Nietzsche and Gibson, Locke and Pasolini

Chris,

I appreciated your willingness to acknowledge the moral power of religious faith, specifically (in this case) the Christian doctrine that we are all equal members in the family of God. But that doctrine only works, only makes sense, in the context of redemption, in the light of God’s saving work. Those who have lost both familiarity with and (frankly) interest in the Christian story might wonder why we can’t just emphasize the “good parts” (the loving, “liberal” message of commonality) and dump the “bad parts” (the sense of sin and “indebtedness” which, you say, leads to “a mixture of guilt, worthlessness and rage”). But Nietzsche was wiser than most critics of Christianity, in that he saw that the two were complementary, and detested them both. Look around. We are manifestly not equal, not the same. There are sinners and saints, strangers and intimates, loving people and selfish people, people advantaged in every possible way and people disadvantaged in every possible way, givers and abusers, fools and geniuses. In other words, as the ancient prophets emphasized again and again, we are sundered by sin; we are not one. The ONLY way for common concern to truly take root in the human heart is for something (or Someone) to enter into history, break up or break off all the ways in which human beings turn against (or are turned against) one another, and make a new arrangement–a new testament, if you will. (Sounds like Rousseau’s lawgiver and the manifesttation of the general will, I know–but Rousseau’s project was in many ways all about trying to recreate the Christian world without all that messy believing.)

Too many people accept too easily Nietzsche’s rather harsh psychology of morality. Indebtedness doesn’t have to–doesn’t even usually, I think–produce resentment; only Freudian absolutists really believe that all kids must resent their parents. Submission and dependency are arguably also what allow you to view others through non-self-interested eyes; you recognize others as others, and not a source of advantage for oneself. Which means, paradoxically (Rousseau again!), more autonomy. As the man said, the truth shall make you free.

Sorry for the sermon. I promise it won’t happen again.

Ha, funny you should mention it. I was thinking as I read the first half of the post, ‘Yes, I know, right, that’s what I’m planning to get to next – I need to acknowledge the other side of the coin.’ Then read on and was startled/amused to find you were thinking the same thing.

It’s on the schedule.

Gibson’s film is not a reminder of religion at its worst. In fact, it’s permeated with an emphasis on compassion for the suffering of others. One of the most striking –and much unremarked-on — things about the film is how much help Jesus receives from others (his family and friends accompany him the entire way, Simon helps carry the cross, Veronica wipes his face, etc.), and how much their assistance seems to matter. And there is no expression of rage or worthlessness or desire for revenge on the part of Jesus’ followers in the film (well, excepting Peter, but then he betrays his friend three times).

I also think that, great as Nietzsche is, relying him as an expert on Christianity is perhaps not the best idea. More practically, at the very least, Chris, you should refrain from writing about a movie — and comparing it to another movie, no less — before having seen it.

Keef,

Having not seen The Passion, I’ve no intention of defending Gibson’s movie. I don’t know what its real (or unintended) message is. But there’s a lot loaded into what it means to “communicate” a message. How does that parent say “I love you and enjoy your company”? Through words and deeds. Which words and deeds? Ones made without sacrifice, without cost? That communicates convenience, not love. To the extent that certain versions of the Christian story emphasize a kind of finger-pointing, blood-on-one’s-own-hands fault-finding (“look what I made God have to go through for me!”)–a recognition which is in actuality quite self-centered–so much the worse for such versions. (Martyrdom can also be a species of pride.) But the message itself involves no such finger-pointing; it makes one cognizant of the costs involved in fully loving, fully reconciling oneself to another human being, without making those costs into a resentful weapon to beat oneself or others with.

If Steve’s right (and I fully concur with his second point re: Nietzsche, by the way), then it appears Gibson shows a fair number of people in the movie who don’t take the suffering of Jesus as a rebuke or a burden; instead, they just suffer and serve along with Him. It is that kind of humility, I think, which is necessary for the more “rational” moral or ethical message of commonality to take hold. I sincerely question the degree one could exist without the other.

“Great post and discussion, and the second time in as many weeks I’ve sat down at the computer with a lecture to write, procrastinated by logging on to CT, and found a post about the exact topic I need to write a lecture about!”

Yeah, same here – not a lecture to write, but a bit of writing to write. All the more helpful in disagreeing with me in particular, and on a point I was just rolling up my sleeves to concede anyway.

I agree with Chris that it’s the motivation that’s the difference. I think secular morality is in fact vastly better at thinking about moral issues, but I can’t pretend it’s as good at motivating it.

But on the other hand, of course, religion is also good at motivating horrible morality. One would need an awful lot of data and means of analyzing it to figure out how it all balances out. Does religion motivate more compassion and generosity than cruelty and oppression? Or vice versa. I sure don’t know.

As to the issue of a wholely secular basis of morality and ethics, such ethics are usually conceived on the basis of the notion of personal autonomy. Now autonomy, in various guises, is a notion that permeates modern Western culture and I think it is important to recognize that the ideal of autonomy has its origins, at least in the historical sense, in Greek metaphysics. Metaphysics begins in the recognition of the sheer transcendence of being, beyond anything one can say or do about it, that is, the independence of the world and its availability and amenability to a rational implicature that structures our understanding of it. But for there to be such an understanding, there must be one who understands and thus, reflexively, as it were, such a rational knower takes on the independence of the independent world that is known, rising above enmeshment in particularities and separating himself from the world by standing over against it. Such a rational knower is a superior soul, in contrast to the demotic mythically-enmeshed man, who remains tied to the world and sacrifices himself to it. But in such separation, there is trauma, as well,- (together with those Platonic impassibilities)- and “autonomy”, literally self-law, amounts to an effort to deal with and compensate for this trauma. (Much of what is extreme in Plato amounts to animadversions against this trauma.) Transferred onto the domain of ethics, the emphasis falls on human action and action is defined as voluntary or “free” precisely insofar as it masters and controls causality, which, of course, requires self-mastery as well. The goal of ethics becomes the preservation of this freedom defined as autonomy at all costs.

Now it is an unexpungible and irremissible fact that each person is existentially separate from each and every other person. Equally, as a language-bearing being, each human being is “free” and exists fundamentally in relation to at least some other such persons. And from this follows that all human action is directly or indirectly interaction. I take it that the matter of ethics concerns not just the permissibility of our actions, but our relations with other similarly separate persons as others. From this perspective, it is questionable whether the notion of autonomy is not an ideologization of the existential fact of separateness, one that perhaps blinds us to the relation to the other that is at stake in the ethical matter.

Now ethical norms, being counterfactuals, by definition do not “exist”. But, insofar as they are relevant, I think that they are anchored at the level of recognitions between persons- or failures of recognition. And this level, whether or not it is deemed “real”, is not amenable to objectifying modes and methods of thinking. And in this I think one can see something of the failure of projects of rational, systematic, meta-ethically grounded ethical theories. Kantian ethics is not just formalistic, but legalistic, as well. It is as if it takes the stand-point of a third party judging a matter between two disputing parties. And it is based on a postulation of an abstract, purely intellectual respect for the other, for the “abstract” humanity in each human being. (“Treat no man as a mere means to an end, but *also* as an end in himself.”) I think it is fair to say that such an abstract respect may lead to quite other conclusions or prescriptions than a concrete encounter and recognition of the other in his vulnerability. (We all want hold others morally accountable and “take them to task”. I think this is part of the reason Nietzsche shifted the ground to the “will-to-power”.) The attempt to extend the reign of autonomy to the entire ultimate “kingdom of ends” may in fact preclude actual recognition and the kind of accountability and responsibility that it avails. (I realize there is much more to Kant than this, especially his crucial recognition of the “de-ontic” nature of morality, but I hope I have not bowlderized him too badly.) Which would return us to the question of whether we do, in fact, draw much of our moral/ethical conceptions, in all their bewildering inconsistency, from inherited traditions, especially religious ones.

I am reminded again what a devilishly sharp thinker Nietzsche was, (though I find people who endlessly quote him unoriginal, since he obviously wrote to be quoted and read at length he tends to become tiresomely vitriolic). As for him being especially dangerous, though I think he would have taken that as a compliment, I think Nietzsche needs to be read in relation to Kant, as polemically blurting out all those half-truths that are repressed in the overweening, four-square conception of reason constructed by Kant. (The “will-to-power” is the synthetic unity of apperception, the “uebermensch”, who overcomes “man”, is the transcendental ego, and “eternal recurrance” is the categorical imperative gone beserk.) The “death of God” does not just refer to the decline of religion, but also to the concommitant loss of the logical forms of unity that the (transcendental) ego imposes on the world. In this, he poses the deeper challenge.

As for Christianity itself and what sort of “redemption” it offers, I thought that the core notion of Christian religion was the imitation of Christ, with the understanding that this was also an impossible injunction, since the fellow was said to be divine, after all. In this, the figure of Jesus Christ could be compared with the Buddha, though with a conception of the world that was somewhat different in its complexion and implicature. In particular, the believer/adherent attains “redemption” from the corruption, guilt and suffering of the world only by passing through it rather than passing out of it.

A trivial point, but: whatever you think of the Gibson film, don’t download it from bittorrent and watch it at home. Not because you’ll be immoral, but because this is a film that should be seen on the big screen.

I would rather believe that we are all brothers and sisters because of our genetic similarities.

I would rather do good to others for the betterment of the overall conscious existence. If the overall conscious existence is better off, I am better off too. This may sound a bit self-centered; however, religious morality is also self-centered (fear of sin and going to hell). (Not that I see anything wrong with self-centered morality.) The difference is that we have yet to see anyone who has sinned and gone to hell.