Nietzsche had a sharp and often contemptuous view of what he called “English psychology” and the broader tradition of British empiricist and utilitarian moral philosophy. His critique is scattered across several works — Beyond Good and Evil, Twilight of the Idols, On the Genealogy of Morality, and The Gay Science — but forms a coherent attack on a whole intellectual temperament.
1. The Critique of Utilitarianism and the “Herd Morality”
Nietzsche’s most sustained target was Utilitarian ethics — chiefly Bentham and Mill’s reduction of morality to the calculation of pleasure and pain, and the maximization of happiness for the greatest number.
- He found this mediocre and life-denying: it privileges comfort, safety, and the average over excellence, risk, and greatness.
- Utilitarianism, for Nietzsche, is the philosophical expression of the herd — a morality that flattens hierarchy and punishes the exceptional individual.
- “Man does not strive for happiness; only the Englishman does,” he quipped in Twilight of the Idols — meaning that making happiness the supreme value is a parochial, petit-bourgeois illusion.
2. The Attack on British Empiricism and Its Psychologists
In Beyond Good and Evil (Part I) and On the Genealogy of Morality (Preface), Nietzsche attacks English moral psychologists — figures like Spencer, Hume, and their successors — for:
- Lacking historical sense: They projected modern values (utility, sympathy, altruism) backward onto all of human history, as if these had always been the basis of morality.
- Flatness of soul: They could only explain the origin of moral concepts mechanistically — habit, utility, association — and missed the deeper question of the value of values themselves.
- “They are no philosophical race”: Nietzsche says this explicitly in Beyond Good and Evil (§252), charging that the English lack the instinct for genuine philosophy. They are capable of great industry and data-gathering but not of the bold, creative, self-overcoming thought he demands of a philosopher.
3. Darwin and the Problem of “Survival”
Nietzsche had a complicated relationship with Darwin, but largely rejected Social Darwinism and the popular English interpretation of evolution:
- The “survival of the fittest” was vulgarized into a justification for mediocrity — it is the most numerous, the most adaptable, the most average that survive, not the highest.
- Nietzsche argued that nature often sacrifices the species for the sake of the exceptional individual — the reverse of what the Darwinian moralists claimed.
- Evolution, in the English reading, pointed downward toward conformity; Nietzsche wanted to point upward toward the Übermensch.
4. Critique of Sympathy and Altruism (Spencer & the “Comfortable” Ethics)
Herbert Spencer attempted to merge evolution with utilitarian ethics, grounding morality in social cooperation and sympathy. Nietzsche despised this:
- Sympathy (Mitleid) — “feeling with suffering” — was for Nietzsche a form of weakness and even a contagion of suffering, not a virtue.
- Altruism as a supreme value he traced (in the Genealogy) to slave morality — the resentful inversion of aristocratic values by the weak.
- Spencer’s “evolution toward happiness” was, to Nietzsche, a comfortable lie told by a civilization in decline.
5. The Deeper Charge: Mediocrity of Philosophical Spirit
Beyond specific doctrines, Nietzsche’s critique is temperamental and cultural:
“They are not a philosophical race — the English: Bacon represents an attack on the philosophical spirit generally, Hobbes, Hume, and Locke an abasement and a depreciation of the idea of a ‘philosopher’ for more than a century.” — Beyond Good and Evil, §252
The English philosopher, in Nietzsche’s portrait, is:
- Too empirical — chained to facts, unable to think beyond them
- Too Christian in disguise — utilitarian altruism is secularized Christian morality without the honesty of its theological roots
- Too comfortable — philosophizing in service of stability, society, and contentment, rather than danger, solitude, and transformation
Summary Table
| Target | Nietzsche’s Charge |
|---|---|
| Utilitarianism (Bentham/Mill) | Herd morality; reduces life to comfort |
| Empiricism (Hume/Locke) | Debases philosophy; no historical sense |
| Darwinism (Spencer) | Glorifies the average; misreads nature |
| Altruism/Sympathy | Slave morality in disguise; weakness |
| English “character” | Industrious but philosophically shallow |
A Fair Assessment
Nietzsche’s critique, while brilliant and penetrating, is also polemical and sometimes unfair. Hume, in particular, is a far deeper thinker than Nietzsche credits. And Nietzsche himself borrows more from the British tradition than he admits — his psychological method of unmasking morality owes something to precisely the “English psychologists” he mocks. The critique is best read not as sober scholarship, but as Nietzsche’s philosophical war cry against a particular vision of what life and thought are for.
Know Thyself 