His willingness to do so is one clear indication of the philosophical distance that separates Marx from another thinker who stands in close historical proximity to Bauer, and whose provocative ideas deserve fuller consideration than they can be given here: Johann Caspar Schmidt, more commonly known by his pseudonym, Max Stirner (1806–56). Stirner moved for a time in the same circle of highly educated and underemployed intellectuals in Berlin with whom Marx and Engels were associated in the early 1840s. Like them, Stirner found himself put out by the political and theological conservatism of the Vormärz period, and like them, he produced a set of philosophical ideas that is among the most radical to have emerged in the history of western philosophy, though his radicalism, spelled out in the book with which he is most frequently associated, The Ego and Its Own (1845), is of a strikingly different stripe from theirs.60 As attested by Plato’s Republic and Gorgias, the outrageousness of a philosophical claim is not always a good measure of the earnestness with which it deserves to be taken.61 One indication of the earnestness with which Stirner may deserve to be taken is the fact that Marx and Engels, in spite of the intensity of the bombast heaped by them on “Saint Max,” nevertheless felt compelled to devote several hundred pages in the third and longest section of The German Ideology to the task of refuting him. Part of the historical importance of Stirner’s book, in which he takes aim at the vestiges of religious piety that he perceived to remain in the humanistic atheisms of Feuerbach (whose disciple he took Marx to be) and Bauer, is due to its role in bringing the Young Hegelian movement to a close.62 Among the relatively few who have shown a willingness to take Stirner seriously are commentators such as Stepelevich, who consider the account of self-consciousness contained in the Phenomenology to be Hegel’s most original philosophical contribution, and who regard Stirner as the one among Hegel’s disciples who most clearly recognized and consistently developed the radical implications of this account.63
Stirner regards as constitutive of religion the attribution of sanctity to any being, abstraction, institution or ideal from which there is supposed to arise, by virtue of this sanctity, a binding claim to the allegiance or respect of the individual, and for the sake of which the individual can be reasonably called upon to sacrifice his (or, as throughout, her) “own” interests. Examples of the sorts of objects to which sanctity of this kind has in the course of history been variously attributed include God, humanity, “the” self (as opposed to one’s “own” self), the church, the state, goodness, truth, and a range of purportedly normative imperatives and obligations, including the obligation we are often presumed to have to subject ourselves to the claim of reason. Stirner’s position is that, in every case in which any such thing has been regarded as sacred, its sanctity has arisen from, and consisted entirely in, the acts of consciousness though which individuals have accorded to the object in question the status of the sacred, and in doing so have relinquished not their autonomy (since Stirner regards a self-imposed law as no more binding than one imposed by someone else) but their possession of themselves, or their “ownness,” of which they have sought to rid themselves in something like the way in which the masses for whom Dostoyevsky’s Grand Inquisitor has such sympathy want someone else to bear the burden of their freedom because they find it intolerable.
41.5 NIETZSCHE AND THE UNCANNY GUEST AT THE DOOR OF THE TWENTIETH CENTURY
Friedrich Nietzsche is probably the most notorious of all nineteenth-century atheists, and one of the most scathing critics of Christianity ever to have written. The year of his death, 1900, marks the transition from the century with which this volume is concerned to a century the troubled cultural self-awareness of which Nietzsche has often been regarded as having prophesied, and upon which he exercised an unsurpassed influence that shows few signs of abating. It is therefore fitting that this chapter should end with a brief consideration of Nietzsche’s atheism. Because it is impossible to touch here on many issues that would need to be addressed in a longer treatment, the following discussion will focus on features of Nietzsche’s approach to religion by which it can be distinguished from those taken by the figures considered previously in this chapter.64
One obvious difference between Nietzsche and these other figures is that, whereas they all cut their philosophical teeth on Hegel, Nietzsche cut his on Schopenhauer. This is significant partly because of Schopenhauer’s disdain for what he regarded as the spurious efforts of his idealist contemporaries to present reason (Vernunft) as a faculty distinct from the understanding (Verstand) and capable of apprehending supersensible truths. This he regarded as an opportunistic attempt on the part of Hegel and his disciples to “palm off as the results of philosophy the subjects of their country’s established religion.”65 In contrast and in opposition to this attempt, Schopenhauer identified the supreme metaphysical principle underlying all observable phenomena not with reason but with a universal, non-individuated, and fundamentally blind or unintelligent will, among the manifestations of which are to be counted all the psychological phenomena associated with human volition, as well as animal desire. It is to the indefatigability of this will, oscillating between the pain of unfulfilled desire, on the one hand, and boredom, on the other, that Schopenhauer attributes the impossibility for human beings, and for sentient beings more generally, to achieve any lasting happiness.66 An additional source of unhappiness for human beings results from the awareness of death and its inevitability that they acquire in the course of the development of their mental powers. There arises from this awareness a “metaphysical need” to discover the meaning of existence.67 The presence of this need is, for Schopenhauer, what distinguishes humans from animals. Religious myths—Schopenhauer’s understanding of which bears a certain affinity to Strauss’s—serve to meet this need for those not in a position to grasp the unadulterated truth through metaphysical reflection.68 Thus, in spite of his atheism—or rather, as he preferred to call it, his “non-Judaism”69—and his disdain for popular religion, Schopenhauer nevertheless affirmed what he took to be the fundamental religious impulse, namely, to achieve salvation from the illusions of spatio-temporal existence and their attendant hardships through the ascetic renunciation of the will to live.
Schopenhauer’s philosophy exercised a powerful attraction on the early Nietzsche, as it also did on Richard Wagner, with whom Nietzsche was during his early period closely associated.70 The account of the will to power contained in his later published and unpublished writings, to which the critique of religion articulated in those writings is closely related, was conceived in no small measure as an alternative to this philosophy, and as an expression of resistance on Nietzsche’s part to what he came to regard as the spiritual temptation posed by it.71 Before turning our attention to these themes as they are developed in his later writings, it will be useful to consider certain scientific developments by which Nietzsche was decisively influenced, as is especially evident in the works of what is sometimes referred to as his “positivistic” middle period. These developments, which, in conjunction with industrialization, contributed in the mid-nineteenth century to the rise of realism both as a scientific Weltanschauung and as an aesthetic ideal, also help to account for the widespread appeal of Schopenhauer’s pessimistic philosophy among those who began rather suddenly in the 1850s to rediscover it, perhaps, as suggested by Mauthner, because of the consolation it seemed to offer for their religious and political disillusionment.72 They are also important for making sense of Nietzsche’s famous observation that “God is dead.”
In Daybreak, Nietzsche assigns to “former times” the task of producing arguments against belief in God, and identifies the task at hand to be to explain “how the belief that there is a God could arise and how this belief acquired its weight and importance.”73 That Nietzsche regards this latter task as incomplete is an indication that he had come by this time to reject Schopenhauer’s explanation of the origin of religious conceptions in the “metaphysical need” mentioned already. The task referred to by Nie
tzsche here is part of the larger task previously assigned by him in Human, All Too Human to “historical philosophy […] the youngest of all philosophical methods,” namely that of producing “a chemistry of the moral, religious, aesthetic conceptions and sensations,” something that had become conceivable “only now, with the various sciences at their present level of achievement.”74
Although Nietzsche does not specify in this passage the scientific achievements he has in mind, a number of groundbreaking developments in both the natural and the historical sciences that occurred during the nineteenth century, and that bear in various ways on his overall philosophical project, seem like plausible contenders. These include the emergence of philology, the field in which Nietzsche himself was trained, as a rigorous academic discipline, from which there became available to European scholars a wealth of hitherto unfamiliar ancient and non-European literatures reflecting a previously unimaginable diversity of metaphysical, religious, and ethical beliefs and values, and which also made it possible for the first time to trace on the basis of their grammatical similarities and differences the genealogical relations among the languages of the world, living and dead. This latter development gave rise to ideas about the differences and historical interactions among Aryan and Semitic races by which Nietzsche and many of his contemporaries were influenced, though one must be cautious about attributing to them the ideological uses to which this distinction was put by subsequent propagators of the Aryan myth (who were nevertheless happy to claim Nietzsche as one of their own). Relevant developments in the natural sciences include the empirical verification of the laws of the conservation of matter and energy; the discovery of the cell and its basic structures, and of the difference between prokaryotic and eukaryotic cells; as well as recognition of the similarities and differences between organic and inorganic chemical processes, and of the central role played by the former in the metabolic functions upon which both life and consciousness depend. These achievements were widely popularized in the works of scientific materialists like Carl Vogt, Jacob Moleschott, and Ludwig Büchner, who saw in them irrefutable proof of the non-existence of an immaterial soul and of a God who intervenes in the course of natural events.75
Last but not least among the scientific achievements presupposed by the historical or genealogical method of philosophy, to the development of which Nietzsche sought to contribute, is Darwin’s discovery of the principle of natural selection, which itself is unlikely to have occurred without the prior recognition of the temporal magnitude of the geological processes through which the observable world has been shaped. Taken together, these discoveries forced upon many nineteenth-century Europeans, including Nietzsche, a disconcerting awareness of what Charles Taylor, borrowing a phrase from Buffon, calls “the deep abyss of time,”76 from which they began to recognize themselves as having emerged. That Nietzsche’s appropriation of Darwin was far from uncritical is reflected both in his disdain for Ernst Haeckel and other German Darwinists, and by the fact that the centrality in his later writings of the concept of the will to power represents as much an alternative to the emphasis placed by Darwin and Spencer on the mere survival of “the fittest” as it does a reply to Schopenhauer’s pessimistic appraisal of the will to life. In spite of these misgivings, because Nietzsche’s atheism could not have taken the form it does apart from Darwin’s direct or indirect influence, the latter’s theory of the origin of species must be assigned a high rank among the nineteenth-century achievements of empirical scientific research, attunement to which is another feature distinguishing Nietzsche’s way of thinking about religion from those considered previously in this chapter.
The central question with which Nietzsche seems to be concerned as a practitioner of the “historical method” as applied to questions of moral psychology is “How have human beings, and particularly modern Europeans, come in the course of their evolutionary and cultural history to be psychologically constituted in the ways that we generally find them to be today?” Nietzsche attributes a considerable role in answering this question to the internalization of instinctive cruelty that was a necessary condition for the possibility of social existence on a large scale, and which manifests itself in the form of “bad conscience.”77 This identification of instinctive cruelty and its sublimation as important factors in the psychology of religion and of culture more generally, and in the evaluative judgments associated with the kinds of ascetic ideals emphasized in many historically prevalent forms of religion, is yet another feature of Nietzsche’s account of religion by which it can be distinguished from those previously considered. It needs also to be emphasized that the genealogical interest taken by Nietzsche in the cultural evolution of what he calls Moral is closely related to an overriding normative or therapeutic concern to diagnose a moral sickness by which he found modern European culture to be terminally afflicted.78
The event to which Nietzsche refers by the term “death of God” consists essentially in the increasingly frequent experience on the part of educated Europeans toward the end of the nineteenth century of their inability, out of considerations of intellectual integrity (Redlichkeit), and in light of the previously described developments in the historical and natural sciences, to continue to affirm belief in God’s existence. In a famous essay Sartre once observed that an important distinction needs to be drawn between those nineteenth and early twentieth-century atheists who experienced the so-called death God as a source of distress (sometimes mingled, as in Nietzsche’s case, with a sense of new and limitless possibilities for living a human, or “superhuman,” life), and those who found (and often continue to find) that “nothing will be changed if God does not exist,” because they do not recognize the death of God as undermining the normativity of, and hence their commitment to, values like “honesty, progress, and humanism.”79 It can be pointed out, as another way of distinguishing Nietzsche from his nineteenth-century atheistic precursors, that he clearly falls into the former of these categories, whereas most of the other figures discussed in this chapter fall into the latter (Stirner being a “unique” case, since he regards all norms as so many forms of enslavement, by the unavailability of some of which he is not bothered). One must hasten to add, though, that what Nietzsche finds especially scandalous is not so much the fact of God’s having “died” as the incredulity with which the announcement of this event and its consequences is met by those to whom Nietzsche took it upon himself to deliver it, and the inability or unwillingness of the otherwise most free-thinking among his contemporaries to squarely face up to what he took to be the inevitable undermining by this event of their entire basis for assigning moral values to actions and persons insofar as this has been predicated on what Nietzsche sometimes calls “the psychology of error.”80
The fundamental error involved in this moral psychology consists in the ascription of moral responsibility, and hence culpability, to individual human beings, in referring to whom as “agents” one has already thereby indicated one’s susceptibility to it. In light of recently (i.e. in the nineteenth century) acquired knowledge of the physiological constitution and evolutionary history, both biological and cultural, of the human organism, what this error, the historical origins of which Nietzsche is concerned to trace, can “now” be seen to involve is a failure to recognize that the actions performed by human beings do not result from the occult powers of a metaphysical entity called “the will.” They are rather the outcome of an ongoing struggle among conflicting drives (Triebe), the effects of which include, but are not exhausted by, both conscious deliberation and the actions that it has erroneously been thought to be capable of producing. Nietzsche takes this error to underlie the kinds of moral judgments sanctioned by Christianity, which he regards as having been bequeathed by it to a number of post-Christian forms of moral idealism, egalitarianism, and universalism.81 The ultimate source of Nietzsche’s animus against these various forms of Moral, however, is not the erroneousness of this basic psychological assumption, but rather what Nietzsche c
ame increasingly to regard as the insidiousness of the underlying volitional impulse of which he took this “psychology of error” to be but one manifestation. That is, Nietzsche came to interpret the attribution of culpability as the expression of an impulse to punish, which he came to regard in turn as an expression of the ressentiment that is symptomatic of the will to power in decline. This is the condition of a will afflicted by nihilism, which Nietzsche understood to involve a commitment to values to the actualization of which reality is not amenable, for which reason it comes to be secretly hated, especially by those most susceptible to the slave morality of which Nietzsche took Paul to be the classical representative.82 The fundamental indictment leveled by Nietzsche against Christianity, and eo ipso against the secular strains of moral universalism that he regarded as its heirs, is that it is not in fact a religion of love but an expression of this secret hatred of existence, by which he regarded modern European culture as having become thoroughly infected. In seeking a cure to this moral affliction, and predicting the end of the age of which it is most characteristic (i.e. the presumptive age of man, toward which human history was supposed by many of Nietzsche’s contemporaries to be steadily progressing), Nietzsche acts not only as a psychologist, but also as a self-professed life-affirmer and disciple of Dionysos,83 one of whose guises is that of a prophet (i.e. Zarathustra), who, in symbolic contrast to Moses, descends from his mountainous cave at the “dawn” of a new post-Moral age to proclaim the immanent self-overcoming of man.84
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