Third Essay — What is the Meaning of Ascetic Ideals?

The essay opens with a paradox Nietzsche has been building toward across the first two essays: the human being cannot bear meaningless suffering. He can bear tremendous pain if it has meaning; he cannot bear even mild discomfort if it has none. The ascetic ideal answers this need. It tells the sufferer: your suffering is your fault, and the cure is self-denial, renunciation, the negation of the will. This is not healing — but it is meaning. And meaning, Nietzsche argues, is what the human animal requires above all. The ascetic priest is the figure who provides it, and by providing it makes himself the most powerful figure in human history.

Nietzsche works through the cases with characteristic violence of method. Wagner's turn to Parsifal — the sensual revolutionary of the Ring becoming a Christian mystic — is demolished in two pages: the artist's asceticism is mostly costume, the condition of creative work, not a genuine metaphysical commitment. Schopenhauer's embrace of the will's negation is taken more seriously and attacked more carefully: it is the most honest philosophical expression of the ascetic ideal, which is precisely why Nietzsche must defeat it rather than dismiss it. The philosopher's asceticism — solitude, poverty, intellectual focus — is admitted as a useful hygiene, not a betrayal of life. But the priest's is what the essay is about: the ascetic priest as saviour, shepherd, manager, and perpetuator of the sick herd.

The essay closes with the most consequential question of the book: is there any rival to the ascetic ideal? Nietzsche looks at science, at modern history, at secular humanism, and finds them all still operating within the ascetic ideal's framework — driven by the will to truth at all costs, which is itself the ascetic ideal wearing a lab coat. "What, I put the question with all strictness, has really triumphed over the Christian God? The answer: the Christian morality itself, the idea of truth, taken as God's prohibiting lying, even the lying of the faith." The Genealogy ends with the admission that the ascetic ideal still has no genuine rival, followed by the darkest sentence in the book: "Man would sooner will nothingness than not will." The will needs a goal; it prefers self-negation to goallessness. The redeemer — the philosopher who could replace the ascetic ideal with something that affirms rather than negates — has not come. The book ends as a wager on his arrival.