The object of Nietzsche's argument in Ecce Homo is not Christian morality, but rather mythology in general. The argument is for the recognition of myths for what they are—ideals, things man-made—and no more; the attack on Christian morality, is incidental—it just happens to be a dominant myth in contemporary society (according to Nietzsche). The danger in mistaking an ideal for reality is the unwitting cultivation of sickness rather than of health. His task is not towards an improvement of mankind: it is against false improvements.
Ecce Homo seeks to overthrow idols—his word, he tells us, for “ideals.” Here is the text's first explicit “revaluation of values”: one word is identified with another in order to undermine the normative distinction between them. An ideal, for Nietzsche, is not just an idea, but an idea which is worshiped; it is made here to share “idol's” connotations of excess and falsity. These words have never, in fact, been too semantically disparate; nonetheless, “ideal” tends to provoke more positive than negative connotations. It is this normative lie, the “mendaciously invented world,” representing a real sickness bedizened with the language of Christian morality, which Ecce Homo seeks to strip.
In “Why I Am So Wise” Nietzsche revaluates decadence by applying the term to his historical self, first describing his own decadence and then enumerating in the same figure qualities fundamentally opposite decadence (the activity with which he took his physical health in hand (is this a paradox?), his abandonment of pessimism at his point of “lowest vitality,” his careful consideration of “what is good for him” (in particular), etc.). This is a crucial revaluation, decadence later serving as a heading under which Christian morality is placed. (There is an intimacy between decadence and ressentiment—the latter of which Nietzsche asserts sickness as a kind—which demands further discussion. It is also primarily within the space of the historical Nietzsche's sickness that his own decadence is discussed. The definition of morality in “Why I Am Destiny” posits it as “the idiosyncrasy of decadents, with the ulterior motive of revenging oneself against life—successfully.” This motive seems irrefragably rooted in ressentiment).
It is hardly worth saying, Nietzsche's audience is a rare or nonexistent one. This he readily admits: to understand anything at all of his text “one must perhaps be similarly conditioned as I am—with one foot beyond life.” Got it?
One cannot, according to Nietzsche, “become what one is” while living within the lexicon of morality, for this would be to become what one isn't—namely, an ideal. Nietzsche's argument is literal, and the gridiron beneath the ideal—the ideal including the moral—is the literal. It is not that all ideals are bad (note the slip back into morality) but rather that many common normative ideals are productive of sickness rather than of health. What one is is a (wo)man, flourishing, becoming—not ill, dying.
What comes to replace “good” and “evil?” If we must have an answer we might say: whatever is productive of healthiness and of unhealthiness, respectively. The text's predominating alimentary concerns are not troping, but literal.
(By Ryan Nichols)
Ryan,
ReplyDeleteI really enjoyed this interpretation of Nietzsche's argument, and found many of your insights to be clarifying and very helpful to my understanding of the work. However, I believe that the audience, which you pass over very briefly, is worth mentioning and discussing. Ecce Homo has been called an autobiographical text, and to write an autobiography is to write one's life story specifically for an audience. "How One Becomes What One Is," the subtitle for the work, is explained during the work using Nietzsche as an example, so an audience may learn from his example. He does not believe that a large audience will comprehend his argument, and he is of the view that “one must perhaps be similarly conditioned as I am—with one foot beyond life” to find its meaning. But Nietzsche gloats about the complexity and radicalism of his ideas, and dangles them on a string in front of the audience, challenging them to understand his view of society when he makes remarks similar to this one. Although Nietzsche's audience may not be large in size or comparable to that of a mainstream author, the audience drives Ecce Homo and is a very important factor to consider in its interpretation.
Not exactly to the point, but involving the audience is this clipping from Peter Rabinowitz's Truth in Fiction: https://acrobat.com/#d=B5zIeEC5q1l5aOwt46RlEg . Interested parties can safely skip to "The First Three Audiences Defined" (p. 125). It might be worth considering what Nietzsche would say of the fourth, "ideal narrative audience" (p. 130) in light of passages like "Go away from me and resist Zarathustra! And even better: be ashamed of him!. . .You say that you believe in Zarathustra? But what matters Zarathustra? You are my believers—but what matter all believers?. . .Now I bid you lose me and find yourselves; and only when you have all denied me will I return to you."
ReplyDeleteAaand, from The Gay Science:
ReplyDelete"On the question of being understandable.-- One does not only wish to be understood when one writes; one wishes just as surely not to be understood. It is not by any means necessarily an objection to a book when anybody finds it impossible to understand: perhaps that was part of the author's intention--he did not want to be understood by just "anybody." Every more noble spirit and taste selects its audience when it wishes to communicate itself; and choosing them, it at the same time erects barriers against "the others." All the more subtle laws of style have their origin at this point: they at the same time keep away, create a distance, forbid "entrance," understanding, as said above--while they open the ears of those whose ears are related to ours."
I think you hit the nail on the head in your précis when you talk about Nietzsche’s feelings towards idols. I think that the keystone for interpreting Nietzsche’s work is the title: “Behold the man”, which for all of its biblical implications is tying his view on Christianity to the masses view of Christianity. I think that this work is all about not worshipping the man but listening to his ideas. We have co-opted ideals as idols. They are the same to us. Christ is Christianity; but shouldn’t Christianity be about Christian values? I think that the purpose of the Ecce Homo is about rejecting idols, but also about rejecting idols for ideals, because I think we do want ideals as long as they are ideals and not people. idk, nice analysis, though.
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