Nietzsche, Morality, and Eternity`

 [written in 2008]

The following essay is addressed to a woman and was in response to one of her posts on her weblog. The post was about Nietzsche's theory of morality. The woman claimed that Nietzsche asserted that all morality is a result of group think. I refuted this claim and wrote other things as well. It may be of some interest to my readers, or not.

Okay, zur Sache, as the Krauts say. First off, it is wrong to claim that Nietzsche proposed that morality is always the product of group think, if by "group" you mean the unwashed, knuckle-scraping masses of the "herd". For Nietzsche there are two categories of morality, the one of "good and bad" and the other of "good and evil". The former is the morality of the strong and is by Nietzsche's lights the healthy, life-affirming morality. The latter is the morality of the weak, which is according to Nietzsche based not upon love, as its proponents claim, but upon vindictive resentment against the strong. This is what Nietzsche calls "slave morality" and that is what would be according to him the morality of the "herd" and not the former morality of the aristocratic lords or simply the strong.

Now, it is crucial to understand that Nietzsche's critique of morality is not a critique of morality as such. In fact, he regards morality or values as indispensable for any thriving culture. A culture that has no values will fall victim to decadence and nihilism. Nihilism is the idea that nothing in life is of value. If nothing in life is of value, then suicide is the only reasonable answer. What is true on an individual level is also true on the cultural: A culture that falls victim to nihilism will have no reason to sustain itself and will die out. Nietzsche's entire project was to come up with a new set of values that would counter the nihilism he saw threatening to snuff out his beloved European culture.

Nietzsche argued vehemently that the Christian faith was directly responsible for this grave nihilistic threat. To understand why he thought so, we must understand his analysis of slave morality. Slave morality is a reaction of the weak against the strong. The weak are weak precisely because they can't retaliate against the strong when the strong rape and pillage them. So, the weak literally make a virtue out of their pathetic lot and declare that they don't strike back not because they can't but because they are the ones who are truly good and moral, and the raping and pillaging aristocratic lords are not just bad; they are evil.

But the strong will get their comeuppance. Just not in this life. In the next life, and in that life they will be consigned to the lowest depth of sulphurous hell, and the weak will see this gruesome spectacle and rejoice because the revenge which they could not accomplish in this life will be achieved spectacularly in the next. Thus, Nietszche regards all the Christian claims about love to be bogus. All Christian morality is predicated upon a final eschatological payback for the noble blond beast. This is a morality not of love but revenge.

But these Christian values did produce a thriving culture for even though it was at bottom a religion of resentment against the powerful, it at the very least had a conception of a mighty jealous God that gave the Christian Age a purpose and a sense of meaning. But the Christian Faith had within itself the seeds of its own destruction: its insistence that liberation comes through truth, which, of course, meant that Christians had a moral obligation to uncover the truth. This obligation to the truth produced modern science, and modern science in turn showed the truth to be this: that the Christian Faith is a silly myth and that there is no God. God is dead.

But even though modern science had unmasked the Christian Faith as just another hollow ideology, Christian values still formed the basis of the modern West, and this is where the nihilistic crisis kicks in. Society in the modern west is based upon values which are in turned based upon something that modern science has shown to be simply nothing. Hence, the modern west values nothing. The only thing to do is to scrap the Christian Faith entirely and start afresh with a new set of values, one that will place the ultimate value on life in this world instead of life in some non-existent next. This is the project that Nietzsche terms Die Umwertung aller Werte, the transvaluation of all values.

Okay, fine, but this transvaluation cannot be effected simply by an attack on the Christian Faith. It cannot even be effected by replacing the Christian Faith with some new philosophy of life. What must be done first and foremost is a radical uprooting of everything Christian, but this is much harder than at first impression. One cannot just merely get rid of the creed, the Bible, various pious devotions etc., one must go to the heart of the matter, and for Nietzsche the heart of the matter is actually not so much the Christian faith but the very idea that this world can be understood only by another world in the beyond, and this could be the Christian Heaven or the Platonic Realm of Forms. As long as this world is understood as a mere anticipation of or an imperfect participation in some eternal otherworldly realm, then this world is subordinate to nothingness and is, hence, robbed of its value. Nietzsche's war on the Christian Faith is ultimately a war against the Platonic tradition of metaphysics. Not only that, his war is against the very notion of understanding our world in the light of eternity.

Philosophers throughout the centuries have taken recourse to some notion of eternity because without it it is impossible to formulate general truths. If something is true, then it must be true always and everywhere. But if we look around ourselves, there is nothing that is eternal. Everything we experience with our five senses is particular and is subject to change, decay, and death, and yet our minds still formulate general truth claims about the world. If the Nietzschean project will work at all, it must rid us of this nasty ingrained habit of implicitly comparing this world of change to some unreal world of eternity. As long as we have this comparison, however implicit, we devalue the world in which we live and will hence fall victim to nihilism. To really affirm the only life we have, we must, therefore, radically alter our thought. We can no longer think about eternal Being in whatever form but about ever-changing Becoming. Only such a radical transformation of thinking will rid the world of this nihilistic claptrap about eternal Being and yield a truly life-affirming philosophy of Becoming.

But Nietzsche himself could not dispense with eternity. Simply because he had to make general formulations of truth himself. To rid the mind of all concepts of eternity is to rob the mind of coherence and, therewith, the ability to affirm anything at all, much less the glorious rapings and pillaging of the noble Blond Beast. Nietzsche could have suggested that we all get lobotomies so that we can forget we are intelligent human beings and act like noble brutes, but he did not. He prized knowledge and philosophy too much to castrate himself intellectually. So, he came up with another solution: if eternity cannot be rid of, then let's rob it from the gods and bring it down to earth. Let's make eternity part of our very lives. And presto! We have the doctrine of the eternal recurrence of the same!

This doctrine teaches that you must will everything that happens in your life to recur in exactly the same manner throughout all of eternity. By doing so, you are using eternity no longer to judge the world as inferior and thereby to condemn it but to affirm and celebrate it. Pretty neat solution, actually. Nietzsche could not rid man of his need for eternity and so he subordinates it to the service of affirming this life and in doing so finally gets his revenge on Plato. Whereas Plato enslaved this world to eternity, Nietzsche has put eternity under the yoke of man's life-affirming will. Or has he?

Nietzsche's doctrine of the eternal recurrence of the same robs man of the ability to say no. He must affirm everything in his life even atrocities such as murder, rape, preventive war, Donald Rumsfeld, Dick Cheney, and the like. So what, Nietzche might respond, this life is all there is und Nichts außerdem!. If you are going to truly value it, you cannot make comparisons between it and a world that does not exist. The only standard of life is this life, and you might as well say yes to it eternally because that is the only thing that will satisfy this ineradicable eternity craving man has.

Fine, but this ineradicable craving for eternity is in man precisely because he is unable to will the eternal recurrence of the same for everything. If he actually had the ability to make eternity bend to his will, then he certainly would not will an eternity of each and every happening of his earthly life. Even the Blond Beast would want at least an eternity of his best pillagings and not those in which the other lords caught him, tied him to a tree, covered him with honey, and then let big ants loose on him. Man wants, if not the good, then at least the pleasant, and that is why he will always say no to the being covered with honey and ants. No man is able psychologically to say yes everything in his life because not everything in his life is pleasant. If we could discipline ourselves to say an eternal yes to everything that happens to us, then we would lose entirely are motivation to seek the pleasurable and avoid the pain. This is hardly an affirmation of life. This is a numbing of ourselves to the point where we would be as insensitive and as dumb and as inhuman as rocks.

But there is an even more fundamental objection to this teaching. Man simply cannot will eternity, and any one who acts like he does is considered insane (including Nietzsche--cf. his notorious "I'd rather be a Basel Professor than God" letter to Burckhardt). Nietzsche merely shows with this stupid idea that not only can he not dispense with eternity, he also cannot dispense with the power of God for obviously God is the only being powerful enough to will anything for all of eternity. Just as Kant killed off God in his first critique only to need Him to make his moral theory work, Nietzsche kills off God to rescue us from otherworldly nihilism only to need His power to make sense of an atheistic chaos. Nietzsche's whole project merely serves to confirm Dostoevski's famous dictum: "If there is no God, I am God." Of course, such a statement is absurd, and that's the point. Without God we are doomed to absurdity, and no amount of wanna-be superhuman will can extricate us from it.

Now in answer to your question put to your readers, I say that Nietzsche has not shown that our morality is simply a result of self-interest and the evolutionary urge to survive. Nietzsche himself says that one morality, the morality that he attacks as a slave morality, the morality that has prevailed in the west for the last two millennia, is not merely the result of self-interest and a Darwinian struggle for life. No, it is also the result of an intelligent being's inability to think without a notion of eternity. Brute animals don't need eternity to eat, sleep, copulate, and excrete, but man does more than brute animals. He reasons, and as long as he reasons, eternity will haunt him and force him to wonder why. Nietzsche tried his best to destroy this wonder. He failed, and this wonder prevails, and we continue to wonder why we think about eternity and from whence these thoughts come. Our temporal science cannot exhaust such questions for that would be as absurd as a stream draining an ocean. Modern science can only explain itself in the light of eternity and not vice versa. The wonder will never be extinguished, and this means that faith will never be as well.