6. For Nietzsche,
traditional philosophy and morality invert ends and means. They are means but
they are transformed into ends that suppress life and distort instincts. The
sickness of modern man is not an argument against life but against a form of
truth that induces sickness. Nietzsche’s main objection to Christianity is its
life denying impact and consequences. Christianity is a set of ascetic ideals:
it demands surplus repression of instincts. Repression is an indispensable
cultural agent. Man must be humanised, socialised and resistance is crucial for
creative overcoming and expanding power. For Nietzsche, this was the original
goal of the Christian church, the spiritualisation of man. However, he argues:
‘… from the time of the
Reformation the concept of hierarchy in the church was destroyed. The
destruction of faith and its spirituality was undermined by surrendering
biblical interpretation to conscience, by allowing priests sexual intercourse
and taking away their confessional role. With the slogan “Everybody his own
priest” Luther expressed Christianity’s inherent hatred of superiors and gave
the vital push to a egalitarianism that gradually gave birth to the oppressive
and life-negating fictions like equality and the idea of the autonomous and responsible
individual subject.’
Christianity also
dramatically escalates the quota of suffering producing guilt and denying vital
instincts. Nietzsche traces this ascetic impact back to Christian morality and
its conceptual foundations. Concepts like ”the immortal soul”, “sin”, ‘free
will” and the immaterial “beyond” are fabricated to despise and torture the
body, to confuse our instincts, to impose unity on essentially divergent
passions and desires. Nietzsche points out the impossibility of a morality of denial.
‘What does it mean when the human being, in full consciousness, says, “no”
while all his senses and nerves say “yes” and every fibre, every cell resists,’
(CW 11, 63) Christian doctrine implies the unity of the person (soul) and their
responsibility (sin, conscience) but the body is a plurality of senses and
states of which consciousness is only one. We do not have only one self but a
multitude of drives and passions and health requires the unfettered competition
between them for the ultimate supremacy. Nietzsche assumes the truth of the
Hobbesian notion of the “war of all against all” but internalises it. This
ongoing dynamic struggle is the manifestation of power and health and the basis
of everything great. Christianity also rejects this natural, sensuous, true
reality and invents a “beyond” to devalue it. However, the vilest lie of all is
the “good person” characterised by self-sacrifice, humility and compassion;
most dreadful in this is not the fiction itself but the fact that this lie
supports everything that is feeble, sick and botched. The proud and
well-fashioned man gives way to humility, self-denial and asceticism; is
transformed into the “evil one” and the healthy expenditure of instinctual
power is repressed and distorted. In short Christianity is a millennial
catastrophe. It is the penultimate chapter in a sequence of worldviews that
have deformed instincts and promoted decadence in modern man. Nietzsche
complains about the typical Christian. ‘He combats evils as if one could
dispense with them; that he will not take the one with the other--that he wants
to erase the typical character of a thing, a condition, an age, a person,
approving of only one part of their qualities and wishing to abolish the
others’. (WP470) For Nietzsche, instinctual outlets--even depravity and
brutality—are manifestation of our animal instincts and power, vital both for
health and culture. Life is essentially the will to power. Life is infinitude;
it wills incessant growth, domination, the overpowering of the alien and weak.
7. In this worldview,
conflict and exploitation are inescapable: they are co-terminus with social and
political life.
‘ “Exploitation” does not
belong to a corrupt or undeveloped and primitive society: it lies in the
essence of living things as a basic organic function’.
Social life is not the
issue of collective interests or a social nature but the product of an order of
rank imposed by the ruler on the ruled. Nietzsche uses this imposition of
social unity to explain the origins of morality. The origins of social life in
struggle and exploitation is expressed in two forms of morality: that of master
and slave. Interestingly, the motif of master/slave was initially made famous
by Hegel. For him, it is also identified with the beginning of social life. It
is the first form of recognition, albeit requiring subordination. However, in
Hegel, it is the slave that is the real bearer of historical development who
comes to represent a higher form of freedom and the possibility of equal
recognition in the form of bourgeois legal personhood through their discipline
and labour. While Nietzsche is also prepared to concede that the slaves and
their morality comes to dominate the present, he adamantly rejects the idea
that this is progress. In Nietzsche’s account, the master determines values. As
a result of their own inherent power they are active and value creating and do
not require approval. They act instinctively, spontaneously and without guile.
Their own distinctive qualities, that which is agreeable and useful for them,
becomes the good. Slave morality, on the other hand, is ostensibly passive but
really reactive. They are propelled by resentiment: the angry desire to punish
and surpass those who are better and more powerful: the good is defined in
terms of opposition to power that inverts its evaluations. Thus the typical
Christian values are patience, kindness, humility, industry and pity.
Interestingly, Nietzsche clearly sees an active will to power operative in
these passive creeds. Their worldviews are powerful illusions that overcome the
meaninglessness of life. For him, history is a record of the triumph of this
slave morality. Masters create and build societies but in the more sedentary
and artificial conditions of civilisation tend to succumb to the multitude and
assimilate the morality of slaves. Under “normal conditions” the “weak” will
always be victorious; they have numbers and they flourish in the calm of the
everyday in pursuit of prosperity and security. Nietzsche struggles to find
explanations for this victory of the slaves that threatens the highest values.
On the one hand, he speculates that the conflict between master races is too
costly and civilisation must return quieter waters to rebuild its strength, on
the other, he views it simply as a result of decadence and the
over-spiritualisation of the masters.
8. Modern morality is a
product of a decadence that goes back to Socrates. This destroyed the
dictatorship of elites based on competitive struggles. The latter was healthy,
a doctrine of relations of supremacy affirming will to power and the becoming
of life. Nietzsche deplores the official disappearance of slaves; ‘A higher
civilisation can only come about when there are two social castes: that of the
working people and that of the leisured, those capable of true leisure: or, to
put it more strongly, the caste of forced labour and the caste of free labour’
(H all to H, 211). However, because he believes that the natural order of rank
cannot be suppressed by social engineering he continues to hope that is will
reassert itself, as you will see, in a new form. Nietzsche speaks with an
insider’s knowledge of modernity but from the outside. His spiritual home is
the cultural achievement of the aristocratic elites and he mounts his critique
of modernity from this perspective.
9. The contemporary demise of the unhealthy, ascetic Christian
worldview does not immediately see the reassertion of a master morality. As we
have seen, for Nietzsche the ideological struggle between Christianity and
Enlightenment is superficial. Behind the contest of reason and faith is
continuity and an abiding affinity. Equality in the sight of God is easily
translated into the rights of man and popular sovereignty. Contemporary
bourgeois liberalism with its democratic creed is Christian insofar as it makes
a sovereign of the mediocre, uncultivated individual of the herd.
10. The democratic ethos declares domination immoral; it defends the interests of the mediocre herd that cannot form, create or dominate. The preference for egalitarianism as mutual toleration is a prejudice for the mediocre and a disbelief in the possibility of the great human being. The idea of making the people sovereign means a devaluation of civilisation and of a society orientated to greatness. The masses are give permission to choose between a few opinions creating the impression of individual autonomy and the struggle of opinions. But this is a charade that obscures the main issue. The masses are simply incapable of creating new values. The call for equality, freedom and security in reality legitimates the anarchy of the base instincts of private individuals. It fails to recognise that inequality of rights is the first condition for the existence of all rights. In economics, this means the pursuit of self-interest and, in politics, the oppression of the superior individual and the overturning of natural inequality. The “rights of man” are a shabby product of slave morality. The “common good” is another fiction corresponding neither to individual instincts nor to any real social telos. It is an oppressive and constraining weight of mediocrity on the few. For Nietzsche, society has no other end than to be a means to the creation of the great.
11. These democratic slogans are against nature that is boundless and wasteful. Its infinite plenitude has only one law: inequality and domination. This is why political revolutions (past and present) are also superficial. They cannot transform the natural basis of inequality. Nietzsche explicitly rejects the proposition that society can ignore the fact of human inequality. Liberal democracy and socialism hold to the illusion that natural endowment is either significantly malleable or socially constructed. This perpetuates the basic principle of humanist rationalism since Socrates that it is possible to transform human nature through knowledge. However, the task of culture is not to resist nature but to take what it has supplied and through cultivation to augment it. Ironically, Nietzsche also views himself as an advocate “justice” but this is the justice of life itself: of nature and the “higher pity” of great and healthy individuals. No two individuals are equal and natural justice demands an order of rank.
12. This critique of democracy spills over into a wholesale assault on bourgeois life and its values. Its focus is on money and equivalence. The bourgeois world is a world of utility, calculation and trickery aspiring to obtain value cheaply. Nietzsche wants to dissolve this relation between value and cost. The highest values must be pursued irrespective of expense. This is a total repudiation of utilitarianism and the profit calculations of the bourgeois world. The latter’s world is that of possessions but its existence is insubstantial. He believes that “he who possesses is possessed”(GM.III,8) Possession is not a goal but merely a means. Only those with spirit have the right to possess--this is the doctrine preached by life itself. Nietzsche’s individualism is not one of “having’ but of “being” and “becoming”, of striving for self-mastery, of creating values and qualities.
13. Like Marx, he believes that the bourgeois reduce everything to money, even culture. ‘The value of a man...does not reside in his utility...And why could not that man who produced the most disastrous effects be a pinnacle of the whole species of man; so high, so superior that everything would perish from envy of him (WP 469). Culture requires spiritualisation and the contempt for material possessions. But the bourgeois world is one obsessed with acquisition, selfishness, production, work and haste. Is it little wonder that the workers despise those who exploit them! This is one of Nietzsche’s strongest convictions: that the herd willingly submits to whose superiority is manifest in natural bearing and noble manners. The multitude is content in its mediocrity and its happiness from mastery of a single competence in the division of labour. However, the dominance of the bourgeoisie has eroded the natural order of rank. The notorious vulgarity of the bourgeois reinforces the impression that it is only luck that sees them in the elevated social position. Socialism is a further consequence of the death of authentic hierarchy. The struggles of the workers are a product of the dissolution of hierarchy and the universalisation of bourgeois values. The workers are allowed to live too well and educated to be masters. Yet, these aspirations have already been contaminated by bourgeois values.
14. Nietzsche is disdainful of material values. Real creativity demands an absolute freedom that cannot abide any encumbrance. The higher individual must conquer lower needs in order to create. Bourgeois production is caught in the web of low needs, of consumption. However, creation must be an end in itself and not a means to an end. For Nietzsche, creative play and leisure have priority over work and acquisition. Bourgeois society has inverted these values by losing the class distinction between leisure and labour. The higher individual must have the time to find himself without trivial impediments. However, the process of self-discovery is made more difficult because modern man is increasingly subsumed in a variety of masks and roles to the extent that he has no center. This is partly a product of commodity exchange where we evaluate not through our own eyes but through those of another. It is also a product of the increasing dynamism of this life. This is a dynamism of impersonality, objectivity and over-stimulation that has stripped the superior individual of their self certainty and unconscious instinct. Nietzsche sees the mark of nobility as confidence in spontaneous, instinctive judgement without the constraints of self-doubt. Yet, just this spontaneity is disappearing with modern dynamism. As our knowledge becomes unprecedentedly vast our capacity for action is disabled, because it is derivative and second hand. Against this, a culture of leisure is only possible through a social domination. This makes possible a leisure class devoted to culture. While ancient society was destroyed by slavery, Nietzsche considers modernity is dying from its lack.
10. The democratic ethos declares domination immoral; it defends the interests of the mediocre herd that cannot form, create or dominate. The preference for egalitarianism as mutual toleration is a prejudice for the mediocre and a disbelief in the possibility of the great human being. The idea of making the people sovereign means a devaluation of civilisation and of a society orientated to greatness. The masses are give permission to choose between a few opinions creating the impression of individual autonomy and the struggle of opinions. But this is a charade that obscures the main issue. The masses are simply incapable of creating new values. The call for equality, freedom and security in reality legitimates the anarchy of the base instincts of private individuals. It fails to recognise that inequality of rights is the first condition for the existence of all rights. In economics, this means the pursuit of self-interest and, in politics, the oppression of the superior individual and the overturning of natural inequality. The “rights of man” are a shabby product of slave morality. The “common good” is another fiction corresponding neither to individual instincts nor to any real social telos. It is an oppressive and constraining weight of mediocrity on the few. For Nietzsche, society has no other end than to be a means to the creation of the great.
11. These democratic slogans are against nature that is boundless and wasteful. Its infinite plenitude has only one law: inequality and domination. This is why political revolutions (past and present) are also superficial. They cannot transform the natural basis of inequality. Nietzsche explicitly rejects the proposition that society can ignore the fact of human inequality. Liberal democracy and socialism hold to the illusion that natural endowment is either significantly malleable or socially constructed. This perpetuates the basic principle of humanist rationalism since Socrates that it is possible to transform human nature through knowledge. However, the task of culture is not to resist nature but to take what it has supplied and through cultivation to augment it. Ironically, Nietzsche also views himself as an advocate “justice” but this is the justice of life itself: of nature and the “higher pity” of great and healthy individuals. No two individuals are equal and natural justice demands an order of rank.
12. This critique of democracy spills over into a wholesale assault on bourgeois life and its values. Its focus is on money and equivalence. The bourgeois world is a world of utility, calculation and trickery aspiring to obtain value cheaply. Nietzsche wants to dissolve this relation between value and cost. The highest values must be pursued irrespective of expense. This is a total repudiation of utilitarianism and the profit calculations of the bourgeois world. The latter’s world is that of possessions but its existence is insubstantial. He believes that “he who possesses is possessed”(GM.III,8) Possession is not a goal but merely a means. Only those with spirit have the right to possess--this is the doctrine preached by life itself. Nietzsche’s individualism is not one of “having’ but of “being” and “becoming”, of striving for self-mastery, of creating values and qualities.
13. Like Marx, he believes that the bourgeois reduce everything to money, even culture. ‘The value of a man...does not reside in his utility...And why could not that man who produced the most disastrous effects be a pinnacle of the whole species of man; so high, so superior that everything would perish from envy of him (WP 469). Culture requires spiritualisation and the contempt for material possessions. But the bourgeois world is one obsessed with acquisition, selfishness, production, work and haste. Is it little wonder that the workers despise those who exploit them! This is one of Nietzsche’s strongest convictions: that the herd willingly submits to whose superiority is manifest in natural bearing and noble manners. The multitude is content in its mediocrity and its happiness from mastery of a single competence in the division of labour. However, the dominance of the bourgeoisie has eroded the natural order of rank. The notorious vulgarity of the bourgeois reinforces the impression that it is only luck that sees them in the elevated social position. Socialism is a further consequence of the death of authentic hierarchy. The struggles of the workers are a product of the dissolution of hierarchy and the universalisation of bourgeois values. The workers are allowed to live too well and educated to be masters. Yet, these aspirations have already been contaminated by bourgeois values.
14. Nietzsche is disdainful of material values. Real creativity demands an absolute freedom that cannot abide any encumbrance. The higher individual must conquer lower needs in order to create. Bourgeois production is caught in the web of low needs, of consumption. However, creation must be an end in itself and not a means to an end. For Nietzsche, creative play and leisure have priority over work and acquisition. Bourgeois society has inverted these values by losing the class distinction between leisure and labour. The higher individual must have the time to find himself without trivial impediments. However, the process of self-discovery is made more difficult because modern man is increasingly subsumed in a variety of masks and roles to the extent that he has no center. This is partly a product of commodity exchange where we evaluate not through our own eyes but through those of another. It is also a product of the increasing dynamism of this life. This is a dynamism of impersonality, objectivity and over-stimulation that has stripped the superior individual of their self certainty and unconscious instinct. Nietzsche sees the mark of nobility as confidence in spontaneous, instinctive judgement without the constraints of self-doubt. Yet, just this spontaneity is disappearing with modern dynamism. As our knowledge becomes unprecedentedly vast our capacity for action is disabled, because it is derivative and second hand. Against this, a culture of leisure is only possible through a social domination. This makes possible a leisure class devoted to culture. While ancient society was destroyed by slavery, Nietzsche considers modernity is dying from its lack.
15. This leads to the fundamental point of Nietzsche’s critique of the bourgeois world. Modern bourgeois freedom is a freedom to live well; of mediocrity, security, selfishness and passivity. Nietzsche’s definition of freedom is aristocratic.
“For what is freedom? That one has self-responsibility. That one preserves the distance that divides us. That one has become indifferent to hardship, toil, privation, even to life. That one is ready to sacrifice man to one’s cause, oneself not excepted. Freedom means the manly instincts that delight in war and victory gained in mastery over other instincts—for example over the instinct for ‘happiness’. The man who has become free…spurns the contemptible sort of well-being dreamed of by shopkeepers, Christians, cows, women, Englishmen and other democrats. The free man is a warrior—how is freedom measured, individuals as in nations? By the resistance which has to be overcome, by the effort it costs to stay aloft” (TI 92)
In comparison to this, the freedom of the bourgeois is permeated by internal conflicts. No single instinct can become masterful and impose itself on the others. (Despite this devastating critique, the industrial component of bourgeois society has a saving grace. It has dynamic potential and the capacity to discipline the herd. Industrial specialisation creates the conditions for the possible reintroduction of the distinction between work and leisure. It imposes a flexible but routine organisation that renders the worker docile but intelligent. They become malleable material for strong individuals. To attain a great height, a building must have a broad and strong base. But this is only one prospect amongst others).
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