Eric Wills reveals how Nietzschean morality is displayed in Martin Scorsese’s Oscar-winning movie.
Unless of course the gangster himself [and most gangsters are men] quotes Nietzsche in order to rationalize his own behaviors.But we must be careful not to identify the overman with Nicholson’s gangster.
Just as, say, the occasional Nazi quoted him, right?
What to make of this "for all practical purposes"? If Costello is a moral nihilist, what's that make me? Instead, it just bespeaks the fact that like most things of this sort pertaining to value judgments, one size does not fit all. In fact, starting with the No God premise, moral nihilists can be found rationalizing behaviors that other moral nihilists would scoff at. I'm certainly no gangster. Though, had my life continued to unfold along the trajectory of those years [before I found God] when I was in a gang [my Burkleigh Manor years] I might well have become one.Like Nietzsche, Costello finds that conventional morality has a hollow ring, but Costello is nothing more than a nihilist. Although we might admire his defiance, our admiration is rooted in the kind of resentment which Nietzsche takes to be the mark of slaves, who seek to hide their weakness and deny their suffering.
And if despising thugs of Costello's ilk makes me a slave, so be it.
The Übermensch?There is a lack of subtlety in supposing that God must be the source of moral value. Moral nihilism is not the only possible response to the death of God. Nietzsche calls for a different perspective. Ultimately, it’s a perspective which he supposes only a few of us can occupy.
Here, in my view, Nietzsche blinked. He knocks off God, but still feels compelled to put a few of us in His place. In other words, he reconfigures a might makes right world into a right makes might world by supposing this "philosophical" distinction between the masters and the slaves.
Then, whatever this means to each of us as individuals:
So, there's the Übermensch's superior perspective on this, alongside the Last Man's bleating conformity?Aside from a few cynics, Nietzsche says we are still mostly good Europeans, paying lip-service to conventional notions of good and bad while teetering on the edge of a Godless abyss. In the first part of Beyond Good and Evil he condemns past philosophers for not pursuing the question of why we value truth at all. Must the falsity of a judgement lessen its value to us? This is his ‘dangerous maybe’ –that there need be no fact of the matter at all regarding true or false, good or evil. But this still does not have to lead to nihilism.
Again, for those who believe they grasp the True Nietzsche here, let's bring this down to Earth given a particular set of circumstances.