Book contents
- Frontmatter
- Contents
- Acknowledgments
- Abbreviations and Translations
- Introduction
- 1 Nietzsche’s Ascetic Morality
- 2 The Kantian Rational Will and the Tyranny of Self-Overcoming
- 3 Hegel’s ‘Labour of the Negative’ and the Lacerations of Self-Negation
- 4 The Bitter Cup of Pure Love: Feuerbach and Zarathustra
- Conclusion
- Bibliography
- Index
1 - Nietzsche’s Ascetic Morality
Published online by Cambridge University Press: 25 April 2023
- Frontmatter
- Contents
- Acknowledgments
- Abbreviations and Translations
- Introduction
- 1 Nietzsche’s Ascetic Morality
- 2 The Kantian Rational Will and the Tyranny of Self-Overcoming
- 3 Hegel’s ‘Labour of the Negative’ and the Lacerations of Self-Negation
- 4 The Bitter Cup of Pure Love: Feuerbach and Zarathustra
- Conclusion
- Bibliography
- Index
Summary
In themselves, ascetic habits and exercises are still far from indicating an anti-natural attitude, a hostility to existence, or degeneration and sickness
self-overcoming, with harsh and dreadful inventions: a means of having and demanding respect for oneself: ascesis as a means of power
(WLN 7[5]:131, KSA 12:271)Few commentators would dispute the claim that Nietzsche’s works are principally concerned with the question of morality. But within that scholarly consensus there is a tendency to overlook the fact that Nietzsche’s sustained critique of morality is itself an extension or a refinement of the morality under scrutiny. As Nietzsche succinctly puts it in one of his late notebook entries: ‘Morality itself, as honesty, compels us to negate morality’ (WLN 5[58]:113, KSA 12:206), or in a more effusive entry written slightly earlier: ‘that one must subject moral valuations themselves to a critique … is itself our present form of morality, as a sublime sense of honesty … as the most sublime kind of probity’ (WLN 2[191]:96, KSA 12:161–2). We hear the same refrain (but see Introduction, n31) in his retrospective work, Ecce Homo: ‘Zarathustra is more truthful than any other thinker. His teaching, and his alone, posits truthfulness as the highest virtue’ (EH ‘Why I am a Destiny’ 3, KSA 6:367). Thus, notwithstanding the scorn habitually heaped by Nietzsche on the ‘will to truth’ as a tenacious moral residue in the fields of science and philosophy (see GS 357, KSA 3:600), it is with this will that Nietzsche flushes out what in his view is ‘the most malicious form of the will to lie’, namely Christian morality. ‘Have I made myself understood?’ he bristles in Ecce Homo; ‘What defines me, what sets me apart from the rest of mankind is that I have unmasked Christian morality’ (EH ‘Why I am a Destiny’ 7, KSA 6:371–2). But if truth is ‘the highest virtue’ in Nietzsche’s system of values, it is but one of a number of Christian virtues which he appropriates and repurposes in a critical onslaught that consumed the greater part of his productive life.
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- Zarathustra's Moral TyrannySpectres of Kant, Hegel and Feuerbach, pp. 29 - 62Publisher: Edinburgh University PressPrint publication year: 2022