False Antitheses
Against opposites
I’m Bryan Kam. I endeavour daily to make philosophy accessible and relevant. I write this newsletter, host a podcast called Clerestory, and I’m writing a book called Neither/Nor. I also host a book club, writing group, and other events in London. My work is concerned with how abstract concepts relate to embodied life, and how to use this understanding to transform experience.
Good and evil are not opposites. Opposites don’t exist.
Sound childish? It is in a way, but that’s what I like about it. Friedrich Nietzsche (1844–1900) waged a lifelong war against false antitheses, sometimes going so far as to deny that opposites exist. Most famously, he denied that “good” and “evil” are opposites. How did he come to this conclusion? More specifically: What was his technique?
Indeed, what compels us to assume there exists any essential antithesis between ‘true’ and ‘false’?
— Nietzsche, Beyond Good and Evil (1886)
A chemistry of concepts
Here’s the first aphorism in Nietzsche’s Human, All Too Human (§1, 1878, trans. Hollingdale). In it, Nietzsche tries to argue for a chemical understanding of “concepts and sensations,” presumably as opposed to the logical, categorical structures used by previous philosophers. Rather than mechanistic and billiard-ball-like, Nietzsche’s is chemical, which allows for unusual mixtures and surprising transformations:
Chemistry of concepts and sensations. — Almost all the problems of philosophy once again pose the same form of question as they did two thousand years ago: how can something originate in its opposite, for example rationality in irrationality, the sentient in the dead, logic in unlogic, disinterested contemplation in covetous desire, living for others in egoism, truth in error? Metaphysical philosophy has hitherto surmounted this difficulty by denying that the one originates in the other and assuming for the more highly valued thing a miraculous source in the very kernel and being of the ‘thing in itself.’
How, to take a simple example, can steam arise from ice?
Latent Platonism
From Plato (428–323 BCE) to Kant (1724–1804), there’s a desire to define some parts of experience as good, but since much of our experience is bad, philosophers have done a sort of sleight-of-hand to say that what’s good must come from some other transcendental realm. This tendency lasted over two thousand years, and even the most embodied philosophers took their stand inside the assumption that reality is somehow conceptual, and that opposite concepts are straightforward pairings. Moreover, these concepts are understood not to be accessible to the senses or to the body, but only to the “intellect” or “soul.”
For example, Plato does this with the virtues, asserting that they must come from realm outside of the body. To some degree, I agree: they come from outside the body, in social interaction. If we use “virtues” as a makeshift concept, referring to whatever we happen to regard as “good,” then I think that the virtues must come from sociality. They don’t seem to arise spontaneously and fully-formed in the individual. If they did, children wouldn’t need to be trained how to behave in the way we deem “virtuous.” However one defines our best characteristics, they must originate or (at least) be developed interpersonally; they do not seem to arise sui generis within the individual.
But Plato wants the virtues to be more than makeshift; he wants them to really, categorically exist, and not only that, but to be orderly and consistent. He wants to place them somewhere which is neither sensory nor social, which is better or “higher” than the sensory and the social.
Here, for example is a passage from one of the most famous of Plato’s “middle” dialogues, the Phaedo (65e–67b, trans. Grube). It emphasises Plato’s committed disembodiment, which I’ve emphasised elsewhere.
It’s worth quoting at length. See how you feel after reading it. Notice how “reality” becomes clear to the “soul” but only by avoiding the “senses” and the “body.” This is used to apprehend abstract but apparently disembodied concepts like the “Just,” the “Beautiful,” and the “Good,” which are presumed to pre-exist this investigation. You could say that Plato thinks they are “discovered” by this process of disembodied thinking:
Is it not in reasoning if anywhere that any reality becomes clear to the soul?
Yes.
And indeed the soul reasons best when none of these senses troubles it, neither hearing nor sight, nor pain nor pleasure, but when it is most by itself, taking leave of the body and as far as possible having no contact or association with it in its search for reality.
That is so.
And it is then that the soul of the philosopher most disdains the body, flees from it and seeks to be by itself?
It appears so.
What about the following, Simmias? Do we say that there is such a thing as the Just itself, or not?
We do say so, by Zeus.
And the Beautiful, and the Good?
Of course.
And have you ever seen any of these things with your eyes?
In no way, he said.
[…]
Then he will do this most perfectly who approaches the object with thought alone, without associating any sight with his thought, or dragging in any sense perception with his reasoning, but who, using pure thought alone, tries to track down each reality pure and by itself, freeing himself as far as possible from eyes and ears and, in a word, from the whole body, because the body confuses the soul and does not allow it to acquire truth and wisdom whenever it is associated with it. Will not that man reach reality, Simmias, if anyone does?
What you say, said Simmias, is indeed true.
All these things will necessarily make the true philosophers believe and say to each other something like this: “There is likely to be something such as a path to guide us out of our confusion, because as long as we have a body and our soul is fused with such an evil we shall never adequately attain what we desire, which we affirm to be the truth. The body keeps us busy in a thousand ways because of its need for nurture. Moreover, if certain diseases befall it, they impede our search for the truth. It fills us with wants, desires, fears, all sorts of illusions and much nonsense, so that, as it is said, in truth and in fact no thought of any kind ever comes to us from the body. Only the body and its desires cause war, civil discord and battles, for all wars are due to the desire to acquire wealth, and it is the body and the care of it, to which we are enslaved, which compel us to acquire wealth, and all this makes us too busy to practice philosophy.
“It really has been shown to us that, if we are ever to have pure knowledge, we must escape from the body and observe things in themselves with the soul by itself. It seems likely that we shall, only then, when we are dead, attain that which we desire and of which we claim to be lovers, namely, wisdom, as our argument shows, not while we live; for if it is impossible to attain any pure knowledge with the body, then one of two things is true: either we can never attain knowledge or we can do so after death. Then and not before, the soul is by itself apart from the body. While we live, we shall be closest to knowledge if we refrain as much as possible from association with the body and do not join with it more than we must, if we are not infected with its nature but purify ourselves from it until the god himself frees us. In this way we shall escape the contamination of the body’s folly; we shall be likely to be in the company of people of the same kind, and by our own efforts we shall know all that is pure, which is presumably the truth, for it is not permitted to the impure to attain the pure.”
To me, the idea that “wisdom” can be apprehended in a disembodied way sounds quite dangerous. I definitely think that long periods of contemplation and meditation are necessary, but I think the rejection of embodied reality seems risky.
But for Plato, the best reasoning is not embodied and does not involve the senses. It leaves the body and has as little contact with it as possible. The “Just,” the “Beautiful,” and the “Good” are never visible, but exist in this extra-sensory realm. The body is an impediment, something to be escaped.
Here’s a passage from the even more famous Republic (~375 BCE, VI 508e, trans. Grube and Reeve; I left “good” uncapitalized as they do):
So that what gives truth to the things known and the power to know to the knower is the form of the good. And though it is the cause of knowledge and truth, it is also an object of knowledge. Both knowledge and truth are beautiful things, but the good is other and more beautiful than they. In the visible realm, light and sight are rightly considered sunlike, but it is wrong to think that they are the sun, so here it is right to think of knowledge and truth as goodlike but wrong to think that either of them is the good—for the good is yet more prized.
In other words, to put it kindly, “knowledge,” “truth,” and “the good” are purely conceptual. To put it unkindly, Plato took a bunch of verbs and adjectives, like “know,” and “true,” and “good,” usually used to refer to things in experience, and “elevated” them into noun terms with no experiential referents — and is now busily arranging them, using abstract reason, not embodied experience.
Kant continues to elide origins
Kant does a similar operation differently, in the Critique of Pure Reason (1781), attempting to show that certain ideas like freedom, immortality, and God cannot be considered by reason. For Kant, unlike Plato, reasoning is inseparable from the senses. But rather than giving an embodied account of how these ideas might have arisen, which characterises Nietzsche’s project, Kant instead attempts to delimit reason, thereby preserving a realm which exists outside the body, even if (because it’s part of the “thing-in-itself,” which Nietzsche will refer to later) we can never experience it.
Kant represents an important step towards the kind of embodiment Nietzsche advocates for, and Nietzsche’s “educator” Schopenhauer will take another. I won’t go into this at length here, but please let me know in the comments if you want a bit more on this trajectory.
What unites both Plato and Kant in Nietzsche's critique is their refusal to consider how seemingly “higher” values might emerge from “lower” origins — how the rational might develop from the irrational, how selflessness might grow from selfishness, or how truth might evolve from error. Throughout his works, Nietzsche argues that this is exactly how rationality, selflessness, and the “will to truth” must have arisen.
Both philosophers, despite their differences, engage in what Nietzsche describes as giving to “more highly valued thing” “a miraculous source in the very kernel and being of the ‘thing in itself.’”
Back to chemistry
Nietzsche continues, in Human, All Too Human (emphasis mine):
Historical philosophy, on the other hand, which can no longer be separated from natural science, the youngest of all philosophical methods, has discovered in individual cases (and this will probably be the result in every case) that there are no opposites, except in the customary exaggeration of popular or metaphysical interpretations, and that a mistake in reasoning lies at the bottom of this antithesis: according to this explanation there exists, strictly speaking, neither an unegoistic action nor completely disinterested contemplation; both are only sublimations, in which the basic element seems almost to have dispersed and reveals itself only under the most painstaking observation.
In other words, to return to Nietzsche’s earlier list:
The most rational system still contains something irrational.
The most sentient thing contains something dead.
The most logical thing contains something unlogical.
The most disinterested contemplation contains some covetous desire.
The most altruistic life contains egotism.
And the greatest truth contains an error.
Pretty Daoist, eh? And much of it aligns with our modern sensibility. But he also asserts that only the most “painstaking observation” can reveal the “basic element,” the hidden origin of higher things. Unlike in Plato or Aristotle, he is not proposing that things have an “essence”; instead, he’s proposing that complex things arise from simpler things, which he calls the “basic element.” In this sense, his explanation is Darwinian.
Notice also that Nietzsche denies that there are opposites, but he doesn’t deny the possibility of negation. He seems instead to think that two positive concepts can’t be opposites. For example, he would agree that “emotional” and “unemotional” form a pair. But he would not agree that “emotional” and “rational” are opposites.
Bearing this in mind, pause now to think about whether you regard “good” and “bad” — or “good” and “evil” — as opposites. He’s going to look at these two pairs in subsequent works.
Nietzsche continues:
All we require, and what can be given us only now the individual sciences have attained their present level, is a chemistry of the moral, religious and aesthetic conceptions and sensations, likewise of all the agitations we experience within ourselves in cultural and social intercourse, and indeed even when we are alone: what if this chemistry would end up by revealing that in this domain too the most glorious colours are derived from base, indeed from despised materials? Will there be many who desire to pursue such researches? Mankind likes to put questions of origins and beginnings out of its mind: must one not be almost inhuman to detect in oneself a contrary inclination? —
This down-to-earth, no-nonsense, commitment to messy embodied experience is characteristic of all of Nietzsche's work, and is among his biggest contributions to modernity, in that this same attitude (as Kaufmann notes) led onto Freud's no-nonsense approach.1
It’s also striking that Nietzsche considers the investigation of origins “almost inhuman.” The Buddha prescribes a similar investigation of the origins of suffering, in a doctrine called dependent arising — and practising in this way can lead to an “almost inhuman” cessation of suffering.2
What if there are no opposites?
Eight years after Human, All Too Human, Nietzsche continues his attack on antitheses. in Beyond Good and Evil (1886, Part one §2, trans. Kaufmann). He first mimics the thinking of other philosophers, who can’t imagine how origins could arise from opposites:
“How could anything originate out of its opposite? for example, truth out of error? or the will to truth out of the will to deception? or selfless deeds out of selfishness? or the pure and sunlike gaze of the sage out of lust? Such origins are impossible; whoever dreams of them is a fool, indeed worse; the things of the highest value must have another, peculiar origin — they cannot be derived from this transitory, seductive, deceptive, paltry world, from this turmoil of delusion and lust. Rather from the lap of Being, the intransitory, the hidden god, the ‘thing-in-itself’ — there must be their basis, and nowhere else.”
Then he critiques the mimicry he’s just made:
This way of judging constitutes the typical prejudgment and prejudice which give away the metaphysicians of all ages; this kind of valuation looms in the background of all their logical procedures; it is on account of this “faith” that they trouble themselves about “knowledge,” about something that is finally baptized solemnly as “the truth.” The fundamental faith of the metaphysicians is the faith in opposite values. It has not even occurred to the most cautious among them that one might have a doubt right here at the threshold where it was surely most necessary—even, if they vowed to themselves, “de omnibus dubitandum.” [Descartes: “All is to be doubted.”]
In other words, though philosophers like Descartes have professed to doubt everything, it has never occurred to them to doubt logic itself. Or to doubt the possibility that opposites are not real pairs. He will specifically question whether the opposition of “truth” and “falsehood” is tenable; he continues (emphasis mine):
For one may doubt, first, whether there are any opposites at all, and secondly whether these popular valuations and opposite values on which the metaphysicians put their seal, are not perhaps merely foreground estimates, only provisional perspectives, perhaps even from some nook, perhaps from below, frog perspectives, as it were, to borrow an expression painters use. For all the value that the true, the truthful, the selfless may deserve, it would still be possible that a higher and more fundamental value for life might have to be ascribed to deception, selfishness, and lust. It might even be possible that what constitutes the value of these good and revered things is precisely that they are insidiously related, tied to, and involved with these wicked, seemingly opposite things-maybe even one with them in essence. Maybe!
I love his emphasis on “foreground estimates” and “provisional perspectives,” as I think this is a great way to regard all views, with a kind of provisionality and curiosity rather than rigidity and dogmatism. Note also his emphasis on painterly perspective. This is the realm of art, not of science.
Perhaps, Nietzsche thinks, antitheses are only a matter of perspective. A commitment to deception might have more evolutionary value than a commitment to truth, just as a commitment to lust might have more evolutionary value than a commitment to chastity. Perhaps the will to truth originates in a will to deceive oneself? Or the will to chastity originates in lust? Darwin and Freud come to mind again. Elsewhere,3 Nietzsche makes a highly Darwinian argument that recognition of predator versus prey depends not on perception of things as they are, but on things as they might be.
What if the will to truth originates in error, or even in a will to deceive? Why shouldn’t falsehood, rather than truth, be valued? Such “values,” i.e., valuing “truth” over “error,” for Nietzsche, amount to no more than “moral prejudice.” He finds no grounds for such a judgement, nor any “view from nowhere” position whence such a judgement could be made.
Here he is later in the same work, in a characteristic jeremiad against the opposition between ‘true’ and ‘false.’ This is Beyond Good and Evil, Part Two: The Free Spirit, §34. What verve, what gall, to reduce truth and falsehood, those primary categories of philosophy, to mere grammar! Whether or not you agree, it is powerful vitriol:
It is no more than a moral prejudice that truth is worth more than appearance; it is even the worst-proved assumption that exists. Let us concede at least this much: there would be no life at all if not on the basis of perspective evaluations and appearances; and if, with the virtuous enthusiasm and awkwardness exhibited by some philosophers, one wanted to abolish the ‘apparent world’ altogether, well, assuming you could do that — at any rate nothing would remain of your ‘truth’ either! Indeed, what compels us to assume there exists any essential antithesis between ‘true’ and ‘false’? Is it not enough to suppose grades of apparentness and as it were lighter and darker shades and tones of appearance — different valeurs, to speak in the language of painters? Why could the world which is of any concern to us — not be a fiction? And he who then objects: ‘but to the fiction there belongs an author?’ — could he not be met with the round retort: why? Does this ‘belongs’ perhaps not also belong to the fiction? Are we not permitted to be a little ironical now about the subject as we are about the predicate and object? Ought the philosopher not to rise above the belief in grammar? All due respect to governesses: but is it not time that philosophy renounced the beliefs of governesses?
Thrilling! — and again back to his painting metaphors, a kind Caravaggian chiaroscuro of truth and lies.
“Good” is not the opposite of “evil”
The following year, Nietzsche describes in detail how he found a solution to the question of where the apparent antithesis of ‘good’ and ‘evil’ comes from. He lays bare the method.
This is the first essay in Genealogy of Morality (1887), ‘Good and Evil’, ‘Good and Bad’, §4):
What first put me on the right track was this question: what is the true etymological meaning of the various terms for the idea ‘Good’ which have been coined in various languages? I then found that they all led back to the same evolution of the same idea — that everywhere ‘aristocrat’, ‘noble’ (in the social sense) is the root idea out of which have necessarily developed ‘good’ in the sense of ‘with aristocratic soul’, ‘noble’ in the sense of ‘with a noble soul’, ‘with a privileged soul’ — a development which invariably runs parallel with that other evolution, in which ‘vulgar’, ‘plebeian’, ‘low’ are transformed finally into ‘bad’. […]4 From the standpoint of the genealogy of morals this discovery seems to be substantial; that it was only recently discovered must be attributed to the suppression of all questions of origin due to democratic prejudice in the modern world. This extends, as will shortly be shown, even to the province of natural science and physiology, which, to all appearances, is the most objective.
How did he come to this conclusion? A developmental, historicist view, which involves etymology. I find this really exciting. He’s telling you the method!
A summary of Nietzsche’s decade
I’ll try to summarise Nietzsche’s argument over these works, since the argument is not easily quotable. During this period, from 1878 to 1887, Nietzsche is transitioning from his middle “aphoristic” period into his late work, which focuses on what he calls “the revaluation of all values.” These works provide the critique. He then intended Will to Power and The Antichrist to begin to form his positive program. However, he abandoned Will to Power, and The Antichrist and Twilight of the Idols represent his late work. The positive program was never really finished, and we’re (mostly) left with just the critique.
Here’s my summary of the most famous part of his critique:
“Good” and “evil” are not opposites.
In Europe, “good” used to mean “noble.” Noble people considered whatever they did, including but not limiting to repaying debts, pillaging, and conquering, “good.” Whatever they did not do, which the common people did, was “bad.” But the nobility pillaged and conquered the common people. Over time, the common people, the victims of all this pillage and conquest, grew in numbers and strength. As they did, they renamed what was once “bad” (like being friendly and not killing people) to “good” and they renamed what was once “good” (which often involved killing people) to “evil.”
Now “good” has two conflicting meanings, one of which was the old “bad,” and “evil” means the old “good.” Ergo, because they have two separate genealogies, “good” and “evil” are not opposites. Q.E.D.
A matter of method
I’m bringing this argument to your attention not because I necessarily agree with the details of it, but because of the method by which Nietzsche combats obviousness. It seems “just obvious” that “good” is the opposite of “evil,” probably because we are taught them from a very young age as a pair, or contrast set. But we are also taught pairs like “dog” and “cat” as contrast sets, so just being taught as a pair does not necessarily mean that they are opposites.
I think it’s also important to note once more that there are two kinds of “opposite.” There’s a kind of opposite between the presence and absence of some positive quality. For example, “emotional” and “unemotional,” as I said before. But there’s also another learned opposite that we might have, between “emotional” and “rational.” It is this type of opposition between two positive characteristics which I believe Nietzsche primarily opposes. This will be important in my future arguments.
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Best,
Bryan
For Freud, see Kaufmann’s translation of Nietzsche On the Genealogy of Morals and Ecce Homo, third essay, §19, footnote 1.
The “worldling” or “run-of-the-mill person” (normal human, as opposed to “well-instructed disciple”) does not investigate origins, and therefore suffers as humans normally do. But the “arahant,” who could be described as “inhuman,” does investigate origins, and thereby ceases to suffer. See MN 109; also MN 1, AN 7.54.
The Gay Science (1882), Book III, §110. If you’re interested, let me know, and I’ll write more about this.
Here’s the example Nietzsche gives within the text:
The aptest example of this last contention is the German word ‘schlecht’ itself: this word is identical with ‘schlicht’ – (compare ‘schlechtweg’ and ‘schlechterdings’) – which originally and simply denoted the simple, common man in contrast to the aristocratic man, without any sinister implication. It is at the rather late period of the Thirty Years’ War that this sense changed to the sense now current.