Thursday, January 31, 2013

The Deceptive Nature of Asceticism


               In the third essay of The Genealogy of Morals, Nietzsche poses the question, “What is the meaning of ascetic ideals?” and answers it by identifying humanity’s desire to escape nothingness (77). As he puts it, humans deprive their senses as a way to occupy the soul, to “will nothingness rather than not will at all” (77). In explaining this, he often discusses the body, incorporating it into various analogies and imagery sequences. Nearly all of them are negative, which allows him to highlight the physical degradation that occurs through asceticism. In this way, he points out that people who subscribe to this practice end up deteriorating part of their own reality and coming closer to nothingness than ever. This contrariness is at the heart of the phenomenon he calls “ascetic self-misunderstanding” (91).
                From the start, Nietzsche connects humanity’s  horror vacui to its moralistic notions of physical deprivation (77). Because people “must have a goal,” they often turn to asceticism, for it provides an area of focus by crafting meaning out of nothingness. All one needs is a body and some spiritual dedication; thus, the process occupies both body and mind. However, as Nietzsche shows through his copious physical references, it is truly just a physical process. In his words, “We derive pleasure from our curious dissection of the soul of a living body” (92). Here, by evoking the soul as something like a floppy piece of liver to be picked apart, he suggests the baseness of the system, which ends up being much more physical than mental. Moreover, he suggests how damaging it can be. Asceticism, like an overly curious scientist, ends up cutting and snipping apart one’s flesh and spirit.
                This “hatred of the senses” causes sickness and injury (90). People who subscribe to it have “mouths [that] continually secrete the word ‘justice’ like poisonous saliva, with lips always pursed, ready to spit at anything which looks content” (102). They “tear open the oldest wounds, they bleed from scars long healed” (107). Again, Nietzsche employs negative physical imagery to emphasize that asceticism is truly a bodily ordeal, and a destructive one at that. The grotesque vividness of his analogies strips the practice of its lofty reputation and reveals its hidden, injurious baseness.
                Because adherents to asceticism destroy their bodies, they destroy themselves. In chasing away emptiness through systematic self-denial, they end up “reduc[ing] the physical world to an illusion” (97). Sick and broken, they “cease believing in [their] own self” and “deny [their] own reality” (97). In this way, they end up losing their grip on something that is not nothingness—their physical presence. Ultimately, they are further away from their goal of escaping nothingness than they were to begin with. This reality serves as the foundation of Nietzsche’s identification of asceticism as self-misunderstanding.

Discussion question: Does the degradation of the body really constitute a loss of one’s own reality? Can one deprive their physical self while still maintaining a spiritual understanding of themselves?

1 comment:

  1. In concerns to Emily's discussion question, Nietzsche's argument in the text revolves around proving the origins of morals, through his own rather interesting view of natural sciences and history. All of his arguments are, to him, based on the physical world, not disembodied ideals. Because Nietzsche is taking such a material view, it makes sense that he would disbelieve those who claim spiritual enlightenment can come from rejecting physical reality, as he is search for Truth in history and science. In addition, in the noble morality which Nietzsche partially-endorses, to be good is to be "the noble, the powerful, the superior, and the high-minded" (12). As physically starving oneself makes one less strong, under noble morality it may be viewed as a flaw and a sign of weakness, and therefore bad.

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