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F. Nietzsche's criticism of the Christian religion and morality

Nietzsche's relationship with religion is complex and ambiguous. He was born into a pastor's family and read prayers with rapture as a child. But later the attitude towards Christianity changed dramatically. At the same time, it cannot be said that Nietzsche rejects any religion and becomes an atheist. He treats some types of Eastern religion with great sympathy (and here he follows in the footsteps of his teacher). According to Nietzsche, a person needs a god in two cases: the weak need him in order to ask him for something and complain about something, the strong need him to share the joy of his own victories with him. Christianity is the religion of the weak, the downtrodden, the slaves. At first glance, it is not clear what caused such a rejection of the principle of compassion. In any society there are strong and weak, and the compassion of the strong to the weak is normal. But Nietzsche believes that Christianity is contrary to the basic law of nature - the law of the struggle for existence, according to which everything weak must perish, moreover, it must be helped to perish. Hence the extremely unattractive thesis: "push the falling one."
Nietzsche deeply explores the essence of Christianity and draws a disappointing conclusion: Christianity is interested in weak people, pride is a mortal sin in Christianity. If a person will rely only on himself, will be strong and independent, then he does not need the Christian God and this religion will die by itself. Society is interested in weak people, thanks to them the Christian religion exists, thanks to them strong people, helping the weak and compassionate to them, can feel their nobility and strength. Hence the peculiar advice to the poor: “Never thank the one who gave you alms; let them thank you for taking it.” Only at first glance, such advice seems paradoxical, but with a deeper analysis, Nietzsche's position becomes clear - thanks to the beggars, the one who gives alms can rise in his own eyes - so let him thank the beggar for this.
Separate statements, taken out of context, may suggest that Nietzsche's entire philosophy is anti-human, directed against man. In this regard, it is worth listening to the arguments of the Russian philosopher Lev Shestov, an adherent of Nietzsche's philosophy. In his article “Good in the teachings of gr. Tolstoy and F. Nietzsche” L. Shestov cites the words of L. Tolstoy, recorded in his diary after he visited the hospital for the poor. Tolstoy writes that after the visit, there were tears of emotion in his eyes, emotion of his own act. This begs the question: whose position is more humane - a person who is touched by his own act (even if it is noble and compassionate towards the poor and sick), or a person who advocates that each person finds the strength in himself to get out of the state into which did he hit, became strong and independent? It becomes clear why the giver of alms should thank the beggar, and not vice versa.

Introduction

Everyone knows with what unheard-of sharpness Nietzsche rejected Christianity. For example: "Whoever shows today even the slightest hesitation in his attitude towards Christianity, I will not extend even a little finger to him. Only one position is possible here: an unconditional "No" (XVI, 408) / 1 /.

Nietzsche never tires of exposing Christianity, moving from indignation to contempt, from calm research to caustic pamphlet. With amazing delicacy, he changes points of view, considering Christian realities from all sides and stripping them naked. He assimilated the motives of all his predecessors in this struggle and laid the foundation for a new war against Christianity - a war unprecedentedly radical and completely conscious.

Knowing about this fiery enmity, the attentive reader of Nietzsche will more than once be taken aback by some of his statements, which at first glance are in no way compatible with anti-Christianity. Nietzsche sometimes speaks of Christianity like this: "This is the best piece of ideal life that I really had a chance to know: I rushed after him almost from the cradle, and I think I never betrayed him in my heart" ("Letter to Gast" , 21.7.81). He can also speak approvingly of the impact of the Bible: "The unfailing reverence for the Bible, which persists in Europe, in general, to this day, is perhaps the best example of culture and refinement of morals, which Europe owes to Christianity ..." (U11, 249 ). Moreover, Nietzsche, a scion of priestly families from both parents, sees in the perfect Christian "the noblest of human types" he has encountered: "I consider it an honor to come from a family that took their Christianity seriously in every "(X1Y, 358).

In short, if we decide to go through all of Nietzsche's statements about Christian subjects separately, whether it is about a "clergyman" or about the "Church", we will come across such difficultly compatible assessments: it is true that negative assessments will be in such an overwhelming majority that it will simply be difficult to notice positive ones.

Church for Nietzsche - the mortal enemy of everything noble on earth. She defends slavish values, she seeks to trample on every greatness in man, she is the union of the sick, she is a treacherous counterfeiter. However, even here he cannot refuse her respect as a special kind of power: “Every Church is, first of all, an institution of power that provides the highest position for spiritually gifted people; she believes so much in the power of spirituality that she refuses all cruder means of violence, and For this reason alone, the Church is under all circumstances a nobler institution than the State" (U, 308). Thinking about the origins of power catholic church, Nietzsche comes to the conclusion that it draws its strength "in those still numerous, priestly natures" who voluntarily "make their lives full of difficulties, and thereby of deep meaning" (11, 76). Therefore, he does not approve of the struggle against the Church in all cases: “The struggle against the Church means, among other things, also the resistance of lower, self-satisfied, naive and superficial natures against the domination of deeper, more difficult and prudent, and therefore more evil and suspicious people tormented by incessant doubt about the value of being and their own value ... "(U, 286).

There are many more examples of such conflicting assessments and interpretations; something else is important; to understand Nietzsche as a whole, it is necessary to understand these contradictions of his, for they are not accidental. In search of a reasonable and correct interpretation of Nietzsche's ambivalent attitude towards Christianity, let's try to approach the problem from this angle.

Nietzsche himself regarded his origin from a house of Protestant priests and, consequently, his "natural" closeness to Christians as a fact of paramount importance, as something irreplaceable. However, this closeness itself takes on a completely different meaning for him since he realizes that most Christians are imperfect Christians. The discrepancy between the claim, requirement and reality from time immemorial has been the driving force of Christianity. True, it is not uncommon for a claim that demands the impossible, and reality that refuses to obey the demand, can peacefully coexist without touching. But where they, having met, do not give each other rest, something out of the ordinary can grow. Nietzsche remarks that "an impudent inner skepticism" grew up "in Germany among the children of Protestant pastors". Why? “There are too many philosophers and scientists in Germany who happened in childhood, after listening to a sermon, to turn their eyes to the preacher himself (!) - and as a result they no longer believe in God ... German philosophy is, in essence, nothing more than unbelief in homines religiosi ("men of religion"), in saints of the second rank, in all village and city pastors, including university theologians" (U111, 314).

Here the most characteristic feature of Nietzsche's passionate hatred is outlined: his enmity to Christianity as a reality is inseparable from its connections with Christianity as a requirement. And he himself considers this factual connection not as dust to be shaken off his feet, but as something very positive. He is well aware of what moral the impulse of christianity for the first time brought to life an unbounded will to truth; "that even we, today seeking knowledge, we - atheists and anti-metaphysicians - light our torches from that old fire kindled by a thousand-year-old faith" (U11, 275). That is why he calls "not just to get rid of everything Christian, but to overcome it through the super-Christian" (XV1, 390). This means that Nietzsche understands himself as follows: his thought grew out of Christianity under the influence of Christian impulses. His struggle against Christianity by no means means a desire to simply throw it into the dustbin, cancel it or return to pre-Christian times: on the contrary, Nietzsche wants to overtake it, overcome it, relying on the very forces that Christianity brought into the world - and only it.

Nietzsche knows for sure: "We are no longer Christians", but to this he immediately adds: "Today our very piety does not allow us to be Christians - it has become both stricter and more capricious" (X111, 318). When he opposes to any morality his "beyond good and evil", he wants to make something more out of morality than morality: "We want to become the heirs of morality, destroying it" (X11, 85). In our hands is "the high result achieved by the former humanity - the moral feeling" (X1.35). "Everything we do is just morality, only turned against its former form" (X111, 125).

It is Christian impulses, that is, moral truthfulness that has reached the highest degrees, that have at all times stirred up the Christian struggle against real, real Christianity, as it manifests itself here - in the power of the Church and in the actual being and behavior of people who call themselves Christians. This struggle within Christendom has not been without consequences - Nietzsche sees himself as just the last of these consequences. Centuries of Christian culture brought forth a new Christian breed people and gave rise, in his opinion, to an unprecedented opportunity, the realization of which he devotes himself: spiritual tension, which has never happened on earth: from now on, holding such a tightly drawn bow in your hands, you can hit the most distant targets ... We, good Europeans, bearers of a free, very free spirit - we have retained all the languor of the spirit, all the tension of the spiritual string! It is possible that we will also find an arrow - a task, and maybe even a goal - who knows? .. "(U11, 5).

To sum up: the main experience of Nietzsche's own life - opposition to Christianity for Christian reasons - becomes for him model of the world historical process. The age in which he lived marked for him - not the historical background of millennia - a certain turning point, fraught at the same time with the greatest danger and the greatest opportunity for the soul of man, for the truth of his assessments and values, for the very essence of human being. And Nietzsche consciously steps into the very center of this whirlpool of world history.

In order to measure the spiritual depth in which this revolution took place, we should put the question this way: in what way did it take place? in Nietzsche himself? We would like to see his original naive Christianity, and then follow step by step how the transformation took place, we would be interested in the details of Nietzsche's liberation struggle on the path of his development - from a Christian to an opponent of Christianity. But in fact, nothing like this ever happened: Nietzsche from the very beginning - and this is extremely important for the characterization of his thinking as a whole - perceived Christian impulses exactly in the form in which they continued to live in him until his death; that is, the unconditionality of higher morality and truth, he initially felt as something of his own, native, as an undoubted reality, but the Christian content of this morality and this truth, Christian givens and Christian authorities did not exist for him as something real even in childhood. So later he had nothing to free himself from: there were no youthful illusions that would have to be broken, there was no dust that would have to be shaken from his feet. We can reconstruct the thought process of the Nietzsche boy with the help of a few examples.

Christianity as a meaningful doctrine and dogma is alien to him from the very beginning; he recognizes in it only human truth in symbolic form: "The main teachings of Christianity express only the basic truths of the human heart" (1862). And these basic truths for the boy are the same as they will remain for the adult philosopher Nietzsche, for example: "To gain bliss through faith means that not knowledge, but only the heart can make us happy. God became a man - this means that a man should seek bliss in the infinite, but build his own heaven on earth. Already in his early youth, he writes down thoughts that anticipate his later criticism of Christianity. Here - against the world's sorrow, which the Christian worldview gives rise to: this is nothing but reconciliation with one's own impotence, a plausible pretext that excuses one's own weakness and indecision, a cowardly refusal to create one's own destiny. The boy is already writing about his suspicion: "Has not humanity been following the wrong path for two thousand years in pursuit of a mirage?" Or this: “We are still in for great upheavals when the masses begin to realize that all of Christianity stands on mere assumptions; that the existence of God, immortality, the authority of the Bible, inspiration has always been and will remain in question. I tried to refute all this: oh, before Why is it easy to destroy, but to build! .. "At first, the boy expresses only hypotheses - hesitantly, with doubt and hesitation; over the years, the character of statements will change radically: every passion begins with a daze, and only later turns into a will to fight. But the principled position is already evident in the child and will remain unchanged to the end.

If we compare Nietzsche with Kierkegaard in this respect, the difference is enormous. With Kierkegaard, the Christian faith always rests in the depths of his soul, somewhere at the very bottom; until the end of his days, he does not lose touch with it, precisely with its historical content: "because my father told me so." Nietzsche, on the contrary, the historical content of Christianity is initially alien. As a result, Kierkegaard was honored with an initiation - he penetrated into the very depths of Christian theology. And it never occurred to Nietzsche that this theology could have depths, and he simply did not care about his sublime and refined constructions.

All of the above allows us to outline the main direction the critical analysis we have undertaken. First, we will consider first of all how Nietzsche's struggle against Christianity is motivated Christian impulses and to what extent he himself is aware of it. Secondly, we have to make sure that Nietzsche's Christian impulses from the very beginning devoid of any Christian content, turning into naked driving energy. And from here we can see, thirdly, the way in which Nietzsche smashed one by one all the positions that he happened to occupy, and which led him to nihilism. Moreover, as soon as he himself realized where he was moving, he immediately declared the movement towards nihilism inevitable for the whole era; it is true that the crowd will only have to do it in the future, but he, Nietzsche, will henceforth perform it quite consciously and will follow this path to the end. However, not in order to remain a nihilist, no, but in order to discover absolutely new source resistance to nihilism, anti-nihilistic movement. And in the face of this new philosophy we will try to answer our last questions: has this philosophy retained anything in common with its Christian starting point? And does it really exist at all? And if so, what kind of reality is this?

However, before approaching these critical questions, it is necessary to understand Nietzsche's views on essence and history of Christianity. In presenting them, we will first leave out the contradictory statements and give a single, clear picture as it comes to the fore in Nietzsche's later writings. Only having seen it in all its sharpness, we can move deeper and try to consider the second plan - the deep interconnection of thoughts: from here the initial picture will seem superficial and rough - such Nietzsche himself could hardly consider absolute and final knowledge.

Nietzsche's view of world history

Now we have three circles of questions: the first is Nietzsche's awareness of the modern era as a crisis; the second is the doctrine of Christianity as the source of this crisis; and third, Nietzsche's view of world history as a whole and of the place of Christianity in this history.

1. The crisis of the modern era

Nietzsche was the first to draw a terrifying picture of the modern world, which everyone tirelessly repeats since then: the collapse of culture - education is replaced by empty knowledge; spiritual substantiality - by the universal hypocrisy of life "pretend"; boredom is drowned out by drugs of all kinds and thrills; every living spiritual sprout is suppressed by the noise and roar of the illusory spirit; everyone is talking, but no one is listening; everything decays in a stream of words; everything is blabbed and betrayed. None other than Nietzsche showed the desert, in which there are crazy races for profit; showed the meaning of the machine and the mechanization of labor; the meaning of the emerging phenomenon - the masses.

But all this for Nietzsche is a foreground, a ripple on the surface. Today, "when the whole earth trembles. When everything is bursting at the seams," the main events take place in the depths - in the depths, and what we observe is only the consequences; Inhabitant of a comfortable age of calm and self-satisfied bourgeoisness, Nietzsche writes with a shudder of genuine horror about what no one else notices: the main event is that "God is dead." "Here is the monstrous news that will reach the consciousness of Europeans only after a couple of centuries; but then - then it will seem to them for a long time that things have lost their reality" (X111, 316).

Nietzsche does not formulate a thought, he communicates a fact, makes a diagnosis of contemporary reality. He doesn't say, "There is no God," he doesn't say, "I don't believe in God." It is not limited to the psychological ascertaining of the growing unbelief. No, he observes being and discovers a striking fact, and all the individual features of the era are immediately explained as consequences of this main fact: everything groundless and unhealthy, ambiguous and slanderous, all hypocrisy and fussy haste, the need for oblivion and thought, characteristic of this era.

But Nietzsche does not stop at stating the fact. He wonders, "Why did God die?" He has several answers to this question, but only one is fully thought out and developed: the cause of the death of God is Christianity. It was Christianity that destroyed every truth by which man lived before him, and above all destroyed the tragic truth of the life of the pre-Socratic Greeks. In its place, Christianity put pure fictions: God, the moral world order, immortality, sin, mercy, redemption. So now, when the fictitiousness of the Christian world begins to be revealed - after all, after all, "the sense of truthfulness, so highly developed by Christianity itself, cannot but inspire aversion to the false and utterly false Christian worldview" (XY, 141) - now there is no place left for fixation Nothing: nihilism is the natural result of all our great values and ideals, think them through to their logical conclusion and you will find Nothing (XY, 138). into Nothing - as deep as it has never failed in its entire history.

Today, all this is barely visible. "The rise of nihilism," predicts Nietzsche, "will constitute the history of the next two centuries." Our whole European culture has long been moving with painful tension, with a trembling and grinding, growing from decade to decade, towards a catastrophe; he moves not calmly, but convulsively, in swift jerks, as if through force: “I wish it were over, if only I didn’t come to my senses, because it’s so scary to wake up and come to my senses” (ХУ, 137).

Nietzsche's answer to the question "Why did God die?" - indicating the cause of his death in Christianity - was supposed to give a completely new meaning to the whole history of Christianity. Two Christian millennia lying behind them are our evil destiny. How does this evil fate manifest itself in history?

2. The origin of Christianity and its change

Nietzsche's texts provide a coherent historical picture of the emergence, perversion and further development of Christianity (2). Jesus himself is wholly withdrawn from this history of Christianity. It stands apart from Nietzsche. The reality of Jesus has absolutely nothing to do with the history of Christianity.

a) Who is Jesus?

Nietzsche answers: a certain human type, which needs to be given a psychological characteristic.

Jesus brings into the world a new life practice, not a new knowledge, a change of life, not a new faith (USh, 259). He is guided by a "deep instinct", indicating "how one should live in order to feel 'in heaven', in order to feel 'eternal'" (USh, 259). "bliss" which Jesus lived, which he reached by his life practice, is the "psychological reality of salvation" (USh, 259).

This bliss lies in "feeling at home in a world that no reality can disturb - in the inner world"(USh, 253). Jesus speaks only of him: "life" or "light" - with these words he denotes the depth of the inner world; everything else - all reality, all nature, language itself - are valuable to him only as symbols, signs in comparison, in a parable" (USh, 257). Nietzsche's extremely short form is this: "Bliss is the only reality; everything else is signs to talk about it "(USh, 258). Everything that exists objectively is the world, things are nothing more than material for a parable." Yes, not a single word is understood literally, "but this not only does not interfere with such an anti-realist, but constitutes the main condition without which he cannot speak at all" (USh, 257). That is why there can be no teaching of Jesus, let alone some unequivocal and firm teaching: “This faith cannot be formulated in principle: it lives and resists any formula” (USh, 256).

But how is the fundamental attitude to this " true life", this "eternal life", which is not "promised" in prophecy, but "exists here and now"?

When the blessed one speaks word, any unambiguity is doomed to drown in symbolic images and parables. "The good news is that there are no more opposites" (USh, 256), that is, all differences end and disappear. In Nietzsche, Jesus speaks as if there is nothing else that we think, perceive and know as being, as being - due to the fact that it is different, opposed and thus determined.

BUT a business The blessed one is manifested in the fact that he passes by the world, or through the world, not allowing himself to be touched by it. What consequences should follow from such an attitude? Here is how Nietzsche puts it.

First, with the necessity of the following commandment: never resist anything! Say no to nothing, say yes to everything. This is the attitude Jesus calls love. His "life of love, no exceptions, no distance" (USh, 252) means that it is close to him anyway. He does not "distinguish between strangers and friends, between Jews and non-Jews" (USh, 258). This is indiscriminate love for every neighbor, for someone who happened to be nearby right now. Such love really "despises no one."

But this non-resistance to love is not limited to ignoring all differences. Christian not fighting- does not fight even when his own life threatened. "Such a faith does not get angry, does not condemn, does not defend itself, it does not "bring the sword." The Christian "does not resist the one who holds evil against him, either in word or in his heart" (USh, 258). He does not enter into a fight under no circumstances, and therefore “does not show up in courts and does not testify against anyone (“Do not swear!”)” (USh, 258).

But if all the distinguishing, active relation of man to the world is shaken in its foundations, if what he used to call reality turned out to be only a shaky symbolism that exists in order to speak with its help about true reality - about inner bliss, then the second consequence is inevitable. , of which Nietzsche says: "Such a symbolism par excellence stands outside every religion, every cult, every history, every book, every art." The "knowledge" and "wisdom" of Jesus consists precisely in the complete ignorance that such things even exist" (USh, 257). "He is not familiar with culture even by hearsay ... and therefore he does not even need to deny it ... The same applies to the state, to labor, to war - he never encountered them, and therefore had no reason to deny " world"... For it is absolutely impossible for him to deny anything..." (USh, 257). And since there are no longer any opposites, then there are no "concepts of guilt and retribution. Sin and, in general, any relationship between God and man that presupposes distance" (USh, 258).

And after the whole world reality has melted away like a mirage, it becomes - third consequence - void and death. "The Gospel completely lacks the concept of natural death: death is not a bridge, not a transition - it simply does not exist, for it belongs to another, unreal, ghostly world. Time, physical life with its crises, there is simply no "good news" for preachers..." (USh, 260).

By his death, Jesus confirmed the bliss of his life practice: "This "evangelizer" died as he lived: not for the sake of "redeeming people", but in order to show how to live." This is how he "behaves before the judges ... behaves on the cross. He does not resist, does not defend his rights ... He asks, suffers, he loves those who harm him - he is with them and in them." And this is the fundamental principle: "Don't defend yourself, don't get angry, don't lay responsibility on someone... don't resist even evil - love him..." (USh, 261).

Characterizing the life practice of Jesus in this way, Nietzsche thereby shows one of the fundamental possibilities of human existence in general. He poses questions like this: what kind of people, what type people are able to choose such a path? What kind of person was Jesus supposed to be? Nietzsche calls these questions questions about physiological conditions. And here's how he responds.

"Extreme susceptibility to suffering and irritation, as if shouting to everything in the world "Don't touch me!" hatred for reality. "Extreme susceptibility to suffering and irritation feels any resistance as completely unbearable displeasure; the only bliss (pleasure) for her is to resist nothing more, "and therefore she purely instinctively excludes all disgust, all enmity:" the only, last life opportunity remains for her love. "This boundless susceptibility to Nietzsche's suffering and irritation calls it "physiological reality" (USh, 253).

In this context, the famous characterization that Nietzsche gives to Jesus is quite natural: "Such a mixture of the sublime, the sick and the infantile has a soul-grabbing charm" (USh, 255). He laughs that Jesus is sometimes called a hero or a genius. "Any physiologist, strictly speaking, would use a completely different word here - the word" moron"..." (USh, 252). Nietzsche understands the word "idiot" in exactly the same sense in which Dostoevsky called his Prince Myshkin an "idiot" (3).

Everything that Nietzsche sees in Jesus is a kind of what he himself defines as decadence, with the one exception that this decadence is not false, not completely false; all the other features of decadence as a form of perishing life are here in all their expressiveness. They also include "an instinct that dooms them to actions that knowingly make them enemies in the person of all those in power - they themselves create their own executioners; the instinct of the will to nothingness" (ХУ, 185). This is what Jesus did and died on the cross.

A truly amazing portrait of Jesus paints us Nietzsche. And yet so visual, so convincing in its complete integrity. Only one question arises: does it correspond in any way to historical reality? Nietzsche answers this way.

The Gospels do not give us a definite and unambiguous picture. The face of the real Jesus has to be reconstructed through conjecture and critical analysis. From Nietzsche's point of view, the Gospels yawn "between a preacher wandering through mountains, meadows and lakes, whose charm resembles Buddha, although he is by no means Indian on soil, and in everything opposite to him, an aggressive fanatic, a mortal enemy of theologians and priests" ( USh, 255). The first for Nietzsche is the real Jesus, the second is an interpretation, a conjecture generated by the instincts of the Christian primordial community, absolutely alien to Jesus. Nietzsche is emphatically against confusing the traits of a "fanatic with the Savior type." And in general, he is very skeptical about the possibility of revealing in the Gospels a more or less reliable historical reality. "How can one," he writes, "generally call the "source" or "tradition" of the legend of the saints!" (USh, 251) (4).

However, the real features of the “psychological type could, according to Nietzsche, be preserved in the Gospels, in spite of the Gospels themselves, albeit in a mutilated form and interspersed with features that are absolutely alien.” The only question is, "Is it even possible to imagine this type on the basis of this 'tradition' (USh, 252)? Nietzsche answers this question in the affirmative and draws his portrait of Jesus.

A second question arises: is there, in principle, psychological opportunity occurrence of this type? Nietzsche has no doubts about this: "Christian practice is not a fantasy at all, just like the practice of Buddhism: it is a means to be happy" (XY, 260). But as a psychological possibility, this life practice is completely ahistorical, that is, it did not arise in any specific historical situation and therefore “is possible at any moment,” in any era, including today. "Such a life is still not only possible today, but even necessary for some people: genuine, original Christianity will be possible at all times" (USh, 265). That is why this type has been revived again and again throughout the Christian millennia, for example, in Francis of Assisi (VSH, 252) (but not at all in people like Pascal. Whose strength was broken by the ideals of perverted Christianity - XY, 238 ff.). And since this life practice is possible first of all in epochs of growing decadence, it suits our times as well as possible. "Our age in in a certain sense is ripe for it (I mean its decadence) and reminds of the time of the Buddha. And therefore, again, Christianity is possible without absurd dogmas" (XY, 318).

In conclusion, let us formulate once again - in the words of Nietzsche himself - what this Christian life practice of Jesus is expressed in: "Anyone who would say today:" I do not want to be a soldier "," police", "I do not want to do anything that can disturb my inner peace, and if I have to suffer because of this, suffering itself will save me my peace better than anything in the world" - that Christian "(XY, 299). And from a sociological point of view, Nietzsche spoke of this Christianity in the following way: "Christianity is possible as the most private of the forms of private life; it presupposes a narrow, isolated from the world, absolutely apolitical community - its place in the monastery" (XY, 298) (5

B) Perversion of Jesus Christianity

What is the relationship between Jesus and Christianity? Nietzsche declares: Christianity from the very beginning is a complete perversion of what was true for Jesus. "In essence, there was only one Christian, and he died on the cross." (VIII 265). Here is a case, a historical coincidence; It was Jesus who took advantage of completely different motives - the thirst for revenge and settling scores - they reinterpreted all his words and deeds, added something that was not there, completely alien and impossible for him, and thereby turned him into a means to achieve their goals. Therefore, the meaning of the words "Christian" and "anti-Christian" in Nietzsche changes.

Ernst Benz ends his work, which we quoted above, with an interesting remark. Throughout his exposition, he constantly indignant at the falsity of the liberal and positive theology of the XIX, and in the end he gives an assessment of the image of Jesus in Nietzsche. This theologian finds that Nietzsche's interpretation of Jesus is "a positive contribution to the realization of a new form of Christian life and Christian thought", and concludes: "The anti-Christian is ... a teacher of imitatio Christi (imitation of Christ), weakness and for the sake of comfort.The enemy of the Church turns out to be the prophet of a new possibility of Christianity, one that the Church herself chose to silence and hide for fear of its inexorable and inconvenient consequences.He is the herald of the coming ordo evangelicus (evangelical order), which will unite the new community of the faithful in a new imitation of Christ and will finally give sincerely believing Christians a true idea of the life of Jesus, knocking paper confessions and ink symbols out of their hands" (p. 313). These are truly amazing words for a theologian, all the more amazing if we remember Nietzsche's portrait of Jesus as a whole, as we only tried to convey it in the words of Nietzsche himself!

If Jesus is a Christian, then the original community, and even more so the entire later Church for Nietzsche, is an absolutely anti-Christian phenomenon. However, by the word "Christianity" he understands precisely this Christianity of the apostles and the Church. And Nietzsche himself will therefore be an anti-Christian in a third sense, different from the first two: an opponent of Jesus (however, with due respect for his truthfulness) and at the same time his opponent of the apostles and the Church (with all contempt for their untruthfulness); because both of them are for Nietzsche symptoms of a decline in life. Although he depicts Jesus in all the splendor of his radiant sincerity, he rejects him without the slightest hesitation.

According to Nietzsche, Jesus is not the ancestor and not the source of Christianity, but just one of the means that Christianity used for its own purposes along with others; this is why the truth of Jesus has been radically perverted in Christianity from the very beginning. The history of Christianity is not a process of gradual falling away from the original truth, which was imperceptibly lost; Christianity stands on completely different principles and was born from different sources. It distorted Jesus, who was absolutely alien to him in everything, at the first touch, at the first attempt to appropriate him for himself.

The idea of falling away is in itself a Christian thought; before Nietzsche, falling away was understood as a weakening, liquefaction, relief of true, original Christianity given in the New Testament, or a betrayal of it. Throughout the Christian centuries, attempts have not ceased to return from this state of falling away to the true New Testament through a revival, a restoration of the original faith. But for Nietzsche, the perversion of Christianity is by no means a falling away, manifesting itself only gradually as a result of historical changes; it is the essence of Christianity and is present in it from the very beginning. The Gospels themselves, the entire corpus of the New Testament, is already a perversion.

Nietzsche sees the meaning of this perversion in the following.

Jesus realized life practice and the New Testament is not about life, but about faith. But: "If being a Christian comes down for you to recognizing a certain truth, then you simply deny Christianity. That is why there were no Christians in reality" (VIII, 266) Christ, like Buddha, was different from other people actions, and Christians from the very beginning differed from others only in faith.

Faith has become teaching. What was a symbol of communicated bliss has become a tangible reality: "continuous facts and personalities instead of symbols, continuous history instead of eternal realities, continuous formulas, rites and dogmas instead of the practice of life" (XV, 260) ". The sacred legend has taken the place of the symbolic Now and Always, Here and Everywhere, a miracle - in place of a psychological symbol (XV, 287). From the Jesus truth, which disputes the reality of everything personal and historical, personal immortality, a personal Savior, a personal God are "fabricated" (XV, 286). But: " Nothing can be more alien to Christianity than all these crude church platitudes about God as a person, about the coming "Kingdom of God", about the otherworldly "Kingdom of Heaven", about the "Son of God" - the second Person of the Trinity ... All this is world-wide -historical cynicism, brazenly mocking the symbol ... "(VIII, 260). First of all, in the place of the real Jesus, they substituted a fictional image of Jesus: a fighter and fanatic attacking priests and theologians; then, in the interpretation of Paul, appeared the image of the Savior, in which, in fact, only death and resurrection were important.

As Nietzsche notes one after the other all the manifestations of the "Great Perversion", he grows astonished at the picture that opens up to him, "Humanity kneels before the direct opposite of that which constituted the source, meaning and right of the Gospel; in the concept of "Church" it sanctifies exactly that from which the blessed “Annunciator” rushed to escape and what he considered finally overcome - one can hardly find a more striking example of a world-historical lie ... "(VIII, 262).

C) The origins of Christian perversion

Christianity began with perversion, perversion forms its foundation, but this perversion itself must also have its origins. These sources are by no means in the peace-loving refusal of Jesus from any struggle, not in his life practice, the fruit of which was bliss here and now in quiet non-resistance; not in his detachment from the world and from death. The roots of Christianity are in a completely different stereotype of the human worldview, which, precisely in that historical constellation, was able to acquire hitherto unseen power: this ressentiment losers and nonentities, the malice of all the oppressed and humiliated, the envy of all the gray and mediocre. Here Nietzsche is credited with a psychological discovery, namely: the ressentiment of weakness, which springs from the will to power, strength and power nestled in weakness, impotence and humiliation itself, is capable of becoming creative force generating new values, ideals and concepts. In the pathos of the moralist, Nietzsche sees a hidden meanness seeking revenge; in the fanaticism of justice - a secret thirst for revenge; in ideal values - an underlying struggle against everything really high. The totality of all these motives is capable of producing a special refined spirituality, which takes on ever new sublimated forms. With the help of this psychology, Nietzsche tries to comprehend the origins and paths of development of Christianity. Christianity strives to take advantage of any truth it comes across, including the truth of the real Jesus; it appropriates it, reinterpreting and perverting it beyond recognition, and makes it work for itself - to bury alive everything that is high, powerful, noble in the world, everything that is healthy, strong, generous, flowering and life-affirming.

Already the original apostolic community was, according to Nietzsche, "the world, as if emerging from the pages of a Russian novel - a refuge for the dregs of society, nervous patients and infantile idiots" (VIII, 254) late antique world these people met kindred spirits everywhere. For in the depths of healthy paganism, anti-paganism has long been growing - ugly and sick religious forms, against which Epicurus fought back. And so Christianity "swallowed and assimilated" the teachings and rituals of all the underground cults of the Roman Empire, the senseless creations of all kinds of sick minds. "For" the fate of Christianity lies in the fact that its faith could not help but become as sick, base and vulgar as , base and vulgar were the needs that it had to satisfy" (VIII, 262).

The pagan world allowed this anti-paganism, this "pre-Christian Christianity", to flourish at the heights of its philosophy: Socrates and Plato for Nietzsche are the first heralds of this fatal phenomenon. This means that antiquity itself gave birth to Christianity, this is its own child. Christianity did not attack it from the outside, as something alien, and therefore any honest enemy of Christianity should be suspicious of antiquity itself: “We suffer too much from our errors and are too dependent on antiquity in them to treat it condescendingly, in any case, now, and probably for a very long time to come. Antiquity is to blame for the most monstrous of the crimes of mankind - for the fact that Christianity as we know it turned out to be possible. Together with Christianity, antiquity will be thrown into the dustbin "(X, 403 pp.).

Christianity has absorbed all the mysteries, all the search for salvation - sacrifice, asceticism, the theory of two worlds and the philosophy of world denial - all manifestations of a flawed and fading life. It defeated all its competitors except the cult of Mithra, absorbing their content and strengthening their motives. And he succeeded, Nietzsche believes, solely thanks to his specific historical roots, thanks to his origin directly from Judaism. In its last motives, as well as in their concentration, Christianity is a purely Jewish phenomenon.

The Jews are the most curious people in world history: only they, being confronted with the question "To be or not to be?", with absolute and terrifying consciousness chose being at any cost.

And the price of this was a radical perversion of all nature, of all reality ... "(VIII, 243). They perverted values by inventing moral values, inventing moral ideals, which - as long as they are believed in - turn their weakness into their power, and their insignificance - into value. It was here that "the instinct of ressentiment - malicious envy - reached the stage of genius and invented new world", from which any life-affirmation looks evil.

The denial of power, power and success in a world where life, joy and happiness triumph, forced the Jewish instinct to deny any reality in general, including the historical reality of their own past, heroic and militant. The Jewish priests slandered and distorted the history of Israel in the same way that Paul did the history of Jesus and his first disciples. The source of both is a deadly hatred of reality.

For the sake of self-affirmation in reality, the Jewish instinct used all the underground forces that could serve it. Jewish people, "a people endowed life force unheard of tenacity, "voluntarily took the side of all the decadent - decadent - instincts, being placed in unbearable conditions and guided by the deepest wisdom of self-preservation." At the same time, however, the Jews themselves are the complete opposite of any decadence: they only had to pretend to be decadents, sometimes creating a really convincing illusion "" For this type of people who seek power among Jews and Christians - people of a sacred warehouse - decadence is only a means " (VIII, 244).

Christianity - but not Jesus - is for Nietzsche nothing but Judaism taken to its logical limit. Speaking "in the form of Christianity - with the chosen people", with the reality of Jewry as such "(VIII, 240). Again and again Nietzsche returns to describing the various aspects of that long process and perversion that does not stop in history, which he calls denaturalization, or the denaturalization of values , fraud with values, in place of which fakes soaked through with morality are slipped in. In the history of mankind, only the Jews took part in this process from beginning to end, following all its branches, realizing the consequences of all its valuable installations. humanity, then fool him by feeding him with your lies that the modern Christian considers himself entitled not to accept Judaism and not to love the Jews, not realizing that he himself is just the last conclusion from Judaism "(VIII, 243). And all those who contributed to this process even before the emergence of Christianity: Plato, the Stoics and others, Nietzsche calls "infected with Jewish hypocrisy" (VIII, 289).

Immediately after the death of Jesus, nascent Christianity committed its first forgery by slandering the very reality of Jesus. The confused disciples after the crucifixion asked in bewilderment: "Who was it? What was it?" And the answer came, but prompted by his will to fight, Jesus was viewed from now on as a rebel who rose against the prevailing order in spite of the boundless non-resistance of the present Jesus. The ressentiment of the disciples did not forgive anyone for anything; everything was suppressed and swallowed up by the most unevangelical feeling in the world - the thirst for revenge. They needed a settling of accounts - a trial .... And then Paul appeared and gave an answer to the question: "How could God allow this?" "God gave his son as a sacrifice." From now on, the doctrine of resurrection and judgment, of personal immortality, has become a dogma - a thing absolutely alien to Jesus (VIII, 296 ff.)

D) further development of Christianity

The history of Christianity is marked for Nietzsche by the trapping of more and more souls through the perversion of values adopted by Christians from the very beginning. However, this entails hitherto unheard of mental complications. During periods of upsurge, people reach such a powerful spiritual tension that, in the end, even the strong and noble cannot but obey the ideals of Christianity, but in their souls the struggle against these ideals never stops. It ends, as a rule, with detente - the landing of the spirit that has soared into transcendental Christian heights. This is how pseudomorphoses of Christian ideals arise. Among all these pseudomorphoses, Nietzsche recognizes some merit only in Jesuitism. But nothing but contempt deserves, from his point of view, such pseudo-morphoses of Christian ideals as secular morality, liberal and socialist worldview - sort of help with which Christianity still directs every step of European humanity, despite all its supposedly disbelief.

We cannot convey all of Nietzsche's reflections on this huge segment Christian history; Let us give examples of only some of his considerations.

Here Nietzsche characterizes preaching technique and the spread of Christianity. The main principle of this technique is: "It doesn't matter if it's true, it matters if it works." "Lack of intellectual honesty" allows you to take advantage of any lie, if only it strengthens the "warmth" in the soul, if only people "believe". From this develops a whole methodology, a real school of seduction into faith: a fundamental contempt and humiliation of those spheres from which resistance could come (reason, philosophy and wisdom); shameless self-praise and exaltation of the doctrine with a constant reminder that it is given to us by God himself ... that nothing in it can be criticized, but everything must be taken on faith ... and it must be accepted not as it were, but in a state of deepest humility and gratitude ... Constant speculation on ressentiment - a play on the feelings and envy that the lower always feel in relation to the higher .... This sermon recruits all the stray and outcast ... turns the poor, little stupid heads, turning them into fanatics and forcing one to pout with arrogance because of the most absurd fantasy - as if they are the meaning and salt of the earth .... This teaching perfectly understood how great the power of the paradox is; with its help, it amazed, indignant, irritated and carried away to fight for the pursuit and defeat of enemies "... (XV-268).

The most unexpected thing is that Christian ideals in some incomprehensible way enslave the souls of the noble and strong and that is what Christianity is striving for. This is the main riddle of Christian history, which Nietzsche tries to solve with the help of psychology, but he does not succeed well. The Christian ideal "is in tune with the cowardice and vanity of weary souls, but even the strongest of people know moments of fatigue, and this is where the substitution takes place: what seems most necessary and desirable in such a state is trust, good-naturedness, patience, love for one's own kind, sublimity surrendering oneself to the will of God, liberation from one's own Self and self-denial, - is presented as something most necessary and desirable in itself" (XV-328). And Nietzsche concludes: "What do we hate in Christianity? - That it seeks to break the strong, to turn their courage into weakness, to use every bad moment when they are depressed and tired, in order to replace their proud confidence with restlessness and fruitless remorse; that it can poison their noble instincts and make healthy ones sick, turns their will to power inward - against themselves, so that even the strongest, in the end, drowns, swept by waves of self-destruction and self-torture: the most famous example of such a monstrous death is the death of Pascal "(XV, 329).

However, in such a struggle there is a colossal tension of the spirit, which Nietzsche considers a side effect of Christianity and welcomes as an opportunity for a new rise of humanity: without this spiritual tension, humanity, having overcome Christianity, would never have known what chances it has. Nietzsche considers himself one of those in whom the generated Christianity has reached the greatest strength. But whether humanity manages to take advantage of the opportunities that open up to it, whether the tension will work and whether it will be preserved - this is a great historical question, for the danger here is at least as great as the chance for good luck. For on the way up, a person is hindered, perhaps even more powerful than Christianity itself, by historical phenomena, the essence of which is in the spiritual detente, relieving all tension (VII, 5; XVI, 196, 394). Sometimes it seems that these relaxing phenomena are hated by Nietzsche even more than Christianity as such. It's already a complete disaster, worse than ever. In the foreground among these phenomena for Nietzsche, apart from Jesuitism, is the spirit of modern democracy and everything connected with it.

Liberalism, socialism, democracy, no matter what anti-Christian slogans they hide behind, are for Nietzsche a product of Christianity that has lost its tension and relaxed. It is in them that Christianity continues to live today; by a convenient lie of Christian origin in a secular guise, it retains itself and its influence. The current philosophy and morality, "humanism" and especially the ideals of equality are nothing but veiled Christian ideals. The fact that every insignificance, powerlessness, weakness should help, because they are weak; that every biological being, by virtue of its existence as such, has the right to claim what is available to a person of a certain rank; that any fool and dullard can and should learn that which befits only a gifted mind from birth, in whom living ideas are born; the fact that absolute primacy is recognized for the simple fact of human existence, and not for its content, and enthusiasm, genuine in a person and a strong-willed beginning in him, have lost their significance; that they pretend that everything is available to everyone, as if there is no harsh reality; that today they do not want to make decisions and take responsibility; that the spiritual and ideal is actually used as a means for the sake of self-preservation and the preservation of power in the virtually never-ceasing struggle for existence, which must be won at all costs, "at any cost" - so, for Nietzsche, all this - the fruits of the Great Perversion, late antique, Jewish, Christian. In all historical vicissitudes, these ideals retain the same well-known falsity, they still remain far from reality. When they finally wear out, decay and allow people to see through the holes through, then nihilism is born, which no longer believes in anything, does not consider anything to be true - or everything is indiscriminate, has no ground under its feet and in fact its own is a consequence of the Christianity of the "Great Perversion, and not the Christianity of Jesus.

One cannot enumerate all the phenomena in which Nietzsche exposes the pseudomorphoses of Christianity in the modern world. He speaks least hostilely, perhaps, of the "euthanasia of Christianity" in the bourgeois world.

Truly active people today do without Christianity at all, and thinking people of an average spiritual level use a corrected Christianity, which Nietzsche describes as follows: “God, who, out of His love, arranges everything in such a way that we, in the end, would be better. .. so that everything as a whole always turns out well and correctly, so that no one has reason to complain about life or is burdened by it ... in a word, not God, but the deification of resignation and modesty - this is better, what else is left of Christianity .... A kind of soft moralism .... Not so much "God, freedom and immortality" remained, but benevolence and decency, as well as the belief that benevolence and decency will reign in the whole universe one day "(IV, 88).

3. World history

Christianity for Nietzsche is just one of many phenomena in world history. He is not inclined to accept history as a whole as a kind of complete picture. However, trying to trace the possible path of becoming a higher human type, he still considers it as a whole. Then the whole history appears before him as a kind of transitional period, at the end of which a person must learn from a person more than a person. The present epoch is the epoch of nihilistic crisis; humanity must pass through nihilism, which contains the greatest danger, but also the greatest opportunity of our time.

In this historical whole, Christianity appears to Nietzsche as a once-accomplished fatal misfortune, as a result of which people lied and deteriorated. Only today are we living Christianity to the end, only today some of us see through it, together with the antiquity from which it grew. We are now experiencing a unique historical moment. The fact is that now we still have the fullness of knowledge about the past, which will be forgotten, as soon as it will be completely outlived. “Glancing over world history, we can see that the history of Christianity on earth is one of the most terrible parts of history .... And with Christianity, antiquity also burst into our present era; as soon as Christianity leaves, the understanding of antiquity will also leave. Now best time to learn and understand everything; on the one hand, not a single prejudice makes us take the side of Christianity anymore, and on the other hand, we are still able to understand it and in it - antiquity ... (X, 403). Here Nietzsche comes to the point that, in his trembling concern for the future, he even exalts our era - the era of the deepest fall of man: "We live at the middle point of human history: This is the greatest happiness" (XII, 209).

Further, at this turning point in world history, Christianity presents for Nietzsche the most important object of observation on which it is possible and necessary to study the general patterns and fundamental connections of human existence: to study the effect of impotence, when it, in its ressentiment, animated by the will to power, becomes the force of spiritual creativity; to study the sublimations of perversions and all kinds of spiritual tension, to study the possibilities of unconditional truthfulness, to study the priest as a special type of person; study the methods of mastering souls, the technique of proselytizing, etc.

In the study of all these possibilities of human nature, he is helped by comparison. Strength and impotence, decline in life - decadence - and rise, masters and slaves, priesthood and nihilism - this can be found everywhere. And so Nietzsche begins to compare analogous phenomena in Buddhism and Islam, in classical antiquity and in the legislation of Manu. And in each case, he discovers lies. This leads him to the idea of constructing a classification based on such a distinction: for the sake of what they lie in each given case and what this lie leads to subsequently. In this way, he hopes to find the criteria for obtaining healthy, constructive, creative lies from the destructive lies inherent in Christianity. Shuddering with disgust and horror, and making the reader shudder, Nietzsche shows how Christianity nullified everything that Greek antiquity managed to achieve; how Christianity crushed the great Greek empire; destroyed the conquest of Islam; how the European Renaissance - that great rebirth of the Real Man - ended in nothing because of Luther.

All these observations must serve Nietzsche's one and only purpose. Christianity has prepared such conditions in which, guided by Christianity's own educated motives, and only at one definite moment, namely, when Christianity itself will breathe its last breath, humanity can make its unique leap forward; of course, if it uses the conditions correctly and calculates the moment accurately. So, today, according to Nietzsche, the turning point of all time is approaching, when we have to not only alleviate the suffering of humanity writhing in the throes of nihilism. But for the first time to designate the possibility of achieving the highest goal of human existence. Having at our disposal an accurate picture of the course of things in past history, we can draw an equally accurate plan for the cultivation of a superior breed of people for the future. All periods of world history should, according to Nietzsche, be approached with one question: how did the data historical events or the conditions for the formation of a certain human type? What was until now a series of happy accidents and fortunate coincidences, as a result of which exceptions appeared - great people, should henceforth become the content of the purposeful management of history on the part of man. If we know what happens to a person under the influence of such a selection factor as Christianity, we can approach the answer to the question; What can possibly come out of a person? The world-historical meaning of events shows us the results of random selection and thus teaches us conscious selection. That is why Nietzsche proclaims our time "the moment of the highest self-consciousness" in the face of the total history of mankind. This self-consciousness will bring the nihilism that is now emerging to its logical and psychological conclusion: it must be fully realized, carried to the limit, so that a new, anti-nihilistic solution arises within itself. All types of faith and religion with their consequences, all modern ideals with philosophies must be discarded as life-threatening and based on their ruins a new, life-affirming, raising a person up, and not pulling him to death worldview. And, armed with this new worldview, he will take world history into his own hands and begin to plan it himself.

Nietzsche's thinking is actually determined

Christian impulses, although their content has been lost.

However, we have outlined Nietzsche's understanding of world history, modern history and the history of Christianity, perhaps too briefly. Of course, Nietzsche's principled position is clear, but sometimes the point is precisely in the details, and we have bypassed them, not to mention uncertainties, doubts and contradictions. What to do? The volume of this book will not allow us to go into all the details anyway. Where should we stop?

It is easy and pleasant to point out mistakes; it is also not difficult to enumerate the most important facts that Nietzsche simply overlooked. And those of his thoughts that could be assessed positively often turn out to be self-evident and almost commonplace. Nevertheless, we will try to highlight a few points that deserve a positive assessment.

Studying Nietzsche, we get to see real facts, to catch psychological and sociological causation; Thus, Nietzsche allows us to discern the individual threads of the most intricate tangle of consequences of ressentiment, capable of perverting all assessments and values.

Nietzsche again addresses to Christianity the old, to a large extent justified reproach, resounded from different sides, including from the 8th century from the Far East: Christians do not do what they teach, do not do themselves what is commanded by them holy books. Nietzsche formulates it this way: "A Buddhist acts differently than a non-Buddhist; a Christian acts like everyone else; Christianity with him is for ceremonies and creating a special mood" (XV, 282).

Nietzsche insists on consciousness, clarity of choice in the face of Christian demands, and above all the requirements of the Sermon on the Mount: do I personally want to follow them, or not? Evasive excuses he resolutely rejects. But at the same time, he makes us think about the meaning of the great, insoluble antinomies of Christian reality, inherent in it from the very beginning and manifested in the questions: how is faith and knowledge related? How does Christianity relate to culture? Where is the true and pure source of Christianity: in the church tradition that has grown through the centuries, in which only what was laid down in the seed was revealed, or only in the sacred books, or somewhere earlier, before these already distorted and obscured documents?

Christianity is a historical phenomenon, and therefore, not completed in time and ambiguous in its manifestations. Nietzsche tried to draw internal distinctions: here - Jesus himself, there - other, all-perverting sources, the legacy of late antiquity and Judaism; and finally, secular transformations of Christian values: socialism, liberalism and democracy. All these distinctions, insofar as they concern objectivable facts, have at best the value of hypotheses that are subject to verification. However, the impressive pictures often drawn by Nietzsche are not at all verifiable, because they do not concern the fakes themselves, but only their interpretation and evaluation. These historical paintings have a completely different - not cognitive - meaning and a different value. They express the essence of the one who saw them, his understanding of himself, his will and his values, which are revealed in contact with history.

However, all these moments of enlightenment with the truth and all these critical questions are not of primary interest to us. Nietzsche has all this, but not only him. Now something else is more important to us: what is the significance of the view of world history we have described for Nietzsche's philosophy as a whole? We affirm: these views are only the foreground, the surface; Nietzsche's thinking is much deeper. True, at first glance it seems that it is precisely this concept that constitutes the absolute content of Nietzsche's later, especially the last, works and acts as the final, indisputable result of his thought and knowledge, but to understand it in such a simplified way, as we have done so far in our presentation, was would not be fair. To understand a thinker is to understand his deepest motives. And those do not open at first sight; only the simplified unambiguous scheme that we have proposed so far can be understood without any difficulty.

Let's see if we can now go a little deeper, following the guiding thread of the same Nietzsche's statements. Of course, on this path, we will hardly be able to achieve clarity and consistency of exposition, but on the other hand, we will be able, firstly, to feel the full depth of the question that Nietzsche has opened up, and not just see anti-Christianity in it; Secondly, if we are lucky, we will be able to see the actual philosophical movement of Nietzsche's thought towards the truth - beyond rationalistic alternatives and arbitrary dialectical games.

We will take the first step towards such an understanding by returning to our original question; to what extent Nietzsche is conditioned in his thinking precisely Christian impulses? And here we find that the possibility itself see world history as a whole owes its origin to Christianity. But even more obvious is the Christian origin striving for unconditional truth from which the main attacks on Christianity flow. It is the moral certainty of such truthfulness that prompts the search for universal knowledge about the world, man, as well as about Christianity itself and its history.

However, as soon as we try to consider what is the essence of Nietzsche's Christianity - and that his concept of world history, his idea of man and his desire for unconditional truth, supporting the first two, of Christian origin, there is no doubt - we will see that there is no trace left in his thinking of the Christian content of these Christian formal structures. The loss of content is already evident in the manner in which Nietzsche assimilated his own Christian impulses as Nietzsche's own source. And the immediate consequence of such a loss is a turn to nihilism. For nihilism, it was precisely its form of Christianity that became.

However, these reflections are only a preliminary step towards understanding Nietzsche, and only after everything is clear to us here, we dare to jump into the unknown depths of the true Nietzsche.

1. The picture of world history as a whole

At the basis of all Nietzsche's historical ideas lies a certain mental scheme - the proposal that you can have, or even already have, some kind of total knowledge about the course of human history; as if we are thoroughly familiar with our own era and therefore we are able to know what is now timely and what is not; and as if we were even capable of fully grasping the future, planning it and seeing in it something desirable or undesirable. This mental scheme is far from something taken for granted or, even less, natural. Most of humanity got along very well without history: people lived outside it, entirely in the present, as if in eternity, as if everything had always been and will be exactly the same as today; they did not ask questions and did not doubt that they themselves belonged to the measured cycle of phenomena. Where could this new thought come from, so exciting a person, which, depending on the circumstances, could fill him with a feeling of unbearable impotence or, conversely, with a consciousness of supernatural power over the course of things?

This idea is of Christian origin. It was Christianity that strictly insisted that everything in the history of mankind takes place only once: creation, the fall, the incarnation of the Son of God, the end of the world, the Last Judgment. Christianity knows the course of world history as a whole, and therefore it perceives empirical history not as a chain of random events, not as an indifferent change, but as a link in another chain - supersensible, expedient history. Therefore, empirical history is imbued with deep meaning for him; and besides, at every moment of it, the fate of an individual person is decided in it - the salvation or death of his soul.

Christian historical thought has turned into a philosophy of history - a secular science of a specific subject - "universal" "total" history. From this Christian thought came Herder, Kant, Fichte, Hegel and Marx, and with them Nietzsche. The very nature of their thinking is determined by the vision of the historical whole as a single general picture; they all recognize the epoch of their time as a strictly defined point in the general course of history - and always precisely as a point of crisis, as a decisive turning point. All of them were inclined to choose somewhere in the past a certain peak, the source of everything beneficial in the development of mankind, and then hope for a possible return to it in their own present. The global model of the historical process is the same for all of them: at the beginning everything was fine, but then the correct, healthy course of things was suddenly disrupted, confused and perverted; evil has penetrated history - either a crime, or some kind of infection, a destructive poison that has begun to alienate a person from himself; and now, precisely in our era, it is necessary to correct all this, to restore and revive the true man and the true course of things. True, the content of these categories is different for different thinkers, but they themselves are constantly repeated in the same form.

For Nietzsche, this peak of human development is in pre-Socratic Greece, he sees it through the ages in the same golden halo in which the Christian discerns behind the texts of the Gospels the radiant fullness of times. Only by returning as far as possible to the Greeks of the tragic epoch can we reach our truth and our reality. A later era - the ancient classics - has already been undermined from the inside by the very poisons that will then be collected, infused and offered to humanity in the form of Christianity (XVII, 306) and will lead the world to the collapse that has been going on for two millennia and has reached its lowest point today, so that just now - that should begin reverse movement- up.

In itself, the universality and unquestionable absoluteness of this knowledge (despite the concrete change in its content) is of Christian origin; however, in the case of Nietzsche, the situation is not so simple: he seems to be absorbed in his global vision of history; and at the same time cannot be unaware of its relativity. In fact, what once was the metaphysical consciousness of being and, as such, was endowed with the deepest meaning, loses its authenticity, presenting itself in the form of knowledge. Nietzsche's new metaphysical consciousness, combined with his critical scientific nature, destroys both his own and any other integral worldview, for he knows that there is nothing integral, but only eternal becoming; the very question of meaning is already falling away from truth; the whole remains beyond meaning and meaninglessness; even the universe as a whole, as something unified, does not exist. World history from the point of view of Christianity is the single and only process of choice and decision that has a supernatural origin; from the point of view of the philosophy of history - single in all its diversity, the development process unified spirit, - Nietzsche loses both integrity and unity, turning into experienced workshop, a laboratory of human types: "History is a great experimental workshop" (XIII, 32). "Humanity not only does not progress, it does not even exist. The general picture of humanity is something of a monstrous experimental factory, where something succeeds ... and inexpressibly much fails" (XV, 204). And this means that the general view of history has completely changed. The Christian motives that once moved Nietzsche led him eventually to the abolition of the very idea of unity, which was replaced by Nothing, and with it the idea of eternal return.

When world history turns into an experimental workshop, the unity of universal development, of course, disappears from it, but the general necessary laws of the process remain; they are available to our knowledge through observation and comparison of unplanned experiments that have taken place so far. Armed with the knowledge that history is only a laboratory of experience, Nietzsche takes the second step and arrives at a completely non-Christian thought: he asks this time not about the nature of the whole, but about how to manage it. If for Christianity the general course of history was predetermined in advance and the question of saving his own soul remained unresolved for each individual, then for Nietzsche the direction of the general process is in question: in which direction it will go will depend on the will and activity of man. Hegel still refused to raise the question of the future; Marx called for hastening the onset of what was bound to happen anyway due to necessity, which, as it seemed to him, his science irrefutably testified to; but Nietzsche saw the most terrible danger in the future: man may perish, may again become a monkey, if at the last moment he does not manage to change the direction of history. However, such a radical turn is possible, if Nietzsche, only on condition that the whole is known within the framework of a new worldview, thanks to the conscious and systematic breeding of the higher man. In the place of God the Creator, who directs the course of history, there is a person - a creative person who takes history as a Whole into his own hands and plans its further movement.

Against the fundamental possibility universal knowledge and the possibility that comes from it. planning universal history, one cannot fail to cite the following critical objections:

World-historical universal knowledge is not possible, because we can know something in general, but we never know self whole. Every sketch of the whole is only a hypothesis; we try on various data about cognizable reality to it - this is how perspectives and lines of ordered interconnection of historical phenomena are obtained, if the data fit our hypothesis of the whole, and if they do not fit, then new questions arise that have no answers in the face of historical infinity. But the fixed universal knowledge will not only always be untrue, it will reduce the certainty of what is really known, sacrifice for the sake of false completeness, for the sake of the pleasure that imagination and reason experience from the consciousness of a false fullness of knowledge, in which they can finally calm down.

In the same way, any integral picture of an epoch is just a construction - of course, filled with meaning and to some extent explaining the essence of things - but it can never be knowledge about the essence and all the infinite reality of a certain time as a whole. Any knowledge about an epoch is limited by reality - by those of its facts that do not correspond to it.

Any knowledge of anything, including knowledge of the course of our history, in order to remain true, must not lose consciousness of some basic relationship of our entire being. The source of our being and our life is something embracing, which itself never becomes an object. When it seems to us that we have comprehended the historical process as a whole, having made it an object of knowledge, and now, finally, we have before our eyes that in which and by virtue of which we exist, it turns out that we have lost our being within this Comprehensive, in which and from which we live and in which alone the limitation and objectification of things can take place - their transformation into objects of knowledge. It is characteristic that Nietzsche, speaking of history, now and then gets bogged down and does not go beyond energetic statements, bold assessments and harsh statements, or gets entangled in psychological analogies, mostly of a negative nature. Every time it seems to him that he already knows what a person is, history, what "I myself" as a whole is, the ground leaves under his feet, he loses the Comprehensive, and with it - the source and essence.

So it is impossible to know about Christianity as a colossal historical phenomenon what it is in in general. Every knowledge fits its subject either outside- and then he does not notice the internal existential vital forces, limiting himself to superficial psychological statements, comparisons and rearrangements, or from within- how a believer and leader sees Christianity Christian life a person - and then knowledge, being in the Embracing, will always be directed only to certain aspects of the phenomenon. A false approach to history entails inevitable distortions: after one or two centuries, every historian undertakes to investigate the spiritual phenomenon of the past as an integral object accessible to knowledge, but in reality such a phenomenon remains itself only existing in the unity of knowledge and being; Thus, when people start discussing the essence of Christianity, they either reduce the whole matter, without noticing it themselves, to indefinite generalizations, or consider specific particulars that in themselves do not at all constitute essence.

2. activities that plan device of the world-historical the whole, is also impossible, because it assumes that this whole has already become an object of knowledge. Nietzsche really knows that such knowledge does not yet exist, but he considers it possible in principle. In any case, if humanity, having undertaken to consciously manage the totality of historical processes, does not want to destroy itself, it must first master knowledge that surpasses everything hitherto comprehended knowledge of the conditions for the development of culture, which will serve as a scientific basis for ecumenical (universal) purposes" II. 43). In the end, Nietzsche completely forgets that at the present moment such knowledge is in fact impossible. the impossibility of such knowledge, for everything that is known is always a limited, finished part, which is embraced by the never unknowable Whole. Every action has always entailed, in addition to those planned, and such consequences that no one thought about and which no one would wish. always remains an action within the Whole that encompasses it - a continuously ongoing historical process; it is never given to direct the course of the Whole, or influence it to a final action. In striving to achieve final goals within finite, and therefore closed wholes, I can have a certain and reliable knowledge, which will allow me with the help of known devices, having made known efforts and having done certain operations, d get what I want. As for the Whole, if I manage to form at least some idea of it at all, I will rely on illusory knowledge and, with the help of perverted scientific methods, perform on indefinite contents certain operations that I myself vaguely understand, which have nothing to do with reality, so that the results of my activities will be the opposite, or in any case, very far from what was intended.

There is also no correct world order, at least not at least somewhat stable and complete: everything “correct” is only a path in relation to the Whole, and it opens only to those who are already walking along it, and it opens as something like this. , which could not be called "correct" at first.

The striving to make the Whole the content of the will transforms the Comprehensive into the finite and makes that which, having become the goal, ceases to exist and loses its meaning.

What an amazing contrast between the seriousness of the question, when it is really directed at the historical Whole and the future in its entirety, and the frivolity of "total", universal knowledge, crumbling to dust in the face of any critical science; the ridiculous frivolity of planning and management, the influence of which on the course of things is determined by completely different forces, and by no means the "planner" himself.

Every time I strain to know the Whole and justify my actions by the course of world history, I step aside from what really could be done. Blinded by delusion, I deprive myself of the present, whether - in knowledge - for the future, but in cases lived and never realized. A person who wants to remain true to reality must do here and now what is right and true and not deduce his "Here and Now" because of something else - from his goal. True, all human life is a kind of means to realization plan and goals. But how far does the action of the planning will extend? It depends on the situation and on knowledge: how methodical and methodical knowledge is, how much our idea of the situation corresponds to reality, how true will be the direction of our will with its plans. Then both the situation and our knowledge will be rooted in the Comprehensive, which remains, or can remain, eternally present, for it moves all vital being and must lead every desire, doing, all plans and actions, if they are substantial in nature. And this means this: the essence is not in world history, which no one can comprehend, the essence is in the current - "here and now" - historicity; it is important for me what I really become, whom I meet, whom I love, in what specific task I find my vocation, how I imagine a person and his essence, what kind of human community surrounds me, what people and fatherland I belong to, and, finally, how in all this I feel being itself and how my relation to transcendence, to eternity becomes in reality, and how Nothing appears to me.

The existing man, the existing man, must enter with knowledge of the matter into the course of things, in which he becomes himself; of course, he is nothing in the face of transcendence, but an independent being in the face of world existence, who wants to reduce him to a mere means at all costs; including in the face of the future, for the future takes on a certain shape and is given only to that which has a real essence. the shaky ground of unreality.

True, a thinking person is not afraid of the abyss and bravely throws himself into it, but in no place can he find a bottom, no shore, no support - neither in the world of the future, nor in other distances: he finds ground under his feet only in his present, in the face of transcendence if he is able to live from his deepest core.

Of course, courage is also necessary for a person: the distances draw him, and he must fearlessly entrust himself to the boundless space of the possible; but here he himself decides his fate: will he lose himself here in the face of the Nothing, which will force him first to despair, and then to fanaticism, or will he find himself in the face of transcendence, which will allow him to stand and become free.

World-historical thinking, which, being absolutized, turns into total knowledge, like a fog has enveloped our reality. This fog covers vast areas of modern thought. You need to shake well to get rid of the oppressive cover. However, it is not difficult to imagine such a liberation, it is difficult to realize it.

Nietzsche, and with him modern man, no longer lives in connection with the One, which is God, but exists, as it were, in a state of free fall, connected only by the guiding thread of the Christian unity of human history; he falls towards the transcendent Unity that constitutes this world and the history of mankind, and only in the course of his fall is doomed, along with Nietzsche, to find out that this universal immanence does not exist at all as something single. Unity disintegrates, and chance becomes the last resort, chaos becomes the true reality, fanaticism the only support, just to grab at least something; the universal Whole appears as an experimental workshop, and a person, deceiving himself, begins to plan this Whole, but in the depths of his soul he cannot but be aware of the deception - and now Nihilism rises higher and more powerfully.

2 "There is some fundamental flaw in man"

These words of Nietzsche (XIV, 204) sound like a variation on the Christian thought of original sin.

Nietzsche suffers so much for man that he sometimes sinks into "the blackest melancholy." In contrast to the animals, each of which “hits the target exactly”, fully responding to the established type and obeying its own nature, man “is an animal not yet established” with indefinite possibilities, and therefore his very existence, in its unresolved nature, is a kind of disease of the earth.

However, it is precisely this fundamental shortcoming of a person that is at the same time his chance. He is not yet what he can be; he failed, he missed the target; but he can still become everything. Nietzsche does not at all want man to finally become a "established animal," that is, a definite type, for this would necessarily mean a herd type; quite the opposite: the real essence of man lies precisely in the fact that he is not established, that he can always go beyond himself.

As a result, Nietzsche comes to the absolute justification of man. He withdraws all his previous accusations: " A real man a hundred times more precious than any ideal person who exists only in wishes and dreams" (VIII, 139).

In Nietzsche's understanding of human existence, the basic scheme is preserved: a person is lost, but can be saved; however, the Christian content of this concept has been lost from the very beginning and replaced by another.

The fundamental difference is that in Nietzsche there is only one person, he is completely left to himself. He can rise, he can "go on", but without God. Nietzsche consciously does not want to give a person anything but himself, and rejoices at this: “Everything beautiful, everything sublime with which man has endowed real and imaginary things, I want to demand back and declare the property and creation of man” ((XV, 241).

But can a man, we ask, reach his goal if he wants only himself and his "progress"? Nietzsche also realized that nothing would come of this, and wrote out for himself the words of Goethe: “True respect can only be felt for someone who does not look for himself ... I must admit that in my whole life I have had to meet selfless characters of this kind only where I came across a firmly rooted religious life, with a confession established on immutable foundations, self-sufficient in the sense that it does not depend on time with its spirit and its science" (XIII, 304).

Probably, Nietzsche understood that this was true, but later he denied this reality. It is characteristic that all his reflections on human existence also stem from Christian motives, but from the very beginning he carefully takes care to clean out any Christian content from them; here it is the connection of man with the Divine. He tries to keep his thought in the iron framework of reality without illusions, he strives to think creatively, and yet he slides into a cold void "to be only a man and nothing more" and, suffering unbearably for a man who finds himself in a void, immediately jumps to the idea of a superman. But this indefinite superman cannot mean anything to a real, living man who must and wants to do what is necessary here and now, "fixing his eyes to perfection" in this activity lies his chance to reach his highest limit, and in it he finds peace. making sure of being as such. Not to look for ourselves, not to look for a person is the main condition for finding ourselves, for finding a person.

2. Science as an unlimited will to know

The will to truth and to knowledge in Nietzsche is also of Christian origin.

True, Nietzsche himself argues differently: religion, which, like Christianity, "does not come into contact with reality at any point, must be a mortal enemy of knowledge" (XIII,. 281). Christian "faith", as well as any other, has always vetoed science, especially vehemently taking up arms against "the two great opponents of superstition - philology and medicine." "holy books," and the doctor cannot but see the physiological degeneration of typical Christians. The doctor's diagnosis: "Incurable," the philologist's conclusion: Nonsense... (VIII, 282).

But in other cases, Nietzsche himself derives both his own will to truth and the unconditional character of modern science from the fire that first flared up in Christianity, from that special morality that requires truth at all costs (VII, 275).

Nietzsche wants truth - as a weapon against illusion and nonsense; he searches for truth, and nothing against the truth, in his studies of Christianity and the fatal consequences of Christianity for human existence. truth itself and, finally, having doubted truth as such, Nietzsche learns from his own experience that with modern science the situation is not so simple as it seems. The transformations that Nietzsche had to experience here are interesting not only in themselves, but as representation of what happened and is happening in the hidden depths our era. If this had been manifested with complete clarity, in reality there would have been a complete change in our consciousness of both being and truth. It is worth saying more about this.

Nietzsche, pointing to Christian morality How on source that unconditional will to truth, on which rests our science, thus gave an extremely brief answer to the question: where did our Western European science and modern scientific way of thinking come from (although it is always embodied in only very few people)? His answer is discouraging; we need to look closely at it and at the possible conclusions from it - thereby we will better understand Nietzsche's own attitude towards truth and science - surprisingly contradictory, and sometimes simply confusing.

Between Greek science and science modern West there is not just a difference, but downright bottomless abyss. The distinctive feature of the Christian world is that historically formed in it, and only in it alone, inclusiveness thirst for knowledge relentless perseverance in search of truth, which is embodied in our science. That such science with its versatility that does not recognize any boundaries, and with its inner unity arose only in the West and only on Christian soil, there is an indisputable fact. Only here can we observe - at least in individual people - that special spirit of scientificity, to which all consciousness and all activity are completely subordinated.

But also Greeks had all the prerequisites for such a science. For they are familiar with a clear development of methods, and their specific knowledge in the field of astronomy, medicine, geography, physics, zoology, botany, surpasses everything that the people of the then world knew, even if compared with the achievements of modern science, all this, with the exception, perhaps, mathematics, looks like pathetic babble. But the Greek does not know a fundamentally reliable method of empirical research, which would extend to everything that is knowable without exception; in rare cases, however, individual scientists resort to such methods, but they are considered not quite reliable, limited and do not have any effect on scientific development. When you begin to read the writings of Hippocrates, you find with irritation some kind of hodgepodge of genuine observations, more or less acceptable interpretations, philosophical theories and fantastic superstitions. The Greek does not know the infinitely moving forward universal science, in which everything is correlated and interconnected, everything works for the development of knowledge, in which all individual sciences represent only its functions; the Greek is only able to create systematic, ordered reviews that bring all known data into a single picture; he seeks not so much to move forward as to complete and stop.

Even moving a step forward in his studies, the Greek strives to give them the character of something ready. He does not know the passionate will to truth, which explodes everything in its path; he does not go beyond reflective doubts, as in the days of sophistry and Euripides, or, with a calm air, indulges in the study of some special objects as a kind of game, because it is interesting - such are Euclid, Archimedes, Thucydides. The closer you become acquainted with the spirit of Greek science and its achievements, the deeper the gulf between it and modern science opens up for you.

This circumstance is worth thinking about. What is the reason for this difference? I see it precisely in what Nietzsche points out, and I would only like to expand on the meaning not fully disclosed in his statement. The fact that the Greeks, the creators of science as such, never created a truly universal science can only be explained by their lack of spiritual motives and moral impulses to that; they appeared for the first time in a Christian person, which allowed him to create such a powerful science, which in its development grew into Christianity, and then turned against it, at least against all its objective forms.

For the Greek, the subject of knowledge is space, that is, Perfect and Orderly; the Greek cognizes the reasonable and the regular; everything else for him - nothing, matter, (non-existence) - is unknowable and unworthy of knowledge. But if the world is Creation God, then everything that exists is worthy of knowledge as God's creation - not only reasonable, having measure and number, but also everything else that one has to face in experience; any phenomenon and any slightest feature of it are worth immersing themselves in their study with love; There is nothing in the world that you do not need to know and explore. According to Luther, God the Creator is present even in the flea intestine. The Greek stops before the boundless distance possible knowledge; he does not want to go beyond his closed pictures, to leave the eternal beauty of his intelligible cosmos, the logical transparency of the conceivable universe. he either groups everything in subsummating schemes of hierarchical orders and steps, or by means of syllogisms establishes the interconnections of everything conceivable, or comprehends the laws of eternal becoming. But at the same time, Aristotle, and Democritus, and even Thomas and Descartes follow the same Greek impulse that relaxes the driving spring of science - to strive for a closed form and completeness.

The dictates of the new impulse are quite different; it requires limitless openness and towards all creation. In obedience to it, knowledge rushes precisely to those aspects of reality that do not correspond to the orders and laws established by the former science. In the Logos itself, an irresistible desire is suddenly revealed to destroy itself, but not in order to destroy it, but in order to find itself in a new, more complete, more developed form, and also in order to continue this fascinating process to infinity, never without reaching final fullness. Our science comes from Logos, which the does not close in on itself, but is open to "Alogon"(that is, the irrational) and itself penetrates into it due to the fact that it does not fence itself off, but opens itself to it and obeys it. The constant, never-ending interaction between theoretical construction and experimental, experiential knowledge is a simple and great example, a symbol of that universal process, the beginning of which was laid by a spark that flared up at the contact of Logos and Alogon.

For a new, tearing forward knowledge, the world is no longer just beautiful. This knowledge is directed both at the beautiful and the ugly, and at the good and the bad. However, ultimately for him ("all that is good"), that is, the good in him is that he was created by God. But this blessing is no longer that Greek visible and somodern beauty; it is carried out only in love for all that exists as for God's creation; hence the belief in the meaningfulness of the study. The knowledge that everything in the world is created allows one to calmly look into the abyss of reality, provides peace even in the midst of eternal unrest, endlessly tearing ahead of research, which, without having time to solve one question, immediately puts the next in its place.

All known and cognizable world being is being created, and consequently being of the second rank. It means that the world as such is bottomless for its bottom is something else, namely the Creator; this means that the world as such is not closed, and therefore cannot act as something complete in cognition. To any cognition, world existence is revealed only relatively; from one being to another, from an object to knowledge about an object. Everything that is known is always known in perspective. The more clearly the world being is known, the smaller the pieces into which it is torn; nowhere is it given into hands as a final and irreversible reality always and everywhere it points to something else.

However, one idea of world existence as a created existence, with all the consequences that follow from it, would not be enough to give rise to such a phenomenon as modern science. Here a second thought was needed: if God - Creator of the World, then he is responsible for everything that exists in the world, and for everything that happens in it. The need itself theodicies- the justification of God, for example, in the form in which it appears in the book of Job, does not yet provide sufficient motivation for the development of scientific research; and yet it brought into science the spirit of struggle, the struggle for the true God through the knowledge of world reality. This God, who claims to be unconditionally true, cannot be comprehended by building illusions: he himself does not want this. He himself refutes the theologizing of Job's friends, who wish to console and encourage him with thoughtful nonsense. This God requires real knowledge, even if this knowledge brings more and more accusations against Himself.

From this tension, from this struggle with one's own idea of God in the arena of cognition of the reality created by God, an unprecedented pressure of striving for a universal and at the same time disinterested and incorruptible research arises.

Along with this struggle for the true God, the researcher is constantly fighting on another front - fight against everything, beloved and desired, against their own ideals, premises and principles; all this must be questioned and tested, as a result of which it will either be confirmed or replaced by another.

So, in order for true faith in God to be possible, this God must not retreat under the terrible hail of questions thrown against him by reality; and the search for God is always accompanied by a painfully difficult expulsion of illusions; and finally, a genuine will to know and explore means fighting against one's own expectations and desires. The researcher is obliged to take under suspicion every thought that seems to him self-evident, convincing and does not require proof.

With the help of this brief description, I have tried to identify the main components of that driving spring of modern science - the essence of its striving for truth. The result of the correct scientific knowledge has, of course, universal significance, that is, it is true at all times and for every person, for a person in general. However, the fact that this universal significance in all its manifestations and boundless dimensions is suddenly sought and found has a single and unique historical basis.

This is, firstly, the idea of creation, which makes everything created, as created by God, worthy of attention and love and, in addition, provides an unprecedented closeness before turns to reality; at the same time, this closeness is an unprecedented distance, since such a reality is a created being, and not God himself, and therefore. is, properly speaking, neither being nor reality. This, secondly, struggle for the image of the Divine for the very idea of God. And finally, thirdly, the pursuit of the truth that God requires; an aspiration through which knowledge ceases to be a game, a noble occupation at leisure, and becomes a vocation, the most serious occupation in the world, where everything is at stake. The united action of these three motives was necessary for the emergence of that high science as we know it. That's why this science could not appear simultaneously with Christianity, or a little later, when the Nordic peoples entered the historical arena: that spiritual constellation must first have taken shape in which all three different motives could meet and start interacting. For this, long centuries of education of thought were needed, special material conditions and specific personal attitudes were needed: the necessary constellation took shape by the fourteenth century, at a time when the power of faith had not yet begun to weaken, but its content had already been shaken. It was the time of the last deepening of Christian impulses, the time of the highest spiritual tension, when human soul struggle brought to light a new science. How many truly amazing paradoxes this new type of will to know presents: a bad conscience can here be the key to success in research; piety can be the motive for research, and piety can make one renounce one's own research; for the joy of discovery, the discoverer often has to pay with horror at what he has done, with despair and madness; the scientist is shy of his own science and does not dare to take a step forward; but when the barrier is broken, he is seized by an increasingly uncontrollable passion for research. In that one-of-a-kind historical situation, the struggle of impulses intensified the thirst for truth to the last degree and created colossal opportunities for scientific development. The Greek went in his knowledge only where he was led calm observation and a clear view of the mind; he stopped at that limit beyond which they did not penetrate. He did not go into the depths where only consciousness can penetrate. unbearable tension, where the researcher is driven an internal struggle that haunts him. Only the last centuries have shown us what can be revealed to knowledge in such spiritual tension.

Thus, a comprehensive science, driven by a truly existential passion, is necessarily connected with a historically conditioned structure - with a special, "deep" soul. It rests on an extremely fragile foundation, which does not allow hope for its longevity and does not guarantee its continuation, even in the next generation. The existence of such a science is constantly under threat, and it faces specific dangers related to its nature. It is based on the most complex combination of motives, so that when even one of them disappears, it either begins to limp on one leg, or becomes an empty scientific shell; that is why, during all the centuries of modern times, real science was so rare, and now it is less and less common. The deafening noise about scientific achievements that are changing the face of the material world, the cloud of sonorous phrases of an "enlightened" worldview, enveloping the entire globe, cannot deceive us; science, which today seems like a bargaining chip, still remains the most secret thing. Modern man, as a rule, does not even know what science is, he has no idea what motivates him to do it. Even researchers who are still making discoveries in their special fields, unconsciously, by inertia, continue for some time the movement that began under the influence of forces unknown to them - even these scientists do not know what science is, as evidenced by all their activities outside that narrow area. in which they are masters. Modern philosophers talk about science as if they know it briefly, and turn it into a historically transient worldview delusion. Even philosophers of such stature as Hegel do not know anything about this science.

Having once felt the existential foundations of the impulse that induces one to engage in such a science, it is not difficult to discern and danger that threaten a person who comes into contact with science, but is unable to comprehend it with his very being. One can clearly see how the well-known aberrations take place. First, science is expected to by itself - that is, without those impulses we have described - give us a basis for life and faith, give a guiding principle for all our activities; the expectations of such superstitious worship of science are usually deceived, and a disappointed person begins to deny science in general as meaningless and far from life, or even blame it for his own helplessness. This is where the constant fluctuations between science worship and science hatred come from. However, both of these phenomena are only the last, grossest consequences of the process that began earlier and which Nietzsche himself embodied in his philosophy.

When the amazing achievements of science lead to the fact that a person strikes out God, the creation remains without the Creator. However, for science, this creation continues to retain its former appearance - the same one that it took thanks to faith in the Creator. The world still has no foundation in itself; but its former mythical and magical depth is irretrievably lost; the dogmatized remnants of scientific achievements are unable to console devastated souls with a lifeless picture of the world. So, the world without God is at the decline of science; in this position there are three possibilities.

1. If knowledge can remain honest, the consciousness of the abyss, the groundlessness of the world, inevitably associated with it, will also remain; for the more distinct is knowledge to man the demand to make a leap beyond the other side of the world, to transcendence, which is not cognizable and for cognition is Nothing. The open world itself, in its abyss, will be known only in relative perspectives; being and existence will be torn apart. There will be no leap to transcendence, but even the unrealized possibility of such a leap, that is, a simple vision of the boundaries of the world, will give rise to the type of a great, honest, spiritually ascetic researcher.

2. The world in its bottomless groundlessness, devoid of any meaning, become for man intolerable. For some time, despite the consciousness of complete meaninglessness, the study of the boundless will continue, nourished by the striving for truth, preserving from past eras, but this transitional period will not be able to last long. When godlessness becomes a reality, all interest in truth will die out. Disappointment and lack of a foothold will push more and more towards nihilism. The longer, perhaps, the purely technical will survive, the clearer the vision of boundaries that grows out of it; these boundaries are the inverted interest in the existing, but even this will dry up - it will not stand on its own.

3. In a state of unbearable groundlessness, a person wants one thing - supports. The place of genuine interest in truth will take strengthening- Opinions, pictures, laws, which are considered achievements of science, will begin to become stone-hard. The world is a machine, as the mechanical sciences study it; the world is universal life, as biology studies it; and in each case - a series of unshakable, inviolable statements, similar to the old dogmas of faith - this is what will become the content of science, now and forever given and given; no more development - neither in breadth, nor in depth, nor forward, only new experimental illustrations; only new journalistic versions of the popular presentation.

Nietzsche went through all three possible paths. He even went along the path of petrification of the concepts created by science, along the path of superstitious worship of science, forgetting about his own reflections on the meaning and method of science, and then it seemed to him that by uttering physiological-positivist planes he was really discovering something new and great "Diagnosis of a doctor: "Incurably", the conclusion of the philologist: "Nonsense" - this is only one of Nietzsche's innumerable statements of this kind; perhaps he is partly right in being indignant at the degeneration and perversion of all religions in the world, but still every doctor and every philologist who still preserves non-partisan loyalty to science, will have to admit that in this particular case, Nietzsche is not just exaggerating, he is lying.

However, another thing that is essential for us in Nietzsche's thinking is that he himself understands his striving for truth as the ultimate result of Christian morality; the fact that he succeeded in formulating the essence of science and its methods more clearly and more precisely than anyone else; the fact that he went through all the paths of a science that has lost contact with God and is becoming more and more devastated; what he used as a weapon in the fight against Christianity, which arose mainly from the false absolutization of science. At first glance, it seems that the result of his entire philosophy was the denial of the meaning of any science and truth in general - in any case, his thought moved precisely in this direction. Where she finally led him, we shall soon see.

Preliminary results

Nietzsche's Christian origins lie in his all-consuming desire to see world history as a whole and comprehend its meaning. But the Christian content of this striving is lost for him from the very beginning, because from the very beginning world history for him is not an expression of the Divine; she is entirely on her own. In the same way, there is no Christian principle in one of the cornerstone ideas of Christianity, which also became Nietzsche's main idea - in the idea human sinfulness for this man has nothing more to do with God. Deprives of its foundation and unconditional striving for truth because it rested on the fact that God demanded the truth. That is why Nietzsche each time renounced what he himself asserted with the same passion: from the unity of world history, from the idea of sinfulness - "failure" - of man, from truth itself; his thought endlessly throws from one extreme to another.

And despite all this: despite the fact that the roots of his thinking and the very impulses that prompt him to think lay in line with Christian tradition- never, not for a single moment, was there for him a way back, to the restoration or "renewal" of Christianity.

We can only ask him himself: "Where does his path lead?" - and to our question we will hear two answers that lie at the basis of all Nietzsche's reflections.

First answer is already contained in that unheard-of, terrible denial, which Nietzsche decided to bring to an end - the negation of any morality and every truth. Both morality and truth are themselves aware of themselves as derivatives of Christian morality and the pursuit of truth; and therefore they themselves can no longer discover their groundlessness. Again and again Nietzsche repeats this with unsurpassed energy of persuasion.

"Criticism of morality is the highest level of morality" (XI, 35). Since "the feeling of truth is one of ... the most powerful manifestations of the moral feeling" (XI, 35), morality - through it - "itself puts a noose around its neck, which is destined to strangle it: the suicide of morality is its own last moral demand "(XI, I 84. Doubt about all truth is itself an act of striving for truth, for it is ultimately compelled to forbid lying to God,” the last step has become inevitable today: Christian love of truth, which for centuries has drawn conclusion after conclusion, will draw its last and main conclusion against itself, posing the question as follows: What does any will to truth mean in general? (VII, 480-482). Nietzsche can say that this is how it should be: "All great things destroy themselves, performing an act of self-submission" (VII, 481).

The pinnacle of negation is Nietzsche's triumphant thesis, which he proudly erects on the ruins: "Nothing is true, everything is permitted" However, this famous thesis is not without some ambiguity.

On the one hand, with this thesis, Nietzsche seems to fall into a hole. He is aware of the Nothing of his era as his own, and his own Nothing as epochal. In this radical indifference to all significance, in this despair, so brilliantly expressed in Nietzsche, lies an enormous attractive force for all who are deprived of faith, no matter where this force leads them: to the unbridled looseness of all random impulses, or to desperate faith, turned against one's own Nothing to fanaticism for the sake of fanaticism - "just to grab onto something."

On the other hand, the destructive meaning of this thesis can be countered with a completely different interpretation: perhaps this thesis only makes room for the development of the most original, most genuine possibilities inherent in man. Overwhelmed by chaos and fanaticism that accompanies it, Nietzsche's hated "weakness" will sink into the abyss, and in its place will rise the winner - the "nihilism of force", a force capable of enduring the infinite distance of the Ambient, which does not need props of false absolutization of finite objectivities - patterns and laws. It does not need all this, for from the deepest foundations of the All-Encompassing, it is revealed to it - each time historically concrete, but illuminated by the peace of eternity - what is true and what needs to be done; in other words: it is the power in which a person is bestowed upon himself in his own being.

This is how I think I can characterize second answer, given by Nietzsche to the question: "Where?" (after a radical denial). Nietzsche's thought is a constant self-destruction, for no truth can maintain stability in it, and at the end of it Nothing is always revealed; however, Nietzsche's will is directed in the exact opposite direction - against nihilism: it is looking for something positive in empty space. His second answer is the outline of a new worldview, which should replace Christianity, not brush it aside and not forget it, but, as its heir, surpass Christianity with the help of that highest rank of human existence, which Christianity has raised; It is this new worldview that must give the thesis: "Nothing is true; everything is permitted" a different meaning, turn it into a new, never before profound truth.

However, Nietzsche still does not have this second answer, and therefore we will have to raise new questions: does Nietzsche, unable to realize his own idea, turn every time back to the path of the first answer - to boundless negation, to desperate, unconditional affirmation, to prophetic fanaticism, to the unbridling of any arbitrariness, instinct, violence? Didn't he turn - he, who aspired to the highest, craved the impossible - against his will into some kind of force that wants to unleash all the demons hiding in us? Or, perhaps, just all this is just a confusing, seductive appearance, a foreground, behind which lies something else?

Friedrich Nietzsche (1844-1900). For Nietzsche, a great impetus in his reflections was the criticism of the Christianity that surrounded him in Germany. Nietzsche, like Kierkegaard, simply felt that people were professing Christianity, calling themselves Christians, and the very spirit of Christianity was vanishing. Nietzsche in the phrase "God is dead" stated real fact general cooling towards Christianity, understanding the complexity of the situation, when society and culture have lost spiritual guidelines and eternal values.

The first work in which Nietzsche attacked contemporary society was Human, Too Human (1878). In this book, Nietzsche proposed the concept of "free minds", which meant the ideal of a person who is able to rise above the flat morality and customs of society. A "free mind" is, according to Nietzsche, a person who has experienced a "great break". After the "great break" a person becomes free, he is attracted to the unknown. Nietzsche, unlike Kierkegaard, who remained within the framework of Christianity, easily made the transition from the Protestant type of thinking to the creation in essence new religion. To create a pseudo-religious ideal, Nietzsche began by stating: "Never before has any religion, directly, indirectly, dogmatically, or allegorically, contained truth."

Nietzsche's spiritual maximalism is revealed, in particular, in his discussion of the "everyday Christian". If Christianity is right, then every Christian would aspire to become a priest, an apostle or a hermit, but since this is not the case, then the "everyday Christian" is a rather "pathetic figure." In Nietzsche's perception of Christianity there is one more peculiarity: Christianity for him is, first of all, morality. Man himself created morality as a code of special requirements. Thus, according to Nietzsche, he "worships a part of himself." Such a simplified understanding of Christianity opens the way for Nietzsche to reassess values, to search for new ideals. One of these ideals is genius, from which Nietzsche is only one step away from the concept of "superman".

The most striking work in which Nietzsche's idea of Christianity is expressed is "Thus Spoke Zarathustra" (1883-1885). This book is written by a man who is well acquainted with the gospel. On the pages of the book "Thus Spoke Zarathustra" we meet gospel images and hidden or whole quotations from the gospel. In the image of Zarathustra one can guess not just a prophet, but the legislator of the new religion and the denier of the gospel commandments. In the book, Nietzsche speaks the voice of a tortured man, doomed to combine his idea of God and religion with observations of how Christianity is expressed in everyday life. According to Nietzsche, people have learned utilitarian morality from the gospel, and God has been forced to serve their low, selfish interests. Nietzsche's phrase "God is dead" is not just an expression of atheism, but the result of deep religious reflections.

Nietzsche is one of the greatest writers who masterfully mastered the art of irony, but under his irony lies the greatest horror and tragedy. Nietzsche does not agree to accept compromises in religion, he does not agree to accept a "formal" God. However, in his extreme denial, he is ready to deny every God, since, in his opinion, every God rapes a person.

In The Antichrist (1888), Nietzsche acted as an "interpreter" of the New Testament. His "interpretation" boils down to finding words and phrases throughout the Gospel, and then presenting them as compromising Christianity. However, Nietzsche began his criticism of Christianity with theology and philosophy, which is "of the flesh and blood of theologians." Nietzsche declares that "the blood of the theologians has corrupted philosophy" and lashes out at Kant and his morals. In his opinion, "the Protestant pastor is the grandfather of German philosophy", "the success of Kant is only the success of the theologian", and the transformation of a person into an automaton of "duty" is a recipe for idiocy. Thus, for Nietzsche, all philosophy is religious, and Christianity for him is, first of all, Socrates and Kant, their moralism. In the later writings of Nietzsche, the theme of Greek culture and criticism of Christianity merge, and the image of Socrates personifies all sorts of vices.

If in Thus Spoke Zarathustra Nietzsche showed his deepest religious thirst, in Antichrist he radically renounces all Christianity, both historical and evangelical. Nietzsche's views on Christianity evolved from attempts to create a religious ideal to a complete rejection of Christianity and religion in general. AT recent books Nietzsche, who easily accepted the ideas of evolutionism, firmly stated that the immortality of the soul does not exist. If a person is mortal, then it is impossible to love him in the present state. If human culture is capable of developing, and man is descended from apes, then the goal of man is "superman", the goal of history is "superman". For this, it is necessary to abandon Christianity and gain freedom. According to Nietzsche, the "death of God" means the return of freedom to man and the possibility of the birth of a "superman".

Kierkegaard and Nietzsche had a significant influence on the philosophy of the 20th century. - first of all, by the very style of his thinking, free, uncompromising, at the limit of human capabilities. Subsequently, the philosophy of religion split into two alternative directions - academic science, the content of which was a rational interpretation of religion, and free philosophizing, whose representatives were opponents of scientific and academic forms of thought and relied on personal life experience. For free thinkers, Kierkegaard and Nietzsche have forever become models of philosophizing, spiritual and intellectual ideals.

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In the discipline "Religious Studies"

On the topic: "Friedrich Nietzsche on religion"

nietzsche christianity faith

Introduction

Chapter 1. Life and scientific works of F. Nietzsche

1.1 The path of the philosopher F. Nietzsche from birth to death

1.2 Creativity F. Nietzsche

Chapter 2. Death of God. The Problem of Christianity

2.1 F. Nietzsche "Antichrist"

2.2 Buddhism

Conclusion

Bibliography

Introduction

By studying such a discipline as religious studies, we students master one of the most important areas of world and national culture. Religious science helps us to exercise free and conscious self-determination in our worldview position, spiritual interests and values, learn how to competently conduct a worldview dialogue, master the art of understanding other people whose way of thinking and acting are different. This will help us avoid, on the one hand, dogmatism and authoritarianism, and on the other, relativism and nihilism. Ultimately, the study of religious studies contributes to the establishment of a spiritual climate of mutual understanding, the harmonization of interpersonal relations between representatives of various religious and non-religious worldviews, the establishment of civil harmony and social stability in society. Thus, we learn, enrich our spiritual world, a world that is associated with faith in something, so faith is a state of a person’s soul that allows him to overcome life’s trials, find support in life, regardless of the presence of really existing positive factors, often in counter to reason. In my opinion, faith is directly related to religion, because it is faith that underlies religion, thus religion is one of the forms of social consciousness, a set of spiritual ideas based on belief in supernatural forces and beings (gods, spirits) that are the subject worship.

The purpose of my work- Get acquainted with the work of Friedrich Nietzsche, which is associated with religion.

Main goals:

1) View Nietzsche's life path.

2) Study his writings.

3) Give an assessment of Friedrich Nietzsche's attitude towards religion.

Chapter 1. Life and scientific works of F. Nietzsche

1.1 The path of the philosopher from birth to death

Friedrich Wilhelm Nietzsche, the first son of a priest, Lutheran pastor Karl Ludwig Nietzsche (born in 1813, in the family of a priest) and Franziska Nietzsche, nee Ehler (born in 1826, in the family of a priest), was born on October 15, 1844 in the town of Röcken near Lützen , Germany. The birthday coincided with the birthday of the king - Frederick William IV, so the boy was named after him. Nietzsche grew up in a deeply religious family, and faith formed the basis of his worldview in his childhood. In 1846, on July 10, his sister Elizabeth was born, and in 1849, on February 27, brother Joseph was born, but happiness was replaced by grief - on July 30, the father dies after a year of madness and debilitating suffering, later on January 4, 1850, his little brother dies from a nervous attack . The entire tragedy of the lived days remains for a long time in the mind of Nietzsche. After all that had happened, the family moved to Naumburg, where Nietzsche entered the city school for boys, then he moved to a preparatory school at the cathedral gymnasium. In adolescence, Nietzsche enjoys prestige with his schoolmates, learns to play the piano, makes the first samples of poetry and musical compositions. One day, in 12 days, he writes the story of his childhood.

Nietzsche's favorite authors were Schiller, Byron, Hölderlin. At this time, the first attempts at writing were small essays “On Music”, poems; there is an acquaintance and friendship with Paul Duiseen, and in 1860 he founded, together with childhood friends V. Pinder and G. Krug, the German musical and literary union, which lasted 3 years. Since 1862, Nietzsche began to suffer from regular headaches, which, however, did not interfere with intensive studies at school and in free time. In April, he wrote the poem "Ermanarich" and three articles: "Fatum and History", "Free Will and Fate", "On Christianity". In mid-October 1862, Nietzsche left Naumburg and went to the University of Bonn, where he studied theology and philology. Then he moved to continue his studies in philology at the University of Leipzig (to Professor Richl). The first reading of Schopenhauer is accompanied by deep internal upheavals for Nietzsche, he even calls Schopenhauer his father

“Three things serve me as a rest: my Schopenhauer, Schumann's music, and finally, lonely walks.” Novikov A. “Thus spoke Friedrich Nietzsche” - Aurora, No. 11-12/1992 There is an acquaintance with Erwin Rode.

In 1872 Nietzsche published his first book, The Birth of Tragedy from the Spirit of Music. The first fifteen chapters of the book are an attempt to find out what Greek tragedy is, but in the last ten chapters it is more about R. Wagner. The book's initial influence was slight, but its central thesis was widely accepted: characteristics such as "noble simplicity," "cold majesty," or "serenity" (expressions characteristic of the 18th and 19th centuries) indicate only one side of Greek culture, "Apollo", without taking into account the "Dionysian" element of dark passion, which found its extreme expression in the festivities of the god of wine Dionysus. The first work was followed by four Untimely Reflections (UnzeitgemasseBetrachtungen, 1873-1876)nietzsche.ru›biograf/short/. In the first of these, Nietzsche attacks the complacent superficiality of German culture in the period after the victory over France. The second reflection on the benefits and harms of history for life had a profound influence on German historiography of the 20th century. the concept of “monumental history” developed in it, an attempt to show through the study of the heroes of the past that a person is capable of great things, despite the current dominance of mediocrity.

In the third reflection, Schopenhauer as a teacher, Nietzsche argues that to discover the "true self", not at all "hidden deep inside, but existing immeasurably higher", is possible by asking the question: "What have you really loved so far?" . Nemirovskaya A.Z. Nietzsche: morality "beyond good and evil"

M.: Znanie, series "Ethics" No. 6/1991 p. 63 In a "monumentalist" manner, Nietzsche begins to create a portrait of Schopenhauer, highlighting the features that delight him and by which he intends to "build himself." The fourth meditation is dedicated to Wagner. It brought Nietzsche a lot of trouble, his relationship with the composer became more and more tense. For Wagner, Nietzsche was a brilliant preacher, but also a parcel boy, he was not interested in Nietzsche's own philosophical search. On many important issues they had opposite opinions, and Wagner, being older, could not stand being contradicted.

1.2 Creativity F. Nietzsche

His work, which glorified the fusion of man and nature in the spirit of antiquity and clearly reflected the discord of society and the individual, attracted the young man because Hölderlin was able to express the moods inherent in Nietzsche at that time. In April 1862, Nietzsche created two philosophical and poetic essays: "Rock and History" and "Free Will and Rock", which contains almost all the main ideas of his future works. Again and again throughout his life he will return to these topics, each time more passionately and openly. “... Free will contains for the individual the principle of isolation, separation from the whole, absolute unlimitedness, but fate again organically connects a person with general development ... Absolute free will without fate would make a person God, a fatalistic principle - a mechanism” A.I. Patrushev, "The Life and Drama of Friedrich Nietzsche" No. 5, 1993. P. 46-51, Nietzsche writes in this essay. In the second essay, "Free Will and Fate," Nietzsche's sharp attacks against the Christian idea of \u200b\u200bthe other world seem most remarkable: "The fact that God becomes a man only indicates: a person should seek his bliss not in infinity, but create his heaven on earth; the illusion of an unearthly the world has distorted the attitude human spirit to the earthly world: it was the creation of the childhood of peoples... Mankind matures in grave doubts and battles: it realizes in itself the beginning, core and end of religions. " A.I. Patrushev, "The Life and Drama of Friedrich Nietzsche", No. Pages 57-58 In these small works, rather, sketches, the germs of those problems are already visible, around which until the very end of his life Nietzsche will be doomed, his restless thought will revolve. human values, recognition of the limitations and relativity of any morality, the idea of eternal becoming, the idea of a philosopher and historian as a prophet, subverting the past for the sake of the future, the problem of the place and freedom of the individual in society and history, the denial of the unification and leveling of people carried through the years, a passionate dream of a new historical the era when the human race finally matures and realizes its tasks - all this can be caught in his first philosophical experiments. These ideas will, of course, be developed much later. While they were not too clear to the author himself.

Along with musical studies, Nietzsche intensively studied the history of literature and aesthetics, biblical texts and ancient tragedies. The dispersion of interests began to disturb him himself, until he decided to turn to the study of philology. Here he hoped to find exactly what would harmoniously combine cold logic, scientific rationalism and the artistic side. He firmly chose philology, although he understood that narrow specialization was not suitable for his mindset and character.

Studies in philology returned to him a sense of self-affirmation, largely lost during the year of study in Bonn, where he was constantly torn between theology, music and philology, not daring to stop at one thing. close to Nietzsche's own reflections. He was struck by the philosopher's contempt for people, with their petty concerns and selfish interests. The meaninglessness of this existence, so vividly depicted by Schopenhauer, led Nietzsche to the idea that looking for the meaning of human life in the performance of his duty is a waste of time and energy. “Friedrich Nietzsche and the Russian religious philosophy» in two volumes / comp. Voiskaya IT, Minsk, 1996 A person fulfills his duty under the pressure of external conditions of existence, and this is no different from an animal that also acts solely according to circumstances.

The question of the meaning of human existence arose before Nietzsche no longer in fantastic images of art, but in cruel reality. After his illness and return to Basel, Nietzsche began attending lectures by the outstanding historian Jacob Burckhardt (1818-1897), full of skepticism and pessimism about the futurePatrushev A.I. "The Life and Drama of Friedrich Nietzsche" - New and recent history, No. 5/1993 pp. 65-67 . Nietzsche freed himself from the frenzy of patriotism. Now he, too, began to regard Prussia as a militaristic force in the highest degree dangerous for culture. Not without the influence of Burckhardt, Nietzsche began to develop the tragic content of history in sketches for the drama "Empedocles", dedicated to the legendary Sicilian philosopher, physician and poet of the 5th century. BC. Clear elements of late Nietzsche's philosophy are already visible in them. In the Empedoclesian doctrine of the transmigration of souls, he found one of the postulates of his own theory of eternal return. In many ways, Nietzsche's thoughts were based on the ideas of Burckhardt. In many ways, but not in everything. The latter believed that in history there are two static potencies - religion and the state - and one dynamic - culture. Nietzsche, on the other hand, found only religion static, and divided culture into two dynamic elements: art, based on the world of appearance and fantasy, and science, which destroys all illusions and images. He did not consider the state at all to be the creative force of history, it is only the result of the real potentialities of culture.

On January 2, 1872, Nietzsche's book "The Birth of Tragedy from the Spirit of Music" was published. It was conceived even before the Franco-German war, and schematically outlined in the report "Greek Musical Drama", read at the university in January 1870. Dedicated to Wagner, the work determined the foundations on which the birth of tragedy as a work of art rests. Ancient and modern lines are closely intertwined with each other in the constant comparison of Dionysus, Apollo and Socrates with Wagner and Schopenhauer. Nietzsche formulated the ancient symbols in this way: "Until now, we have considered the Apollonian principle and its opposite - the Dionysian - as artistic forces: on the one hand, as the artistic world of dreams, the completeness of which is not in any connection with the intellectual level or artistic education of an individual , and on the other hand, as an intoxicating reality, which also does not take into account the individual, but, on the contrary, even seeks to destroy the individual and replace him with the mystical insensitivity of the whole. Patrushev A.I. "The Life and Drama of Friedrich Nietzsche" - Modern and Contemporary History, No. 5/1993 Pp.67-68

In January - March 1872, Nietzsche delivered a series of public reports "On the Future of Our Educational Institutions", referring not so much to Swiss as to Prussian gymnasiums and universities. There, for the first time, one of Nietzsche's main ideas was voiced - the need to educate a true aristocracy of the spirit, the elite of society. He was horrified by the trend towards the expansion and democratization of education. He pointed out that "universal education is the prologue of communism. In this way, education will be weakened so much that it can no longer give any privileges" Friedrich Nietzsche Composition in 2 volumes / Ed. K. A. Svasyan /p. 24. According to Nietzsche, pragmatism should be present not in classical gymnasiums, but in real schools that honestly promise to give practically useful knowledge, and not at all some kind of "education". In 1874, Nietzsche conceived a series of pamphlets. Of the approximately 20-24 planned, only four essays were written under the general title "Untimely Reflections": "David Strauss, confessor and writer", "On the benefits and harms of history for life" (1874), "Schopenhauer as an educator" (1874) and "Richard Wagner in Bayreuth" (1875-1876). In these reflections, Nietzsche acted as a passionate defender of German culture, castigating philistinism and victorious drunkenness after the creation of the empire. Nietzsche's doubt that a brilliant culture would be born from the victory of Germany and her political unification sounded like annoying dissonance against the background of the bravura roar of the timpani, heralding the era of the flowering of culture, as happened with the ancient Greeks after the end of the Persian wars in the time of Pericles. In the article "Mr. Friedrich Nietzsche and German Culture," a Leipzig newspaper declared him "an enemy of the Empire and an agent of the International." Indeed, it is difficult to imagine anything more comical than the last accusation, but after that Nietzsche began to be hushed up in Germany. Moreover, just at the time when the German historical science became a model in Europe and experienced a period of upsurge, Nietzsche sharply opposed the worship of history as a blind force of facts. In the past, he saw only a burden that burdened the memory, preventing him from living in the present. Meanwhile, the past needs exactly as much as is required for the accomplishment of the present. In this, Nietzsche clearly followed in the footsteps of Goethe, who once said: "The best that we have from history is the enthusiasm it arouses." Nietzsche distinguished three kinds of history - monumental, antiquarian and critical. The history of the first kind, in his opinion, draws from the past examples of the great and sublime. It teaches that if the great has already existed in the past at least once, then it can happen again sometime. Therefore, monumental history serves as a source of human courage and inspiration, a source of great motives. Nietzsche saw its danger in the fact that with such an approach, entire epochs are consigned to oblivion, forming, as it were, a gray monotonous stream, among which individual decorated facts ascend as peaks. Antiquarian history guards and honors the entire past, for it is sanctified by tradition. It is conservative by nature and rejects everything that does not bow to the past, rejects everything new and striving for the future. When modernity ceases to spiritualize history, the antiquarian race degenerates into a blind passion for collecting more and more facts that bury the present. Therefore, Nietzsche placed above others critical history, which brings the past to judgment and passes judgment on it in the name of life itself as a dark and entailing force. But he warned that critical history very dangerous, because we are a product of previous generations, their passions, mistakes and even crimes. And it is impossible to break away from all this. All types of history have their undoubted right to exist. Depending on the circumstances, goals and needs, every person and every people needs a certain familiarity with each of these species. The only important thing is that history should not replace life, that the past should not overshadow the present and the future. That's why weak people history is overwhelming; only strong personalities can endure it. In this, Nietzsche saw both the benefit and harm of history for life. Novikov A. “Thus spoke Friedrich Nietzsche” - Aurora, No. 11-12 / 1992

Nietzsche rejected modern culture because, from his point of view, it is not aware of its purpose to produce geniuses. "Anxiety of the Spirit", M.: Knowledge, series "Philosophy and Life" No. 3/1992. Low mercantile interests, cold scientific rationalism, the desire of the state to lead culture - all this leads it to decline and crisis. Meanwhile, the path to true culture, defined by Nietzsche as "the unity of artistic style in all manifestations of the life of the people", lies through the development in us and outside of us of a philosopher, artist and saint, the ideal combination of which Nietzsche found in Schopenhauer and Wagner. The panegyric to Wagner in the fourth "Untimely" is both a renunciation of him and a farewell to him, a swan song of "Wagnerism and heroic Germanism." This gap opened up the prospect of absolute loneliness, for, in the words of Nietzsche himself, "I had no one but Richard Wagner." Schopenhauer is also drawn into the sphere of revision. A short period of positivist rebirth of Nietzsche began, the diligence of the artisan became higher than natural talent, science - higher than art, the goal of culture was no longer the creation of artistic genius, but the knowledge of truth. This period coincided with such a sharp deterioration in health that Nietzsche received a year's leave in October 1876 for treatment and rest, during which he worked in fits and starts on a new book, compiled in the form of aphorisms that became common for his subsequent writings. The point here is in the original way of thinking of Nietzsche, alien to traditional systematics, free and musical. He does not fix a strictly delineated thought, but rather, what comes to mind does not offer a rigid formula, but a wide field for careful consideration of all that is supposed. In May 1878 was published A new book Nietzsche's "Humanity Too Human" subtitled "A Book for Free Minds". In it, the author publicly and without much ceremony broke with the past and its values: Hellenism, Christianity, Schopenhauer, Wagner. One of the versions of what happened sees the reason for the turn in the influence on Nietzsche of his "evil demon" - the philosopher and psychologist Paul Re (1849 - 1901), with whom Nietzsche became close friends while living in Sorrento. Undoubtedly, friendship with Re played a certain role in the turning point of Nietzsche's worldview, but even before this acquaintance Nietzsche had clearly lost interest in Wagnerism and the metaphysics of German idealism. When he left Basel for Sils Maria, in the Upper Engadine valley. In this, 1879, he created new books: "Colorful Thoughts and Sayings", "The Wanderer and His Shadow". And in the next year, 1880, "Morning Dawn" appeared, where one of the cornerstone concepts of Nietzsche ethics was formulated - "morality of morals". In the winter of 1881-1882, Nietzsche wrote "Merry Science", which was later published in several editions with additions. This work began a new dimension of Nietzsche’s thought, a never-before-seen attitude to a thousand-year-old European history, culture and morality as a personal problem: “I have absorbed the spirit of Europe - now I want to strike back.” But such an intimate empathy with history could not turn into anything else , as "poisoned by the arrow of knowledge" and "clairvoyance", and Nietzsche himself - "the battlefield". It is easy to shrug at this recognition, believing that it was made by a man suffering from megalomania. It is more difficult to recognize as an immutable given Nietzsche's amazing gift to live in the sublime world and not perceive it as "something fake and creepy."

Nietzsche was so deeply moved by the idea of eternal return that he created the majestic dithyrambic poem Thus Spoke Zarathustra. He wrote it in February and at the end of June - beginning of July 1883 in Rapallo and in February 1884 in Sils. A year later, Nietzsche created the fourth part of the poem, so personal and intimate that it was published in only 40 copies at the expense of the author for close friends. Nietzsche wrote in the winter of 1885-1886 "a prelude to the philosophy of the future", the book "Beyond Good and Evil", in his words, "a terrible book", which this time came from my soul - very black. "Nietzsche understood perfectly well who crossed a certain line and became something like an intellectual dissident who challenged the lies of millennia.It is here that he, convinced that in man the creature and the creator have merged together, destroys the creature in himself in order to save the creator.But this nightmarish an experiment in that not only the creature, but also the mind of the creator was destroyed.To avoid misunderstandings around the book, Nietzsche in July 1887 wrote as an addition to it a polemical essay "On the Genealogy of Morals", published, by the way, also at his expense. In it, he posed three main problems: ascetic ideals that can give meaning to human existence; "guilt" and "bad conscience" as instinctive sources of aggressiveness and cruelty, and finally, the key concept driving force in structuring moral values - ressentiment. In Nice, in the autumn of 1887, Nietzsche began the first drafts of the "major work" he had conceived of throughout his life. In total, he wrote down 372 notes, divided into four sections: European nihilism, criticism of higher values, the principle of new evaluation, discipline and selection. These are not really the finished and polished notes, and not the sparkling aphorisms that his readers are accustomed to. The notes collected later made up one of his most sensational books, The Will to Power, although Nietzsche himself, as it turned out, was not responsible for its content and meaning. After this, Nietzsche wrote the pamphlet Casus Wagner. It was a carefully crafted, brilliantly written work, laced with venomous and destructive sarcasm. At the end of 1888, Nietzsche was seized by an agonizing anxiety. On the one hand, the features of megalomania began to emerge more and more clearly in him: he felt that his finest hour was approaching. In a letter to Strindberg in December 1888, Nietzsche wrote: "I am strong enough to split the history of mankind into two pieces." On the other hand, he had growing doubts and vague fears that the world would never recognize his brilliant prophecies and would not understand his thoughts. In a feverish rush, Nietzsche wrote two works at the same time - "The Twilight of the Idols" and "Antichrist", the obviously unfinished first part of "The Reappraisal of All Values". Not yet finished with Antichrist, Nietzsche decides to create a prelude to Reassessment in the form of a biography and annotation of his books so that readers understand what he is. This is how the idea of the work "Essehomo" arose, where Nietzsche tried to explain the reasons for his cooling off towards Wagner and show how it matured in his books over the years. But this work, a real crucible in which all genres are melted down, remained, in essence, a draft version, there is a lot of shocking in it. What are some chapter titles - "Why I'm so wise", "Why I write such good books", "Why I am rock".

Chapter 2the mouth of God. The Problem of Christianity

2.1 Friedrich Nietzsche "Antichrist"

The problem of religion is clearly manifested in various works of Nietzsche, his attitude to religion is not in general, but specifically to Christianity. Analyzing his works, it is safe to say that he was an anti-Christian. He wrote: “Christianity is a religion of compassion, a religion of weak and sick people, Christianity leads to lack of freedom and no resistance of a person, Christianity operates entirely with imaginary concepts, it raises the “sinfulness” of a person, and, finally, religion and science are incompatible.” What explains this?

According to Nietzsche, religion arises as a result of the degeneration of humanity as a biological species, the degradation of its inner mental life. Psychological basis This fact is the opposition of the instinctive and the rational, which appears in the form of the antinomy of life and morality. “Antinomy is this: since we believe in morality, we condemn” Nietzsche F. The Will to Power // Nietzsche F. Sobr. op. M., 1995. S. 36. . This conflict (in essence, between the moral ideal and reality), quite possible within the framework of individual consciousness, F. Nietzsche extrapolates to the entire human culture

Any religion appeared out of fear and need, when people did not know anything about nature and its laws, everything was a manifestation of mystical forces that could be pacified through prayers and sacrifices. Friedrich Nietzsche writes: “Neither morality nor religion in Christianity come into contact with any point of reality. Purely imaginary reasons (“God”, “soul”, “I”, “spirit”, “free will”, - or even “not free”); purely imaginary actions (“sin”, “redemption”, “mercy”, “punishment”, “forgiveness of sin” by F. Nietzsche “Anti-Christian. Damnation to Christianity”, 1990, p. 16.). Communication with imaginary beings (“God”, “spirits”, “souls”); an imaginary science of nature (anthropocentric; complete absence of the concept of natural causes); imaginary psychology (obvious misunderstanding of oneself, interpretation of general feelings that are pleasant or unpleasant to everyone - such as, for example, the well-known states of nervus sympathicus - using the symbolic language of religious and moral idiosyncrasy, - “repentance”, “remorse”, “temptation of the devil”, “intimacy God"); imaginary teleology (“Kingdom of God”, “Last Judgment”, “ immortal life”). - This world of pure fictions is very different from the world of dreams, not in its favor, precisely in that the latter reflects reality, while the former distorts it, devalues it, denies it. Only after the concept of "nature" was opposed to the concept of "God", the word "natural", "natural" should have become synonymous with "unworthy" - the root of this whole world of fiction lies in hatred of the natural (reality); this world is the expression of a profound aversion to the real...”

Christianity contrasts the spiritual (pure) and the natural (dirty). And, as Nietzsche writes, “this explains everything.” Who has reason to hate the natural, the real? - The one who suffers from this reality. And the weak and sick suffer from reality, whom compassion keeps “afloat”.

The Church, however, elevates sick or madmen to the rank of saints, and the “higher” states of the soul, religious ecstasy resemble Nietzsche’s epileptoid states ... Let us recall how in Russian villages fools and lunatics were considered holy people, and their words were considered prophecies ... Let us recall the words from the Bible: “... God chose the foolish of the world ... and the weak of the world God chose ... the humblest of the world and the humble ... "! And what is the image of God crucified on the cross! - Nietzsche writes: “Is it really still not clear the terrible deceit of this symbol? Everything that suffers is divine…” Divine are the martyrs who suffered for the faith… But martyrdom does not prove the truth, it does not change the value of the deed for which people accept torment. For Nietzsche, the very idea of sacrifice for the good of mankind was something unhealthy, contrary to life itself. Christ sacrifices himself for the sake of man, the redemption of human sins and the reconciliation of man with God, and Nietzsche writes: “God brought his son to the slaughter for the sake of forgiveness of sins. That's the end of the gospel, but how! An expiatory sacrifice, and even in the most disgusting, barbaric form - the innocent is sacrificed for the sins of the guilty!

Christianity arose to make life easier for a person, but now it must first burden their life with a consciousness of sinfulness, so that later it can make it easier for them. The Church has arranged everything in such a way that it is now impossible without it: all natural events (birth, wedding, death) now require the presence of a priest who would “sanctify” the event. Christianity preaches the sinfulness and contempt of man in general, so that it is no longer possible to despise other people. By putting forward excessive demands, comparing a person with a perfect God, the church makes a person feel sinful, bad, he needs supernatural powers to remove this burden in order to “save” from “sinfulness”, but when the idea of God disappears, the feeling of “sin” also disappears. as violations of divine precepts.

Already in his early youth, Nietzsche wrote down thoughts that anticipate his later criticism of Christianity: the worldly sorrow that the Christian worldview gives rise to is nothing but reconciliation with one’s own impotence, a plausible pretext that excuses one’s own weakness and indecision, a cowardly refusal to create one’s own destiny.

Religion is a delusion; no other religion has ever contained the truth either directly or indirectly. Nietzsche writes: “A religion of the Christian type, which does not come into contact with reality at any point and immediately perishes, as soon as we recognize the correctness of reality at least at one point, such a religion cannot but be at enmity with the “wisdom of this world”, that is, with science, it will bless everything. means suitable for poisoning, slandering, disgracing the discipline of the spirit, honesty and severity in matters affecting the conscience of the spirit, noble coldness and independence of the spirit .... One cannot be a philologist and a doctor and not be anti-Christian at the same time. After all, the philologist sees what is behind the "holy books", and the doctor sees what is behind the physiological degradation of a typical Christian.

Here is how Nietzsche interprets the famous story of Adam and Eve's expulsion from paradise: God - perfection itself - is walking in the garden and he is bored. He decides to create a man, Adam, but Adam also gets bored... Then God created animals, but they did not entertain the man, he was a "master"... God creates a woman, but it was a mistake! Eve incites Adam to taste the fruit of the tree of knowledge, and man became a rival of God - because thanks to knowledge you become like God ... “Science is forbidden as such, it is alone and is under prohibition. Science is the first sin, the germ of all sin, original sin. It was necessary to make a person forget about science, a person should not think - and God created pain and illness, poverty, decrepitude, death ... But a person continues to think, "the work of knowledge grows, rises ... brings twilight to the gods"!

Religion is an inhibitory, hindering, negative factor for society. Religion serves the masses, it is the weapon of the mob and slaves. In Christianity, the hatred of the mob, the ordinary person for the noble finds its expression ... God, holiness, love for one's neighbor, compassion - prejudices invented by those whose lives are empty and monotonous. Faith in God does not elevate and spiritualize a person, but, on the contrary, fetters him and deprives him of freedom. A free man does not need God, for he himself is the highest value. The church for Nietzsche is the mortal enemy of everything noble on earth. She defends slavish values, seeks to trample on all greatness in man. Nietzsche writes: “In Christianity, at first glance, the instincts of the oppressed and enslaved come out: the lower classes seek salvation in it”, “Christianity is an uprising of reptiles on the earth against everything that stands and rises: the gospel of the “low” belittles”, “Christianity fought not for life, but for death with the highest type of man, it anathematized all his basic instincts and extracted evil from them ... Christianity took the side of everything weak, low, ugly; it formed its ideal in opposition to the instincts for the preservation of life, life in strength.

For Nietzsche, the question of faith is connected with the problem of morality, values and human behavior. The meaning and purpose with which Nietzsche declared war on Christianity is the abolition of morality. The death of God opens up to man the possibility of creative freedom to create new valuable worlds. In death lies rebirth. In place of spiritual values associated with the idea of God, Nietzsche puts diametrically opposed values arising from needs and goals. real life superman. The arrival of the superman is due to the process of the formation of man, the rejection of the existence of God and the moral and religious values associated with it. From here in the philosophy of Nietzsche follows total nihilism and reassessment of all values.

Touching upon the issues of religion, Nietzsche also offers their solution, the first one reads as follows: “Christianity can only be understood in connection with the soil on which it grew up - it is not a movement hostile to the Jewish instinct, it is its consistent development, a syllogism in its logical fearsome chain. According to the Redeemer's formula: "Salvation comes from the Jews." Second position: psychological type The Galilean is still accessible to recognition, but to be suitable for what he was used for, that is, to be a type of the Savior of mankind, he could only with his complete degeneration.

I want to write this eternal accusation against Christianity on all the walls, wherever they are - I have letters to make the blind see... I call Christianity the one great curse, the one great inner corruption, the one great instinct of revenge, for which no remedy will be poisonous enough, insidious, base, small enough - I call it the only immortal, shameful stain of humanity ... And now they count the time from that diesnefastus when this fate began, from the first day of Christianity! Why not the last one? - Not from today? - Reassessment of all values!

2.2 Buddhism

I consider it necessary to elucidate also Nietzsche's attitude to Buddhism. In general, Nietzsche considers it akin to Christianity in the sense that it is also a nihilistic religion, a religion. According to Nietzsche, “Buddhism is a heritage of objective and cold problem-posing, it appears after a philosophical movement that has lasted hundreds of years; the concept of "God" was already done away with when he appeared. Buddhism is the only true positivist religion found in history; F. Nietzsche "The Anti-Christian: An Experience in the Criticism of Christianity" even in his theory of knowledge (strict phenomenalism) he does not say: "struggle against sin", but, with full recognition of reality, he says: "struggle against suffering". He already leaves the self-deception of moral concepts behind him - and this is his deep difference from Christianity - he stands, in my language, on the other side of good and evil. - Here are two physiological facts on which he rests and which he has in mind: the first is an exaggerated irritability, expressed in a refined sensitivity to pain, the second is an intensified spiritual life, too long a stay in the field of concepts and logical procedures, leading to the fact that instinct personality, to its detriment, gives way to the "impersonal" (both states, known by experience, at least to some of my readers, are "objective" like myself). On the basis of these physiological conditions, a state of depression arose, and the Buddha spoke out against it with his hygiene. He prescribes life in the open air, in wanderings; moderation and choice in food, caution regarding all alcohol; foresight also in relation to all passions that produce bile, inflame the blood - no worries either about oneself or about others. He demands performances that are soothing or amusing - he invents means to wean himself from others. He understands kindness, a benevolent mood as a requirement of health. Prayer is excluded, as is austerity; no categorical imperative, no coercion at all, even within the monastic community (from which a way out is always possible). All this would be a means to increase exaggerated irritability. Therefore, it is he who does not require any struggle with those who think otherwise; his teaching is most strongly armed against the feeling of revenge, disgust, ressentiment (“enmity does not end through enmity” is a touching refrain of all Buddhism). And this is quite right: it is precisely these affects that would be completely unhealthy in relation to the main, dietary, goal. If he encounters spiritual fatigue, which is expressed in too much “objectivity” (i.e., in the weakening of individual interest, in the loss of “egoism”), he fights against it by giving even completely spiritual interests a strictly personal character. In the Buddha's teaching, selfishness becomes a duty. “One thing is needed: how to free yourself from suffering” - this provision regulates and limits the entire spiritual diet (perhaps we should recall that Athenian who also declared war on pure “scientificity”, namely Socrates, who raised personal egoism to the realm of moral problems) ".

Thus, the religion of Buddhism outgrew the concept of "god", as well as the concept of "good and evil", due to the fact that it emerged from a profound philosophical concept. A Buddhist doesn't say, "I am sinning," he says, "I am suffering." Buddhism is the fight against depression through the fight against satiety, which means that in its essence it is a healing religion. She is selfish: "One thing is needed: how can you free yourself from suffering"

The healthy properties of Buddhism, according to Nietzsche, are largely due to the fact that, unlike Christianity, it was created by people from the upper classes.. F. Nietzsche "On the Genealogy of Morals"

Conclusion

Thus, the personality of Friedrich Nietzsche was not ordinary, as well as his view of religion. He criticized Christianity, recognized Buddhism. Nietzsche rebelled against the crass attempts of the Christian church to pervert the meaning and aims of true Christianity, which "is not associated with any of the insolent dogmas that flaunt its name." Lies and deceit that we consider ourselves Christians, but live the life from which Christ preached liberation.

Christianity imposes an imaginary meaning on life, thereby preventing the revelation of the true meaning and replacing real goals with ideal ones. In a world in which "God is dead" and moral tyranny no longer exists, man remains alone and free. But at the same time, it also becomes responsible for everything that exists, because, according to Nietzsche, the mind finds complete liberation, only guided by a conscious choice, only taking on certain obligations. And if the need cannot be avoided, then true freedom lies in its full acceptance. To accept the earthly world and not indulge in illusions about the other world means to dominate everything earthly. Nietzsche therefore rejected Christianity because it denies the freedom of the spirit, the independence and responsibility of man, turns lack of freedom into an ideal, and humility into a virtue. But Nietzsche did not give an answer to the question: will the prison of reason be better than the prison of God that he destroyed? In any case, he categorically predicted that the transition to a free society could not be accomplished by the violent destruction of the current society, because violence can only give rise to new violence. The only way, according to Nietzsche, is to revive the ideal of a free strong personality, above all to place its sovereignty trampled upon by religion.

“The “death of God” itself is only a dramatized depiction of a certain fact of our spiritual biography. God is eliminated as the personification of those values that are now done away with"

Bibliography

1. "Anxiety of the Spirit", M.: Knowledge, series "Philosophy and Life" No. 3/1992

2. "Friedrich Nietzsche and Russian religious philosophy" in two volumes / comp.

Voyskaya I.T., Minsk, 1996

3. Deleuze J. "The Secret of Ariadne" - Questions of Philosophy, No. 4 / 1993

4. Dudkin V.V. "Dostoevsky and Nietzsche (the problem of man)", - Petrozavodsk,

5. Kuchevsky V.B. "Philosophy of Nihilism Friedrich Nietzsche", 1996.- 166 p.

6. Nemirovskaya A.Z. Nietzsche: morality "beyond good and evil"

M.: Knowledge, series "Ethics" No. 6/1991

7. Novikov A. “Thus spoke Friedrich Nietzsche” - Aurora, No. 11-12 / 1992

8. Patrushev A.I. "The Life and Drama of Friedrich Nietzsche" No. 5/1993

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" Philosophy of life" F.Nietzsche. Criticism of Christian morality

Friedrich Nietzsche (1844-1900)

His philosophy is the philosophy of life, which was inspired by Darwin's theory of the evolution of animals and plants. He sharply and originally reflected the drama and contradiction of the era of transition from classical philosophy to modern philosophy.

We single out three stages of his work.

The first stage took place within the framework of understanding the ideas of antiquity, the work of Schopenhauer. During this period, "The Birth of Tragedy from the Spirit of Music", "Philosophy in the Tragic Age of Greece", "Untimely Reflections" were written.

The second period marks a break with the previous philosophical tradition - "Human, too human".

In the third stage, "Thus Spoke Zarathustra", "Beyond Good and Evil" are created.

Key Ideas:

Reassessment of all values, the critical idea of breaking and destroying obsolete moral (mainly Christian) values and replacing them with new ones, proclaimed in the teachings of Nietzsche. Morality - "the sum of the conditions for the preservation of poor, semi-successful or completely unsuccessful species of man." He criticizes all philosophy, starting with Socrates, and its inherent rationalism, idealism and the moral origin of all philosophical judgments. Introduces the philosophy of the category "value" into Europe. He considers philosophy itself to be value thinking, and the question of value is more important for him than the question of the truth of knowledge. Nietzsche introduced the concept of nihilism - the highest values lose their value. How does this happen? Gradually, says Nietzsche, there is a realization that in the world there is no certain" goals" , the achievement of which the whole world is concerned about, there is no" unity" , no truth. With the help of these concepts, man considered himself the meaning and measure of the values of all things, "he created such a whole in order to be able to believe in his own value." And this world is shattered. No truth, no morality, no God. Higilism" weak" - it's decay and decay. Radical nihilism, nihilism" strong" - this is the path of absolute authorship - the creation of a new morality, a new person. Reassessment of values involves the transition from love to neighbor to love to" distant" . Love to" distant" - this is creative love, this is not a mitigation of the current manifestations of evil, but a change in the very principles of life. This love takes the form of a struggle with the people of today, love is accompanied by contempt, alienation of the neighbor. This is love for" idea" man, to man, what he can be. The program of "reassessment" includes the revision of human happiness. Man does not have to be happy, he has to be free. Immoralism is not a denial of morality, it is an increase in the responsibility of a person for himself and for all of humanity.

"Will to power"- a fundamental ontological concept. "I have a will and act, and therefore I live." A person who has become the master of nature, the master of his own wildness, represents a colossal amount of power. " Life is only a means to something: it is an expression of the forms of growth of power" . Self-satisfied human subjectivity imagined itself to be the master of the world, encountering no resistance anywhere in its own created world. There are no two worlds - the world in itself and the world for us, there is one world - the world of life, struggle and defeat. Life for Nietzsche is between nature and culture. To live means to be other than nature, not subject to either natural or human necessity. Life as a person's realization of the "will to power" is the sphere of the creation of meaning, it is beyond life, devoid of normativity.

The idea of a superman, arising from the concept of the growth of the will to power, the theory of overcoming all the negative qualities of man and bringing him closer to the ideal of the Superman - the creator and bearer of new values and new morality. New values - the ability to reassess values, spiritual creativity, full concentration of the will to power, self-improvement

Idea" eternal return". The moral meaning of the eternal return lies in the ongoing responsibility of man for what he has done, the eternal return is a symbol of eternity, inseparable from the symbol of freedom - the superman.

The pessimistic myth about the eternal return of the same thing in the world, an idea that actually puts the entire previous philosophia n to the brink of nonsense. Christian moral Nietzsche

Opponent of opposition to the true world of the empirical world.

At the heart of morality, he sees the desire (often unconscious) of physiologically weak individuals to dominate strong and healthy ones. An appeal to reason and truth is a substitute for physical violence, a way for one will to dominate another.

Links the criticism of metaphysics with the criticism of its language. Emphasizes the incommensurability of the categorical scheme of describing the world to the real state of affairs, hence the inability of language, and therefore of thinking, to present any knowledge, regardless of language or thinking. Beliefs in the falsifying nature of language and thinking lead him to think about the dominant role of action and will. All universal and necessary truths, etc. just lucky finds in the struggle for life and power. All concepts are determined by utility within the framework of the transcendental life process.

Introduced concept" generic subject", whose interests and goals are hidden from the individual. For him, the prejudices of the mind and the form of life are a priori and compulsory, he cannot but follow them. Hence the fatalistic idea of the eternal return of the same delusions, wars, illusions. The idea is opposed to this superman, the need (including through education and selection) to overcome the properties of human nature, for example, the structure of sensuality.

Nietzsche chooses reason, science, morality, the Christian religion as the object of criticism. He acts as a militant anti-democrat, from his point of view, the elite are strong and militant people. Most of the population are inferior, inferior, which can be completed with the help of war.

Nietzsche says that reason imagines itself to be the master of the world, of nature, only the thirst for life, which must be combined with the will of power, has meaning. Nietzsche has a negative attitude towards the Christian religion, tk. she preached the equality of all before God, compassion, tolerance, following the commandments of I.Kh., which made Europe weak and not opposed to Asia and Africa. Nietzsche's ideal is the despot artist.

Nietzsche is hostile to women. "Women are cats and birds, at best cows. A man should be brought up as a warrior, and a woman for his inspiration, and a man should go to a woman with a whip."

But Nietzsche also has interesting provisions that relate to the revision of moral values by society, he stands for honesty, health, etc., for people's desire for art.

Criticism of Christian morality

If in the first period of creativity, the problem of cultural values interested Nietzsche mainly from an aesthetic point of view, then in the second period he focuses his main attention on the analysis of ethical norms and assessments, their essence and origin. During this period, a style of presentation specific to the philosopher was developed: from now on, his books no longer resemble scientific treatises, they are compositionally and thematically designed collections of aphorisms.

"Morality," writes Nietzsche, "is, in the most immediate way, a means of protecting society from disintegration." First of all, a system of coercion must appear, forcing the individual to coordinate his personal opinions and interests with public ones. This mechanism operates most successfully if coercion takes the anonymous form of custom, when public authority is gradually established through the system of education and training. In this case, loyalty can become "second nature", be demonstrated voluntarily and even bring pleasure. Morality becomes an internal property and a means of self-control by a person of his behavior as the social organism improves.

Such reasoning, it would seem, should suggest that Nietzsche is a supporter of utilitarianism. In fact, his position is not so unambiguous. Thus, he speaks of a "double prehistory" of the concepts of good and evil. developing this idea in later writings. In the book "Beyond Good and Evil" he puts forward the doctrine of two main types of morality: "the morality of masters and the morality of slaves." In all developed civilizations they are mixed, elements of both can be found literally in the same person. But to distinguish between them, according to Nietzsche, it is necessary.

In master morality, or aristocratic morality, "good" and "evil" are equivalent to the concepts of "noble" and "contemptible" and refer not so much to the actions of people as to the people themselves who perform these actions. In slave morality, the meaning of the basic ethical categories depends on what is useful, what serves to maintain order in a society that defends the interests of spiritually and physically weak individuals. Such qualities as compassion, good-heartedness and modesty are considered as virtues, while at the same time, the properties that strong and independent individuals display are considered dangerous, and therefore "evil".

These ideas are presented in the book "The Genealogy of Morals", where Nietzsche makes extensive use of the concept of revenge (ressentiment). The highest type of man, in his opinion, creates his values from an excess of vitality. The weak and powerless are afraid of such people, they seek to curb and tame them, to suppress them with their numbers, imposing "herd values" as absolute ones. Of course, such vindictiveness is not openly recognized and, perhaps, not even recognized by the "crowd" as an incentive, however, it acts, finding both direct and roundabout ways, and indirect expressions. All this brings to light the sophisticated "moral psychologist" that Nietzsche considers himself to be.

So, in the history of morality, according to Nietzsche, two main ethical positions are fighting each other. From the point of view of a higher type of people, they can coexist. This is possible if the "crowd", incapable of anything sublime, will practice "slave-killing" exclusively among themselves. But she, Nietzsche emphasizes, will never confine herself to this and will not renounce her universalist pretensions. Moreover, at least in the history of the West, "slave morality" had and still has every chance of success. This, for example, is evidenced by the spread of Christianity. Nietzsche does not completely deny any value of Christian morality, recognizing that it has made the human inner world more refined. However, he sees in it an expression of vindictiveness characteristic of the herd instinct, or "slave morality." Nietzsche sees the same embodiment of vindictiveness in the democratic and socialist movements, considering them a derivative form of Christian ideology.

Nietzsche believes that the ideal of universal, unified and absolute morality must be discarded, since it leads life to decline, and humanity to degeneration. Its place must be taken by a gradation of ranks, degrees of different types of morality. Let the “herd” remain committed to its value system, Nietzsche argues, provided that it is deprived of the right to impose it on people of the “higher type”.

When Nietzsche speaks of the need to become “beyond good and evil,” this must be understood as a call to overcome the so-called slave morality, which, from his point of view, puts everyone on the same level, loves and protects mediocrity, and prevents the rise of the human type. He does not mean, as is sometimes claimed, complete indifference to the nature of values and the abolition of all moral criteria. This would be suicidal for the average person. Only those who belong to the highest type can, without prejudice to themselves, become "beyond" the understandings of good and evil imposed by society, for these individuals themselves are the bearers of the moral law and do not need anyone's guardianship. Their free self-determination, Nietzsche believes, is the only way to a higher level of human existence, to the superman (Ubermensch).

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