In these three short essays, Nietzsche brings his unique take on the progression of mankind specifically to the history of morality. He has no problem casually tearing down all received wisdom. “No one has, up to the present, expressed the slightest doubt or hesitation in judging the ‘good man’ to be of a higher value than the ‘evil man’, of a higher value with regard specifically to human progress, welfare and prosperity in general.” Nietzsche posits that, in fact, it was the aristocracy, from their position of power, who labeled their own actions as ‘good’, in a self-justifying manner. “The judgement ‘Good’ did not originate among those to whom goodness was shown! Rather it has been the ‘good men’ themselves, that is, the noble, the powerful, those of high degree, the high-minded, who have felt that they themselves were good…. It was from this pathos of distance that they first claimed the right to create values for their own benefit…. The pathos of nobility and distance, as I have said, the continuing and dominating collective instinct, and feeling of superiority of a higher race, a master race, in comparison to a subservient race—this is the origin of the opposition of ‘Good’ and ‘Bad’.” Modernity has been crippled by its quest for leveling, for the egalitarian spirit. “Our greatest peril lurks in the European drift towards egalitarianism, for it is this prospect which wearies us—we see today nothing which wishes to be greater, we surmise that everything is still, retreating, going backwards, regressing towards something more reserved, more inoffensive, more cunning, more comfortable, more mediocre, more indifferent, more Chinese, more Christian.” Human advancement marches towards the mass man, towards blandness.
In his second essay, Nietzsche moves on to the origins of obligations, debts, conscience, repression, and religion. “It is then in this sphere of contracts and legal obligations that we find the crucible of moral concepts such as ‘guilt’, ‘conscience’, ‘duty’, the ‘sacredness of duty’—their beginnings, like the beginnings of all great things in this world, are drenched with blood, through and through…. How can suffering be considered a compensation for ‘debts’?—It is because the infliction of suffering produces supreme pleasure, because the injured party will receive in exchange for his loss (including his vexation at his loss) an extraordinary reward: the pleasure of inflicting suffering—a real feast.” The joy of inflicting suffering had to be restrained as humanity matured. “It was that desire for self-torture in the savage who suppresses his cruelty because he was forced to contain himself (incarcerated as he was in ‘the state’, as part of his taming process), who invented bad conscience so as to hurt himself…. This man of bad conscience armed himself with religious precepts so as to carry his martyrdom to its ghastly extreme…. He takes ‘God’ as the most extreme antitheses that he can find to his own characteristic and indomitable animal instincts.”
Finally, Nietzsche takes on the march from ascetic ideals to secular modernity. “All good things were once bad things…. The feelings we call tenderness, benevolence, care, sympathy—which have been valued so highly that they are now almost ‘intrinsic values’—were for a very long time actually despised by their possessors…. The submission to law; oh, how reluctantly the noble races throughout the world renounced the vendetta and gave to the law power over themselves! ‘Law’ was for a long time a vetitum, an outrage, something unheard of; it was introduced with force, as a force, something to which men submitted only in shame.” The State finally usurped from the powerful. Nietzsche questions the values of secular truth and science, supposedly the outgrowth and cure for religion. “The belief on which our faith in science is based has remained to this day a metaphysical belief. Even we modern men of science—we who are godless foes of metaphysics—light our torches in that conflagration which was kindled by a belief thousands of years old, that Christian belief, which was also Plato’s belief, the belief that God is truth, that truth is divine…. What if God Himself proved to be our oldest lie?” Science is not opposed to asceticism, only art is. “In art, lying is consecrated, and the desire for deception has good conscience on its side. Plato felt this instinctively—Plato, the greatest enemy of art whom Europe has ever produced. Plato versus Homer.” For Nietzsche, only the poet can triumph over the truths. Asceticism alone will never quench man’s thirst. “The ascetic ideal simply means that something was lacking, that Man was surrounded by a tremendous void…. He suffered from the problem of his own meaning…. He was in the main a diseased animal; his problem was not suffering itself, though, but lack of an answer to that crying question, ‘Why do we suffer?’ Man, the bravest animal and the one most inured to suffering, does not repudiate suffering in itself; he desires it, he even seeks it out, provided that he is shown a meaning for it, a purpose for suffering…. Man will desire oblivion rather than not desire at all.”
No comments:
Post a Comment