what can no longer come differently: the advent of nihilism. . . . This future speaks even now in a hundred signs, this destiny announces itself every-where.”4 The culture of Europe, Nietzsche believed, was experiencing a malaise and general decline in vitality, and two of the most evident signs of this decline were the Christian and the anarchist. Nietzsche’s examination of these two types makes especially apparent what he thought wrong with humankind, and also illustrates the dynamic operations of nihilism. Since Nietzsche’s treatment is fundamental to our contemporary understanding of the problem, it will be useful in what follows to take a look at his approach in some detail, preparing the way for our own handling of the topic.5
THE CHRISTIAN, THE ANARCHIST, AND SOCRATES
The Christian, Nietzsche tells us, is objectionable as a symptom of humankind’s world-weariness. In rejecting the realm of the here and now in favor of a transcendent, heavenly afterlife, the Christian’s weakness is revealed. This weakness was first observed in Judaism whose logic was sim-ply carried out in the development of Christianity. When faced with the question “to be or not to be,” Nietzsche tells us that the Jews decided “to be at any price.”6Their flight from Egypt into the desert, in search of a new homeland, modified their spirit and character, and the price for their survival turned out to be an inversion of natural values and a flight from “Yahweh”
into the hands of “God.”
Yahweh originally represented the natural state of affairs that prevailed in the world, and the Jews were most noble in their worship of this severe and uncompromising presence. Yahweh was the principle of nature, personified as an arbitrary, all-powerful ruler who creates and destroys on a whim. The exo-dus from Egypt, however, modified the needs of the Jewish people, and in accordance with this situation Yahweh changed from a natural force that tested the Jewish toughness of spirit into a willful God who erected a moral order with the proclamation of commandments. The priest is the mouthpiece through which this unnatural state of affairs gains a voice, being the one who judges everything stupidly in terms of “obedience or disobedience to God.”7 The priest is a further symptom of decline, inventing sin as the condition nec-essary for his own survival, draining the strength of the people, and preparing the way for the nature-inverting onslaught of Christianity.
The Jews at least retained the noble assertion that they were a chosen people. But with Christianity, even this vestige of rank hierarchy was abol-ished. In this way Christianity revolted against the last thing that was noble in Judaism. Nietzsche interprets Christianity as an attempt to extend, pre-serve, and multiply the type of human spirit found in Jesus. This project, how-ever, was doomed to failure from the start. Jesus’ teaching was about a way to
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live, not about a way to believe, and the attempt to perpetuate his type through preaching to the masses only led to a perverted and distorted doctrine. The lower humans who followed Jesus reinterpreted his message in their own terms, thereby misconstruing it altogether. The Christian acts in a certain way because it is the law, but Jesus did what he did out of an instinctual physio-logical sensitivity to suffering, similar to that of Buddha or Epicurus. No one who experiences this sensitivity is able to endure extended contact with the world because they “feel every contact too deeply.”8The Christian, on the other hand, behaves in accordance with the rules of the church only in order to gain access to heaven and obtain eternal happiness. The difference is an extremely important one. It is the difference between acting in accord with one’s nature and rebelling against what one is.
The Christian, Nietzsche claims, is similar to the anarchist. The anarchist also denies the natural rank order of the world in favor of an egalitarian vision of the equality of all souls. This rejection of super- and subordination is a symptom of resentment against reality. It is the dissatisfied cry of the weak who, instead of acting in accord with their own temperaments, revolt against nature and commit a kind of hubris against the world. Nietzsche thought that the socialist doctrines advocated by anarchist and nihilist writers of his time attested to just this sort of weakness of spirit.9These advocates of political rev-olution thought that humans would enjoy expanded freedom and happiness with the abolition of property, leadership, unequal social status, and privilege.
But, Nietzsche points out, the complaints and desires of the anarchist are the complaints and desires of those who want revenge on a world that has denied them what they are too weak to seize for themselves. “[T]here is a fine dose of revenge in every complaint.”10Anarchists try to find someone at fault for their own suffering, and in this fault-finding is exhibited the weakness of one who cannot simply move forward with life. The difference between the Chris-tian and the anarchist is that ChrisChris-tians find fault in themselves while anar-chists find fault in others.
A world full of Christians and anarchists is a world in decline. Desiring release from suffering in the here and now, Christians and anarchists imagine the existence of illusory, utopian worlds beyond this one: the Christian heaven and the anarchist collective. In these otherworldly utopias, because everyone is equal, everything is perfect. Since all suffering is the result of the powerful imposing their will upon the weak, in these worlds, all suffering ceases. Pain and want are eliminated, life is happy, fulfilling, and easy. This is a result of the fact that the common structure of these utopias is in perfect synchronization with the capacities of the weak. But, in actual fact, this is a denial of the real structure of the world and a desecration of the earth itself. The desire for utopias is decadent in that they represent a deterioration of the capacity for real world life and living. The Christian and the anarchist are both nihilists in that they reject the only kind of life possible in the here and now, and in this
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rejection they undercut the possibility of the only type of meaning that ever was or ever will be available to humans.
When the weakest portions of society band together, perverting and dis-torting the natural order, the situation that obtains is nihilism. Christianity and anarchism are two symptoms of this tendency, but in the example of Socrates we have the quintessential model of the slave revolt against master morality and the most significant antecedent of modern nihilism. The most important thing to know about Socrates, according to Nietzsche, is that he was ugly. This physiological fact accounts for his entire orientation toward life in the Greek polis. He sought to take revenge upon the beautiful culture of the Greeks, and in a “masterful” departure from nature, he developed the art of dialectic. It was in the practice of logic and argumentation that Socrates saw his opportunity to overpower the authority of those around him and thus to secure a position of moral superiority to them. Anyone can learn logic, and since logic is directly opposed to appeals to authority, Socrates and his fol-lowers were advocates of a kind of anarchism that invited the lowest common denominator to overthrow and subvert the commands of those in power. It was the perfect weapon for the weak who had no other means of enforcing their own preferences.11
As this logical tendency spread throughout the Greek world, Socrates got his revenge. The Greek instincts began to change and the aristocratic bearing of the culture was destroyed, becoming democratic in its political and aes-thetic tastes. Tragedy deteriorated and humans became “absurdly rational.”12 Socrates was both a symptom of an emerging Greek nihilism and an instiga-tor of modern nihilism, according to Nietzsche. He stepped onto the scene at a time when Western culture was facing the question that the Jewish people had faced upon their exodus from Egypt: “To be or not to be?” Socrates offered an answer that the world came to accept and embrace, namely that
“with the clue of logic, thinking can reach to the nethermost depths of being, and that thinking cannot only perceive being but even modify it.”13 This Socratic imperative reaches all the way into the present, and with it Socrates wreaks his revenge.
APOLLO AND DIONYSUS
Nietzsche offers more than a symptomatology of the modern malaise. In addition to pointing out the various sores and ailments of Western culture, he identifies the common cause of these symptoms. In the spirit of revenge lies the urge to distort the natural order of the world, and this disposition is caused by a lack of Dionysian vitality.
For Nietzsche, the natural world is a chaotic flux of unorganized energy that has no purpose or meaning except the expression of the power that
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makes up its being. “The total character of the world . . . is in all eternity chaos. . . .”14Though this chaotic flux is a never-ending process, some of its fluctuations are distinctive. Humankind is one such distinctive fluctuation.
The human world is a symptom of the natural impulse toward the expression of power, and humans cannot avoid the struggle and battle that is at the root of their very being. With Heraclitus, Nietzsche sees the world of change and passing away as the only real world there is. To deny this is to deny the nature of the universe.
Though humans are a part of nature, they are also unique. They are like a wave on the surface of the ocean. A wave comes into being and disappears, but for those moments when it is in existence, it has a unique identity. Like-wise, humankind erupts out of chaos and briefly moves across the surface of Being, exhibiting a certain form and direction. In this way it is part of the nature and makeup of the universe. However, humans also possess the pecu-liar feature that they must have meaning in life. Just as a wave must have a shore to break on, so must humans have a purpose for which to live. This need for purpose and meaning is simply a consequence of humankind’s nature as a power-expressing species. The manner in which humans express this “will to power” is through the interpretation of the world.
In accordance with Kant’s “Copernican Revolution,” Nietzsche conceives of our phenomenal world as arising out of the relationship between our minds and the “Ding an Sich,” which for Nietzsche is “chaos.” By imposing order on chaos, humans “falsify” the “objective” world, producing an unfaithful repre-sentation of the reality that surrounds them. This reprerepre-sentation, in its static and comprehensible appearance, does not really correspond to the chaos that underlies it, but nevertheless what we call “knowledge” is just the outcome of this imposition of structure on the world’s disorder. Thinking and contempla-tion is, thus, more akin to a process of interpretacontempla-tion than it is to the simple apprehension of objective reality. Knowing, thinking, and cogitating are all acts of creation. They necessarily involve activity and effort pursued from a particular perspective in order to bring a subjective reality into existence. “We cannot look around our own corner: it is hopeless curiosity that wants to know what other kinds of intellects and perspectives there might be.”15As we navi-gate through the world, we are tied to the prejudices, structures, and endow-ments of our own perspectives. The human mind, in organizing and sifting through the data of experience, is at all times involved in a creative act of the interpretation of reality.
Nietzsche introduces two concepts in order to attempt an analysis of the structure of human interpretation. The Apollonian and the Dionysian are two opposite psychological tendencies that pull humans back and forth in a strug-gle between the need for order and contemplative representation and the desire for uninhibited frenzy and expression of energetic impulses. The pre-dominance of the Apollonian impulse is exhibited in the painter, sculptor, and
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epic poet. It is characterized by a certain restraint in representation that allows us to look at and linger on the product of interpretation. It forms and shapes life in the same manner that our minds give shape and form in dreams to the impulses from our unconscious. The Apollonian is the principium individua-tionis, organizing reality and making it representable. The Dionysian, on the other hand, is the failure and destruction of the principium individuationis. It resists the imposition of form and structure, delighting instead in the unin-hibited expression of frenzied activity. Dance, drunkenness, and music exhibit a predominance of the Dionysian impulse.16
Both the Apollonian and the Dionysian impulses are necessary in any act of human interpretation. The Apollonian contributes structure and form while the Dionysian contributes energy and intensity to interpretive under-takings. Like Aristotle’s form/matter duality, the two are conceptually distinct, but in fact normally appear in some admixture of one with the other. The product of such a nexus may end up being a well-balanced compromise between the two, as in the highest forms of Attic tragedy, or it may end up being an unbalanced mixture that leans too far toward one extreme or the other. If it leans too far toward the Dionysian, the product will be a confusing frenzy of undisciplined activity. If it leans too far toward the Apollonian, it will be an overly static and lifeless representation.
The human world is full of interpretations that lean one way or the other, but it also possesses a few examples of interpretations that are well balanced. The tendency of Western civilization since Socrates, however, has been to neglect the Dionysian in favor of the Apollonian. Nietzsche’s dis-satisfaction with this development is more than simply a distaste for the products of these interpretations. It is more importantly an observation about the types of humans that predominate in the world. As one is more insistently called toward the Apollonian, one is called away from the Dionysian, and it is Dionysus rather than Apollo who provides the content and vitality of life. Whereas Apollo offers structure, “by the mystical tri-umphant cry of Dionysus the spell of individuation is broken, and the way lies open to the Mothers of Being, to the innermost heart of things.”17The Dionysian is the vital energy and activity lying at the heart of reality. It is the unstructured and overpowering chaos that perpetually threatens struc-ture and order. The Freudian notion of the Id comes close to depicting the Dionysian. It is the power and energy that drives our mental machinery, being held in check and channeled for useful purposes by the Ego, which is itself a notion paralleling the Apollonian. Whereas the Ego should serve the Id, directing and shaping its urges in a manner consonant with reality, an Ego that exists at the expense of the Id is like the Apollonian holding dom-inance over the Dionysian. It signals the sickness, neurosis, and decline of the organism. For Nietzsche, the proliferation of Apollonian interpretations of the world, then, reveals an underlying general disorder in humankind. It
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suggests that those who exist in the world have exhausted their spiritual energy and vitality. It signals a lack of spiritual depth.
Nietzsche’s diagnosis for modern human beings is that they suffer from a lack of the Dionysian. This is apparent in those interpretive products that attempt to erect illusory representations of utopian worlds that cannot be made to exist in the here and now. These purely formal speculations ignore the single most important evidence against them; namely, that humans are part of nature and must struggle and express their power as long as they remain living. Without struggle and contest, humans degenerate and become sick. Those who become sick instinctively retreat from struggle and contest, and in commiseration with them, the rest of humankind becomes infected.
In obtaining the pity of the strong, the weak gain a type of control over the world and invert the natural order of things. With this inversion, the weak seek to bring an end to the cycle of struggle. By banding together they become collectively strong, and as Nietzsche observes, “What is strong wins:
that is the universal law. If only it were not so often precisely what is stupid and evil!”18
HEALTHY CULTURE AND THE WELL-ORDERED SOCIETY
Nietzsche is as explicit as he can be about what is wrong with the culture that he observes around him. “What is bad? But I have already said this: all that is born of weakness, envy, of revenge. The anarchist and the Christian have the same origin.”19Of course these are only two among “a hundred signs,” but by showing the common origin of the Christian and the anarchist in weakness, Nietzsche offers his diagnosis of modern humankind’s disease. It is because of the lack of Dionysian fervor that humankind is sick. Collectively speaking, modern humans are not up to the task of producing “higher humans.” Doc-trines such as Christianity and anarchism don’t even believe in higher humans, and in this weakness is exhibited.
This situation is fatal to higher culture. A higher, healthy culture is one that mirrors nature and its order of rank. Nietzsche seems to follow Plato in the assertion that such a society is naturally divided into three types: the spiritual ones, the guardians, and the mediocre. “A high culture is a pyramid:
it can stand only on a broad base; its first presupposition is a strong and soundly consolidated mediocrity.”20The mediocre ones are the most numer-ous and least ambitinumer-ous members of a healthy collectivity. They are, however, indispensable in that they provide society with its basic necessities such as
“handicraft, trade, agriculture, science, the greatest part of art, the whole quintessence of professional activity.”21They are the backbone and the very machines that make collective life possible. It is well in accord with nature that the vast majority of humans are drawn to this sort of social activity by
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instinct, and there is certainly no need to coerce them into service. The mediocre ones find happiness in this function.
Once the material base of society is secure, there is much that humankind
Once the material base of society is secure, there is much that humankind