Much Ado About Nothingness Melinda Selmys Originally published in Issue XII of Vulgata, February, 2003.

It has been suggested that if you wish to have some sense of how great a tragedy was the fall of the brightest of the angels, you need merely introduce yourself to the writings of Friedrich Nietzsche. A man of tremendous literary genius, great intellect, and wide-spread influence, Nietzsche shares with his philosophical muse an overweening pride that, unfortunately, colours every line of grimly sparkling prose that he ever wrote. From the lofty and prophetic aphorisms of Thus Spake Zarathrustra, to the endless self-aggrandizement of his narcissistic magnum opus, Ecce Homo (the Homo in question being, of course Nietzsche and not Christ), he presents a philosophy that is extremely elitist, amoral, and anti-Christian. Unfortunately, it is a philosophy that – both because of its appeal to pride, and because of Nietzsche's obvious talent – is at least partially alluring to a large number of people. More importantly, his ideas and his thought have had a wide influence on numerous other philosophies, from Nazism to Existentialism, so it can be useful for the Christian apologist to have some knowledge of what he said.

Thus Spoke Friedrich Nietzsche

Nietzsche is often called a nihilist, but this is not entirely true. It is not that he believes that there are no morals, but rather that he rejects Christian morality outright – to the point where he almost posits its opposite as a moral obligation. He believes that it is the morality of the coward, the resentful, oppressed slave who, in seething, internalized revolt against his superiors conceives a morality of degradation and self-abasement. It is the morality of Priests in who, “because of their impotence…hatred grows to monstrous and uncanny proportions, to the most spiritual and poisonous ideal of hatred.” This doctrine is, of course, absurd, and there are few people who would ever relate it in its pure form, as set down by Nietzsche himself, however the offspring of this idea can commonly be found, especially amongst young people.

It is actually not uncommon to discover that people believe that the original priests were men who, on account of their weakness, were unable to join in the hunt – unable to gain power of authority in the usual ways. And so, the story goes, these men invented religion, gods and magic, in order that they could, by cleverness, usurp the power that they could not gain by strength. What power they had not in themselves they could claim to have by virtue of the superior power of their god. All religion, therefore, is an attempt to impose upon the strong the limitations of the weak.

There is a temptation here to try to disprove the first statement: that the original priests were men who, because of weakness, could not join in the hunt. This may or may not be true – we have no means of testing it, because we have neither direct experience nor historical documentation about the physical capabilities of the first priests. Furthermore, all the historical data that we do have – both about early man, and about primitive societies – suggests that there is a great deal of variation, so that neither Nietzsche's hypothesis nor the opposite is really provable in any meaningful way. We can, however, address his contention that Judeo-Christian morality is the result of an effeminate priestly class attempting to emasculate the superior hunter caste.

Consider that what is being contrasted here is not so much the difference between the weak and the strong, but rather the difference between the physically strong and the intellectually strong. It is a contest that can be seen in any school play-ground – the little boy who is able to beat up any other kid on the playground happily throws stones at the boy who wants to sit in the corner with his book. Eventually both grow up, and the weaker, more intelligent boy comes to feel that he is perfectly in his rights looking down his nose at the high-school jocks who used to be the elementary school bullies. He does not, however become a priest as Nietzsche supposes. On the contrary, he becomes a philosopher (rather like Nietzsche himself...) There is no greater cure for what Nietzsche calls “resentiment” than a feeling of intellectual superiority. But such superiority depends not upon magical tricks and deceits, nor upon fictitious gods, as Nietzsche seems to assume – the victory to be gained by such means would be entirely unfulfilling, and hence quickly abandoned or not even widely practiced in the first place – it can, in fact, only come from the feeling that one has something real, something genuine, something true, which the schoolyard bully does not have and could not have discovered. (Note that this does not imply that what they find will be actually true, only that it arises out a desire for truth, and therefore cannot be based on any deliberate deception.)

In order to make sense of Nietzsche's contention, we must make the unlikely assumption that the sophisticated moral systems and scriptural writings of the great religions did not arise from the work of a physically weak intellectual caste, but from the trickery of a game-legged charlatan. The circus huckster might, if he were transported back ten thousand years, be expected to use low cunning in order to convince the “rubes” that he was a powerful shaman and oracle of God – but such a man differs from Nietzsche's proto-priest in a number of significant ways. In the first place, he is motivated not only by resentment, but also by a mammoth contempt for those who he is trying to deceive. He doesn't consider them his superiors, and therefore desire to bring them down to his own level, he considers them his inferiors, and tries to use them to his own ends. Because of this, he doesn't make controversial claims: quack necromancers and fraudulent psychics may be able to win gold and adulation by their trickery, but they do so, invariably, by telling people exactly what they want to hear. Thus, if religion had been, to begin with, nothing more than an elaborate confidence trick, it would never have suggested a moral schema that contradicted the morality of those whose favor it sought to curry. Since, in Nietzsche's proposed scenario, the shyster-priest would have gained most by pandering to the strong, it is ridiculous to assume that he would have presented a morality of weakness.

Of course it might be objected that conditions in human prehistory were not entirely analogous to those of the modern playground or circus – and in some sense this is true. The underlying psychology is, however, still relevant – everything that we know of early human history, and of the development of human culture, demonstrates that the basic principles of human psychology are essentially the same. If this were not true, we would expect to find that the old stories were completely inaccessible to us, or that stories from other cultures were completely incomprehensible on a psychological level. This, however, is not the case – we can watch a Japanese movie, or read a Babylonian document, and although the symbolism or cultural ethos may be incomprehensible, we are still able to relate precisely because the people involved are psychologically similar to those that we know.

Neither the resentment of the scorned intellectual, nor the contempt of a cunning swindler will ever produce a morality of solidarity and compassion. The latter will only mimic the morality of those it seeks to dupe, and the former will produce what it always has done – a morality of nobility, of civilization, of pride. It will be precisely the morality of a Nietzsche who imagines himself to be of a more refined, more noble type than the common man. Spurned intelligence has no concept of solidarity with the common man, at best it will produce a sort of pitying condescension – as Nietzsche himself points out, “….“bad,” “low,” “unhappy” never ceased to sound to the Greek ear as one note with a tone-colour in which “unhappy” preponderates.”(38)* The nobility, which he so values, are not the men of action, the men of war, but the very weak men who have, by cleverness, established themselves as rulers of the rest of the mankind. Having done this they can, of course, condescend to hand out medals and write great poems in praise of war heroes – but to pretend that it is the war heroes who first established civilization and the noble ideal is absurd.

On the Genealogy of Altruism

The man who rides out every day to defend his country must, at least to some degree, care for the people of his country. The man who hunts for the whole tribe must feel that he is responsible to the whole tribe. Even if they are motivated primarily by the desire for personal glory, they must still begin by feeling that the defence and care of others is a great undertaking in which one could reasonably take pride. The notion of solidarity arises not from a communal resentment of the strong, but rather from the feeling of the strong that they are responsible for the weak. The explanation for the origin of such a sentiment does not require the intervention of any priestly caste at all, as Nietzsche supposes – it can be found at the heart of the survival of the human species, in the necessary structure of the family.

Nietzsche’s error is fairly straightforward. He explains the origins of morality working from the assumption that the basic unit of society is the individual, and that the individual always exists in the context of some sort of power struggle – that the most fundamental type of human relationship is master/slave. In this context, the morality which seeks to place the strong at the disposal of the weak, which values human life in itself and encourages compassion, solidarity, obedience, altruism and so forth, can only be the result of the slaves, out of resentment of their master’s power, seeking either to bring the masters down to their level, or to elevate the necessary conditions of their own existence to the level of a moral good. If, however, we wish to find the origins of human morality in psychology or history, we must begin by recognizing that the first relationship that any human being finds himself in is that of a child to their parent. The moment we recognize that the family, not the individual, is the basic unit of society, and that the most fundamental human relationship is not master/slave but parent/child we can immediately comprehend how it is that we came to – and in fact need to – value the altruistic virtues. Ayn Rand's “virtue of selfishness” may work very well if we want to produce immense capital wealth, and the “will to power” may seem like a revelation to Zarathrustra all alone on his mountain, but the moment that you want to propagate the species you need to turn to a different ideal. It is impossible for a society to survive if parents are not willing to submit their work and their lives for the sake of their children. It is equally impossible for it to thrive if children do not submit themselves to the superior knowledge and judgment of their parents.

Of course those who believe in the morality of egoism will simply say that people, freed from self-abnegating constraints of Judeo-Christian morality will still have children – only they will be honest enough to admit that their child-bearing is fundamentally self-motivated – a sort of self-fulfillment, or a personal accomplishment. This sort of notion is not altogether uncommon, but those who hold it are, almost universally, not parents. It is simplicity itself for a young journalist on birth control to breezily assert that all parents are really in it for selfish reasons, it is another thing  to hold this position when you’re so tired, frustrated and depressed that the only thing preventing you from running away or hanging yourself is your feeling of responsibility for another human being. It is here that the ideal of the strong, self-asserting, independent man, unfettered by a morality of self-sacrifice, breaks down. Such a man, upon finding that his entire life is being poured out for the sake of a weak, mewling little thing that weighs less than a sack of potatoes, would surely flee, leaving the helpless infant to fend for itself (with obvious consequences.) Nietzsche claims that “the feeling of guilt, of personal obligation, had its origin…in the oldest and most primitive personal relationship, that between buyer and seller, creditor and debtor.”(70) This statement is utterly absurd, first because, as I pointed out, the oldest personal relationship is between a parent and their children, and secondly because we don’t need to imagine personal obligation arising from financial transactions when we can see clearly that a sense of obligation is absolutely necessary in order to ensure that children survive past the first days of infancy.

The Noble Rapist

The follower of Nietzsche sees self-sacrifice as the strong man squandering his strength in a desperate attempt to pull the weak up a foot of mountain when he would have done far more for himself and for human endeavor had he instead forged on alone. Of course no one believes in this sort of philosophy without believing himself to be one of the strong, one of those capable of climbing to new heights or, as Dostoyevski’s Raskolnikov puts it, of “uttering a new word.” This is, in practice, a remarkably lonely philosophy – if one actually acts upon it, they will quickly find that those around them are not entirely necessarily willing to put up with the hubris of a self-proclaimed superman.

Unfortunately, some people who believe in egoist doctrines never actually reach the point where they accept that the consequent loneliness and unhappiness are their fault, and the result of a false system of beliefs. They go on believing that in order to be privileged to breathe the “air of the heights, a strong air,” (as Nietzsche calls his beliefs) they must be willing to leave behind the mass of common humanity, and thus be largely alone. Others never really reach the point where they act as if their supposed beliefs are true, and hence they never realize the consequences of their beliefs. In the case of the former there is little enough that it is possible to do, except to pray and to let them see that, in spite of your supposedly crippling and resentful beliefs, you really are happy. In the case of the latter, however, there are a couple of arguments to be made.

In the first place, Nietzsche’s ideal of the “active, strong, spontaneous, aggressive man" (75) is not one that is actually appealing to most people who consider themselves Nietzschesians. I knew, for example, a girl who was utterly besotted with Nietzsche – and yet who worked for Amnesty International, railing against all sorts of injustices being perpetrated against the wretched of the earth. Now you will not get anywhere by saying that Nietzsche’s philosophy is the philosophy of Hitler, or that it is anti-Semitic, or anything of the sort – anyone who likes Nietzsche will have heard this before and will have means of refuting it. They cannot deny, however, that Nietzsche himself points out (indeed he says he will be “the last to deny” it) that his ideal men have within them a “hidden core [that] needs to erupt from time to time,” and which causes them to commit a “procession of murder, arson, rape, and torture." (40, 41) Indeed, he claims that “in itself, of course, no injury, assault, exploitation, destruction can be 'unjust,' since life operates essentially, that is in its basic functions, through injury, assault, exploitation, destruction and simply cannot be thought of at all without this character.” (76)

Feasting Upon Darkness

The question that must immediately arise in the mind of almost anyone reading this description of the Nietzschesian ideal is “What can anyone possibly find appealing in this?” It seems as if it is one thing to think that Christianity makes too much of weakness, and quite another to believe that the ideal man is someone who, the moment they are let lose from the confines of civilization, runs about raping and pillaging. Indeed, Nietzsche himself repeatedly affirms that his conclusions are ugly, and unpalatable, and altogether unpleasant. So why does he believe them?

The reasons here are essentially twofold. In the first place, he believes them because, whether or not they are attractive, they are his. Reading any of Nietzsche, but especially the self-glorifying rhapsody that opens Ecce Homo, one gets the sense that he is brooding like a starry-eyed mother over a deformed and monstrous child. Of course this doesn’t provide any explanation whatever of why anyone else would be attracted by Nietzsche, but it is important as an apologist to be aware that you will sometimes run into people who have developed their own philosophy, and that in many cases these people will protect their ideas with all the devotion of a mother warthog. The only approach in this case is to be as harmless and nonthreatening as possible. Without the least sarcasm, contempt or disbelief, you must ask them about their ideas, and you must listen with respect and interest. Even if their idea involves the esoteric knowledge of healing crystals as passed down to us from Atlantis, you must try as much as possible to take it seriously. We need to keep in mind that the desire to be original is strongly allied to intellectual pride, and the intellectually proud cannot bear to lose an argument, or to be proved wrong. What you must do, therefore, is to very gently and innocently question their idea. Look for its weak points, its unproven assumptions, and ask about them – not triumphantly, as though to say “Ah ha! You didn’t think of that, did you!” but rather as though you are genuinely curious and actually expect them to have an answer to your questions that would edify you. They are likely to either produce some sort of unconvincing prop, or to change the subject – you will almost never get a direct admission that they hadn’t thought about it, or that they are wrong, but you may well find that by the next time you talk they have realized (quite independently of your influence, of course) that there was a flaw in their original theory.

The second reason why Nietzsche might have found his conclusions appealing, and the reason why other people are attracted to them, is that they confirm a deep, psychological suspicion that underneath everything that is supposedly good there is really a gnawing, “subterranean” worm, that when one presses forward, beyond all constraints, to find the truth at all costs, that one will find “plain, harsh, ugly, repellent, unchristian, immoral truth.” This notion sounds dreadfully unappealing, but it is not, for a couple of reasons. The first is that if Christ is really, underneath His apparent, unimpeachable goodness, just a neurotic and fanatical slave, then there is no need to imitate Him. This is the basest form of moral cowardice and self-justification – that upon finding one is not virtuous, one decides that there must really be no such thing as virtue, or that virtue is really a terrible and inhuman lie designed to destroy human happiness and vigor. The second is that there is something in fallen man that finds ugliness enthralling. Dostoyevski calls it the second beauty – the appeal which sin holds even when it is unmasked and divorced from all its justifications or disguises. It is that within us that listens with rapt attention, even delight, to hear the sins of others – that morbid curiosity which finds pleasure in discovering perversion, and the pleasure of which is increased in direct proportion to the grotesqueness of that which is unearthed. In Nietzsche this is raised to a positive pitch – he speaks of climbing to the highest peak of the mountain, where there is “clean air,” and yet one finishes reading with only the vaguest sense of what he thinks he has found on that peak. Yet of the dark, the “subterranean” which he claims to abhor, one learns everything, for he positively wallows in his “revelation” of the terrible and ugly secret that supposedly underlies Christian morality.

Baptizing the Aesthetic Sense

How, then, do we argue against someone who loves Nietzsche, or who accepts his ideals? To begin with we need to understand that Nietzsche, while he is certainly brilliant, and in many ways highly original, is not really much of a philosopher. He has had intellectual successors who are philosophers, and who were able to take his work and make of it something that stands up to greater intellectual scrutiny, but Nietzsche himself is certainly not a disciplined scholar. His works are full of unverified assumptions, they contain few citations (except references to other works of his own), they are poorly organized and in many cases they don’t resemble philosophical treatises at all. This is not to belittle Nietzsche, but it is important to keep this in mind because it can be tremendously helpful in understanding how to dialogue with his followers. Nietzsche does not appeal to people on the basis of a rigorous rationalism. He appeals to them on the basis of aesthetic. He is a brilliant polemicist and his works are appealing precisely because they are grand, and moving, and poetic. The cure for them, then, cannot be a dry Thomistic syllogism, it must be something else which is sweeping, poetic and brilliant, but which also happens to contain truth. Dostoyevski and Kierkegaard are both excellent because they write with the same sort of stylistic virtuosity as Nietzsche, and their writings are extremely sympathetic to the Nietzschesian temperament.

I recall reading Kierkegaard as a young atheist, and being tremendously impressed by his vision of faith – to the point where I began to yearn to believe in God, simply in order that I might have the sort of sublime and profound outlook that characterized Fear and Trembling. My sister, also an atheist and a post-modernist, called me up after reading Crime and Punishment and commented that it was nearly enough to convince her of Christianity. These books – besides the fact that they have obvious literary merit and are wonderful reading in their own right – are appealing on the same grounds as Nietzsche's work. They are dark, brooding, and full of the sense of alienation and morbidity that draws people to nihilism in the first place. However, rather than simply cherishing and stroking this dark impulse, like Gollum bent over the One Ring, they point a clear and unambiguous finger towards the one means of escape – towards faith, and towards Christ.

Ecce Homo

While, as I said at the beginning, Nietzsche is not entirely a nihilist, many of his followers are. His perfect man – the noble, vigorous, conquering hero – is so patently unappealing, that many people who accept the rest of Nietzsche's philosophy reject this ideal outright. Unfortunately, since Nietzsche's philosophy is designed to discount all other possible models of virtue, this leaves them with nothing, and hence, nihilism. The problem in this case is that you are confronted with someone who believes life to be fundamentally meaningless, who sees it as an unbearable and unbreakable monotony, and who doesn't have hope that it will ever be anything more. It might seem absurd, but if you find yourself conversing with such a person, the best thing to do is to ask them why it is that they don’t commit suicide. This is effective for two reasons. The first is that it brings the conversation directly to the central question of the meaning of life – and it forces them either to admit that there is, after all, something that they truly value (in which case you will have something to build upon), or to admit that they don’t know why they go on living (in which case any claim that their philosophy is vastly superior to yours will suddenly seem rather empty.) Secondly, if they are really a nihilist, and not just someone who likes to throw around the idea of nothingness in order to appear fashionable at parties, this question will help to persuade them that you understand them. This alone is more valuable than any argument, for a nihilist will always, as a rule, assume that you understand nothing of their plight – because if you understood it at all, you could not possibly have persuaded yourself of the truth of Christianity. They see themselves, like Nietzsche, as those who have seen through the false facade of faith and have uncovered the worm-ridden underbelly. They have opened the whitened sepulcher, and found in it only death. It is absolutely critical, therefore, that you gain some sort of credibility – and this question is an invaluable first step. It indicates that, if nothing else, you can see that the justification of existence is the single central concern, the question which must be answered, and yet which cannot be answered without going beyond nihilism.

It must be understood that, whatever the answer you receive to this question, a conversation with a nihilist can never be handled in purely rational terms. Nihilism is not rational nor is it easy. The nihilist does not reject meaning or morality out of hand, nor does he do so simply in order that he can satiate himself on all sorts of physical pleasures. Indeed, most nihilists turn to pleasure only as a means of trying to escape from their nihilism, because at the foundation of their philosophy is the deepest and most unbearable despair. It is this despair that must be addressed, and it must be addressed with the greatest possible solidarity and compassion. You must ask (and you must listen with all seriousness to the answers) why they think that morality is impossible, why they think that God cannot exist. This must, however, be asked in a personal and not an abstract way – rational discourse can easily become a retreat, and a technical philosophical defense nihilism will allow them to discuss the subject without becoming invested in it. You need to find out, and may even want to ask directly, why they would prefer to accept a system in which there is no meaning, why they are willing to adopt a philosophy that leads towards suicide. It is helpful, here, if you already know the answer – and so it is important that you know something about them as a person. In most cases, it will not be difficult to see what they are fleeing from, what has created such despair, but from their perspective it will be practically invisible, because it will be painful to look at. In my own case, I fled to nihilism following a year of intense depression, because if life was meaningless and morality non-binding, then I could, in a sense, simply let go of things. It absolved me of any necessity to be substantially involved in my own life, and allowed me to treat existence as a sort of tiresome and not particularly amusing toy – a notion that isn't appealing in and of itself, but which I was willing to accept as an alternative to the suffering that came from taking life seriously.

Any serious nihilist, anyone who has taken this creedlessness and made it the central proposition of their whole philosophy, is in retreat from some sort of suffering. They feel that they have come to banquet of life, and found the whole thing poisoned – which means, in practice, that some particular food upon which they once depended for sustenance turned out to be laced with venom. Thus, in order to avoid the agony of the poison working through their veins and closing off their breath, they are willing, rather, to endure a sort of slow starvation. Of course this means that, alongside their fear and bitterness is an incredible hunger, and so our primary concern must be to convince them that the Gospel is not poison but an antidote. The means of doing this will depend upon the answers that they give – the reasons why they think that there must be no God, the reasons why they cannot accept the possibility of morality. Whatever their answer, however, we must behave as bearers of Christ, showing by our conduct and our compassion that He can be trusted, that He is loving, and that He is directly concerned about their life and their problems.

* Quotations from: On the Geneaology of Morals, Friedrich Nietzsche, trans. by Walter Kaufmann, Random House, 1967.