Greg Detre
Tuesday, 05 March, 2002
Appointed
professor of classical philology at the University of Basel when he was just 24
years old, Nietzsche was expected to secure his reputation as a brilliant young
scholar with his first book, Die Geburt der Trag� (The Birth of Tragedy)
(1872). But that book did not look much like a work of classical scholarship.
Bereft of footnotes and highly critical of Socrates and modern scholarship, it
spoke in rhapsodic tones of ancient orgiastic Dionysian festivals and the
rebirth of Dionysian tragedy in the modern world. Classical scholars, whose
craft and temperament it had scorned, greeted the book with scathing criticism
and hostility; even Nietzsche eventually recognized it as badly written and
confused. Yet it remains one of the three most important philosophical
treatments of tragedy (along with those of Aristotle and Hegel) and is the soil
out of which Nietzsche�s later philosophy grew. By 1889, when he suffered a
mental and physical collapse that brought his productive life to an end,
Nietzsche had produced a series of thirteen books which have left a deep
imprint on most areas of Western intellectual and cultural life, establishing
him as one of Germany�s greatest prose stylists and one of its most important,
if controversial, philosophers.
Nietzsche
appears to attack almost everything that has been considered sacred: not only
Socrates and scholarship, but also God, truth, morality, equality, democracy
and most other modern values. He gives a large role to the will to power and he
proposes to replace the values he attacks with new values and a new ideal of
the human person (the �ermensch meaning �overhuman� or �superhuman�). Although
Nazi theoreticians attempted to associate these ideas with their own cause,
responsible interpreters agree that Nietzsche despised and unambiguously
rejected both German nationalism and anti-Semitism. Little else in his thought
is so unambiguous, at least in part because he rarely writes in a straightforward,
argumentative style, and because his thought changed radically over the course
of his productive life. The latter is especially true of his early criticism of
Socrates, science and truth.
Nietzsche�s
philosophizing began from a deep sense of dissatisfaction with modern Western
culture, which he found superficial and empty in comparison with that of the
ancient Greeks. Locating the source of the problem in the fact that modern
culture gives priority to science (understood broadly, including all forms of
scholarship and theory), whereas Presocratic Greece had given priority to art
and myth, he rested his hopes for modern culture on a return to the Greek
valuation of art, calling for a recognition of art as �the highest task and the
truly metaphysical activity of this life�.
He
soon turned his back on this early critique of science. In the works of his
middle period he rejects metaphysical truth but celebrates the valuing of
science and empirical truth over myth as a sign of high culture. Although he had
earlier considered it destructive of culture, he now committed his own
philosophy to a thoroughgoing naturalistic understanding of human beings. He
continued to believe that naturalism undermines commitment to values because it
destroys myths and illusions, but he now hoped that knowledge would purify
human desire and allow human beings to live without preferring or evaluating.
In the works of his final period, Nietzsche rejects this aspiration as
nihilistic.
In
his final period, he combined a commitment to science with a commitment to
values by recognizing that naturalism does not undermine all values, but only
those endorsed by the major ideal of value we have had so far, the ascetic
ideal. This ideal takes the highest human life to be one of self-denial, denial
of the natural self, thereby treating natural or earthly existence as devoid of
intrinsic value. Nietzsche saw this life-devaluing ideal at work in most
Western (and Eastern) religion and philosophy. Values always come into
existence in support of some form of life, but they gain the support of ascetic
religions and philosophies only if they are given a life-devaluing
interpretation. Ascetic priests interpret acts as wrong or �sinful� because the
acts are selfish or �animal� - because they affirm natural instincts - and
ascetic philosophers interpret whatever they value - truth, knowledge,
philosophy, virtue - in non-natural terms because they share the assumption
that anything truly valuable must have a source outside the world of nature,
the world accessible to empirical investigation. Only because Nietzsche still
accepted this assumption of the ascetic ideal did naturalism seem to undermine
all values.
According
to his later thought, the ascetic ideal itself undermines values. First it
deprives nature of value by placing the source of value outside nature. Then,
by promoting the value of truth above all else, it leads to a denial that there
is anything besides nature. Among the casualties of this process are morality
and belief in God, as Nietzsche indicated by proclaiming that �God is dead� and
that morality will gradually perish. Morality is not the only possible form of
ethical life, however, but a particular form that has been brought about by the
ascetic ideal. That ideal has little life left in it, according to Nietzsche,
as does the form of ethical life it brought about. Morality now has little
power to inspire human beings to virtue or anything else. There is no longer
anything to play the essential role played by the ascetic ideal: to inspire
human beings to take on the task of becoming more than they are, thereby
inducing them to internalize their will to power against themselves. Modern
culture therefore has insufficient defences against eruptions of barbarism,
which Nietzsche predicted as a large part of the history of the twentieth and
twenty-first centuries.
But
Nietzsche now saw that there was no way to go back to earlier values. His hope
rested instead with �new philosophers� who have lived and thought the values of
the ascetic ideal through to their end and thereby recognized the need for new
values. His own writings are meant to exhibit a new ideal, often by
exemplifying old virtues that are given a new, life-affirming interpretation.