On the Genealogy of Morals

By Friedrich Nietzsche

A commentary by Giles Fraser

Part 1 — guardian.co.uk, 2008-10-27
Part 2 — guardian.co.uk, 2008-11-03
Part 3 — guardian.co.uk, 2008-11-10
Part 4 — guardian.co.uk, 2008-11-17
Part 5 — guardian.co.uk, 2008-11-24
Part 6 — guardian.co.uk, 2008-12-01
Part 7 — guardian.co.uk, 2008-12-08

Edited by Andy Ross
 

Part 1: Meet Dr Nietzsche

"I can write in letters which make even the blind see. I call Christianity the one great curse, the one great intrinsic depravity, the one great instinct for revenge for which no expedient is sufficiently poisonous, secret, subterranean, petty. I call it the one immortal blemish of mankind."

Friedrich Nietzsche is woefully underappreciated by the fashionistas of contemporary media atheism. He makes an uncomfortable ally for the Dawkins brigade. He does Christianity the compliment of first seeking to understand it.

Nietzsche does not claim that the primary sin of religion is that it has an imaginary object at its centre. He is remarkably indifferent to the question of God's existence. Rather, Nietzsche thinks religion in general, and Christianity in particular, is a corruption of the human spirit.

Nietzsche grew up a pious little boy. His father, a Lutheran clergyman, died when Friedrich was only five. His mother wanted him to grow up just like his dad. It was a role he played throughout his early years. This piety continued to the first year at university, where he won the preaching prize, after which he lost his faith. From then on in, Christianity was the enemy.

Contemporary popular atheism presumes that the most fundamental question to address is whether or not God exists. The religion that Nietzsche was brought up with starts somewhere else entirely. The first question is not so much "Does God exist?" but rather, something like "How are we saved?". Christianity isn't dodgy philosophy but, as it were, corrupt existentialism.

Nietzsche sets out to save people from the idea that they stand in need of salvation. The paradox of Nietzsche's work is that he is offering a narrative of salvation from salvation itself.

Response to comments

For those unfamiliar with Nietzsche's idea of eternal recurrence, its clearest exposition is probably this one:

"What, if some day or night a demon were to steal after you into your loneliest loneliness and say to you: 'This life as you now live it and have lived it, you will have to live once more and innumerable times more' ... Would you not throw yourself down and gnash your teeth and curse the demon who spoke thus? Or have you once experienced a tremendous moment when you would have answered him: 'You are a god and never have I heard anything more divine.'"

What this thought experiment challenges is whether you can be so lacking in regret that you would will your life the same way again and again. In other words, the eternal recurrence poses the question as to whether you would judge your own life to be a success or a failure.

The idea reintroduces something akin to ultimate judgment, whicht was eliminated with the death of God. It reintroduces a sense that there is judgment bearing down on one's every action. Cleverly, it does this without any judge other than oneself.
 

Part 2: The slave morality

Nietzsche says Christianity is the religion of the downtrodden, the bullied, the weak, the poor and the slave. And this is why it is so filled with hatred. For there is nothing quite as explosive as the sort of bottled up resentment that the oppressed feels towards their oppressor.

Nowhere is this more obvious, Nietzsche insists, than with the invention of the idea of hell. For hell is a fantasy of the weak that enables them to imagine compensatory revenge against the strong. Nietzsche contends that the very origins of morality itself can be understood as springing from the same impulse.

Nietzsche is re-narrating the myth of the fall. In the beginning, there was nothing much wrong with the notion of God. Yahweh represented a culture at ease with itself and its prosperity. But then came slavery and deportation into exile. And with this, the whole idea of God was re-imagined. Instead of being an expression of abundant confidence, God was transformed into a vehicle for desired revenge:

"Only those who suffer are good, only the poor, the powerless, the lowly are good; the suffering, the deprived, the sick, the ugly, are the only pious people, the only ones saved, salvation is for them alone, whereas you rich, the noble and powerful, you eternally wicked cruel, lustful, insatiate, godless, you will be eternally wretched, cursed and damned."

Everything vibrant and life-affirming is redescribed as "bad" so as to undermine the authority of the strong. And with this revolution, Nietzsche contends, humanity degrades itself.

Many who read Nietzsche still experience some residual anxiety that his celebration of the powerful and his denigration of the weak has proto-Nazi overtones. He speaks approvingly of the "magnificent blond beast avidly prowling around for spoil and victory" in contrast to the "failed, sickly, tired and exhausted people of whom today's Europe is beginning to reek". This is not a reference to Jews. Even so, this sort of language stinks.

Nietzsche is out to expose the vast weight of poisonous anger that lurks behind that hideous evangelical smile. But his ambition is much greater than this. For Nietzsche contends that Judeo-Christianity has shaped European culture to such an extent that the inversion of values that it promotes has permeated the entire way we see the world.
 

Part 3: The birth of the Übermensch

A society that has been founded up the suffering of the slave is not easily able to throw off the deep psychological scars of its origins.

"The sufferers, one and all, are frighteningly willing and inventive in their pretexts for painful emotions; they even enjoy being mistrustful and dwelling on wrongs and imagined slights ... they rip open the oldest wounds and make themselves bleed to death from scars long since healed, they make evil-doers out of friend, wife, child, and anyone else near them."

The priest protects society from itself by saying that we are all responsible for our own suffering. So the individual blames himself or herself, folding hatred back upon itself and generating self-hatred instead. The church persuades people to discharge all that poisonous energy back upon itself.

Nietzsche's main task is to rid human beings from the nihilistic power of self-destructive hatred that is the church's true gift to the world. He regards his philosophy as an exercise in liberation: better to express one's anger and bitterness than to keep it bottled up inside. For by expressing it, one discharges all its destructive energy. Hence the notorious übermensch, the atheist holy man:

"Some time, in a stronger age than this mouldy, self-doubting present, he will come to us, the redeeming man of great love and contempt ... This man of the future will redeem us not just from the ideal held up till now, but also from the things which have to arise from it, from the great nausea, the will to nothingness, from nihilism, that stroke of midday and of the great decision which makes the will free again, which gives earth its purpose and man his hope again, this antichrist and anti-nihilist, this conquerer of God and nothingness – he must come one day."
 

Part 4: Is Christianity cowardly?

"We godless anti-metaphysicians, still take out fire from the blaze set alight by a faith a thousand years old, that faith of the Christians, which was also Plato's faith, that God is truth and that truth is divine."

Plato is the thinker Nietzsche holds most responsible for providing the philosophical foundations of Christianity. So it is vital to understand Nietzsche's attack on Plato.

According to Nietzsche, Plato is driven by the desire to protect the values of the rational Athenian world. Plato fears that the logical order of his world would one day be overcome by the forces of chaos that raged away beyond the boundaries of the city-state. Plato sets out to eliminate all aspects of human life that expose us to change, and to index our lives to that which is beyond the physical, to an unchanging and eternal truth. This is the realm of the forms.

This philosophical thinking came to merge with the parables of an itinerant preacher from Galilee. With the Roman takeover of Christianity, the essentially Jewish marrow of early Christian thought was traded for a version of Platonic philosophy. Nietzsche said that Christianity is little more than popular Platonism.

Nietzsche's objection here is that the whole invention of metaphysics, as described by Plato and followed by the Christians, comes about because of Plato's fear of change. Instead of standing firm at the barricades of reason against the forces of moral chaos, Plato elevates the source of human value into the heavens, thus apparently projecting it from change and chance. For Nietzsche, this otherworldliness simply reflects Plato's failure of courage.

It is not just Christianity that gets infected with this moral cowardice. Philosophy itself is thoroughly imbued with the same spirit:

"You ask me of the idiosyncrasies of philosophers? … There is their lack of historical sense, their hatred of the idea of becoming, their Egyptianism. They think they are doing a thing a favour when they dehistoricize it, sub specie aeterni – when they make a mummy of it. All philosophers ... kill, they stuff when they worship, they're conceptual idolaters – they become a mortal danger to everything they worship."

Western philosophy generally and Christianity in particular has founded its thought upon the idea that change is a bad thing and thus that for human life to be valuable it must be rooted in something fixed and unchanging and eternal. Nietzsche points out that anything that is not able to change is, by definition, dead. The Christian/Platonic worldview is essentially a celebration of death dressed up to look like the opposite.

"God degenerated into the contradiction of life, instead of being its transfiguration and eternal Yes! In God a declaration of hostility towards life, nature, the will to life! …In God nothingness deified, the will to nothingness sanctified."

Christian theology without Plato seems to many almost impossible. But Christianity was originally a Jewish peasant religion, with no understanding of metaphysics. Jesus had never heard of Plato. And the God of the philosophers is nothing like the God of Abraham.
 

Part 5: Breaking the cycle of conflict

The thinker who has done most to defend Christianity against Nietzsche's ferocious onslaught is the brilliant French sociologist René Girard. Girard critically examines Nietzsche's central contention that Christianity is a religion of sublimated vengeance and contends that Nietzsche is dangerously naive about violence.

Girard's main interest is the relationship between religion and violence. He looks at how violence often becomes self-perpetuating. For Girard, the teachings of Christ are an attempt to break this wheel of revenge. Instead of the endless reciprocity of an eye for an eye, forgiveness breaks the cycle. Christian forgiveness is about not answering back in kind. In essence, it represents a stubborn refusal to act in the same way as the violent other, it is a refusal to become like them.

Because forgiveness refuses the satisfaction of vengeance it generates ressentiment. So Nietzsche is partly right. Yes, there are huge wells of anger that form within the Christian imagination. The instinct for vengeance is not spirited away by the Christian act of forgiveness. Girard says the fact that Christians have chosen to forgive and thus not to answer violence directly with violence is itself already a huge victory.

Nietzsche is brilliant at diagnosing the hidden hatreds that lurk within the Christian breast, but he does not appreciate that these hatreds are themselves the by-product of a victory over real violence. Ressentiment is the collateral damage of forgiveness.

Nietzsche was naive about the reality of violence. For him it was almost a game. It was only because Nietzsche treated violence a bit like a game that he could think of violence as a cure for ressentiment. Christianity takes violence a good deal more seriously than Nietzsche did.

Quite a lot of Christian theology has little place for forgiveness. The evangelical doctrine of penal substitution argues that human beings are saved through a process whereby the violence that is due to human beings is instead discharged upon Jesus. This nasty and pernicious theology is built around the idea of a holy lynching.
 

Part 6: Superman goes mad in solitude

Nietzsche marks an important stage in the development of western individualism. Many begin this story with the rise of Protestantism and the idea that human beings are individually responsible for their relationship with God. This led to an explosion of individual piety.

Dietrich Bonhoeffer said: "It was only out of the soil of the German reformation that there could grow a Nietzsche." Going way further than the Protestants who so decisively influenced him, Nietzsche tasks the individual with the responsibility of actually generating his or her own individuality. Thus not "be who you are", à la Polonius, but "become who you are". We must become our own authors.

When this spiritual discipline of self-authoring is going well, Nietzsche thinks of himself as a hero, as Zarathustra. This is the Nietzsche of myth, striding out over the mountain top. But when it all goes badly, he collapses in on himself:

"The last philosopher I call myself, for I am the last human being. No one converses with me beside myself and my voice reaches me as the voice of one dying. With the beloved voice, with thee the last remembered breath of human happiness, let me discourse, even if it is only for another hour. Because of thee I delude myself as to my solitude and lie my way back to multiplicity and love, for my heart shies away from believing that love is dead. I cannot bear the icy shivers of loneliest solitude. It compels me to speak as though I were two."

For some this is a reductio of Protestantism itself, the empty climax of that terrible experiment not to recognize any authority outside of one's own heart. Nietzsche seeks to be "born again" wholly from his own spiritual recourses. He wants to be his own father and mother, the sole author of himself. He wants to do away with the need for others in his heroic act of self-creation. Tragically, Nietzsche is so locked up in himself, he is cut off from the sources of creativity.
 

Part 7: Nietzsche contra dogma

The phrase "the death of God" is now firmly associated with Nietzsche. Yet the death of God has historically been understood as a reference to Christ on the cross, not the advent of unbelief. Nietzsche knew this perfectly well. He does not claim for his atheism the pristine rationalistic puritanism that is so widespread amongst the current crop of militant unbelievers.

Nietzsche provides a powerful and imaginative attack upon faith that does not rely upon pretending that faith is without its reasons or that atheism is an easy shortcut to a rational solution for all the world's moral ills. Nietzsche asks religious believers to recognize their own capacity for atheism and for atheists to face the religious imperatives even within their own lack of faith:

"'What do I hear!' the old pope said at this point, pricking up his ears; 'O Zarathustra, you are more pious than you believe, with such an unbelief! Some god in you has converted you to your godlessness … although you would be the most godless, I scent a stealthy odour of holiness and wellbeing that comes from long benedictions: it fills me with joy and sorrow."

Nietzsche insists that truth requires first a training in truthfulness. The search for truth cannot be simply the product of some machine that churns out truths once the mechanism has been properly set. Nietzsche recalls us to the role of self-critical honesty in the search for truth. There is no systematic rationality that can accommodate this.


Reverend Dr Giles Fraser is the vicar of Putney. He was formerly a lecturer in philosophy at Wadham College, Oxford. His books include Redeeming Nietzsche: On the Piety of Unbelief (Routledge, 2002).
 

AR  Nietzsche is an interesting philosopher who deserves to enjoy eternal recurrence on student reading lists, at least for a while yet. I found his Also sprach Zarathustra to be a deeply fascinating and disturbing parody of a holy book.