This strength gives him power, the power to lead and direct the flock of weaker souls. It arises partly from their perception of his inward strength, partly from the air of mystery and esoteric knowledge with which the ascetic surrounds himself. But it also arises in part from the fact that he does them a service: he alleviates their suffering. Remember that they suffer because they have set themselves against their own vital instincts; so he can hardly be expected to cure their suffering, because he too sets himself against his vital instincts, only more openly, with greater determination and singleness of purpose.
An important fact about human suffering is that people will put up with a great deal if only they understand the reason for it—even glory in it, if they find the reason good enough. Another is that those who are suffering want to find someone to blame for it—that acts as a kind of anaesthetic, blocking the pain out with an overlay of anger.
The priest instinctively knows this, and gives his flock both a reason for their suffering and an author of it. They are suffering to make their souls fit for heaven, or for the victory of justice, or for the sake of truth, or so that God’s kingdom should come on earth—all fine things to suffer for. Who is to blame for the suffering? Answer: they themselves. With this stroke the seething resentment of the masses is directed away from the rulers, its original objects, conflict with whom will most likely only lead them into more suffering, perhaps partial annihilation. Redirected onto themselves it may at least provide strength and motivation for a little self-discipline and self-improvement—under priestly instruction. And they are ready to accept it, for as we saw they have already turned against their own instincts and so in one sense against themselves. They know what has to be rooted out: any hint in themselves of the attitudes and behaviour characteristic of the strong. They have been rendered harmless.
Such is Nietzsche’s analysis. Whatever else we may think of it, it is certainly unflinching. These are no more than a few of the main thoughts, crudely compressed. Nietzsche’s style, its musicality, its energy, its variety, its biting wit, is something one can only experience for oneself. And the text is full of delightful detail, like the account of the real philosopher in §7 of the third essay. Or take the first essay, §§7–9. Do you find this anti-Semitic in tone? Then read it again, and you will see that it is really aimed at anti-Semitism itself. What it says is that it was only the moral history of the Jews which created the psychological climate in which Christianity could arise—Nietzsche is firing an ironic salvo at those Christian anti-Semites who grounded their anti-Semitism on the premiss that it was Jews who were responsible for the crucifixion of Christ. Once again he has turned a popular way of thinking upside down: Christians should revere Jews, because they have the Jews to thank for the success of Christianity. Delicious stuff!
Chapter 8 Freedom of the will
Do we have free will? Down the centuries the question has caused philosophers any amount of trouble—often more than they realized. Epicurus had a go at it, but appears not to have appreciated the severity of the problem. Descartes found it central to his thinking, but made things too easy for himself. Hegel had a solution, but one that will only convince someone who accepts all that heavy-duty metaphysics that we saw in Chapter 7. And it still keeps nagging away at us today, suggesting that certain of our attitudes, ones we cannot give up, are in uneasy conflict with intellectual conclusions which we cannot avoid. This part of our tour is a bumpy ride.Descartes
We begin with Descartes, but first we need to introduce another of those ‘isms’: determinism. This is the doctrine that everything happens in accordance with causal laws, that every event is a consequence of the way things were immediately before it. Almost any modern discussion of this problem will take determinism as its starting point. If determinism is true, then isn’t the whole course of events laid down from the beginning, and how can my feeling that I can influence it be anything more than an illusion? Aren’t I just being swept along in the great causal stream? That is the thought that sets the debate going. It has a long way to run, as we’ll see, but that is how it starts.
Now the first point to notice about Descartes—and it is a good example of the effect of historical situation on a philosopher—is that this is not his route into the issue of free will. For him (see the fourth of his Meditations) the difficulty arises out of his theology. He has been created, so he has assured himself by the end of Meditation III, by a God who is perfect and who therefore cannot be a deceiver, for that would imply imperfection. (This, you will recall from pp. 79–80, was the way Descartes began his recovery from the deepest point of his scepticism.) It follows that Descartes’s faculties, being God-given, cannot lead him into error if they are used properly; his mistakes, and there is no denying that he sometimes makes them, must be due to improper use of these faculties, something he could have avoided. Otherwise the blame for his errors would fall on God. And we can’t have that.
Here we find ourselves in the neighbourhood of a classic controversy, so let’s turn aside for a moment to look at it. It
