Abstract
Friedrich Nietzsche associated philosophical asceticism with “hatred of the human, and even more of the animal, and more still of the material”: with aversion to life. Given the prevalent view that philosophy is anthropocentric and idealizes the human, Nietzsche’s remark about philosophical hatred of the human is unexpected. In this paper, I investigate what Nietzsche’s remark implies for philosophical claims of human uniqueness. What is the meaning of the opposition between human and animal, if the opposition somehow expresses hatred also of the human? The investigation leads to an inquiry into metaphysics as an intellectual kind of magic, and into the notion of “power over life” as it connects to intellectual asceticism. Finally, I relate Nietzsche’s remarks on ascetic ideals to Donna Haraway’s questioning of the Anthropocene as a story to think with. I propose that the dualism of the story, the idea of a conflict between Humanity and Nature, can be seen as a feature of the metaphysical attitude that life is to be mastered through escaping from it into the purity of thinking.
Highlights
This paper is about power, but not about ordinary power in life
My starting point is this remark by Friedrich Nietzsche on ascetic ideals in philosophy: We can no longer conceal from ourselves what is expressed by all that willing which has taken its direction from the ascetic ideal: this hatred of the human, and even more of the animal, and more still of the material [...]. (Nietzsche 1969: 162)
Nietzsche’s remark gives rise to a problem that will drive my investigation: What is the meaning of the philosophical opposition between human and animal, if the opposition somehow expresses hatred of the human? Here is what I will do: First, I summarize Nietzsche’s remarks on ascetic ideals in philosophy
Summary
This paper is about power, but not about ordinary power in life. It is about more transcendent power over life itself, which may appear achievable if we discipline ourselves intellectually. They handled their self-doubt as uncomfortable questioners of the society to which they belonged by presenting their asceticism as “intellectual rigor”, through which morality could be secured rather than problematized They sought social status by identifying philosophy with its terrifying ascetic disguise: as if denying the world, as if hating life and doubting the senses, constituted the philosophical attitude as such. I think, in suggesting that philosophy itself has conditions as a human activity – forms of asceticism – that shaped universal claims, and the philosophical attitude When philosophers exaggerated these instrumental conditions as the highest virtues, they deformed “the way of philosophy” and philosophy’s attitude to life, which is not necessarily unloving. How does it relate to philosophical claims of human uniqueness and to aspirations to intellectual power over life?
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