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Nietzsche, Europe and Islam

  
 
All Acting Regiment
14:58 / 21.11.07
I want to start off with something from the blog Conjunctural Research:

In his treatments of Islam, or Hinduism – all of which are explicitly anti-liberal, hierarchical and frequently misogynist – he considers the possibility that an affirmative culture might entirely separate itself from the Christian, Western heritage. As he writes in The Anti-Christ: ‘Christianity robbed us of the harvest of the culture of the ancient world, it later went on to rob us of the harvest of the culture of Islam. … For in itself there should be no choice in the matter when faced with Islam or Christianity, as little as there should be when faced with an Arab and a Jew. The decision is given in advance: no one is free to choose here. One either is Chandala or one is not… “War to the knife with Rome! Peace, friendship with Islam!’ (The Anti-Christ, p. 196).

Though this Islam may be purely ‘semiotic’ (as Ian Almond argues in a piece on Nietzsche’s phantasmatic infatuation with Islam), a mere signifying counterpart and provocation, it does reveal to us two things: one, the fact that as Nietzsche’s work progresses any identity to the archipolitical or philosophical concept of Europe, or indeed the West, is thrown into doubt; two, that the hierarchical invariants of his thinking remain determining in his evaluation of cultures: as he writes in his notebooks, the superiority of Arabs and Islam lies for him in the fact that we are dealing with a world ‘where man believes in order of rank and not in equality or equal rights’.

Despite the rather unsavoury reasons for this civilisational dislocation, it is nevertheless true that in its extreme consequences we could say, following the Italian philosopher Biagio de Giovanni, that Nietzsche’s thought brings into crisis ‘the self-representation of Europe’, and with Losurdo, that Nietzsche strikes a potent blow against the Christian imperialism that in his epoch (let us recall that the Berlin Conference and the scramble of Africa under the cover of anti-slavery morality takes place in 1884) seeks to justify Europe’s ‘civilising mission’, and destroys the genealogical myth of Europe and the West, whether Christian-Aryan-Germanic or the Hebrew-Christian-Greek-Occidental one.

So - if I've understood this properly, Nietzsche seems to be doing two things:

a) Using something he calls 'Islam' to attack the Christian-moral complex used to justify European colonialism and empire,

which weapon he creates by

b) Claiming 'Islam' as monolithic, anti-equal, rigidly locked into a non-egalitarian structure.

So what can we say about this? Is it an early example of anti-Imperialism, soaked as it is in Orientalism? Or is it just straight-forward Orientalism? Or something else entirely?
 
 
grant
15:07 / 21.11.07
Without engaging directly with the ideas Nietzsche is presenting, I'd find it really hard to argue that a man who spent an entire book putting words in the mouth of a very real major Middle Eastern religious leader was not guilty of Orientalism.
 
 
Glenn Close But No Cigar
16:11 / 21.11.07
Well, while not wishing at all to excuse the Orientalism present in Nietzsche's monolithic construction of Islam, such Orientalism is in no way remarkable for a middle class son of a clergyman born in the mid 19th Century. What is far more interesting is his attempt to find, in Islam, a kind of life-affirming Other to Christianity - a faith with which he is more familiar than Islam, but also constructs in an equally monolithic fashion (Occidentalism?). To my mind, this attempt founders on the shores of his apparent dismissal of the egalitarian aspects of the Islamic faith (which, arguably, expand upon the egalitarian aspects of the New Testament), in favour of carefully selected, or more accurately fantasised-about, aspects of social practice in certain majority-Muslim communities. To be honest, though, I think Nietzsche is the wrong place to look for accurate and nuanced anthropological research, and I'm not really sure how profitable holding him up to contemporary standards and finding him wanting really is. A more profitable approach might be to rub his approach to Islam against that of Schopenhauer, an influence of his, who wrote in 'The World as Will and Representation' (1819):

Consider the Koran, for example; this wretched book was sufficient to start a world-religion, to satisfy the metaphysical need of countless millions for twelve hundred years, to become the basis of their morality and of a remarkable contempt for death, and also to inspire them to bloody wars and the most extensive conquests. In this book we find the saddest and poorest form of theism. Much may be lost in translation, but I have not been able to discover in it one single idea of value.

There is a useful link here to a review of Roy Jackson's 'Nietzsche and Islam'.
 
 
petunia
16:40 / 21.11.07
I will have to find the relevant texts to properly engage with what has been said above, but it's worth bearing in mind that Nietzsche's criticism of Christianity is very well developed and to say he uses 'Islam' to attack the Christian-moral complex used to justify European colonialism and empire would be to greatly oversimplify his thought. Nietzsche uses many tools to pick apart the Christian tradition, and Islam, or 'Islam' may just be one of those tools.

Without reading the texts it's hard to be sure, but I suspect a part of his infatuation with (his image of) Islam would be related to his critique of Christianity as nihilistic. He sees Hierarchy as inherent to the world, and attempts to treat all as equal end up as nothing more than attempts to treat all as Nothing. He tends to see Islamic morality as a more 'affirmative' morality than those of Judaism and Christianity. I can't really say more as I don't have enough knowledge of Islam or Nietzsche's treatment of it to do much more than guesswork at the mo.

It's important to see that Nietzsche's not just interested in hierarchical critiques of Christianity. His attack of it is pretty much the key theme running through his work. He wants to find how we can move from a morality which he sees as debasing and negating of life and into a true affirmative mode of being. His view of hierarchy is based in his 'return to nature' - he sees justice as essentially what is dictated by an immoral universe - to affirm life is to affirm the differences inherent in our powers, our ways of being. Hierarchy is seen as a fact for Nietzche, with some people being 'greater' than others. However, he does claim to be thoroughly a-political, so i'm not sure he can be seen as advocating any particular structuring of society in a political sense. It's complex.

N. Likes to quote Hassan-i Sabbah's famous phrase "Nothing is true. Everything is permissible." I can't help but think his ideas on the hashshashins are influenced by a romantic tendency, or orientalism if you wish - the idea, popular with RAW-alikes, that there was a secret genius mystical sect who got to do cool sex and killing and were beyond morality, seems to be quite attracive to a lot of people who what to do the whole 'Beyond Good and Evil' thing...

As for Zarathustra - the way I understand it is - Zarathustra/Zoroaster (the historical one) created what many consider (especially in Nietzche's time) to be the first Dualist religion in the sense that there is a Good God, and an Evil adversary. Nietzsche sees this as the start of the Abrahamic religions, with their negative moralities. He used the image of Zarathustra for his book as a kind of irony - he wished a prophet of an anti-religion of affirmation of all and a refusal (more specifically, a 'going beyond') of the dividing categories of Good and Evil. To have the first prophet of God proclaim the Death of God probably seemed quite fitting to Nietzsche. Wiki has a good quote:

[F]or what constitutes the tremendous historical uniqueness of that Persian is just the opposite of this. Zarathustra was the first to consider the fight of good and evil the very wheel in the machinery of things: the transposition of morality into the metaphysical realm, as a force, cause, and end in itself, is his work. […] Zarathustra created this most calamitous error, morality; consequently, he must also be the first to recognize it. […] His doctrine, and his alone, posits truthfulness as the highest virtue; this means the opposite of the cowardice of the "idealist” who flees from reality […]—Am I understood?—The self-overcoming of morality, out of truthfulness; the self-overcoming of the moralist, into his opposite—into me—that is what the name of Zarathustra means in my mouth. - ecce homo

It's also worth considering that Nietzsche believed 'there are no facts, only interpretations'. As language and thought consist of metaphors of metaphors, I'm not sure how worthwhile it is to try to consider Nietzsche's thought in simple terms of 'Orientalism' and 'Anti-Imperialism'. These may well be elements of what is being said, but Nietzche is renowned for being hard to stuff in any political bag, for good reason.
 
 
Phex: Dorset Doom
18:32 / 21.11.07
Historically, the Ottoman Empire, a massive Islamic nation right on Europe's doorstep, had been a Constitutional Monarchy, like much of Europe to some extent, and had a secular legal system for thirty-something years before The Anti-Christ was written and had been declining politically and economically for two centuruies or more, so it's difficult to see where this conception of Islam as any more powerful and anti-egalitarian than Christianity was coming from.

Elsewhere in AC Nietzche says that the animosity between Judeo-Christian culture and Islam, cumulating in the Crusades, exists "[B]ecause Islam was noble, because it owed its origin to manly instincts, because it said Yes to life even in the rare and exquisite treasures of Moorish life!". The 'rare and exquisite treasures' part reads as classic Orientalism, all vieled dancing girls, hookahs and exotic spices under the desert moon. As for 'ow(ing) its origin to manly instincts', I can see how somebody could interpret Islam this way- Muhammad was a military commander who fought and killed to carve out a place for his faith, retiring from the battlefield to his 11-13 wives while Jesus was a celibate pacifist. It's easy to see who comes out ahead in the version of masculinity Nietzche seems to have believed in. However, it is unlikely that Nietzche would have approved of the meaning (literally and figuratively) of Islam: surrender to a God little different from that of the Christians and Jews.

The line “War to the knife with Rome! Peace, friendship with Islam!" is a 19th century precursor of the banners I saw held by members various Socialist groups at, of all things, the march for immigrant rights in the US a couple of years back: "Down with the USA! Down with Israel! Support the Iraqi resistance!" etc. Not to diminish an intellectual giant by lumping him in with those barely-pubescent cretins, but I imagine the impetus is the same: I don't like my own culture so I shall (superficially, since my support effects nothing) throw my support behind the cultural Other as my culture defines it (to the West, both then and now this is Islam, throughout much of the twentieth century it would have been Communism). We are decadent and lazy so they must be vigorous and life-affirming. We don't have the answers so they, being our opposites, must have them.
 
 
All Acting Regiment
12:45 / 22.11.07
So, is there a way of criticising Christianity (or indeed anything) without using some other? Is there any other you can use that isn't flawed itself? Mathematics?
 
 
Glenn Close But No Cigar
18:21 / 22.11.07
What might be useful here is a nice distinction between the notions of an Other, and an other. 'Othering' might briefly be described as a term employed by certain post-structuralist and especially post-colonial theorists to denote the process of constructing a (negative) image, idea etc. of something-that-is-not-you for the purposes of a) exercising power over that something-that-is-not-you, and b) defining yourself positively in relationship to it. For anybody who hasn't read it, Edward Said's wonderful book Orientalism is a key text to understanding this phenomenon. Interestingly, Nietzsche seems to reverse the usual 19th Century formula of imag(in)ing Islam as languid, feminine etc. At the same time, his talk of manly instincts might also be described as a form of Orientalism, albeit one in the erotics function rather differently.

An other, though, is just a something-that-is-not-you, and does not necessarily suggest the same asymmetrical power relationships that an Other does.

To respond to AAR's question, it would seem to be clearly imprudent to criticise Christianity (which was in N's time and remains very far from being a monolithic faith) by comparing it to an Othered Islam, whether along Nietzchean or Said-ian lines, or any iteration of Islam at all. More broadly, a critique of a given phenomenon is usually best begun by mapping its own internal inconsistancies, rather than by comparing it to something else.
 
 
petunia
22:21 / 22.11.07
Mathematics?

You've got me intrigued - how could a system of language/thought that is decidedly 'objective' and amoral be used to critique, or even speak of, a moral/religious system?
 
 
All Acting Regiment
10:42 / 23.11.07
You've got me intrigued - how could a system of language/thought that is decidedly 'objective' and amoral be used to critique, or even speak of, a moral/religious system?

Because for a moral/religious system to be of any use to us, if it's a practical one that goes on in the real world, it must interact with the facts of the world as they are, without denying them - you can use mathematics to work out what the facts of the world are and to show how the system in question is out of touch with them.
 
 
Phex: Dorset Doom
14:31 / 23.11.07
What would be the difference between using Mathematics to criticize Christianity (or any religious faith) and Science (or Reason) qua Richard Dawkins?
 
 
petunia
14:54 / 23.11.07
hmmm...

I can see that mathematics/science in general can give us a telling of 'the facts of the world' which may be more accurate than, say, the Bible, but i'm not sure a tellling of the world will necessarily give the ability for moral critique.

Moral/ethical stances are based in solely in the valuing of actions/things/processes. I can't see that maths can be used to critique any kind of values, unless it is used to say that all values are subjective and irrelevant to the truth of the world. This may be a stance you want to take, and it would be the stance that Nietzsche criticises as the essentially nihilistic view of the Christian/Scientific (the two are largely the same for N.) world. As he puts it - "the highest values devalue themselves" (Truth, as the highest value of the Christian/scientific tradition, comes to devalue all values and thus devalues itself.)

Of course, one is already taking a moral stance in supposing that 'Truth' (in this case, an 'accurate representation' of the 'facts') is to be supported and followed. One is also presupposing that we can work out what the facts of the world are (with the supposition that there are 'facts' and not just interpretations...)

So by positing mathematics as a framework from which to critique other frameworks, one has already made a couple of moral presuppositions. These presuppositions are taken as the grounding for the use of mathematics and, as such, cannot be justified by mathematics. Quandry.

I'm inclined to agree with Glenn when he says a critique of a given phenomenon is usually best begun by mapping its own internal inconsistancies. When we do the whole battle thing of using one system to counter another, we open ourselves up to as many holes and contradictions as the system we try to combat.
 
 
All Acting Regiment
15:05 / 23.11.07
"What would be the difference between using Mathematics to criticize Christianity (or any religious faith) and Science (or Reason) qua Richard Dawkins?"

If there's a difference, I'd say its because mathematics is common in all cultures - it's shared wherever you go because every society needs some form of it (and it's value is immediately obvious).

Whereas things like 'science' and 'reason' are connected to it but come bundled with a lot of cultural baggage and, if not cultural specificty, then historical/power-relations specificity that gives us the spectacle of Richard Dawkins, a professor from a rich country who eats three hot meals a day, calling the morals of people less fortunate than him 'stupid', when actually it's that they haven't had a chance at an education. Which clearly doesn't contitute an effective critique (because I don't see Dawkins' Delusion book resolving the problems he attacks).

Even if you're a subsistence farmer, you'll use maths to keep track of your plants and animals, whereas to get to the stage of having a powerful scientific apparatus (beyond the natural skills of the individual) requires that you have enough wealth that some of you can sit around thinking and debating while the others work the field. The value of science or the truth of a scientific theory isn't always immediately obvious, whereas it's always vitally important to keep a count of your seeds/family/etc.

So using mathematics allows you to approach a problem from a neutral, objective perspective.
 
 
All Acting Regiment
15:05 / 23.11.07
Or perhaps 'as objective and neutral as possible'.
 
 
petunia
15:20 / 23.11.07
Even if you're a subsistence farmer, you'll use maths to keep track of your plants and animals, whereas to get to the stage of having a powerful scientific apparatus (beyond the natural skills of the individual) requires that you have enough wealth that some of you can sit around thinking and debating while the others work the field.

I'm sorry, but I really can't see that the farmer counting beans will have the time, access to university training etc etc to be able to come up with a coherent mathematical ontology.

The maths you are talking about (I assume your speaking of mathematics is influenced by the stuff you mention in the Badiou thread) has been enabled by specifically the same culture of wealth, privilidge and access that enables the Science and Reason of our time.

Or do you think that Pythagoras, Newton and Russell, or Badiou, for that matter came up with their theories while working in fields and factories?
 
 
petunia
15:31 / 23.11.07
The value of science or the truth of a scientific theory isn't always immediately obvious, whereas it's always vitally important to keep a count of your seeds/family/etc

It's also pretty important to have that malaria jab (or even the understanding that malaria is contracted through mosquito bites). Pretty important to have that filtration system added to the pump. Pretty important to have a knowledge of the benefit of sanitation.

Or, if we want to get more simple - it's pretty important to know that your seeds will only grow in a certain season, that they need water to grow, that you will be able to see them better in daylight than in darkness.

Seems to me that Science and Reason, in both their core aspects and their developed modes, are just as valuable as mathematics (which is a part of Science/reason anyway).
 
 
Good Intentions
21:47 / 24.11.07
You've got me intrigued - how could a system of language/thought that is decidedly 'objective' and amoral be used to critique, or even speak of, a moral/religious system?

Because for a moral/religious system to be of any use to us, if it's a practical one that goes on in the real world, it must interact with the facts of the world as they are, without denying them - you can use mathematics to work out what the facts of the world are and to show how the system in question is out of touch with them.

To give a short but comprehensive answer, RM Hare articulates one way (I'd say the correct way) for how moral language and an objective language like mathematics, and whatever else you might be reaching for, intersects:

For any non-trivial inference you need at least two premises, like: that brick is in the air unsupported, there is gravity in effect, therefore the brick will fall to the ground. We can seperate this into a minor premise, describing some fact of the world (the unsupported brick), a major premise, some universal imperative (in normal gravity all unsupported objects fall towards the ground), and the conclusion.
Using this same form for a moral inference makes the relationship between objective and moral language clear: Irma wants to take the bread from the shop (minor premise), stealing is wrong (major premise), therefore Irma shouldn't just take the bread, but also pay for it (conclusion).
Objective language can only contribute to the minor premise, while you need moral language to describe the major premise, the one that does prescriptive work. The major premise can not be reduced to an objective language (though many disagree with me), and even if it could, it is far from obvious how this would be done (see the naturalistic fallacy and the open question argument).

And, as others have remarked on this thread, it is hardly as if using any language and system of analysis of any type does not carry its own problems.
 
 
Good Intentions
21:53 / 24.11.07
Let's not describe Dawkins' project as using Reason against religion, since in the course of his tirades Dawkins is systematically uncharitable, inconsistent and uses other forms of selective reasoning, all of which are formal fallacies.
 
 
Good Intentions
22:09 / 24.11.07
Commonly when people discuss Nietzsche I'm very worried by gestures towards Nietzsche's position on something, like here the quote in the OP gestures towards Nietzsche's anti-liberalism, misogyny and hierarchialism. It's not like the old bastard ever wrote down the tenets of his position. It's not like he claimed to have a consistent position whatsoever, except for 'the revaluation of all values', which is hardly something that could sit comfortably on any manifesto, especially not a conservative one like an anti-liberal, hierarchical, misogynistic one of the type gestured at would be.

Something which does run through his work is the technique of decentering, the same ball Derrida would pick up and run with as far as his legs could carry him, the technique by which Nietzsche attempts to re-evaluate all values. Like has been mentioned, Nietzsche's portrayal of Islamic culture (in a book more notable for rethoric and irony than scholarship, the stage of his work where Nietzsche was writing examples of what he was preaching in letters ten feet high to an audience of nobody, which could not last for long and did not) runs against the grain of the analysis of his contemporaries. To decenter an analysis you take the object of analysis and invert the evaluation, and take a good look at it again. I imagine Nietzsche saying: "You, C19 Europe, see Islam as languid and femine, but what if I tell you that it is fiery, masculine and domineering? This is also true! Where does that leave your analysis of Europe's place as the sober, decisive force in the world?"
 
 
All Acting Regiment
12:11 / 25.11.07
Petunia: The maths you are talking about (I assume your speaking of mathematics is influenced by the stuff you mention in the Badiou thread) has been enabled by specifically the same culture of wealth, privilidge and access that enables the Science and Reason of our time.

Or do you think that Pythagoras, Newton and Russell, or Badiou, for that matter came up with their theories while working in fields and factories?

Right, good point. Let me then try and answer again Phex's question: What would be the difference between using Mathematics to criticize Christianity (or any religious faith) and Science (or Reason) qua Richard Dawkins?

As an answer I'd like to bring in Good Intentions': Let's not describe Dawkins' project as using Reason against religion, since in the course of his tirades Dawkins is systematically uncharitable, inconsistent and uses other forms of selective reasoning, all of which are formal fallacies.

Which is a very good point, and describes the way that Dawkins-ism falls far short of what I'm talking about - having thought some more about something that was admittedly a shot in the dark, I suppose the answer is that [using science/reason to question some moral code] is included in the idea of [using mathematics] to do so, but that this is very different to [Dawkin's unreasonable way of using reason and science].

Why? Because if one were using mathematics to approach a situation, one could not fail to see the economics underlying it and come to a greater understanding of it - you could literally count the number of helicopters, or the ammount of oil wealth, or the potentially gained votes, for each belligerent, you could map out the flow of money from out of the proletariat's hands and work out where it was going to, and these are only some of the simplest operations you could carry out.

Whereas if we approach it with Dawkins-ism all we get is: 'Look! Those people there are religious - that's unreasonable, and must be the cause of all the trouble!'

And if we approach it with 19th century colonial Christianity: 'Look! Those people there are not Christian - that's making them evil, so we must convert them!'

I appreciate that this doesn't outline a complete system (Badiou seems to have done this already, although I'll reserve that judgement until I've finished the book) but I hope I've made it clearer.

***

On to more from GI:

Commonly when people discuss Nietzsche I'm very worried by gestures towards Nietzsche's position on something, like here the quote in the OP gestures towards Nietzsche's anti-liberalism, misogyny and hierarchialism. It's not like the old bastard ever wrote down the tenets of his position. It's not like he claimed to have a consistent position whatsoever, except for 'the revaluation of all values', which is hardly something that could sit comfortably on any manifesto, especially not a conservative one like an anti-liberal, hierarchical, misogynistic one of the type gestured at would be.

Again, very good point - I can't find the quote now but there's a point in, I think, BGE where he's at pains to point out that he's not a politician.

Something which does run through his work is the technique of decentering, the same ball Derrida would pick up and run with as far as his legs could carry him, the technique by which Nietzsche attempts to re-evaluate all values. Like has been mentioned, Nietzsche's portrayal of Islamic culture (in a book more notable for rethoric and irony than scholarship, the stage of his work where Nietzsche was writing examples of what he was preaching in letters ten feet high to an audience of nobody, which could not last for long and did not) runs against the grain of the analysis of his contemporaries. To decenter an analysis you take the object of analysis and invert the evaluation, and take a good look at it again. I imagine Nietzsche saying: "You, C19 Europe, see Islam as languid and femine, but what if I tell you that it is fiery, masculine and domineering? This is also true! Where does that leave your analysis of Europe's place as the sober, decisive force in the world?"

Again, good point.
 
 
All Acting Regiment
12:13 / 25.11.07
Objective language can only contribute to the minor premise, while you need moral language to describe the major premise, the one that does prescriptive work. The major premise can not be reduced to an objective language (though many disagree with me), and even if it could, it is far from obvious how this would be done

Perhaps - but we need mathematics to remain aware that the major premise is arbitrary, cultural and originating in us, as opposed to neccesary, natural, and originating in divinity or 'the unquestionable'.
 
 
Less searchable M0rd4nt
14:28 / 25.11.07
Without wanting to get into an offtopic discussion of Dawkins - my reading of him is quite different, of course - I would say that I don't really buy into the claims about math offering some superior and objective mode of argumentation as opposed to Dawkins style science/reason. There is very little that clearly follows from committing yourself to either kind of abstract framework which are, in fact, probably pretty similar when this far from their natural domains; many, if not most, of Dawkins abstract arguments against religion go back to Russell, for example, who was a mathematician philosopher.
 
 
Lurid Archive
14:29 / 25.11.07
Sorry, that was me above, not Mordant.
 
  
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