The first treatise in On the Genealogy of Morals is how the categories of good and evil evolved out of the categories of good and bad. The second treatise is about how guilt evolved out practices surrounding debts and punishment. The final treatise is about the meaning or value of human life.
The third treatise is even more sprawling than the others. It is about something that Nietzsche calls the ascetic ideal. He finds the ascetic ideal in almost everything: from Wagner’s operas to modern science.
We are going to be most interested in how the ascetic ideal is related to morality. But I think some remarks about science are in order as well. And we are going to have to start with the part of the second treatise that we did not get to last time, namely, the part concerning guilt.
The first section sets out the question: “What do ascetic ideals mean?” Nietzsche follows this with several examples; I found it hard to understand how he was using them. Then the paragraph ends with a cryptic answer: “That the ascetic ideal has meant so much to man, however, is an expression of the basic fact of the human will, … it needs a goal, – and it would rather will nothingness than not will.” Did you follow that? Nietzsche knows you would not; that is how the story ends and he is not going to spoil his story.
I, however, have no compunctions about spoiling the story. I suggest you read section 1 and then immediately flip to section 28, the last section in the third treatise. The power of the ascetic ideal is derived from the fact that without it human life has no meaning or no goal. Nietzsche thinks that our knowledge of this fact is painful to us and that we turn to the ascetic ideal in order to give meaning to our lives. We do so, he maintains, even though it causes us to suffer even more. We want two things. We want our lives to have a goal. And we want there to be an explanation for our suffering. The ascetic ideal provides both even though it makes us suffer even more than we would have without it.
So what is the ascetic ideal? Maudmarie Clark, in the introduction to our edition, writes that there are actually a variety of ascetic ideals. What unites them, according to her, is that they are all “variations on the ascetic ideal, the priestly ideal according to which the life of self-denial, the monkish life, is the highest human life” (Clark 1998, xxxi).
One feature of the ascetic ideal is the thought that this world is not the important one. “This world” has two features that seem to be especially relevant. First, we know about it by using our senses. Second, it is the world we occupy until we die.
The idea of an afterlife, or, at least, a life in the “intelligible realm” is obviously important for ethics. We started with the proposition that belief in such a thing was a necessary spur to moral action. In addition, we spent a fair amount of time puzzling over Kant’s quite different ideas about how ethics depends on the existence of a something other than this world.
The bit about knowing the world through the senses, though, might strike you as off topic. Nietzsche, however, believes that it is implicated in the ascetic ideal. Another manifestation of this ideal is the belief that the world that we perceive through the senses is not the real world; the senses, as Descartes, Hume, Kant, and others argued, cannot tell us how things really are. If all we have to go by are the senses, a kind of skepticism about our knowledge of the external world seems to be inevitable since there can always be a gap between the way things seem to be an the way they really are. Nietzsche’s own reaction to this is called “perspectivism;” roughly, there is nothing other than our various perspectives on the world and so no gap between how things seem to us and how they really are. The ascetic ideal, by contrast, holds that there is such a gap and maintains that reality is beyond our grasp. The quest for objective knowledge, independent of any particular perspective, drives the sciences and that is why, Nietzsche believes, the sciences are manifestations of the ascetic ideal too.
Anyway, it would be madness to try to ingest all of this. It is too sprawling and eccentric. I recommend that you focus on the following sections and skim the rest.
First, the question and the answer: sections 1 and 28.
Second, sections 11-21. Pay special attention to sections 14, 15, 18, and 20.
Third, sections 23-25, 27-28.
You are going to want to pay special attention to what Nietzsche has to say about guilt. In a nutshell, guilt offers an explanation for suffering. Why do I suffer? Because I deserve it. Obviously, the explanation usually makes people feel worse.
Guilt is one of the distinctive features of morality. But it is not clear to me that this point is directed at morality as opposed to monotheistic religion. As I read him, Nietzsche’s point goes something like this. “Suppose you believe that there is an all powerful God who is provident, meaning he cares about you. Yet you suffer. Why would such a God let you suffer, given that he is both caring and all powerful? The only answer is that you deserve it.” (Just to be clear: that’s Nietzsche, as I understand him, not me.)
I don’t know that the thought that I deserve all of my suffering would be an inevitable consequence of a morality centered on guilt without those beliefs about God. That is why I am not sure that this is best seen as an attack on morality as opposed to a particular set of theological beliefs.