Author: Huenemann

Nietzsche’s American legacy?

Here is an interesting review of the sorts of ways Nietzsche’s thoughts have been received in the U.S. One paragraph in the essay hits upon a worry I have had from time to time:

For all these reasons, Nietzsche often figures in American culture as a sinister guru of the violent and deranged. When Jared Lee Loughner, who murdered six people in his attempted assassination of Arizona congresswoman Gabrielle Giffords, turned out to be a close reader of Nietzsche’s The Will to Power, an old stereotype was confirmed. Indeed, the title of America’s best-known Nietzscheans goes to Nathan Leopold and Richard Loeb, the teenagers who in 1924 murdered a boy with a chisel because they took seriously the philosopher’s belief that the “Superman” is liberated from conventional notions of good and evil. (Their lawyer, Clarence Darrow, blamed the effect of Beyond Good and Evil on their impressionable minds in his 12-hour defence speech.) If you were to include fictional characters, Leopold and Loeb might have a rival in Howard Roark, the arrogant architect in Ayn Rand’s The Fountainhead.

The essay claims that the intellectuals influenced by Nietzsche tend not to be sinister and arrogant assassins. They carefully consider the ideas and incorporate them into further theory making (sometimes judiciously, sometimes not). It is the less studious who obsess over Nietzsche, buy a weapon, and await their opportunity to prove themselves the overman.

One might decry these would-be criminals and accuse them of misreading Nietzsche, but the fact is that Nietzsche’s powerful prose can get people in the mood for some pretty dark goings-on. This fact sometimes causes me to wonder whether it is morally irresponsible to turn young minds on to Nietzsche. I’ll be the first to admit that I myself am too timid to step beyond good and evil, and I really don’t want my neighbors to take that step. If, when I teach Nietzsche, I always face a certain probability of getting some people into a dark mental space where they might do dark things, should I back off and teach, I dunno, Emerson? Any thoughts?

Understanding through neuroscience, unpromising and promising

For any die-hard reductionists out there, here’s an article on the promise of “neuroeconomics”:

Yet it is likely that one day we will know much more about how economies work – or fail to work – by understanding better the physical structures that underlie brain functioning. Those structures – networks of neurons that communicate with each other via axons and dendrites – underlie the familiar analogy of the brain to a computer – networks of transistors that communicate with each other via electric wires. The economy is the next analogy: a network of people who communicate with each other via electronic and other connections.

Well, good luck on that! Similarly, one might hope that we’ll all be better at using Excel spreadsheets if we start studying how electrons move about in the CPU.

On another note, here is an interesting interview with Michael Gazzaniga talking about the interplay between neuroscientific accounts and broader social structures, particularly in discussions of free will:

For me, it [the interplay between mind and brain] captures the fact that we are trying to understand a layered system. One becomes cognizant there is a system on top of the personal mind/brain layers which is yet another layer–the social world. It interacts massively with our mental processes and vice versa. In many ways we humans, in achieving our robustness, have uploaded many of our critical needs to the social system around us so that the stuff we invent can survive our own fragile and vulnerable lives.

This seems to me the way to go. We shouldn’t simply dismiss neuroscience, of course; but the interesting question is how the “bottom-up” causal story connects with the “top-down” causal story.