2
Horst Hutter
Few Nietzsche scholars have paid any attention to the theme of the philosopher as a therapist. Yet this theme dominates his entire opus, from his earliest writings through to the Zarathustra period and beyond, to the writings of his final active year. They have not seen, or simply ignored, due to certain preconceptions about what philosophy is, that Nietzsche wished to hasten the coming and future sanctification of a new type of synthetic human being. In addressing his specific audience of “free spirits,” he aimed for them to transform themselves into physicians, priests, teachers, and leaders in one. Only such human beings would be able to become cultural healers and leaders on the model of the pre-Socratic thinkers. The pre-Socratic philosophers were educators, teachers, and physicians and were thus able to address the problems and disorders of their times. On such an understanding of Nietzsche, we may read in Camus’ L’homme révolté: “Mais on ne peut rien tirer de Nietzsche . . . tant qu’on ne met pas au premier plan dans son oeuvre, bien avant le prophète, le clinicien.”2
The lack of attention to such a major theme in Nietzsche implies that modern scholars and philosophers were and are perhaps themselves infected by the dis-eases of their times. Thus, they were unable to contribute any significant diagnosis and far less any curative suggestions for the modern, cultural and psychological malaises of nihilism. Many modern philosophers might thus not be philosophers for themselves, that is to say, to be both patients and physicians in one, but only manage to assume the image of philosophers in the eyes of fellow citizens in their roles as academics and as functionaries of political orders.
Nietzsche’s entire teaching is shaped by his struggles against his own many illnesses that he traced to his upbringing as a Christian and to the embodiment of punitive Christian moralism in his character, in an age in which the Christian moral order is undergoing dissolution. This dissolution is induced by its own internal developments. His teaching hence does not offer any “doctrines” valid for all times and for all circumstances. The contradictory doctrines in his writings are historically situated at this particular point in the evolution of Christianity and do not aim to provide logically coherent “eternal verities.” They are Janus-faced, looking backward to Christian origins, with an intention of deconstruction, and looking forward to the future, with an intention of eventual reconstruction and the creation of new types of human orders. They are oriented toward new kinds of ascetic practices, which hopefully might eventually be incorporated in new forms of religiosities that are “loyal to the earth.” These new religions would not set the goals for human striving in some nebulous “beyond” to which “souls” should escape as quickly as possible. Nietzsche’s teachings proceed from a negation, even if phrased affirmatively, and then proceed to an affirmation, even if phrased negatively.
This yes/no structure was identified by Nietzsche to reside in his own immense suffering, deeply rooted in his Christian “second nature,” as well as his unsuccessful attempts to heal himself through writing. The attainment of what he envisioned as the “great health” was impossible for his own lifetime and only seen as tentatively possible for his future free-spirited disciples. His critical analyses of the nihilistic disorders of the modern Christian soul are both intensely personal and endowed with far-reaching emotional and mental implications. In his vision, the personal is thus both the philosophical and the political. Indeed, from this perspective, the understanding of philosophy as an abstract and impersonal theoretical discourse on the model of the natural sciences is both a symptom of the underlying malaise and a major factor contributing to its continuation.
A core idea of Nietzsche’s diagnosis of current forms of Christianity as a malady involves a critical deconstruction of the soul/body division, implied by the anthropology of most Abrahamic religions. He proposes a new vision of the human totality that sees whatever may be understood as “mind,” “soul,” “spirit,” seen as separate from a “body,” and understood as a “monad,” as an inherited cultural and political fiction. He prefers the German term “Leib” with its close etymological connection to “life,” to the alternate German term “Koerper,” which already suggests that humans are beings in which an at least potentially “‘good’ soul” temporarily inhabits a “bad” body, which already should be seen as a corpse (= Koerper). The Christian moral code is based on what St Paul called the “mortification of the flesh.” The consequence of such an ascetic program has been to render sexuality sinful and something that needs to be hushed up. And just as the “body” may be thus despised, the material environment of life may also be neglected and treated with contempt—for after all, from this perspective, the world is going to disappear with the coming of the “savior.” Against these harmful visions, Nietzsche has proposed a new focus that sees the “Leib” as an enspirited material entity that needs to renew its sundered connection with the earth and all of its living forms. In this sense, he proposes a vision of a “cosmos anthropos” that sees soul, mind, and spirit to be everywhere, completely connected to their material bases. Indeed, the very distinction between material base and inherent spirit is never more than a sometimes necessary conceptual fiction. Human selves and egos would be envisioned as temporary managerial entities with the task of assuming the “imperative of responsibility” for the Leib and its environment. They need to become responsible “masters of the earth” and cease to despoil and ruin nature.3
Every culture may be seen as a multifaceted and dynamically embodied program of thought and action: it is, to borrow a term from cybernetics, a “difference engine,” something with a unified and finite structure with possibilities for infinities of developments. It is like a natural language that has finite sets of grammatical and syntactical rules that yet permit the construction of an infinite number of sentences. The culture that has proceeded from the Paulinian religious vision, supported by Platonic/Aristotelian reasonings, is also such a difference engine, but one that has served its evolutionary purpose and now is dissolving from within. This requires a new understanding of the human totality as “Leib,” in which soul, mortal body, mind, and spirit, are seen as parts and aspects in antagonistic cooperation with one another. They need to be reordered and retrained.
To be sure, any new reordering also is based on a poetic/political fiction, but one more appropriate in its life-affirming tendencies, designed to resolve the crisis that is engulfing the planet. Nietzsche, in this manner, has proposed a new set of mythologies that are meant to beneficially guide human conduct. From the perspective of this new mythology, all elements of the old myths that can be adapted to serve in the new order are to be transformed and reused. Thus, the “Christian ascetic ideal,” the last form of the Christian will-to-power as a will-to truth, is to be overcome in both its religious and scientific variants. Yet some of its practices, which in any case will still last for generations, may be integrated into new modes of askesis. A frequent error in interpreting Nietzsche’s teaching has been not to see that his attack on the “ascetic ideal” is not his final word in regard to askesis. Thus, he has called for new modes of ascetic practices that will enable enspirited human totalities to survive and prevail in the coming “age of barbarism,” in which the sciences will be in the service of barbarism,4 which he has foreseen and predicted. This new version of an “ascetic ideal” calls for new kinds of ascetic practices that will lead to new kinds of “gymnastics of willing.” Since we live in the era of globalization, the great wealth of ascetic practices to be found in the various religious traditions may be adapted to new requirements. Hence these practical aspects of Nietzsche’s teaching have often been likened to a new kind of Buddhism, or, to use the title of a recent book, a “Euro-Taoism.”5 The new ascetic practices all would involve a mental focus by its practitioners on their embodied “souls,” here and now, during movements, very much on the model of Eastern spiritual practices, such as Yoga or Tai Chi. They would not aim to attain a good position for its practitioners in any “beyond.”
General human evolution has led to the development of a great variety of cultural programmings of animal bodies that have warred with one another across history. They may be seen as experiments made necessary and enabled by the “eccentric positionality”6 of the human species: humans have left or “fallen,” or perhaps been torn out of instinctual guidance and hence have needed emotional and spiritual guidance by culturally designed, embodied programs of conduct. These programs have been initiated by the shamanistic and spiritual poet-thinkers of the past, who have created the various religious and spiritual dispensations that have shaped human history hitherto. All such programs, once they are educated into bodies, provide goals and directions for human strivings and show how humans may increase and use their limited freedoms of choice. They are guides to the development of lines of willing and as such imply a terminus a quo (= from which), the animality of the human, and a terminus ad quem (= to which), often seen as “divine.”
These cultural programs affirm distinctions between right and wrong, good and evil, or good and bad and thus define the in-between status of the human animal, defined Platonically as the metaxy, but more relevantly in Nietzschean term, as the in-between the animal and the “over-human.” They are the “golden loosings”7 that have initiated the human evolutionary trajectory from animality to the “divine,” or rather, the present stage of the “super-animal.”8 As an interesting aside it may be remarked here that Nietzsche’s term “Uebermensch” is a direct translation of the Greek “hyperanthropos.” One of the first uses of the latter term was the description of the nature of Jesus, as not an incarnate God, but as a hyperanthropos, by Montanus in the so-called Montanist heresy in the second century A.D.9 These “golden loosings” have done so by imposing punitive moralistic chains on human animals. These involve a consciousness of sin and the memory of a fall from grace (of instinctual nature). The way backward is barred and the way forward is enabled by rules of conduct, the various moralities. With the disintegration of religiosities in this age of nihilism, new moral codes need to guide humans from the stage of super-animals to the stage of the over-human. Humans furthermore now are frequently in ignorance of what they should do, or when knowing what to do, are unable to do it. Other animals are innocent, as it were, and without “sin.” But for humans “sin is behovely.”10 But the way up is only half-done, and the super-animals need further guidance from a new “golden loosing.”
The rules that enable the transition of the in-between require incentives, threats, rewards, and punishments. They need to be “burned into the flesh” as it were, hence the great importance of cruelty in human history, so frequently both negated and affirmed by Nietzsche in his attempt to transfigure cruelty. Thereby the human will comes to be created and formed, with the suspension of all lines of willing from a summum bonum, a highest good that orients human conduct. The line of willing thereby created can only be sustained through spiritual and ascetic practices. Many of these askeses were developed in ancient philosophical schools of conduct, which in their times were schools for the reeducation of diseased groups of individuals in need of healing. The Christian religion has also provided such spiritual and ascetic practices, by way of selectively adopting them from philosophical schools, such as the Stoa and the Epicurean Garden. But these have now been, and continue to be, undermined by the metaphysical developments that have proceeded from within the enormous successes of Christian spirituality. The empirical sciences have their origins in this spiritual base, frequently by way of its dialectical negations.
Nihilism is for Nietzsche a part of the internal logic of the development of Christian history. With the loss of credibility of its metaphysical grounding via the development of the empirical sciences, the ascetic practices that had sustained religions also have lost their cogency and suffered a serious decrease in meaning. The aim of self-struggle and obedience to rules, seen to lie in salvation in the beyond, is no longer believable. Simultaneously, the fear of eternal damnation has become less and less real, leading to a tremendous loss of power for Christian authorities. A telling measure of these changes may be seen in the fact that, when the Nazi regime instituted a special tax for members of churches, many so-called Christians simply left the churches, so as to avoid this tax. When the regime then was defeated, many of those who had left returned to the churches so as to establish their de-nazification credentials. Such actions would have been unthinkable in the ages of faith, when the fear of damnation was strong and suffused the whole souls of believers.
These developments may be seen as terrible losses, but also as tremendous opportunities for the creation of new lines of willing, new spiritual practices, and new forms of askesis. These new “disciplinae voluntatis,” as Nietzsche envisions them, will have the double task of undoing fully embodied doctrines which have now become harmful in their destructive impact on planetary nature. They need to be replaced by newly embodied rules and interpretations, even in the form of new modes of religiosity, “new gods,” as it were. The philosophical schools that Nietzsche wished to create in his lifetime, but could only foresee for his posthumous future, would revolve around spiritual and ascetic practices that renounce any orientation to the “beyond,” but center on the love of finite life. Like the ancient schools that Nietzsche admired, such as the Epicurean Garden and the Platonic Academy, these new schools would also be schools for the reeducation of humans. Some of these then would evolve into new forms of religiosity over several generations. Since Nietzsche conceived the human totality, the “Leib,” as a labyrinth, escape from the sufferings that human totalities will have to endure, will require a new kind of Ariadne, with a new kind of thread, and her successful marriage with a new kind of kind of Theseus, who is sufficiently inspired by Dionysus and thus will no longer abandon Ariadne on Naxos. And Naxos in turn will have to evolve into a new kind of nurturing Gaia (= earth).
These processes will take a long time and will require sustained efforts by millions of reeducated humans, humans that have been conceived and nurtured in completely different kinds of erotic regimes. This new regime can naturally no longer be based on any vilification of the “flesh,” but must valorize sexual pleasure as a genuine goal for human striving, without any intention of conception. Access to sexual pleasure must become free from the fear of disease and from inevitable and unwanted pregnancies. Only then will “conception” of children become the sacred task that it is meant to be; it may even become immaculate again. Then only wanted children will populate the earth and will be raised by parents, able and willing to sustain these efforts, unencumbered by rage and anxiety. Meanwhile, however, these latter thumotic soul formations will have to be transfigured through appropriate askesis that do not just engage the “body,” but involve dancing and new forms of festivals, in which communities are sustained and members thereof rejuvenated, in such a manner that the inner divinity of each and every human is fully awakened. An excellent description of such a new founding of a tolerably good city, called Magnesia, may be found in Plato’s Laws. It appears that Nietzsche read this text in one of the happiest moments of his life, when he sojourned in Sorrento, together with Paul Ree, in the house of his friend Malwida von Meysenbug, and paid frequent visits to the Wagner residence, borne by his still relatively undisturbed friendship with the Wagners.
Conception of children would have to become conscious and fully willed by both mothers and fathers, who in the act of love intend to conceive a child together, in an environment that is as benign and as stress-free as possible. This too is a suggestion to be found in Plato’s Laws. Nietzsche functioned within a Christian context, and being strongly educated as a Christian, he was naturally aware of the concept of original sin and of the Christian doctrine that original sin is transmitted through the act of conception. His healing vision would seem to foresee an overcoming of the consequences of original sin that are present in the hatreds and anxieties transmitted from generation to generation. Only with an overcoming of original sin, is a new society, based in loyalty to the earth, even conceivable. Only such a society would have overcome the hatred of the “body” and of “nature,” so deeply rooted in the second natures of all humans raised within the confines of Abrahamic religions. This process would naturally take a long time, and it would have to begin with a program of education that targets already the fetus in the mother’s womb. At this stage, the “sounds of life” become crucially important, as the work of the French otolaryngologist Alfred Tomatis has shown. Dr Tomatis has been able to measure the responses of fetuses to benign and adverse sounds in the pregnant woman’s environment. Ultrasound measurements have shown the responses of fetuses to be different to benign sounds than to adverse sounds. From this it would follow that, what is usually called second nature, is already programmed into humans at their fetal stage.11 Naturally, Nietzsche did not know of the Tomatis effects, but these recent scientific results fit entirely within Nietzsche’s program for building a better and higher human species and thereby also to save the earth.
The Tomatis method has been very successful in healing the condition of autism by way of introducing calming music at an early stage of life and even at the fetal stage. Certain kinds of music, in particular Mozart, have proven to be especially curative, a fact well-attested in Tomatis institutes. The odd thing about this is that Mozart’s “The Magic Flute” is meant to convey a form of healing sound rooted in ancient Egyptian traditions. It may be a bit far-fetched, but one might speculate that Christian souls are in a way deeply autistic, and that what is needed is a new form of music, based in a new kind of Pythagorean understanding of human totalities. In any case, given the fact that Nietzsche held life to be a mistake without music, the above speculations would not seem to be so far-fetched.
Once the overall structure of the reeducative gymnastics and reeducative forms of music, and their role in preventing anxiety already in fetuses, for example, has been understood as involving both negations that imply affirmations, and affirmations that imply negations, specific techniques may then be envisioned. The great variety of spiritual and ascetic practices to be found in the philosophers of antiquity, as well as in Eastern spiritual disciplines, may serve as sources and guides for adaptation to modern humans. They need to be adapted to current forms of decadence, that is to say, weakness of wills, and would need to be adjusted to individual specificities. They would provide exercises designed specifically for the parts of human beings called “mind” and/or “spirit,” as well as specific forms of askesis involving “body work.” Such bodywork may be learned from Eastern schools to involve conscious attention during movements to that part of the human totality, so maltreated by the Paulinian “mortification of the flesh.” Thereby a new type of human self would slowly be formed and re-formed by free spirits in themselves. These would transmit their embodied visions to their physical and spiritual descendants. But, currently, we still live (following categories described in Zarathustra) in the stages of the camel, and of the lion, with their emphasis on either blind obedience or misguided deconstruction. Few may have attained the stage of the child, at which a new beginning in a reconstruction becomes conceivable.
The present age of nihilistic disintegration is characterized by terrible confusion and by the strong resistances by the old orders of acculturation to any kind of change in regimes of the soul. Thus, at a recent population conference in Cairo, the representatives of the three monotheistic religions made common cause against any kind of innovation in erotic regimes. They strenuously insisted on maintaining moral codes that forbade any kind of erotic activity that did not intend conception. All artificial means of pregnancy prevention and interruption were vigorously rejected.12 This resistance will continue for a long time yet, and this despite the fact that the human population of the planet is already too large, in terms of quantity, but even more in terms of quality. Similarly, resistance against reeducating girls in matters of erotics seems to be vigorously resisted in many parts of the world. It seems that humans are in love with oppression and oppressors.
The most significant part of the regime of human souls concerns erotic matters, as Eros is the strongest and completely unconquerable force in the soul. But this force has been shaped variously by taboos and restrictions that have become embodied in second natures, and which as such remain mostly unconscious. Humans are governed and willed from deep within themselves by age-old prohibitions and restrictions that are transmitted from one generation to the next. In such a situation, even if individuals feel the need to reeducate themselves, motivated by conflicts and deep suffering, all such reeducation has to proceed within the terms of embodied norms. The very terms of striving to overcome one’s selves are defined by that which needs to be overcome. Thus, Christians struggle against Christian conditioning, while Muslims need to struggle against Muslim conditioning. The “enemy” is within and defines the very goals sought. The struggle is one between conditioned reactivities, one of these conditioned by education, and the other by suffering experienced due to a now increasingly useless education.
As stated above, human animals have been severed from instinctual guidance and hence need cultural modes that define lines of willing. Such lines of willing are defined for the few by philosophical practices and for the many by religions. The shamanic healers and philosophers, the paradigmatic individuals such as Jesus, the Buddha, Laotse, Muhammad, and Socrates, as well as many others before these, have established the patterns that then have been infused into religions for the masses. At all stages of these evolutionary developments, the human soul has revealed itself as a most complicated structure of command/obedience, as a conflictual and conflicted multiplicity, with a strong tendency to chaos. This tendency to chaos becomes very obvious in times of cultural disintegration, such as our era of nihilistic transition. The signs and concepts that have served to organize the dissolving order of the soul have become largely untenable and no longer serve their purposes. Chief among such concepts is the idea of a separate faculty of the soul, called “free will,” which has been at the core of what Nietzsche has called the “metaphysics of the hangman.”13
The foundation of this metaphysics seems to be the fear of death and of the horrors that might await the disobedient after death. An entirely phobocratic structure of command/obedience has been erected on these psychic factors, frequently nourished throughout Christian history by horrible acts of cruel punishments and ghastly public executions. Punishment in this life has often served as an anticipation of what might await “sinners” in the other life. In this manner, a structure of willing has been established in souls, in which the interior and inborn commands, such as sexual desires, have warred with the commands proceeding from imposed moral codes. This has made the human soul rich in thoughts, feelings, and volitions. This very complicated structure of willing has then been ideologically fortified by the doctrine of “free will.” As Nietzsche points out, the one word will has been used to hide an enormous complexity.14 The basic chaotic nature of the soul has been manifesting itself with the waning in the fear of the metaphysical beyond. Cruel punishments and tortures still occur, but they are no longer publicly performed as spectacles on high religious holidays.
With the disappearance of the metaphysics of the hangman, its positive effects have also waned. Nihilism is characterized by decadence, and decadence may be defined as weakness of will. The chaos of the human animal soul is becoming visible in tremendous cultural confusions and in the search for substitute religions in the form of political ideologies such as Nazism, Marxism, and the various forms of Fascism. These ideologies order the chaos of the soul and straighten the lines of willing, by introducing new command centers and new forms of obedience. Naturally, these deep processes in the soul are accompanied by conflicts that are unimaginable in their extent and in their violence. There are “wars like there have never been wars before.”15 The current lack of any clear goals for human striving has also then led to serious emotional disorders that manifest themselves in events such as the drug culture and its lovely little “war on drugs.”
Nietzsche’s therapeutic teaching aims to diagnose the etiology of the above disorders and then to prescribe healing visions and actions. Chief among his curative suggestions is his call to his free-spirited followers to form political orders and small societies of sane and life-affirming ways of living. It seems to me that the model for such new healing communities might well be the garden communities, initiated by Epicurus in antiquity. Members would need to define their lines of willing entirely in this-worldly terms, and rule would be exercised in terms of joy and pleasure, and no longer in terms of fear and anxiety. Indeed, the latter might be the main motives for joining or forming such benign gardens. In such a garden community members would relate to one another in terms of agonistic friendships. They would dance, chant, and sing and thus aim to reestablish in their conscious lives, the unconscious rhythms of the Dionysian within. But, as the saying goes, the way is long and life is short.
Bibliographical note
My reasoning in the above is guided primarily by two sources:
(A) The Nietzsche dictionary, of which only the first volume is so far available. It is meant as a comprehensive subject index, and volume one contains every mention in all of Nietzsche’s writings of the word Askesis in its various forms: Paul van Tongeren, Gerd Schank and Heinrich Siemens, eds. Nietzsche –Woerterbuch. Band 1. Berlin, New York, de Gruyter, 2004. Guided by this subject index, I have examined every mention and every discussion of the concepts of askesis and ascetic practices.
(B) Heinrich Schipperges. Am Leitfaden des Leibes; zur Anthropologik und Therapeutik Friedrich Nietzsches. Stuttgart: Ernst Klett Verlag, 1975.
Notes
1 The phrase “Gymnastik des Willens” is to be found in KSA, 12, 387.
2 Albert Camus. L’Homme révolté. Paris: Editions Gallimard, 1951, p. 88.
3 KSA 12 (9), 93 and 165.
4 KSA 9, 395.
5 Peter Sloterdijk. Eurotaoismus. Frankfurt: Suhrkamp Verlag, 1987.
6 The concept of the excentric positionality of the human animal is the key concept of Helmuth Plessener’s major study in philosophical anthropology: Die Stufen des Organischen und der Mensch. Einleitung in die philosophische Anthropologie (Goschen, 1928). See also Ferdinand Fellmann. “Das Paar als Quelle des Selbst,” Deutsche Zeitschrift fuer Philosophie 57 (2009): 745–56.
7 Der Wanderer und sein Schatten, # 350; KSA 2, 702.
8 “Ueberthier,” in Menschliches-Allzumenschliches #40; KSA 2, 64.
9 Heinrich Mueller, a professor of Greek theology at the University of Rostock in the seventeenth century, in translating the theological writings of Montanus, was the first to render the Greek Hyperanthropos into the German Uebermensch, in his Geistliche Erquickunsstunden (1664).
10 The phrase is attributed to the highly mysterious, fourteenth-century English anchorite Juliana of Norwich.
11 Alfred Tomatis. L’Oreille et la Vie. Paris: Editions Laffont, 1987.
12 See the reports on the United Nations Cairo population conference, held in Cairo from 5 to 13 September 1994.
13 Goetzendaemmerung; “Die vier grossen Irrtuemer”; KSA 6, 90.
14 Jenseits von Gut und Boese # 19; KSA 5, 31–4.
15 Ecce Homo “Warum ich ein Schicksal bin”; KSA 6, 365–74.