Scope:
In the second and third essays of the Genealogy,Nietzsche treats the moralization of religion and the ascetic ideal. Claiming that religion was originally a non-moral phenomenon, Nietzsche narrates a process by which the "bad conscience" uses religion to increase feelings of guilt. This process culminates in Christianity and its ascetic ideal. The ascetic ideal gives meaning to life but at the expense of denigrating the body and this-worldly goals. Nietzsche also argues, paradoxically, that modern ideals of science and this worldliness do not escape but are the latest stages of the development of the ascetic ideal. Thus, Nietzsche does not see modernity as a way beyond the life-denial of religion. The Genealogy leaves us only with questions about possible alternatives to modernity, but in The Gay Science, Nietzsche suggests an affirmative "Dionysian faith" as a way beyond the ascetic ideal,
Outline
I. As noted in the last lecture, Nietzsche claimed that morality as we know it today is the result of a slave revolt in values.
II. The second half of Essay Two in Nietzsche's Genealogy begins, like Essay One, by examining the psychological consequences of a sociological situation of domination: in this case, what happens to the human psyche when people are thrown together in a society where instincts of aggression and self-interest have to be controlled.
A. Here, at the origins of human society, human beings must internalize what Nietzsche describes as an instinct of hostility and cruelty toward others.
1. He calls the result of this internalization "bad conscience," a kind of cruelty directed against the self.
2. Although the bad conscience leads to a kind of sickness, it also holds a good deal of promise because it is the origin of the human soul, of inner depths of selfhood.
B. From here, Nietzsche moves to discuss the origin of religion, which he says, is not related to bad conscience but to feelings of indebtedness to ancestors.
1. As memory of them recedes, our ancestors take on the attributes of gods.
2. This is a non-moral sense of indebtedness; it is more like an economic debt: We owe the gods our lives and feel the need to repay them.
C. But then, according to Nietzsche, bad conscience latches on to this sense of indebtedness in an effort to increase human self-torture: It moralizes it and, in so doing, creates the idea of sin.
1.Our debt to the gods now is seen as a consequence of transgression for which we must pay.
2. This idea reaches its height in the Christian concept of original sin: a sin so bad, so primal, that human beings condemn themselves for it, seeing themselves as utterly corrupted.
3. T o ensure that this self-torture does not lead to humanity destroying itself, Christianity comes up with a "paradoxical and horrifying expedient": the idea of a God that sacrifices himself for the guilt of humankind.
III. In Essay Three, Nietzsche further explores this moralization of religion by explaining how the priest uses the bad conscience to
infect both the weak and the strong.
A. Here, Nietzsche introduces his famous idea of the ascetic ideal, which is the key to the book and especially to the argument that even after the death of God, we are still caught in a nihilism of willing nothing.
B. Nietzsche is very interested in asceticism as a religious phenomenon.
1. It is a form of self-denial that gives meaning to life by directing the bad conscience to an ultimate goal: One denies this life for the sake of being saved. Thus, self-denial becomes the meaning of life; it is the route to salvation.
2. By means of the ascetic ideal, the priest gains power not only over those most sickened and weakened by bad conscience but also over the strong by infecting them with guilt.
3. Thus, it is the power of the ascetic ideal that allows the priest to accomplish the revaluation of values.
4. For Nietzsche, Christianity has been the main vehicle for the ascetic ideal in Western civilization and has so shaped Western civilization that it is not clear that Westerners can imagine any other way to give meaning to their lives.
IV.Nietzsche asks whether it is possible to find another meaning, another ideal, another goal for the will.
A. One possibility is that if the ascetic ideal were based on the nothingness of the afterlife, the alternative would be a life of truth focused on this world.
B. Nietzsche never directly answers the question of the alternative to the ascetic ideal. He suggests that we may not be in a position yet to answer the question, that the only real meaning to be found in life is precisely in the very immersion in this predicament.
C. In The Gay Science,Nietzsche goes into a bit more detail about the ways in which immersion in the problem of truth might be meaningful.
1. He introduces the idea of the "free spirit," not a simple rejection of the idea of faith but a comparison and contrast of one kind of faith, the "wish for certainty," with another, a faith that allows him to dance near, without plunging into, the abyss of nihilism.
2. This is faith not in another life, not in progress toward a utopia, but in the affirmation of life in all its strange and confusing and painful reality.
3. One embraces life by both exploring it with a suspicious eye toward all denials of life but also with a kind of creative, artistic effort to make life beautiful. It is a "tremendous, unbounded saying Yes and Amen" to life.
Suggested Reading:
Nietzsche, The Gay Science.
Roberts, Contesting Spirit.
Questions to Consider:
1. What does Nietzsche mean by the "ascetic ideal" ?
2. Why doesn't Nietzsche think that science and atheism are the answer to the ascetic ideal?
Lecture Twenty-One — Transcript
Nietzsche — Religion and the Ascetic Ideal
In our last lecture, I focused on the first essay of Nietzsche's On the Genealogy of Morals and the claim that he makes there that morality as we know it today is the result of the slave revolt in values accomplished in and through Judaism and Christianity. Nietzsche understands this morality — and as I explained in the last lecture really understands morality in general — as a reactionary effort of sickly, weak human beings to overcome and exert power over healthy, self-affirming human beings. With Christianity, the priests accomplished a revaluation of values. They overthrew the noble values of the Roman Empire and replaced them with a slave morality based on the distinction between good and evil. This distinction supports a morality based in the idea of responsibility: The aggressors and the conquerors are evil and are responsible for being this way. They can choose to act in a way that the priests consider good.
But for Nietzsche this goodness, this Christian love, in fact, grows out of resentment and hatred. It grows out of a desire to take revenge on the strong — and so, for Nietzsche, priestly morality is a lie, and those who embrace it are deceiving themselves — or, to use the term we discussed in the lecture on Marx, the priests and their followers are victims of "false consciousness."
In this second lecture on Nietzsche, I want to do three things. I want to briefly consider how Nietzsche, in the second essay of the Genealogy, magnifies this picture of human morality and connects it with religion. Then, I want to look at the last essay of the Genealogy, where Nietzsche argues that this morality continues, even after the death of God, to infect Western culture. It's a kind of shadow of God that takes us even further into nihilism. Then, finally, I' ll go back to The Gay Science to ask whether Nietzsche gives us any sense of a way out of this nihilism.
Essay Two of the Genealogy is perhaps the most complicated essay of the book, and here I want only to look at the second half, which begins, as does Essay One, by examining what we might call the "psychological consequences of a sociological situation of domination." In the first essay, remember, Nietzsche focused on the idea of resentment — this psychological state that the weak feel towards the strong, this psychological state that was caused by the strong's domination of the weak, their oppression. In Essay Two, Nietzsche focuses on a different sociological situation. He argues that when people are forced to live together in cities, they had to restrain their instincts by directing their aggressiveness — what he calls their "instinct for freedom"—inwards, back against themselves. Nietzsche argues that this results in what he calls "bad conscience," a kind of cruelty directed against the self.
Remember what I've said about the concept of genealogy. Nietzsche wants to look at human history from a naturalistic perspective, where people and history are driven by the struggle for power. We should think about this power in at least two senses. First, we can think about it in terms of raw power and social domination. This was basically the topic of the first essay. But here, in the second essay, Nietzsche is thinking about power over the self, and one of the interesting points he makes is that this process of directing the instinct for freedom and aggression inwards, while resulting in a bad conscience, is also the origin of the human soul. So Nietzsche writes this:
All instincts that do not discharge themselves outwardly turn inward — this is what I call the internalization of man: thus it was that man first developed what was later called his "soul." The entire inner world, originally as thin as if it were stretched between two membranes, expanded and extended itself, acquired depth, breadth, and height, in the same measure as outward discharge was inhibited.
In this sense, we can start to see some hints of a crucial ambivalence in Nietzsche's treatment of bad conscience and of morality more generally. On the one hand, bad conscience, he says, is a sickness, for it leads human beings to delight in hurting themselves, doubting themselves, thinking they are worthless and, as we' ll see in a moment, sinners. On the other hand, he thinks that it's through the bad conscience that the inner life of human beings develops, that human beings become interesting, complex — even capable of beauty. So, even as he describes bad conscience as a sickness, he says that it's a sickness with promise. He compares this to the condition of pregnancy — it gives birth to something even though it's painful.
We'll need to come back to this ambivalence, but at this point I want to consider how the bad conscience is connected to religion — that is, the way the bad conscience makes use of religion to drive human self-torture to gruesome extremes. Originally, Nietzsche argues, religion is not connected with morality — rather it's rooted in a sense of being indebted to one's ancestors, in the recognition that one' s community owes its ancestors its existence. As the ancestors recede farther and farther—so goes Nietzsche's story—into the past, this sense of indebtedness increases, and the ancestors seem more and more powerful until they become gods in the eyes of their descendants. But Nietzsche is careful to say that this sense of indebtedness to the ancestors is a non-moral sense of indebtedness. It's more like an economic debt: We owe the ancestors or the gods our lives, and we should repay them.
But now we see a clear example of what Nietzsche means by genealogy — where one social and cultural phenomenon, in this case the beliefs and practices that revolve around indebtedness to ancestors and gods, religion, is appropriated and transformed by another social force — in this case, bad conscience as morality. That is, as Nietzsche tells the story, the bad conscience finds in religion a tool by which to increase its urge toward cruelty and self-torture, and it does this by moralizing religion — that is, it turns the sense of indebtedness to gods into a sense of moral guilt and sin. It's not simply that we' re indebted to the gods, we have to repay them for all that they' ve given us, but that we have somehow done something wrong. We have transgressed against the gods and must make up for this transgression. Nietzsche argues that this process reaches its height in the Christian idea of original sin — this is a sin so primal that human beings see themselves as utterly corrupted and see themselves as being able to do nothing to make up for this transgression.
So, Nietzsche writes: "This man of bad conscience has seized upon the presupposition of religion so as to drive his self-torture to its most gruesome pitch of severity and rigor." Nietzsche goes on to say that the only way to respond to this situation so that the self-torture does not get out of hand and lead people to destroy themselves is what Nietzsche calls "the stroke of genius" on the part of Christianity — the idea of a God that sacrifices himself for the guilt of humankind, a God who kills himself — Christ on the Cross — in order to save humanity. On Nietzsche's reading, then, Christianity, and particularly the Christian idea of Christ's substitutionary atonement — that is, that Christ's death paid back God for human sins — is the logical end of the process by which the bad conscience comes to exert its power over human beings.
That is, Christianity achieves a delicate balance between the urge to self-torture, by which people experience themselves as utterly corrupt, and a promise of salvation in the future that keeps them going — that prevents them from falling into suicidal or nihilistic despair at the thought of this sin or this corruption. Exactly how this works is the topic of the third essay of the Genealogy, in which Nietzsche also explains how the priests use the bad conscience in order to infect both the weak and the strong. Nietzsche entitles the third essay, "What is the Meaning of Ascetic Ideals?" In many ways, this concept of the ascetic ideal is the central concept of the book as a whole, and it's a key to understanding Nietzsche's argument that even after the death of God, we are still caught in a nihilism of willing nothing.
Before explaining what I mean by this, I just want to make sure that we' re on the same page with the term "ascetic." My students always confuse the word "ascetic" with the word "aesthetic." We' re thinking about the word "ascetic" — it's a word that comes from the Greek ascesis, and it literally means "training" — so athletes engage in ascesis. But when we' re talking about religion, asceticism generally refers to disciplines of the body and the mind that are designed to cultivate and focus spiritual energy and to model religious devotion — and it's often identified. Nietzsche does this in much of what he writes. Asceticism is often identified with religious forms of renunciation — which in some contexts can take spectacular form in practices of severe self-punishment and mortification, often directed at the body. As we might guess from Nietzsche's interest in the way that human beings, through the bad conscience, impose forms of self-torture on themselves, he's very interested in asceticism as a religious phenomenon. But in the context of the third essay of the Genealogy, he's particularly interested in what he calls the "ascetic ideal" — that is, he's interested in the connection between ascetic self-denial and the problem of meaning and nihilism.
As I said regarding the second essay, on the one hand the bad conscience drives human beings to self-torture and self-denial, but on the other hand, it does it in such a way, through the idea of God and God's salvation, that it also prevents people from killing themselves. This is the basic point Nietzsche makes about the ascetic ideal: In the situation in which people experience themselves as sinners, as worthless in the eyes of God, as obligated to deny themselves, the ascetic ideal tells them that if they do this, they will be saved. Thus, self-denial becomes the meaning of life — it is the route to salvation. "Yes," says the priest, "your life is worthless and corrupt, unless you deny yourself for the sake of God." Or, as Nietzsche puts it:
[The priest] juxtaposes [our life] with a quite different mode of existence which it opposes and excludes, unless it [life] turn against itself, deny itself: in that case, the case of the ascetic life, life counts as a bridge to that other mode of existence. The ascetic treats life as a wrong road on which one must finally walk back to the point where it begins, or as a mistake that is put right by deeds.
Nietzsche adds, stressing the moral component of all of this — "'It is a mistake,' says the priest, 'that we ought to put right.'" So, life is a mistake and is only justified to the extent that it treats itself as a mistake by denying itself for the sake of this other divine mode of existence in the afterlife. At the same time, the priest gives meaning to life, particularly for those too weak, or sick, or decadent to affirm life — the ascetic ideal gives them a reason to live. From this perspective, Nietzsche says, the priest is a preserver of life. He allows people who ordinarily would have nothing to live for to say "Yes" to life. Or, to go back to our earlier discussion of nihilism, it gives people who might otherwise not be able to will, something to will. But Nietzsche argues that the biggest problem with the ascetic ideal is not that it has given some people meaning, but that by taking on the mantle of morality and religious truth, the priest has wielded the ascetic ideal in such a way that it has gained power not only over the weak, but also over the strong. So, Nietzsche's discussion of the ascetic ideal works its way back to the first essay of the book. It is the ascetic ideal, the power of its meaning, that allows the priest to accomplish the revaluation of all values. Nietzsche writes:
They monopolize virtue, these weak, hopelessly sick people, there is no doubt [about] it: "we alone are the good and the just" they say.... They walk among us as embodied reproaches, as warnings to us — as if health, well constitutedness, strength, pride and the sense of power were in themselves necessarily vicious things for which one must pay some day and pay bitterly.... The will of the weak to represent some form of superiority, their instinct for devious paths to tyranny over the healthy — where can it not be discovered, this will to power of the weakest!"
For Nietzsche, Christianity is the name for the dominant form of this tyranny over the healthy. It has been the main vehicle for the ascetic ideal in Western civilization for the past 2,000 years, and it has so shaped Western civilization that it is not clear that the people of this civilization can even imagine any other way to give meaning to their lives. So, after cataloguing the various ways in which the priests have deployed the ascetic ideal to infect the weak and the strong alike, Nietzsche poses the question of an alternative to the ascetic ideal: "Where is the other one goal for the will that he asks? The ascetic ideal has been the goal for as long as we can remember. Where is the other one goal? " Or to put it differently: Can human beings find a meaning for life that is not wrapped up in the ascetic ideal? This is the question Nietzsche grapples with in the second half of the last essay of the Genealogy. If the ascetic ideal has been based on the nothingness, the lie of the afterlife, perhaps, Nietzsche suggests, the best candidate for an alternative is a life dedicated to, and guided by, the truth of this world. So, he goes on, perhaps instead of idealizing the priests or giving the priests cultural social power, we should be idealizing the scientists — or, more generally, those who pursue the truth of this world in a disciplined and careful way, even those philosophers like Nietzsche who are dedicated to smashing illusions and other idols, so that we can find the truth of who and what we really are.
With this, of course, Nietzsche is giving voice to a powerful current in late 19 -century Western culture, one that will become even more powerful in the 20 century as the cultural and intellectual authority completes the swing from religious to the scientific that started with the scientific revolution. But it's precisely here that Nietzsche, the critic of modernity, asserts himself, and he pulls the rug out from under us and, importantly, out from under himself — for he argues that even as we in the West are turning our gaze away from God and the other world, we remain caught up in the ascetic ideal. How so? The problem, for Nietzsche, is truth; or better, truth and morality; or, even better, the morality of truth. The problem for Nietzsche is the morality of truth. The search for truth, he tells us, has led us to the point where we can no longer believe in God, where we come to understand this world and ourselves more and more — but even as we embrace the death of God, we still remain convinced in ultimate moral value, and now it's not God, but truth itself. Nietzsche puts it this way:
The truthful man, in the audacious and ultimate sense presupposed by the faith in science, thereby affirms another world than that of life, nature, and history: and insofar as he affirms this "other world" does this not mean that he has to deny its antithesis, this world, our world?... It is still [Nietzsche goes on to say] a metaphysical faith that underlies our faith in science — and we men of knowledge today, [and notice that he says "we"] we godless men and anti-metaphysicians, we, too, still derive our flame from the fire ignited by a faith millennia old, the Christian faith, which was also Plato's, that God is truth, that truth is divine.
So, Nietzsche's even saying here that the whole idea of God is rooted in this moral value that we put on truth, and it's this moral value that he said is surviving even after the death of God. He goes on to be even more explicit, and he implicates himself even further in this metaphysical faith that he says is part of the ascetic ideal. So he writes:
Unconditional, honest atheism ...is therefore not the antithesis of that ideal, [the ascetic ideal] as it appears to be; [but] is rather only one of the [latest] phases of its evolution ... it is the awe-inspiring catastrophe of two thousand years of training in truthfulness that finally forbids itself the lie involved in the belief in God.
So, what Nietzsche is saying here is that belief in the ultimate value of truth that is driving the best, and Nietzsche means the best of modern science and philosophy, driving atheists such as himself is, itself, only another phase in the ascetic ideal — because it's depending on this idea of truth. Indeed, he' ll go on to say that this "will to truth" is itself the "kernel," the core, the essence, of the ascetic ideal. We' re still, as it were, looking at shadows of God in a cave, though now Nietzsche is telling us that God is not really the point, that what is at stake in the ascetic ideal is a metaphysical — that is, an other-worldly — faith in the moral value of truth. But Nietzsche asks: Why should we assume that truth has this value? If we' re really going to affirm this life, this world, don't we need to ask whether truth really is as valuable as we have believed it to be?
So, Nietzsche asks: Is it possible that the lie is more valuable than the truth? It would, of course, be possible to claim that truth is the most valuable thing without making a metaphysical claim, but to do this we would have to show that it has this value — it would require that we actually pose the question: What is the value of truth? We investigate it, experiment with it, and entertain alternative possibilities. So, Nietzsche asks whether art might be the way to overcome the ascetic ideal, because at least certain ways of doing art are not enslaved to the value of truth, because art can idealize and beautify life — can lie in ways that, Nietzsche suggests, have creative, positive effects on life.
So, in his effort to think beyond the ascetic ideal, to find a worldly rather than otherworldly meaning for life, and in his effort to both acknowledge and pursue his own will to truth, Nietzsche finds himself in the position of questioning the value of his will to truth and the value of truth itself. As I read the Genealogy, Nietzsche does not really give us an answer to this question, but rather he ends the book with an acknowledgement that the questions of the alternative to the ascetic ideal and the value of truth remain open ones. He's not sure. He does suggest the lie, he suggests art, but he doesn't come down with any real conclusion at the book, but what he does do is suggest that at least at this point in history, it may be that the only real meaning to be found in life is precisely to immerse one's self in the predicament of the question of truth and the question of nihilism. He asks: "What meaning would our whole being possess if it were not this, that in us the will to truth becomes conscious of itself as a problem?" This is the approach to the issue that we also find in Book Five of The Gay Science, but there I think that Nietzsche goes into a bit more detail about how immersion in the problem of truth might itself be a way of giving life meaning.
So, I want to conclude this discussion of Nietzsche with a brief examination of Book Five of The Gay Science. As I've mentioned, The Gay Science was written in 1882, so when Nietzsche declares the death of God for this first time this is from this 1882 version of The Gay Science, but five years later, in 1887 and just before he wrote On the Genealogy of Morals, Nietzsche published a new edition of TheGay Science, and he added a new fifth book to it, and it's this fifth book that I want to look at briefly right now. In the first sections of Book Five, Nietzsche basically makes the same point about himself and his fellow atheists that he makes in the Genealogy. He notes that to quote the title of one of the early sections of Book Five, he notes: "We, too, are still pious" — that is, we, too, we atheists, we anti-metaphysicians, we, too, still have faith in the value of truth, which, in its otherworldliness, makes us nihilists — because, again, it's nothing, and it leads us to will nothing.
But, he asks: If we reject this faith in truth, won't we also end up in a kind of nihilism, because now we' ll have nothing to believe in, nothing to will? But here Nietzsche asks us to imagine a new idea, perhaps a new ideal, that is the "free spirit" — which he sees as, if not quite the opposite of the person of faith, at least something very different. He puts it like this:
One could conceive of such a pleasure and power of self-determination, such a freedom of the will, that the spirit would take leave of all faith, of every wish for certainty, being practiced in maintaining himself on insubstantial ropes and possibilities and dancing even near abysses.
It becomes clear as we move toward the end of Book Five that instead of simply rejecting the idea of faith with this idea of the free spirit, Nietzsche is actually contrasting two different kinds of faith: On the one hand, there is faith as what he describes in the passage I just read: the "wish for certainty," but on the other hand, there is a faith that allows him to dance near, without falling into, the abyss of nihilism. So, he writes:
We have also outgrown Christianity and are averse to it precisely because we have grown out of it, because our ancestors were Christians who in their Christianity were uncompromisingly upright: for their faith they willingly sacrificed their possessions and position, blood and fatherland. We — do the same. For what? For our unbelief? For every kind of unbelief? No, you know better than that my friends! The hidden Yes in you is stronger than all Nos and Maybes that afflict you and your age like a disease; and when you have to embark on the sea, you emigrants, you, too, are compelled to this by — a faith!
Again, Nietzsche's goal is to learn how to affirm life, even in the face of nihilism, but one cannot do this if one is not willing to see life for what it is. For Nietzsche, life is not the promise of another life — life is not inevitable human progress towards some utopia; life, instead, is strange and confusing, full of suffering and may, in fact, have no real meaning beyond itself. Thus, Nietzsche insists that to affirm this life is to hope for the future — for example, to hope for human beings who will not be enslaved to the ascetic ideal, but also to know that one can't find all one's meaning in the future — that if one cannot affirm and take joy in where one is here and now, with this life, this suffering, this set of problems and puzzles, then one has missed the whole point of his diagnosis of the denial of life.
I think what Nietzsche means by "faith" in the passage I just read, that is a "Yes" to life even in the midst of deep and dangerous questions about the meaning of life — a faith that leads one to look directly at what is most ugly and problematic about life, but out of a love for life. Interestingly, in The Gay Science and in other of his later books, Nietzsche gives the name of the Greek god Dionysus, the god of wine and ecstasy, to this affirmation of life. Nietzsche often compares Dionysus favorably to Christ, drawing a contrast between an attitude of gratitude for, and blessing of, life — even in its inevitable suffering, even in its inevitable death, and this is Dionysus. He compares it to an attitude, an ascetic ideal, that sees life as something from which we need to be redeemed — that's Christ. From this perspective, nihilism — as a problem and as a real possibility — is something to be faced and even embraced, for it is where we are now, in this life, in this history. The Dionysian, Nietzsche says, can find affirmation even in the specter of nihilism, and he can find in nihilism itself, as he puts it, "one reason more for being himself the eternal Yes to all things, 'the tremendous, unbounded saying Yes and Amen.'" So, we end, then, with Nietzsche the atheist, the author of a book entitled The Antichrist, invoking faith and saying Amen — and in this, he distinguishes himself sharply from the other masters of suspicion — especially from Freud, as we' ll see in the next lecture.
