Nietzsche's Twilight Of The Idols Nietzsche mischaracterizes the Christian tradition when he states that "the Church fights passion by cutting it out." The Catholic Church has never dogmatically opposed passion, but it has opposed sin. Nietzsche is writing out of the naturalist, Romantic tradition. He is a believer in self-determination, of the will to power. He views natural instincts and natural desires as justified and in no need of Redemption. His conflict with the Church is that the Church views man as having a fallen human nature in need of redemption, which is offered through the Blood of Jesus Christ. Nietzsche rejects this view: he sees man in line with what Rousseau taught -- that what is natural is good. The Church, for example, preaches against lust because this is disordered passion. Ordered passion, according to the Church, would be sexual love between husband and wife. If one or the other lusts after one who is not his or her spouse, that is a sin and to be condemned. By preaching against lust or any other form of disordered love or passion, as St. Augustine calls sin, the Church attempts to help Christians cut out sin. But it is not passion, per se, that is being cut out -- as Our Lord Himself is said to have undergone His own Passion in the Way of the Cross, which Christians commemorate. However, Nietzsche would view such Passion as weak and an effect of slave-morality, which he identifies as being Judaic in conception. Nietzsche admires the Roman conception of morality -- master-morality, as he calls it -- the supreme example of which he asserts is found in Medea in the play by Euripides of the same name.

However, when Nietzsche speaks of spiritualizing, beautifying and deifying a desire, he is speaking in poetic terms, as usual, by which he means to signify that there is nothing sinful about the human condition or about human nature except to scorn it -- which is what he perceives the Church as doing. When he speaks of deifying a desire, he is following in the tradition of the French Revolutionaries who deified Reason. It does not have any overwhelming significance other than to show that the "worshipper" has supports an idol of his own creation -- in Nietzsche's case, it is passion -- the sort that he confessed to having for Wagner's wife and the sort that enabled him to act, as Wagner indicated, as a compulsive masturbator. Nietzsche's justification for these acts, which the Church would have identified as sinful and the effect of disorder, was that they were the fruit of passion, which is beautiful. Nietzsche, in other words, attempts to place on human nature an order that is distinctly his own and not informed by any "God" or "Church." Nietzsche's spiritualizing of desire is a poetic way of saying your desires are good in and of themselves because they are your own and no one has the right to tell you they are bad. It is willfulness that Nietzsche idolizes.

The Church does not view nature as bad but rather as fallen. It views natural law as indicative of God's desire for man and His wish for how mankind to behave. Natural passions are good in and of themselves because they are given by God to man, but they must be used according to their proper intended usage: thus, because sex is for procreation not merely recreation, the Church condemns adultery and masturbation, etc. Nietzsche rejects this condemnation as being anti-nature. However, what he is rejecting is the idea that there is an order to nature that man is meant to submit to. Nietzsche does not want to submit to anything but his own will. When he speaks of spiritualizing desire it is not in a traditional Christian way, i.e., by uplifting one's mind and heart to God, Who is a spirit, but rather in a pagan sense of associating the one, the good, the true, and the beautiful with one's own desire. In a sense, Nietzsche is like Euthyphro in Plato's Dialogues. Euthyphro is a subjectivist and is opposed to submitting to the objective reality of truth and moral natural law, which Socrates attempts to get him to see.

Section 2

Nietzsche claims that it is weak people who try to eradicate their desires (or who preach asceticism) because strong or powerful people do not struggle with themselves or try to deny themselves what they want. Again, Medea, is an example of someone who is not weak, in Nietzsche's...

She gets her revenge on Jason in a horrific manner, but Nietzsche applauds her actions as being to one who is strong. An ascetic on the other hand, is one who practices self-denial. Since Nietzsche's philosophy is at root based on selfishness and the assertion of Self, a practice of self-denial is antithetical to what he preaches. And because he conceptualizes in terms of weakness and power, of brute strength (because he is at root a materialist, whose sense of spiritualization is animalistic rather than actually spiritual), he views philosophies of life that contradict his own as being inferior and weak. He likewise views Christ as weak because He preaches renunciation and fasts and acts like an ascetic in the desert. This sort of behavior enslaves one to the Church's conception of morality, which is what Nietzsche wishes to break: he asserts his own conception of morality. He does not view morality as something that is written by God -- that is, he does not view natural law as stemming from God's moral law. He views natural law in terms of might making right.
For Nietzsche, weak people attempt to control or eradicate their desires because they are afraid of fulfilling or pursuing them. The pursuit of desire can fly in the face of what is acceptable socially, and if one is afraid of violating social mores, then he is weak. However, if one cares not for what others think or for what the Church says or for what "God" decrees, then that person is strong -- like Medea.

Section 3

Nietzsche claims that the there is value in having enemies -- and this idea is reiterated by Big Brother in 1984. Essentially, the totalitarian state, the embodiment of the ubermensch -- the superman -- the will to power -- needs enemies in order to maintain a militant stance and a posture of determination. Without enemies and a body to fight, one stagnates; his passion becomes cold and aimless. But if one is engaged in a struggle, a revolution (as Nietzsche is), the passion burns hotly and desire is felt and alive. Enemies inspire one to act, to live, to fight.

Nietzsche therefore sees value in possessing enemies because an enemy is even better than a friend in this sense: the enemy represents the opposite of the Self and thus creates a polarizing effect, which prompts the Self to engage in the Extreme. The enemy's very existence drives the Self to promote the Self in the face of the Enemy. It is a necessary duality for Nietzsche and underscores his inherent materialism, which in ancient days was described as Manichean. St. Augustine had fallen into the hands of the Manicheans in his youth, and viewed life in terms of good and evil, both of which needed the other so as to define themselves (as in good cannot define itself without evil and vice versa). This idea is contradicted by the Church, which teaches that Good does not need evil in order to exist or to be able to define itself. Rather, it states that Evil is simply an absence of the Good -- or a rejection of the Good. Nietzsche, because he rejects the Christian tradition, also opposes the idea of Good existing independently of Evil. Nietzsche needs an Enemy in order to justify his own existence because knowing that as Self he is not responsible for his own being, he cannot justifiably assert that he exists independently of anything else. Therefore, what he should recognize as Good -- God -- he views as Evil and sets up that Evil as the other side of the duality in which he exists. Thus, even as Nietzsche rejects the concept of the Christian God, and calls it his Enemy, he admits that he is in need of this Enemy, because without it his life has no definition.

Section 4

Any passion that seems appropriate at the time would go on Nietzsche's list of instincts of life -- whether it was a sexual instinct or a murderous instinct, it would make no difference. The moment of passion is everything for Nietzsche and embracing the passion is what life is all about. This is his principle of healthy morality. Anti-natural morality is the opposite in that it condemns momentary passions that do not correspond to the doer's purpose, as defined by natural and/or supernatural law.

On my own list of "instincts of life" I would put the instinct of self-preservation, which would allow one defend himself against assault,…