This Art of Transfiguration Is Philosophy: Nietzsche’s Asceticism
Author(s)
Roberts, Tyler T.
Abstract
In later work, Nietzsche sharpened his analysis of asceticism and power into the point of his attack on Christianity. Most famously in his essay “What is the Meaning of Ascetic Ideals,” Nietzsche insisted that pathological denial of self and world, exemplified in the religious ascetic, continues to grip the scientific and moral dispositions of the modern West. Despite the force of Nietzsche’s condemnation of asceticism and despite the continuing power of antiascetic critique, in recent years historians such as Peter Brown and Margaret Miles and critics such as Geoffrey Harpham have begun to challenge the simplistic association of asceticism with a masochistic madness, by attending to the way that ascetic practices have served as empowerment, spiritualization, and liberation. This new work offers an opportunity and a perspective from which to revisit Nietzsche’s treatment of asceticism. It is a mistake, in other words, to read Nietzsche as simplistically as he himself reads Christianity, for, despite his polemic against the ascetic ideal, Nietzsche’s writing does not reject but refigures asceticism. Moreover, his refigured asceticism is informed in a profound way by practices of body and soul that are developed in the same Christian tradition of which he was so critical.
