Nietzsche's Five Nos

This is the Nietzsche Podcast. Summarizing Nietzsche's philosophy is notoriously difficult because any straightforward statement of Nietzsche's positions is almost sure to ignore the nuances that can change the entire sense of his thinking. One example of this that comes to mind is School of Life's video on Nietzsche that I've skewered on this channel in the past. This video presents the core of Nietzsche's philosophy as a series of four positions. Own up to envy. Don't drink alcohol.

Don't be a Christian, and God is dead. For reasons discussed in my reaction to that video, this is one of the worst summations of Nietzsche's philosophy I have encountered because it focuses on aspects of Nietzsche's thought that are only incidental to his broader project, and it fails to really convey the core ideas

and how they relate to one another. It presents his ideas as commandments. Much of what I've done on this channel has been to take some of these core concepts in Nietzsche's philosophy, such as the eternal return or the master-enslave morality, and bring out their full complexity.

rather than oversimplify them into a series of yes or no statements. But occasionally, Nietzsche does provide us with yes or no statements. Because this is so rare for Nietzsche, we should pay attention when he does this. One example of this is a note found in the compilation of unpublished materials known as Will to Power, number 1021, entitled My Five No's.

this note, Nietzsche at least tells us definitively what his philosophy stands against. This passage would have been a much better place for a channel like School of Life to start when trying to come up with an easy listicle of Nietzsche's ideas.

But since no one else has taken the opportunity, I guess it falls to me. So if you've ever wanted a quick, easy-to-understand explanation from Nietzsche himself as to what his philosophy opposes, you've come to the right place. Without further ado, here are Nietzsche's five

knows. 1. My fight against the feeling of sin and the introduction of the notion of punishment into the physical and metaphysical world, likewise into psychology and the interpretation of history. the recognition of the fact that all philosophies and valuations hitherto have been saturated with morality to my identification and my discovery of the traditional ideal of the christian ideal

even where the dogmatic form of Christianity has been wrecked. The danger of the Christian ideal resides in its valuations and that which can dispense with concrete expression my struggle against latent Christianity. For instance, in music, in socialism. Three, my struggle against the 18th century of Rousseau, against his nature, against his good man, his belief in the dominion of feeling, against the pampering.

weakening, and moralizing of man, an ideal born of the hatred of aristocratic culture, which in practice is the dominion of unbridled feelings of resentment and invented as a standard for the purpose of war. The Christian morality of the feeling of sin, as well as the morality of resentment, is an attitude of the mob. 4. My fight against romanticism, in which the ideals of Christianity and of Rousseau converge.

but which possesses at the same time a yearning for that antiquity which knew of sacerdotal and aristocratic culture, a yearning for virtu and for the strong man. Something extremely hybrid, a false and imitated kind of stronger humanity, which appreciates extreme conditions in general and sees the symptom of strength in them, the cult of passion.

An imitation of the most expressive forms, furore espressivo, originating not out of plenitude, but out of want. 5. My struggle against the predominance of gregarious instincts. Now science makes common cause with them against the profound hate with which every kind of order of rank and of aloofness is treated."

This list is actually fairly self-explanatory in many ways, but it's still worth going over the list and considering how each know informs Nietzsche's broader corpus of ideas and positions his project in the context of the Western philosophical tradition.

We'll start at the beginning. Number one, Nietzsche's fight against the feeling of sin. This is an all too often ignored aspect of Nietzsche. Nietzsche's ideas are often called harsh, but why? For the precise reason that he calls nature innocent.

this is not to say that nature is benign nietzsche refers to nature as tyrannical and says that tyranny may even be too soft a word for the relations of predation and exploitation that occur But we are able to perceive that impulse and instinct rule in nature, and thus do not see guilt in the actions of a parasite or a predator.

We do not typically extend this same grace to mankind, but Nietzsche rejects the division between nature and mankind, constantly reminding us that we are simply another species of animals. a remarkable species a species that invented knowledge but one which likes to forget this fact we tend to regard humanity as something special different or even created by a higher power

What comes with this error are a series of other errors, variously instantiated by the philosophies and religions of world history. The notion of the ego as the arbitrary governor of the self. The notion of free will. And finally, the notion of guilt, sin, and punishment. This is what Nietzsche understands as the moralization of the physical world. This is nothing new.

Since Anaximander, the pre-Socratic philosopher, human beings have explained the suffering of the world as a result of guilt. Anaximander believed that existence was originally an undifferentiated, indefinite state of being. And by stealing our particular differentiated existence from this indefinite, we incur guilt. That must be settled by eventually perishing.

We can see similarities to the ideas contained in the Upanishads and Vedic philosophy, in which the Godhead's creation of the world requires the Godhead to exist within that world as a kind of atonement for this error. or in the Buddhist doctrine that our misperception of the ego's separateness causes us to desire and suffer. In all of these ideas, there is a sense of responsibility for our own suffering.

This is what Nietzsche means when he says all philosophies and valuations have been saturated with morality. Ultimately, philosophy has largely been an exercise in interpreting the world morally. And what comes along with this is the imputation of moral guilt onto the individual as responsible for his own suffering. Nietzsche would argue that the most powerful form of this philosophy, that existence itself is guilty,

is Christianity. The Christian worldview treats all desires of the flesh, in other words, our basic animal functions and drives, as evil. it tends to regard worldly success or ambition as at best a distraction from the holy life and at worst a path to damnation it is the ultimate denial of man's reality as animal as a natural being in the christian view

We are not natural beings. We are souls. The real reality is non-physical. The real value is non-physical. Christianity, in Nietzsche's analysis, becomes nihilistic, a secret path to nothingness. It locates the goal for our existence in the afterlife. The good that Christianity seeks is found in death. As such, Nietzsche would argue that his own apparently harsh philosophy is in fact a kind of redemption.

It is a far more generous view of mankind than Christianity, which claims to forgive mankind but only does so conditionally upon adopting those life-denying values. Nietzsche forgives mankind unconditionally. like all animals we are fundamentally innocent of all such accusations of guilt or responsibility moral guilt was developed as a part of a project of civilizing mankind

It is inculcated into us by the collective as a means of suppressing our impulses. The function of guilt is that it gets us to suppress a feeling by means of a thought. Presumably for other animals this is impossible because in nature every impulse wishes to discharge itself immediately. This mediation between the drives by thought is why we experience guilt.

for nietzsche the voice of conscience within us is the voice of society what freud would later call the super ego wagging its finger and demanding that we follow the rules sin is the apotheosis of this feeling of guilt into a metaphysical claim

That may have been necessary at one time to compel behavior as part of the civilizational process. But Nietzsche believes that we now stand at the edge of a new era of thought in which the concepts of guilt, sin, and moral responsibility can finally be overcome.

The second no is the rejection of the Christian ideal. Nietzsche says that his attack on the traditional ideal of Christianity is to expose Christianity for what it really is, a set of value judgments. It is the values of Christianity that Nietzsche opposes. That is what he says no to. This is an incredibly important distinction because it is a very different critique of Christianity than the kind made by the new atheists.

Nietzsche doesn't criticize Christianity for being superstitious or making claims that can't be empirically verified. He doesn't criticize it for being patriarchal. hierarchical, or justifying systems of economic exploitation, as for instance the Marxists do. For Nietzsche, the problem is precisely those values we mentioned earlier.

the suppression of natural drives and desires, the rejection of ambition, the imputation of guilt, the value of life as a preparatory for death. In Nietzsche's philosophy, values are more fundamental than the symbolism, rituals, doctrines, and narratives. Values for Nietzsche are the fundamental evaluations made by one's impulses as to which conditions the organism ought to seek out.

Some conditions in nature preserve a given organism and some hinder it. A healthy value system seeks conditions that are beneficial to the organism. whereas a sick value system aims at that which will actually hinder or harm it. This seems rather straightforward, but Nietzsche believed that, in nature, the norm is for healthy values to prevail, since sickness is naturally selected out.

only in thinking beings in consciousness can we find a form of life that will actually prefer what is injurious to it christianity is one such example because it emerged as a cult of the powerless a religion of the Roman underclass who were dominated, enslaved, and exploited by the aristocracy. Christianity, to Nietzsche's mind, rejects all worldly good,

because it was a religion created by those who found themselves in this sorry state. Those who celebrated physical beauty, power, sexuality, and wealth were their enemies and their oppressors, and thus Christianity rejects all of these things.

Those otherworldly values may have been appropriate for the Roman underclass. As Deleuze might have put it, these were the values that they quote-unquote deserved according to who and what they are. Perhaps it was their only means of coping with their reality.

But Christianity did not remain localized to the Roman underclass. It persisted in the Western psyche long after Rome fell. Those world-denying values, sick values, then went and got into the heads of the Northern Europeans who conquered Rome. These were, in Nietzsche's words, cruel and hard men, who now found that under Christianity their cruelty could only be discharged inward, into themselves. This pathological use for consciousness is a dismal workshop.

of resentment, self-punishment, and life denial, continues on into the modern day, where these Sikh values persist in ideologies that are ostensibly non-religious. Nietzsche mentions socialism here because he regarded socialism as a kind of atavistic rejection of progress, rather than a progressive ideology.

This is a very big topic in Nietzsche, but the short version is that the socialistic vision of an ideal society is effectively a return to primitive communalism. Out of an aversion to the suffering and inequality caused by industrialization, the liberalization of the markets the socialists idealized an existence that wouldn't be unfamiliar to the apostolic christians

Almost 2,000 years of Christian values had shaped the European mind, such that even after the superstitious beliefs of Christianity began to fall away, the European socialist begins to envision a way of life in which one simply attempts to exist

while doing as little harm as possible. The way that many European socialists imagined their ideal commune is really not that different from the monastic life, and the free love ideology of early Christian sects considered heretical, such as the Adamites, could represent a similar desire. to return to a state of mankind before the fall into sin. But of course, for Nietzsche, latent Christianity exists in many forms. It also can be found in utilitarianism, secular humanism.

Volkish movements, and other apparently non-Christian ideologies. The important thing is the valuations. These issues dovetail into Nietzsche's third no, his rejection of the philosophy of Jean-Jacques Rousseau.

there are few philosophers that Nietzsche opposes more strongly, even though both men shared many things in common. Both were critics of the Enlightenment, of the idea that the widespread fetishization of reason and the advancement of the arts and sciences would quote-unquote improve mankind in some way. For Nietzsche, this is because there is no progress, merely a cyclical motion of history.

the eternal recurrence of war and peace and the only accomplishments worth anything are to be found within the events of a single life for rousseau on the other hand the rejection of the enlightenment's promise comes from a conviction of the so called natural equality that would have characterized the human condition in the state of nature, the natural pity of mankind in that state.

Nietzsche had a grudging respect for Rousseau, at least insofar as Rousseau provides a useful antipodal view to Nietzsche's own. In one aphorism in Wanderer in His Shadow, he places Rousseau alongside Plato as one of the four pairs of thinkers that he continually returns to in order to test his own ideas. He pairs Rousseau with Plato because Plato had faith in the state.

and in the project of civilization, and in the state's ability to educate mankind to virtue, whereas Rousseau believed that the state had harmed virtue and miseducated mankind. Nietzsche rejects both Plato and Rousseau for different reasons. But here, in this third no, his focus is on Rousseau as an advocate for the dominion of feeling, for the pampering, weakening, and moralizing of mankind. He says that what lies at the bottom of this sentiment is resentment.

What Nietzsche means by this is that Rousseau's philosophy, even as it presents itself as a rejection of the modern regime, of the domestication of mankind, is in fact a product of that regime. Nietzsche writes that only the modern man who feels himself half-crushed to death by the pitilessness of wealth and caste and badly educated by priests would ever look to such a fictitious view of the state of nature.

The best example of this is Rousseau's concept of natural pity. For Nietzsche, pity is not natural. In fact, it's a kind of vice, one that has been vociferously propagated by Christianity. Pity doesn't actually alleviate suffering, but spreads it.

it makes suffering contagious. While it is undoubtedly true that the feeling of pity can drive some people to alleviate the pain of others, alleviating pain can never be one's reason for being. Pain is a part of human life because it is a part of nature. Nietzsche wonders whether we could even experience pleasure if we didn't have the relative experience of pain, or whether by deadening pain, we would actually deaden pleasure.

The Christian, on the other hand, is led to expand his sphere of concern from the experiences and sense impressions that are actually within his perception and his control, and to take on the suffering of the entire world. Because this suffering can never be alleviated in total, this world embracing pity becomes a crushing burden.

which heightens the pain of existence and thereby makes life itself seem less appealing. This is why resentment sits at the bottom of this dominion of Rousseauian feeling. Pity for all the world leads us to reject the world. Rousseau's philosophy is the ideology of the one who has internalized this Christian pity so completely that he sees it as an inherent aspect of nature itself.

He seeks his relief in an idealized natural state, something imagined, not experienced, which is therefore indistinguishable in that way from the Garden of Eden. It has merely been rendered into secular terms.

One might think, therefore, that Nietzsche might have advocated for a return to the actual primitive state of mankind found in the aristocratic cultures of the Greeks and Romans, for example. But Nietzsche's fourth no makes clear that Nietzsche is equally opposed to this form of romantic reaction. Here, he targets romanticism as the yearning for previous forms of aristocratic society and a return to virtue.

He calls this a false and imitated version of stronger humanity. In modern language, it's a LARP that we engage in in the modern world. It is a compensation for the fact that these values are precisely what we find lacking. Nietzsche's problem with this kind of approach to life is that any value system created out of lack is ultimately an expression of weariness.

and inability to survive and flourish within the actual conditions in which one finds oneself. This know may be harder to grasp as to Nietzsche's underlying reasoning. Some particularly enlightening passages are his word to conservatives in Human All to Human, or his Four Great Errors in Twilight of Idols. Romanticism attempts to artificially reconstruct

past cultural, moral, or civilizational structures, as though one could decide what is necessary in a given moment as an arbitrary function of the will. But the cultures and value systems of the past were not decided upon rationally. Their necessity was determined by the material, social, and physiological realities of past conditions. Nietzsche thought that this kind of regressive ideology was a fool's errand, another dead end, another idealization,

of a world that doesn't exist, or in this case, no longer exists. The driving sentiment under this kind of romanticism is a dissatisfaction with the world as it is. In this way, this kind of conservative romanticism repeats the same patterns as ancient Christianity. It's a flight into fantasy out of an inability to live in the real world. It would be one thing if this approach to life actually motivated some sort of meaningful action, but it isn't even effective.

Nietzsche writes that the conservative approach of attempting to restore a civilization by combating vice and luxury has the causal relationship backwards. This is one of the most important ideas in Nietzsche's work. Vice and licentiousness are symptoms, not causes. The church and the moralists look around at society and point to sexual license and cowardice and the collapse of traditional structures of value.

and petty materialism and hedonistic pleasure-seeking. They then suggest that these things are what is causing society to decline. Nietzsche argues that it is the other way around. Ultimately, societies, like individual organisms, have a finite lifespan. They have a certain amount of energy that eventually declines as the society approaches its terminus. For Nietzsche, this is a physiological process. Vices and hedonistic behaviors are really an attempt to create some form of stimulation.

We might consider an old or dying person whose senses are now weakened, the way that one's taste buds decline with age. Eventually, they may have to over-season their food in order to taste anything at all. And this is what Nietzsche says is really going on when a society appears to decline into decadence. They require an overstimulation in order to feel anything.

attempting to rejuvenate the dying society by taking away the stimulation is nothing more than a confusion about the true cause of the decline. It would be like taking away someone's morphine, but without curing the underlying cause of their pain. Nietzsche opposes Romanticism because it is based on these errors, that we cannot simply decide to adopt old forms of virtue or archaic social orders.

just as we cannot arbitrarily decide to cut out vices and luxuries and expect to revitalize our society. In his view, this is all a giant cope.

The last of Nietzsche's nose concerns something that occupied his interest from his first book to his last years, the problem of science. Particularly, the values of science, or what Nietzsche called the theoretical worldview. The theoretical worldview emerges with the philosopher Socrates in ancient Greece. It represents the formula that reason equals virtue equals happiness, which Nietzsche called the strangest equation he had ever seen.

The theoretical approach to life sees reason as sovereign, or at least the rightful sovereign of the human life, and of human civilization in general. Nietzsche was not anti-scientific. Philology, Nietzsche's discipline, was considered a science in the German university, which means he's something of a scientist himself, and he is not an irrationalist, because, after all, he is still a philosopher who employs reason.

Where Nietzsche differs from most other philosophers is in seeing the value of unreason. Irrationality may actually be indispensable for human life. The theoretical worldview attacks all of those irrational values, however. For example, the order of rank, the preference for one's own tablet of values over others, and not to mention love, art, passion, and so on.

the reason why nietzsche says that science makes common cause with gregarious instincts is because the theoretical approach to life sees the problems of morality of culture and of society itself as solvable by rational inquiry Nietzsche argued in Daybreak that the greatest horror of the theoretical moralists, such as Socrates and Plato, was the possibility that right action wouldn't follow after right knowledge.

that no amount of rational argument or inquiry could force people to behave morally. This is precisely what is confirmed before our eyes every single day, and yet we persist in believing that we can assemble a complete worldview from a series of rational propositions. More broadly, this last no therefore points to a Gordian knot that Nietzsche attempted to cut, particularly during his last productive years.

Valuations cannot be rationally determined. Values are always pre-rational because they are physiological, and ultimately they cannot be argued with. And yet, man cannot live without values. Man is the measurer.

the animal that estimates, judges, prefers. This is why Nietzsche said in Twilight of Idols that the formula for our happiness is a yes, a no, a straight line, a goal. But reason cannot decide this for us. The conclusion that many reach... within the theoretical worldview, is therefore that any set of values is as good as any other.

Nietzsche argues in the Antichrist that our modern sensibility therefore forgives everything because it understands everything. This knowledge of the relativity of values, for those who believe that life must be lived rationally, gives way to a kind of values nihilism. If it cannot be rationally determined, then it must not be able to be determined at all. On the contrary, Nietzsche argues that our values must be determined, but that this revaluation of values cannot be affected.

as the decree of a godlike faculty of reason. If we continue to conceive of reason this way, of every question as a scientific question, we will never find that straight line, that goal. We will persist in a kind of gregarious relativism.

Ultimately, unwilling to posit any way of life as preferable. But again, in nature, an animal that did this, that was unwilling or unable to distinguish between conditions that are beneficial and conditions that are harmful, would eventually die off thus nietzsche's project does attempt to use reason but to use it in order to find the physiological bedrock

of value judgments to understand the necessity behind these judgments nietzsche is a moral relativist but holds that it would be a fatal mistake to remain in a kind of logical paralysis about which values we should hold The details of Nietzsche's revaluation of values could fill an entire video. What is important for our purposes is that we understand, contra the theoretical worldview, that Nietzsche affirms the irrational and the perspectival.

in determining our own values. Nietzsche would have us dare to say, I will, and assert a goal for life unhindered by the theoretical demand that this goal prove itself logically. And so, those are Nietzsche's five no's. Nietzsche attacks 1. The feeling of sin 2. The values of Christianity 3. The benign view of nature 4. The romantic return to virtue

And five, the gregarious values of the theoretical worldview. To definitively say what a troublesome label such as Nietzscheanism ought to mean will always be problematic. But this list provides us with a starting set of positions, or at least a starting set of negations. Nietzsche tells us here, first and foremost, what his philosophy is not, what it attempts to combat, to make war on.

That is as good a summary of Nietzsche's philosophical project as any, and it has the advantage of coming from Nietzsche's own hand. While this passage is not by any stretch the most famous or notable of Nietzsche's writings, perhaps it deserves more attention as a helpful gateway to understand his project. If you enjoyed the Nietzsche podcast or found it helpful,

You can visit us and support the show at patreon.com slash untimely reflections. The link is in the description. Or just share the show with any of your friends that you think might enjoy it or on social media. Thank you for your support.