Zadok Paper S95 Autumn 1998
Nietzsche: insight and immorality
by Greg Restall

A 'spiritual revenge'

AT THIS POINT, NIETZSCHE is being quite understanding-there is no need to find fault with the slave's evaluation of the situation. It is manifestly understandable: in a position of adversity you are bound to look for someone to blame for your plight. However, not all is well and good with slave morality. If slave morality is instituted, and becomes dominant over master morality, as Nietzche thinks it has, then it becomes a form of "spiritual revenge".5 It is a way of the weak dominating and restricting the flourishing of the strong. It is like the child who goes to the parent to 'dob in' the stronger sibling. Of course, the motivation is not for justice or well-being. It is for revenge. And this is where slave morality goes sour.

But isn't Nietzsche inconsistent disvaluing the revenge of the weak while he valorises the revenge of the strong? No, he isn't. For the revenge of the strong is shameless and honest. It is honest about what it is doing. The revenge of the weak, by contrast, is shameful and dishonest. It utilises a morality which preaches integrity and forgiveness but its underlying motivation is one of revenge. It is both unforgiving and dishonest-it is inconsistent, it is a lie. So, Nietzsche rails against the revenge of the weak.

Nietzsche thought that it was not just morality which was used for cramping the flourishing of the good. Christianity as a whole religious system is in his sights. The Antichrist is a forthright tract explaining the evils of Christianity. He starts at his favourite starting point-the conditions for human flourishing; power and proficiency:

What is good?-All that heightens the feeling of power, the will to power, power itself in man.
What is bad?-All that proceeds from weakness.

What is happiness?-The feeling that power increases-that a resistance is overcome.
Not contentment, but more power; not peace at all, but war; not virtue, but proficiency (virtue in the Renaissance style, virtu, virtue free of moralic acid).

The weak and ill-constituted shall perish: first principle of our philanthropy. And one shall help them to do so.

What is more harmful than any vice?-Active sympathy for the ill-constituted and weak-Christianity . . .6

How are we to interpret this? One could be quite uncharitable and say that Nietzsche has gone off the rails at once. For if he is sanctioning 'moral cleansing' by the wide-scaled elimination of the weak and ill-constituted, then this is obviously repulsive. However, there is no need to be so uncharitable. Nietzsche has given us no reason to interpret him as talking of military might or raw strength as power, any more than interpreting power as something more positive, like self control or excellence in courage. When Nietzsche says 'war', he might mean a domination of all that is lazy and weak in ourselves; war against all that would make us less than we could be. To try to fend off his criticism by saying "this is the man who inspired the Nazis" just won't do. (After all, Jesus of Nazareth 'inspired' the Crusades and the Spanish Inquisition in exactly the same sense.) Now, how has Christianity worked against human flourishing? Nietzsche goes on to explain:

One should not embellish or dress up Christianity: it has waged a war to the death against this higher type of man, it has excommunicated all the fundamental instincts of this type, it has distilled evil, the Evil One, out of these instincts-the strong human being as the type of reprehensibility, as the 'outcast'. Christianity has taken the side of everything weak, base, ill-constituted, it has made an ideal out of opposition to the preservative instincts of strong life; it has depraved the reason even of the intellectually strongest natures by teaching men to feel the supreme values of intellectuality as sinful, as misleading, as temptations. The most deplorable example: the depraving of Pascal, who believed his reason had been depraved by original sin while it had only been depraved by his Christianity!7

It is clear that Nietzsche is deeply suspicious. He claims to see the hidden motives of moralities and religious practices. And it is not enough for us to say 'people don't do things for those reasons.' 'It isn't revenge which motivates morality.' 'Christian belief doesn't intentionally cramp the well-being of others.' None of that will do. Nietzsche is intentionally being suspicious. He is attempting to bring to light the way morality and religion actually function. According to Nietzsche, "Actions are never what they appear to us to be!"8

The philosopher, for Nietzsche, "has a duty to suspicion today, to squint maliciously out of every abyss of suspicion".9 We can never just read actions or beliefs at face value. They have functions which go beyond what we might consciously take them to be. And if an action or a belief performs a particular function, and this function is somehow negative, then this is an argument against that action or belief, no matter how it is consciously regarded. This is an important technique for modern critics. Freud, Feuerbach and Marx also wielded it in their critiques of Christianity, capitalism and false consciousness. This method is quite powerful, and it is not enough for us to respond by saying 'we don't see things like that', unless we can come up with a good reason to think that things are always as they seem.

None of this should be foreign to the Christian. After all, according to Jeremiah: "the heart is devious above all else; it is perverse-who can understand it?".10 Christians of all people should not be surprised when religious practices are perverted and used for selfish ends. This is the content of the prophetic denunciation of Israelite and Jewish practice before the exile, and of Jesus' denunciation of Pharisaic religious practice during the Roman occupation. Nietzsche purports to show that Christian beliefs and practices are also used for selfish purposes and also lead to immoral ends. We cannot simply dismiss this kind of criticism out of court. This is a part of the Christian heritage.

Of course Nietzsche works with a caricature of Christianity. Not all Christians exhibit all of the features he will go on to describe. But the question remains: does the caricature reveal what is essentially Christian? Are those who deviate from the type less Christian to the extent to which they don't measure up to Nietzsche's portrait? Or is Nietzsche wrong, and are no Christians like this? Is Christianity never practiced for those ends? Is this never a temptation to which individual Christians or Christian structures succumb? Or is there another response? Can Nietzsche show us the functions that Christian belief and practice perform in many cases, and how this function is inconsistent with the content of Christian faith?

These, I take it, are Nietzsche's claims which have vital importance for Christians. There are two generally discernible sorts of criticism in Nietzsche's body of work. One is that Christianity involves a form of slave morality, that it works against human flourishing instead of working toward it. Another, related issue, it is that Christianity subverts people's reason, it is intellectually irresponsible. We will address these two criticisms in the second half of this paper.

Note that I have not considered Nietzsche's famous claim that God is dead. Of course this is the topic of much discussion. However, I think it's obvious that Nietzsche did not use this as a claim that God no longer exists (but once did). But rather, that the concept 'God' no longer has the kind of purchase, or need have the kind of purchase that it once had. This is an interesting sociological fact about living in what is becoming more and more a post-Christian society. However, it doesn't present as many problems for a Christian as do his specific criticisms of Christian thought and practice. So again, this is one of those things I will not examine directly in the rest of this paper.

To: Beyond cheap shots

Greg Restall lectures at the School of History, Philosophy and Politics, Macquarie University, Sydney. He is not a Nietzchian scholar, rather his disciplines are logic, the philosophy of language and the philosophy of religion. The author wishes to thank Fernando Gros and to Christine Parker for their thoughtful comments and encouragement.