The Pill and Nietzsche

Friedrich Nietzsche was the father of the philosophical school of nihilism. He died at the turn of the 20th century, well before effective oral contraception became widely available. In fact, he was a philosopher and not a chemist or doctor. So what does he have to do with the pill? Well Nietzsche was an honest atheist who recognized that without God there is only one thing that matters in the end; the “will to power;” in other words, self-assertion; pursuing our will becomes our god. I would suggest that the Pill is the ultimate manifestation of Nietzsche’s “will to power” philosophy. Our fertility gives us the ability to cooperate with God in passing on life, in co-creating with Him. But in contraception we demand the right to worship the gods of sex, power, and wealth regardless of the cost. We find fertility such a dangerous foe that women are willing to put their health at risk to defeat it (It seems to me that sex is in first place of the sex, power, and money tri-theon right now, but I wonder how long it will be before the lawyers recognize the financial windfall available if they were to take the drug companies to the carpet over the death and disease, including breast cancer and a host of other problems including blood clots, caused by chemical contraception). Unlike the lower animals which sexually procreate, we have the intellectual capacity to choose to impede our cooperation with procreation. With the pill we manifest our wish to overcome nature; we go to battle with nature (i.e. with God) over our fertility. And battle seems to me to be the correct term considering the ever so martial contraceptive vocabulary (contraception, barrier method, spermicide, etc.). In the end, we are fighting against life. We are embracing the culture of death; in fact the paradox is that in pursuing the satisfaction of our every sexual desire, we actually seem to have a death wish. Walker Percy saw this in his book, Lost in the Cosmos in which he criticizes our sex crazed culture. Literary AIDS is a new manifestation of this coming out of the “gay” subculture. This genre (??) seems to be a celebration of death, of flirting with and embracing activities which will bring death. The late Stephen Happel discusses this:

the condition for accepting the pleasure of single-sex affection . . . is the willingness to accept death by AIDS, not as the antagonist of pleasure, but as the always already-there inner limit of an open-ended desire. This appropriation of death-in-life, however, requires divesting oneself of the kind of constructed masculinity that asserts dominance over everything, including suffering and death. The understanding of anthropology faces lack as an intrinsic moment of human self-realization, whether male or female (Stephen Happel and James J. Walter, Conversion and Discipleship: A Christian Foundation for Ethics and Doctrine [Philadelphia: Fortress Press, 1986], 114).

Demanding the right to seek death is the ultimate self-assertion of one’s will (even if Happel doesn't see this); it is the final defiance against the Lord and Giver of Life. If the traditional satanic exclamation Non Serviam does not come to mind here, I would be surprised. It makes perfect sense that Satan would attack the very point at which our wills can either bring us into the imitation of Trinitarian, fruitful love or into a rejection of the purpose of our free wills by our becoming lower than the animals who still at least act according to their instincts.