I discovered Nietzsche in my early 20s. As many know, Nietzsche was a harsh critic of religion and Christianity in particular. Because I had been judged, shamed and oppressed by the fundamentalism I grew up with in southern West Virginia, I was drawn to Nietzsche even though he is actually way too harsh and extreme for me. He gave me some backbone and a way of seeing through some of the judgment I felt from the holier-than-thou set and their redneck attack dogs. So I thought I would share my general impression of Nietzsche. I don’t claim to be an authority on Nietzsche. These are just my thoughts and personal views.
Nietzsche was a brilliant scholar whose academic career advanced rather quickly. History remembers him as a 19th century German philosopher, but he was trained as a philologist. He was a language expert, and he specifically focused on the ancient Greeks.
He was impressed by Greek tragedy. He thought the Greeks got it right in their tragic dramas. Life is hard, cruel, painful, but in Nietzsche’s estimation, the ancient Greek tragedians ultimately affirmed life. Life was worth living, worth the struggle despite the suffering.
Nietzsche believed that Socrates and Plato infected Greek culture with poisonous ideas. For Nietzsche, this life was what was important, despite all it’s downfalls, so he didn’t much care for the notion that we were living in a cave and only knew flawed, shadowy reflections of greater, perfect things that existed far away.
Darwin and Nietzsche were contemporaries, more or less. Darwin was a bit older, so Nietzsche was probably introduced to evolution and natural selection in his formative years, and Nietzsche adopted a variation of this idea that he called the Will to Power. I think a lot of people misunderstand Nietzsche’s Will to Power. It is not a decision by a free moral agent to oppress others. It has little to do with freedom. Nietzsche wasn’t a great believer in radical free will. In Nietzsche’s view, everyone has Will to Power. It’s a kind of inescapable drive toward survival and independence. Will to Power motivates everyone no matter how much actual social, political or economic power they have.
Because of this Will to Power, you end up with winners and losers, masters and slaves. But it has nothing to do with race or ethnicity or who your parents were, where they came from, what church they went to. It’s much more individualistic. The Nazis misread Nietzsche, and he was outlived by an anti-Semitic sister who misrepresented him. Nietzsche actually thought anti-Semites were idiots, and even though he sometimes had harsh things to say about Jews, it was nothing compared to what he had to say about Christians. He also thought Germans were generally kind of dull and witless, too. Hardly a “master race.” In Nietzsche, there are masters, but no master race.
Nietzsche believed that religion was a kind of fantasy for the weak, for those who had failed to exert their will to power in this world and had ended up in a subservient position. He saw it in the East with their goal of escaping Samsara or the cycle of death and rebirth. Nietzsche’s theory of eternal return is a kind of critique of Eastern religion. He claimed that perhaps we do return over and over again, and experience the same suffering over and over again, but rather than wanting to escape it, you should relish the endless cycle. He also thought that Western ideas of heaven were a kind of copout for not advancing your will to power in this life. Christianity tells you not to worry about your situation in this world because you’ll be rewarded in the next. That belief makes a person weak and lazy according to Nietzsche. And it was also a way to make the pain of the religious folk meaningful. In the weak religious person’s mind, according to Nietzsche, they have been wronged, and the world is governed by evil influences, but if they keep the faith and put up with the suffering as Christ did, they will win in the end.
Nietzsche also believed that the morality that goes along with religion was a kind of underhanded and dishonest trick of the weak. Rather than winning your independence in a direct and honest way, the weak shame their masters, talk them into believing there is something wrong with their character. According to Nietzsche, this has nothing to do with right and wrong. It’s just a cheap version of the will to power. “You should be ashamed of yourself” is a ploy of a weak person who can’t take control by force. True human masters, just like any other successful animal that doesn’t take any shit from any other animals, has no shame and lives in a world “beyond good and evil.” Lions have no shame. Bears have no shame.
Unlike Nietzsche, I do believe in morality. I don’t have any kind of systematic ethics that I live by, and I can’t justify morality by way of religion or philosophy, but I do believe in some kind of morality. I think humans are social animals, and we have to find some way of getting along with each other. I’m not interesting in living in a dog eats dog world. I want to live in a society where we look out for one another.
But I don’t reject Nietzsche’s notion of the will to power. I think there’s a lot of will to power in the moralizing that often goes on. Much of it doesn’t have any actual concern for right and wrong. I think there’s a will to power at work in the struggle to establish who gets to decide what is moral and immoral.
I see the will to power at work among the Religious Right all the time. In my younger days, right after I started reading Nietzsche, I saw it in those who screamed homosexuality is a sin, as well as those who screamed about “faggots” and “queers.” I had kept my mouth shut and my head low around those people all my life, but I kept my eyes and ears open. I knew those people weren’t all that hung up on sexual morality. Most of them would jump at the chance to engage in some unauthorized rumpy pumpy. Singling out the homos was a way of making them feel superior and establishing dominance by shaming those of us who weren’t hetero.
No comments:
Post a Comment