"In what do you believe?– In this, that the weights of all things must be determined anew."
“In what do you believe?— In this, that the weights of all things must be determined anew.”
Friedrich Nietzsche, The Gay Science, section 269
It is difficult to find a philosopher so historically misappropriated as Friedrich Nietzsche. Warped to fit the narratives of Nazis and nihilists alike, he remains an influential figure whose true profundity fails to be appreciated. Not only is his work some of the most nuanced in the philosophical field, but his creative (and admittedly hyperbolic) writing style can obscure his meaning for those who do not parse him carefully. Nietzsche is not (in any conventional sense) a systemic thinker, but rather a musing artist unafraid to play against expectations.
The passages we will review here relate to one particular aspect of Nietzschean thought: his critique of conventional values, moral and otherwise, with the eventual goal of revaluation. To holistically examine Nietzsche’s thoughts on values, we must first survey his theory of their origins. Nietzsche claims that from distant beginnings, "intellect produced nothing but errors" (section 110). Some of these, he adds, "proved to be useful and helped preserve the species," continually being reinforced in new generations until they "became almost a part of the basic endowment of the species" (section 110). In sum, Nietzsche is saying that knowledge functioned as a tool of survival, true or otherwise. This prioritization of utility over truth inevitably resulted in certain beneficial (but false) assumptions taking form, which were inherited by successive members of the species.
As societies evolved, a dialogue began to form around the merits of knowledge. Nietzsche writes, "subtler honesty and skepticism came into being wherever two contradictory sentences appeared to be applicable to life because both were compatible with the basic errors" (170). Notice the use of the adjective, "subtler," which establishes that these are only rumblings of intellectuality. There is still no commitment to seeking truth outside of a limited worldview. Ideas are weighed against each other merely in terms of their utility. Humans also found room for propositions which "though not useful to life, were also evidently not harmful," opening up what Nietzsche describes as an "intellectual play impulse" and an "innocent" honesty and skepticism (170).
However, the playfulness of disagreements soon wore off and "the human brain became full of such judgments and convictions, and a ferment, struggle, and lust for power developed in this tangle. Not only utility and delight but every kind of impulse took sides in this fight about 'truths'" (section 110). These struggles illustrate more considerable shifts in the purposes and priorities of knowledge as a whole. Rather than merely being a tool for utility, "knowledge and the striving for the true found their place as a need among other needs... scrutiny, denial, mistrust, and contradiction became a power; all evil instincts were subordinated to knowledge... and eventually [acquired] even the eye and innocence of the good" (section 110). Thus, the traits of the skeptics were virtuized as ways of drawing closer to rightness and reinforcing one's own rightness.
Alas, the trouble with skepticism is that it must turn inward. Knowledge became "a continually growing power–until eventually knowledge collided with those primeval basic errors: two lives, two powers, both in the same human being" (section 110). Humankind's life-preserving assumptions all came under attack from an "impulse for truth [which] has proved to be also a life-preserving power" (section 110). The old systems began to break down; dread became a pinnacle of human experience; the human needs continually undermined each other.
The problem Nietzsche illustrates here (a rather apt diagnosis of our postmodern crisis) leads us into the next phase of his investigation: how values stack up against each other in the context of societies ruled by error. Nietzsche observes a sort of hierarchy of “human impulses and actions'' as “expressions of the needs of a community and herd: whatever benefits it most—and second most, and third most” (section 116). From these criteria, he posits a sort of relativism among moral codes within different contexts, e.g., Sparta holding discipline as the penultimate virtue compared to Athens promoting contemplativeness. The moral system a society relies upon evolves out of the needs of said body. Thus, Nietzsche writes, the hierarchy of mores “trains the individual to be a function of the herd and to ascribe value to himself only as a function” (section 116). In other words, the value of individuals is first and foremost measured according to how well they function as a cog within an ethical system optimized for the preservation of the whole.
In Nietzsche’s time, this primacy of the whole comes under attack from a looming trend toward individualism. Nietzsche describes this transition of taste like so: “during the longest period of the human past nothing was more terrible than to feel that one stood by oneself… While we experience law and submission as compulsion and loss, it was egoism that was formerly experienced as something painful… To be a self and to esteem oneself according to one’s own weight and measure—would have been considered madness” (section 116). So we see that a person’s emphasis on their own preferences (whether in the form of priorities, desires, or ethical judgments) above those imposed by herd-oriented value systems is becoming far less stigmatized and far more admired. This shift toward individualism is a change that Nietzsche primarily endorses (though he admits without much scorn that many are incapable of resisting the herd instinct). The systems his criticisms predominantly target (though he has much to say about everything, it would seem) are those which perpetuate the notion of the individual as a function (metaphorically, systems which deem people pieces of a pen rather than the writers themselves).
It is with these points in mind that we turn to Nietzsche’s critique of Christendom. In his life’s project, the revaluation of values, Nietzsche inevitably clashes with the aforementioned hierarchies rendering the individual vassal to the collective. The God construction is chief among the primeval errors perpetuating such systems. Nietzsche muses, “‘God himself cannot exist without wise people,’ said Luther with good reason. But ‘God can exist even less without unwise people’—that our good Luther did not say” (section 129). It is difficult to think of any hierarchy more apparent than that positing God’s dominance (and, among the Catholics, the de facto dominance of priests). It is naturally quite convenient for those in power when they hold the religious authority to relate the “will of God” to a herd more than willing to believe and serve. Nietzsche relates a specific example of this in section 131, where he asserts that the Church exploited the prominent “craving for suicide” at the time of Christianity's founding as a means of reinforcing power. The early Church used their doctrinal monopoly over the will of God to permit “only two kinds of suicide, [dressing] them up with the highest dignity…, and [forbidding] all others in a terrifying manner. Only martyrdom and the ascetic’s slow destruction of his body were permitted.” Such absurdities return us to Nietzsche’s point: that the uncompromisingly dominant construct of God can only make the individual a function of its authority.
Thus, in a world built anew, God too must go. Long before Nietzsche’s time, this process had been slowly set in motion by the Enlightenment. Notwithstanding his criticisms, Nietzsche is not ignorant of the weight of this change. We do not find him gloating at God’s funeral, nor do we find him with his usual bark and bite. Instead, we find the man who would forever be known for proclaiming “God is dead” mourning. Somber. Afraid. The following selection from section 125 requires little explanation:
“‘Whither is God?’ [the madman] cried; ‘I will tell you. We have killed him— you and I. All of us are his murderers. But how did we do this? How could we drink up the sea? Who gave us the sponge to wipe away the entire horizon? What were we doing when we unchained the earth from its sun?... Are we not plunging continually?”
Yet our dear scientist wouldn’t have us live an existence complacent within a vacuum. Friedrich Nietzsche believes that what makes us heroic is “Going out to meet at the same time one’s highest suffering and one’s highest hope” (section 268). It is after “the weights of all things [are] determined anew” that “‘You shall become the person you are’” (section 269-70). From the depths, we rebuild.
References
Nietzsche, Friedrich. The Gay Science. Translated by Walter Kaufmann. Random House, 1974.
