Nietzsche

My own journey with Friedrich Nietzsche (1844-1900) began in in the early 1970s. I read many of his writings about 20 years later. Lately, a reading group has challenged me to look at his writings again. If you have heard the term “post-modern,” Nietzsche is the one many consider a foreshadowing of that philosophical movement.

Recently, I have pondered him in a bit different way. I had a friend who pondered him often. I asked about the fascination. He thought Nietzsche was a unique, one of a kind thinker. After pondering him over the past few months, I get that response. The question raised at the beginning of the Cambridge Companion on Nietzsche is a good one: Is Nietzsche playing the same philosophical game with different rules or is it now a different game? The answer will largely depend upon the significance one attributes to the breadth and depth of his influence throughout philosophy. One cannot imagine a philosophical school devoted to Nietzsche, in the same way one can imagine such a school devoted to Plato or Aristotle, to Kant or Hegel, or even to Heidegger and the various brands of existentialism. One cannot imagine a disciple of Nietzsche. If someone tried, he would, if he could, chase away the school or disciple. Nietzsche is different. If you let him, his influence will play around in the background of your thinking and behaving.

Most philosophers write in a way that appeals to the intellect. They want their readers to understand their vision of the world, and, potentially, to change it. When I read such philosophers, I can help others understand by explaining their thought. Nietzsche does not write that way. His writing is more in the style of one who says something from which he wants a response. I am mindful, as he put in The Gay (Joyful) Science, that he writes for others to understand him, but also, for others not to understand.^[1] In Thus Spake Zarathustra (1883), he will say that whoever writes in blood and aphorisms, as he does, wants to be learned by heart. In the same book, he says one repays a teacher badly if one always remains a pupil. He wants his readers to lose him and find themselves. As I see it, Nietzsche writes in a way that makes one ponder, even if one concludes that one needs to move in a different direction. Reading Nietzsche will change you, if you let it. It will likely change you in a good direction, especially if you become more acquainted with yourself. You may well find yourself. He may well be seeking to turn philosophy into a different game. If he was not successful, he makes an interesting attempt.

He was born in Röcken, Prussia. His father was a Lutheran minister who died when Nietzsche was five. His mother raised him in a home that included his grandmother, two aunts, and a sister. He studied classical philology at the universities of Bonn and Leipzig and was appointed professor of classical philology at the University of Basel at the age of 24. Ill health (he was plagued throughout his life by poor eyesight and migraine headaches) forced his retirement in 1879. Ten years later, he suffered a mental breakdown from which he never recovered. He died in Weimar in 1900.

In addition to the influence of Greek culture, particularly the philosophies of Plato and Aristotle, German philosopher Arthur Schopenhauer, the theory of evolution, and his friendship with German composer Richard Wagner, combined for the primary influences upon Nietzsche.

My focus in this essay is on the religious and moral dimension of Nietzsche, although I find it hard to separate Nietzsche into such neat compartments. Consequently, I will not try. My pattern for this discussion is Will to Power, with other writings brought into the discussion.

In The Will to Power (1906, published by his sister posthumously) I received the impression that it took him a while to admit that he was a nihilist. It took him a while to have the courage to admit this conclusion of his thinking. He thinks nihilism is the philosophy of the future. He refers to such nihilism as the music and gospel of the future. He was already writing of it in The Gay (Joyful) Science, when he thought of the distinction of being homeless for this secret wisdom, such children of the future. They could have no home in the present if they are children of the future.^[2] In the conclusion of that book, he writes of being an Argonaut of the ideal. We have a still undiscovered country before us, the boundaries of which no one has yet seen. We cannot be content of the person of the present. The worthiest aims and hopes of the person of the present are nothing more than amusing to those adopting the perspective of Nietzsche. The ideal of the person of the future is strange, tempting, and full of danger, for it plays naively with the good, true, and beautiful of the present.^[3] In Thus Spake Zarathustra (1883) he says he walks among people as a fragment of the future that he envisions. He thinks of such nihilism as the logical outcome of Western philosophy. The will to power is nothing less than an attempt to re-evaluate all values. A nihilist is one who judges of the world as it is that it ought not to be, and of the world as it ought to be that it does not exist. According to this view, our existence (action, suffering, willing, feeling) has no meaning. It has only suffering in vain.

An illustration may help. Acceptance of Christianity in Europe was already declining, as it does today. He links the Christian notion of God to a naïve quest for truth. Yet, all interpretations of the world and of human history are false. The Christian vision of another world, a divine realm, that gives meaning to this world, is gone. “We” recognize it as an attempt to escape responsibility for this world. This will lead to nihilism, that everything lacks meaning. Science and philosophy have advanced due to a moral judgment each has made. Yet, this nihilistic future will bring hostility to science. Further, every belief considers something to be true. Nihilism will suggest every such belief is false, for there is no true world. Such a view might even be divine, for it admits that all we have is a perspective on the world that simplifies the world in a way that we can manage it. He sees such belief in Kant and Hegel as well, who have morality as the starting point of their respective systems. He thinks of them as under the spell of their instincts. They saw truth, but only for them.

The notion that such nihilism might be divine is an interesting one. Even for the one who believes in God, the temptation is present to replace God with certain ideas of God. We cannot help developing them, of course. Yet, willingness to allow experience to alter such ideas is important. One could apply this notion to the realm of political philosophy as well. If the belief is false from the standpoint that it cannot explain the totality of the world, then it becomes divine to admit it and become open to the possible expansion of one’s beliefs. Our beliefs about the world are nothing more than our attempts to simplify its complexity and make it more manageable to live in it. Of course, he is quite right that any Christianity that avoids responsibility for this world is doing harm. Yet, I think that people like Nietzsche assume that any belief in life with God in eternity demands avoiding responsibility for this world. However, Christianity has always shown compassion for people in this world, as well as their eternal destiny.

He will want to declare that philosophical notions like spirit, reason, thinking, consciousness, soul, will or truth are fictions of no use. The distinction between subject and object is also fiction. He rejects the positivist appeal to facts, for one has no fact. One has only interpretations. Knowledge works as a tool of power. The same is true with philosophical notions of good and beautiful. They increase only with the increase of power. Knowledge is particular to the human species in that it helps to maintain and increase its power, its conception of reality, and its behavior. Knowledge has the utility of preservation. The measure of the desire for knowledge depends upon the measure to which the will to power grows in a species: a species grasps a certain amount of reality in order to become master of it, in order to press it into service. The value and importance of knowledge depends on the force and courage of the will to power involved. Human beings do not orient their thinking to the way things are, but attempt to increase their power. The world is knowable, but one can interpret it otherwise. It has no discoverable meaning. In The Gay (Joyful) Science he will offer that the past has a thousand secretes lurking in places that need sunlight. One cannot know what history may be someday, for the past is still perhaps undiscovered in its essence. He thinks the ability to reinterpret is sorely needed.^[4] In Thus Spake Zarathustra (1883) he will refer to the old conceit of those who think they have long known what good and evil for humanity. Good and evil are the creation of the person. He gives the name “perspectivism” to his approach. A generous way of reading Nietzsche at this point is that the key to comprehending anything is to learn to appreciate the relationships involved. The only way to do this is by acquiring the eyes needed to discern these relationships in different cases. An appreciation of the ways in which all life involves the establishment of and operation within perspectives is a step toward getting these matters right. Our needs interpret the world. Every perspective has behind a drive that would like to compel all the other drives to accept as a norm. All of this leads him to reconsider truth as the posture of various errors in relation to each other. One error is older and may seem reliable. Another error seems profound and we may think we need it to live. That of which we can think must be a fiction. Humanity finds nothing but what it has imported into the world. In this, he seems close to a form of solipsism. The finding is science, while the import is art, philosophy, and religion. In all of this, one can also see a reading of Nietzsche in French post-modernism, one that focuses on the arbitrary nature of interpretation, on interpretation as an imposition of power.^[5] Paul Ricoeur will put Nietzsche within the framework of a hermeneutics of suspicion, especially in relation to values. He assists in the development of a mediate science of meaning. He makes his conscious methods of deciphering coincide with the unconscious work of ciphering that he will attribute to the will to power. He will focus on the illusions of consciousness.^[6]

Nietzsche wants to begin, then, not with thoughts, but with the body and physiology. The body is the beginning of any reflection on identity. In this, he is closer to behaviorism than psychoanalysis.^[7] In Thus Spake Zarathustra (1883) he will say that the awakened and knowing say, “Body am I entirely, and nothing else. I shall not go your way, O despisers of the body.”

I have my greatest struggle with Nietzsche at this point. Of course, I find it helpful to recognize that my views do not interpret the world in totalistic way. Of course, I find it helpful to recognize that I have a perspective that differs with that of another. Yet, if knowledge is only a tool of power, it does not advance our understanding of humanity and the world, and our place in it, then all that matters is who has the power to impose their vision on others. We might as well give up discussion of what is best and engage in massive power struggles. This approach opens the possibility of attacking the person instead of the argument or thesis. Of course, one can always question motive, for we are all imperfect. We may not even be aware of our motives. Since he is not on a quest for truth, he seems to reduce himself to questioning the integrity of the person. To do so, he assumes moral superiority to others, who have devious motives, casting suspicion on their ideas and values. Much of his writing seems intended to shock, and disgust. When we see the genealogy of morals, for example, we can then dismiss them. How presumptuous it is for morality to give itself trump status at the expense of any number of other non-moral virtues such as heroism, wit, charm, and devotion. Perspective means there is no one scale of values and no single way of measuring people and their virtues, but that does not mean there is no comparing perspectives or that some perspectives cannot be seen as preferable to others. What we call morality is nothing other than the development of a special set of particularly pragmatic prejudices of an unusually downtrodden lot. Who benefits from this procedure? Obviously, those who benefit are the worst off, the weak, and the mediocre. The system works above all to suppress the drives and the energies of the superior, the strong, those who would rather make something of themselves that morality does not allow or does not recognize. Universality is part of the strategy of the weak to deny the significance of the non-moral virtues and impose their own morality on others. My point is this. Giving up the quest for truth and a better understanding of a common and shared world, what we have left is nothing other than who is in the privileged position of exercising power to implement the perspective one has. When we translate this into the political arena, this becomes dangerous.

He admits that metaphysics often assumes the dignity of humanity and has a form of faith in moral values. Such a vision was true of the “modern age,” especially as represented by the Enlightenment and the romantic period. We see it in Kant and Hegel in a strong way. For that reason, Nietzsche will analyze both. I will not bore with the analysis. Suffice to say that nihilism means surrendering the notion of the dignity of humanity. His reason is disarmingly simple. Humanity has no goal, no reason, and no purpose, toward which it strives. Living without goals is the paradoxical goal of nihilism. Humanity has no destiny. The habit of associating a goal with every event and a guiding, creative God with the world is powerful. It will require effort to move toward the aimlessness of the world. In The Gay (Joyful) Science, he says that much of Europe still needs Christianity. One might refute the dogma thoroughly, but must people will still need it. Some still have need of metaphysics. Some trust in the scientific. All are doing so in a positivist fashion. They long for a way to get to something stable. They long to hold on to something. In reality, the instinct is weakness that creates religions. Such positivist systems are nothing but vapor. One person requires the need for someone to command, and thus becomes a believer. Another person delights in the power of self-determination and freedom of will, thereby bidding farewell to every belief.^[8] The world intentionally avoids such a goal. The world of modernity has some catch words that Nietzsche wants to dispel. The word “tolerance” becomes lack of capacity to say yes or no to anything. Objectivity in the scientific realm becomes a lack of will, personality, and love. Truth becomes forgery and lies. The modern age wants to believe in progress and development. Since time marches forward, we would like to think everything else does as well. Instead, we find a mixture of moving forward and backward. Humanity cannot advance and progress because humanity does not exist. History tells us of a few successes, but we also need to see the untold failures as well. For him, Christianity is a movement of decadence. The Reformation was a reaffirmation of barbarism. The French and German revolutions destroyed the instinct for a grand organization of society. Humanity itself, then, is no progress over other animals. Everything that looks like growth carries with it crumbling and passing away. Every fruitful and powerful movement creates a nihilistic movement. The coming of such nihilism and pessimism could be the sign of new conditions of existence. Civilization itself is an attempt to tame the human animal. In doing so, it has intolerance against the boldest and most spiritual natures. Socialism is the tyranny of the most dumb of society. He thinks of democracy itself as a tool to weaken humanity. Spiritual enlightenment, accompanied as it is by the need for company and support, actually develop the herd mentality in humanity. He refers to the question of Rousseau as amusing, namely, whether humanity becomes better through building civilization, but saying that the reverse is obvious to him. In reality, he does not rise of the good person, just as continual fine weather is not desirable. He wants the ever-increasing dominion of evil, understood as the growing emancipation of humanity from the narrow and fear-ridden bonds of morality. He wants the increase of force. In Thus Spake Zarathustra (1883) he denounces preachers of equality, who are secretly vengeful. He urges us to resist people whose impulse is to punish the powerful and talk much of their justice. They would be Pharisees if they had the power. People are not equal. In The Gay (Joyful) Science, he stresses that he has no desire to return to any past age. He is not liberal, he does not labor for progress, he has no interest in equal rights, or free society. He wants no kingdom of peace and righteousness established on earth. He loves danger, war, and adventure. He makes no compromises. He is among the conquerors. He ponders over the need of a new order of things. He wants a slavery of the strengthening and elevating type. He finds the parading of weakness as humane, the religion of pity, as offensive. He is no humanitarian. He has no desire to speak of love for humanity.^[9] Pannenberg points out that Nietzsche in Thus Spake Zarathustra I.22 refers to love as “giving love,” even if he erroneously supposed that he was formulating an opposing concept to that of Christian love. Nietzsche can say that his soul is the song of a lover. A craving for love is within him. His soul speaks the language of love. He refers to the discussion by Nygren, 63ff, who claims that Nietzsche confused Christian love with ordinary altruism, although Nygren, p. 57, could occasionally use the formula of Nietzsche.^[10] In the same book, he says our longing for a friend betrays us. Love is a device to overcome envy. The “you” is older than the “I.” We pronounce the other as holy, but we are not. We crowd toward the neighbor. We cannot endure ourselves and do not love ourselves enough. We go to the neighbor because we seek ourselves. We have long belonged to the herd. The voice of the herd is audible to us. We also need to beware of loneliness, for the lonely offer a hand too quickly to anyone they encounter. Your worst enemy is within you. In the same book, he refers to the political state as the coldest of all cold monsters. It tells lies, as if the state could be the people. The state lures people into it and devours them. It makes the courageous weary, so much so they give up and serve a new idol. It surrounds itself with new heroes, who become new idols. It will give you everything, if you adore it. Where adherence to the state ends, the bridge to the super-human begins.

One of the issues here is that modernity viewed itself as a synthesis of Plato and Aristotle, and thus classical Greek philosophy, with the Christian humanism of the renaissance, positive regard for science, and the rational explorations of various philosophical schools that culminated in the Enlightenment and Romanticism. It has much confidence that this intellectual tradition that valued freedom, progress, and dignity of the individual, was one to share with the world. The genealogical critique of Nietzsche and his notion of perspectivism sought to bring down this synthesis. His brand of nihilism, to the extent that it finds reflection in post-modernism, may well have succeeded. Many intellectuals of the West no longer have regard for the accomplishments of Western civilization. It has no moral standing, given its imperfections (slavery, colonialism, capitalism, oppression, inequality). The older liberalism of the 1800s, that valued freedom, has given way to the notion that the West has no moral compass it can offer to the world. Thus, intellectuals of the West can identify with Islamic terrorists, who are also fighting modernity in their way. The terrorist has learned to exploit a notion of tolerance that allows them free reign, even if their goal is to end tolerance. Such intellectuals, grounded in another critique of modernity, that of Karl Marx, can identify groups they view as victims of the West and promote their cause. The reason is that they want to bring down the synthesis that made the West. Christianity comes increasingly attack by such intellectuals in the West. So has capitalism. Democracy itself has come under attack in the attempt in America to rule by courts or by government agencies.

In pondering such thoughts for today, I wonder if Nietzsche has grasped something important. In contrast to the naïve notion of a human or world community, he is going to say that it does not exist. As I write in 2014, I find much truth in this. If the Russian leader Putin is trying to restore the old Soviet Union, then one failure of the West has been to bring Russian and its people into the Enlightenment era of constitutional democracy and freedom. Israel comes under attack by Hamas, and many in the media and in intellectual circles side with Hamas. At one level, the medieval religion of Islam is on the march. Hegel, in his Philosophy of Religion, viewed Islam as a step backward from the insights of Christianity. In many ways, is this not true? “Humanity” has not progressed, while those cultures have progressed who have accepted some notion of constitutional democracy, which limits the herd mentality denounced by Nietzsche, and which therefore values the freedom of the individual to pursue happiness. Yet, the Islamic terrorism witnessed in the 21^st century represents the rise of a medieval brand of religion that will bring, if victorious, the destruction of human freedom. It will bring rejection of freedom of religion, it will mean the death of atheism, and it will mean the end of economic and philosophical thought, including nihilism. It will mean a major step backward in the rights of women and freedom regarding sexual orientation. Clearly, “humanity” does not exist in the sense in which it moves forward, as if united by a human community. A failure in human history that is now coming home to roost for the West is the failure to bring Islam into this century.

I do not view this process as entirely negative for the church. The church may well have needed to re-examine its relationship to this synthesis that created western civilization. It may well need to consider how it can be faithful to following Jesus, to making disciples of Jesus Christ, to becoming Christ-like, in this new setting.

Nietzsche will uncover what he believes is the real fault of all religion. Humanity does not dare ascribe to itself strength. Ascribing strength to the supra-human and a being foreign to humanity, humanity has belittled itself. The pitiable and weak are human, while strength resides in God. Within Christianity, Nietzsche will argue that the church of his day is precisely that against which Jesus and the first disciples fought. He will also ascribe to Paul much of what he thinks is wrong with Christianity. His reason is that the church of his day sanctioned life under the political state. This meant that Christianity was a way of life that encouraged the herd mentality that the modern state needed in order to over-ride the will of individuals. In The Gay (Joyful) Science, Nietzsche describes the maniac who goes to the market, calling out that he seeks God. Yet, many people then in the market did not believe in God. One asked if God had become lost, or takes a voyage, or emigrated. They laughed at him. The insane man then asked rhetorically where God has gone. He answers his question that “We have killed” God. We have murdered God. Who gave us the sponge to wipe away the whole horizon? [Charles Taylor wonders if the loss of the horizon corresponds to something very widely felt in our culture.^[11]] We now stray through infinite nothingness. The maniac grew silent. He admits that he has come too early. He is not yet speaking at the right time. He concludes by saying that the churches are nothing more than the tombs and monuments of God.^[12] In the same book, he refers to preachers of morality as seeking persuade humanity that it is very ill and in need of a radical cure. Humanity listens to such teachers deeply, coming to believe that it was in a very bad way. They are far too ready to sigh, acting as if life were hard to endure. People speak with exaggeration about pain and misfortune. Such preachers seek to convince of the profound inner misery of humanity. Such preachers lie.^[13] He wonders if God turns out to be the most persistent lie we tell ourselves.^[14] This Spake Zarathustra (1883) famously has the old saint in the forest who has not yet heard that God has died. In the same book, he says he knows that in which Christians have the most faith. They have faith in afterworlds and redemptive drops of blood. They have faith in the body, even if a sickly one from which they long for liberation. Therefore, they listen to the preachers of death and themselves preach afterworlds. Rather, he wants people to listen to the voice of the healthy body. That is a more honest and purer voice. More honestly and purely speaks the healthy body that is perfect and perpendicular. It speaks of the meaning of the earth. In the same book, he will say that our desire for faith betrays our desire to have faith in ourselves. In the same book, he will say that the Hebrew Jesus died too young. He ought to have remained in the wilderness, far from the good. Had he lived long enough, he would have recanted his teaching of his youth.

Nietzsche is quite vivid in his portrayal of atheism.

Once upon a time, in a distant corner of this universe with its countless flickering solar systems, there was a planet, and on this planet some intelligent animals discovered knowledge. It was the most noble and most mendacious minute in the history of the universe – but only a minute. After Nature had breathed a few times their star burned out, and the intelligent animals had to die.^[15]

The intent of Toward a Genealogy of Morals (1887) is to provide a supplement and clarify his previous book, Beyond Good and Evil (1886). Pannenberg refers to Essay 2, no 16 as close to the view of Freud that civilization limits the claims of individuals to happiness and unleashes aggression inward in the form of feelings of guilt.^[16] In that part of the essay, Nietzsche says we are unknown to ourselves. We are strangers to ourselves. Modern people claim to have much knowledge, but they do not have knowledge of themselves. The two opposing values, good and bad, good and evil, have been engaged in a fearful struggle on earth for thousands of years. Though the latter value has certainly been on top for a long time, there are still places where the struggle is yet undecided. One might even say that it has risen ever higher and thus become increasingly profound and spiritual. So that today there is perhaps no more decisive mark of a higher nature a more spiritual nature, than that of being divided in this sense and a genuine battleground of these opposed values. He thinks the feeling of guilt, of personal obligation, had its origin in the oldest and most primitive personal relationship, that between buyer and seller, creditor and debtor. The bad conscience is the serious illness that humanity was bound to contract under the stress of the most fundamental change he ever experienced. Humanity walled itself within the safety of society and peace. The instinct for freedom forcibly made latent, this instinct for freedom pushed back and repressed, incarcerated within and finally able to discharge and vent itself only on itself. That is what the bad conscience is in its beginnings. The feeling of debt to the divinity grew as the conception of God grew. The coming of the Christian God carried with it the maximum feeling of guilty indebtedness on earth. Presuming we have gradually entered upon the reverse course, there is no small probability that with the irresistible decline of faith in the Christian God there is now also a considerable decline in humanity’s feeling of guilt. Indeed, one cannot dismiss the prospect that the complete and definitive victory of atheism might free humanity of this whose feeling of guilty indebtedness toward its origin, its first cause. Atheism and a kind of second innocence belong together. He thinks of the Christian answer for guilt as sickness. The Son, part of divinity, sacrifices to the Father, another aspect of divinity, for the guilt experienced by humanity. Divinity sacrifices itself for the guilt or debt incurred by humanity. God makes the payment of the debt to God. The creditor sacrifices for the debtor, doing so out of love of the debtor. Humanity is unredeemable in that it cannot pay the debt. As he sees it, this theological notion represents the sickness of Christianity.

Ayn Rand once said, consistent with Nietzsche here, “The worst guilt is to accept an unearned guilt.”

Pannenberg points out that Nietzsche will derive the idea of God from the fear of the ancestor and his power and from the consciousness of indebtedness to the ancestor. He sees belief in God as originating in the aggression against the self manifested in the feeling of guilt. He also assumed that belief in God intensifies the feeling of guilt. As he put it, the advent of the Christian God was accompanied by the maximum feeling of guilty indebtedness on earth. For him, the phenomenon of the judging conscience and the idea of guilt are incurred in relation to God. In close connection with these two phenomena is that the idea of God itself was to be explained as a product of aggression that had turned inward. Therefore, he could think of atheism as promising liberation from the burden of guilt feelings. He hypothesized that a bad conscience, the idea of God, and the idea of indebtedness to God, originate in an illness in the original animal soul of human beings.^[17]

Guilt is a condition that grips you like a free-floating sense of worthlessness or an existential dread. It burrows deep down inside you, an agonizing writhing of conscience permanently lodged in the soul. In the context of this essay, freeing the people living in western civilization from the divine has not released them from guilt. In his book, Infinite Desire: A Guide to Modern Guilt (2001), poet and novelist Paul Oppenheimer (who also teaches medieval literature and English at CCNY) examines the prevalence of guilt in a society that is largely irreligious. Paul Oppenheimer believes that modern secular guilt squats inside us constantly, unrelieved and unarticulated, growing ever more rancid. He writes that millions of seemingly innocent people feel guilty. Yet they have committed no crimes, done nothing truly shameful. "Nonetheless their guilt persists, at least in their own eyes, and often neatly folded away, though it cannot help but inject their other emotions and acts with unmentioned pain."

Where does this guilt come from? And what does it mean? Oppenheimer suggests a number of possibilities.

First, there are the lawn-watering laws and their ilk. We feel hemmed in by all kinds of new laws that regulate every aspect of life: littering laws, seat-belt laws, lawn-watering laws, drink and drug laws, gambling laws, parking laws, ... you name it. We have implied laws regarding healthy eating that if we do not fulfill cause guilt. Cross any of these lines and you immediately feel a twinge, if not the burden, of guilt.

Second, there is our day-to-day respectability. Oppenheimer believes that there is another kind of guilt that arises out of mediocrity, conformity and unfulfilled potential. To use a term from Nietzsche, we behave as part of the herd. We believe that we can do more with our lives, be truer to ourselves, take more risks and have more fun. We feel guilty when we compromise our potential by following the safe road of quiet respectability.

Third, we feel guilty about rejecting guilt. We think that a clear conscience is the sign of a bad memory. We feel guilty about our modern abandonment of genuine morality, nagged by our rejection of traditional guilt. When everything was black and white, we knew precisely why we felt guilty, and we knew what to do about it. We live in a world of grayness and confusion and moral relativity; we have no widely accepted moral truths to give shape to our guilt. We need a strong morality to make sense of our suffering conscience, or else our guilt festers and consumes.

Once upon a time, Western culture, founded largely on the myths of original sin and the Fall, conveniently described guilt as the result of sinning against God. Such a view of guilt entered history through Augustine -- who repressed his own lustful childhood in his Confessions with idealized versions of sin and salvation -- and held sway in the West until the 19th century. By that century's end, Nietzsche had condemned the Christian religion for enslaving its followers through a doctrine of guilt that weakened them and robbed them of their will to power. In addition, Nietzsche proclaimed the death of God, while Feuerbach, Marx and Freud declared that God was simply a projection of humankind. The 20th century opens, according to Oppenheimer, on a moral wasteland bereft of God -- and yet, he notes, the guilt remains. Writers as diverse as Kafka, Dostoyevski, T.S. Eliot and Maupassant, he says, express lucidly the anguish and despair of the modern conscience when it lacks the contours and context to define its inchoate guilt. As the 21st century unfolds, guilt lingers on and begins to take a new shape. Oppenheimer contends that our unending material desire provides the foundation for our current guilt.^[18]

Oppenheimer's overarching insight is this: The modern world gives us a deep and disturbing sense that there is something terribly wrong with our lives. We are facing a guilt glut, and it feels absolutely awful.

Although for the atheist, it would be convenient if guilt has its origin in the religious teaching of a debt owed to God. If we could just get rid of God, then we could get rid of guilt. This study suggests that all a fully secular society would accomplish is a shallow feeling of guilt that hangs around inside us, but with no way of dealing with the guilt.

In The Antichrist (1888) he says that Jesus was a rebellion against the good and the just, against the saints of Israel, against the hierarchy of society. He was not against its corruption, but against caste, privilege, order, and formula. The life of the redeemer was nothing other than this practice: he broke with the whole of Jewish doctrine of repentance and reconciliation. He knows that it is only the practice of life that one feels divine. The deep instinct for how one must live, in order to feel oneself in heaven, to feel eternal, while in all other behavior one decidedly does not feel oneself in heaven, this alone is the psychological reality of redemption. A new way of life, not a new faith. What was formerly just sick is today indecent. It is indecent to be a Christian today. Here begins my nausea. Everybody knows this, and yet everything continues as before. Where has the last feeling of decency and self-respect gone when even our statespersons still call themselves Christians today and attend communion? There was only one Christian, and he died on the cross. It is false to the point of nonsense to find the mark of the Christian in a faith, for instance, in the faith in redemption through Christ. Only Christian practice, a life such as he lived who died on the cross, is Christian. In the Christian world of ideas there is nothing that has the least contact with reality. It is the instinctive hatred of reality that we have recognized the only motivating force at the root of Christianity.

When one places life’s center of gravity not in life but in the beyond, that is, in nothingness, one deprives life of its center of gravity. The concept of the immortal soul, for example, feeds every kind of selfishness into the infinite, into the impertinent. Yet, Christianity owes its triumph to this miserable flattery of personal vanity. The salvation of the soul translates into nothing more than, “The world revolves around me.” The poison of equal rights for all was spread by Christianity. It has been against the elevation of culture. It undermined the aristocratic outlook. The good news of the lowly makes everyone low.

Judge not, they say, but they consign to hell everything that stands in their way. Paul was the greatest of all apostles of vengeance.

He says he has looked in vain in the New Testament for anything that is free, gracious, candid, and honest. Every book becomes clean after one has read the New Testament. To be attacked by the first century Christians is a sign of honor. We sympathize with whatever it condemns. Scribes and Pharisees must have been worth something to be attacked by the first Christians. They were people of privilege, which is enough for the New Testament to attack them. The Christian is against everything that is privileged, fighting for equal rights. Every word in the mouth of a first century Christian is a lie. Every act is performed from a falseness of instinct. His or her goals are harmful. Whatever the first century Christians hate has value. The only figure in the New Testament that demands respect is Pilate. He does not take a Jewish affair seriously.

Nobody is free to become a Christian: one is not converted to Christianity. One has to be sick enough for it. We others who have the courage to be healthy and to despise – we despise a religion that taught people to misunderstand the body. We despise a religion that does get rid of superstitious belief in souls. Holiness is merely a series of symptoms of an impoverished, unnerved, incurably corrupted body. The Christian movement has been from the start a collective movement of the dross and refuses elements of every kind. It does not express the decline of a race, it is an aggregate of forms of decadence flocking together and seeking each other out from everywhere.

We may understand his late attacks on Christianity as his desperate struggle against the most successful form of the morality of resentment, which he regarded as hostile to human life. His attacks became more sever the more he was convinced that most modern ideas, such as liberalism, socialism, and the politics of emancipation, were expressions of the Christian ideal.

He argued that historical method and criticism rendered invalid the mythical presuppositions without which religion in general and Christianity in particular could not survive. Historical criticism made Christianity outdated. The fundamentalist, evangelical, and liturgical expressions of Christianity run the risk of escapism, accepting much of the modern world while maintaining ideas one cannot reconcile with this worldview. His hope that historical criticism would destroy Christianity has not materialized. His reductionist premise that all religion depends on morality has not proved true to life. However, Christianity thrived in his day because of the resentment characteristic to Christian morality. By resentment, he designated a psychological disposition motivated by weakness and the often self-deceptive lust for revenge. Resentment reacts. Resentment was a reactive morality hostile to human life. He rightly suggests that reactive responses like envy, hatred, and resentment threaten to poison all areas of human relations, including religious interactions. Resentment undermines claims to authority because it is essentially pathetic. It is an expression of weakness and impotence. Nietzsche is against resentment because resentment is an ugly, bitter emotion that the strong and powerful do not and cannot feel. Resentment is an emotion that dwells on competitive strategy and thwarting others. It does not do what a virtue or a proper motive ought to do, for Nietzsche as for Aristotle, and that is to inspire excellence and self-confidence in both oneself and other. The universal rules of morality are themselves a strategy for inhibiting the best. The religious area may have a tendency to the impact of resentment. In particular, religion may resent its lack of power on the world stage, and seek recognition on that stage through political and violent means. Therefore, he argued that the strong should despise Christianity. Slave morality is the foundation of Christianity. Honor comes to the strong who overcome Christianity.

Resentment is an interesting way of analyzing the relationship between church and state. Americans grow up with an assumption of separation between the two. Europeans have grown up with taxation supporting the State church. Yet, the actual political power of the church was waning. The same is true today in America as the political and economic influence of the church continues to wane. Could “political theology” of a previous generation be the result of resentment? Maybe. It may tap into resentment of its lack of influence upon society. It reaches out, in the name of what they perceive to be the victims in society who also have resentment toward others whom they perceive to be strong. In fact, the overemphasis at a national level in mainline denominations on political themes may well be an expression of resentment. Such denominations continue to address social issues as if anyone cares what they think. Their numbers have declined. Increasingly, however, in the secular minds of many young people in the West, it simply does not matter what the church regarding political judgments. They will care only to the extent that the church supports the political agenda. Yet, such support, sometimes viewed within liberal Protestant denominations as removing barriers to people today, does not become a means of bringing people to the church. The strident call for the church to be relevant and involved in “transforming” society may well arise out of frustration with the increasingly limited spheres of influence exercised by the church, even in the lives of its members. It may also betray another reality. No longer believing in the importance of the spiritual life and community, the church of today can still say its mission is to make disciples of Jesus Christ to transform the work, while in reality investing itself in the support of a particular political agenda. In the case of much of mainline Protestant and Roman Catholic denominations, this means the progressive cause. Another way of saying this is that they resent having such an unimportant task and role in the lives of people today as their relationship with Jesus Christ. They would much rather invest their energies into a political or economic task, the tasks that really matter.

As a pastor, I admit that if all Christianity does is making people compliant tools of political leaders, it is nothing more than that against which Jesus and the disciples worked. While it might have become true of the Christianity Nietzsche knew, in the old Soviet block the church was the place of resistance to the dominating influence of the communist party. The church is often the place of renewal in Africa and Latin America. Christianity can abuse the notion of compassion by encouraging dependence. Christian love as compassion grows out of awareness of the evils of the world and motivates one to fight against them. Yet, Nietzsche seems to ridicule the communal nature of the human being. We need society with others. We can see this in our infancy most dramatically. Yet, throughout life, I do not find it a sign of weakness, but rather, a sign of strength, to be in community with others. Family is part of that, but every increasing and interlocking circles of community are also part of our development as human beings.

I will now turn to a theologian, Wolfhart Pannenberg. He will discuss attempts to ground belief in God by an appeal to human experience. He refers to Luther, who thought that despair in the face of the law led to Christian faith. Yet, the grounding of faith in the experience of a guilty conscience came under devastating criticism in Nietzsche and Freud, to the effect that one can hardly take this path today in trying to show the relevance of the Christian faith.^[19] Nietzsche would develop his notion of the neurotic origin of the idea of God in a sense of guilt.^[20] For Nietzsche, the idea of God has the function of a norm located in the conscience with the resultant sense of guilt. Atheism is not just a matter of enlightenment but of the will and self-affirmation. What Nietzsche will do is subject all truth to the will. Therefore, God appears only as a value. God is a posit of the human will and thus departs from the deity of God. The school of theologian Ritschl had already placed the notion of God within practical reason, which made it closely connected to the will as well. Such a theological position could not deal with Feuerbach, let alone the attack of Nietzsche. For Ritschl, religion supports the moral striving of humanity. The result in Barth and Bultmann was also an affirmation of the will, a practical necessity, and a decision of the will. Pannenberg thinks the only way forward for theology is the philosophical question of being.^[21] Such a radical criticism of religion stands or falls with the claim that religion is not a constitutive part of human nature. Religion is an aberration or at best an immature form of the human understanding of reality that secular culture has overcome. Religion will wither away. If religion is so constitutive of human life that one needs it for a fully rounded and complete human life, then the mission of the church will pose a potential danger to the secular culture.^[22]

Having no destiny, says Nietzsche, humanity has no single task to perform. Destiny suggests a search for knowing why humanity is here. Having a destiny means knowing what good and evil are. Such a notion is arbitrary and obscure. Humanity is a multiplicity of ascending and descending life processes. It does not have a youth, maturity, and old age. Rather, all the strata entwine together. Humanity is not a “whole.” Decadence is everywhere in its history. For Christianity, the goal is oneness with God. One is either moving toward that goal, or receding from it, and hence, it knows good and evil. Yet, no one believes “in this absurd self-inflation” today. The ideal is gone. Such a Christian vision is now in the hands of socialist and utilitarian thinkers. They think they can advance toward this ideal type of humanity. They have transferred the arrival of the kingdom of God with a human form on earth. They have not given up on the ideal. In reality, morality is false, even as interpretation of the world is false. The will to truth is nothing other than the abolition of the false character of things. Truth is not something one can discover, but something created. Truth is nothing other than the will to power. The essence of a thing is only an opinion. The real world has become the apparent world once again. The apparent world is that which one sees in accord with certain values that preserve and enhance the power of those who interpret. The perspective decides the character of the appearance. The apparent world becomes a specific mode of action on the world, emanating from a center that must be you, your bodily life. Appearance is an arranged and simplified world, at which our practical instincts have been at work; it is perfectly true for us; that is to say, we live, we are able to live in it: proof of its truth for us. The world is essentially a world of relationships; under certain conditions, it has a differing aspect from every point; its being is essentially different from every point; it presses upon every point, every point resists it--and the sum of these is in every case quite incongruent. The measure of power determines what being possesses the other measure of power; in what form, force, constraint it acts or resists.

Nietzsche has suffered much from those who read him. One can see his phrases, especially with Aryan and master race, especially when he says that a master race must have no religion, for nothing can be above such a race. His distaste for socialism and democracy are throughout his writings. Both gave rise to the Nazis. He thinks that democracy is making people small. Yet, it will be the driving force for the breeding of a stronger race. The masses in Europe that he saw were becoming uniform. It will take another master race who sole task is to rule, but has its own sphere of life, with an excess of strength, beauty, bravery, culture, manners. It will grant itself every luxury. It will have no need of the tyranny of the virtue that governs the herd. It will have no need of thrift and meticulousness. It will be beyond good and evil. He calls this race a barbarian from the heights that rule the herd. He refers to them as masters of the earth. They are a new and tremendous aristocracy, based on the most severe self-legislation. They are a higher kind of humanity who, thanks to their superiority in will, knowledge, riches, and influence, employs democracy as their pliant and supple instrument for getting hold of the destinies of the earth. They will be artists whose work will be humanity itself, molding it into something new. The point is not to make them better, to create conditions that require stronger people who will have a morality that makes them strong. The most powerful of them would have to be the most evil, in as much as he or she will carry his or her ideal against the ideals of others and remake them in his or her image. In this case, “evil” simply means hard, painful, and enforced, such a person is far from amiable. In Thus Spake Zarathustra, toward the end, he will say that evil is the greatest strength of humanity. Humanity must become better by becoming more evil. In fact, the greatest danger for the future of humanity is people who think they already know the good and just. They are Pharisees, as Jesus said. The good and just will never understand Jesus at this point. Their good conscience imprisons them. The good crucify those who invent their own virtue. They crucify the future of humanity. He explores this type of evil in The Gay (Joyful) Science (1882, Book 1.4), in which good people are agriculturalists of the spirit, bringing forth fruit from the roots of old thoughts, while the new is evil because it wants to conquer and upset the old boundaries. The problem is that the soil becomes tired, so evil must come. In Thus Spake Zarathustra (1883) he looks for that which will surpass humanity. He wonders what the reader has done to surpass humanity. In the past, sin against God was the greatest sin, and now, sin against the earth is the greatest sin. He urges that one needs chaos to create dancing star, and that you still have chaos within yourselves. He wants to lure people away from the herd. The creator of this new humanity is the one who breaks the table of values. Believers in all faiths hate such persons the most. He wants to create new values, which is within the power of the lion. The creation of freedom for oneself and a sacred “No” to duty, that is the most terrifying assumption for a reverent spirit that would bear much. However, what can the child do that even the lion cannot? The child is innocence and forgetting, a new beginning, a game, a self-propelled wheel. The spirit now wills his own will, and he who had been lost to the world now conquers his own world. In his sexist way, he will say that the male receives education for war, and woman for the play, even if she is a dangerous plaything. The male has a hidden child that wants to play. The woman brings out the child in the male. Pannenberg notes that this notion of play and freedom will not appear in philosophical literature until Sartre.^[23]

I will not defend Nietzsche. In all of this, he set the stage for one like Hitler. Of course, one like Hitler will abuse the thought of anyone if it advances his agenda. He argues that the grounding of a society is politics and power relations, rather than philosophical and ethical arguments.

Yet, I wonder if one might not take this future master race in a different direction. This elite group of politicians and managers of government will not destroy democracy. Rather, it will learn how to use democracy to gain its power and make people form into their ideal. It will not be easy. It will require the use of force. It will require convincing the masses to surrender their freedom and ideals for some supposed “greater good” as defined by these powerful, elected, politicians and mangers. Such an elite group in America might ignore the constitution and the laws passed by Congress, for they operate under a set of rules that they establish for themselves. They will want to “remake” citizens into their vision of a good citizen. Such a group, if committed to progressive ideals, will have a vision of certain types of energy usage, certain healthy foods and personal behaviors, all of which will be for the good of the masses, even if they as the elite can do as they please. It will favor certain types of businesses over others. It will determine which business wins and which business loses. Such an approach to business will not be socialism, but it will be its brand of fascism, the management of business activities by political agenda. We might call this “progressive” politics in our day. We might call it the European Union.

Nietzsche seems to offer a picture of morality that shows it to be merely envy, or a device of the weak, or ressentiment, depriving it of all claim on our allegiance. It looks upon benevolence as exacting a high cost in self-love and self-fulfillment, which may require payment in self-destruction and violence. Pity becomes destructive to the giver and degrading to the receiver. Benevolence becomes indefensible. If some form of agape is not available, then Nietzsche is wrong.^[24]

Pannenberg expands on this notion as he discusses the difficulty of the topic of sin within a discussion of Christian anthropology. With the decline of this teaching in Protestanism, piety attached to recognition of sin as a condition of assurance of salvation became problematic. Revivalist piety stressed a story of suffering under spiritual oppression. While successful for some, for many people it became a source of inauthentic guilt feelings. In others, it led to turning aside from Christianity. He refers to the son of a pastor, Nietzsche, as an influential example.^[25] He points out that Christian moralism could seem to be life-denying rigidity, and extended guilt feelings seemed to be simply neurotic, with Nietzsche and Freud offering converging lines of argument in moral criticism. To many people, the unmasking of the neurotic character of the Christian sense of guilt demonstrated the oppressive nature of the entire Christian belief in God. He particularly concerns himself with a false sense of vaguely universal guilt linked to moralism. Sin became nothing more than the individual act. It led to criticism of Christian Pharisaism that judged the moral failures of others without any psychological or social understanding of the causes. Moral norms became nothing more than convention.^[26] As Pannenberg sees it, Nietzsche and his followers are right to say that Christianity is offering a false or distorted view of human life if it cannot ground its notion of sin in the structures of human life. What Christians say about human beings as sinners is true only if it relates to something that characterizes the phenomenon of human life. In fact, Christian faith presupposes the fact of sin. It does not create it. The challenge for theology is to show this to be the case.^[27] He considers the link often made between sin, death, and life, suggesting that theology tended to focus on the moral life. Connecting natural evil and death to sin is more likely neurotic and the product of sick imaginings. Such a psychological criticism could also extend to the validity of moral norms, as we see in Genealogy of Morals.^[28] The problem is that Nietzsche presupposes an original state of health and identity that the bad conscience interrupts. Since this is not true, it leaves open the possibility of guilt and its sign of non-identity as a step toward freedom rather than illness and loss. The consciousness of the failure of the self is not aggression turned inward, but breaks the spell exercised by the distorted view of humanity that presupposes human health and holiness.^[29]

I am never quite sure what to do with Nietzsche. His notion of perspectivism, while helpful on the level of personal discussion, could have disastrous implications when carried into the sphere of political life. His attack on democracy was, I think, an attack on the pure form of democracy, which would simply mean government by the majority. In America, the founders did all they could to protect America from majority rule, through the constitution and through divided government. They wanted power disbursed in as many ways as possible. Yet, his concern that democracy will lead to a soft form of tyranny (Do Tocqueville), a tyranny of the herd, is well-founded. His awareness that the socialism growing in Europe had Christian roots, and therefore he needed to attack both, is insightful and helpful. As one who values individual freedom, I find much with which to work. His rejection of the overwhelming demands of the political state is dear to my heart. His rejection of the notion that “humanity” exists, as if in a community, and the complex nature of “progress” when considering human history, are all worthy of reflection. Easy talk of a “world community” becomes naïve in the hands of Nietzsche. He challenges me on the relationship between church and culture. In this regard, his notion of resentment is worthy of further reflection. Generally, his theological observations seem shallow. He wants to reduce belief in God to the experience of guilt and a debt owed. Yet, imagine a world in which no one believed in God. Would guilt disappear? My suggestion is that guilt has its origin, not in a theological issue, but in a human issue. We do have the feeling of guilt or debt in that we seem to owe someone something, even while feeling like we could never repay the debt. Whether religion in general or Christianity in particular deals with the human experience of guilt properly is another question. From his narrow and simplifying perspective, Christianity encourages weakness. His lack of appreciation for the human experience of community, sympathy for others, especially the weak, remains a puzzle to me. Christian love does not keep people weak or make them weak, but seeks to lift people up, to help them be strong. Of course, strength in the Christian view is adopting a center of gravity away from self and toward Another, toward Christ, and toward Christ-likeness. His notion of being a person of the future is an interesting one. From the perspective of Paul, for example, conforming oneself to the image of Christ makes one a person of the future, a future defined by God, who raised Christ from the dead, and gave us a vision of new humanity. In that sense, Christians are also homeless in the present. Such homelessness, however, leads one to care for ourselves as persons who live in these unique bodes God has made and to care for this world that God has also made. What Nietzsche never appreciated was that for most Christians, the faith and hope of life with God in eternity, far from disposing of self and world, energizes them for life in this world.

[1] 1882, Book 5, 381.

[2] 1882, Book 5.377.

[3] 1882, Book 5.382.

[4] (1882, Book 1.34)

[5] Charles Taylor, Sources of the Self, 487-9.

[6] Freud and Philosophy, 32-5.

[7] Pannenberg, Anthropology in a Theological Perspective, 205.

[8] The Gay (Joyful) Science, 1882, Book 5.347.

[9] Book 5.377.

[10] Systematic Theology Volume 3, 184.

[11] Sources of the Self, 17.

[12] (1882, Book 3, 125)

[13] The Gay (Joyful) Science, 1882, Book 4.326.

[14] The Gay (Joyful) Science, 1882, Book 5.344.

[15] Quoted in Philip Clayton, The Problem of God in Modern Thought, p. 4, from a German addition of the Works of Nietzsche.

[16] Anthropology in a Theological Perspective, 304.

[17] Anthropology in a Theological Perspective 151-2.

[18] --Publishers Weekly, Cahners Business Information, Inc., posted on amazon.com. Retrieved January 19, 2002.

[19] Systematic Theology Volume 1, 65.

[20] Systematic Theology Volume 1, 104.

[21] Systematic Theology Volume I, 152 and Basic Questions II, 192-6.

[22] Systematic Theology Volume 1, 154-5 and Anthropology in Theological Perspective, 15.

[23] Anthropology in a Theological Perspective, 322.

[24] Charles Taylor, Sources of the Self, 516-20.

[25] Systematic Theology Volume 2, 232.

[26] Systematic Theology Volume 2, 235.

[27] Systematic Theology, Volume 2, 236.

[28] Systematic Theology Volume 2, 268.

[29] Anthropology in a Theological Perspective 152.