Nietzsche’s Morgenröte series of entries continues in the chronological order.
***
By the same token as we may
applaud one person of convictions, but abhor another person of convictions,
depending on what these convictions are, what their extent is, and how the
person in a position of power is using or abusing them in his or her life, we
can say the very same thing about the correlation between social customs and a
person’s individuality. We should know that it is improper to elevate any
particular custom to the lofty status of an object of religious veneration just
because it dates back several centuries. But, on the other hand, it is equally
wrong to dismiss customs and traditions on the grounds of their ancient origin,
as if they have automatically been outdated by the progress of the times. Customs
and traditions are always the lynchpins of civilizations and national cultures.
Remove them, and the fast-spinning wheels of progress will surely come off our
chariot, causing it to overturn, plunging the riders into a total mess.
Looking at it from the
individual’s perspective, an iconoclastic person who breaks up every idol of
the past ought to be judged by the amount of harm he perpetrates. An
independent thinker who has assumed the role of a gadfly on the body of his
society must be allowed and welcomed to pursue his vocation, as we ought to
recognize that even his bitterest criticism serves only as a tonic to
everything which is healthy in a society, but it turns into a necessary
life-saving remedy in each case when it addresses an actual malady. Nietzsche
was definitely one of the largest gadflies humanity had ever been blessed with.
But, on the other hand, an authoritarian person in a position of great power
can do society great harm by debunking traditions, and by destroying great
symbols by the unbridled force of his anathema, like Khrushchev did it to the
Stalin symbol in 1956, undermining the whole Soviet edifice, which, however,
would hold off its subsequent inevitable collapse for another thirty-five
years, but then, eventually, caved in…
This discussion is highly
pertinent to our reading of the following passages in Nietzsche’s Morgenröte 9
and 16, published in 1881, and given here in excerpts:
Concept
of morality of custom. In comparison with the present mode of life of whole
millennia of mankind, we, present-day men, live in a very immoral age. The
power of custom is astonishingly enfeebled, and the moral sense so rarefied and
lofty, that it may be described as having more or less evaporated. That is why
the basic insights into the origin of morality are so difficult for us,
latecomers, and, even having acquired them, we find it impossible to enunciate
them, because they sound so uncouth, or because they appear to slander
morality! This is, for example, already the case with the following chief
proposition: morality is nothing other (ergo no more) than obedience to
customs, of whatever kind they may be. However, customs are the traditional way
of behaving and evaluating. In things in which no tradition commands, there is
no morality; and the less life is determined by tradition, the smaller is the
circle of morality. The free human being is immoral, because in all things he
is determined to depend upon himself, and not upon a tradition: in all the
original conditions of mankind, “evil” signifies the same as “individual,”
“free,” “capricious,” “unusual,” "unforeseen,” “incalculable”… Judged in
terms of these standards, if an action is performed not because tradition
commands it, but for another motive (because of its usefulness to the
individual, for example) even indeed for precisely the motives which once
founded the tradition, it is called immoral and it is felt to be so by him who
has performed it: because it has not been performed in obedience to tradition.
What is tradition? A higher authority, which one obeys, not because it commands
what is useful to us, but because it commands. What distinguishes this feeling
in the presence of tradition from the general feeling of fear? It is the fear
in the presence of a higher intellect that here commands, of an
incomprehensible and indefinite power, something more than personal: there is
superstition in this fear. Originally, all education, care of health, marriage,
cure of sickness, agriculture, war, speech and silence, traffic with one
another, and with the gods, belonged within the domain of morality: they
demanded that one observe prescriptions without thinking of oneself as an
individual. Originally, therefore, everything was custom, and whoever wanted to
elevate himself above it had to become a lawgiver and a medicine man, a kind of
demigod: that is to say, he had to make customs—a dreadful, mortally dangerous
thing!… Those moralists who, following in the footsteps of Socrates, offer the
individual a morality of self-control and temperance as a means to his
advantage, as his personal key to happiness, are the exceptions, and if it
seems otherwise to us it is because we have been brought up in their
aftereffect: they all take a new path under the highest disapprobation of all
advocates of the morality of custom— they cut themselves off from the
community, as immoral men, and are in the profoundest sense evil. Thus, to a
virtuous Roman of old, every Christian who considered first of all his own
salvation appeared evil, each individual action, each individual mode of
thought arouses dread ----it is impossible to compute what precisely the rarer,
more original spirits in the whole course of history have had to suffer through
being felt as evil and dangerous,---- indeed, through feeling themselves to be
so. Under the dominion of the morality of custom, originality of every kind has
acquired a bad conscience, and the sky above the best men is for this reason to
this very moment gloomier than it need be. (9)
First
proposition of civilization.--- Among barbarous peoples there is a species of
customs, whose purpose is custom in general: minute and fundamentally
superfluous stipulations, which, however, keep continually in the consciousness
the constant proximity of custom, the perpetual compulsion to practice customs:
so as to strengthen the mighty proposition, with which civilization begins: any
custom is better than no custom. (16)
This last condition of any
emerging civilization is perfectly reasonable and understandable: Any custom
is better than no custom, because without customs and traditions (religion
is, of course, a part of this) there is nothing else to hold together, both
horizontally and vertically, the complex living organism, which we call a
civilization, a culture, a nation. The most recent history of the breakup of
countries and the proliferation of new nations in large numbers, with others
striving to achieve complete autonomy, if not full independence, teaches us
that common language and common borders alone do not constitute a national
entity, but there is only one glue which can hold them together as one, which
are their common traditions, legends, practices, rituals, customs, and such.
As for the individualities of
particular persons, especially exceptional persons, they ought to recognize the
cohesiveness of national customs, and respect them, while their nation as a
whole ought to recognize their exceptionality, protect them, like a good
gardener protects a rare flower, and honor them as the best of what any nation,
great or small, can offer to its posterity, and to the world at large.
Only such mutual recognition and
respect constitutes national morality, any lack of it is immoral.
No comments:
Post a Comment