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Third EssayWhat Do Ascetic Ideals Mean?25
No! People should not come at me with scientific knowledge when I am looking for the natural antagonist of the ascetic ideal, when I ask, "Where is the opposing will, in which an opposing ideal expresses itself?" For that purpose, scientific knowledge does not stand sufficiently on its own; for that it first requires an ideal value, the power to make value, in whose service it could have faith in itself. But scientific knowledge is never in itself something which creates values. Its relationship to the ascetic ideal is not inherently antagonistic at all. It`s even more that case that it represents the constantly forward driving force in the inner development of that ideal. Its resistance and struggle, when we inspect more closely, are not concerned in any way with the ideal itself, but only with its external trappings, its clothing, its masquerade, its temporary hardening and petrification into dogma. Scientific knowledge makes the life of this ideal free again, since it denies what is exoteric in it.
These two things, scientific knowledge and the ascetic ideal - they really stand on a single foundation - I`ve just clarified the point, namely, that they both stand on the same overvaluing of the truth (or more correctly, on the same faith in the inestimable value of the truth, which for them is beyond criticism). In that very claim they are necessarily allies, so that, if someone is going to fight against them, he can only fight them together and place them both in question. An appraisal of the value of the ascetic ideal unavoidably also involves an appraisal of the value of scientific knowledge. And for that people should take the time to keep their eyes open and their ears alert!
(As for art - let me offer a preliminary remark, for I`ll be coming back to it at some point or other at greater length: the very art in which the lie sanctifies itself and the will to deceive has good conscience is much more fundamentally opposed to the ascetic ideal than is science. That`s what Plato`s instinct experienced - the greatest enemy of art which Europe has produced up to this point. Plato versus Homer: that`s the entire, the real antagonism - on one side, the "beyond" of the best will, the great slanderer of life; on the other side, life`s unintentional worshipper, the golden nature. A artistic bondage in the service of the ascetic ideal is thus essentially the worst corruption of the artist there can be. Unfortunately it`s also one of the most common, for nothing is more corruptible than an artist.)
Physiologically considered, scientific knowledge rests on the same foundation as the ascetic ideal: a certain impoverishment of life is the precondition for both - emotional affects become cool, the tempo slows down, dialectic replaces instinct, seriousness stamped on faces and gestures (seriousness, this unmistakable sign of a more laborious metabolism, of a life of struggle and hard work). Just look at those periods in a population when the scholars step up into the foreground: they are times of exhaustion, often of evening, of decline. An overflowing force and certainty about life and the future have gone. A preponderance of mandarins never indicates anything good - no more than does the arrival of democracy, the peaceful tribunal instead of war, equal rights for women, the religion of pity, and all the other things symptomatic of a degenerating life. (Science grasped as a problem: what does science mean? - on this point see the preface to The Birth of Tragedy).
No! This "modern science" - keep your eyes open at this point - is for the time being the best ally of the ascetic ideal, and precisely for this reason: it is the most unconscious, most involuntary, most secret, and most subterranean ally! They have up to now been playing the same game, the "poor in spirit" and the scientific opponents of this ideal (we should be careful, incidentally, not to think that these opponents are the opposite of that ideal, something like the rich in spirit - they are not. I call them the hectic in spirit). The famous victories of the latter - and they have undoubtedly been victories - but over what? They in no way overcame the ascetic ideal. With those victories, the ideal rather became stronger, that is, harder to understand, more spiritual, more dangerous, as scientific knowledge ruthlessly and continually kept breaking off and demolishing a wall, an external structure which the ideal had built onto itself and coarsened its appearance.
Do people really think that something like the downfall of theological astronomy indicates the downfall of that ideal? . . . Because of that, have human beings perhaps become less dependent on redemption in a world beyond as a solution for the puzzle of their existence, given that existence since that time looks, in the visible order of things, even more arbitrary, indolent, and dispensable? Isn`t it the case that since Copernicus the self-diminution of human beings and their will to self-diminution have made inexorable progress? Alas, the faith in their dignity, their uniqueness, their irreplaceable position in the chain of being has gone. The human being has become an animal, not a metaphorical animal, but absolutely and unconditionally—the one who in his earlier faith was almost God ("child of God," "God-man" [Gottmensch]) . . . Since Copernicus human beings seem to have reached an inclined plane. They`re now rolling at an accelerating rate past the mid-point. But where to? Into nothingness? Into the "penetrating sense of their own nothingness"? . . .Well, then, wouldn`t this be precisely the way into the old ideal? . . .
All scientific knowledge (and not just astronomy, whose humbling and destructive effects Kant understood remarkably well, "it destroys my importance". . . )-all scientific knowledge, natural as well as unnatural (the name I give to the self-criticism of knowledge) is nowadays keen to talk human beings out of the respect they used to have for themselves, as if that was nothing more than a bizarre arrogance about themselves. In this matter we could even say scientific knowledge has its own pride, its characteristically acrid form of stoical ataraxia [indifference], this laboriously attained self-contempt for human beings as its ultimate, most serious demand for respect, for the right to hold itself erect on its own (and, in fact, that`s justified, for the one who despises is always still one more person who "has not forgotten respect" . . .). Does that really work against the ascetic ideal? Do people really think in all seriousness (as theologians imagined for quite a while) that somehow Kant`s victory over dogmatic theological concepts ("God," "Soul," "Freedom," "Immortality") succeeded in breaking up that ideal?
In asking that question, it`s not our concern at the moment whether Kant himself had anything like that in mind. What is certain is that all sorts of transcendentalists since Kant have once more won the game. They`ve become emancipated from the theologians. What a stroke of luck! Kant showed them a secret path by which they could now, on their own initiative and with the most sincere scientific decency, follow their "hearts` desires". And similarly who could now hold anything against the agnostics, if they, as admirers of what is inherently unknown and secret, worship the question mark itself as their God? (Xaver Doudan once spoke of the ravages brought on by "l`habitude d`admirer l`inintelligible au lieu de rester tout simplement dans l`inconnu" [the habit of admiring the unintelligible instead of simply staying in the unknown]; he claimed that the ancients had not done this). If everything human beings "know" does not satisfy their wishes and, beyond that, contradicts them and makes human beings shudder, what a divine excuse to be allowed to seek the blame for this not in "wishes" but in "knowledge"! . . . "There is no knowledge. Consequently, there is a God" -what a new elegantia syllogismi [syllogistic excellence]! What a triumph of the ascetic ideal! -
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