A Bitter Psalmist

The Psalms are sometimes described as comforting--recommended to those wrestling with dark nights of the soul. Reading over the past few days' Lenten Psalms, I'm afraid that any general recommendation of this kind strikes me as careless. For every Psalm 23, with its shepherding Lord leading us beside still waters, there is a Psalm 35, with its bargaining voice bitterly begging the Lord to put enemies to shame and violence in return for the promise of later praise. "Take hold of shield and buckler, and rise up to help me! Draw the spear and javelin against my pursuers . . . ." The psalmist's resentment is matched only by self-righteousness: "But as for me, when they were sick, I wore sackcloth; I afflicted myself with fasting. I prayed with head bowed on my bosom, as though I grieved for a friend or a brother; I went about as one who laments for a mother, bowed down and in mourning."

As material for worship, I do not claim insight into how to handle such a text. But reflection on this public confession of anger, weakness, and desperation did make me think about an apparent paradox of our broadly self-disclosing culture. That we have such a culture should be obvious to anyone who has a social media account, or anyone who has heard a politician or celebrity criticized not so much for engaging in shameful behavior, but for being unwilling to "share" with the public her feelings about such behavior. On the one hand, we make extensive demands on people to unveil their inner lives. We do so both in our relation to public figures and in our friendships and intimate relationships. Nietzsche diagnoses this tendency as another kind of bargaining: "People who give us their complete trust believe that they therefore have a right to our own. This conclusion is false: rights are not won by gifts."

On the other hand, we often have very little patience for disclosures when they are offered. We require public confessions to end with expressions of renewed self-resolve ("I'm just excited to move on to the next phase of my life") or the kinds of promises that are almost impossible to keep ("I'm just so sorry I let down my fans, and I will never let that happen again.") Of course, that we have such requirements does not mean that we always want people to satisfy them, which would take away the fun of excoriating those who fail to do so. Indeed, one suspects that the opportunity for such judgments may be the real good sought by far too many hearers of confessions, both public and private.

The illusion of public openness encourages forgetfulness of one of Christ's most pervasive messages--that we have no standing on which to judge the hearts of others. It is so, so easy to forget.

I should know better. Having been painfully shy since I was a very small child, I had the blessing of turning painfully awkward in adolescence and being the subject of psychological and, less often,  physical bullying. Being a false master of instrumental reasoning even back then, I decided to stop looking so awkward as quickly as possible, and set about reading and applying the relevant tomes. My reward for this, since it did nothing, of course, about my natural shyness, was that my new high school classmates decided that I must be a horrible snob. They had no way of knowing that I was really a nerd in hiding.

As an adult, a bout with a chronic but invisible illness showed me how quick people can be to attribute any failings to motives that are easily available to them, when they have no access to the real ones. Pain that is not seen cannot explain impatience with colleagues or struggles in relationships, and people will fill in what they cannot explain.

These are relatively easy examples to share, but I am not claiming to be self-disclosing. The point is--I should know. But I forget. Indeed, this tendency is perhaps the besetting sin of shy people: we are constantly presuming to understand other people's reactions to us, as if we are uniquely capable of seeing disdain in the face of others.

Any such presumption fails profoundly to respect the differences between persons as well as the vexed problems of self-knowledge. None of us either owns or fully understands a single human being--least of all ourselves. The presumption that we can, and that we can make judgments on the basis of such knowledge, results in some of the subtlest and therefore most painful forms of cruelty available to otherwise civilized people.

Any confession of pain or weakness therefore demands the utmost compassion. We cannot purge our discourse of "offensive" language, since the number of offenses is infinite. But we can take seriously, and charitably, claims that one has indeed been offended, even if the source of that offense has been a source of joy for us. The practices and institutions that nourish one person always have the potential to wound someone else. That is how human power works.

So I will endeavor to be grateful to the psalmist, who had the courage to record resentment, despair, and unabashed demandingness of God. This courage enables us to speak these feelings aloud, under the protection of corporate recitation of scripture. And they can perhaps remind us that those beings of otherness to whom we pass the peace may truly be in need of it. As are we.

On Plump Berries and Cruel Winters: Some Reflections on the Truths and Lies of Hedonism

"Why does everyone desire pleasure? We might think it is because everyone also aims at being alive." (Aristotle)

If it makes sense to speak of the expertise of a culture, and if our culture is expert at anything, it may appear that it must be expert at the pursuit of pleasure. In addition to all the traditional bases of sensual gratification--food, sex, mind-altering substances--we spend much of our time inventing new ones. Poor Aristotle never knew the joys of millions of musical pieces available at the touch of a button, or yelping one's way through a foreign city in search of exotic delights, or luxuriating in awe-inspiring cinematography. And I'm pretty sure that he never tried Scotch.

But if Aristotle is right--and on this I think he is--that desiring pleasure is essential to life, then we are all linked by this single interest, with one another, with our fellow citizens of whatever origin, and even with ancient Greek philosophers. Wouldn't it be reasonable, then, to evaluate our options, public and private, by considering how much pleasure they produce?

This simple logic is the logic of one form of utilitarianism. Its very simplicity holds out the promise for easy-decision making, fairness, and harmony among humankind, but unfortunately, it has a fatal flaw.

Our pleasures are not static. And they are not all equal, even when it comes to their capacity to sustain pleasure.

Indulge me in two examples. Sometime in the mid-aughts, I decided that it might be time to reconsider the eating habits that had just barely gotten me through part of my first three decades on earth, but which promised to make later middle age little fun indeed. I honestly don't remember what I was in the habit of eating for breakfast at this time, or even if I ate breakfast at all. But what would have sounded lovely to me, had I the time to prepare it, would have been a homemade buttermilk biscuit, with plenty of butter tucked inside of it to melt on the spot. But I soon learned that in the new, healthier language I was speaking, just a teaspoon of that butter would cost me as much as a whole cup of blueberries, or even more strawberries, raspberries, or blackberries.

I started eating a lot of berries. And I fell in love with them.

This was not a wholly new love, and it took little work to achieve. I had picked berries in Southern summers as a child, and I knew the joys of eating them straight off the vine or bush. But I had never before appreciated the way in which they pair beautifully with any number of other foods, the way in which they seem to capture the fire and the consolation of the sun, or the way in which they have what I called, in a whimsical moment, "plump beauty."

That biscuit with melted butter still sounds good to me, but there is now no way that I would choose it over a bowl of fresh berries.

The second case was more difficult. I have been running since my junior year in college, almost twenty years now. And for most of those two decades it has been a chore. Sometimes the chore has been rewarding: during a long struggle with chronic pain, the discovery that I could still run brought me a moment of exultation during a very dark time. But it has long been primarily duty that has forced me out the door.

Then, one day last year, I found myself in the park near my house in Southwestern Pennsylvania, slogging up the beginnings of the difficult hill that ends my running route, smiling. Somehow, gradually, this had become not just a duty, but a pleasure. I can say something about the nature of that pleasure--how it relates to the intimate connection with nature that one finds at certain odd hours of the day, how it arises from the playfulness of feeling one's body move rhythmically, how it sets one's thoughts free to wander in directionless yet productive patterns. But none of this would be sufficient. This pleasure is its own feeling, not to be defined in terms of other goods. And it is this pleasure that now takes away (at least most of) the resentment that I would otherwise feel at leaving the house when the wind chill is in the single (sometimes negative) digits, as it has been so often lately.

The intensity of both of these pleasures was a new discovery for me. How much more impoverished, then, are we choosing to make our lives, when we take our given pleasures to be determinative? Or when we focus on pleasures that everyone can share innately, because that seems easy or more marketable? Or when we take those pleasures simply for what they are in their most childish form, for much the same reason? No mature adult approaches the table with the same tastes that she had as a child or even adolescent; why would we approach music, art, reading, or even sex that way? We cannot truly be experts at pleasure if we assume that everyone is born with the relevant expertise. On such a paradigm, "expertise" becomes what Thomas Hobbes would call insignificant speech.

Aristotle knew this, of course. He goes on to discuss the way in which the activities we love will determine which pleasures we seek, and how pleasure will loop back onto those activities, reinforcing our love even more. Some of these activities promise short bursts of pleasure, some produce quick pleasure followed by enduring pain, and some offer sustained, joyful satisfaction. The path to the latter may be arduous, but the determined hedonist cannot be deterred by such inconveniences, when there is so much promise of plump beauty at the finish.

Five stages?

"One begets the idea, another is godfather at its baptism, the third begets children by it, the fourth visits it on its deathbed, and the fifth buries it."

So writes G.C. Lichtentberg in notebook H, aphorism 24, printed in the collection titled The Waste Books. As Roger Kimball says in a good appreciation of the man, he is not a household name, but something rarer: a writer loved by those who are household names. The latter would include Goethe, Nietzsche, Tolstoy, Karl Kraus, Wittgenstein, Oakeshott. Often it's difficult to hear Lichtenberg well, for a reason given by Kraus: "Lichtenberg digs deeper than anyone ... He speaks from the subterranean depths.  Only he who himself digs deep hears him."

The fivefold scheme given by Lichtenberg seems implicit in the "ideal eternal history" proposed by Vico in 1725, in the first version of the Scienza Nuova. This ideal history is traversed in time by every nation in its "rise, development, maturity, decline, and fall." At times, Vico is no less aphoristic than Lichtenberg.  He too is not a household name, and probably never will be. 

As I was thinking about this fivefold scheme, a section of Nietzsche's Twilight of the Idols came to mind: "How the 'Real World' at last Became a Fable." Nietzsche gives us five stages that seem related to those of Lichtenberg and Vico.

1. The real world is attainable to the wise. "Plato" - the philosopher who is also a creator par excellence, begetting the idea. 

2. The real world is unattainable for the moment, but is promised to the wise. "It becomes Christian" -- Plato baptized, made more enticing, more appealing, but perhaps also more incomprehensible.

3. The real world is unattainable, but it's consoling to think about, and we have a duty toward it. "Königsbergian."  A Copernican revolution in thought, with plenty of heirs.  

4. The real world is unattainable and unknown, so that it gives us nothing, either by way of consolation or obligation. "Cockcrow of positivism." The real world is dying, but it's not quite dead. The voice that speaks the world sub specie quantitatis, without quite abolishing the real world.

5. The "real world" -- useless, superfluous, worthy of abolition. "Free spirits run riot." To bury something that has been dying for quite a while -- this can be an occasion for cheerfulness, as it so clearly is in some moods. The real world having been abolished, so too is the apparent world.

Where next?  Are we at the end of history? Or is there a sixth age? Nietzsche thought there is, or at least he did when he was still communicating with us. He presumes to mark it by the fateful words "Incipit Zarathustra."  Would such an age be something new? Or would it be a return to the first?  The safest answer is probably "yes."  Zarathustra is not entirely new, so far as he is an archetype of the wise old man, as Jung points out. What from one perspective is a radical break, is from another perspective a return to something old.

Art Garfunkel Wrestles with Plato?

Garfunkel Defends His Art

In the Apology, Plato has Socrates offer the following dim report of his encounter with the poets:

"I am almost ashamed to speak of this, but still I must say that there is hardly a person present who would not have talked better about their poetry than they did themselves. That showed me in an instant that not by wisdom do poets write poetry, but by a sort of genius and inspiration; they are like diviners or soothsayers who also say many fine things, but do not understand the meaning of them."

This brief interview (see link above) with Art Garfunkel presents a nice challenge to the suggestion that artists are unlikely to comprehend--let alone articulate--the meaning of their art. Of course, Simon was arguably the poet behind Garfunkel's most famous work. But it hardly makes Garfunkel's insights less impressive to note that he was the voice, not the wordsmith.

Part of what is nice about the interview is that it belongs to a genre we are seeing more of these days: the reconciliation story of parties to a once-acrimonious musical divorce, who have gained the maturity that sometimes comes with age. But beyond this sentimental comfort, we find some genuinely reflective insights.

Consider, for instance, Garfunkel's description of the power of collaborative friendship:

"How about the very mentality of Paul Simon? This is a very interesting Paul Simon with a mind that can reach into the future, and I am a spiritual partner. When you sing with a partner and he has a very pleasing sound, and he's your friend and you laugh a lot, you soon start making music with the heads very close to each other, the noses almost touching. And you study the diction, and you create over your two heads a little bubble of reality and sound. When I work with Paul, I go into that dome, that invisible, small circumference dome. And when you visit that place, it's apart from life on Earth, it's its own very pleasing soundscape."

One might have to go back to Montaigne to find a better description of the way that friendship, through intense intimacy that might appear small, can actually offer a magnanimous gift to the world.

In another link with Plato--here, the Plato of the Symposium--we find the suggestion that there is some relationship between eros (broadly understood), friendship, and beautiful productions: recording by oneself is not the same. "You miss the electricity that lights up the recording session and makes it all fun and games and makes the night go on for many extra hours because partnership is juicy."

Or how about this description of singing itself?

"To me, the act of singing is an expression of love. You form it in the vocal cords. When you love your song and you lose yourself into the song . . .  it's very tough to analyze the act of singing."

Here we have intensely personal love giving rise to that unique overcoming of the person as self-consciousness: the song expresses the love, and the love allows oneself to let go of the self. And there is even a Socratic recognition that the topic is difficult to understand--worthy of contemplation, but resisting analysis.

But what struck me most about this conversation was Garfunkel's unabashed ambition for excellence--and for recognition of his excellence. He is not satisfied with being known as "the guy with the silver voice." He wants to be "a virtuoso singer," and to be seen as a virtuoso singer. And he wants people to remember that they were good--the "real thing"--that they "recorded as if a record was an important thing," a thing that, when done well, was a masterpiece. He wants, he says, "to be in that world of a real artist."

Perhaps this is also a challenge to a Platonic thought. One can glean from some of Plato's dialogues that, while one ought to strive for excellence, one should scorn the opinion of the masses who presume themselves to be good judges. This thought offers something important and useful. But how are we to inspire a generation to fight and claw for greatness, if we are ashamed to say that we want to be great ourselves? Garfunkel does not seem to desire recognition for the sake of the goodies it brings--fame, money, etc. He seems to desire it as a kind of assurance that he has achieved some of what he strives for. And that, I think, is an innocent and admirable desire.

What One Learns in loco parentis.

George Eliot’s Silas Marner is in part the story of a broken man, repaired by love of a child. From the moment that these two “lone things” find one another, the spidery existence of the miser expands as she forces his vision out and forward, warms “him into joy because she had joy.”

It is a beautiful story, though parts of it seem wildly implausible to me. But I am interested in this benign portrait of a kind of stepparent—a man who takes care of little Eppie simply because she is there, and because they both need love. For Eppie and Silas, there are no “real” parents in their story, at least not for quite a while. Yet Silas is still in that odd boundary position that we stepparents know too well: loving without the biological ground of love, without the recognition of bonds afforded to other parents, and without the security of the indestructible love that most children naturally feel for the parents they have known since birth.

Those of you who are parents of transitional children—those strange beings on the cusp of adulthood that we too innocuously call “teenagers”—may question that last part. Attempting to love these sometimes moody and narcissistic little beings can feel like a thankless, hopeless task. But—to generalize irresponsibly from my own and a few other cases—I can say that these little beings still love their parents, even as they are saying and doing things that break the parents’ hearts. And there is even hope that they may grow up, remember those ugly moments, and feel truly remorseful and grateful that you put up with them nonetheless. The tragic case of abused children who still cling to their abusive parents shows the power of this love. This is a horrible basis for security, but I maintain that there is security there to be had.

Such security is less available to a stepparent. Not only must she fight against the lack of early bonding, she must also overcome a cultural history full of stories of wicked stepparents, and perhaps the hostility that often results from divorce and remarriage. She must love in full knowledge that the love may never be returned. There is consolation in one’s spouse of course—who, if he is worth loving, will love you all the more for loving his children. Nonetheless, the stepparent’s love can never be rooted in the promise of strict reciprocity.

And now that I have mentioned the difference, I wish to do it away. The truth is that no parent’s love should be rooted in such a promise. It simply is not good for the parent, who is in a position of greater strength and therefore must exhibit greater magnanimity. We must love because we have the strength to love, and because others have given us that strength through their own love. This, I believe, is called grace.

So does this let those of us who were or are narcissistic little beings off the hook? By no means. As I recall from somewhere, the proper response to grace is unceasing gratitude. Expressing it is an excellent way to enlarge one’s own soul, thus making future magnanimity possible. We were all once lone things: if someone saved you from that, you owe them everything—at the very least the acknowledgement of their gift.

On "spirit" and "spirituality"

One hears a lot of talk—a lot of loose talk—about the "spirit" and "spirituality." But such loose talk may be indispensable.  Certainly it's preferable to one way of dismissing the spirit.  This is the brutal attempt to reduce everything worth talking about to a mechanism.  Such a reduction is tasteless, because (as Nietzsche says) it betrays the wish to “divest existence of its rich ambiguity” (more literally, “its multi-aspected character” [seines vieldeutigen Charakters]).  Nietzsche invites us to imagine a critic who judges a piece of music according to how much of it can be counted, calculated and expressed in formulas.  What would such a critic grasp in the piece?  “Nothing, really nothing of what is ‘music’ in it.”  Similarly, those who try to grasp a person purely in terms of mechanism will grasp an aspect, but only an aspect, of the human being.  Like existence itself, human beings are multi-aspected.  If the facets in human beings that do not reveal themselves to mechanistic analysis are to be seen, we must continue to use categories that are not at home in materialistic natural science.  To suppose otherwise—to think that everything “real” about human beings can be understood mechanistically—is a “faith with which so many materialistic natural scientists rest content nowadays.”  To call it a faith is not a compliment (at least, not from Nietzsche).  The faith’s directive to permit “counting, calculating, weighing, seeing, and touching, and nothing more” is, Nietzsche says, “a crudity and naiveté, assuming that it is not a sickness of the spirit, an idiocy” (Gay Science 373).

It is vital to see that Nietzsche has no interest in making the world safe for the “materialistic natural scientist.”  Equally important is to grasp that he is not a dualist.  We should continue to speak of “spirit”—but not as though it names an entity that exists, or can exist, apart from the body.  When Nietzsche speaks harshly of “spirit,” he means to criticize a particular notion of “spirit.”  He means spirit conceived as disembodied, a ghostly thing that hovers above the body.  For this idea of spirit, Nietzsche has nothing but scorn.  “Pure spirit is pure lie,” he says in one place.  But spirit is not “pure spirit.”  The despisers of the body speak of “spirit.”  They do not succeed in speaking of spirit.  What, then, does Nietzsche understand by spirit?  If spirit is not to be confused with “pure spirit,” what is it?

To tackle this question swiftly, to quickly get into it and then out again, one cannot do better than to examine two aphorisms, both from the Gay Science.  Aphorism 329 begins by noticing the “breathless haste” with which Americans work.  This haste, the “distinctive vice of the new world,” has “begun to infect old Europe with its ferocity and is spreading a lack of spirituality (Geistlosigkeit) like a blanket.  Even now one is ashamed of resting, and prolonged reflection almost gives people a bad conscience.”  To rest and to reflect are two activities proper to spirit. Rather than genuinely reflect on a question, giving it as much time as it requires, “one thinks with a watch in one’s hand.”  Instead of resting with companions over a well-prepared dinner, “one eats one’s midday meal while reading the latest news of the stock market.”  If one is drawn to these counterfeits of rest and reflection, it is because “one lives as if one always ‘might miss out on something.’”  Those dominated by such anxiety simply have no time or energy “for ceremonies, for being obliging in an indirect way, for esprit in conversation, and for any otium at all.”  Moreover, the time-crunched chase for gain does not promote genuine virtue: “Virtue has come to consist of doing something in less time than someone else.”  Nor does it reward honesty: “hours in which honesty is permitted have become rare.”  When efficiency trumps virtue and honesty, the natural consequence is a deflation of the spirit, notwithstanding any corresponding inflation of bank accounts and multi-story houses.  “Living in a constant chase after gain compels people to expend their spirit to the point of exhaustion in continual pretense and overreaching and anticipating others.”  Such a life, while perhaps diverting, cannot be called joyful.  Those educated to excel in the chase are becoming “increasingly suspicious of all joy!  More and more, work enlists all good conscience on its side; the desire for joy already calls itself a ‘need to recuperate’ and is beginning to be ashamed of itself.  ‘One owes it to one’s health’—that is what people say when they are caught on an excursion in the country.”

From Aphorism 329, one learns what Nietzsche deems bad for the spirit, along with he takes to be good for it.  Here's a quick table.  On the left, the good; on the right, the bad.

Leisure                                     Exhaustion

Reflection                                Thought bound to a schedule

Ceremony                                Dismissal of ritual as “pointless”                       

Indirect helpfulness                  Restriction to what is obviously of service
Conversational esprit               Plain, witless speech

Honesty                                   Pretense

Contentment                            Overreaching and anticipating others (cf. pleonexia)            

Desire for joy                           Temporary respite from weariness

Good conscience about joy      Bad conscience about what is useless for gain

           

This table does not pretend to be exhaustive.  It could be expanded by analyzing other aphorisms that use “spirit” as a key term.  It suffices, however, to show that when Nietzsche speaks of “spirit,” he talks about nothing detached from the body.  He intends, rather, to convey something about the activities and qualities of embodied human beings.  Those who despise the body, but claim to value spiritual activities and qualities, can be reminded that we never do encounter these activities and qualities in separation from bodies.  Against the reductive mechanist or materialist, we can observe that these qualities and activities are but minimally illuminated by approaches that reduce body to what can counted, calculated and expressed in formulas.

   

Nietzsche picks up the intrinsic connection between the spirit and joy in Aphorism 359.  “There is a human being who has turned out badly, who does not have enough spirit to be able to enjoy it but just enough education to realize this.”  Such a human being, who is “fundamentally ashamed of his existence,” is joyless and therefore less spiritual than his joyful counterpart with a good conscience.  He will at some point seek “revenge against the spirit.”  He will seek “to give himself in his own eyes the appearance of superiority over more spiritual people and to attain the pleasure of an accomplished revenge at least in his imagination.”   By what means?  By morality—not higher morality, but exploitation of the “big moral words.”  Nietzsche lists “justice, wisdom, holiness, virtue."  To this list, we can and should add “spirituality.”  Those who love to describe themselves as “spiritual” tend to have little of what Nietzsche would regard as genuine spirit.  More likely they are “born enemies of the spirit”; they fear genuine spirit and seek to revenge themselves against it.  Even philosophers are subject to this harsh judgment.  It applies particularly to the kind of philosopher who continually speaks about “wisdom.”  To talk about wisdom about the time will perhaps impress the inexperienced as “spiritual.”  The more experienced, however, will not be misled.  All too often, the rhetoric of wisdom functions as a kind of screen.  It is a “screen behind which the philosopher saves himself because he has become weary, old, cold, hard.”

The aphorism concludes with a question: “Wisdom as a screen behind which the philosopher hides from—spirit?”  This ending strikes me as brilliant.  It suggests what I've discovered from my own experience.  The very people who are quickest to attribute spirituality to themselves, who most pride themselves on spirituality, are actually the least spiritual, at least in any sense that counts.

Or it seems to me at the moment.  I'm in the middle of working on a chapter, and I would love to hear your criticisms and insights.

The Psychology of Conviction

"What's wrong with our politicians these days," one hears often, "is that they have no convictions."  This familiar complaint gets at a real problem.  So many politicians are unprincipled, in the sense that what drives them is exclusively their own short-term interest.  They will say anything to get elected, no matter how outrageous, or how little they believe it themselves.  We can and should detest this.

We should not, however, let our justified indignation mislead us into thinking that we simply want politicians who are "principled."  Why not?  It's easy to think of people who are sincere and "principled" in a sense, but who hold utterly wacky views, and refuse to subject these views to examination and evidence.  Such types might in fact be more dangerous than their unprincipled counterparts.  

"After all, it is putting a very high price on one's conjectures to have a man roasted alive because of them."  This line from Montaigne should not be forgotten.  Nor should these ironic words from C.G. Jung: "Even the holy Christian church, which is the incarnation of divine love, burnt more than a hundred thousand of her own children alive."  There is little or nothing admirable about the mere fact of having convictions.  The problem with Anders Breivik is not that he has no convictions.  It is not that he is unprincipled or insincere.  Nor is it that he is insane, in the clinical sense (if there is such a thing).  That's an extreme example, but it illustrates the point well.  

Nietzsche speaks to the issue: “This is our conviction: we confess it before all the world, we live and die for it.  Respect for all who have convictions!  I have heard that sort of thing even out of the mouths of anti-Semites.  On the contrary, gentlemen!  An anti-Semite certainly is not any more decent because he lies as a matter of principle."  One might take Nietzsche's point to be that content is more important than sincerity.  Someone who does something good, whether on principle or out of expediency, is preferable to someone who does something wicked but on principle.  Sincerity, if it is a virtue at all, is not the highest virtue.  Insincerity, though almost certainly a vice, is yet not the worst vice.

Nietzsche’s emphasis, however, is a little different.  He seems to think that one can be fully sincere, fully convinced or “convicted” (as some like to say), and yet fundamentally dishonest.  For Nietzsche, honesty is not really a function of subjective sincerity.  It has to do, rather, with one’s willingness to resist not only deceiving, but also being deceived.  Positively, it requires one to continually ask hard questions and to subject one’s answer to those questions (and indeed, one’s formulation of the questions themselves) to the most probing tests.  No matter how sincere the anti-Semite is in holding his anti-Semitism, he is guilty of a fundamental kind of dishonesty, because he is lazy with himself.  He is willing to deceive and to be deceived.  He holds anti-Semitism out of conviction, but not out of intellectual honesty.

What's the alternative?  Something like this: views based on an examination of things which proceeds according to what Nietzsche calls the “intellectual conscience.”  (See the second aphorism of the Gay Science.)

Nietzsche combines an attack on the “psychology of conviction” with a strong affirmation of the intellectual conscience and its attendant virtue, honesty or probity (Redlichkeit)  That alone prevents him, I think, from approving of politicians who are simply unprincipled.  It also enables him to distinguish between the ersatz honesty of subjective sincerity and the genuine article.