The Ascetic ideal has already won, confessions of a lost agnostic.

I woke up this morning with a strange felling, I had just become aware of the idea which had troubled me for two weeks. Let me tell you about how it began.

I read Nietzsche’s On the Genealogy of Morals two weeks ago, and, as a good agnostic which had been raised in an atheist family, I thought “oh yes, Nietzsche is right, only atheism can fight against the ascetic ideal! Ascetic way of life is the worst we can imagine, it weakens our willing of power, it keeps Man expressing his own nature. I don’t believe, so I will not follow the ascetic ideal, I will be better than this biased vision of the dialectic “good-mean”, I will go back to the old and not warped vision of good, the good which can follow its willing of power.” In a few words, as explains Rousseau in his “Confessions”, I was like a child reading La Fontaine’s fables; I was identifying myself to the winner. But the winner in the story is not always the winner in the life. Days after days, I thought a bit (fact which is rare enough to be noticed), and I tried to consider the way I acted. At this point of the story, my resolution to be the man who would overcome the ascetic ideal began to weaken.

Indeed, I am a common man, I am not especially kind with the others, but, as my whole compatriots, I do not live as if I were alone. I take the door when someone comes after me, I say “hello”, “good bye, have a nice day”, even if I want the one I say it to be dead in a painful situation. Talking to this, I want often people I don’t like to be death in horrible suffering, but I never killed anyone and I even never hurt anyone. More important, I follow the rules, even if they are compelling me not to be what I would prefer to. I follow the rules because, most of the time, I totally agree with them; I think the rules are fair, because, to me it is normal not to kill someone, not to endanger the others driving fast, it is normal to wait your turn at the entry of a museum, to pay for the meal you eat… In other words, I am an agnostic who shares the ascetic ideal. Here we are facing an important obstacle: how can you be agnostic and follow part of the ascetic ideal?

How can you be agnostic and follow part of the ascetic ideal?

The first answer to it could be “you are not atheist, you are agnostic, so shut up, you are totally out of the topic.” This answer cannot be relevant, because what is important, in Nietzsche’s perspective, with atheism is not the fact that you exclude every possibility of a God’s existence, but the fact that you do not believe there is something after physical life. And this characteristic is shared by atheists and agnostics.

The Second answer could be “Nietzsche was wrong”. Indeed, you can consider our societies are so linked to the ascetic ideal that we cannot live out of this way. That could be right, our societies are very old, and they are based on the Catholic moral (for France) or the Protestant one (for the United Kingdom or the United States). Deeming Western States as children of the Christian moral, it is easy to conclude that, as people of these states, we are socialized following the rules of the ascetic ideal and thus, we cannot go out these rules, even if we do not believe in God or in life after death. Following this idea, we do not need atheism but we need atheism and a lot of time to overcome the ascetic ideal. Gradually, and only if there are more and more atheists, societies will begin to change and the socialization to. And, maybe a day, the ascetic ideal will be overcome. This answer to my problem seems to me as facile as the first. It is too easy to say “Nietzsche was wrong; I cannot do anything to overcome the ascetic ideal”. Then the last proposition we have to consider is the sentence “and if I had misunderstood Nietzsche?”

“And If I had misunderstood Nietzsche?” is maybe the best answer to this matter, because it invites us to reconsider what means “overcome the ascetic ideal”. That is right, I am not the Noble man, which, according to Nietzsche, follow his willing of death in all situations. But maybe, the ascetic ideal is overcome as soon as you stop to believe in the God, or, to reformulate, as soon as you stop to choose your acts observing the willing of a hypothetic being. When you follow the ascetic ideal saying “I follow it because I think some of these rules because I find them fair” instead of “I follow these rules because God’s will judge my soul at the end of the life” you are overcoming this ascetic ideal. And more important, in this perspective you are choosing the rules you want to follow because you think they can be good for your own behavior. Acting in this sense, we can, I think, overcome the ascetic ideal.

According to you, is this a way to overcome the ascetic ideal, or is this ideal even a thing which has to be overcome? Is there another way?