|
Third EssayWhat Do Ascetic Ideals Mean?9
A certain asceticism, as we have seen, a hard and cheerful renunciation in the best wills, belongs to those conditions favourable to the highest spirituality and is also among its most natural consequences. So, of course, it`s no wonder that philosophers in particular never treat the ascetic ideal without some bias. A serious historical review demonstrates that the tie between the ascetic ideal and philosophy is even much narrower and stronger. We could say it was in the leading reins of this ideal that philosophy in general learned to take its first small steps on earth - alas, still so awkwardly, alas, still with such a morose expression, alas, so read to fall over and lie on its belly, this small, tentative, clumsy, loving infant with crooked legs!
At the start, with philosophy things played themselves out as with all good things: for a long time it had no courage for itself - it always looked around to see if anyone would come to its assistance and yet was afraid of all those who gazed at it. Just make a list of the individual desires and virtues of the philosopher - his desire to doubt, his desire to deny, his desire to wait (the "ephectic" desire), his desire to analyze, his desire to research, to seek out, to take chances, his desire to compare and weigh evenly, his will for neutrality and objectivity, his will to that "sine ira et studio" [without anger and partiality] - can you not understand that all of them went against the demands of morality and conscience (to say nothing at all about reason in general, which even Luther liked to call Mrs. Clever, the Clever Whore) and that if a philosopher had come to an awareness of himself, he would have necessarily felt that he was the living manifestation of "nitimur in vetitum" [we search for what`s forbidden] and thus taken care not to "feel himself," not to become conscious of himself? . . .
As I`ve said, the case is the same with all the good things of which we are nowadays so proud. Measured by the standards of the ancient Greeks, our entire modern being, in so far as it is not weakness but power and consciousness of power, looks like sheer hubris and godlessness; for the very opposite of those things we honour today had for the longest period conscience on their side and god to guard over them. Our entire attitude to nature today, our violation of nature, with the help of machines and the unimaginable inventiveness of our technicians and engineers, is hubris; our attitude to God is hubris - I`m referring to our attitude to that alleged spider spinning out purposes and morality behind the fabric of the huge safety net of causality - we could say with Charles the Bold in his struggle with Ludwig XI, "Je combats l`universealle araignée" [I`m fighting the universal spider]; our attitude to ourselves is hubris, for we experiment with ourselves in a manner we would not permit with any animal and happily and inquisitively slit the souls of living bodies open. What do we now care about the "salvation" of the soul? We cure ourselves later. Illness teaches us things - we don`t doubt that - it`s even more instructive than health. The person who makes us ill appears to us nowadays to be more important even than medical people and "saviours." We violate ourselves now, no doubt about it, we nut crackers of the soul, we questioning and questionable people, as if life were nothing else but cracking nuts. And in so doing, we necessarily become every day constantly more questionable, more worthy of asking questions, and in the process perhaps also worthier - to live? . . .
All good things were once bad things; every original sin becomes an original virtue. For example, marriage for a long time seemed to be a sin against the rights of the community. Once people paid a fine for being so presumptuous as to arrogate a woman to themselves (that involves, for instance, the jus primae noctis [the right of the first night], even today in Cambodia the privilege of the priests, these guardians of "good ancient customs"). The gentle, favourable, yielding, sympathetic feelings - which over time grew so valuable that they are almost "value in itself" - for the longest period were countered by self-contempt. People were ashamed of being mild, just as today they are ashamed of being hard (compare Beyond Good and Evil, p. 232). Subjugation under the law - how the noble races throughout the earth had to fight their conscience to renounce the vendetta and to concede the power of the law over them! For a long time the "law" was a vetitum [something prohibited], a sacrilege, an innovation - it appeared with force and as force, something to which people submitted only with a feeling of shame for their conduct. Every one of the smallest steps on earth in earlier days was fought for with spiritual and physical torture. This whole historical point, "that not only moving forward, no, but all walking, moving, and changing necessarily involved countless martyrs," nowadays sounds so strange to us.
In The Dawn, pp. 17 ff. I brought out this point. "Nothing has come at a higher price," it says there on p. 19, "than the small amount of human reason and feeling of freedom, which we are now so proud of. But because of this pride it is now almost impossible to sense how that huge stretch of time of the `morality of custom,` which comes before `world history,` is the really decisive and important history which established the character of humanity, where people recognized suffering as a virtue, cruelty as a virtue, pretence as a virtue, revenge as a virtue, the denial of reason as a virtue and, by contrast, well being as a danger, the desire for knowledge as a danger, peace as a danger, sympathy as a danger, being pitied as a disgrace, work as a disgrace, insanity as divinity, change as untraditional and inherently pregnant with ruin."
|
