David Hart also critiques Nietzsche in The Beauty of the Infinite, the entirety of which can be found HERE, some brief excerpts :
"I shall address neither the factual accuracy of his interpretations of Christian history nor the limits of his grasp of the spectrum of Christian thought. It is more to the point to recognize in Nietzsche’s imaginative probings of the Christian tradition an attempt at narrative subversion; he understood that Christian truth depends first upon a story, and so to meet his critique of Christianity tellingly (so to put it), one must engage it on the field of rhetoric, persuasion, and aesthetic evaluation first, and not that of “historical science” or the discourses of “disinterested” reason.
Christianity, simply said, is false to the world (AC, 125).
But what exactly, one must pause to ask, is the world, and what precisely is nature? The current emphasis in the academy on Nietzsche’s “antiessentialism” and irony often fails to do justice to his equally pronounced inclination toward miraculously broad, but earnest, pronouncements.
Here we must beware of superficiality and get to the bottom of the matter, resisting all sentimental weakness: life itself is essentially appropriation, injury, overpowering of what is alien and weaker; suppression, hardness, imposition of one’s own forms, incorporation and at least, at its mildest, exploitation……life simply is will to power. (BGE, 203)
The lessons of nature are “agonistic,” they enjoin contest and struggle, presuppose injustice, and have no end but ascent, growth, expansion, and ever greater acquisition. Values, though, that require the suppression of this “nature” rather than its spiritualization and the recognition of its necessity in the economy of culture (albeit in refined form), are the unique achievements of the most depraved world-haters: of, that is, priests.
Whether or not it is the case (as Karl Jaspers claims it is) that in opposing unconditional nature to unconditional morality, Nietzsche knowingly violates his own injunction against absolutes, it is quite beyond dispute that, for him, consonance with nature is the standard against which any morality must be measured.
One can scarcely deny, to begin with, the appearance of a seemingly unreflective naturalism in Nietzsche’s thought, prompting him to employ such words as “life,” “instinct,” and “nature” with a casual assurance that belies his own acute awareness of the cultural contingency of all “truths”; and one might justly wonder whether the life he celebrates is anything more diverting than the upward thrusting of an empty will, blind and idiotic, to which he has arbitrarily ascribed (in an ebullition of romantic enthusiasm) such qualities as richness, vitality, and creativity.
One is often sorely pressed to hear the ironic tone that will indicate to the attentive ear that discreet juncture where an apparently absolutist metaphysics reveals itself as an intentional and exotic feat of fabulation. If Nietzsche’s vision of nature – of being – is simply that of the pagan (Heracleitean, Epicurean, etc.) αγων κοσμικος, if the “life” of which he speaks is essentially appropriation, injury, and overpowering, then of course ontic difference appears in Nietzschean narrative as opposition and contradiction; indeed, difference is appreciably different precisely in the degree to which each force resists, succumbs to, or vanquishes another force: an ontology of violence in its most elementary form.
Not that this is in any sense a startling observation, nor does it somehow tell against Nietzsche’s position; it merely renders dubious the antimetaphysical rigor of his arguments. Can any degree of ironic distance make the Nietzschean critique any less “metaphysical” than what it attacks? Or, rather, can that critique sustain itself with any force or durability unless it stakes itself upon the “truth” of the narrative it invokes? And is then the nostalgia of Janus, at the last, unconquerable?
...this in no way alters the truth that in posing an ontology of violence against the Christian narrative, the advantage that Nietzsche seems to have gained turns out to be, ultimately, only as compelling as any other aesthetic preference. There would be no objection to this, of course, if it were not for Nietzsche’s habit of treating his preference as a more honest, less resentful, less arbitrary, and more truthful account of reality; Nietzsche’s post-Christian counternarrative (which is itself perhaps occasionally tainted by resentment rather than honesty) cannot be denied its power and its appeal, but it should be recognized not simply as critique but as always already another kerygma.
Between Nietzsche’s vision of life and an agon and the Christian vision of life as creation – as a primordial “gift and “grace” – there is nothing (not even the palpable evidences of “nature red in tooth and claw”) that makes ether perspective self-evidently more correct than the other. Each sees and accounts for the violence of experience and the beauty of being, but each according to an irreducible mythos and a particular aesthetics. A battle of tastes is being waged by Nietzsche, and the metaphysical appears therein as a necessary element of his narrative’s completeness; the difference that is immediately noticeable, however, between the Christian and Nietzschean narrative dynamisms is not that the former is indisceptibly bound to the metaphysics of identity and presence, but that the latter is simply more disingenuous regarding the metaphysics it advances.
Still, even within these limits, it is not altogether certain how far Nietzsche’s rhetoric can credibly be taken, for however just his condemnation of pious otherworldliness may be – and the church has seen no end of it – it is the unambiguous renunciation of gnoticism, and not the paradoxical renunciation of classical Christianity, that would correspond most nearly to his account. Indeed, no one familiar with late antiquity and the world in which the gospel was first preached can be unaware that a prevailing spirit of otherworldliness had long been moving inexorably through the empire: not only Gnosticism, but every variety of etherealizing devotion, mystery religions, Eastern esoterica, mystical Platonisms, and the occult; the contempt for the flesh expressed by Valentinus, Ammonias Saccas, Plotinus, the Mithraic mysteries, or even the sanctimoniously ungroomed Emperor Julian was more bitterly world-weary than any of the exorbitant expressions of spirituality to which the church fell prey.
One may agree with Nietzsche that this atmosphere of acosmic and incorporeal religiosity defames the world, and one may acknowledge that it infected every institution and spiritual aspiration of its age, including those of the church; but one should also recognize it as first and foremost a pagan phenomenon: a growing awareness, within an increasingly pluralistic and cosmopolitan empire, that the pagan cosmos was a region of strife, in response to which one could adopt only the grammars of empire or spiritual retreat, and an increasingly fashionable tendency to elect the latter. Christianity suffered from the contagion in some considerable measure, but was also able to resist it as paganism could not, because it had at its disposal means for renarrating the cosmos from the ground up.
But it was also into this crepuscular world of transcendental longings, of a pagan order grown weary of the burden of itself, that the Christian faith came as an evangel promising newness of life, and that in all abundance, preaching creation, divine incarnation, resurrection of the flesh, and the ultimate restoration of heavens and earth: a faith, moreover, whose symbols were not occult sigils, or bull’s blood, or the brackish water and coarse fare of the ascetic sage, but the cardinal signs of fellowship, feasting, and joy: bread and wine.
There was in such a faith an undeniable assault upon pagan values: a certain very Jewish subversion, a rejoicing in the order of creation as gift and blessing, an inability to grow too weary of the flesh, an abiding sense of the sheer weightiness – kabod – of God’s glory and the goodness of all that is; but it is a subversion that Nietzsche does not grasp from the perspective of his rather adolescent adoration of pagan harshness, and so his story grows shrill and unbalanced.
If Christian culture were simply spiritualist, if it endorsed an ethos like that of the Corpus Hermeticum or the libretto of Parsifal, Nietzsche’s indictments of Christian “castratism” would command great force; but for all the cunning and psychological inventiveness of his genealogy, it fails at every juncture to accommodate the complexity of what he wishes to describe.
The orthodox doctrine of creation out of nothingness, and its attendant doctrine of the goodness of creation, led the church (more radically even that Neoplatonism) to deny to evil any ascription of true being, to define it not as an essence or positive force but as mere negation, reaction, a privation of the good (στερησις αγαθου), a perversity of the will, an appetite for nonbeing – but no objective thing among things: all things had to be affirmed, and with equal emphasis, as God’s good creation.
And surely there is something almost tediously wrong in asserting that Christ’s crucifixion has ever figured in Christian tradition as a repudiation, rather than ultimately an affirmation, of the fleshly life Christ was forced to relinquish. “Verily I say unto you, I will drink no more of the fruit of the vine, until that day that I drink it new in the kingdom of God” (Mark 14:25; Matt. 26:29; Luke 22:18) – wine clearly appears here as the perfect and concrete emblem of the beauty of creation and the joy of dwelling at peace in the midst of others: not the wine of Dionysus, which makes fellowship impossible, promising only intoxication, brute absorption into the turba, anonymity, and violence, but the wine of the wedding feast of Cana, or of the wedding feast of the Lamb.
As for Nietzsche’s contention, in On the Genealogy of Morals, that the idea of a soul, an abiding subjectivity lying behind the actions of the nobles – the ravening birds of prey – was the invention of the imaginations of the weak upon whom the nobles visited their spoliations, and who wished to believe in a moral interval, an intermediate ground between agent and action at which they could direct their reproaches, it is unlikely that it can bear very close scrutiny.
Milbank can be credited with the most inspired riposte to this story: no leap of fancy, he observes, is required for the slave to reprehend the master; there is no need for a “metonymic” displacement of moral judgment onto a permanent “self,” because within “noble” actions there is always already a metaphoric tension. The wild warrior of primitive, tribal societies did not simply resemble the eagle or the lion, but actively imitated them, took them for totems; noble naturality was already a cultural invention, the mimetic piety of man-becoming-eagle.
Perhaps, then, the slave has merely seen the truth of metaphor, and so is entirely justified in denying the necessity of noble aggression or the inevitability of life’s boisterous violences, and equally justified in choosing another story, woven from a more pastoral tropology, whose grammar depends not upon the romance of strength and acquisition but upon the primordiality of love.
Milbank also notes that Nietzsche is little interested in the codes that were already written into heroic society, but imagines the order of that society (rather fantastically) as consisting in the compromises arrived at between powerful men, in the prime of their animal exuberance; and he suggests, further, that another genealogy of subjective interiority might more plausibly locate its origins in the fanatical self-referentiality of heroic culture.
One should probably ask whether the phenomenalistic monism of Nietzsche’s account of noble naturality is not still as firmly wedded to a subjective essentialism as Christian thought could ever be. When, after all, one likens the unfettered power and uncomplicated immanence of the noble in his action to the indivisibility of lightning and the lightning flash, the felicity of the image veils a fairly obvious intellectual crudity.
Lightning, as it happens, possesses very little in the way of linguistic ambiguity, and any given flash has a very particular and uninvolved history; but one need only consider the linguistic, social, and political complexity of human existence, the historicity and metaphorical provisionality of every human “essence,” to recognize in the martial virtues of the noble not simply an original and natural phenomenon, but an effect – and a stage effect, at that. Were the noble warrior simply his own phenomenon, an immediate expression of himself, present to himself in the event of his “unveiling,” what would he be other than an egological substance? Where there is no distinction between action and identity, where no moral space intervenes, is this not still the concrete reality of a self, invariable and absolute, the Cartesian ego transposed into a phenomenalist key?
Is it not obvious that his account of the self is just as irredeemably “identitial” from the very ease with which Nietzsche can construct analogies of resemblance: lightning, eagles, lions…?
The special pathos of the human is one of ubiquitous metaphor, the condition of being always an interpreted being, never to be traced back to a place prior to culture or language, to a state of nature and simple presence; there is always in the action of the person a formidable absence of the person; an “otherwise” within presence, even the instincts of the flesh, upon which Nietzsche places so great an emphasis, are curiously inadequate in delineating the shape of the human – “totemism” is born with human “nature.” In the end, for all his efforts tot liberate the subject from the labyrinthine metaphorics of the soul, Nietzsche can at best merely prefer the kids of animals that the “noble” chose to imitate.
And while Nietzsche may dispense with such notions as the thing-in-itself or the “soul,” he nevertheless clings to an equally naïve belief in the essential event, the transcendent event of power present in all the universe’s finite transactions: hence, a Christian repudiation of power must turn out to be the strategy whereby power assumes an unprecedentedly potent form. The will to power necessarily remains hidden within, and is indeed advanced by, its own negation. This is metaphysics tout court, more crudely monistic than Hegel’s, and no less dependent on the circular myth of negation.”
John Milbank has also made similar critiques of Nietzsche, which I blogged about HERE
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