Nietzsche begins by saying he thinks that humanity doesn’t really know or understand itself. He wants to explore the history of morals, to see where they come from and how they evolve. He wants to know if conventional ideas about what’s “good” and “evil” in 19th-century Europe (or “modern” Europe, as he calls it) help humanity thrive and flourish. He suspects that they don’t.
Nietzsche’s “First Essay” focuses on the concepts of “good,” “bad,” and “evil.” Nietzsche says that British psychologists think, like he does, that people aren’t born with ingrained morals—they learn them. British psychologists think that selfless behavior is useful in early societies, so it becomes entrenched in conventional ideas about morality, but Nietzsche disagrees. He looks at the etymology of the word “good” and discovers that in early usage, “good” means “aristocratic” or noble. It references society’s most powerful people. This means that whoever’s the most powerful person in a society determines what’s good. In such societies, like Ancient Greece, there’s no concept of evil. People who aren’t strong and powerful are simply less good, rather than fundamentally evil. Societies ruled by knights or warriors tend to think that being strong, aggressive, and ambitious are good. Nietzsche thinks that “priestly” morality evolves from historically oppressed people around the birth of Christianity. Oppressed people resent their oppressors, so they “revolt” and develop a new moral code that depicts their own own humble, patient, and obedient behavior as “good” and demonizes people they hate (their oppressors) as barbaric, aggressive beasts of prey. Nietzsche thinks this has catastrophic effects on European society. All around him in Europe, he smells bad air that emanates from people who aren’t thriving, but rotting. People are making themselves miserable because they think they can choose to be nonviolent, meek, and obedient, but they misunderstand human nature. Such people think they’ll achieve “bliss” in heaven, but to Nietzsche, this is a lie. He thinks scholars need to study the value of the morals a society upholds, and think about what they’re good for.
Nietzsche begins his “Second Essay” by looking at promises. In order to keep promises, people have to train themselves to develop a conscience, so that they’ll feel guilty for breaking promises and be more inclined to keep them. Many people assume that developing a conscience is a good thing, but Nietzsche thinks the social customs that encourage people to develop a conscience are entrenched in pain, fear, and violence circulating around notions of “debt” and “credit.” Nietzsche then shifts his focus to punishment, arguing that when a person (a debtor) breaks a promise, they fail to deliver on a promise, and so they owe a debt to the person who expected to receive some something from them (a creditor). Punishment entitles the creditor to claim compensation for what they’re owed in the form of physical pain. The creditor effectively gets the satisfaction of seeing someone suffer until the debt is paid off. Nietzsche says that deriving satisfaction from being cruel is a natural human instinct, which is why historical festivities often included violent components. Nietzsche thinks that humanity was healthier when people weren’t so ashamed about this aspect of human nature.
Nietzsche then turns to justice. He thinks that this, too, is about collecting debts. People in a society promise to behave in certain ways, and when they break their promises, the creditor (society’s legal system) claims compensation by making the criminal suffer, which yields a certain satisfaction for the populace. Nietzsche thinks that ancient societies were healthier because they created other outlets for people to express their aggression and feel that satisfaction, so people didn’t need to use to the legal system to make criminals suffer or to feel satisfaction from aggression through some twisted notion of justice. Nietzsche thinks that customs don’t necessarily get progressively better over time. It really depends on who’s in power—and how they shape customs (like punishment) to achieve their aims. Nietzsche thinks that punishment in European society doesn’t actually service the culture’s aims. People think that punishment teaches people to feel guilty so they won’t break laws in the future, which will help them succeed in life. But Nietzsche disagree—he thinks that guilt is incredibly unhealthy.
According to Nietzsche, ancient humans were nomadic predators who used their aggressive instincts to kill prey. As they formed societies, they began to direct that aggression towards conquering territory. Modern society doesn’t have any spaces where people can be aggressive, so they repress that instinct and end up unleashing their aggression on themselves: they torture themselves with guilt for having aggressive instincts, which causes tremendous mental anguish and suffering. Christian values exacerbate this suffering: people try to “tame” their “animal selves” to become “good,” and they start believing their natural human instincts are “evil,” which makes them suffer even more. Nietzsche thinks that modern humans have demonized our natural instincts for too long, and he longs for something that will turn the situation around.
Nietzsche’s “Third Essay” focuses on ascetic ideals, which advocate abstaining or withdrawing from emotional, bodily, and material urges in order to practice “poverty, chastity, and humility.” Nietzsche wants to see where and how ascetic ideals come up in European culture. He sees them in operatic composer Wagner’s art because Wagner’s later work celebrates thinks like chastity. Nietzsche prefers Goethe and Hafiz’s poems because they play with the tension between sensual and spiritual aspects of life, like Wagner’s earlier work. Wagner’s later work, however, seems like a shallow mouthpiece for his religious views—which, to Nietzsche, makes his art bad. Nietzsche turns to philosopher Kant’s views about art, which he finds idiotic. Kant thinks that a person needs to maintain an emotionally and psychologically distanced attitude to appreciate the beauty in art, but Nietzsche thinks this is nonsense. Nietzsche agrees with writer Stendhal that art’s great power is its ability to move, excite, and stimulate people. Philosopher Schopenhauer thinks that contemplating beautiful art facilitates a calming, distanced sensation that gives people a break from the relentless striving or “willing” feeling that underscores reality. Nietzsche thinks that Schopenhauer might feel that personally when he looks at art, but many people look at art to stir up their emotions, not to calm them.
Nietzsche thinks that the ascetic ideal also surfaces in most scholarly practices in European culture. Philosophers tend to enjoy thinking, so they prefer to live quietly and shun the distractions of everyday life. They also tend to privilege intellectual thinking and depict emotional and bodily aspects of life as primitive. They usually think that retreating from life to think gives them a more objective perspective on the world, but Nietzsche disagrees, since they’re always looking from their own subjective perspective. Nietzsche characterizes people who find value in distancing themselves from everyday life as “ascetic priests.” Nietzsche thinks the ascetic ideal manifests most tangibly in Christianity: religious leaders want to escape the pain of mortality, so they tell themselves that withdrawing from their emotional urges, materialistic aims, and bodily desires will give them access to immortality in heaven. Nietzsche thinks that this is a perverse attitude that makes European society sick. Ascetic priests position themselves as leaders who will heal people’s suffering; this makes them feel powerful, which diminishes their own suffering. But in doing so, they encourage people to turn their aggression on themselves and feel guilty for having natural human urges, which makes people suffer more. Nietzsche says that in other cultures, spiritual people use tremendous discipline to withdraw from life so that they can move beyond all emotional experience and feel a blissful sensation of nothingness—but he thinks that Christian ascetic priests do the opposite. They control people’s behavior by telling them to act charitable and kind, but they also rile up people’s emotions by encouraging them to feel passionate about the Christian moral code. This, to Nietzsche, encourages mass hysteria (like witch hunts).
Although scientists tend to think they escape the ascetic ideal, Nietzsche doesn’t believe this is the case. It’s true that scientists take God out of the picture, but they still need to live quiet, focused lives to do their work. They also tend to value truth and objectivity, meaning that they think (like philosophers do) that suppressing emotional, bodily, and material urges and being rational and detached somehow brings them closer to seeing the world objectively. To Nietzsche, this kind of thinking just embodies the ascetic ideal. In fact, to Nietzsche, anyone who thinks taking a step back from life will help them think more objectively about what to believe—which includes atheists, amateur thinkers (“armchair scholars”), and historians—merely end up reinforcing the ascetic ideal. Nietzsche thinks that the ascetic ideal is so pervasive in European culture that all he smells is bad air from the rotting corpses of people who are stunting their lives by stepping back from living. Nietzsche thinks that European society has grown more secular—meaning it’s moved on from Christian dogma—but it’s still entrenched in Christian morality, encapsulated in this idea that holding back or abstaining from life’s messiness has some moral or intellectual advantage.
Nietzsche concludes that when it comes down to it, one question plagues humankind: the meaning of life. He thinks the ascetic ideal is so pervasive because it helps people feel that their lives have a purpose or meaning. Unfortunately, it also makes people feel guilty, hate their natural human instincts, suffer, and desire “oblivion” (an end to it all). Nietzsche wryly concludes that even aligning with the ascetic ideal betrays some desire. Desiring, after all, is a fundamental aspect of human nature, which is the point Nietzsche has been making all along.
