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Nietzsche and the murder of God

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  16 April 2007

CHRISTOPHER HAMILTON
CHRISTOPHER HAMILTON
Affiliation:
Department of Theology and Religious Studies, King's College London, Strand, London WC2R 2LS
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Abstract

Nietzsche's tortured relationship to the Christian God has received scant attention from commentators. In this paper I seek to map out the central lines a proper understanding of Nietzsche in this regard might take. I argue that fundamental in such an understanding is Nietzsche's profoundly corporeal moral vocabulary, and I trace connections between this vocabulary and Nietzsche's concern with cleanliness, his asceticism, and the notion of a sense of common humanity with others.

Type
Research Article
Information
Religious Studies , Volume 43 , Issue 2 , June 2007 , pp. 165 - 182
Copyright
Copyright © Cambridge University Press 2007

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References

Notes

1. Stephen Greenblatt, discussing Christopher Marlowe's Dr Faustus in ‘Marlowe and the will to absolute play’, in idem Renaissance Self-Fashioning (Chicago IL: University of Chicago Press, 1984), 214. Greenblatt's essay helps one see the many ways in which Nietzsche can be helpfully illuminated by the comparison with Marlowe. Something similar may be said of L. C. Knights's essay on Marlowe, ‘The strange case of Christopher Marlowe’, in Selected Essays in Criticism (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1981).

2. All translations from the German in this paper are my own, unless otherwise indicated. Citations from Nietzsche are from: Nietzsche, Werke: Kritische Studienausgabe, G. Colli and M. Montinari (eds), 15 vols (Berlin/New York: Walter de Gruyter, 2nd edn, 1988). For Nietzsche's works, I have used the following abbreviations:

AC:

Der Anti-Christ (The Anti-Christian)

ASZ:

Also sprach Zarathustra (Thus Spoke Zarathustra)

EH:

Ecce Homo

FW:

Die fröhliche Wissenschaft (The Gay Science)

GD:

Die Götzen-Dämmerung (Twilight of the Idols)

GM:

Zur Genealogie der Moral (The Genealogy of Morals)

JGB:

Jenseits von Gut und Böse (Beyond Good and Evil)

M:

Morgenröte (Daybreak)

MAM:

Menschliches, Allzumenschliches (Human All Too Human), I, IIi and IIii

3. A surprising parallel can be found here in the work of Hume, at least in parts: the surface of Hume's texts reveals an urbane acceptance of things, yet underneath there is often a despair about man's faculty of reason and the very nature of philosophical thought itself. Hume's texts themselves might therefore be read as, in part, patterns of suppression: he often would like to believe what he cannot believe, though in Hume's case the object of such longings is certainly not Christianity; he had a much more thoroughly secular mind than Nietzsche did.

4. Surprisingly few commentators on Nietzsche have taken seriously his longing for Christianity, for reasons which are obscure, but may be due to the deeply secular nature of most modern philosophy. Two notable exceptions are: Karl Jaspers Nietzsche und das Christentum (Munich: Piper, 1952), and F. A. Lea The Tragic Philosopher: Friedrich Nietzsche (London: Methuen, 1957).

5. For an excellent exploration of Nietzsche's pedagogic impulses see Ernst Bertram Nietzsche: Versuch einer Mythologie (Berlin: Georg Bondi, 1918), passim.

6. Though it is discussed, in part, by René, Girard in ‘Superman in the underground: strategies of madness – Nietzsche, Wagner and Dostoyevsky’, Modern Language Notes, 91 (1976), 1161–1185Google Scholar.

7. Thomas Mann ‘Nietzsche's Philosophie im Lichte unserer Erfahrung’, in Leiden und Größe der Meister, Gesammelte Werke in Einzelbänden (Frankfurt: Fischer Verlag, 1982), 838–875.

8. After completing this essay, I read Stephen Mulhall's Philosophical Myths of the Fall (Princeton NJ: Princeton University Press, 2005). Chapter 1 of that work discusses the imagery of blood in the passage from FW under consideration, and also compares Nietzsche to Macbeth. Mulhall develops these themes in a different way from that which I take in this paper, but what he has to say, in general, complements my approach.

9. Heinrich Heine Zur Geschichte der Religion und Philosophie in Deutschland, (Stuttgart: Reclam, 1997), 90. One might compare here Heine's comments on Christ, suffering, pity, and love in his Die Stadt Lucca in Reisebilder (Berlin: Goldmann Verlag, 2001), 453. I hope elsewhere to trace the influence of Heine's thinking here on Nietzsche, especially this suggestion: ‘Das Mitleid ist die letzte Weihe der Liebe, vielleicht die Liebe selbst’.

10. Ibid., 104–105.

11. Cf. Iris Murdoch The Sovereignty of Good (London: Ark, 1986), 93–94.

12. Cf. here Freud's comments on the Ratman: ‘Our patient showed himself to have [more literally: to be] a nose, who, by his own admission, in his childhood could recognise every person by his smell, and for whom even today the olfactory sense was more important than for others. I have found something similar in other neurotics, compulsives and hysterics … . Quite generally I should like to raise the question whether the inevitable atrophy of the sense of smell and the organic repression of the pleasure in smell that came with man's turning away from the ground is not heavily implicated in man's capacity to experience neurotic illness’; Sigmund Freud, ‘Bemerkungen über einen Fall von Zwangsneurose’, in Gesammelte Werke VII (Frankfurt: Fischer Taschenbuch Verlag, 1999), 462. Nietzsche tells us that a person's sexuality reaches into the heights of his spirit; and we know that his sexual experiences were extremely impoverished. Freud's comments might helpfully be read in the light of Thomas Mann's suggestion that Nietzsche deliberately infected himself with syphilis in a brothel in Cologne whilst a student in Bonn. I do not know what evidence Mann had for this claim, but it would certainly fit in with Nietzsche's ferociously ascetic way of life. Cf. my comments on Nietzsche's asceticism below.

13. Sigmund Freud ‘Zur Psychopathologie des Alltagslebens’, in Ibid., IV, 47.

14. Norbert Elias The Civilizing Process (Oxford: Blackwell, 1995), tr. Edmund Jephcott.

15. See David Hume Enquiry Concerning the Principles of Morals (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1975), Sect. VIII: ‘Among the other virtues, we may also give Cleanliness a place; since it naturally renders us agreeable to others, and is no inconsiderable source of love and affection. No one will deny that negligence in this particular is a fault’.

16. That Nietzsche is himself ascetic is not something that many commentators have wanted to acknowledge. An exception is Henry Staten Nietzsche's Voice (Ithaca NY: Cornell University Press, 1990).

17. Cf. René, Girard ‘Nietzsche and contradiction’, Stanford Italian Review, 6 (1986), 53–65, 1–2Google Scholar.

18. Cf. Erich Heller ‘Man ashamed’, in idem In the Age of Prose (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1984), 227ff.

19. Nietzsche brings together the ideas of insatiable hunger for sex, food, and knowledge in an extraordinary passage in M, §327, entitled ‘The Don Juan of knowledge’. One might compare here Kafka's short story ‘Der Hungerkünstler’ [‘The hunger artist’] as another exploration of the spiritual hunger of the modern world.

20. In my comments in this paragraph I have drawn heavily on Ruth Padel In and Out of the Mind: Greek Images of the Tragic Self (Princeton NJ: Princeton University Press, 1992), ch. 2, esp. 12–18.

21. Cora Diamond ‘The importance of being human’, in David Cockburn (ed.) Human Beings (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1991), 35–62, at 50.

22. One might compare here Kafka's reflections on his own meanness: ‘Meanness [Geiz] is, you know, one of the most reliable signs of being unhappy; I was so unsure of everything that I really only possessed that which I already had in my hands or mouth’; Franz Kafka Brief an den Vater (Frankfurt: Fischer Taschenbuch Verlag, 2003), 31. Following this lead, one might trace a kind of meanness in Nietzsche's use of the imagery of the body in his moral understanding. Indeed, in a way, in my reflections below, I am sketching part of one such possibility.

23. But cf. Sarah Kofman Nietzsche et la scène philosophique (Paris: Editions Galilée, 1986), ch. 8.

24. Raimond Gaita takes it that having a sense of common humanity involves seeing other human beings as precious. See his A Common Humanity (London: Routledge, 2000).

25. I am extremely grateful to Peter Byrne for reminding me of the importance and significance of this passage for my concerns here.

26. Raimond Gaita Good and Evil: An Absolute Conception (London: Macmillan, 1991), 25.

27. Ibid., 27.

28. I can find no reference to Falstaff in Nietzsche's published work or in the Nachlaß. However, there are two references in the letters, and it is interesting to note that in both cases Nietzsche directly connects Falstaff's name to his, Nietzsche's, love for a friend – in each case the recipient of the letter in question – and to the idea of a fantastically generous form of giving. The relevant passage is I Henry IV, 3.3, 131–132. See the letters of 4 July 1864 to Wilhelm Pinder and of 30 April 1872 to Erwin Rohde; Friedrich Nietzsche, Sämtliche Briefe G. Colli and M. Montinari (eds), 8 vols (Berlin/New York: Walter de Gruyter, 2nd edn, 1986).

29. Stefan Zweig Der Kampf mit dem Dämon: Hölderlin, Kleist, Nietzsche (Frankfurt: Fischer Taschenbuch Verlag, 1998), 245.

30. Paul Kahn Law and Love (New Haven CT and London: Yale University Press, 2000), 148.

31. Earlier versions of this paper were presented in 2005 at the Welsh Philosophical Society and at King's College London, and I am grateful to the audiences for their comments. I would also like to thank two anonymous referees for Religious Studies for their comments on an earlier draft of this work. And I am especially grateful to Peter Byrne for his extreme patience and tact in helping me to get clearer on what it was that I wanted to say in this piece.