Redeeming Nietzsche: On the Piety of Unbelief

Rating:
Summary: Nietzsche's Salvation Shamed
Review: Redeeming Nietzsche examines the residual theologian in the most vociferous of atheists.
Fraser demonstrates that although Nietzsche rejected God, he remained obsessed with the question of human salvation. Examining his accounts of art, truth, morality and eternity, Nietzsche's thought is revealed to be a series of experiments in redemption. However, when placed in direct confrontation with the enormity of modern understandings of destruction, Nietzsche's prescriptions for human salvation look like the imaginings of a more comfortable age. Drawing upon the work of Kundera, Nussbaum, Girard and Cavell, Fraser traces the successive failures of Nietzsche's salvation theology to an inability fully to face the depths of human suffering.
Though Nietzsche's powerful attack upon Christianity has remained influential for over a century, few have attempted to mount a sustained theological critique of his thought. Redeeming Nietzsche challenges assumptions of Nietzsche's secularity and opens up a new front in Nietzsche scholarship.
Excerpt: One of the most extraordinary things about Nietzsche's reception by theologians in the twentieth century is how so few of them have a bad word to say about him. Barth attacks Nietzsche (though really only in a footnote, albeit a very long one) and so does Milbank (and we shall look at this later), but apart from these two it is hard to think of a major theological voice which seeks to rebut the charges Nietzsche makes against Christianity. Christian theology is not alone in offering so warm a welcome to one so hostile to its fundamental beliefs. Nietzsche wrote that `When a woman has scholarly inclinations there is usually something wrong with her sexuality' yet he has managed to become a fashionable figure in academic feminism. Nietzsche also had nothing good to say about democracy or socialism yet he has been appropriated by leftist movements from the very beginning. Nietzsche is a charismatic figure and everybody wants to be his friend.
Over the centuries Christianity has made a habit of appropriating the arguments of non-Christians and turning them to its own purposes. Given the powerful role Nietzsche has had in shaping twentieth-century thought it
is unsurprising that Christian theologians have looked to use his work as a theological resource. The way in which this has been done has been to break up Nietzsche for his parts. The aspects of Nietzsche's work that are wholly incompatible with Christian theology are fenced off and (largely) ignored, or cleverly re-interpreted. Thus Christians can join in the general applause of Nietzsche's work. I have tried to suggest in this opening chapter that though there is much to learn from Nietzsche, these fences are not very secure. If Nietzsche is to be used as a theological resource I think the Christian theologian ought first to set about the task of refuting him (best of all, on his own terms). And in order to do this we must try to understand him better.
Indeed, isn't his `kind of denial of an existence shared with others' linked to `the murderous lengths to which' Nietzsche will go in order to repress the claim the other has upon him? Could it be that Nietzsche's unwillingness to enter into the suffering of another, that is, his objection to the empathic projection involved with pity, represents an unwillingness not simply to see, but to be seen? Karl Barth seems to be tracking Nietzsche down in precisely this way when he writes:

And the true danger of Christianity . . . on account of which he had to attack it with unprecedented resolution and passion . . . was that Christianity - what he called Christian morality - confronts the real man, the superman . . . with a form of man which necessarily questions and disturbs and destroys and kills him to the very root. That is to say, it confronts him with the figure of the suffering man. It demands that he should see this man, that he should accept his presence, that he should not be man without him but man with him, that he must drink with him at the same source. Christianity places before the superman the Crucified, Jesus, as the Neighbour, ignoble and despised in the eyes of the world (of the world of Zarathustra, the true world of men), the hungry and thirsty and sick and captive, a whole ocean of human meanness and painfulness. Nor does it merely place the Crucified and his host before his eyes. It does not merely will that he see Him and them. It wills that he should recognise in them his neighbours and himself.

For Barth, what Nietzsche feared in the other was a reflection of his own suffering humanity. Nietzsche preferred fantasies of (super-human) strength and self-sufficiency to the recognition of human-all-too-human need and fragility. Throughout Zarathustra, Nietzsche's hero is haunted by the crippled dwarf, the little man, the small man. In one of the great emotional climaxes of Thus Spoke Zarathustra, as Zarathustra comes to feel the full force of eternal recurrence, that is, as he is faced with the reality of what he can and cannot affirm about himself, it is the weight of the dwarf (note especially that Nietzsche speaks of the eternal recurrence as `the greatest weight') that restricts his full self-affirmation. In the climax of the passage Zarathustra turns on the dwarf: `Dwarf! You! Or I!' Stanley Rosen interprets this exclamation in this way: `The immediate sense of the image is as follows. Zarathustra can rise no higher until he overcomes the pity for humanity that still pulls him back to the earth below.' In this way Nietzsche's rejection of pity (in so far as Nietzsche and Zarathustra are of a common mind at this point) represents a rejection of, a refusal to acknowledge, any sense of identity between himself and the crippled dwarf figure, suffering humanity. Better to murder the dwarf, to oust him, to sacrifice him even, than to have him make me face my own dwarfness - thus spoke Zarathustra. In rejecting suffering humanity, in casting people as the herd, Nietzsche is seeking to set himself free from the earth below. This begins Nietzsche's disloyalty to the
earth; a 'murderous' disloyalty which, for all Nietzsche's emphasis on honesty, is motivated by an unwillingness fully to face the pains and disappointments of his own humanity.
Reciprocity, intimacy and marriage
As a choice for a final thought on the failures of Nietzschean soteriology 'marriage' may seem odd and strangely out of place. I am aware that some may suspect that this theme introduces an unwelcome spirit of exclusiveness associated with the more conservative elements of Church teaching. This is not my intention at all. I employ marriage, following Cavell, as a way of speaking about the ordinariness of human intimacy that is shared over time and has come to be caught up in a whole pattern of life. Cavell puts it thus: 'questions about marriage . . . are meant as questions about weddedness as a mode of human intimacy generally, intimacy in its aspect of devotedness'.
There is, nonetheless, an important theological connection between marriage and ordinariness that is worth underlining. As we have already seen, one of the key dimensions of the Protestant revolution is the celebration of what Charles Taylor calls 'ordinary life'. This revolution marks the transition from a sense of the holy based upon separateness and being set aside, to one in which the holy is seen to be enmeshed in the ordinary and the everyday. And a crucial moment in this transition is the abandonment of clerical celibacy. It is highly relevant that many of the key reformers, including Luther and Cranmer, got married while remaining priests. According to Oberman it is Luther's theology of marriage gained through an exegesis of Genesis 2: 18 that 'is truly epoch making' and at the heart of the Reformation. The celebration of marriage (rather than seeing it as occasion for regret), at least historically, constitutes a definitive moment in the celebration of the ordinary.
In Cavell's thought the ordinary everyday human intimacy that is characteristic of (Cavell's sense of) marriage is counterposed to the tragedy of avoidance. He points to a genre he calls 'comedies of remarriage' - films such as The Philadelphia Story and Bringing up Baby - which pursue the logic (and glitches) of acknowledgment. For whereas avoidance 'does violence to others, it separates their bodies from their souls, makes monsters of them; and presumably we do it because we feel others are doing this violence to us', acknowledgment is the 'release from this circle of vengeance'. And here we are back to Girard.
Cavell speaks of marriage as remarriage to emphasise the sense in which 'redemptive' marriage, marriage that institutes cycles of acknowledgement and forgiveness, is constituted by the desire and willingness of each partner repeatedly to remarry each other. Reminding us of the connections with skepticism he writes: 'marriage is an emblem of the knowledge of others not solely because of its implication of reciprocity but because it implies a devotion, in repetition, to dailiness.' This quality of repetition Cavell finds
in Nietzsche's notion of eternal recurrence. Of the title `remarriage' Cavell comments:

The title registers, to my mind, the two most impressive affirmations known to me of the task of human experience, the acceptance of human relatedness, as the acceptance of repetition. Kierkegaard's study called Repetition, which is a study of the possibility of marriage; and Nietzsche's Eternal Return, the call for which he puts by saying it is high time; this is literally Hochzeit, German for marriage, with time itself as the ring.

I have argued that Nietzsche betrays this vision by what I have called a ressentiment against ordinary life. It is a betrayal which leads him away from honesty, away from `the awful truth' (significantly the title of what Cavell takes to be the most impressive of the remarriage comedies). But the 'cyclical' dimension to Nietzschean soteriology is, I think, tremendously important and in speaking of remarriage Cavell reclaims this without succumbing to Nietzsche's own brand of ressentiment.
Circling around a similar idea to that explored by Cavell, Rowan Williams, in a sermon preached at the wedding of John and Alison Milbank, speaks of the relationship between truth and love. Williams begins thus:

One of the great dramatic points in an old-fashioned wedding was the moment when the bride removed her veil from her face; and whatever the original symbolism of this, it's a remarkably telling sign of what marriage involves. Unveiling, undeception - clear and just vision. John and Alison are promising to look at each other for the rest of their lives, and to be looked at by each other: lovingly, faithfully and, above all, truly and honestly.

To begin with, it is worth noting that Williams is speaking here about truth-as-honesty in much the same way as Nietzsche. For Nietzsche, total honesty is only possible alone - for Williams honesty comes through relation-ship; there can be no `total' honesty about oneself that completely by-passes the gaze of the other. Truth requires love just as much as love requires truth.

Because there can be no love without truth. Without clear and just vision, love is a business of projection and fantasy. And there can be no truth without love. Without trust and tenderness and courtesy, truth will vanish behind the walls of fear and pain.

Nietzsche clearly believes the first of these claims, that there can be no love without truth. As we have seen Nietzsche's own `version' of love is affirmation, and he believes total affirmation of human life is only possible and meaningful on the basis of a full apprehension of life's horror. But Nietzsche never sees the point of the second claim - that there can be no truth without
love. Truth can be had for Nietzsche by tough-minded determination, by a rigorous exercise of suspicion. But this suspicion, when pursued as an absolute demand, forecloses upon dimensions of honesty available only to those who are prepared to accept and trust the love of another. The one who is loved is more able to face the reality of their own pain and sense of worthlessness because admitting and facing all of that no longer seems so cataclysmic. Only thus is the wisdom of Silenus fully defeated. Williams sums up: `Truth makes love possible; love makes truth bearable.'

Rating:
Summary: Of thought and legacy
Review: This book contains a thoughtful and provoking analysis of Nietzsche's influences. It is extraordinarily useful in understanding the theologiacl dialogue present in German culture during Nietzsche's life, and how this effected the type of atheism Nietzsche "does."

Rating:
Summary: superb!
Review: This is a superb book which breaks new ground and should be read by everyone interested in Nietzsche and his role in shaping 20th century German politics.