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On Friedrich Nietzsche’s The Genealogy of Morals (1887), “Third essay: what do ascetic ideals mean?” featuring Mark, Wes, Dylan, and Seth.
When people really get serious, and try to put away frivolous things, is that good or bad? A serious athlete will subordinate everything to their training, an artist may even forget to eat or sleep while crafting a work, and of course at the extreme, a religious mystic might completely withdraw from the world and its temptations to put their energy entirely on their connection to divinity. Nietzsche analyses these extreme behaviors as following from ascetic ideals. But while in these cases asceticism is most obvious, the ideal actually rules us all to varying degrees through the values that religion hands down to us.
The civilization of the human animal amounts to the creation of a super-ego to tamp down on some parts of ourselves. For an artist or scholar or warrior, this self-denial is a matter of focusing on some activity that is seen as more important than the parts being repressed, and so Nietzsche finds this admirable. It’s clearly a manifestation of our will to power, like sharpening yourself to a keen point to be more effective, even though doing so involved shaving off a lot of parts of yourself, i.e. not being well-rounded in a more healthy way. But self-denial can also be in favor of, well, nothing, a uniform quashing of the self in favor of some external ideal, as when one simply bows down to a king or god or idol, putting all value on that worshipped thing and none on oneself. This is clearly self-destructive, according to Nietzsche, but nonetheless also has its source in the will to power, because by bowing down and subordinating yourself to something you’ve elevated to the highest, you’re now on its team, your will is now through it subordination one and the same as what you posit to be the most powerful force.
This episode is formally a sequel to our long-ago episode 11 where we discussed the main thesis and first two essays of The Genealogy, in the context of introducing meta-ethics, which is the question of where values come from and what makes them binding upon us. For Nietzsche (as for Locke), they come from our psychology (the will to power, for Nietzsche) and from social customs, which are influenced by psychology but which change dynamically over time. His Genealogy gives a rough history of values: Originally, our values were roughly animal, prizing strength and self-expression: the will to power undiluted. Then with the rise of Judeo-Christian morality (and really, he could craft similar stories about the evolution of Eastern moralities), those animal, “master” values were turned on their head and against themselves, such that raw exertion of power was now labeled as “evil,” and self-effacement, voluntarily (or otherwise) making oneself weak, was considered good. The book’s second essay details how we develop “bad conscience” in light of such a “slave” morality, with the clear implication being that we need to overcome that self-denying system, not so much to go back to being an unrestrained animal, but to more wisely exert these newfound powers of introspection and self-control to create great philosophies and artworks and our own character.
The problem with the picture many readers take away from this reading of The Genealogy is that it’s too binary: Nietzsche has told the story of how the master morality’s “good” and “bad” were switched around such that what was good is now called “evil” and what was bad is now called “good,” and what that leaves us with is a clear call to new values that are more like the master morality. All those slavish priests should be condemned, and maybe those self-confident self-promoters should now be admired. Go seize the day and make your mark on the world! This third essay adds nuance to the picture: The ascetic ideal is a chief tool of the will to power. It of course must have been present in ancient Sparta with its rigorous warrior training, but it was greatly developed (according to Nietzsche) by priests as a sneaky way of turning their strength-denying ways into the dominant social, political, and moral force. Nietzsche is obviously in favor of philosophy, and art, and science as opposed to superstition, and all these practitioners use this tool of asceticism to define and defend their domains, so that philosophy becomes not mere speculation, art becomes not mere dabbling, and science acquires a rigorous methodology. Asceticism is in short professionalization for these areas.
So the same tool has both good and bad uses for Nietzsche. But we need to watch out: The single-mindedness that allows a writer to produce a great work also by its nature creates blind spots, and the chief one that Nietzsche focuses on in the end of his essay is one that we considered in our second foray into Nietzsche’s work: ep. 61 on his unpublished early essay “On Truth and Lies in a Nonmoral Sense.” The blind spot is our faith in the pursuit of truth at all costs. We think of science and religion as opposed, but the scientist for Nietzsche has elevated “truth” into the spot that God used to hold and still acts religiously toward that object. Nietzsche wants us to extend the questioning involved in science (and philosophy, and yes, in art too) to this pursuit of truth (or beauty as a species of truth, in the case of the artist) itself. It’s difficult to tell exactly what this means in practical terms, but in terms of attitude, it means pursuing science and philosophy cheerfully, with self-deprecating modesty, i.e. “gay science” (the subject or our third Nietzsche episode, #84).
Ultimately, awareness of our ascetic tendencies is I think meant to make us more well-rounded. Yes, be an extreme athlete or artist, or whatever you need to do to try to make your life great, but keep well-grounded in doing so; don’t lose the larger perspective that you’ll need if you break a leg or lose some artistic opportunity or capacity. Nietzsche uses the case of Wagner to show you what not to do and what one might do while aging. Nietzsche had admired the great world-building in Wagner’s operas, but found Parsifal to be sentimental Christian dreck. On Nietzsche’s reading, Wagner basically scared himself and retreated to provincial morality as his way of getting serious, getting back to basics. Nietzsche suggests instead that if the weight of world-building is to heavy, Wagner should have instead jumped in his next work to a meta level, satirizing his creative process. This is the way the dialectic of creativity is supposed to work: You overcome what you’ve done in the past to create something new, whereas Nietzsche thought Wagner in creating Parsifal was not overcoming but just retreating from his own greatness.
As with many of Nietzsche’s critiques, this may seem a difference that is just a matter of opinion. Had Wagner created a satire of himself, this might also be seen as a self-rejecting retreat rather than a triumphant overcoming. To be generous to Wagner, I’d venture that only artists themselves can really say whether they’re progressing or regressing along their idiosyncratic dialectical paths, even while we should acknowledge that self-knowledge is far from perfect, so there’s a role for critics like Nietzsche in the process to help us see past our blind spots. This idea of a dialectical progression in self-comportment (including creativity, ethics, and pursuit of truth) was the foundation for Simone de Beauvoir’s The Ethics of Ambiguity, as discussed in our episodes 140-141. She condemns “the serious man” directed by the ascetic ideal, and also “the nihilist,” which is just a serious person whose faith in his god has been destroyed. As Nietzsche says in the current book, we prefer to will nothingness than to not will at all.
Importantly, though, Beauvoir also rejects the next step in the dialectic, “the adventurer,” which may be Nietzsche himself or at least a reasonable interpretation of this exhortation to “gay science.” Such an adventurer will pour himself into an endeavor, but temporarily, and then move on to the next thing, which to Beauvoir betrays a shallowness as opposed to a real ethical engagement. So would Nietzsche condemn Beauvoir as in fact too traditional, too “serious,” or does Nietzsche’s own passion for writing and capturing the subtlety of philosophic truth show that he is no mere adventurer and in fact fulfills Beauvoir’s ideal? Ultimately, if we’re engaged in this inner struggle, then we’ve bought into Nietzsche and Beauvoir’s program of self-development, which is probably all they could’ve really wanted from us.
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Image by Genevieve Arnold. Audio editing by Tyler Hislop.
Transcript
0:08 Mark: You are listening to the Partially Examined Life, a podcast by some guys who at one point set on doing philosophy for a living, but then thought better of it. Our question for episode 262 is something like why do people do philosophy? Or maybe what's the meaning of the ascetic ideal? We're reading essay three of Friedrich Nietzsche's Genealogy of Morals from 1887. For more information, please visit partiallyexaminedlife.com this is Mark Linsenmayer, apparently in rebellion against fundamental prerequisites of life, despite my best efforts in Madison, Wisconsin, this is Seth
0:36 Seth: Paskin putting to flight, at least temporarily, my dull pain and my lingering misery with a religious interpretation and justification in Austin, Texas.
0:46 Wes: This is Wes Alwan doing my best to avoid the sick in Cambridge, Massachusetts.
0:52 Dylan: This is Dylan Casey, instinctively striving for an optimum of favorable conditions under which to expand all my strength and achieve maximal feeling of power in Santa Fe, New Mexico.
1:03 Mark: That is a peppy collection of bumper stickers we have created for that, but that's what this essay is yielding to us. This is a peculiar thing. I couldn't make the main question here be what is the meaning of the ascetic ideal? Because no one would know what the hell we are even talking about by that. Why is that a thing? Dylan, why don't you explain to us why we're doing this now we're going
1:28 Dylan: to be doing for the next episode part of a book called Warspeak: Nietzsche's Victory Over Nihilism by Lise Van Boxel. Lise was a friend of the podcast and a member of Combat and Classics and a former St. John's tutor who died after an unexpected illness basically a year ago, and she had completed her book and it was ready for press and it got brought to publication at University of Toronto Press this year. It's a very interesting book and it seemed also like a great thing to do given her life. And in preparation for that, I talked with Michael Grenke, who wrote the introduction to the book, and Jeff Black, who's a member of Combat and Classics, who was a close friend of Lise's, about what we could prepare for because our habit has been to also engage in authors like Nietzsche.
So the last two chapters of the Book of Warspeak that we're going to be engaging present the solution or some of that portion of Lise's thought on it, and overlaps apparently quite a bit with the third essay. Also, there's the fact that in the previous podcast on Genealogy of Morals, which I was not a Part of you all did.
2:42 Mark: The first two books, that was episode 11, our introduction to Nietzsche. And we were just so giddy about introducing this figure that we were very excited about who had been so central to our formative development. Now, 10 years later, many Nietzsche episodes later, I've just about had enough of this dude. And this in particular, you know, there was a reason that we didn't get to that. Because this ascetic ideal. Well, I first, let's say it did not seem like a really. When I was reading it 10 years ago, and actually in school, it did not seem particularly on point.
It seemed, okay, this is more condemnation of priests or people that whip themselves to try to make themselves suffer. But he really has this picture of asceticism that is not just, I'm going to fast and starve and deny myself because I hate the world, like that's part of it. But he thinks that it's much more pervasive than that. And it's actually one of the expressions of the will to power. And so this essay actually ends up being an explanation of the will to power, maybe more straightforward than we've had in some of our other readings.
3:43 Wes: Yeah. Morality itself. Right. Will be the form of asceticism that we're most familiar with. And it shows up in, you know, he'll start out talking about asceticism in the arts, what it means for the arts and its manifestation in philosophy. And a lot of this is devoted to the quote, unquote priest, which I think will probably be a broad category. And then he moves on to science itself. Right. At the very end. So science and atheism we might think of. If we associate asceticism with religiousness in particular and belief in God, we might think that we find an opposing ideal in science and atheism.
And he's going to say, no, these are just the highest manifestations of asceticism. So I think broadly we're thinking of any form of self denial. Our minds might go first to priests flagellating themselves or monks living asexual lives and their noses in books. But it's supposed to be a culturally and psychologically pervasive sentiment, one that he says at some point. He probably hasn't overcome either in his critique of it.
4:47 Mark: I feel like a lot of our listeners might not even use this word or necessarily know what it means. Just, I mean, I think you just said he's not defining it here. It's not a technical term. It is the thing that is already very prevalent in the culture that he wants to explain the practice of severe self discipline and abstention from all forms of indulgence, typically for religious reasons. That is a dictionary definition. Seems like it would be a fine starting point. But he wants to say, but it's so much more than that.
5:12 Dylan: Yeah, he says towards the end, after he's explained a bit, he says, the ascetic ideal has not only ruined health and taste, it has ruined a third, fourth, fifth and sixth thing as well. I love that I'd beware of enumerating everything I'd never finish. It's my purpose here to bring to light not what this ideal has done, but simply what it means, what it indicates, what lies behind it, beneath it, in it, and of what it is. The provisional, indistinct expression overlaid with question marks and misunderstandings.
5:42 Mark: Seth, opening thoughts.
5:43 Seth: Well, this is, I think, from my perspective, like the best and the worst of Nietzsche. I actually listened to the Audible book version, or one of them that was a slightly different translation, but was very well read and it was very entertaining. He's beautiful and acerbic and funny and smart and insightful, and then beats this horse not only to death. But about halfway through the essay, I was like, really? Once he got into the Ascetic Priest, it just went on and on and on about the same thing, it felt like for me. So, yeah, I have the same sort of feeling that you do, Mark.
Or maybe it's a little different in the sense that all young philosophy students come to Nietzsche early and they misunderstand and they don't appreciate what they're reading. And then you get into systematic philosophy and you leave him by the roadside because you think he's. Then you learn more and grow more, immature more, and you circle back to him and you're like, oh, my gosh, what great insights. Right? Like we did when we recorded this 10 years ago, or whatever it was then. Episode 11. And then you get tired of him again, and then you come back.
It's rich to have a lifetime relationship with him, and I think this shows him at his very best as far as a stylist, to some extent. And it's just. I'm wondering how we're going to get three hours of conversation out of this topic.
7:05 Mark: Let's go short.
7:07 Wes: I can help with that.
7:10 Mark: Should we say what I thought I was reading the Walter Kaufmann, because I believe that's the paper copy that I have that I've always read. But the version that I've actually been taking notes out of, that I found online this Cambridge edition I see is Carol Diethe, originally 1994, but it read exactly like the Kaufman. I wouldn't be surprised if she, you know, was using that as a starting point.
7:31 Dylan: I read the Kaufmann.
7:32 Wes: Yeah, I think Kaufmann translated it with someone else. Right.
7:35 Mark: What does your book in front of you say? Any of you that are not using
7:38 Dylan: mine says translated and edited with commentaries by Walter Kaufmann.
7:42 Mark: Okay.
7:42 Dylan: This is the collection of the basic writings of Nietzsche that Kaufmann published in the 60s.
7:47 Wes: So it's Kaufmann and Hollingdale. So this is a weird hodgepodge. Yeah, Kaufmann translated a lot of Nietzsche alone, but the genealogy, he did it in cooperation with RJ Hollingdale, the one
7:58 Seth: I listened to, A new translation by Ian Johnston.
8:03 Mark: All right, so we got a variety we can draw on here. The third essay, what Do Ascetic Ideals Mean? So, just to recap, the first two essays were about the slave revolt and morality. People should just go back and listen to our episode 11 if you want a summary of the overall text. I think this stands more or less by itself, but if you want to know the context, why he's talking about this, just go check that out. It's his overall meta ethics. What his take on values is going to be.
8:29 Wes: Well, he derives. In the first essay, he's going to give a genealogy in the sense of. He's going to describe the origin of our current set of values, our current ideas of good and evil, from a premoral set of values. So our slave morality has evolved out of a. In reaction to and out of a. What he calls a master morality in the. The distinction is that the master morality is something more aristocratic. Right. It values the virtues, and it values, Overtly values power, whereas slave morality pretends to be all nice and love thy neighbor. It's really just unconscious revenge fantasy.
And then the second essay is basically an account of how we develop a conscience, how we. Or at least a bad conscience, guilty conscience. So again, it's an attempt to give an account of the origins of morality, a kind of historical account that gives us insight into what morality is. And of course, as we all know, the account is not a positive one. Nietzsche is a critic of morality as we know it, which is one of the things that makes him so exciting to read.
9:28 Dylan: And if I'm remembering right, in that second book, the root of that origin of morality is the distinction, the evolution or the genealogy of going from good versus bad to good versus evil in that first essay. Yeah, that's the first essay.
9:43 Wes: Yeah. And then the second essay is on bad conscience, where we Get a kind of twofold account. We get the account of conscience as a evolution from a premoral notion of debt. That's right. And particularly indebtedness to ancestors, which develops into a concept of God. But we also get this idea of repressed instincts. So we get the idea that conscience is an internalization of external power relations. Right. So when the stronger overpower the weaker and inflict pain and suffering on them, that sort of relation gets internalized within us. So our self discipline, in a weird way, is a manifest, you know, internal manifestation that something was once external.
10:23 Mark: So you would associate ascetic ideals with slave morality, with people that no longer trust themselves to just exert their power, that need to control themselves. Oh, everything, all my base, all my gut instincts are actually evil, are vices. I need to control myself, keep myself within limits that are manageable by society.
10:41 Dylan: Basically, it feels like it's a bit complicated. And I found myself alternately confused as I was going through it because maybe the easiest way to put it is that there's a way in which, when he's first talking about the genealogy of the ascetic ideal, it feels like it is an assertion of the will to power that it's hard to distinguish it from. I'll call it a healthy one.
11:05 Wes: And it's a more passive aggressive assertion
11:08 Dylan: just thinking about things like self discipline. Right. Is that it's like a corruption or lack of Right. Relation with respect to self discipline. Right. It's not as if the noble and the healthy modes are wanton, so to speak. They're not hedonistic. The warrior is a disciplined individual.
11:31 Wes: So you're getting a Dylan. The sense in which this is like a state of nature account. And so it suffers from some of those, really in the earlier essays, that is, you know, it suffers from some of the drawbacks of those, which is that you have to simplify. And you start wondering, well, wait a minute, isn't the warrior. Doesn't the warrior already have a discipline and conscience? Isn't that part of, you know, civilization and culture per se? You know, do. Can we go back to a cultural prehistory in which there's no, you know, all of those questions arise.
And the other part of the complication is that because Nietzsche rails against these things, you might get the idea that he wants us to return to being, quote, unquote, blonde beasts who run around indiscriminately killing people. You know, we might become Leopold and Loebs and think this is in fact, all things are permissible. And that's the way to. That's the virtue that we're seeking. And of course there is no way back to that. The only way, and we've discussed it on this podcast before, is forward. And it's towards this aesthetic ideal that Nietzsche posits, or maybe the Ubermensch, maybe some fusion of the instinctual and the scientific.
A gay science, but. So he's not asking us to critically return to master morality. That does complicate things because mostly all we get is his railing and his negativity. And you think, wow, you know, this is. What is he asking us to do here?
12:41 Mark: Well, and you just used another word there that I need to point out. They're often confused, especially in an audio medium like this. We're talking about aesthetic ideals. But the aesthetic ideal, as in love of beauty, love of art, living your life artistically, that's actually his positive thing. He does mention the gay science near the end of this. This idea of it's not just the religious people, but also the scientists and everybody that also engage in this self denial, self discipline, self taming that he thinks has done such overall horrible things to society, but is also a sort of step in the potential development and self overcoming of humanity from this blond beast starting point.
That would be very pathetic if we just remained that and have self overcome that. So, you know, he's going to use this stuff that he basically thinks is anti life is bad to push us forward. It's both a descriptive account. This is how we have developed, and as a prescriptive account, this is how I want us to continue to develop, to get toward living life in a more carefree, humorous, artistic way of being.
13:47 Wes: Mark, your worry about pronunciation paid off because if you just change the pronunciation slightly from aesthetic to aesthetic, you go from negative to positive.
13:56 Dylan: Yeah, all of our non native English speakers are going to be confused about what we're saying.
14:00 Mark: Yes, sorry about that.
14:01 Wes: But yeah, just to reinforce what you're saying, Mark, in the second essay, you know, he says we become. Human beings don't become interesting, of course, until they develop a conscience, until their instincts get turned inwards, until we're starting to be hard on ourselves. And the soul in a way is like the cavernous area that is carved out by inwardly turned instincts in the same way that water might weather a rock. We are sort of made of this stuff. So it is what it means to be human. This is not a call to go back to being more like an animal. We're stuck with conscience, we're stuck with all this stuff. And Then the question is how to go forward.
14:38 Dylan: We're not supposed to go back to being lion like we're supposed to. In some ways he's pointing to a kind of corruption of our conscience and maybe even in some ways necessary, but to be overcome. To me, it's helpful to link it up with him basically saying the ascetic ideal is linked directly with nihilism. And in the first section, what is the meaning of ascetic ideals? In the case of artists, they mean nothing or too many things. In the case of philosophers and scholars, something like a sense, an instinct for the most favorable preconditions of higher spirituality.
In the case of women, at best, one more subjective charm, a touch of morbidezza in fair flesh, the angelic look of a plump pretty animal. In the case of physiologically deformed and deranged the majority of mortals, in attempts to see themselves as too good for this world, a saintly form of debauch, their chief weapon in the struggle against slow pain and boredom. In the case of priests, the distinctive priestly faith, their best instrument of power. Also the supreme license for power. In the case of saints, finally, a pretext for hibernation, their novissima gloriae cupido, their repose in nothingness, God, their form of madness.
That ascetic ideal has meant so many things to man, however, is an expression of the basic fact of the human will. It's horror, vacui. It needs a goal, and it will rather will nothingness than not will.
16:06 Wes: This, by the way, is an abstract of the entire essay. So instead of the normal academic saying, first I will argue this, then I will, he just gives us a nice little tone poem of what's to come.
16:16 Dylan: Yeah, and it's also helpful to remember that the subtitle to the whole book is a polemic, and so you immediately are reminded of that. But he comes back to it occasionally that effectively all of these different manifestations of the ascetic ideal is a willing to nothingness rather than a willing to something. And understanding how those manifestations are willing to nothingness.
16:41 Mark: Can we break that down a little bit? So with artists, that's what we're going to talk about next. He's going to rail about Wagner and how his great hero disappointed him with his vile works. Oh no, with women. He has a few obnoxious things to say about women. Here, with physiological casualties and the disgruntled the majority of mortals. So talk about sick people.
17:03 Dylan: And a lot of people are sick.
17:05 Mark: Yes, a saintly form of debauchery. Their chief weapon in the battle against long out pain and boredom. My translation is quite different from yours, but it matches up.
17:14 Wes: Pause on Wagner for a second because I think part of his falling out with Wagner, right, is Wagner was an anti Semite and lent himself to German nationalism. And that's one of the things that we see again and again in him, in a way he's, you know, in the history of philosophy, I don't know of a more strident anti nationalist than Nietzsche. So it's not just, even though it reads like that, the same reaction as you, Mark. It's not just, okay, my hero disappointed me. It's my hero disappointed me by being a ridiculous sentimentalist and anti Semite.
So I said, screw you, I'm not going to even be friends with you. I have principles. And in particular, what he's objecting to in these passages is that Wagner, he associated with his kind of gay science fusion at one point his spiritualization of the sensual. And then Wagner took a turn towards ordinary moralism and you know, in favor of chastity. That is, that's his big criticism here and towards an embrace of an antithesis between chastity and sensuality, but we can also imagine between morality and sensuality more broadly. So it's that antithesis that really bothers Nietzsche.
This is in section two. For there is no necessary antithesis between chastity and sensuality. Every good marriage, every genuine love affair transcends this antithesis. Wagner would have done well, I think, to have brought this pleasant fact home once more to his Germans by means of a bold and beautiful Luther comedy.
18:41 Mark: So is the name of the work Luther's Wedding that he's complaining about?
18:44 Dylan: No, it's Parsifal.
18:45 Mark: Parsifal, okay.
18:47 Wes: But even in those cases in which this antithesis between chastity and sensuality really exists, there is fortunately no need for it to be a tragic antithesis. At least this holds for all those well constituted, joyful mortals who are far from regarding their unstable equilibrium between animal and angel as necessarily an argument against existence. The subtlest and brightest among them have even found it, like Goethe and Hafiz, one more stimulus to life. It is precisely such contradictions that seduce one into existence.
19:17 Seth: Yeah, I think there's a easier to follow criticism or clarification in the section three. So I'm reading off the PDF from that we. It also highlights one of the functions of, I'll call it aesthetic difference. So he's talking about Parsifal and he says this would have been, as I said, worthy of A great tragedian in which capacity, like every artist, he only reaches the final summit of his achievement when he knows how to see himself in his art. Beneath him and knows how to laugh at himself is Wagner's Parsifal, his secret superior. Laugh at himself, his triumph in attaining the final supreme freedom of the artist, his artistic transcendence.
As I said, it would be nice to think so, because what would an intentionally serious Parsifal be like? And he says, scroll down a little bit. An apostasy and return to sickly Christian and obscurantist ideals. And finally, an actual self denial, self annulment on the part of an artist who had hitherto wanted the opposite with all the force of his will, namely for his art to be the highest intellectualization and sensualization. So Nietzsche sees Parsifal as ultimately being a denial of everything that Wagner celebrated in his earlier works by virtue of celebrating Christian ascetic ideals, instead of celebrating and manifesting what he calls the sensuality of life.
20:38 Wes: Well, highest spiritualization and sensualization, which I took to be a fusion, because that's the way he puts it elsewhere, right? To spiritualize the. The sensual, to bring them together.
20:48 Dylan: And then that's why music in particular is the best at doing that, in part because it avoids words.
20:54 Mark: Am I getting it right that the kind of literature, the kind of music, the kind of art that he likes is this kind? That is. I'm sort of reading Kant into this, that it's autonomous, that it is just a creation unto itself. You're a world creator, you are making yourself a God, whereas if you use your art to deliver a message, it's a morality tale, then there's something cheap and sleazy about that, and especially if you use it in a manipulative way, so it's not just growing of itself and its might, but you're using it to soothe people intentionally. Those are ways to get it wrong.
21:29 Wes: Yeah, he directly criticizes. Right. Of course, this is one of the manifestations of the ascetic ideals and of the ascetic ideal in art, which is just that it's a handmaiden to certain political views or to certain philosophical views. And that actually gives him a transition from Wagner to Schopenhauer to its manifestation and philosophy in general. And to begin with Schopenhauer, he's actually critical of Schopenhauer's influence on Wagner because music goes from being a means to something that accompanies drama. For Wagner, music is your connection to the thing in itself, to the Kantian thing in itself, right?
Because the thing in itself for Schopenhauer turns out to be the will. And music has a special place in the arts of just plugging us in directly into the things in themselves. So he has these funny ways of putting it here. So Nietzsche's. You know, there's a lot of funny stuff in this essay, but the musician becomes a mouthpiece of the. In itself. Or a telephone from the beyond. I love that. A telephone from the beyond.
22:31 Mark: There's a way when he's talking about the artist, that he's actually praising asceticism. Just think of the artist who's so devoted to his or her art that everything else just goes by the wayside. I will not even bother to eat. I'm not going to cultivate any of my relationships because I want to, as he's saying, remove any blocks, any disturbances from my getting in touch with. Whether you could call it the thing in itself or, you know, just the autonomous growth of the work. It's all for the work. Art for art's sake. That is a completely expression of the aesthetic ideal.
But there's something, according to Nietzsche that is awesome about that. That is. He's gonna have mixed feelings about it. But there's something very admirable about some of these ascetics that it ends up being not a self immolation, a self denial, because it is denying parts of the self in favor of other parts of the self. It makes you a lopsided person. I was remembering in Zarathustra, in one of the sections where Zarathustra is at his cave and all these people come to be his disciples and they're all warped in some way, and one is just like a giant eye because he's neglected everything else.
And so those are the kinds of people that are, you know, these misfits that are magnificent, that are part of what virtue comes to for Nietzsche. But we need to recognize that there's something messed up about that still.
23:50 Dylan: I think part of that esteem he has is, particularly, for lack of a better term, the first ascetic, the first of, you know, every given line. And because it's manifesting a will to power of their own, in a way, it's their own lion coming out, even if it's on themselves, as opposed to the consequences of morality, where all those people that are followers of Zarathustra are corrupted versions. The first priest is a different kind of case, or the first philosopher is a different kind of case than all the ones that come after Mark.
24:23 Wes: Were you thinking of A particular place here where he praises the ascetic in relation to art? Or are you just thinking in his
24:29 Mark: corpus generally, the blockage is in section seven. So when he's already talking about Schopenhauer, I saw. Every animal instinctively strives for an optimum of favorable conditions in which to fully release his power and achieve his maximum of power sensation. Every animal abhors equally instinctively with an acute sense of smell that is higher than all reason. That's in quotes. Higher than all reason. Any kind of disturbance and hindrance that blocks or could block his path to the optimum.
24:54 Dylan: That was my quote from the beginning,
24:56 Wes: actually, in this context, he's talking about sexuality and Schopenhauer treating sexuality as his own personal enemy. He's just gone from critiquing Schopenhauer's adoption of Kantian aesthetics to get to the idea that our aesthetic judgments, their function is to liberate us from the will, right? To liberate us from desire. Although those two things aren't exactly equal, of course. And he reads that in particular as a desire to be free of sexuality. And why? Because the philosophical animal needs that. It favors a feeling of power over the feeling of sexuality and sees it as necessary to basically being able to be reasonable.
And so he goes on, and you know, the philosopher abhors marriage. He'll only do it ironically, like Socrates, right? So, in other words, sex interferes with being rational and being reflective and being contemplative, and therefore we must get rid of it. And it's in the next section, section 8, where he will work towards the first account of sublimation that I'm familiar with, where I mean specifically this idea that at the end of Section 8, he'll say sexuality is not eliminated in the aesthetic, it's transfigured so that it no longer enters consciousness as sexual excitement.
That's the way he puts it. He doesn't, of course, use the word sublimation. That's one of the things about this whole book and of course, this essay that is so important with Nietzsche. These little psychological insights that are really novel and build, you know, they're leading into Freud, of course, and they're laying the groundwork for something pretty radical conception of the way human psychology works.
26:32 Mark: I was just searching in my notes for the word blockage because I'm trying to find where actually he says that about artists in here, clearly. You know, he says for art, the aesthetic ideal means too much and nothing, and there are different ways that it can manifest itself. So I'm not sure exactly Where I got the idea of art for art's sake. It seems an obvious. Anyone that's completely devoted to their. Whether it's the scientist pursuing truth or the artist pursuing art or the priest pursuing God, you know, the classic monks. I will hide myself away from the world and give all my energy to the only thing that really matters. Whenever you say that there's only one thing that really matters, that is definitely an expression of the ascetic ideal. And also an expression, a messed up expression, but a interesting one, of the will to power, that you're funneling your power in a certain way.
27:23 Wes: You know, the end of Section 8 gives us an insight, you know, into a possible distinction between good ways, you know, good repression and bad repression, right? Where, you know, I use the term sublimation because I think that's the best way to describe it, but where you are not simply taking instincts and suppressing them so that they are turned against oneself as bad conscience, but they are given expression artistically, they're sublimated. So that's part of the solution, right? Nietzsche's not going to say we can go backwards and just let our instincts have unlimited outward expression and dominate and kill and all that stuff.
They're still going to be inwardly turned. It's just we're going to tweak that a little bit. And of course, the arts are outwardly turned as well, and they're directed towards an audience and they give us power over the artistic object and power over the thoughts and feelings of the audience to some extent. So there are ways to do the same thing. You know, instead of going and running around killing peasants, you entertain them, you put on a play for them.
28:24 Dylan: Are you thinking, in particular the last paragraph of Section eight?
28:27 Wes: Yes.
28:28 Mark: Well, here's another quote from section seven. The ascetic ideal points the way to so many bridges, to independence that no philosopher can refrain from inwardly rejoicing and clapping hands on hearing the story of all those who one fine day decided to say no to any curtailment of their liberty and go off into the desert. Even granted, they were just strong asses and the complete opposite of a strong spirit. So, in other words, what does the ascetic ideal mean for a philosopher? On seeing an ascetic ideal, the philosopher smiles because he sees an optimum condition for the highest and boldest intellectuality.
28:59 Wes: He needs time to study. He or she needs a room of one's own. Right? So that's the idea. That's why the aesthetic ideal is important to philosophy. I want to be with my Books.
29:08 Dylan: Well, there's also recognizing that there's part of asceticism, and Mark referred to this, that it is a manifestation of the will to power, that you are taking control of your environment and yourself. And that is empowering in some way. Right. Self deprivation is an activity of power. To me. This is where parsing out the difference between that being an act of being ill versus that being an act of being healthy and what the differences are is actually a little tricky.
29:41 Seth: There's another section right before this I've been staring at while you guys are talking. This is in reference to the artist. This is four. In section four, he says we should avoid the confusion to which the artist is only too prone, out of psychological contiguity, as the English say, of thinking he were identical with what he can portray, invent and express. In fact, if he really had the same identity, he simply would not be able to portray, invent or express it. Homer would not have created Achilles, and Goethe would not have created Faust.
If Homer had been an Achilles and Goethe a Faust, a perfect and complete artist, is cut off from what is real and actual for all eternity. On the other hand, we can understand how he can occasionally be so tired of the eternal unreality and falsity of his inner existence that he's driven to despair and then tries to remedy that, like Wagner did with Parsifal. So there's a sense in which the ascetic ideal is a necessary movement for artistic creation, for philosophical invention, for scientific discovery. It's a cutting yourself off not from everything, but from large parts of lived life.
Because you need to create the space and the distance to be able to do whatever it is that you're. You're wanting to do. And if you were immersed in your everyday life, life and all of the various things, if you were actually living, so to speak, you would not have the distance or the capacity to undertake any of the activities which I think I want to differentiate from willing. Certainly you don't have to be an artist or philosopher or a priest or anything like that to will. So I think what he's trying to do is reconcile will to power and the ascetic idea.
How do you take ascetic distance or how do you maintain ascetic distance, a disconnection from the real, and yet will without falling into melancholy or despair or insanity or something like that, or turning it violently against the people who aren't with you like the priests do.
31:47 Mark: So the way that I read this, with regard, I'm glad you brought this Quote up Seth with regard to art is that you have to suspend your own desire to chatter and self express to actually create the art. And I know that I can do this in certain ways. Like I can get really into a musical arrangement or something where you're not just expressing in real time, but you have to slow down and like create the layers and put on the paints, so to speak. But I have this problem when I try to write fiction is that it's very hard for me to just suspend my wanting to just say what the message is and actually write realistic dialogue and describe the scenes.
Like that takes a lot of patience. And so it takes self denial, asceticism, discipline of a sort that I don't quite have. And that's one of the ways that the ascetic ideal serves art, is that you're not just tied to reality and to the reality of your feelings as you're expressing them at the moment. That one of the ongoing themes in here is how is Nietzsche not a romantic? Why is he against Romanticism? Because it seems like he sees your inner blonde beast or whatever. Sounds very much like seize the day, the romantic kind of stuff. But one of the things the Romantic is guilty of, according to Nietzsche, is art is just self expression.
And whereas you just read this quote that says, no, the work is greater than you. You are just the ground from which it grows.
33:10 Wes: This maybe gets us towards section nine. It sounds a little bit like there's something to praise in asceticism, because here's the way it is. In Kaufmann, we have seen how a certain asceticism, a severe and cheerful continence with the best will, belongs to the most favorable conditions of supreme spirituality. And it is also among its most natural consequences. He's moving on here to further explain why philosophy. And Mark and Seth, you were just explaining the connection again between art and the ascetic ideal. So there's something similar here.
But the way in which philosophy and the ascetic ideal are closely bonded. In the one case, as we've seen above, it's just about what it means to retreat from the world enough to do these creative things or to engage in these intellectual pursuits. Now he's going to transition into talk about self denial in a way, in the sense of self doubt and suspension of judgment. So we get a little bit of a turn here, I think, ultimately to what he calls self vivisection.
34:10 Dylan: I want to read the end of that paragraph because in some ways he characterizes philosophy in as tripping on asceticism. That even as at the beginning you're quoted, that there's a certain asceticism, that a severe and cheerful continence with the best will belongs to the most favorable conditions of a supreme spirituality. He then, at the end of it says, a serious examination of history actually reveals that the bond between philosophy and the ascetic ideal is even much closer and stronger. One might assert that it was only on the leading strings of this ideal that philosophy learned to take its first small steps on earth. Alas, so clumsily, so unwillingly, so ready to fall on its face and lie on its belly, this timid little toddler and mollycoddle with shaky legs. I mean, his account is that philosophy tripped on the ascetic ideal.
34:55 Wes: Well, I think he's saying that philosophy was a toddler that needed the ascetic ideal in order to start walking. In the next paragraph he's going to say, you know, for a long time philosophy didn't have the courage to be itself. Its bent is towards doubt and suspension of judgment. Right. So he's thinking of the ancient skeptics. How does it actually, in light of that, assert itself? Well, it asserts itself once it can tie itself to the ascetic ideal. That's part of why the ascetic ideal is so important to philosophy. It becomes like its rallying cry. It becomes the banner under which it can march. In other words, doubt can't just be doubt, and investigation can't just be investigation. They have to be moralized to some extent to get some forward momentum.
35:38 Dylan: And it turns into a kind of hubris in which we cheerfully vivisect our souls.
35:44 Wes: Yeah, yeah.
35:46 Mark: And the other episode that we've done in the past that people should Listen to, episode 61, the On Truth and Lies in a Non Moral Sense, on this early unpublished essay, because you were saying the rallying cry of philosophy, we needed this ascetic ideal. Well, it's going to end up being the pursuit of truth. Everything, just like everything could be sacrificed to art, everything could be sacrificed to scientific accuracy. Well, the general way of putting that, and really, in all the cases for the scientist, the artist, the religious person, is the will to truth.
And that justifies that gives the philosopher confidence in being okay, dissing traditional morality, you know, basically being evil, because to hold the morals that everybody accepts in suspension, to question them, that is a deeply subversive thing to do. And so you need to have some rallying cry and saying, well, I just. I need to pursue truth wherever it lies. And the way that Nietzsche is going to sketch out the story is this essay continues, is that that is actually given in the traditional values themselves. Right, the traditional values.
It's not just be nice to people, but it's, you know, be honest is a key thing. And so if you really pull that to its logical conclusion, it doesn't just mean don't cheat on your taxes and don't cheat on your spouse. It means that even the hard truths you have to accept, you have to put aside the things that are comfortable and deny yourself the easy things. So it ends up being an ascetic call to action, to focus.
37:15 Seth: Yeah.
37:15 Dylan: And I think you're pointing out the way in which it's a turn to self righteousness or a kind that is at the core of the corruptive ascetic ideal, where that will to truth ends up damaging and separating rather than flourishing.
37:34 Wes: Then I think intent we start to get the transition between from the philosopher to the priest. Right. I mean, part of the account that he gets is that the earliest contemplative men are objects of suspicion, which is mark part of what you just got at. And they're despised. And so you have to do something, you have to disguise yourself in a way in order to make that permissible. And he talks about getting others to be afraid of you. And you do that, oddly enough, by being self castigating because it's like, holy shit, what the fuck that person is whipping themselves with. So there's a certain power in that. And he talks of power hungry hermits, right?
38:09 Dylan: Power hungry hermits, yep.
38:11 Wes: And it's the power of self torture which leads to some sort of power for the contemplative man. I think what he's saying is that you have to cloak yourself in priestliness. Right. So in order if you want to be contemplative, you have to become the priest.
38:26 Dylan: At the end of that section he says the peculiar withdrawn attitude of the philosopher world, denying, hostile to life, suspicious of the senses, free from sensuality, which has been maintained down to the most modern times and has become virtually the philosopher's pose par excellence, is above all a result of the emergency conditions under which philosophy arose and survived at all. For the longest time. Philosophy would not have been possible at all on earth without ascetic wraps and cloak, without an ascetic self misunderstanding. To put it vividly, the ascetic priest provided until the most modern times the repulsive and gloomy caterpillar form in which alone the philosophers could live and creep about.
39:08 Wes: That is so awesome.
39:09 Mark: Yeah. So it's not that if you want to be A philosopher. Now you have to become a priest. Is this is still a genealogical account?
39:15 Wes: Yeah. Now you just have to be a nerd.
39:19 Mark: Well, nerdiness, I like thinking about these modern terms in aesthetic terms. Like what does nerdiness means, in fact, for pretty much pop, we just recorded one on chess. And these people that give their lives to chess and just it becomes this endless pit of their attention that you can always learn more history, more rules, more strategies, train your mind so you can see so many moves ahead. Like, this is completely an example of the ascetic ideal at work.
39:46 Wes: Yeah. And this is why nerds are disliked, right? At least in the old nerd, in the way the term used to be in the pejorative sense. Now it can be kind of cool to be a nerd, but the nerd is bullied and mistreated because they overvalue truth. The overvaluation of truth immediately makes you an object of suspicion because social life is built on lies. It's built on deception. When someone says something that's wrong or false, but it's for the sake of establishing a social bond. If you raise your finger and say, well, actually that's not really the way it works. You're ignoring the whole social function of that speech act and taking it literally and trying to interpret it literally. And that's the will to truth in the nerd and the. And why it goes wrong.
40:30 Dylan: But just in that phrasing, you see how the priest or the iconoclast self righteous religious person, they gather their actual power by that dissociation, by turning that self righteousness into a pose and convincing other people of it, they become more powerful themselves in that position.
40:53 Mark: So he ends up adding nuance to this account that we've covered in other episodes and earlier in this text of why the Christian ideal is self denying it's slave morality. It is going against the instincts. It works differently for the leaders. Right. The priests that keep everybody else in line, they serve a particular social function as opposed to the sheep over which they are the shepherd. At least they get to exert that power themselves, whereas the common people are merely made. Well, there's a lot of quotes on what the difference between these two groups is, but they're different social functions.
41:31 Wes: The priests supply the common people with their narcotics, right. Which will turn out to be work and love thy neighbor, which he calls a. What is it? A petty pleasure or something like that. So you get distracted by that, by the priest.
41:43 Seth: Let me read this quote and then see if I can tie it back to what you just said. So he's talking about, why are we battling against the ascetic priest? The idea we are fighting over here is the valuation of our life by ascetic priests. They relate this together with all that belongs to it, nature, the world, the whole sphere of what has become and what passes away to a quite different kind of existence that it opposes and excludes, unless it should turn against itself and deny itself. In this case, the case of the ascetic life, life counts as a bridge to that other existence.
The ascetic treats life as a wrong path that he has to walk along backwards till he reaches the point where he starts. So, Mark, are you then making the connection in what you just said, the Christian overturning or reversal of all values as an ascetic turn, which would mean that the values they overturned were not ascetic values?
42:40 Mark: That is the initial implication. But as we've said, Dylan and Wes were having exchange at the beginning of, like, isn't there self discipline for the warrior? Yeah, but yes, in the simplest case, you could say that the master morality was unrestrained and the slave morality is all about not only restraining the masters, but now that we have made ourselves the masters, we need to restrain ourselves. So the Emperor of Rome could still be a Christian and will be controlled basically by his connection to his religion in a way that a Caligula would not.
43:14 Wes: And it's connected, Right, to ressentiment. Right. So the motivation for the slave moralist is envy and. And a unconscious revenge fantasy towards the powerful. And morality is the product of that. Morality is the revenge of the. Not the revenge of the nerds, but the revenge of the oppressed. It's a way to control and punish the oppressors by subjecting them to this, you know, these rules, this order. And he brings that up in this next paragraph. He brings up ressentiment. And in particular, I was just going to read this because it's funny, and I tweeted on my account and then I retweeted from Pel that this sounded like Douglas Adams, basically, or that Nietzsche's influence on Douglas Adams was clear and it got, like, much more attention than we usually get from tweets.
So read from a distant star. The Majuscule script of our earthly existence would perhaps lead to the conclusion that the Earth was the distinctively ascetic planet, a nook of disgruntled, arrogant and offensive creatures filled with a profound disgust at themselves, at the earth, at all life, who inflict as much pain on themselves as they possibly can. Out of pleasure in inflicting pain, which is probably their only pleasure, love that
44:24 Seth: links up to the first sentence in On Truth and Lie in the Extra Moral Sense.
44:29 Mark: So, unfortunately, I feel like the rest of this essay is more typically Nietzschean social commentary elaborating about the sickness and how bad the priests are, how sick the people that they are soothing through their priestly productions. Whereas this whole like. No, actually, the aesthetic is a good and necessary step and an admirable thing. And you know something? That philosophy needed to get going and that art needed to create art in the first place, to sort of suspend everyday cravings, to put those at bay enough to create something. That was the interesting part of this to me.
So in our second half, I know we've finished a lot of the essay, but there's still a lot of good quotes left in here. I think we can also use this as an opportunity. I couldn't help but read this in a political context. And you know how the kinds of things that Nietzsche is objecting to, how those are going to actually apply to active groups, whether in intellectual life or political life today. So we're going to record that in part two. It is the next thing in your supporter feed. Thanks for supporting us. See you in a minute.
the ‘blind spot’ is the differential element which accompanies force but is not to be confused with force. force is what can, will to power is what wills.