Nietzsche Essay #4: The Gay Science and the "Death of God"

* I'm taking a class on Friedrich Nietzsche and we do a 2-page essay on our weekly readings.  This is one of my essays.

·      Sections 108, 109, 125 of The Gay Science introduce the death of God. Explain what Nietzsche means by this phrase and how it plays into his work.

 

Nietzsche is famous for his concept of the “death of God.”  Keith Pearson and Duncan Large helpfully explain what this means:

The death of God can be interpreted in two senses: it can mean the death of the “symbolic God,” that is, the death of the very specific and particular God of Christianity that has held European humanity in bondage for two millennia. It can also mean the death of the God of theologians, philosophers, and some scientists, that is, the “God” that serves as a guarantor of order, structure, and purpose in the universe. We think it is clear that for Nietzsche God is now dead for us in both of these senses.[1]

 

To speak even more concisely, we might call distinguish between (1) Christian theism and (2) a transcendent realm for which “God” is often the foundation.  Both of these ideas are important for Nietzsche as concepts to be overcome.[2]

            Once the existence of God is done away with there is still the question of the “shadow of God” which must be vanquished. This shadow is the conventional morality which has been tied to Christendom.  German culture and its elites may have dispensed with God but Nietzsche is vexed that these same people have not realized the implications of this for the arena of morality.  For Nietzsche, the twin errors of an objective morality and transcendent realm to which it is ontologically anchored must be dispensed with along with traditional belief in the Christian God.  

            Section 125 in The Gay Science is, thus, not an argument against God.  It is, rather, about the implications of the loss of belief in God for a culture.  Although German culture had rejected orthodox Christian theism—at least its cultural elites as represented by David Strauss—it had, by and large, retained traditional Christian morality.  There was a kind of cultural inertia in which, although the engine of objective morality had disappeared, the effects of it continued.  Or, to use Nietzsche’s metaphor, the substance which sustained objective morality was gone and only the shadow was left—and many were content with merely the shadow.  

            Nietzsche’s “madman” appears in the midst of a collection of people who do not realize the implications of dispensing with God. The haunting questions of the madman reveal this dynamic: 

“Whither are we moving?  Away from all suns?  Are we not plunging continually?  Backward, sideward, forward, in all directions?  Is there still any up or down?  Are we not straying as through an infinite nothing?  Do we not feel the breath of empty space? Has it not become colder?

 

The silence and the astonishment at the madman speak of a people who do not understand the implications of their philosophical ideas.  Christopher Janaway poignantly speaks of the madman and his “double pain of facing both a disorienting vacuum of values and the alienation of sensing the vacuum when others do not.”[3]  

            It is not hard to see a connection between Nietzsche and the madman.  Nietzsche is calling out for those few with courage to see through the folly of objective morality as one of the implications of the denial of God and the transcendent.  Janaway, however, notes a key distinction between Nietzsche and the madman: 

But as we shall see, neither complacent unthinking atheism nor the “heavy” desperation of the madman can be a final resting place for Nietzsche, the would-be light-hearted investigator.[4]

 

Nietzsche will go on to a more joyful response as he seeks to create values for himself.

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     [1]Keith Ansell Pearson and Duncan Large, “General Introduction” in The Nietzsche Reader(Malden, Mass.: Blackwell, 2006), xxxv.

     [2]Stephen Williams perceptively explains, “Nietzsche rather assumes than argues the intellectual case against God.  His is more interested in examining the damage done by its content than in revisiting an intellectually familiar closed case against God.” The Shadow of the Antichrist: Nietzsche’s Critique of Christianity(Grand Rapids, Mich.: Baker, 2006), 92.

     [3]Christopher Janaway, “The Gay Science” in The Oxford Handbook of Nietzsche, Ken Gemes and John Richardson, eds. (United Kingdom, Oxford, 2013), 256.

     [4]Janaway, “The Gay Science,” 256. 

In Honor of the White Rose: Hans & Sophie Scholl and Christopher Probst--February 22, 1943

In honor of Sophie and Hans Scholl and Christoph Probst who were put to death on February 22, 1943 in Nazi Germany for their resistance movment called "The Resistance of the White Rose."  

"Many people believe that our age is the last.  

All the omens are terrible enough to make one think so, but isn't that belief of secondary importance?  

Mustn't we all, no matter what age we live in, 

be permanently prepared for God to call us to account from one moment to the next?  

How am I to know if I shall still be alive tomorrow?  

We could all be wiped out overnight by a bomb, and my guilt would be no less than if I perished in company with the earth and the stars--I know all that, but don't I heedlessly fritter away my life just the same?  

O God, I beseech you to take away my frivolity and self-will, which clings to the sweet, ephemeral things of life.  

I can't do so myself, I'm far too weak."  

Sophie Scholl

[Diary entry from August 9, 1942]

Nietzsche Essay #3: Human, All Too Human

 * I'm taking a class on Friedrich Nietzsche and we do a 2-page essay on our weekly readings.  This is one of my essays.

·      Articulate Nietzsche’s position in section 107 [Human, All Too Human]. Given his assumptions is there any other view he could have?

 

Nietzsche continues to seek consistency between a naturalistic, non-teleological vision of the world.  In line with this Nietzsche affirms a kind of physical determinism which undermines moral responsibility—a person can be neither responsible for their behavior or nature.  Julian Young has drawn attention to one reason why Nietzsche is at pains to promote the denial of human free will: “… the real payoff is the denial of guilt.” (Young, 258)

Nietzsche also denies the objective nature of good and evil.  In its place Nietzsche opts for a form of psychological egoism in which the “individual’s only demand for self-enjoyment… is satisfied in all circumstances.” (178)[1]  But this idea, when coupled with evolution, means that the standard of morality which is linked to human self-enjoyment is “constantly in flux” as the human nature continues to evolve.  Nietzsche goes so far as to call our actions “stupid” since the highest degree of human intelligence that we now have will be surpassed one day.  

Although morality is evolving in concert with the evolution of human nature there is a goal to which moral reasoning is moving. Nietzsche forcefully states: “Everything in the sphere of morality has evolved: changeable, fluctuating, everything is fluid, it is true: but everything is also streaming onward—to one goal.” (178) This goal seems to be the production of persons who are “wise and innocent.”  These should not be confused with classical virtues but, rather, wisdom replaces morality and innocence is the result of seeing that “good” and “evil” are merely constructs that can be overridden without guilt.

Nietzsche recognizes that the viewpoint he is articulating can be difficult to acknowledge and come to grips with for most people.  As he states, “To understand all this can cause great pain…” (178) and that many “fear the consequences” of such a proposal (174—section 39).  But Nietzsche believes that there are a “few” self-reflective individuals who will be able to see through the implications of evolution for morality.  They will be the ones who transform from the moral into the wise for they have the wisdom to see the “truth” of evolving morality.  Given time, then, “these men are the necessary first stage, not the opposite of those to come.” (178)  They, thus, serve as the vanguard of those to come in the process of social evolution.

Given Nietzsche’s philosophical assumptions of non-teleological evolution, determinism, and the lack of objective morality because of a commitment to evolving psychological egoism, it is not hard to see how Nietzsche develops his views.  His viewpoint seemingly flows necessarily from his assumptions. There may be one exception. Earlier in section 34 Nietzsche spoke of the potential responses to the lack of moral truth.  He looks at Schopenhauer’s conclusions that death may be preferable in light of the bleakness of existence.  Whereas for Nietzsche, he opts for “joy.” (170). The choice between despair and joy is not a logical one but, rather, one of “temperament.”  Nietzsche writes: 

“I believe that a man’s temperament determines the aftereffect of knowledge; although the aftereffect described above [tragedy and despair] is possible in some natures, I could just as well as imagine a different one, which would give rise to a life much more simple, more free of affects than the present one.” (170)

 

The act of choosing to see the implications of evolving, non-objective morality is not a logical one but, rather, an act of the will based, at least in part, by one’s temperament.  

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[1]This psychological egoism is also articulated in a previous section--# 57, page 175.

Nietzsche Essay #2: "On Truth and Lies in a Nonmoral Sense"

  * I'm taking a class on Friedrich Nietzsche and we do a 2-page essay on our weekly readings.  This is one of my essays.

·      “What then is truth?  A movable host of metaphors, metonymies, and anthropomorphisms: in short, a sum of human relations which have been poetically and rhetorically intensified, transferred and embellished, and which, after long usage, see to people to be fixed, canonical, and binding.” (p 117) Explain what this means.

 

In his essay “On Truth and Lies in a Nonmoral Sense" Nietzsche clearly denies that truth is any sort of correspondence between the thoughts of a subject and the objective world.  He calls such a notion “a contradictory impossibility” (119). Furthermore, Nietzsche rejects any conception of universals—“nature is acquainted with no forms and no concepts” (117).

Nietzsche holds to a kind of scientific psychology of human language and its relationship to the world.  Nietzsche’s outline looks something like this: 

“The thing in itself” >>nerve stimulus >>image >>sound

The “thing in itself” (a very Kantian phrase!) is “pure truth” but “incomprehensible to the creator of language” (116).  This impinges on our nerve stimulus to create an image. This image Nietzsche calls “first metaphor.”  When the subject translates this image into sound (language) this is called “second metaphor.” It is important to note that for Nietzsche there is no necessary connection between the nerve stimulus and the generated image (119).   Given this picture, Nietzsche is able to forthrightly state:

It is this way with all of us concerning language: we believe that we know something about the things themselves when we speak of trees, colors, snow, and flowers; and yet we possess nothing but metaphors for things—metaphors which correspond in no way to the original entities.

 

So for Nietzsche, language does not map onto reality in any truthful sense. Rather, linguistic creation of concepts necessarily falsifies the empirical world.  Thus, all that is left are the self-created metaphors that are twice-removed from reality.  According to Nietzsche, these metaphors take on a “fixed, canonical, and binding” status by sheer repetition.

            Nietzsche will not even allow that “science” gets us at truth.  It is an illusion that science gets at the “infallibility of laws of nature” (120).  It is a vain hope that “Science will be able to dig successfully in this shaft forever, and all the things that are discovered will harmonize with and not contradict each other” (120).  These “laws of nature” are simply what the result of relations to other “laws” we have created.  In a statement seemingly dependent on Kant, Nietzsche writes, “All that we actually know about these laws of nature is what we ourselves bring to them—time and space, and therefore relationships of succession and number” (120).  Thus, Nietzsche is able to conclude that the empirical world is the anthropomorphic world (121). 

            So for Nietzsche there is not access to the “real world”—the “thing in itself.”  All we have are self-generated linguistic conventions that function as metaphors for reality.  With the passing of time these are hardened into “laws” but they are just “anthropomorphisms” since they are generated by the human subject which cannot break out of the prison house of the Kantian categories which the human subject imposes on reality.  Even the vaunted claims of empirical science are rendered anthropomorphic since the alleged natural law “which impresses us so much in the movement of the stars and in chemical processes, coincides at bottom with those properties which we bring to things” (120).  All that is left of “truth” is metaphor and anthropomorphism, according to Nietzsche.

Nietzsche Essay #1: Birth of Tragedy

 * I'm taking a class on Friedrich Nietzsche and we do a 2-page essay on our weekly readings.  This is one of my essays.

·      Discuss the roles of the spirit of Apollo and that of Dionysus in the Birth of Tragedy.  What point is Nietzsche making?

 

Apollo and Dionysus functions as metaphor for differing aspects at work in Greek culture.  The Apollonian concerns that which is more rational.  It is the realm of order and optimism. It manifests itself in the visual arts such as sculpture—what Nietzsche calls the “plastic arts.”  The Dionysian, on the other hand, revolves around sensuality and cruelty.  It is the realm of the chaotic and it manifests itself in music which is not dependent on images.  These two impulses are inter-related but, according to Nietzsche, “differ in their deepest essence and their highest goals” (NR, 73).  In fact, Nietzsche states plainly that “the real goal of our enquiry” is to consider the mystery of the union between the Apollonian and the Dionysian. (NR, 54)

      Another way to contrast the Apollonian and the Dionysian is to consider this dialectic as attempting to answer the question of the “One and the Many.”  The Apollonian is linked to the Many.  It is the impulse of individuation, or as Nietzsche puts it the prinicipium individuationis.  The Dionysian concerns the One—the undifferentiated unity of all things.  Although both the Apollonian and the Dionysian are at play it seems as though the Dionysian has a primacy.  Perhaps it is better to say that what the Dionysian represents is primary. It is as though the flux and undifferentiated “stuff” of the universe is the primal reality upon which individuals place some sort of order.  Nietzsche quotes the pre-Socratic philosopher Anaxagoras: “In the beginning all things were mixed together, then came understanding [nous] and created order” (NR, 65).  Nietzsche links this philosophical conception to the arena of the arts and sees Euripides as making a transition from the “Aeschylean-Sophoclean tragedy” to a more propositionally oriented play with its introduction of the explanatory prologue.

      With these two competing aspects, the Apollonian and the Dionysian, Nietzsche goes on to add to his taxonomy and speak of “three stages of illusion: Socratic knowledge, Apollonian art, and “the metaphysical consolation” (NR, 77).  These stages are not to be seen as historically chronological since Nietzsche has already claimed that the Apollonian is historically prior to the Socratic.  The Socratic ideal flows out of the Apollonian under the influence of Euripides.  Thus, this creates a new tension between the Socratic (with its focus on reason) and the Dionysian (with its focus on emotions). Nietzsche then takes these three stages of illusion and speaks of how differing cultures will mix these components thus creating the major cultural impulses and definitions of that time. In Nietzsche’s words: “… according to the proportions of the mixture we have a predominately Socratic, or artistic or tragic culture; of if I may avail myself of historical examples: either an Alexandrian, or a Hellenic or an Indian (Brahmanic) culture” (NR, 77).

Thus, Nietzsche’s use of the categories of the Apollonian, with its attendant Socratic impulse, and the Dionysian is meant to be not merely of historical interest.  By these categories Nietzsche is attempting a cultural analysis and offering a way forward for his German culture.  He is clear about this intention when he writes: “I repeat that only from the Greeks can we learn what such a miracle-like awakening of tragedy means for the innermost foundation of the life of a people” (NR, 80).  It is through the proper blending and dialectical tension between the Apollonian and the Dionysian that a culture can progress and move forward.