Friedrich Nietzche "Morality as Anti-Nature"

Morality as Anti-Nature Summary

Nietzsche expresses his philosophical views on the concept of morality, specifically pertaining to morality taught by religion, through his writing: Morality as Anti-Nature. The primary critique of morality that Nietzsche had lies within its nature and ties with religion. Nietzsche explains how all humans have “passions”, that which are the innate and natural desires of people. He states that while some may be good, others “are merely disastrous” (347). Because of the inevitably destructive nature or effect of these passions, if not controlled, humans create morals to combat passions with excuses deeming the passions as “bad” or “sinful” as a deterrent from succumbing to the passions. In a sense, our morals prevent us from indulging in passions under the pretense of an artificially created threat. It is through these grounds “out of which Christianity grew” he says (347).

Yet Nietzsche goes on to argue against these morals created by religion, as he believes that they limit humans in a nonsensical manner. He even goes as far as to say that “the practice of the church is hostile to life”. Nietzsche explains how a strong person should be able to combat detrimental passions through one’s own willpower and limit themselves. Only the weak and “degenerate” must rely on “means in the fight against a craving” such as “[castration or extirpation]” (348). Even weaker men can avoid desires through abstinence and total avoidance. He explains that only the most degenerate cannot resist their cravings, and that the response to address such be creating morality is excessive and detrimental to those who can resist.

He also attacks the church through its failure to fully eliminate all passions, addressing the passions of love and hostility. He accuses the church of hypocrisy as the church feels hostility, wanting “destruction of its enemies”, the “immoralists and Antichristians” (348). The irony in which the church carries a passion, that which it seeks to eliminate, demonstrates Nietzsche’s assertion of the futility of restrictions that morality is thought to provide. While hostility may be valued as a negative passion that should not exist, as so enforced by the church, the church in turn feels that passion, hostility, in its effort to eliminate it.

In fact, Nietzsche claims, through internal means, we “come to appreciate its value” (349). Nietzsche explains:

“The price of fruitfulness is to be rich in internal opposition; one remains young only as long as the soul does not stretch itself and desire peace. Nothing has become more alien to us than that desideratum (The thing that is desired) of former times, “peace of soul,” the Christian desideratum; there is nothing we envy less than the moralistic cow and the fat happiness of the good conscience. One has renounced the great life when one renounces war” (349).

Essentially life is meaningless without some form of conflict. Any form of disarray allows for progression and established life. He alludes to a majority of humans becoming a mere herd of sheep through the teachings of “morality”, only thinking and doing as our morality deems correct. He in turn stresses the importance of “Peace of soul”, when one attains calm through one’s own will and satisfaction. This state must be obtained through strong personal will power and attribute critical to a superior human being

Yet Nietzsche does not solely attribute morality as completely artificial values meant to restrict humanity. He also emphasized that there is “naturalism in morality - that is, every healthy morality - that is dominated by an instinct of life” (349). This form of morality, drawn from instinct, is good as opposed to the “Anti-natural morality -that is, almost every morality which has so far been taught, revered, and preaches- turns conversely, against the instincts of life” (349). Nietzsche emphasizes how god is the “enemy of life” as religion is, as his existence contradicts nature (350). Life, Nietzsche implies, is inherently meaningless and morality exists as a futile effort to establish meaning and structure to an existence lacking of divine order. In this regard Nietzsche can be viewed as a nihilist; however he also challenges nihilism in other texts.

Nietzsche finishes expressing how claiming that some things “ought to be done” is foolish, and that “Morality, insofar as it condemns for its own sake, and not out of regard for the concerns, considerations, and contrivances of life, is a specific error with which one ought to have no pity” (351). Essentially morals do not work for the greater benefit of humanity, rather for specific motive, and is detrimental for that which matters.

Another key aspect of Nietzsche’s work and philosophy lies in his The Four Great Errors, where he expresses four flaws in human culture, that being; the error of confusing cause and effect, the error of false causality, the error of imaginary causes, and the error of free will. These errors fall back into his criticism of religion as he believes that religion produces and promotes these errors. People are taught to do things in regards to future happiness, regardless of human’s incapability to truly predict the effects of their actions, as well as attribute events to falsified causes. Humans fear the unknown and hence like to create fictional explanations to satisfy the hole in their knowledge. And finally he argues that free will is far too easily accepted in culture as it gives religion the ability to pin responsibility and blame on mankind.

It is because religion promotes all these detrimental human faults that he criticizes the church, and pushes for greater men to “will” themselves beyond the path pre-rendered by society.

Nietzsche’s Philosophy

Friedrich Nietzsche became one of the Germany’s most influential philosophers though his innovative and unique perspective towards philosophy and his views on religion and morality. Born in Prussia, Nietzsche grew up in a religious family with a father who was a Lutheran minister, yet ironically proceeded in his future writings to reject god and critique the nature of religion. Although Nietzsche lived a relatively short life, he accomplished much throughout his life, becoming “a professor of classical philology at the University of Basel in Switzerland” at the age of twenty-four (Jacobus 344). He wrote numerous texts on varying aspects of philosophy, becoming a pioneer to many new philosophical ideas and perspectives on thought, as well as challenging even modern thinkers to decipher and comprehend his complex ideas. Throughout his texts, Nietzsche challenges conventional philosophical thinking, questioning the motive behind moral values and societally established concepts.

Nietzsche’s essay Morality as Anti-Nature comes from his book Twilight of the Idols. Such texts exist as but one of Nietzsche’s many challenging and rather esoteric works. Understanding Nietzsche's works in full requires further in-depth analysis of a variety of his texts as well as research into the limitless interpretations of these texts. While the book addresses a wide variety of topics, Morality as Anti-Nature focuses on the church institutionalized morality that saturates society. In this text, Nietzsche essentially questions the application human produced morals and expresses that this form of morality, while providing good structure to humans who need it, ultimately limits humanity and humans who have the capability to moderate themselves. Yet even this apparently simple idea introduces layers of complexity that are difficult to decipher in his writing, this complexity being a key component in distinguishing Nietzsche’s philosophy.

Nietzsche’s philosophy can be interpreted in many different ways depending upon perspective which often leads to conflicting or incompatible interpretations. He can be seen as Nihilistic due to his tendency to deny universal truth, freewill, while favoring the idea of motive bound perception of reality. He is described as “an anti-realist about values: that is, for Nietzsche there are no moral facts, and there is nothing in nature that has value in itself”, and hence seen as a believer towards purposeless existence (Caldwell). To further this interpretation, Nietzsche infamously states that God is dead, in his writing The Gay Science, encouraging the perception that Nietzsche is a Nihilist through his attack on religion, also backed in his writings in Morality as Anti-Nature. However, at the same time, Nietzsche also criticizes Nihilism as a response to humanities degradation.

Nietzsche in fact, quite the contrary critiques the Nihilistic state of society as expressed by Kenneth Kierans of the University of Oxford:

Nihilism appears first in a weak or passive form. There is, for example, the "philosophical nihilist": he “is convinced that all that happens is meaningless and in vain; and that there ought not be anything meaningless and in vain…. At bottom, the nihilist thinks that the sight of such a bleak, useless existence makes a philosopher feel, dissatisfied, bleak, desperate”.

Nietzsche states in his The Genealogy of Morals that "the sight of man now fatigues. -- What is present-day Nihilism if it is not that? -- We are tired of man", furthering his expression of how nihilism is in fact the negative consequence of how society has developed, or rather failed to progress (Kierans 100), which Nietzsche believes needs to be fixed, even when some of his values seem to align with that Nihilism.

Due to the complex nature of his ideas and philosophy, it is difficult to classify his views into a single form and many of his writings seemingly clash with each other and “It is hard to deny the claim that Nietzsche’s thought defies systematic order because it is too manifold, erratic and contradictory” (Gerhardt). This ambiguities leaves ample room for interpretation of both Nietzsche's writings, and well as his philosophy as a whole:

There are no grounds for ascribing to him a political philosophy, since he has no systematic (or even partly systematic) views about the nature of state and society. As an esoteric moralist, Nietzsche aims at freeing higher human beings from their false consciousness about morality (their false belief that this morality is good for them), not at a transformation of society at large. (Leiter)

But while Nietzsche is often considered an apolitical philosopher due to the uncertain nature of applications to his beliefs, his goals towards the development of higher human beings surfaces throughout his work.

The distinction needs to be made within Nietzsche's philosophy between the societally developed, objective truth, as opposed to that which could be. “Nietzsche does not simply criticize philosophers for their failure to achieve objectivity in their quest for the truth. Nietzsche questions the very value of their quest for the objective truth” (Furman 287). While, shooting down the significance of god and emphasizing morality as a deterrent towards greater human development, Nietzsche still has tangible goals and views for humanity. At the core, he questions philosophy itself in a sense, as he denies morals on a societal level as he strives for an attainment of “betterness”, not established or judged on the basis of socially constructed perceptions, but rather esoteric values that are far more attuned with the abstract, natural instinct of “higher humans”. Nietzsche’s work in turn becomes cluttered and difficult to analyze as the ideas he portrays lie beyond our artificially constructed values and lives, and addresses what he believes to be the fundamental core of our existence.

Works Cited

Caldwell, Roger. "Nietzsche and Morality."Philosophy Now. Web. 20 Nov. 2014. <https://philosophynow.org/issues/70/Nietzsche_and_Morality>.

Roger Caldwell studied philosophy at Reading University and social anthropology at Oxford. He has written several articles and reviews on different philosophies, as a journalist.

Furman, Todd M. The Canon and Its Critics: A Multi-perspective Introduction to Philosophy. 2nd ed. Mountain View, Calif.: Mayfield Pub., 2000. Print.

The Canon and its Critics provides short summaries of a variety of philosophers and a excerpt of writing from those philosophers. It gives a useful summary that assists in understanding aspects of individual philosophers.

Gerhardt, Volker. "Philosophizing against Philosophy: Nietzsche's Provocation of the Philosophical Tradition — Hunter College."The Journal of Nietzsche Studies. Web. 20 Nov. 2014. http://www.hunter.cuny.edu/jns/research/philosophizing-against philosophy-nietzsche2019s-provocation-of-the-philosophical-tradition>.

A professor at Humboldt Volker Gerhardt is a German philosopher who specializes in a wide variety of philosophical fields. His article provides insight into Nietzsche’s style philosophy and values.

Kierans, Kenneth. "On The Unity of Nietzsche's Philosophy." Web. 20 Nov. 2014. <http://www2.swgc.mun.ca/animus/Articles/Volume 14/9_Kierans.pdf>.

Kenneth Kierans is an assistant professor of humanities at University of King’s College, who graduated from University of Oxford as well as a current editor to Animus, an academic journal of philosophy. His article provided extremely in-depth analysis of Nietzsche’s philosophy.

Leiter, Brian. "Nietzsche's Moral and Political Philosophy." Stanford University. Stanford University, 26 Aug. 2004. Web. 20 Nov. 2014. <http://plato.stanford.edu/entries/nietzsche-moral-political/#2>.

Brian Leiter is a professor at University of Chicago Law School. The article on Nietzsche comes from Stanford University's Encyclopedia of Philosophy, which provides in depth analysis and examination of Nietzsche and his philosophy.

Primary Source:

Jacobus, Lee A. "Friedrich Nietzsche Morality as Anti-Nature." A World of Ideas: Essential Readings for College Writers. 9th ed. Boston: Bedford/St. Martin's, 2002. N. pag. Print.

This text provides  primary source as well as a summary for a variety of different philosophers. Lee Jacobus was a Professor at the University of Connecticut and graduate of Brown University.