Nietzsche on Humanism

Epicurean Focus

Friedrich Nietzsche (1844–1900) is the sharpest critic of Humanism, and he was also an admirer of Epicurus. He saw that the educated Europeans of his time had given up belief in God but kept the morality that rested on that belief: universal duty, equal rights, pity and the love of mankind. These passages are his diagnosis. Epicureans need not accept Nietzsche’s whole program, with its talk of rank, war and conquest, to see that on this point his analysis is correct. Each excerpt has its own link target and a link to the printed page.

Christian Morality Without God

The key passage is the short paragraph on George Eliot, who translated Feuerbach and gave up her faith while keeping its morality: “They are rid of the Christian God and therefore think it all the more incumbent upon them to hold tight to Christian morality.” Christianity “is a system,” and Christian morality “stands or falls with the belief in God.” The famous announcement that “God is dead” comes with a warning: “we have still to overcome his shadow!” The madman asks the unbelievers in the market-place: “Shall we not ourselves have to become Gods, merely to seem worthy of it?”

The Absolute Good

Nietzsche saw that the morality that outlived God still claims to be the only morality: “I am morality itself and nothing else is morality!” Its political form is the democratic movement, “the inheritance of the Christian movement.” He traces the doctrine of equal rights to the Christian doctrine of the immortal soul (Antichrist 43), and he attacks Kant’s impersonal duty: ““Virtue,” “Duty,” “Goodness in itself,” goodness stamped with the character of impersonality and universal validity—these things are mere mental hallucinations.” Against Kant he states a rule close to Epicurus’s: “An action stimulated by the instinct of life, is proved to be a proper action by the happiness that accompanies it.” He finds the same habit in the Stoics, who “wish to dictate your morals and ideals to Nature.” He refuses the humanitarian label for himself: “We are no humanitarians.”

Epicurus had already built an ethics without the gods’ commands. The feelings of pleasure and pain are the standard (DL X.129), and justice “never is anything in itself” but is a compact for mutual advantage (Principal Doctrine 33). That is why the Epicurean can accept Nietzsche’s diagnosis: Epicurean ethics does not rest on the God whose death Nietzsche announced.

Nietzsche on Epicurus

Nietzsche wrote of Epicurus with deep respect: “Yes, I am proud of perceiving the character of Epicurus differently from anyone else perhaps.” He saw Epicurus as the opponent of the religion of guilt and immortality that Christianity would carry to victory: “One has only to read Lucretius in order to understand what Epicurus combated,” and “to deny immortality was at that time a genuine deliverance.”

Contents

• Christian Morality Without God
  • They Are Rid of the Christian God
  • The Shadow of God
  • The Madman
• The Absolute Good and the Herd
  • I Am Morality Itself
  • Against Kant as a Moralist
  • Immortality and Equal Rights
  • We Are No Humanitarians
  • Living According to Nature
• Nietzsche on Epicurus
  • Epicurus
  • What Epicurus Combated

The Passages

Christian Morality Without God

“They Are Rid of the Christian God”

George Eliot (Marian Evans), the novelist, translated Feuerbach’s Essence of Christianity and gave up her Christian faith while keeping its morality.

Nietzsche, The Twilight of the Idols, “Skirmishes in a War with the Age” §5 (tr. A. M. Ludovici, 1911) · pp. 63–64

G. Eliot.—They are rid of the Christian God and therefore think it all the more incumbent upon them to hold tight to Christian morality: this is an English way of reasoning; but let us not take it ill in moral females à la Eliot. In England, every man who indulges in any trifling emancipation from theology, must retrieve his honour in the most terrifying manner by becoming a moral fanatic. That is how they do penance in that country.—As for us, we act differently. When we renounce the Christian faith, we abandon all right to Christian morality. This is not by any means self-evident and in defiance of English shallow-pates the point must be made ever more and more plain. Christianity is a system, a complete outlook upon the world, conceived as a whole. If its leading concept, the belief in God, is wrenched from it, the whole is destroyed; nothing vital remains in our grasp. Christianity presupposes that man does not and cannot know what is good or bad for him: the Christian believes in God who, alone, can know these things. Christian morality is a command, its origin is transcendental. It is beyond all criticism, all right to criticism; it is true only on condition that God is truth,—it stands or falls with the belief in God. If the English really believe that they know intuitively, and of their own accord, what is good and evil; if, therefore, they assert that they no longer need Christianity as a guarantee of morality, this in itself is simply the outcome of the dominion of Christian valuations, and a proof of the strength and profundity of this dominion. It only shows that the origin of English morality has been forgotten, and that its exceedingly relative right to exist is no longer felt. For Englishmen morality is not yet a problem.

The Shadow of God

Nietzsche, The Joyful Wisdom §108 (tr. Thomas Common, 1910) · p. 151

New Struggles.—After Buddha was dead people showed his shadow for centuries afterwards in a cave,—an immense frightful shadow. God is dead: but as the human race is constituted, there will perhaps be caves for millenniums yet, in which people will show his shadow,—And we—we have still to overcome his shadow!

The Madman

Nietzsche, The Joyful Wisdom §125 (tr. Thomas Common, 1910) · p. 167

The Madman.—Have you ever heard of the madman who on a bright morning lighted a lantern and ran to the market-place calling out unceasingly: “I seek God! I seek God!”—As there were many people standing about who did not believe in God, he caused a great deal of amusement. Why! is he lost? said one. Has he strayed away like a child? said another. Or does he keep himself hidden? Is he afraid of us? Has he taken a sea-voyage? Has he emigrated?—the people cried out laughingly, all in a hubbub. The insane man jumped into their midst and transfixed them with his glances. “Where is God gone?” he called out. “I mean to tell you! We have killed him,—you and I! We are all his murderers! But how have we done it? How were we able to drink up the sea? Who gave us the sponge to wipe away the whole horizon? What did we do when we loosened this earth from its sun? Whither does it now move? Whither do we move? Away from all suns? Do we not dash on unceasingly? Backwards, sideways, forwards, in all directions? Is there still an above and below? Do we not stray, as through infinite nothingness? Does not empty space breathe upon us? Has it not become colder? Does not night come on continually, darker and darker? Shall we not have to light lanterns in the morning? Do we not hear the noise of the grave-diggers who are burying God? Do we not smell the divine putrefaction?—for even Gods putrefy! God is dead! God remains dead! And we have killed him! How shall we console ourselves, the most murderous of all murderers? The holiest and the mightiest that the world has hitherto possessed, has bled to death under our knife,—who will wipe the blood from us? With what water could we cleanse ourselves? What lustrums, what sacred games shall we have to devise? Is not the magnitude of this deed too great for us? Shall we not ourselves have to become Gods, merely to seem worthy of it? […]

The Absolute Good and the Herd

“I Am Morality Itself”

Nietzsche, Beyond Good and Evil §202 (tr. Helen Zimmern, 1907) · pp. 126–127

We have found that in all the principal moral judgments, Europe has become unanimous, including likewise the countries where European influence prevails in Europe people evidently know what Socrates thought he did not know, and what the famous serpent of old once promised to teach—they “know” today what is good and evil. […] Morality in Europe at present is herding-animal morality, and therefore, as we understand the matter, only one kind of human morality, beside which, before which, and after which many other moralities, and above all higher moralities, are or should be possible. Against such a “possibility,” against such a “should be,” however, this morality defends itself with all its strength, it says obstinately and inexorably “I am morality itself and nothing else is morality!” Indeed, with the help of a religion which has humoured and flattered the sublimest desires of the herding-animal, things have reached such a point that we always find a more visible expression of this morality even in political and social arrangements: the democratic movement is the inheritance of the Christian movement.

Against Kant as a Moralist

Nietzsche, The Antichrist §11 (tr. A. M. Ludovici, 1911) · p. 136

One word more against Kant as a moralist. A virtue must be our invention, our most personal defence and need: in every other sense it is merely a danger. That which does not constitute a condition of our life, is merely harmful to it: to possess a virtue merely because one happens to respect the concept “virtue,” as Kant would have us do, is pernicious. “Virtue,” “Duty,” “Goodness in itself,” goodness stamped with the character of impersonality and universal validity—these things are mere mental hallucinations, in which decline the final devitalisation of life and Königsbergian Chinadom find expression. The most fundamental laws of preservation and growth, demand precisely the reverse, namely:—that each should discover his own virtue, his own Categorical Imperative. A nation goes to the dogs when it confounds its concept of duty with the general concept of duty. Nothing is more profoundly, more thoroughly pernicious, than every impersonal feeling of duty, than every sacrifice to the Moloch of abstraction.—Fancy no one’s having thought Kant’s Categorical Imperative dangerous to life! … The instinct of the theologist alone took it under its wing!—An action stimulated by the instinct of life, is proved to be a proper action by the happiness that accompanies it: and that nihilist with the bowels of a Christian dogmatist regarded happiness as an objection …. What is there that destroys a man more speedily than to work, think, feel, as an automaton of “duty,” without internal promptings, without a profound personal predilection, without joy? This is the recipe par excellence of decadence and even of idiocy. […]

Immortality and “Equal Rights”

Nietzsche, The Antichrist §43 (tr. A. M. Ludovici, 1911) · p. 185

When the centre of gravity of life is laid, not in life, but in a beyond—in nonentity,—life is utterly robbed of its balance. The great lie of personal immortality destroys all reason, all nature in the instincts,—everything in the instincts that is beneficent, that promotes life and that is a guarantee of the future, henceforward aroused suspicion. The very meaning of life is now construed as the effort to live in such a way that life no longer has any point… Why show any public spirit? Why be grateful for one’s origin and one’s forebears? Why collaborate with one’s fellows, and be confident? Why be concerned about the general weal or strive after it?… All these things are merely so many “temptations,” so many deviations from the “straight path.” […] The “salvation of the soul”—in plain English: “the world revolves around me” … The poison of the doctrine “equal rights for all”—has been dispensed with the greatest thoroughness by Christianity […]

”We Are No Humanitarians”

Nietzsche, The Joyful Wisdom §377 (tr. Thomas Common, 1910) · pp. 343–344

Is it not obvious that with all this we must feel ill at ease in an age which claims the honour of being the most humane, gentle and just that the sun has ever seen? What a pity that at the mere mention of these fine words, the thoughts at the back of our minds are all the more unpleasant, that we see therein only the expression—or the masquerade—of profound weakening, exhaustion, age, and declining power! What can it matter to us with what kind of tinsel an invalid decks out his weakness? He may parade it as his virtue; there is no doubt whatever that weakness makes people gentle, alas, so gentle, so just, so inoffensive, so “humane”! […] We are no humanitarians; we should not dare to speak of our “love of mankind”; for that, a person of our stamp is not enough of an actor!

Living “According to Nature”

Nietzsche, Beyond Good and Evil §9 (tr. Helen Zimmern, 1907) · pp. 13–14

You desire to live “according to Nature”? Oh, you noble Stoics, what fraud of words! […] In your pride you wish to dictate your morals and ideals to Nature, to Nature herself, and to incorporate them therein; you insist that it shall be Nature “according to the Stoa,” and would like everything to be made after your own image, as a vast, eternal glorification and generalism of Stoicism! […] But this is an old and everlasting story: what happened in old times with the Stoics still happens today, as soon as ever a philosophy begins to believe in itself. It always creates the world in its own image; it cannot do otherwise; philosophy is this tyrannical impulse itself, the most spiritual Will to Power, the will to “creation of the world,” the will to the causa prima.

Nietzsche on Epicurus

Epicurus

Nietzsche, The Joyful Wisdom §45 (tr. Thomas Common, 1910) · pp. 81–82

Epicurus.—Yes, I am proud of perceiving the character of Epicurus differently from anyone else perhaps, and of enjoying the happiness of the afternoon of antiquity in all that I hear and read of him:—I see his eye gazing out on a broad whitish sea, over the shore-rocks on which the sunshine rests, while great and small creatures play in its light, secure and calm like this light and that eye itself. Such happiness could only have been devised by a chronic sufferer, the happiness of an eye before which the sea of existence has become calm, and which can no longer tire of gazing at the surface and at the variegated, tender, tremulous skin of this sea. Never previously was there such a moderation of voluptuousness.

What Epicurus Combated

Nietzsche, The Antichrist §58 (tr. A. M. Ludovici, 1911) · p. 223

such things became master of Rome, the same kind of religion on the pre-existent form of which Epicurus had waged war. One has only to read Lucretius in order to understand what Epicurus combated, not Paganism, but “Christianity,” that is to say the corruption of souls through the concept of guilt, through the concept of punishment and immortality. He combated the subterranean cults, the whole of latent Christianity—to deny immortality was at that time a genuine deliverance.—And Epicurus had triumphed, every respectable thinker in the Roman Empire was an Epicurean: then St Paul appeared […]

About These Translations

These passages come from The Complete Works of Friedrich Nietzsche, edited by Oscar Levy.

• The Joyful Wisdom (Die fröhliche Wissenschaft, 1882; Book V, 1887), translated by Thomas Common, with poetry rendered by Paul V. Cohn and Maude D. Petre (Edinburgh: T. N. Foulis, 1910). Scan (Allen and Unwin printing, 1924). Text from Project Gutenberg.
• Beyond Good and Evil (1886), translated by Helen Zimmern (New York: Macmillan, 1907). Scan. Text from Project Gutenberg.
• The Twilight of the Idols and The Antichrist (1888), translated by Anthony M. Ludovici (Edinburgh: T. N. Foulis, 1911). Scan (Allen and Unwin printing, 1927). Text from Project Gutenberg.