TYLER ROBERTS
The influence of Friedrich Nietzsche (1844–1900) on twentieth- and twenty-first-century continental philosophy and critical theory rivals that of Kant and Hegel. Son and grandson of Lutheran pastors, trained as a philologist at the University of Leipzig (after initially enrolling to study theology), Nietzsche was appointed professor of philology at the University of Basel at age twenty-four. While at Basel, his thinking deeply impressed by the philosophy of Arthur Schopenhauer and his close friendship with Richard Wagner, he published his first book, The Birth of Tragedy (1872). As these influences waned and his health deteriorated, Nietzsche resigned his academic post in 1879. For the next decade, he led a nomadic existence and wrote. Between 1878 and 1882, he published Human, All Too Human, Daybreak, and the first four books of The Gay Science. Then came the stylistic and conceptual departure of Nietzsche’s best-known work, Thus Spake Zarathustra. Between 1885 and 1887, Nietzsche published what are perhaps his greatest works, Beyond Good and Evil, the remarkable fifth book of The Gay Science, and his most philosophically influential work, On the Genealogy of Morals. In 1888, in a furious burst of productivity that preceded a mental breakdown in January 1889, he wrote Twilight of the Idols, The Antichrist, The Case of Wagner, and Ecce Homo. Nietzsche died in 1900, having spent the last decade of his life as a mental and physical invalid.
The reception of Nietzsche by two philosophers, Martin Heidegger and Gilles Deleuze, has been particularly important for establishing his impact on twentieth- and twenty-first-century philosophy, theology, and religious studies. In an extended series of lectures on Nietzsche in the 1930s, Heidegger read Nietzsche’s proclamation of the death of God as heralding the end of metaphysics. Not only did Heidegger’s reading shape Nietzsche’s early reception as an existentialist philosopher but, more important, it laid the groundwork for the astonishing readings of Nietzsche’s thought that emerged in France starting in the 1960s. In 1963, Deleuze published his Nietzsche and Philosophy, which championed Nietzsche’s thought as an affirmative challenge to Hegel’s philosophy of totality. This is one of the initial moments of postmodernism, as Nietzsche’s stylistic challenges to philosophical writing, his perspectivalist challenges to philosophical theories of truth, and his genealogical challenges to philosophies of history were developed and transformed not only by Deleuze, but also by Derrida, Foucault, and many other interpreters. Of particular importance for thinking about the study of religion, as we will see, is Nietzsche’s genealogical method, a radical historicizing of concepts and values. As Foucault puts it, “the genealogist refuses to extend his faith in metaphysics, if he listens to history, he finds that there is ‘something altogether different’ behind things: not a timeless and essential secret, but the secret that they have no essence or that their essence was fabricated in a piecemeal fashion from alien forms.”1
NIETZSCHE ON RELIGION
Against Religion
For modernists, existentialists, and many postmodernists, Nietzsche’s pronouncement that God is dead makes it clear that Nietzsche was an atheist proclaiming the end or exhaustion of religion. And there is no doubt that Nietzsche is one of modernity’s most vehement and incisive critics of religion and, in particular, of Judaism and Christianity. In much of his work, up to and including Beyond Good and Evil, Nietzsche argues that metaphysics, philosophy, and religion are all grounded in a “faith in opposite values,” a faith that things of the highest value cannot have their origin in this transitory world but in some perfect or eternal realm.2 For Nietzsche, though, all values, meanings, and practices have a material, worldly origin—they are “human, all too human.” In his early works, Nietzsche brings this idea to bear on religion in a way that is close to Marx’s criticisms of religion as a hermeneutic of suffering. Religion provides consolation, but only as it prevents us from examining the real causes of suffering and even imposes new forms of suffering, such as the intense guilt caused by the concept of sin. As Nietzsche puts it in Daybreak: “The worst sickness of mankind originated in the way in which they have combated their sicknesses, and what seemed to cure as in the long run produced something worse than that which it was supposed to overcome.”3
By the time we get to the Genealogy, Nietzsche is condemning the faith in opposite values as “nihilism.” If all values have a human origin, then the belief in absolute values that have an otherworldly origin must be a belief in “nothingness.” But human beings, Nietzsche thinks, cannot bear the thought that life has no meaning and so would rather “will nothingness than not will.”4 In this book, Nietzsche also brings the genealogical method to bear on the issue of the origins and development of religion (though we can see this method emerging as early as early as Human, All Too Human in 1878). In essay 2 of the Genealogy, Nietzsche offers one of his most concise and interesting accounts of religion. The idea of gods, he claims, originates when social groups articulate a sense of debt—a “juridical duty”—toward their ancestors.5 As time passes and as the power of the social group grows, the imagined power of the ancestors increases to the point where the ancestors are “transfigured” into gods. At the origin of religion, then, is a primarily juridical and economic relation to the gods. But Nietzsche goes on to argue that a crucial transformation takes place when this relationship is “moralized,” that is, when it is reinterpreted by the bearers of “bad conscience” who found in the idea of a moral debt owed to a god a perfect vehicle for increasing the hatred and torture of self that is the goal of bad conscience.6 This moralization finds its strongest and most influential expression in the concept of sin, where the debt to God is not simply something owed, but something owed due to a fault or transgression on the part of the debtor. For Nietzsche, this trajectory is of course perfected, brought to its “most gruesome pitch,” in Christianity. The Christian concept of “original sin” means that only God can pay the debt that is owed to him through his own self-sacrifice on the Cross.
This moralization of religion is examined in more depth in the final essay of the Genealogy, titled “What Is the Meaning of Ascetic Ideals?” There, Nietzsche argues that human beings need meaning and that the ascetic ideal has been made the most powerful, and nearly exclusive, meaning for human beings so far. The ascetic ideal posits an “other mode of existence” as the goal of this life, a goal that can be reached only by denying this life.7 This ideal has come to dominate human life because it has served the interests of the priests—here Nietzsche’s original insight into religion as a form of life denial is bound up closely with a more traditional Enlightenment perspective on the power of clerics and institutional religion—and because it has been a preservative force for the sick and decadent who would rather “will nothingness than not will.”8
Nietzsche for Religion?
Though most readers of Nietzsche have been satisfied to view him as an atheist and critic of religion, others, especially recently, have offered more nuanced readings. Especially noteworthy among earlier interpreters is Paul Ricoeur’s argument that the “hermeneutics of suspicion” in Marx, Nietzsche, and Freud must be incorporated into any “mature faith.”9 We find variations on this idea in Merold Westphal and in Giles Fraser’s account of Nietzsche’s own “piety of unbelief.” We also find versions of it in the secularist and postmodern theologies or a/theologies of Mark C. Taylor, Charles Winquist, and Carl Rashke.
In recent years, however, a number of book-length studies and volumes of essays have appeared that directly challenge the received view of Nietzsche the atheist and antireligious thinker. As Julian Young puts it: “While most conclude … that Nietzsche was, quite obviously, an ‘atheist,’ I hold the he never was. Though atheistic with respect to the Christian God, Nietzsche, I hold, ought to be regarded as a religious reformer rather than an enemy of religion.”10 These studies have focused on a range of themes in Nietzsche, including his Dionysian affirmation and his disruptions of the religious/secular binary,11 his religious communitarianism,12 his pietistic, Dionysian faith,13 his mysticism,14 his soteriology,15 and his transformative bodily practices.16 If nothing else, these studies show that Nietzsche’s criticisms of religion have to be reexamined in light of the much more complicated picture of the philosopher that is still in the process of emerging.
This brings us back to Nietzsche’s fundamental genealogical warning against the assumption that the value or meaning of something is determined by its origin. Religion for Nietzsche clearly has been the vehicle, if not the cause, of some of the worst forms of self-degradation in human history. But he also claims that this is not the only use human beings have put to religion. Thus, in essay 2 of the Genealogy, immediately after some of his most scathing writing on the degradations of the Christian imagination, Nietzsche pauses to note that when we look at the Greeks, we find “more noble” interpretations of the concept of gods.17 Although in the context of the Genealogy’s attack on Judaism and Christianity, the significance of this passage can be easily overlooked, it shows that for Nietzsche religion is not necessarily life-denying. It also reminds us of Nietzsche’s fascination with and admiration of the Greeks and, in particular, of his discussions of Greek religion in The Birth of Tragedy and other early writings. There, as Julian Young has argued most recently, Nietzsche views Greek tragedy as “the most important moment in Greek religion.”18 For Nietzsche tragedy was ritual, not entertainment. It invoked Dionysus for the spectators/participants and produced for them a “metaphysical solace.” Although Nietzsche later criticized The Birth of Tragedy, the Dionysian makes a return in the character of Zarathustra, in the fifth book of The Gay Science, in Twilight of the Idols, and in Ecce Homo. In these works, where religion, philosophy, and art come together, the Dionysian represents a creative and ecstatic principle of gratitude and affirmation. “Dionysian art,” Nietzsche writes, is the “transfiguring power of intoxication,” rooted in the noble soul’s overabundant “gratitude and love.”19 In his notebooks from 1888, as he was preparing to write Twilight of the Idols, Nietzsche complained that Christianity had for two thousand years prevented the creation of new gods. But he goes on to say, “how many new gods are still possible! As for myself, in whom the religious, that is to say god-forming instinct occasionally becomes active at impossible times—how differently, how variously the divine has revealed itself to me each time! … I should not doubt that there are many kinds of gods.20
NIETZSCHE AND THE STUDY OF RELIGION
Nietzsche’s work has not had as much of a direct influence on the study of religion as theorists such as Marx, Freud, or Durkheim. Nonetheless, his influence has been significant. With the new work on Nietzsche and religion, this influence promises to grow in at least three different directions. First, Nietzsche’s most important contribution to the study of religion today is grounded in the genealogical method, particularly as mediated by Foucault, Edward Said, and Talal Asad and expressed in recent titles such as “Manufacturing Religion,” “The Invention of World Religions,” and “The Modern Myth of ‘Hinduism.’ ” Genealogy has been particularly important in shaping new perspectives on the history of religious traditions and in exploring the history of the concept of religion itself. With respect to the former, genealogy exposes the way in which religious traditions are always contested and always being constructed in and through these contestations. It also can show, as we see, for example, in Richard King’s treatment of Hinduism, how the very concept of “religious tradition” can be imposed on a rather decentralized religious history in a colonial context. Talal Asad’s genealogical work examines the very effort to define religion and, as he puts it, the way “the theoretical search for an essence of religion invites us to separate it conceptually from the domain of power.”21 More generally, a genealogical approach to the study of religion itself leads us to inquire into the constellation of discourses and powers out of which this field has been established and institutionalized. Asad more recently has extended this approach to questions about the “formation of the secular.”22 He thereby makes the important point—anticipated in Nietzsche’s argument that the will to truth of modern science is the latest form of the ascetic ideal—that the distinction between the religious and the secular, as it operates, for example, both in modern politics and in the modern study of religion, is clearly tied to questions of power and exclusion.
Second, Nietzsche can help us think about religion as an interpretive operation and, more particularly, about the operation of positing “gods” or “divinity.” “What, then, is truth? A mobile army of metaphors, metonyms, and anthropomorphisms—in short, a sum of human relations which have been enhanced, transposed, and embellished poetically and rhetorically, and which after long use seem firm, canonical, and obligatory to a people.”23 In this, one of Nietzsche’s most quoted lines, truth is produced, in history, through poetical and rhetorical processes, that is, through interpretations that are tied to particular social configurations of will and power. Tim Murphy has recently produced an incisive study of these processes as they pertain to Nietzsche’s views on metaphor and religion. For Nietzsche, metaphor is Übertragung, a “carrying over.” As Murphy elaborates, metaphor carries over a meaning or set of meanings from one domain to another in a process of “interpretive transfer.” Moreover, these mappings for Nietzsche, the philosopher of will to power, are agonistic and thus seek to impose new meanings on old domains. From this perspective, Murphy argues, Nietzsche views religion as a metaphorical, cultural mapping operation. Among other things, this suggests that we might usefully shift the focus of our search for a definition of religion from content, where religion has to do with gods, ultimate meaning, or the “sacred,” to “operation,” that is, the cultural mapping operations characteristic of religious discourses. Murphy himself, in line with other contemporary theorists who study religion in terms of “social formation” (such as Bruce Lincoln), defines religion in terms of a “foundationalist” and “obsessively totalizing” operation.
Despite the usefulness of this general approach to religion, we need to ask whether the claim that religion is a totalizing operation can be supported by a reading of Nietzsche or by work in the history of religions. One reader of Nietzsche who would point us in a different direction is Peter Murray. His study of Nietzsche’s “affirmative morality” views Nietzsche’s Dionysus as a name for the “infinite otherness” of life and world. On this reading, “gods” in Nietzsche are clearly human creations, as in Feuerbach or Freud. Feuerbach’s projection creates gods out of human essence and Freud’s illusion is rooted in infantile wish. For both, then, gods are formed as, in Karl Barth’s words, “reflected images and guarantees of the needs and capacities of man.”24 But for Murray, Nietzsche’s Dionysus is different, a projection or creation that affirms the human only as it also affirms the limits of the human and in an affirmative relation to the otherness of the earth. This is the meaning of Nietzschean faith—be “true to the earth”—in which the idea of god, a “chthonic god,” is “equal to that of faith in the totality of the process of becoming.”25
Finally, one of most fascinating aspects of Nietzsche’s work is the way he philosophizes not just about but through, with, and against the body. He proclaimed his affirmative vision as a philosopher who “danced” and he grounded it in the “great health.” Eric Blondel, in another important study of metaphor in Nietzsche, argues that the body is Nietzsche’s fundamental metaphor, that it is “an interpretive space.”26 In this and other ways, then, Nietzsche anticipated much of the academic, theoretical work of recent decades in religious studies and other fields that seeks to put the body at the center of cultural histories and theories. The genealogical work of both Asad and Foucault, which often focuses on issues of punishment and pain, can be traced directly to Nietzsche’s concern with these same issues. As scholars of religion—who long have been focused on questions of belief and text—begin to explore different kinds of questions, about, for instance, forms of action, discipline and expression in ritual, movement, dress, sound, and smell, this recovery of the body as a topic or subject for study is of great significance. However, as Kimerer Lamothe warns in her study of Nietzsche, dance, and religion, we should be careful not to view the body simply as a site for the reception of discipline or to too quickly “textualize” the body. Lamothe argues that for Nietzsche the body is a generative source of knowledge and that for Nietzsche, and for dancers influenced by him, such as Isadora Duncan and Martha Graham, the “process of bodily becoming is a locus for discovering and exploring alternative forms of knowledge and alternative ideals of religion than those offered by the Christian values woven into western culture.”27 Whether as a critic of religion or as someone who anticipated postsecular forms of imagining the divine, Nietzsche remains one of our most provocative sources for thinking about religion.
NOTES
1. Michel Foucault, “Nietzsche, Genealogy and History,” in Language, Counter-Memory, Practice: Selected Essays and Interviews (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1977), 142.
2. Friedrich Nietzsche, Beyond Good and Evil, trans. Judith Norman, ed. Rolf-Peter Horstmann (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2002), 10.
3. Friedrich Nietzsche, Daybreak, trans. R. J. Hollingdale (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1982), 33.
4. Friedrich Nietzsche, On the Genealogy of Morals, trans. Walter Kaufmann and R. J. Hollingdale (New York: Vintage, 1969), 97.
5. Ibid., 88.
6. Ibid., 91.
7. Ibid., 117.
8. Ibid., 97.
9. Paul Ricœur, The Philosophy of Paul Ricœur: An Anthology of His Work, ed. Charles E. Reagan and David Stewart (Boston: Beacon, 1978), 219.
10. Julian Young, Nietzsche’s Philosophy of Religion (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2006), 2.
11. See Peter Durno Murray, Nietzsche’s Affirmative Morality: A Revaluation Based in the Dionysian World-View (Berlin: de Gruyter, 1999); Tyler T. Roberts, Contesting Spirit: Nietzsche, Affirmation, Religion (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1998).
12. See Young, Philosophy.
13. Bruce Ellis Benson, Pious Nietzsche: Decadence and Dionysian Faith (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 2008).
14. See Jill Marsden, “Lunar Rapture: Nietzsche’s Religion of the Night Sun,” in Nietzsche and the Divine, ed. Jim Urpeth and John Lippitt (Manchester: Clinamen Press, 2000); and Tyler Roberts, “Ecstatic Philosophy,” in Nietzsche and the Divine, ed. Jim Urpeth and John Lippitt (Manchester: Clinamen Press, 2000).
15. Giles Fraser, Redeeming Nietzsche: On the Piety of Unbelief (London: Routledge, 2002).
16. Kimerer L. LaMothe, Nietzsche’s Dancers: Isadora Duncan, Martha Graham, and the Revaluation of Christian Values (New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2006).
17. Nietzsche, Morals, 93.
18. Young, Philosophy, 22; Roberts, Contesting Spirit; Murray, Nietzsche’s Affirmative Morality.
19. Friedrich Nietzsche, The Gay Science, trans. Walter Kaufmann (New York: Vintage, 1974), 328.
20. Friedrich Nietzsche, The Will to Power, trans. Walter Kaufmann and R. J. Hollingdale (New York: Vintage, 1967), 534. See also Nietzsche, Sämtliche Werke: Kritische Studien Ausgabe, in Bänden, ed. G. Colli and M. Montinari (Berlin: de Gruyter, 1980), 13:523–26.
21. Talal Asad, Genealogies of Religion: Discipline and Reasons of Power in Christianity and Islam (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1993), 29.
22. Talal Asad, Formations of the Secular: Christianity, Islam, Modernity (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 2003).
23. Friedrich Nietzsche, “On Truth and Lie in an Extramoral Sense,” in The Portable Nietzsche, ed. Walter Kaufman (London: Penguin: 1976).
24. Murray, Nietzsche’s Affirmative Morality, 275.
25. Ibid., 232.
26. Eric Blondel, Nietzsche, the Body and Culture: Philosophy as a Philological Genealogy (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 1991), 238.
27. LaMothe, Dancers, 221.