Standing Problems 237but they are still pathways to reality. Thus, in Bergson it is via ‘intuition’, in Freud it
is through the analysis of dreams, in Levi-Strauss it is a deep structural analysis, and
in Heidegger it is a meditative waiting on Being to disclose itself in art, and the like.
For Nietzsche, however, the flux of sensation, or the unconscious,hasabsolutely no
meaning, other than thatweimbue it with an artifice of conventional meaning. As he
states, ‘The habits of our senses have woven us into lies and deception of sensation:
these again are the basis of all our judgments and “knowledge”—there is absolutely
no escape, no backway or bypath into thereal world! We sit within our net, we spiders,
and whatever we catch in it, we can catch nothing at all except that which allows itself
to be caught in preciselyournet’ (Nietzsche 1982: 73). Thus, the obscure flux of the
world has no inner sense of meaning. There is nothing to be discovered, no inner
telos, no god, no core of reasonableness, no metaphysical Esperanto. Literally, all we
have are our conventions. There isnoreality above or beyond our conventions and
perspectives. We float, as it were, in a sea of these conventions.
The perspectivist thesis underpins Nietzsche’s account of morality. There are two
aspects to morality. The first is his negative critique, the second concerns his more pos-
itive ideas on morals, which focus on notions like the will to power andübermensch.
For Nietzsche the important point in considering issues of morality (or religion) is
that since all morality is just conventional perspective, and there is no inner, true,
or correct perspective in knowledge of any kind (moral or otherwise), it makes no
sense to ask about true or false moralities or even whether something is moral or
immoral. In morals, all values are just ourownvalues imposed on the flux of the
world. As Nietzsche put it, ‘value judgments concerning life,...can in the last resort
never be true: they possess value only as symptoms, they come into considerations
only as symptoms—in themselves such judgments are stupidities’ (Nietzsche 1968:
section 2, 30; see Hollingdale 1999: 134ff.). There are no hard and fast moral rules.
Morality is simply what is conventional or customary. Given that wecreatemorality,
it might therefore be more apt to think of morality via aesthetics. Morality is about
the creative will and the power of the individual imposing a particular rule or code
upon themselves and the world.
The more negative critical dimension of morals can be summed up in one word—
genealogy. Genealogy is a historical tracing of words to grasp the metaphoric process
through which these words take on moral meanings. The task that Nietzsche set him-
self moves against the standard conceptions of moral philosophy. He is not interested
in normative persuasion or reasoned judgement. He conceives of his task as primar-
ily based upon a historical and psychological method—although there is no sense
of any teleological history. In effect, he suspends all direct normative and teleolo-
gical concerns. The genealogical method undermines the universalist enterprise and
humanist affectations of morality. For Nietzsche, man is by nature neither a political
nor moral animal. He has been trained and cultivated in certain ways. There is no
universal morality, conversely there are a series of moralities both within and between
individuals and cultures. Genealogy traces out the minute and complex ways through
which humans absorb and take on moral terms and then construct a vision of the
human self, as if all this were natural to us. In this sense, genealogy initiates a form