by Winston Tingle
It was in the late 19th century that Friedrich Nietzsche launched his famous attack against religion and its moral precepts. Since the time of Nietzsche’s writing, Western society has only become more secular. Perhaps as we attempt to situate ourselves in the new world we are still just beginning to find ourselves in, it might be prudent to examine his account of religious thought. While some of Nietzsche’s claims about religion can be taken generally, that is, in regard to all religion, Nietzsche’s critique ends up being largely directed toward Judeo-Christian groups in Europe—religious traditions and theologies that were influential in his time and part of the world. Nietzsche’s arguments in On the Genealogy of Morality are nevertheless taken as one of the strongest attacks on religion in the Western philosophical tradition. A critique that actually sets up the problem of the modern self: without divine warrant for any particular set of behaviors and attitudes, how are we supposed to understand and conduct our lives?
Nietzsche’s first argument against religion is that the moral values it impresses on its followers do not have divine origins. Though the church asserts that they come from God, and are therefore good in their very essence, Nietzsche argues that they have worldly origins, origins that may not be driven by the purest of motivations. Nietzsche first questions how those values Judaism and the Christian church consider to be moral—that is to say, meekness, selflessness, self-sacrifice, and so forth—first came to be viewed as such, and likewise how those actions considered immoral—self-interestedness, lust to rule, delight in excess, and so forth—came to be viewed as such. Nietzsche attributes this development to a revolt against the power-possessing people of society by the oppressed and downtrodden masses. Here, importantly, Nietzsche summons the Jewish people as the progenitors of Christianity. Nietzsche illustrates how the disenfranchised, powerless, or common people develop moral valuations which favour themselves—that is to say, which hold forms of weakness, which for Nietzsche means meekness, selflessness, and unegoistic action, as being “good”—and use these values against their oppressors:
out of the vengeful cunning of powerlessness the oppressed, downtrodden, violated say to themselves: “let us be different from the evil ones, namely good! And good is what everyone is who doesn’t retaliate, who leaves vengeance to God, who keeps himself concealed, as we do, who avoids all evil, and in general demands very little of life, like us, the patient, humble, righteous”—it means, when listened to coldly and without prejudice, actually nothing more than: “we weak ones are simply weak; it is good if we do nothing for which we are not strong enough.” (1.13/p. 26)
The powerless essentially claim that though the powerful may have worldly superiority, they, the powerless, have spiritual superiority. It is their only advantage over the powerful who lord over them. Thus, moral values are established not through a divine hand but through a basic, even automatic human attempt at retaliation, not for the sake of the souls of the powerless, but rather for the sake of their own satisfaction. Nietzsche specifically levels his critique of these moral values on Judaism and, ultimately, Christianity, to which he attributes this “slave revolt in morality” (1.7/p. 17). Nietzsche’s first point of contention over religion, then, is that the moral values it propagates are really done so under false pretenses. They are not transcendent, rather they are actually the products of petty anger, hatred, and even deceit (as the phrase “vengeful cunning” might suggest). They are meaningless as purportedly transcendental values.
But Nietzsche doesn’t just think that these moral values are ill-founded: he argues that in some sense they might actually be increasing the world’s suffering—achieving the opposite of their alleged purpose. Nietzsche sees the dissatisfied anger and hatred of the powerless, what he refers to as ressentiment, at the heart of Judeo-Christian thought, and therefore at the core of Western thought in general. He takes great issue with these sorts of thought patterns as he finds them hypocritical, and in some measure, debilitating. To demonstrate the extent of Christianity’s ill-willed approach to the world, Nietzsche quotes Thomas Aquinas, the eminent theologian, who said that “The blessed in the kingdom of heaven will see the punishments of the damned, in order that their bliss be more delightful to them” (1.15/p. 28). Not the most traditionally Christlike of sentiments, to be sure. Nietzsche finds these sorts of sentiments, those of ressentiment, objectionable not least because of their hypocrisy, but because he sees them as potentially counterproductive. He writes, “just ask yourself who is actually ‘evil’ in the sense of the morality of ressentiment…precisely the noble, the powerful, the ruling one, only recoloured, only reinterpreted, only reseen through the poisonous eye of ressentiment” (1.11/p. 22). According to Nietzsche, the “evil” one in the eye of the person of ressentiment is the powerful one, the one who, because they are powerful, is actually capable of projecting their will onto the world and of deriving happiness from within, rather than through the judgement of others. Nietzsche writes,
The “well-born” simply felt themselves to be the “happy”; they did not first have to construct their happiness artificially by looking at their enemies, to talk themselves into it, to lie themselves into it (as all human beings of ressentiment tend to do); and as full human beings, overloaded with power and therefore necessarily active, they likewise did not know how to separate activity out from happiness. (1.10/p. 20)
Nietzsche’s big problem with ressentiment is that it is a condition which starts first from a place of unhappiness, of hatred, and from there can only derive happiness through exterior means and comparison with one’s enemies. Going further, ressentiment disdains those very things—namely power, self-interest, and associated traits, which Nietzsche sees as necessary to having happiness as one’s basic condition, and the making of real activity in the world. The people of ressentiment then go on to impose their subjective experience of the world onto the world as fact; their enemies become the world’s enemies, and popular morality is born. This is the “slave revolt in morality,” and according to Nietzsche, it has left us all a great deal worse off. In fostering an attitude of ressentiment, religion distorts people’s perception of the world, of the other people in it, and of themselves. Ressentiment, and by extension Christian religion, has created a cultural atmosphere of judgement, hatred, and general ill-will toward others, and fosters an ill-founded sense of superiority in the hearts of the people of who participate in it.
Europe’s problems with religion don’t end at ressentiment. Nietzsche observes a second kind of cruelty at play, one that isn’t directed outward, as ressentiment is, but instead inward—guilt, or “active bad-conscience” and its active manifestation as self-torment. Nietzsche believes that people by nature possess a certain desire to be cruel and inflict suffering on others, that they get some sort of satisfaction out of it. He describes how, historically, in creditor/debtor relationships, in a case of non-payment on the debtor’s part, the creditor would possess a right to the punishment of the debtor, writing that, “Through his ‘punishment’ of the debtor, the creditor […] for once attains the elevating feeling of being permitted to hold a being in contempt and maltreat it as something ‘beneath himself’” (2.5/p. 41). Nietzsche references how suffering and inflicting pain was historically something humans celebrated:
In any case it has not been all that long since one could not imagine royal marriages and folk festivals in the grandest style without executions, torturings […] likewise no noble housing without beings on whom one could vent one’s malice and cruel teasing without a second thought. (2.6/p. 42)
Nietzsche argues that no matter how we may like to think of ourselves today, humans do seem to derive some pleasure from cruelty, maybe some “animal” (Nietzsche 2.16/p. 53) sort of satisfaction. Nietzsche believes that, in modern society, we are ashamed of our cruelty and repress it, and are therefore more unhappy: “when humanity was not yet ashamed of its cruelty, life on earth was more lighthearted than it is now” (2.7/p. 43). Nietzsche is concerned with how this cruelty manifests itself in the modern day. He doesn’t think this urge has been tamed, rather that today it only exercises itself in a different form. He writes,
Perhaps one may even be allowed to admit the possibility that this pleasure in cruelty needn’t actually have died out: but, in the same proportion as the pain hurts more today, it would need a certain sublimation and subtilization, namely it would have to appear translated into the imaginative and inward. (2.7/p. 43)
Nietzsche believes that today we still get satisfaction out of inflicting suffering, only the suffering we inflict we now inflict upon ourselves. (Of course, it persists in other forms as well, but this is the one Nietzsche is most interested in.) The bad-conscience the debtor used to experience in relation to the creditor, we now experience in relation to ourselves, or perhaps, in relation to God.
In Nietzsche’s argument, the crucifixion of Christ stands as a tool by which people can inflict psychic pain on themselves, thereby relieving their repressed desire to cause pain. He writes that it is,
Christianity’s stroke of genius: God sacrificing himself for the guilt of man, God himself exacting payment of himself, God as the only one who can redeem from man what has become irredeemable for man himself—the creditor sacrificing himself for his debtor, out of love. (2.21/p. 63)
This is a debt that people can never repay—it is the greatest and most unearned of sacrifices. The crucifixion stands as a mechanism with which people can inflict not just psychic pain on themselves, but the maximum amount of psychic pain possible, all in order to obtain some kind of personal fulfillment. Nietzsche explains that “this man of bad-conscience has taken over the religious presupposition in order to drive his self-torture to its most gruesome severity and sharpness. Guilt before God: this thought becomes an instrument of torture for him” (2.22/p. 63). This is another of Nietzsche’s problems with the Christian religion specifically. (Some other religions, as he points out, don’t have the same trouble with guilt [2.23/p. 64].) Having been socialized to indulge in bad-conscience and to participate in self-torment, but not admit to the satisfaction they get out of it, let alone the satisfaction they get out of inflicting pain on others, people are denying part of their true nature, their will-to-inflict-pain, and become profoundly dissatisfied. This repression, and its dismal fruits, to Nietzsche, are quite upsetting.
It is in the Genealogy’s third treatise that Nietzsche’s critique of the sort of metaphysics found in religions emerges in its most comprehensive form. Exploring the value of ascetic ideals, his conclusions certainly diverge from many readers’ expectations. These “ascetic ideals” in question are of course those which esteem self-control and the suppression of material, emotional, bodily, or otherwise worldly desires. As we might anticipate, he observes these ideals in the lifestyles of religious authorities—those of the once subjugated “priestly” social caste (the alleged original perpetrators of the “slave revolt in morality”)—but also as having an acute presence in the lives of philosophers, scientists, and so forth—“all great fruitful inventive spirits” (Nietzsche 3.8/p. 76). As Janaway points out, this is a broader category of people than it may seem in translation, with their pursuits often described simply as “science,” as opposed to the original German Wissenschaft, encompassing the much more far-reaching concept of systematic inquiry, which would then include a great number of academic disciplines beyond the natural sciences, for a start (Janaway 230).
Though these scholars (if we are to give them a single name) may seem at first, and claim themselves, to represent the rejection of the sort of life-denying, allergy-to-the-physical attitudes that seem to be epitomized in those “priestly” individuals, Nietzsche makes the significant discovery that they are, as it turns out, mistaken. These scholars, even if self-styled atheists understanding themselves to be freed from religious worldviews, still worship, only less obviously, and directed towards a different God. Nietzsche finds most scholars to be innocent of this hypocrisy, but only because they pursue no ideal at all, describing their “mindless diligence, their heads smoking day and night, their very mastery of their craft—how often all this has its true sense in preventing something from becoming visible to oneself! Science as a means of self-anesthetization” (3.23/p. 108). Nietzsche isn’t interested in these directionless souls, but rather, in those scholars of the idealistic persuasion. He contends that though “they believe themselves to be as detached as possible from the ascetic ideal […] [t]hese are by no means free spirits: for they still believe in truth” (3.24/pp. 108–109). Nietzsche goes so far as to say that these scholars have imposed a metaphysical value on truth, fashioning it into Truth. They have turned from God so that they might worship a different monosyllable. Nietzsche is not arguing, of course, that truth is actually something unattainable or without value (otherwise, why would he be writing at all?). Rather, as Janaway puts it: “He is charging them with valuing truth in a certain way” (Janaway 231). In the same way the priests venerate God and the moral truth He represents as something above themselves and the physical world, so do the scholars promote truth itself to a higher cosmological position and, importantly, engage in the same forms of self-sacrifice in its name.
It is important to remember, this behaviour is by no means limited to just the scholars and priests, but to “all great fruitful inventive spirits”: even as the priests and scholars elevate their ideals above all else, so too do artists elevate their art above themselves, athletes their sport, and so on. But we shouldn’t let this point slip away from us, that the club of the ascetic ideal is made up precisely by the sorts of “inventive spirits” Nietzsche admires most. This is a point that Nietzsche is very concerned with emphasizing, but that many (including myself) have been all too willing to overlook. This oversight perhaps shouldn’t be attributed entirely to intellectual laziness (only mostly): Nietzsche’s attitude toward the ascetic ideal, especially the ascetic priest, is checkered with ambivalence. Confusion likely arises from the fact that Nietzsche has spent most of the text up until this point engaged in a polemical attack of the values and beliefs held and proselytized by the ascetic priest. His perspectivism doesn’t by any means spring up for the first time in the third treatise; the critique retains a not insignificant degree of nuance throughout, but he has been up until this point much more engaged with the negative side of all things ascetic. Indeed, even in the third treatise there is a part of him that still finds the worldview of the ascetic priest deeply troubling. He writes that:
The idea we are fighting about here is the valuation of our life on the part of the ascetic priest: he relates our life (together with that to which it belongs: ‘nature,’ ‘world,’ the entire sphere of becoming and of transitoriness) to an entirely different kind of existence, which it opposes and excludes, unless, perhaps, it were to turn against itself, to negate itself: in this case, the case of an ascetic life, life is held to be a bridge for that other existence […] [It is] Such a monstrous manner of valuation (3.11/p. 83)
Nietzsche fears the implications of this sort of life-denying on both an individual and societal level. This seeming “life-against-life” approach to existence can easily seem on the one hand to be harmful and self-defeating to an almost frightening degree, but on the other:
The ascetic priest is the incarnate wish for a different existence somewhere else, and in fact the highest degree of the wish, its true fervor and passion: but the very power of his wishing is the shackle that binds him here; in this very process he becomes a tool that must work at creating more favorable conditions for being-here and being-human […] precisely he belongs to the very great conserving and yes-creating forces of life. (3.13/p. 86)
This reversal is arguably the singular moment of the Genealogy. That such polar ideas about the ascetic priest can be simultaneously found to be true, existing in perfect contradiction of one another, is the epitome of Nietzsche’s perspectivism. While from a certain point of view the ascetic priest can appear as an extremely powerful nihilistic force, a profound threat to mankind’s wellbeing, a broader perspective reveals just the kind of life-affirming power the ascetic priest wields against nihilism. In constructing a meaning for our ceaseless suffering, “we have successfully shielded ourselves from a threatening tide of arbitrariness and pointlessness” (Janaway 240). Constructed though this meaning may be, what is the alternative? Searching for the Truths of the academy? It is only another construction, only another ascetic pursuit.
But now, the question arises: what does all this mean for the individual self, liberated by Nietzsche from religion and Truth? The Genealogy marks a focussed attempt on the part of Nietzsche at a “revaluation of all values”, but while we have explored and understood his critique of popular moral values, the “re-” part of “revaluation” is now, at the time we need it the most, decidedly elusive. Especially with Nietzsche’s eventual embrace of the ascetic priest as a “yes-creating force,” conceding that the very values he has spent much of the work criticizing are in fact useful in the most fundamental of senses, it can be difficult to see what sort of “re-valuation” has really taken place. In light of the negative side of Nietzsche’s critique—his issues with selflessness, self-sacrifice, and so forth as moral imperatives—his eventual affirmation of ascetic ideals can be a tough pill to swallow. And so, we search for something deeper. Plain adherence to ascetic ideals, gratifying as they (in a perhaps somewhat twisted way) may be, might not be enough for people; they would at least prefer some knowledge of a new, basic—though of course, not divine—ideal. Certainly, Nietzsche doesn’t seem to think that the ascetic ideal is the, for lack of a better word, ideal manifestation of the yes-creating force: the ascetic priest merely “belongs to the very great conserving and yes-creating forces of life” (3.13/p. 86). Kaufmann argues that it was not Nietzsche’s conception of the “revaluation” to “re-valuate” at all, insisting that those who desire to “produce Nietzsche’s ‘new’ virtues” must “rely on their imaginations,” and that “the ‘revaluation’ means a war against accepted valuations, not the creation of new ones” (110–111). This seems true, but only to a certain extent. That Nietzsche was more concerned with evaluation than revaluation tracks consistently with his explorations in the text, which only on occasion gestures to the virtues he holds in higher regard (courage, honesty, integrity, or whatever else you’d like to interpret), but Kaufmann overlooks the fact that Nietzsche does clearly uncover at least one essential value.
In Nietzsche’s closing remarks, he does his utmost to make it clear:
One simply cannot conceal from oneself what all the willing that has received its direction from the ascetic ideal actually expresses: this hatred of the human, still more of the animal, still more of the material, this abhorrence of the senses, of reason itself, this fear of happiness and of beauty, this longing away from all appearance, change, becoming, death, wish, longing itself—all of this means—let us dare to grasp this—a will to nothingness, an aversion to life, a rebellion against the most fundamental presuppositions of life; but it is and remains a will! […] man would much rather will nothingness than not will …. (3.28/p. 118)
So it is that the fundamental life-giving value is will itself. It needn’t be the purest expression of the noble “will to power,” or the hostile “will to nothingness,” so long as it is a will. Unlike the other virtues people associate with Nietzsche (i.e., courage, honesty, integrity, etc.), this is one that runs beneath the surface, underlying them all. The cultivation of any other value only functions as a life-giving endeavour because it provides a goal, and thus, a will: “the basic fact of the human will […] it needs a goal” (Nietzsche 3.1/p. 67). Considering this, in this new world we inhabit, how should we attempt to understand our lives? With his critique of religion, Nietzsche removes from us the goals and ideals that have until this point guided Western society, but in his description of the ascetic priest, he reminds us of what it is about the ascetic ideal that draws us in and nourishes us. We understand that it is will that gives life its colour, makes it “interesting” (Nietzsche 3.20/p. 102), and gives us forward momentum. And how should we conduct our lives? If it’s will that gives our lives that special, sought-after, heady quality, then, naturally, we should do our best to cultivate it. And we should look for it anywhere we can because, like Nietzsche, we may find that it lies in the unlikeliest of places.
Works Cited
Janaway, Christopher. Beyond Selflessness: Reading Nietzsche’s Genealogy. Oxford University Press, 2007.
Kaufmann, Walter. Nietzsche: Philosopher, Psychologist, Antichrist. 4th ed., Princeton University Press, 1974.
Nietzsche, Friedrich, et al. On the Genealogy of Morality. Hackett Publishing Company, Inc, 1998.