Sympathy for Nietzsche: On Mummification and History
A million years ago, when we were earnest, we watched The Matrix. In a key early scene, Neo stores his renegade hacker disks in a copy of Baudrillard’s Simulacra and Simulation, in particular, in the chapter entitled “On Nihilism.” There were read:
I am a nihilist. I observe, I accept, I assume the immense process of the destruction of appearances (and of the seduction of appearances) in the service of meaning (representation, history, criticism, etc.) that is the fundamental fact of the nineteenth century. […] I observe, I accept, I assume, I analyze the second revolution, that of the twentieth century, that of postmodernity, which is the immense process of the destruction of meaning, equal to the earlier destruction of appearances.
In the curious amalgam of Plato, Descartes, and Buddhism that is the Wachowski brothers’ imagination, it’s hard to know exactly what to do with this reference. Is Neo going to be liberated from such nihilism, or by it?
I have always had a similarly ambiguous relationship to Nietzsche’s Twilight of the Idols. If I have to pick between Plato and Nietzsche, there’s a part of me that throws my lot in with Nietzsche, and for theological reasons.
“Reason” in Philosophy
Twilight is another one of Nietzsche’s anti-Platonic tracts. What Socrates bequeathed to us, he fears, is a hatred of life. One of the symptoms is a Platonic preference for being over becoming. This is the symptom of decadence and decay, Nietzsche says. The stench of modernity stems from an ancient rot. Logic is the revenge of the rabble.
Philosophy’s failure to truly account for history is both a symptom and cause, Nietzsche claims. Here’s a key paragraph to also remind us of what philosophical writing can be:
You ask me what’s idiosyncratic about philosophers? … There is, for instance, their lack of a sense of history, their hatred for the very notion of becoming, their Egyptianism. They think they’re honoring a thing if they de-historicize it, see it sub specie aeterni–if they make a mummy out of it. Everything that philosophers have handled, for thousands of years now, has been conceptual mummies; nothing real escaped their hands alive. They kill and stuff whatever they worship, these gentlemen who idolize concepts–they endanger life of whatever they worship. From them, death, change, and age, like reproduction and growth, are objections–refutations, even. Whatever is does not become; whatever becomes is not…
The metaphysician is a mortician; Socrates’ “intelligible” world is where becoming–life–goes to die. Thus Nietzsche concludes: “The ‘apparent’ world is the only world: the ‘true world’ is just added to it by a lie…”
How the “True World” Finally Became a Fiction
As a Christian, I’m supposed to be resistant to this Nietzschean take. After all, Nietzsche posits a straight line from Platonism to Christianity. “Dividing the world into a ‘true’ and an ‘apparent’ world, whether in the style of Christianity or in the style of Kant (a sneaky Christian to the end), is merely a move inspired by décadence–a symptom of declining life…”
Then why am I so sympathetic?
In “How the ‘True World’ Finally Became a Fiction,” Nietzsche offers a “History of an Error,” namely, the error of imagining or positing a world that is not seen and calling such “the real world.” But as we have already seen, Nietzsche thinks that this “real” or “true” world is only a lie, that the “apparent world” is the only true world. Hence for N., the “true” world is only an illusion. This passage gives us a history of how humanity has supposedly overcome that illusion.
- The first stage is Platonic: the true world can be attained by the wise or virtuous. But it can be attained.
- The second stage is (so-called) Christian: this true world cannot be attained in the here-and-now, but attainment is promised in the future to the sinner who does penance. So the true world is beginning to slip out of our grasp.
- The third stage is Kantian: the true world can never be attained or seen, but it nevertheless functions as both a regulative ideal and a consolation. While it cannot be seen or attained, it must be posited.
- The fourth stage is positivist: This is the beginning of coming-of-age, “the first yawnings of reason”: if the true world is unattainable and unattained, then it is also unknown. If it is unknown, then it can neither obligate or console us. What good is the whole idea, then?
- The fifth stage is a new day: Having asked the last question, the “true world” is seen to have no use anymore and is done away with. “Bright day; breakfast; return of bon sens and cheerfulness; Plato blushes; pandemonium of all free spirits.”
- The sixth stage is Zarathustrian: having abolished the notion of the “true world,” we finally do away with even the notion of the “apparent world,” since without a “reality,” we cannot speak of “appearances.” We are left only with simulacra.
This narrative, of course, is just a tad too tidy; to contest it with a thousand footnotes of qualification would be something of a category mistake.
Instead, the question I find myself asking is: Whence my sympathy? Why does Nietzsche’s history of an error resonate as true?
I think it’s because I’m sympathetic to his critique of philosophy’s penchant for mummification. There is something about a long history of conceptualization that is a de-historicizing of the human condition, an idealism that freezes what moves and pulses. Keep your Forms; I’ll take the bodies that dance, even as they are bent and broken and curve towards the earth that will receive them again.
I think that’s why I also disagree with a key turn in this history of an error at stage 2. Nietzsche imagines Christian eschatology as just a kind of “horizontalization” of Plato’s intelligible world–the what was the “real” but invisible world of the Forms becomes an “eternity” posited in the future. But that construal is its own error. Christian eschatology is not Platonic escape from becoming; it is the hope of Resurrection which one might imagine as an eternal becoming, a celebration of life precisely because it posits a future filled with bodies. “Let it be” is the fiat, not of stasis, but God becoming human, reaffirming that becoming bodies are sacred.
New Book: Available for Pre-Order
A little announcement: my new book, The Nicene Option: An Incarnational Phenomenology will release this summer and is now available for pre-order from Baylor University Press (and other booksellers). If you use code 17FALL21 when you order at baylorpress.com you’ll get 20% off and free US shipping. I’ll share more about the book in the coming weeks, but wanted to give you a heads-up.