Abstract
The post-Hegelian ethic of self-interpretation developed in Chapters 8, 9, and 10 might still be regarded as normatively weak, insofar as, in giving up essentialism, we seem to give up any appeal to the notion of a distorted self-conception. However, Nietzsche’s thought supplies what we need to give useful sense to the notion of a distorted self-conception, while remaining sceptical of essentialism. Nietzsche’s emphasis on self-overcoming is grounded in a fundamental appeal to honesty in self-interpretation. Similarly, the sceptical essentialist can re-interpret references to distorted self-conceptions as references to self-conceptions that would, if adopted, be adopted dishonestly. Moreover, since I am not self-sufficient in my self-interpretations, such honesty would have to have a collective basis. Collective honesty would be a suitable foundation for a sceptical essentialist ethic of self-interpretation. The chapter closes with some reflections on the implications of this view for professional ethics.
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- 1.
- 2.
As in Aristotle 1962, book 1, Chapter 13.
- 3.
Marx 1967, p. 289.
- 4.
See e.g. Foucault 1977.
- 5.
Nietzsche 1954b, part 2, ‘On Self-Overcoming’.
- 6.
Nietzsche 1974, sections 110–4.
- 7.
Ibid., section 110.
- 8.
Heidegger 1962, sections 25–7.
- 9.
See Rorty 1989.
- 10.
Ibid., p. 3.
- 11.
Ibid., Introduction. See also Rorty 1991.
- 12.
Rorty 1989, Chapters 7–9.
- 13.
See Rorty 1991.
- 14.
Ibid., p. 7.
- 15.
Rorty 1989, pp. 73–8.
- 16.
- 17.
Such, in broad outline at least, seems to have been the view of Pyrrho of Elis , for example.
- 18.
Nietzsche 1974, sections 110–114, 319. It is true that in the 1873 fragment ‘On Truth and Lie in an Extra-Moral Sense’ (Nietzsche 1954a, pp. 46–7) he expresses doubts about the explanatory power of the appeal to honesty , faced with the variety of individual acts to which the term might be applied. But the problems afflicting the term ‘honesty’ prove here to be the same as those that afflict all general concepts: we treat unequals as if they were equal. While this problem clearly has special relevance to the concept of honesty, once acknowledged it gives us no more reason to abandon that particular general term than to abandon any other general term. Thus the point does not altogether undermine the idea that individual acts, views and opinions can be characterised as more or less honest.
- 19.
Note that this stance gives us a basis for rejecting truths, as well as falsehoods. Referring back to my earlier discussion of ideological stereotypes (Section 4.3), and the fact that particular categorisation-generalisation complexes may comprise a number of general truths, even while the complex itself lacks all legitimacy: Nietzschean honesty gives us a basis on which to reject such complexes, however many truths they may embody.
- 20.
Nietzsche 1974, section 319.
- 21.
See Chapters 7, 8, and 9, above.
- 22.
Wood 1990, pp. 33–5.
- 23.
Popper 1945, Chapter 12.
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Lucas, P. (2011). Honesty. In: Ethics and Self-Knowledge. Library of Ethics and Applied Philosophy, vol 26. Springer, Dordrecht. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-94-007-1560-8_11
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