Reason vs. Instinct

           In Friedrich Nietzsche’s Twilight of the Idols and The Anti-Christ, the author gives a thorough judgment of two figures that have significantly shaped all subsequent philosophical thought: Socrates and Jesus Christ, respectively. Although Nietzsche feels that both thinkers introduced a diseased perspective, one that denies the instincts, he still betrays a certain respect for each. One must also bear in mind that Nietzsche’s own thought was inevitably influenced by theirs. In fact, Nietzsche, in his polarizing fashion, occasionally seems resentful of each thinker’s ideas, characterizing his own thoughts as negations of theirs and completely condemning their beliefs. Ultimately, however, Nietzsche expresses more disdain for the Christian Church than Jesus himself, and he praises the philosophy of Jesus, with its absence of resentment, above Socrates’s dialectical reason.
           In Twilight of the Idols, Nietzsche, who believed that a full account of a thing’s origin provided much insight into the nature of the thing itself, gives a historical examination of Socrates. Nietzsche puts Socrates in the context of Athens, a decadent, and thus declining, society. The degeneration of Athens was the result of their becoming slave to their desires, their bad instincts. Socrates, seeking to “devise a counter-tyrant who is stronger”, attracts fascination as the embodiment of reason (43). Dialectics and extreme rationality are taken to be the apparent cures for decadence; only through them could they, like Socrates, become master of their instincts. Here, Nietzsche criticizes dialectics as “a pitiless instrument; with its aid one can play the tyrant; one compromises by conquering. The dialectician leaves it to his opponent to demonstrate he is not an idiot” (42). In other words, dialectics is purely linguistic, and language, in Nietzsche’s view, is naturally flawed. A successful argument proves only that one’s sophistry outdid another’s, and not that it expressed reality more accurately. Socrates argued that reason=virtue=happiness, that our reason must counter our bad instincts and project an absolute, *static optimism*, but in this he merely substitutes one tyrant for another; they do not abolish decadence, but merely alter its expression.
           Nietzsche blames Socrates for introducing reason into western thought, which has since spawned a host of other “idiosyncrasies of philosophers” (45). One idea reason is opposed to is becoming, or change, but “in so far as the senses show becoming, passing away, change, they do not lie” (46). The philosopher concludes that the senses depict a false world that is only a shadow of the ‘real’ world, which is made up of the highest, most abstract, ‘absolute’ concepts. In this one can see that the philosopher’s aversion to impermanence causes him to trick himself into believing that that which the senses perceive derives from the supreme concepts, which are causes in themselves, personified by God. Reason also projects everything into categories, which is a kind of fetishism, a taking of the parts for a whole. This same fetishism is in itself language. From language we conceptualize a subject and an object, a cause and an effect, something willing an effect, all in a linear fashion. Nietzsche expounds a view in which effects are linked back to a vast interweaving causal web, but even that is inevitably an anthropomorphic perception. Thus Nietzsche undermines Socrates’s entire dialectical method. This is what Nietzsche calls ‘philosophizing with a hammer’. By recalling Zarathustra in Twilight of the Idols’s final chapter, Nietzsche links the hammer and hardness to instinct, strength, and power.
           With The Anti-Christ, Nietzsche returns to one of his favorite subjects, Christianity. Of all religions that he discusses, Nietzsche likely values Christianity least of all. In Christianity, he sees the most blatant case of a morality based on resentment. It is a religion that seeks preservation of the weak, the poor, and the sick over the strong. It is centered around the concept ‘sin’, which is a condemnation of the self rather than an affirmation of it. Nietzsche also expresses particular disdain for the Christian priest, epitomized by the disciple Paul, a figure he holds responsible for the falsification of the Judeo-Christian history and the creation of what Nietzsche calls a ‘moral world-order’. Both of these actions were perpetrated because the priest can use “only those concepts, teachings, symbols with which one tyrannizes over masses, forms herds” (167). The priestly order believed they were doing good by making Jesus’s teachings more accessible, but their actions resulted in a false interpretation of the Bible that portrays the life of Jesus as the necessary and prophetic result of the Old Testament. They thus fabricated a history out of which Christianity came, altering the context, and thus the perceived meaning, of Christianity and the life of the redeemer.
           As Socrates and his influence were the product of a decadent society, Nietzsche distinguishes Jesus from the ambiguous history from which he came and the Church that followed. To begin with, Nietzsche characterizes Jesus as an ‘idiot’, in the Dostoyevskian sense of one who is morally alien from the society from which he comes, but only because he instinctively must be so (“his proofs are inner ‘lights’, inner feelings of pleasure and self-affirmations”), not due to any reason or rationale (157). In this, Jesus is fundamentally different from any of the Greeks, who were slaves to their bad instincts, and more akin to the Buddha; Jesus was at one with his good instincts, with what was in his heart, and what corresponded to his will.
           While Nietzsche admires Jesus for the self-affirmation of behaving instinctively, he criticizes him for denying all that is physical and creating a world “undisturbed by reality of any kind, a merely ‘inner’ world, a ‘real’ world, an ‘eternal world’” (153). In essence, Nietzsche claims that Jesus advocated a solipsistic philosophy, but this is because he speaks only of the soul or the self, and takes all of nature to be merely metaphor. Jesus could discern nothing but the self; he never revolted against or denied order or culture because he was unable to acknowledge either. He had no ill-will toward any being, and that is what makes him the only true Christian: he does not resist evil in not only his words, but his heart also. His instinct was to love and forgive even those who do evil to him, even his executors, and he allows no one to prevent him from willing so. Jesus recognized that it is through living one’s life that one senses the divine, that the Kingdom of God is a condition of the heart that exists eternally, not something that comes into existence.
           Nietzsche returns to a historical account of the Church, and further divides Christ from Christianity. Jesus remained a Christian even in his death by resisting not his executors, while his disciples became resentful of the ruling class. “From this moment one felt oneself in mutiny against the social order, one subsequently understood Jesus as having been in mutiny against the social order” (164). The Disciples once again create a fabricated historical account of Jesus’s origins. This is an example of the kind of “Egyptianism” that Nietzsche describes: 2000 years of ecclesiastical writings and interpretations, led by Paul, who took Jesus’s death and wove out of it a fable for sin and redemption, have mummified Christianity and stripped it of its history.
           After restoring Socrates and Jesus their proper origins, Nietzsche is able to lay bare the shortcomings of each, as well as their admirable characteristics. Ultimately, Nietzsche recognizes Socrates for exposing to Athens its decadence, but this is a limited acknowledgment, as he merely substituted one tyrant for another. He also criticizes Socrates for denying the instinct and promoting dialectical reasoning. Of Jesus, however, Nietzsche has a more favorable view. While Nietzsche does criticize Jesus for fleeing from the external senses into an acknowledgement of only an inner world, he holds Jesus to be fundamentally sound in his instincts. Indeed, The Anti-Christ may have been more aptly titled Anti-Christian, so far does Nietzsche draw the divide between Jesus and the Church that sprung up in response to him.

Works Cited:
Twilight of the Idols and The Anti-Christ. Nietzsche, Friedrich. Penguin Books. England, 1990.            Tr. Hollingdale, R.J.