Nietzsche and the End of the Ascetic Ideal

This contribution to the Common Knowledge symposium “The Satisfactions of Asceticism” offers an analysis of what Nietzsche calls “the ascetic ideal” along with two accounts of its demise. The analysis explains how ascetic ideals can be valued for their own sake, why they have an expressive character, and why their failure seems inconclusive. The standard account of the demise of the ascetic ideal posits that with time it becomes implausible, leaving room for a successor ideal to replace it. The more worrisome account of its demise is that since it is the only means of making sense of what counts as an ideal, its collapse leaves us with little hope for making sense of what matters.