HOMERIC CULTURE VERSUS HUMAN NATURE?
There are, however, compelling reasons for wondering how serious Nietzsche is regarding such a neo-Homeric political and moral project. In the first place, Nietzsche’s discussion of the political aspect of this project is remarkably brief, 2 out of 296 aphorisms, even in the work in which he discusses it most specifically, Beyond Good and Evil.
What is more, although he declares in that book that “[g]enuine philosophers, however, are commanders and legislators,” Nietzsche does not conclude the book with a command or law or indeed with a call to political action of any kind addressed to his readers (BGE 211). Instead, Nietzsche concludes Beyond Good and Evil by addressing his own thoughts and hence by, as it were, speaking alone, to himself: “And it is only your afternoon, you, my written and painted thoughts... but nobody will guess from that how you looked in your morning, you sudden sparks and wonders of my solitude [meiner Einsamkeit], you my old beloved - wicked thoughts” (296).[673] He then adds a poem, an “Aftersong,” entitled “From High Mountains.” The philosopher Nietzsche at the end of Beyond Good and Evil does not come to sight as “the man of the most comprehensive responsibility for the over-all development of man” (61) but rather as one of “the royal and magnificent hermits of the mind” (204).Nietzsche’s project of retying “the Gordian knot of Greek culture” by resurrecting a Homeric culture is, moreover, called into question if we reconsider more carefully his account of that culture (EH 3.BT.4). For Nietzsche’s account of the culture founded by Homer indicates that it cannot reasonably form the basis of a more or less permanent form of human society - one lasting for “millennia” (BGE 208). Even though Nietzsche emphasizes that Greek culture is “the highest culture” (GM ι.ιι), one that produced “[t]he best turned out, most beautiful, most envied type of humanity hitherto” (BT.ASC.ι), and remains “the first cultural event in history” (TI 9.47), he also acknowledges that Greek culture proved to be fragile.[674] And it was fragile, Nietzsche indicates, because, even though Greek culture was in many ways exceptionally in harmony with human nature, more so than Christianity, in crucial respects, with regard to Homeric religion and master morality, Greek culture was also at odds with human nature.
One sign of its fragility is that Homeric culture passed away quickly: “Alas, Greek history moves so fast!... With the Greeks everything goes quickly forwards, but it likewise goes quickly downwards” (HATH 1:261). The Greeks abandoned their gymnastic and artist contests and “the Greek state disintegrated into inner turmoil and dissolution” (HATH 3:226). The old, still Homeric Athens in which Socrates emerged was already subject to “degeneration,” was “coming to an end,” was experiencing “a universal distress,” and had lost its virtues (TI 2.9, 10.3; see also BT 10, 14; BGE 212). It is also important to note that the heirs of Greece, the mighty Romans, were, in Nietzsche’s words, defeated “beyond all doubt” by the seemingly weak Christians (GM 1.16; see also A 58-59).We may discern the cause of the fragility of Greek culture if we consider a tension within Homeric religion, as Nietzsche presents it. On the one hand, the core of the greatness of Greek culture is the deification of humanity as a whole: Homer was the “deifier” of humanity; thanks to him the Greeks “deified” their passions; more broadly “everything in man possessing power they called divine and inscribed it in the walls of their Heaven” (GM 3.25; GS 139; HATH 2:220; see also HATH 1:214). This belief in the divinity of humanity as a whole apparently inspired tremendous confidence and pride in human power among the Greeks as a whole, for “Man thinks of himself as noble when he bestows upon himself such gods” (HATH 1:114). One may see this confidence and pride in human power most clearly in the master morality of the Homeric heroes and their confidence in their ability to enforce justice and secure happiness for themselves on their own, without the assistance of the splendid but improvident gods they believed in (HATH 2:189, 2:212; GM 2.7): “every noble morality develops from a triumphant affirmation of itself”; “In the foreground there is the feeling of fullness, of power that seeks to overflow, the happiness of high tension, the consciousness of wealth that would give and bestow....
The noble human being honors himself as one who is powerful”; “He who has the power to requite, good with good, evil with evil, and actually practises requital - is, that is to say, grateful and revengeful - is called good; he who is powerless and cannot requite counts as bad” (GM 1.10; BGE 260; HATH 1:45).And yet, on the other hand, Nietzsche’s account of master morality, contrasting sharply as it does the powerful with the powerless, indicates that the Homeric religion does not, in truth, deify humanity as a whole but rather only a segment of humanity, those who are actually or potentially powerful: “The Greeks did not see the Homeric gods as set above them as masters.... They saw as it were only the mirror image of the most successful exemplars of their own caste” (HATH 1:114); the Greeks saw their gods as “reflections of noble and autocratic men” (GM 2.23). Nietzsche indicates, then, that the Homeric religion appealed most to those Greeks who were, or thought they could become, powerful, those whom Nietzsche calls broadly “masters.” They saw themselves deified in the Olympian gods. And precisely insofar as they felt themselves powerful, they did not feel the need for divine assistance and hence were untroubled by the indifference of the gods. But what about the rest of the Greeks?
The rest of humanity, “the violated, oppressed, suffering, unfree, who are uncertain of themselves and weary,” whom Nietzsche identifies in a general way as “slaves,” did not see themselves reflected in the mighty and splendid Olympian gods (BGE 260). As Nietzsche explains, their weakness and suffering naturally inspire in them “a pessimistic suspicion about the whole condition of man,” a suspicion that humans are so weak that they cannot truly achieve justice and happiness on their own (BGE 260). This suspicion that humans are woefully weak beings leads the weak to look to superhuman beings, to gods - and the mouthpieces of the gods, “the most impotent” priests - who will help them to avenge themselves against the powerful humans but also to defend themselves from the afflictions of mortal life as a whole (GM 1.7).
The weak, then, who are after all the great mass of humanity - “the majority of mortals, the weak and oppressed of every kind” (GM 1.13) - look to the immortal gods, not as images of themselves but as beings who are unlike themselves, who are powerful, but also beneficent. The weak look to gods not for selfaffirmation but for help, not for a justification of humanity but for providence and consolation. This the Homeric gods could not offer: “The Greek gods, too, were unable to offer consolation [trosten]; when Greek mankind at last, one and all, grew sick, this was a reason for the demise [Untergang] of such gods” (D 424). To humans who keenly feel their vulnerability, a Greek culture that offers competition rather than consolation, and a Greek religion that offers dazzling and charming but uncaring gods offer little appeal (HATH 3:226). To such humans, it was Christianity, that “great treasure house of ingenious means of consolation [geistreichster Trostmittel],” with its promise, for example, of personal immortality, that offered the greatest appeal: “Christianity owes its triumph to this miserable flattery of personal vanity - it was precisely all the failures, all the rebellious-minded, all the less favored, the whole scum and refuse of humanity who were thus won over to it. The ‘salvation of the soul’ - in plain language: ‘the world revolves around me’” (GM 3.17; A 43; see also D 546).Nietzsche harshly criticizes slave morality as a whole and Christianity in particular for appealing to the weak, the suffering, and the sick. Yet Nietzsche also acknowledges that it is understandable for weak, suffering, and sick humans to seek more consolation and providence from religion than the Homeric religion has to offer. As Nietzsche observes, “[t]hat lambs dislike great birds of prey does not seem strange” (GM 1.13). Accordingly, “[p]erhaps nothing in Christianity or Buddhism is as venerable as their art of teaching even the lowliest how to place themselves through piety in an illusory higher order of things” (BGE 61).
In this way Nietzsche implicitly acknowledges that the Homeric religion was less able than Christianity or Buddhism to offer the lowliest a place in the “higher order of things.” The sufferings of the slaves render them “pessimistic” about the whole condition of man, and understandably so (BGE 260). For, even though their hope for divine beings to provide for them is, according to Nietzsche, illusory, the belief of the slaves that they themselves are incapable of attaining justice and happiness on their own seems simply to reflect their accurate recognition of their own weakness.Furthermore, and more importantly, Nietzsche acknowledges that all humans, even the strong and the noble “masters,” are naturally susceptible to the experiences that shape the outlook of the slave - weakness, suffering, and sickness: “For man is more sick, uncertain, changeable, indeterminate than any other animal, there is no doubt of that - he is the sick animal” (GM 3.13). The key example of the weakness, sickness, and suffering of the human animal would seem to be its mortality: “the terrible anxiety which death and time evoke in the individual” (UM 4.4). The noble human beings may believe, “[w]hat does not kill me makes me stronger” (TI 1.8). But what about what does kill them?[675] Even though the most powerful of humans, for example the Homeric heroes, are conscious of their power, they too, like all humans, at times feel their human, all too human weakness: “do not forget the lament of the short-lived Achilles, mourning the leaflike change and vicissitudes of the race of men”; “It is not unworthy of the greatest hero to long for a continuation of life” (BT 3).[676] And when they feel their weakness, the mighty Homeric heroes themselves turn to the gods for the divine assistance that the weak and oppressed “slaves” seek as well.
In his account of Homeric culture, Nietzsche, as we have seen, omits any reference to the fact that the Homeric heroes, even such heroes as Achilles and especially Odysseus, pray to the gods for justice and protection.
In Homer’s poems, as Nietzsche surely knew, Achilles prays to the gods for assistance on 3 occasions,[677] Odysseus prays to the gods for assistance on 14 occasions,[678] and Odysseus relies entirely on the gods once he has returned to Ithaca.[679] Nietzsche might defend this omission by arguing that, in his account of Homeric culture, he focuses on the true, inner teaching of Homer: not that it is unnecessary for humans ever to wish for help from gods because humans are sufficiently powerful to secure their well-being, as the heroes in their proudest moments may believe, but that it is unwise for even weak and needy humans to look to the carefree, indifferent gods for help (HATH 2:189, 2:212; GM 2.7). Nevertheless, Nietzsche associates the Homeric heroes entirely with master morality, with the proud belief in the fullness and sufficiency of human power, and conceals the extent to which Homer’s heroes too, especially Odysseus, display the pessimistic suspicion of the slave that humans are incapable of achieving justice and happiness on their own, and look to Zeus, the Father of Gods and Men, and his divine children, for providence. Nietzsche idealizes the master morality of the Homeric heroes by purifying those heroes of any elements of slave morality.Nietzsche, however, indicates his awareness that Homeric Greek culture combined elements of both master and slave morality through his statement that “in all the higher and more mixed cultures there also appear attempts at mediation between these two moralities, and yet more often the confusion and mutual misunderstanding of both, and at times they occur directly alongside each other - even in the same human being, within a single soul” (BGE 260). For if all the higher cultures attempt to mediate between these two moralities, both moralities must be present in all the higher cultures, including the “highest culture,” Homeric Greece (GM ι.ιι). And both moralities are present in higher cultures because both moralities are rooted in human nature, in the human soul, and higher cultures seek to allow human nature to flourish in all its fullness. Humans are both naturally powerful - given, for example, our reason and will - and powerless - given, for example, our mortality. Humans are, accordingly, spirited and fearful, proud and pessimistic, and these two aspects of human nature give rise to the two “basic types” of morality. But the tension between these two basic types of morality suggests that no morality can simply accommodate or fulfill human nature. Any morality will tend toward being either slave or master morality, and hence will tend to be “a bit of tyranny [ein Stuck Tyrannei] against ‘nature’” or at least the part of nature that slave or master morality expresses (BGE 188; see also 9). Either the spirited side of humans will be “branded and slandered most” as “evil” by a culture that appeals to the natural fear of death or the more fearful side will be despised as “cowardly” by a culture that appeals to the natural love of victory (BGE 201, 260). All higher cultures, including the Homeric, attempt to combine master and slave morality because both are rooted in human nature. But all higher cultures fail to combine both moralities effectively because no culture, not even the highest, Homeric culture, can successfully accommodate in a stable and lasting way both the spirited, proud side of human nature and the fearful, pessimistic side of human nature. By pointing to the inevitable tension between Homeric culture and human nature, Nietzsche indicates that Homeric culture could not truly form the basis of a culture that would last indefinitely, for “millennia” (HATH 3:226; D 424; BGE 208).
Indeed, Nietzsche suggests that a neo-Homeric, noble culture, would be incapable of understanding and appreciating Homer himself and therefore might be incapable of understanding, and sustaining, itself. For Nietzsche observes that, paradoxically, “the men of a noble culture,” for example, “the French of the seventeenth century,” who would seem instinctively to embrace the classical, Homeric ideal, that is, “the noble mode of evaluating all things,” were unable to enjoy Homer (BGE 224; GM 1.16). As Nietzsche explains, the noble and powerful always revere their own “tradition” and cherish a “prejudice in favor of” their own ancestors, to the exclusion of others: “altogether the reluctance of every noble and self-sufficient culture to own a new desire, a dissatisfaction with what is one’s own, and admiration for what is foreign - all this inclines and disposes them unfavorably even against the best things in the world which are not theirs” (BGE 260, 224). On the other hand, thanks to “the democratic mingling of classes and races” and their “submissive plebeian curiosity,” it is possible for at least a few individuals of the nineteenth century to understand and appreciate Homer: “We enjoy Homer again, for example: perhaps it is our most fortunate advantage [unser glucklichster Vorsprung] that we understand how to relish Homer” (BGE 224). Were Nietzsche to replace democratic culture with a neo- Homeric, noble culture, he would thereby, by his own account, deprive his contemporaries of the “most fortunate advantage” of profiting and learning from Homer himself, that “golden nature” (GM 3.25).