Asceticism: a sickness raised into an ideal

“He botched his exit, like a spoiled and ill-bred child. On Sunday, July 9, during the final of the World Cup in Germany, Zinédine Zidane tarnished the end of his story as a footballer of genius with an inadmissible, intolerable, inexcusable head-butt. (…) One head-butt, and everything collapses, and his earlier lapses come back to mind. (…) One head-butt, and it is the dark side of the figure that reappears, his black face, the reverse of the peddled image of one of the French public’s favorite men. On Sunday, the Italians beat the Bleus in the World Cup final. France above all lost Zizou.”¹ These few lines make the French football champion appear as a Mister Hyde hidden behind the good Doctor Jekyll, as the umpteenth misdeed (twelfth red card) of a man lacking in civility. A trace of his “origin”? A sign of his “community”? “He broke his legend”,² maintains the journalist in an article that, curiously, says nothing about Marco Materazzi’s attitude… All of them, with smug complacency, lectured the champion. “Zinédine,” he is told in an open letter, “do you know that the hardest thing this morning is not trying to understand why the Bleus, your Bleus, lost, last night, a World Cup final that was within their reach? But explaining to tens of millions of children across the world how you could let yourself go so far as to deliver that head-butt to Marco Materazzi, ten minutes before the end of extra time.” The journalists (were they the only ones?) at least had a guilty party to sink their teeth into. In general, this is called a scapegoat. Sacrifice or envy? In any case, an end-of-match trial. There were not two players who had let themselves go. There is, in the end, only a single bad player.

Of such facts, Nietzsche would have feasted: so many occasions to confirm his intuitions, his hypotheses, his analyses! If Zinédine, according to public opinion, failed, it was not, in fact, as an athlete; it was, in truth, as an ascetic. Zinédine Zidane is not, evidently — this at least is what he was reproached with, what he was accused of — an ideal ascetic. Such, at least, is the point of view of the ascetic priest. The philosophers, as Nietzsche observed in his time, even if they are not priests, nonetheless share, with regard to asceticism, a favorable prejudice. It must be said that they are, practically speaking, specialists in it. How, then, are we to analyze “the final of a legend”?³ How, more generally, are we to approach asceticism, particularly within minorities? We shall first show that the narcissistic dimension that asceticism comports is bound to the implicit search for an impossible recognition. We shall then show that asceticism is a sickness, certainly, but one that is the price to be paid, under conditions of social suffering, for sheer survival.

1. Asceticism: a narcissistic ideal

During this famous “final”, is it the distinction between words and acts that grounds the severity toward the one, the indulgence toward the other? And yet the moralists, whom Nietzsche frequented, indeed observed the aggressiveness that subsists in all social relations, however polite, however policed they may be. “It is a monstrous thing,” La Bruyère affirms in Les Caractères (The Characters), “the taste and the facility within us for mocking, disapproving, and despising others; and, at the same time, the anger we feel toward those who mock us, disapprove of us, and despise us.” But the roles are not, in reality, and whatever one may say of it, interchangeable. The moralists indeed noted that civility is a shared illusion that conceals the diversity in the distribution of power and wealth — more broadly, of positions and social goods. It is, to put it plainly, the “valet” who must swallow everything. The “master” can, in reality, speak as he pleases. Situations of apparent reciprocity dissimulate the profound asymmetry at work in esteem. For what is at stake is to replace conflict (of interests) with play (of appearances). If certain ones, indeed, beyond the appearances of the social game, have de facto the possibility of being “givers” of symbolic gratifications, others are in the position of “askers”.

“The individual, in the position of asker, awaits being ‘agreed to’, being ‘admitted’.⁴ The pleasure, one may guess,” writes Jean Starobinski, “is then attached less to the persons by whom the asker is agreed to than to the recognition of which he is the object, to the esteem that he is henceforth entitled to grant himself: it is the pleasure of being ‘distinguished’, of being judged worthy of belonging to the ‘circle’. For those, on the other hand, who ‘receive’, who ‘select’, who ‘prefer’, the pleasure consists first in the exercise of a choice, in the feeling of having the faculty to refuse access, and finally in the recourse to criteria of similitude, which oblige the petitioner to confirm, by his whole being and his whole conduct, the ideal image that the members of the ‘circle’ form of themselves: they will accept only the one who resembles them and who, by his merits and his agreeable qualities, offers them the reflection of their own value.” The description could pass for a definition of the “complex of the colonized”… It could likewise illuminate the notion of “symbolic violence”. The fact remains that the criterion of admission, narcissistic if ever there was one, is an image and not a reality, an ideal and not a practice. Mirages of complacency. To belong to “the majority” comes down simply, in this perspective, to considering oneself as having the faculty to judge, to admit, and to exclude… It thereupon falls to the “askers”, even if they are asking for nothing, properly speaking, and even if the “judges” are not exempt from it, to give proof of the appropriate degree of asceticism.

Asceticism, in effect, is generally defined as a self-control that is accompanied, inevitably, by frustrations. But askesis designates, originally, any exercise, notably any gymnastic exercise. It is a labor that shapes the body, a discipline in the strict sense of the term.⁵ The ascetic ideal, in this sense, is an ideal at once physical and moral. This is why, of course, the ascetic ideal, as Nietzsche showed, is, in its principle, a pillar of morality, and, in its practice, of morals. It is above all remarkable that asceticism appears, in his philosophy, as a subjective revenge of the weak, who seek to prevail in morality if they do not prevail in reality (socially) — a subjective revenge of a minority that, paradoxically, can amount, in number, to the majority of the population.

Indeed, to say minority is not necessarily to say small in number. Two cases are, in this respect, paradigmatic. The first is that of women, who may be thought to constitute, historically, a minority, on the economic and social planes as much as on the political and cultural ones.⁶ The second is that of the colonized, the former natives who, as in Algeria for instance, constituted, before the country’s independence, an economic, social, political, juridical, and cultural minority just as much as the immense majority of the population. Is it by chance that conformity to the ascetic ideal should be so expected of a native’s descendant? Should football engage only the best of oneself? What, then, of the insults and obscenities?

There is a minority, in the broadest sense there is, as soon as there is no equality — neither on the political plane, nor on the social, nor on the economic, nor on the cultural, and, often, not on the juridical plane either. Religious minorities (Jews and Protestants in Europe) are a particular case of minority. What gathers all minorities, in their great heterogeneity, is to live not under the (evil) gaze of the other — for that is an abusive simplification — but under the gaze that one can oneself lend to the other, in a ferocious demand for conformity, not to the other, but to ideals that are in the end shared, however differently. Prodigies of interiorization… A tyrannical and cruel superego, Freud would say, watches over women, Jews, and other Protestants. A domestic tyrant who administers and domesticates, in Nietzsche’s vocabulary, the aggressiveness accumulated by what we shall here call, for convenience, domination — with the reservation that it be envisaged as a relation of force, and not as a force exerted by some upon others. One may also name it, the term is older, power.

The complex of the colonized⁷ is akin to the impossibility of getting rid of oneself. There is a manifest contradiction, indeed, in being oneself and wishing to be, at the same time, and likewise in the same place, an other. The complex of the colonized expresses the passion of being an other. This impossibility (of getting rid of oneself) covers over the tyranny that the colonized, candidate for assimilation, exerts against himself. Would he not have to change his skin in order to change his condition? “The crushing of the colonized,” writes Albert Memmi, “is included in the colonizing values. When the colonized adopts these values, he adopts inclusively his own condemnation. In order to free himself — at least so he believes — he agrees to destroy himself. The phenomenon is comparable to the negrophobia of the negro, or to the antisemitism of the Jew.” The complex of the colonized attests to the human price to be paid in order to win, in the best of cases, an honorable social image of oneself. The complex of the colonized is an expression of the ascetic ideal in which the absence of shame, self-esteem, are supposed to (re)compensate the irremediable self-denial that is, apparently, its condition.

No letting-go in asceticism. No caprice. “When the oppressed,” writes Nietzsche in La Généalogie de la morale (On the Genealogy of Morals), “those who suffer violence, the enslaved, begin to say, with the vindictive cunning of impotence: ‘let us be different from the wicked, let us be good! And good is anyone who does not do violence, who commits no aggressions and uses no reprisals, who leaves vengeance to God, who, like us, keeps to the shadows, who shuns all manner of evil, and who in a general way demands little of life, as we do, we the enduring, the humble, the just.’ — well, for a cold and impartial man, this means nothing other than this: ‘we the weak are, decidedly, weak; it is good that we do no thing for which we are not strong enough.’”⁸ Asceticism develops against a background of impossible vengeance, of forbidden reprisals, of prohibited violence. Asceticism thus appears as the response that is at once the most onerous, because it costs very dearly, and the most adapted within an unfavorable relation — in other words, within a relation in which one finds oneself disadvantaged. How to make a virtue of necessity: such is the enigma of asceticism, what the Americans call self help… How to redeem oneself in ten lessons… Asceticism is the price of dignity, an investment in self-esteem: a reactional phenomenon. Thus, by the effect of an accounting that obeys the principle of communicating vessels, self-esteem will be all the greater as endurance is proportional to the suffering undergone, patience to the violence experienced, and so on. An eye for an eye, a tooth for a tooth: to every blow received, asceticism responds with an exhibited quality.

A strange reckoning… “The gaze of the slave,” writes Nietzsche, “is unfavorable to the virtues of the powerful; it is full of skepticism and mistrust, of a crafty mistrust, toward the ‘good’ that the powerful man honors; he would like to convince himself that even the happiness of the powerful man is not real. He will, on the other hand, advocate and bring to light the qualities that serve to lighten the existence of those who suffer: he will honor pity, the spirit of helpfulness and altruism, affection, patience, eagerness, humility, amiability — for these are the most useful qualities, and very nearly the only remedies for bearing the weight of existence.”⁹ All these qualities, one will have noticed, are so many of the virtues said to be feminine… They are even their “trademark”.¹⁰ Egoism, indifference, impatience, negligence, pride, arrogance have never, anywhere, been considered feminine attributes. Nietzsche’s analysis does not bear on the benefits of such a line of conduct. Indeed, these benefits are only secondary. They mask the cost — that is to say, at bottom, the sacrifice — that such a morality implies. The supposed benefits represent only the tree that hides the forest. What Nietzsche unveils is the policing of morals and, inseparably, the policing of thought that endurance, humility, and the sense of justice veil. These qualities are, in his eyes, only the expression of inferiority first, of impotence next. This comes down to affirming, in a narrower sense, that to be in a situation of minority means to be in a state of impotence, to find oneself grappling with the distress of the child.

2. Asceticism: a poisoned remedy

Asceticism is against nature but, to follow Nietzsche, asceticism transforms ressentiment “positively”. Ressentiment is the correlate of relative impotence in social relations. Asceticism is a way of sublimating this impotence. With ressentiment, what is invented is responsibility. Ressentiment transforms, for the “weak”, the powerful into the guilty. But above all, ressentiment transforms itself: it engenders bad conscience. From the moment, indeed, that one substitutes responsibility for the affects (anger, for example), one comes to envisage facts as faults. “It is your fault,” clamors ressentiment. The invention of accusation. “It is my fault,” confesses bad conscience. The invention of guilt. Everything thereupon becomes matter for a trial. What happens, then, in the mind of the “asker” of whom there was question at the start?

Freud’s “dream of the uncle” stands at the crossroads of ressentiment and bad conscience. What emerges from this magnificent dream of Freud’s is the repression and the censorship at work in asceticism, in the renunciation of the dearest desires, in the prudence that social life imposes on some more than on others, in the disguise(s) imposed on expression. What it reveals is the unconscious accounting that lies at the origin of the dream. It is the memory that all innocence, like all guilt, needs in order to be established.¹¹

Freud wished, rightly, to be appointed professor extraordinarius. In the spring of 1897, he recounts,¹² he learns that he is being proposed by two professors of the University. He strives, however — because he knows that eminent colleagues are also waiting — not to believe in it too much. But one day, one of his friends, “waiting” like him, pays him a visit and informs him that, at the Ministry, he was told — and not merely given to understand — that, “given the present tendencies”, the “confessional motives” were preventing certain appointments. He understands of course at once that, being himself a Jew, his appointment is not difficult, or complicated, but impossible.¹³ “It is his fault,” the dreamer will think, in order to contrive a way out for himself… Indeed, the dream makes Freud’s friend an imbecile, like his uncle Joseph. It makes another of Freud’s colleagues a criminal, who could not deserve (as Freud, who is, for his part, intelligent and honest!! does) to become professor extraordinarius. And Freud continues thus: “I must interpret this dream more completely. I am not yet at ease; I cannot reconcile myself to the levity that made me belittle two honorable colleagues in order to clear a path for myself.” To thwart the ruses of this dream, Freud compares psychic life to social life, “in the relations of two men, one of whom holds a certain power that the other must handle carefully; the latter will disguise his thought.” “The political writer,” Freud adds, “finds himself in an analogous situation when he wishes to tell unpleasant truths to the powerful.”

As Pascal so well formulated it, force is beyond dispute:¹⁴ action is always without speech. It is thought that has need of words. Asceticism thus presents a discursive dimension that one does not always easily perceive. Asceticism is not only an intelligence, but also an art of commentary. When cruelty, indeed, is exerted principally against oneself, for one’s own greater good, when its delights are daily experienced, the transformation of this cruelty into justice, of these torments into morality, is a matter of thought, and of discourse. It would indeed be unfortunate not to perceive the speculative dimension of ressentiment, the reflexivity proper to belonging (but this term is defective) to a minority and, finally, the lofty spirituality of asceticism. For asceticism drinks, hermeneutically, at suffering: it is, in concreto, an interpretation of it. The nec plus ultra will be, for the ascetic, to consider, in concreto of course, the sufferings undergone as consented-to chastisements.

Nietzsche launched his campaign against morality in 1881, with Aurore (Daybreak). If he denounces the savagery at work in morals, he can only admit that, in morality, it is reason that “must win a difficult and bloody victory within the soul” in order “to overcome terrible contrary instincts”.¹⁵ Asceticism is therefore a victory of rationality over instinct, of humanity over animality. But, paradoxically, this rationalization, this humanization, this moralization pass by way of stultification.¹⁶ Asceticism is therefore doubly paradoxical: on the one hand because it is a matter of the valorization of a life against life; on the other hand because it is a matter of stultifying oneself in order to become intelligent.

No one better than Kafka has described the complexity of asceticism, the throes of bad conscience, the difficulty of being, accidentally, certainly, but also structurally, in the minority. The ascetic, this artist of fasting, applies himself to showing that his suffering or sufferings are not his own fault. He applies himself to justifying himself. Proclaiming his innocence, the Nietzschean dog, the Kafkaesque animal, the wild beast become domestic animal,¹⁷ has, in this trial, the ambition of establishing that the wrongs are not shared. He wants to clear himself of all suspicion. He will have to furnish proof of his asceticism, of his purity, of his innocence. He will then have to summon memory. Memory is indeed, in this framework, the reactive force that animates the weak, those who appear, in the portrait the philosopher draws, as slaves of thought (in other words, artists or philosophers!!!) while the masters appear as masters of action. For some, indeed, the world is a field of adventures. For others, it is, quite the contrary, a prison, even a penal colony.

If there is one text that, otherwise, makes audible the hammer-blows of the German philosopher, it is Un Rapport pour une Académie (A Report to an Academy).¹⁸ A humanized ape, called Rotpeter, presents to honorable academicians, at their request, a report on his earlier life, when he was an ape, five years before. This ape is a monster of asceticism, a masterpiece of humanity and morality. He was, he recounts, captured in the Gulf of Guinea, and was wounded in the face and on the hip. Two traces of these blows remain: a mark and a limp. One of the first declarations of this extraordinary character consists in explaining that his (dazzling) ascent was made possible only in the forgetting of his origins and his youth: “indeed,” he concedes, “the absolute rule I imposed on myself was to renounce all obstinacy; I, a free ape, submitted to this yoke.” Thanks to this yoke, the ape became a stranger to himself. His past is no longer a “storm wind” but a mere “draft of air”. He is henceforth cut off from himself. It was only, he recounts, at the price of an Olympian calm that he managed, from the depths of his cage, to find a way out. “Today,” he observes, “I see it very clearly: without the greatest inner calm, I would never have been able to get out of it. Besides, everything that I have become I owe perhaps to that calm that took hold of me after the first days, out there, on the boat.” Kafka indicates that flight, in the name of liberty, must not be confused with a way out. For the ape, the only way out, in order to live, lies in the imitation of the members of the crew. Just as the way out is not liberty, the apparent calculation is not a calculation of interest. It is only a quasi-calculation.¹⁹

“Ah, when one is obliged,” confesses Rotpeter, “one learns; when one wants to find a way out, one learns; one learns without sparing oneself! One watches oneself, one drives oneself with the whip, one tears oneself to pieces at the slightest attempt at resistance. I rid myself, at a mad speed, of my ape nature.” He had, to begin with, to “stifle his sobs”, to abandon all hope of seeing his bars disappear. “The ascetic ideal,” as Nietzsche says, “is a ruse for the preservation of life”; it is a contradiction in terms: “life against life”. Asceticism makes it possible to live. Very well. But the ascetic lives badly. Such was, for the Kafkaesque ape, the only way out: the entry into humanity. It then remains for him only to avoid the zoological garden and to become a music-hall star.²⁰ This Guinean ape has attained, at the highest price, “the average cultural level of a European”. He is almost an artist. He is at last tolerated in society, he has success, but, Kafka shows, on a double condition: that he hide and silence his wounds, on the one hand; that he keep his private life secret, on the other. Indeed, when he leaves the stage, and the salons, when he comes home, the tamed ape rejoins a half-trained little chimpanzee. “During the day,” he avows, “I do not want to see her; for she has in her eyes the bewildered look of the trained, disturbed animal; I am the only one to notice it, and I cannot bear it.” Terrible conclusion of assimilation.

Conclusion

If, then, asceticism constitutes, under certain conditions, the only possible way out — short of taking flight, or drowning, as in Kafka — it remains no less a way out without a future, a poisoned remedy, a pathological ideal, as Nietzsche showed. The philosopher makes of the notion a social good without moral value, instead of a moral good without social value, as philosophy was able, in idealizing asceticism, to maintain. An ascetic life is indeed a negation of self. It is an ideal for society but a sickness for man. Society can find its account in it: social peace is at this price, what Nietzsche, and others after him, call the police. The individual, for his part, loses in it, like Faust, his “soul”, in other words his animality, his being. In asceticism, indeed, ressentiment attains its full power, dissatisfaction is at its height: self-hatred triumphs. For it is life that the will means to dominate, by using force in order to avoid having recourse to force, by employing force against itself, life against life. If, with asceticism, the individual finds within himself his greatest enemy, the medication is bitter, the consolation very feeble. To make it a point of honor to save one’s image is vain. Did Zinédine Zidane not understand this, forsaking, in the end, his image in the name of his honor? Recognition, manifestly, is a lure, above all for an “ape”. Passed, then, beneath the philosophical and genealogical scalpel, submitted to internal critique, asceticism is not engaging, though useful; it is enraging, though fecund (without asceticism, neither art nor philosophy is possible).

Asceticism consequently raises, one will have understood, a problem of conscience. How to regard it otherwise than in an ambivalent fashion — for the ape’s interrogation is also our own — how (with unequal arms) to get out of it when one is an ape and, a fortiori, a little chimpanzee?… Is it when one cannot but lose one’s calm that one must, ascetically, keep it? Or is anger a good counselor?

Notes