His mother, Jennie Jerome, was the daughter of an American business tycoon, Leonard Jerome. Winston's childhood was not a particularly happy one. Like many Victorian parents, Lord and Lady Randolph Churchill were distant. The family Nanny, Mrs Everest, became a surrogate mother to Winston and his younger brother, John S Churchill. The Soldier After passing out of Sandhurst and gaining his commission in the 4th Hussars' in February 1895, Churchill saw his first shots fired in anger during a semi-official expedition to Cuba later that year. He enjoyed the experience which coincided with his 21st birthday. In 1897 Churchill saw more action on the North West Frontier of India, fighting against the Pathans. He rode his grey pony along the skirmish lines in full view of the enemy. "Foolish perhaps," he told his mother, " but I play for high stakes and given an audience there is no act too daring and too noble." Churchill wrote about his experiences in his first book The Story of the Malakand Field Force (1898). He soon became an accomplished war reporter, getting paid large sums for stories he sent to the press – something which did not make him popular with his senior officers. Using his mother's influence, Churchill got himself assigned to Kitchener's army in Egypt. While fighting against the Dervishes he took part in the last great cavalry charge in English history – at the Battle of Omdurman in 1898. The Politician Churchill was first elected to parliament in 1900 shortly before the death of Queen Victoria. He took his seat in the House of Commons as the Conservative Member for Oldham in February 1901 and made his maiden speech four days later. But after only four years as a Conservative he crossed the floor and joined the Liberals, making the flamboyant gesture of sitting next to one of the leading radicals, David Lloyd George. Churchill rose swiftly within the Liberal ranks and became a Cabinet Minister in 1908 – President of the Board of Trade. In this capacity and as Home Secretary (1910-11) he helped to lay the foundations of the post-1945 welfare state. His parliamentary career was far from being plain sailing and he made a number of spectacular blunders, so much so that he was often accused of having genius without judgement. The chief setback of his career occurred in 1915 when, as First Lord of the Admiralty, he sent a naval force to the Dardanelles in an attempt to knock Turkey out of the war and to outflank Germany on a continental scale. The expedition was a disaster and it marked the lowest point in Churchill's fortunes. However, Churchill could not be kept out of power for long and Lloyd George, anxious to draw on his talents and to spike his critical guns, soon re-appointed him to high office. Their relationship was not always a comfortable one, particularly when Churchill tried to involve Britain in a crusade against the Bolsheviks in Russia after the Great War. Between 1922 and 1924 Churchill left the Liberal Party and, after some hesitation, rejoined the Conservatives. Anyone could "rat", he remarked complacently, but it took a certain ingenuity to "re-rat". To his surprise, Churchill was appointed Chancellor of the Exchequer by Stanley Baldwin, an office in which he served from 1924 to 1929. He was an ebullient if increasingly anachronistic figure, returning Britain to the Gold Standard and taking an aggressive part in opposing the General Strike of 1926. After the Tories were defeated in 1929, Churchill fell out with Baldwin over the question of giving India further self-government. Churchill became more and more isolated in politics and he found the experience of perpetual opposition deeply frustrating. He also made further blunders, notably by supporting King Edward VIII during the abdication crisis of 1936. Largely as a consequence of such errors, people did not heed Churchill's dire warnings about the rise of Hitler and the hopelessness of the appeasement policy. After the Munich crisis, however, Churchill's prophecies were seen to be coming true and when war broke out in September 1939 Prime Minister Neville Chamberlain appointed him First Lord of the Admiralty. So, nearly twenty-five years after he had left the post in pain and sorrow, the Navy sent out a signal to the Fleet: "Winston is back". The War Leader For the first nine months of the conflict, Churchill proved that he was, as Admiral Fisher had once said, "a war man". Chamberlain was not. Consequently the failures of the Norwegian Campaign were blamed on the pacific Prime Minister rather than the belligerent First Lord, and, when Chamberlain resigned after criticisms in the House of Commons, Churchill became leader of a coalition government. The date was May 10, 1940: it was Churchill's, as well as Britain's, finest hour. When the German armies conquered France and Britain faced the Blitz, Churchill embodied his country's will to resist. His oratory proved an inspiration. When asked exactly what Churchill did to win the war, Clement Attlee, the Labour leader who served in the coalition government, replied: "Talk about it." Churchill talked incessantly, in private as well as in public – to the astonishment of his private secretary, Jock Colville, he once spent an entire luncheon addressing himself exclusively to the marmalade cat. Churchill devoted much of his energy to trying to persuade President Roosevelt to support him in the war. He wrote the President copious letters and established a strong personal relationship with him. And he managed to get American help in the Atlantic, where until 1943 Britain's lifeline to the New World was always under severe threat from German U-Boats. Despite Churchill's championship of Edward VIII, and despite his habit of arriving late for meetings with the neurotically punctual King at Buckingham Palace, he achieved good relations with George VI and his family. Clementine once said that Winston was the last surviving believer in the divine right of kings. As Churchill tried to forge an alliance with the United States, Hitler made him the gift of another powerful ally – the Soviet Union. Despite his intense hatred of the Communists, Churchill had no hesitation in sending aid to Russia and defending Stalin in public. "If Hitler invaded Hell," he once remarked, "I would at least make a favourable reference to the Devil in the House of Commons." In December 1941, six months after Hitler had invaded Russia, Japan attacked Pearl Harbor. The war had now become a global one. But with the might of America on the Allied side there could be no doubt about its outcome. Churchill was jubilant, remarking when he heard the news of Pearl Harbor: "So we have won after all!" However, America's entry into the war also caused Churchill problems; as he said, the only thing worse than fighting a war with allies is fighting a war without them. At first, despite disasters such as the Japanese capture of Singapore early in 1942, Churchill was able to influence the Americans. He persuaded Roosevelt to fight Germany before Japan, and to follow the British strategy of trying to slit open the "soft underbelly" of Europe. This involved the invasions of North Africa, Sicily, and Italy – the last of which proved to have a very well armoured belly. It soon became apparent that Churchill was the littlest of the "Big Three". At the Teheran Conference in November, 1943, he said, the "poor little English donkey" was squeezed between the great Russian bear and the mighty American buffalo, yet only he knew the way home. In June 1944 the Allies invaded Normandy and the Americans were clearly in command. General Eisenhower pushed across Northern Europe on a broad front. Germany was crushed between this advance and the Russian steamroller. On May 8, 1945 Britain accepted Germany's surrender and celebrated Victory in Europe Day. Churchill told a huge crowd in Whitehall: "This is your victory." The people shouted: "No, it is yours", and Churchill conducted them in the singing of Land of Hope and Glory. That evening he broadcast to the nation urging the defeat of Japan and paying fulsome homage to the Crown. From all over the world Churchill received telegrams of congratulations, and he himself was generous with plaudits, writing warmly to General de Gaulle whom he regarded as an awkward ally but a bastion against French Communism. But although victory was widely celebrated throughout Britain, the war in the Far East had a further three months to run. The atomic bombing of Hiroshima and Nagasaki finally brought the global conflict to a conclusion. But at the pinnacle of military victory, Churchill tasted the bitterness of political defeat. The Elder Statesman Churchill expected to win the election of 1945. Everything pointed to his victory, from the primitive opinion polls to the cartoons in newspapers and the adulation Churchill received during the campaign, but he did not conduct it well. From the start he accused the Labour leaders – his former colleagues – of putting party before country and he later said that Socialists could not rule without a political police, a Gestapo. As it happened, such gaffes probably made no difference. The political tide was running against the Tories and towards the party which wholeheartedly favoured a welfare state – the reward for war-time sacrifices. But Churchill was shocked by the scale of his defeat. When Clementine, who wanted him to retire from politics, said that it was perhaps a blessing in disguise, Churchill replied that the blessing was certainly very effectively disguised. For a time he lapsed into depression, which sympathetic letters from friends did little to dispel. Soon, however, Churchill re-entered the political arena, taking an active part in political life from the opposition benches and broadcasting again to the nation after the victory over Japan. In defeat Churchill had always been defiant, but in victory he favoured magnanimity. Within a couple of years he was calling for a partnership between a "spiritually great France and a spiritually great Germany" as the basis for the re-creation of "the European family". He was more equivocal about Britain's role in his proposed "United States of Europe", and, while the embers of the World War II were still warm, he announced the start of the Cold War. At Fulton, Missouri, in 1946, he pointed to the new threat posed by the Soviet Union and declared that an iron curtain had descended across Europe. Only by keeping the alliance between the English-speaking peoples strong, he maintained, could Communist tyranny be resisted. After losing another election in 1950, Churchill gained victory at the polls the following year. Publicly he called for "several years of quiet steady administration". Privately he declared that his policy was "houses, red meat and not getting scuppered". This he achieved. But after suffering a stroke and the failure of his last hope of arranging a Summit with the Russians, he resigned from the premiership in April 1955. "I am ready to meet my Maker," Churchill had said on his seventy-fifth birthday; "whether my Maker is prepared for the great ordeal of meeting me is another matter". Churchill remained a member of parliament, though an inactive one, and announced his retirement from politics in 1963. This took effect at the general election the following year. Churchill died on 24 January 1965 – seventy years to the day after the death of his father. He received the greatest state funeral given to a commoner since that of the Duke of Wellington. He was buried in Bladon churchyard beside his parents and within sight of his birthplace, Blenheim Palace. The Family Man In the autumn of 1908 Churchill, then a rising Liberal politician, married Clementine Hozier, granddaughter of the 10th Earl of Airlie. Their marriage was to prove a long and happy one, though there were often quarrels – Clementine once threw a dish of spinach at Winston (it missed). Clementine was high principled and highly strung; Winston was stubborn and ambitious. His work invariably came first, though, partly as a reaction against his own upbringing, he was devoted to his children. Winston and Clementine's first child, Diana, was born in 1909. Diana was a naughty little girl and continued to cause her parents great distress as an adult. In 1932 she married John Bailey, but the marriage was unsuccessful and they divorced in 1935. In that year she married the Conservative politician, Duncan Sandys, and they had three children. That marriage also proved a failure. Diana had several nervous breakdowns and in 1963 she committed suicide. The Churchills' second child and only son, Randolph, was born in 1911. He was exceptionally handsome and rumbustious, and his father was very ambitious for him. During the 1930s Randolph stood for parliament several times but he failed to get in, being regarded as a political maverick. He did serve as Conservative Member of Parliament for Preston between 1940 and 1945, and ultimately became an extremely successful journalist and began the official biography of his father during the 1960s. Randolph was married twice, first in 1939 to Pamela Digby (later Harriman) by whom he had a son, Winston, and secondly in 1948 to June Osborne by whom he had a daughter, Arabella. Neither marriage was a success. The life of Sarah, the Churchills' third child, born in 1914, was no happier than that of her elder siblings. Amateur dramatics at Chartwell led her to take up a career on the stage which flourished for a time. Sarah's charm and vitality were also apparent in her private life, but her first two marriages proved unsuccessful and she was widowed soon after her third. Her first husband was a music hall artist called Vic Oliver whom she married against her parents' wishes. Her second was Anthony Beauchamp but this marriage did not last and after their separation he committed suicide. In 1918 Clementine Churchill gave birth to a third girl, Marigold. But in 1921, shortly after the deaths of both Clementine's brother and Winston's mother, Marigold contracted septicaemia whilst on a seaside holiday with the childrens' governess. When she died Winston was grief-stricken and, as his last private secretary recently disclosed in an autobiography, Clementine screamed like an animal undergoing torture. The following September the Churchills' fifth and last child, Mary, was born. Unlike her brother and older sisters, Mary was to cause her parents no major worries. Indeed she was a constant source of support, especially to her mother. In 1947 she married Christopher Soames; who was then Assistant Military Attaché in Paris and later had a successful parliamentary and diplomatic career. Theirs was to be a long and happy marriage. Over the years Christopher became a valued confidant and counsellor to his father-in-law. They had five children, the eldest of whom (Nicholas) became a prominent member of the Conservative party. Christopher Soames died in 1987. The Private Man Churchill's enormous reserves of energy and his legendary ability to exist on very little sleep gave him time to pursue a wide variety of interests outside the world of politics. Churchill loved gambling and lost what was, for him, a small fortune in the great crash of the American stock market in October 1929, causing a severe setback to the family finances. But he continued to write as a means of maintaining the style of life to which he had always been accustomed. Apart from his major works, notably his multi-volume histories of the First and Second World Wars and the Life of his illustrious ancestor John, first Duke of Marlborough, he poured forth speeches and articles for newspapers and magazines. His last big book was the History of the English-Speaking Peoples, which he had begun in 1938 and which was eventually published in the 1950s. In 1953 Churchill was awarded the Nobel Prize for Literature. Churchill took up painting as an antidote to the anguish he felt over the Dardanelles disaster. Painting became a constant solace and preoccupation and he rarely spent a few days away from home without taking his canvas and brushes. Even during his tour of France's Maginot Line in the middle of August 1939 Churchill managed to snatch a painting holiday with friends near Dreux. In the summer of 1922, while on the lookout for a suitable country house, Churchill caught sight of a property near Westerham in Kent, and fell instantly in love with it. Despite Clementine's initial lack of enthusiasm for the dilapidated and neglected house, with its overgrown and seemingly unmanageable grounds, Chartwell was to become a much-loved family home. Clementine, however, never quite overcame her resentment of the fact that Winston had been less than frank with her over the buying of Chartwell, and from time to time her feelings surfaced. With typical enthusiasm, Churchill personally undertook many major works of construction at Chartwell such as a dam, a swimming pool, the building (largely with his own hands) of a red brick wall to surround the vegetable garden, and the re-tiling of a cottage at the bottom of the garden. In 1946 Churchill bought a farm adjoining Chartwell and subsequently derived much pleasure, though little profit, from farming. Churchill was born into the world of hunting, shooting and fishing and throughout his life they were to prove spasmodic distractions. But it was hunting and polo, first learned as a young cavalry officer in India, that he enjoyed most of all. In the summer of 1949, Churchill embarked on a new venture – he bought a racehorse. On the advice of Christopher Soames, he purchased a grey three-year-old colt, Colonist II. It was to be the first of several thoroughbreds in his small stud. They were registered in Lord Randolph's colours – pink with chocolate sleeves and cap. (These have been adopted as the colours of Churchill College.) Churchill was made a member of the Jockey Club in 1950, and greatly relished the distinction. Among Winston's closest friends were Professor Lindemann and the "the three B's" (none popular with Clementine), Birkenhead, Beaverbook, Bracken. The Churchills entertained widely, including among their guests Charlie Chaplin, Albert Einstein and Lawrence of Arabia. Churchill regularly holidayed with rich friends in the Mediterranean, spending several cruises in the late 1950s as the guest of Greek millionaire shipowner, Aristotle Onassis. Editorial note Much of the information presented here was originally compiled by Josephine Sykes, Monica Halpin and Victor Brown. It was edited by Allen Packwood. | | 3. Value Creation Unfortunately, neither Nietzsche's ideas about the nature of value creation nor his suggestions about what specific values should be "created" have seemed as clear to readers as his negative critique of traditional values. (The disparity is often marked in the literature by doubts about whether Nietzsche has a "positive" ethics to offer.) There is something to this reaction: Nietzsche's critique has a clear target and is developed at an extended scale, whereas his suggestions about alternative values can seem scattered or telegraphic. That said, it is not as though Nietzsche is the least bit shy about making evaluatively loaded claims, including "positive" ones. To some extent, disappointment among commentators in search of "positive views" arises from our looking for the wrong things—for example, seeking a systematically organized axiological theory when Nietzsche himself is skeptical of any such project, or expecting any "positive" ethics to accommodate certain "moral intuitions" which Nietzsche is more inclined to challenge than to save. This section surveys some territory Nietzsche covers under the heading "value creation". After mentioning different options for understanding the nature of such "creation", it explores some of the values he promotes. 3.1 Nietzsche's Meta-ethical Stance and the Nature of Value Creation Nietzsche's talk about the creation of values challenges philosophical common sense. It is common, if not altogether standard, to explain values by contrasting them against mere desires. Both are positive attitudes toward some object or state of affairs ("pro-attitudes"), but valuing seems to involve an element of objectivity absent in desiring. (Consider: If I become convinced that something I valued is not in fact valuable, that discovery is normally sufficient to provoke me to revise my value, suggesting that valuing must be responsive to the world; by contrast, subjective desires often persist even in the face of my judgment that their objects are not properly desirable, or are unattainable; see the entries on value theory and desire.) Nietzsche challenges this basic philosophical conception when he treats value as "created" rather than discovered in the world: We [contemplatives] … are those who really continually fashion something that had not been there before: the whole eternally growing world of valuations, colors, accents, perspectives, scales, affirmations, and negations. … Whatever has value in our world now does not have value in itself, according to its nature—nature is always value-less—but has been given value at some time, as a present—and it was we who gave and bestowed it. Only we have created the world that concerns man! (GS 301; see also GS 78, 109, 139, 143, 276, 289, 290, 299; Z I, 17, 22, II, 20, III, 12; BGE 203, 211, 260, 261, 285; TI IX, 9, 24, 49) Passages like GS 301 have an unmistakable subjectivist flavor, tracing value to some source in our own attitudes and/or agency, but it is a difficult question how this subjectivist strand of Nietzsche's thought is to be reconciled with his ubiquitous (and uncompromising, unqualified) insistence that his own value judgments are correct and those he opposes are false, or even rest on lies. Some scholars take the value creation passages as evidence that Nietzsche was an anti-realist about value, so that his confident evaluative judgments should be read as efforts at rhetorical persuasion rather than objective claims (Leiter 2015), or (relatedly) they suggest that Nietzsche could fruitfully be read as a skeptic, so that such passages should be evaluated primarily for their practical effect on readers (Berry 2011, 2019; see also Leiter 2014). Such skeptical readings have been thoughtfully challenged by Huddleston (2014). Others (Hussain 2007) take Nietzsche to be advocating a fictionalist posture, according to which values are self-consciously invented contributions to a pretense through which we can satisfy our needs as valuing creatures, even though all evaluative claims are (strictly speaking) false. Still others (Richardson 2004; Reginster 2006; Anderson 2005, 2009; Silk 2015, 2018) are tempted to suppose that Nietzsche's talk of "creation" is meant to suggest one or another form of "constructivism," according to which value claims are "attitude-dependent" in some definite respect that requires careful specification, or "subjective realism"—a view according to which values have some basis in subjective attitudes of valuing, but nevertheless also gain some kind of objective standing in the world once those attitudes have done their work and "created" the values. Nietzsche's meta-ethical stance is treated elsewhere (see Section 3 of the entry on Nietzsche's moral and political philosophy), but even aside from the meta-ethical status of "created" values, the very idea of "value creation" is challenging to understand. This continues to be a very active area of research, with quite different recent accounts appearing in Richardson (2020: 439–74), Clark (2015b), Dries (2015), and others. In lieu of a fuller discussion, here are three textual observations. First, while a few passages appear to offer a conception of value creation as some kind of legislative fiat (e.g., BGE 211), such a view is hard to reconcile with the dominant strand of passages, which presents value creation as a difficult achievement characterized by substantial worldly constraints and significant exposure to luck, rather than something that could be done at will. Second, a great many of the passages (esp. GS 78, 107, 290, 299, 301) connect value creation to artistic creation, suggesting that Nietzsche took artistic creation and aesthetic value as an important paradigm or model for his account of values and value creation more generally. While some (Soll 2001) attack this entire idea as confused, other scholars have called on these passages as support for either fictionalist or subjective realist interpretations. In addition, Huddleston (2019) shows that investigations into the creation of artistic and cultural value with real intersubjective purchase was utterly central to Nietzsche's very conception of philosophy and its proper ambitions. Progress in this area is likely to come from careful interrogation of Nietzsche's conception of artistic creation itself. Finally, Nietzsche's account of "revaluation" remains an understudied source of examples for what he might mean by "value creation". After all, the moral revaluation achieved by the "slave revolt in morality" (see section 2) is presented as a creation of new values (GM I, 10, et passim). In addition to showing that not all value creation leads to results that Nietzsche would endorse, this observation leads to interesting questions—e.g., Did Nietzsche hold that all value creation operates via revaluation (as suggested, perhaps, by GM II, 12–13)? Or is "value creation ex nihilo" also supposed to be a possibility? If so, what differentiates the two modes? Can we say anything about which is to be preferred? etc. 3.2 Some Nietzschean Values Aside from issues about what it is to create values in the first place, many readers find themselves puzzled about what "positive" values Nietzsche means to promote. One plausible explanation for readers' persisting sense of unclarity is that Nietzsche disappoints the expectation that philosophy should offer a reductive (or at least, highly systematized) account of the good, along the lines of "Pleasure is the good"; "The only thing that is truly good is the good will"; "The best life is characterized by tranquility"; or the like. Nietzsche praises many different values, and in the main, he does not follow the stereotypically philosophical strategy of deriving his evaluative judgments from one or a few foundational principles. While the resulting axiological landscape is complex, we can get a sense of its shape by considering six values that play indisputably important roles in Nietzsche's sense of what matters. 3.2.1 Power and Life The closest Nietzsche comes to organizing his value claims systematically is his insistence on the importance of power, especially if this is taken together with related ideas about strength, health, and "life". A well-known passage appears near the opening of the late work, The Antichrist: What is good? Everything that heightens the feeling of power in man, the will to power, power itself. What is bad? Everything that is born of weakness. What is happiness? The feeling that power is growing, that resistance is overcome. Not contentedness but more power; not peace but war; not virtue but fitness (Renaissance virtue, virtù, virtue that is moraline-free). (A 2) In the literature, claims of this sort are associated with a "will to power doctrine", commonly viewed as one of Nietzsche's central ideas (see section 6.1). That doctrine seems to include the proposal that creatures like us (or more broadly: all life, or even all things period) aim at the enhancement of their power—and then further, that this fact entails that enhanced power is good for us (or for everything). In the middle of the twentieth century, many readers (more or less casually) received this as a deeply unattractive blunt claim that "Might makes right", which they associated with disturbing social and political tendencies salient in the era (see, e.g., Beauvoir 1948: 72). After the Second World War, Walter Kaufmann ([1950] 1974: 178–333) engaged in a long-term campaign to recuperate Nietzsche's thought from this unsavory line of interpretations, largely by insisting on how often the forms of power emphasized by Nietzsche involve internally directed self-control and the development of cultural excellence, rather than domination of others. While this account rightly highlighted internal complexity and nuance that were flattened out by the oversimplified "might makes right" reception dominant at mid-century, Kaufmann's approach threatens to sanitize aspects of Nietzsche's view that were intended to pose a stark challenge to our moral intuitions. More sophisticated versions of this broad approach—like Richardson's (1996) development of Nietzsche's distinction between tyranny (in which a dominant drive wholly effaces what it dominates) and mastery (in which a more dominant drive allows some expression to the less dominant one but controls and redirects that expression to its own larger ends)—are rightly inclined to concede the troubling aspects of Nietzsche's view (e.g., that the doctrine countenances tyranny as well as mastery, even if it privileges the latter). Together with such concessions, recent work has made important progress in understanding the internal complexities of Nietzsche's position valorizing power. One of the most important and influential strands is Bernard Reginster's (2006: 103–47; see also 2018a) emphasis on Nietzsche's conception of power as overcoming resistance (BGE 259, 230; GM I, 13; II, 16–17; A 2; KSA 11[111] 13: 52–3; 14[173] 13: 358–60; 14[174] 13: 360–2; 11[75] 13: 37–8; 9[151] 12: 424). This conception connects power directly to the person's capacity to reshape her environment in the service of her ends, and it thereby provides a more intuitive sense of what, exactly, is supposed to be good about power. In addition, the interpretation locates Nietzsche's view directly athwart Schopenhauer's efforts to motivate pessimism by appeal to a ubiquitous "will to life". By replacing Schopenhauer's will to life with his will to power (understood as a drive to overcome resistance, which wills the world's resistance along with its overcoming; KSA 9[151] 12: 424), Nietzsche can argue that our basic condition as desiring, striving creatures can lead to a mode of existence worthy of endorsement, rather than to inevitable frustration (as Schopenhauer had it). The same conception has been developed by Paul Katsafanas (2013), who argues that, qua agents, we are ineluctably committed to valuing power because a Reginster-style will to power is a constitutive condition on acting at all. (His account thereby contributes to the constitutivist strategy in ethics pioneered by Christine Korsgaard (1996) and David Velleman (2000, 2006).). More recently, Katsafanas (2015, 2019) has extended his view in a way that places the value of power at the basis of a wider account of "higher values" in Nietzsche. A second important strand of recent work emphasizes not a general, structural feature of power like overcoming resistance, but a "thicker", more substantive ethical idea. On this view, what Nietzsche values is power understood as a tendency toward growth, strength, domination, or expansion (Schacht 1983: 365–88; Hussain 2011). Brian Leiter (2002: 282–3) criticized what he called a "Millian" version of this idea, according to which power is valuable simply because (per the alleged Nietzschean doctrine) power is in fact our fundamental aim. (This is supposed to be analogous to Mill's strategy for deriving the principle of utility, based on the thought that we can show something—viz., pleasure—to be desirable by showing it to be desired.) Leiter is surely right to raise worries about the Millian reconstruction. Nietzsche apparently takes us to be committed to a wide diversity of first order aims, which raises prima facie doubts about the idea that for him all willing really takes power as its first-order aim (as the Millian argument would require). Moreover, Nietzsche's sensitivity to pessimism as a possible evaluative outlook creates problems for the soundness of the argument form itself—e.g., even supposing we must aim at power, maybe that is exactly what makes the world a terrible place, rather than providing any reason to think that power, or its pursuit, is valuable. But Hussain (2011) persuasively argues that if we shift our focus away from the pursuit of power in any narrow sense to the broader (and quite Nietzschean) idea that growth, strength, power-expansion, and the like are all manifestations of life, then at least some of Leiter's philosophical and most of his textual objections can be avoided. On the resulting picture, Nietzsche's position reads as a form of ethical naturalism, arguing that expression of these fundamental life tendencies is good for us precisely because they are our basic tendencies and we are inescapably in their grip (Hussain 2011: 159, et passim). It remains unclear that this view can avoid the objection rooted in the possibility of pessimism (i.e., that the value of life/power cannot follow from its inescapability for us, since that might be a state to which we are condemned). Given his engagement with Schopenhauer, Nietzsche should have been sensitive to the worry. But Hussain (2011) shows that a substantial strand of Nietzschean texts do fit the picture, and that many other nineteenth-century philosophers who share Nietzsche's anti-supernaturalist commitments were attracted by such naturalist arguments from inescapability. 3.2.2 Affirmation A second value commitment prominent in Nietzsche's work (and arguably related to his positive assessments of life and power) is the value of affirmation. According to Reginster (2006: 2), "Nietzsche regards the affirmation of life as his defining philosophical achievement". This theme enters forcefully in Book IV of The Gay Science, which opens with an expression of dedication to "amor fati": I want to learn more and more to see as beautiful what is necessary in things; then I shall be one of those who make things beautiful. Amor fati: let that be my love henceforth! I do not want to wage war against what is ugly. I do not want to accuse; I do not even want to accuse those who accuse. Looking away shall be my only negation. And all in all and on the whole: someday I wish to be only a Yes-sayer. (GS 276) After that opening move, Nietzsche develops the idea in several more sections: GS 277 expresses Nietzsche's worries about a seductive doctrine of "personal providence", according to which "everything that happens to us turns out for the best", but such an idea could be tempting at all only because of a far-reaching (and, Nietzsche thinks, admirable) affirmation of life, rooted in a talent for self-interpretation that creatively identifies some description under which things really do have "a profound significance and use precisely for us"; a bit later, GS 304 (entitled, "By doing we forego") recommends against any ethic demanding that we renounce this or that or the other, and in favor of one that demands that one do something and do it again, from morning till evening… and to think of nothing except doing this well, as well as I alone can do it; and then in GS 321, Nietzsche suggests that we give up on reproaching others directly and just focus on see[ing] to it that our own influence on all that is yet to come balances and outweighs his…. Let our brilliance make them look dark. No, let us not become darker ourselves on their account, like all those who punish…. Let us look away. Famously, the book concludes with Nietzsche's first introduction of his thought of eternal recurrence, which is supposed to place "The greatest weight" on each event through its suggestion that our life is good only if, upon imagining its return in every detail, we can affirm it as it is (GS 341). After that penultimate section, Nietzsche quotes the first section of Thus Spoke Zarathustra, which returns repeatedly to the same theme of affirmation (see, e.g., Z I, 1, 5, 17, 21, 22; II, 7, 12, 20; III, 3, 7, 13, 16; et passim; BGE 56; TI VIII, 6 and IX, 49). Some have found Nietzsche's valorization of affirmation ironic, given the polemical zeal of his negative attacks on Christianity and traditional morality, but in fact, the value of affirmation meshes nicely with some key aspects of Nietzsche's critique. That critique focuses in large measure on aspects of morality that turn the agent against herself—or more broadly, on the side of Christianity that condemns earthly existence, demanding that we repent our earthly life as the price of admission to a different, superior plane of being. What is wrong with these views, according to Nietzsche, is that they negate our life, instead of affirming it. Bernard Reginster (2006), who has made more (and more systematic) sense of Nietzsche's praise of affirmation than anyone, shows that the main philosophical problem it is meant to address is the crisis of "nihilism"—provoked by a process in which "the highest values de-value themselves" (KSA 9[35] 12: 350). Such "de-valuation" may rest either on some corrosive argument undermining the force of all evaluative claims whatsoever, or instead, on a judgment that the highest values cannot be realized, so that, by reference to their standard, the world as it is ought not to exist. The affirmation of life can be framed as the rejection of nihilism, so understood. For Nietzsche, that involves a two-sided project: it should both undermine values by reference to which the world could not honestly be affirmed, while also articulating the values exemplified by life and the world that make them affirmable. (Readers interested in these issues about Nietzschean affirmation and its compatibility (or not) with Nietzschean critique should also consult Richardson (2020: 353–97) and Huddleston, forthcoming a, which reaches a more diffident conclusion than this entry.) 3.2.3 Truthfulness/Honesty | |
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