The Nietzschean Odyssey Closing Chapter (For Now, Anyway): Twilight of the Idols
Since I have not managed to get my hands on Nietzsche's earlier works yet, and the two remaining are a combined forty pages or so, this will be the last on Nietzsche's work at the moment. Now, let's get started.
There isn't any big leap in this work; instead we have more of a summary of what Nietzsche stands for, with some particulars expanded upon and whatnot. I will, therefore, cover a few different ideas and hopefully crack open some new ground (in terms of what I've done so far) as we close out.
The Idols of the title are the theme of the first part of this work. 'Idols' is an excellent term here to describe Nietzsche's sentiment: the objects of veneration and even worship in others are seen by Nietzsche as false, powerless, and deceitful in reality. We've been introduced to most of these idols before, and we know what's going to happen. For a good opener, though, we can start with this:
The philosophical system is of paramount interest to Nietzsche and has been since his earliest works. And what are the great systems, the Idols, that Nietzsche despises so much?
1. Socrates - "The value of life cannot be estimated..." and yet this is exactly what Socrates does. Namely, he lowballs it. Life is bad, impure even, the Socratic man says. This is the view of the lower classes of Athens, of whom Socrates was a member. Waaaay back in The Birth of Tragedy, Nietzsche describes Socrates as a man who observed the great tragic culture of noble Athens and simply didn't get it. It didn't make sense. And to survive, to get a culture he could deal with, he had to do away with the noble values. The tool Socrates used to wage his war was that of the dialectic. We should note here that by default the 'noble values' won't survive the scrutiny of dialectic; in fact, they fail by definition. But that is part of what makes them noble: they are chosen not for their objective truth, but because they are sought by those who have the power to obtain them. But when challenged on a field where 'reason' and logic hold the keys, they seem merely arbitrary. The values of the nobles couldn't stand up to the force of dialectic, and so the weak used logic as a tool to take power for their own. Western civilization, as Nietzsche would tell us, has yet to recover.
2. 'Reason' in Philosophy - What exactly is Socrates' reason supposed to reveal to us, one might ask? What was life thrown away in favor of? Through Plato, we see an answer in the Forms: those perfect, nearly incomprehensible, eternal beings which make things the way they are. My emphasis is on the eternal, because eternity is just the thing Nietzsche accuses all the philosophers of 'reason' of bowing to. The eternal is a fiction: it is created to give comfort, give meaning to those who can't generate their own. Nietzsche's greatest case is Kant, that creator of "Practical Reason," the fiction which throws away all the real philosophy that man can come up with in favor of a world that is eternal, objective, and all that bull. And of course we can make a note of, or at least use of, the idea of Pure Reason in talking about mistakes philosophers do. Simply put, there is no pure reason. All that is real, all that counts, is the senses for Nietzsche. When we try to interpret what comes to us, that's when error comes in, for we have a tendency to stick things in where nothing exists. Suppositions of unity, of moral purpose, of an "I," these are fictions we refuse to give up built on a foundation of error. But we'll get to that soon.
3. Anti-Natural Morality - Do I really need to say anything here? There is one new point that Nietzsche makes, a description of passions. A trait of the weak, he tells us, is their inability to control their passions. If one cannot control one's self, it will inevitably lead to pain and destruction. So what is one to do (that is, if one is weak and can't accept such a possibility as pain)? "...if your eye offends you, pluck it out." And so with the passions. Of course, following Nietzsche, our passions give us our reasons for living, our drives for power. Cut the passion out, you cut out life. "every healthy morality...is governed by an instinct of life...anti-natural morality, on the other hand...explicitly turns its back on the instincts of life, - it condemns these instincts..." A healthy morality would value the passions, since they are natural and human. Suppressing the passions is taking away our humanity.
4. The Four Great Errors - Here is something interesting, and hence we spend more time on this. Just what are the errors made by the philosophers and moralists?
Number one: confusing cause and effect. This is a bit odd, but better understood with an example which Nietzsche provides: "do this, don't do that - and then you'll be happy." Virtue does not create happiness, you see, for that is exactly backwards. A happy person will inevitable act 'virtuous'. Vices do not harm people, instead weaker people are the ones who fall into vice. I might be taking a bit of a liberty here, but if I may attempt to generalize: the Nietzschean truth is that it is the body that comes first, which then affects the mind/soul/consciousness. Christianity gets this backwards.
Error two: false cause. An independent will, a complete self, a mind...these do not reflect reality. Idealism, in short ("thing in itself", to put it another way). That the world is affected by these things identified only by concepts is simply wrong. What exists is what we experience, not what we infer as existing.
Error three: imaginary cause (a favorite of mine). Things need reasons, right? And not only reasons, but reasons that make sense to us. Recall the Genealogy of Morals: why is there suffering? The aesthetic priest can tell you: it's because of your sin. In this manner our states, our circumstances, do not make sense to us until we posit something else, something that isn't there. If we can explain something in our own manner, it gives us control. I know why I feel such anguish. Now I know how to fix it. The reality, that such things can and often do exist without any good reason at all, is simply too much for one of weaker constitution.
Error four: free will. A trick of the priests to gain control. Free will allows for the feeling of guilt, which can be used by the priests. They use it to judge, and with the power of judgment comes the power of defining things, and that is a great power indeed.
The Improvement of Humanity - here we start to move into different territory. How does one make mankind better? In The Genealogy of Morals, Nietzsche sums it up in the sentence quoted in that post. Here a comparison is made with the the Christian method of 'improvement', domestication. I needn't say more. Nietzsche's point of comparison in this example? Breeding. Here we can return to a favorite of Nietzsche's, the Hindu Book of Manu. Basically sets up the legendary Indian caste system that we all love to hate. But Nietzsche has his feelings about who is worthy of what, and you get the rest. Perhaps some criticism and alteration for a slightly more tolerable option would do in another post, but we'll move on for now.
---
The rest of the work kind of wanders all over the place, talking about individuals, countries, values, and the like, and so I'll close up with a couple ideas I found very interesting.
First, Nietzsche on education. A masterstroke, in my opinion. First, German education: "German 'higher schooling' is in fact a brutal form of training that tries to process a horde of young men as quickly as possible for use - and abuse - in the civil service." More generally: "The fact that education, that development...is itself a goal, the fact that you need educators...to reach this goal, people have forgotten this...We need educators who are themselves educated...not the scholarly morons that schools and universities offer young people these days as 'higher wet nurses'." "And there is such an oppressive and indecent sense of hurry, as if something would be lost if a twenty-three-year-old is not 'finished' yet..." (Hallelujah!)
(This is me, not Nietzsche, ranting) What is the purpose of education? If you want someone to just do a task, and do it again and again, you don't educate them, you train them. We're not only talking about assembly lines here...doctors, lawyers, they are trained. This is why law and medical schools are not universities. When a child is growing up, however...when an adolescent is defining himself...when a person is developing, you do not 'train' them. You educate them. You teach them to think, to consider. Or not, apparently. We cannot treat education like some sort of perfectly objective list of to-dos. An education whose goal is to teach a child to reason cannot be so simple. Training, of course, can be relatively simple, as there is a certain body of knowledge and concepts that must be mastered. But are we supposed to be 'training' our children in reading and the sciences? Will training create not only a voter, but an informed voter who thinks for him or herself? Or will a lifetime of training, a rush to learn facts, create a hyper specialized human who is a master of his widget but has at best a marginal concept of humanity?
Going back to Nietzsche, what is a 'real' education? "Learning to see - getting your eyes used to calm, to patience, to letting things come to you; postponing judgment, learning to encompass and take stock of an individual case from all sides." Learning to think...thought is not some abstract calculation, but something we do. A dance, even. An art. Grace with logic, "a finger for nuances..." And lastly, "...do I still have to say that you need to be able to do it with a pen too - that you need to learn to write?"
Last of all, and completely switching gears, a note on the will to power. What does the infamous will to power seek? Is it control? Destruction? Will all power-seekers seek to dominate man? Is all power brutal?
Ah!
---
End Nietzsche. What will come next? I don't know. Since I am getting the semester underway, I don't have time for too much, but depending on my reading opportunities in my classes (Existentialism + Independent study of Nietzsche + World Religions = Win), I may turn to...Dostoevsky, Camus, Nietzsche Redux, Tillich (Wikipedia him)...the possibilities are endless.
There isn't any big leap in this work; instead we have more of a summary of what Nietzsche stands for, with some particulars expanded upon and whatnot. I will, therefore, cover a few different ideas and hopefully crack open some new ground (in terms of what I've done so far) as we close out.
The Idols of the title are the theme of the first part of this work. 'Idols' is an excellent term here to describe Nietzsche's sentiment: the objects of veneration and even worship in others are seen by Nietzsche as false, powerless, and deceitful in reality. We've been introduced to most of these idols before, and we know what's going to happen. For a good opener, though, we can start with this:
I distrust all systematizers and avoid them. The will to a system is a lack of integrity.
The philosophical system is of paramount interest to Nietzsche and has been since his earliest works. And what are the great systems, the Idols, that Nietzsche despises so much?
1. Socrates - "The value of life cannot be estimated..." and yet this is exactly what Socrates does. Namely, he lowballs it. Life is bad, impure even, the Socratic man says. This is the view of the lower classes of Athens, of whom Socrates was a member. Waaaay back in The Birth of Tragedy, Nietzsche describes Socrates as a man who observed the great tragic culture of noble Athens and simply didn't get it. It didn't make sense. And to survive, to get a culture he could deal with, he had to do away with the noble values. The tool Socrates used to wage his war was that of the dialectic. We should note here that by default the 'noble values' won't survive the scrutiny of dialectic; in fact, they fail by definition. But that is part of what makes them noble: they are chosen not for their objective truth, but because they are sought by those who have the power to obtain them. But when challenged on a field where 'reason' and logic hold the keys, they seem merely arbitrary. The values of the nobles couldn't stand up to the force of dialectic, and so the weak used logic as a tool to take power for their own. Western civilization, as Nietzsche would tell us, has yet to recover.
2. 'Reason' in Philosophy - What exactly is Socrates' reason supposed to reveal to us, one might ask? What was life thrown away in favor of? Through Plato, we see an answer in the Forms: those perfect, nearly incomprehensible, eternal beings which make things the way they are. My emphasis is on the eternal, because eternity is just the thing Nietzsche accuses all the philosophers of 'reason' of bowing to. The eternal is a fiction: it is created to give comfort, give meaning to those who can't generate their own. Nietzsche's greatest case is Kant, that creator of "Practical Reason," the fiction which throws away all the real philosophy that man can come up with in favor of a world that is eternal, objective, and all that bull. And of course we can make a note of, or at least use of, the idea of Pure Reason in talking about mistakes philosophers do. Simply put, there is no pure reason. All that is real, all that counts, is the senses for Nietzsche. When we try to interpret what comes to us, that's when error comes in, for we have a tendency to stick things in where nothing exists. Suppositions of unity, of moral purpose, of an "I," these are fictions we refuse to give up built on a foundation of error. But we'll get to that soon.
3. Anti-Natural Morality - Do I really need to say anything here? There is one new point that Nietzsche makes, a description of passions. A trait of the weak, he tells us, is their inability to control their passions. If one cannot control one's self, it will inevitably lead to pain and destruction. So what is one to do (that is, if one is weak and can't accept such a possibility as pain)? "...if your eye offends you, pluck it out." And so with the passions. Of course, following Nietzsche, our passions give us our reasons for living, our drives for power. Cut the passion out, you cut out life. "every healthy morality...is governed by an instinct of life...anti-natural morality, on the other hand...explicitly turns its back on the instincts of life, - it condemns these instincts..." A healthy morality would value the passions, since they are natural and human. Suppressing the passions is taking away our humanity.
4. The Four Great Errors - Here is something interesting, and hence we spend more time on this. Just what are the errors made by the philosophers and moralists?
Number one: confusing cause and effect. This is a bit odd, but better understood with an example which Nietzsche provides: "do this, don't do that - and then you'll be happy." Virtue does not create happiness, you see, for that is exactly backwards. A happy person will inevitable act 'virtuous'. Vices do not harm people, instead weaker people are the ones who fall into vice. I might be taking a bit of a liberty here, but if I may attempt to generalize: the Nietzschean truth is that it is the body that comes first, which then affects the mind/soul/consciousness. Christianity gets this backwards.
Error two: false cause. An independent will, a complete self, a mind...these do not reflect reality. Idealism, in short ("thing in itself", to put it another way). That the world is affected by these things identified only by concepts is simply wrong. What exists is what we experience, not what we infer as existing.
Error three: imaginary cause (a favorite of mine). Things need reasons, right? And not only reasons, but reasons that make sense to us. Recall the Genealogy of Morals: why is there suffering? The aesthetic priest can tell you: it's because of your sin. In this manner our states, our circumstances, do not make sense to us until we posit something else, something that isn't there. If we can explain something in our own manner, it gives us control. I know why I feel such anguish. Now I know how to fix it. The reality, that such things can and often do exist without any good reason at all, is simply too much for one of weaker constitution.
Error four: free will. A trick of the priests to gain control. Free will allows for the feeling of guilt, which can be used by the priests. They use it to judge, and with the power of judgment comes the power of defining things, and that is a great power indeed.
The Improvement of Humanity - here we start to move into different territory. How does one make mankind better? In The Genealogy of Morals, Nietzsche sums it up in the sentence quoted in that post. Here a comparison is made with the the Christian method of 'improvement', domestication. I needn't say more. Nietzsche's point of comparison in this example? Breeding. Here we can return to a favorite of Nietzsche's, the Hindu Book of Manu. Basically sets up the legendary Indian caste system that we all love to hate. But Nietzsche has his feelings about who is worthy of what, and you get the rest. Perhaps some criticism and alteration for a slightly more tolerable option would do in another post, but we'll move on for now.
---
The rest of the work kind of wanders all over the place, talking about individuals, countries, values, and the like, and so I'll close up with a couple ideas I found very interesting.
First, Nietzsche on education. A masterstroke, in my opinion. First, German education: "German 'higher schooling' is in fact a brutal form of training that tries to process a horde of young men as quickly as possible for use - and abuse - in the civil service." More generally: "The fact that education, that development...is itself a goal, the fact that you need educators...to reach this goal, people have forgotten this...We need educators who are themselves educated...not the scholarly morons that schools and universities offer young people these days as 'higher wet nurses'." "And there is such an oppressive and indecent sense of hurry, as if something would be lost if a twenty-three-year-old is not 'finished' yet..." (Hallelujah!)
(This is me, not Nietzsche, ranting) What is the purpose of education? If you want someone to just do a task, and do it again and again, you don't educate them, you train them. We're not only talking about assembly lines here...doctors, lawyers, they are trained. This is why law and medical schools are not universities. When a child is growing up, however...when an adolescent is defining himself...when a person is developing, you do not 'train' them. You educate them. You teach them to think, to consider. Or not, apparently. We cannot treat education like some sort of perfectly objective list of to-dos. An education whose goal is to teach a child to reason cannot be so simple. Training, of course, can be relatively simple, as there is a certain body of knowledge and concepts that must be mastered. But are we supposed to be 'training' our children in reading and the sciences? Will training create not only a voter, but an informed voter who thinks for him or herself? Or will a lifetime of training, a rush to learn facts, create a hyper specialized human who is a master of his widget but has at best a marginal concept of humanity?
Going back to Nietzsche, what is a 'real' education? "Learning to see - getting your eyes used to calm, to patience, to letting things come to you; postponing judgment, learning to encompass and take stock of an individual case from all sides." Learning to think...thought is not some abstract calculation, but something we do. A dance, even. An art. Grace with logic, "a finger for nuances..." And lastly, "...do I still have to say that you need to be able to do it with a pen too - that you need to learn to write?"
Last of all, and completely switching gears, a note on the will to power. What does the infamous will to power seek? Is it control? Destruction? Will all power-seekers seek to dominate man? Is all power brutal?
Architects...for them it is the great act of will, the will that moves mountains, the intoxication of the great will that demands to be art. Architects have always been inspired by the most powerful people; architects have always been under the spell of power. Buildings are a visible manifestation of pride, the victory over gravity, the will to power.
Ah!
---
End Nietzsche. What will come next? I don't know. Since I am getting the semester underway, I don't have time for too much, but depending on my reading opportunities in my classes (Existentialism + Independent study of Nietzsche + World Religions = Win), I may turn to...Dostoevsky, Camus, Nietzsche Redux, Tillich (Wikipedia him)...the possibilities are endless.
posted by Derek at 10:03 PM
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