Book III, Section 24 – Science and Religion are NOT in Opposition

And now consider the rarer case of which I spoke, the last idealists we have today amongst philosophers and scholars: do we perhaps have, in them, the sought-for opponents of ascetic ideals , the latter’s counter-idealists? In fact, they believe themselves to be, these ‘unbelievers’ (because that is what they all are); that seems to be their last remnant of faith, to be opponents of this ideal, so serious are they on this score, so passionate is their every word and gesture: – does what they believe therefore need to be true?

… We ‘knowers’ are positively mistrustful of any kind of believers; our mistrust has gradually trained us to conclude the opposite to what was formerly concluded: namely, to presuppose, wherever the strength of a belief becomes prominent, a certain weakness, even improbability of proof. Even we do not deny that faith ‘brings salvation’: precisely for that reason we deny that faith proves anything, – a strong faith which brings salvation is grounds for suspicion of the object of its faith, it does not establish truth, it establishes a certain probability – of deception. 

What now is the position in this case? – These ‘no’-sayers and outsiders of today, those who are absolute in one thing, their demand for intellectual rigour, these hard, strict, abstinent, heroic minds who make up the glory of our time, all these pale atheists, Antichrists, immoralists, nihilists, these sceptics, ephectics, hectics of the mind (they are one and all the latter in a certain sense), these last idealists of knowledge in whom, alone, intellectual conscience dwells and is embodied these days, – they believe they are all as liberated as possible from the ascetic ideal, these ‘free, very free spirits’: 

and yet, I will tell them what they themselves cannot see – because they are standing too close to themselves – this ideal is quite simply their ideal as well, they themselves represent it nowadays, and perhaps no one else, they themselves are its most intellectualized product, its most advanced front-line troops and scouts, its most insidious, delicate and elusive form of seduction: – if I am at all able to solve riddles, I wish to claim to do so with this pronouncement! …

These are very far from being free spirits: because they still believe in truth.

… When the Christian Crusaders in the East fell upon that  invincible order of Assassins, the order of free spirits par excellence, the lowest rank of whom lived a life of obedience the like of which no monastic order has ever achieved, somehow or other they received an inkling of that symbol and watchword that was reserved for the highest ranks alone as their secretum: ‘nothing is true, everything is permitted’ … Certainly that was freedom of the mind, with that the termination of the belief in truth was announced.

… Has a European or a Christian free-thinker ever strayed into this proposition and the labyrinth of its consequences? Does he know the Minotaur of this cave from experience? … I doubt it, indeed, I know otherwise: – Nothing is stranger to these people who are absolute in one thing, these so-called ‘free spirits’, than freedom and release in that sense, in no respect are they more firmly bound; precisely in their faith in truth they are more rigid and more absolute than anyone else.

Perhaps I am too familiar with all this: that venerable philosopher’s abstinence prescribed by such a faith like that commits one, that stoicism of the intellect which, in the last resort, denies itself the ‘no’ just as strictly as the ‘yes’, that will to stand still before the factual, the factum brutum, that fatalism of ‘petits faits’ [small facts] (Ce petit faitalisme [the petty factualism], as I call it) in which French scholarship now seeks a kind of moral superiority over the German, that renunciation of any interpretation (of forcing, adjusting, shortening, omitting, filling-out, inventing, falsifying and everything else essential to interpretation) – on the whole, this expresses the asceticism of virtue just as well as any denial of sensuality… However, the compulsion towards it, that unconditional will to truth, is faith in the ascetic ideal itself, even if, as an unconscious imperative, make no mistake about it, – it is the faith in a metaphysical value, a value as such of truth as vouched for and confirmed by that ideal alone…

Strictly speaking, there is no ‘presuppositionless’ knowledge, the thought of such a thing is unthinkable, paralogical: a philosophy, a ‘faith’ always has to be there first, for knowledge to win from it a direction, a meaning, a limit, a method, a right to exist.

(Whoever understands it the other way round and, for example, tries to place philosophy ‘on a strictly scientific foundation’, must first stand on its head not just philosophy, but also truth itself: the worst offence against decency which can occur in relation to two such respectable ladies!) Yes, there is no doubt – and here I let my Gay Science have a word, see the fifth book (section 344) – ‘the truthful man, in that daring and final sense which faith in science presupposes, thus affirms another world from the one of life, nature and history; and inasmuch as he affirms this “other world”, must he not therefore deny its opposite, this world, our world, in doing so? … Our faith in science is still based on a metaphysical faith, – even we knowers of today, we godless anti-metaphysicians, still take our fire from the blaze set alight by a faith thousands of years old, that faith of the Christians, which was also Plato’s faith, that God is truth, that truth is divine … But what if precisely this becomes more and more unbelievable, when nothing any longer turns out to be divine except for error, blindness and lies – and what if God himself turned out to be our oldest lie?’ 

— At this point we need to stop and take time to reflect. Science itself now needs a justification (which is not at all to say that there is one for it). On this question, turn to the most ancient and most modern philosophies: all of them lack a consciousness of the extent to which the will to truth itself needs a justification, here is a gap in every philosophy – how does it come about? Because the ascetic ideal has so far been master over all philosophy, because truth was set as being, as God, as the highest authority itself, because truth was not allowed to be a problem. Do you understand this ‘allowed to be’? –

From the very moment that faith in the God of the ascetic ideal is denied, there is a new problem as well: that of the value of truth. – The will to truth needs a critique – let us define our own task with this -, the value of truth is tentatively to be called into question …

Book III, Section 25 – Science, too, upholds the ascetic ideal!

No! Do not come to me with science when I am looking for the natural antagonist to the ascetic ideal, when I ask: ‘Where is the opposing will in which its opposing ideal expresses itself?’ Science is not nearly independent enough for that, in every respect it first needs a value-ideal, a value-creating power, in whose service it can believe in itself, – science itself never creates values. 

Its relationship to the ascetic ideal is certainly not yet inherently antagonistic; indeed, it is much more the case, in general, that it still represents the driving force in the inner evolution of that ideal. Its repugnance and pugnacity are, on closer inspection, directed not at the ideal itself but at its outworks, its apparel and disguise, at the way the ideal temporarily hardens, solidifies, becomes dogmatic – science liberates what life is in it by denying what is exoteric in this ideal. Both of them, science and the ascetic ideal, are still on the same foundation – I have already explained -; that is to say, both overestimate truth (more correctly: they share the same faith that truth cannot be assessed or criticized), and this makes them both necessarily allies, – so that, if they must be fought, they can only be fought and called into question together. A depreciation of the value of the ascetic ideal inevitably brings about a depreciation of the value of science: one must keep one’s eyes open and prick up one’s ears for this in time! 

And when we view it physiologically, too, science rests on the same base as the ascetic ideal: the precondition of both the one and the other is a certain impoverishment of life, – the emotions cooled, the tempo slackened, dialectics in place of instinct, solemnity stamped on faces and gestures (solemnity, that most unmistakable sign of a more sluggish metabolism and of a struggling, more toiling life). Look at the epochs in the life of a people where scholars predominated: they are times of exhaustion, often of twilight, of decline, – gone are the overflowing energy, the certainty of life, the certainty as to the future. The preponderance of the mandarins never indicates anything good: any more than the rise of democracy, international courts of arbitration instead of wars, equal rights for women, the religion of compassion and everything else that is a symptom of life in decline.

No! – open your eyes! – this ‘modern science’ is, for the time being, the best ally for the ascetic ideal, for the simple reason that it is the most unconscious, involuntary, secret and subterranean! The ‘poor in spirit’ and the scientific opponents of this ideal have up till now played the same game (by the way, beware of thinking that they are its opposite, i.e. the rich in spirit: – they are not that, I called them the hectics of the spirit). These famous victories of the latter: undoubtedly they are victories – but over what? The ascetic ideal was decidedly not conquered, it was, on the contrary, made stronger, I mean more elusive, more spiritual, more insidious by the fact that science constantly and unsparingly detached and broke off a wall or outwork that had attached itself to it and coarsened its appearance. 

Do you really think that, for example, the defeat of theological astronomy meant of defeat of that ideal? … Has man perhaps become less in need of a transcendent solution to the riddle of his existence because this existence has since come to look still more arbitrary, loiterer-like, and dispensable in the visible order of things? Has not man’s self-deprecation, his will to self-deprecation, been unstoppably on the increase since Copernicus? Gone, alas, is his faith in his dignity, uniqueness, irreplaceableness in the rank-ordering of beings, – he has become animal, literally, unqualifiedly and unreservedly an animal, man who in his earlier faiths was almost God (‘child of God, ‘man of God’) … Since Copernicus, man seems to have been on a downward path, – now he seems to be rolling faster and faster away from the centre – where to? Into nothingness? Into the ‘piercing sensation of his nothingness’? – Well! That would be the straight path – to the old ideal? 

… All science… is nowadays seeking to talk man out of his former self-respect as though this were nothing but a bizarre piece of self-conceit; you could almost say that its own pride, its own austere form of stoical ataraxy, consisted in maintaining this laboriously won self-contempt of man as his last, most serious claim to self-respect. Does this really work against the ascetic ideal?

Do people in all seriousness still really believe (as theologians imagined for a while), that, say, Kant’s victory over theological conceptual dogmatism (‘God’, ‘soul’, ‘freedom’, ‘immortality’) damaged that ideal? – We shall not, for the moment, concern ourselves with whether Kant himself had anything like that in view. What is certain is that every sort of transcendentalist since Kant has had a winning hand, – they are emancipated from the theologians: what good luck! – he showed them the secret path on which, from now on, they could, independently, and with the best scientific decorum, pursue ‘their heart’s desires’. 

Likewise: who would blame the agnostics if, as worshippers of the unknown and the secret, they worship the question mark itself as God…Suppose that everything man ‘knows’ does not satisfy his desires but instead contradicts them and arouses horror, what a divine excuse it is to be permitted to lay the guilt for this at the door of ‘knowing’ rather than ‘wishing’! … ‘There is no knowing: consequently – there is a God’: what a new elegantia syllogismi! What a triumph for the ascetic ideal!

Book III, Section 27 – Free the spirit!

– Enough! Enough! Let us leave these curiosities and complexities of the most modern spirit, which have as many ridiculous as irritating aspects: our problem, indeed, can do without them, the problem of the meaning of the ascetic ideal, – what has that to do with yesterday and today! …The only reason I have alluded to this is that the ascetic ideal has, for the present, even in the most spiritual sphere, only one type of real enemy and injurer: these are the comedians of this ideal – because they arouse mistrust.

Everywhere else where spirit is at work in a rigorous, powerful and honest way, it now completely lacks an ideal – the popular expression for this abstinence is ‘atheism’ -: except for its will to truth. But this will, this remnant of an ideal, if you believe me, is that ideal itself in its strictest, most spiritual formulation, completely esoteric, totally stripped of externals, and thus not so much its remnant as its kernel. Unconditional, honest atheism (- its air alone is what we breath, we more spiritual men of the age!) is therefore not opposed to the ascetic ideal as it appears to be; instead, it is only one of the ideal’s last phases of development, one of its final forms and inherent logical conclusions, – it is the awe-inspiring catastrophe of a two-thousand-year discipline in truth-telling, which finally forbids itself the lie entailed in the belief in God.

…What, strictly speaking, has actually conquered the Christian God? The answer is in my Gay Science (section 357): ‘Christian morality itself, the concept of truthfulness which was taken more and more seriously, the confessional punctiliousness of Christian conscience, translated and sublimated into scientific conscience, into intellectual rigour at any price…’

… All great things bring about their own demise through an act of self-sublimation: that is the law of life, the law of necessary ‘self-overcoming’ in the essence of life, – the lawgiver himself is always ultimately exposed to the cry: ‘patere legem, quam ipse tulisti’ [‘Submit to the law you have yourself made’]. In this way, Christianity as a dogma was destroyed by its own morality, in the same way Christianity as a morality must also be destroyed, – we stand on the threshold of this occurrence. After Christian truthfulness has drawn one conclusion after another, it will finally draw the strongest conclusion, that against itself; this will, however, happen when it asks itself, ‘What does all will to truth mean?’

… and here I touch on my problem again, on our problem, my unknown friends (- because I don’t know of any friend as yet): what meaning does our being have, if it were not that that will to truth has become conscience of itself as a problem in us? … Without a doubt, from now on, morality will be destroyed by the will to truth’s becoming-conscious-of-itself: that great drama in a hundred acts reserved for Europe in the next two centuries, the most terrible, most questionable drama but perhaps also the one most rich in hope… 

Book III, Section 28 – Why Are We Ascetic?

Except for the ascetic ideal: man, the animal man, had no meaning up to now. His existence on earth had no purpose; ‘What is man for, actually?’ – was a question without an answer; there was no will for man and earth; behind every great human destiny sounded the even louder refrain ‘in vain!’ This is what the ascetic ideal meant: something was missing, there was an immense lacuna around man, – he himself could think of no justification or explanation or affirmation, he suffered from the problem of what he meant. Other things made him suffer too, in the main he was a sickly animal: but suffering itself was not his problem, instead, the fact that there was no answer to the question he screamed, ‘Suffering for what?’ Man, the bravest animal and most prone to suffer, does not deny suffering as such: he wills it, he even seeks it out, provided he is shown a meaning for it, a purpose of suffering. The meaninglessness of suffering, not the suffering, was the curse that has so far blanketed mankind, – and the ascetic ideal offered man a meaning!

Up to now it was the only meaning, but any meaning at all is better than no meaning at all; the ascetic ideal was, in every respect, the ultimate ‘faute de mieux’ par excellence. Within it, suffering was interpreted; the enormous emptiness seemed filled; the door was shut on all suicidal nihilism. The interpretation – without a doubt – brought new suffering with it, deeper, more internal, more poisonous suffering, suffering that gnawed away more intensely at life: it brought all suffering within the perspective of guilt … But in spite of all that – man was saved, he had a meaning, from now on he was no longer like a leaf in the breeze, the plaything of the absurd, of ‘non-sense’; from now on he could will something, – no matter what, why and how he did it at first, the will itself was saved. 

It is absolutely impossible for us to conceal what was actually expressed by that whole willing that derives its direction from the ascetic ideal: this hatred of the human, and even more of the animalistic, even more of the material, this horror of the senses, of reason itself, this fear of happiness and beauty, this longing to get away from appearance, transience, growth, death, wishing, longing itself – all that means, let us dare to grasp it, a will to nothingness, an aversion to life, a rebellion against the most fundamental prerequisites of life, but it is and remains a will! …And, to conclude by saying what I said at the beginning: man still prefers to will nothingness, than not will… 

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