Psychoanalyzing Nietzsche
Nietzsche seems to have a life-long obsession with Christianity, which he blames for the subversion of all noble values, and the corruption of the Western civilization. Underneath the facade of “noble” contempt for Christianity, however, I suspect Nietzsche is really blaming it for his own unhappiness. He sounds as if he would be happier with any other belief system, Darwinism, Buddhism, Hinduism, Epicureanism, Paganism, anything but Christianity, and yet it was Christianity he was constantly engaged with. If Christianity was really as ignoble and wretched as he would have his readers believe, why didn’t he cast it aside as dung, and spend more time writing about what constitutes true value? His power doesn’t extend to building value system from the ground up, without borrowing from existing value systems. As a self-proclaimed psychologist, Nietzsche couldn’t heal himself: he spent his life trying to deconstruct the cause of his own misery, but couldn’t find any cure to deliver himself, let alone the world, from it. For that, I pity him.
The Antichrist is a comprehensive criticism of Christianity, in that all the criticisms I’ve read so far can be found here, historical, psychological and sociological. For example, Paul perverted the Gospel, Christianity destroyed the classical world, the Judeo-Christian religion was invented by the priestly class to control the masses, etc, etc. Nietzsche provides no evidence whatsoever to support his various assertions — and there are many, nor does he give any reasons as to why his interpretations of historical events and texts are more worthy of acceptance than the alternatives. One gets the impression that he is not really interested in the “truth” as he claims–come to think of it, I’m not even sure what he means by “truth”. So it’s probably an exercise in futility to attempt to engage Nietzsche and his fans in a rational discourse. Nevertheless, I recognize the value of the work of a fellow human being, which is worthy of a thoughtful response. In the limited scope of this blogpost, I’ll focus on one subject: power, as it is most relevant today.
What is Power
I suspect Nietzsche keeps writing about the “will to power” because he feels impotent himself, as one who is starved can think of nothing but food. He blames Christianity for depriving man of power, as, according to its doctrine, pride in one’s own power is a sin.
For argument’s sake, let’s define power as the ability to cause an effect. By definition, he who has the ability to create things has more power than he who doesn’t, and he who has the ability to strengthen and heal has more power than he who doesn’t. The Christian idea of power is that the weak and the sick in society shall not be cast aside, but the weak shall be strengthened, and the sick healed. Those who bear with the weak are more powerful than those who despise the weak, because the former have the power to sustain both themselves and other people, whereas the latter only have power to preserve themselves. In other words, those who “sacrifice the weak” are actually weak themselves. When people abuse others in order to get what they want, they may appear powerful, but are in fact weak, because they are reliant upon others for their own need. When their need is not satisfied, their impotence is manifested in rage and violence.
If absolute power is having the source of power in oneself, independent of anything external to oneself, then it should be obvious to anyone with a modicum of self-knowledge that he doesn’t have absolute power, as even his very existence doesn’t depend on himself. Christianity acknowledges this fact, as well as many other belief systems, including Epicureanism. Epicureanism attributes power to movement of atoms and chance, whereas Christianity attributes the source of man’s power to God, his Creator. Pride in one’s own power, without acknowledging the source of that power, is unjust, as it fails to give credit where credit is due. Pride goes before a fall, because pride blinds a person and separates him from the source of his power.