Of the three essays of The Genealogy of Morals I recommend the first two. Skim the third. Collectively, they are extremely useful reading for citizens of the West to see clearly the oligarchic power dynamics under which we live.
Show me a modern Western nation-state where there isn't an increasing concentration of power among the elites--and a reduction in freedom for everyone else. You can't find one. Today we live in an increasingly neo-feudal system, where elites control more and more of the wealth, the actions, even the thoughts of the masses. Perhaps we should see the rare flowerings of genuine democratic freedom (6th century BC Athens, Republic-era Rome, and possibly pre-1913 USA) for what they really are: extreme outliers, quickly replaced with tyranny.
The first essay inverts the entire debate about morality, as Nietzsche nukes centuries of philosophical ethics by simply saying the powerful simply do what they do, and thus those things are good by definition. Lambs might think the birds of prey who eat them are evil, but the idea of a predator considering its prey's moral argument is ridiculous, hilarious even: birds of prey don't care what lambs think, they just prey and eat. ("We have nothing against lambs, nothing tastes better!") Thus Nietzsche doesn't just argue that "the strong and powerful decide what is good." His argument is more aggressive: that whatever the strong and powerful do is good. If you're familiar with Nietzsche's book Beyond Good and Evil (I recommend it, in fact it's a more interesting read than The Genealogy of Morals), this is essentially Nietzsche's "will to power" concept.
This essay also features some amusing mockery (as Nietzsche taunts 19th century English psychologists for arguing "altruism" was the foundation for morality), and plenty of bitching about all the "milksop intellectuals" of his era. Nietzsche then mourns the loss of a genuinely noble European aristocracy, and then finally concludes with worshipful commentary on the unexpected rise of the "anachronistic" Napoleon, who Nietzsche saw as a throwback to a braver, nobler ideal. The essay of course neglects to mention that Napoleon (basically a relative nobody from Corsica) was neither particularly aristocratic nor even French--but such is the weight of Nietzsche's writing that the reader can't help but let it pass. There's so much good rhetoric and so much forceful blackpill realtalk in here it's worth reading just to see how to write mercilessly. And it proves why it's necessary to have at least some command of Nietzsche's work if only to see how to write with genuine heft.
The second essay leads with one of the better sentences you'll find in a philosophy essay (an admittedly low bar): "To breed an animal with the right to make promises--is not this the paradoxical problem nature has set itself with regard to man? And is it not man's true problem?" Nietzsche goes on to describe two standards: a sovereign individual whose word is without question his bond, and a non-sovereign, non-volitional person whose "word" is primarily contingent on things going right for him. The former is the epitome of Nietzschean morality. The latter sadly describes the ethical standard of most of the rest of humanity. And this is why entire systems of punishments, state power, legal codes and even religious guilt are required just so large numbers of humans can coexist in a reasonably functional society.
The last essay, the weakest of the three, offers an interesting take on asceticism: that it solves many of man's existential problems, that it explains and gives meaning to suffering, and that it is a means by which man can impose will and agency on his reality--or at the very least impose will and agency on himself. I'd cite the mini-chapter VIII as one section of this essay particularly worth reading: it's a beautiful discussion of philosophical, intellectual and ascetic ideals and how they all complement each other.
Note that Nietzsche considers asceticism, and particularly religious asceticism, a flawed rejection of life (a "revulsion" from life, as he puts it). However, as a set of practices, he at least credits asceticism as one possible escape from the tedium and morbidity of "civilized" life, which is filled with "predestined failures." [*] The modern milksop, the modern sheep, wants to blame his unsatisfactory condition on someone else, anyone else: "Somebody must be responsible for my discomfort!" At least the ascetic is responsible for his own, and knows it, and endures it.
Note on the translation: There are some bad translations of Nietzsche out there. Francis Golffing's isn't one of them.
Note:
[*] If you do read this essay, note that this is a really good triple insult, mocking normies, Protestants, even Martin Luther himself, all at once. Typical gentleness from Nietzsche!
[Readers, as always, what follows are various notes, quotes and thoughts from the text: these are only to help me order my thoughts and help me remember what I've read. PLEASE read no further unless you have unlimited time and an unlimited attention span. And even then, don't. Life is short!]
Notes:
Preface:
I On how we are "unknown to ourselves" via a good metaphor: a man, absorbed in his work, hears the twelve strokes of noon, but then comes to himself and asks himself what hour actually struck: "We sometimes rub our ears after the event and ask ourselves, astonished and at a loss, 'What have we really experienced?... And we recount the twelve tremulous strokes of our experience, our life, our being, but unfortunately count wrong." [We are unreliable observers and rationalizing narrators of our own lives, you can even go so far as to say we have no idea what we are talking about when we talk about ourselves.]
II On another book of aphorisms by Nietzsche, Human, All Too Human: A Book for Free Spirits, where Nietzsche began work on his ideas of our moral prejudices; he wants to continue with these ideas here. Discussion here on the obligations of a philosopher to organize his thoughts and achieve the ends of these thoughts at all costs--whether we like or don't like the result. "We [philosophers] have no right to isolated thoughts, whether truthful or erroneous. Our thoughts should grow out of our values with the same necessity as the fruit out of the tree... Supposing you find these fruits unpalatable? What concern is that of the trees--or of us, the philosophers?"
III Nietzsche writes his first essay on ethics at age 13, then later learns not to seek the origin of evil behind the world, instead to think sort of outside of a system of good and evil, and to ask "under what conditions did man construct the value judgments good and evil? ...Have they thus far benefited or retarded mankind?" [This is a callback of Nietzsche's Beyond Good and Evil which was published in 1876, one year before The Genealogy of Morals.]
IV On Dr. Paul Rée's book The Origin of Moral Perception: "I believe I have never read anything from which I dissented so thoroughly from beginning to end, and yet I did so entirely without rancor." Nietzsche formulated some of his hypotheses which are the concern of this present work, about the double evolution of good and evil, about the origin and value of the ascetic code of ethics, about a more ancient type of morality "which is worlds apart from any system of altruistic valuations"; also on how Nietzsche disputes with Rée "about the origin of punishment, which cannot possibly be reduced to motives of intimidation (as Dr. Rée assumes; those motives being always secondary and only coming into play under special circumstances)."
V On the origin of ethics as a means toward an end, something much more important than hypotheses about the origin of ethics; on attacking non-egotistical instincts such as instincts of compassion, self-denial and self-sacrifice, which Schopenhauer and others had "consistently gilded"; on Nietzsche's "suspicion" of these instincts, considering them a danger for humanity: "the constantly spreading ethics of pity, which had tainted and debilitated even the philosophers, was the most sinister symptom of our sinister European civilization." "The philosophers of the past deny, to a man, all value to pity." See for example Plato, Spinoza, La Rochefoucauld and Kant.
VI On the problem of pity and the ethics of pity, which at first seem a marginal issue but when pondered will shake a philosopher's belief in ethics of any kind, forcing him to listen to a new claim: that we must call into question the intrinsic worth of all moral values; that morality is hypocritical and based in misunderstanding.
"Nobody, up to now, has doubted that the 'good' man represents a higher value than the 'evil,' in terms of promoting and benefiting mankind generally, even taking the long view. But suppose the exact opposite were true. What if the 'good' man represents not merely a retrogression but even a danger, a temptation, a narcotic drug enabling the present to live at the expense of the future? More comfortable, less hazardous, perhaps, but also baser, more petty--so that morality itself would be responsible for man, as a species, failing to reach the peak of magnificence of which he is capable? What if morality should turn out to be the danger of dangers?" [As interesting as this is to think of the species and the heights it could be capable of, it's sort of a gross, collectivist philosophy: it's a short step from this to making Lenin's argument "you have to break eggs in order to make an omelette" and using that argument to justify literally anything "for the species."]
VII More mocking of Dr Rée and the fact that he had read Darwin, "So it happened that in his hypotheses, most amusingly, the Darwinian brute and the ultramodern moral milksop who no longer bites walk hand in hand, the latter wearing an expression of bonhomie and refined indolence..." Nietzsche on taking problems of morality very seriously.
VIII On how this text will be unintelligible or jarring to some readers; it is necessary to read Nietzsche's earlier works including Zarathustra "with some care." "One skill is needed--lost today, unfortunately--for the practice of reading as an art: the skill to ruminate, which cows possess but modern man lacks. This is why my writings will, for some time yet, remain difficult to digest."
First Essay: "Good and Evil," "Good and Bad"
I "What are these English psychologists really after?" On looking for the "motive forces of human development in the very last place we would wish to have them found... in the inertia of habit, in forgetfulness" which is both passive and "profoundly stupid." Nietzsche wonders if these early attempts at a genealogy of morals come from a desire to belittle humanity or from a petty resentment of Christianity which is beneath the "threshold of consciousness" of these thinkers; "people tell me that these men are simply dull old frogs" but "these microscopic examiners of the soul may be really courageous, magnanimous, and proud animals, who know how to contain their emotions and have trained themselves to subordinate all wishful thinking to the truth."
II On the "amateurishness" of the English psychologists as they try to explain the concept "good" , revealing the key ideas of utility, habit; but they are looking in all the wrong places: "the judgment good does not originate with those to whom the good has been done. Rather it was the 'good' themselves, that is to say the noble, mighty, highly placed, and high-minded who decreed themselves and their actions to be good, i.e., belonging to the highest rank, in contradistinction to all that was base, low-minded and plebeian." [Nietzsche flips the whole argument here.] "The origin of the opposites good and bad is to be found in the pathos of nobility and distance, representing the dominant temper of a higher, ruling class in relation to a lower, dependent one. (The lordly right of bestowing names is such that one would almost be justified in seeing the origin of language itself as an expression of the rulers' power. They say, 'This is that or that'; they seal off each thing and action with a sound and thereby take symbolic possession of it.)" Nietzsche likens the egoism-altruism definition of good as a "herd instinct," as "aristocratic values have begun to decline" during his era.
III-IV-V
Discussion here of Herbert Spencer, on equating "good" as a thing that's useful or practical, and thinking about "good" or "bad" through this lens; Nietzsche considers this derivation suspect, and then in the next two sections he goes into his own etymological derivation of "good" and "bad" reflecting basic concepts of nobility versus common/plebeian.
VI On moving from political supremacy to spiritual supremacy; on the idea of a priestly class, and looking at good and bad through a lens of "pure vs impure"; on how the priestly class avoids impure things, impure actions, as well as plebeian people; Nietzsche waffles back and forth about how humanity still suffers from the aftereffects of priestly practices like abstinence from meat, the self-hypnosis of the brahmins and the Buddhists; he has mixed feelings here: he considers these priestly practices to be structurally effete, but at the same time this is how "man has proved his superiority over the rest of creation."
VII [Interesting extended quote here]: "By now the reader will have got some notion how readily the priestly system of valuations can branch off from the aristocratic and develop into its opposite. An occasion for such a division is furnished whenever the priest caste and the warrior caste jealously clash with one another and find themselves unable to come to terms. The chivalrous and aristocratic valuations presuppose a strong physique, blooming, even exuberant health, together with all the conditions that guarantee its preservation: combat, adventure, the chase, the dance, war games, etc. The value system of the priestly aristocracy is founded on different presuppositions. So much the worse for them when it becomes a question of war! As we all know, priests are the most evil enemies to have--why should this be so? Because they are the most impotent. It is their impotence which makes their hate so violent and sinister, so cerebral and poisonous. The greatest haters in history--but also the most intelligent haters--have been priests. Beside the brilliance of priestly vengeance all other brilliance fades. Human history would be a dull and stupid thing without the intelligence furnished by its impotents."
On inversion of aristocratic values of the good and noble and powerful: here Nietzsche rather blatantly discusses "what the Jews have done, that priestly people who succeeded in avenging themselves on their enemies and oppressors by radically inverting all their values."
VIII On Christianity branching off from Jewish thinking, how Christianity extends the celebrating of the suffering, weak and the sick as those who are truly blessed; there are some really wild quotes here: "Has not Israel, precisely by the detour of this 'redeemer,' this seeming antagonist and destroyer of Israel, reached the final goal of its sublime vindictiveness? Was it not a necessary feature of a truly brilliant politics of vengeance, a farsighted, subterranean, slowly and carefully planned vengeance, that Israel had to deny its true instrument publicly and nail him to the cross like a mortal enemy, so that 'the whole world' (meaning all the enemies of Israel) might naively swallow the bait? And could one, by straining every resource, hit upon a bait more dangerous than this? What could equal in debilitating narcotic power the symbol of the 'holy cross,' the ghastly paradox of a crucified god, the unspeakably cruel mystery of God's self-crucifixion for the benefit of mankind? One thing is certain, that in this sign Israel has by now triumphed over all other, nobler values." [Holy cow: first you wonder where Nietzsche comes up with this stuff, and then you have to wonder how he just says it. He says the unsayable like some kind of tone-deaf autist at a party.]
IX Here Nietzsche quotes a freethinking peer's ("an honest fellow... And a Democrat to boot") reaction to his argument: "But what is all this talk about nobler values? Let us face facts: the people have triumphed--or the slaves, the mob, the herd, whatever you wish to call them--and if the Jews brought it about, then no nation ever had a more universal mission on this earth. The lords are a thing of the past, and the ethics of the common man is completely triumphant." This argument goes on to argue that this is a type of "blood poisoning" and that even the church no longer has a reason to exist except perhaps to slow down this process. "He had been listening to me until that moment, and could not stand to hear my silence. For I have a great deal to be silent about in this matter." [This passage plus the fact that Nietzsche follows it with a quick contra-argument gives the reader the idea that perhaps Nietzsche is unwilling to really follow his anti-Semitism to its conclusion, or he knows it's reputationally dangerous to articulate his genuine opinion, or that he knows he shouldn't. It isn't clear. It's an unusual passage and it's not clear what Nietzsche's real opinion is here.]
X On "slave ethics": On "saying no to an 'outside,' an 'other,' a non-self, and that no is its creative act... Physiologically speaking, it requires an outside stimulus in order to act at all; all its action is reaction." Nietzsche compares this (unfavorably, obviously) to aristocratic values, which are spontaneous, and which seek contraries only to affirm themselves. [He has a point that many people are reactive or reactance-based in their behaviors, and it is a passive way to navigate reality.]
On the idea that activity is an "unnecessary part of happiness"; on the phrase Plato would use to sign all his letters 'Eu prattein' which carries a double meaning in ancient Greek: both "be well" and "do well/act virtuously."
"All this stands in utter contrast to what is called happiness among the impotent and oppressed, who are full of bottled-up aggressions. Their happiness is purely passive and takes the form of drugged tranquility, stretching and yawning, peace, 'sabbath,' emotional slackness." [The reader can arrive some very motivating ideas from this quote, a quote which at first seems very deeply condescending, but it tells you to avoid the tranquilizing and narcotizing elements of modernity (like sportsball, like arguing about politics, like drugging yourself or turning to alcohol or the television or the latest Netflix series, etc.), and to obviously at all costs avoid any kind of impotence (impotent faculty lounge rage, free-floating anxiety, etc.) in any form whatsoever.]
Nietzsche here cites Mirabeau [Honoré Gabriel Riqueti, Count of Mirabeau, prominent during the French Revolution], "who lacked all memory for insults and meannesses done him, and who was unable to forgive because he had forgotten."
XI "Deep within all these noble races there lurks the beast of prey, bent on spoil and conquest. This hidden urge has to be satisfied from time to time, the beast let loose in the wilderness. This goes as well for the Roman, Arabian, German, Japanese nobility as for the Homeric heroes and the Scandinavian vikings." Nietzsche quotes Pericles' famous oration to the Athenians, "our boldness has gained us access to every land and sea, and erected monuments to itself for both good and evil."
Comments here on Hesiod, trying to describe mankind by presenting the ages in sequence: first the age of heroes and demigods of Troy and Thebes, and then second the Iron Age "as seen by the descendants of those who have been crushed, to spoiled, brutalized, sold into slavery." Nietzsche goes an extra step here by distinguishing culture as a domestication of man's savage instincts but then distinguishing the organizers of that culture themselves as representing the opposite; On preferring fear (with admiration) of a nobility quite capable of evil, as compared to the repugnance we have for "tamed" man: there is no longer anything to be feared from him... tame, hopelessly mediocre, and savorless, he considers himself the apex of historical evolution."
XII On the "bad smell" of failure, on the "diminution of European man," "the sight of him makes us despond." "We no longer see anything these days that aspires to grow greater; instead, we have a suspicion that things will continue to go downhill, becoming ever thinner, more placid, smarter, cozier, more ordinary, more indifferent, more Chinese, more Christian--without doubt man is getting 'better' all the time."
XIII On how lambs will consider birds of prey evil, although birds of prey "will look somewhat quizzically" and say we have nothing against lambs, nothing tastes better! [The predator doesn't really think too much about the prey, likewise the aristocrat doesn't think too much about the lumpenproletariat, and the WEF/Davos elites likewise think nothing of the people they encourage to eat bug paste.] On strength and how we divorce it from its manifestation and its nature: "To expect that strength will not manifest itself as strength, as the desire to overcome, to appropriate, to have enemies, obstacles, and triumphs, is every bit as absurd as to expect that weakness will manifest itself as strength."
[Quite an aggressive argument here from Nietzsche but yet it carries weight]: "Thus they assume the right of calling the bird of prey to account for being a bird of prey. We can hear the oppressed, downtrodden, violated whispering among themselves with the wily vengefulness of the impotent, 'Let us be unlike those evil ones. Let us be good. And the good shall be he who does not do violence, does not attack or retaliate, who leaves vengeance to God, who, like us, lives hidden, who shuns all that is evil, and altogether asks very little of life--like us, the patient, the humble, the just ones.' Read in cold blood, this means nothing more than "We weak ones are, in fact, weak. It is a good thing that we do nothing for which we are not strong enough.'" [Translation: "Stop being a pussy."]
On the idea of framing impotence and weakness as some kind of spontaneously meritorious act: "It makes possible for the majority of mankind--i.e., the weak and oppressed of every sort--to practice the sublime sleight of hand which gives weakness the appearance of free choice and one's natural disposition the distinction of merit." [Translation: we give away our power and then somehow conclude we are noble and good because of it.]
XIV [Amplifying the "stop acting like the weak" argument still further] "...to be unable to avenge oneself is called to be unwilling to avenge oneself..."
[Again, Nietzsche mocks the weak person's argument/justification:] "...one beats the dogs one loves best, that this misery is perhaps also a preparation, a test, a kind of training." [Basically the weak allow themselves to be convinced to put up with injustice, or even to consider it "bliss" in the hopes of a future reward.] "They call it Judgment Day... and meanwhile they live in 'faith,' in 'love,' in 'hope.' Stop! I've heard enough." [Nietzsche's sarcasm drips off the page here.]
XV "Faith In what? Love for what? Hope of what? There can be no doubt that these weaklings, too, want a chance to be strong, to have their kingdom come." Neitzsche sarcastically quotes Thomas Aquinas and Tertullian, describing this meek acceptance of this world while waiting for the final judgment when all those bad guys will get hurled into the fire and (finally!) get their final comeuppance.
XVI "Rome vs. Israel, Israel vs. Rome. No battle has ever been more momentous than this one. Rome viewed Israel as a monstrosity; the Romans regarded the Jews as convicted of hatred against the whole of mankind--and rightly so if one is justified and associating the welfare of the human species with absolute supremacy of aristocratic values." Nietzsche goes on to say that the Jews have won against Rome. (!) "Remember who it is before whom one bows down, in Rome itself, as before the essence of all supreme values--and not only in Rome but over half the globe, wherever man has grown tame or desires to grow tame: before three Jews and one Jewess (Jesus of Nazareth, the fisherman Peter, the rug weaver Paul, and Maria, the mother of that Jesus). This is very curious: Rome, without a doubt, has capitulated."
Nietzsche describes the Renaissance as an awakening of the classical ideal, but then Israel triumphed once again with the German and English Reformation, and then even more decisively with the French Revolution through which the last political nobleness Europe had known "collapsed under the weight of vindictive popular instincts."
"And yet, in the midst of it all, something tremendous, something wholly unexpected happened: the ancient classical ideal appeared incarnate and in unprecedented splendor before the eyes and conscience of mankind... Like a last signpost to an alternative route Napoleon appeared, most isolated and anachronistic of men, the embodiment of the noble ideal. It might be well to ponder what exactly Napoleon, that synthesis of the brutish with the more than human, did represent..."
XVII [Hilarious (and quite effective) rhetoric here in this final endnote to the essay]: "The welfare of the many and the welfare of the few are radically opposite ends. To consider the former a priori the higher value may be left to the naiveté of English biologists."
Second Essay: "Guilt," Bad Conscience," and Related Matters
I "To breed an animal with the right to make promises--is not this the paradoxical problem nature has set itself with regard to man? And is it not man's true problem?" [God damn, what a wonderful, layered, provocative lead sentence.]
II On the origin of responsibility, which was a "labor man accomplished upon himself over a vast period of time" and after this process "we shall find the ripest fruit of that tree to be the sovereign individual, equal only to himself, all moral custom left far behind."
"This autonomous, more than moral individual (the terms autonomous and moral are mutually exclusive) has developed his own, independent, long range will, which dares to make promises... This fully emancipated man, master of his will, who dares make promises--how should he not be aware of his superiority over those who are unable to stand security for themselves? ...It is natural to him to honor his strong and reliable peers, all those who promise like sovereigns: rarely and reluctantly; who are chary of their trust; whose trust is a mark of distinction; whose promises are binding because they know that they will make them good in spite of all accidents, in spite of destiny itself. Yet he will inevitably reserve a kick for those paltry windbags who promise irresponsibility and a rod for those liars who break their word even in uttering it." [Basically we have a taxonomy of two kinds of people: a sovereign individual whose word is without question his bond, and a non-sovereign, non-volitional person whose word is contingent on things going right, an excuse-maker a person with significantly lower standards.] Nietzsche then calls the sovereign individual's promise-based traits "an instinct" and "his conscience."
III Next, a discussion of the types of punishments and brutality that human civilizations have set in place to force people to remember their conscience, to force people to remember their promises and the consequences of failing to keep them; Nietzsche goes through various types of punishments in Germany as examples, then says "By such methods the individual was finally taught to remember five or six 'I won'ts' which entitled him to participate in the benefits of society; and indeed, with the aid of the sort of memory, people eventually 'came to their senses.' What an enormous price man had to pay for reason, seriousness, control over his emotions--those grand human prerogatives and cultural showpieces! How much blood and horror lies behind all 'good things'!"
IV One should draw the distinction between this idea of conscience and a "bad conscience" or the consciousness of guilt. "...a very high level of humanization was necessary before even the much more primitive distinctions, 'with intent,' 'through negligence,' 'by accident,' compos mentis, and their opposites could be made in allowed to weigh in the judgment of cases... whoever thinks it can be found in archaic law grossly misconstrues the psychology of uncivilized man." [It's interesting to contrast this from Rousseau and his view that archaic societies willingly gave their power over to subjects in return for various guarantees of safety and government, as if it were some sort of volitional arrangement. We will read more about this as Nietzsche will later mock Rousseau repeated, see section XVII for example.]
Also on the idea of finding an equivalency between damage done and punishment due to the doer: Nietzsche says "it arose in the contractual relation between creditor and debtor, which is as old as the notion of 'legal subjects' itself and which in its turn points back to the basic practices of purchase, sale, barter, and trade."
V On the nature of these contractual relationships, where a promise would be backed up with an additional guarantee of another of a person's possessions, like his body, his wife, or his freedom; this was "to enjoin on his own conscience the duty of repayment"; "In 'punishing' the debtor, the creditor shares a seignorial right... Thus compensation consists in a legal warrant in titling one man to exercise his cruelty on another."
VI Now on to the concept of "sacred duty" which Nietzsche says "are the beginnings of everything great on earth." On tying together of the ideas of guilt and pain which are now "quite inextricable."
"Let us ask once more: in what sense could pain constitute repayment of a debt? In the sense that to make someone suffer was a supreme pleasure... I am merely throwing this out as a suggestion, for it is difficult, and embarrassing as well, to get to the bottom of such underground developments." On how older mankind naively manifested their cruelty; how cruelty constituted the whole history of culture and society; how weddings used to involve public executions or tortures, how "a noble household would always have some person whose office it was to serve as a butt for everyone's malice and cruel teasing." Nietzsche cites Don Quixote and the court of the duchess and how moderns "quail in reading it" today but Cervantes' contemporaries would consider it the funniest of books; "To behold suffering gives pleasure, but to cause another to suffer affords and even greater pleasure."
VII "...it should be clearly understood that in the days when people were unashamed of their cruelty life was a great deal more enjoyable than it is now in the heyday of pessimism... On his way to becoming an 'angel' man has acquired that chronic indigestion and coated tongue which makes not only the naive joy and innocence of the animal distasteful to him, but even life itself." "...pleasure has had to undergo a certain sublimation and subtilization, to be translated into imaginative and psychological terms in order to pass muster before even the tenderest hypocritical conscience."
On the senselessness of suffering which is why we rebel against it, yet the Christian created a whole machinery of salvation based on suffering, "early man had to invent gods and a whole apparatus of intermediate spirits" so that suffering could be seen; "We need only study Calvin and Luther to realize how far the ancient conception of the gods as frequenters of cruel spectacles has penetrated into our European humanism." Also as humans is sort of playthings for the gods, who enjoyed our struggles and self-mortification and suffering; free will was a sort of thing that kept everything novel for the gods; a truly deterministic world would be boring for the gods.
VIII Man as a creature that can measure, can assay, can assess value; on the early idea of fair play, everything has its price or can be paid for.
IX Thinking of a commonwealth of people that enjoyed privileges inside it; compared to man outside the commonwealth; if a person violates their pledge to the commonwealth the community (in this case the creditor) "will get his money back as best he can, you may be sure." The offender is treated "brutally, without consideration."
X "As the commonwealth grew stronger, it no longer took the infractions of the individual quite so seriously. The individual no longer represented so grave a danger to the group as a whole." On the development of penal law; also on the idea that a society with more and more wealth can afford to let its offenders go less and less punished, hence the idea of mercy. "But mercy remains, as goes without saying, the prerogative of the strongest, his province beyond the law."
XI A sidebar here criticizing recent attempts to trace justice from rancor, to dignify vengeance in the name of justice; Nietzsche shows that even the most decent people become enraged by small insults; also contrasting the aggressive man with the vindictive man; the aggressive man is stronger, bolder and nobler and has the better view and the clearer conscience; the vindictive man lacks control of himself, he acts prejudicially; thus one can see how a body of law would be established specifying punishments for injuries, and anyone acting outside of that body of law would be seen as rebellious infractions of the law; thus "the eye is trained to view the deed ever more impersonally."
[Money quote here summarizing Nietzschean "morality":] "To speak of right and wrong per se makes no sense at all. No act of violence, rape, exploitation, destruction, is intrinsically 'unjust,' since life itself is violent, rapacious, exploitative, and destructive and cannot be conceived otherwise. Even more disturbingly, we have to admit that from the biological point of view legal conditions are necessarily exceptional conditions, since they limit the radical life-will bent on power and must finally subserve, as means, life's collective purpose, which is to create greater power constellations."
XII On the idea that we confound the origin and the purpose of punishment; on the mistake of discovering some kind of "purpose" in punishment (like deterrence or revenge) and naively place this purpose at the origin of punishment [another good quote here]: "There is no set of maxims more important for an historian than this: that the actual causes of a thing's origin and its eventual uses, the manner of its incorporation into a system of purposes, are worlds apart; that everything that exists, no matter what its origin, is periodically reinterpreted by those in power in terms of fresh intentions."
"That's the whole history of the thing, an organ, a custom, becomes a continuous chain of reinterpretations and rearrangements, which need not be causally connected among themselves, which may simply follow one another." Nietzsche here calls it a "sequence of appropriation": both of transformations of the purpose as well as the results of successful counterattacks along the way to re-interpret and re-re-interpret history to fits the needs of those in power.
This then helps Nietzsche reach a logical yet repulsive conclusion by first arguing about this indirect movement of historical appropriation, counter-attacks, and then thinking about this through the lens of an organism's use or disuse of an organ, then these are all aspects of any progress which "appears always in the form of the will and means to greater power and is achieved at the expense of numerous lesser powers. The scope of any 'progress' is measured by all that must be sacrificed for its sake. To sacrifice humanity as mass to the welfare of a single stronger human species would indeed constitute progress."
Nietzsche disagrees with the current fashion among historians to assume haphazardness or mechanistic meaninglessness of events and processes; in stead it is a "will to power" process mirrored in all processes.
XIII On distinguishing between features of punishment and its meaning and purpose and expectations of it; again here Nietzsche repeats how punishment can have many meanings and adaptations to various uses and gives examples of hypothetical meanings of punishment, 11 of them, ranging from rendering the offender harmless, to payment of damages to the injured party, to inspiring fear, to elimination of a degenerate element, as a compromise with the tradition of vendetta, etc.
XIV On how it's absurd to use modern understandings and reasons for punishment like imposing remorse, this is a blunder for modern man and absurd for early man; "True remorse is rarest among criminals and convicts." Not to mention the criminal sees the service of justice using equally immoral processes in its legal system, spying, setting traps, bribing, "the whole tricky, cunning system, which chiefs of police, prosecutors, and informers have developed among themselves." [Holy cow is he ever right, if you think about Eliot Spitzer-style "justice" using the media, imposing reputational damage and/or using the threat of direct business harm to extract guilty pleas and civil penalties without the prosecutor even needing to go to court in the first place.]
XV On Spinoza's view on conscience and punishment, which Nietzsche paraphrases as "something went wrong here" and not "I should never have done that." Likening punishment to sickness or misfortune, and not as any moral or conscious-based result of an action. "What punishment is able to achieve both for man and beast, is an increase of fear, circumspection, control over the instincts. Thus man is tamed by punishment, but by no means improved; rather the opposite."
XVI Nietzsche gives his own hypothesis for the origin of bad conscience: he considers it to be a "deep-seated malady" which arrived as humanity became "sociable and pacific" creatures, along with the development of society; he likens it to when sea creatures came onto land: all their movements and instincts became useless and backwards, they became repressed. "All
instincts that are not allowed free play turn inward. This is what I call man’s interiorization; it alone provides the soil for the growth of what is later called man’s soul... Lacking external enemies
and resistances, and confined within an oppressive narrowness and regularity, man began
rending, persecuting, terrifying himself, like a wild beast hurling itself against the bars
of its cage. This languisher, devoured by nostalgia for the desert, who had to turn himself
into an adventure, a torture chamber, an insecure and dangerous wilderness--this fool,
this pining and desperate prisoner, became the inventor of 'bad conscience.' ...This spectacle (and the end of it is not yet
in sight) required a divine audience to do it justice." Thus implying that man had to create a "god" for ourselves as a sort of divine presence or witness.
XVII This section is kind of hilarious as Nietzsche mocks Rousseau; instead of states beginning with a "social contract" basically happily made between ruled and rulers, Nietzsche instead theorizes that what happened would be more likely begin with an act of violence: "the earliest commonwealth constituted a terrible despotism" of a "pack of savages" fiercely dominating a population: "Such was the beginning of the human polity; I take it we have got over that sentimentalism that would have it begin with a contract. What do men who can command, who are born rulers, who evince power in act and deportment, have to do with contracts?"
XVIII Here Nietzsche talks about how modern humans turn this cruelty inward on themselves; it helps you rethink what suffering is; how we suffer for the pleasure of suffering, this could be an interesting take on the Holy Desert Fathers for example. Next makes the case that selflessness, self-denial and self-sacrifice are an ideal and a beauty, but they derive from a form of cruelty on ourselves; thus this causes you to rethink altruism: "So much for the origin of altruism as a moral value."
XIX Sidebar here where Nietzsche goes back to the debtor-creditor relationship he wrote about earlier [see for example sections IV and V], but in a new context, referring to the relationship between a living society and their ancestors or forebears, a type of "debt" that was "repaid" in the form of burnt offerings, shrines, rituals or other forms of obedience; ultimately those ancestors likely evolved into the first gods.
XX On man's indebtedness to the gods and the desire to make final restitution; also on the idea that despotism seems to prepare the way for some form of monotheism as a single King overcomes all the independent nobles: it's as if Nietzsche sees the latter as sort of a smaller fractal version of the former; Nietzsche then goes on a tangent here briefly arguing, before correcting himself, that "atheism might deliver mankind altogether from its feeling of being indebted to its beginnings," to a sort of "second innocence."
XXI Nietzsche here quickly corrects this little tangential atheism hypothesis; then moves on to the idea of Christianity as a stroke of brilliance, where God sacrificed himself for man and thus absolved us of this debt that we can no longer discharge: "the creditor offers himself as a sacrifice for his debtor out of sheer love (can you believe it?)" [Some of these sarcastic parenthetical comments from Nietzsche are absolutely hilarious.]
XXII [Good restatement here of the essay's argument so far] "By now the reader will have guessed what has really been happening behind all these facades. Man, with his need for self-torture, his sublimated cruelty resulting from the cooping up of his animal nature within a polity, invented bad conscience in order to hurt himself, after the blocking of the more natural outlet of his cruelty. Then this guilt-ridden man seized upon religion in order to exacerbate his self torment to the utmost. The thought of being in God's debt became his new instrument of torture... In such psychological cruelty we see an insanity of the will that is without parallel: man's will to find himself guilty, and unredeemably so; his will to believe that he might be punished to all eternity without ever expunging his guilt; his will to poison the very foundation of things with the problem of guilt and punishment and thus to cut off once and for all his escape from this labyrinth of obsession; his will to erect an ideal (God's holiness) in order to assure himself of his own absolute unworthiness. What a mad, unhappy animal is man! What strange notions occur to him; what perversities, what paroxysms of nonsense, what bestialities of idea burst from him, the moment he is prevented ever so little from being a beast of action!"
XXIII Distinguishing the Christian God of self-crucifixion and self-punishment with the Hellenic gods where a man's animal self was celebrated, and hence humanity in the Hellenic era had "no need to lacerate and rage against itself."
XXIV When you introduce a new ideal to civilization, how much of reality thus to be slandered, even destroyed, "how many Gods sacrificed? For the raising of an altar requires the breaking of an altar." On the futility of trying to go back to this past and more vital era would be opposed by all good men as well as all the resigned, vain and comfortable people as well. Nietzsche dreams of a true Redeemer, a "man of the future, who will deliver us both from a lapsed ideal and from all that this ideal has spawned--violent loathing, the will to extinction, nihilism--this great and decisive stroke of midday, who will make the will free once more and restore to the earth its aim, and to man his hope..."
XXV Nietzsche refers to a future Zarathustra, "one younger, stronger, more pregnant with future than I am."
Third Essay: What Do Ascetic Ideals Mean?
[This is the weakest essay of the three. Nietzsche is trying too hard to be witty here, and his writing lacks its usual force and weight. He's also trying to make an intricate argument: attempting to thread a needle by articulating how vile he thinks the ascetic ideal is, yet at the same time respecting certain aspects of it (for example, he respects sincere religious leaders who comfort and help those he considers "weak people"). The argument ultimately comes across as unsteady, constantly reversing, and the reader wonders what Nietzsche is really trying to say. It doesn't help that several of the segments in this work start with comments like "But enough of this..." or "But let us return to our argument..." phrases which undermine (and in some cases make pointless) the previous segment. The reader wonders, "why the heck did I even bother to read that last chapter?" or more importantly "Why didn't the author do us all a favor and just cut out that section and save us the time and trouble?]
I-II-III [The first few sections of this book are written in a cutesy way, it's not Nietzsche's normal standard] Comparing the meaning and significance of ascetic ideals across different disciplines, artists, scholars, philosophers; a discussion of the work of Wagner and his evolution over the course of his career; a sarcastic reference here about "detractors of the flesh": "Once those pigs who have failed as pigs... come round to the worship of chastity, they ...will worship it with the most tragic grunting zeal." On Wagner's musical composition Percival, written at the end of his career; Nietzsche believes Wagner parodied the tragic spirit; on Wagner's late conversion to Catholicism, on his evolution towards self-mortification and Christianity, but yet it was a timid, unsure transition.
IV On separating the artist from his work, "and to take him less seriously than it. He is, after all, only a condition of the work, the soil from which it grows, perhaps only the manure on that soil. Thus he is, in most cases, something that must be forgotten if one wants to enter into the full enjoyment of the work." Also worthwhile comments here on the the artist's unenacted desire ("velleity") to join the real world, to be like other men: but he can't do it, the artist cannot be that thing he writes about or "he would be unable to imagine or express it: Homer would not have created Achilles, nor Goethe Faust, if Homer had been an Achilles or Goethe a Faust. An artist worth his salt is permanently separated from ordinary reality."
V On how artists are often bought and paid for: "They have ever been in the service of some ethics or philosophy or religion, and all too often they have been tools in the hands of a clique, smooth sycophants either of vested interests or a forces newly come to power. In any case they have always needed protection, security, a force to back them up. Artists never stand resolutely for themselves." Example here of Wagner using Schopenhauer as his moral support, on how the revolutionary poet Herwegh converted Wagner to Schopenhauer.
VI Comparing Emmanuel Kant and his view of "disinterested" pleasure (which Nietzsche laughs at) with Stendhal's definition of beauty as the promise of happiness; then moving on to Schopenhauer's interpretation of the term "disinterested." On Schopenhauer referring to the wheel of Ixion, where we can never satisfy our passions and urges. [Ixion was a Greek mythological figure known for his excessive pride, self-confidence, and ambition. As a result of this hubris, he was punished by Zeus, the king of the gods, and sentenced to an eternity of suffering on a spinning wheel of fire] Nietzsche quotes Schopenhauer here, from his work World as Will and Representation: "This is the painless state which Epicurus praised as the highest good and as the state of the gods; we are during that moment freed from the vile pressure of the will, we celebrate the Sabbath of the will's hard labour, the wheel of Ixion stands still." Nietzsche reacts: "What vehemence of language! What images of anguish and protracted revulsion! Nietzsche then describes Schopenhauer saying (basically) that beauty acts as a sedative of the will, contrasting this with Stendhal who describes beauty as "it promises happiness."
"If we now return to our original question, 'What does it mean when a philosopher pays homage to the ascetic ideal?' we receive our first clue: he craves release from a torture."
VII [Nice lead sentence here.] "Let us not immediately pull a long face at the word torture; there is plenty to offset it, to mitigate it--there will even be something left over to laugh about." Basically first of all keep in mind that Schopenhauer was being cantankerous [our translator uses the word "atrabilious"!] and he treated sexuality as a personal enemy; his rage was his happiness; on the "philosopher's resentment against sensuality," Schopenhauer being "only the most eloquent...and most delightful exponent of that resentment"; on how asceticism can also involve avoiding marriage, avoiding children, avoiding a settled-down life, avoiding pleasure etc; "Asceticism provides him with a condition most favorable to the exercise of his intelligence."
Pereat mundus, fiat philosophia, fiat philosophus, fiam!
[Though the world may perish, let there be philosophy, let there be philosophy, let me be!]
VIII [This is quite a beautiful, poetic mini-chapter on the nature of a true philosopher: his ascetic ideal, what he seeks and so on, all by way of explaining how Schopenhauer and thought about sensuality] On the ascetic ideal, on the practices of poverty, humility and chastity serving as fertile ground for true intellectuals; Nietzsche here also mocks pseudo-intellectuals who are themselves an intellectual desert, rather than the desert that a true intellectual (or a Holy Desert Father) would retire to, a desert that "mere mimes of the intellect could not endure it for a moment" since it's not romantic or "stagey" enough.
For the true philosopher: "His motto is 'We are owned by the things we own.'" [Sounds like a modern minimalist, or a modern FIRE proponent! What's old is new again...]
Also re the sex urge and its negative effect on creativity/intellectual activity: "Every artist is familiar with the adverse effect which sexual intercourse has during times of great intellectual tension and preparation." [Oddly enough you see this exact subject discussed, compellingly so, for an entire chapter in Napoleon Hill's book Think and Grow Rich, one of the 20th century's key works of "success literature."]
IX "We have seen that a certain asceticism, that is to say a strict yet high-spirited continence, is among the necessary conditions of strenuous intellectual activity as well as one of its natural consequences. So it cannot surprise us to find that philosophers have always treated the ascetic ideal with a certain fondness." On the philosophers and their traits of skepticism, negation, suspension of judgment; Nietzsche then goes on to say that these tendencies ran counter to the requirements of accepted ethics for the longest time; he goes on to criticize [his] modern era, featuring hubris and impiety, a period where we are violating nature with the help of machines and technicians; also on how we moderns violate ourselves: "nutcrackers of the soul."
X On the various pressures the early ascetics lived under: distrust of everyone else, they employed self-inflicted cruelty, self castigation; Nietzsche refers to King Vishvamitra "after millennia of self-torture, acquired such a sense of power and confidence in himself that he undertook to build a new heaven." Also on the ascetic priesthood as the "larval form, repulsive and somber, under which alone philosophy could survive and crawl about."
XI What does seriousness really mean in the context of philosophical inquiry? On the various paradoxes of the ascetic ideal: how it confronts existence with a differently-constituted kind of being; how it is a type of self-loathing behavior; on how priests inflicting pain on themselves perhaps is the only kind of pleasure they know; obviously a celibate priest won't experience biological reproduction, but yet this type of person and this set of values lives on, the ascetic priest or the ascetic enquirer looks "malevolently on all biological growth and on its principal expressions, beauty and joy, while it gazes with delight on all that is misshapen or stunted, on pain, disaster, ugliness, on gratuitous sacrifice, on unselving and self-castigation. All this is paradoxical to the highest degree."
XII On the Vedas, which declares that body, pain, the subject/object dichotomy are all illusions; also in Kant's concept of the "noumenal" we see "that aspect of things about which the intellect knows only that it can never comprehend it." On using the most diverse perspectives and psychological interpretations in the service of the intellect. Thus pure reason and absolute knowledge are contradictory notions. "All seeing is essentially perspective, and so is all knowing." Thus the idea that emotions and will give us a fuller and more complete conception of reality and, paradoxically, increase our "objectivity": "But to eliminate the will, to suspend the emotions altogether, provided it could be done--surely this would castrate the intellect, would it not?"
XIII On the tedium of civilized life, "the persistent morbidity of civilized man" and how the ascetic ideal is a wish to be different; "When this master of destruction [Nietzsche here is referring to the self-injuring religious ascetic], of self-destruction, wounds himself, it is that very wound which forces him to live."
XIV "The more regular morbidity becomes among the members of the human race, the more grateful we should be for the rare 'windfalls'--men fortunate enough to combine a sound physical organization with intellectual authority. We should do our best to protect such men from the noxious air of the sick room. It is the sick who are the greatest threat to the well; it is the weaklings, and not their own peers, who visit disaster upon the strong."
"One who smells not only with
his nose but also with his eyes and ears will notice everywhere these days an air as of a lunatic asylum or sanatorium. (I am thinking of all the current cultural enterprises of man, of every kind of Europe now existing.)
It is the diseased who imperil mankind, and not the 'beasts
of prey.' It is the predestined failures and victims who undermine the social structure, who poisoned our faith in life and our fellow men."
"Is there any place today where the sick do not wish to exhibit some form of superiority and to exercise their tyranny over the strong? Especially the sick females, who have unrivaled resources for dominating, oppressing, tyrannizing." [Holy cow]
On miserable people implanting their own misery into the consciences of the happy, "so as to make the happy one day say to one another, 'It is a disgrace to be happy! There is too much misery in the world!' But no greater and more disastrous misunderstanding could be imagined and for the strong and happy to begin doubting their right to happiness."
[Another quote capturing Nietzschean societal ethics in a nutshell]: "Our first rule on this earth should be that the sick must not contaminate the healthy... The higher must not be made an instrument of the lower; the 'pathos of distance' must to all eternity keep separate tasks separate. The right to exist of the full-toned bell is a thousand times greater than that of the cracked, miscast one: it alone heralds in the future of all mankind."
XV [Extended quote here to capture the argument to this point, see also a various fascinating meta-comments here and to follow that are strikingly relevant to modern healthcare] "If the reader has thoroughly grasped--and I demand here especially he dig down deeply--that it cannot be the task of the healthy to wait on the sick, or to make them well, he will also have grasped another important thing: that for physicians and medical attendants we require men who are themselves sick.[*] I believe that we have here the key to the meaning of the ascetic priest. We must look upon the ascetic priest as the predestined advocate and savior of a sick flock if we are to comprehend his tremendous historical mission. His dominion is over sufferers; he is instinctively propelled toward this empire, in which he can display his own peculiar gifts and even find a kind of happiness. He must be sick himself, he must be deeply akin to all the shipwrecked and diseased, if he is to understand them and be understood by them; then he must also be strong, master over himself even more than over others, with a will to power that is intact, if he is to be their support, overlord, disciplinarian, tyrant, god. They are his flock, and he must defend them--against whom? Against the healthy, obviously, but also against their envy of the healthy..."
[*] [Unfortunately a mental image of a sweating, visibly unfit, grey-visaged and carious Peter Hotez instantly appeared to me upon reading this sentence.]
"To be sure, he carries with him balms and ointments, but in order to cure he must first create patients. And even as he alleviates the pain of his patients he pours poison into their wounds. Such, then, is the supreme accomplishment of this magician and animal tamer, in whose orbit all that is sound becomes sick and all that is sick, tame."
"...it is up to the priest to redirect resentment toward a new object. For is it not true that every sufferer instinctively seeks a cause for his suffering; more specifically, an agent, a 'guilty' agent who is susceptible to pain--in short some living being or other on whom he can vent his feelings directly or in effigy, under some pretext or other?"
"The wish to alleviate pain through strong emotional excitation is, to my mind, the true physiological mode behind all manifestations of resentment."
"'Somebody must be responsible for my discomfort.' This sort of reasoning is universal among sick people and holds all the more sway over them the more obscure the real psychological cause of their discomfort is to them... All sufferers alike excel in finding imaginary pretexts for their suffering. They revel in suspicion and gloat over imaginary injuries and slights stomach; they ransack the bowels of their past and present for obscure and dubious incidents which give free reign to their torturous suspicions; they intoxicate themselves with a poison of their own minds. They tear open the most ancient wounds, fasten the guilt on friend, wife, child--whatever is closest to them. Every suffering sheep says to himself, 'I suffer; it must be somebody's fault.' But his shepherd, the ascetic priest, says to him, 'You are quite right, my sheep, somebody must be at fault here, but that somebody is yourself. You alone are to blame--you alone are to blame for yourself.' This is not only very bold but also abundantly false. But one thing, at least, has been accomplished; resentment has found a new target."
XVI On the idea that the ascetic priest and ascetic practices use sophistical concepts such as guilt, sin, damnation and perdition to render the sick harmless and "make the incurable destroy themselves and to introvert the resentment of the less severely afflicted." It utilizes their evil instincts for the purpose of self surveillance and self-conquest, and although it's not a psychologically effective cure, it organizes the church such that it concentrates the sick in a sort of sequestered group, "the opening up of a chasm between sickness and health." [This is fascinating, albeit totally harsh and condescending: but basically his idea here is that weak people use the church to find comfort.]
"If anyone is unable to get rid of a psychological pain, the fault lies not in his psyche but, more likely, in his belly... The strong, healthy person digests his experiences (including every deed and misdeed) as he does his meals, even though he may have swallowed a tough morsel."
XVII We can't help but admire the priest's genius to alleviate discomfort. "Christianity has been the richest treasure house of ingenious nostrums. Never have so many restoratives, palliatives, narcotics been gathered together in one place, never has so much been risked for that end, never has so much subtlety been employed in guessing what stimulants will relieve the deep depression, the leaden fatigue, the black melancholy of the physiologically incapacitated. For, to put it quite generally, the main object of all great religions has been to counteract a certain epidemic malaise due to unreleased tension. It may safely be assumed that large masses of the Earth's population periodically suffer from physiological anxiety which, however, from lack of adequate physiological knowledge is not understood as such; whereupon religion steps in with its staple of psychological and moral remedies."
Nietzsche goes on to give a list of reasons for this "psychological anxiety" including race-mixing (!), class-mixing "Class distinctions are always indicative of genetic and racial differences"), "a race finding itself in a climate to which it is not entirely adapted, like "the case of the Hindu in India" or "from the senescence of a race (the Parisian brand of pessimism from 1850 onward)"; he then goes on to mention the Great Depression after the Thirty Years' War, "which infected one half of Germany with disease and thus prepared the ground for German civility and pusillanimity."
Then Nietzsche goes into a surprisingly sincere discussion of what he calls Brahmanism: various ideas from the Bhagavad Gita (with Shankara's commentaries) that recently had been made available in Germany in Nietzsche's day. "Yet we must not forget that we find here, under the sumptuous robe of oriental extravagance, the same kind of appraisal as in Epicurus, that classically cool, limpid, but suffering Greek. No person who suffers deeply and is deeply out of tune can help viewing the hypnotic nirvana, the peace of profound sleep, as the greatest of goods, as the positive value par excellence. (Following the same emotional logic, all pessimistic religions bestow upon nothingness the title of God.)"
XVIII A discussion here of various tools used by religious institutions to help sufferers alleviate their suffering, escape their depression, etc. On labor, for example: which is best for "sufferers of the lower classes, slaves or prisoners (or women, who as a rule are both things)"; also on the ministration of small pleasures, like charity or helping others, characteristic of early Christianity; also on the gathering of congregations, which "enabled the individual to forget his troubles in the joy he felt at the success of the group"; Per Nietzsche, this is something instinctive for the weak but not for the strong: "it is every bit as natural for the strong to disaggregate as for the week to congregate."
[Also an interesting and timely quote today]: "The entire course of history bears out the fact that every oligarchy conceals a desire for tyranny."
XIX "Let us now turn our attention to the more interesting deleterious drugs. They all have one characteristic in common: extravagance of feeling, the strongest anodyne for a long, dull, enervating pain." [A couple of hilarious Nietzsche parentheticals here: "But why should I caress further the ears of our modern milksops, who are already effeminate enough?" followed by "I have no doubt what use posterity will make of all modern books and other cultural products (provided they last, of which there is however no danger, and further provided that a generation will arise one day whose taste is stricter, harder, sounder): it will use them as emetics..."]
A discussion of how modern educated men in Nietzsche's era can't "withstand" the truth, how they're hypocritical, it really rhymes with the truth-obscuring behavior of today's regime-compliant pundit-intellectuals. "Here are a few proofs: Lord Byron noted down a very few personal things about himself, but Thomas Moore was too 'good' for them; he burned his friend's papers. The same has been said of [Schopenhauer biographer] Dr. Gwinner, for Schopenhauer too had jotted down something about himself, possibly against himself. Beethoven's biographer, the solid American Thayer, abruptly stopped in the middle of his work; having arrived at a certain point in this noble and naive life, he couldn't take it any longer. Should we be surprised, then, that no intelligent person today cares to say and honest word about himself, unless he is bent on asking for trouble?"
XX "I am reminded of the diplomat who said to his colleagues, 'Gentlemen, let us distrust our first reactions, they are invariably much too favorable.'" On the techniques of the modern ascetic priest being "highly objectionable" even though Nietzsche says "they have been employed in good faith."
XXI The "method of medication" [meaning here the ascetic priests' techniques for palliating essentially weak people] is a type of "emotional debauch"; Nietzsche gives examples of collective religious neuroses that have happened throughout history, like the Saint Vitus' Dance of the Middle Ages, the change of temperament of entire cities like Geneva or Basel in Switzerland. "I can think of no development that has had a more pernicious effect on the health of the race, and especially the European race, than this."
XXII "Just as the ascetic priest has corrupted man's mental health wherever he has held sway, so he has corrupted his esthetic taste." Nietzsche cites the Fathers of the Church who "dared to decree: 'We have our own classical literature. We don't need that of the Greeks.' And they pointed proudly to certain collections of legends, apostolic epistles, and apologetic penny tracts--the same kind of literature with which the English Salvation Army wages its war against Shakespeare and other pagans. The reader may have guessed already that I have no fondness for the New Testament." Followed by more hilariously bombastic criticism of the New Testament: "Think of the tremendous fuss these pious little people make over their little trespasses! Who cares? Certainly God least of all."
On the Christians' "horrible chumminess with which they address their Maker": "In Eastern Asia are found small, inconsequential pagan tribes which might have taught these early Christians a lesson or two in tact; those tribes, as Christian missionaries have told us, do not permit themselves to use the name of God at all... To get a clear sense of the contrast, think of Luther, the most eloquent and presumptuous of German peasants; think of his manner of speaking, especially when he held converse with God!... He wanted to be able to speak directly, in his own voice, 'informally' with his God... Well, that's what he did. Obviously the ascetic ideal was at no time at school of good taste, much less of good manners. At best it has been a school of hieratic manners."
XXIII "But my purpose here is not to show what the [ascetic] ideal has effected but only what it signifies, suggests, what lies behind it, beneath it, and hidden within it... It was only with this purpose in view that I afforded my reader a rapid view of its tremendous consequences, some of which have been disastrous. I wanted to prepare him for the last and, to me, most terrible aspect of the question 'What does the ascetic ideal signify? What is the meaning of its incredible power? Why have people yielded to it to such to such an extent? Why have they not resisted it more firmly?' The ascetic ideal expresses a will: where do we find a contrary ideal expressing a contrary will?... Where do we find the antithesis to this closed system? Why are we unable to find it?"
Criticism here of modern scholars in Nietzsche's age who seem "splendidly thus far to get along without God" but he considers them all to be unimpressive: "scholarship today has neither faith in itself nor an ideal beyond itself." With a few exceptions, to Nietzsche learning as a whole today has no ideal, has no passionate belief, "learning today is a hiding place for all manner of maladjustment, lukewarmness, self-depreciation, guilty conscience." "Haven't we all grown familiar with learning as a drug?"
XXIV "Let us now look at those special cases I mentioned a moment ago, those few idealists still surviving among the philosophers, scholars, and scientists of today. Is it perhaps among them that we must look for the effective antagonists of the ascetic ideal?" Musings here on the nature of faith, Nietzsche argues that the stronger a faith is the more suspicious we should be of that object of faith, or we should assume it has some aspect of deception to it. He then goes on to reverse himself and argue that these types of philosophers and scholars represent the ascetic ideal too, he means this as a pejorative. "As for the absolute will to truth which begets such abstinence, it is nothing other than a belief in the ascetic ideal in its most radical form, though an unconscious one."
On the philosophy of science: "...there is no such thing as a science without assumptions" at the same time a philosophy or a type of "faith" is "always needed to give science a direction, a meaning, a limit, a raison d'être."
XXV "As I have already indicated, inquiry and the ascetic ideal have grown from the same soil; they are at one in their overestimation of truth, in their belief that truth is incommensurate and not susceptible of criticism." "As for art, which I hope to discuss more fully at another time, it is far more radically opposed to the ascetic ideal than is science. In art the lie becomes consecrated, the will to deception has good conscience at its back. Plato felt this instinctively--the greatest enemy of art Europe has thus far produced. Plato vs. Homer: here we have the whole, authentic antagonism; on the one hand the deliberate transcendentalist and detractor of life, on the other, life's instinctive panegyrist."
On when scholars assume prominent positions in a nation it augurs times of fatigue and decline: "...those are always the crepuscular times of fatigue and decline... It does not augur well for a culture when the mandarins are in the saddle, any more than does the advent of democracy, of arbitration courts in place of wars, of equal rights for women, of a religion of pity--to mention but a few of the symptoms of declining vitality."
On how science "is now determined to talk man out of his former respect for himself, as though that respect had been nothing but a bizarre presumption."
"...does anybody now hold it against the agnostics, those admirers of mystery and the unknown, that they worship the question mark itself as their god?"
XXIV Criticizing the modern historian who neither affirms nor denies, "disdains to act the part of judges." "All this is very ascetic but even more nihilistic, let us be frank about it!" And then criticizing these historians as "clever fops" who are "impotent" in their fairness.
Very interesting anti-antisemitic comments here from Nietzsche: "And I am equally out of patience with those newest speculators and idealism called anti-Semites, who parade as Christian-Aryan worthies and endeavor to stir up all the asinine elements of the nation by that cheapest of propaganda tricks, a moral attitude. (The ease with which any wretched imposture succeeds in present-day Germany may be attributed to the progressive stultification of the German mind. The reason for this general spread of inanity may be found in a diet composed entirely of newspapers, politics, beer, and Wagner's music. Our national vanity and hemmed-in situation and the shaking palsy of current ideas have each done their bit to prepare us for such a diet.)"
XXVII "The one thing I hope I have made clear here is that even at the highest intellectual level the ascetic ideal is still being subverted. Great is the number of those who travesty or counterfeit it--let us be on our guard against them"; on atheism, "intransigent atheism" as Nietzsche puts it: "the only air breathed today by the elite of this world" which is not opposed to asceticism, all appearances to the contrary.
"What is it, in truth, that has triumphed over the Christian god? Here Nietzsche refers to a long quote from his book The Gay Science: basically the Europeans have conquered themselves and have ceased to interpret nature as proof of God's beneficent care, and instead consider these non-agnostic views as cowardly, effeminate and an act of self-cancellation.
"Here I touch once more on my problem, on our problem, my unknown friends (for I do not yet know whether I have any friends among you): what would our existence amount to if it were not for this, that the will to truth has been forced to examine itself? It is by this dawning self-consciousness of the will to truth that ethics must now perish. This is the great spectacle of a hundred acts that will occupy Europe for the next two centuries, the most terrible and problematical but also the most hopeful of spectacles..."
XXVIII [Good summary of the entire argument here in this last mini-chapter, I'm quoting it in full.] "Until the advent of the ascetic ideal, man, the animal man, had no meaning at all on this earth. His existence was aimless; the question, 'Why is there such a thing as man?' could not have been answered; man willed neither himself nor the world... His own meaning was an unsolved problem and made him suffer. He also suffered in other respects, being altogether an ailing animal, yet what bothered him was not his suffering but his inability to answer the question 'What is the meaning of my trouble?' Man, the most courageous animal, and the most inured to trouble, does not deny suffering per se: he wants it, he seeks it out, provided that it can be given a meaning. Finally the ascetic ideal arose to give it meaning--its only meaning, so far. But any meaning is better than none and, in fact, the ascetic ideal has been the best stopgap that ever existed. Suffering had been interpreted, the door to all suicidal nihilism slammed shut. No doubt that interpretation brought new suffering in its wake, deeper, more inward, more poisonous suffering: it placed all suffering under the perspective of guilt... All the same, man had saved himself, he had achieved a meaning, he was no longer a leaf in the wind, a plaything of circumstance, of 'crass casualty': he was now able to will something--no matter the object or the instrument of his willing; the will itself had been saved. We can no longer conceal from ourselves what exactly it is that this whole process of willing, inspired by the ascetic ideal, signifies--this hatred of humanity, of animality, of inert matter; this loathing of the senses, of reason even; this fear of beauty and happiness; this longing to escape from illusion, change, becoming, death, and from longing itself. It signifies, let us have the courage to face it, a will to nothingness, a revulsion from life, a rebellion against the principal conditions of living. And yet, despite everything, it is and remains a will. Let me repeat, now that I have reached the end, what I said at the beginning; man would sooner have the void for his purpose than be void of purpose..."
Vocab:
Tartufferie: hypocrisy
Hermeneutics: the branch of knowledge dealing with interpretation, especially of the Bible or literary texts.
Quaeritur: "it is asked" or "that which is in question" or "the subject under consideration"; In Roman law, quaeritur was used to introduce a difficult legal problem for consideration, often when there was no clear answer or precedent
Per fidem: "by faith" or "through faith"
Compos mentis: having full control of one's mind; sane
Desuetude: a state of disuse
Velleity: a wish or inclination not strong enough to lead to action: "the notion intrigued me, but remained a velleity"
Atrabilious: melancholy or ill-tempered: "an atrabilious old man"
Estivation: a state of dormancy that some animals and plants enter during hot and dry periods in the summer to survive
Hieratic: of or concerning priests: "he raised both his arms in an outlandish hieratic gesture"; also of or in the ancient Egyptian writing of abridged hieroglyphics used by priests
Exoteric: of the outside world; external; not limited to a select few or an inner group of disciples; suitable for the uninitiated
Ataraxia: calmness untroubled by mental or emotional disquiet; The highest goal of an Epicurean disciple was ataraxia—tranquility of mind
Anacreontic: (of a poem) written in the style of the ancient Greek poet Anacreon, known for his celebrations of love and wine
To Read:
Nietzsche: Human, All Too Human: A Book for Free Spirits
Nietzsche: Thus Spake Zarathustra
Nietzsche: The Gay Science
Works of Arthur Schopenhauer (e.g.: The Two Fundamental Problems of Ethics, The World as Will and Representation, Essays and Aphorisms)
Dr Paul Rée: The Origin of Moral Perceptions
Poetry of Georg Herwegh
Bhagavad Gita with the Commentary of Sri Shankaracharya by Swami Gambhirananda: