Nietzsche, the ascetic ideal
How the deepest instinct of life turns into incarnate desire and power. It does not, in the Buddhist conception...
Renunciation and the ascetic life is held in high regard by most civilisations — or perhaps by all that call themselves “civilisations”. It is not unrelated that in Greek philosophy too we read of the highest place given to what is called a life of contemplation. The notion of the philosopher-king too carries the same seed.
Particularly, in India, different traditions have given a very high place to the ascetic life or ascetic ideal. Nietzsche will invoke the Indian traditions too.
Nietzsche of course does not uphold the ascetic ideal but mercilessly attacks it. For him this ideal aligns with slave morality.
For Nietzsche this ascetic life includes also a life in science, scientists, atheists and materialists, who pursue truth, who value truth.
Most scholars would want to understand the ascetic life in terms of the spiritual, the sublime and the Unknown. What is interesting is that Nietzsche wants to understands it as part of the instinct of self-preservation. He understands it in relation to life. Indeed, the ascetic ideal is a bit like an objective necessity for evolutionary purposes — in fact, “a high-order necessity”:
There must be a high-order necessity which makes this species hostile to life always grow again and flourish — it must be in the interest of life itself not to have such a type of self- contradiction die out.
In his The Genealogy of Morals, we are told that the ascetic seems to uphold the contradiction, the absurdity, of “life against life”. A self-contradiction: where you have a mode of life which denies life only in order to still persist in life, continue, uphold and maintain life. So we have this bizarre scenario:
“this ascetic priest, this apparent enemy of life, this denier — precisely he is among the greatest conserving and yes-creating forces of life.”
Nietzsche says that there is a “gap” which the ascetic ideal seeks to fill up. There is a gap between life and the NO that the ascetic says to life.
The No he says to life brings to light, as if by magic, an abundance of tender Yeses; even when he wounds himself, this master of destruction, of self-destruction — the very wound itself afterward compels him to live.
The ascetic ideal is therefore a modality of the instinct of self-preservation (contrary to what the practitioners of this ideal believe in — “therefore the opposite of what those who reverence this ideal believe”).
The life here is however an eclipsed and exhausted life:
the ascetic ideal springs from the protective instinct of a degenerating life which tries by all means to sustain itself and to fight for its existence; it indicates a partial physiological obstruction and exhaustion against which the deepest instincts of life, which have remained intact, continually struggle with new expedients and devices. The ascetic ideal is such an expedient….
The ascetic ideal is the struggle “against disgust with life, against exhaustion, against the desire for the “end””. And with what does one do this struggle? Nietzsche again turns to “life”, when he answers: “the deepest instincts of life, which have remained intact.”
Here is the paradox: “the ascetic ideal is an artifice for the preservation of life”. Now “artifice” and “life” might normally contradict each other, cancel each other — artifice is always distant from the fullness of life and yet that is the point Nietzsche is making. Even when the fullness of life has almost completely disappeared, here is a state where the “deepest instincts of life” would have survived….
Now let us just note here as a preliminary observation that Buddha turns Nietzsche’s conception of the acetic ideal on its head.
For Buddhism, the “ascetic ideal”, if you want to call it that, is not the reversal of “the desire for the ‘end’”, but its calm embrace! Buddha, as it were, pushes on the ascetic ideal to eliminate the “gap” which Nietzsche talks about — such that the “ascetic ideal” is now the end turned into a desire.
Buddha’s notion of the nibbana makes this clear.
Nibbana is the total and final extinction — it is not the attainment of Enlightenment. As Rahula Walpola explains, “There is no such thing as 'entering into Nirvana after death’.” He explains further:
There is a word parinibbuto used to denote the death of the Buddha or an Arahant who has realized Nirvana, but it does not mean 'entering into Nirvana'. Parinibbuto simply means 'fully passed away', 'fully blown out' or 'fully extinct', because the Buddha or an Arahant has no re-existence after his death.
It will be clearer if we bring in another point. And that is that Nietzsche’s notion of the ascetic ideal is in fact closer to the Brahminical ideal of asceticism rather than the Buddhist.
For what Brahminism does is to convert force into power, forces into a social ideology, into power.1 That is, life or life-force is mediated in such a way in Brahminism that social power retains the “natural” legitimacy of nature as life-force even though it is fully part of culture. Power presents itself as force.
Nietzsche is of course extremely sensitive to the conversion of force into power, even though he uses different terms. For example, take his emphasis on how the ascetic ideal came to rule over people:
this ideal acquired such power and ruled over men as imperiously as we find it in history, especially wherever the civilization and taming of man has been carried through….
He locates the power in the “sickliness” of man under the rule of the ascetic ideal. He points to the great internal friction, that great internal tension, where the desire to live, to continue living, thriving, ruling and multiplying must now contradictorily co-exist with the drive towards self-diminution, abnegation. Nietzsche powerfully captures this aspect:
The ascetic priest is the incarnate desire to be different, to be in a different place, and indeed this desire at its greatest extreme, its distinctive fervor and passion; but precisely this power of his desire is the chain that holds him captive so that he becomes a tool for the creation of more favorable conditions for being here and being man — it is precisely this power that enables him to persuade to existence the whole herd of the ill-constituted, disgruntled, underprivileged, unfortunate, and all who suffer of themselves, by instinctively going before them as their shepherd.
The “incarnate desire to be different, to be in a different place” — here we have a more precise formulation of the ascetic ideal, that which gives it the power and the drive. That is why, “this power of his desire” is “the chain that holds him captive”.
Here is an account then of how force, “the deepest instincts of life”, is turned into power — how “an artifice for the preservation of life” is generated, an artifice which is yet close to life.
While Buddhism blocks this process of conversion of force into power, Brahminism precisely allows this conversion while always remaining within the domain of force — that is, always pretending an agnosticism towards ideology and power.
Thus this power-generating force, in order to maintain the agnosticism, must develop a conception adequate to it. Brahminism is the name of a social power which wants to ontologically be seen as belonging to the domain of the passive, of the ascetic, the Unknown even as it actively structures and regulates society. It is as though culture’s break with nature must always be presented as though on the side of nature. Philosophically, such a notion is already to be found in the Upanishads. The Mandukya Upanishad develops this concept of the highest state of consciousness as emanating from the deepest of passive states, the susupta, which is the dreamless sleep.
On the other hand, the great Buddhist text, the Mahasattipathana Sutta, teaches how force can be destroyed through the power and practices of the monk’s body and mind. That is, force is not to develop into power. The “contradiction of life against life” is resolved in a different way.
This is where we find that we must revise Nietzsche’s statement that “the ascetic ideal is an artifice for the preservation of life”. If we take the word “artifice” as the key word here, then we know that Nietzsche is focusing on how the ascetic life is another way of duplicitously concentrating power in the ascetic priest.
In the light of Buddhism, we must now revise Nietzsche’s phrase “the ascetic ideal is an artifice for the preservation of life”. For now we must say: “the ascetic ideal is the method for leading a life without vasana, without the accumulation of vasana or karma”. In the Bhagavad Gita, we see a perversion if you like of the Buddhist ideal — Arjuna’s is supposed to be rising above vasana, attachment and brotherly love, only to attain to a “higher purpose”, higher karma. The sublimity of karmic yoga, of being the vehicle of a higher purpose, of the Unknown, the Renunciation of the Earthly attachments, does not in any way mean a life without vasana.
The Bhagavad Gita seems to completely permit the conversion of force into power, the ascetic ideal as the accumulation of power for Arjuna, renunciation as a modality of power.
Yet it must be said that the Buddhist account of the removal of vasana, the end to all karmic accumulation, of what is the teaching of parinibutto, the end to the ceasing and becoming, does include precisely the practice and method of working with an Ineffable Self. In that sense, Buddhism does allow for a dialectical notion of the self, a self which while trying to abhor all trishna, in fact, must work towards that end by mobilising, deploying, appeasing trishna itself. Buddhism allows for a minimal self, or a minimally dialectical self — that being a core element in the doctrine of no-self, anatta.2
Given that the Buddhist ascetic ideal is free of vasana, free of the ascetic priest’s “incarnate desire” which is the basis of his power, it is possible that Nietzsche would find the Buddhist notion, properly understood, much more acceptable. But then Buddhism would not allow the short-circuit to the Superman!
For such a use of the terms force and power, I took cue from Dipesh Chakrabarty’s essay “Anthropocene Time”, History and Theory 57, no. 1 (March 2018), 5-32
Such a notion of self was something I had earlier tried to capture through the prevalent notion of “vanishing mediator” deployed in critical theory. It is here: "The Buddhist Ineffable Self and a Possible Indian Political Subject", Political Theology, Vol. 19, pp. 734-750, ISSN: 1462-317X, 2018. DOI: https://doi.org/10.1080/1462317X.2018.1537583