Nietzsche and the Mother: A Contrast to Kantian Enlightenment

Dean W.

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Nietzsche and the Mother: A Contrast to Kantian Enlightenment

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Abstract

To what extent does Nietzsche impose his ideals on the reader or create an open and flexible world-view? Upon closing his arguments in On the Genealogy of Morals Nietzsche imagines a reader asking him "'What are you really doing, erecting an ideal or knocking one down?'" (95). He answers with a rhetorical question: "But have you ever asked yourselves sufficiently how much the erection of every ideal on earth has cost?" (95). By this we are not to assume that he must therefore be knocking down an ideal, he is simply questioning the nature of the act of ideal creation. Rather than erecting ideals there seems to be latent in his text the idea of a different kind of ideal creation which turns back to the womb, to the potentiality of pregnancy and new generations, and finds in the mother an opportunity for rebirth of society through her artistic gift to and manifested in the child. Crucial to the development idea is an examination of the imposed, which Kant first began in his essay "What is Enlightenment?"

Introduction
Nietzsche's critique of the history of religious guilt
Examining the religion of the nobles
The rhetorical brilliance of the passage and the creation of a remarkable synthesis of ideas
Conclusion
Works cited

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[...] Even the bad conscience itself is not such a bad thing and it can have a high rank as a value if it is harnessed in the proper way if, as Nietzsche proposes, it could be used to make man feel guilty when he did not act according to the will to power which is his natural essence. Nietzsche is too clever to erect an ideal, for he knows the cost of destruction it entails: a temple is to be erected a temple must be destroyed” (95). [...]

[...] important to remember though, that Nietzsche never says that the bad conscience is itself bad or good or evil. He remains aloof in judgement, perhaps because as a historian of morals he knows that its role could shift radically. After all, he says of morals ideas that ‘evolution' of a thing, a custom, an organ is thus by no means its progressus toward a goal, even less a logical progressus . (77). One reason for his reservation of judgement on the bad conscience is that Nietzsche is less concerned with calling things good or bad than with determining the “order of rank among values” (45). [...]

[...] He does not idealize the Ancient Greeks or Romans and other pre- Christian cultures, he only sees in them the cycle or generation which achieved the furthest progress for humanity (before the regression) and Nietzsche tries to distill from their cultures his ideal conception of man: to see what man has lost and what he can gain or create for himself. One of the more interesting ways he does this is by examining the religion of these nobles, which he felt exemplified a positive morality that was more compatible with the creative will to power. [...]

[...] It is all the more interesting then that Nietzsche compares this bad conscience to pregnancy, for he says that the original creators of society, whom he idealized, were like terrible artists whose creation was “justified to all eternity in its ‘work,' like a mother in her child” (87). These artists were unhampered by the guilt which comes with the bad conscience, and yet Nietzsche connects both with the mother. So far Nietzsche's critique of the history of religious guilt and its developments appears to be in line with Kant's belief that any man seeking enlightenment must not be hampered by religious imposition. [...]

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