Nietzsche 1
Nietzsche – On the Genealogy of Morals
Bio
Born on 15 October 1844, Nietzsche grew up in the small town of Röcken, near Leipzig, in the Prussian Province of Saxony.
In 1854, he began to attend Domgymnasium in Naumburg but since he showed particular talents in music and language
At Schulpforta, Nietzsche received an important grounding in languages – Greek, Latin, Hebrew, and French
After graduation in 1864, Nietzsche commenced studies in theology and classical philology at the University of Bonn.
In 1865, Nietzsche thoroughly studied the works of Arthur Schopenhauer.
In 1867, Nietzsche signed up for one year of voluntary service with the Prussian artillery division in Naumburg. He was regarded as one of the finest riders among his fellow recruits, and his officers predicted that he would soon reach the rank of captain. However, in March 1868, while jumping into the saddle of his horse, Nietzsche struck his chest against the pommel and tore two muscles in his left side, leaving him exhausted and unable to walk for months. Consequently Nietzsche turned his attention to his studies again, completing them and meeting with Richard Wagner for the first time later that year.
In part because of Ritschl’s support, Nietzsche received a remarkable offer to become professor of classical philology at the University of Basel in Switzerland. He was only 24 years old and had neither completed his doctorate nor received a teaching certificate.
Before moving to Basel, Nietzsche renounced his Prussian citizenship: for the rest of his life he remained officially stateless.
Nevertheless, Nietzsche served in the Prussian forces during the Franco-Prussian War (1870–1871) as a medical orderly. In his short time in the military, he experienced much and witnessed the traumatic effects of battle. He also contracted diphtheria and dysentery. Walter Kaufmann speculates that he might also have contracted syphilis along with his other infections at this time
Living off his pension from Basel and aid from friends, Nietzsche travelled frequently to find climates more conducive to his health and lived until 1889 as an independent author in different cities.
On 3 January 1889, Nietzsche suffered a mental collapse. Two policemen approached him after he caused a public disturbance in the streets of Turin. What happened remains unknown, but an often-repeated tale from shortly after his death states that Nietzsche witnessed the flogging of a horse at the other end of the Piazza Carlo Alberto, ran to the horse, threw his arms up around its neck to protect it, and then collapsed to the ground.
In 1893, Nietzsche’s sister Elisabeth returned from Nueva Germania in Paraguay following the suicide of her husband. She read and studied Nietzsche’s works and, piece by piece, took control of them and their publication.
In 1898 and 1899 Nietzsche suffered at least two strokes which partially paralysed him and left him unable to speak or walk. After contracting pneumonia in mid-August 1900, he had another stroke during the night of 24–25 August and died about noon on 25 August.
The Greek Music Drama, 1870
The Birth of Tragedy, 1872
The Untimely Meditations, 1873–6
Human, All Too Human, 1878
The Dawn, 1881
The Gay Science, 1882, 1887
Thus Spoke Zarathustra, 1883–5
Beyond Good and Evil, 1886
On the Genealogy of Morals, 1887
The Case of Wagner, 1888
Twilight of the Idols, 1888
The Antichrist, 1888
Ecce Homo, 1888
Nietzsche contra Wagner, 1888
The Will to Power and Other Posthumous Collections
On the Genealogy of Morals
First Essay
Nietzsche opens by expressing dissatisfaction with the English psychologists who have tried to explain the origin of morality. They claim to be historians of morality, but they completely lack a historical spirit. Their theories suggest that, originally, people benefiting from the unegoistic actions of others would applaud those actions and call them “good.” That is, initially, what was good and what was useful were considered one and the same. Over time, these genealogists suggest, we forgot this original association, and the habit of calling unegoistic actions “good” led us to conclude that they were somehow good in and of themselves.
Nietzsche disagrees with this account, suggesting that those to whom “goodness” was shown did not define “good.” Rather, it was the “good” themselves–the noble and the powerful–who defined the term. They came to see themselves as good when they came to see the contrast between themselves and those who were below them: the common people, the poor and the weak. Their position of power included the power over words, the power to decide what would be called “good” and what “bad.”
In support of his argument, Nietzsche remarks on the similarity between the German word for “bad” and the words for “plain” and “simple.”
Nietzsche also remarks on how “dark” and “black” are used as negative terms, presumably because of the dark-haired peoples of Europe who were overrun by blonde, Aryan conquerors.
Nietzsche then considers the change in language that takes place when the priestly caste gains power. Here, “pure” and “impure” become opposites associated with “good” and “bad.” This “pureness” consists in an abstinence from sex, from fighting, and from certain foods, a renouncement of many of the noble warrior’s habits. With these priests, everything becomes more dangerous: they alternate between brooding and emotional outbursts, and their wills are much stronger and sharper. But Nietzsche also remarks that only with the priests do human beings become interesting. With the priests, the human soul first gains those attributes that set it apart from animals: it acquires depth and becomes evil.
Though the priestly mode of evaluation springs from the knightly-aristocratic mode, it becomes its opposite, and its most hated enemy. Because the priests are impotent, they learn to hate, and their hate becomes more powerful than any of the warlike virtues lauded by the nobles. Nietzsche identifies the Jews as the finest example of the priestly caste, the most refined haters in human history. The Jews managed to effect a complete reversal in moral valuations, associating themselves, the poor, the wretched, the meek, with “good,” and the lustful, powerful, and noble as “evil,” damned for all eternity.
This revaluation of values effected by the Jews has happened so slowly that it has not been noticed. Its crowning achievement was the development of Christianity: Christian love, created by this burning hatred. Nietzsche sees Jesus as the ultimate embodiment of these Jewish ideals, and his crucifixion as the ultimate bait. All the opponents of the Jews might side with Jesus against them, thereby adopting his and their Judeo-Christian moral code. With the advent and success of Christianity, Nietzsche suggests, the reversal of the moral code became complete: what was once “good” became “evil” and what was once “bad” became “good.”
Nietzsche suggests that the “slave revolt in morality” begins when ressentiment, or resentment, becomes a creative force. Slave morality is essentially negative and reactive, originating in a denial of everything that is different from it. It looks outward and says “No” to the antagonistic external forces that oppose and oppress it. Master morality, on the other hand, concerns itself very little with what is outside of it. The low, the “bad,” is an afterthought and is noticed only as a contrast that brings out more strongly the superiority of the noble ones.
Ressentiment in philosophy and psychology, is one of the forms of resentment or hostility. It is the French word for “resentment”. Ressentiment is a sense of hostility directed at that which one identifies as the cause of one’s frustration, that is, an assignment of blame for one’s frustration. The sense of weakness or inferiority and perhaps jealousy in the face of the “cause” generates a rejecting/justifying value system, or morality, which attacks or denies the perceived source of one’s frustration. The ego creates an enemy in order to insulate itself from culpability.
This constant brooding and obsession with ones enemies begets the greatest invention of ressentiment: evil. The concept of the “evil enemy” is basic to ressentiment just as “good” is basic to the noble man. And just as the noble man develops the concept of “bad” almost as an afterthought, so is the concept of “good” created as an afterthought by the man of ressentiment to denote himself.
Nietzsche remarks on how different the concepts of “evil” and “bad” are, in spite of both being considered the opposite of “good.” He explains this difference by explaining that there are two very different concepts of “good” at work: The noble man’s “good” is precisely what the man of ressentiment calls “evil.”
Among their own kind, noble men are respectful and subdued, but when they venture out among strangers, they become little more than uncaged beasts– “blonde beasts,” as Nietzsche calls them. “Blonde” here is a reference to lions rather than to hair color, as Nietzsche bestows this name not only on Vikings and Goths, but also on Arab and Japanese nobility. The name “barbarian” is often associated with the violence that occasionally erupts from noble people.
Today’s world of ressentiment is neither: it is merely mediocre. Nietzsche characterizes the nihilism he detests in contemporary society as a weariness with humanity. We no longer fear humanity, but we also no longer have hopes for, reverence of, or affirmation of humanity. Nietzsche fears that our slave morality has rendered us insipid and dull.
It is quite natural that lambs may consider birds of prey to be evil, since they kill and carry off lambs. And from this, it may also be understandable that lambs consider everything unlike birds of prey–themselves, for instance–to be good.
While Nietzsche accepts these conclusions as understandable, he denies that they can be used to reproach or condemn birds of prey for killing lambs. It would be as absurd to ask a bird of prey not to kill as it would be to ask a lamb to kill.
Grammar has thus led us to think of a bird of prey as somehow separate from its expressions of strength, and thereby free either to kill or not to kill. On the contrary, Nietzsche suggests, the bird of prey is the strength is the killing. The lamb’s morality is in no position to hold the bird of prey accountable for killing: that would be equivalent to blaming it for existing.
When slave morality lauds its conception of “good,” praising all those who do not kill, hurt, or offend, it is essentially praising all those who are too powerless to cause any harm for not causing any harm. It interprets the inaction resulting from impotence as a positive, meritorious deed, as enduring ills and leaving revenge to God. Slave morality depends on the belief in a subject (or a “soul”) which is independent of its deeds, so that it can interpret its weakness as freedom, and its inaction as praiseworthy.
Nietzsche concludes with the remark that the struggle between “good and evil” and “good and bad” is one of the oldest and greatest on earth, and that the “good and evil” of ressentiment has unquestionably come out on top. He asks, however, if there might be a resurgence of the overthrown master morality, suggesting that we might will this with all our might.
Second Essay
Nietzsche opens the second essay by examining the significance of our ability to make promises. To hold to a promise requires both a powerful memory–the will that a certain event should not be forgotten–and a confidence about the future and one’s ability to hold to the promise in the future. This confidence demands that, on some level, we must make ourselves calculable or predictable, and for a people to be predictable, they must share a common set of laws or customs that govern their behavior.
Society and morality thus serve the purpose of making us predictable, which in turn serves the purpose of allowing us to make promises. This complicated process has as its end the “sovereign individual” who is able to make promises, not because he is bound by social mores but because he is master of his own free will. The sovereign individual is then faced with the tremendous responsibility of being free to make claims regarding his own future: we call this sense of responsibility a “conscience.”
Nietzsche then turns to the concepts of guilt and “bad conscience.” He identifies a similarity in the German words for “guilt” and “debt,” suggesting that, originally, guilt had nothing to do with accountability or immorality. Punishment was not meted out on the basis of guilt, but simply as a reprisal. If someone failed to fulfill a promise or pay off a loan they were in debt to the person they let down, and that debt could be balanced by submitting to punishment, cruelty, or torture. If a creditor could not have the pleasure of getting his money back, he could have the pleasure of harming his debtor. The memory that is necessary to our ability to make promises was thus “burned in”: all sorts of cruelty and punishment ensured that we would not forget our promise the next time.
And there were no hard feelings because everyone understood this is how things worked and once they were done, they were done.
Nietzsche remarks that making others suffer was considered a great joy–Nietzsche calls it a “festival”–that would balance out an unpaid debt. We find the origins of conscience, guilt, and duty in the festiveness of cruelty: their origins were “like the beginnings of everything great on earth, soaked in blood thoroughly and for a long time.”
Nietzsche suggests that our revulsion against suffering is, on the one hand, a revulsion against all our instincts, and, on the other hand, a revulsion against the senselessness of suffering. Nietzsche suggests that we invented gods so that there was some all-witnessing presence to insure that no suffering ever went unnoticed.
Nietzsche traces the origins of guilt and conscience to the primitive relationship between buyer and seller, creditor and debtor. The community provides shelter, peace, security, and much else besides, placing people in its debt. People who break the laws of their community are not only not repaying the debt, but they are assaulting their creditor. No wonder such offenders face the harshest of punishments.
Nietzsche also observes that the more powerful the community becomes, the less it needs to punish offenders. If the community is weak, any attack against it is life threatening, and such a threat must be eliminated. A community that is strong enough to resist all sorts of assaults has the luxury of letting offenders go unpunished. Such a society has overcome its demand for strict justice. We give the name “mercy” to the expression of power in letting an offender go.
Nietzsche next turns to the origin of justice, suggesting that the reactive affects of revenge and ressentiment are the last to be touched by justice. Very few can truly be just toward someone who has harmed them. Still, the noble man who lashes out against someone who harms him is far closer to justice than the man of ressentiment, who is poisoned by prejudice and self-deception.
Justice and the institution of law essentially take revenge out of the hands of the offended party. If I am robbed, it is justice, and not myself, that has been harmed, and so justice must claim revenge. Thus, Nietzsche suggests, the concept of justice can only exist in a society that has established laws that can be transgressed: there is no such thing as “justice in itself.”
The concept of punishment, for instance, has an aspect that is enduring and an aspect that is fluid. Contrary to what we might otherwise assume, Nietzsche suggests that the act of punishing is what endures, and the purpose for which we punish is what is fluid. Punishment has such a long history that it’s no longer clear exactly why we punish. Nietzsche provides a long list of different “meanings” that punishment has had over the ages.
In this list, Nietzsche nowhere mentions the development of “bad conscience,” and suggests that even today, punishment does not awaken a feeling of guilt. Punishment arouses the sense of “something has gone unexpectedly wrong” not of “I should not have done that.” Punishment is treated as a misfortune, and serves to make us more prudent and tame.
Having dismissed punishment as the origin of bad conscience, Nietzsche offers his own hypothesis: bad conscience came about with the transition from hunter-gatherer societies to permanent settlements. All our animal instincts of life in the wild became useless, and, in order to survive, we had to rely on our conscious mind rather than our unconscious instincts.
Nietzsche suggests that instincts that cannot be released outwardly must be turned inward. The instincts of hunting, cruelty, hostility and destruction that characterized our pre-historic lives had to be suppressed when we entered into society. As a result, we turned all this violence in toward ourselves, made ourselves a new wilderness to be struggled against and conquered. In so doing, we developed an inner life and bad conscience. Nietzsche characterizes the war we wage against our own instincts as “man’s suffering of man, of himself,” and sees in this struggle the suggestion that “man [is] not a goal but only a way, an episode, a bridge, a great promise.”
This assessment relies on the assumption that the transition into settled communities was a violent one, that it was forced upon the majority by a tyrannical minority: the “social contract” is a myth. Deprived of freedom, the majority had to turn their instinct for freedom inward upon themselves, thus creating the bad conscience. In so doing, they also created the idea of beauty and developed selflessness as an ideal.
Next, Nietzsche traces the development of the bad conscience beginning with the sense of indebtedness early tribe members must have felt toward the founders of the tribe. As the tribe became increasingly powerful, there was an increasing debt that had to be paid to these revered ancestors. Given enough time, these ancestors came to be worshipped as gods. As “the maximum god attained so far,” the Christian God also produces the maximum feeling of guilty indebtedness. This debt cannot possibly be repaid, and so we develop the concepts of eternal damnation and of all people being born with irredeemable original sin. The genius of Christianity is then to have God (as Christ) sacrifice himself in order to redeem all our sins: God, the creditor, sacrifices himself out of love for his debtor.
Nietzsche suggests that not all Gods serve to reinforce bad conscience. While the Christian God is the focal point of bad conscience, self- torture, and guilt, the Greek gods serve as a celebration of their animal instincts, as a force to ward off the bad conscience.
Nietzsche concludes by suggesting that there might be a way out of the past few millenia of bad conscience and self-torture. If the bad conscience could be turned not against our animal instincts, but against everything in us that opposes those instincts and turns against life itself, we could turn consciousness toward an affirmation of life and against the “illnesses” of Christianity and nihilism.
Nietzsche suggests that the will to power is the fundamental drive that motivates all things. This suggestion might contrast with the suggestion that our fundamental drive is the will to life; that is, the suggestion that above all we pursue self-preservation. There are a number of reasons for seeing power as more important to us than life. For instance, the martyr who is willing to die for a cause is essentially saying “you can kill me, you can do anything to my body, but you cannot touch my principles because I am powerful enough to resist all your threats.” This martyr clearly values that power of independence more than life itself.
Third Essay
Nietzsche introduces this essay by asking, “what is the meaning of ascetic ideals?” He answers that it has meant many different things to many different people, suggesting that we would “rather will nothingness than not will.”
After a brief discussion of Wagner, Nietzsche concludes that we can learn little about the meaning of ascetic ideals from artists, because they always lean on the authority of some prior philosophy, morality, or religion
Everything strives to secure for itself those conditions under which it maximizes its feeling of power. Philosophers thus abhor marriage (Nietzsche observes that Heraclitus, Plato, Descartes, Spinoza, Leibniz, Kant, and Schopenhauer never married) and all other distractions from their philosophical pursuits. In this, Nietzsche finds the meaning of ascetic ideals among philosophers: it is a means to maximize the feeling of power. Ascetic ideals are not a denial of existence, but rather an affirmation of existence, wherein the philosopher affirms his and only his existence. Thus, Nietzsche concludes, philosophers do not write about asceticism from a disinterested standpoint. They think of its value to themselves,and how they can benefit from it. Philosophers are at their best when they isolate themselves from the bustle and chatter of the world about them.
Having identified the value of ascetic ideals among philosophers, Nietzsche goes on to argue that philosophy was born of and depends on ascetic ideals. All major changes in our world have been achieved through violence and have been mistrusted. The contemplative, skeptical mood of philosophy ran counter to ancient morality, and must have been mistrusted. The best way to dispel this mistrust was to arouse fear, and Nietzsche sees the ancient Brahmins as paramount in this respect. Through self-torture and asceticism, they made not only others fear and reverence them, but they came also to fear and reverence themselves.
Essentially, Nietzsche suggests, philosophers could not parade as philosophers, and so chose a different mask to present themselves. With the Brahmins, and with most philosophers since, this mask has been that of the ascetic priest. Nietzsche suggests that this is still the case: there is not yet enough freedom of will on this earth for the philosopher to drop the pretence of the ascetic priest.
In the ascetic priest we find the most serious representative of the ascetic ideal. He sees life as “a wrong road on which one must finally walk back to the point where it begins, or as a mistake that is put right by deeds.” Life, with all its sensory pleasures and distractions, must be denied and turned against itself. The result is the ascetic life. In this light, the ascetic life is not a goal, but a path away from life toward something different and better.
Ascetic ideals spring up spontaneously everywhere on earth, in every time and culture. There must be something desirable in ascetic ideals that it should be so universal. The ascetic life seems to be a contradiction: it is the will to stop willing, life turned against itself. It is an expression of the will to power trying to master not some part of life, but trying to master life itself.
Such a contradictory will, when turned to philosophy, is likely to turn itself against the real, claiming that it is unreal. Thus, physical objects are seen as illusions, and the human subject and the ego are renounced. Reason is limited to dealing with the illusions of physical reality, and cannot penetrate the truth itself.
Rather than argue against this point of view, Nietzsche expresses some gratefulness toward it. By shifting our perspective, it allows us to see a matter from a new point of view. This point of view may not be objective–influenced as it is by ascetic ideals–but, Nietzsche suggests, there is no such thing as an “objective” point of view; at least, there is no such thing as the “pure, will-less, painless, timeless knowing subject” that we posit as the ground for things like pure reason and absolute truth. We can only approach objectivity, Nietzsche argues, by gaining as many perspectives as we can on a matter: “There is only a perspective seeing, only a perspective ‘knowing’; and the more affects we allow to speak about one thing, the more eyes, different eyes, we can use to observe one thing, the more complete will our ‘concept’ of this thing, our ‘objectivity,’ be.” Nietzsche objects to ascetic ideals only insofar as it tries to eliminate thought altogether. This would not be a different perspective, but a demolition of all perspectives.
Nietzsche next tackles the contradiction found in saying that the ascetic ideal represents “life against life.” He suggests that quite the contrary is true, that “the ascetic ideal springs from the protective instinct of a degenerating life.” Humans are great experimenters, constantly exploring, searching, and struggling to gain power over themselves, over nature, even over the gods. Through this entire struggle and self-torture, we have also made ourselves “sick,” and it is no wonder that we find the ascetic ideal springing up everywhere. Though it may seem to deny life, the ascetic ideal is supremely life affirming, as it says “yes” to life in the face of hardship and sickness.
Nietzsche says this “sickness” arises from nausea at and a pity for humanity. This nausea inspires nihilism, the will to nothingness, which characterizes ascetic ideals. The nihilism of the weakest and the sickest is a great danger to any who are still healthy, as it parades as virtue, claiming that health, power, and happiness are evils that will be punished. The strong should not be ashamed of their strength, and they must be quarantined from the sick if they are to maintain their strength. They should not pity, or try to cure, the “sick” majority.
Having perceived that the spiritually healthy cannot look after the sick without becoming sick themselves, Nietzsche concludes that the sick need “doctors and nurses who are themselves sick.” The role of the ascetic priest is precisely to tend the sick masses. He must be sick himself, but also strong enough to lead and dominate the masses. The ressentiment of the masses demands that they find someone to blame for their suffering, and this search for a scapegoat can be violent and dangerous. The ascetic priest serves the purpose of altering the direction of the ressentiment, by persuading the masses that they themselves, and no one else, are to blame for their suffering. This renders them harmless, promotes their self-discipline, and by organizing them into a religious framework of sin and guilt, helps to keep them apart from the healthy.
However, the priest only serves to ease the suffering of the sick without trying to cure the sickness itself. The sick are those who haven’t the strength for the great struggle of humanity against its instincts, and religion does not give the sick strength so much as it eases their sense of displeasure at life.
Nietzsche identifies two primary ways in which the ascetic priest combats this prevailing sense of displeasure. First, there is the attempt to dull the sensations and the will so that the pain of this world isn’t felt as keenly. The supreme state of redemption is seen, particularly by Indian philosophy, as liberation from everything: truth, knowledge, reality, good, evil, etc. all fade to insignificance as the soul slides into a deep sleep.
Second, there is the attempt to distract the mind from its suffering by means of hard work. The priest manages to convince the lower classes that hard work is blessed, and so they set themselves to it with ardor. Also, in commending small deeds of selflessness and neighborly love, the ascetic priest prescribes a harmless and easily attained expression of the will to power. This spirit of mutual helpfulness is what brings the weak together into congregations.
While these two are primarily “innocent” means of working against the feeling of displeasure, there is also the “guilty” means of working up an “orgy of feeling.” These “orgies of feeling” are found in the concepts of sin, guilt, bad conscience and the like, and they are “guilty” means because they ultimately serve to make the sick sicker. The ascetic priest convinces the sick to find the cause of their suffering in themselves, to see their suffering as punishment. Once we come to see ourselves as sinners, there is no hope of being healed. Our suffering in that case is misunderstood as being fully our own fault, and we indulge this suffering in masochistic orgies of feeling.
Nietzsche remarks that the poisoning influence of ascetic ideals has also harmed good taste. For instance, Nietzsche finds the New Testament a despicable example of bad taste, a collection of anecdotes written by early Christians tacked on to the end of the Old Testament (which Nietzsche deeply admires) and then proclaimed to be its culmination. Nietzsche acknowledges that he is virtually alone in despising the New Testament, but he holds to his opinion.
Having accused the ascetic ideal of ruining both taste and health, Nietzsche shifts his focus to the main topic of the essay: what the ascetic ideal means. The ascetic ideal is so powerful, Nietzsche suggests, because it interprets all human history and human experience in terms of its one goal. It interprets everything, and denies the validity of any alternative interpretaton. Nietzsche asks whether there is any other will that might oppose the monstrous power of the will expressed by the ascetic ideal.
Nietzsche first considers the suggestion that science is such an opposing will. Science has been able to stand on the strength of its own interpretations without calling on the existence of God, an afterlife, or asceticism. Nietzsche opposes this suggestion, claiming that science lacks the positive will that characterizes ascetic ideals, and where it does arouse passion, it manifests itself only as the latest incarnation of the ascetic ideal itself.
Scholars may appear to have independent wills because they renounce faith of all kinds. They demand proof and rigorous reasoning, and will not base their claims on faith in God or religious doctrines. However, Nietzsche suggests, they renounce these faiths only in favor of a different faith: a faith in truth. As long as they have faith in truth, they cannot speak as truly free spirits: “nothing is true, everything is permitted.”
Science’s obsession with truth leads it to value facts and facts alone. Interpretation relies on a distortion of the truth, a particular way of looking at the truth, and so a faith in absolute truth calls for pure, uninterpreted facts. This abstinence from interpretation is as much an expression of the ascetic ideal as the chastity of a priest. Science’s faith in the absolute and metaphysical value of truth is essentially a faith in the ascetic ideal. Science, like everything else, requires a will, a “faith” that will motivate it and direct it. That scholars deny that they allow themselves to be driven by any will is only a manifestation of their ascetic ideals.
Not even truth should be believed in blindly. We have a tendency to see truth as a justification in itself, just as the religious see the word of God as a justification in itself. Nietzsche asserts: “The will to truth requires a critique … the value of truth must for once be experimentally called into question.” Even our faith in truth needs to be justified.
Science, says Nietzsche, does not create values: it always exists in the service of some other values. Thus, it cannot be the force that opposes the ascetic ideal. Rather, it and the ascetic ideal are together in their valuing of truth as being beyond criticism. Science may seem opposed to religion, but it has merely replaced God with truth as an absolute, transcendent ground that justifies and explains existence.
Science with its will to truth is not the antithesis to the ascetic ideal. Rather, Nietzsche suggests, the opposing force is found in the self-overcoming of the ascetic ideal, when the meaning of the will to truth is called into question.
Nietzsche concludes with the observation that our problem is not that we suffer but that we need to give meaning to our suffering. We cling to the ascetic ideal because it explains life to us; it explains why we must suffer. Granted, ascetic ideals direct the will against pleasure, beauty, even life itself, but it is still a will. And, Nietzsche says, returning to the point with which he opened the third essay, “man would rather will nothingness than not will.”
Discussion Questions