7
A Summary of Arguments
Introduction
A Summary of Arguments
This manuscript may firstly be placed within the broader context of Platonic political philosophy. It is structured around the argument that Nietzsche, despite his ostensive “enmity” to Plato and Socrates, understood himself to be a Socratic, and as someone called upon by his fate to renew the Platonic task of being a philosophical legislator of modern souls, culture, and political society. I suggest that we may explain his opposition to these two founders of our culture by his perceived need to attack these “idols” as the originators of late and decadent Christian culture. For Nietzsche, decadence is now a major feature of the “slavish” second natures of persons inhabiting liberal democracies. He saw his task as one of deconstructing the “slavish” second natures of free spirits from among “last men” and thereby to find the means for overcoming decadence. Accepting himself as also such a Christian decadent, his task involved first a conceptual effort to undo his and others’ “embodied” opinions and then to awaken the ability to move toward a vibrant “healing culture” based on an affirmation of life. The No-saying portion of his effort involves a redesigning of the regime of the soul on which decadent Christianity is based. His Yes proceeds from his No. The Yes involves a freeing of the autonomous person hidden underneath a historical succession of layers of slavish selves. Slavish selves are characterized by a structure of willing that is contradictory in itself; life-affirmations involve hidden life-denials. Nietzsche proposed a redesigning of slavish wills, whereby the strength of the negations may be channeled into new and affirmative lines of willing. Both tasks derive their impetus from his interpretations of the ancients. However, they derive their particular configurations from the different circumstances of the modern age. Nietzsche thus wished to replace Plato and Socrates as philosophical legislators and thereby become the founder of new and post-Christian regimes of soul and political society. The efforts of Socrates and Plato have been so successful that they have shaped two millennia of history upon a basis of the spirituality initiated by Jesus. Now this culture confronts the very different circumstances of a humanity that must become united and that must assume global dominance and planetary governance. However, it is handicapped for this task by the unknown envy and resentful willing, hidden as motive forces of Christian souls. These imply life-threatening potentials and may presage the auto-destruction of a humanity armed with lethal technologies.
Nietzsche’s philosophical struggles aim to initiate a new line of philosophers of the future and a new way of life propounded by them. These new philosophers and their predecessors, the free spirits, are to use the inherited negativities of Christian souls, their slavish modalities of guilt and bad conscience, as precisely the tools for liberating human willing of the future from imprisonment by and in the past. Thereby the original will of life, a will of total affirmation, is to be freed from its inversion into a death wish. This death wish had received its validation from the “beyond” posited by Christian metaphysics.
Nietzsche also conceived his task as preparing the coming of a future nobility whose individual members would traverse the coming age of nihilism by working on themselves and by reshaping their wills. At some future time, this new nobility would provide the leadership for a new kind of humanity that would emerge victoriously from contemporary cultural struggles and conflicts of civilization. During the actual transition of nihilistic struggles, however, the free spirits and potential philosophers of the future would avoid involvement in political conflicts. They would focus on creating in themselves new regimes of soul, nourished by a return into themselves, into the deep structures of their souls, in periods of creative solitudes.
The manuscript is, secondly, an effort to develop the paths of reasoning opened up by Pierre Hadot in his studies of ancient philosophers as teachers of ways of life and not just as providers of sets of logically coherent and “true” opinions and doctrines about the world. Hadot’s work shows that this view of philosophy was never really completely abandoned and is now again adopted by modern philosophical authors. Hadot sees such a view to be the foundation of the work of Wittgenstein, as his forthcoming book on this philosopher demonstrates. Propositions and doctrines, accordingly, are not identical with philosophy, but are instruments of philosophers that aim to shape readers (as well as listeners, in the case of oral teachings). Doctrines thus aim to transform and not merely to inform their public.
My book applies these reasonings newly developed by Hadot, which call for a complete revaluation of the activity of philosophizing, to the work of Nietzsche. I argue that Nietzsche himself, from the beginnings of his career as a philosophical author to its end, likewise conceived of doctrines, written as well as oral, as never identical to philosophy itself. “True” as well as “false” doctrines were artistic means of self-creation that had to be related to, and could emerge from, an askesis, a working on oneself.
Specifically, I try to map out the ascetic practices of a Nietzschean way of life. I argue that Nietzsche’s “doctrines” are “attempts” and “temptations” that aim to provoke his free-spirited readers into changing themselves, as well as inducing such self-changes in their natural and spiritual descendants. Free spirits are asked to transform themselves into the philosophical legislators of the future people of humankind. The “tempting” doctrines are instruments of philosophizing to be used in conjunction with specific ascetic practices, designed to create a new and non-Platonic regime of the soul. Without being thus related to a set of practices, they remain contradictory and partially unconvincing.
Thirdly, my study focuses specifically on a Nietzschean regime of the soul and the meditative practices appropriate to it. It emphasizes “individual” self-creation, but it follows Nietzsche in his understanding of individuals as conflictual multiplicities. These multiplicities have been shaped by the labors of Christian moralities into dividualistic structures that contain command and obedience centers. Individuals are nothing isolated, but are evolutionary and cultural processes—collectively designated as the human species—that carry systems of interpretation through living time; each individual is an experiment and an “attempted” set of interpretations in one direction. Each individual is, moreover, a mirror and a locus of contemporary political struggles. Most individuals are not really fully “persons,” but are conflicted structures being willed by the moral programs ensconced in their ensouled bodies. The modern age, however, provides possibilities for the self-creation of autonomous persons. Such persons, which have arisen accidentally in the past, may now be created by conscious design. Nietzsche’s askesis focuses on techniques of conscious self-creation, by the use of which truly individual persons may arise. These would be then the latest products of the long process of human cultural self-creation. Only such persons would have the long and strong wills that may appropriately be called free wills. Nietzsche’s philosophical labors are directed in the first instance at “individuals” and only secondarily at human “herds.” They envision self-shaping primarily for the “few” with the benefits of such self-shaping accruing ultimately also for the “many.”
Fourthly, my analysis proceeds from a view that, beside considering discourses of philosophy as instruments of philosophers, the distinction between speaking and writing always remained supremely important for Nietzsche. This distinction tends to be effaced in post-modern interpretations of Nietzsche, but his texts contain frequent injunctions to his readers to translate the written logos into the silent logos of thinking via the oral logos. Only in this manner could his writings be “understood,” that is to say, metabolized as nourishment for the self-shaping of free spirits. Moreover, his writings also contain frequent hints to his readers that point to these writings as faded and late manifestations of Nietzsche’s original and lived self-creation. Thus, they invoke the metaphor of reading with the ears, which implies that the visual aspect is insufficient for comprehension and needs to be complemented by attention to the aural-musical and rhythmic unfolding of a powerful vision.
Finally, from the above it follows that my view of philosophy does not restrict the activity of philosophizing to analysis. It affirms that understanding the analytical Nietzsche can occur only when combined with an appreciation of his view that “truths” are poetical creations of the future. Thus, I do not privilege his more “analytical” works, such as the Genealogy of Morality, as sources for my interpretations. I do not discount Thus Spoke Zarathustra, because it is written as a poetic-fictional work, and not written in Nietzsche’s own voice. I do not consider this as an embarrassment to be finessed away, or to be ignored, but as essential parts of Nietzsche’s rhetorical strategy. Hence, I do not follow what appears to be the scholarly consensus that focuses on the Genealogy as the only work in which Nietzsche seriously did philosophy. Nor do I join the scholarly consensus in segmenting Nietzsche’s poetical-analytical opus into early, middle, and late periods, thus postulating a development in which the later is philosophically superior to the earlier. Indeed, such development does exist, but it seems to me to have the structure of a living entelechy, in which later stages recuperate earlier ones, and earlier ones hold in themselves all grounds of future unfolding. Nietzsche’s writings contain explicit statements that the evolutions of his analyses are stages in the progressive unveiling of the fundamental idea at work in his depths as a philosophical task. This also means that his writings are intensely personal and can only be fully grasped if they are related to his life. His philosophical task proceeded from his life; it was present as a problem in his earliest philosophical works and it became fully visible at its height in Zarathustra. The post-Zarathustra works then may be seen as elaborations and refinements of Nietzsche’s fated Aufgabe, which was to initiate a new way of life. My text hence finds support from all periods of his philosophical writings. To be sure, Nietzsche’s opus is a veritable labyrinth that permits many interpretations. As a finite set of sentences, it is able to initiate a virtually infinite plurality of ways of self-creation. My focus on ascetic techniques is my particular Ariadne thread out of the Nietzschean labyrinth; it is one that should not be ignored but should be tried, as is suggested strongly by Nietzsche himself. The following then is a brief summary of each chapter of the book.
1) Chapter 1 deals with Nietzsche’s view of the nature and function of the philosopher as a therapist of himself as well as of his culture. It argues that Nietzsche’s understanding of philosophy was modeled on figures such as Socrates, Heraclitus, Empedocles, Plato, and Epicurus. These “royal hermits of the spirit” succeeded in creating themselves as works of art and in becoming founders of states, or at least in becoming founders of schools. Thereby they exercised important influences on the political ordering of their societies, which looked to them as therapists of culture. Plato managed to impose his founding will on succeeding centuries by becoming the originator of the Christian regime of the soul. Epicurus showed the way to founding a school in the midst of a disintegrating culture; his disciples managed to preserve wisdom by leading the hidden life.
Nietzsche attempted for most of his life to found a philosophical school. If he had succeeded, this school would have been modeled on the Platonic academy and the Epicurean garden. It would have attempted to realize the political intention of shaping future European society, but it would have achieved this by retreating temporarily into an Epicurean friendship community. In such a community, free spirits would have been able safely to work on themselves, to become the philosophical legislators of a future European culture. Nietzsche’s books were tools for recruiting free spirits to become members of such a school. When his solitude proved irremediable, he began to see his writings as fishing rods to catch free spirits for the creation of schools of self-shaping in his posthumous existence. Such fraternities of free spirits would be necessary to traverse the period of nihilism until a future point in time, when direct political action would again become possible. His books hence do not contain his philosophy but are instruments of philosophical striving meant to initiate ascetic labors of self-transformation in free spirited readers and to provide the foundation for the creation of new values.
2) Chapter 2 analyzes the practices of solitude as the initial and most important technique of a Nietzschean askesis. It explores the modalities of what Nietzsche called “Einsamkeitslehre.” Temporary retreats into solitude are the main part of the deconstructive aspect of self-shaping in which one could begin to dissolve one’s own entrapment in a “slavish” identity. Withdrawals into solitude would make free spirits realize how they are caught in resentment and the desire for revenge that inform the institutions and interaction rituals of modern societies. Solitude would permit someone to avoid to be continuously re-infected by these strong negative emotions. It would open an individual’s deeply rooted line of fate and would show the means by which a “slavish” self could be dissolved. In solitude, the three mechanisms by which slavishness is maintained would become visible and their dissolution would become possible. These mechanisms are: a) the quite natural identification of a self with all of its negative emotions; b) a self’s constant anxious considering of the opinions that others hold of it; and, c) a self’s captivity in the fast and furious pace of modern life that pressures everyone into becoming a workaholic busybody. Solitude makes again possible the practices of contemplation, which puts a self in touch with its own deep sources of wellness.