The Other Side of the Ascetic Ideal: The Power of Forgetting

In the first section of the Second Essay in the Genealogy, Nietzsche presents himself more as a psychologist than a philosopher. He reverses our standard valuation of forgetfulness and memory. Our modern neo-liberal market-driven culture treats forgetting as a defect. Memory is the healthy condition. If we forget what day it is, we are assumed to have erred in some way — a defect has entered the system. Nietzsche doesn’t see it that way. Memory is the condition that must be forced upon us. We admit this in thousands of ways in our modern life: sticky notes, to-do lists, where we put our keys, keeping calendars up to date all point out how fragile our memory is and that our natural condition to to forget. These techniques, practices and devices all exist so that “we won’t forget.” We admit, in this simple phrase and these ubiquitous practices, that forgetting is what the mind is inclined to do and that we need external help to remember.

We can observe this in our everyday behavior. As a quick example, some of my retired friends often remark that they don’t remember what day of the week it is. Sometimes they are bothered by this, sometimes it’s just an observation. But as I think about what motivates me to remember what day of the week it is, I realize that it is bound up with job, work and career, but also with other commitments that I’ve made to myself and to others. Board meetings for a non-profit that I am part of are on the fourth Tuesday of each month. This counting of Tuesdays is itself a mnemonic device that overcomes forgetting. We are thus bred to remember days of the week by a system that requires us to show up on time or be kicked out of the system. For those no longer fully in the system, this ability to remember atrophies. Are we to see this as a defect or a natural state of the system? In what context is this a defect? When untethered from the need to show up on time at the right place, what need do we have of even naming days of the week let alone remembering them? There is nothing natural or required for us to remember that it is Friday and that we should thank God for it.

Why is this reversal of the value of forgetting and memory important? This is a complex argument that I’ll tackle a bit more later, but for the moment I’ll just note this: Nietzsche wants us to understand that the mind’s natural ability to clear itself results from its need for new experiences and to function well in the world. A mind that would naturally hold onto everything and not put anything away fills up and has no space for new feelings, thoughts, and desires. Forgetting, therefore, must be thought of as the mind’s natural ability to have an experience and put it away, perhaps to be recalled later as a memory. This is healthy forgetting and healthy memory. The unhealthy version occurs when forgetting loses its power to put away experiences and thus make way for other experiences in the consciousness. Memory is unhealthy when it shuts off this power of clearing out the consciousness. This is different than memory as recalling to consciousness something once experienced and put away. This can be quite healthy and pleasant. We do this all the time when we think back to happy moments in our past, or when we think back on something we wish we had handled better. Nietzsche is calling out as unhealthy (or decadent) the inability to put experiences away for later recall. When they aren’t put away, they cloud one’s consciousness and color our view of the present and the future. Put succinctly, this unhealthy expression of memory dominates consciousness and colors how we experience whatever happens to us in the future.

We must bear in mind, however, that the Genealogy is a polemic, not a prescription. We should not read it as a psychological treatise as we would find a generation or two later with Freud and the emerging cadre of professionalized psychoanalysts, who needed such treatises to legitimize their profession. Rather, ressentiment and the ascetic ideal are Nietzsche’s polemical targets, and Christianity and Atheism are mere expressions of the will to power. We must, therefore, read Nietzsche’s reversal of the value of memory and forgetting as a provocation rather than a hard truth claim about human psychology. As such, we should treat it as a move within a therapeutic game that provokes us into noticing how we hold onto memories as a way of validating our identities. When he asks, at the beginning of the Second Essay, how is it possible to “breed an animal with the right to keep promises,” he is issuing a provocation to notice what we remember and the external mechanisms that require us to remember certain things. The problem is not memory itself but what the culture around us requires us to remember and how we are motivated to remember these particular things.

The solution is not a wholesale denigration of memory and an unreflective will to forget. This would be merely to eternally return to the same dynamic of nihilism and ressentiment: to suddently hate memory and to love forgetting is merely to flip the binary, which would be silly and futile in overcoming ressentiment and the negative aspects of the ascetic ideal. Nor can we undo the ascetic ideal by marshaling a hatred for it as a way to seek its outside. This would simply be to hold onto the ascetic ideal if only under another name like Atheism (like Nietzsche argued) or (taking a page from my own history) a nihilistic poststructuralism that can never break free of its polemical mode.

What if we stare deeply into the ascetic ideal for the seeds of its own overcoming? Such a deep look should not start from ressentiment for the ascetic ideal. We must be cautious of ressentiment’s power to imagine ourselves standing outside what we despise and judging it from an objective place. This is how Atheism and science ended up, according to Nietzsche’s polemic, merely replacing and intensifying Pauline Christianity’s expression of the ascetic ideal. Rather, we must stand on the ascetic ideal as our inheritance and look within it for the power of overcoming its alliance with ressentiment and permanent guilt as core to our modern identities.

In this meditation, I want to look at a few passages from Athanasius’ Life of Anthony to dwell a bit on the problem of memory and forgetfulness. When I read this work through the lens of Nietzsche’s psychology of the ascetic ideal, I don’t see an ascetic priest — the one who re-directs the outward projection of ressentiment as hatred of others into a self-hatred that creates a permanent state of guilt and bad conscience. I see a healthy relationship between the forces of memory and the forces of forgetting that invigorates the will and gives it life without resorting to ressentiment as its expression. In this way, I see an example of what Nietzsche ended up admiring about the ascetic ideal in the closing lines of the Genealogy:

Man, the bravest of animals and the one most accustomed to suffering, does not repudiate suffering as such; he desires it, he even seeks it out, provided he is shown a meaning for it, a purpose of suffering… In it, suffering was interpreted; the tremendous void seemed to have been filled; the door was closed to any kind of suicidal nihilism [emphasis added]. This interpretation — there is no doubt of it — brought fresh suffering with it, deeper, more inward, more poisonous, more life-destructive suffering: it placed all suffering under the perspective of guilt.

But all this notwithstanding — man was saved thereby, he possessed a meaning, he was thenceforth no longer like a leaf in the wind, a plaything of nonsense — the “sense-less” — he could now will something; no matter at first to what end, why, with what he willed: the will itself was saved. (3.28)

The ascetic ideal and its intensification of ressentiment gave birth to the will — to a democratized will, not just a will for those in power. It would be silly to read Nietzsche’s cure for the ascetic ideal as a going backward. This is neither possible — “man would rather will nothingness than not will” (3.28) — nor desirable — “the will itself was saved.” This would require a “suicidal nihilism” on an epic scale. The nineteenth and twentieth centuries certainly attempted nihilism at this epic scale with its forced marches, gulags, concentration camps and gas chambers — all in the name of a ressentiment-fueled will to Truth that required the naming and annihilation of an Enemy that just so happened to be a huge chunk of humanity with each iteration.

No, this is not our path. Nietzsche’s cure — he styled himself as the physician-philosopher — must be found within this activation of the will itself. The forces that breed it must be re-channeled, re-directed, and re-distributed during the breeding process. This requires restoring the healthy expressions of ascesis to what has become the decadent expressions of “asceticism.” In his evaluation of Athanasius’ Anthony, William Harmless says exactly this and points us to a closer reading that reclaims ascesis from asceticism:

Anthony’s apprenticeship included rigorous training. The term Anthony uses for this, ascesis, is better translated “exercise regimen” than “asceticism,” for it was really a sports term before it became a monastic one. (Desert Christians, 61)

To make this clear, asceticism has come to mean a focus on renunciation for its own sake. Asceticism encapsulates these self-denying practices while jettisoning the positive aspects that come with “exercise regimen.” Pierre Hadot was the primary academic who pointed this out to us in works like What Is Ancient Philosophy? and Philosophy as a Way of Life. We should, I believe, read Athanasius’ use of the terms “ascetic,” “asceticism,” and “ascesis” more like Harmless and Hadot advocate — as spiritual practices of self-transformation that are more like the training regimens of athletes than the radical self-denial of stereotypical monks. To be sure, there is plenty of radical self-denial in Anthony and those who followed him into the Egyptian desert, but we must step back to try to take in the bigger picture of what asceticism actually meant and what he (and Athanasius) was trying to achieve. We need not follow Nietzsche’s reading of Paul to find in the ascetic ideal a total and unavoidable commitment to nihilism and permanent guilt.

The trick then, in reclaiming the will without activating ressentiment and permanent guilt, is to reclaim ascesis as self-transformative training from asceticism as self-violent renunciation for its own sake. We need not philosophize with a hammer. I believe that we can find glimpses of this reclamation by actually returning to the founding texts of what we have come to call asceticism. In those texts, I believe it is possible to find moments where the positive expressions of ascesis are present before they are turned into the negative forces of ressentiment and permanent guilt. For Anthanasius, Anthony demonstrated a practice of memory and forgetfulness that is more inline with Nietzche’s healthy states of these forces.

The key passage is in chapter 7. It comes after a list of bodily renunciations Anthony had undertaken rather rigorously:

He disapproved of oil for anointing the skin, saying that it was more fitting for youths to hold to the ascetic life intensely, and not to seek the things that relax the body, but to habituate it to labors, thinking of the Apostle’s remark, When I am weak, I am strong. For he said the soul’s intensity is strong when the pleasures of the body are weakened. And this tenet of his was also truly wonderful, that neither the way of virtue nor separation from the world for its sake ought to be measured in terms of time spent, but by the aspirant’s desire and purposefulness. He, indeed, did not hold time passed in his memory [emphasis added], but day by day, as if making a beginning of his asceticism, increased his exertion for advance, saying continually to himself Paul’s words about forgetting what lies behind and straining forward to what lies ahead, and recalling also the passage in which Elijah the prophet says, the Lord … lives, before whom I stand today. He observed that in saying today he was not counting the time passed, but as one always establishing a beginning, he endeavored each day to present himself as the sort of person ready to appear before God — that is, pure of heart and prepared to obey his will and no other.

The first half of this passage can easily be read as a near perfect rendition of the ascetic ideal, especially the quote, “When I am weak, I am strong.” Even the last sentence leads in this direction when purity of heart appears to be a complete abdication of one’s own will. But we do ourselves a disservice if we simply stop there. Such a reading will tempt us to face off against the ascetic ideal with renewed ressentiment — just like I used to with polemical poststructuralism.

No. We must pay heed to the power of forgetting and letting go that are the force of the second half of this passage. Each day requires of the ascetic a renewal of his/her commitment to training and self-transformation. When Athanasius writes that Anthony “did not hold time passed in his memory” and that he practiced Paul’s “forgetting what lies behind,” he’s talking about Nietzsche’s healthy relationship between memory and forgetting. To forget, as Nietzsche put it, is the mind’s natural power of making room for renewal — for new experiences. A mind that “cannot have done with anything” cannot make such room. It holds onto too much. Ressentiment holds onto memories and does not put them away for fear of losing one’s identity. We hold onto anger in the form of grudges. We hold onto desires for things as a permanent state that continues on even after we have acquired the things. These grudges and desires become ways to validate ourselves. I have been harmed and in this victimhood I am affirmed! A healthy state is demonstrated by his example of the Comte de Mirabeau, “who had no memory for insults and vile actions done him and was unable to forgive simply because he — forgot” (GM 1.10).

This power that Athanasius describes of “not hold[ing] time passed in his memory” and “forgetting what lies behind” is what Evagrius would (a generation or two later) capture as the demon of acedia. This particular demon uses time against ascesis to wither away one’s commitment little by little.

He [the demon of acedia] depicts life stretching out for a long period of time, and brings before the minds eye the toil of the ascetic struggle and, as the saying has it, leaves no leaf unturned to induce the monk to forsake his cell and drop out of the fight. No other demon follows close upon the heals of this one (when he is defeated) but only a state of deep peace and inexpressible joy arise out of this struggle. (Praktikos 12)

Acedia, then, is the experience of time as drudgery — that the past is wasted and the future is equally futile. It is the lingering power of memory as the gateway to Nietzsche’s fear of suicidal nihilism — the dropping out of the fight. Against this ongoing memory that projects the future as just more of the same, the practices of ascesis require the ability to renew each day and live in a present moment that actively forgets in order to prevent one’s memories from dominating one’s view of the future.

At first read, acedia bears little resemblance to ressentiment, but it is one of its most powerful and nihilistic expressions. If we think of ressentiment only as a highly visible anger that projects itself outward, we miss its fundamental dynamic: it lets memory determine our perception of the future. The future appears to be more of the same. Holding a grudge as an outward projection of anger is only one way of circumventing forgetfulness and expressing ressentiment. Acedia is the more despairing and passive way of expressing ressentiment. It is ressentiment expressed as boredom or apathy or even a disgust for the future. Acedia thus marks one of the ways in which ressentiment turns inward to become a self-poisoning hopelessness. In either case, the future appears to be the continuous holding on of memories that project forward rather than backward.

Anthony knew this. The speech that Athanasius gives him starting at chapter 16 is a speech about acedia. Standing at the beginning of the formalization of anachoresis as a budding institution, Anthony would want other anchorites to understand how difficult the commitment would be to maintain over the long haul. The monk must marshal the virtue of endurance to stick with the ascetic commitment. Daily renewal of that commitment will be essential, but so also will be the regular contemplation of one’s own death. This is the paradox of endurance — it is strengthened by imagining that it is all coming to an end at any moment. Modern endurance athletes understand this and are trained in a version of this technique, which can get used as a meditation within a long event. The idea is to stake out end points so as to break down the long duration of the event (and the continuous effort necessary to finish) into smaller chunks. By imagining shorter durations, your mind is cut off from acedia as the imagination of drudgery. You force your mind back into a focus on the present because you’ve cut off any thoughts beyond the next end point you’ve staked out.

In chapter 19, Anthony provides a very specific daily meditation that encapsulates beautifully this paradox of endurance:

As we rise daily, let us suppose that we shall not survive till evening, and again, as we prepare for sleep, let us consider that we shall not awaken. By its very nature our life is uncertain, and is meted out daily by providence. If we think this way, and in this way live — daily — we will not sin, nor will we crave anything, nor bear a grudge against anyone, nor will we lay up treasures on earth, but as people who anticipate dying each day we shall be free of possessions, and we shall forgive all things to all people. (Chapter 19, page 45, emphasis added)

This is right out of Seneca’s Letters to Lucilius. Core Stoic themes are here: life is experienced as fortuna (unpredictability), but it is as it should be because it is determined by providentia; contemplating death as immanent is a way to put our attachments into proper perspective and to detach our desires from them. This meditation, while derived directly from a Stoic practice, is intensified by the choice of a monastic existence. As such, this meditation must be understood not merely as a way of coping with the ups and downs of life. This meditation is at the heart of a choice and a commitment that his audience has made to shape their lives and their souls in a particular way. They’ve all made a choice to remove themselves physically and spiritually from the life of the village, and this choice will necessarily bring about its own challenges, not the least of which is the enforced repetition of a daily schedule. Putting one’s desires into perspective is also one of those challenges, but Anthony knew (at least Athanasius represents that he knew) that the much, much larger challenge would be to endure in this commitment. Acedia must be met with a specific daily meditation designed to fortify endurance paradoxically by imagining death as immanent.

The serious contemplation of death as immanent has powerful effects for renewing one’s will to continue. It strengthens the will to endure; it doesn’t weaken it. To return to Nietzsche, man now possesses a will and a meaning: “he was thenceforth no longer like a leaf in the wind, a plaything of nonsense — the “sense-less” — he could now will something; no matter at first to what end, why, with what he willed: the will itself was saved.” Anthony’s daily meditation on immanent death is not the ascetic priest at work, but a key moment where the ascetic priest directly confronts ressentiment (as passive nihilism) and infuses it with a positive will to push on. Ascesis is not at this moment asceticism as self-denial for its own sake. Rather, ascesis here is the self-control necessary to renew commitments and to not “drop out of the fight” as Evagrius would put it a few decades later in his advice to the same monastic community.