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“Ιδοὺ ὁ ἄνθρωπος.” This is the statement of Pontius Pilate as it appears in the original Greek of John 19:5: “So Jesus came out, wearing the crown of thorns and the purple robe. Pilate said to them, ‘Here is the man!’” (NRSV, appearing in many other translations as “Behold the man!”). In the Vulgate of St. Jerome, this statement was translated into Latin as ecce homo, a translation which has a curious effect on the statement because the Latin language lacks the definite and indefinite articles. In the Greek, the ὁ in ἰδοὺ ὁ ἄνθρωπος translates to our word “the,” the definite article. “Here is the man.” In Latin, that word does not exist; definiteness must be conveyed through context. What’s more, Jerome uses the word homo rather than the word vir: the latter means “man,” as in, a male person, but the former means “human being.” This is a sensible translation from the Greek word ἄνθρωπος, which likewise means “human being,” as opposed to ἀνήρ, “man,” a male person. Thus, on Jerome’s reading, what Pilate said upon presenting Jesus to the crowd could be understood as, “Here is a human,” “Here is the human,” or “Here is humanity.” Perhaps Jerome, and the Greek author whom we call John, meant this to mean that Pilate was specifically signifying Jesus’ human nature: “Here is a man, who is not a god but rather an ordinary human.” A reference to generalized humanity seems dubious, but I find it attractive regardless. To me, this chapter of the Passion narrative, considering all the actors present, does indeed present a broad portrait of humanity: cruelty, vindictiveness, our capacity to suffer and to endure suffering, and our divine and human natures present together.
The character of Jesus presents us with a curious collection of contradictions and conundra, which have been the subject of much analysis, speculation, and artistic exposition in the millennia following his death. In the past, I’ve overgeneralized Jesus’ divinity as being characteristic of all Christian religion. That is not the case, but the understanding of Jesus as partially or wholly divine—the incarnation doctrine—is a common one within Christianity. It’s the one I grew up with myself, the one I encounter most frequently, and the one most relevant to my recent work on perfectionism.
The Christian view of human nature is famously pessimistic. The basic premise of the religion is that humans are fallen and in need of divine redemption, a redemption which comes in the form of Jesus’ crucifixion and death, a sacrifice in atonement for our sins, justifying us with God. However, this redemption is not universal or automatic; one must make a conscious choice to affirm and accept it. Having done so, one’s nature is changed. The theologian and existentialist philosopher Paul Tillich writes of the “New Being” in the context of the present situation of humankind, and in talking about this he specifically references many of the tropes of existentialist thought, “disruption, conflict, self-destruction, meaninglessness, and despair in all realms of life” (1951, p. 49). What he says of this is that
The question arising out of this experience is not, as in the Reformation, the question of a merciful God and the forgiveness of sins; nor is it, as in the early Greek church, the question of finitude, of death and error; nor is it the question of the personal religious life or of the Christianization of culture and society. It is the question of a reality in which the self-estrangement of our existence is overcome, a reality of reconciliation and reunion, of creativity, meaning, and hope. We shall call such a reality the “New Being,” a term whose presuppositions and implications can be explained only through the whole system.
p. 49
This would indeed be a new being. This is reflected in scripture: “For if we have been united with [Christ] in a death like his, we will certainly be united with him in a resurrection like his” (Romans 6:5). Ephesians 2 says something similar, and I’ll be returning to that verse shortly. In any case, I’m not convinced that there’s any reconciliation of our estrangement that maintains our humanity. This doctrine of Christianity has never sat quite right with me; these seem like false promises. The Bible warns of false prophets (Matthew 7:15) and exhorts us to “lean not on [our] own understanding” (Proverbs 3:5), and yet one must pick this particular one among a plethora of possible redemptions or else be damned for eternity. Many arguments can be mounted against this sort of judgement, and here’s another one: the gift of salvation contra the judgement of God is just, prima facie, only if human free will and the capacity to choose are fundamentally whole, right, and uncorrupted. Though not a sufficient condition for this scenario to be just, it is a necessary one. The promise of redemption and the threat of damnation can only plausibly be just, as a starting point, if humans must indeed lean on their own understanding. And then, in that case, why is the redemption necessary in the first place? If there is some human core that is uncorrupted and capable of making the right choices so as to be able to choose to accept the gift of Christ’s salvation, why can we not let that core guide us directly? If Christ’s salvation is just, it is unnecessary, and if it is necessary, it is unjust. If our free will is fundamentally uncorrupted, then the choice of Adam and Eve to disobey God and eat from the fruit of the Tree of Knowledge of Good and Evil is morally defensible and our having been cursed, cast out, and damned for it is unjust. But if our free will is fundamentally corrupt, then the gift of salvation is meaningless, and our salvation being predicated upon it is fundamentally unjust, arbitrary, capricious, and cruel. One who offers salvation under such terms is no savior.
I’m not the first to consider atonement theology from this angle. Each week I speak with a Lutheran pastor on matters of religion—he has been, first and foremost, a good friend, and despite our particular disagreements, I regard him very highly and consider him a trusted ally on my spiritual quest—and I brought the matter up to him. “One must accept the gift of salvation for it to have its effect, yes?” I asked him.
“It must be received,” he said. “We’re very careful not to use active language there because we don’t want to imply that it’s anyone but God doing the work.” He pointed me to Ephesians 2, in which Paul—or the author writing under his name—speaks of us as being spiritually dead and being brought back to life by the grace of God. The language indeed puts humans in a passive role with regards to their own salvation: “For by grace you have been saved through faith, and this is not your own doing; it is the gift of God—not the result of works, so that no one may boast” (Ephesians 2:8-9). However, Paul paints a different picture elsewhere: “…if you confess with your lips that Jesus is Lord and believe in your heart that God raised him from the dead, you will be saved. For one believes with the heart and so is justified, and one confesses with the mouth and so is saved” (Romans 10:9-10). One might question whether belief is an active or passive activity, but confession is certainly active, and a passive salvation hardly paints a better picture of the atonement. How then could I be condemned for having chosen Satan? If God is the one who decides who believes and who does not, then They have clearly chosen me for the latter camp. My pastor friend did say, though, that, having received the gift of salvation, we may then choose to reject it, and that returns salvation to being predicated upon a free choice that we must make, and in such a case, we will either be our own saviors or there will be no saviors.
With regards to what Tillich says of the reconciliation of our self-estrangement, I think that it’s likely that such is essential to our human nature. It seems to me unlike us to be, as Georges Bataille put it in his Theory of Religion (1989), “like water in water,” simply a part of our environment without our feeling that it is Other to us. Not that we can’t effect that state of being through meditation practices, but my cats have never been to a zendo and they clearly know how to be like water in water better than I do after decades of training. What does this mean for perfectionism, which posits that the development of our essential human characteristics is intrinsically valuable? What does this mean for us if perfectionism is true? On the account of Thomas Hurka (1993), the matter is of no consequence, as self-estrangement is not likely to be plausibly worth developing on its own. But this is to ignore a question that is itself central to our humanity. Human nature is conflicted and contradictory and no escape from that maintains our humanity.
What Christianity resolves by fiat, Islam gives a place of sacred honor. The word for “struggle” in Arabic is jihad, and while not one of the five core tenets of the faith, it is sometimes informally considered to be the “sixth pillar of Islam” (Esposito, 1988). The word has become associated in the Western world with military struggle, but it refers as well to the internal struggle to follow the right path (Jones et al., 2005, pp. 4917-8). Christians often speak of the ideal of becoming Christ-like, referencing such verses as 1 John 2:6: “[W]hoever says, ‘I abide in him,’ ought to walk just as he walked.” It seems then that spiritual struggle should hold a sacred place within Christianity as well. If there is indeed a “New Being in Christ” then, accepting the gift of salvation, we too become both wholly human and wholly divine and engage with the struggle between them, as Nikos Kazantzakis imagined Jesus struggling with his own divinity in the novel The Last Temptation of Christ. As Kazantzakis wrote in his prologue, “This book is not a biography; it is the confession of every man who struggles” (1998, p. 4).
Struggle and overcoming, and their role in human nature and moral attainment, are central concepts in the philosophy of Friedrich Nietzsche, for whom the central principle of all being was the will to power. He introduces the concept in the chapter “On the Thousand and One Goals” in Thus Spoke Zarathustra (1885):
A tablet of the good hangs over every people. Behold, it is the tablet of their overcomings; behold, it is the voice of their will to power.
Praiseworthy is whatever seems difficult to a people; whatever seems indispensable and difficult is called good; and whatever liberates even out of the deepest need, the rarest, the most difficult—that they call holy.
1976, p. 170
In his book Nietzsche: Philosopher, Psychologist, Antichrist, the philosopher Walter Kaufmann comments on this passage, saying: “The will to power is thus introduced as the will to overcome oneself” (2013, p. 200). This squares with the account of perfectionism provided by philosopher Gwen Bradford in her paper “The Value of Achievements,” published in 2013 in Pacific Philosophical Quarterly:
Achievements are difficult, and engaging in difficult activity is intrinsically valuable. The explanation for this value lies in perfectionism, according to which the will is among our fundamental human capacities. Since engaging in difficult activity just is the excellent exercise of the will, and the excellent exercise of the will has intrinsic value, this is precisely what makes all achievements intrinsically valuable.
pp. 221-2
In a note on this passage, Bradford acknowledges that “[t]his perfectionism is thus a sort of Nietzschean perfectionism, we might say” (p. 223). Also like Nietzsche, we Satanists are concerned with a mode of valuation that is independent of conventional morality, which we determine for ourselves from our own highest humanity. Being inextricably human, we value our humanity and seek the best of human existence within ourselves. To accomplish this, we must overcome ourselves, overcome what of our nature is inessential. The one who accomplishes this and creates their own values is, as Nietzsche famously described, der Übermensch, best translated as the overhuman, as ein Mensch in German is a human person, as opposed to ein Mann, a male person.
For an individual to posit his own ideal and to derive from it his own law, joys, and rights—that may well have been considered hitherto as the most outrageous human aberration and as idolatry itself. The few who dared as much always felt the need to apologize to themselves, usually by saying: “It wasn’t I! Not I! But a god through me.” The wonderful art and gift of creating gods—polytheism—was the medium through which this impulse could discharge, purify, perfect, and ennoble itself; for originally it was a very undistinguished impulse, related to stubbornness, disobedience, and envy. Hostility against this impulse to have an ideal of one’s own was formerly the central law of all morality. There was only one norm, man; and every people thought that it possessed this one ultimate norm. But above and outside, in some distant overworld, one was permitted to behold a plurality of norms; one god was not considered a denial of another god, nor blasphemy against him. It was here that the luxury of individuals was first permitted; it was here that one first honored the rights of individuals. The invention of gods, heroes, and overmen [Übermenschen] of all kinds, as well as near-men and undermen, dwarfs, fairies, centaurs, satyrs, demons, and devils was the inestimable preliminary exercise for the justification of the egoism and sovereignty of the individual: the freedom that one conceded to a god in his relation to other gods—one eventually also granted to oneself in relation to laws, customs, and neighbors.
Nietzsche, 1974, §143
It’s unavoidably concerning when a late 19th-century German speaks of “near-men and undermen,” but know that here Nietzsche, who vigorously repudiated nationalism and racism throughout his writings, is referring specifically to the kinds of supernatural creatures that he lists, which personify the individual creation of values. Nietzsche here is critical of a kind of naive perfectionism resulting in a universal morality. The world of polytheism, he says, was a world in which differing, even competing values could be understood as having their own validity, in contrast to a monotheistic world in which only a single value system could even be conceivable. We would do well to remind ourselves that only from a perspective in which all of humanity is known and understood as a totality could a universal perfectionism be established, and none of us has that perspective. Despite the name, perfectionism need not imply that humans are morally perfectable according to some universal standard; indeed, to such a degree as we are morally perfectable at all, it can only be according to our own individual capacities as humans. And even here, moral perfection is an unattainable ideal. Perfection is what we strive for relative to each of our essences in itself. Ultimately, as we have seen, these essences conflict with one another, and so we are forced to choose and struggle between them. The perfection of our rational essence would mean the extermination of our non-rational essence and a diminishing of our humanity. Indeed, modernity, which holds the rational as the supreme value, has brought us not only remarkable scientific, technological, and economic progress, but also a deep sense of alienation from our essential human nature, as Karl Marx, Sigmund Freud, Max Weber, and many others have described.
Ιδοὺ ὁ ἄνθρωπος. Ecce homo. Behold humanity. Is human nature basically good or basically evil? Perhaps somewhere in between? The question itself demonstrates the value of perfectionism as a moral theory. In the absence of moral truth, the only possible starting place for moral reasoning is the human. Unavoidably, whether good or evil according to some external moral structure (if any exists), we are what we are. If I am evil—intrinsically evil, fundamentally evil—then I would rather be what it is that I am than be made into something else, something that is intrinsically and fundamentally different from what I call my self. Such a “New Being” could only mean my death, and a morality that can only be attained from my own death is no morality to which I can adhere. I do not mean that a morality could never require me to die. In such a case, morality would be prior to death. This is possible. What is not possible—at least not possible for me—is that my death be prior to my morality. I also do not mean that I would be unwilling to submit to such a morality: I cannot submit to it because whatever follows my submission to my own death could no longer be me at all. “Do you not know that all of us who have been baptized into Christ Jesus were baptized into his death?” Paul writes in Romans 6:3. “Therefore,” he continues, “we have been buried with him by baptism into death, so that, just as Christ was raised from the dead by the glory of the Father, so we too might walk in newness of life” (Romans 6:4).
The real test of a moral theory is how well it answers difficult moral questions. For that purpose, I’m turning to the book The Pig that Wants to Be Eaten by Julian Baggini, an excellent book which I often recommend to those new to philosophy. Baggini’s book is a collection of 100 famous thought experiments from the Western philosophical tradition, covering all of the different spheres of thought: metaphysics, epistemology, aesthetics, and ethics. I’ll address a few of them here, referring to the individual thought experiments as pigs, using the framework of perfectionism. Some of these problems are extremely difficult. Our hope is that perfectionism will give us some satisfactory guidance, but it would be unrealistic to expect easy answers. Such answers would suggest that I’m giving neither the thought experiments nor perfectionism proper consideration.
That said, I’ll start with a bit of a softball, just to get warmed up. In pig #18, “Rationality demands,” Sophia Maximus, who would “never knowingly act contrary to the dictates of reason,” has been persuaded by rational argumentation to set off a bomb, killing a large number of innocent people without any benefit. She doesn’t want to do this and senses that something must be wrong with the argument, but she can’t find a single flaw. (2005, p. 52).
Implausible as this scenario seems, historically, people have done monstrous things while believing that they were acting in accordance with reason, and indeed, a skilled rhetorician can rationalize just about anything. Perfectionism, on my account, tells us that there is a non-rational component to human nature as well, and to ignore that aspect of our existence is to act wrongly. In general, we must struggle to know when it’s best to heed our non-rational essences instead of our rational essences, but in this case, the choice seems perfectly clear. Sophia should ignore her theoretical and practical rationality and make the non-rational choice to not detonate the bomb.
In pig #20, “Condemned to life,” based on a thought experiment presented by the philosopher Bernard Williams in Problems of the Self in 1973, Vitalia possesses the formula for an elixir of immortality. Now in her third century of life, everyone she knows is dead and her life has become meaningless. She creates an antidote that will allow her to die and burns the formula for the elixir (2005, p. 58).
Mortality is certainly an essential human characteristic. A few other animal species may be aware of their mortality, but for us, such knowledge is combined with an ability to shape our lives in response to our impending deaths. Part of our mortal nature involves avoiding death rather than just walking into traffic on a whim, but to remove mortality entirely would be to remove a core aspect of our humanity. But there remains an interesting complication with this one. Perfectionism gives the clear answer that Vitalia acted wrongly in becoming immortal, but I don’t find that entirely satisfactory. Clearly there are existential problems associated with immortality, but these problems don’t seem to me to be tantamount to moral wrongness. As can be seen in the television series Altered Carbon, society might face some significant moral quandries were immortality a possibility, but would that make human immortality itself wrong? Would it be wrong for a single person to become immortal without promulgating the knowledge for how to do so? I can think of more problems arising from this, but a personal, secret immortality still seems only problematic without being wrong. So there may be a conflict here between perfectionism and my moral intuitions. That’s entirely acceptable, especially when the overall judgement comes out the same.
Pig #79 is basically the Clockwork Orange scenario: an experimental treatment called Crime Aversion Therapy can be used on criminals against their will, causing them to be repulsed by the very thought of committing crime. This seems to be better for both society, which will have less crime to deal with, and for the criminal, who will no longer be at risk of prison time and other punishments. The book’s discussion on the thought experiment notes that we have all been shaped by a process of enculturation imposed on us by our parents and by society; accordingly, Crime Aversion Therapy would just be a distillation of that process, accelerated and applied towards a specific outcome (2005, pp. 235-237). We might consider questions about who would have this power and who would decide which criminals receive this treatment, and while those are important considerations, they avoid a direct confrontation with the problem itself. This process would interfere with the criminal’s will, which would seem to be immediately rejected by Thomas Hurka’s agent-neutral account of perfectionism, but this procedure would be implemented in order to prevent greater harm, which would be arguably permissible. Under a more Nietzschean perfectionism that is not agent-neutral, this procedure would seem to accord with the commanding of value. It is in this problem that my own account of perfectionism seems strongest: this procedure would remove the person’s personal moral struggle, to which they are entitled according to perfectionism. This still must be weighed against the prevention of harm, but this isn’t a choice between Crime Aversion Therapy and allowing criminals to run rampant, but rather a choice between the therapy and more traditional forms of punishment and crime prevention. That’s not to say that our present justice system is at all worthy of the name, but the choice between Crime Aversion Therapy and nothing remains a false dilemma.
Taking another angle on it, what if I committed a crime, one which was clearly wrong and not merely illegal, and was convicted and faced a choice between going to prison for ten years or receiving the therapy and going free? Ten years of my life spent in the poor and unjust conditions of the American prison system, which would surely change me as a person in significant and likely very negative ways, versus a substantial alteration to my personality that is more direct and arguably more positive? Not an easy choice to make, and I can only speculate as to how I would answer were that scenario to become a reality. More in accordance with the thought experiment, what if I were not given a choice but rather subjected to the therapy against my will?
On this matter, my account of perfectionism provides some clear guidance and sways me towards opposing the procedure, even when presented as a choice rather than being mandated. My conclusion here is an uncertain one, but I accept that certainty regarding an especially difficult moral question is a rare thing. At the least, I can say that, even if the victory is not decisive, perfectionism has not failed the challenge.
I’ll conclude with some discussion on how Satan plays into all of this.
The second creation narrative in the book of Genesis, when read according to the Christian interpretation in which the Serpent is Satan, clearly ties Satan to human moral knowledge. The typical modern reading casts Satan as having deceived Eve into eating the fruit of the Tree of Knowledge of Good and Evil, but this is not reflected in the text. “You will not die,” said the Serpent to Eve after he had suggested to her that she might eat the fruit, “for God knows that when you eat of it your eyes will be opened, and you will be like God, knowing good and evil” (Genesis 3:4-5). After Adam and Eve eat the fruit, God says, “See, the man has become like one of us, knowing good and evil” (Genesis 3:22), confirming the veracity of the Serpent’s claim. In a sense, all moral reasoning that does not rely on divine command theory is a Satanic act.
More generally, I see Satan as standing opposed to a particular nihilistic Christian morality that is inimical to our humanity. Principium Luciferi here identifies Satan in his role as Accuser, shining light on Christian moral propositions and asking whether they are indeed the case. Friedrich Nietzsche took a decidedly perfectionist stance against what he considered to be a particularly problematic variety of Christian morality as Walter Kaufmann describes in his classic study of the philosopher:
…the conception of a life after death has historically furnished the basis for the deprecation of this life. The expectation of perfection in another world has made men condone their imperfection in this world. Instead of striving to become perfect here and now, as Jesus had exhorted them to do, they put their trust in the distant future.
2013, p. 346
Nietzsche and I are aligned in repudiating not Christianity proper, but the Pauline religion in which faith in Jesus is substituted for a life devoted to the teachings of Jesus. Nietzsche reads Jesus as a kind of perfectionist, and considers the whole history of Christianity to be one of misunderstanding what Jesus had truly symbolized. Perhaps Nietzsche himself wondered whether history might deal him a similar hand: his final original book, Ecce Homo, a brilliantly insightful but half-sarcastic and self-effacing survey of his life and works, concludes with the question, “Have I been understood?” (2000, p. 791). A few months after completing the book, Nietzsche went insane, and afterwards his works were appropriated by the Nazis, for whom he would have undoubtedly have felt a deep hatred.
In concluding this series of essays on perfectionism and moral philosophy, I find myself with a much more thorough understanding of the theory, but not with a greater degree of certainty with regards to its viability. I certainly do not find myself in a position to declare it the moral theory which will invariably lead humans to right action, if only we follow the right course. I remain doubtful that any one moral theory can fulfill that role; this may lead me in the long run towards some form of moral particularism, but I’ll let that course unfold in its own time and not make predictions. Perfectionism is attractive, useful, intuitive, and if I cannot say that it is fundamentally correct, I can at least express a confidence that it follows from proper foundations. Morality cannot follow from a resentment of what we are. If we are capable of acting rightly, then this capability is intrinsic to our own humanity; if we are not, then nothing can save us.
A virtue must be our own invention, our most necessary self-expression and self-defense: any other kind of virtue is merely a danger. Whatever is not a condition of our life harms it: a virtue that is prompted solely by a feeling of respect for the concept of “virtue,” as Kant would have it, is harmful. “Virtue,” “duty,” the “good in itself,” the good which is impersonal and universally valid—chimeras and expressions of decline, of the final exhaustion of life…. The fundamental laws of self-preservation and growth demand the opposite—that everyone invent [their] own virtue, [their] own categorical imperative.
Nietzsche, The Antichrist, §11, 1976, p. 577
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Works Cited or Referenced
Baggini, J. (2005). The pig that wants to be eaten: 100 experiments for the armchair philosopher. Penguin Group.
Bradford, G. (2013). The Value of Achievements: The Value of Achievements. Pacific Philosophical Quarterly, 94(2), 204–224. https://doi.org/10.1111/j.1468-0114.2012.01452.x
Esposito, J. L. (1988). Islam: The straight path. New York : Oxford University Press.
Hurka, T. (1993). Perfectionism. Oxford University Press.
Kaufmann, W. A. (2013). Nietzsche: Philosopher, psychologist, antichrist (First Princeton classics edition). Princeton University Press.
Kazantzakis, N. (2015). The last temptation of Christ (P. Bien, Trans.).
Nietzsche, F. W. (1974). The gay science: With a prelude in rhymes and an appendix of songs (W. A. Kaufmann, Trans.; 1st ed.). Vintage Books.
Nietzsche, F. W. (1976). The portable Nietzsche. Penguin Books.
Nietzsche, F. W. (2000). Basic writings of Nietzsche (W. A. Kaufmann, Trans.; Modern Library ed). Modern Library.
Tillich, P. (1951). Systematic theology, volume one. University of Chicago Press.