From the Middle Ages to modernity



Nietzsche & Nihilism; Boedeker

Handout on Friedrich Nietzsche (1844-1900), Thus Spoke Zarathustra (1883-4), Genealogy of Morals (1887), Twilight of the Idols and The Antichrist (1888)

I. Nietzsche’s life:

- Became a professor of classical philology at the University of Basel, Switzerland, at the unheard-of age of 25.

- Was badly injured while serving in the Franco-Prussian War (1870-71) as a medical orderly, and never fully recovered.

- Resigned his professorship at the age of 35 due to pain, failing eyesight, and bad health.

- 1887: Publishes Toward the Genealogy of Morals: A Polemic.

- 1888: Publishes Twilight of the Idols and The Antichrist.

- Became insane at the age of 45, and lived with his sister until his death at age 55.

II. Nietzsche on morals:

A. The will to power:

1. “Will to power” is the instinct or desire to increase one’s strength, force, and domination of things outside oneself.

2. For Nietzsche, the will to power is the essence of life. Thus all living things seek not just to survive and reproduce, but also to increase their power.

3. “Will” in “will to power” is not arbitrary free will – as in St. Augustine and Descartes. Instead, it is the basic life force, which always desires to increase itself. Will to power is part of the physical and biological world.

4. A value-system is a moral code specifying what we should and should not do. For Nietzsche, all value systems are a product of the will to power of human beings.

B. The will to power and values.

1. The oldest values:

a. The oldest values are life-affirming and this-worldly: the values of good (= life, power) vs. bad (= death, weakness).

b. These oldest values were developed by people in power. Nietzsche therefore calls these value-systems master morality.

2. At some point, these old values underwent a crisis: they no longer served the will to power; they were bad for life. These values were in decline, what Nietzsche calls “decadent”.

3. As a response to this crisis, new values replaced the older ones, changing “good vs. bad” to “good vs. evil”.

a. What used to be “good” now became “evil”, and what used to be “bad” now became “good”.

b. In the moral system of “good vs. bad”, “good” is the primary value, and “bad” is defined as what’s not good. But in the new moral system of “good vs. evil”, “evil” is the primary value, and “good’ is defined as what’s not evil.

c. Western European Christian moral values (the morals of “good vs. evil”) are therefore life-denying and otherworldly.

d. For Nietzsche, the moral system of “good vs. evil” is based on resentment by the powerless of people in power.

e. He therefore calls the moral system of “good vs. evil” a slave morality.

f. Nietzsche thus terms slave morality “nihilistic.” Nihilism comes from the Latin word “nihil”, which means “nothing”. Nietzsche defines “nihilism” as “the will to nothing” – that is, the will to deny and reject life in this physical world.

4. People invent the very ideas of God and a perfect world beyond the physical world in order to back up the values of slave morality. These other-worldly beings or places (e.g., Plato’s Forms, the Judeo-Christian God, Heaven) are regarded as the ultimate source of values.

Moral systems:

Good vs. bad Good vs. evil

Earlier Later

Life-affirming Life-denying

This-worldly Otherworldly

Master morality Slave morality

Based in the will to power Based in resentment by the powerless

of people in power

C. Nietzsche’s criticism of the morality of good vs. evil: A nihilistic value-system is contradictory. This is because the ultimate source of values is life itself, and its essence, the will to power. Nevertheless, the morality of good vs. evil attempts to place a value – and a negative value at that – on life itself. In this way, nihilism is a value-system that defeats the purpose of value-systems: to increase the power of one’s life. Nihilistic slave-morality of “good vs. evil” pulls the rug (of life) out from under its own feet.

III. Nietzsche’s genealogy of morals: A genealogy (or “family tree”) of morals (focused on the past): to trace our current moral values (of Western European Christianity in the late 19th Century) back through time to their source. Nietzsche’s Nietzsche sees 3 main sources of these moral values:

A. Ancient Greece:

1. The earliest Greek values were warrior values.

a. To be a good man was to be brave, strong, powerful, attractive, and influential. (Recall the heroes in Homer’s Odyssey and Iliad.)

b. To be bad was to be cowardly, weak, powerless, ugly, and without influence.

2. Crisis in values: The Peloponnesian War (431-404BC) between the city-states of Athens and Sparta placed these ancient Greek values in a crisis. Warrior values led to horrible wars that were to destroy Greek civilization itself.

3. As a response to this crisis, Athenian philosophers during and after the Peloponnesian War introduced new values. These new values were a reversal of the old ones.

a. “The problem of Socrates”:

(i) Socrates (c.470-399BC) belonged to the lowest social class of free men in Athens. He was also ugly. He was thus “bad” according to the traditional Greek warrior-values.

(ii) Out of resentment for those in power, Socrates reversed traditional values of “good vs. bad”, forming instead a value-system of “good vs. evil”. For Socrates, a good man was now someone who rejected satisfying bodily desires and seeking power and influence in this physical world. Instead, a good man was someone who did nothing but seek knowledge and wisdom. For Nietzsche, this is summed up in Socrates’ last words in the Phaedo, which imply that life is a disease cured by death and a good afterlife.

b. Plato (c.427-347BC) completed Socrates’ work by arguing that this physical world is really just a shadow of the real world, composed of perfect, non-physical, universal objects that he called “Forms” or “Ideas”. Examples of Forms include geometrical figures (lines, points, planes, etc.) and numbers. We cannot perceive the Forms through the five bodily senses, but can only know them with our minds. All objects in the physical world are just poor copies of the perfect Forms. The truly valuable world is one that we can contact not with our bodies, but only with our souls. After we die, our souls can live in the perfect realm of the Forms – but only if we have spent our lives “preparing for death” by rejecting the body and its desires.

B. Judaism:

1. Jewish history:

a. Judaism began as a life-affirming fertility cult, whose values were the fertility of the soil and the people. The Jews performed sacrifices to God in order to secure and thank Him for His protection of the people.

i) Jewish values during this period:

- good = what’s good for life (fertility of the soil and the people)

- bad = what’s bad for life (sterility, death)

ii) During this period, the God of the Jews was

- an expression of the hopes and self-confidence of the Jewish people, who were flourishing.

- not the universal God of everyone, but just of the Jews – God’s “chosen people.”

- essentially a protector of the life of the Jewish people, as long as they gave thanks and performed the proper sacrifices.

- not only good, but also somewhat arbitrary – in demanding certain sacrifices, etc.

iii) This original form of Judaism reached a peak in the Golden Age of Israelite Monarchy (c. 1030-930 BCE): Kings Saul, David, and Solomon. This occurred after the Jews were liberated from Egyptian domination (c. 3000-1030 BCE) under the leadership of Moses (c. 1300 BCE).

b. 930-164 BCE: Jews were dominated for centuries by Assyrians, Egyptians, Babylonians, Greeks (with the conquest of Alexander the Great in 332 BCE). During this period, there was a brief Restoration of Jewish Independence during the Maccabean/Hasmonean Dynasty (164-63 BCE), but the Romans then occupied Judea from 63BCE to 600CE.

i) This foreign domination made for a crisis in Jewish values, since God did not appear to be protecting them.

ii) In order to survive under these conditions, a new story thus had to be told about God and the Jews. God no longer protects the Jewish people, but punishes them for their real flourishing and happiness before the Egyptian domination, and during the Golden Age. Thus the history of the Jews becomes a history of God’s punishment for their sins. For Nietzsche, “a good part of the Bible” contains this falsification of the history of Israel as a story of guilt and punishment.

iii) This new story requires a new conception of God: as a demanding, vengeful, judging God whose will tells human beings what they should and should not do (e.g., in the 10 Commandments), and punishes them if they disobey His will.

iv) This new conception of God brings with it a new, moralistic set of values, as found in the 10 commandments:

- Evil (what the Devil tempts us to do) = happiness, flourishing, sexuality.

- Good (= the Kingdom of God = how God wants things to be on earth) = misery, decline, abstinence.

C. Christianity: for Nietzsche, progressed in roughly 3 stages. Nietzsche argues that “Christianity can be understood only in terms of the [false {A 27}] soil out of which it grew – it is not a counter-movement to the Jewish instinct, it is its very consequence” (A 24). Some of what he says here sounds anti-Semitic, but this is misleading. In fact, Nietzsche’s portrayal of Christianity as arising out of Judaism is a direct response to the anti-Semitism that was sweeping through Europe at this time. Whereas the anti-Semites argued for Christianity by claiming that it was superior to – and thus different from – Judaism, Nietzsche argues against Christianity by painting it as more “Jewish” than Judaism. Indeed, the title “Der Antichrist”, which can mean both “The Antichrist” and “The Anti-Christian”, is probably intended to bring to mind “anti-Semitism”.

1. Jesus (c. 6/4BCE-c.29/30CE, born in Judea):

a. Jesus’ program: Jesus was a “holy anarchist” who led a “Buddhistic peace movement, for an actual, not merely promised, happiness on earth” (A 42) of rebellion “against the hierarchy of society…, against caste, privilege, order, and formula” (A 27).

b. Jesus’ rebellion appealed primarily to “the people at the bottom [of society], the outcasts and ‘sinners’” (A 27).

c. The evangel (“good news”) of Jesus the Redeemer: “True life, eternal life, has been found – it is not promised, it is here, it is in you: as a living in love, in love without subtraction and exclusion, without regard for station [in society]. Everyone is the child of God – Jesus definitely presumes nothing for himself alone – and as child of God everyone is equal to everyone” (A 29). “The ‘good news’ is precisely that there are no longer any opposites; the kingdom of heaven belongs to the children” (A 32). “‘Sin’ – any distance separating God and man – is abolished: precisely this is the ‘good news’. Blessedness is not promised, it is not tied to conditions: it is the only reality” (A 33). Jesus thus does away with all Jewish dichotomies: obedience vs. sin (guilt), reward vs. punishment, God’s will vs. human conduct.

d. “Redemption” is not forgiveness of sins, but abolishing the whole notion of sin altogether. Thus Jesus did not preach the doctrines of Heaven, forgiveness of the sins we repent, the personal immortality of the soul, the Last Judgment, or even God as judge. The “Kingdom of God” didn’t mean a “heaven” beyond this physical world, but just meant the way God would want things to be on earth: peaceful, fair, and loving. “The ‘kingdom of God’ is nothing that one expects; it has no yesterday and no day after tomorrow, it will not come in “a thousand years” – it is an experience of the heart; it is everywhere, it is nowhere” (A 34).

e. Jesus’ true followers were not distinguished by their beliefs, but by their actions: “by not resisting, either in words or in his heart, those who treat him ill; by making no distinction between foreigner and native, between Jew and not-Jew; by not growing angry with anybody, by not despising anybody” (A 33). “Only the evangelical practice leads to God, indeed, it is ‘God’!” (A 33)

f. Jesus’ death on the cross was a natural consequence of his practice – his way of life. He was rightly perceived as a threat by both the Roman occupiers and the Jewish priests. Jesus’ death gave “publicly the strongest exhibition, the proof of his doctrine” (A 40). It showed that Jesus would rather die than give up his way of life, and set an example for us by showing that such commitment is possible for all of us.

2. Paul (wrote letters from c. 50-64 CE, when executed, along with Peter, by Roman Emperor Nero).

a. Jesus’ followers completely misunderstood Jesus’ death. “In truth, there was only one Christian, and he died on the cross” (A 39). They took it not as a proof, but as a refutation, of their cause. They thus looked for a reason why Jesus died. They came up with the answer that Jesus was sacrificed for our sins. They also held the Jews responsible for Christ’s death, and sought revenge against them (thus starting the long history of Christian anti-Semitism).

b. Thus Paul’s values were entirely unlike Christ’s. Whereas Christ loved his enemies, Paul hated them.

c. Paul thus reverted to the old Jewish picture of God as a judging and avenging God, which Christ had rejected. And Paul went considerably beyond Judaism in 4 ways:

(i) inventing the concept of Heaven – a “higher”, “better”, “other” world where good souls are rewarded after death. God and Heaven are the source of all value; this physical world is only of second-rate importance. The way to get to Heaven is to obey the moral law that God lays down: deny your own body and its desires, and only seek wisdom.

(ii) appropriating the ancient Greek (and non-Jewish) doctrine of the personal immortality of the soul;

(iii) inventing the concept of the “Last Judgment”, where God separates the good from the evil. “The ‘last judgment’ is the sweet comfort of revenge – the revolution, which the socialist worker also awaits, but conceived as a little farther off” (TI 535; recall the similarities we’ve seen between St. Augustine’s and Marx’ views of history!); “by letting God judge, they themselves judge” (A 44);

(iv) re-interpreting “the Kingdom of God” to mean not earth as God would want it (as it meant for the Jews and for Jesus), but rather Heaven;

d. In these ways, Paul’s Christian values became typical slave morality. It was other-worldly, life-denying, and based on resentment of those in power (the Romans and the Jewish priests).

e. In order to back up his values, Paul invented the notion that Christ was resurrected from the dead – as a reward for his obeying his Father’s will. This story is retold in the Gospels (Mark: c. 70 CE; Matthew: c. 80 CE; Luke: c. 85 CE; John: c. 95 CE).

3. St. Augustine (354-430AD) combined Pauline Christianity and Plato’s philosophy at the fall of the Roman Empire:

a. The values of the Roman Empire included seeking pleasure and power in this world.

b. Crisis in Roman values: By the 4th Century AD, the Roman Empire had become greedy and corrupt. Rome was in decline, and was sacked by the Vandals in 455. St. Augustine saw Christian values as a response to this crisis, and converted to Christianity in 387.

c. In order to reconcile the perfection of God with evil human actions, Augustine invents the concept of free will. For Nietzsche, the belief in free will arises out of “the instinct of wanting to judge and punish”; “the doctrine of the [free] will has been invented essentially for the purpose of punishment, that is, because one wanted to attribute guilt… Men were considered ‘free’ so that they might be judged and punished – that that they might become guilty. Christianity is a metaphysics of the hangman” (TI 7).

d. Augustine recognizes a deep similarity between Pauline Christianity and Plato’s philosophy. Both despise the body and its desires, and value a “perfect” world beyond this physical one. Augustine thus identifies the Christian Heaven with Plato’s Forms. And he identifies God with Plato’s Form of the Good (the Being of the Forms, i.e., the property of being eternal and perfect).

IV. Nietzsche’s evaluation of our current moral values (focused on the present).

A. The life-denying and otherworldly slave morality (“good vs. evil”) did serve their purpose when they were introduced. Nevertheless, these values have now outlived their usefulness. They are an extremely unnatural kind of morality, since we are creatures living in this world!

B. Current Western European Christian morality is unhealthy. Denying our bodily desires and pleasures in favor of an imaginary Heaven is making us sick. Nietzsche calls this denial of life “nihilism”. Nihilistic values are placing modern culture in decline, or “decadence”. As a result of their nihilistic values, people now feel that there is no purpose in life.

V. Nietzsche’s plan of action (focused on the future):

A. We must participate in the “death of God”. We must not just recognize that God does not exist, but we must actually kill God. (“God is dead, and we have killed him!”, from The Gay Science). That is, we must throw away the whole system of slave morality on which the idea of God is based.

B. An objection to Nietzsche’s view of morals:

Isn’t Nietzsche just telling us to cast aside all morality and do whatever we want? Wouldn’t this just lead to anarchy and unnecessary suffering?

Reply to this objection:

Nietzsche is not telling us to cast aside all morality. Instead, he’s just telling us to cast aside all slave-morality. In other words, he’s not telling us to do evil, but trying to get us to a perspective “beyond good and evil.”

Nietzsche believes that casting aside nihilistic slave morality will free us from the resentment (of those we perceive as responsible for our unhappiness) that’s at its root. This freedom, in turn, has 2 positive effects:

1. Once we’re free of the belief in free will, we will see that behaviors that hurt us aren’t the fault of other’s “free will” – they are not to be damned or hated. We will be freer to understand the real causes of our feelings and others’ behavior. As in Buddhism, we will first admit that we are suffering, and then try to develop realistic ways to prevent us from suffering.

2. Being free of resentment will make us happier – less spiteful and brooding (like venomous spiders). And only happy people can be truly virtuous – i.e., truly loving and generous to other people.

C. But what system of morals should we adopt? Nietzsche does not want us to return to ancient Greek, Jewish, or Roman values. But he has very little to say positively about which values we should adopt. All he says is that they will be life-affirming, and be based on the will to power.

D. Who will introduce these new values? Nietzsche believed that someday an “overman”, or “superman” (Übermensch), will come, and will introduce a new, healthier set of values.

Philosophy: Basic Questions; Fall 2002; Prof. Boedeker; last handout on Nietzsche

VI. Nietzsche and the problem of history:

A. Nietzsche’s view of morals implies that there’s an apparent contradiction at the heart of human life:

1. On the one hand, our essence as living organisms is the will to power: the instinct to increase force, to dominate, to impose ourselves outside ourselves. The will to power is future-directed.

2. On the other hand, Nietzsche’s genealogy of morals has shown how human life – especially human values – is a product of the past. Call this aspect of human life “historicity”. In Thus Spoke Zarathustra (1885) Nietzsche calls it the “eternal recurrence of the same” – since the same old historical events are constantly (= eternally) shaping who we are. In every moment of our life, the effects of the past on us are thus being “repeated.”

3. Historicity is essentially out of our control. It thus always provides resistance – and thus a threat – to our will to power. The will to power seems unable to dominate historicity. Nietzsche calls the effects of the past “the spirit of gravity”, whom he describes as “half dwarf, half mole, lame, making lame, dripping lead into my ear, leaden thoughts into my brain”. The past is always dragging us down, preventing us from becoming free by exercising our will to power.

4. The problem: The essence of human life is the future-directed will to power, but the will to power is weighted down by the effects of the past on us.

5. The effects of historicity (= the eternal recurrence of the same) are especially threatening to the will to power when we have inherited life-denying values that make us sick.

6. The question: Is there any way for the will to power to dominate historicity without denying it – to will its historicity as a product of the will to power?

B. Nietzsche’s answer to the question:

1. Yes! The will to power can dominate the past by re-interpreting it with a new set of values – those of the will to power. When we re-interpret the past, we change the effects that it has on us now. Re-interpreting the past thus brings it under the control of the will to power.

2. Nietzsche’s genealogy of morals is just such a re-interpretation of the past.

3. Re-interpreting the past as Nietzsche does is liberating, empowering. We come to see our present, unhealthy morals not as something “written in stone” – following from the ultimate nature of reality (as for Plato) or God’s commandments (as in Judaism or Christianity). Instead, we view our morals as products of the human will to power.

4. Re-interpreting past morals as the product of the will to power frees us up to will a new, healthier set of morality for the future.

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