Simply Nietzsche, page 12
The ascetic ideal
What has this all to do with modern western morality? The third treatise concerns the “acetic ideal” and what the ideal means for various groups, including artists and philosophers. For reasons of space, I shall not look at what Nietzsche said about artists or philosophers, turning instead to what seems a very surprising claim, namely Nietzsche’s view that the ideals of science are, in fact, “the last expression” of the ascetic ideal. But to address the question about how all this connects to modern western morality, we need to get some precise grasp of what is meant by the “ascetic ideal.”
In GM III: 8, Nietzsche wrote that the ascetic ideal is marked by “three great pomp words:” chastity, poverty, humility. An ideal is a goal to which to aspire, and which most of us fail to live up to. Our conception of a saintly figure is someone who lives a life of chastity, poverty, and humility. He is a figure to which to aspire—an ideal—and against whom we can measure our own shortcomings, regulating and improving ourselves. Such an ideal is “life-denying” or “hostile to life.” It is against the will to power in the sense that it sets an ideal that is against its straightforward expression: instead, it is an invention of the priest’s will to power, his will to provide a dominant interpretation. It “devalues” the dominating and appropriating character of drives. Humble people do not dominate, they do not seek to acquire things or satisfy bodily desire. The saint rejects all those objects of human endeavor, material wellbeing, bodily gratification, and self-interest. The normal human being struggles against these temptations in the light of the ideal set by the saint.
Most humans think this is the morality of the religious. It is a “Christian” morality, with the ideal of the saint, but western morality is now secular. In what way is our morality related to the ascetic ideal? One way to think about this is to see all our values as expressions of the valorization of poverty, chastity and humility, but without being so literal or explicitly religious. Our positive attitudes to selflessness and peacefulness, along with our dislike of arrogance, are secularized forms of humility. Our admiration for frugality, dislike of materialism and of ostentatiousness, represent a form of poverty. Our dislike of promiscuity, and, indeed, the whole complexity of attitudes to sex, is a form of chastity. Morality is about self-denial.
I will return to how and why this might be thought to be problematic. All that I have done so far is give a very brief sketch of Nietzsche’s thoughts on how our morality emerges. I mentioned above his belief that science is the last expression of the ascetic ideal. That, on the face of it, seems a bizarre claim. Nietzsche approached it by considering someone who says that science is opposed to such an ideal, partly because science undermines the Christian conception of the universe that underwrites it. What is central to science (and, remember, that the German term—Wissenschaft—means any disciplined knowledge seeking) is the unconditional value it places on truth. Truth is to be obtained at any price, be it helpful or terrible. Ideal scientists are those who sacrifice all in the pursuit of knowledge—“hard, strict, abstinent” types whom Nietzsche described as “heroic” and “pale atheists, anti-Christians.” But you will recall that Nietzsche opened Beyond Good and Evil by asking just why we value truth unconditionally. Or, to put it his way, why there is an unconditional will to truth. He posited that this will is an expression of the ascetic ideal, albeit a “noble” one. This claim has puzzled commentators, but in the GM Nietzsche referred to The Gay Science 334, a section entitled “In what way we too are pious.” There Nietzsche connected the will to truth with the will not to deceive, and, in particular, the will not to deceive one’s self. He suggested that the unconditional will to truth could not be accounted for in terms of usefulness since many truths lack utility, and, more importantly, many truths are dangerous or harmful. Instead, this will stemmed from the “moral ground” that “I will not deceive—even myself.”. This is connected to the existence of God and, with the Death of God, the question of whether we ought to value truth unconditionally emerges. Even so, this connection is obscure. Nietzsche alluded to the idea that science posits another world, one akin to the Christian heaven, and that truth had been identified with the divine in both the Platonic and Christian traditions. But this doesn’t seem yet to connect to the moral claim that “I will not deceive—even myself.” Here is a suggestion about the will not to deceive one’s self, God, and the will to truth as the expression of the ascetic ideal, though I am not confident that there is enough evidence to support it in the text. God is omniscient, the knower of everything, including, crucially, the knower of the heart of every man and woman. Not deceiving one’s self is very important—since God knows your heart, he also knows also your attempts to deny your culpability and evil thoughts. This means we must know our own heart, irrespective of how ugly or awful it might be because we cannot deceive God. Our will to truth becomes unconditional since truth can never, in the end, be escaped.
More about the Death of God
You will notice that I have touched on the Death of God. I have also just referred to a passage that comes from book 5 of The Gay Science, and, as I mentioned, this book was coeval with Beyond Good and Evil and On the Genealogy of Morality. That book opens with a statement of the Death of God, but a statement that seems optimistic. The Death of God brings with it the possibility of truly “free spirits” and an “open sea” of possibility. But there is a different tone in the closing section of the GM. The ascetic ideal, though contributing to the sickness of humanity, has, nevertheless, given man an ideal. It has provided an overarching interpretation or significance to human existence, and in particular, its inescapable suffering. Without it we “suffered from an enormous void.” Human existence is suffering in many different ways—not only sheer animal suffering, but also suffering from the absence of meaning and from the answer given by the ascetic ideal. Nevertheless, any meaning is better than none, and suffering is bearable when it has a meaning. But in the unconditional pursuit of the truth—itself an expression of the ascetic ideal—those of intellectual conscience can no longer believe in the God who underwrites this meaning, thus destroying the conditions of the “only meaning man has so far had.” We understand the ascetic ideal and find that beneath it is “hatred of the human, still more of the animal, still more of the material, … abhorrence of the senses, of reason itself, … fear of happiness and beauty, … looking away from all appearance, change, death, wish, longing itself.” For the few, then, there is a very real threat of suicidal nihilism. Humans need an ideal, something to guide the will; otherwise life is impossible. As Nietzsche put it pithily in the final words of the GM, “man would rather will nothingness than not will.”
Zarathustra, Nietzsche claimed, represents the counter-ideal, he who is “the Anti-Christ, the anti-nihilist; this conqueror of God and of nothingness.” (GM II: 24) We talked a little about what the higher type of human being might be like, and how such a person constitutes a new ideal in the chapter on Thus Spoke Zarathustra. The GM itself only hints at what this ideal might be (and, it has to be said, Nietzsche was sketchy elsewhere). What the GM does not provide is a side-by-side comparison of slave morality with Nietzsche’s counter-ideal. Nietzsche was completely clear in Ecce Homo—though some commentators remain stubbornly deaf to his declaration that the GM itself is not his revaluation of values but instead constitutes “three decisive preliminary studies by a psychologist for a revaluation of all values” (my emphasis). Similarly, he wrote in The Gay Science that “the history of origins [of moral judgments] … is something quite different from a critique” and a “morality of could even have grown out of an error, and realization of this fact would not as much as touch the problem of its value.” (GS 345) These “preliminary studies” help to show how the moral culture we inhabit can be seen as a natural product of human psychology and not, therefore, a timeless, fixed thing that constitutes the only possible morality. Once we recognize that, we can consider the possibility of an alternative ideal.
Coming to an End
Twilight of the Idols, The Antichrist, Ecce Homo, and Wagner Revisited
The year 1888 was extraordinary for Nietzsche. His philosophy was becoming appreciated. At the end of 1887, he was contacted by a Scandinavian professor, Georg Brandes, who was impressed by his work and began lecturing on Nietzsche’s philosophy in Copenhagen—lectures that would lead to Nietzsche’s eventual acclaim. Nietzsche discovered the northern Italian city of Turin, falling in love with the town (and its ice cream). His physical health improved a little. He had been laboring on what he thought would be his magnum opus, which was sometimes entitled The Revaluation of Values, and at other times The Will to Power (or a combination of the two). Not to be confused with the pseudo-work assembled from his notes by his sister, Nietzsche declared that he abandoned the project in February, though he tinkered with it until August. His preoccupation with Wagner gave birth to The Case of Wagner and Nietzsche contra Wagner, the latter a compendium of Nietzsche’s previous thoughts on the composer. He also wrote three other works: Twilight of the Idols, or How to Philosophize with a Hammer (TI), The Anti-Christ (A), and Ecce Homo: How What One Become What One Is (EH). The last of these Nietzsche was still working on right up until his fateful breakdown in January 1889, and it was published posthumously in 1908 (TI was published in 1889, A in 1895).
His breakdown naturally raises the question of his mental health in 1888. On the one hand, as I mentioned, he was a little better physically, which seemed to contribute to a sense of giddy exhilaration and megalomaniacal tendencies. But there were signs of his impending collapse. He wrote to Brandes in December, claiming that The Anti-Christ was a work of such significance that it would require printing a million copies in every language. In the same month, he stated that he expected a visit from the King and Queen of Italy. These and other signs of mental instability inevitably affect how we understand the writings of his final year. Certainly, Twilight of the Idols seems to bear no trace of his breakdown, and his visitors during the period of its composition saw nothing worrisome in his behavior. Some of what Nietzsche wrote in The Anti-Christ and in Ecce Homo carries with it a question mark. The Case of Wagner has its peculiarities, but it doesn’t seem out of tune with Nietzsche’s general attitude to the composer who, he thought, was symptomatic of the decline of culture. His critique makes use of the concept of “decadence,” one that is important in the writings of that year, and to which we shall return. We turn first to Twilight of the Idols.
“A declaration of war”
The title of Twilight of the Idols is, as many have observed, a play on Wagner’s Twilight of the Gods. Its subtitle, How to Philosophize with a Hammer, can mislead, making one think of Nietzsche as engaged in wanton destruction, an orgy of smashing. But it is too a musical reference, a matter of “tapping” idols to see if they are hollow or cracked, the hammer being akin to a tuning fork. The philosopher (Nietzsche) is examining those idols with “an evil ear” (TI preface). It is, he wrote, “a declaration of war” and part of his project of the “revaluation of values” (TI preface). The preface is dated September 30, 1888, which he declared as the day he finished the first book of the Revaluation of Values—The Anti-Christ.
This work touches on many subjects, though it is certainly more compact and focused than some other of his works. It is perhaps the best distillation of his mature philosophy, and yet recalls themes from The Birth of Tragedy. It was written, reportedly, at a tremendous pace but without seeming to suffer from that fact. Its opening section, “Arrows and Epigrams,” contains pithy aphorisms (Nietzsche at his most quotable), and is followed by “The Problem of Socrates.” The reader will recall that in The Birth of Tragedy, Nietzsche pointed the finger at “Socratism” as a philosophy that killed the redemptive character of Greek Tragedy, and there are echoes of this claim in this chapter. Socrates, Nietzsche claimed, was decadent. Decadence was a concept of great currency in the late 19th century, informing a whole school of art. At a first approximation, it signaled a kind of moral decline and a collapse into hedonism. Nietzsche would certainly not see mere voluptuousness as a welcome thing, but moral decline for him was obviously a rather more complicated matter. The kind of decline Nietzsche had in mind was the threat of nihilism, as humanity suffered increasingly from a lack of meaning. Humans are sets of drives, and without some ideal, there is psychic and cultural anarchy. Socrates represented a rejection of dominant instinct, both personally and culturally, and the honoring of dialect—of the method of question and answer—behind which is little but rabble-rousing ressentiment. Cold reason doesn’t cure the human condition, Nietzsche posited, but instead puts human beings at war with their own instincts. It is a “fight” against the instincts.
Nietzsche identified these problems in some artists and thinkers whom he named and criticized in “Skirmishes of an Untimely Man” and saw the problem endemic in certain conceptions of the German character (“What the Germans Lack”). Under the title of “Morality as Anti-Nature,” Nietzsche returned to this fight against the instincts. The reader will recall that bad conscience is the sickness caused by instincts turned against themselves. One “cure” is the Christian interpretation of our nature, which includes the idea that many of our instincts are base, merely animal and not part of our “real” nature. Therefore, our instincts are to be denied, destroyed, and extirpated. This is a key sense in which morality is “anti-nature.” But in this section, Nietzsche offered an alternative, positive proposal, which is to harness our natures rather than to deny them. This is the notion of the “spiritualization” or “sublimation” of the instincts (a notion which was to become central to Freud’s philosophy). To sublimate a drive is not to reject or extirpate it, but instead redirect it to another object, and in doing so shape that very drive. Nietzsche gave two examples, the sublimation of sensuality into love, and hostility into valuing the existence of enemies. In both cases, the basic expression and its aim in its object alters. Mere sex drive is turned into a deeper appreciation of the other, and hostility is turned into an appreciation of enemies as an object of resistance over which the will to power can exercise itself. This is in line with Nietzsche’s view that we constantly reinterpret our drive-based tendencies and offer them new meanings. Our sex drive is not destroyed but given a new, healthier expression. Though Nietzsche didn’t explicitly say it, such sublimation is part of what it means to create new values. As mentioned before, Nietzsche saw the world as valueless and values were created by the drives being directed towards objects. Sublimation is a matter of the very same drive producing a more nuanced and subtle conception of its objects, creating richer and more subtle values.
Nietzsche also offered his “first example” of the revaluation of values (TI, Four Great Errors, 2). He claimed that all moralities and religions prior to him saw happiness as coming from following certain prescriptions. Happiness was conceived as a reward for good behavior. Nietzsche’s first example of the revaluation of values is that the truth is precisely the opposite. The capacity for generosity, for example, requires someone who exhibits the kind of self-determination and order of the drives which Nietzsche found so admirable. He or she can deal well with others, rather than slavishly following the dictates of morality in hopes of reward. Nietzsche’s conception of happiness was not that of the “last men,” seeking contentment and a balance of pleasure over pain, but instead, those who, through a coincidence of drives and circumstance, have a single overarching goal to which all their drives are harnessed.
This can all sound rather homely, as it were. Harness one’s drives in a healthy way and tend to your own wellbeing first to ensure you can help others. But it leaves open the question of how that might be achieved. One thing that is clear in Nietzsche’s writing, and rather unpalatable to modern ears, is his belief that only aristocratic, rather than democratic, orders are conducive to the flourishing of such higher types. For him, democracy was the political outgrowth of the morality of ressentiment, the aim of which was to devalue the higher types, and create a modest working class, trained not to aspire to anything but to be self-sufficient in their work, allowing the great to flourish. A further problem lurks in Nietzsche’s account. In inveighing against slave morality and its focus of selflessness, didn’t he give license to individuals whose selfishness is horrific? It is unclear what Nietzsche could say in response to this; certainly, he didn’t want his immoralism to be a free-for-all. In Daybreak 103, for example, he wrote that it “goes without saying that I do not deny—unless I am a fool—that many actions called immoral ought to be avoided and resisted, or that many called moral oughts to be done and encouraged.” He added that they should be done for “other reasons than hitherto.” But it remains unclear just why that is so or what constraints there are on what is to be done or not done. I suspect Nietzsche thought that since each higher type set their own goals and standards, then it would be impossible to codify some set of restrictions that are to be placed on them. Nietzsche praised Goethe as an incomparable individual who “created himself” (TI, Skirmishes of an Untimely Man, 49). But there is a question mark about whether some darker individuals might go beyond good and evil in a far less attractive way.
Declining mental state
The subtitle of The Anti-Christ was going to be The Revaluation of Values until a last-minute switch to A Curse of Christianity, a change that perhaps reflects Nietzsche’s rapidly declining mental state. The title itself is, as so many of Nietzsche’s titles, potentially misleading. It could equally be translated as The Anti-Christian, and this would be perhaps the better translation, since Nietzsche seemed to hold Jesus Christ in some regard, reserving his sternest invective for St. Paul. Section 2 of the work could be an all-too-brief summary of Nietzsche’s revaluation of values. Good is what enhances the feeling of power; bad is that which stems from weakness. Happiness is the activity of power—“the feeling of power growing.” That much is familiar, but Nietzsche added, provocatively, that the “new principle” of the “love of humanity” is that the “weak and the failures should” perish, and what is more harmful than any vice is “pity for weakness and failures.” This was Nietzsche at his most hyperbolic, perhaps intimating his imminent collapses again.
