Learning from Nietzsche
Nietzsche suggests that all life can be characterised by a “will to power”; that all life essentially shares an ambition to dominate and exercise control over its neighbour. He saw this not only in the dimension of human relations but all the way down to that of the lot of a micro organism.1 Effectively life, even if it is just a weed growing in a field, seeks to expand its horizons, such that its environment is modified to suit it and it can prosper.
When it comes to human kind though, there is the added dimension of language which creates a social context in which the “will to power” operates on a whole different plane. Though we may resort to violence to gain ascendancy over another, language is a far more effective instrument.
Words, in a very real sense, govern how we perceive and interpret our world; they form the structure from which it is fabricated. What we believe to be right or wrong, or true or false, is wrapped up and delivered, and constructed by language. Using it, we can shape the world to our advantage and craft it after our own imaginations and ambitions.
But language is a tool which cuts in two directions. We are in turn the slaves and the masters of it. Though we can make it work for us, we are at the same time caught in its grasp. Nietzsche writes:
What, then is truth? A movable army of metaphors, metonymies, anthropomorphisms, in short a sum of human relations which have been subjected to poetic and rhetorical intensification, translation and decoration, and which after they have been in use for a long time, strike a people as firmly established, canonical and binding; truths are illusions of which we have forgotten that they are illusions, metaphors which have become worn by frequent use and have lost all sensual vigour, coins which, having lost their stamp, are now regarded as metal and no longer as coins.2
Nietzsche suggests that what we have come to understand as moral and ethical absolutes, started life as nothing more than words, but that as time has gone on, these humble beginnings have been forgotten. Notions of truth, and right and wrong, now have a far more lofty status. Language has for all intent and purpose, shaped the world in which we inhabit. It has set boundaries and limits on our humanity.
But the expansive individual can modify these boundaries - they are forged in language and cast in words and as such, can be recast. We can make our perspective, the perspective. In fact, Nietzsche suggests that this is exactly what the innate striving for power within us all seeks. We need to convince others of the truth of our convictions. A subconscious ”will to power” drives us to interpret our world and compel others to accept our view as the norm, and so in effect, fashion the world after ourselves.3
We might not like or agree with Nietzsche’s idea of truth – although I for one, am willing to go a long way with his understanding – but he should give us pause for thought. Next time you find yourself waxing lyrical on your favourite subject, or sharing your political or religious ideas, think about what it is you are doing and why are you doing it. Are you really just passing on neutral dispassionate information for your listeners to take or leave and be untouched by? If you are anything like me, I suspect not. I want people to be convinced by my ideas and adopt a new and better perspective – that is, my perspective. It doesn’t take too much introspection for me to realize that actually, what I am really seeking to do is to shape their world after mine. I might be doing this for what, I believe, are the best of motives but where I think Nietzsche’s philosophy is particularly incisive, is in the deeper realization that we rarely, if ever, do something for purely altruistic ends.
As someone who believes he has a gift in Christian teaching, I find Nietzsche particularly challenging. I can no longer see the act of teaching as an ethically neutral activity; in fact, from a Nietzschian perspective, it is hard not to see it as anything but an aggressive move and an oppressive act. Words are never neutral; our “speech acts” always make a difference. If I expand my horizons and broaden my frontiers, yours must lessen, you must make room and you must decrease.
In this respect I have found myself reflecting on Jesus’ teachings. I have noted how his way of teaching is very different to ours. His preferred method was that of the parable – or the story if you like. He didn’t deliver weighty sermons or construct sophisticated theologies. If anything, his stories generate more questions than answers. They encourage further reflection and deeper thought, the meaning has to be sought out and pondered over. Meaning is something which is arrived at though a kind of dialogue in which we must invest something of ourselves. It is as if the teacher student hierarchy fades and instead truth is sought in a more relational conversational setting. I find my horizons are broadened and I am challenged to think in new ways. And in this sense, I find his words enlarge my perspective and broaden my vision. In him, I find (again), I am more than I might otherwise be.
- Friedrich Nietzsche, The Will to Power(Trans. Walter Kaufmann & R. J. Hollingdale; New York: Vintage, 1968) 346 [↩]
- Friedrich Nietzsch, “On Truth and Lying in a Non-Moral Sense”, in The Birth of Tragedy and Other Writings(Trans. Ronald Spiers; Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1999) 146 [↩]
- Nietzsche, The Will, 267 [↩]
4 Responses to “Learning from Nietzsche”
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isc
Said this on May 11th, 2007 at 8:41pm:… or maybe, on this analysis, Jesus was just making his oppressive power-play in a more subtle way - drawing people in through an intriguing style of loaded and moralistic storytelling?
If propositional communication is inherently oppressive, then maybe (as people wanting to live as “good” people - I’m presuming here!) we should pack up and throw in our lot with old Wittgenstein (”Whereof one may not speak, thereof one must remain silent” and all that).
I think that this whole area opens so many cans of worms I don’t really know where to start…
One might be that it’s not new to say that all such communication is “oppressive” or a “power play” to form someone else’s thinking to your own view of the world. In one sense, this is just a truism that everyone has known from the beginning. And there has for a long time been a strain of psychotherapy that is so committed to the principle that the therapist tries at all costs to say as little as possible and then if at all possible to restrict what they do say to encouraging nods, grunts and repetition of what the client has just said (the non-directive therapy people). I used to know someone who went to such a therapist for a while. After a bit, they jacked it in with that therapist. This was because they were spending a lot of money on talking to someone who (we assume) was highly educated and trained to heal real mental pain, but who on principle refused to say much or provide any direction in the process. Back to Nietzche, Wittgenstein and the rest. From the therapists’s point of view, they were being true to their principles and training and refusing to “use language to oppress” or “impose their agenda” on the client. From my friend’s point of view, it was just a waste of time and money… She went to another therapist who was more willing to talk back to her and made quick progress.
I’m not saying that the idea that what AJ’s saying is wrong. Only that, even if we can’t quite put our finger on why in a way that can’t be deconstructed, we do really have a clear and real idea of what “right” and “wrong” are - and even where we disagree we can have a meaningful conversation without that necessarily becoming an attempt to destroy the other’s perspective. I think that we also recognise humility when we see it (although there’s not much of that in London, I’ll grant that - even in Church circles…) and I think that humility is the quality that lets us engage with people without wanting to dominate them. I think that we also recognise and feel in our bones when attempted domination/oppression is happening. Maybe (ooh - being controversial) a particular style or thematic preoccupation of certain clergy we could think of!
Another point that occurs to me is that Nietzche was amoral - in fact believing that morality in general and Christianity in particular were what were holding human beings back from an evolutionary leap into becoming superhuman. So you become a better person by abandoning moral behaviour and thought and re-conceiving the world as a set of power games that you should go about winning. Nice. It strikes me that Nietzche was right in thinking that what he was saying was opposed to Christianity. If he preached the “will to power” as the epitome of “good”, then he is right to think that Jesus taught and modelled the opposite - as Jurgen Moltmann called him: “The Crucified God” - in traditional Christian thinking, submitting to evil and in so doing modelling something fundamental about the essence of the good God and forging reconciliation with an alienated creation.
I agree that oppression is to be avoided, because I believe as a Christian that it is morally wrong and that this principle is clearly discernable from how Jesus lived. I think that this sense that oppression is morally wrong is clear in the desire not to “oppress” others through use of communication/language. But having this sense and acting on it by trying to avoid that oppression of others, seems to me to be to disavow and avoid what Nietzche proposed (embracing the will to power and becoming the superhuman race), rather than to follow him. Amen to that.
What do you reckon?
AJ
Said this on May 12th, 2007 at 10:21am:Hey ISC
Thanks for your comments on this blog. Looking at the site stats, it is the least viewed post but for me, one of the most important so far.
You are right in your “tongue in cheek” suggestion of Jesus’ subversive power play - but hey it is all interpretation and it’s all about what you bring to the text!
When it comes to Nietzsche’s philosophy though, I think you may have missed my point. I don’t mean to suggest we incorporate Nietzsche’s thought wholesale into our Christian believe system, but just that we learn from aspects of it. That is why I did not explore this darker side of Nietzsche here. My personal view is that Nietzsche diagnosed the problem correctly but then offered the wrong solution - but hey, we all only “know in part…”!
My purpose in writing this post was to make us think again about the way we speak about the gospel and think about truth - I guess, in this sense, it is my own subversive power play. I am repulsed - and I think, so is the rest of our post-modern world - by that form of Christianity which unreflectively believes itself to be the custodian of all truth. Christianity in such a guise steam rollers over human lives and violates people in the process. This may seem like strong rhetoric but I absolutely believe that much of the way the gospel is promulgated is incredibly immoral and further, I believe, Christ would want no part of it. People are delicate and easily crushed but the God I know is absolutely respectful of that. Moltmann has indeed deeply influenced my thinking!
isc
Said this on May 19th, 2007 at 5:53pm:Well, I know we agree on that - but I’m just glad I managed to get a rise of you! The truth is that I didn’t miss the point, but I don’t see how it’s possible to do justice to Nietzche if we pick that aspect of what he was saying and leave the bit that I was talking about. I think that it hangs together and leads to what I think was his key message - that we have to “transcend” morality, leave behind ideas of “good” and “evil” and embrace the power play. So the power in the use of language for him was a “given” and not a “bad thing” - since categorising it as a “bad thing” - “oppressive” is to make a moral judgement about it by way of the use of a fundamental Christian value (the God-given dignity of human beings and the moral “wrongness” of one person riding roughshod over that for their own selfish (another moral category) ends. And that is to move from universal concepts of “good” and “evil” - and so not really very post-modern (or genuinely Nietzchean), it seems to me…
But I take the point - that if that observation about the inherent “loadedness” of language is taken in isolation from the wider context of what Nietzche was getting at, then that observation was valid.
I suppose that basically the issue of oppression for me is that you just can’t get away from communicating with people and that whether that communication is inherently “oppressive” or not is to import a moral framework and judgement. I think that the fact that most people in this world aren’t Christians bears witness to how ineffective Christians are in converting people. This, for me, is a pragmatic testimony to how ineffective the oppressive or manipulative techniques (verbal or non-verbal, intentional or unintentional) of so much evangelism are.
I think that the sensitivity that ex-fundamentalists rightly feel about “oppressiveness” of the use of language comes from their own experience of having lived in what is often a highly emotionally charged and manipulative sub-culture. When we have lived lives which have been marked both by being manipulated and by the manipulation of others for our own ends and then wake up and realise both that that’s what we’ve been doing and that it’s profoundly at odds with what we understand to be Jesus’ values in the Gospels, then that’s a shock. The question becomes “So what now?” or “How can I now live my life as a committed Christian but without the trappings of the so-called “Christian” culture that embodies and lives by values that we find to be fundamentally un-Christlike?”.
I think that it is really all about that - about a moral outrage at a sub-culture and religious conditioning that does so often oppress and abuse people’s God-given dignity. Whereas people who’ve never been in that “world” (or other similar sub-cultural worlds like religious or psychological cult communities or radical political movements) just don’t feel that way - and don’t therefore have that acute moral sensibility about it all.
I think that, to that extent, those of us who see and feel the oppressive use of language and other modes of manipulation in Church communities, can constructively see ourselves as having a prophetic role. I think that Church will always be a mixed bag - as we all have our own strengths, weaknesses, insights, past experiences and perspectives. And so I think that those of us that see things this way can speak to those who don’t as a “check” on their potential excesses. So “church” as a community working it out together isn’t just a game for the post-evo’s/chari’s/whatever, but for the whole church. And so the “post-whatevers” have a valuable and, I think, essential function in that ongoing conversation.
But hopefully (here’s the sting) surely if what we’re doing as church is really Christian, it doesn’t stop at conversation. But that’s where it does get messy, doesn’t it? Because as soon as we get out of the pub/funky coffee hangout and into the real world, we have to stop kicking around ideas (as fun as that is) and actually do something. Or do we?
But if we do think that we should “do something” and not just sit around spouting what most people in this world think is (let’s be honest!) pseudy intellectual bollocks, then what do we do? Or do we “do” anything? Is the drive to “do something”, to “save the world” not just a hangover from our evangelical “activist” conditioning? If we don’t believe in converting people anymore (or do we?), then do we “need” to satisfy that inner evangelical that makes us feel guilty unless we are actually doing something to save the world (albeit by our new agenda of what that means)?
But then, if we do just go with the instinct to “do something”, the choice of what to do (among the million things that any of us could do) and the decision to put it into action will definitely affect other people’s lives. And be a moral choice. And if there’s a sensitivity to “communication” being “oppressive”, then (to get all biblical) how much more is “action” “oppressive”? “Sticks and stones” and all that.
But I think that I’ve swerved into another of AJ’s posts here. I’ll sign off now.
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Said this on April 27th, 2008 at 8:08am:[...] wants to appropriate these words of Christ for myself. John 14:6 [NIV] [↩]See my post entitled Learning from Nietzsche [...]