Greg Detre
Tuesday, 09 January, 2001
This is intended as a continuation and companion to BGE. It attacks what Nietzsche sees as the dominant moral values of his age, the Judaeo-Christian slave morality where the ressentiment of the weak to band together against the aristocratic morality of the strong has cunningly inverted �good� and �bad� in their favour. He is also attacking the Victorian scientific critique of Utilitarianism, associationist psychology and Social Darwinism??? Nietzsche means his �genealogy� to trace the conflicting, intersecting strands of history back from the current malaise to their origins. His first essay is an etymological account of how moral words, such as �guilt� and �conscience� have their origins in the creditor/debtor relationship, a morality imposed upon the masses rather than agreed upon between equals in the Rousseau tradition.
OaGoM is full of paradox and ambivalence, towards truth, interpretation, morality, science. It appears to use scientific methodologies of comparative anthropology, physiology and etymology to debunk science. Yet Smith points out that with his mixed metaphors, figurative, demogogical language, analogy is really the tool being employed. Nietzsche attacks the notion of absolute truth, yet doesn�t defend this statement of truth, discusses the violence done by interpretation yet does violence with his interpretation etc.
aspiration of expressivist consciousness:
unity
freedom
communism??? with man
the state being formed by a warlike, domineering blond race which subjugates a perhaps numerically superior weaker race, forming a living artistic monument of domination. the will to power of the slaves turns inwards upon itself, aka the instinct for freedom, and the soul rends in two �
�Bad conscience� is the will to power turned in upon itself.
Unconcerned, contemptuous, violent � this is how wisdom would have us be: she is a woman, she only ever loves a warrior. � Thus Spake Zarathustra
This essay is about ascetism � especially in artists, philosophers and priests. The slogan of ascetism is: poverty, humility and chastity. Depending on where the ascetic drive stems from, it can be the route to the philosopher�s optimum existence, or the priest�s life-denying fear.
He starts by discussing the artist, Wagner, his chastity at the end of his life and Parsifal. Artists are �valets to some ethics or philosophy or religion�. Wagner, for instance, needed Schopenhauer.
He talks about the ascetic ideal in priests with terrible disdain. They are the shepherders of the flock, the subtle poisoners of the flock with their ingenious consolations, their haven where the sick organise and congregate (the �church�). Understanding and placating the sick requires the doctor to understand the condition, to be sick too. The sick seek anaesthetising from their physiological pathology, their leaden, unhappy existences. God is the ideal of nothingness.
Ascetism can be seen as a most thoroughly-worked interpretation. Nietzsche ends the book by showing how so much of human history can be seen in the context of various forms and versions of the ascetic ideal, including especially science, that which might seem to be, and holds itself out as, its opposite. For both science and the ascetic ideal hold at their core the will to truth. It is confusing whether atheism too could not have the charge of a will to truth levelled against it � he seems to be pointing to an honest and a dishonest atheism, where the honest atheists, the free spirits revel in the freedom of a godless world, unbounded by this infinite will to nothingness and the trappings of religion (institutionalised anaesthesia, sickness and suffering-justfications), while the agnostics (and dishonest atheists???) have merely replaced one god for another, say, the question mark.
In truth, art is more of an opposite to ascetism than science ever could be, for art is affirming yet holds no truth(s).
Mankind needs to free itself from this history of �why?�, especially �why does man suffer?� in order to free of the ascetic ideal. For the ascetic ideal is the widest, most varied, subtle, ramified, defended answer � the will to power and life turned in against itself, for mankind would rather will to nothingness than will nothing at all.
What does Nietzsche
mean by �woman�?
He is a misogynist. His characterisations of women tend to be derogatory and to stereotype them in terms of the feelings they arouse in men. He seems bitter yet almost amused and respectful - admiring, almost lecherous, but unashamed.
Woman is either whore or mother. Temptress, sex object, capricious and somehow desirable, natural � anathema too??? Or � pregnant, carrying the burden of the next generation, giving birth and bringing forth, an analogy for the creative act � in man. Woman must be wooed and won, but even then cannot be possessed.
How is wisdom a woman?
Does he really think this about woman? Or is it a bit of
a theme-ideal to make a point?
What can we see from
Nietzsche�s philosophy and assumptions about him? What does his metaphysics
reveal about his psychology?
The answer is either � nothing � for Nietzsche is so aware of this that he writes straight from the soul with no interposing distortions of prejudice, assumption and fear. Or � there is a great great deal to be seen, revealed by such honest philosophy. But his style is such that one feels niggardly and fears being branded a �philosophical labourer�, an angry herdmember tugging at his trouserleg, a parasite or peasant � one fears demonstrating one�s own misunderstanding and being targetted by questioning the master.
What is the difference
between �bad conscience� and the ascetic ideal (they are both the �will to
nothingness�)?
Can one become a philosopher, or are the sick incurable?
What is suffering? Why
do we have it? How should we bear it?
I think Nietzsche would say that some things just are � what you hold those things to be depends of course upon your interpretation � and perhaps each interpretation provides an answer as to �why suffer?�. But we must bear suffering as the healthy and strong, as a sublimation, as a given, without seeking justification, anaesthetic or cause.