Philosophy: Basic Questions; Boedeker
Handout on Friedrich Nietzsche (1844-1900), Twilight of the Idols and The Antichrist (1888)
I. Nietzsche’s life:
- Becamke a professor of classical philology at the University of Basel, Switzerland, at the unheard-of age of 25.
- Was badly injured while serving in the Franco-Prussian War (1870-71) as a medical orderly, and never fully recovered.
- Resigned his professorship at the age of 35 due to pain, failing eyesight, and bad health.
- 1887: Publishes Toward the Genealogy of Morals: A Polemic.
- 1888: Publishes Twilight of the Idols and The Antichrist.
- Became insane at the age of 45, and lived with his sister until his death at age 55.
II. Nietzsche on morals:
A. The will to power:
1. “Will to power” is the instinct or desire to increase one’s strength, force, and domination of things outside oneself.
2. For Nietzsche, the will to power is the essence of life. Thus all living things seek not just to survive and reproduce, but also to increase their power.
3. “Will” in “will to power” is not arbitrary free will – as in St. Augustine and Descartes. Instead, it is the basic life force, which always desires to increase itself. Will to power is part of the physical and biological world.
4. A value-system is a moral code specifying what we should and should not do. For Nietzsche, all value systems are a product of the will to power of human beings.
B. Truth, falsehood, and values:
1. Every statement is either true or false.
2. Every statement must be formulated in some language, conceptual scheme, conceptual framework, or value-system.
3. For example, let’s say that the statement
“The temperature here and now is 32 ºF”
is true. In this case, so are the statements
“The temperature here and now is 0 ºC”,
and
“The temperature here and now is 273 K”.
The first statement is phrased in the value-system, or language, of degrees Fahrenheit, the second in that of degrees Celsius, and the third in that of Kelvin.
4. A language (conceptual scheme, value-system) itself, however, is neither true nor false. Indeed, it’s simply nonsense to say that such a statement is either true or false. Such attempts to make such statements commit what’s called a category error: applying a category (such as “true”) to something to which that category can’t apply. Thus it’s just as nonsensical to try to say that a value-system is true (or false) as it is to say that the tone middle-C has some color.
5. But a language, or value-system, can be useful or useless for certain purposes. For example, the Fahrenheit value-system is useful for such everyday purposes as deciding what to wear (since 100 ºF is about as hot as it gets on earth, and 0 ºF is about as cold as it gets). The Celsius value-system, however, is much more useful than the Fahrenheit value-system for doing chemistry on the surface of the earth around sea-level, since 0 ºC is (approximately) the freezing point of pure water at sea-level. And the Kelvin scale is much more useful for doing physics, since 0 K is “absolute zero”: the temperature at which all physical motion stops.
C. The will to power and values.
1. The oldest values:
a. The oldest values are life-affirming and this-worldly: the values of good (= life, power) vs. bad (= death, weakness).
b. These oldest values were developed by people in power. Nietzsche therefore calls these value-systems master morality.
2. At some point, these old values underwent a crisis: they no longer served the will to power; they were bad for life. These values were in decline, what Nietzsche calls “decadent”.
3. As a response to this crisis, new values replaced the older ones, changing “good vs. bad” to “good vs. evil”.
a. What used to be “good” now became “evil”, and what used to be “bad” now became “good”.
b. In the moral system of “good vs. bad”, “good” is the primary value, and “bad” is defined as what’s not good. But in the new moral system of “good vs. evil”, “evil” is the primary value, and “good’ is defined as what’s not evil.
c. Western European Christian moral values (the morals of “good vs. evil”) are therefore life-denying and otherworldly.
d. For Nietzsche, the moral system of “good vs. evil” is based on resentment by the powerless of people in power.
e. He therefore calls the moral system of “good vs. evil” a slave morality.
f. Nietzsche thus terms slave morality “nihilistic.” Nihilism comes from the Latin word “nihil”, which means “nothing”. Nietzsche defines “nihilism” as “the will to nothing” – that is, the will to deny and reject life in this physical world.
4. People invent the very ideas of God and a perfect world beyond the physical world in order to back up the values of slave morality. These other-worldly beings or places (e.g., Plato’s Forms, the Judeo-Christian God, Heaven) are regarded as the ultimate source of values.
Moral systems:
Good vs. bad Good vs. evil
Earlier Later
Life-affirming Life-denying
This-worldly Otherworldly
Master morality Slave morality
Based in the will to power Based in resentment by the powerless
of people in power
D. Nietzsche’s criticism of the morality of good vs. evil: A nihilistic value-system is contradictory. This is because the ultimate source of values is life itself, and its essence, the will to power. Nevertheless, the morality of good vs. evil attempts to place a value – and a negative value at that – on life itself. In this way, nihilism is a value-system that defeats the purpose of value-systems: to increase the power of one’s life. Nihilistic slave-morality of “good vs. evil” pulls the rug (of life) out from under its own feet.
III. Nietzsche’s genealogy of morals: A genealogy (or “family tree”) of morals (focused on the past): to trace our current moral values (of Western European Christianity in the late 19th Century) back through time to their source. Nietzsche’s Nietzsche sees 3 main sources of these moral values:
A. Ancient Greece:
1. The earliest Greek values were warrior values.
a. To be a good man was to be brave, strong, powerful, attractive, and influential. (Recall the heroes in Homer’s Odyssey and Iliad.)
b. To be bad was to be cowardly, weak, powerless, ugly, and without influence.
2. Crisis in values: The Peloponnesian War (431-404BC) between the city-states of Athens and Sparta placed these ancient Greek values in a crisis. Warrior values led to horrible wars that were to destroy Greek civilization itself. (Greece fell to the Macedonian army of the 18-year-old Alexander the Great in 338.)
3. As a response to this crisis, Athenian philosophers during and after the Peloponnesian War introduced new values. These new values were a reversal of the old ones.
a. “The problem of Socrates”:
(i) Socrates (c.470-399BC) belonged to the lowest social class of free men in Athens. He was also ugly. He was thus “bad” according to the traditional Greek warrior-values.
(ii) Out of resentment for those in power, Socrates reversed traditional values of “good vs. bad”, forming instead a value-system of “good vs. evil”. For Socrates, a good man was now someone who rejected satisfying bodily desires and seeking power and influence in this physical world. Instead, a good man was someone who did nothing but seek knowledge and wisdom. For Nietzsche, this is summed up in Socrates’ last words in the Phaedo, which imply that life is a disease cured by death and a good afterlife.
b. Plato (c.427-347BC) completed Socrates’ work by arguing that this physical world is really just a shadow of the real world, composed of perfect, non-physical, universal objects that he called “Forms” or “Ideas”. Examples of Forms include geometrical figures (lines, points, planes, etc.) and numbers. We cannot perceive the Forms through the five bodily senses, but can only know them with our minds. All objects in the physical world are just poor copies of the perfect Forms. The truly valuable world is one that we can contact not with our bodies, but only with our souls. After we die, our souls can live in the perfect realm of the Forms – but only if we have spent our lives “preparing for death” by rejecting the body and its desires.
B. Judaism:
1. Jewish history:
a. Judaism began as a life-affirming fertility cult, whose values were the fertility of the soil and the people. The Jews performed sacrifices to their god, Yahweh, in order to secure and thank Him for His protection of the people.
(i) Jewish values during this period:
- good = what’s beneficial to life (fertility of the soil and the people)
- bad = what’s detrimental life (sterility, death)
(ii) During this period, Yahweh, the god of the Jews was
- not the universal God of everyone, but one of many god – the only one to have “chosen” the Jews as his favored people.
- an expression of the hopes and self-confidence of the Jewish people, who were flourishing.
- regarded as the author of the Ten Commandments (canonically 1500-1300 BCE), the laws governing proper rituals and sacrifices to Yahweh, and even the God who challenged Abraham to sacrifice his son Isaac, resulting in the Covenant to circumcise all Jewish males in return for being fruitful an multiplying in the Promised Land. Both of these events can be understood as part of master morality: necessary for securing a flourishing people with the strongest possible ties to Yahweh.
- essentially a protector of the life of the Jewish people, as long as they gave thanks and performed the proper sacrifices.
- not only good, but also somewhat arbitrary – in demanding certain sacrifices, etc.
(iii) This original form of Judaism reached a peak in the Golden Age of Israelite Monarchy (c. 1030-930 BCE): Kings Saul, David, and Solomon. This occurred after the Jews were liberated from Egyptian domination (c. 3000-1030 BCE) under the leadership of Moses (c. 1300 BCE).
b. 930-164 BCE: Jews were dominated for centuries by the following peoples:
(i) Egyptians/Canaanites (c. 930-722 BCE).
(ii) Assyrians (722-612 BCE; overthrown by the Babylonians in 612-605 BCE).
(iii) Babylonians (612-539 BCE), who destroyed Solomon’s temple by King Nebuchadnezzar II in 586 BCE); the Jews were then deported, beginning the Babylonian Captivity.
(iv) Persians (with the conquest of the Babylonians by Persian King Cyrus II the Great in 539 BCE). In 538 BCE or later, King Artaxerxes commissioned the scribe Ezra to take command of the Jews and lead them back to Judea to rebuild the Temple (520-516 BCE). (See below.)
(v) Macedonians (with the conquest by Alexander the Great in 332 BCE).
(vi) The Seleucid Greek Empire (312 BCE-164 BCE).
c. There was a brief Restoration of Jewish Independence during the Maccabean/ Hasmonean Dynasty (164-63 BCE),
d. Romans then occupied Judea from 63BCE to 600CE (under the Roman-controlled King Herod the Great [ruled 37-4 BCE]).
e. This foreign domination made for a crisis in Jewish values, since God did not appear to be protecting them.
(i) In order to survive under these conditions, a new story thus had to be told about God and the Jews. This began perhaps with the scribe Ezra, commissioned (in 459 or 408 BCE) by Persian King Artaxerxes I (ruled 465-424 BCE) or Artaxerxes II (ruled 414-358 BCE) to lead the Jews back to Jerusalem. Ezra accused the Jews, including Jewish priests, of sinning by marrying non-Jewish women – a practice that hadn’t been prohibited by Jewish law prior to Ezra.
(i) God no longer protects the Jewish people, but punishes them for their alleged sexual sins during and after the Golden Age. Thus the history of the Jews becomes a history of God’s punishment for their sins. For Nietzsche, “a good part of the Bible” contains this falsification of the history of Israel as a story of guilt and punishment. And indeed, the Torah, or Pentateuch – the first five books of the Hebrew Bible – might well have been written down c. 600 BCE, during the Babylonian Captivity.
(ii) This new story requires a new conception of God: as a demanding, vengeful, judging God whose will tells human beings what they should and should not do, and punishes them if they disobey His will.
(iii) This new conception of God brings with it a new, moralistic set of values:
- evil (what the Devil tempts us to do) = happiness, flourishing, illicit sexuality (e.g., with non-Jews).
- good (= the Kingdom of God = how God wants things to be on earth) = obedience, abstinence from illicit sex (e.g., with non-Jews).
C. Christianity: for Nietzsche, progressed in roughly 3 stages. Nietzsche argues that “Christianity can be understood only in terms of the [false {A 27}] soil out of which it grew – it is not a counter-movement to the Jewish instinct, it is its very consequence” (A 24). Some of what he says here sounds anti-Semitic, but this is misleading. In fact, Nietzsche’s portrayal of Christianity as arising out of Judaism is a direct response to the anti-Semitism that was sweeping through Europe at this time. Whereas the anti-Semites argued for Christianity by claiming that it was superior to – and thus different from – Judaism, Nietzsche argues against Christianity by painting it as more “Jewish” than Judaism. Indeed, the title “Der Antichrist”, which can mean both “The Antichrist” and “The Anti-Christian,” is probably intended to bring to mind “anti-Semitism.”