Nietzsche Friedrich Archives

Equal Rights

It is easy to imagine Friedrich Nietzsche sitting in his study, writing away, merrily imagining the look of horror which will cross the faces of his readers when they come across the line he just penned. He obviously liked to shock people; the bigger the shock, the happier he was. But, alas, unlike his contemporary creator of scandalous bon mots, Oscar Wilde, Nietzsche was not popular in the salons of the day. People never knew what the guy was mumbling about over there in the corner.

Having never read a biography of Nietzsche, I have no idea if that portrait is correct. But, it sure feels right. How else to explain bits like this:

This book belongs to the very few. Perhaps not one of them is even living yet…
The conditions under which I am understood, and then of necessity—I know them only too well. One must be honest in matters of the spirit to the point of hardness before one can even endure my seriousness and my passion. One must be skilled in living on mountains—seeing the wretched ephemeral babble of politics and national self-seeking beneath oneself. One must have become indifferent; one must never ask if the truth is useful or if it may prove our undoing. The predilection of strength for questions for which no one today has the courage; the courage for the forbidden; the predestination to the labyrinth

That is from the Preface to a book Nietzsche wrote in 1888, shortly before he went insane. It wasn’t published for another 7 years because, well, the Publisher (quite understandably) was a bit leery. The title of the book: The Antichrist. Yep. Nietzsche put on his most malicious grin and pulled out all the stops in this one.

The quick summary: Christians are really bad. The longer version: Christians are really really bad.

The book is a mess if you want a nice linear dispassionate argument. Then again, all of Nietzsche’s books are a mess on those grounds, which, not coincidentally, is what makes him fun to read. Would you rather read a long dry explanation of the failures of Christianity or witticisms like this: “What is more harmful than any vice? Active pity for all the failures and the weak: Christianity.”

Be careful before you agree with that witticism, however. Do you really think pity is a vice?

Quite in general, pity crosses the law of development, which is the law of selection. It preserves what is right for destruction; it defends those who have been disinherited and condemned by life; and by the abundance of the failures of all kinds which it keeps alive, it gives life itself a gloomy and questionable aspect.

This is the same issue with which Darwin struggles in The Descent of Man. If you have a passel of pigs (also known as a bunch of pigs), and one of them is sickly and weak, you don’t take pity on it and let it spend its days breeding and bearing offspring. You kill it off to preserve the passel. (Yes, really!, a group of pigs called a passel. I am not making this up! There is, incidentally, also a “Sounder of Swine” and a “Singular of Boars.”)

Where did we get this crazy idea that we should have pity on the weak? Yeah, that is a Christian idea. Nietzsche explains that it is part of the slave revolt, the rise of the priest, whom Nietzsche recognizes “for what he is, the most dangerous kind of parasite, the real poison-spider of life.” Again, be careful before you agree that priests are really that evil.

If you are a Christian, can you really take offense? Nietzsche is, after all, right. You do take pity of the weak, you do think they should be loved and helped. And, if you are honest with yourself, you also know you would not prosper in Nietzsche’s preferred playground.

Nietzsche may seem like he is all merry fun if you like the idea of mocking Christians. If you like the frisson of shocking religious types, a book like The Antichrist seems like the perfect tome. Well, until you hit this sort of passage:

Whom do I hate most among the rabble of today? The socialist rabble, the chandala apostles, who undermine the instinct, the pleasure, the worker’s sense of satisfaction with his small existence—who make him envious, who teach him revenge. The source of wrong is never unequal rights but the claim of “equal” rights.
What is bad? But I have said this already: all that is born a weakness, of envy, of revenge. The anarchist and the Christian have the same origin.

What’s worse than a Christian? A socialist! An anarchist! Anyone who thinks that all people are equal. People like you.

The poison of the doctrine of “equal rights for all”—it was Christianity that spread it most fundamentally. Out of the most secret nooks of bad instincts, Christianity has waged war unto death against all sense of respect and feeling of distance between man and man, that is to say, against the presupposition of every elevation, of every growth of culture…
And let us not underestimate the calamity which crept out of Christianity into politics. Today nobody has the courage any longer for privileges, for masters’ rights, for a sense of respect for oneself and one’s peers—for a pathos of distance. Our politics is sick from this lack of courage.
The aristocratic outlook was undermined from the deepest underworld through the lie of the equality of souls…

Are you still agreeing with Nietzsche about the evils of Christianity?

Nietzsche is entirely right about this: Christianity is the source of the belief that everyone deserves equal respect. As Paul notes in his letter to the Galatians, “There is neither Jew nor Greek, there is neither slave nor free, there is no male and female, for you are all one in Christ Jesus.” That is a very radical claim. We have still not perfected the idea of living like that. Truth be told, we will never be able to perfect that life as long as we are all stamped with sin. But the idea that this is something to which we should all aspire is powerful. How powerful? It is powerful enough that you can hear it echo in the arguments of people today who believe they have completely rejected Christianity.

You want an honest and total rejection of Christianity? See Nietzsche. But, if you want to talk about equal rights, then perhaps you should acknowledge your debt to the New Testament.

Philosophizing With a Hammer

“Why so hard?” the kitchen coal once said to the diamond. “After all, are we not close kin?”
Why so soft? O my brothers, thus I ask you: are you not after all my brothers?
Why so soft, so pliant and yielding? Why is there so much denial, self-denial, in your hearts? So little destiny in your eyes?
And if you do not want to be destinies and inexorable ones, how can you one day triumph with me?
And if your hardness does not wish to flash and cut through, how can you one day create with me?
For all creators are hard. And it must seem blessedness to you to impress your hand on millennia as on wax.
Blessedness to write on the will of millennia as on bronze—harder than bronze, nobler than bronze. Only the noblest is altogether hard.
This new tablet, O my brothers, I place over you: Become hard!

With that, Nietzsche closes his book, Twilight of the Idols or, How One Philosophizes With a Hammer. It is quite natural for someone to wonder about the content of a book. After all, if you are choosing which philosophy book to read, you might be interested in knowing the subject of the books you are contemplating. This book has a fairly simple subject matter. The topic is “Nietzsche’s Ego.”

That Nietzsche had a large ego is obvious to anyone who has ever read anything he wrote. That close of the book reprinted above, for example, is a passage from one of Nietzsche’s other books; after all, he is so brilliant, he might as well quote himself. This is the guy whose wrote an autobiographical book entitled Ecce Homo with four sections: “Why I Am So Wise,” “Why I Am So Clever,” “Why I Write Such Good Books,” and “Why I Am Destiny.”

So, to say Twilight of the Idols is about Nietzsche’s Ego may seem a bit underdefined. All Nietzsche’s books put his ego on display. What makes this one different is that it is nothing other than a roundabout paean to Nietzsche’s genius. His last book published before he went insane (insert the usual joke that he was always insane), it is in one way just a summary of his previous books, but as he notes in one of the maxims which lead off the book, “I mistrust all systematizers and I avoid them. The will to a system is a lack of integrity.” No system here folks. Just Ego.

After 44 of the enigmatic aphorisms he loved so much, Nietzsche sets out to take down Socrates. One can see why Nietzsche needed to do this. Who is the wisest and most enjoyable philosopher of all? Nietzsche wants you to think of him, but, alas, you answered “Socrates.” So, what is “the problem of Socrates”?

Whenever authority still forms a part of good bearing, where one does not give reasons but commands, the dialectician is a kind of buffoon: one laughs at him, one does not take him seriously. Socrates was the buffoon who got himself taken seriously: what really happened there?

One chooses dialectic only when one has no other means. One knows that one arouses mistrust with it, that it is not very persuasive. Nothing is easier to erase than a dialectical effect: the experience of every meeting at which there are speeches proves this. It can only be self-defense for those who no longer have other weapons.

The dialectician leaves it to his opponent to prove that he is no idiot: he makes one furious and helpless at the same time. The dialectician renders the intellect of his opponent powerless. Indeed? Is dialectic only a form of revenge in Socrates?

And there you have it. You might think that reasoned philosophical discourse is a good way to think about Truth. You buffoon. You have bought into the Greek lie that there is only one choice “either to perish or—to be absurdly rational.” You want “Reason-virtue-happiness”?

The most blinding daylight; rationality at any price; life, bright, cold, cautious, conscious, without instinct, in opposition to the instincts—all this too was a mere disease, another disease, and by no means a return to ‘virtue,’ to ‘health,’ to happiness.

With that Nietzsche is off on his usual themes, philosophizing with a hammer, not a stiletto. The message of the book is clearly written on every page: “I, Nietzsche, am right. All others are wrong.”

Beyond the fact that he is right, what is the philosophy he is summarizing here? This is where talking about Nietzsche always gets one into trouble. No matter what you write, it needs qualifications and elaboration. Nietzsche was not systematic; he explodes on the page in prose so wild, your jaw just gapes as you follow the wild ramblings. I want to say that Twilight of the Idols is not a good starting place for reading Nietzsche, but truth be told, there is no good starting place for reading Nietzsche. The art of reading Nietzsche is to dive in and go along for the ride until the shape of things begins to appear. While at times (or more accurately, while most of the time) he is totally incomprehensible, his prose is so carefree, it is an easy matter to just keep going looking for a place to stand.

Nietzsche doesn’t like the world in which you live, that world in which you believe there is a moral code, that you are a mere human who needs to care about human rights, that world in which the weak rule the strong. Nietzsche is screaming that you should liberate yourself from all such thoughts, that your trust of reason is simply denying your animal desires, that we should all rise up and live true human lives, that the strong should no longer be told to act like the weak, that the tarantulas have poisoned the society so that you no longer are willing to acknowledge your will to power and seize what you can. That description of Nietzsche is woefully incomplete and inaccurate.

Why read Nietzsche? When he is wrong, he is spectacularly wrong in ways that help make clear the important questions. But, he isn’t always wrong; sometimes he is right for the wrong reasons, which means he makes the Truth even clearer than it otherwise would be. A couple of examples. First:

Anti-natural morality—that is, almost every morality which has so far been taught, revered, and preached—turns, conversely, against the instincts of life: it is condemnation of these instincts, now secret, now outspoken and impudent. When it says, ‘God looks at the heart,’ it says No to both the lowest and the highest desires of life and posits God as the enemy of life. The saint in whom God delights is the ideal eunuch. Life has come to an end where the ‘kingdom of God’ begins….One would require a position outside of life, and yet have to know it as well as one, as many, as all who have lived it, in order to be permitted even to touch the problem of the value of life: reasons enough to comprehend that this problem is for us an unapproachable problem.

Fascinatingly, that is about as good a description of the theology of Christian morality as could be written by any Christian theologian. Remove Nietzsche’s sneering tone and you are left with the statement that morality is a denial of human instincts and that the only way to examine the value of human life and thus the need for a moral code is to have a starting place outside of humanity. Without that standpoint outside of humanity, it is an unapproachable problem. This is exactly what Christians say: man is born with original sin, and the Law and Grace were both provided to allow man to lead a more properly human life, a life that runs counter to the sinful desires of the flesh, and that such a law is found only from outside humanity, in the revelation of God Himself. Nietzsche and the most devout Christian theologian ever agree that all attempts by humans to create a moral code independent of the existence of a God are doomed to fail because they are grounded on nothing.

A second example:

In present-day Germany no one is any longer free to give his children a noble education: our ‘higher schools’ are all set up for the most ambiguous mediocrity, with their teachers, curricula, and teaching aims. And everywhere an indecent haste prevails, as if something would be lost if the young man of twenty-three were not yet ‘finished,’ or if he did not yet know the answer to the ‘main question’: which calling? A higher kind of human being, if I may say so, does not like ‘callings,’ precisely because he knows himself to be called. He has time, he takes time, he does not even think of ‘finishing’: at thirty one is, in the sense of high culture, a beginner, a child.

Here again, one does not have to agree with Nietzsche’s story of the slave revolt and the rise of the weak and the sickness of Western Civilization to see in that description one of the best explanations for the collapse of the liberal arts even in the liberal arts colleges.

To read Nietzsche is to experience the thrill of watching the guy with the hard hammer smash everything in his sight. Reading Nietzsche is work; he never even tries to make his ideas clear to the reader. But reading Nietzsche is fun if you give up the attempt to finish reading him, if you start by saying, “I am only a beginner, a child, reading Nietzsche;” then you find therein whatever you find therein.

Nietzsche and the Apostle Paul

Nietzsche doesn’t get invited to many Christmas parties.

Something about declaring “God is dead” has made him persona non grata at gatherings of Christians.

But, before dismissing him, let us first note that his most famous aphorism was, in fact, correct.

By the late 19^th century, in European intellectual circles, God was, indeed, dead. It wasn’t always so; look back at the writings of earlier generations and you find a plethora of Christian intellectuals. Even the non-Christian intellectuals made nods in the direction of God. But, by the 1870s, all that God-talk had largely vanished. God, who sed to be the center of European intellectual discourse, was no longer there are all. God, the idea and relevance of God to the intellectual arguments of the late 19^th century, was indeed quite dead.

Nietzsche looked out at the godless landscape, and what did he see? A true curiosity. While nobody wanted to talk about God anymore, everyone still had all these moral codes which looked a whole lot like the Christian moral code. “Why?,” Nietzsche asks.

That is a really good question. It is the sort of question both Christians and non-Christians ought to be asking. If there is no God, why exactly should I love my neighbor? If I am strong enough, why shouldn’t I kill my neighbor and take all his stuff?

When I ask students this, they inevitably immediately reply, “Well, you don’t want someone to kill you, do you?” They announce this proudly, like it is the ultimate answer. But, it is, of course, just a sign of their weakness. If I am strong enough, why would I worry that others will kill me? Only weak people worry about that. So, again, why shouldn’t I kill my neighbor?

If there was a God who did not want me to murder my neighbor, then that gives me an answer. But, if there is no God? Why not then? Here Nietzsche comes in with an answer. His answer sprawls among a great many books, but the easiest place to start is The Genealogy of Morals.

Once upon a time, the strong could kill their neighbors. Those were the good old days. In those days, there was only the strong and the weak. The strong were good; the weak were not good. The weak did not like being preyed upon by the strong, so they banded together to create a moral code which would constrain the strong. Don’t be strong, said the weak. Be weak like us.

That lambs dislike great birds of prey does not seem strange: only it gives no ground for reproaching these birds of prey for bearing off little lambs. And if the lambs say among themselves: “these birds of prey are evil; and whoever is least like a bird of prey, but rather its opposite, a lamb—would he not be good?” there is no reason to find fault with this institution of an ideal, except perhaps that the birds of prey might view it a little ironically and say: “we don’t dislike them at all, these good little lambs; we even love them: nothing is more tasty than a tender lamb.”
To demand of strength that it should not express itself as strength, that it should not be a desire to overcome, a desire to throw down, a desire to become master, a thirst for enemies and resistances and triumphs, is just as absurd as to demand of weakness that it should express itself as strength

Thus began the slave revolt in morality. Henceforth all expressions of strength will be called “evil.” All expressions of weakness will be called “good.” The Church arises to impose this new moral code on everyone, constraining the strong and elevating the weak. These new Priests of Weakness, the tarantulas, have gradually poisoned everyone to the point where nobody can see the truth any more.

A predominance of mandarins always means something is wrong; so do the advent of democracy, international courts in place of war, equal rights for women, the religion of pity, and whatever other symptoms of declining life there are.

Even Science has led us further down the same path. Once upon a time, Humans were the Masters of the Universe, ruling the World. Now, we are mere animals, pathetic little creatures acting like a virus on a small planet which is no longer the center of anything at all.

Has the self-belittlement of man, his will to self-belittlement, not progressed irresistibly since Copernicus? Alas, the faith in the dignity and uniqueness of man, in his irreplaceability in the great chain of being, is a thing of the past—he has become an animal, literally and without reservation or qualification, he who was, according to his old faith, almost God (“child of God,” “God-man”).

All this was the history of the world when Nietzsche wrote. But, he warned, it was about to get worse, much worse.

What happens when people become aware that the moral codes they have been using are not actually True? What happens when Truth itself gets called into question?

As the will to truth thus gains self-consciousness—there can be no doubt of that—morality will gradually perish now: this is the great spectacle in a hundred acts reserved for the next two centuries in Europe—the most terrible, most questionable, and perhaps also the most hopeful of all spectacles.

The great spectacle: world wars, genocide, mass killings…all in the name of power. If the 20^th century has shown us anything, this Will to Power in the absence of any Truth is a very ugly thing. Nietzsche was right.

Should that surprise us? Well, not if we have read the Apostle Paul.

Nietzsche may be the most perceptive commentator on the writings of Paul which the world has ever produced. Paul and Nietzsche completely agree on one thing: in a world without God, there is no moral code, and people behave abominably.

In the absence of God, Paul and Nietzsche fully agree that there is no check upon the wickedness of man. In the absence of God, there is no reason that strength should not express itself as strength. In the absence of God, the Christian Church is just imposing a moral code in an attempt to restrain these natural inclinations we all have. Paul notes the wickedness at the heart of all humans; Nietzsche explains the implications of Paul’s observation about human nature.

If there is no God, then we do in fact live in that the Nietzschean world. Prepare yourself for another century of horror. Get used to the Will to Power being the only Rule of Law. If you want to dream, then dream with Nietzsche that maybe the Overman, the Superman, will arise to lead us out of this dark pit.

How do we escape the Nietzschean horror? Easy. If the premise is wrong, then the conclusion is wrong. If there is a God, then weakness and love are indeed good.

Paul and Nietzsche lead to the same place. Both look forward to a redemptive moment in the future to save us from our plight. And both agree on this: if we assume the absence of God, Nietzsche is entirely correct. There is no moral code; there is only power. And if you don’t think that conclusion is True, then maybe it is the assumption that needs modification.