Dr W Large
NIETZSCHE'S ATHEISM
It
is not an
overstatement to say that the whole of this lecture course has been
orientated
towards Nietzsche’s philosophy. It’s main aim is to understand what it
means to
be an atheist. What Nietzsche teaches us above all is that it is not as
easy to
be an atheist as one might think, and in fact the atheism of some one
like
Richard Dworkins is more stupid than any religious faith, if it is
stupid to
have a faith at all. We should not forget that it is the atheists that
Nietzsche
despises in the famous passage of the death of God in The
Gay Science and not the madman (and who else would Nietzsche
be?), who is seeking God.
If
Nietzsche
despises the atheists, why then is he so critical of religion and
especially
Christianity? Because he does not despise religion per se,
or even the belief in God, if we understand the portrait of
Jesus in The Anti-Christ, but the values
that a religion espouses. It
is perfectly possible to think of a Christianity that would celebrate
life
rather than one that did not; that the history of Christianity has been
nothing
but the expression of reactive will to power is an historical
contingent fact,
not an intrinsic necessity of Jesus’ message, and in fact Nietzsche
goes into
some detail to show that what Christianity became and what Jesus said
or taught
are diametrically opposed to one another.
Nietzsche is not easy.
On the surface he
appears to be so, since he writes, unlike most philosophers, well, and
he does
not have the tendency to express his thought in abstract and
long-winded
sentences, whose meaning has been quite lost by the time one has
reached the
end. But this easiness of style is what is most dangerous about
Nietzsche.
Since, at least first time around, he is so easy to read, one can take
him too
much at face value - one can miss the irony, the style, the
exaggeration. It is
only as one reads Nietzsche more that one sees how complicated and
intricate
his thinking is, and moreover how contradictory it is. This is why he
writes in
the preface to The Anti-Christ that
there are only certain kinds of readers who can make sense of him:
This book belongs to the
very few. Perhaps
none of then is even living yet… Only the day after tomorrow belongs to
me.
Some are born posthumously.
One of the most absurd
misunderstandings
about Nietzsche is that he is a anti-Semite and a philosopher of the
Nazis.
There are numerous passages in Nietzsche's work which show that he was
more
disgusted by the Germans than he was by the Jews. This does not mean
that Nietzsche
did not say critical things about Judaism (he does so in The
Anti-Christ, but also the early Judaic religion is expression
of active will to power). But being critical in this sense, is not immediately,
so it seems
to me, to be anti-Semitic in the way that this word is used to today: a
blind
hatred of other races simply because they are different from oneself. Such a hatred for Nietzsche, as we shall see, is that
which he most
despises, and which he calls slave
morality.
Let us begin trying to
think Nietzsche's
attack on Christianity as it is presented in the Anti-Christ.
These are Nietzsche's words at the end of the book:
I condemn
Christianity, I bring against the Christian Church the most terrible
charge any
prosecutor has ever uttered. To me it is the extremest thinkable form
of
corruption, it has had the will to the ultimate corruption conceivably
possible. The Christian Church has left nothing untouched by its
depravity, it
has made of every value a disvalue, of every truth a lie, of every kind
of
integrity a vileness of the soul.
This
condemnation
sounds too strong in our ears. How could something like the Christian
Church be
such a terrible thing to have happened to the human species? Some of us
might
think that the past of the Christian Church is nothing to boast about,
or that
in modern times, with the development of science and a liberal
morality, that
the Christian Church has largely become irrelevant, but who of us would
charge
it with such a crime of having corrupted the human race? This is the
stake of
Nietzsche's interpretation. For Nietzsche, the Christian Church is not
a
relative untruth, but an absolute one
and thus there is nothing at all worth preserving in the Christian
tradition,
if this tradition is understood as the tradition of Church.
The first thing that one
must remark about
this condemnation of the Christian Church is that it is value
critique of Christianity. I wish to make a distinction
between two different kinds of atheism, and this has been the central
thesis of
this lecture course. This distinction, I think, will help us to think
about the
meaning of atheism as a whole. The more traditional kind of atheism is
the one
that one finds taught in the philosophy of religion. Such an approach
either
tries to prove logically, or by using the methods of science, that the
God does
not exist, in the same way that one might try to disprove that a table
does not
exist. This approach is quite wrong, if
one accepts Kant’s argument that God is not something that can be an
object of possible
experience, and therefore cannot be known. If it cannot be known, then
the
category of existence or non-existence cannot be attached to it. Of
course this
limitation is as true for the believer as it is for the atheist; for
she cannot
prove the existence of God either. Thus both the believer and the
unbeliever
are left with faith; one believing in the God and the other choosing
not to do
so. Nietzsche would argue that the only
possible reaction to this interminable, but in the end futile debate
about
whether God exists or not, and which the only serious philosophical
reaction,
is complete indifference.
Not that Kant himself
give up any hope in
showing the necessity of at least the idea of God in the postulates of
practical reason. Rather than being a necessary existence, as in the
ontological proof, God becomes a moral necessity. Quite crudely, Kant's
argument is that one can not conceive of a moral system without
postulating at
least the subjective existence of God; that is to say, without the idea of God I cannot conceive of my life
having any ultimate purpose. I already need the idea of the after-life
to live
this life, whether in reality there is an after-life or not (Again Kant
would
argue that no one can know whether there is one or not – immortality
and God,
are ideas of reason, not objects of experience). I want to argue that
Nietzsche’s atheism quite naturally develops from the moral idea of
God, and
this atheism is of a very different kind that what I shall call the
metaphysical atheism. As we have said,
Nietzsche is quite indifferent as to whether God exists in the abstract
or not,
that is to say whether one can philosophically disprove, by induction
or deduction,
the existence of God; rather he is interested in the value
of the God which is believed in by a people, what kind of
vision of the world this moral idea of
God portrays, and what kind of psychological type the believer is who
has such
and such a conception of God. Nietzsche’s attack upon Christianity is
not
whether God in the abstract exists or not, but what kind of value the
particularly Christian God expresses,
and thus what kind of vision of life it expresses. Nietzsche's argument
is that
the moral ideal that the Christian God expresses is the most degenerate
and
debased form of value, and thus expresses an extreme distortion of the
reality,
and its believers the lowest kind of psychological type.
In metaphysical atheism, we conceive of God
as a being whose existence we might disprove, whereas in moral atheism
we
conceive of God as the crystallisation of values at a given place and
time.
This is why Nietzsche’s accusation against Kant in The
Anti-Christ is
not a metaphysical one, but that he is a closet theologian – his
philosophy is
just a hidden form of Christianity (which is why Nietzsche would not be
all
surprised that the only true religion in Kant’s Religion within the Limits of Reason Alone
would have to be Christianity, for what comes first is not Kant’s
rational
morality, but his Christianity):
One only has to say the
words ‘College of Tübingen’ to
grasp what German philosophy is at
bottom – a cunning theology… . The
Swabians are the best liars in Germany,
they lie innocently… . Why the rejoicing throughout the German academic
world –
three quarters composed of the sons of pastors and teachers – at the
appearance
of Kant? Why the Germans’
conviction, which finds an echo even today, that with Kant things were
taking a
turn for the better? The theological
instinct in the German scholar divined what
was henceforth possible once again… .
What allows Nietzsche to
determine the
difference between values? Why is one form of life better than another
and why
is the Christian form of life the most degenerate? One must understand
that
this is not a moral question for Nietzsche, but one of psychology and
the
psychology of unconscious processes which Nietzsche calls forces,
drives or
instincts. Morality is a product of these forces rather than their
cause.
Morality begins with the assumption that ideals and values themselves
are all
that is needed to understand a form of live, rather than hidden and
subterranean
impulses which preserve it. It is this emphasis on unconscious
processes, as
opposed to the conscious ones, which makes Nietzsche an important
precursor to
Freud. This means that Nietzsche does not attempt to confront the
morality of
Christianity with a morality of his own, with another system of ideals
and
laws, but to thrown light upon the origins of our morality, to shown
their amoral origins, which is the will to
power. This first of all appears merely as a negative
critique, whose purpose is to demonstrate the
impossibility of morality altogether, Nietzsche’s or anyone else’s. But
this
critique or morality becomes transposed to an different level, to a
deeper one,
which I would like to call ‘ways of life’, which again are not directly
products of the conscious, but have their source in the instincts. The
opposition between Dionysus and the Crucified, which is one way that
Nietzsche
describes the whole of his work, is not
an opposition between a morality and another morality, or a morality
and
immorality, but an opposition between two difference forms of life and
the
instincts that they express, which only secondarily reveal themselves
as one
set of values opposed to another.
As we saw from the
previous lecture, For
Nietzsche there are only two fundamental basic instincts: reactive and
active.
He gives the most thorough investigation of these two forces in The Genealogy of Morals. Reactive
forces, as the words suggests only
have their existence through an opposition to another force which it
rejects.
Reactive forces, Nietzsche says, are always a no-saying. It might be
better to
understand this relation in terms of political or social model; that is
to say
in terms of the relation between groups.
a reactive
group is a
group in which only obtains a feeling of power through hating another
group and
who only gains its values through this negation. Everything
that we do is good, whereas what
they do is bad. Active forces, on the contrary are self-affirming; they
have
their values from the beginning, and do not obtain them through hatred
of those
that are different from them
It’s Nietzsche’s
argument that
Christianity has its source in essentially reactive unconscious
processes.
These unconscious processes manifest themselves in what Nietzsche calls
ressentiment. What
is ressentiment? A hatred at many different levels. A
hatred first of
all of life, of nature; that life itself can not be good enough, so
that we
have to invent a world beyond this world which is better, more perfect.
A
hatred of oneself as a natural being, that is a hatred of one's
instincts and
desire to the point of self loathing - thus the invention of the soul,
which is
pure and holy, as opposed to the body with is sinful and disgusting.
Finally,
because of all these, a hatred of others, those who do not hate life
and
themselves, whom Nietzsche calls ‘noble spirits’. Thus, the invention
of
morality in which one distinguishes the sheep from the goats, the saved
from the
damned.
If one examines
Christianity as a
historical object, then it is the triumph of reactive forces, because
it is the
result of a reaction to an existing force, or ‘way of life’;
Christianity is
essentially negative. What is it that
there was in the first place against which Christianity reacted? What
is most
natural, most real and most actual - Christianity is the negation of
all of
this. It says no to life, inventing
fictions and superstitions, so as to legitimate its hatred of reality.
The triumph of
Christianity is also the
triumph of certain psychological type and its will to power. Nietzsche
is
insistent that behind the ‘good’ words of the Church, there is the will
to
power of a certain form of life; the ‘priest’. The definition of the
priestly type
is one who turns their back upon reality. The archetype of this kind of
type
for Nietzsche is Paul. What really motivated Paul is power over others,
and the
only way that one can have power over others is to turn them into a
herd; one
makes thinking a sin; uniqueness, individuality itself as something
sinful.
For Nietzsche, however,
it is important to
make distinction between Christianity and Christ. Christ and the Church
are
antithetical - whereas the Church seeks power and creates ‘followers’
through fictions
and superstitions, Christ has no desire for power at all. His world is
the
inner world. Moreover, his language is the symbolic representation this
inner
world. The Christians mistook the symbols for fact; They thought there
really
was a kingdom of God not realising that the kingdom of God
was
themselves. They took Christ too literally. And rather than being a
form of
life based on hatred and judgement of others, he was a free spirit. Being such a free spirit meant that his
psyche was free of any opposition or conflict, and thus he abolished
the
necessity of sin and guilt. But we should not let Nietzsche’s
admiration for
Christ mislead us, for one can admire one’s enemy, and perhaps him
above all,
even when one disagrees with the utterly.
For Nietzsche was not slow to call Jesus an ‘Idiot’,
though we should be
careful again here of not thinking that this was simply an insult. What differentiates finally Nietzsche from
Jesus? The love of knowledge.
The philosopher’s curse. In
the end for Jesus, if one wants to reach
‘the kingdom of God’, one has to will oneself stupid – ‘be like the child’.
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