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Third EssayWhat Do Ascetic Ideals Mean?23
The ascetic ideal has not only ruined health and taste; its has also ruined a third, fourth, fifth, and sixth something as well. I`ll be careful not to mention everything (when would I come to the end?). I`m not going to reveal what this ideal has brought about. I would much rather confine myself to what it means, what it allows us to surmise, what lies hidden behind, under, and in it, what it provisionally and indistinctly expresses, overloaded as it is with question marks and misunderstandings. And only with this purpose in mind, I cannot spare my readers a glimpse into the monstrosity of its effects, its disastrous consequences, in order to prepare them for the ultimate and most terrifying aspects which the question of the meaning of this ideal has for me. What precisely does the power of this ideal mean, the monstrous nature of this power? Why was it given room to grow to such an extent? Why was there not a more effective resistance?
The ascetic ideal is the expression of a will. Where is the opposing will, in which an opposing ideal finds its expression? The ascetic ideal has a goal - a goal which is so universal that all other interests in human existence, measured against it, seem small and narrow. It interprets times, people, and humanity unsparingly with this goal in mind. It permits no other interpretation. No other goal counts. It rejects, denies, affirms, and confirms only through its own interpretative meaning (and has there ever been an interpretative system more thoroughly thought through?). It doesn`t submit to any power. By contrast, it believes in its privileged position in relation to all other powers, in its absolutely higher ranking with respect to all other powers. It believes that there is no power on earth which does not have to derive its meaning first from it, a right to exist, a value, as a tool in its own work, as a way and a means to its own goals, to a single goal. . . Where is the counterpart to this closed system of will, goal, and interpretation? Why is this counterpart missing? . . . Where is the other "single goal"? . . .
But people tell me that counterpart isn`t missing, claiming that it has not only fought a long and successful war with the ascetic ideal, but has also already mastered that ideal on all major points, that all our modern scientific knowledge is a testament to this - modern science, which, as a true philosophy of reality, evidently believes only in itself, possesses courage and will in itself, and has got along up to this point well enough without God, a world beyond, and virtues which deny. However, I`m not impressed with such a fuss and agitprop: these trumpeters of reality are bad musicians. One can hear well enough that their notes do not sound out of the depths. The abyss of scientific conscience does not speak through them - for today scientific knowledge is an abyss. The phrase "scientific knowledge" in such trumpeting mouths is mere fornication, an abuse, an indecency.
The truth is precisely the opposite of what is claimed here: scientific knowledge nowadays has simply no faith in itself, to say nothing of an overarching ideal. And where it consists of passion, love, ardour, suffering, that doesn`t make it the opposite of the ascetic ideal but much rather its newest and most pre-eminent form. Does that sound strange to you? . . . There are indeed a sufficient number of good and modest working people among scholars nowadays, people happy in their little corners. For this reason: because their work satisfies them, from time to time, with some presumption, they make noises demanding that people today should in general be happy, particularly with scientific knowledge. There are so many useful things to do. I don`t deny that. The last thing I want to do is to ruin the pleasure these honest labourers take in their handiwork. For I`m happy about their work. But the fact that people are working rigorously in science these days and that there are satisfied workers is simply no proof that science today, as a totality, has a goal, a will, an ideal, a passion in a great faith. As I`ve said, the opposite is the case.
Where science is not the most recently appearing form of the ascetic ideal - and then it`s a matter of cases too rare, noble, and exceptional to counter the general judgment - science today is a hiding place for all kinds of unhappiness, disbelief, gnawing worms, despectio sui [self-contempt], bad conscience. It is the anxiety of the absence of ideals, suffering from the lack of a great love, the dissatisfaction with a condition of involuntary modest content. Oh, what nowadays does science not conceal! How much, at least, is it designed to conceal! The efficiency of our best scholars, their mindless diligence, their heads smoking day and night, the very mastery of their handiwork—how often has all this derived its meaning from the fact that they don`t permit some things to become visible to them any more! Science as a means of putting themselves to sleep. Are you acquainted with that? . . .
Now and then people wound scholars to the bone - everyone who associates with them experiences this - with a harmless word. We anger our scholarly friends just when we intend to honour them. We drive them wild, merely because we were too coarse to figure out the people we are really dealing with, suffering people, who don`t wish to admit to themselves what they are, narcotised and mindless people, who fear only one thing - coming to consciousness.
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