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The
Atheist Devotional: Timeless Meditations for
the Godless by M. Moore
Copyright ã 2008 M. Previous: Reading Number 6: Darwin the Social Darwinist Next: Reading Number 8: Nietzsche...and His Imaginary Friends
- Reading Number Seven -
Nietzsche: Beyond Good and Evil...and Sanity
Excerpted from: Nietzsche, Beyond Good and Evil, various sections
Friedrich Nietzsche was a man with a vision...a vision of godlessness. So he wrote his vision down, in a way calculated to make it seem all bold and thrilling and visionary. And many people have found it to be just that, including Adolf Hitler. In fact, Hitler was probably the closest thing we’ve had to being the fulfillment of Nietzsche’s vision of the “overman,” the next great leap forward in human evolution. And then Nietzsche went insane and Hitler committed suicide. Well, every religion needs its martyrs, right? Including atheism.
Assuming that truth is a woman—what then? Is there not reason to suspect that all philosophers, in so far as they were dogmatists, have known very little about women? That if their aim was to charm a female, they have been especially inept and inapt in making advances to truth with such awful seriousness and clumsy insistence?
These are the first words of Nietzsche’s Preface to his Beyond Good and Evil, in which he makes the bold claim that all philosophers before him have been “clumsy” and “inept” in their claims to have found truth. Do you get the feeling that modesty was probably not one of Nietzsche’s long suits?
One thing is certain: she has not let herself be charmed—and nowadays every dogmatism stands defeated and dispirited—if it is standing at all! For there are those who tauntingly claim that it has fallen, that all dogmatism lies defeated, even more, that it is breathing its last gasp. In all seriousness, there is good reason to hope that all philosophical dogmatizing, however solemn, conclusive, or definite its manner, may have been nothing but the infantile high-mindedness of a beginner.
Now we’re beginning to see Nietzsche’s technique—which consisted of name-calling, boasting, bluster and bravado. But hey, it worked. It earned him the reputation as one of the most influential philosophers of all time, with many devotees even today!
And we may be very near to a time when people will be constantly recognizing anew what in fact it was that furnished the cornerstone for those lofty, unconditional philosopher’s edifices once built by the dogmatists: some folk superstition from time immemorial (such as the superstition about souls, which even today has not ceased to sow mischief as the superstition about subject and ego); some play on words perhaps, some seductive aspect of grammar, or a daring generalization from very limited, very personal, very human, all-too-human, facts.
Yep, call something a superstition and you can dismiss it without worrying about whether it’s true or not—a time-honored tactic among atheists that we should always be ready to use. But Nietzsche was too bold and forward-looking to be concerned with details like whether his ideas were true or false. Let’s look at the beginning of the first chapter (“Section One”) of his book:
The will to truth, which will seduce us yet to many a risky venture, that famous truthfulness about which all philosophers to date have spoken with deference; what manner of questions has this will to truth presented for us! What strange, wicked, questionable questions! ...What is it in us that really wants to ‘get at the truth’? ...Given that we want truth: why do we not prefer untruth? And uncertainty? Even ignorance? The problem of the value of truth appeared before us—or did we appear before it?...It is a rendezvous, so it seems, of questions and question marks. And would you believe that in the end it seems to us as if the problem had never yet been posed, as if we were seeing it for the first time, focusing on it, daring it? For there is daring to it, and perhaps no daring greater.
And who is this ‘we,’ who is so bold and daring as to focus for the first time on the question of whether truth is really of any value? Well, basically it’s Nietzsche himself...but he probably realizes that it would sound a little over the top for him to boast that he’s the most daring person ever, because of his looking into this question...
For may there not be doubt, first of all, whether opposites even exist...? However much value we may ascribe to truth, truthfulness or altruism, it may be that we need to attribute a higher and more fundamental value, to appearance, to the will to illusion, and to egoism and desire. It could even be possible that the value of those good and honorable things consists precisely in the fact that in an insidious way they are related to those bad, seemingly opposite things, linked, knit together, even identical perhaps. Perhaps! But who is willing to worry about such dangerous Perhapses? We must wait for a new category of philosophers to arrive...they will be in every sense the philosophers of the dangerous Perhaps. And to speak in all seriousness—I see these new philosophers coming.
And you wonder why Nietzsche went insane? But what about those “dangerous Perhapses”? Just how were they dangerous? Was Nietzsche’s life in jeopardy because he dared to look into these things? No. Was his livelihood threatened? No, his books sold quite well in his time. It’s just more of his bravado, I guess, trying to give his ideas an allure of being bold and daring.
We do not object to a judgment just because it is false...the question is rather to what extent the judgment furthers life, preserves life, preserves the species, perhaps even cultivates the species;
Hmm, did anyone ever worry about the survival of the human species before guys like Malthus and Darwin came along? Judging from our numbers, I don’t think we’re due for anybody’s endangered species list any time soon...
and we are in principle inclined to claim that judgments that are the most false...are the most indispensable to us... Admitting untruth as a condition of life: that means to resist familiar values in a dangerous way; and a philosophy that dares this has already placed itself beyond good and evil.
Oh the boldness and daring of it all, eh? Nietzsche throws off the shackles of “familiar values” like concern for truth, and places himself “beyond good and evil.” Lies in the service of “life” (meaning, presumably, anything that gives me an advantage in my own life) are perfectly fine. At least that’s the message we can take from this. Certainly it appeals to my desire as an atheist to decide my own values, how about you? And one final quote to round out this reading:
[From Section Four] Objections, evasions, a gay distrust, mockery—all are indications of health: everything absolute comes under pathology.
Here we see that not only did Nietzsche place very little value on truth, he ignored logic as well. He makes the absolute statement that all absolutes are “pathology” (unhealthy). So the statement itself is pathology. Hmm... Actually, if you look through his writings, Nietzsche quite regularly made absolute statements. Well, perhaps he didn’t mean for his writings to be taken seriously. Perhaps they were just meant as a colossal joke, the playful ravings of a near-lunatic. Perhaps!
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