A typical Nietzschean form of argument, for example, runs as follows. A person's theoretical beliefs are best explained in terms of his moral beliefs; and his moral beliefs are best explained in terms of natural facts about the type of person he is (i.e., in terms of type-facts). So Nietzsche says, “[E]very great philosophy so far has been . . . the personal confession of its author and a kind of involuntary and unconscious memoir”; thus, to really grasp this philosophy, one must ask “at what morality does all this (does he) aim” (BGE 6)? But the “morality” that a philosopher embraces simply bears “decisive witness to who he is” — i.e., who he essentially is — that is, to the “innermost drives of his nature” (BGE 6). Indeed, this explanation of a person's moral beliefs in terms of psycho-physical facts about the person is a recurring theme in Nietzsche. “[M]oralities are . . . merely a sign language of the affects” (BGE 187), he says. “Answers to the questions about the value of existence . . . may always be considered first of all as the symptoms of certain bodies” (GS P:2). “Moral judgments”, he says, are “symptoms and sign languages which betray the process of physiological prosperity or failure” (WP 258). “[O]ur moral judgments and evaluations . . . are only images and fantasies based on a physiological process unknown to us” (D 119), so that “it is always necessary to draw forth . . . the physiological phenomenon behind the moral predispositions and prejudices” (D 542). A “morality of sympathy”, he claims, is “just another expression of . . . physiological overexcitability” (TI IX:37). Ressentiment — and the morality that grows out of it — he attributes to an “actual physiological cause [Ursache]” (GM I:15). Nietzsche sums up the idea well in the preface to the Genealogy: “[O]ur thoughts, values, every ‘yes,’ ‘no,’ ‘if’ and ‘but’ grow from us with the same inevitability as fruits borne on the tree — all related and each with an affinity to each, and evidence of one will, one health, one earth, one sun” (GM P:2).
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