Nietzsche Versus Paul

If it is assumed that, for Nietzsche, Modernity includes both the purification of Christianity and the accumulation of the whole of its history, the definition of Modernity becomes one that turns around the question of the continuity-discontinuity relationship between Modernity and Christianity. This relationship of continuity and discontinuity excludes the identity of Modernity with Christianity, something that Nietzsche’s own words explicitly affirm.1 In addition, and from the perspective of the purification of Christianity in Modernity, this continuity-discontinuity relationship is developmental: Christianity is concluded in Modernity. But such a conclusion does not reduce this continuity-discontinuity relationship to an antithetical relationship according to which Modernity is the antithesis of Christianity. For Modernity is also the accumulation of the history of Christianity. Besides its conclusion of Christianity in morality, Modernity includes the (possibility of the) immoral Dionysian, that is, the anti-Christian. In sum, Modernity has a continuity-discontinuity relationship with the Christian and a continuity-discontinuity relationship with the anti-Christian, that is, the Dionysian. But if Modernity’s continuity with Christianity (morality) means its antithetical discontinuity with the Dionysian, Modernity’s discontinuity with Christianity does not necessarily mean that Modernity is identical with the Dionysian.

It is Modernity’s discontinuity with Christianity that defines Modernity as other to both the Dionysian and the Christian. This turns the discontinuity of Modernity with Christianity to the touchstone for a definition proper to Modernity. The development of this initial definition of Modernity should be furthered in the frame of the Nietzschean history of Christianity. How should this task be approached? So far, the reconstruction of the Nietzschean history of Christianity saw the question of the value of life from the viewpoint of suffering as its axis. Accordingly, in turning to Modernity as part of this history, it should be asked how Nietzsche sees Modernity answering this question, insofar as this answer marks Modernity’s discontinuity with Christianity. Additionally, the Nietzschean history of Christianity identified science and art as being discontinuous with Christianity, and more precisely as anti-Christian Dionysian. The definition of Modernity within the Nietzschean history of Christianity (or according to Modernity’s continuity-discontinuity relationships with the Dionysian and the Christian) may be formulated as the following question: what would be the definition of Modernity according to Nietzsche’s view of the discontinuity of modern science and modern art with Christianity, in view of the answer that these two give to the problem of suffering?

My approach to this question starts with the examination of the continuity-discontinuity relationship between Christianity and Modernity as it is marked by “the greatest recent event—that ‘God is dead’: that the belief in the Christian god has become unbelievable.”2 This great event of the unbelief in the Christian God not only marks, as it may seem, the relationship of discontinuity between Modernity and Christianity, but also marks its relationship of continuity, particularly as Nietzsche adds that this event is only “beginning to cast its first shadows over Europe.”³ Nietzsche’s cheerful⁴ announcement from The Gay Science that “God is dead”⁵ is an event that has not fully ended. In addition, this event is a prophecy:⁶ It is announced by a madman (wearing the mask of Diogenes of Sinope)⁷ to men who are God’s murderers and yet do not know of what they did.⁸ The incompleteness of this event points in the direction of the task that Nietzsche sets before himself: “to vanquish his [God’s] shadow, too.”⁹

If that is correct, and if the event of the death of God speaks of “historical atheism”10 in the Christian God,¹¹ then the task of atheism is not yet completed: modern man is not cheerful and gay, which is as it should be after this event. The task of Modernity is to overcome the Christian God completely. Modernity cannot remain continuous-discontinuous with Christianity. If God is dead, the modern reproduction, or secularization, of Christianity—being the remaining shadow of God—is a nonauthentic lie insofar as this lie is a dead lie.

As the event of the death of God takes place under these circumstances (that is, not being fully completed), modern man kills God and yet keeps his shadow. Put another way, modern man kills God in order to keep his shadow. Thus, God’s own shadow is the cause of the death of God. Which is then the shadow of God? Following the conversation between the “retired Pope” and Zarathustra, God’s own pity is the cause of his death: God died “choked on his all-too-great pity.” Yet, it is also clear from Zarathustra’s questioning of the old pope, who “was blind in one eye,” that he takes the old pope’s testimony to be apparently true, or better yet as an incomplete testimony. In this conversation, Zarathustra repeats that God might have died in more than one way: “Surely it might have happened that way—that way, and also in some other way.” Nietzsche’s intention in making Zarathustra thus question the pope is not one directed at the possibility that some other cause, besides God’s pity, has also brought him to his death. Nietzsche wants to say that the old pope, despite his close relationship to God (being his servant), does not know completely of how God died. The pope does not know of this how more than “what they say.”¹² As I shall demonstrate next, it is a fact that the old pope is one-eyed, which explains his lack of complete knowledge about how God died.

The case is that God did not only die choked on his all-too-great pity, for God was also murdered by “the Ugliest Man.”¹³ This is the man whom Zarathustra meets immediately after meeting the old pope:

God’s pity remains the reason behind his death: pity choked and killed God. The killing of God is the riddle that was hidden from the old pope. But why could the old pope not know of this despite his close relationship to God? I mentioned that the answer lies in the fact that the old pope was one-eyed. How is that? Nietzsche clarifies this problem in his other writings, starting with The Antichrist. This is where Nietzsche “give[s] a few examples of what these petty people [early Christians] have put into the mouth of their master [Jesus].”¹⁵ The following is one of these examples: “‘And if thine eye offend thee, pluck it out; it is better for thee to enter into the kingdom of God with one eye, than having two eyes to be cast into hell fire: Where their worm dieth not, and the fire is not quenched.’ (Mark ix, 47–48)—It is not precisely the eye that is meant.”¹⁶

Although later, in the Twilight of the Idols, Nietzsche writes that “fortunately no Christian follows this prescription,”¹⁷ the old pope (to consider the allegorical spirit of Thus Spoke Zarathustra) seems to be an exceptional case here. Yet here, Nietzsche clarifies that it is not precisely the eye that is meant. What is meant is man’s “passions. … [and] de-sires,”¹⁸ which this Christian point of view fights with “methods [that] seem like those of a dentist whose sole cure for pain is to pull out the teeth.”¹⁹ According to this, Nietzsche is here drawing a contrast between the old pope and the ugliest man. But this contrast is not meant to make of the old pope the most beautiful:

It is clear, then, that Zarathustra’s old pope, as one may deduce from his profession (or his practice, his cure), is one who follows the teachings of the primitive church. The primitive church does not fight passion by way of spiritualization but by way of castration. Thus, the old pope, after plucking out his eye, is totally unaware that passion can be possibly ugly or beautiful. In continuity with this, and when Zarathustra rejects the Christian God (for “he [God] wreaked revenge on his. … never finished … pots and creations for having bungled them himself”),²¹ the old pope can imagine another form of piety after the death of his Christian God: “O Zarathustra, with such disbelief you are more pious than you believe. Some god in you must have converted you to your godlessness. Is it not your piety itself that no longer lets you believe in a god?”²² Nietzsche here identifies one kind of atheism. This is atheism as the negation of God as Christianity’s God. Within this concept of atheism, there remains the possibility that modern man may become a-Christianly religious.²³ This is the possibility “that the religious instinct … [is] in the process of growing powerfully,”²⁴ which may bring modern man to make even an ass into his God.²⁵

Nietzsche’s previously quoted words now demand more attention: “on the soil out of which Christianity grew the concept spiritualization of passion could not possibly be conceived.” As anticipated, Christianity’s spiritualization of passion refers to an aspect of Christianity other than that of castration. This is in fact the order of the beautiful and the ugly. Christian spiritualization refers to Christianity’s beautifying of man. And, in turn, Christian spiritualization makes reference to the ugliness of man. Thus, insofar as the ugliest man is the murderer of God, Christian spiritualization leads to a second Nietzschean conception of atheism, according to which the death of God is an act of murder.

It is clear enough that Zarathustra’s ugliest man is the murderer of God. Yet, to conceive of this second conception of atheism, I further recall my discussion of the idea that the cause standing behind man’s murdering of God is man’s bad conscience. I claim here, accordingly, that the ugliness of man represents man’s feeling of bad conscience, and thereby that the ugliest man is the later modern man, within the cumulative history of Christianity, holding “the maximum feeling of guilty indebtedness.”26 I base this claim on the following two considerations: First, the eye, which the old pope does not have, is the eye that the ugliest man together with God, as the “witness [of man’s ugliness, … the witness who] saw [his ugliness]. … through and through,”²⁷ possesses. This is the eye of pessimism. It is the eye that sees the ugly instead of the beautiful “pure forms”:²⁸ “In the Manu Law-Book … only the most spiritual human beings are permitted beauty, beautiful things. … On the other hand, nothing is more strictly forbidden them than ugly manners or a pessimistic outlook, an eye that makes ugly. … ‘The world is perfect’—thus speaks the instinct of the most spiritual, the affirmative instinct.”²⁹

Being antithetical to Christianity, according to its purposes,30 the Manu Law-Book points in the direction of noble-morality. And accordingly, it leads to a second consideration: considering his talk with Zarathustra against “the little people … [and] the preacher … who himself came from among them,”³¹ the ugliest man descends from a noble origin.³² This noble man has the eye that makes ugly, or the eye that, like the eye of God, sees man’s passions in man’s depth: “he [God] saw man’s depths and ultimate grounds, all his concealed disgrace and ugliness.”³³ And, following my previous analysis, to see the passions in the depth of man means to see them with a bad eye, that is, as evil. Accordingly, and in view of his noble origin, the ugliest man, who should affirm evil, suffers from bad conscience, the conscience of his passions being the original evil depth.

One should ask here whether the idea of the ugliest man’s bad conscience as his conscience of his passionate original evil depth contradicts the fact that pity was the cause of the death of God. Zarathustra answers this question negatively as soon as he departs from the ugliest man: “How poor man is after all, … how ugly, how wheezing, how full of hidden shame! I have been told that man loves himself: ah, how great must this self-love be! How much contempt stands against! This fellow too loved himself, even as he despised himself: a great lover he seems to me, and a great despiser.”³⁴

God does not return in Zarathustra, as Tillich sees it.³⁵ If the death of (the son of) the Jewish God made a New Testament possible (that is, renewed the reflection of God-man through the Christian love), the modern death of the Christian God is the ultimate end of such reflection; and consequently, it is the birth of a new alternative conception of love.³⁶ On the one hand, and according to God’s love, man’s depth, man’s passion, or man’s original sin is pitiful. And when God pities man, God knows one solution: God sacrifices himself, he dies choked on his all-too-great pity. It is according to this Christian way of reasoning that the old pope, as seen above, could read a new testament, a new piety born from Zarathustra’s atheism. Still, according to (the ugliest) man’s new self-love, man’s depth, man’s passion, man’s ugliness is not pitiful or sinful but shameful: The new ugliest man kills God because of God’s pity, or pity through which this God does not reflect man anymore.

Nietzsche’s idea of bad conscience, as represented through man’s conscience of his ugliness in Thus Spoke Zarathustra, resembles the same idea in the Genealogy of Morals. Toward the end of Zarathustra, the higher men “are merry. … From them too their enemy retreats, the spirit of gravity. … They have learned to laugh at themselves. … Nausea is retreating from [them]. … All stupid shame runs away, they unburden themselves.”37 In parallel, man’s killing of God, in the Genealogy of Morals, results in man’s liberating himself from the accumulated debt to God. Man succeeds at overcoming the (bad) conscience of guilt. And after having killed God, man’s bad conscience becomes the self-conscience of ugliness, it becomes man’s genealogical consciousness for which the history of God is the history of ugly truths (that is, dialectical truths governed by the arbitrariness of the passions accumulated in man’s depth). Man thereafter succeeds at connecting atheism with naivety: man substitutes the eye that makes ugly with the naive laughing eye, which, as such, makes beautiful; Nietzsche points out that man could not become conscious of the beautiful and the good without becoming conscious of the ugly and evil.³⁸ I stress that man’s becoming conscious of the ugly is bound to the feeling of shamefulness and not to the feeling of guilt: shamefulness follows guilt. Hence, it is not exactly true that “with the guilt that he has taken upon himself, the ugliest man returns innocence to existence.”³⁹ Instead, the ugliest man promises (beautiful) innocence, as he becomes shameful and not guilty anymore.

The event of the death of God marks a complete identity between the continuity and the discontinuity between Christianity and Modernity. On the one side, Modernity is discontinuous with Christianity in view of its murder of the Christian God. On the other, Modernity is continuous with Christianity in view of this same act of murder. It is God’s pity—or slave-morality’s pity—that Nietzsche uncovers as the only cause of the death of God. What remains after the death of God is one and the same thing: his own shadow, his own pity. The way in which modern science and modern art come to reproduce the shadow of God is the subject of the following sections.

In The Gay Science, and immediately after his elucidation of the “meaning of our cheerfulness”40 resulting from the death of God, Nietzsche follows the remaining shadow of God by way of turning directly to the realm of modern science. Here, Nietzsche’s starting argument is directed at a criticism of the constancy of modern science’s idea that in “science convictions have no rights of citizenship. … [o]nly when they decide to descend to the modesty of hypotheses.” Nietzsche continues to unfold the meaning of this idea: “more precisely, … a conviction may obtain admission to science only when it ceases to be a conviction.”⁴¹ So he concludes:

Since science is still making its first steps within the ongoing history of Christianity, it should depend on this history: science must borrow some prior conviction from the history it has just entered and, at the same time, sacrifice all other convictions. It follows that the validity of this criticism of modern science is grounded in the assumption that modern science works within the framework of genealogical consciousness. Nietzsche can claim that modern science may borrow one faith from many only insofar as modern science is newly born into a reality of a plurality of possible faiths. And these faiths belong to the history (of Christianity), which genealogical consciousness revealed, and which modern science has just entered. Nietzsche’s argument against modern science loses its validity without this assumption, for otherwise Nietzsche cannot mark the difference between science’s hypothesis as a pregiven faith and as an independent hypothesis.

Against this background, Nietzsche turns to question science’s purification (that is, sacrifice) of the accumulated historical faiths before its genealogical consciousness into “a [one] faith.”43 Here, Nietzsche’s question does not concern the problem as to whether science should realize this act of purification or not. Additionally, it does not concern the problem as to whether such an act puts the truth-value of scientific inquiry into question. For Nietzsche, this act speaks of a governing active will moving scientific inquiry from the stage of putting its hypothesis to the stage of proving its truth. That is, in short, science’s will to truth. Accordingly, and as Nietzsche affirms that there is simply no science without presuppositions, modern science’s formulation of such a hypothesis must rely on its contextualization within the history of Christianity.

After this stage, in which it has been made possible for this discipline to begin, Nietzsche takes the question about the latter autonomy of modern science in relation to the history of Christianity as one depending only on the meaning of its will to truth. Nietzsche’s question turns out to be directed at the meaning of science’s action of affirming its one faith: “‘truth at any price.’ …‘At any price’: how well we understand these words once we have offered and slaughtered one faith after another on this altar!”⁴⁴

The question whether truth is needed must … have been … affirmed to such a degree that the principle, the faith, the conviction finds expression: “Nothing is needed more than truth.” … This unconditional will to truth—what is it? Is it the will not to allow oneself to be deceived? Or is it the will not to deceive? For the will to truth could be interpreted in the second way, too—if only the special case “I do not want to deceive myself” is subsumed under the generalization “I do not want to deceive.” But why not deceive? But why not allow oneself to be deceived?⁴⁵

Nietzsche’s introduction of the idea of faith in modern science is not meant only to conclude that there is simply no science without presuppositions. The Nietzschean claim that science has its beginning in faith renders a genuine questioning of the value of truth possible. Once truth is read as faith, the value of truth becomes comparable to the value of untruth. For otherwise, the value of truth remains self-referential: truth or nothing. And consequently, the (lack of) value of untruth also makes its reference to truth alone: untruth or truth. Nevertheless, once faith becomes the grounds from which both truth and illusion emerge, the values of truth and untruth are subjected to the same criteria of usefulness. Nietzsche’s critical question becomes the following one: will as will to truth or as will to illusion? And since “both truth and untruth [are] constantly proved to be useful,”46 then,

“will to truth” does not mean “I will not allow myself to be deceived” but—there is no alternative—“I will not deceive, not even myself”; and with that we stand on moral ground. … Thus the question: “Why science?” leads back to the moral problem: Why have morality at all when life, nature, and history are “not moral”? No doubt, those who are truthful in that audacious and ultimate sense that is presupposed by the faith in science thus affirm another world than the world of life, nature, and history; and insofar as they affirm this “other world”—look, must they not by the same token negate its counterpart, this world—our world?⁴⁷

If that is the case, Nietzsche’s criticism of modern science, thus formulated, is reduced to a criticism of morality. Yet, before moving on to see how Nietzsche conceives of “morality as a problem,” a further account of the continuity-discontinuity relationship of science and Christianity until this point is needed. Nietzsche says that after the death of the Christian God, modern science does not affirm the Christian faith itself but “a faith”: “a metaphysical faith.” Nietzsche does not consider faith in science as identical to the Christian faith: this faith “rests [on], … take [s] … [its] fire, too, from the flame lit by … [the] Christian faith which was also the faith of Plato.” And here he adds: “But what if this should become more and more incredible, if nothing should prove to be divine any more unless it were error, blindness, the lie—if God himself should prove to be our most enduring lie?”48 In this view, and in harmony with the above conclusion that the shadow of God (pity) constitutes the identity of the continuity and discontinuity of Modernity with Christianity, the following claim can be made. For Nietzsche, Christianity’s faith in the Christian God is, by itself, an authentic illusion, while modern science is Christianity without Christianity’s faith in the Christian God being such an authentic illusion. More explicitly, one finds underneath Nietzsche’s previously quoted words—“if God himself should prove to be our most enduring lie”—the penetrating claim that the successful case (which is not without an end) of the life and the death of the Christian God proves that it is the will to illusion which moves history. And insofar as, in Modernity, the Christian God is not an authentic lie anymore, that is, insofar as the Christian God has become a dead truth, science’s metaphysical faith in the divinity of truth cannot be said to be an authentic lie. Again, Nietzsche holds as truth that lie which transcends the dialectics of history (that is, which proves the illusion that it is the sole and only truth, through its vital exercise of its will to power). The Christian God was just such a Nietzschean truth, or such an authentic lie. The death of the Christian God proves that history is the history of the will to illusion. Since God is dead, the truth—or the authentic lie—of the Christian God is not possible anymore.⁴⁹ Accordingly, modern science’s will to this God is a will to truth, and not a will to the Nietzschean illusory truth. Modern science’s will to truth is a nonauthentic lie. In sum, the continuity-discontinuity relationship between Christianity and modern science is one between the Christian faith being an authentic lie and the faith in science being a nonauthentic lie.

In what way does Nietzsche take modern science to be a nonauthentic lie? For Nietzsche,

Nietzsche’s main point here is that modern science is not for itself. Modern science does not own an independent faith. Thus, if modern science is not an ideal in itself, it should be read as being subjected to some other ideal above it, that is, subjected either to the ascetic ideal or to art as the ascetic ideal’s true antithesis.⁵¹ Otherwise, science remains “a hiding place of every kind of discontent, disbelief, gnawing worm, despectio sui [self-contempt], bad conscience, … [a place where scholars are] sufferers who refuse to admit to themselves what they are, with drugged and heedless men, who fear only one thing: regaining consciousness.”⁵² Following this description, one is reminded of the ugliest man. Disbelief, self-contempt, and bad conscience bring up the portrait of the ugliest man,⁵³ for in being such a hiding place, modern science conceals the ugliness of the murderer of God.

Nietzsche does not see such concealment in a positive light. This concealment (of the ugly) is different from the concealment produced by the making-beautiful eye of art. Instead, this concealment is reached through modern (scientific) work [Arbeit]. In Beyond Good and Evil, Nietzsche criticizes the kind of concealment of the “proud of itself, stupidly proud, … modern, noisy, time-consuming industriousness (‘Arbeitsamkeit’), … [of the] German middle-class Protestants. … [and of the] German scholar. … [which] educates and prepares people, more than anything else does, precisely for ‘unbelief.’” What is highly important for my discussion here is not this criticism taken alone, but Nietzsche’s contextualization of this criticism. This criticism stands between Nietzsche’s exultation of religious self-consciousness and of religious concealment. On the one hand, the latter refers to piety as the most “potent means for beautifying man, … [to] the homines religiosi[’s]. … impassionate and exaggerated worship of ‘pure forms,’… [their] cult of surfaces. … [born from] the profound suspicious fear of an incurable pessimism” And on the other hand, the former refers to “religious life [’s] … self-examination … [which] requires a leisure class, or half-leisure, … leisure with a good conscience, from way back, by blood, to which the aristocratic feeling that work disgraces is not altogether alien.”54

Nietzsche holds the kind of concealment that modern work (including modern science’s work) represents to be other to both a genuine concealment and a genuine self-consciousness. Accordingly, with its kind of concealment, modern science is totally alien to Nietzsche’s question: what is the meaning of all will to truth? That is, first, through its lack of a genuine self-consciousness, modern science cannot begin to raise this question. Second, through its lack of a genuine concealment, modern science cannot begin to answer this question. Thus, the understanding of this total alienation is the understanding of what Nietzsche means by the meaning of all will to truth.

Nietzsche is making two claims. First, modern science is alienated within its happiness—the happiness that its faith in the useful produces. Second, scholars are sufferers who refuse to admit to themselves what they are. My claim is that what Nietzsche means by the meaning of all will to truth is nothing but the meaning that modern science gives to the problem of suffering. For Nietzsche, the problem of modern science is the problem of its alienation from the question about the meaning of suffering. This claim does not mean that modern science ignores the problem of suffering. Instead, modern science reduces its concept of suffering to the context of usefulness. Once the useful becomes the answer given to the question of suffering, the realm of the meaning of suffering is altogether abolished. For the end of modern scientific technology is the useful application of its knowledge so as “if possible [at all]—‘to abolish suffering.’” And since “there is no more insane ‘if possible’”55 than this, modern science creates for itself the illusion that suffering could be subjected to the treatment of the realm of usefulness. With such an idea, modern science does not assume what Nietzsche assumes. It does not assume that suffering is inherent in man as such. It thus follows that this assumption demands that suffering be attributed a meaning by modern science. It also follows that ignorance of this assumption leads to the idea that the question about the meaning of suffering may be avoided.

Thus, modern science—which cannot truly avoid this question—has to conceal its suffering. Modern science, which appeared to lack the possibility of providing any new meaning of suffering, should be located within the history of suffering. This location should be made by way of referring science to the already existing opposite ideals of suffering, namely, the ascetic ideal or the Dionysian ideal. The case of modern science shows that Modernity cannot be said to be a true synthesis of the historical dialectics of the Christian ascetic and the Dionysian ideals. This end reasserts once more the fact that the opposition between these two ideals is irreducible; soothing that opposition brings Nietzsche to demand that modern science should complete its atheist attempt to overcome the Christian dogma by way of subjecting itself to art.

Before such a completion may take place, the fact remains that modern science’s idea of truth shows itself to be that of a nonauthentic lie. In order that some faith be read as an authentic lie, it should be proved to be beyond the dialectics of the history of Christianity. The above discussion has shown that modern science cannot fulfill this condition before it subjects itself to art. Christianity successfully concealed its Dionysian other. And this concealment was revealed through Nietzsche’s criticism of modern science’s overcoming-preservation of the Christian dogma. Unlike Christianity’s genuine concealment of the Dionysian, modern science becomes the hiding place of (the ugliness of) the Dionysian other. And under these conditions, modern science can only escape historical dialectics. Modern science’s forgetfulness of its Dionysian other can be realized only in its purification of Christianity as asceticism. Asceticism stands beyond historical dialectics as a “will to nothingness.”⁵⁶ Yet despite its achievement of such naivety, modern science’s will to truth fails to meet life. The idea of being beyond, which Nietzsche demands from an authentic lie, is absolutely the opposite of the idea of being beyond historical dialectics, which modern science creates for itself, as the first affirms this-world while the latter affirms the other-world.

The conclusion that modern science’s purification of Christianity from its dogma does not fulfill the condition that modern science’s truth be an authentic lie can be further verified. Namely, science’s resulting asceticism should be explored further by turning to Nietzsche’s unification of the problem of science and that of morality. This unity is reflected in the unity of modern science’s overcoming of the Christian dogma and modern morality’s (pity’s) causing the death of the Christian God. Modern morality is a nonauthentic purification of Christianity. A consideration of the truth of this claim requires a short examination of the Nietzschean conception of the unity in question from the viewpoint of modern morality, or better pity.

For Nietzsche, pity signifies the highest point in the course of the history of Christianity. Pity, as reflected in Schopenhauer’s philosophy, is the cause of the death of the Christian God and Zarathustra’s “last temptation.”57 The problem, Nietzsche holds, is that the pitying-man identifies suffering in the fellow man as other.⁵⁸ Accordingly, pity is grounded in the assumption of an external division of man, that is, a pitying-man and a pitied-man. For his part, Nietzsche does not take this external division to be true. For Nietzsche, the plurality of man, as well as man’s being both a subject and an object of some action, is internal to the one body.⁵⁹ Thus, Zarathustra teaches: “if a friend does you evil [Übles], then say: ‘I forgive you what you did to me; but that you have done it to yourself—how could I forgive that?’”⁶⁰ Zarathustra’s point here is the following: insofar as man is plural from within, the act of forgiveness from the side of the external sufferer is meaningless. For the I of the sufferer is found underneath the skin of the person who has caused the sufferer’s suffering. Therefore, keeping the idea of forgiveness—which does not erase suffering—becomes the source for accounting for suffering. Consequently, the false idea of the possibility of forgiveness may result in ressentiment. The idea of possible forgiveness assumes the caused suffering to be an (evil) act made by an external causer of suffering, where the sufferer can only imagine revenge (as the opposite of forgiveness). The idea of possible forgiveness assumes the idea of possible accountability regarding suffering. But if such forgiveness cannot be realized, given the internal aspect of suffering, man should turn to ressentiment against himself, being the source of a suffering that is impossible to combat.

Thus, Zarathustra adds: “Thus speaks all great love: it overcomes even forgiveness and pity.” The idea of pity is like that of forgiveness: “what in the world has caused more suffering than the folly of the pitying?”⁶¹ The act of pitying (or being together with the sufferer in suffering [Mitleiden, Compassion]) bridges the division between the pitying and the pitied as they become one in the pitied. Pity doubles suffering in its donating to suffering. How, then, does pity come to meet its end (that is, abolish suffering)?⁶² Pity’s only way out from the accumulation of suffering is death: “Thus spoke the devil to me once: ‘God too has his hell: that is his love of man.’ And most recently I heard him say this: ‘God is dead; God died of his pity for man.’”⁶³

Pity’s conception of love is that of Christianity: “the religion of pity.”⁶⁴ Pity is the reproduction of slave-morality and of its concepts of good and evil. If pity stands on the ground of the belief of the simple unity of the subject (as assumed by the external division of man into a pitying subject and a pitied other), then pity involves an opposition between altruism and egoism governed by the principle of a free will. The pitying one is that man who freely decides to activate good altruism, and thereby levels himself above evil egoism to join the “faith in the community as the savior, … in the herd.”⁶⁵ To be more precise, given the being-alone of the pitied-man before the pitying-man’s act of pitying, the latter does not exactly join such a community, but rather constitutes it.⁶⁶ What is highly interesting about this moment is the new concept of the good produced by the modern purified slave-morality as compared with its traditional concept of the good. Before, slave-morality attributed its concept of the good to God and to the passive “free to be weak … lamb”⁶⁷ In its modern version, as pity, the act of demonstrating a free will remains preserved for the pitying-man: the pitied-man, being passive, is excluded from such possibility.

Under the condition that pity has man as a simple atomic unity, one can imagine a scale at the top of which stands an atomic human agency that only pities and does not become pitied, while at its middle stands an agency that is both pitying and pitied, and at its lowest level stands the agency that can only be pitied. But from the perspective of Nietzsche’s destruction of the atomic subject—according to which the body of the individual is plurality—there exists no such thing as the absolutely-pitying or the absolutely-pitied. For Nietzsche, the scale of pity described above becomes a circle in which all individual bodies are both pitying and pitied. Nietzsche’s immoral speech, as expressed in his concept of “converse pity,”68 directs itself at the potential immorality of the pitying in man and not at that of both the pitying and the pitied. Accordingly, Nietzsche, who identifies the potentiality of immorality in both the absolutely-pitying and the absolutely-pitied, dismisses the latter one.⁶⁹

Nietzsche turns his speech to the absolutely-pitying to reverse her concept of pity. Nietzsche’s reverse concept of pity, his new concept of great love as the reverse of the Christian love that suffers in the pitied, pities its own depth. It pities the ugly instinct that is not evil anymore. Nietzsche’s egoistical great love suffers in the creator: “All great love is even above all its pity; for it still wants to create the beloved. ‘Myself I sacrifice to my love, and my neighbor as myself—thus runs the speech of all creators. But all creators are hard.”⁷⁰

Nietzsche’s new Gospel of hard love substitutes the pitying and the pitied in the moral man for the beautiful diamond and the ugly coal in the immoral man: “‘Why so hard?’ the kitchen coal once said to the diamond. ‘After all, are we not close kin?’… This new tablet, O my brothers, I place over you: become hard!”71 Once again, the Christian love—love your neighbor as yourself—fulfills the laws of the old tablets of the Old Testament in being that positive formulation through which the negative formulation of the Old Testament is overcome. Nietzsche, after his destruction of slave-morality’s concepts of good and evil, does not have man’s instincts as evil anymore, but rather as ugly. They remain ugly, for in them the sum-truth revealed before genealogical consciousness is seen. This sum-truth is the foolish fatality of the passions,⁷² in which the eye sees the meaninglessness of suffering. It has been shown that the ugly stands consciously naked (as man and woman in paradise) before two feelings: pity and shame. The logic of pity redeems the ugly under the threat of referring it back to evil. Shame, alternatively, keeps the ugly negative. For shame seeks to keep the ugly hidden from the eyes of its witnesses: the pitying God and the shameful Zarathustra. Nonetheless, when the ugliest man murdered God, he remained naked before Zarathustra’s naked eye as his only remaining redeemer.

If Paul sacrificed, through the body of Jesus, his body and the body of the neighbor to redeem the spirit of the Jewish law from its negativity, so does Zarathustra’s love: myself I sacrifice to my love, and my neighbor as myself. Through the body of the ugliest man, Zarathustra sacrifices his most deep self and the neighbor’s self to redeem the ugly body from its negativity. What this analysis of Nietzsche’s criticism of pity intends to underline is his demand that modern science should have “a ‘faith’… so that science can acquire from it a direction, a meaning, a limit, a method, a right to exist.”⁷³ Science needs a faith, that is, an authentic lie. It is only art that can provide science with this lie, for in “art… [it is] precisely the lie [that] is sanctified and the will to deception has a good conscience.”⁷⁴ To give science its good conscience: this is the task of art. For hitherto, the task of science has been to overcome bad conscience: “Alongside the bad conscience, all science has grown so far, break, you lovers of knowledge, the old tablets!”⁷⁵

Nietzsche asserts that, “Kant… considered art and the beautiful purely from that of the ‘spectator,’… [and defines the beautiful as that] ‘which gives us pleasure without interest.’” And “Stendhal…. emphasizes another effect of the beautiful: ‘the beautiful promises happiness’; to him the fact seems to be precisely that the beautiful arouses the will (‘interestedness’).”⁷⁷ Here, Nietzsche contrasts the viewpoint of the artist (Stendhal) as creator with that of the philosopher (Kant) as spectator. At the same time, Nietzsche locates Schopenhauer between these two points of view.⁷⁸ On the one hand, Schopenhauer’s will is “interested in” Kantian aesthetics, insofar as this aesthetics promises it the standpoint of the spectator it longs for. On the other hand, the location of Schopenhauer between the creator and the spectator does not mean that Schopenhauer belongs to two opposites—the creator and the spectator—which do not themselves belong to each other. Nietzsche’s strategy behind this location of Schopenhauer is to unfold the manner in which the creator and the spectator become united in the creator.

For Nietzsche, Schopenhauer is an example of the “great philosopher,” insofar as there is “something typical [of the great philosopher] in him.” By typical, Nietzsche means to refer to the philosopher “in itself [as] it just stands there, stupid to all eternity, like every ‘thing-in-itself.’” When translated from Kant’s language back into Nietzsche’s own language, there remains nothing but the animal in the philosopher:“Every animal—therefore la bête philosophe, too—instinctively strives for the optimum of favorable conditions under which it can expend all its strength and achieve its maximal feeling of power.”79

At this point, when “we no longer trace the origin of man in the ‘spirit,’ in the ‘divinity,’ [when] we have placed him back among the animals,”⁸⁰ the apparent alienation of the philosopher, as spectator, from being an animal demands an explanation. Nietzsche explains that the philosopher’s animal instinct is asceticism, that is, there where he attains “an optimum condition for the highest and boldest spirituality.”⁸¹ How does this explain the fact that Schopenhauer and Kant, “like all philosophers,” end by judging the beautiful from the point of view of the spectator? For Nietzsche, sublimation guarantees the possibility that the philosopher can become a spectator:

The beautiful has become the meeting point of the artist’s instinct and the philosopher’s (sublimated) instinct. Since it is the creating-artist who initiates this meeting place, the philosopher’s releasing of the energy of the instinct owes its debt to the artist. For Nietzsche, art encompass philosophy, while philosophy does not encompass art. Philosophy is interpretable from the viewpoint of art, but art is not interpretable from the viewpoint of philosophy. Indeed, reading art from philosophy, insofar as the philosopher’s instinct is ascetic, affirms art from the viewpoint of the spectator only. To put it in another way, since the philosopher “does not deny ‘existence,’ but rather affirms his existence and only his existence,”83 it becomes impossible for the philosopher to affirm the creating artist’s existence. For the realm of the spectator, being the realm of the philosopher’s affirmation, assumes the distance needed for contemplation and penetration between the eye and its object. Philosophy excludes the creative activity of the artist, insofar as this activity demands that there be no distance of the artist from the object. Furthermore, if art is a valet of some morality, philosophy, or religion, then the contest is one between Nietzsche’s philosophy and the history of philosophy until Schopenhauer:

Philosophy began as all good things begin: for a long time it lacked the courage for itself…. is it not clear that for the longest time … [philosophy] contravened the basic demands of morality and conscience (not to speak of reason quite generally …)—that if a philosopher had been conscious of what he was, he would have been compelled to feel himself the embodiment of “nitimur in vetitum”—and consequently guarded against “feeling himself,” against becoming conscious of himself?… Our entire modern way of life … has the appearance sheer hubris and godlessness. … We violate ourselves nowadays, no doubt of it, we nutcrackers of the soul, ever questioning and questionable, as if life were nothing but cracking nuts; and thus we are bound to grow day-by-day more questionable, worthier of asking questions, perhaps also worthier—of living?⁸⁴

Here stands the question that Nietzsche directs to Modernity: what is the meaning of the will to truth as self-consciousness? On the one hand, the history of philosophy—which Nietzsche unfolds here—is the hidden ugly history of “suffer[ing and sacrificing] for truth.”85 Accordingly, Nietzsche demands that the philosopher be guarded against feeling himself, against becoming conscious of himself. On the other, modern philosophy represents exactly the opposite of what has been the good conscience of philosophy: modern self-consciousness as the opposite of guarding against becoming conscious. But if philosophy is self-violation, whether in its past or at present, then the form in which philosophy violates itself in Modernity goes through its self-consciousness. Nietzsche’s mere exposition of this fact is the self-consciousness of philosophy. This is its historical self-consciousness. This is philosophy’s sin, or its striving for the forbidden. This is, in the end, philosophy’s overcoming-preservation of itself. And, for Nietzsche, this is the fate of Modernity, its pathos.

I identified above this self-consciousness as Nietzsche’s modern genealogical consciousness. Until this moment, art, insofar as it preserved a place for the spectator, seems to have guarded against the all-destructive impact of the dialectics involved in this self-consciousness. In art, philosophy becomes unconscious sublimation. Yet, Nietzsche’s philosophy of art has now brought the unconscious to the sphere of genealogical self-consciousness. As an authentic lie, the sublimation of the philosopher’s instinct—through the standpoint of the spectator—is not possible anymore. Under these conditions, Modernity is as chaotically meaningless as its history:

As anticipated, and here through its historical sense, Modernity reflects itself in its history as semibarbarism mixture, chaos, the unmeasured, all that is not the “perfection and ultimate maturity of every culture and art,”87 and in sum, that which lacks definitive form: the creature. Before this creature, Nietzsche introduces the creator, or the artist. And accordingly, the totality of Modernity’s history becomes part of the division of the unity of man as creature and creator. Thus, there remains before philosophy the possibility of taking the standpoint of the creating artist:

In view of the accidental character, the meaninglessness, of man’s history, art meets the demand of unifying the division of man into creature and creator: “In man creature and creator are united: in man there is material, fragment, excess, clay, dirt, nonsense, chaos; but in man there is also creator, form-giver, hammer hardness, spectator divinity, and seventh day.”⁸⁹ For Nietzsche, man’s overcoming of man through man is what constitutes the legitimacy of Modernity. This legitimacy is deduced from the ontology of man as defined by the history of Christianity. That is, that the existence of man is the existence “of an animal soul turned against itself, taking sides against itself.”⁹⁰ Departing from this view, Nietzsche gives the otherness of man toward himself in this division a meaning, a direction. This direction is governed by the law of overcoming. But the end of the law of overcoming is not man: “man is a bridge and no end.”⁹¹ If man to man, and if the modern philosophical man did not overcome his historical man, then this overcoming is not about philosophy’s overcoming of religion or art; rather, it is about the overcoming of man himself.

It is through tragic art—the redeemer of accidents—that the “overman”92 can come to meet that which is not history (that is, the eternal recurrence of the same according to which the will says, “thus I willed it and thus I shall will it”). Tragic art is given the task of overcoming history (to work on the future). It redeems man’s history, through the re-creation of all that has been, what is past in man, all it was, from its meaninglessness (that is, from its being a fragment and a riddle and a dreadful accident).

If “since Copernicus, man seems to have got himself on an inclined plane—now he is slipping faster and faster away from the center into … nothingness,”⁹³ then delivering the problem of the division of man to art constitutes Nietzsche’s attempt to return man to the center:

The findings of Nietzsche’s criticism of Modernity give renewed support to two main theses. First, the possibility of Modernity’s overcoming-preservation of Christianity cannot be Nietzsche’s goal, insofar as he criticizes it as it is already realized in Modernity. Modernity’s overcoming-preservation of Christianity is exactly the continuity-discontinuity relationship between Christianity and Modernity, under the condition that the continuous and the discontinuous form an identity. For Nietzsche, modern morality is the overcoming-preservation of Christianity. Second, from the perspective of the idea of overcoming-without-preservation, Nietzsche has even broken the unity of Modernity’s overcoming-preservation of Christianity; and, as demonstrated, Modernity’s overcoming-without-preservation of Christianity resulted in asceticism. For Nietzsche, asceticism is not genuine overcoming. It is rather otherworldliness. If that is correct, there remains ahead the task of examining what remains from Modernity’s worldliness, that is, examining preservation within Modernity’s overcoming-preservation.