Blogging Nietzsche—Nietzsche's Poetry: "To the Virtuous"
Continuing my series on the philosophy behind Nietzsche’s poetry, I come to a short poem titled “To the Virtuous” (Nietzsche, The Gay Science, ‘Joke, Cunning, and Revenge’ Prelude in German Rhymes, No. 5):
5. To the Virtuous
Our virtues too should step lively to and fro:
Like the verses of Homer, they have to come and go!
The title of this poem, “To the Virtuous” is deceptive. At a glance it appears that the poem is addressed to the so-called virtuous people of Western morality. However, as a philosopher who is critical of Judeo-Christian morality, Nietzsche is always seeking to move beyond morality as it is commonly conceived of in Western culture. So the proper audience for this poem are those people who have deceived themselves into believing that there is something necessary or objective about Judeo-Christian morality, and who have thus deceived themselves into thinking they are virtuous when actually they are the weakest, most herd-like of humanity.
In the first line, “Our virtues too should step lively to and fro,” Nietzsche presents a colorful picture of the nature of virtue—that virtue should be lively. Nietzsche is constantly reminding us that we are embodied, physical, animal beings, with all of the connotations entailed by that description. We are neither eternal souls nor disembodied Cartesian minds. We are biological beings with all of the drives and desires and needs that description entails.
As embodied beings here in the physical world, Nietzsche thinks we are deeply creative, each of us with our own metaphors and individual perspectives. Our virtues, then, should have this embodied, individualistic quality, with a liveliness that reflects the kind of creative, embodied beings we are. We long to create, and so our virtues must likewise be creative—and created by us instead of being handed to us from on high or from any divine being in an ethereal heaven. Our virtues should be dance-like; they should step to and fro and have the same aesthetic quality as a dance. They should not just be beautiful; they should unfold and evolve dramatically as a dance progression unfolds and evolves.
The reference to the verses of Homer in the last line is clearly a reference to The Iliad and The Odyssey. As a philologist, Nietzsche was keenly aware that the virtues cherished in Ancient Greece and Ancient Rome were substantively different than the virtues praised by Judeo-Christian morality, with the latter serving to pacify and castrate (as Nietzsche might say) the strength of character that Nietzsche admired about the mindset of the ancient world and about our human potential. But just as few people today—or even in Nietzsche’s time—read Homer any longer, so too are the values praised by ancient world—values of individual strength of character—are largely forgotten by us “modern” men and women. Instead, we prefer the relatively genteel and relatively safer morality of the Judeo-Christian tradition, which Nietzsche laments and criticizes again and again throughout his philosophical work.
In the second half of the final line, “[our virtues] have to come and go,” Nietzsche makes an interesting claim that our virtues and values must come and go, just as the values of the ancient world have come and gone for us modern humans, and just as the reading of Homer has (sadly) faded out of popularity. Nietzsche anticipates and advocates for a day when we will finally transcend Judeo-Christian morality—along with its moralistic concepts of “good” and “evil”—in favor both of a return to the individual strength of character championed by the ancient world and of a more artistically creative notion of virtue more akin to a dance, a musical composition, or a piece of art—something deeply personal, individualistic, metaphorical, and authentic—not a universal morality but a deeply individual and personal morality based on the uniqueness, strength, and creativity of each of us as individuals.
To continue to rely on Judeo-Christian morality as if it were necessary, fixed, unchanging, and eternal is to put ourselves in a cage of morality, to make us weak and dependent instead of finding our strength within ourselves individually and authentically. Virtue, then, for Nietzsche is not the same as morality; our virtues are historical, contextual, personal, and individual—they change and should change and fluctuate over time, both historically and in the course of your own lifetime. Most importantly for Nietzsche, we should attempt to transcend and keep ourselves from falling back into the supposedly necessary—but pacifying and castrating—virtues of Judeo-Christian morality, which should reach its twilight much like the values of Homer have for us present-day individuals. Nietzsche deeply hopes that future thinkers, philosophers, and students of human nature will look back on Judeo-Christian morality as something in the past, something humanity was finally able to transcend and overcome on its way to a future morality defined creatively and authentically by each individual—individuals who purposefully avoid the herd-like trappings of morality.
For Further Reading:
