In Bernard Reginster’s account of On the Genealogy of Morality, Nietzsche’s genealogical exercise is ‘functional.’ Nietzsche aims, in his view, to expose the functional role of moral beliefs in serving particular emotional needs of agents. The focus on this theme is tight, to the exclusion of some traditional topics, including perspectivism or truthfulness, as Reginster himself notes. Chapters 3, 4, and 5 tackle essays 1, 2, and 3 of the Genealogy, but virtually the first half of the book is devoted to Reginster’s overarching argumentative frame, which I will briefly sketch. Reginster sees Nietzsche’s demand that the value of moral values be called into question as a call to understand the function of moral beliefs, by providing a naturalistic explanation of them. History plays no role in Reginster’s analysis. He concentrates on the internal dynamics of a more or less timeless, generic, individual human agent. If this is Nietzsche’s focus, Reginster argues, then it is legitimate for some of his genealogical accounts to be fictional, because the target is generic types of psychological condition and because in real life the explanatory emotional factors are concealed from agents themselves. Function is the key notion here: what psychological work do moral beliefs perform for the agent? For Reginster, Nietzsche is not principally out to challenge the epistemic reliability of the route by which we have acquired our moral beliefs; rather he uncovers how moral beliefs affect the agent’s ‘emotional economy,’ in particular how they impact the agent’s sense of self, otherwise described as the agent’s ‘standing in the world,’ or sense of being ‘somebody.’Some well-known phrases haunt the literature on Nietzsche. One is ‘Moralities are only a sign language of the affects.’ Reginster gives a convincing reading of this slogan. He distinguishes between expressive and functional readings of the relation between value judgements and affects. On an expressive (or sentimentalist) reading, ‘evaluative experience is constituted by affective experience: what it is to experience something as “good” or “bad” is (roughly) to feel “inclination” or “aversion” toward it’ (25). Here there is a noncontingent and transparent relation between the evaluation and the affect: necessarily, if you are finding something good, you have a positive affect towards that same thing. But Nietzsche’s conception of ‘sign language’ is different: the affects that do the explanatory work are often related neither constitutively nor transparently to the object of the surface evaluation. For example, one’s making the judgement that it is right to help the needy may be explained not by a positive affect towards the needy, but by disgust, or by a feeling of one’s own superiority. Reginster is right that Nietzsche’s characteristic explanations are typically of this nature (though this fact is compatible with Nietzsche’s possibly holding the expressive view.)In its overall form, Reginster’s ‘pragmatic’ account does not seem radically new. As he says, ‘In the Preface to Genealogy, Nietzsche makes it unequivocally clear that when he calls the “value” of moral values into question, he is referring to their functional value’ (41), and this prominent passage has surely not gone unnoticed by previous commentators. However, if we interpret ‘value’ merely as ‘function,’ we risk losing sight of another sense of ‘value.’ For Nietzsche is not just trying to explain how emotional needs get satisfied, but suggesting that a particular way in which that occurs is not good. When morality fulfills its affective functions for some human agents, the effect, Nietzsche thinks, is to make humanity worse. Reginster is less clear throughout the book on why Nietzsche makes this latter valuation. He prioritizes the notion of a ‘self-undermining functionality,’ and the overall arc of the book reveals how a way of bolstering up one’s sense of self (or power) can lead to one’s own sickness and impoverishment. But it is not obvious that identifying this kind of functionality exhausts the valuation of morality Nietzsche calls for.Reginster sees ressentiment as the affective state that unites all three essays of the Genealogy. The cause of ressentiment is a tendency ‘to construe suffering as demeaning or degrading, as a challenge to the agent’s standing in the world’ (50). But instead of lingering with this sense of being demeaned, the person of ressentiment finds a way to restore his or her inner sense of ‘standing’ by viewing the suffering as an offense traceable to some perpetrator. Commentaries traditionally explain ressentiment by way of its most obvious instance in the psychology of the first essay’s ‘slaves,’ with their vengefulness and hatred directed at more powerful individuals in their society. By contrast, Reginster takes the concept in a wider sense, from which it emerges that ressentiment need not be construed primarily as a ‘social sentiment’ directed at other agents. It is more concerned with an agent’s own sense of self, can be directed at the world more generally, and can reflexively light on oneself as the object of blame, as in Nietzsche’s version of Christianity in the third essay.Reginster’s account makes will to power the driving instinct that causes the reaction of ressentiment. Eschewing discussion of whether will to power is any kind of cosmological view, he reads ‘power’ as a ‘conformity of the world to the agent’s will which is the product of the agent’s exercise of effective agency’ (65). Thus, one’s feeling of power is always relative to whatever is the overriding goal of one’s will. Reginster succinctly explains another Nietzschean slogan, ‘Ressentiment itself becomes creative’: a revaluation of values alters the agent’s will and thus ‘alters what counts as bending the world to it, that is, what counts as power for him’ (82). This clarifies what Nietzsche means by ‘creative’ here and shows how an aspiration to refrain from aggression toward others can also be an expression of will to power. By the end of the discussion, it is obvious how in Christian morality ‘ascetic self-denial is now what counts as power’ (160). Yet the precise status of will to power remains somewhat unclear. Nietzsche calls psychology ‘the doctrine of the development of the will to power,’ but Reginster says that this may be read as a biological rather than a psychological claim, and that Nietzsche is possibly exhorting us to ‘reconsider human psychology from the perspective of the new conception of life’ (63). It is hard to grasp the point here. It seems to amount to, ‘Thinking about how all living organisms function may help you see how the human mind is set up to preserve its own sense of standing in the world.’ But one would like to hear more about what kind of explanation is then supposed to be taking place.Having established this psychological structure of will to power, standing in the world, and ressentiment, Reginster applies it to the three essays of the Genealogy. It is not possible here to engage with details, but the analyses are penetrating, nuanced, and insightful. The reader will gain much by following the intricacies of the account through the major topics of equality, freedom of the will, imaginary revenge, guilt, punishment, and asceticism. Like Nietzsche, Reginster leaves any mention of the ‘will to nothingness’ to the end of his book. But we are left to figure out why Nietzsche writes specifically of ‘nothingness’ here. ‘Not willing’ is characterized as a kind of nihilism or meaninglessness in which one lacks any goal, and ‘there is nothing to will’ (167), or at least nothing that is achievable. The ascetic ideal provides the escape from ‘not willing’, eliminates the agent’s feeling of impotence, and ‘gives him a new lease of life’ (169). Reginster suggests that interpreting suffering as punishment allows the sense of power to be restored: suffering can both be justified as having stemmed from one’s own agency, and relieved because accepting the punishment restores one’s worth as a person. All of this is a pathological manifestation of will to power because in devaluing natural human well-being, it ‘decreases the organism’s capacity for life’—again a case of ‘self-undermining functionality.’ But one would like to hear more on why this condition of a relative ‘depletion of energy’ (187) deserves the absolute description of willing nothingness. Perhaps more could be made of the aspiration literally to lose the sense of self, to be nothing, which Nietzsche finds in Schopenhauerian negation of the will to life or in Buddhism.In Reginster’s final analysis, morality is a way for the weak to deal with a ‘depression’ that is endemic in human existence: ‘Morality poses a danger when it is put to a particular use, because this use is self-defeating. It poses such a danger … when it is made to serve the ressentiment of those who feel “weak and impotent”, by promising to restore their “feeling of power”, and thus offering them a way out of “depression” and “suicidal nihilism”’ (188). This seems to leave it open that morality might be objectionable only ‘in the wrong hands’ and that there could be unobjectionable uses of it for those who are not ‘weak and impotent.’ But there is no evidence of such a view in Nietzsche. Nietzsche’s usual attitude to the weak seems to be roughly ‘If morality functions to help them to get by, let them get on with it.’ He is more preoccupied with morality as a threat to the ‘strong.’ Reginster’s account addresses this point by introducing, in the last few pages, the thought that the ‘depression’ to which morality is a seductive remedy ‘is a chronic consequence of essential features of the human condition, and thus affects all human beings’ (188). Morality is a danger to the ‘strong’ because they are also sometimes, to some degree, weak and impotent. This theme would benefit from further development.Reginster in effect sees Nietzsche as giving a cool, timeless analysis of the ways in which the human mind functions to preserve its sense of power in relation to the world. That analysis is without doubt there in Nietzsche’s text, and Reginster’s sustained exposition advances our understanding of it. For that reason, everyone interested in Nietzsche should pay serious attention to this book. But, having collapsed the notion of ‘value’ into that of ‘function,’ Reginster effectively ends up locating the alleged disvalue of morality principally in the fact that its function is self-undermining: it is a ‘danger’ because it is self-defeating. It is hard to see this feature of morality as what motivates the alarm and disgust in Nietzsche’s narrative voice in the Genealogy. He sees himself at a historical juncture in which art, science, politics, and great human achievement are under threat as a consequence of moral beliefs and practices. That the psychology of the generic moral agent is self-defeating may be true, but it is not obviously Nietzsche’s chief evaluative concern.

中文翻译：

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虚无意志：尼采论道德谱系论

在伯纳德·雷金斯特 (Bernard Reginster) 的《论道德谱系》(On the Genealogy of Morality) 中，尼采的谱系学实践是“功能性的”。在他看来，尼采的目标是揭示道德信念在服务于代理人的特定情感需求中的功能作用。正如 Reginster 自己指出的那样，对这一主题的关注非常紧密，以至于排除了一些传统主题，包括透视主义或真实性。第 3、4 和 5 章处理 Genealogy 的论文 1、2 和 3，但实际上本书的前半部分致力于 Reginster 的总体论证框架，我将简要概述一下。雷金斯特将尼采要求质疑道德价值的价值视为通过提供对道德信仰的自然主义解释来理解道德信仰的功能。历史在 Reginster 的分析中没有任何作用。他专注于或多或少永恒的、通用的、个体人类代理人的内部动力。雷金斯特认为，如果这是尼采的关注点，那么他的一些家谱叙述是虚构的是合理的，因为目标是一般类型的心理状况，而且在现实生活中，解释性情感因素对代理人本身是隐藏的。功能是这里的关键概念：道德信念为代理人执行哪些心理工作？对雷金斯特来说，尼采主要不是要挑战我们获得道德信仰的途径的认知可靠性；相反，他揭示了道德信念如何影响行动者的“情感经济”，特别是它们如何影响行动者的自我意识，否则被描述为行动者“在世界上的地位”或“成为某人”的感觉。一些著名的短语经常出现在有关尼采的文献中。一个是“道德只是情感的一种手语”。Reginster 对这个标语给出了令人信服的解读。他区分了价值判断和情感之间关系的表达解读和功能解读。在表达性（或感伤主义）的阅读中，“评价性体验由情感体验构成：将某事体验为“好”或“坏”是（粗略地）对它感到“倾向”或“厌恶””（25 ). 在这里，评价和影响之间存在一种非偶然且透明的关系：必然地，如果你发现了一些好的东西，你就会对同一件事产生积极的影响。但尼采对“手语”的概念不同：起到解释作用的情感通常与表面评价的对象既不构成关系也不透明。例如，一个人做出帮助有需要的人是正确的判断可能不是因为对有需要的人有积极的影响，而是因为厌恶，或者是因为自己的优越感。Reginster 是正确的，Nietzsche 的典型解释通常具有这种性质（尽管这一事实与尼采可能持有表达性观点相一致。）从整体形式来看，Reginster 的“实用主义”解释似乎并不是全新的。正如他所说，“在谱系学的序言中，尼采明确表示，当他质疑道德价值的“价值”时，他指的是它们的功能价值”（41），以前的评论员肯定不会忽视这段突出的段落。然而，如果我们将“价值”仅仅解释为“功能”，我们​​就有可能看不到“价值”的另一种含义。因为尼采不仅试图解释情感需求是如何得到满足的，而且还暗示满足这种需求的特定方式是不好的。当道德对某些人类代理人发挥其情感功能时，尼采认为，其效果是使人性变得更糟。雷金斯特在整本书中都不太清楚为什么尼采会做出后一种评价。他优先考虑“自我破坏功能”的概念，这本书的整体弧线揭示了一种增强自我意识（或权力）的方法如何导致自己的疾病和贫困。但是，识别这种功能性并不明显会耗尽尼采所呼吁的道德价值。雷金斯特将怨恨视为将系谱的所有三篇文章联系在一起的情感状态。怨恨的原因是一种倾向“将苦难解释为贬低或贬低，作为对代理人在世界上的地位的挑战”（50）。但是，怨恨的人并没有在这种被贬低的感觉中徘徊，而是找到了一种方法来恢复他或她内心的“站立”感，方法是将痛苦视为可追溯到某些肇事者的罪行。传统上，评论通过第一篇文章中“奴隶”心理中最明显的例子来解释怨恨，他们的报复心和仇恨指向社会中更有权势的人。相比之下，Reginster 在更广泛的意义上采用了这个概念，从中可以看出，怨恨不必主要被解释为针对其他代理人的“社会情绪”。它更关心行动者自身的自我意识，可以更普遍地指向世界，可以反射性地将自己作为责备的对象，就像第三篇文章中尼采版本的基督教一样。雷金斯特的叙述使权力意志导致怨恨反应的驾驶本能。回避讨论权力意志是否是任何一种宇宙论观点，他将“权力”解读为“世界与代理人意志的一致性，这是代理人行使有效代理权的产物”（65）。因此，一个人的权力感总是与一个人意志的首要目标相关。雷金斯特简洁地解释了尼采的另一个口号，“怨恨本身变成了创造性的”：价值的重估改变了行动者的意志，从而“改变了让世界屈服于它的东西，也就是改变了对他来说算作权力的东西”（82）。这澄清了尼采在这里所说的“创造性”是什么意思，并表明了避免对他人进行攻击的愿望也可以表达权力意志。到讨论结束时，很明显在基督教道德中，“苦行者的克己现在才是力量”（160）。然而，权力意志的确切地位仍然有些不清楚。尼采称心理学为“权力意志发展的学说”，但雷金斯特说，这可以被解读为生物学而非心理学的主张，尼采可能是在告诫我们“从新的生命观的角度重新考虑人类心理学”（63）。这里很难把握要点。这似乎相当于，“思考所有生物体的功能可能有助于你了解人类的思想是如何建立起来的，以保持自己在世界上的地位。” 但是人们想知道更多关于当时应该发生什么样的解释。在建立了这种权力意志、世界地位和怨恨的心理结构之后，雷金斯特将其应用于《系谱》的三篇文章。这里不可能涉及细节，但分析是深刻的、细致入微的和富有洞察力的。通过平等、意志自由、虚构的报复、内疚、惩罚和禁欲主义。像尼采一样，雷金斯特在他的书的结尾留下了任何提及“虚无意志”的地方。但我们需要弄清楚为什么尼采在这里专门写下“虚无”。“不愿意”被描述为一种虚无主义或无意义，在这种虚无主义或无意义感中，一个人没有任何目标，并且“没有什么可以想要的”（167），或者至少没有什么是可以实现的。禁欲主义的理想提供了摆脱“不愿意”的方法，消除了代理人的无能感，并“给他新的生命”（169）。Reginster 认为，将苦难解释为惩罚可以恢复权力感：苦难既可以被证明是源于一个人自己的力量，也可以因为接受惩罚恢复了一个人的价值而得到解脱。所有这一切都是权力意志的病态表现，因为在贬低人类自然福祉的过程中，它“降低了有机体的生命能力”——这又是一个“自我破坏功能”的例子。但是人们希望更多地了解为什么这种相对“能量耗尽”（187）的情况值得用意志虚无的绝对描述来描述。尼采在叔本华对生命意志的否定或佛教中发现了从字面上失去自我意识、成为虚无的渴望。在雷金斯特的最终分析中，道德是弱者应对的一种方式。人类普遍存在的“抑郁症”：“当道德被用于特定用途时，它会带来危险，因为这种用途会弄巧成拙。” 它带来了这样的危险……当它被用来满足那些感到“软弱无能”的人的怨恨时，承诺恢复他们的“权力感”，从而为他们提供摆脱“抑郁”和“自杀式虚无主义”的出路”（188）。这似乎使道德可能只在“坏人之手”中令人反感，而对于那些并非“软弱无能”的人来说，道德的使用可能不会令人反感。但在尼采那里并没有这种观点的证据。尼采对弱者一贯的态度似乎大致是“如果道德能帮助他们度过难关，那就让他们继续吧。” 他更关注道德作为对“强者”的威胁。Reginster 的帐户通过在最后几页中介绍来解决这一点，认为道德是一种诱人疗法的“抑郁症”“是人类状况的基本特征的慢性结果，因此影响了所有人”（188）。道德对“强者”来说是一种危险，因为他们有时在某种程度上也是软弱无能的。这个主题将受益于进一步的发展。实际上，雷金斯特认为尼采对人类思维保持其与世界相关的权力感的方式进行了冷静、永恒的分析。毫无疑问，这种分析存在于尼采的文本中，雷金斯特的持续阐述促进了我们对它的理解。正因如此，凡是对尼采感兴趣的人都应该认真关注这本书。但是，将“价值”的概念分解为“功能”的概念后，’ Reginster 有效地最终将所谓的道德贬值主要定位在它的功能是自我破坏的事实：它是一种“危险”，因为它是自我挫败的。很难将道德的这一特征视为激发尼采在《系谱》中的叙述声音中的警觉和厌恶的原因。他认为自己处于一个历史关头，在这个关头，艺术、科学、政治和人类的伟大成就由于道德信仰和实践而受到威胁。一般道德行动者的心理是弄巧成拙的可能是真的，但这显然不是尼采的主要评价关注点。很难将道德的这一特征视为激发尼采在《系谱》中的叙述声音中的警觉和厌恶的原因。他认为自己处于一个历史关头，在这个关头，艺术、科学、政治和人类的伟大成就由于道德信仰和实践而受到威胁。一般道德行动者的心理是弄巧成拙的可能是真的，但这显然不是尼采的主要评价关注点。很难将道德的这一特征视为激发尼采在《系谱》中的叙述声音中的警觉和厌恶的原因。他认为自己处于一个历史关头，在这个关头，艺术、科学、政治和人类的伟大成就由于道德信仰和实践而受到威胁。一般道德行动者的心理是弄巧成拙的可能是真的，但这显然不是尼采的主要评价关注点。