Abstract
Friedrich Wilhelm Nietzsche (1844–1900) is the maverick as well as most-misrepresented and most-misunderstood within the West’s philosophical tradition. He dares to say things most others before him would not venture to express. Particularly in his unmitigated criticisms of Christianity, he becomes important for contemporary Western paganism in its struggle to emerge from Christian historical and social repression. He is not a pagan himself but can be seen nevertheless to interface significantly with pagan ideas and thought. Nietzsche rejects Kant and his world of noumenal abstraction. Most importantly, as this chapter endeavors to make clear, Nietzsche offers to the individual something different than the bourgeois ethos of Aristotle. He caters to the margins and shamans of society. For Nietzsche, humanity has the potential to supersede even God/the gods. While there are indeed mistakes and incorrect assertions to be found with Nietzsche, I wish to include discussion of parting from him as well as rehabilitating him. Additionally, I will further focus on his notion of aristocracy and his relation to idolatry.
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Notes
- 1.
For Durant (1953: 440), Nietzsche was “the last great scion of the lineage of Rousseau.” Nevertheless, in “Expeditions of an Untimely Man,” Twilight of the Idols 3 (Hollingdale 1968: 79), Nietzsche refers to Rousseau’s instinct for revenge placing him among the plebians. Later, discussing George Sand, he compares her to Rousseau as “false, artificial, fustian, exaggerated” (6 [81]). In ‘Progress in my sense’, 48 (113), Nietzsche is explicit in expressing his hatred of Rousseau with his vanity and self-contempt: “this first modern man, idealist, and canaille in one person.” But as Solomon and Higgins (2000: 59f) point out, “His use of parody does not necessarily indicate Nietzsche’s hostility toward a predecessor; it is also an acknowledgment, even a gesture of admiration while moving onward.”
- 2.
For Rousseau, see also Chap. 7 footnote 52.
- 3.
S.E. Frost (1942: 74, 204f), for instance, dismisses Nietzsche in two brief passages that mention only a contended argument for the unfriendliness of nature vis-à-vis humanity and that the natural state of man is dis-equality. Therefore, enforcing equality through the state is unnatural. Bertrand Russell (1961: 736f), on his side, feels that Nietzsche’s aristocracy is superior on grounds of biology rather than education and environment. In other words, aristocratic superiority is biological superiority. And according to Russell, “the only practicable form of aristocracy [based on Nietzsche’s philosophy] is an organization like the Fascist or the Nazi party.” But while Russell (739) claims that “Nietzsche despises universal love,” in “The Child with the Mirror,” Thus Spake Zarathustra 23 (Common, u.d. [1962]: 89), Nietzsche’s protagonist Zarathustra claims “How I now love every one unto whom I may but speak! Even mine enemies pertain to my bliss.”
Often considered the rationale and foundation behind German fascism, Steven Taubeneck attributes the prevailing understanding of Nietzsche in Europe and America to the interpretations of, respectively, Martin Heidegger and Walter Kaufmann: See Taubeneck’s Afterword in Behler (1991: 159–77): “Nietzsche in North America: Walter Kaufmann and After.” However, Michael Tanner claims unabashedly that Nietzsche is “a very great thinker” who “attacks modernity by analysing the perennial tendencies that it manifests” – Hollingdale (1973/1990: 7, 9): Michael Tanner’s Introduction (pp. 7–26).
- 4.
Barrett (1958: 181). Nietzsche’s major works include The Birth of Tragedy (1872, third edition 1886), The Gay Science (1882, second edition 1887), Thus Spoke Zarathustra I & II (1883), III (1884) and IV (1885, published 1892), Beyond Good and Evil (1886), Zur Genealogie der Moral [On the Genealogy of Morals] (1887), Götzen-Dämmerung [Twilight of the Idols] (1888, published 1889), Der Antichrist [The Anti-Christ] (1888, published 1895), Ecce Homo (1888, published posthumously in 1908), and The Will to Power (a collection of notes written between 1883 and 1888, published posthumously in 1901 with an expanded edition in 1905).
- 5.
Nietzsche met and befriended Richard Wagner in 1868, but their friendship ended 10 years later – in particular over Nietzsche’s objections to the Christian emphasis on renunciation in the composer’s opera Parsifal. In 1869, Nietzsche was appointed to the chair of classical philology at Basel University. Perpetually plagued with poor health, he frequently is forced to take leave from teaching and eventually retires on a pension in 1879. Ten years later, in Turin, he collapsed and was admitted to the psychiatric unit at the University of Jena. He spent the rest of his life insane and paralyzed under first the care of his mother until her death in 1897 and then his sister Elisabeth until his own death in August of 1900.
- 6.
The Genealogy of Morals 3.25 (Golffing 1956: 290): Plato is “the greatest enemy of art Europe has thus far produced.”
- 7.
The Gay Science 125. See further Thus Spake Zarathustra 25 (Common u.d. (1962): 96), 66 (289f), 67 (297) & 73.1f (320).
- 8.
Barrett (1958: 205) argues differently that the answer to Nietzsche’s existential deadlock is to be found in Heidegger.
- 9.
See in particular Nietzsche’s The Anti-Christ 32–36 & 39f (Hollingdale 1979: 156–60, 163–5). Jesus, the Evangel, the Nazarene, is described not as a redeemer but as a ‘free spirit’, opposed to dogma, a world-affirmer rather than a world-denier, an abolisher of the concept of ‘sin’, a demonstrator of how one ought to live, one who stood against the social order and one who was completely emancipated from all feelings of resentment. In short, Jesus is for Nietzsche the one and only true Christian.
- 10.
Tanner’s 1990 “Introduction” to Hollingdale’s republished 1973 translation of Nietzsche’s Beyond Good and Evil, p. 21.
- 11.
But while we may appear to be missing an integrally laughing Nietzsche, he nevertheless declares laughter to be holy and, in Zarathustra’s Part IV (“The Higher Man”), suggests to those who aspire to greatness to learn first how to laugh (73.15 [328], 73.18 [330] & 73.20 [332]). And concerning sleep, the lord of virtues, Zarathustra informs in “The Academic Chair of Virtues” 2 (26) that “Few people know it, but one must have all the virtues in order to sleep well.” Laughter also is admonished as necessary. In 1.24 of Will to Power, Nietzsche tells us that because of the intensity of our suffering, it was necessary for humanity to invent laughter.
- 12.
In identifying sin as “the ethico-religious interpretation of physiological distemper” and asceticism as a sublimation of suffering, Nietzsche nevertheless adds that despite these attitudes, he can still be “an enemy of all materialism”: The Genealogy of Morals 3.16 (Golffing 1956: 266).
- 13.
A similar, more positive, notion is expressed by Behler (1991: 95f) concerning Nietzsche’s Übermensch who, being free from nihilism and resentment, approaches the world “as worthy of infinite repetition.” Likewise, following Nietzsche, Freud and Marx, Foucault argues that self-reflexive interpretation has now “become an infinite task” (ibid. 79). This endlessness of repetition and interpretation is no longer a horror but, as it is for a pagan, a ceaseless possibility of joyous affirmation.
- 14.
MacIntyre (1998: 225) translates the Übermensch as “the man who transcends.”
- 15.
Thus Spake Zarathustra 46.2 (Common u.d. [1962]: 175f). See further “The Convalescent” 57.2 (244f).
- 16.
In other words, from the human perspective, as the absolutely transcendent, the Abrahamic ‘God’ is beyond the empirical and constitutes an ultimate abstraction, but the Abrahamic tradition personalizes this ultimate abstraction and renders it anthropomorphic and, despite the Genesis reversal, is essentially creating (or transforming) ‘God’ in (or into) man’s image.
- 17.
Barrett (1958: 187).
- 18.
For example, Zarathustra complains to the disillusioned youth that sensual pleasures are simply the shameful recourse open to the hero manqué: “The Tree on the Hill,” Thus Spake Zarathustra 8 (Common u.d. [1962]: 44). Nevertheless, in “Voluntary Death” (Section 21; p. 77), Zarathustra advises that it is immaturity that is the cause of youthful hatred of humanity and the earth. In maturity, there is less of melancholic youth and more of the understanding child. Consequently, Zarathustra/Nietzsche counsels suicide if and when the time is right for it – but not as a rejection of humanity and the earth but as an affirmation of one’s virtuous and spiritual love for them. Nietzsche’s downward progression itself is presented as spirit to man to populace in “Reading and Writing,” Thus Spake Zarathustra 7 (Common u.d. [1962]: 39). But in contrast, Nietzsche’s Zarathustra also proclaims that the heavenly world is an invention of those who despise both body and earth (3 [30]).
As a caveat, I wish to point out that I am conceiving a distinction between paganism and gnosticism even though the contemporary Western pagan movement is a bricolage that includes what the sociologist could consider gnostic/theosophical elements along with what we might then term ‘green’ or ‘deep’ pagan essentials. In my, hopefully forthcoming, manuscript on Pagan Mysticism, I distinguish between ‘gnostic paganism’ and ‘pagan paganism’.
- 19.
“The Bestowing Virtue,” Thus Spake Zarathustra 22.1 (Common u.d. [1962]: 80). However, in “The Pitiful” 25 (94), Nietzsche makes the claim that our original sin is humanity’s inability to enjoy, and, later, in “The Three Evil Things” 54.2 (209), voluptuousness is identified as innocence and freedom, “the garden-happiness of the earth” to those whose hearts are free. See also 56.13 (228).
- 20.
See also The Genealogy of Morals 2.24 (Golffing 1956: 229f) in which Nietzsche proclaims that the “true Redeemer” will appear in the future.
- 21.
Ibid. 3.26 (294) in which Nietzsche declares his impatience with anti-Semitism and those “Christian-Aryan worthies” who employ the cheapest of propaganda’s tricks, namely, a moral attitude, in order to stir up racist attitudes.
- 22.
In “The New Idol,” he denounces the state as the “coldest of all cold monsters …, [that] whatever it saith it lieth; and whatever it hath it hath stolen … the state, where the slow suicide of all – is called ‘life’”: Thus Spake Zarathustra 11 (Common u.d. [1962]: 49, 51).
- 23.
Ibid. 22.3 (83). Both the chosen people and the overperson as people of knowledge possess the capacity not only to love their enemies but as well to hate their friends (82).
- 24.
Nietzsche’s Zarathustra rejects Christian piety and, rather than becoming like children to enter the kingdom of heaven, proclaims, “But we do not want to enter the kingdom of heaven: we have become men, − so we want the kingdom of earth” (“The Ass-Festival,” Thus Spake Zarathustra 78.2 [Common 1962: 355]). See also 21 (77), 35 (127), & 73.15f (328f). For Nietzsche’s thoughts on Christianity, see especially 26 (98f), 55 (217), 56.12 (227), 57.2 (244f), 66 (290f), 67 (296f) & 69 (307).
- 25.
Thus Spake Zarathustra 22.2 (Common u.d. [1962]: 80).
- 26.
Russell (1961: 738f).
- 27.
Thus Spake Zarathustra 22.3 & 24 (Common u.d. [1962]: 83 & 90–3).
- 28.
Leopold (1970: 204).
- 29.
Masquerading as the ‘good and just’, Nietzsche lambasts the non-imagination of the ordinary who “So alien are ye in your souls to what is great, that to you the Superman would be frightful in his goodness!”: Thus Spake Zarathustra 43 (Common u.d. [1962]: 158). Zarathustra/Nietzsche understands that greatness is perceived by vain humanity as the devil himself/itself. Moreover, as Nietzsche has Zarathustra proclaim, he is a law only for himself and not for everyone (72 [319]). For the small-mindedness of the common people, see also 49.2 (185–8), 52.1 (199), 53 (205), 54.2 (212), 56.21 (234), 73.8f (324), etc. In “Talk with the Kings” 63.1 (272), the peasant is exalted over the hodgepodge populace. Today’s leaders are identified as the overperson’s greatest danger 73.3 (321). Moreover, the populace has an evil eye for the earth (73.16 [329]).
- 30.
Beyond Good and Evil 199 (Hollingdale 1973: 120).
- 31.
Ibid. 228 (158).
- 32.
Beyond Good and Evil 207 (Hollingdale 1973: 134f).
- 33.
Ibid. 211 (142). It is important in understanding Nietzsche that he is not referring to an aristocracy as constituting the highest social class of a society – the traditional understanding of the term – but as those people within a society who are the most courageously innovative. See further, note 42 below.
- 34.
Beyond Good and Evil 242 (Hollingdale 1973: 173).
- 35.
Ibid. 257 (192).
- 36.
Durant (1953: 445). And, as Solomon and Higgins (2000: 21) explain, what Nietzsche means by nobility is not privileged birth but people who are distinguished by “style and refinement.” As Cameron (2002: 2) puts forward, Nietzsche’s “foremost ethical concern [is] the production of exemplary individuals.”
- 37.
Beyond Good and Evil 253 (Hollingdale 1973: 183). See also 213 (145f), but note that among the decisive things behind the right to philosophy – namely, one’s origin, ancestors and ‘blood’, the last is placed in inverted commas.
- 38.
Ibid. 208 (136f). The semi-barbarism of Europe has been unleashed, according to Nietzsche, by the democratic mingling of classes and races: Beyond Good and Evil 224 (Hollingdale 1973: 152); see also 261 (199). He deplores the resultant plebian type that is characterized by intemperance, jealousy and ungracious and persistently tiresome self-expression: ibid. 264 (203).
- 39.
Beyond Good and Evil 268 (Hollingdale 1973: 205). Nevertheless, in his quest for “the voice for the soul of Europe” rather than merely a national affair (ibid. 245 [178]), Nietzsche would have rejected the Third Reich as much as he opposed the Bismarckian Reich of his own day which he considered “destructive of what was best in Germany and [demanding] of the Germans that which they were least fitted for”: Hollingdale (1973: 234n241).
- 40.
In Beyond Good and Evil 225 (Hollingdale 1973: 154f), Nietzsche specifies hedonism, utilitarianism, eudaimonism and pessimism as derisory from the perspective of creative abilities or the conscientious artist.
- 41.
Questioning whether Nietzsche understood humans as animals, Bron Taylor asks what is wrong with a herd? “Herd animals increase their survival by being herd animals.” (Personal communication 8 March 2014).
- 42.
It is, however, important to differentiate Nietzsche’s aristocracy from the priestly. Although he recognizes the religious specialist – especially the professional religious specialist – as an outgrowth of the aristocracy, he understands when, where and how the former ceases in time to be part of the latter. Nietzsche is clear about the divide between the priesthood and the aristocracy. While some contemporary Western pagans assume the title and role of priests, as a rule they do not function in a proverbially priestly sense. They are instead playing with and challenging a long-standing ‘war’ throughout Indo-European culture, if not others as well, between the nobles and the brahmans, between the aristocracy and the priesthood. As is everyone, pagans are part of Nietzsche’s triad between the heroic type, the ecclesiastical type and the people at large. While this last has opted for a route to power through commerce, it is in itself one more tyranny of the mob and by the mob. The greatest horror for Nietzsche was the prospect of an alliance between non-spiritual spiritualists (his false spiritual-ethical pretenders) and the masses. This can and does occur under capitalistic guises but no less under socialist ones as well. For Nietzsche, the sole product of Marxism is the “autonomous herd” (Hollingdale 1973: 202 [125]). In either case, whether capitalist or communist, the mob has dominated – either on its own or through the support of a clergy. For much of the world, in fact, Christianity has become irrevocably influential through competing systems for power – the totalitarian one-world-government approach as expressed and exemplified by the Roman Catholic Church (the largest single ecclesiastical organization globally) or the ruse of internal fission and ‘pretend’ war into a multitude of quasi-competing components or parts. Either way, Christianity as an ethos has managed to dominate the world.
- 43.
Beyond Good and Evil 263 (Hollingdale 1973: 203).
- 44.
For Nietzsche’s comments on ‘woman as such’, see in particular Beyond Good and Evil 84, 145, 147, 232–239 & 261, although, in 231, he makes clear “these are only – my truths” (Hollingdale 1973: 163).
- 45.
The Genealogy of Morals 1.10 (Golffing 1956: 171).
- 46.
In Beyond Good and Evil, compare 9 & 198 with 44, 188 & 227.
- 47.
For the self-inflicted cruelty of the ‘ascetic ideal’ with its slogans of poverty, humility and chastity and its hatred of sensuality, see in particular Nietzsche’s Third Essay (“What Do Ascetic Ideals Mean?”) in The Genealogy of Morals. Overall, Nietzsche understands “the use of the ascetic ideal as a safety valve for pent-up emotions” (3.20 [Golffing 1956: 276]). In its most radical form, it constitutes the belief in truth as an ‘absolute value’, and Nietzsche counter-cites the innermost maxim of the Society of Assassins, namely, “Nothing is true; everything is permitted.” He concludes that the ascetic ideal in all its disguised and undisguised forms signifies a “will to nothingness, a revulsion from life, a rebellion against the principle conditions of living” (3.28 [299]).
- 48.
The Genealogy of Morals 2.24 (Golffing 1956: 229f).
- 49.
The Anti-Christ 13 (Hollingdale 1968: 135).
- 50.
David Sloan Wilson in Taylor (2005: 628 – author’s italics).
- 51.
- 52.
Ibid. Twilight of the Idols, “The ‘Improvers’ of Mankind” 4 (page 69).
- 53.
In Twilight of the Idols, “Expeditions of an Untimely Man” 5 (Hollingdale 1968: 80f), Nietzsche contends that Christian morality falls with the fall of Christian theology. Morality in Christianity is transcendental in origin and is based on the command of God – presupposing that the human being cannot determine or know what is good and evil without God. Moreover, Christianity is “an antithetical condition, a specific anti-artisticality of instinct – a mode of being which impoverishes and attenuates things and makes them consumptive” (Ibid. 9 [83]). For Nietzsche, a Christian artist is an oxymoron.
- 54.
Twilight of the Idols, “What the Germans Lack” 7 (Hollingdale 1968: 77).
- 55.
Note David Sloan Wilson’s comment that “Rational thought is not the gold standard against which all other modes of thought must be judged” (in Taylor 2005: 628). For him, the gold standard is adaption.
- 56.
Cameron (2002: 4) examines love of one’s fate (amor fati), the eternal return, giving style to one’s character, and becoming what one is as the examples of Nietzsche’s positive/affirmative ideals.
- 57.
See The Anti-Christ 20–23 & 42 (Hollingdale 1968: 141–5, 166).
- 58.
Thus Spake Zarathustra 22.1 (Common u.d. [1962]: 78f).
- 59.
Beyond Good and Evil 4 (Hollingdale 1973: 36).
- 60.
Thus Spake Zarathustra 49.3 (Common u.d. [1962]: 188f).
- 61.
Ibid. 77.2 (350). See further 78.2 (355). In “The Apostates” 52.2 (200), Zarathustra condemns religious congregations: “wherever there are closets there are new devotees therein, and the atmosphere of devotees.”
- 62.
Twilight of the Idols, “Foreword” (Hollingdale 1968: 31f).
- 63.
Among these, Nietzsche singles out Socrates’ equation of reason, virtue and happiness, the anti-corporality of what Nietzsche calls the rational ‘monotono-theism’ of grave-digging philosophy, the insistence that true worth is a priori and causa sui, the anti-nature moral spiritualization of the passions, the contention that there are moral facts of any kind, religion as love, modern ‘objectivity’, revenge wearing a religious mask, art produced from a state of non-intoxication, art subordinated to morality, idealizing, altruism, pity, faith with no place for skepticism, democracy, and intra-human leveling as a fundamental moral principle: ibid. et passim. In Thus Spake Zarathustra 11, the state itself is acknowledged as “The New Idol.” He denounces “the idolatry of the superfluous” (Common 1962: 51).
- 64.
Ecce Homo “Foreword” 2 (Hollingdale 1979: 4). In the section on “Twilight of the Idols” 1 (86), the idol is “quite simply that which has hitherto been called truth.”
- 65.
Twilight of the Idols, “Expeditions of an Untimely Man” 49 (Hollingdale 1968: 114).
- 66.
The Anti-Christ 12, (Hollingdale 1968: 135).
- 67.
Thus Spake Zarathustra 30 (Common 1962: 111).
- 68.
Ibid. 40 (144). Nevertheless, Zarathustra expresses his grudge against the warming “pot-bellied fire-idol”: “Better even a little teeth-chattering than idol-adoration!” 50 (191). See also 78.1 (352).
- 69.
Thus Spake Zarathustra 37 (Common 1962: 134).
- 70.
Beyond Good and Evil 263 (Hollingdale 1973: 202f).
- 71.
Ibid. (202).
- 72.
Beyond Good and Evil 9 (Hollingdale 1973: 39).
- 73.
Ibid. 188 (110–112).
- 74.
The Genealogy of Morals 2.17 (Golffing 1956: 219).
- 75.
Twilight of the Idols, “Expeditions of an Untimely Man” 48f (Hollingdale 1968: 113f).
- 76.
Ibid. “Maxims and Arrows” 6 (33).
- 77.
Twilight of the Idols, “Morality as Anti-Nature” 4 (Hollingdale 1968: 55).
- 78.
Thus Spake Zarathustra “Prologue” 3 (Common 1962: 6f). See also 35 (127): “laud all that is earthly!” Further: 78.2 (355): “… we want the kingdom of earth” – rather than that of heaven.
- 79.
The Anti-Christ 15, (Hollingdale 1968: 137).
- 80.
Ecce Homo “Foreword” 2 (Hollingdale 1979: 4).
- 81.
The Anti-Christ 38, (Hollingdale 1968: 162). See also 26 (150).
- 82.
Ibid. 47 (174f). See also 43 (167).
- 83.
The Anti-Christ 14, (Hollingdale 1968: 136).
- 84.
The obtainment of demi-godhood occurs when one becomes himself or herself a metaphor – a cultural figure of speech.
- 85.
Much of Nietzsche’s own portrayal of nobility carries something akin to Arthurian chivalry – despite the philosopher’s condemnation of Romanticism: Twilight of the Idols, “Expeditions of an Untimely Man” 6 (Hollingdale 1968: 81). The Knights of the Roundtable in Thomas Malory’s Le Morte d’Arthur simply attend matinal mass as normal routine and then get on with being chivalrous and gallant heroes in an essentially Nietzschean format (though Nietzsche would criticize any readiness to help the weak). The Christianity here is almost incidental. But whether an emerging pagan nobility of today would conform to anything close to the medieval institution or not, it will express the sacred because it recognizes the sacred in and of the earth wherever else it may also be.
- 86.
Nobility is to be specially bred: Beyond Good and Evil 213 (Hollingdale 1973: 145f); but, as noted previously, Nietzsche places here the decisive word ‘blood’ in inverted commas. Nietzsche considers the mixing of classes and races to be an error: ibid. 208 (136f); see further 224 (152), 244 (174) and 261 (199) and also The Genealogy of Morals 3.17 (Golffing 1956: 267) – but note Solomon and Higgins (2000: 9) who claim that what Nietzsche really “praised most was miscegenation, the mixing of the races, not the ‘racial purity’ idealized by the Nazis.”
- 87.
- 88.
Ecce Homo, “Daybreak” 2 (Hollingdale 1979: 67).
- 89.
Beyond Good and Evil 258 (Hollingdale 1973: 193).
- 90.
Ecce Homo, “Daybreak” 2 (Hollingdale 1979: 67).
- 91.
It is perhaps important to distinguish conversion from recruitment. Yes, pagans may seek to expand pagandom to others, but they do not endeavor in the process to have the recruit abandon any other beliefs she or he may have. In sociology of religion, conversion refers to the exclusion of other beliefs in the adoption of a new and exclusive way of seeing and believing.
- 92.
This removing or de-hexing attempt is not to annihilate or critically undermine the beliefs of others but to open up and awaken the person. Of course there are exceptions to this, and some pagans may indeed seek to convert another, but the general feeling among contemporary Western pagans is that this is something they do not do.
- 93.
On the magnanimity of the overperson, see once again “The Bestowing Virtue” in Thus Spake Zarathustra – especially 22.1 (Common 1962: 78f).
- 94.
The Anti-Christ 55, (Hollingdale 1968: 187).
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York, M. (2016). Friedrich Nietzsche. In: Pagan Ethics. Springer, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-319-18923-9_6
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