In reading Nietzsche's "Beyond Good and Evil", a childhood memory recently surfaced in which, as an eight-year old boy, I was allowed to attend a Baptist Revival with some neighbors who were friends of my parents.
I distinctly remember the intense fear that welled up in my heart as I watched beads of sweat form on the brow of the preacher who delivered his frightening ultimatum to the congregation with all the Puritan flair of a Jonathan Edwards hellfire sermon. Upon deliverance of his message, the exhausted preacher beseeched the unsaved souls of the congregation to walk the aisle and let Jesus deliver them from an eternity of suffering. Being almost frightened to tears at the prospect of eternal flames licking at my flesh, I immediately sprang from my pew and kneeled at the altar to beg Jesus to deliver me from this unthinkable damnation.
After the services were complete and the last refrain of "I Come" was played on the organ, I was a superstar as the youngest member of the congregation to have walked the aisle. I was bombarded by hugs and kisses of acceptance, and my shirt was stained from the tears of pious old women. I was no longer just a little dogie. Fear had mothered this little calf into the mentality and morality of "the herd". I was too young, at the time, to realize that the stage had been set.
My mother could not have been happier with the news that the neighbors brought them about my brave trek to salvation, but my father accepted the news with indifference as he aimlessly chewed his cud in the corner of the living room. My mother and the neighbors, however, were flitting about in anxious anticipation of my growing three additional stomachs. I did not discover Nietzsche until much later in life, but thanks to ideas that reflect some of his philosophical tenets, I was able to spit out my cud and open my mind to new possibilities.
There is no doubt that the members of my boyhood revival accepted God as absolute truth and perfection. The idea of an ultimate truth echoes throughout the history of philosophy, from Plato's forms to the Christian ideal of God and Heaven. No matter what the tradition, the idea of ultimate truth had not been questioned...until Nietzsche.
Nietzsche asks for the first time, "From where did our desire for truth come?" Up to now, every philosophical tradition was born on the notion of a desire to believe in a realm where there is not chaos, but order; not constant change, but immutability. Nietzsche declares that these are imaginary realms and that these ideas are not perceptions of something that really exists, but desperate attempts to invent a place where we know for certain that all our beliefs are true.
Why have we done this?
He poses the theory that maybe the appearance or the idea of absolute knowledge or truth is, itself, the illusion-not our imperfect perception of temporal knowledge. What if the unstable is actually the foundation of the stable? Nietzsche wants us to go back to the starting gate and reappraise our assumptions and, at the very least, ask:
"Where did they come from?"
Nietzsche offers his own theory about where our biased thinking originated. He theorizes that there are two types of morality: Master morality and Slave morality.
He further asserts that our desire for ultimate truth was inspired by the Slave morality. People of the Master morality are not truth-seekers. They derive meaning from life through worldly things. The Master morality is composed of conquering, aggressive people who create their own values. Alexander the Great would be an example of the Master morality. He conquered the entire world, that was known at the time, and be-damned to anyone who got in his way.
The Slave morality, on the other hand, derives meaning from life by denying worldly things. Nietzsche believes that the Slave morality arose because slaves could not enjoy the spoils of the Master morality, so they invented God and a realm of ultimate truth in order to give their lives meaning. People of the Slave morality believe that by believing that the world we live in is an illusion, the "true" realm will be their ultimate reward. Nietzsche believed that the problem in later thinking was that society had inherited the Slave morality. Where, then, does Nietzsche want to lead us?
A point to be considered is that if Nietzsche's ideal of the Master morality is accepted, we also have to accept exploitation as a necessary means of attaining it. Slave morality teaches us that exploitation is evil, but Nietzsche wants us to understand that exploitation is imperative for life, so we must come to believe that it is not evil. But once again: Where does Nietzsche want to lead us?
We have already established that he believes our desire for truth is based on an unstable foundation. With that being the case, where can pursuit of truth ultimately lead but to nihilism? But in nihilism, life has no meaning, so Nietzsche wants to lead us beyond nihilism...beyond good and evil. He wants us to see life for what it is; an endless bombardment of fictions and games. The sooner we accept this, the sooner that we can move beyond good and evil and find meaning in our lives. This would be a means of asserting the Master morality toward a new notion of self-mastery, without necessarily having to slay kingdoms as Alexander the Great did. The real question for us, then, is about the standard against which "greatness" is to be measured. That's a tough one.
Be that as it may, Nietzsche is saying that in order to fix the herd mentality, we must, once again, strive for greatness (whatever that may be) and in doing so, we must make some sacrifices. While warmongering conquests may not be the answer for individuals, I believe that necessary sacrifices can begin to be identified by thinking in terms of long-term goals instead of the current societal mindset of instant gratification. Whether these sacrifices would fall within the bounds of current moral standards is unclear, but also unimportant if the Master morality is the goal.
While I do not claim to have all the answers about how to apply Nietzsche's philosophy in our daily lives (or whether we even should) I do believe that being introduced to his new brand of philosophy helped to free me from the chains of the repressive, narrow-minded, dogmatic silliness of religious bondage. He may not have been right about everything but, as I understand him, his philosophy teaches us to aspire to greatness and to celebrate life in the world we live in, not the imaginary world of "perfection". In this new world, little boys would no longer be frightened into the herd by hellfire sermons.
Rick Huffman is a National long-haul driver who spent 20 years in the broadcasting industry before becoming a trucker. He describes the career change as, "...the best decision I ever made on one day, and the worst one I ever made on the next."
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