Nietzsche’s Prophecy: The Great Unlearning of Morality

~by David Aiken~

The media are having a heyday with the assorted moral and legal challenges that are splitting and coring the traditionally held socio-religious beliefs and practices that permeate our Western societies. The affirmation of gay marriage by the US Supreme Court in 2013 effectively guillotined the conventionally held American and Christian belief that marriage is between one man and one woman. And obviously, as has been asserted by some, when traditionally held moral beliefs and religiously held opinions begin dropping like flies on the table, all things then become possible in the Land of the Free and the Home of the Brave. There is no doubt about it: it is mighty slippery on society’s slopes, and the Times They Are (still) A-Changing.

Activist singer Bob Dylan is no doubt surprised to have lived long enough to see the Supreme Court reverse itself and declare de facto, by proclaiming unconstitutional the Voting Rights Act, that race is no longer an issue in America (evidence being, obviously, our black ‘Kenyan-born’ former president). And US Republican Congressional Representative Louie Gohmert, “accomplished idiot” and bigot,  has lived long enough to predict, in the aftermath of the Supreme Court’s willingness to consider alternative social forms of marital union, that bigamy and polygamy will also eventually become legal forms of family-making and breaking in American. The Future attends us, and we wait breath abated.

So, what if all this social change and all these challenges to traditional morality really do portend the dawning of a new age for America? Is doomsday at hand? Will America, as we know her, cease to exist? Well, yes, and no. Already in the late 19^th century Nietzsche gave prophetic voice to the inevitable advent of profound philosophical changes that must eventually come about both in our actions as well as in our moral consciousness – because we have been too long Christianized. It would seem that the bill is finally coming due for 2000 years of Christian influence. And We the People are once again become the pioneers in a New World adventure. This time, though, America’s Manifest Destiny is leading us into a philosophical wilderness beset with novel and diverse pitfalls and traps, and, failing the emergence of a new Natty Bumppo, “near-fearless warrior” and proto-Marvel superhero, to lead us through the wild highways and byways of this changing intellectual and moral landscape, the only reliable Pathfinder we have to rely on in this new world order is not our Belief, but rather our own Intelligent Reasoning.

My Meditative Philosophical Meandering this month strives to shadow some after-effects of an Idea expressed by Nietzsche perhaps most clearly in his 1888 book The Antichrist, which is the only book completed in what was to have been a four volume series entitled the Will to Power.

Now for reasons that must make sense to them, professional philosophers and other Nietzsche interpreters have chosen to translate into English Nietzsche’s formulation of this Idea, the Umwertung aller Werte, through an unenlightening, immensely unattractive, and scrupulously pompous locution – rendering it as the Transvaluation of Values. Yes, the German expression does mean quite textually: transforming the value of our values; but it is also patently obvious that the English translation is, among many other not-so-nice things, pompous, because it carefully seeks to obscure through hoity-toity and self-important scholarly lingo a rather straightforward philosophical idea – that a time of Great Unlearning is dawning for Western Christianized peoples and cultures.

So while my present Meditative Philosophical Meandering is entirely that of a freewheeling libre-penseur, no blame can be traced back to Nietzsche for this. However, the springboard that propels me into this, my philosophical free-fall, yet remains faithful to Nietzsche’s original idea—the idea of a Great Unlearning, an inversion of morality that is yawning like a philosophical abyss in front of a Western European civilization o’er-hasty for the tumble.

For Nietzsche, in a world in which an individual’s existence is the only anchor for any possible truth about Life and living, the foundational experience for an authentic life must take place in the moment of the Great Unlearning. This is in fact the story of Nietzsche’s Zarathustra, who was himself destined to become the first voice of this Unlearning, who was himself, much like his antagonistic prototype John the Baptist, an isolated prophet crying out on the highways and byways a new message of good news—“make straight the way of Man.” The Prologue to Thus Spoke Zarathustra is important to this overarching narrative precisely because Zarathustra had himself also to become aware of, and then deliberately unlearn, all the hidden little beliefs, opinions, unarticulated moral principles, and culturally inherited ethical practices (e.g., dead bodies and their need to be honored) that were imperceptibly, but effectively, framing and therefore defining the possibilities of his Thinking. Zarathustra had to unlearn his moral Self before he could get on with the job of becoming a proto-Jack Kerouac come to lay out before the world of the 19^th century and beyond the story of a new “road trip” in which the hero, Man, journeys back from Über-Tier (more-than-animal) to nothing-more-than-Tier (Human All too Human § 40).

           

The details of this psychological journey, this road trip toward the freedom of the individual mind, are then made explicit in Zarathustra’s First Discourse (“The Three Transformations of the Mind”). The first leg of our cognitive transformation comes about when we realize that the Self is a Beast of Burden (= camel, or the Beast + its Burden), when we become aware that we carry around in our minds, for the duration of our stopover in this twilight zone, the Burden of inherited moral, cultural and intellectual baggage. The second leg of our transformation comes about when we seek, and find, the courage to accept the Self as Hero (= lion), when we realize that we must stand, oh how very alone!, in the deserted corners of our mind to fight against the phantasmagorical onslaught of our inherited superstitions and beliefs and values. Finally, the ultimate leg of our transformative journey into freedom, which is to say into the possession of our own Thinking, comes about when we awaken to the Self as New-born (= child), when we have become The Ultimate Outsider, alone in a world packed full of constructed values, now able to “see” that, like a great symphony, the World is also a composition, which is only heard as, in, and through a perceptual and conceptual paradigm called Kosmos. As the Child, the Outsider to the Kosmos, we are finally now free to follow out of our own initiative, unconstrained and with awareness, the paths that the World opens up before us.

         

  In Nietzsche’s vision of the world, for the individual to become free, for him to enter into the possession of himself as a specific and creatively distinct Self, there must be a very deliberate Unlearning of those “culturally” encrusted values that have molded and framed us in our perceptions and conceptions. We must, each and every one individually and in the privacy of our own solitude, shake ourselves loose from society’s “one size fits all” cupcake mold.

            To be sure, Nietzsche’s Great Unlearning was directed principally at inherited moral belief, which is intellectually oppressive precisely because it is anti-here-and-now-human-life, and which grows up out of the religious mind like great unwieldy and bothersome weeds; but of course his greatest battle was pitched against the Dragon of the West, which has been too long protecting the deep-rooted weeds sprung up out of Judaeo-Christian death-promoting morality. So the Great Unlearning in the world of the West would be to become aware of the pervasiveness of the weed-growing root-system of Judaeo-Christian morality, then to fetch the weed-whacker of Reason and whack those weeds into individual and thus collective oblivion; and then to start all over again with constructing for ourselves life-affirming values and principles for action, which would flow out of an essentially pro- and fully- human space. So, Nietzsche writes in the Will to Power (Der Wille zur Macht, n. 30; 1888)

The time is coming when we must pay the bill for having been Christian for 2000 years: we have squandered the Center of Gravity [das Schwergewicht] that allows us to live, and for a while we will not know whence we have come or wither we are going. With precisely that same abundance of energy that has generated among men such extreme over-estimations of mankind, we continue unexpectedly to collide with contradictory estimations.

           

When we are birthed into this place, we are not simply popped out neutrally into the big-wide world, and voilà presto, we begin growing as pure, self-defining plants. Rather, we are seeded into a cultural context that, quite independently from our bodies and brains, actually serves, unbidden and automatically, to provide for each one of us a necessary and invisible cultural “shape,” an exoskeleton for our personal I/Self. The question, Who am I?,  does not reference something physical, nor does it point to some brain function. Rather, this “who” is constructed like a puzzle: carefully, unconsciously at first, and piece by piece, out of all the various and sundry cultural influences that surround us. This is one reason why education is so important, and why the study of feral children so fascinating. The one teaches us about journeys whither—toward visions of what we can become if we choose to go on the various journeys the world has on offer; the other shows us a possible journey whence—from what we were and will likely remain, in maybe a more measured, perhaps softer form, if, by choice or laziness, we disregard the Life-world of journeys through the wasteland of Thinking.

The philosophical quest prophesied by Nietzsche now stands before us to accomplish—to transvalue, to deliberately invert our inherited values. What is it that we most value? Justice? Equality? Goodness? Power? Peace? Money? Life? Why is it that we value these ideas, and are these ideas fundamental to the Human Animal in his full glory as both wholly human and profoundly animal?

           

Aside from the obvious importance of the individual journey on this road to personal psyche, there is also the collective journey. In a darker period of modern Western history, Martin Heidegger spoke in his Kanzeler’s Address of the “geistig-volklichen Daseins” of the German people—of the unfolding of the Unenlightenment destiny of the German Volk and its historical blooming into world history as a German moment of self-realization in being-itself. The results of that awakening into Unenlightenment brought the world to its knees, and between 70-85 million individuals, world-wide, into their graves.

For America and the American people, however, because of their historical commitment to Enlightenment philosophical principles, there remain possibilities for a different historical destiny. That said, on the American journey to ‘We the People’, we are now arrived at a philosophical fork in the road. In one direction the road will lead us into a socio-religious life, with its autocratic and unenlightened tendencies, which is even now unfolding before us with its gaping maw yawning like the doors of the thought-prison it is; but it is the predictable because long familiar road. In another direction there is the secular life- the new, the unthought-of, the untested, the unbounded, the free. What is left for us, individuals of interest, to do as We the People approach, by fits and by starts, this fork in the road? That is entirely the question. And the opportunity.

To the Magical Man: it is left to you to drop to your knees to appeal to the Outrageous Deity of the “steep heavens,” and thereby to enter into the Great Silence of the impotent skies. For you others, the Thoughtful Ones, put on your thinking caps, become involved in the life of We the People—for there is much work, much thinking to be done.

Thinking philosophically is a dangerous and lonely game—and certainly not an attractive or comforting enterprise for the normal clan-animal. Especially when the quest that Nietzsche has put before us is nothing less than to see the world of men with new eyes, to reconsider, and to recast the exposed and crumbling intellectual foundations of the moral self in a world becoming new. That bill has now come due.

(Original essay reprised and reworked from Phrontisterion, July 2013)

Further reading on Nietzsche’s Great Unlearning on Phrontisterion:

·      https://nonimprimatur.blogspot.com/2019/09/great-unlearning-i-elvis-has-left.html

·      https://nonimprimatur.blogspot.com/2013/09/one-nation-under-god-pseudo-romance.html

·      https://nonimprimatur.blogspot.com/2014/12/december-januarys-essaysupermen.html

On Masks.

 

We are often told, or perhaps we just overhear it in other’s conversations, that we should just try to be ourselves, that this is what is really important in Life. But what precisely is this Self that is me, which everyone says we should be?

Private Man and Public Man. It is an obvious entry into our reflection to consider that, generally speaking, there are two MEs wandering around the world. (Good Grief! As if ONE of me weren’t enough…). Anyway… to the great dismay of many, there are actually two meandering MEs. There is the Me that fusses around the house fixing reluctantly flushing toilets, and using rather colorful language to encourage the reluctance away; the Me that sings silly, not to say completely inane ditties to the dog and the wife (albeit not necessarily always in that order); the Me that wanders around the house, bewhiskered and hair hirsute, clad in warm flannel-y house pants with black & white polar bears on them … thinking about some book in hand or muttering about things I’ve forgotten to do. This is the Me at home, the Me that is not for public consumption, the Private Man.

Then there is the Me that stands in front of the classroom correctly shoed (for the most part anyway) and trousered (the polar-bear pants become a wishful and wistful Distant Thought…); the shaved version of Me that has generally managed to put some orderliness to hair; that uses more formal language to convey more formal concepts to rapt audiences of youthful disciples of philosophy (this may actually be the Me-in-a-dream variation of Me); the Me that saves the silly ditties for the more appropriate private and therefore captive audience. This is the Civic Me, the Me for public consumption, the Public Man.

So, at the very least, there is one same individuum, but two masks, two personae.

Self (le soi/moi, das Selbst). Amidst this growing collection of apparent Selves, I am mindful that I have somewhere asked the (for me) rhetorical question: “what is man if not himself a nexus drifting toward forgetfulness, if not himself an elusive apparition in the time continuum… a junction of converging lifecurrents?” So for the sheer playfulness of it, let us pretend for a moment that, behind the Masks, both Public and Private, I am/have no fixed Self, no immutable and stable ‘thing’ that is just simply Me, no real ‘thing’ or ‘essence’ that corresponds to the idea of Who, when I am asked to respond to the question, ‘Who do you think you are?”

In reality, this question is rather tricky to answer. It would not be accurate to say that I am trying to find my ‘center’, as we used to say in the days of Nietzsche-inspired hippy-ism—the (conceptual) center does not hold here for Self; so it is neither truly, nor even metaphorically, possible for me to get ‘centered’. Nor is it truthful for me to say that I am the Sum of my days (the clear end-times of my own personal History), but rather, that each fleeting day is making its own particular little contribution to each of my preceding days. For there does not seem to be any fixed or permanent underpinning to Me that collects and stockpiles all my days together in one place, but rather just a flowing transience that is the Me-locus (location, geography) where events happen, for a very brief while, in terms of this Me. And while it is undeniably true that there is this Body-locus, which right now lives and teaches philosophy in this place, it is equally accurate to affirm that I am more than the simple material presence of my body parts in this time and in this space.

There is also another element of Me, which lives within the apertures of my body—a rather mysterious and complex Mental Persona, yet a third mask, a psychological vitality called Mind. This Mind-Me is the interpreter of the world that is rushing into Body-Me, non-stop, through the data-collecting tools that are my Skin, Eyes, Ears, Nose, and Mouth; it is the Mind-Me that endlessly organizes the information collected by my body, that shows Me ways of making sense of my passage through space and time and the continuum of the World of Men, and that translates and thus transforms inchoate and muddled information into choate meaning.

It is certainly true, for the most part, to say that an infant begins its life as a rather passive ‘knowledge-gathering animal’, accepting all the randomness of information that comes its way. This is the way education happens for the very young and the young. However, as the child grows in knowledge and understanding, discernment and judgment follow on the heels of information; and the child learns to separate out (aus-legen for readers of German hermeneutics) among the pieces of the world and among the shards of interpretation that have been fed to him – the child begins to grow into an awareness of the shifting and transient ‘edges’ of a self/not-self sort, it begins to lay out and knit together the first interlaces in its own personal weave. This marks the beginnings of the child’s move toward autonomy, independence, and personal freedom—toward it-self. In the process of child-becoming-adult, educators normally expect a certain degree of “seeing” to begin taking place – of a partial but ever-increasing understanding about where an individual’s personal weave can fit into the greater tapestry of the entire world that is given to us. ‘You “see”, don’t you?’ is really a loaded question; and Nietzsche was right to see in us, in the creation of Self, the work of an artist. So in its most fulfilled and authentic form (existentially speaking), a human life is the creation of Self as Life-Art.

Nouns and Verbs. Reflecting upon a murky idea found in the Greek philosopher Heraclitus, one of Nietzsche’s later contributions to the Great Conversation of Ideas is that individuals should continually strive, each and every day, to think themselves into creation. Now while it is accurate to say that we derive the initial contours of our-Self from the particular cultural soup into which we are plunged at birth, and which gives us the rudiments of language, relationships, and values, that soup does not determine finally who we ‘are’ nor who we ‘can be’ through our becoming. Who we can be in the world flows out of continual acts of our own willing and doing; and the Self we create is both measured by and limited by, the strength of our desire to sculpt our-Selves into an Image that we dream or envision. This is the psychological import of Nietzsche’s Will to Power – and this Willing lies at the heart of our own personal Affirmation of our-Self. So it is more helpful as well as more accurate philosophically speaking, to understand our-Self not as Noun-idea, as some substantive, fixed ‘thing’ that is some-Thing in and of it-self, but rather as Verb-process, as active and doing—as striving and struggling to be truly Quick (a verbal idea, as in ‘the quick and the dead’) in all the minutes of our days, paying attention to create our-Selves dynamically beautiful during each of the days that attend us.

It is also Nietzsche’s contention that in the individual’s creation of its personal weave pattern, there is no room to incorporate materially into our design the various tag-along creatures left-over from our western mythological heritage, such as the Soul or the Un- or Sub-conscious, not because philosophers think to disprove their existence (some do, others do not), but rather because such creatures, and whether or not they truly exist, are finally irrelevant to the living-out of our days. Obviously, we may believe all the things we wish about things mythological; but all our beliefs do not change either the uncompromising reality concerning the fleeting seconds of our life, the sheer insubstantiality of each of the days through which we journey, or the absolute incumbency that rests with each individual to do the job of creating himself by himself. The reality surrounding our ‘situation’ is quite down-to-earth: if I do not create my-Self, then a self at the heart of this fleeting shape of Me will not be quickened into existence; and this version of Me will never experience the flight of creation into the beauty of Life-Art. At the end of such a body-life, because the labor of weaving a personal and therefore substantial and quickening history into a work of art has been neglected, there will be nothing more significant than a dead body in the casket; and the Greater Art-history of Men will be the poorer for it. More is the pity.

Hide and Seek. Finally, in addition to de- and con-fining purposes, masks are also for hiding. In the study of ancient philosophy, for instance, Socrates is the de facto mask behind which Plato hides himself. This has created untold confusion in Plato studies, because Socrates is the protagonist that Plato puts on stage; and yet it is only with the greatest difficulty that philosophers make their arguments trying to separate Socrates the philosopher, and his individual thought, from Plato the philosopher and his individual thought—or is Plato’s Socrates really just the vocal platform for Plato’s own ideas? Quite messy stuff all in all; but it makes all the more pertinent the high questions of philosophy: What is real about the world? And how do I fit into that picture?