AKC 9 General Spring Term 2009 Dead Or Alive: the Search for God Inside and Outside the Church

AKC 9 General – Spring Term 2009 – Dead or Alive: the search for God inside and outside the Church

AKC 9 - 16 MARCH 2009

NIETZSCHE, THE DEATH OF GOD AND MORALITY

DR CHRISTOPHER HAMILTON, DEPT OF THEOLOGY AND RELIGIOUS STUDIES, KING’S COLLEGE LONDON

Nietzsche 1844-1900

Biography: brilliant classical education; professor at the University of Basel at age of 24; friendship with Wagner; sister and mother; illness and withdrawal from teaching; lived rest of life on small pension in Italy and France; suffered permanent mental eclipse in 1889.

Style of philosophising: aphorisms, short essays, contradictions, discussion of his own constitution - yet throughout a kind of living in the truth, a determination to be completely honest and not to conceal the deepest springs of thought and action in himself. And yet, at the same time, his works sometimes show patterns of repression or suppression. Philosophy at therapy.

Attitude to Christianity: ‘God is dead’ (The Gay Science [Die fröhliche Wissenschaft], §125). Speaking as a cultural critic. Interested in how people make meaning in their lives (esp. in the face of suffering). Three types of Christianity interest Nietzsche: a) genuinely Christ-like life, which he admires (with some reservations) – see The Anti-Christ(ian) (Der Antichrist); b) a Christianity which revolves around ideas of the fall of man, repentance, suffering as a punishment for our guilty/sinful condition, free-will and blame, asceticism, which he sees as false and life-denying; c) a kind of easy-going bourgeois Christianity which he despises (cf. Kierkegaard [1813-1855]). Most who claim to believe in God don’t really, in Nietzsche’s eyes. Christianity as praxis.

Decay of Christianity is a disaster and a liberation. Spiritual depression and potential for greatness.

If God abandoned then Christian morality has no backing and must be rejected. This includes asceticism etc. but also e.g., pity.

Further: distinction between master and slave morality. Distinction: noble/base; good/evil

Masters: strong, overflowing with energy, confident, independent, enjoys practising harshness of himself, self-glorification, powerful and loves exercising his power, aristocratic, believes in a rank order of the spirit, a creator of values, affirmation of life.

Slaves: weak, flatterers, liars (dishonest about themselves), want to reduce everyone to a common denominator, small-minded and small-souled, is always dependent on others for his sense of what is important, needs the approval of others, denies life.

Ascetic priest; slave revolt in morality.

At least two ways of reading this: historically or as a kind of therapy.

Relation between morality and power. Cf. Raskolnikov/Napoleon in Dostoyevsky’s Crime and Punishment. Morality/virtue can be unhealthy; wickedness can be healthy. Do the concepts of good and evil collapse into those of strength and weakness?

Is slave morality the same as modern morality? Sometimes Nietzsche seems to think so, other times he is just directing his fire at the idea that we have arrived at the moral truth – at the idea that it’s obvious that modern, egalitarian, democratic values are the right ones. Cf. here the system of values of Greece and Rome: morality vs. cultural greatness.

Vice (greed, envy, vanity etc.) as necessary in the total economy of life/the soul. First- and third-person perspective. Sea-sickness.

At the very least we can be glad that morality has not always prevailed.

Nietzsche interested in the exceptional specimens of ‘the plant man’ which justify existence.

AKC 9 General Spring Term 2009 Dead Or Alive: the Search for God Inside and Outside the Church

NIETZSCHE, THE DEATH OF GOD AND MORALITY

Suggested reading