Part II of My paper on Reason according to Augustine & Nietzche:
It interesting that both Augustine and Nietzsche, who stand at opposite ends of the spectrum would find unity in the fact that reasoning is flawed. Both of them take on a Neo-platonic perspective that there are fundamental truths external to people that provide the ground floor for reasoning to develop. They would argue that an ethic based totally on internal reasoning is flawed by the flaws of the person doing the reasoning. Nietzsche would argue that the average person may not even be capable of such reasons and is easily deluded by their limited capacities. Thus both philosophers would disagree with Kant, and with him the entrenched paradigm of the West, that morality cannot be derived through reason alone.
Nietzsche’s foundational principle is that all men are driven by the will to power. He attempts to show the reader this is his conclusion through reason. This view became the title of one of his books and was perhaps best articulated in Beyond Good and Evil:
“[Anything which] is a living and not a dying body... will have to be an incarnate will to power, it will strive to grow, spread, seize, become predominant - not from any morality or immorality but because it is living and because life simply is will to power... 'Exploitation'... belongs to the essence of what lives, as a basic organic function; it is a consequence of the will to power, which is after all the will to life. (Nietzsche, P.259)
For Nietzsche power is the underlying motivator of all actions and because of that is the supreme good. He who has the most power therefore controls morals, and can force others to abide by his convictions as well. So ultimately it is the person with power that makes the most difference. Exploitation is not necessarily wrong as it is “after all the will to life”. In his work the Antichrist he states what is the ultimate good:
“What is good? All that heightens the feeling of power in man, the will to power, power itself. What is bad? All that is born of weakness. What is happiness? The feeling that power is growing, that resistance is overcome.” (Nietzsche, 1999, P.2)
Nietzsche even argues in Beyond Good and Evil that men should acknowledge there are grades and rank that “separate man from man” and that equality before God is a nonsense that weakens men and countries making them “sickly” and “mediocre” (Nietzsche, 1990, P. 69, 71). For the majority of people “exist for service and general utility” and religion is often used to buttress their ego. In fact, Nietzsche titles one of his books Human, all too Human where he argues that men should return back to their animal nature. “Error has transformed animals into men; is truth perhaps capable of changing man back into an animal? (P. 182)
Augustine, on the other hand would refute Nietzsche at every step. “When therefore, man lives according to man, not according to God he is like the devil (Augustine, 1993, P. 445)". In other words if he lives according to the animal instincts that Nietzsche would advocate Augustine would say he makes himself the devil.
For Augustine the animal instinct of men is a result of the fall of mankind away from God. What is now our animal instinct is the source of all that is evil because they are desires that are not subservient to God. As he states in the City of God “because it had willfully deserted its superior Lord, it no longer held its own inferior servant (animal desires) (p.422). As man separated himself from God, desires which used to be ordered to and subjugated to the will of God, now create strife and are opposed to God. When men disobeyed God it threw out of kilter its natural desires and “being of his own will corrupted…begot corrupted and condemned children (P.422). Augustine also sees power in a completely different light. In the City of God he states
“For to the just all the evils imposed on them by unjust rulers are not the punishment of crime, but the test of virtue. Therefore the good man, although he is a slave, is free; but the bad man, even if he reigns, is a slave, and that not of one man, but, what is far more grievous, of as many masters as he has vices; of which vices when the divine Scripture treats, it says, "For of whom any man is overcome, to the same he is also the bond-slave (p.112)."
Therefore when Nietzsche advocates raw power and a return to animal instinct, Augustine would dissent.
Here Augustine and Nietzsche enter into an intriguing debate. For Nietzsche, God is a construct built by the ordinary men in order that they can deal with their routine and powerless role in life. Nietzsche states in his book The Birth of Tragedy, “Christianity was from the beginning, essentially and fundamentally, life's nausea and disgust with life, merely concealed behind, masked by, dressed up as, faith in "another" or "better" life (Nietzsche, P. 23) .” People who are powerless because do not have the intellectual strength to influence others use Christianity to find worth. While the minority, who were in power, used Christianity or God or religion, as a tool to assert power over the masses. However, in doing so they themselves at times where trapped by the same snare they were using to trap others. For Nietzsche, it was fine for the uberman (those in power) to use God as a construct to dominate the masses but not for them to be enslaved by such a “prehistoric” concept. In his book The Gay Science he declares God to be dead and gives a mandate to those destined for power.
After Buddha was dead, his shadow was still shown for centuries in a cave - a tremendous, gruesome shadow. God is dead; but given the way of men, there may still be caves for thousands of years in which his shadow will be shown. -And we- we still have to vanquish his shadow, too (Nietzsche, 1974, P108).
Religion could and would confine the use of power so therefore had to be expunged from the uberman of each generation.
The effect of this philosophy is it has given rise to the notion that truth is often used to control or manipulate people. This is a philosophy that Foucault would pick up on a century later and become a key part of his interpretation of how truth is used to assert power over the masses- a theory currently embraced by many social scientists. Such a vantage point has played a huge role in the skepticism many people have of any truth based assertions. It has helped to formulate a culture that would make everything relative in order to avoid the possible corruption of truth as a vehicle to maintain power. Sept. 11th further enforced this view in many people’s minds as they saw fundamental Muslims attack the World Trade Center because they believed their conception of the world to be superior, therefore they were trying to destroy others who did not believe like they did.
Augustine would agree that people have used truth claims in destructive ways; however, he would argue that we cannot avoid truth claims. He would state that when Nietzsche says there are no valid truth claims that in and of itself is a truth claim. Truth and faith in God are inseparable for Augustine as he states in the City of God:
“When, then, a man lives according to the truth, he lives not according to himself, but according to God; for He was God who said, "I am the truth." When, therefore, man lives according to himself -- that is, according to man, not according to God -- assuredly he lives according to a lie; not that man himself is a lie, for God is his author and creator, who is certainly not the author and creator of a lie, but because man was made upright, that he might not live according to himself, but according to Him that made him -- in other words, that he might do His will and not his own; (p.445)
This truth orders all things just as the laws of physics order the way objects will respond to gravity and force. Augustine believes that with and only with the truth of God will a person become a good ruler. Augustine then goes on to show how God’s truth would create such a person:
“if they make their power the handmaid of His majesty by using it for the greatest possible extension of His worship; if they fear, love, worship God; if more than their own they love that kingdom in which they are not afraid to have partners; if they are slow to punish, ready to pardon; if they apply that punishment as necessary to government and defense of the republic, and not in order to gratify their own enmity; if they grant pardon, not that iniquity may go unpunished, but with the hope that the transgressor may amend his ways; if they compensate with the lenity of mercy and the liberality of benevolence for whatever severity they may be compelled to decree; if their luxury is as much restrained as it might have been unrestrained; if they prefer to govern depraved desires rather than any nation whatever; and if they do all these things, not through ardent desire of empty glory, but through love of eternal felicity, not neglecting to offer to the true God, who is their God, for their sins, the sacrifices of humility, contrition, and prayer (P.178).”
This is then Augustine’s measure of a just rule one that is guided by and subservient to not an internally invented or reasoned truth but rather the revealed truth of God.
Such a definition of leadership is the predecessor of servant leadership that is advocated by Ken Blanchard and Phil Hodges or Robert Greenleaf today. Leaders that exercised this sort of power would see truth as something that does not attempt to keep people infantile but rather challenges them to grow up. It is a truth that does not seek to control people as much as to liberate them from narrow mindedness and selfish action. A person following this philosophy would not try to use coercive power unless absolutely necessary to maintain order. Instead they would restrain their own self interest for that of the greater good .
Interestingly despite these vastly different perspectives Augustine and Nietzsche echo each other about the impact that pride has on the individual and their ethics. Nietzsche states that we are too insecure to handle the truth in his book Beyond Good and Evil. “I have done that says my memory. I cannot have done that says my pride (p.80)”. When this argument occurs we revise our memory as pride always wins out. Augustine argues a similar vein when he states in his book Confessions:
“And it gratified my pride to be free from blame and, after I had committed any fault, not to acknowledge that I had done any,--" that Thou mightiest heal my soul because it had sinned against Thee;" but I loved to excuse it, and to accuse something else which was with me, but was not I. But assuredly it was wholly I, and my impiety had divided me against myself; and that sin was all the more incurable in that I did not deem myself a sinner (P.84)
The application for this ethic is both simple and hard. People are always revising history to flatter their conception of themselves. As President Kennedy, uttered famously after the Bay of Pigs invasion “Success has a thousand fathers; failure is an orphan.” Therefore as a person the challenge becomes having others that can rebuke you and hold you accountable. Making sure that when mistakes are made one ultimately owns up without attempting to blame or pass responsibility elsewhere. As a Christian owning mistake and sharing success must be a mantra.
Nietzsche ethic influenced perhaps most famously Hitler as he viewed himself as the uberman, a person whose will to power should not be restrained by conviction or guilt. However, his influence continues to pervade and influence modern culture. His ethic would justify the sorting mechanism of schools, would give credence to the idea if it “feels good do it”, and perhaps must frighteningly leads to the loss of conviction and feeling that there should be no conviction in modern morals. Augustine’s ethic perhaps is best preserved in the parts of the non-western church where many still find his insistence on revelation and his critique of reason valid.
Most of western society has followed the lead of Kant and held both Nietzsche and Augustine to be wrong in their critique of Reason. Reason is the supreme way to determine one’s course of action according to the west, the idea of revelation seems too messy to most westerners. After all whose revelation should we use? Yet, as Augustine and Nietzsche show us, that same critique could be applied to reason. Perhaps Socrates was right in that there are external rights and wrongs that lie outside a person. Perhaps a better question is if reason does not fully function as promised where can we find the foundation to build our ethic? Maybe if we seek we shall find rather then the traditional role of abandoning the search altogether. This might be the strongest legacy that a combined Augustine and Nietzsche ethical perspective gives us.
