Nietzsche

The Ethics of an Immoralist

Peter Berkowitz

• Publisher: Harvard University Press
• Year: 1996
• ISBN:
  9780674252394
• Topic: Philosophy
• Subtopic: Ethics & Moral Philosophy

Once regarded as a conservative critic of culture, then enlisted by the court theoreticians of Nazism, Nietzsche has come to be revered by postmodern thinkers as one of their founding fathers, a prophet of human liberation who revealed the perspectival character of all knowledge and broke radically with traditional forms of morality and philosophy.In Nietzsche: The Ethics of an Immoralist, Peter Berkowitz challenges this new orthodoxy, asserting that it produces a one-dimensional picture of Nietzsche's philosophical explorations and passes by much of what is provocative and problematic in his thought. Berkowitz argues that Nietzsche's thought is rooted in extreme and conflicting opinions about metaphysics and human nature. Discovering a deep unity in Nietzsche's work by exploring the structure and argumentative movement of a wide range of his books, Berkowitz shows that Nietzsche is a moral and political philosopher in the Socratic sense whose governing question is, "What is the best life?"Nietzsche, Berkowitz argues, puts forward a severe and aristocratic ethics, an ethics of creativity, that demands that the few human beings who are capable acquire a fundamental understanding of and attain total mastery over the world. Following the path of Nietzsche's thought, Berkowitz shows that this mastery, which represents a suprapolitical form of rule and entails a radical denigration of political life, is, from Nietzsche's own perspective, neither desirable nor attainable.Out of the colorful and richly textured fabric of Nietzsche's books, Peter Berkowitz weaves an interpretation of Nietzsche's achievement that is at once respectful and skeptical, an interpretation that brings out the love of truth, the courage, and the yearning for the good that mark Nietzsche's magisterial effort to live an examined life by giving an account of the best life.

II

THE HIGHEST TYPE

… Zarathustra is more truthful than any other thinker. His doctrine, and his alone, posits truthfulness as the highest virtue …

Ecce Homo

Oh, how should I not lust after eternity and after the nuptial ring of rings, the ring of recurrence?

Never yet have I found the woman from whom I wanted children, unless it be this woman whom I love: for I love you, O eternity.

Zarathustra, “The Seven Seals”

Love is the state in which man sees things most decidedly as they are not. The power of illusion is at its peak here, as is the power to sweeten and transfigure. In love man endures more, man bears everything. A religion had to be invented in which one could love: what is worst in life is thus overcome—it is not even seen any more.

The Antichrist

5

The Beginning of Zarathustra’s Political Education: Thus Spoke Zarathustra (Prologue)

Nietzsche’s efforts to come to terms with the moral significance of the death of God, its uses and disadvantages for life, lead to the foundations and the peak of his thought. In criticizing the teaching of philosophy in the universities of his day, he announced his criterion for determining the authority of a philosophical teaching: “The only critique of a philosophy that is possible and that proves something, namely trying to see whether one can live in accordance with it, has never been taught at universities: all that has ever been taught is a critique of words by means of other words” (SE 8, p. 187).¹ Nietzsche, as nowhere else, puts his philosophy to the test in Thus Spoke Zarathustra.² By dramatizing the attempt to live the highest kind of life, Zarathustra’s speeches and deeds clarify the severe and radical practical implications arising from, and the theoretical defects inhering in, Nietzsche’s fundamental convictions.³

To be sure, Zarathustra is a work marred by a diffuse plot, repetitive speeches, and obscure images. Yet Nietzsche himself vouched for its unique significance, declaring it his most profound and farsighted work.⁴1 believe that this judgment is fair, for Zarathustra, more relentlessly than his histories and Beyond Good and Evil, reveals the obstacles to supreme mastery demanded by Nietzsche’s new ethics. Indeed, the tale told in Thus Spoke Zarathustra constitutes a grave indictment, from the point of view of convictions that Nietzsche himself cherished, of his own ideas about the relation between knowledge, freedom, and mastery in the attainment of human excellence.

In studying Zarathustra’s speeches and deeds common sense dictates what fascination with Nietzsche’s multifarious style may obscure: Zarathustra’s shortcomings, errors, and setbacks should be examined and placed in perspective no less than his merits, insights, and triumphs. Consideration of the vices he betrays in deed is as important to reaching a reasoned evaluation of his teaching as is an investigation of the virtues he praises in speech. His atrocious ineptitude as an orator and his disappointing quest for disciples beg for consideration alongside his brave repudiation of the need for followers and companions and his slashing polemics directed against the lusterless lives of those living in the twilight of Christianity. One must fully appreciate the desperate and immoderate character of his efforts to articulate a doctrine of secular redemption, not merely applaud his Herculean quest to liberate the creative will. Finally, mindful of Zarathustra’s disconcerting suggestion that being a poet he lies too much (Z II “On Poets”), one must be wary of taking his assertions, observations, and visions at face value. His credentials and character must be established rather than assumed. So severe and encompassing is his criticism of humanity, so bold and all-embracing is his promise of superhuman splendor, so demanding is the new regimen he teaches, that Zarathustra himself must be held to the highest standard.

This is more than fair since the highest standard is Zarathustra’s standard. The highest standard, as Zarathustra conceives it, depends upon the courage to face the world as it really is. Zarathustra cherishes honesty—a virtue at once moral and intellectual—because it is an indispensable prerequisite to knowing and achieving what is great (Z IV “On the Higher Men” 8). Or as Nietzsche puts it in restating Zarathustra’s self-understanding:

… Zarathustra is more truthful than any other thinker. His doctrine, and his alone, posits truthfulness as the highest virtue [Tugend]; this means the opposite of the cowardice of the “idealist” who flees from reality; Zarathustra has more intestinal fortitude than all other thinkers taken together. To speak the truth and to shoot well with arrows, that is Persian virtue [paraphrasing Zarathustra in Z I “On the Thousand and One Goals”].—Am I understood?—The self-overcoming of morality out of truthfulness; the self-overcoming of the moralist, into his opposite—into me—that is what the name of Zarathustra means in my mouth. (EH IV 3)

And, to repeat, the task of truthfulness in philosophy, the only critique of a philosophy that is possible and proves anything, according to Nietzsche, is trying to see whether one can live in accordance with it (SE 8, p. 187). Thus Spoke Zarathustra is the most philosophical of Nietzsche’s works because it displays most vividly the kind of life demanded by the supreme form of truthfulness about morality.

Evaluation of Zarathustra’s practical teaching hinges upon distinguishing between the prodigious significance he audaciously attributes to his new dispensation and the recurring setbacks, self-delusion, and misery that dominate his adventures. There is a discrepancy between Zarathustra’s claims to wisdom and his exhibition of foolish, reckless, and hysterical behavior. There is a disproportion between his hopes for a new kind of man and his ill-fated efforts to recruit and instruct potential supermen. There is a disparity between the freedom from the past he announces as his goal and the ineliminable limitations on freedom that he stumbles against as he attempts to empower the creative will to command time. And there is a fateful imbalance between the weight the doctrine of the eternal return can bear and the actual work he assigns to it. One betrays Zarathustra, much in the manner of his fawning disciples, by failing to distinguish his seductive boasts from his actual achievements, his grandiose promises from his genuine accomplishments.

The glaring gap between expectation and experience, speech and deed, and theory and practice pervading Thus Spoke Zarathustra constitutes a decisive clue to the meaning of Zarathustra’s doctrine and the significance of Nietzsche’s achievement. The conclusions of theory and the lessons of experience converge in Zarathustra’s tragicomic adventures. The incoherence that undercuts Zarathustra’s teaching is, in Nietzsche’s philosophical poem, magnified, brought to life, and infused with a human sense. A major consequence of Nietzsche’s decision to explore fundamental questions of moral and political philosophy through the medium of drama is to produce a vivid image of the disintegration of judgment, the loss of dignity, the estrangement from human ties, the sacrifice of intellectual integrity, and the victimization by an insatiable pride that result—regardless of the fundamental nobility of the original impulse—when the will is assigned the ruling position in the soul. It must immediately be added that the bankruptcy of the will’s rule would be neither vivid nor compelling were it not for the intellectual conscience that drives Zarathustra to make himself a god.

I cannot say that Nietzsche himself understood Thus Spoke Zarathustra exactly as I interpret it, that is, as a searing criticism of the structural defects contained in the very foundations of Zarathustra’s quest for supreme knowledge, freedom, and mastery. Who can look into Nietzsche’s mind? We each may, however, explore the work that Nietzsche has left us. I do maintain that my reading is governed by the drama and overall structure of Zarathustra and consistent with Nietzsche’s most striking claims about the relation between Zarathustra and his other works. In addition, my account identifies metaphysical and ethical themes that, as I argued in earlier chapters, are central to Nietzsche’s histories. And my account shows how the contest of extremes that unfolds in those histories is pushed to a more fundamental level in the work that Nietzsche himself claimed as his most profound and farsighted. Finally, as I shall show in Chapter 9, my account of Zarathustra’s abandonment of his “highest hope” is strongly supported by Nietzsche’s discreet abandonment in Beyond Good and Evil of his second conception of the highest type, the philosopher of the future.

On my reading, the striking achievement of Thus Spoke Zarathustra is to exhibit a coherent and persuasive picture of the incoherence and unworkability of Zarathustra’s highest hopes. Whether Zarathustra comes to realize fully the incoherence and unworkability of his new ethics is difficult to say on the basis of what he says and does. But uncertainty on this question does not entail ambiguity everywhere.⁵

Whether Nietzsche deliberately sought to show through his art the failure of Zarathustra’s aspiration to bring into being a new kind of man who makes himself the master of his world by commanding the greatest things must remain open to question. However that question is answered, attention to the overwhelming indications of the text gives rise to a compelling picture of the dire consequence for moral and political life stemming from Zarathustra’s teaching as well as the fatal theoretical difficulties that afflict his account of human excellence. Like the alcoholic who steadfastly denies his addiction while the evidence of his disease abounds in decreased production at the office, deteriorating relations with friends, and the breakdown of his family, Zarathustra deludes himself about his highest hopes in such a way as to reveal the roots and consequences of his delusion. Although he refuses to view his devastating practical setbacks as a reflection of a flawed theoretical understanding, his debacle in the market place, frequent histrionics, prolonged association with unworthy disciples, quickly forgotten union with eternity, and absurd posturing and dealings with the higher men constitute, according to Nietzsche’s own standard as set forth in Schopenhauer as Educator and reaffirmed by Zarathustra, a devastating judgment against Zarathustra’s new ethics.

But this is by no means the whole story. For it is precisely the devastating judgment that Thus Spoke Zarathustra issues against Zarathustra’s “highest hope” that vindicates the philosopher in Zarathustra. It is Zarathustra’s hatred of the lie in the soul, inseparable from his intellectual conscience, that transforms his praise of creativity into an unrivaled exhibition of the inhumanity and the betrayal of wisdom which the exaltation of the creative will demands.

Zarathustra’s devotion to the truth is a kind of higher piety.⁶ Because his rebellion is bound up with that which he rebels against, Zarathustra should be seen as a member of the moral and philosophical tradition that he excoriates and seeks to overcome. Contrary to the dogma of the new school of Nietzsche interpretation that depicts Nietzsche as having broken radically with traditional morality, religion, and philosophy, the pathos of Zarathustra’s quest becomes intelligible only in the light of the traditional doctrines he powerfully evokes and on which his own exhortations and aspirations depend. By emphasizing the traditional dimension in Thus Spoke Zarathustra I do not, however, seek to portray Nietzsche as essentially a reactionary. Nor do I wish to deny the revolutionary dimensions of Zarathustra’s hopes and promises. Like his creator, Zarathustra is both reactionary and revolutionary. Accordingly, my aim is to draw attention to the fundamentally antagonistic elements that lie at the foundations of his doctrine.

Zarathustra’s Descent

Zarathustra is a teacher whose origins are shrouded in mystery. For the reader, his life begins when he leaves his home at the age of thirty and goes up alone into the mountaintop cave for ten years during which he “enjoyed his spirit and his solitude” (Z Prologue 1). We learn little about his childhood, upbringing, or adult life. Until part IV we have hardly any idea about his appearance, although in a related matter Nietzsche held that a key to unriddling the mystery of Socrates was grasping the significance of Socrates’ physical ugliness (TI “The Problem of Socrates” 3, and “Skirmishes of an Untimely Man” 19, 20).

Is Zarathustra an exception to Nietzsche’s own rule that physical beauty and bodily health reflect good character? Or is it rather that we are deprived of what Nietzsche himself regards as information critical to the evaluation of Zarathustra? And what of Zarathustra’s lineage and descent? Was he the scion of a well-to-do family or born into poverty? What of his youth, his education, his journeys, his amorous adventures? What books has he read and loved? What need prompted him to sever all connections with civilization for ten long years? How does he feed and shelter himself? What recommends him as a herald? On the basis of what authority does he teach? Has his word been vouched for by signs and miracles? Has he performed brave deeds, overcome formidable obstacles, or received the endorsement of wise teachers?

The customary ways in which we recognize that somebody has a claim to wisdom or deserves our ear are not readily apparent in Zarathustra’s case. Moreover, we are forbidden or prevented from investigating the origin and development of his teaching by the silence surrounding his past.⁷ Whereas Nietzsche’s typical practice in his histories is to investigate the need that engenders beliefs about morality and religion, in Zarathustra the text points away from Zarathustra’s origins and development, creating a man without a history.⁸

Zarathustra “enjoyed his spirit and his solitude, and for ten years did not tire of it” (Z Prologue 1). His self-imposed exile from practical and political life, from companions and books,⁹ was neither a trial in the wilderness nor a painful self-sacrifice, but rather a confident, deliberately sought spiritual adventure. But what kind of spiritual adventure? So little is revealed about the character of Zarathustra’s activity that it is difficult to say whether or to what extent he was engaged in reflection on things eternal or introspective examination focused on his own distinctive memories, passions, and hopes.¹⁰

We do quickly learn, however, that Zarathustra’s solitude has at last become burdensome. It is a prompting of the heart rather than a conclusion of the mind that impels Zarathustra, after ten good years, to return to society, in search not of friends but of students and disciples. Stepping before his cave, claiming for himself a position at the center of the sun’s world, he addresses the glowing heavenly body with a mixture of reverence and presumption:

You great star, what would your happiness be had you not those for whom you shine?

For ten years you have climbed to my cave: you would have tired of your light and of the journey had it not been for me and my eagle and my serpent.

But we waited for you every morning, took your overflow from you, and blessed you for it.

Behold, I am weary of my wisdom [Weisheit], like a bee that has gathered too much honey; I need hands outstretched to receive it.
(Z Prologue 1)

In this revision of Plato’s allegory of the cave, cave and sun now both occupy heights above political life.

Zarathustra confesses to the overrich sun his envy for its glory and his wish to emulate its happiness. Although the sun appears to be self-sufficient, inasmuch as its movement and its light do not depend on the admiration or presence of human beings, Zarathustra, presumptuously comparing his ambitions and wisdom to those of the sun, insists that the sun, like him, is in need of companions, or if not companions grateful admirers who bask in its warmth and reflect its brilliance. The sun’s magnificence is confirmed or validated, he implies, by those whom it benefits. His insinuation that the sun, contrary to appearances, is not self-sufficient leads into Zarathustra’s acknowledgment of his own dependence, his disclosure of his weariness with his wisdom and a confession of his need for others to receive wisdom from him.

But can Zarathustra’s characterization of the “great star,” arising as he acknowledges it does from weariness and envy, be trusted? Whereas Zarathustra articulates his own neediness, the sun’s alleged neediness must be articulated by Zarathustra. Moreover, the sun’s movement and light are not subject to change on account of the opinions of human beings. What appears to distinguish the sun is precisely its independence, and its lack of need for human recognition. What terrific need then compels Zarathustra to begin his descent by deflating the sun and bringing it down to earth, to vindicate the significance of his own need to shine for others by projecting it on to the “great star”?

Unlike the sun, which looks up to no other object, Zarathustra looks up to the sun as his model. His decision to imitate the sun by “descend [ing] to the depths” is not driven by the dictates of theoretical or practical reason, nor by duty or compassion, nor again by considered reflections on right conduct, but by a need, by the desi...