Scope:
Friedrich Nietzsche stands out from the other "masters of suspicion" as a critic of both religion and modernity. Nietzsche saw in the modern period a culmination of the nihilistic "slave morality" that for him was at the heart of Judaism and Christianity. This argument finds its clearest expression in On the Genealogy of Morals. In the first essay of this book, Nietzsche presents an account of the morality of altruism as having its origin in the revolt of slaves against their masters. This morality is based in resentment and the denial of self and contrasts with the self-affirming morality of the nobles. The slave revolt begins with Judaism and is victorious in its Christian form.
Outline
I. Nietzsche's proclamation of the death of God became a touchstone for 20'"-century theists and atheists alike.
II. Nietzsche's attack on religion and Christianity is a complicated one because unlike Marx and Freud, his attack on religion is also an attack on modern thinkers who confidently proclaim a new age without God and religion.
A. Because Nietzsche closely connects the death of God with a loss of meaning, the question of how we live after the death of God becomes a crucial one for him.
1. He is suspicious of religion but also of modernity and almost everything human beings find valuable and meaningful, including truth and morality.
2. Where does his suspicion lead us?
B. Nietzsche became a professor of philology at the remarkably young age of 24, but after 10 years, he left the academy.
1. Like Kierkegaard, Nietzsche criticized modernity from the margins of European intellectual life and from an "existentialist" perspective that, unlike the fundamentalists or traditionalists, looked ahead to something beyond modernity
2. Also like Kierkegaard, Nietzsche was a great writer who refused to accept the limits and demands of modern philosophical style.
3. He employed a number of strategies to complicate his message and to show the reader a living thinker at work: misdirection, aphorism, humor, and hyperbole.
III. For Nietzsche, the death of God is not primarily about the end of religion but about the beginning of nihilism: After God, after morality, after science, what can we affirm?
A. In its simple sense, nihilism is a state in which one's life has no overarching goal, no orientation or direction.
1. Nietzsche claims that for life to have meaning, our wills
must have a goal.
2. Human beings will gladly suffer, as long as they can be shown that they are suffering in service of a goal.
B. But nihilism is more complex, and Nietzsche distinguishes two forms of nihilism. Sometimes even when we have something to will, we are in a state of nihilism, whether we know it or not.
1. We are in a state of nihilism when our will wills something that, in fact, is really nothing.
2. Most people throughout history have been in this situation because their lives have aimed at God and goodness, which ultimately are forms of willing nothingness.
3. The problem is this: We either will nothingness when we believe in God or we don't have anything at all to will.
4. And we would rather will nothingness than not will at all.
IV. In On the Genealogy of Morals, Nietzsche explains why human beings have for so long willed the nothingness of God and why even those who seem to accept the death of God still worship the "shadows of God" and, thus, do not really confront nihilism.
A. Nietzsche's genealogical approach to history rejects the idea that there is some kind of overarching plan for or inherent logic to history: History proceeds by fits and starts and is the product of multiple contingencies, accidents, and intersecting stories.
1. Nietzsche's is a naturalistic approach to history in which the main focus is on how human beings try to maintain and increase their power over themselves, over others, and over life itself.
2. Nietzsche argues that our highest ideals emerge not out of some connection with the divine or some basic moral sensibility — such as altruism — but out of struggles for power and self-possession.
B. Nietzsche devotes the first sections of the Genealogy to an account of two types of morality, what he calls "master morality" and "slave morality."
C. He describes the victory of slave morality over master morality as a "revaluation of values."
D. For Nietzsche, morality as we understand it today is slave morality because it is this category that was able to overcome master morality through, first, the priestly religion of the Jews and, then, with the emergence of a dominant Christianity out of the Roman Empire.
E. The question is whether we can find a new nobility and cure the moral sickness of humanity. Working our way further into the Genealogy, we will see how Nietzsche connects the approach to morality that he develops in the first essay to religion and what he calls the "ascetic ideal."
Suggested Reading:
Nietzsche and Smith, On the Genealogy of Morals.
Roberts, Contesting Spirit.
Questions to Consider:
1. What does Nietzsche mean by "nihilism" ?
2. What role does Christianity play for Nietzsche in the "revaluation of values" ?
Lecture Twenty — Transcript
Nietzsche and the Genealogy of Morals
Back in the beginning of the course, I mentioned that in some ways these lectures would hinge on the work of Friedrich Nietzsche and his announcement in The Gay Science that God is dead. I didn't mean by this that Nietzsche has all the answers to the questions of religion in the modern period, but I meant something more like the following. First, it simply means that we are now just a little more than midway through the lectures, and with Nietzsche we reach the end of the 19th century. More significantly, it means that although Nietzsche is obviously not the first critic of religion we've explored in these lectures nor the first to imagine a world without God, his proclamation of the death of God becomes a kind of touchstone for the 20th century, for theists and atheists alike.
Indeed, over the past 25 years, Nietzsche's influence on philosophy and religious thought has only grown, especially among those who've embraced some version of postmodernism — and we' ll discuss this more in later lectures. We might say that with the proclamation of the death of God, Nietzsche captured something that for many people was crucial about modern Western culture and the place of religion in that culture. Depending on how one reads Nietzsch — and this is always a very contested matter; he was the most elusive of writers — we might think about the significance of this proclamation in one of two ways. First, we've seen that there were many "cultured despisers" of religion before Nietzsche, but that in the 19th century, intellectual culture in the West was still deeply imprinted with Christianity, and many still believed that religion had i crucial role to play in the culture.
But Nietzsche's announcement is a convenient symbol for that period of transition — and this is roughly the last quarter of the 19th century — to a culture in which atheism was not only respectable, but it least among intellectuals, often even assumed — a culture in which belief in God was increasingly seen to be intellectually irrelevant or even embarrassing. As I'll try to show, however, I think the significance of Nietzsche's announcement is more uncanny — it's more complicated than this. Rather than simply signaling and reinforcing the developing and very modern dichotomy between the secular and the religious, between atheism and theism, Nietzsche disrupts these simple oppositions and points us toward an uncertain postmodern future. One of my objectives in the next two lectures is to explain what I mean by this, but to anticipate I can make the following observations.
Like Kierkegaard, Nietzsche was a critic of modernity. As much as he's critical of Christianity and belief in the Christian God, he's also critical of the ways that many modern thinkers confidently proclaim a new age without God and religion. In part, as I pointed out in the second lecture, this is because Nietzsche connects the death of God with a loss of meaning — the loss of horizon, direction, orientation and in doing so, he raises the specter of nihilism, and he undermines the self-confidence of modernity that was so prevalent in the 19th century. Unlike Marx, who was essentially a utopian thinker, Nietzsche was in many respects pessimistic about the future. He was convinced that optimistic modernists had not really confronted the radical meaning of the death of God, and that even non-believers were still worshipping what he called "the shadows of God."
In this, Nietzsche's suspicion of religion differs very much from Marx's and, as we shall see, from Freud's. Both Marx and Freud ground their suspicion of religion in their confidence in modern scientific modes of analysis that can show us how to put things right — or, in Freud's case, how to put things better. Nietzsche, on the other hand, is not suspicious only of religion, but of these modern scientific forms of analysis, and he's concerned that they might just lead us even deeper into nihilism. For Nietzsche, the hermeneutics of suspicion does not just undermine religion, but it undermines just about everything human beings find valuable, meaningful including truth and morality.
So, the question with Nietzsche is: After the death of God, what is there left to affirm or to value? It will require two lectures for me to talk about how Nietzsche addresses this problem. I'm going to start in this lecture with some general comments on Nietzsche's life and his approach to philosophy. I'll then examine his concept of nihilism to show its centrality to his diagnosis of the death of God. To do this, I want to focus primarily on a book that Nietzsche published in 1887 called On the Genealogy of Morals. This will take me through the first lecture and into the next lecture, where I also want to discuss what Nietzsche, in the third and final essay of the Genealogy, calls the "ascetic ideal" — a concept that allows him to argue that nihilism inhabits not only religion, but also modernity. Then, finally, to conclude my discussion of Nietzsche, I'll return to The Gay Science to talk about the possibilities that Nietzsche sees for overcoming nihilism after the death of God.
Nietzsche was born near Leipzig in Germany. He was the son of, and grandson of, Lutheran pastors. He was an extremely gifted student and was appointed professor of classics and philology — philology is the history of language — at the University of Basel, in Switzerland, at the remarkably young age of 24. However, after 10 years in Basel—and this was due in large part to ill health, but also to Nietzsche's frustrations with the expectations and what he perceived as the limitations of academic life — he left his post, and he spent the remainder of his life living very frugally on his pension as a wandering writer. He searched all over Europe for good weather. He was rather sickly, and he thought that if he could find the perfect weather, he could find good health.
Like Kierkegaard, and Feuerbach, and Marx, then, and unlike most of the other thinkers we've examined in this course, especially after Kant, Nietzsche did his major writing outside of the context of the European university. But, the parallels of Kierkegaard, I think, are the most interesting here. I think it's one of philosophy's great losses that Nietzsche never heard about Kierkegaard until shortly before his physical and mental breakdown, and he thus never had a chance to read Kierkegaard. One of these parallels is that neither accepted the limits and demands of philosophical style as it had been developed by the great university philosophers Kant and Hegel. Nietzsche, like Kierkegaard, was a master stylist. He brought a literary, writerly sensibility to his work and in doing so challenged standard philosophical forms. We've seen that Kierkegaard used devices such as pseudonyms and irony in part to subvert and show the limits of the Hegelian system and to challenge the reader to think about issues he raised in his work in terms of their own lives.
Nietzsche was quite similar in this regard, and this is one of the main reasons that both Kierkegaard and Nietzsche are often viewed as "existentialist" philosophers. Nietzsche doesn't use pseudonyms, but employs all sorts of strategies—misdirection, aphorism, humor, hyperbole — to complicate his message and to show the reader a living thinker at work. As a critic of modernity, Nietzsche is not like the Fundamentalists or other traditionalists looking back to a time before the modern period as a kind of ideal time. Rather, he seems to be looking ahead, anticipating something different than modernity though he acknowledges the difficulty of discerning what that is. What he can see is nihilism, and so we' re going to start by considering what Nietzsche means by nihilism. I'll start with a passage that was found in Nietzsche's notebooks after his death, and I think this passage expresses the blankness of Nietzsche's vision of nihilism. He writes:
Once upon a time, in some out of the way corner of that universe which is dispersed into numberless twinkling solar systems, there was a star upon which clever beasts invented knowing. That was the most arrogant and mendacious minute of "world history," but nevertheless it was only a minute. After nature had drawn a few breaths, the star cooled and congealed, and the clever beasts had to die.
It's an anti-creation story — a bleak, naturalistic account of "world history," as in the large scheme of things, utterly meaningless. It's in that sense, a nihilistic account of world history. One way of thinking about Nietzsche's work is to see him as challenging us to affirm our lives, to find meaning in our lives, while at the same time acknowledging that this, what I just read, this anti-biblical, anti Hegelian view of history is the big picture. To get to that point, though, we have to consider Nietzsche's concept of nihilism with some more precision, for it's at once a simple and a complicated idea. In its simple sense, nihilism is a state in which human life has no overarching goal — in which it is believed that there is nothing in the fabric of the universe that gives us meaning. This idea of a goal of life is closely connected to Nietzsche's concept of the "will" — and the will in many respects is the key concept for Nietzsche's whole philosophy, because he claims that for life to have meaning, our wills must have a goal — we must have an aim, something to will.
Human beings, Nietzsche will say at the end of the Genealogy, will gladly suffer as long as they can be shown that they are suffering in the service of a goal. But there's another way to think about nihilism, for Nietzsche argues that sometimes even when we have something to will, when we have a goal, we are still in a state of nihilism whether we know it or not. That is, we're in a state of nihilism when our will wills something that, in fact, is really nothing. I'll explain what this means. Indeed, Nietzsche thinks that most people throughout history have been in this situation — that is, most people have oriented their lives around ultimate goals like God and like being good, which, for Nietzsche, just are not real, are ultimately forms of what he says, what he calls, "willing nothingness." So, Nietzsche distinguishes between two forms of nihilism. We either will nothingness — for example, when we believe in God, when we pretend that there's a goal embedded in the vary nature of things we' re willing nothingness because those are just illusions, or we don't have anything at all to will — for example, when we give up the pretense of God, but then have nothing to replace it with, no goal, no new goal. Both of those are forms of nihilism. Nietzsche thinks that we' ll do just about anything to avoid the latter form of nihilism. We' ll do just about anything to avoid a conscious sense of not having anything to will. This is a major reason, he thinks, why belief in God has been so attractive for so many people, and it remains so even as it becomes more and more unbelievable. They, or indeed just about all of us, he says, would rather will nothingness, such as God, than not will at all. So, this is why, in TAe Gay Science,a few pages before Nietzsche's madman comes on the scene, Nietzsche writes about what he calls "shadows of God." So, this is from the beginning of Book Three in The Gay Science: "After Buddha was dead, his shadow was still shown for centuries in a cave — a tremendous, gruesome shadow. God is dead: but given the way of men, there will still be caves for thousands of years in which his shadow will be shown."
So, Nietzsche's problem is that in wanting to refuse the first form of nihilism — willing nothingness, that is willing God or one of God' s shadows — he feels compelled to face the possibility that there is, in fact, nothing to will — that human existence is, in fact, meaningless. Thus, his story of the clever beasts, which can be read as Nietzsche's effort to tell a story that vanquishes all shadows of God, and thus Nietzsche's belief that only in facing the second form of nihilism, there's nothing to will, will it be possible to learn whether there is, in fact, a non-nihilistic meaning for human life — even if this means risking the possibility that there is none. In this sense, Nietzsche the philosopher is acting like his madman, announcing the death of God and finding himself falling through an empty space.
To work this problem out in some more detail, I want to turn now to On the Genealogy of Morals, and I want to interpret this as Nietzsche's most sustained analysis of the meaning of the death of God. In this book, he explains not only why human beings have for so long willed the nothingness of God, but also why he fears that even those who no longer believe in God still continue to will, to worship, shadows on the wall of a cave. I want to begin by discussing the term "genealogy" itself, because it relates directly to the question of history as we discussed it in talking about 19th century biblical criticism and theology. So, On the Genealogy of Morals (or what I'll just call the Genealogy) is a kind of history. It tells a story — or more precisely, a number of intersecting stories about the origins of morality and religion. Most importantly, for our work here, it tells stories about what Nietzsche calls the "moralization of religion" — about how the idea of God was turned into a moral idea, and how this transformation has led Western culture to its present dire situation. But as I said, it's not one story, but a series of stories — a set of different narratives whose relation to one another is not always obvious. It's a hard book to read in this way.
This has to do with the concept of genealogy, which Nietzsche understood as a particular way of thinking about history. It's a way of thinking about history that rejects the kind of history-telling that interprets history in terms of an overarching pattern or plan — the kind of history we see in the Bible or the kind of history we see in Hegel. For Nietzsche, there is no appointed end to history — there' s no grand scheme into which all historical events and periods fit neatly. This is just one of many shadows of God, this idea that we can capture the whole of history and see how everything is moving along. Nietzsche rejects this idea. Instead, he wants to say history proceeds by fits and start — it's the product of multiple contingency, multiple accidents, intersecting stories that just happen to intersect and influence one another. Another way to put this, to look back at the discussion of biblical criticism, is that the genealogical approach to history is a relentlessly naturalistic approach—again, full of contingencies, full of accidents; there's no overarching pattern being imposed onto the world. History is, to use the title of one of Nietzsche's early books, simply "human, all too human." It is simply human beings living, fundamentally natural beings — they do various things that produce various results. These human beings, and here we get at what, for Nietzsche, is the most important driving force in human history — these human beings are always trying to maintain and to increase their power — power over themselves, over others, even over nature or life itself. So, we should think about genealogy as a method of the hermeneutics of suspicion. It's a method through which Nietzsche tries to show that our highest values and ideals, our religion and our morality, exist not because of some connection with the divine, or some basic human capacity, or sensibility for goodness or altruism — but they emerge essentially by accident, rather out of human, all too human, struggles for power, self-possession. They emerge naturally.
So let me begin to walk through the three essays that make up the Genealogy. In the remainder of this lecture, I'll discuss Nietzsche s views on the origin of morality. Then, in the next lecture, when I move to Essays Two and Three of the Genealogy, I'll talk about the origin and moralization of religion and then about the ascetic ideal, nihilism, and the problem of meaning. Nietzsche devotes the first sections of the Genealogy to an account of the origins and development of two types of morality: The first he calls "master or noble morality," and the second he calls "slave or base morality." He makes two fundamental claims about these moralities. First, he argues that morality originates with the nobles, and that the primary concept of noble morality is the concept of "the good." But, for the nobles, Nietzsche argues, the concept "good" is not primarily what we, today, would understand as a moral concept.
To support this claim, Nietzsche relies on the tools of his original academic discipline, philology — that is, he traces the history of the word "good" to argue that originally, or more precisely, the roots of the German word gut and the English "good" — argues that the roots of these words simply meant something like "having a privileged or aristocratic soul." Essentially, with the word "good" the nobles — the strongest, most healthy, and domineering group in a society — were simply affirming themselves: "We' re good." Similarly, they opposed this term "good" to the term "bad," which, for the nobles, simply was used to refer to those who weren't noble — those who were plain, or simple, or common, and, to quote Nietzsche, bad in a sense was a term with no "inculpatory implication" — the bad were not to blame for being bad. This is just what they were. They were not like us. They' re common. It's not a moral designation in our sense of the term "moral."
The second point Nietzsche makes is that slave or base morality, the other form of morality, is a derivative or what he calls a "reactive form" of valuing, and he calls it this because base or slave morality begins not with the self-affirmation or the idea of good, but rather with the concept of evil — a concept the base used to designate the nobles — that is, those who dominate and oppress them. For the base, for the slaves, the concept of good is only a secondary concept, with which they refer to themselves and simply means "not evil." So, Nietzsche is presenting us with two value systems — one, the noble, that starts with the idea of the good and opposes good to bad; and the other, the base or the slave, that starts with the idea of evil and from that derives the idea of good.
The first thing I want to say about this contrast is that although Nietzsche uses the word "morality" with respect to both the nobles and the base, I think it does make more sense, as I've already indicated, to say that morality proper — morality as we tend to think about it and morality as Nietzsche will, in fact, go on to analyze it really begins with the base, or the slaves. That is, the noble distinction between good and bad is not really a moral distinction it's more like a judgment of taste than a moral judgment; it's more like saying "this pleases me," or "this makes me feel good," rather than saying "this is right or wrong." The bad here, again, as I've already said, is simply something unpleasing, or something like "it would be awful to be like that." Essentially, what Nietzsche is saying is that the masters, the nobles, they just do their thing — they like it, and they call it "good." For Nietzsche, this is why there's a certain shallowness that goes with the noble way of valuing: The nobles are healthy, active, and they' re not particularly self-reflective.
By contrast, base morality, the source of morality proper, originates in a group of people who out of some weakness, or illness, or oppression cannot spontaneously act out their desires or needs — and, most importantly, who come to resent those who they blame for their situation, and they call them "evil." This resentment is then the true source of morality, for Nietzsche. He puts it like this:
The slave revolt in morality begins when ressentiment itself becomes creative and gives birth to values: the ressentiment of natures that are denied the true reaction, that of deeds and compensate themselves with an imaginary revenge. While every noble morality develops from a triumphant affirmation of itself, slave morality from the outset says No to what is "outside," what is "different," what is "not itself', and this
No is its creative deed.
For Nietzsche, the key figure in accomplishing this creative deed of saying no — the key figure is the priest, for it's the priest who turns resentment into morality, and they do so in the context of their own struggle for power with the noble warrior class. Their tools in this struggle are the ideas of responsibility and freedom. Again, for the nobles, people just are good or bad. It's not really their fault. They can't really be blamed for it — it's just the way it is.
The priests, though, they claim that the nobles are responsible for the misery they create — that they are free to act difFerently. They could, if they so chose, be mild, non-aggressive, like the priests or the slaves. So, when the nobles express their strength through dominating others, they are — from the moral perspective of the priests — accountable. They're blameworthy. They' re evil.
But Nietzsche wants us to think critically, suspiciously, about this idea of responsibility. What does it mean to hold the nobles accountable for their sense of health and self-affirmation? Isn't that who they are? Don't they feel the need to express their strength? Are they really free to restrain themselves? Nietzsche's answer is essentially "no." Nietzsche also argues that the priests — who claim to be acting out of moral concern, not out of self-interest — are, in fact, themselves not free from the desire to dominate others — though they do not have the strength to do it directly. So, again, Nietzsche's claiming that all human beings are driven by what he calls "a will to power," and this has as one of its expressions the desire to dominate others. So, for him, the reality is that the priests in their weakness are unable to directly and honestly express this desire, but to compensate they've developed clever and devious ways to overcome the strong.
The priests take what Nietzsche describes as their "monstrous and uncanny" hatred of the nobles and turns it into a kind of power turns this resentment and this hatred into a kind of power, and morality — the slave morality — is the key to this power. Again, the power of the nobles is active, straightforward, blunt. But the power of the priest is more roundabout — it requires subtlety and, of course, also requires a certain self-deception, because the priests can't admit that their morality actually enables them to exercise a new kind of domination over others. They have to believe that they are exerting power not for themselves, but for others and for the sake of God. So, morality proper, slave morality, originates in the idea that to be good is to be meek, to not want to hurt or dominate others — and the priests, in supporting this idea, can explain their own domination by claiming that they do it not for themselves, but for God.
In the second half of the first essay of the Genealogy, Nietzsche argues that through the priests — the slaves, the weak, have overcome the masters. They have accomplished what he calls the "revaluation of all values." Noble morality has been replaced by slave morality or what I'd call more a way of valuing things based on taste and pleasure has become morality proper, slave morality. Essentially, what happens, for Nietzsche, is that the priests succeed in infecting the nobles with the ideas of responsibility, freedom, and selflessness. It's at this point of the book, that we begin to see that although the initial discussion of master and slave morality had not been particularly historically specific, at least not specific enough to locate it in the history of actually existing groups, once Nietzsche starts talking about the priests, he makes it explicit that, above all, he' s talking about Judaism. He claims that it was only the Jews who developed a slave morality and did so with such consistency and creativity that they were able to accomplish what Nietzsche calls the revaluation of all values. That is, the Jews started a process by which slave morality overcame, defeated, master morality. He writes:
All that has been done on earth against "the noble," "the powerful," "the masters," "the rulers," fades into nothing compared with what the Jews have done against them; the Jews, that priestly people, who in opposing their enemies and conquerors were ultimately satisfied with nothing less than a radical revaluation of their enemies' values, that is to say, an act of the most spiritual revenge.
In the context of the late 19th-century Germany, we might see this as a classic anti-Semitic attitude, and many have attributed anti Semitism to Nietzsche — including the Nazis themselves, who saw Nietzsche as "their philosopher." But the fact is that Nietzsche was a critic, and a rather harsh critic, of anti-Semitism. In the first essay of the Genealogy, he goes on to say that the hatred that begins with the Jewish priests becomes perfected in the religion of love, Christianity, which is the force that actually accomplishes the revaluation of values when the Roman Empire becomes Christian. So, where we've already seen that German philosophers, such as Kant and Hegel, decisively distinguish Judaism and Christianity and elevate the latter, Christianity, to a position of superiority — Nietzsche treats Christianity as an extension of Jewish slave morality, and he condemns both. It's in Christianity, he argues, that the priestly thirst for revenge finds its highest expression and is able, therefore, to conquer noble, pagan world antiquity and end up ruling Western culture for the past 2,000 years. The problem is this: Morality, especially as it is embodied in Judaism and Christianity, is a symptom of sickness and weakness — it's an expression of hatred and revenge that undermines the health and strength of human beings.
Recognizing this now 2,000 years later, Nietzsche asks: Can we hope for a new reversal, a new revaluation of values? He ends the first essay of the Genealogy by asking whether this new revaluation is one that will allow us — and here we can use the title of one of his other books — to think "beyond good and evil." In asking this question, though, I don't think that Nietzsche is simply looking for a return to the nobility of the past, for in the first essay we can see a couple of things: One, the weak, at least in some respects, the priests, are stronger than the strong; they won, after all, they reversed the hierarchy of values; and two, the nobles are stupid; the priests are clever and deep..There's something about this that Nietzsche, this cleverness, this deepness, that Nietzsche admires and sees as a promise for the future. So, there's something about morality and religion that have made human beings more fascinating, more complex creatures. Again, this, for Nietzsche, is important for the future. So, the question is not whether we can return to the old nobility, but whether we can find a new nobility and a cure for the moral sickness of humanity. We' ll return to this question in the next lecture as we work our way further into the Genealogy and see how Nietzsche connects the approach to morality that he develops in the first essay with his discussion of religion and what he calls the "ascetic ideal."
