XXXX. Abolish God, Abolish Guilt?As more sophisticated societies developed from primitive tribes, the sense of indebtedness to their gods continues to grow. IN parallel, the conception of the gods themselves changes. As tribes are unified under despotic rule, their gods become unified until they are consolidated into a single god. The God of Christianity is the “highest potency” god yet developed and correspondingly the feeling of indebtedness and guilt is the greatest in Christianity. Modern society is beginning to become skeptical of Christianity and with this should come a diminution of guilt. A complete and definite victory of atheism may bring about a second innocence devoid of guilt for humanity as a whole.
In section 22 Nietzsche summarizes his hypothesis. Social humanity invented guilt to torture itself. Religion was seized upon to make this self-torture even worse. An entire inventory of instruments of torture was created. Naturalness was rejected in favor of eternal torture of hell. Here we find “an insanity of the will that is without parallel.” Everything humans will is directed against themselves, culminating in a God that assures them of their unworthiness. This is the worst sickness humanity has ever endured. We must turn away in horror from the cry of “love” in the midst of all of this torture.
Beyond Good and Evil, Prelude to a Philosophy of the Future was published in 1886. It consists of nine “Parts”, each of which is divided into a number of sections, and a set of poems. In the Preface, Nietzsche places the book in the contest of “the fight against Plato, . . . or the fight against the Christian ecclesiastical pressure of millennia.” The “dogmatists error” committed by Plato was his “invention of the pure spirit and the good as such.” The conflict between Europe and Platonism/Christianity has created a dynamic tension, which gives hope of attaining a new goal.
Part One of Beyond Good and Evil is entitled “Prejudices of Philosophers” (or “On the Prejudices of Philosophers”). It begins with the fact that philosophers had had a will to discover the truth. There is a question of the origin of the will to truth, but in investigating the question, one is driven to the more fundamental question as to the value of the will to truth. “Granted that we want the truth: why not rather untruth? And uncertainty? Even ignorance. Nietzsche suggests that he is the first to raise the question of the value of will to truth. He adds that this may be the most risky question that could possibly be raised.
Reading between the lines of what the philosophers say, Nietzsche concludes that all thinking, including philosophical thinking, must be counted among the instinctive functions. “Being conscious” is no more opposed to instinct than being born is opposed to heredity The thinking of the philosopher, then, is secretly influenced by the philosopher’s instincts. Behind al logic are valuations, which in turn are based on “physiological demands, for the maintenance of definite mode of life.” The value of “truth” over illusion and of certainty over uncertainty may only be necessary for human maintenance, but may be only superficial.
It is strange to assert, as Nietzsche does, that the falsehood of an opinion is no objection to it. The important questions about an opinion are whether it is life furthering, life preserving, and species preserving. The falsest opinions serve these functions best. Belief in the eternal and immutable. Reduction of the world to mathematical quantities. To recognize untruth as a condition of life is to go “beyond good and evil,” because it takes conditions of life to be ultimate values.
The philosophers claim to have uncovered their “truths” as the result of the cold application of logical dialectic. In fact, they are merely propounding and defending their real opinions: “their hearts desire abstracted and refined.” They do not admit that it is their prejudices that they parade as “truths.” Kant proposes his “categorical imperative” as if it was the result of dialectical thinking, but instead it expresses the prejudice of an old moralist and ethical preacher. Spinoza packages his own “wisdom” in a mathematical form that is nothing but hocus-pocus.
The Stoics desired to live “according to nature” but nature is indifferent and devoid of all values. Nature is thus contrary to life, which ultimately is al about valuation. If nature were equated to life, then the desire would be the empty imperative to live life according to life. The reality is that the Stoics were attempting to dictate their values to nature. The Stoic “love of truth” turns into a false view of nature. This projection of the values of the philosopher onto everything else is the most spiritual “will to power”: to create the world.
As regards Kant, Kant proclaimed the great discover of synthetic apriori judgments and asked how they are possible. Kant went on to discover a moral faculty to account for moral judgments. His explanation was that they are the product of a “faculty.” But this explanation is empty: such judgments are possible because we have a means for making them. This is like explaining the sleep-inducing property of opium to their power to produce sleep. The German philosophers followed Kant’s procedure enthusiastically, as with Schelling’s “intellectual intuition.” The real explanations for these claims were a felt need to counter the sensualism of the seventeenth century.
As regards Life as Will to Power, Nietzsche contends that living things seek to discharge their strength. “Life itself is will to power” according to Nietzsche. Self-preservation is only a relatively insignificant by-product of the discharge of strength. Thus, self-preservation is not the goal of life. Indeed, teleological principles such as that of self-preservation are superfluous and should be avoided. Spinoza showed that method demands the exclusion of teleological principles.
Philosophers are fond of discovering “immediate certainties” such as: “I think” (Descartes) and “I will” (Schopenhauer). But immediate certainty, absolute knowledge, the thing in itself is contradictions in terms. In the case of “I think” there is a host of connections to the other matters that make its immediacy impossible. What is the origin of the concept of thinking? What is the I? How can the I be the cause of thinking? If the answer is supposed to be given by intuition, we must ask why what is give by intuition is true.
