Further notes related to some words from last post.
If life is in decline, you can expect an increase in the ascetic instinct. When the world is rotting, men become ascetic. The more fucked up the external world, the more one is pushed internally to find some sanity. The more the world appears as a lie, the more truth is sought internally. If no noble mission presents itself in the outside world, one can always seek God. People go to yoga retreats because life sucks.
Now, this does not mean that the ascetic instinct = life in decline. It might be a symptom, or a reaction, but not life in decline itself. This is what Nietzsche seems to say when he is questioning if the ascetic instinct is not life’s most powerful means of protecting itself from its own decline.
Man acts in the world, on the world, with the world. But when it seems that this acting is not serving the end for which it exists —an increase in one’s powers, an expansion of one’s being, that is, an increase in one’s power to act —, man starts questioning the very meaning of his acting. And so, the ascetic instinct is born. Not necessarily as a desire for world renunciation, but as the desire to seek what is truly of worth, when it becomes evident that nothing is of any worth anymore.
Now, not all ascetic instincts are the same. There is a world-renouncing and life-hating type of ascetic, which receives its example in the stereotype of the Christian ascetic; starving, disease-ridden, inflicting suffering on himself and his body. It says love for god and others, but it means only hate for itself. (I am not saying there is no power here, not at all.) On a much more terribly powerless level, the world-renouncing ascetic is seen in the disillusioned youth meditating 5 hours a day to escape his miserable existence. He says he seeks enlightenment, but he only seeks an excuse not to act. There must also be a different type of asceticism, a life-affirming type of ascetic instinct, that seemingly renounces the world, and even life itself, not because it hates life, but because he yearns for it. And nothing makes it impossible for the disillusioned youth to participate in this type. Disillusion can lead to great things. As rotten matter can be vital soil for new life.
—Speaking in absolutes, one could say that even the basest forms of asceticism are in the end only confused expressions of this higher ascetic instinct.—
The ascetic instinct is not contrary to man’s nature as a beast of prey, as a creature of action. And man’s nature as a contemplative being is certainly not an argument against man’s nature as a beast of prey.
A sheep or a cow has to eat all day, it has no time for leisure and contemplation. It has to act, constantly. It is a low level of action, however, mere chewing and small steps. It does not look far. It does not do much, yet it is condemned to constant movement. The more predatorial in nature the animal, the more intense the action becomes. A wolf, a lion, or an eagle does not graze. It seeks, it chases, it explores, and it kills with violence, all while showing miraculous insight and skill in how it goes about this. But, after the hunt is over, the lion rests for hours on end. Doing nothing, except for gazing into the distance. The more capable of intense irruptions of action, the more capable of leisure. Man is similar to the lion in this regard. He does not have to graze all day. And he does not even have to hunt every day. Which leaves more time for contemplation, and more time to think about acting in a way that surpasses the mere action required for survival. Thought and action do not exist separately. The more one is capable of thought, the more one is capable of action. And the more one is capable of action, the more one is capable of thought. At least, this is the ideal. But being man, we are already further ahead towards this ideal than the herbivore herd animal.
The ascetic instinct can not be opposed to life. Life is partly an action, and partly a drawing away from action. And the higher the life, the higher its capacity for drawing away. Higher, that is, when it has gone beyond mere life seeking to preserve itself. What can happen is that, just as the instinct for action can degrade in quality, so can the ascetic instinct. And what can happen is that man’s two sides —contemplative and active— come to be seen no longer as two sides of one and the same being, but as two separate and opposed ‘faculties.’ In this case, the moment before one of them turns against the other is not far off. And so the scholars and contemplatives breed a hatred for the men of action, and the men of action breed a hatred for the contemplative. The one says to the other; your mode of life is not truly life. But it hates only what is lacking in itself. A peculiar stage where this scenario regularly plays out is with the conflicts between religions. The Christian says to the Pagan; you do not know the virtue of stillness and peace. And the Pagan says to the Christian; you are weak and corrupted by the monastic spirit, you no longer know how to act in accordance with nature, and you can not accept that life is war and that this is how it should be. A different Christian enters the conversation, and he sides with the Pagan, telling the first Christian that his vision is a corrupted one, and that ‘originally’, Christianity is a religion of violent action and holy war.
In truth, all higher ‘systems’ of belief are able to think man’s nature as a contemplative being, and his nature as a being of action, together.
Having split the contemplative and the active parts of man, diving deeper into the avenue of contemplation, and coming to identify more with this, and less with the aspect of action, all sorts of illnesses grow. We can imagine a lion resting after the hunt, lying there, dreaming, and it thinks to itself: but do I really need to kill these innocent animals, if all I do is lay in the sun? No longer having adequate nutrition, movement, and all the other virtues the lion gains from the experience of the hunt, eventually both his contemplative and active parts degrade. And so, it is not a killing off of the one by the other, but a degrading of the unity. Life grows more frustrated, that is all.
Instinctively, I do not look highly at the incessant low-intensity activity of the herd animal, and it is why there is something so terribly depressing about most jobs today. No deep leisure, but no intense action either. Incessant low-level activity in which neither the contemplative instinct nor the instinct for action has any release. Much more interesting and joyful is the life of the cat-like or even the lizard or the crocodile. Lying around all day, doing nothing, not out of a conscious decision to meditate or anything, but out of pure instinct, pure stillness and carelessness. And then, when the opportunity is there, fast, intense, violent action. And then back to rest, without worrying for a second about what just happened or what might happen. Can you, for example, sit on the beach all day or sit on a mountaintop, without feeling restless? And can you do this, without it being a way to escape from action? It is a good measure of health. But then again, it is a health gained through action. Don’t take this in any overly spiritual sense as spoken about in these clichés like ‘if you can’t sit still with yourself and so on.’ It is a question of instinct and how one orders one’s life.
There is a peculiar dynamic where, because of the capacity for intense action, granted by the capacity for greater generation of energy, the animal is given the possibility of leisure. And when in leisure, the animal can think and contemplate. The more it has acted in the past, the more time it has to rest and contemplate. And being so distanced from action by now, it no longer feels the value of action. And no longer feeling the value of action, its thoughts can come to turn against action. One likes and values what one knows. And no longer exerting force or power, the animal comes to value powerlessness to a greater degree. Inspectio sui leads to despectio sui. Contemplating oneself, the road is opened towards despising oneself.
One should also question if there even is such a thing as expending or conserving/accumulating energy. All expending of energy is also a generating of energy, and all conserving of energy is always already an expending of energy. The degree to which one is capable of doing the one seems dependent on the other. And the degree to which one is capable of both is dependent on the total amount of energy present.
When suffering, life can do two things. It can affirm the suffering, and it can flee from the suffering. Why is suffering fled from? Not because it is suffering, but because it lacks meaning, because there is no meaning to the suffering. Now, here is the mistake, to think that all ascetic instinct flees from suffering because it does not like to suffer. Rather, it flees from suffering because it seeks meaning, and it is willing to take up an even deeper suffering if that means that meaning is to be found.
A different corruption exists too. There is not only the fleeing from suffering, where ‘nothingness’ becomes the supreme virtue. There is also a twisted seeking of suffering for suffering’s sake, where suffering itself is taken as good. There is no meaning to be found in the suffering, and so suffering becomes the meaning. The desert ascetic hopping on every opportunity to torture himself.
There is no ascetic instinct, but there are ascetic instincts. Just as there is no ‘will to life’, but there are wills. This does not exclude the possibility of there being, ultimately, one and the same end or will underlying all these wills and instincts.