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.26 Plato s description of democracy and of the democratic soul. chapter 5The Gay ScienceBooks i iv of The Gay Science were published in 1882.Book v was addedin 1887, the year in which The Genealogy of Morals also appeared.Thework is thus interrupted by both Zarathustra and Beyond Good and Evil.In the main, however, I shall treat it as the unity Nietzsche intended.Though the work is a wonderfully rich discussion of everything under thesun I shall confine my attention to what it has to say that bears on mytopics of community and religion.Bernard Williams, in his introduction to the Cambridge translation ofthe work, claims that This book, like all his others [The Birth?], makes itclear that any life worth living must involve daring, individuality andcreative bloody-mindedness (GS p.xiv).This is the familiar Nietzsche:the aristocratic individualist who, concerned only for the flourishing ofthe exceptional type, takes society the herd to be at best a footstoolfor, and at worst a serious impediment to, the flourishing of a creativeelite.If this were the whole story about The Gay Science if all Nietzschevalued was the masterful individual hammering society s idols to smith-ereens in the interests of doing his own thing then religion, as asociety-bonding fetter , could be expected to appear as nothing but anoppressive force and as such a prime target for deconstruction. Antichristwould then be the long and the short of The Gay Science s philosophy ofreligion.What I want to show in this chapter, however, is that this familiarNietzsche is only half the story.That in fact Nietzsche values, continuesto value, social stability and cohesion at least as much as he valuesindividual creativity, and that his real interest lies in promoting neitherthe one nor the other but rather in resolving the tension between the two.Iwant to show, in other words, that the author of The Gay Science is amuch more interesting thinker than the ranting-elitist reading makes himout to be.And I want also to show that because he values communal88 The Gay Science 89stability he also values religion of the right kind.I want to show that, asin earlier works, religion still figures as the essential agent of the existenceand health of community.In a word and in spite of the negative rhetoric to which I shall attendin due course Nietzsche values both the free spirit and the herd type.Neither, however, is his ultimate value.His ultimate value is the flourish-ing of communal life which, as we shall see, consists in a dialecticalinterplay between the two.So what I am going to do is to present, first, the familiar, individualisticNietzsche his validation of the bloody-minded creative individual second, his validation of the herd type and the forces of social conservatismin general, and finally, his reconciliation of the two sets of values.the familiar nietzsche: the bloody-minded,creative individualistThe qualities of character praised by society and conditioned into theindividual through education are, says Nietzsche, those that are useful toit.Selflessness, diligence and industriousness, for example, promote thegood of the social whole but particularly in the degree promoted bysociety victimise the individual, are to his private disadvantage.Argu-ments that society s morality makes the individual happy are just propa-ganda , part of the conditioning process.This harming of the individualis, however, of no concern to society at large: its aim is to turn him into amere function of the whole (GS 21).Again: the evaluations of morality always express the needs of thecommunity or herd.(That these vary according to time and place isthe reason there are many moralities.) Morality instructs the individualto value himself only as a function of the herd. Morality [i.e.the voiceof conscience , or super-ego ] is the herd-instinct in the individual (GS116).So morality is a kind of confidence trick to which, it seems, Nietzscheis alerting us.Those who go along with the trick, it appears, are objects ofcontempt, herd animals.They lack the courage to be self-sufficient.What they really fear is the cold look , the sneer , growing solitary , inshort the social ostracism which is the penalty for departing from socialnorms (GS 50).Conversely, nobility belongs precisely to those who defyconvention, who create themselves as new, unique, incomparable, whogive themselves laws .We must, says Nietzsche (sounding like Sartre), com-mit ourselves to the purification of our opinions and value judgements 90 Nietzsche s Philosophy of Religionand to the creation of tables of what is good that are new and all our own (GS 335).Nietzsche asks (for neither the first nor last time): what makes aperson noble ? It is, he answers, the use of a rare and singular standardand almost a madness; the feeling of heat in things that feel cold toeveryone else; a hitting upon values for which the scale has not yet beeninvented; a sacrifice on altars made for an unknown god (GS 55).InWilliams term, bloody-mindedness.In short, then, Nietzsche seems to be employing the by now familiarrhetoric of authenticity to tell us to have the intelligence and courage tosee through the machinations of, in Heidegger s language, the They andto achieve authentic selfhood.One is, it seems, to become eigentlich, one sown (eigen) person, a free spirit rather than a herd animal.the unfamiliar nietzsche: conservatismand communitarianismIn fact, however, one does not have to look very hard in The Gay Scienceto find a great many things seriously at odds with the above picture.Section 10, for example, praises atavistic people, those rare spirits whofeel old powers and values which were once common but now seemextraordinary (Nietzsche s moustache, for example, a legacy of an alreadyantiquated military style).If they avoid becoming mad or eccentric, suchpeople are great human beings.Their ancient practices they must nurse,honour and defend.Such people (surely related to the antiquarianspirits of the second Meditation and the slow-willed of Twilight of theIdols) are valuable because what is absolutely necessary to the develop-ment of a people is andante, the tempo of a passionate and slow spirit ,the spirit characteristic of conservative generations.While there is asuggestion here of andante as, as it were, the goldilocks speed for socialchange (not too fast and not too slow), the emphasis is on the need forrelative slowness.Change that is too fast, the implication is, defeats the plastic power (see p.37 above) of a culture to assimilate the new whilepreserving its unity and identity.There is, to be sure, a certain bloody-mindedness involved in thisconception of the noble human being: a stubborn resistance, extreme sus-picion, towards the flux of fashion, towards current political correctnesses [ Pobierz całość w formacie PDF ]
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.26 Plato s description of democracy and of the democratic soul. chapter 5The Gay ScienceBooks i iv of The Gay Science were published in 1882.Book v was addedin 1887, the year in which The Genealogy of Morals also appeared.Thework is thus interrupted by both Zarathustra and Beyond Good and Evil.In the main, however, I shall treat it as the unity Nietzsche intended.Though the work is a wonderfully rich discussion of everything under thesun I shall confine my attention to what it has to say that bears on mytopics of community and religion.Bernard Williams, in his introduction to the Cambridge translation ofthe work, claims that This book, like all his others [The Birth?], makes itclear that any life worth living must involve daring, individuality andcreative bloody-mindedness (GS p.xiv).This is the familiar Nietzsche:the aristocratic individualist who, concerned only for the flourishing ofthe exceptional type, takes society the herd to be at best a footstoolfor, and at worst a serious impediment to, the flourishing of a creativeelite.If this were the whole story about The Gay Science if all Nietzschevalued was the masterful individual hammering society s idols to smith-ereens in the interests of doing his own thing then religion, as asociety-bonding fetter , could be expected to appear as nothing but anoppressive force and as such a prime target for deconstruction. Antichristwould then be the long and the short of The Gay Science s philosophy ofreligion.What I want to show in this chapter, however, is that this familiarNietzsche is only half the story.That in fact Nietzsche values, continuesto value, social stability and cohesion at least as much as he valuesindividual creativity, and that his real interest lies in promoting neitherthe one nor the other but rather in resolving the tension between the two.Iwant to show, in other words, that the author of The Gay Science is amuch more interesting thinker than the ranting-elitist reading makes himout to be.And I want also to show that because he values communal88 The Gay Science 89stability he also values religion of the right kind.I want to show that, asin earlier works, religion still figures as the essential agent of the existenceand health of community.In a word and in spite of the negative rhetoric to which I shall attendin due course Nietzsche values both the free spirit and the herd type.Neither, however, is his ultimate value.His ultimate value is the flourish-ing of communal life which, as we shall see, consists in a dialecticalinterplay between the two.So what I am going to do is to present, first, the familiar, individualisticNietzsche his validation of the bloody-minded creative individual second, his validation of the herd type and the forces of social conservatismin general, and finally, his reconciliation of the two sets of values.the familiar nietzsche: the bloody-minded,creative individualistThe qualities of character praised by society and conditioned into theindividual through education are, says Nietzsche, those that are useful toit.Selflessness, diligence and industriousness, for example, promote thegood of the social whole but particularly in the degree promoted bysociety victimise the individual, are to his private disadvantage.Argu-ments that society s morality makes the individual happy are just propa-ganda , part of the conditioning process.This harming of the individualis, however, of no concern to society at large: its aim is to turn him into amere function of the whole (GS 21).Again: the evaluations of morality always express the needs of thecommunity or herd.(That these vary according to time and place isthe reason there are many moralities.) Morality instructs the individualto value himself only as a function of the herd. Morality [i.e.the voiceof conscience , or super-ego ] is the herd-instinct in the individual (GS116).So morality is a kind of confidence trick to which, it seems, Nietzscheis alerting us.Those who go along with the trick, it appears, are objects ofcontempt, herd animals.They lack the courage to be self-sufficient.What they really fear is the cold look , the sneer , growing solitary , inshort the social ostracism which is the penalty for departing from socialnorms (GS 50).Conversely, nobility belongs precisely to those who defyconvention, who create themselves as new, unique, incomparable, whogive themselves laws .We must, says Nietzsche (sounding like Sartre), com-mit ourselves to the purification of our opinions and value judgements 90 Nietzsche s Philosophy of Religionand to the creation of tables of what is good that are new and all our own (GS 335).Nietzsche asks (for neither the first nor last time): what makes aperson noble ? It is, he answers, the use of a rare and singular standardand almost a madness; the feeling of heat in things that feel cold toeveryone else; a hitting upon values for which the scale has not yet beeninvented; a sacrifice on altars made for an unknown god (GS 55).InWilliams term, bloody-mindedness.In short, then, Nietzsche seems to be employing the by now familiarrhetoric of authenticity to tell us to have the intelligence and courage tosee through the machinations of, in Heidegger s language, the They andto achieve authentic selfhood.One is, it seems, to become eigentlich, one sown (eigen) person, a free spirit rather than a herd animal.the unfamiliar nietzsche: conservatismand communitarianismIn fact, however, one does not have to look very hard in The Gay Scienceto find a great many things seriously at odds with the above picture.Section 10, for example, praises atavistic people, those rare spirits whofeel old powers and values which were once common but now seemextraordinary (Nietzsche s moustache, for example, a legacy of an alreadyantiquated military style).If they avoid becoming mad or eccentric, suchpeople are great human beings.Their ancient practices they must nurse,honour and defend.Such people (surely related to the antiquarianspirits of the second Meditation and the slow-willed of Twilight of theIdols) are valuable because what is absolutely necessary to the develop-ment of a people is andante, the tempo of a passionate and slow spirit ,the spirit characteristic of conservative generations.While there is asuggestion here of andante as, as it were, the goldilocks speed for socialchange (not too fast and not too slow), the emphasis is on the need forrelative slowness.Change that is too fast, the implication is, defeats the plastic power (see p.37 above) of a culture to assimilate the new whilepreserving its unity and identity.There is, to be sure, a certain bloody-mindedness involved in thisconception of the noble human being: a stubborn resistance, extreme sus-picion, towards the flux of fashion, towards current political correctnesses [ Pobierz całość w formacie PDF ]