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The Ascetic Ideal as a Poisonous Ideology of Pleasurable Pain

In The Genealogy of Morality, Nietzsche claims that the weak, or “the unfortunate, the downtrodden, the broken” (GM, III, §14), “reinterpret” and “anesthetize” their pain and suffering (§20) and vent their ressentiment through the “ascetic ideal” (§15).1 What exactly Nietzsche means by this claim, I cannot explain without getting into details. Still, the problem that I will examine in this paper has already surfaced: How can asceticism, which Nietzsche associates with “self-denial, self-annulment” (§3) and even “pain” (§11), relieve pain and suffering? How can pain help deal with pain? Nietzsche himself recognizes a “self-contradiction” (§11) here, but he offers no immediate clue how to resolve this apparent contradiction. Even if he does, the clue seems hidden in his convoluted prose. Making sense of the “ascetic ideal” becomes even more difficult when Nietzsche characterizes it as a “sickness” (§14-17). Hence my questions: How and why does the ascetic ideal, a form of sickness and self-torture, alleviate (yet not eradicate) its pursuers’ pain and suffering? In what sense is the ascetic ideal sickly and unhealthy? And why would one accept the ascetic ideal if it makes one sick? In answering these, I will both consult and amend Bernard Reginster’s interpretation of Nietzsche. Specifically, I will argue for a point that I think Reginster misses to emphasize: the ascetic ideal exploits (§16) and controls a human proclivity for inflicting pain by partly satisfying it and thereby inhibiting a full-fledged natural expression of the will to power, which results in “anarchy” (§15) if left unchecked. Too many terms and concepts mentioned so far remain unexplained; I will clarify them when necessary as I go on.
Nietzsche diagnoses ressentiment as a driving force of the ascetic ideal (GM, III, §11) and characterizes ressentiment as “an unfulfilled instinct and power-will that wants to be master” (§11). What does ressentiment have to do with will, power, and ideal? According to Reginster, ressentiment is a natural reaction to the frustration or “feeling of impotence” that one experiences when one wills yet fails to assert one’s power or competence (Reginster, 2017).2 Ressentiment results in revaluation, or reassignment and reinterpretation of what is deemed valuable and worth pursuing, because failure to attain previously desired values hurts the sense of competence that the will to power tries to maintain. For example, consider priests who desire to flaunt their power, just as much as their aristocratic counterparts do, but are unable to do so because they lack socioeconomic capital. Their will to power remains strong — Nietzsche seems to assume without any further argument that everyone always possesses such will to power — yet the priests cannot in reality assert power as the aristocrats. Consequently, they become “the incarnate wish for being otherwise, being elsewhere” (§13). To fight the sense of impotence, they pursue the ascetic ideal, which disregards secular values and regards unworldly practices as inherently good and righteous. The ascetic ideal gives them a crooked and peculiar way to win the battle they wish to have won in reality — the battle of asserting power. And it is in this sense that “[the ascetic ideal’s] devaluation [of existence in this world] is motivated by an extreme form of ressentiment” (Reginster, 2006, p. 260).3
The exact definition of the “will to power” should be more complicated, but the key psychological observation is already on the table: ressentiment is a reaction to one’s failure to assert power, and the ascetic ideal is a product of revaluation that such ressentiment motivates. Since the will to power is portrayed here as obsessing over the felt impotence and striving towards competence, I will call Reginster’s conception of the will to power in ressentiment as the Mastery Complex view.
Now Reginster’s Mastery Complex view explains how ressentiment, a fairly reactive and negative affect, leads one actively to reassess, reinterpret, and put forward such new values as the ascetic ideal. Yet the Mastery Complex view does not seem to be able to explain a defining aspect of the ascetic ideal: it is so painful and gnawing that it becomes self-destructive and sickly. Of course, Reginster himself does not argue that ressentiment or the following ascetic ideal is healthy in any sense. Still, his emphasis on the will to power seems incompatible with the pain and self-destructiveness that the ascetic ideal entails. If the ascetic ideal is driven by revaluation, which is supposed to “repair the injured feeling of power” as Reginster puts (Reginster, 2017), shouldn’t the will to power that impels such revaluation also demand that the self-destructive practice to be stopped, at least at some point when one realizes its harmful implications? After all, Nietzsche characterizes the ascetic ideal as contradictory because the will therein undermines the very basis of the will, namely life itself (GM, III, §11).
In fact, Reginster explains why suffering, if not pain, must necessarily follow from the will to power (Reginster, 2007, p. 40).4 Here it may help to introduce Reginster’s distinction between suffering and pain. Pain is the state or subjective feeling of deprivation, while suffering is frustration that the will to power experiences with regard to the object it purports to overcome. Given this distinction, we can see why having the will to power involves suffering. Speaking of frustration and overcoming makes sense only with regards to something hard to achieve. It is trivial to talk about “mastery” over something easy and painless. No pain, no gain; self-discipline is duly expected.
Even though the will to power may necessitate suffering to a certain degree, however, self-torture need not be a defining feature of the suffering and overcoming in the ascetic ideal. Extreme pain need not be, in Reginster’s terms, constitutive of the ascetic ideal. If the Mastery Complex is about jumping hurdles, whether real or imaginary, to one’s satisfaction, and if “the pursuit of power assumes the form of growth, or self-overcoming” (Reginster, 2007, p. 41), then it seems pointless and irrelevant to inflict pain on oneself through demoralizing self-denial or excruciating self-mutilation (BGE, §229). How, then, should we make sense of Nietzsche’s emphasis on the torturing pain of the ascetic ideal?
One way to resolve the interpretive problem is to supply another psychological assumption of Nietzsche’s, which Reginster does not particularly highlight: inflicting pain is itself a way to assert power. Reginster does acknowledge that assertion of power “takes the form of inflicting suffering”, but he also qualifies that inflicting suffering is not necessary (Reginster, 2017). Now I suggest to amend Reginster’s interpretation: inflicting suffering and pain is necessary and crucial for asserting power. For otherwise the will to power can neither sustain the self-undermining torture of the ascetic ideal nor derive any “pleasure” (§11) from it.
Nietzsche explicitly mentions the human penchant for cruelty, whether towards others or oneself, in many different passages. According to Nietzsche, people get pleasure from cruelty, even when it is directed towards themselves, and the cruelty satisfies their will to power. Consider the Second Essay of The Genealogy, where he discusses the “strange” commensurability between pleasure and inflicting pain in a creditor-debtor relationship (GM, II, §5). Here he directly mentions “the pleasure of having the right to exercise power over the powerless without a thought” and equates it with “the enjoyment of violating” (§5). This pleasure of violation, punishment, and cruelty is not limited to contractual relationships that involve two or more parties. Regarding the self-negating aspects of the ascetic ideal, Nietzsche also suggests that one derives pleasure from harming oneself, that this kind of pleasure “belongs to cruelty” (GM, III, §18), and that this is the “only pleasure” derivable from the ascetic ideal (§11). He repeats the same point in Beyond Good and Evil: “there is also an abundant, superabundant enjoyment of one’s own suffering, of making oneself suffer, – and wherever man allows himself to be talked into self-denial in the religious sense or to self-mutilation … he is secretly lured and propelled by his cruelty, by the dangerous thrills of cruelty turned against himself” (§229).5 Nietzsche goes even further to generalize that “[a]lmost everything we call ‘higher culture’ is founded on the spiritualization and internalization of cruelty” (§229).
If we accept the human will towards cruelty as a given psychological fact, then we can see not only how the ascetic ideal both alleviates suffering and intensifies pain, but also why one would pursue the ideal despite the pain. Just as ressentiment is a reaction given the unsatisfied and frustrated will to power, self-torture is a reaction given the unsatisfied will to inflict pain. The ascetic ideal becomes appealing to those who have no power to torture others because it allows them a chance to inflict pain, but also poisoning because the pain is directed solely onto themselves.
Now one may object as follows. Even if one could see in the ascetic ideal some psychological appeal, the appeal of cruelty may not be so strong as to override an “instinct of self-preservation and self-affirmation” (§13). Pleasure of self-violation may be the only pleasure that one can derive within the ascetic ideal, but why should one adopt the ideal in the first place?
In response, I will point out that ressentiment and the ascetic ideal stem from the inability and powerlessness in achieving secular values. Powerless yet suffering, priests and slaves have no choice but to adopt the ascetic ideal; they cannot afford what masters can. If the masters had the Mastery Complex, they could choose a healthy alternative other than self-torturing: biting the bullet, taking the difficulty head on, and striving towards actual mastery. Their temporary failure, if any, does not perpetually frustrate them: “A strong and well-formed man digests his experiences (including deeds and misdeeds) as he digests his meals” (GM, III, §16). On the contrary, neither ascetic priests nor slaves who follow their ideal have power to reject and dismiss what harms them as bad, whereas masters can proclaim, “What harms me is harmful as such” (BGE, §260). Given the bare fact of pain and frustration, then, the ascetic priests and the slaves cannot but reinterpret their suffering in a way that comforts them. And the reinterpretation involving cruelty takes place often in relation to God, hence the religious and dramatic aspect of the ascetic ideal: “Consequently it is imagined that the gods too are refreshed and in festive mood when they are offered the spectacle of cruelty – and thus there creeps into the world the idea that voluntary suffering, self-chosen torture, is meaningful and valuable” (D, I, 18).
Furthermore, I should also point out that those who are not priests themselves — the originator of the ascetic ideal — are much worse off than the priests in that they are tricked into the ideal by the priests, the “power-hungry hermits and thought-innovators” (GM, III, §10). Nietzsche depicts the priests as “shepherds” (§15) or ideologues, namely those who spread certain practices and ideas that regulate ways of life: they “make the sick harmless to a certain degree, to bring about the self-destruction of the incurable, to direct the less ill strictly towards themselves, to give their ressentiment a backwards direction … and in this way to exploit the bad instincts of all sufferers for the purpose of self-discipline, self-surveillance and self-overcoming” (§16). In other words, the ascetic ideal has social and political effects, although Nietzsche does not explicitly describe them in political terms. First, the ideal “tames” (§15) its pursuers by exploiting their will to power and their desire to inflict pain. Second, the ideal isolates and disempowers its pursuers by channeling and containing their ressentiment strictly onto those victims themselves. Even when the ideal preaches such virtues as love, “the ascetic priest thereby prescribes … life-affirming impulse [i.e. the will to power] … in the most cautious dose,” for “otherwise they hurt one another, naturally in obedience to the same fundamental instinct [to dominate and inflict pain on others]” (§18). In short, the ascetic ideal regulates society and prevents “the inner disintegration of the herd” (§15) by controlling the herd’s revolutionary (if not master-like) impulses.
In this paper, I have tried to answer in what sense and how the ascetic ideal both relieves and aggravates its pursuer’s pain and suffering, and also why one would pursue the ideal despite its poisoning aspects. Accordingly, I have explored the concepts of ressentiment and the will to power in psychological terms. I don’t think my argument covers all the facets of the ascetic ideal that Nietzsche and Reginster discuss. A more comprehensive analysis seems beyond my reach for now, mostly due to my incapability and partly due to the difficulty that “only something which has no history can be defined” (GM, II, §13) precisely.

  1. Ansell-Pearson, Keith & Diethe, Carol (eds.) (2006). Nietzsche: ‘On the Genealogy of Morality’ and Other Writings Student Edition. Cambridge University Press. ↩

  2. Reginster, Bernard (2017). Ressentiment, Power, and Value [Lecture handout], November 30, 2017. ↩

  3. Reginster, Bernard (2006). The Affirmation of Life: Nietzsche on Overcoming Nihilism. Harvard University Press. ↩

  4. Reginster, Bernard (2007). The will to power and the ethics of creativity. In Brian Leiter & Neil Sinhababu (eds.), Nietzsche and Morality. Oxford University Press. pp. 32–56. ↩

  5. In this quote, Nietzsche does not clearly distinguish pain and suffering in Reginster’s sense. Since Nietzsche refers not only to self-denial (a psychological aspect related to the will to overcome) but also to self-mutilation (a subjective experience from deprivation), however, it seems reasonable to assume that Nietzsche has both pain and suffering in mind when he refers to “suffering” and the “cruel” intention to harm oneself. ↩

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