In 2010, Julian Young gave us what I consider the best overall biography of Friedrich Nietzsche. I used it, along with biographies by Safranski, Cates, and others, extensively in this bio-blog. A couple of years prior to that Young wrote Nietzsche’s Philosophy of Religion which caught my eye a couple of years ago. It was one of those books I bought knowing I would read it eventually, but only recently have I had time to enjoy it.
Young has some slightly unconventional ideas about Nietzsche’s philosophy. At first blush it seems that the philosopher who proclaimed “God is dead” and who was so rabidly critical of Christianity might not want to have anything to do with ‘religion.’ But, Young argues, fairly conclusively in my opinion, that for all his concern with free spirits and the Ubermensch, Nietzsche nevertheless desired a communal solution to the problem of nihilism.
One of the most interesting facts that Young points out is that the origins of Nietzsche’s revolutionary thought are, ironically, in essence conservative within the context of German philosophy. “The crucial fact about Nietzsche’s critique of modernity is that it issues from the standpoint of the conservative, past-oriented right rather than from the socialist, future-oriented left. This places Nietzsche in proximity to the so-call ‘Volkish’ tradition of German thinking…Volkish thinkers were appalled by the alienated, materialistic, mechanistic, secular, urban, creepingly democratic, mass culture of modernity which they saw as the product of Enlightenment rationalism. In the quest for a more spiritual, less alienated society they looked to an idealized image of the pre-Enlightenment past. What they found in that past was the spiritual unity of the Volk.” (pp. 4 – 5)
Young proceeds to go book-by-book through the body of Nietzsche’s work to see how his “philosophy of religion” evolved and was expressed in his writings. From The Birth of Tragedy, Young shows how this commitment to the Volkish tradition’s reaction of modernity impacted Nietzsche’s thought regarding the importance of myth in modern times and how modernity poses a threat to human fulfillment.
“Nietzsche claims that two things are wrong with modernity. First, through the loss of the Dionysian ‘material womb’ we are deprived of the ‘metaphysical solace’ for the fact of death that is possessed by a tragic culture…The second thing wrong with our Socratic culture, according to Nietzsche, is that it kills myth, destroys the foundation on which authentic community depends.” (page 29)
“The final symptom The Birth draws attention to is modernity’s ‘feverish agitation’. The loss of the eternal, mythical perspective on things, the loss of a ‘meaning of life’, leads to an ‘enormous growth in worldliness’, a ‘frivolous dedication to the present…of the ‘here and now’ or else ‘dull turning away from it.’ This is what modern German sociologists call the Erlebnisgesellschaft - the society of the frenzied quest for ‘experiences’, for cheap thrills.” (page 32)
“…far from celebrating secularism, he calls for a religious revival. Specifically, he calls for something that will play the role in modern life that was played by religious myth, and in particular by the tragic myth and tragic festival, in the lives of our ‘radiant leaders’, the Greeks. He calls, in an oversimplifying nutshell, for a revival of ‘Greek’ religion. Religion is thus early Nietzsche’s solution to the ills of modernity.” (pp. 32 – 33)
For Young, Nietzsche’s commitment to the social impact of Wagnerism as clearly defined in The Birth is extended in his ‘Untimely Meditation’ Wagner at Bayreuth. For Nietzsche, Richard Wagner offered a way to redefine religion in a meaningful way that could address the ills of modernity through the guidance offered by Hellenism, a topic that was his area of expertise as a professor of philology.
“As Nietzsche sees it, that is, the Wagnerian festival fulfils the two central functions of religion. In its Apollonian aspect we are to find, as the Greeks found in their tragic festival, disclosure and affirmation of ethos and so a gathering of community, of Volk. And in the Dionysian aspect we are to find an anxiety-overcoming transcendence of death. In 1876, Nietzsche’s solution to the destitution of modernity is, therefore, a religious one. The salvation of modernity lies in a return of ‘the Hellenic’, in the rebirth and refashioning of Greek religion.” (page 57)
Of course, Nietzsche’s commitment to Wagner eventually turned into outright rejection following the disillusion he experienced at the first Bayreuth festival. In Human, All-too-Human he was critical of Christianity and sought new ways to find a way to successfully navigate the ills of modernity as a society. The basics remained essentially unchanged since his earlier writings, but the emphasis shifted away from Wagner entirely toward the strength of ancient Greek culture.
“Modern culture, Nietzsche repeats, is a work culture. We live harried, harassed, high-speed lives – which means that we view life ‘as from a railway carriage’. There is no time to contemplate alternatives to the status quo…Another reason for the conformist character of modernity is that it is a machine culture: alternatively put a ‘big city’ culture. The machine (which of course includes bureaucratic ‘machines’) produces mutual co-operation in which each individual performs only one action. Individuals are turned into mere ‘instruments’, cogs…The machine culture…since it does not engage the individual’s creative capacities, it generates both boredom and alienation.” (pp. 61 - 62)
“More specifically, Nietzsche’s highest value is global community. The greatest fact in the civilization of Greece, he says, is the fact that Homer became pan-Hellenic so early. Of course there was a price to pay for this: by centralizing, leveling ‘dissolving the more serious instincts for independence’ all great spiritual forces have a ‘repressive’ effect. But, he adds, it makes all the difference in the world whether it is Homer (with his natural morality) of the Bible (with its anti-natural morality) that ‘tyrannizes’. (page 81)
“In Human, All-too-Human we saw Nietzsche objecting that by ‘narcoticizing’ us against suffering, Christianity destroys the will to deal with its causes.” (page 106)
Young points out that Nietzsche was not a big fan of “modern” ideas like equality and democracy. In The Gay Science, Nietzsche elevates the ability to “flourish” as the most important criteria for where a person is positioned in society. Moreover, the philosopher’s critique of Christianity is better qualified by his appreciation for how institutions can be the purveyors of communal values.
“Nietzsche certainly believes in a society of hierarchy, rank, and disciplined obedience. In a metaphorical sense it could be said that he believes in the ‘enslavement’ of the many (especially women.) But this is not because he is indifferent to their well-being but because, as everyone recognizes with regard to children, he believes that most people best flourish in positions of subordination. Many people, he says, exercise a ‘surplus of strength and pleasure’ in becoming the ‘function’ of another.” (page 93)
“What Nietzsche admires is the institutional structure of the Church, that fact, that it created and preserved unit out of warring disunity…What this strongly suggests is that Nietzsche’s ‘ideal’ for the future includes the rebirth of something resembling the hierarchical structure of the medieval Church, the rebirth of society unified by the discipline of a common ethos, a discipline expounded and given effect through respect for the spiritual authority of those who occupy the role once occupied by priests….It will be a life-affirming rather than life-denying church, a humanistic religion whose gods are modeled on the Greek gods in a manner described in Human, All-too-Human.” (page 99)
“The trouble with our contemporary, Americanized, workaholic society in which the ‘true virtue’ is simply ‘doing something in less time than someone else’, is that there is no time for non-productive activity, neither time nor energy for, in particular, ceremony.” (page 101)
Thus Spake Zarathustra was an early modern parable advocating a new, “higher” culture heralding the appearance of the Ubermensch. “’A new nobility is needed, writes Nietzsche…’Mob rule’ is Nietzsche’s word for democratic modernity, and ‘despotism’ is what he – presciently – predicts will arise out of it. In place of this threatening state of affairs we need a new idealism, a new ethos. But this will be a ‘polytheistic’ rather than ‘monotheistic’ ethos…an ethos of gods, not of God, as he quickly adds.” (page 117)
With Beyond Good and Evil he refined the idea of this “higher” culture even more. Again, it was ironically conservative and glorified ancient Greece in many respects. But here he begins to flesh out the “will to power” and extends the concept of “self-overcoming” as a basis for how we should live our lives.
“The trouble with modernity is then, in a word, that we are not in Nietzsche’s sense a Volk. We lack the ‘hardness, uniformity and simplicity of form’ of a genuine community, the shared understanding of world ethos which produces ‘something that ‘understands itself’ – a people’. In a word, whereas a healthy culture/people/community needs structured unity, modernity is simply ‘chaos’.” (page 122)
“…democracy, feminism, socialism and anarchism are, for Nietzsche, essentially negative or destructive values. In the language that comes more into its own in the Genealogy of Morals, they are ‘slave’ values. Nietzsche says that a ‘noble’ culture creates values by ‘honoring everything it …sees in itself’. ‘Slave’ cultures, on the other hand, create only derivatively – by reacting against, negating, the values of nobles.” (page 123)
“’Life’…is the ‘will to power’, that is to say, to ‘growth’: a ‘self-overcoming’ which may involve the ‘overcoming’ of others too. But without a ‘what for’, without an ‘ideal’ for the sake of which one acts, there can be no ‘growth’, since growth is essentially growth-towards. So nihilism is the frustration of, in Nietzsche’s view, the most fundamental of all human impulses.” (page 124)
“…it is important to remember that much of Nietzsche’s Europe – the Prussian Reich, for example – was still fundamentally aristocratic. Democracy and other such ‘modern ideas’ were, for Nietzsche, an advancing threat rather than a contemporary reality…What we need, in short, is a new spiritual aristocracy, exceptional types who are ‘sent out ahead’ and are ‘strong and original enough to give impetus to opposing valuations and initiate a revaluation and reversal of [what are wrongly but necessarily, taken to be] ‘eternal values’’.” (page 125)
Young rightly points out that Nietzsche was masterful at how he wrote his books, in the unorthodox aphoristic style and with the logic scattered over an array of seemingly disconnected pieces. “His works are conceived as training manuals addressed to the select few who are destined to positions of leadership – those, in the main, who have, like himself, attended the top schools and universities. They are addressed either to those who will become, our new spiritual ‘leaders’: those who will rescue the West from contemporary nihilism by instituting a ‘revaluation of all values’ that will provide us with a new ethos.” (page 128)
“The religious life, says Nietzsche, requires ‘idleness with a good conscience. Modern industriousness, therefore – ‘noisy, time-consuming, self-satisfied, stupidly proud industriousness’ – kills the religious life. People of ‘modern ideas’ who approach religion with ‘an air of superior, gracious amusement’ have completely lost the ‘reverential seriousness’ with which religion should be approached. They have stupidly lost all idea of why religion is important.” (pp. 138 – 139)
Young again emphasizes the communal aspect of Nietzsche’s perspective. Making a case that there is a large social component to Nietzsche’s writings, equal to the “heroic individualism” that typically gets quoted and discussed. ‘…what he desires, above all, is the rebirth of a ‘noble’ society. So what he aspires to is the rebirth of a ‘noble’ religion. In sum, then, it seems that what Nietzsche wants is something with the structure and function of the medieval Church but with ‘Greek’ – life-affirming – rather than Christian – life-denying – content.” (page 144)
Most of the time when Nietzsche writes of “religion” it is in the context of criticizing Christianity. In On the Genealogy of Morals, he equates morality with power. “Nietzsche writes that people adopt moralities because they ‘instinctively strive for an optimum of favorable conditions in which to fully release [their] power’. Thus people would not adopt a morality unless the effect, verified over generations, was to maximize their power. But the origins of our current, essentially Christian, morality lay in the attempt by the sick and oppressed in society to increase their own power by crippling and disempowering the healthy nobility. So, Nietzsche suggests, the origin of Christian morality makes clear its ‘sick’ – making effect, the fact that it hobbles the healthy.” (page 147)
In Twilight of the Idols, the idea of a “healthy society” is prominently displayed. As always, such a society is hierarchical but also dedicated to the flourishing of the Volk. “Everyone in a healthy society, as Nietzsche conceives it, occupies a position that is accorded respect both by its occupier and by others. Services are performed without servility. We now understand the reason why a healthy society must be, though hierarchical, all-inclusive. For a society that excludes, a society that creates an underclass of Untermenschen, creates thereby the seeds of its own collapse.” (page 170)
We catch a rare glimpse of Nietzsche’s "hard" definition for “morality” in a “strong society” in how adjustable it should be. There are no fixed and perpetual truths in morality. “…it is essential to a strong society that its morality should, with the aid of the free spirit, be capable of flexibility, of modulating itself in the light of new circumstances.” (page 171) But we are talking culture and morality here, not religion. And here is where I take issue with Young’s book. The social aspect of Nietzsche’s thought is a philosophy of culture, not of religion.
The hierarchical structure of Nietzsche’s “higher” society is tied to Nietzsche’s concept of eternal recurrence as the supreme test of who is fit to lead such a society. “It is not everyone who has to be able to will the eternal recurrence; not everyone is criticizable for failing to be able to do so. Rather, it is required only of the highest spiritual types charged with governance. The ‘mediocre’ have different ‘laws of spiritual hygiene’ of their own. The reason is that since it is sick ‘selfishness’ that is the human cause of misery, only the super-healthy can be trusted with power. So, ultimately, the test of willing the eternal recurrence is a test of fitness to lead.” (page 185)
With Ecce Homo he expands upon his social hierarchy further. The higher society allows everyone (at different levels, not equally) to flourish in their way. “Nietzsche believes in different levels of flourishing, believes in a ‘stratification’ not only of the virtues but also of well-being. Of course Nietzsche believes, too, that there are exceptional individuals and that, on account of their scarcity and indispensability to the development of society as a whole, they are of vastly greater value to the social whole than average human beings. And he also believes in a ‘naturally’ hierarchical, pyramidal, order to society. But to think that only those at the apex of the pyramid are capable of flourishing is precisely the kind of universalism about the good (in the sense of virtue and well-being) against which Nietzsche protests on many occasions…Not flourishing of the higher individual but the flourishing of a ‘people’ or ‘culture’ as a whole is Nietzsche’s highest goal.” (page 191)
“That Nietzsche’s ultimate concern is for community, for the flourishing of a ‘people’ in general rather than flourishing, merely, of a few individuals, that what he wants is a revival of the great age of Greek culture, a culture whose greatness has at its heart the religious festival, and that consequently Nietzsche remains, all his life, committed to the Wagnerian ideal of the revival of society through the rebirth of Greek tragedy and so remained, in that sense, all his life a Wagnerian.” (page 196)
Nietzsche’s life-long interest in ancient Greek culture and Wagner, coupled with his critique of modernity and Christianity do not, in my opinion, constitute a philosophy of religion. The social aspects of Nietzsche’s philosophy are pronounced through ideas of culture and hierarchical flourishing of the well-being of the Volk. But these are not necessarily religious.
This work confirms that Nietzsche was troubled not only by how Christianity was holding back the advancement of culture, but also about what should take the place of religion in “higher” culture. Nietzsche did not propose a new religion. He proposed a new society where ceremony, festival, and the idea of Volk as a whole could flourish, each person in their own way. I don’t think he had a “philosophy of religion” at all, compared to, say, his philosophies of “art” and “health.” Nevertheless, Young does us a great service by placing the philosopher’s thoughts into the context of this thought-provoking book.
Young has some slightly unconventional ideas about Nietzsche’s philosophy. At first blush it seems that the philosopher who proclaimed “God is dead” and who was so rabidly critical of Christianity might not want to have anything to do with ‘religion.’ But, Young argues, fairly conclusively in my opinion, that for all his concern with free spirits and the Ubermensch, Nietzsche nevertheless desired a communal solution to the problem of nihilism.
One of the most interesting facts that Young points out is that the origins of Nietzsche’s revolutionary thought are, ironically, in essence conservative within the context of German philosophy. “The crucial fact about Nietzsche’s critique of modernity is that it issues from the standpoint of the conservative, past-oriented right rather than from the socialist, future-oriented left. This places Nietzsche in proximity to the so-call ‘Volkish’ tradition of German thinking…Volkish thinkers were appalled by the alienated, materialistic, mechanistic, secular, urban, creepingly democratic, mass culture of modernity which they saw as the product of Enlightenment rationalism. In the quest for a more spiritual, less alienated society they looked to an idealized image of the pre-Enlightenment past. What they found in that past was the spiritual unity of the Volk.” (pp. 4 – 5)
Young proceeds to go book-by-book through the body of Nietzsche’s work to see how his “philosophy of religion” evolved and was expressed in his writings. From The Birth of Tragedy, Young shows how this commitment to the Volkish tradition’s reaction of modernity impacted Nietzsche’s thought regarding the importance of myth in modern times and how modernity poses a threat to human fulfillment.
“Nietzsche claims that two things are wrong with modernity. First, through the loss of the Dionysian ‘material womb’ we are deprived of the ‘metaphysical solace’ for the fact of death that is possessed by a tragic culture…The second thing wrong with our Socratic culture, according to Nietzsche, is that it kills myth, destroys the foundation on which authentic community depends.” (page 29)
“The final symptom The Birth draws attention to is modernity’s ‘feverish agitation’. The loss of the eternal, mythical perspective on things, the loss of a ‘meaning of life’, leads to an ‘enormous growth in worldliness’, a ‘frivolous dedication to the present…of the ‘here and now’ or else ‘dull turning away from it.’ This is what modern German sociologists call the Erlebnisgesellschaft - the society of the frenzied quest for ‘experiences’, for cheap thrills.” (page 32)
“…far from celebrating secularism, he calls for a religious revival. Specifically, he calls for something that will play the role in modern life that was played by religious myth, and in particular by the tragic myth and tragic festival, in the lives of our ‘radiant leaders’, the Greeks. He calls, in an oversimplifying nutshell, for a revival of ‘Greek’ religion. Religion is thus early Nietzsche’s solution to the ills of modernity.” (pp. 32 – 33)
For Young, Nietzsche’s commitment to the social impact of Wagnerism as clearly defined in The Birth is extended in his ‘Untimely Meditation’ Wagner at Bayreuth. For Nietzsche, Richard Wagner offered a way to redefine religion in a meaningful way that could address the ills of modernity through the guidance offered by Hellenism, a topic that was his area of expertise as a professor of philology.
“As Nietzsche sees it, that is, the Wagnerian festival fulfils the two central functions of religion. In its Apollonian aspect we are to find, as the Greeks found in their tragic festival, disclosure and affirmation of ethos and so a gathering of community, of Volk. And in the Dionysian aspect we are to find an anxiety-overcoming transcendence of death. In 1876, Nietzsche’s solution to the destitution of modernity is, therefore, a religious one. The salvation of modernity lies in a return of ‘the Hellenic’, in the rebirth and refashioning of Greek religion.” (page 57)
Of course, Nietzsche’s commitment to Wagner eventually turned into outright rejection following the disillusion he experienced at the first Bayreuth festival. In Human, All-too-Human he was critical of Christianity and sought new ways to find a way to successfully navigate the ills of modernity as a society. The basics remained essentially unchanged since his earlier writings, but the emphasis shifted away from Wagner entirely toward the strength of ancient Greek culture.
“Modern culture, Nietzsche repeats, is a work culture. We live harried, harassed, high-speed lives – which means that we view life ‘as from a railway carriage’. There is no time to contemplate alternatives to the status quo…Another reason for the conformist character of modernity is that it is a machine culture: alternatively put a ‘big city’ culture. The machine (which of course includes bureaucratic ‘machines’) produces mutual co-operation in which each individual performs only one action. Individuals are turned into mere ‘instruments’, cogs…The machine culture…since it does not engage the individual’s creative capacities, it generates both boredom and alienation.” (pp. 61 - 62)
“More specifically, Nietzsche’s highest value is global community. The greatest fact in the civilization of Greece, he says, is the fact that Homer became pan-Hellenic so early. Of course there was a price to pay for this: by centralizing, leveling ‘dissolving the more serious instincts for independence’ all great spiritual forces have a ‘repressive’ effect. But, he adds, it makes all the difference in the world whether it is Homer (with his natural morality) of the Bible (with its anti-natural morality) that ‘tyrannizes’. (page 81)
“In Human, All-too-Human we saw Nietzsche objecting that by ‘narcoticizing’ us against suffering, Christianity destroys the will to deal with its causes.” (page 106)
Young points out that Nietzsche was not a big fan of “modern” ideas like equality and democracy. In The Gay Science, Nietzsche elevates the ability to “flourish” as the most important criteria for where a person is positioned in society. Moreover, the philosopher’s critique of Christianity is better qualified by his appreciation for how institutions can be the purveyors of communal values.
“Nietzsche certainly believes in a society of hierarchy, rank, and disciplined obedience. In a metaphorical sense it could be said that he believes in the ‘enslavement’ of the many (especially women.) But this is not because he is indifferent to their well-being but because, as everyone recognizes with regard to children, he believes that most people best flourish in positions of subordination. Many people, he says, exercise a ‘surplus of strength and pleasure’ in becoming the ‘function’ of another.” (page 93)
“What Nietzsche admires is the institutional structure of the Church, that fact, that it created and preserved unit out of warring disunity…What this strongly suggests is that Nietzsche’s ‘ideal’ for the future includes the rebirth of something resembling the hierarchical structure of the medieval Church, the rebirth of society unified by the discipline of a common ethos, a discipline expounded and given effect through respect for the spiritual authority of those who occupy the role once occupied by priests….It will be a life-affirming rather than life-denying church, a humanistic religion whose gods are modeled on the Greek gods in a manner described in Human, All-too-Human.” (page 99)
“The trouble with our contemporary, Americanized, workaholic society in which the ‘true virtue’ is simply ‘doing something in less time than someone else’, is that there is no time for non-productive activity, neither time nor energy for, in particular, ceremony.” (page 101)
Thus Spake Zarathustra was an early modern parable advocating a new, “higher” culture heralding the appearance of the Ubermensch. “’A new nobility is needed, writes Nietzsche…’Mob rule’ is Nietzsche’s word for democratic modernity, and ‘despotism’ is what he – presciently – predicts will arise out of it. In place of this threatening state of affairs we need a new idealism, a new ethos. But this will be a ‘polytheistic’ rather than ‘monotheistic’ ethos…an ethos of gods, not of God, as he quickly adds.” (page 117)
With Beyond Good and Evil he refined the idea of this “higher” culture even more. Again, it was ironically conservative and glorified ancient Greece in many respects. But here he begins to flesh out the “will to power” and extends the concept of “self-overcoming” as a basis for how we should live our lives.
“The trouble with modernity is then, in a word, that we are not in Nietzsche’s sense a Volk. We lack the ‘hardness, uniformity and simplicity of form’ of a genuine community, the shared understanding of world ethos which produces ‘something that ‘understands itself’ – a people’. In a word, whereas a healthy culture/people/community needs structured unity, modernity is simply ‘chaos’.” (page 122)
“…democracy, feminism, socialism and anarchism are, for Nietzsche, essentially negative or destructive values. In the language that comes more into its own in the Genealogy of Morals, they are ‘slave’ values. Nietzsche says that a ‘noble’ culture creates values by ‘honoring everything it …sees in itself’. ‘Slave’ cultures, on the other hand, create only derivatively – by reacting against, negating, the values of nobles.” (page 123)
“’Life’…is the ‘will to power’, that is to say, to ‘growth’: a ‘self-overcoming’ which may involve the ‘overcoming’ of others too. But without a ‘what for’, without an ‘ideal’ for the sake of which one acts, there can be no ‘growth’, since growth is essentially growth-towards. So nihilism is the frustration of, in Nietzsche’s view, the most fundamental of all human impulses.” (page 124)
“…it is important to remember that much of Nietzsche’s Europe – the Prussian Reich, for example – was still fundamentally aristocratic. Democracy and other such ‘modern ideas’ were, for Nietzsche, an advancing threat rather than a contemporary reality…What we need, in short, is a new spiritual aristocracy, exceptional types who are ‘sent out ahead’ and are ‘strong and original enough to give impetus to opposing valuations and initiate a revaluation and reversal of [what are wrongly but necessarily, taken to be] ‘eternal values’’.” (page 125)
Young rightly points out that Nietzsche was masterful at how he wrote his books, in the unorthodox aphoristic style and with the logic scattered over an array of seemingly disconnected pieces. “His works are conceived as training manuals addressed to the select few who are destined to positions of leadership – those, in the main, who have, like himself, attended the top schools and universities. They are addressed either to those who will become, our new spiritual ‘leaders’: those who will rescue the West from contemporary nihilism by instituting a ‘revaluation of all values’ that will provide us with a new ethos.” (page 128)
“The religious life, says Nietzsche, requires ‘idleness with a good conscience. Modern industriousness, therefore – ‘noisy, time-consuming, self-satisfied, stupidly proud industriousness’ – kills the religious life. People of ‘modern ideas’ who approach religion with ‘an air of superior, gracious amusement’ have completely lost the ‘reverential seriousness’ with which religion should be approached. They have stupidly lost all idea of why religion is important.” (pp. 138 – 139)
Young again emphasizes the communal aspect of Nietzsche’s perspective. Making a case that there is a large social component to Nietzsche’s writings, equal to the “heroic individualism” that typically gets quoted and discussed. ‘…what he desires, above all, is the rebirth of a ‘noble’ society. So what he aspires to is the rebirth of a ‘noble’ religion. In sum, then, it seems that what Nietzsche wants is something with the structure and function of the medieval Church but with ‘Greek’ – life-affirming – rather than Christian – life-denying – content.” (page 144)
Most of the time when Nietzsche writes of “religion” it is in the context of criticizing Christianity. In On the Genealogy of Morals, he equates morality with power. “Nietzsche writes that people adopt moralities because they ‘instinctively strive for an optimum of favorable conditions in which to fully release [their] power’. Thus people would not adopt a morality unless the effect, verified over generations, was to maximize their power. But the origins of our current, essentially Christian, morality lay in the attempt by the sick and oppressed in society to increase their own power by crippling and disempowering the healthy nobility. So, Nietzsche suggests, the origin of Christian morality makes clear its ‘sick’ – making effect, the fact that it hobbles the healthy.” (page 147)
In Twilight of the Idols, the idea of a “healthy society” is prominently displayed. As always, such a society is hierarchical but also dedicated to the flourishing of the Volk. “Everyone in a healthy society, as Nietzsche conceives it, occupies a position that is accorded respect both by its occupier and by others. Services are performed without servility. We now understand the reason why a healthy society must be, though hierarchical, all-inclusive. For a society that excludes, a society that creates an underclass of Untermenschen, creates thereby the seeds of its own collapse.” (page 170)
We catch a rare glimpse of Nietzsche’s "hard" definition for “morality” in a “strong society” in how adjustable it should be. There are no fixed and perpetual truths in morality. “…it is essential to a strong society that its morality should, with the aid of the free spirit, be capable of flexibility, of modulating itself in the light of new circumstances.” (page 171) But we are talking culture and morality here, not religion. And here is where I take issue with Young’s book. The social aspect of Nietzsche’s thought is a philosophy of culture, not of religion.
The hierarchical structure of Nietzsche’s “higher” society is tied to Nietzsche’s concept of eternal recurrence as the supreme test of who is fit to lead such a society. “It is not everyone who has to be able to will the eternal recurrence; not everyone is criticizable for failing to be able to do so. Rather, it is required only of the highest spiritual types charged with governance. The ‘mediocre’ have different ‘laws of spiritual hygiene’ of their own. The reason is that since it is sick ‘selfishness’ that is the human cause of misery, only the super-healthy can be trusted with power. So, ultimately, the test of willing the eternal recurrence is a test of fitness to lead.” (page 185)
With Ecce Homo he expands upon his social hierarchy further. The higher society allows everyone (at different levels, not equally) to flourish in their way. “Nietzsche believes in different levels of flourishing, believes in a ‘stratification’ not only of the virtues but also of well-being. Of course Nietzsche believes, too, that there are exceptional individuals and that, on account of their scarcity and indispensability to the development of society as a whole, they are of vastly greater value to the social whole than average human beings. And he also believes in a ‘naturally’ hierarchical, pyramidal, order to society. But to think that only those at the apex of the pyramid are capable of flourishing is precisely the kind of universalism about the good (in the sense of virtue and well-being) against which Nietzsche protests on many occasions…Not flourishing of the higher individual but the flourishing of a ‘people’ or ‘culture’ as a whole is Nietzsche’s highest goal.” (page 191)
“That Nietzsche’s ultimate concern is for community, for the flourishing of a ‘people’ in general rather than flourishing, merely, of a few individuals, that what he wants is a revival of the great age of Greek culture, a culture whose greatness has at its heart the religious festival, and that consequently Nietzsche remains, all his life, committed to the Wagnerian ideal of the revival of society through the rebirth of Greek tragedy and so remained, in that sense, all his life a Wagnerian.” (page 196)
Nietzsche’s life-long interest in ancient Greek culture and Wagner, coupled with his critique of modernity and Christianity do not, in my opinion, constitute a philosophy of religion. The social aspects of Nietzsche’s philosophy are pronounced through ideas of culture and hierarchical flourishing of the well-being of the Volk. But these are not necessarily religious.
This work confirms that Nietzsche was troubled not only by how Christianity was holding back the advancement of culture, but also about what should take the place of religion in “higher” culture. Nietzsche did not propose a new religion. He proposed a new society where ceremony, festival, and the idea of Volk as a whole could flourish, each person in their own way. I don’t think he had a “philosophy of religion” at all, compared to, say, his philosophies of “art” and “health.” Nevertheless, Young does us a great service by placing the philosopher’s thoughts into the context of this thought-provoking book.
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