Shaping the Future:
Nietzsche's New Regime
of the Soul and Its Ascetic Practices
By Horst Hutter
Introduction
"Horst Hutter’s Shaping the Future: Nietzsche’s New Regime of the Soul and Its Ascetic Practices is the wise work of a serious disciple. Notwithstanding the irony such a term immediately connotes in relation to an anti-foundational thinker such as Nietzsche, “disciple” is indeed the appropriate term. First let us recall the origin meaning of the Latin “discipulus:” “a student,” “a member of a school,” for Hutter indeed understands his primary task to be the reincarnation of Nietzsche as a philosopher in the ancient style. Inspired by the groundbreaking approach of Pierre Hadot, Hutter’s own teacher, Hutter’s Nietzsche emerges from the libraries of modern commentary as a philosopher in the mold of the pre-Socratics and the Hellenistic schools, a sage whose imitable manner of life rather than doctrinaire philosophy proves to be valid or invalid."
As Hadot has taught us, “discourses were never more than tools to facilitate the striving for self-perfection…the ‘doctrines’ actually contained in the writings of ancient philosophers are hence frequently contradictory and appear to be entirely provisional and subject to refutation”(i). According to Hutter, this is precisely how Nietzsche intended us to read his “suffering logos”: the life of the sage that inspires our own (vxi).”
Below is the introduction and first chapter to Mr. Hutter's new book. On February 11th, Mr. Hutter visited New York for the celebration of the release of his new work, an event staged by the Nietzsche Circle. The Nietzsche Circle wishes to thank Mr. Hutter and The Rowman & Littlefield Publishing Group for generously permitting us to publish these excerpts. To purchase a copy of Shaping the Future, please visit http://www.rlpgbooks.com
Also, if you wish to respond to these excerpts, please visit our Discussion Board.
The above quote is from Rachael Sotos' review of Mr. Hutter's book.
A Summary of Arguments
This manuscript may firstly be placed within the broader
context of Platonic political philosophy. It is structured
around the argument that Nietzsche, despite his ostensive
“enmity” to Plato and Socrates, understood himself
to be a So-cratic, and as someone called upon by his fate
to renew the Platonic task of be-ing a philosophical legislator
of modern souls, culture, and political society. I suggest
that we may explain his opposition to these two founders of
our culture by his perceived need to attack these “idols”
as the originators of late and deca-dent Christian culture.
For Nietzsche, decadence is now a major feature of the “slavish”
second natures of persons inhabiting liberal democracies.
He saw his task as one of deconstructing the “slavish”
second natures of free spirits from among “last men”
and thereby to find the means for overcoming decadence. Accepting
himself as also such a Christian decadent, his task involved
first a conceptual effort to undo his and others’ “embodied”
opinions and then to awaken the ability to move toward a vibrant
“healing culture” based on an af-firmation of
life. The No-saying portion of his effort involves a redesigning
of the regime of the soul on which decadent Christianity is
based. His Yes proceeds from his No. The Yes involves a freeing
of the autonomous person hidden un-derneath a historical succession
of layers of slavish selves. Slavish selves are characterized
by a structure of willing that is contradictory in itself;
life-affirmations involve hidden life-denials. Nietzsche proposed
a redesigning of slavish wills, whereby the strength of the
negations may be channeled into new and affirmative lines
of willing. Both tasks derive their impetus from his inter-pretations
of the ancients. However, they derive their particular configurations
from the different circumstances of the modern age. Nietzsche
thus wished to replace Plato and Socrates as philosophical
legislators and thereby become the founder of new and post-Christian
regimes of soul and political society. The efforts of Socrates
and Plato have been so successful that they have shaped two
millennia of history upon a basis of the spirituality initiated
by Jesus. Now this culture confronts the very different circumstances
of a humanity that must be-come united and that must assume
global dominance and planetary governance. However, it is
handicapped for this task by the unknown envy and resentful
will-ing, hidden as motive forces of Christian souls. These
imply life-threatening potentials and may presage the auto-destruction
of a humanity armed with lethal technologies.
Nietzsche's philosophical struggles aim to initiate a new line of philosophers of the future and a new way of life propounded by them.
These new philosophers and their predecessors, the free spirits, are to use the inherited negativities of Christian souls,
their slavish modalities of guilt and bad conscience, as precisely the tools for liberating human willing of the future from
imprisonment by and in the past. Thereby the original will of life, a will of total affirmation, is to be freed from its inversion
into a death wish. This death wish had received its validation from the "beyond" posited by Christian metaphysics.
Nietzsche also conceived his task as preparing the coming of a future nobil-ity whose individual members would traverse the coming age of
nihilism by working on themselves and by reshaping their wills. At some future time, this new nobility would provide the leadership for
a new kind of humanity that would emerge victoriously from contemporary cultural struggles and conflicts of civilization. During
the actual transition of nihilistic struggles, however, the free spirits and potential philosophers of the future would avoid
involvement in po-litical conflicts. They would focus on creating in themselves new regimes of soul, nourished by a return into
themselves, into the deep structures of their souls, in periods of creative solitudes.
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The manuscript is, secondly, an effort to develop the paths of reasoning opened up by Pierre Hadot in his studies of ancient philosophers as teachers of ways of life and not just as providers of sets of logically coherent and "true" opinions and doctrines about the world. Hadot's work shows that this view of philosophy was never really completely abandoned and is now again adopted by modern philosophical authors. Hadot sees such a view to be the foundation of the work of Wittgenstein, as his forthcoming book on this philosopher demonstrates. Propositions and doctrines, accordingly, are not identical with philosophy, but are instruments of philosophers that aim to shape readers (as well as listeners, in the case of oral teachings). Doctrines thus aim to transform and not merely to inform their public.
My book applies these reasonings newly developed by Hadot, which call for a complete revaluation of the activity of philosophizing, to the work of Nietzsche. I argue that Nietzsche himself, from the beginnings of his career as a philosophical author to its end, likewise conceived of doctrines, written as well as oral, as never identical to philosophy itself. "True" as well as "false" doc-trines were artistic means of self-creation that had to be related to, and could emerge from, an askesis, a working on oneself.
Specifically, I try to map out the ascetic practices of a Nietzschean way of life. I argue that Nietzsche's "doctrines" are "attempts" and "temptations" that aim to provoke his free-spirited readers into changing themselves, as well as inducing such self-changes in their natural and spiritual descendants. Free spirits are asked to transform themselves into the philosophical legislators of the future people of humankind. The "tempting" doctrines are instruments of philosophiz-ing to be used in conjunction with specific ascetic practices, designed to create a new and non-Platonic regime of the soul. Without being thus related to a set of practices, they remain contradictory and partially unconvincing.
Finally, from the above it follows that my view of philosophy does not restrict the activity of philosophizing to analysis. It affirms that understanding the analytical Nietzsche can occur only when combined with an appreciation of his view that "truths" are poetical creations of the future. Thus, I do not privilege his more "analytical" works, such as the Genealogy of Morality, as sources for my interpretations. I do not discount Thus Spoke Zarathustra, because it is written as a poetic-fictional work, and not written in Nietzsche's own voice. I do not consider this as an embarrassment to be finessed away, or to be ignored, but as essential parts of Nietzsche's rhetorical strategy. Hence, I do not follow what appears to be the scholarly consensus that focuses on the Genealogy as the only work in which Nietzsche seriously did philosophy. Nor do I join the scholarly consensus in segmenting Nietzsche's poetical-analytical opus into early, middle, and late periods, thus postulating a development in which the later is philosophi-cally superior to the earlier. Indeed, such development does exist, but it seems to me to have the structure of a living entelechy, in which later stages recuperate earlier ones, and earlier ones hold in themselves all grounds of future unfolding. Nietzsche's writings contain explicit statements that the evolutions of his analy-ses are stages in the progressive unveiling of the fundamental idea at work in his depths as a philosophical task. This also means that his writings are intensely personal and can only be fully grasped if they are related to his life. His philoso-phical task proceeded from his life; it was present as a problem in his earliest philosophical works and it became fully visible at its height in Zarathustra. The post-Zarathustra works then may be seen as elaborations and refinements of Nietzsche's fated Aufgabe, which was to initiate a new way of life. My text hence finds support from all periods of his philosophical writings. To be sure, Nietzsche's opus is a veritable labyrinth that permits many interpretations. As a finite set of sentences, it is able to initiate a virtually infinite plurality of ways of self-creation. My focus on ascetic techniques is my particular Ariadne thread out of the Nietzschean labyrinth; it is one that should not be ignored but should be tried, as is suggested strongly by Nietzsche himself. The following then is a brief summary of each chapter of the book.
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1) Chapter 1 deals with Nietzsche's view of the nature and
function of the philosopher as a therapist of himself as well
as of his culture. It argues that Nietzsche's understanding
of philosophy was modeled on figures such as Socra-tes, Heraclitus,
Empedocles, Plato, and Epicurus. These "royal hermits of the
spirit" succeeded in creating themselves as works of art and
in becoming foun-ders of states, or at least in becoming founders
of schools. Thereby they exer-cised important influences on
the political ordering of their societies, which looked to
them as therapists of culture. Plato managed to impose his
founding will on succeeding centuries by becoming the originator
of the Christian regime of the soul. Epicurus showed the way
to founding a school in the midst of a dis-integrating culture;
his disciples managed to preserve wisdom by leading the hidden
life.
Nietzsche attempted for most of his life to found a philosophical
school. If he had succeeded, this school would have been modeled
on the Platonic academy and the Epicurean garden. It would
have attempted to realize the political intention of shaping
future European society, but it would have achieved this by
retreating temporarily into an Epicurean friendship community.
In such a com-munity, free spirits would have been able safely
to work on themselves, to be-come the philosophical legislators
of a future European culture. Nietzsche’s books were
tools for recruiting free spirits to become members of such
a school. When his solitude proved irremediable, he began
to see his writings as fishing rods to catch free spirits
for the creation of schools of self-shaping in his post-humous
existence. Such fraternities of free spirits would be necessary
to traverse the period of nihilism until a future point in
time, when direct political action would again become possible.
His books hence do not contain his philosophy but are instruments
of philosophical striving meant to initiate ascetic labors
of self-transformation in free spirited readers and to provide
the foundation for the creation of new values.
2) Chapter 2 analyzes the practices of solitude as the initial
and most important technique of a Nietzschean askesis. It
explores the modalities of what Nietzsche called “Einsamkeitslehre.”
Temporary retreats into solitude are the main part of the
deconstructive aspect of self-shaping in which one could begin
to dissolve one’s own entrapment in a “slavish”
identity. Withdrawals into solitude would make free spirits
realize how they are caught in resentment and the desire for
revenge that inform the institutions and interaction rituals
of modern societies. Solitude would permit someone to avoid
to be continuously re-infected by these strong negative emotions.
It would open an individual’s deeply rooted line of
fate and would show the means by which a “slavish”
self could be dissolved. In solitude, the three mechanisms
by which slavishness is maintained would become visible and
their dissolution would become possible. These mechanisms
are: a) the quite natural identification of a self with all
of its negative emotions; b) a self’s constant anxious
considering of the opinions that others hold of it; and, c)
a self’s captivity in the fast and furious pace of modern
life that pressures everyone into becoming a workaholic busybody.
Solitude makes again possible the practices of contemplation,
which puts a self in touch with its own deep sources of wellness.
3) Chapter 3 explores Nietzsche’s theory of friendship.
While the dissolution of a self caught in self-destructive
willing becomes possible in solitude, the reassembling of
new lines of willing requires a return into friendship communi-ties
of like-minded seekers of truth. Nietzsche offers a new vision
of friendship, which is partially modeled on the Aristotelian
and Epicurean prototypes. How-ever, he goes beyond these models
by positing a theory of friendship communi-ties in which the
dynamics of enmity are integrated into the practices of friend-ship.
Following Emerson, he believes that in one’s friend
one should have one’s best enemy; thereby the reactive
passions of negative envy could be transformed into the emulative
strivings of mutually supportive rivals and lovers. Such ago-nistic
friendships would thereby become the chief means of ascetic
self-transformation; they are the first aspect of the yes-saying
and constructive phase of Nietzsche’s askesis. Friendship
communities would then also constitute the bases for reconstructing
society.
4) Chapter 4 explores Nietzsche’s usage and advocacy
of reading and writing as ascetic techniques. It discusses
the relationship of reading and writing to philosophical striving,
as both means of, and expression, for philosophizing. It shows
that Nietzsche always saw writing as subordinate to speaking,
and both as tools for shaping the self. It identifies Nietzsche
as a late heir of a long tradition of writing the self, in
which the formation of personal identities involved refer-ences
to interpretations of texts authoritative within the tradition.
He was raised within a world view based in a religion of the
book. He was trained within the Christian religion of the
book to become an exegetical mediator between textual authority
and the shaping of personal identities. However, he came to
experience Christian identity, both in himself and in his
culture, as a structure that was dis-integrating into decadence
and nihilism. He diagnosed this process of disintegra-tion
as a general cultural malaise of which his own dis-ease was
a symptom and focal point. Understanding himself as a decadent,
he also understood himself as possessing within himself the
means for overcoming decadence and thus to move toward the
“great health.” In his effort to heal himself
and to become the philosophical therapist of his culture,
he saw that convalescence required first a deconstruction
of old modes of self and identity, to be followed secondly
by envisioning new forms of selfhood. This required an attack
on those historical figures that he perceived to be at the
origin of the Christian written self, namely Jesus and St.
Paul, as well as Socrates and Plato. His war for a new healing
cul-ture thus required a dislodging of these figures as founding
icons of decadent Socratism and decadent Christianity.
The problem, however, was that neither Socrates nor Jesus wrote anything at all. Yet they managed to become (perhaps without intending so) the figures in terms of which the powerful tradition of the Christian written self evolved. They accomplished without writing what Nietzsche could only accomplish with writ-ing. They had found disciples both within their life times and posthumously-chiefly Plato for Socrates, and St. Paul and the evangelists for Jesus-who au-thoritatively structured the Christian written tradition. Nietzsche's task then re-quired him to write against writing, as it were. He had to become his own Plato to his own Socrates, as well as, and to a lesser extent, his own evangelist to his own Jesus. He had to recover the orality that lay at the origin of a powerful tra-dition of writing. Moreover, he had to do this in writing. This in turn required him to develop new styles of writing in which the author Nietzsche would imi-tate and supplant the authority of St. Paul and of Plato. His aphoristic books are meant to move beyond the Platonic dialogues, and his Zarathustra is the "fifth gospel" meant to replace St. Paul and the evangelists. Thereby he hoped to initi-ate a new authoritative tradition in which books had to carry readers beyond all books. Free spirited disciples of Nietzsche are exhorted to use his books to de-construct themselves and then to move toward new versions of selfhood beyond books. Reading Nietzsche then is to move toward an explicit affirmation of one-self in amor fati, based on an implicit No to one's slavish features.
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5) Chapter 5 moves fully into the territory of Nietzsche's reconstructive labors. It explores his concerted efforts to suggest to his free spirited disciples to use their bodies as guiding threads for finding the way out of the labyrinths of nihilism to a healing culture. Hence his focus on nutrition and his suggestion to abandon the old fictional division of the human totality into soul, mind and body. This old division is to be replaced by a new fiction that emphasizes "body" as the comprehensive unity of all mental, psychic, and emotional proc-esses. The soul hypothesis would still be useful, but soul would merely be a fic-tion that enabled a judicious steering of body as the totality. Nutrition becomes the focus for following the guiding thread of the body. However, nutrition has to be understood in the most comprehensive manner as everything that is taken in by a body and that has to be metabolized. This in-cludes not only gross material foods and drink, but also and especially air, as well as everything seen, heard, and read. It includes among the more noxious modern foods the fare presented on television. Individual attention to nutrition in this sense has to be oriented to the goal of how precisely this body must nourish itself, to achieve its maximum of strength and clarity of insight. Environments for living, places of residence, choices of music and literature, choices of conversations, would all have to be ordered along the lines most likely to achieve one's maximum strength. Nietzsche calls for a new science of nutrition, which is to provide insight into the effects of various kinds of "food" on various kinds of bodies in various kinds of situations. The results of such a science could then become a part of the cus-toms and rules for living legislated by the philosophers of the future.
6) Chapter 6 focuses on dance as a practice of self-shaping that aims to harmonize the conflictual multiplicity of the human totality. It does this by inte-grating all negative and recalcitrant passions into a "symphony" of the soul. Nietzsche suggested dance as the chief means for re-educating the sub rational part of human mentation Thus, it would be the most important feature of Yes-saying for building a healthy culture in the future. Nietzsche did not merely use the symbol of dance as a metaphor for the possible nimbleness of a human spirit. I believe that he actually considered dancing to be an important technique for soul care. In this regard he followed his friend-enemy Plato who, in the Laws, also considered dance as an important tool for choreographing the multiple motions of the human soul and thus endowing them with due measure. Nietzsche's advocacy of dance proceeded from his critical engagement with techniques of a Christian askesis. This askesis involves "spite against oneself." It requires a splitting of oneself into two parts, one part of which is "good," and the other part is declared "evil." The good part is worshiped and associated with God; the other part is demonized and associated with the devil. The demonic portion, however, does not go away. It goes underground and continues its resis-tance from there. The Christian regime of the soul results in a dividualistic struc-ture, in which the conscious self is locked into an Apollonian prison of order, whereas the negative passions, the "wild waters of the soul," are locked into a Dionysian dungeon of chaotic strivings. Dance is suggested as an ascetic tech-nique to counteract the dividualism of Christian souls. It aims to integrate the Dionysian chaos at the bottom of Christian souls by making Apollo and Diony-sus dance with one another. It would permit some satisfaction to the wild hun-gers of Puritan souls. Integration of the dangerous and chaotic forces of the soul would then again open everyday life to the experience of the sacred. Periodic and communal ritual dancing would be an important tool for maintaining the health of bodies in the healing culture to be founded by philosophers of the fu-ture.
7) In my final chapter, I focus on Nietzsche’s “abysmal thought” of the eternal recurrence of the same. I deal with eternal recurrence entirely as a tool of meditation, as a mantra, as it were, and I ignore its cosmological and ontological implications (which may be important). One of the aims envisioned by this meditation would be a freeing of the soul from being imprisoned in Christian end time. The notion that time has a beginning and an end, to be marked by the (second) coming of a savior, appears to be a fiction based in resentment; it is not given in nature. Nietzsche, however, proposed that even the division of time into past, present, and future is fictional. There is only the Now, which is (in) the light and visible. The conditions for this visibility are the darkness of the No-longer and the darkness of the Not-yet, both of which are eternal. Eternal recur-rence, when used as a meditation (perhaps by focusing on the three parts of a complete breath), then would enable an individual to use the darkness of the No-longer as the power by which to extend the light of the Now over the darkness of the Not- yet. It would permit the transformation of any given little moment of lived experience into the great moment of an experience of the deep eternity of every now and of all time. Eternity would no longer be considered to be outside time and opposed to it, but would be understood to be within time. The integra-tion of eternity and time would then be a portion of the self-renewing and end-less circle of being in the light. If “embodied” by free spirits of the future, this thought would entirely change the structure of hope. “Time present and time past are both perhaps present in time future, and time future contained in time past.”
To read Chapter one, please see the link below.
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Horst Hutter - Introduction
To dowload Chapter One in PDF format
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Horst Hutter - Chapter One