For their Humanities final in December, Upper School students were required to produce an essay comparing Frederick Nietzsche’s view of the will with Charlotte Mason’s. Clapham senior and Head Girl Taline Labib kindly allowed us to share her essay below:
The Struggle of Will in Nietzsche & Mason
by Taline Labib
For a society that seems to hate Hitler, it is interesting how much the man from whom he derived many of his ideas influences the way we think and live. America, whether we like it or not, is a Nietzschean society. In the late 1800s, Nietzsche wrote his book On the Genealogy of Morals to awaken Germany to the “lies” they had been spoonfed for ages. Nietzsche adamantly argued that God is dead, and we have killed him, and that the only real purpose in life was to acquire as much power as possible. His ideas are prevalent in today’s culture, unrecognized by most. Today, people are either nihilists, with nothing to truly live for, or they latch onto power or something larger than themselves to believe in. Amidst that climate stands a small percentage of Americans holding onto a different perspective.
Charlotte Mason influenced education in the aftermath of World War II, and much like us, lived among a society that was the product of ideas like Nietzsche’s. She, however, did not give in to the pressures around her, fighting for a life and an agency that was given by God, not obstructed by Him. She wrote An Essay Towards a Philosophy of Education as a summation of her ideas for curriculum and about child development. In her book, she argued for a revival of the conception of the whole person of the child and for a new understanding of education as a life and not a utilitarian practice. Both thinkers spoke much about the will and the power of the mind, but with very different perspectives and very different outcomes.
Nietzsche believed that the will is the capacity of the mind to exert force and accumulate power. Charlotte Mason believed the will to be the ability of the mind to choose good and not desire wrongly. They both agreed that the will is the strongest faculty of man and has great power, but Mason believed that it is a gift from God to guide us towards goodness, while Nietzsche believed “God” is a tool to stop us from exerting our wills. To Nietzsche, the will is the ability to carry out one’s desires, and to Mason, it is the ability to choose not to carry them out.
Nietzsche described the will as the greatest thing a man can exert, and his claim to power and purpose in life. He claimed that all people were divided between weak and strong, and will was the reason for both categories. Strong people were those who exerted their will on the weak, and the weak were those who could not or would not. He described this image vividly, writing, “To demand of strength that it should not express itself as strength, that it should not be a will to overcome, overthrow, dominate, a thirst for enemies and resistance and triumph, makes as little sense as to demand of weakness that it should express itself as strength” (Nietzsche 29). He used strength almost synonymously with the will here, arguing that the exertion of the will was as natural as the exertion of force.
Nietzsche went on to argue that systems like religion and punishment were all ways to encroach upon the will and make the weak (who could not carry out their wills) feel like they had a semblance of power over the strong. Nietzsche wrote extensively on the facade of punishment as a tool of the weak: “The will to self-torture, that downtrodden cruelty of the internalized animal man who has been chased back into himself, of the man locked up in the state in order to be tamed” (Neitzche 72). Nietzsche’s image is clear here: a man who does not exert his will is a chained animal being forcibly tamed. At the end of his book, after explaining how ascetic ideals, or virtues, were just another tool of the weak, Nietzsche gives a final summarizing statement: “All this represents… a will to nothingness, an aversion to life, a rebellion against the most fundamental preconditions of life, which is and remains nonetheless a will! And to say, once again in conclusion, what I said at the beginning: man would rather will nothingness than not will at all…” (Nietzsche 136). All of Nietzsche’s theories about the ascetic ideal, morality, punishment, and religion rested on this one statement: that man was a beast with the power to exert his will, and the biggest lie the world had been fed was that they shouldn’t. His harsh view of the world tells us as Christians that if there were no God, all we would have is our own desires, and there would be nothing to do except take and take.
Thankfully, Charlotte Mason takes an entirely different approach to the meaning of the will. She defined the will clearly and succinctly: “That the way to will effectively is to turn our thoughts away from that which we desire but do not will.” (Mason 108). Unlike Nietzsche, Mason separated desires from will, while still upholding the strength of the will, regarding desires of the flesh as weak rather than guidelines to be followed. Her ideas are radical even to Christian circles in that she reframes the will as something more similar to the conscience. Most of us understand the will to be our own desire to do something, but Mason flipped that on its head. She wrote, “Its [the will’s] function is to choose, to decide, and there seems to be no doubt that the greater the effort of decision, the weaker the general will” (Mason 108). Furthermore, she emphasized how the exercise of the will produced one’s personality: “The will has only one mode of action, its function is to ‘choose’ and with every choice we make we grow in force of character” (Mason 109). Hence, in Mason’s eyes, if the function of the will is the practice of choosing, then the aim for education and raising a child should be to train the child to choose right.
Both Nietzsche and Mason recognized the importance of the will and how central it is to how a person behaves and influences the world. To both of them, the will could be described as the most powerful faculty of the soul. However, they differ in the fundamental purpose of the will, and that resulted in a huge difference between all their perspectives on life and the advice they gave to their readers. Nietzsche continually advocated for power and the exertion of one’s strength, not stopping to question whether a person could trust their desires or not. He wrote, “This liberated man, who is really entitled to make promises, this master of free will, this sovereign, how should he not be aware of his superiority over everything which cannot promise and vouch for itself? How should he not be aware of how much trust, how much fear, how much respect he arouses…and how much mastery over circumstances, over nature, and over all less reliable creatures with less enduring wills is necessarily given into his hands along with this self-mastery?” (Nietzsche 41). His phrasing exuded the truth he felt most adamantly about the will: that it was what made man king and god over himself and over whoever he could subject to himself.
...make every effort to supplement your faith with virtue, and virtue with knowledge, and knowledge with self-control, and self-control with steadfastness, and steadfastness with godliness, and godliness with brotherly affection, and brotherly affection with love...
This outcome of the strong will is opposite to Mason’s, who thought that the will must be trained by what is good to desire good. The will is the means by which a person can grow in virtue and triumph over their desires, not be ruled by them. Mason wrote, “But the one achievement possible and necessary for every man is character, and character is as finely wrought metal beaten into shape and beauty by the repeated and accustomed action of will” (Mason 109). She went on to argue that becoming good people rested on this process, writing that “We shall escape becoming a nation of imbeciles only because there will always be persons of good will amongst us who will resist the general trend” (Mason 109). Because of this, she places the whole of her philosophy of education on training up the will according to what the Lord wills, as she detailed here: “The boy must learn too that the will is subject to solicitations all round, from the lust of the flesh and the lust of the eye and the pride of life; that will does not act alone; it takes the whole man to will, and a man wills wisely, justly and strongly, in proportion as all his powers are in training and under instruction” (Mason 112). Both Nietzsche and Mason set up vivid, powerful images. But only one of them presented a path of true, lasting power; one of them was ruled by the will, and the other ruled over it.
Taline LabibI don’t want to be ruled by my will, by my desires... I want to choose right. Not just because I call myself Christian and that is what I “ought” to do, but because that is what I was made for.
I don’t want to be ruled by my will, by my desires. That is why I agree with Charlotte Mason and wholeheartedly disagree with Nietzsche. Not because his ideas were illogical or harsh, although they are, but because it is easy to fall into the trap he did, and think that if there is no purpose in this life, you might as well take what you can get. But I want to choose right. Not just because I call myself Christian and that is what I “ought” to do, but because that is what I was made for. We often water down what it means to choose the Lord’s will, and although we disagree with Nietzsche, deep down we let ourselves live by the narrative that choosing not to fulfill our desires makes us weak. But I want to believe that resisting my desires makes me strong, not just because I was taught that, but because it was how God designed me. In a world of people who are blinded by Nietzsche, I want to live like Charlotte Mason, and I pray God gives me the strength, gives me the will, to do just that.
