Commentary on Megan's Paper

Twilight of the Idols: “Morality as Anti-Nature
 Meryem Rabia Tasbilek

When I read Nietzsche’s Twilight of the Idols: “Morality as Anti-Nature” and our friend Megan’s analysis about it, these made me think deeper about the problem morality. I understand that Nietzsche criticizes moral person and morality too, but it seems like he finds moralists more problematic. I cannot think his Anti-Morality argument without this distinction when I synthesize these notions and arguments with my observations. It seems like being moralist is equal to feed an individual’s existence with measuring everyone with the scale of synthetic morality scale. I think Nietzsche was discussed from this human weakness.

                My friend Megan uses Nietzsche’s argument about Matthew 5:29 to emphasize the sharpness of moral rules and their possible violent faces. I think including religious books can give us some intellectual sources to alter anti-nature parts of morality even though mostly we use them to create anti-nature types of morality. They are all raw materials and we need to synthesize them with our wisdom of life and avoid them to be stable, but dynamic to make them active materials for our self-cultivations. If we use them actively, we can create some standpoints which is not anti-nature. Unfortunately, even the religions or philosophies that are intellectually or sometimes physically idol breakers became untouchable idols and their shadows are bigger than the ones they broke in the past.

I want to share one of my favorite parts from Matthew about hypocrites and religious leaders and moralists which support Nietzsche’s anger and critique against moralists. Even though, Nietzsche finds hypocrites valuable because this specialty needs strong character which is very rare in our modern societies. Unfortunately, we easily switch our paradigms when we came across with some resistance in the society:
                 Woe to you, teachers of the law and Pharisees, you hypocrites! You give a tenth of your spices--mint, dill and cumin. But you have neglected the more important matters of the law--justice, mercy and faithfulness. You should have practiced the latter, without neglecting the former. You blind guides! You strain out a gnat but swallow a camel. "What sorrow awaits you teachers of religious law and you Pharisees. Hypocrites! For you are so careful to clean the outside of the cup and the dish, but inside you are filthy--full of greed and self-indulgence! Blind Pharisee! First clean the inside of the cup and dish, and then the outside also will be clean. "What sorrow awaits you teachers of religious law and you Pharisees. Hypocrites! For you are like whitewashed tombs--beautiful on the outside but filled on the inside with dead people's bones and all sorts of impurity. Matthew 23:23-27

It seems like Nietzsche’s strong critiques about Morality is a reflection of this practices that were are able to read even in Matthew. My interpretation might be understood wrongly. I am not trying to link Nietzsche to Christianity directly. However, I insist that the anti-nature morality is mostly being moralists and trying to worship to morality rather than trying to use it as a natural tool in our lives. My friend Megan emphasizes the distinction between two types of morality in Nietzsche’s argument very well. “In section four, Nietzsche makes a significant distinction between natural and anti-natural morality. He argues that morality is healthy when it is natural and governed by one’s instincts.” Nietzsche also argues that “Morality is just a sign language, just a symptomatology; you have to know what it means in order to take advantage of it. He is against violating the nature by idealizing our moral rules and our norms which seems equal to put ourselves to the center of the existence and taking ourselves too seriously. By this way we objectify all the rest. From this perspective, Morality is anti-nature. We invent the meaning of morality and also fences of beauty and concept of purpose. This is problematic for Nietzsche.  

Megan also emphasizes Church’s problematic attack against the roots of passion. “The church attacks the very existence of the passions, and in doing so, Nietzsche argues, attacks life itself. It never asks: ‘how can a desire be spiritualized, beautified, deified?’” (172). Based on this perspective, attacking to passion functions together with morality and produce anti-nature side effects. It is like the human kind is cutting her own arteries. Megan also emphasizes that “in the second section of “Morality as Anti-Nature”, Nietzsche argues people who act aggressively hostile towards their passions do so because they are too weak of will to act moderately; hostility is the only way they can prevent themselves from acting rashly. In this way, the severe hostility of Christian doctrine toward passion is a symptom of a sickness of one who cannot act moderately.” When Megan links this to the spiritualization of hostilities in Christianity, it seems like a very good synthesis. Same as the people who can only manage to act moderately by attacking to their own passions, the societies who spiritualize their enemies owe their existence to their opponents. If they were able to produce enough power and character by themselves from their own roots, they would not need to spiritualize their enemies and try to invent more hostilities intellectually, religiously, militaristically. Megan argues that “It is a new way of thought which is quite different from the reasoning of the Church, which is not able to spiritualize its hostility because it has always endeavored to destroy its enemies.” At one point, I disagree with him, because in our post-modern world, yes we mostly destroy our enemies, but the concept of spiritualizing the enemy and hostilities are still very strong and function for the societies which cannot survive moderately by their own sources. Megan’s analyzes on Nietzsche’s argument about the importance of spiritualizing our inner enemies is very valuable. I believe that when the individual use this spiritualization in her inner world, she decreases these practices against external world. Megan underlines Nietzsche’s argument about the lack of strong will, the existence of laziness produce misinterpretation of ‘peacefulness of the soul’ which is not a good thing the way we want to see.

           My question for Megan is how we can have the knowledge to be able to separate natural and anti-natural morality? And, how we can improve our spiritualization of inner enemies based on Nietzsche's arguments? Do not we produce similar actions when we evaluate morality with our philosophical scales? This is a general question for all the audience: When we create an anti-morality perspective and start to measure and critique moral ones and morality, do not we become the twin of this anti-nature practices? Maybe we need to break all the scales and try to practice Nietzsche’s last part of Gay Science and say yes to morality and anti-morality at the same time from a distance to both sides. Megan uses a quotes from Nietzsche that says: “Which type of life is making value judgments here?—But I have already answered this: it is a judgment of a declining, weakened, exhausted, condemned life” (175). When we judge morality, do not we copy this argument and become weakened, too? I think we cannot change anti-nature morality by using anti-morality rhetorically. I thank to Megan for his paper which made me think about these arguments deeper.