Here’s the sound of me putting a book down…

Yes that’s right. Silence.  I did not throw it. It did not hit the wall. Nevertheless, I will not be able to finish it.

Chapter 10 (the last chapter):

Nietzsche admits to being pious. Even though he calls himself a ‘godless anti-metaphysician’ (a phrase that truns out to be ironic precisely because Nietzsche is not godless), he still believes in truth, which has for millennia been equated with the divine.

That’s the passage that made me put the book down.

The first part of the sentence seems to me to be what the book  (Pious Nietzsche) is about empirically.  That is Benson wants to argue that Nietzsche didn’t become less pious in his life so much as he moved his piety from Christian to Dionysian content while “the form remains virtually unchanged.” The author argues that Nietzsche saw the Christian Pietism of his youth as having fallen “out of rhythm with life” (i.e. into decadence) and his quest, via music, was to get back into this rhythmical state. This quest results is N’s Dionysian content. Hence, the author’s basic argument is that the forms associated with Christian Pietism did not change, that Nietzsche retains those forms, and therefore, N remains pious.

In other words, Benson equates the form he sees in Pietism with religiosity. And here is where it connects with the second part of the sentence that had me put the book down.  In that there seems to be another identity equation – god=truth. This seems to me to be at the heart of what the book is really about metaphysically.

If the form = religiosity then these terms hold identical content. The problem is that I think Benson is mistaking the general structure of having a belief system with the structure of a specific kind of belief system. All human beings have belief systems. This does not equate to any specific kind of belief system, that is, to have a belief system does not necessitate religiosity.  Nevertheless, when Benson discusses Nietzsche’s “obsession” with human salvation, he is, I think, saying something of importance. This is, for me, what the book actually says – that the conceptual structures of one’s life, deeply embedded by culture and childhood training, are not easily left behind. That humans need saving, for example, is a core concept of some belief systems, and it seems truly difficult for those person, so afflicted, to dump. So Nietzsche, seeing Christianity as incapable of the job of this salvation, turned, via music, to a system (Dionysia) that he thought could save us.

Well some of us. And this is another similarity in the basic concepts which structure the Christian world view, which carried over to Nietzsche’s Dionysian solution. These basic structuring concepts seem to be what Benson means by form. These are the thoughts which almost never get exposed to daylight when people are trying to make a change in their world view. Instead what they do is pare down the narrative that connects the bones and redress the supports. This makes the world look new, but it is just a new dress, not a new world.  For a new world, each bone, each concept needs to exposed, disarticulated and some need to be broken, discarded, and all need to be rearranged. I think Benson is quite right that Nietzsche didn’t do that.

Granted N thought we needed saving and Christians think we need saving, but is this kind of equation enough to conflate the two belief systems? I mean I think evolution explains the diversity of life, and many Christians also think that evolution explains the diversity of life, but this doesn’t make Christians atheists. This kind of false equation and the reliance on historical tradition as evidence for the existence of something (e.g. “truth, which has for millennia been equated with the divine”) is the reason I put the book down. I didn’t throw it at the wall, despite this somewhat egregious intellectual misstep, because the basic idea, that conceptual frameworks are difficult to shed, made what effort I put into the earlier parts of the book worth it.

Still, the core concepts of the author, and therefore the book, show through in his identity equations.  These are what the book is about metaphysically and since I don’t share them, I cannot go to the place Benson intended. I did manage to go somewhere though, and for that I am glad. I like learning, especially in places where I least expect it.