Astonishingly accurate as this is about English moral philosophers of the last hundred years, it seems unfair of Nietzsche to attack only them, when it applies at least as much to post-Christians of other nations. But that hardly matters. What does matter is the conclusiveness of the point Nietzsche is making. It applies equally to Kant, whom Nietzsche does not spare in either of these two books. Indeed it applies more to him. For he too gets rid of the Christian God as a foundation of morality, only to reintroduce Him later on as a guarantee that virtue will pay, if not in this world then in the next. Even readers who find much of what Nietzsche writes unsympathetic must surely share his amazement, if not his indignation (though they should share that too), when they contemplate a world from which God has been eliminated but in which it is thought that we should behave just as people did, or ought to have done, when He was still a pervasive presence. The trouble is that our conception of human nature has failed to alter: we still derive it from seeing ourselves as creatures, obliged to obey the dictates of our Creator. This view of ourselves is so difficult to overcome – where do we look to find an alternative one? – and the very idea of ourselves as being continuous with the rest of nature is so reductive, that we mostly lazily stick with our Christian inheritance, which we persuade ourselves is the ‘natural’ view to take. But at the same time we realize that something is amiss, so we tinker around in an ad hoc sort of way, holding on to such concepts as ‘rights’ and ‘equality’, jettisoning or tacitly ignoring others that we find inconvenient. The result, in Nietzsche’s view, is a moral and spiritual vulgarity so depressing that he has to stage a one-man, non-stop demonstration of exaltation.
Though Twilight ranges very widely, taking in every theme that Nietzsche ever dealt with, there can’t be any question that at each point he is preparing the ground for his final attack on Christianity. It is – the whole brief book – very much a matter of reculer pour mieux sauter. And although, reading The Anti-Christ immediately afterwards, one has a strong sense of more of the same, this book was actually intended to be the first instalment of his Revaluation of All Values, which was itself to be in four parts and to present his philosophy in its most definitive form so far – an ambitious project, even if he had not become insane. Nietzsche was touchingly addicted to plans and titles, most of which were abandoned. What is amazing is the sureness of touch with which, in both these books, he surveys the contemporary cultural scene, in addition to many other topics, and pulls all the threads together. It is in pursuance of this dynamic unity that he uses names with such dramatic unfairness. Never scrupulous, let alone ‘scholarly’, in his portrayal of individuals, he reaches new heights of recklessness in these works, with the signal exception of his treatment of Christ, as we shall see. But it would be a terrible pity if this unfairness were to blind one to the essential points that he is making. If accuracy were at issue, Nietzsche is no more accurate in his portrayal of his heroes than he is of his villains. The whole enterprise has to be seen in terms of lining up his troops to fight the enemy, and it is a central part of his project that his own forces are enormously but not hopelessly outnumbered.
Both books should be read under the aspect of the last words of Ecce Homo: ‘Have I been understood? – Dionysos against the Crucified…’ Dionysos had, of course, always been his name for what he regarded as the element in life which was most fearful but also which vindicated it; ‘The Crucified’ is a comparatively late piece of nomenclature for its opposite. But in fact to put the contrast in these terms is misleading and has certainly resulted in much misunderstanding, even among those who aren’t hostile to Nietzsche’s general position. For Dionysos has two opponents, one worthy of him, the other contemptible. The name Nietzsche gives to his worthy opponent is Christ – hence Dionysos is the Anti-Christ. But as translators of the eponymous work have pointed out, in German ‘Der Antichrist’ can mean either ‘The Anti-Christ’ or ‘The Anti-Christian’. I think that it was intended to mean both. The Christian can be seen as the unworthy opponent of Dionysos, the squalid enemy who is too ubiquitous to be ignored, but who is undeservedly dignified by being treated to such elaborate condemnation. Similarly, it is Christianity, not Christ, of which Nietzsche writes in the closing passage of The Anti-Christ that it is ‘the one great curse, the one great intrinsic depravity, the one great instinct for revenge for which no expedient is sufficiently poisonous, secret, subterranean, petty – I call it the one immortal blemish of mankind…’ In the central sections of the book Nietzsche goes to great pains to distinguish between Christ and everyone who has used his name for whatever purposes. So, to simplify slightly, The Anti-Christ constitutes an attack on both Christ and Christians, while Twilight makes its assault on the exceedingly complex set of motives, feelings, attitudes and longings which have ensured that ‘in reality there has been only one Christian, and he died on the Cross’ (The Anti-Christ, number 39).
To make this point clearer, it is necessary to go back to Nietzsche’s first book, The Birth of Tragedy, as indeed he does in number 6 of the section of Twilight entitled ‘ “Reason” in Philosophy’, where he enunciates four propositions, the fourth of which runs:
To divide the world into a ‘real’ and an ‘apparent’ world, whether in the manner of Christianity or in the manner of Kant (which is, after all, that of a cunning Christian –) is only a suggestion of décadence – a symptom of declining life… That the artist places a higher value on appearance than on reality constitutes no objection to this proposition. For ‘appearance’ here signifies reality once more, only selected, strengthened, corrected… The tragic artist is not a pessimist – it is precisely he who affirms all that is questionable and terrible in existence, he is Dionysian…
Certainly, this is not exactly the way he put it in The Birth of Tragedy, but the difference is not damaging, at least not for present purposes: on the contrary, it strengthens his position. For the central positive point that Nietzsche is making here, that the Dionysian artist affirms precisely what we are all most tempted to deny, is something to which he always held firm. But in The Birth of Tragedy ‘the terrible’ had denoted something glamorous, the underlying and mainly appalling substratum of existence which we are usually unable to face, but which the phenomenon of tragedy forces us to face. In the sixteen years between The Birth of Tragedy and Twilight, Nietzsche had abandoned the metaphysics which enabled him to postulate that substratum, while finding that ‘the terrible’ was more terrible than he had thought, because it wasn’t at all glamorous. It was everything that makes small what should be great, that saps life and will, that ministers to what Nietzsche, in his last works, came to sum up, in the word (he always puts it in French) décadence. And, with only an appearance of paradox, he found it more frightful than the metaphysical horrors that he had evoked in The Birth of Tragedy.
So, now that Nietzsche has told us, perhaps a little more offhandedly than the importance of the subject warrants, that ‘ “appearance” here signifies reality once more, only selected, strengthened, corrected’ he sets about doing the selecting and the correcting in order – and this is the absolutely crucial point – that he should be able to effect a final volte-face and return to his original conception of ‘the terrible’, only purged of its Schopenhauerian-Wagnerian overtones or undertones. In other words, he now wants to denote by ‘the terrible’ those elements in existence which are very nearly unendurable, but the enduring and the overcoming of which lead to an increase in strength or will. The version of ‘the terrible’ which is in one way worse is that which leads to debility and a sense of impoverished life. It is not the role of the Dionysian artist or philosopher to affirm that – it is their job to expose and extirpate it. The twilight of the idols, whether eternal or modern, is at hand.
It is in this sense that Nietzsche is driven, against many explicit resolutions to the contrary, to be a No-sayer. For what the décadents who surround him are doing is to say No where they should be saying Yes, where they should be Dionysian; and what
is leading them to this life-denying perversity, mostly of course unconsciously, is that they subscribe to a set of values that puts the central features of this world at a discount. Where they find suffering, they immediately look for someone to blame, and end up hating themselves, or generalize that into a hatred of ‘human nature’. They look for ‘peace of mind’, using it as a blanket term and failing to see the diversity of states, some of them desirable and some of them the reverse, which that term covers. They confuse cause and effect, thinking that the connection between virtue and happiness is that the former leads to the latter, whereas in fact the reverse is the case. They have, in Nietzsche’s cruelly accurate phrase, ‘the vulgar ambition to possess generous feelings’ (‘Expeditions of an Untimely Man’, number 6). They confuse breeding fine men with taming them. Throughout the major part of Twilight this devastating list of our vulgarities continues.
It goes without saying that most of Nietzsche’s readers will find reasons not to be devastated. At most they will claim to find it all very stimulating, or say that they would do if Nietzsche could be a little calmer and less abusive. But really Nietzsche’s impudence (he called Richard Wagner ‘the impolitest of geniuses’ – The Case of Wagner, section 1 – when he should clearly have reserved that title for himself) gives them the excuse to ignore the substance of what he is alleging. His own obsession with moral and intellectual hygiene guaranteed that throughout his life he remained aghast at and incredulous of the degree of self-deception and willingness to believe what suits them that almost everyone routinely practises. By the time he wrote his last works he had behind him a uniquely impressive series of books, especially Human, All Too Human, Daybreak and supremely The Gay Science, in which he had employed scrupulous analysis, teasing and satire, lyrical depth psychology; and no one had given a damn. So he produced this ‘grand declaration of war’, but this merely served to make people feel that they had been right all along to ignore him. His only consolation was that since he was speaking to décadents they would of course disagree with whatever he said. But how does one succeed in getting under the skin of a décadent? How does one reveal to vulgar people the catastrophic effects of their vulgarity? How does one effect any truly radical conversion in people’s consciousness, especially if they are not particularly unhappy? Only, it would seem, by producing in them an experience so devastating that our paramount example of it is Saint Paul’s experience on the road to Damascus – something that was never far from Nietzsche’s mind when he was writing these books. And although he was desperate to achieve a similar effect, he was horrified at the way in which it was produced on that world-historical occasion.
But suppose that, for all our initial resistance, we try to take Twilight seriously, and not as a kind of spiritual thriller or whodunit. We might begin by agreeing that some of his milder claims are, at the very least, plausible. It does seem to be true, for example, that most people, when they find something has gone wrong, do look for someone to blame quite as soon as they look for a way of putting it right. Equally, people who lack the advantages that others have form intense resentments against the ‘privileged’, claiming that they (the non-privileged) are being denied their ‘rights’. Such movements of the soul are, it would seem, ‘natural’; Nietzsche is not in the least disposed to deny that. What he loathes is the way in which such attitudes of vengefulness and ressentiment are used as the linchpins of moral systems. It is inevitable that they should be, at any rate when the gulf between the haves and the have-nots is sufficiently obtrusive and when there are sufficiently skilful people around to work on the feelings of deprivation in the majority. But as a result a set of values is inaugurated in which these feelings of an essentially hostile kind are institutionalized as the sole morality for humanity. It goes without saying that there are other factors which constitute the basic elements of the kind of morality that Nietzsche is particularly opposed to a – ‘slave’ or ‘herd’ morality – but he is tirelessly insistent on the crucial role of these feelings of deprivation. Not that we are consistent on this score. Take the case of jealousy: it is widely and rightly taken to be a destructive and corrosive emotion liable to have catastrophic effects both on those who suffer from it and, as a likely consequence, on the object or objects of their jealousy. We regard it with horror and alarm both because its destructiveness is so blatant, and because the context in which it typically arises is one in which the objects of jealousy are not to blame for being its cause. Still, it seems to be as ‘natural’ as any emotion we have. And yet it is hard to see what the difference is between jealousy and those other feelings which give rise to morality as we most commonly know it. We can take the argument a painful stage further: someone (a ‘decent’ person) who recognizes the degrading effects of jealousy may decide to try to escape from them by behaving in a ‘noble’ way: he forswears the courses of action which he feels driven to follow, and indulges ‘the vulgar ambition to have generous feelings’ (‘Expeditions of an Untimely Man’, number 6). (Hegel had already expounded this dialectic of feeling and action in The Phenomenology of Spirit. Nietzsche often echoes Hegel, but almost certainly without realizing it.) How can we escape from this whole ghastly and spiritually debilitating cycle of feeling? Only by denying the process in its very beginnings, which will involve, among other things, seeing that the ‘nobility’ of the person feeling and acting within this kind of morality (which we tend to regard as morality per se) is a very different matter from the genuine nobility of the person who recognizes the true conditions of existence from the start; who recognizes that there are, as Nietzsche often puts it, no ‘moral facts’, no ‘natural rights’ to which we can lay claim, no valid concept of blame.
Who would such a person be? It isn’t surprising that Nietzsche found it necessary to coin the term Übermensch (usually, if unfortunately, rendered as ‘Superman’). For, as I have already argued, our concept of what human nature is is so permeated with our moral concepts that to attempt to sort out the one from the other is by now almost certainly vain. In the course of these two books Nietzsche, although primarily on the warpath, gives fairly detailed accounts of two kinds of person that he finds it impossible to condemn as incarnations, of however ‘sublimated’ (a favourite, and very influential, term of his) a kind, of morality as it is ordinarily understood. One of these kinds of person truly deserves the title of Superman, even if there hasn’t yet been a complete example of it. The other class contains only one member, and that is Christ, at least as seen by Nietzsche in his idiosyncratic but extraordinarily powerful and moving depiction of him in the central stretch of The Anti-Christ. It is this second kind of person whom Nietzsche feels is sufficiently impressive to be his arch-opponent: Dionysos against the Crucified.
It is in number 28 of The Anti-Christ that Nietzsche touches ‘for the first time… on the problem of the psychology of the redeemer’. The point of his doing so is to contrast him with the type of the priest, who figures in this book as the arch-villain though not the arch-opponent. The priest is, in Nietzsche’s violently abusive account, the embodiment of meanness seeking, all too successfully, to persuade his flock (which comes dangerously close to being coextensive with the Western world) to live their lives wholly in accordance with the concepts of fear and loathing. By contrast the redeemer, from now on referred to by Nietzsche as Jesus, lives entirely without rancour or vindictiveness. This is no news: but Nietzsche observes that, in attempting to categorize such an extraordinary, indeed unique, being, theologians, of whom he singles out Renan for special derision, have appropriated for their ‘explication of the type Jesus the two most inapplicable concepts possible in this case: the concept of the genius and the concept of the hero’. He immediately continues in number 29:
But if anything is unevangelic it is the concept hero. Precisely the opposite of all contending, of all feeling oneself in struggle has here become instinct: the incapacity for resistance here becomes morality (‘resist not evil!’: the profoundest saying of the Gospel, its key in a
certain sense), blessedness in peace, in gentleness, in the inability for enmity. What are the ‘glad tidings’? True life, eternal life is found – it is not promised, it is here, it is within you: as life lived in love, in love without deduction or exclusion, without distance. Everyone is a child of God – Jesus definitely claims nothing for himself alone – as a child of God everyone is equal to everyone else…. To make a hero of Jesus! – And what a worse misunderstanding is the word ‘genius’!
The idiosyncrasies of Nietzsche’s interpretation of Christ’s character are obvious, but then any attempt to extract an intelligible portrayal of him from the gospels is bound to be selective. What takes one by surprise is the nature of Nietzsche’s selectivity. As his eight-page account continues – he does a good deal more than merely ‘touching on’ the psychology of the redeemer – the tone becomes ever warmer and even ecstatic. The portrayal of Nietzsche’s (or Dionysos’s) antipode becomes, bizarrely, one of the most moving passages in the whole of his writings. With the occasional omission, it could be used as a magnificent sermon addressed to a devout congregation.
The omissions which would have to be made are crucial; from time to time in this piece of exalted prose Nietzsche refers to Jesus as an idiot, though his use of that term is clearly influenced by Nietzsche’s belated discovery of Dostoyevsky, to whom he refers favourably several times, but only in these two books. Jesus is also described as a décadent, and as a case of retarded puberty. These descriptions are undoubtedly sincere, yet the fact remains that Nietzsche is obviously at least as much in love with the portrayal of the redeemer that he finds himself giving as he is with that of Socrates, that other sublime opponent, with whom he had a still more protracted affair of the spirit. Both of them fascinated him, partly by virtue of possessing natures which didn’t say No simply because they could not conceive of an alternative morality, which, had they been able to, would have both horrified and fatally corrupted them. If one can’t have innocence – a matter about which Nietzsche never made up his mind – at least ignorance, or certain species of it, is the next best thing. In the end it won’t do, of course, and certainly not for someone with such paralysingly absolute demands on life as Nietzsche. But lacking a paradigm of genuine innocence, he reverted at several crucial places in his writings to the appeal of ‘pure folly’. Not that he could use that phrase in a. positive sense, since Wagner had preempted it in his characterization of Parsifal, for whom Nietzsche had nothing but scorn. So he uses instead the closely related image of the child.