Nietzsche

by Roy Jackson

  Salvation, for Nietzsche, is an internal transcendence. It is a healing process to cure humanity of what he saw as a disease brought about by attempts to ameliorate suffering through Christian redemption. However, rather than healing, Christianity has made the patient worse. Nietzsche’s conception of health is not that of a pain-free state, for he believed pain to be a prerequisite of health. Nietzsche believed that Christianity does not cure, it anaesthetizes: it blocks pain and persuades people that the absence of pain is the same as salvation.

  Nietzsche and ‘inspiration’

  Mention has already been made of Nietzsche’s curious ‘religious’ experience beside the lake of Silvaplana (see Chapter 3). In Ecce Homo, Nietzsche again refers to this experience: ‘It was on these two walks that the whole of the first Zarathustra came to me, above all Zarathustra himself, as a type: more accurately, he stole up on me…’ (EH, Thus Spoke Zarathustra, 1) and, in the same book, Nietzsche says the following:

  ‘If one had the slightest residue of superstition left in one, one would hardly be able to set aside the idea that one is merely incarnation, merely mouthpiece, merely medium of overwhelming forces. The concept of revelation, in the sense that something suddenly, with unspeakable certainty and subtlety, becomes visible, audible, simply describes the fact. One hears, one does not seek; one takes, one does not ask who gives; a thought flashes up like lightning, with necessity, unfalteringly formed – I have never had any choice. An ecstasy whose tremendous tension sometimes discharges itself in a flood of tears, while one’s steps now involuntarily rush along, now involuntarily lag; a complete being outside oneself with the distinct consciousness of a multitude of subtle shudders and trickling down to one’s toes… Everything is in the highest degree involuntary but takes place as in a tempest of a feeling of freedom, of absoluteness, of power, of divinity.’

  Ecce Homo, Thus Spoke Zarathustra, 3

  Such remarks do not suggest a man who lacks a religious outlook. This ‘inspiration’ is not conceived of in terms of ideas that Nietzsche himself invented, but rather it comes across as a mystical feeling ‘of power, of divinity’.

  Religion as life enhancing

  For Nietzsche, it is not important whether religion is true or not, but whether or not it is life enhancing. Perhaps the best way to understand Nietzsche is not as a global philosopher full of grand schemes, but as a local philosopher. When reading Nietzsche it is better to think locally – to find out what his specific target is. For example, Nietzsche does not reject compassion wholesale, but rather compassion that leads to nihilistic ends. He does not attack compassion and self-sacrifice as such – in fact, Nietzsche was considered a compassionate person by those who knew him – but how it is expressed through such individuals as Schopenhauer and Paul Rée. It is interesting that both Schopenhauer and Rée, like Nietzsche in certain respects, were atheists, determinists and naturalists, yet Nietzsche goes out of his way to condemn them.

  Does he reject the belief in the supernatural, the non-empirical? No. Rather, he is concerned with what is achieved as a result of a belief. For example, the belief in Greek gods is quite acceptable because it signified an affirmation of life. Therefore, certain kinds of religion, of the supernatural, are equally acceptable. A future society could indeed be supernatural and non-empirical.

  When Nietzsche writes about religion, when he is either being critical of Christianity or positive about Christ, Buddhism or Islam, his ultimate value is health: what promotes greater health? What he means by this, in a seemingly Freudian sense (and perhaps even a Platonic one), is that our selves – our ‘souls’ if you will (and Nietzsche himself freely uses the word ‘soul’) – are fragmented. Humans are, for the most part, fragmented with drives all over the place.

  On Islam

  Interestingly, Nietzsche makes over a hundred references to Islam and Islamic cultures in his works. At times, he pours great praise on Islam, with his admiration of the people in general and in particular for individuals such as the Muslim Sufi poet Hafiz (1315–90). He talks of the great achievements of Muslim Spain, and sees Islam as a life-affirming religion in opposition to the life-denying Christianity of his time. At the same time, Nietzsche can come across as incredibly ignorant and Orientalist (see Chapter 7) in his perception of Islam and the Islamic world, which he shared with many Europeans at this time, who saw Islam as a manipulative instrument of social engineering and the Prophet Muhammad as a cunning impostor. Nietzsche read many Orientalist texts, including those by William Palgrave, Julius Wellhausen and Max Muller.

  Case study: Muhammad Iqbal

  The Indian scholar and poet Muhammad Iqbal (1873–1938) received a classical, Western education as a boy at the Scotch Mission College in Sialkot (in the Punjab province of what is now Pakistan, but which was part of India at that time). In 1905 he travelled to Europe and studied at Cambridge before travelling on to Heidelberg and Munich to obtain his doctorate entitled ‘The Development of Metaphysics in Persia’. In a way that many of his Muslim predecessors had looked to ancient Greek and Persian philosophers, Iqbal made use of his studies of Western philosophy, especially that of Nietzsche, to inform his understanding of Islam. Certainly, a Nietzschean influence can be detected, especially in his first collection of poems, Secrets of the Self, which he published in 1915.

  Iqbal saw Nietzsche’s Zarathustra and, more generally, the concept of the Übermensch, as possessing the characteristics of the Prophet Muhammad in Islam. Like Nietzsche’s Zarathustra, Iqbal sees Muhammad as the archetype for a politics of redemption: one who founded a new metaphysics of morals that consisted of courage and honesty; one who cast aside false idols. Iqbal sees the Prophet Muhammad as confronting the human predicament of the time in seventh-century Arabia (and Mecca especially), a time of nihilism, in the same way that Zarathustra was confronted by the death of God and the consequent failure to have a belief in any moral values to replace divine guidance. In Secrets of the Self, the ‘self’ smells suicide in conventionalism and this life of decadence, and regards this as the same as no life at all.

  Iqbal argues that the role of the prophets, whether it is Zarathustra or Muhammad, is to be a destroyer of conventional values and to create new values. On a number of occasions in the notes from the composition of Thus Spoke Zarathustra, Nietzsche portrays Zarathustra as a lawgiver (Gesetzgeber), ranking him alongside Buddha, Moses, Jesus and Muhammad. Whereas Nietzsche looked to Zarathustra as a response to what he saw as a moral decline, Iqbal looked to the example of the Prophet Muhammad as an example of how Muslims should respond to what Iqbal saw as a moral decline among Muslims in the nineteenth century.

  Leaving aside the contradictory nature of his remarks, the fact that Nietzsche feels so ready to make any remarks at all concerning Islam and its culture is interesting in itself. One scholar, Ian Almond, states that Nietzsche’s sympathy and interest in Islam may well be a result of his distaste for German culture. That is to say, Nietzsche exaggerates the features of an ‘other’ culture in order to demean his own. This cultural claustrophobia, leading to a longing for the Orient, is not new, especially among Romantic poets (for Nietzsche, these were Heinrich Heine and Goethe). Nietzsche never actually visited a Muslim country and his access to sources on Islam would have been, on the whole, Orientalist in their perspective.

  In a sense, Nietzsche’s Orientalism and the question of how correctly this represents Islam was irrelevant so far as Nietzsche is concerned. What matters to him is how useful it is. This comes back to Nietzsche’s perspectivism, considered in Chapter 8. What this suggests is that Nietzsche was not so much interested in Islam and Islamic culture as such and, for that matter, was not that learned in it either, but rather he used it as a battering ram against his own culture. In addition, Islam served an epistemological function by highlighting the weaknesses of European culture, and so presenting possible alternatives. Importantly, the appeal of Islam for Nietzsche was that he perceived it as less modern, less democratic, less enlightened and hence much
better, given his criticism of so-called enlightened, democratic Europe. As Nietzsche himself said, ‘I want to live among Muslims for a good long time, especially where their faith is most devout: in this way I expect to hone my appraisement and my eye for all that is European.’

  An example of Nietzsche’s perspective on Islam is his admiration for the Assassins: this group, the Hasishin, was an outcrop of the Ismaili Shi’a sect and existed from around the eleventh to the thirteenth century. Their primary task seemed to be to engage in being the medieval equivalent of suicide bombers, particularly assassinating rulers whom they considered to be corrupt and oppressive. Nietzsche was not condoning political assassination here: rather it has to do with Nietzsche’s fascination with the Other. And the more seemingly ‘Other’ the better – his fascination lies with extremities of difference, something that is reflected in one letter to his sister Elisabeth, when he states that he wishes to live in Japan simply because it is so radically different from his own European culture, rather than because he has any particular affinities with Japanese culture as such.

  The following quote from Section 60 of The Anti-Christ illustrates this:

  ‘Christianity robbed us of the harvest of the culture of the ancient world, it later went on to rob us of the harvest of the culture of Islam. The wonderful Moorish cultural world of Spain, more closely related to us at bottom, speaking more directly to our senses and taste, than Greece and Rome, was trampled down (I do not say by what kind of feet): why? because it was noble, because it owed its origin to manly instincts, because it said Yes to life even in the rare and exquisite treasures of Moorish life!… Later on, the Crusaders fought against something they would have done better to lie down in the dust before – a culture compared with which even our nineteenth century may well think itself very impoverished and very “late”…’

  The Anti-Christ, 60

  Here Nietzsche declares Muslims to be ‘one of us’, and his view of Islamic culture as being closer than that of ancient Greece and Rome is quite remarkable considering Nietzsche’s own Hellenic leanings.

  Myth, modernity and monumental history

  Spotlight

  Why is Nietzsche so popular today? To a great extent, his criticisms of modernity were ahead of their time and it is only in recent years, following some of the negative effects of modernity – heavy industrialization, a struggle to find meaning, global warming and so on – that we can relate to what Nietzsche was saying more than a century ago.

  If we are looking for recurrent themes in Nietzsche, then undoubtedly a key theme is his criticism of modernity, of the way we are now. This theme has occurred in Nietzsche’s writings right from his first major work, The Birth of Tragedy. The term ‘modernity’ is a much-bandied one, and is considered to be the result of two important revolutions: the French Revolution and the Industrial Revolution. Henry Cox refers to the ‘five pillars’ of modernity as:

  1 the emergence of sovereign national states

  2 hegemony of science-based technology

  3 bureaucratic rationalism

  4 profit maximization as a prime motivator

  5 secularization.

  For Nietzsche, in monumental history we have, and we need, role models that inspire us to greatness through imitation. For monumental figures to be monumental they must be mythologized, not deconstructed and individualized. Our heroes need to be lacking specific detail, to be blurred around the edges, so that we can fill the gaps with our poetic invention. That is, they have to be flexible in order to be relevant to our modern times. A healthy, thriving culture, for Nietzsche, is one that possesses the ‘plastic power’ to ‘incorporate… what is past and foreign’, to ‘recreate the moulds’ of the past in the language of the present (UM, II, 1). In a sense, the mythologized figures act as our unwritten laws for a community. Only monumental history is creative, although that is not to say that you should not also be critical. To flourish, Nietzsche says, ‘man must possess and from time to time employ the strength to break up and dissolve a part of the past.’ How we are to judge this is on the basis of what is life fulfilling, what makes us grow. Nietzsche is critical of the Christianity of his time because it poisons life; this is in contrast to his praise of Jesus as a monumental, mythical figure.

  Nietzsche argued that history, as it now serves in the world of modernity, atomizes. Historical events are merely historical facts, a vast encyclopedia or, in more modern terms, a Wikipedia. Modernity lacks culture, it is a ‘fairground motley’, a ‘chaotic jumble’ of confused and different styles (UM, I, 1). In Nietzsche’s Thus Spoke Zarathustra, the prophet both loves and scorns the town known as ‘Motley Cow’ because its citizens are cow- (herd-)like and yet live in a chaotic jumble of different lifestyles.

  This is reminiscent of Plato’s criticism of democracy: lots of bright colours but nothing solid or certain. Culture, therefore, represents a unity of the people, a Volk. Nietzsche argues that presenting us with a smorgasbord of lifestyle options that have no evaluative ranking produces a mood of confusion and cynicism. Rather than taking part in life, we become spectators. There is, granted, elitism here, for example, in the often quoted: ‘Mankind must work continually at the production of individual great men – that and nothing else is its task’ (UM, III, 6). Humankind needs to create favourable conditions for great men to thrive, as a plant thrives in the right soil. Note the similarity with Plato’s views on the need for the right kind of society if the philosopher-king is to flourish. But this should not be interpreted as calling for a society where the elite few bask in glory while the many live in the sewers. Nietzsche, rather, is calling for a gradual revolution in which the characteristics of the ‘higher’ (more adaptive) type become the norm rather than the exception, and so the great individual is not an end in itself – that would be pointless – but rather a means to the redemptive evolution of a whole community. We need leadership; we need role models.

  Religion and the state

  The next chapter will consider in some detail Nietzsche’s political views (and, indeed, whether Nietzsche has any political views) but here it is worth considering the role of religion in any political order proposed by Nietzsche. His views on religion are closely tied with the coming of the Supermen, of the philosophers of the future. These philosophers will possess the virtues of courage, nobility and an ability to face cruel reality rather than hide behind the ‘cowardice’ of false idealism:

  ‘I deny first a type of man who has hitherto counted as the highest, the good, the benevolent, beneficent; I deny secondly a kind of morality which has come to be accepted and to dominate as morality in itself – décadence morality, in more palpable terms Christian morality.’

  Ecce Homo, ‘Why I Am Destiny’, 4

  Zoroaster is the first prophet to claim that salvation can be obtained through moral behaviour. Thus personal responsibility comes to the forefront: one will be judged on the Day of Judgement. Time is perceived as linear, moving morally towards its final consummation in the struggle between good and evil. Nietzsche recognizes the Abrahamic tradition of prophetic religions that appeal to an authority higher than the ancestral or the civil, but he would argue that they originate much further back than that: to the work of Zarathustra. This understanding of history is very perceptive: the recognition that Hebrew prophets would have been influenced by Zoroastrian, as well as Greek, thought, during their period of exile. On many occasions in the notes from the composition of Zarathustra, Nietzsche portrays Zarathustra as a lawgiver (Gesetzgeber), ranking him alongside Buddha, Moses, Jesus and Muhammad.

  Nietzsche, as we shall see in the next chapter, is critical of democracy and the secularization of political authority. As he says in Human, All Too Human, ‘In the sphere of higher culture there will always have to be sovereign authority, to be sure – but this sovereign authority will hereafter lie in the hands of the oligarchs of the spirit.’ What is needed to cure social ills ‘is not forcible redistribution of property but a gradual transformation of min
d: the sense of justice must grow greater in everyone and the instinct for violence weaker.’ The capacity to build a new future depends on an ability to see a continuity with the strength of past traditions. An important passage in Human, All Too Human called ‘Religion and Government’ notes that the importance of religion in the life of a culture is that it consoles the hearts of individuals in times of loss, deprivation and fear; that is, in times when a government is powerless to alleviate the sufferings of people during such tragedies as famine and war. However, the increase in democracy has seen a parallel decline in the importance of religion.

  Beyond Good and Evil is particularly enlightening when it comes to determining Nietzsche’s views on the role of religion. The oligarchs of the spirit in the quote above in Human, All Too Human are referred to again in Beyond Good and Evil. What is needed, he argues, is a new spiritual aristocracy that is ‘strong enough and original enough to give impetus to opposing value judgements and to revalue, to reverse “eternal values”’ (BGE, 203). Nietzsche’s hierarchical society will have a place for religion, for it legitimizes the power of rulers and generates obedience, as well as providing comfort for the hardship of those who are ruled. Yet Nietzsche, of course, is not subscribing to Christianity or any other religion of his time, so what would this religion be?

  ‘…the one I was just speaking about; and he has come again and again, the god Dionysus, no less, that great ambiguous tempter god, to whom, as you know, I once offered my first-born [Birth of Tragedy] in all secrecy and reverence.’