This week we continue to explore the second half of Nietzsche’s book Twilight of the Idols. Remember to look out for illustrations of ways in which he distrusts reason. Again, I won’t be reading out everything written here, so parts of the lecture you will be able to read for yourselves.

From last week you might remember that Nietzsche was arguing against reason because it suppressed things that are much more important in the life of a human being. He saw reason as part of the decay of western human life. It was responsible for individuals turning away from their natural instincts, and from following their natural and spontaneous drives and passions. He saw reason make an enemy of the body and its desires, and criticized religion and morality as part of the decay. Religion and morality identified the good as that which waged war against the natural. They are in effect a hatred of feelings. Zarathustra, we saw at the end of the lecture, would be the next kind of human being, the human of the future, one who could live healthily, without God and the hypocrisy of morality. This next part of the book reiterates these points.

5. Morality as anti-nature

Here N argues that the Sermon on the Mount given by Jesus advises man to kill the passions in that, if an organ offends us by its nature, then we should pluck it out. This attack on the roots of passion by religion is says N ‘an attack on the roots of life: the practice of the Church is hostile to life’ (1982, 487). The Church fights passion with castration!

Those people who are too weak to command themselves need some kind of external force imposed upon them in order to overcome their passions. This is like inviting the priest to tell you what you should do, for he will always set you at war with your body and its passions. Their rule is, Thou must not respond to stimulus; this is another sign of degeneration and decay.

Then N makes some surprising comments about the benefits to life of war. One has to read section 3 carefully as there is irony in N’s rhetoric here. The Church is hostile to the passions. But hostility is a passion. And their hostility to instinct and the body is a force, a passion of their own. If they are at war with the passions, then they too are passionate. But they deny this. They pretend that their motives are cleaner and more pure than this, that the good man rises above such base emotions as hostility and loves his neighbour. But N admits that the passions benefit from having enemies, and that we should love our enemies rather than our neighbours, for they fire our passions more (we will hear more on his views on war later on). ‘Almost every party understands how it is in the interest of its own self-preservation that the opposition should not lose all its strength’ (1982, 488).  But self-preservation, self-interest, is what the moralists tell us is immoral!

 

It is the same when we consider the internal enemy, i.e. the soul and its motives. The Church advocates peace of the soul (tranquillity) and tells us that this is what heaven will be like. Yet life knows that it is all the richer for having contradictions and struggles. Besides which, the value attached to peace and tranquillity is physiological – bodily – and has more to do with comfortable digestion than morality. Education, he says, has always been of the body rather than the soul. Values come from the body, from ‘diet [and] physiology’ (1982, 552).[1] And he aims the comment at himself that perhaps even his book TI is aimed at comfortable digestion of difficulties rather than really being in praise of war and enemies. When one renounces war, one renounces life itself, he says.

Then, continuing this theme, N lists some of the ways that moralists have given up passionate life for the sake of peace of the soul: as resignation, as religion, as love of humanity; as a recovery from illness, as satisfaction, as the incapacity of the will, as the laziness of morality, as the peace of certainty, or as the expression of mastery and the freedom of the will. We must note here that N is calling into disrepute the kinds of values that one might feel are irreproachable. How can he seriously question love or morality or religion or certainty, especially when he seems to be criticising them because they have a physiological basis. We will return to this thought later when he discusses pleasure as the basis of morality.

Section 4 now offers something of a summary. All natural morality – healthy morality as N sees it – is governed by a simple instinct for life, that is, that something should or should not be done according to whether it removes another obstacle on the road of life. But anti-natural morality – which is almost every morality that has ever been taught – condemns these instincts of life. When this anti-natural morality says that God looks into the heart for its selfish motives, this opposes ‘the lowest and highest of life’s desires, and takes God to be an enemy of life… Life ends where the “kingdom of God” begins’ (1998, 23).

And yet, as we saw above, N is not averse to criticising his own work as part of the decay. Now he takes this idea further. He says that even if he and his kind, the immoralists, rebel against morality, they too must have realised that such rebellion is useless, even false. Even the judgements of the immoralists are only symptoms of a declining and tired life. Even the critique of morality ‘is a condemnation pronounced by the condemned’ (1982, 491).

Nevertheless the characteristics of the immoralists, and of the man of the future, Zarathustra, are different to the moralists. N sees such men as approving life and saying Yes, against the moralists who close themselves against life, against themselves, and deny life.

 

6. The Four Great Errors

N now lists four errors that characterise the history of morality and religion. The first is where cause is confused with effect; the second is false causality; the third is the error of imaginary causes; and the fourth is the error of free will.

 Where cause is confused with effect, this is ‘the real ruination of reason’ (1998, 26). Religion and morality believe that happiness will result from certain ways of life. N believes that the happy man finds ways of behaving that befit the happy man. Behaviour does not cause happiness: happiness causes appropriate behaviour. What a man does is, as we saw above, a result of his physiology. This error amounts to a lack of confidence in instincts. Where instinct causes effects, religion and morality see the effect as the cause of the instinct (and therefore as something to be controlled). *‘Everything good is instinct’ (1968, 48), says Nietzsche.[2]

The second of the four errors is that of false causality. Neither the mind (spirit) nor the ego are causes. They come only after instinct. They are man’s way of explaining himself to himself and of thinking himself the cause of everything. Man presupposed the world as created by him in his own image through ‘his concept of the I as cause’ (1998, 28). Man understands the cause of cause wrongly. He traces cause back to will, ego, and the I whereas it should be traced back to physiology.

*The third error is the error of imaginary causes. Man invents himself as the cause of everything because he fears his instincts, and his feelings. Man always wants a reason for feeling as he does. He is never happy just to feel, always seeking some kind of cause or reason for it. He says, tracing something unknown back to something known gives relief, soothes, satisfies, and furthermore gives a feeling of power. The unknown brings with it danger, disquiet, worry—one’s first instinct is to get rid of these awkward conditions. First principle: any explanation is better than none’ (1998, 29).

 

He extends this argument saying that we get so much pleasure in making the unknown known, that we call it ‘true’. Thus, his astonishing claim is that man’s idea of what is true is based in pleasure. What pleases us is called truth. The only thing that can be accepted as causes are those explanations that give us pleasure. If it doesn’t make us happy, a cause is deemed untrue. In time, he says, some particular pleasure will grow into a principle, and then into a system by which everything can be explained. In short, ‘morality and religion belong entirely under the psychology of error’ (1998, 31) where effect is mistaken for cause.

*The fourth error is the error of free will. The doctrine of free will was invented by priests in order to give themselves a reason for punishing people. Men were considered free so that they might be judged and be held to be guilty. ‘Christianity is a metaphysics of the hangman’ (1982, 500).

What, then, is Nietzsche teaching here? It is something quite dramatic. He is teaching that ‘no one gives man his qualities – neither God, nor society, nor his parents and ancestors, nor he himself… No one is responsible for man’s being there at all… Man is not the effect of some special purpose’ (1982, 500). There is no final and ultimate end to his life. He sums up here by saying

that no one is made responsible any more, that a kind of Being cannot be traced back to a causa prima, that the world is no unity, either as sensorium or as ‘mind’, this alone is the great liberation—this alone re-establishes the innocence of becoming… The concept ‘God’ has been the greatest objection to existence so far… We deny God, we deny responsibility in God: this alone is how we redeem the world (1998, 32).

 

7. The ‘Improvers’ of Mankind

In this section we enter some very controversial water, as if N had not been controversial enough already!

Philosophy needs in his opinion to go beyond good and evil (this is the title of another of his books). Morality and religion as we have seen are only a hatred of feelings. To improve mankind, priests and moralists have in fact only tried to tame man. He became a sinner, ‘stuck in a cage… locked in between nothing but dreadful concepts’ (1998, 34), or rational explanations. ‘There he lay now, sick, miserable, fitted with ill-will towards himself; full of hatred for the impulses towards life, full of suspicion of all that was still strong and happy. In short, a “Christian”’ (1968, 56).

Strong stuff. But look now at what N says about his own view of improving mankind. He discusses the Law of Manu (Manu in Hinduism was the son of the God Brahma, and father of the human race) which set out to breed four races at once: priestly, warlike, traders and farmers, and servants. He notes that the weak in the Law of Manu are the Chandala, the Untouchable, who are deemed to have no pure race, and are of mixed caste, or are simply out-cast(e). How do the pure treat the impure? They treat them as sick, as wrong, as error, and they regulate contact with them so that they remain weak. There is no programme for ‘improvement’ here. Is this, then, a breeding programme of sorts which keeps the pure free from the impure, unlike in modern Western societies where, N believes, the weak infect the strong? If it is, it is what N refers to as the ‘humanity’ (1982, 504) of the Aryan principle, the idea of pure blood and pure race. In contrast, the Christian societies have adopted the viewpoint of the weak in fighting against everything that is strong and pure, and in their seeking to improve mankind, which is really only continually infusing sickness into it. This breeding programme for improvement is really a taming of all the pure instincts that make man strong and healthy.   

We can’t really let this go without some comment. There is a body of thought that sees here in N a precursor to the Nazi breeding programmes of the 1930s and 40s. Even when you read this section of TI very carefully, it seems to lend itself to the view that N did not just oppose the mixing of strength with weakness by the improvers. He also (at best by default) seems to approve of the notion of pure blood and pure race. Over one hundred years later we are aware of the implications in the world of such a view, not least from WWII, but also from all varieties of ethnic cleansing that are found across the world. We have seen what horrors the idea of ‘pure’ can be used to justify. N could not have expected this. But should he nevertheless be included as justifying the principle that legitimates these horrors? Let us leave this as an open question for now.

 

8. What the Germans lack

In this section N attacks the way the Germans have become stupid and mediocre in no longer trusting the spirit that is assured and strong. Moreover, they seem to want to wrap it up in reason and explanation. He blames alcohol, Christianity and music in particular for this de-spiritualizing, and targets higher education and scholarship in particular. True spirits can no longer live among the scholars because they will be seized by rational knowledge. The universities are ‘the real hothouses for this kind of the withering of the instincts of the spirit’ (1982, 508). The Germans have become incapable of the kind of serious cheerfulness that is needed to understand TI.

Culture and not the state should be the end and the goal of education. Teachers need to be not nurses but noble spirits. Higher education is only a ‘brutal training, designed to prepare huge numbers of young men, with as little loss of time as possible, to become usable, abusable, in government service’ (1982, 510). Education has become democratic, open to everyone, and this marks the decline of genuinely higher and superior education. Mass higher education – ‘that is a contradiction to start with’ (1982, 510). German high schools, he says, ‘are without exception geared to the most ambiguous mediocrity, with teachers, teaching plans, teaching objectives’ (1998, 40). They think that one needs to be finished with education by the age of 23.

And a little later (1982, 532; 1968, 83-4; 1998, 57) he states that the task of all higher education is ‘to turn man into a machine’ (1968, 83) by boring them into accepting their duty to become civil servants.

When Nietzsche now says that teachers are needed for three things, we must again read this very carefully. For example, when he says teachers are needed for learning to see, a quick reading might suggest that he is arguing for learning that makes one careful, suspending judgement on everything until the thing has been seen from all sides – objectively – and teaching one how to resist reacting to stimulus without reasons. But we know now that he finds such thoughts abhorrent. Thus when he says that it is vulgar and common not to resist stimuli, the vulgar and common is what is he approving of. It is called vice, and a sickness, but it what teachers are really needed for, to learn to see as N understands it.

Second, he says teachers are needed for learning to think, yet says immediately that schools and universities have no idea of what this means anymore. What is lost is the idea that thinking needs to be light and not heavy, weighed down by rationalism and explanatory concepts. Educators are therefore needed so that thinking can be learned as dancing; and, thirdly, teachers are also needed who can teach writing as dancing.

 

#9. Skirmishes of an Untimely man[3]

This is the longest section of TI, and contains thoughts on a variety of subjects. I shall move through some of them quite quickly now.

Rousseau was ‘embittered against everything great in men and things, against whatever believes in itself’ (1982, 514).

Backstairs psychology is the kind of psychology that avoids looking at itself when it experiences, and observes others only in order to be the observer, not the subject of experience.

Art needs frenzy and intoxication. ‘The essential thing about intoxication is the feeling of increased power’ (1998, 47), which is so often given up to ideas and abstract thoughts. Such an artist is the Dionysian man, ‘constantly transforming himself’ (1998, 48), something which even music is no longer able to do now that it has become a separate and specialized art. The tragic artist is fearless in the face of fear and seeks out suffering in order to communicate its being honoured. ‘What does the tragic artist communicate about himself? Is it not precisely the state of fearlessness in the face of the fearful and questionable that he shows? This state is itself highly desirable: anyone who knows it honours it with the highest honours’ (1998, 55-6).

*Darwin didn’t get it right. He argued that the strong will prevail over the weak. In fact, ‘the weak prevail over the strong again and again, for they are the great majority’ (1982, 523).

‘The most spiritual human beings, if we assume that they are the most courageous, also experience by far the most painful tragedies: but just for that reason they honour life because it pits its greatest opposition against them’ (1982, 524). 

*It is almost impossible for people today to be hypocrites, because they don’t believe in anything strongly enough in the first place.

He attacks the ideas of socialist equality. Those who demand justice and equal rights do not understand the thing that they lack most, namely: life. They think that their lot in life must be someone else’s fault. Thus, ‘the sufferer prescribes for himself the honey of revenge as a medicine for his suffering’ (1968, 87). Everyone takes pleasure in complaining and grumbling. Both revolution and resurrection are the ‘sweet comfort of revenge’ (1982, 535) for something amiss in present life. ‘The doctrine of equality! There is no more poisonous poison anywhere: for it seems to be preached by justice itself, whereas it really is the termination of justice’ (1982, 553). *‘“Equality for equals, inequality for unequals”—that would be the true voice of justice’ (1968, 102).

Altruism is a bad sign whether in individuals or in concepts. ‘The best is lacking when self-interest begins to be lacking’ (1982, 535). Not wanting advantage for oneself is decadence. It is really about not knowing how to find one’s own advantage; it is weakness made value and virtue. It is a sign that nothing is worth anything any more.

*N also ventures into euthanasia and aided death – a very topical subject at the moment. Doctors, he says, should have a new form of responsibility – to serve only that which promotes life and not to continue lives that have lost their will to live. ‘Death of one’s own free choice, death at the proper time, with a clear head and with joyfulness, consummated in the midst of children and witnesses: so that an actual leaving is possible while he who is leaving is still there’ (1968, 88). For ‘the love of life—one ought to want death to be different, free, conscious, no accident, no ambush…’ (1998, 61). And to people who are pessimists N says they should put themselves, and us, out of their misery.

N asks a question similar to that which Rousseau asked: namely, have we become more moral? N, as you might expect by now, says that modern man has become soft and distrustful of instincts. What we call progress is now more than this softening and lack of vitality. Everyone is sick, and helps everyone else, and calls this ‘virtue’ (1982, 539). Our humanism is no more than decadence, showing a lack of self-esteem. Our virtues are shaped by weakness not strength. ‘We moderns, with our anxious self-solicitude and neighbour-love, with our virtues of work, modesty, and scientism—accumulatory, economic, machine-like—appear as a weak age. Our virtues are conditional on, are provoked by, our weaknesses’ (1982, 540).

*In asking what is freedom N says that the value of freedom lies not in what is achieved by it, but what one loses by achieving it. ‘Liberal institutions immediately cease to be liberal as soon as they are attained’ (1968, 92). Then they become harmful because they undermine the will and the efforts that were used to achieve them. It is war that produces them, but peace and conformity that they then establish. It is only when they are being fought for that they ‘really promote freedom in a powerful way’ (1982, 541). ‘War is an education in freedom’ (1998, 64) because it makes one responsible for himself. Such a man accepts hardships and difficulties in pursuit of his cause. The manly instincts here dominate the search for pleasure. ‘The free man is a warrior’ (1982, 542). Danger forces us to be strong.

*This, then, is a reason to mistrust modern reason. Modernity, says N, and its modern institutions were achieved out of instinct but they lose their merit once they are achieved. Democracy, once established, declines into the state. Institutions will need the will and the instinct that brought them into existence. But the West has lost ‘the instincts out of which institutions grow’ (1982, 543). Even the institution of marriage is in decay; even the instincts of the worker.

*What, then, can be done? One can hold up decay, as water at a dam, but that only makes its advance more sudden and vehement. ‘More one cannot do’ (1968, 97).  But, from such a storing up, geniuses or great men can explode outwards and forwards, and in complete disregard to the values of the time. Thus when a Swiss editor says of N that his ideas seek for ‘the abolition of all decent feelings’ (1982, 538) N’s response is ‘thank you’. Such great men, such genius, does not spare itself, it drives itself to exhaustion and sterility, overriding completely any instinct for self-preservation. And he adds later, the strong man is the man who ‘no longer denies’ (1998, 74) or, the same, who ‘does not negate any more’ (1982, 554). ‘One misunderstands great human beings if one views them from the paltry perspective of utility’ (1968, 103-4).

 

10. What I owe to the Ancients

So we come to the penultimate section of the book in which N seems to set Plato against the god Dionysus. ‘For heavens sake do not throw Plato at me. I am a complete sceptic about Plato’ (1982, 554). He is a decadent. Indeed, ‘Plato is boring’ (1998, 77). His philosophy of the good is not to be believed for he is ‘a coward before reality, consequently he flees into the ideal’ (1982, 559). He and his philosopher-types are ‘decadents of Greek culture, the counter-movement to the ancient noble taste’ (1982, 559).

Against these philosophers N reminds us that he was the first to take seriously the phenomenon of Dionysus. In his festival is there to be found ‘an excess of force’ (1982, 560), and ‘the most profound instinct of life… the future of life’ (1982, 562).

What is the nature of this instinct and of this future? It is ‘saying yes to life, even in its strangest and hardest problems; the will to life rejoicing in the sacrifice of its highest types to its own inexhaustibility—this is what I call Dionysian, this is what I sensed as the bridge to the psychology of the tragic poet. Not freeing oneself from terror and pity, not purging oneself of a dangerous emotion… but, over and above terror and pity, being oneself the eternal joy of becoming’ (1998, 80-1).

And N calls himself ‘the last disciple of the philosopher Dionysus’ (1982, 563), which we can understand from things we have already seen here, but not perhaps that he also calls himself ‘the teacher of the eternal recurrence’ (1968, 111). To understand this, we would have to look at other books, not least his Thus Spake Zarathustra.

 

11. The hammer speaks

The final section is very short and is taken from Book 3 of Zarathustra. It asks us to toughen up a bit!

References

Bacon, F. (1950) Advancement of Learning, Heron Books, ed. G W Kitchin, 1861.

Bacon, F. (1977) Novum Organum, Chicago: Encyclopaedia Britannica, Inc.

Luther, M. (1989) Martin Luther’s Basic Theological Writings, Minneapolis: Fortress Press, ed. Timothy Lull.

Nietzsche, F. (1968) Twilight of the Idols, Penguin: Harmondsworth, trans. R. J. Hollingdale.

Nietzsche, F. (1982) The Portable Nietzsche,  Harmondsworth: Viking Penguin, trans. W. Kaufmann.

Nietzsche, F. (1998) Twilight of the Idols, Oxford: Oxford University Press, trans. D. Large.

Spinoza, B. (1992) The Ethics, Indianapolis: Hackett Publishing Company, trans. S Shirley.