Transcendence, the Divine and Nietzsche [1 ed.] 1527591999, 9781527591998

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Transcendence, the Divine and Nietzsche

Transcendence, the Divine and Nietzsche By

John Mandalios

Transcendence, the Divine and Nietzsche By John Mandalios This book first published 2023 Cambridge Scholars Publishing Lady Stephenson Library, Newcastle upon Tyne, NE6 2PA, UK British Library Cataloguing in Publication Data A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library Copyright © 2023 by John Mandalios All rights for this book reserved. No part of this book may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted, in any form or by any means, electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording or otherwise, without the prior permission of the copyright owner. ISBN (10): 1-5275-9199-9 ISBN (13): 978-1-5275-9199-8

CONTENTS

Preface ....................................................................................................... vi Abbreviations ............................................................................................ xi Chapter 1 .................................................................................................... 1 Scientific Decentration: Earth and Celeste Chapter 2 .................................................................................................. 17 Phantasmagoria as Present Illusion Chapter 3 .................................................................................................. 40 Beyond Atheism Chapter 4 .................................................................................................. 59 Fin Asceticism and Nihilism Chapter 5 ................................................................................................ 107 Post-Theology: Closing in on the Spirit Chapter 6 ................................................................................................ 134 Redemptive Life: Beyond Organic Power Chapter 7 ................................................................................................ 164 Divination and Creative Will Bibliography ........................................................................................... 195 Index ....................................................................................................... 199

PREFACE

One teaches, one wanders, one engages thought and travels, one observes and one’s purpose unfolds in spacetime. The cosmos is replete with meaning and mystery, awaiting further wonderment and knowledge to come. It calls, it invites, as if we are to return home; the “belonged” is invited to understand its very own belonging, as if he is waylaid by time. To be has become vexed; time’s becoming is fraught with countless uncertainties and questions, especially whether truth lies in the earth or in the heavens, the eternal or the matter before our very own eyes. Mind and spirit attend every encounter, every sensorial experience is both had and examined; artfully body and soul dance to the rhythm of life, to the joy of being alive. The course of living is manifold, punctuated by love, reverence, will, decay, purposeful striving, pernicious repetition and robust extension. It beckons toward two things simultaneously: astro-nadir and haughty elevation. Life is a tension where Am-I is tensed by the bow of Apollo’s horizonal parallax; the direction, or instruction, of Being (Sein) appears confusing hence consciousness seeks to catch-up, in part, by overcoming and in part by creatively using Apollo’s light. These performances–musike (Gr.)–allow the world to come-forth; hence consciousness is now in the world, in the stars, clouds, air, water, RWKHUZLVH FDOOHG WKH ʌȠȜȜȐ–the Many. The creature Mensch (hominoid) transfigures into something it was unacquainted with: the bow of Kosmos calls him and her to grasp the One and Many, the Earth and Sky. This call is amplified by sickness or somatic decline, when the reach of the sky is too far and the light too bright. Gravity pulls one down to terra where consciousness feels the weightiness of the earth due to the ominous Higgs-field’s encirclement. Weakness overtakes where “mind” fails understanding; no longer able it instead follows the direction to go under and within. Whence? Trillions upon trillions of protons and neutrons, cell machinery, pull-downwards so you are directed that way. The mystery has unfolded: why do my will and my mind fail to overcome the directive– do I not have purpose to fulfil on earth? Joy and enjoyment are now distant; yet one longs for elation (more than mere comfort). Embodiment is king; and yet something grows, grows out of him. “Within” seems connected to the all–the Many which are One. Yet how, one asks? Logic fails him. I-Am confronts the unknowing, not wilfully. What is this ubiquitous connection? He deceives himself and asks “Am I strong enough to learn it?” Thundering

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Fate overwhelms him; yet thunder (Adad) is also the harbinger of striking electricity–powerful lightning. Zeus and Apollo are in the wings carrying WKHʌȠȜȜȐZKLFKPRUWDOVFRQIXVHIRUȉȪȤȘGHVWLQ\ :KDWLVWKLVVWULNHRI lightning–perhaps elation, ecstatic infinity, perfection, All’s oneness: the unity of cosmos and I-Am? Of “under-and-over” perhaps with Isis (earth) and Osiris (Urania) its charioteers? Is the secret (mystírio) in fact both, unity in manifold cosmographical planes of transcendence and being-conscious? Up is Down, Over is Under said the ancient Milesian Heraclitus. Divisibility is an error he thought–yet mortals are slaves to it. This is learned through painful experience–to soma teaches one this regardless. Hence why the Egyptians cherished the body-eternal (embalming)–as any good Alexandrian will testify. Suffering is only the means by which incorporation makes forgotten Geist, that is, breath, Hridaya 1 and von Herzen 2 effable. The return of Spirit (Geist) is a remembering fundamentally; one does not learn what is already known. It is pure Reminiscence. Inscribed in the spinal DNA coding is this ineffable source that is often confused with “Being”. Yet recollection-asknowledge does not refer sickly ones back to “Being”. The soul is the seat of Remembering (knowing) so it can never be destroyed by quarks or neutrinos let alone ammonia. Degrading matter seems fear-full for the human; yet fear of decay is merely anthropic weakness or more precisely de-spiritedness. Spirit wanes, cells predominate–both are facets of Parmenidean “what is” or the Is. The One is the “Is” hence I am not my body quizzically wondering how I may be related to all other living bodies. That is our pernicious perversion stemming from fear. Originating from heart’s love is the access-point to the beautiful Oneness of all things. The philosopher is deluded: “I love him who is of a free spirit and a free heart: thus his head is only the entrails of his heart” (Z Prologue, 4). Once the head no longer intercepts, due to sickness, we see Seelenscheinleib (“life of the soul”) coming-forth, constituting each moment of Wesen (“to be”, essence). Silencing thoughts brings-forth; sounding the soul’s wavelength out of the body enlivens essence just when you think death is nigh 3. This is the paradox of l’homme; a bridge between fear-love, mind-heart and physus-Spirit. Across landscapes the wanderer searches out silence while movement reveals him variation. Yet wherever he goes his higher self seeks solitude to meditate on things cosmic, things “of breath”. The invisible “oversoul” 4 accompanies him everywhere, always, for there is no space or 1

“That which gives and takes in perfect balance” in Sanskrit. “Of heart” in German. 3 It is the heart that drives one to “go under”, according to Nietzsche. 4 Ralph Waldo Emerson’s term which Nietzsche favoured. 2

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time as such. He writes continuously in his notebook on the move: from Melbourne to London, to Brisbane, to Paris, to Rome, to the ocean, to Paris and to the earth’s forest. Does he leave behind stench or preconceptions, crowded hotels or decadence, God or churches 5? He thinks he ought to Become but awakens to cosmic wonder in himself where the self dissolves away and behold there before him stands the I-Am of Kosmos. This (written) exercise and contemplative work of art and Nous was given birth to by Physus and suffering. The wonder of spirit and the earthly wanderer meshed in most unexpected ways: coming home (France), leaving certainty, diminishing power, suffering, waves of decomposition, energy physics, intensive love at death’s door, octaval movements, arrangements by celestial quaverings and inquisitive minds. Writing, stopping, starting again, illness, teaching minds, moving to home, insight, collapsing, writing again then teaching students sophia. Finding solace in precious solitude, not merely for thinking or Seyn; rather to “let be”, to allow stillness to draw in wonder(ment). Like quiet moments in the eastern Sahara desert before Daybreak where “to be” unfolds simply. One does not contemplate in its wide open expanse; even meditation only follows what preceded it: dawn lights-up and awakens. The oracular sun and moon, and the words of Socrates heightened this awakening experience–where horizon and eternal join up in the Now. Joy flickers but infinity and grace-ful Beauty surpass it thus making Bios Divine. I have benefited from a number of esoteric dialogues over the years and wish to acknowledge those who have participated in this arduous journey and venture of spirit with me. Despite painful days beloved friends kept journeying with me. I also wish to acknowledge and thank my colleagues and students for the wonderful espirit de corps I experienced at the grande ecole SciencePo (Paris). The inspiring milieu there when working on this project and my brief visit to the École Normale Supérieure (Paris) helped spur my investigation into this most fundamental question of our time. Thanks to Frédéric Worms and Marcella Hendersen-Peal for their warmth and espirit whilst teaching in Paris and enjoying coffee over notebooks. Further, my other philos Friedrich Nietzsche, had we spoken sometime would know of my deepest gratitude for his incisive insights and erga of the heart (as Novalis would say). Socrates and Nietzsche now are ijíȜȠȚ through my henosis (binding) and friendship. Special thanks go to the ‘holy family’ YSM and my son Michael who remained steadfast and closeby throughout arduous, challenging times—each of them unique, wonderful

5

Refence to Nietzsche’s focal points–the latter chosen.

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beings in their own beautiful way whom I value greatly. Light of Apollo glistened with them.

Parameters and the Problématique Our discussion of divinity and Nietzsche’s thought will be delimited to an examination of works Nietzsche produced that discuss and thematize the problem of God and modes of deification. In contrast to common philological and textual approaches (not taken up here) which largely assume a certain finality to the pronouncement of the “death of God”, we shall keep open the matter of anything being final and pose it rather as a question of modality. That is to say, anthropically- how are the gods, God and significantly, “how the spirit that leads us would like to be called?” (BGE 227) to be understood? Not merely conceptually, for Nietzsche is no conceptualist per se, but as modalities of creating transcendentally within the Wesen of existence which wreaks of suffering and joy. In this fashion rather than following the standard interpretation beheld by Martin Heidegger and Anglophone scholars in, for instance, the Companion and Handbook 6 series–after Walter Kaufman and Richard Schacht’s exemplary forays–we will implore readers to consider closely Nietzsche’s actual analytics of a) modes of reverence b) modes of divination and c) modes of god-creating as expressions of the basic will of the spirit. Modalities, types and (pivoting) axes, we shall see, paint another picture altogether; a more complex yet supple picture of Becoming, or as he put it once: “That “savage animal” has not really been “mortified”; it lives and flourishes, it has merely become–divine” (BGE 229). For the German verb for spiritualization has so many (more) connotations than modern Saxon-English carries, thanks in part to the enormity of Luther’s Deutsch, German romanticism and the powerful effect of the Rhineland mystics upon the German mind. Nietzsche never quite leans on will, power or fate alone; in the “basic will of the spirit” we in fact carriage many spirits so that immanence evinces a kind of transcendental empiricality. Heidegger, Deleuze, analytic Kantian and quasi-Humean versions of Nietzsche elide this dimension and therefore miss the open-ended transcending power of (his) Becoming 7 and its quintessential Greek Ungrund 8. Our close analysis demonstrates the Gay 6

See for instance The New Cambridge Companion to Nietzsche. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2019; A Companion to Nietzsche. Oxford: Blackwell Publishing, 2006; The Oxford Handbook of Nietzsche. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2016. 7 Werden. 8 “Non-ground”, in Greek also “original ground”.

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Science declaration of a “death” or rather murder of God the Divine Being by mortals is a major event upon the Abendland horizon (Occidental modernity). An event amongst many events, in this case a significant axial event, whereafter two religious-type “ideals” (dominances) of truth-seeking and science prevail over the souls of persons. Neither truth-telling nor empirical investigation are pure; that is, devoid of the metaphysics of presence and belief. For even disbelief–manifest in modern nihilism–is still an attachment to something, a will to negate, Nietzsche argues. We will find, by contrast, that the will to affirm is paramount so therefore when men and women affirm life by means of a “comprehensive” “art of arranging” the thei (supra-natural beings) by divinating Spirit, they transvaluate nihilio (nothingness void). This process of generation following the fall of idols is never-ending: the ebb and flow of destruction-generation shall abide time and thus will not end due to one single event–for it is eternal and new Dionysian or Apollonian or Elysian forms of the divine shall contest or vie in the name of a sacred affirmation of life. Why? Mensch must affirm necessarily lest the process of suffering intransitoriness overwhelms her or him. In my analysis below I demonstrate that the heart of blessedness belongs to this redemptive vision where Bios (life) must not be destroyed by pessimism, meaninglessness, disbelief worship or “materialistic atomism” (BGE) along the eternal path of becoming “that which you are” (ex-Pindar). It is, I show, the weakly or feeble god-types that Nietzsche believed hampered the redemptive project of self-creating and ennobling the speciesbeing of higher and lowly types. The book aims at this powerful vision instead of regurgitating an out-dated death of God thesis with the aim to inform the reader why our zeitgeist is so different to the 20th and 19th centuries.

ABBREVIATIONS OF NIETZSCHE’S WORKS

A BGE BT CW D EH GM GS HH KG PP PT TI Z

The Anti-Christ Beyond Good and Evil Birth of Tragedy Out of the Spirit of Music The Case of Wagner Daybreak: Thoughts on the Prejudices of Morality Ecce Homo On the Genealogy of Morality The Gay Science Human, All Too Human I & II Nietzsche Werke: Kritische Gesamtausgabe, edited by Giorgio Colli and Mazzino Montinari, Wolfgang Muller-Lauter and Karl Pestalozzi, Berlin: DTV/de Gruyter The Pre-Platonic Philosophers Philosophy and Truth Twilight of the Idols Thus Spoke Zarathustra

For unpublished notes and notebooks WP Will to Power (compilation by Elisabeth Nietzsche and Peter Gast) NB Writings from the Late Notebooks (Edited by Rüdiger Bittner) Reference to Nietzsche’s works and passages follow conventions of citation by abbreviated title section numbers rather than page numbers. Abbreviations of Nietzsche’s published works translated into English often refer to translations of Walter Kaufmann and Reginald J. Hollingdale except where otherwise indicated. Reference to Twilight of the Idols (‘TI’) refer to chapter and section number respectively; and ‘P’ refers to the preface of the work cited. Limited use of Nietzsche’s unpublished notes from his Nachlass reflects the philological point that notes, while not necessarily final, are insightful into the author’s viewpoints. Notes consistent with (Nietzsche’s) published material have been incorporated into the analysis.

CHAPTER ONE SCIENTIFIC DECENTRATION: EARTH AND CELESTE

We commence our discussion of the withering away of God in our lives as something commonly attributed to Nietzsche’s work and his stance on divine matters. In this chapter I show that Nietzsche has a keen interest in naturalistic inquiry, “scientific thought”, such that appears to turn his gaze downward from Celeste (celestial heavens) toward earth and nature. Yet though Nietzsche shared an enthusiasm for empirical science with Goethe and Kant before him, he nevertheless developed strong notions of tragic wisdom and the amor fati of the soul. Consistent with critiques of the Aufklärung (Enlightenment) his revaluation of nature leads him to an embrace of physiology, sexuality and a certain “godless honesty” regarding the world. My argument here is that Nietzsche propounded a view of profound transformation, existentially and in Vorstellung, as a result not only of a scientific revolution but also of “Natural Man”1 tragically murdering the Father. This rupture in our Weltanschauung (worldview) is called an event: the “death of God” following the spirit of Wagner and Hegelian philosophy. As a signifier of transformation–a component of Becoming–this event is significant for the course of life on the planet since the bedrock of existential meaning and surety is fundamentally shaken, even ruptured. Science steps in to fill the void of unknowing–radical doubt and purposelessness, but not very meaningfully or indeed honestly–with “good conscience” Nietzsche says. This paradox, and indeed unhappy consciousness, we shall see below, finds Nietzsche looking beyond material atomism and “factum brutum” (GM) while simultaneously denying the “Heaven to Come” of Christianity. Later he would see himself as a prophet of the god Dionysus and wonders whether his disciples will properly understand the enormity of his task and the new

1

Vorstellung: idea or representations; “natural man” is Aristotle’s term for Nietzsche it is apposite for Copernican man who now seeks the fruits of the earth via a knowledge that is a “joyful science” of nature’s Becoming.

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world-orientation he wishes to give birth to (as indeed all gods do). We shall see in this chapter why the “promise of the earth” should emerge as an enticing prospect for his “Copernicanism”, yet it is one counterpoised by an ineluctable honouring of the “structure of the soul” and the will to reverence of “our spirits” as he says in Beyond Good and Evil. From his previous book to his last, Nietzsche is not content to ignore the eternal and the “image of eternity” stamped2 upon the flux of Werden (Becoming). Here though we will see that Nietzsche acknowledges “we still take our fire from that blaze” bequeathed to us by Christian-Platonic metaphysics even when we do science (GM III, 24). So while it seems at first the grund of earth proves triumphal, in following chapters we shall see a different link to Celeste being upheld and inaugurated, not accidentally. First though, we must introduce the weighty significance of cosmos in Nietzsche’s philosophical schema. Is the divine, and indeed reverence, destroyed by Nietzsche’s turn to nature is a question which backdrops our broader theme of the death of the traditional God and the importance of celestial potencies such as Dionysus. These are the questions which will guide our discussion as we enquire into how3 Nietzsche accounts for modes of divination definitive of human existence across time. Therefore, the standard “death of God” interpretation commonly attributed to him by modern scholars in the field– most famously Martin Heidegger in Germany–will be challenged and repudiated. Even though the pronouncement of the “death of a God” is considered a turning-point in Nietzsche’s account of modernity, we shall see it only as a single event–a significant event amongst many in which modes of reverence and modes of divination coexist alongside his resuscitation of nature (following the mesmerizing affect which science had on Nietzsche). There is nothing intrinsically stable about an event, a happening, for him. World-historical events are directive rather than ontical for agents; weaker agents differ from “higher ones” in their response to the push–pull effect of an event’s intrinsic “forward-willing” and “backward-willing” force. At the gateway of time (in Zarathustra) the double-folding of Time’s passage yields different challenges: to a magnanimous-soul distinctly from that of an enfeebled-soul. The prophet knows this belongs to Be-coming (double inflection). To more correctly 2

See further Robin Small “A Dynamic Interpretation of Nietzsche’s ‘The Greatest Weight’”, Nietzsche-Studien 49 (1): 97-124, 2020.x 3 How Nietzsche performs these accounts genealogically and analytically will be our focus rather than an a priori metaphysical commitment to naturalistic presuppositions. The key explanadum concerns his “how”, not his “what” i.e. how does the human adopt a reverence of some kind?

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see Nietzsche as one who prophesizes rather than a grand metaphysician– given to grand declarations of the “end or death of”–is consistently Zarathustrian, not neo-Kantian. The philosopher of the future declares the fundamental openness (not repetition) of “coming-into-being”) wherein reverence for the essential durée of all transitive events allows recognition, even appropriation, but never petrification. The horizon changes in Apollonian light–where the eagle flies high above valleys of convention (or stupidity)–often referred to in Heraclitean terms as flux. It is doubtless particular religious influences bore upon the life and mind of Nietzsche; however, this uncontroversial point is insufficient in bearing out the axial interpretive stratagems he employed to explain both profane and sacred phenomena alike. Rather than basic points such as “influences” or “immoralist” objections, we find more significant here the ubiquitous intellectual commitment to creativity to be the pulse beat of Nietzsche’s thinking. How the world is formed, how it undergoes transformation through actualization, is pivotal; thus creating (and destroying) is highly important to Nietzsche and his type of philosophizing. The various ways in which humankind has created community and meaning has not always been through a scientific-rational prism. Further, the appeal to a Dionysian way is most decidedly an unscientific gesture, one that beckons the mysteries of ancient religious festiva and cults to the rough shores of calculative reason. Neither a return to religion or reason will heal humankind’s sickness; but nor will pure scientific logic (whether mechanical or biologic). In creating meaning, purpose, Man is thought to create himself–his inner and outer life. His or her Kosmos is not mere flux because creativity intervenes to disrupt chaos and repetition thereby instituting life–his most esteemed value viz, the “enhancement of life”. What has “enhanced” life for millennia is a manifold thing; but Nietzsche never falls for the modernist trap of transposing “present” perceptual frames onto past civilizations or epochs. Therefore, logical positivism cannot be easily applied to ancient Egypt, Rome, Babylonia or Miletus. Nor can the hegemonic rise of ecclesiastical precepts and categories since we know that modern science itself, he argues, emerges out of (Western) rational theology. Kant after-all is merely the mouthpiece of protestant theology (A). Hence the manifold that is “life” must also include those forms by which peoples obtained significance, purpose, meaning and value: these are valuations, ideals, forms of “arranging” and forms of reverence (BGE, GM, GS). Empiricism and brutal facticity won’t cut it for him: the order is much higher and experience per se is not an adequate guide to Wirklichkeit (actuality). Sickly existence, degeneracy; or deified beauty and creative

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generation? Might this be the most significant question underlying Friedrich Nietzsche’s thought concerning religiosity4. Perhaps it was the decaying effect that Christianity had upon the spirit and body of the human that impressed upon the young German Lutheran the spiritual bankruptcy of religion: “A radical antagonism…to the senses is a telling symptom”; as a “a deadly hostility” it promotes “castration, eradication” where the will is too weak to barrage the force of desire (TI: Morality, 2). All theistic religions which are structured-organized around a nominal “priesthood” of some kind are accordingly decadent because they degenerate the creature of the earth. A degeneration of instinctual senses, of the passions and erotics of the body is characteristic historically of such forms of social organization. It is conceivable that the critique of such forms is based upon his criticism of the petrified life that such organizations perpetuate. Petrified institutions, whilst inherently lacking, appear to be only secondary to the main criticism of modern society, of le espirit moderne. Religious forms of organization ossify the passions of the instinctual drive the drives of the body and Eros more generally, which are eschewed by a fundamental will to negate and suspect (if not punish) nature. While “modern ideas” appear to embrace progressive change, Nietzsche in contradiction depicts all modern institutions as stultified bodies. Cultural as well as social institutions exemplify an order of being, an existence of existents that at is organized around a moral code which fundamentally originates from an otherworldly discontentment (hence resentment) with the world. The type of moral code which is highly decisive for understanding spiritual decay is very significant in the present context but shall be discussed shortly. Secular, including scientific, institutions and practices sustain and reinforce the paleoarche of a metaphysical transcendentalism5 that founded an ideal, a perfected world of unity, harmony and goodness, beyond the promise of the earth. The corruptibility of modern secular institutions is intrinsically tied to the demise of formative practices embellished by monastic, ascetic and noble dynastic traditions of training and discipline. Where the arts of the body and the earth once entwined with the adventure of the mind as a soulful activity, the nascent emergence of scholarly pursuits by secular (and later bourgeois) citizens of the “modern” epoch dirempted this allimportant nexus. From the beginnings of the scientific revolutions and the 4

Religiosity and not religion because the former includes the ethos, pathos and practice of spiritual activity of various kinds. The colloquialism spiritual is inappropriate here. 5 See Richard Schacht (ed.) Nietzsche, Genealogy, Morality (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1994).

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industrial age of democratic revolutions (e.g. America and France), “modern ideas” took hold in the metaphysical soil of the priests” morality. Nietzsche’s critique of “modern ideas” includes all the resounding icons of modern logical thought: the internal I, the will, cause, substance, atom purpose, teleology, equality, the just and the Good not to mention laws of nature. It appears the penultimate destruction is of “God” and “morality” which in counter-metaphysical terms might be right and yet we find Nietzsche nowhere is enamored with modern postulates of the real. In one specific sense at least, “modern” is equivalent to “decadent”; modernity is synonymous, for Nietzsche, with decline both cultural and spiritual decline. So, if we have killed God and he is nowhere to be found, why is the world not more beautiful, glistening with light and elevated by superior arts of cultivation? Is not “Cause” better than the “hidden God” of old? Similarly, why would he not adapt to “laws of nature” and mechanics over and above the metaphysical world of Augustine and Aquinas? It may well be supposed that any ardent atheist would welcome such alternative concepts or methods. Science is indeed valuable, according to Nietzsche’s genealogy, if it remains untethered to the ascetic ideal of truth. Empirical dogmatism, on the other hand, is just as equally condemnable and deficient. Science and logic afford the human creative insight into means by which it can disclose its own finite nature the physics of the “humanall-too-human”. All “hail physics” he declares after Human All too Human. The condition of man (sic), its physiology as an organism and its physics of dynamic alteration, can consequently be interpreted from so many material perspectives. Physics, biology and astronomy reveal the operations of the (will-) force immanent in nature, in the cosmos: the force which allows growth, extension, exuberant manifold forms in organic and inorganic life and the light of the earth to shine. Historical genealogy serves the useful function of identifying the perspectives; perspectives onto the operations of the immanent “force-will” of natura. Genealogie is essentially unscientific; yet it reveals the fundamental interpretative nature and illusory forms of natural science. Naturalism, for Nietzsche, incorporates an unconscious degree of illusion what he calls the will to deceive and therefore requires the critical spirit (or spiritual interrogation) of genealogical analyses. Hence the vintage preoccupation with science versus anti-science is redundant here. Nietzsche adopted an axiological stance, a position that asks what is the worth (“axia” in Greek) of a particular biological or physics analysis of the nature of phenomena. Valuations along with perspectival “interpretations” are propounded and even altered by scientific investigations of truth: Nietzsche thinks “we must

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become the best learners and discoverers of everything that is lawful and necessary in the world: we must become physicists in order to be able to be creators in this sense–while hitherto all valuations and ideals have been based on ignorance of physics” (GS 335). One esteemed value of scientific theory is its ability to suspend the “hidden God” force in existence, in the actuality of vital life where an otherworldly permanence is surplus to requirement.6 Nature’s endowment through the erotics of the body and biologic life, and the inexorable forces of decomposition and regeneration embedded therein, were decoupled from the Church’s mysterious and providential Almighty Creator. Although not delineated as far back as required, his genealogy of scientific thought would lend itself to finding Roger Bacon (1220) and Nicholas Cusanus (1401) as progenitors of a new naturalistic outlook much earlier than the famed Newton, Copernicus, Galileo, Brahe and Lyell line. The earth no longer stands at the centre of the universe as the crucible of God’s creation. Once the twin faithful believers of the church, Nicholaus Copernicus and Galileo Galilei, brought about the demolition of the holy world order–Aristotelian fixed crystalline spheres–humanity was thrown off its high pedestal. The venerated position in which Man (humankind) was held in ecclesiastical eyes and therefore the common folk was suddenly withdrawn by the findings of early modern astrophysics. A collapsing of the privileged centred world wherein “modern man” derived his or her meaning, the purpose of life, would utterly shatter the cosmogony and theodicy of venerable Christian thinkers from the twelfth century. By the time of Gottfried Leibniz this radically new situation would already begin to yield the fruits of scientific reason. Two yields in particular stand out. Firstly, the gaze of the human eye and mind was understood to properly ascertain the regularities of nature’s less mysterious obedient laws of force, event and repetition. Nature was endowed not only with elemental substances that comprised matter and energy; it also consisted of a microscopic world which appeared to operate in almost clockwork-like fashion a cosmic mechanical system seemingly independent from the old authoritarian God of the Church Fathers. Without any need to meddle with the movements of planets and stars, the benevolent Father of Christianity stood aside to allow the mechanical laws of nature to produce diachrony and synchrony. Grand forces of nature performed what medieval peasants of Europe otherwise attributed to the holy One, the Creator. Yet these immeasurable powers and dynamics of 6

On the relevance of scientific theory (Wissenschaft) see Wolfgang Müller-Lauter Nietzsche: His Philosophy of Contradictions and the Contradictions of His Philosophy (Chicago: University of Illinois Press, 1999).

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nature both terrestrial and celestial so greatly diminished the size and place of Man(kind): the centrality of Adam and Eve’s heirs no longer held sway. De-centred, mankind appeared wayward, vulnerable to contingencies and at a loss what this inexorably big expanse of space (and energy) entailed. Its “meaning”, as Nietzsche names it, is suddenly open to conjecture, to speculation and to doubting the faith (in a higher, transcendent realm of being). This radical doubt is not the beginning of scientific reason which was already exercised by Iberian Jews and Arabs and later Christian monks but rather the natural outgrowth or child of natural theology. Truthsearching inquiry led to the search for scientific verities; paradoxically Rene Descartes” attempt to found a method premised on certainty coincided with a growing scepticism that, ultimately would yield the specter of “European nihilism”. Hence Nietzsche rightly finds the ascetic idea of churchmen to be embedded in modern science itself. This “modern science” ...is for the present the best confederate of the ascetic ideal” (GM III:25). What the men of the Church espouse everywhere as virtuous, viz “poverty, humility, chastity”, was then fruitful for the development of a scientific or logical outlook (GM III:8). Above all, this rational evolution of seeing things in a different, unorthodox light meant significantly a fundamental alteration to the plane of existence. “Since Copernicus men seems to have stumbled onto an inclined plane he is now rolling faster and faster away from the center” (GM III:25). Whither, asks Nietzsche? Into nothingness? A second outcome here is not that of European nihilism. Too many commentaries on Nietzsche’s writings on religion are distracted by a keenness for the phenomenon of nihilism. The enumeration of the consequences of nihilism interests many, yet for Nietzsche the pertinent question became: if there is no unassailable authority over the earth, how might we venerate that which is noble and thus affirm life without any sense of guilt or shame? The point is the new dawn, the new, infinitely new daybreak which awaits all of humankind once it has awoken from its slumber. Having realized it was not placed at the centre of the universe and, moreover, that “coming into being” and “passing away” concords more with the Greek understanding of physis, the human race must heed the call of life, the will to life, without any condemnatory ill-morality. Sickliness ought not impede our move to the dawn of Apollonian light. Life beckons and because we exist in the whole of the totality of life-forms we can take part in its manifold beauty and danger, in its power to regenerate, define and question all things. Life holds out a promise as Nietzsche well learned from Christology and the taste of “higher men” was to overcome modern nihilism in order for a brighter, affirmative grasp

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of the future to take hold. The fruits of this epiphanic revelry, therefore, are arguably about the self-belittlement of man leading to a heightening of the human creative to a stature more befitting noble Greeks and Romans yet without the strictures of antiquity. In arriving at disbelief or unbelief, Europeans (firstly) would not arrive at utopia where existence was suddenly devoid of morality and Churchly condemnation. It is not the terminus of the much heralded “death of God” announced by Hegel and Jacobi. Unbelief or disbelief are signs of the operation of a ubiquitous “self-critique of knowledge” in which neither science (realism) nor art (romanticism) reign supremely. A general godlessness analogous though dissimilar to an all pervasive nihilism could not be justified as a final telos of human endeavor, of striving and willing. The will must be saved because life (Lebens) first must be redeemed; and generic, pervasive godlessness cannot achieve this. Why? Why do not a-theists in the name of science and logic and so forth not prove sufficient ultimately for Nietzsche? The reason is the relentlessness of becoming the striving power will of life to keep regeneration in motion while the truth of the godless ones is essentially negative: to negate that which was. If so, then shall not they too be negated by the force of negation (i.e. argumentation). To stop with the godless ones is to stay still, to remain ossified in the temporal event which defined their importance: the bold gesture of reacting against the truth of the Church in the name of Logos (or reason in modern parlance). The accomplishment of destruction–of de-deifying the world–in itself appears simply one-sided, that is nihilistic. Its salience is intimately linked to its timeliness; an age in which the indisputable centredness of humankind had to come under the scrutiny of the examining eye, the conscious mind of natural law. Rather than its historical necessity Nietzsche identifies its temporal pertinence for the alteration of our fundamental perspective–a perspective onto our place in the universe. This paradox that finds Man diminishing his own importance in the world allows his belittlement to engage in a scientific reasoning into the make-up of his own umwelt (environment), physiology and spirit. Without the onerous trappings of faith, doctrine and mysterious absolutes, the human could come into full view–almost with “innocent” eyes. This semiemancipation from the dead-weight of ecclesiastical authority–priestly power one could say–and the traditional blind faith of “the people”, is classified by Nietzsche as an “event”–a major event of world-historical becoming.

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Death of God Event The “death of God” pronounced boldly in The Gay Science is often temptingly discussed as the greatest event on earth. Nietzsche gave great prominence to the symbolic-philological meaning to the consequences of nihilism, both as a decentration of our Weltanschauung (worldview) and as a fundamental devaluation of the highest values. The first force yielded a radical reevaluation of one’s overestimated value (place) in the universe and the latter force yielded a most transformed, lowly estimation of our worth or “good” in the natural world. With science we gained naturalistic, empirical descriptions and yet we also suffered the sway of nihilistic sentiments regarding an empty, arbitrary, brutal human-all-too-human condition. Man (sic) fell but knowledge increased, a theme wholly consistent with German Romanticism and Christian metaphysics. The possibility of redemption (science) is only attended by the necessity of a (historic) Fall which as a pre-condition for the possible enhancement of Man–that fallen all too human creature. Nietzsche’s frequent “secular” use of the word “redemption” (or redeem) betrays something of his vehement criticism of the religion of his boyhood years and education. Throughout his On the Genealogy of Morality and Zarathustra this becomes most evident: because “There is so much in man that is horrifying…this insane sad beast man” whose “will to erect an ideal” (of the “holy God”) condemns. It does so to the point of a “psychic cruelty” that he argues “it cannot be atoned for” (GM II 22). Whilst the metaphysics of Augustine and Aquinas’ Christianity were rendered superfluous to natural human existence–arguably by Darwinian presuppositions and for others the realism of Greek tragic wisdom–something of the quest to restore the (noble) stature of the human being was preserved. Naturalizing Man(kind), as he frequently sought to do, would not preclude the possibility of incorporating fundamental spiritual powers and resources to once again redeem the fallen human creature. The myth of the Fall was replaced by a historico-genealogical philology of the real presence within becoming that faltered and lapsed into “decadence”. The restoration of the man of decadence to a noble “height” is replete with religious imagery and meaning even though Nietzsche distinctly reacted against Lutheran and Christian teachings and precepts. His claimed “immoralism” is decidedly hostile to the ordinary moral meaning of “decadence” with all its pious, moral condemnatory force. The ascetic condemnation of worldliness uncannily sits in an opposite albeit parallel position with Nietzsche’s disdain for modern worldliness. He is more than a mere “conservative

10

Chapter One

communitarian”7: Nietzsche must find a way to the radical over-turners who will redeem humankind from its own stupidity without resorting to the miracle of the Crucified One–the Crucifixion. The so-called “AntiChrist” is to substitute for the work performed by the Redeemer of the Christian Church. The corrupt Church, churchly metaphysics and commoners (believers) are declared not to be the means by which the “promise of the earth” (Z Prologue) may be realized. By withdrawing from the world, a utopia is promised; however, Nietzsche reverses this formula of psychic cruelty by advancing the opposite: no Promised Land is necessary if we stay grounded in the soil of temporal being where presence incessantly comes-forth and passes-away eternally. Eternality is “of this world” and not the other–the ideal, transcendent world of immortal souls–yet Nietzsche must also provide an account of how this glorious earth degraded into a “madhouse” (GM II 22). His “most terrible sickness”, the condition in which the cheerful “freedom of soul” was lost to servile herd docility in the name of blind-faith, must parallel the symbolic might and spirituality of Christian sin. The reversal is cunning and astute: decadence is no longer a breaking of the moral (Mosaic) code but a breaking (or rejection) of the code of nature, our human nature. To esteem the body, the erotics of the soul of the earth, is to commit a transgressive overcoming of the opposition Good-Evil. If Nietzsche redeems the body–an eros of biology and therefore regeneration–then he can counter the ascetic’s dictate that sin requires a Saviour–a Holy One still to come. This move beyond the sacred, a return to the profane world of festive gods, valour, war and conflict, strength, courage and the “animal soul” (GM II 16) is consistent with early French anthropology (Count Buffon, Lavoisier, Lamarck) and German Natur philosophie preceding the time of Immanuel Kant. Through these very modern prisms Nietzsche reappropriates archaic Greek (i.e. Bronze Age) physical principles of the motion of the earth and celestial bodies–the nomos of worldly phenomena and events. Violent, dangerous and eternally regenerating forces of physis (Nature) loom large in the mind of this teacher of classical philology whose disgust with the modern was retrojected back through Renaissance effected understandings of the natural order. Here the animalic was refracted through the optic of scientia and noble high Renaissance cultivation–namely, ars et scientia. At this conjuncture knowing and intensive refinement were wedded to the instinctual drive of the animalic being. To esteem the hitherto lost value of man–his forgotten former 7 Julian Young Nietzsche’s Philosophy of Religion (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2006).

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estimation of his mortal existence–Nietzsche must recover what he took to be the primordial nature of the human creature.

Caging the Animal-Human This anthropology of the animality of the human being is central to Nietzsche’s reaction to religious mysticism and therefore power too. All religions possess power: a power over the body, the spiritual imagination, the community, the erotics of existence, the daily mundane order and above all, over time (i.e. future). When Hinduism and Zoroastrianism predominated over diverse peoples in their nascent epochs, they restructured the cosmological plane to effectively marshal the “lowly” elements of the moral body. They conquered the “weaker” and transformed it into the “stronger”. The animal in man metamorphosed into a Sphinx-like creature that possessed the power of logic (logos) and spirit–the latter eventually becoming the soul and elevated during the classical period. Ancient religions–although mostly polytheistic–overturned the chaos of pre-moral and pre-metaphysical existence of whole communities largely by invoking a (new) hierarchical order of all sentient beings–a great Chain of Being8. This tragic world-historical innovation meant, for Nietzsche, a supreme loss of innocence: the innocence of becoming within nature. For millennia the human animal–as demonstrated in On the Genealogy of Morality and Daybreak–had roamed relatively free, uninhibited and instinctually vigorous in orientation. For the “longest part of the history of man, his prehistory”–before the “feeling of guilt” as a “reaction of the soul”–the body-soul of a human being remained uncaged and therefore untamed (GM II 14). Nietzsche maintains that modern humans bear an “overrefinement of taste” that evolved over millennia as an artistry for “conscience-vivisection and cruelty to the animal-soul”–a kind of selftorture of the animal-human. From the historical evidence he deduces that non-polytheistic religions accelerated and exacerbated the self-torture of the animal-human by endowing (i.e. imputing) it with guilt and shame. The Crucifixion was (made) necessary by an impoverishment of the soul derived from the caging of the primordial instincts and drives of this once untamed creature. Speaking of the “prehistory” of humanity’s encagement by states Nietzsche finds “these half animals who were happily adapted to wilderness, war, roaming about, adventure–all at once all of their instincts were devalued and ‘disconnected’” (GM II 16). Nietzsche’s evolutionary 8 Arthur O. Lovejoy The Great Chain of Being (Cambridge Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1964).

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anthropology posits two essential features of the animal’s encagement: forces which compelled it to no longer roam freely offered it Gesellschaft (society) to captivate the animal-human into the lure of the pleasures of security and herd-happiness. Complex society justified its general confinement by alluring the (once wild) animal into a matrix of social contracts as compulsive social intercourse that assuaged its primary instincts and passions. The futurity of civilized existence–its open-ended horizon of unfolding power and controlling forces–was dangled seductively before the ignorant or “stupid” roaming native of nature. She was asked to surrender her striving or will in order to gain a mystical future by means of forgetting her Past (i.e. prehistorical freedom). A “freedom of the will” was sacrificed for the benefit of belonging– belonging to a community in which the challenges of the stranger enemy were greatly defused9. Secondly, by losing his primordial “freedom of the will” the human animal could no longer freely or spontaneously vent its feelings and potentially destructive affects. Anger, retaliations for misdeeds, lust, hatred and usurping sensations for domination had to be controlled in some fashion. To abide by the sacro-magical but increasingly priestlybureaucratic order of social relations (Gesellschaft), this once wild “free” creature had to acquire the psychical apparatus for self-restraint. The much-vaunted “bad conscience” only emerges in history once the channel to nature, to vital organic life, is tortured by constant choking (e.g. punishment) and moralization. A pronouncement of Thou Shall Not, simultaneously creating “customs of morality” (D) and prohibitions against instinctual impulses, not only killed off free striving but it also produced the bad conscience that has ever since inflicted mankind. The “bad conscience” presupposes the historic suppression of once naturally vented impulses and affects that now registers as a poisonous corruption of the spirit. Unfreedom or what Nietzsche otherwise sees as the “instinct of denial, corruption, and decadence” promulgated by these ascetic “slanderers of the world and violators of man” is his equivalence of moral sin (EH: Dawn, 2). No deity is responsible for its Fall; the falleness into corruption and decadence was humankind’s own doing as it was in the Book of Genesis. By appropriating a hydraulic-biologic model of pressure and distribution (“organization”) Nietzsche anthropomorphizes what the idealists and priestly-caste construed in metaphysical terms. Namely the homo religoisi constructed a perfect world to reduce this (natural) world 9

This was a universal lie performed by each civilization which only perpetuated systemic violence by means of organized hatred and revenge against the “outsider”.

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into something pitiful and lesser; and their transcendent world rendered the earth lesser by means of corruption, decadence and denial of the truth. To save humankind from this lesser, sickly life the priests had to invent not the means of its atonement but, most importantly, they first had to make necessary the “bad conscience”. Thus the metaphysical creation of “the soul” was made necessary to relieve human beings from (their newly acquired) bad conscience–to absolve them of their sin. Sin had an instinctual, anthropic basis but a forgetfulness was properly secured by the first noble priestly class who invented concepts and ascetic disciplinary practices to govern the body and ordinary rhythms of organic life. Once the transcendentalized world took hold, the “slave revolt” performed by the priests (and their common followers) succeeded in the ascent of “Judea” over the downfall of the almighty empire of Rome. Under polytheistic Roman gods, the impulses and instincts were not sacrificed to a moral order founded on self-negation and self-torture–the infamous “unselfing” of the self (BGE 207). That is, no proper “forgetting” of the animal-soul had yet transpired; whereas under Christianity, Nietzsche identifies a perverse and all-pervasive loss of the animal soul that once roamed freely amongst other creatures.

Route to Redeeming the Future Nietzsche’s genealogies aim to recover and rekindle this specious memory of itself–to demythologize the Past by recouping its lost memory. For redeeming the past is the route to redeeming the Future. Much that has been written about the “bad conscience” most often psychologizes the phenomenon of tragic loss at the expense of this important (Protestant) religious interest in the condition of Mensch (humankind). Reverence toward the past as much as toward Europe’s future by means of reclaiming original Man is uppermost in Nietzsche’s modern, quasi-Protestant mind. He well understood that the pagan Greeks” outlook towards their gods was lost and incuperable–the Greeks were fundamentally strangers to us (TI: The Ancients 2). The abeyance of a return to the Greeks–to the tragic agon (contestation) of the theatro (drama)–meant for him an alternate path to the spiritualization of animal instincts and thus the animal-soul too. Why the prophetic tone, language and vision of Zarathustra? For Nietzsche, the ancient Persian prophet turned over to a modern noble spirit captures the essence of the overhuman (Übermensch) who, having roamed the earth, achieves hitherto unknown heights by means of a necessary fateful “spiritualization”. To know his Past in order to form his Future, Zarathustra required a spiritualization of his inner drives and perspective–

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and not merely a re-remembering of his once noble life in wild nature. The prophetic teacher of time’s eternal recurrence on this and other planets is the beneficiary of the passages which ascetics and priests first laid down in a transcendental fashion. He must emerge out of the Fall into decadence in order to conquer it; he does not conquer death like Christ, no, he conquers the weakly, sickly Man that Judaeo-Christianity valorized as the common flock of believers. Death is conquered but not by the figure of Zarathustra but rather by the all-pervasive eternality10 which he calls “becoming”. Nietzsche snatches away the believers of faith from the picture and turns instead to the finitude or finite universe of Spinoza’s world. Faith in the eternal is retained, as is disgust for the corrupt world of the herd, sickly and meek. Eschewing the “good Samaritan” and the Sermon on the Mount ethos, Nietzsche reverses the dependence on the flock to find redemption elsewhere. Namely, not in “the people” whom Christianity and democrats hold faith in; for people possess will and desire and thus are forsaken by their very own “human-all-too-human” nature (HA). Theirs is the pursuit of happiness, that is, comfort, ease and pleasure–what do they know of eternal matters? he ponders. This is a uniquely profound religious conception of the corruptible world, of its flaws and of its need for redemption. The religious conception of the cosmos–preceding the ascent of “modern society”–is not foreign at all to Nietzsche’s critical eye. As a former student of theological Protestant doctrines, with his powerful paternal figure in the Lutheran church, young Nietzsche was deeply immersed in the good and evil of soteriological preoccupations with (forsaken) life. His dialectical11 contradiction of the “filth” thrown upon “the origin, the presupposition of our life” by Christianity meant that Nietzsche had first to know thoroughly the decadence that was “Platonist Christianity”–the religion of the masses (TI The Ancients 4). To know, that is, its evil so that he could identify another good, a good beyond the evil perpetrated by the Crucifixion tellers. The Crucified is not exactly the object of his attack; it is the commoners who depend upon the priests” transcendent, otherworldly world of perfect being, the Volk who are enslaved by the faith in the filth of the body and sexuality. Instead of the suffering of the Jew crucified by the Romans, we instead end up with a pernicious “ressentiment against life” (TI The Ancients 4). Yet Christ represented life itself, its light and its goodness; he more so represented 10 See Paul Loeb The Death of Nietzsche’s Zarathustra (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2013) for a discussion of the eternal. 11 Dialectics is a key Greek philosophical practice, usually personified by Socrates, stemming from the artistry of the dialectikos who instructs others by use of Logos, a penetrating logic of unconcealing.

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the will to overcome, the overcoming of death and priestly authority or domination. Hence the problem is the Church, its deacons and its practice of resentment against life whilst purporting to save life. Here the dialectics of Nietzsche’s Greek mind hones in on a fundamental problem, a contradiction that must be overturned i.e. overcome. The agency of redemption is condemnable as “corrupt”. The original ancient Semitic “way of life” of Christ was overrun not merely by the disciple Paul but by the rock of the Christian faith–“Peter”. It is the institution, in particular, by way of the institutionalization of what was once merely “the way” of Jesus, the unorthodox Jew who eschewed the sacrilege of money and Pharisaic priestly authority. Demarcating “a way” to conduct one’s life was important in Nietzsche’s eyes. One must have applications, comportments, discipline and sundry strictures to enhance one’s access to life, to the flow that is “becoming”. In Christ, in the radical departure from Sephardic practices, Nietzsche recognized a certain overcoming man, an individual who strove, with will, to overcome Jewish weakness (i.e. corruptibility) and priestly domination. By contrast, the Church values and perpetuates atrophy; it does so because it petrifies what is fundamentally dynamic, changing and alterable. Churchly religion in other words (following St Peter) becomes tradition; and traditional ways conveyed through customary rituals and beliefs betrays the essential message of He who shall overcome the suffering of the earth. The truth of overcoming–for Zarathustra truth is the highest virtue–is stalled, even negated in the Petrine12 church. The Pauline church inaugurates the era of the flock-herd, the passive followers of a will-to-truth enunciated and protected by the rank of priestly power. Faith in the priest’s truth has replaced the ĮȖȠȞȚĮ (pain) of the Crucified one who must struggle perennially with his conscience in the face of the Father: Jesus must confront his own destiny. The Christ is a destiny; and the Persian figure of achieving the “Beyond” through passages of time must experience the ordeal of having a destiny–a demand to encounter in the most fundamental of ways resistance to his (temporal) existence, a resistance to his “will to life”. Here the analogue between two personifications of greatness (i.e. overcoming) becomes inescapable–that of the Occidental Christ with that of the archaic (ancient) Zoroaster. Each embody a certain imaginaire, a vision of the primordial “will to life” that is transcendent of commonly, social, temporal forms. Their “destiny” is marked off by this visionary sense of a higher life, a more esteemed, more valued life, but not one cut12

The rock of the Church signifying solidity and continuity through tradition and orthodox dogma.

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off from this world–as the ascetic monks or hermits would wrongly have it. Without a life which exceeds the valley existence of the herd and their idols13, without the stench of the filth of the mob-herd, there would be no fundamental transvaluation. In other words, a destiny to a point hitherto unavailable and unknown to the droves that constitute traditional religion– “the people’s” religion. The exceptional ones must have an alternate destiny, a direction exceeding (yet incorporating) the condition that Nietzsche designates as “the human-all-too-human”. It is the condition from which any redemption of Man (sic) must emerge from; namely, the abyss of the chaos of a purposeless existence where desire and will (affects) revolve eternally around the exigencies of an essentially nihilistic form of life. The eternal wheel of nothingness turns inexorably when the foresaid “forgotten” memory of one’s human nature prevails; its prevalence means that the dominance of (perceived) meaninglessness is now naturalized. It is ordained as a given in other words. Neither Christ the suffering one nor Zarathustra the prophet-teacher of eternal overcoming embraced this “given”. Theirs was a ridiculing, a defiance, of the given (idols of the valley) since what is given is only given by Time; that is, a corrupted Past without memory. The offering of a future–a futural time that has shaken-off the shackles of herd following–must therefore be something not reducible to the now, the here, the Present. Theirs is a world-historical task to transform the face of the earth; to accomplish the promise which no “given” or “natural” state of affairs can deliver or actualize. Their destiny is bound up with situating the given of the present Today as a temporal error, an illusion, that is both real and powerful. Its effectiveness is undisputed hence the reason for their rejection of it. To redeem the Future, Christ and Zarathustra must first make amends with the Past; the Past must first be redeemed by an un-forgetting of the animal soul’s genealogy into a human spirit.14 Restoring the Past without denying the human-all-too-human in the present is the passage through to a nobler Future–to a destiny that is greater than the feeble, herdish, commonly vision of “Today” which British utilitarianism represents.

13 When Moses left “the flock” to their own devices in the desert journey to liberation, they resorted to the worship of heathen idols and corrupt orgiastic pleasures. 14 Nietzsche states we who know otherwise do not separate body and mind nor mind from soul as “the people” are wont to do.

CHAPTER TWO PHANTASMAGORIA AS PRESENT ILLUSION

It seems at first that this analysis (from chapter one) runs contrary to Nietzsche’s thinking; that is, his critical thought about those (ascetics) who eschew everyday life as profane. Was not Nietzsche an ardent advocate of this world, with all its pitfalls and shortcomings and idealistic idols? It would seem that Nietzsche wants us to stop denying this world and glorifying some other world where perfection and pure being may lie. For instance, in Twilight of the Idols he ponders why we would want “to fabricate a world “other” than this one unless we had a powerful instinct for libeling, belittling and casting suspicion on life” (Reason in Philosophy, 6). He argues, furthermore, that this “phantasmagoria of an ‘other’, a ‘better’ life” is merely ourselves avenging life through a degenerate instinct. Christianized Platonism, or in other words, the metaphysics of the Church–promulgated by the sermon, mass and ritual of sacrifice–is the perpetrator of this dangerous “phantasmagoria”. The phantasmatic ideal of a “true world” is set against this world, the illusory world of present phenomena (what he constantly calls becoming). In denying the “actual world” of its reality they declare phenomena to be illusory; however, “it is an illusory world to the extent that it is just a moral-optical illusion” (Reason in Philosophy, 6). In short, the problematic phantasmagoria of a truer world is founded on a fundamental “moral-optical illusion”. It is this illusion, and its attendant perfusion of the “will to life”, that Nietzsche singles out as an analyst; and he does so because he claims perspectives (hence “optical”) knowingly are conditioned by time, by the evental moments of time’s becoming.1 The disenchantment with “this world” is therefore temporally adduced by an identified moral-optical illusion that only holds sway for a given time. It is a “prejudice” of the present age: a discriminatory taste of the moralists, the priestly types, the metaphysicians and the commonly believers (the Volk). And scientists are not immune either: they perpetuate the phantasmagoria 1

See Robin Small Time and Becoming in Nietzsche’s Thought (London: Continuum, 2010).

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of an other, truer world, through their favoured scientific concept of “cause” (causation); their wont to declare sense unreliable and appearances as illusory. Scientists are Platonistic in so much as they seek the truth behind the veil of appearances by means of knowable “laws”. They explain this world by means of the non-illusory mechanics of laws of nature, proposing that temporal becoming is illusion while “true being” is to be accessed through a fundamental “physics”. Nietzsche finds both religious and scientific myths concerning Werden (becoming) part of the essential dynamics of projecting one’s form and image upon the optical appropriation of reality. Theism and scientific empiricism are each bedeviled by the erroneous commitment to an absolute will to truth: a will to disclose an absolute or perfect Whole, a true underlying reality of the actuality we live and breathe. Laurence Hatab has given a useful picture of the decisive “will to truth” at play in both paradigms, observing: “Even though God is no longer at the forefront of culture, we still have confidence in the “shadows” of God (GS 108), in supposedly secular truths that have nonetheless lost their pedigree and intellectual warrant”.2 What each side, doctrine and worldview cannot fully grasp is the scope of time in which reality unfolds as Plato, Leibniz, Hegel, Bergson and Heisenberg declared. “You don’t have eyes for something that has taken two thousand years to achieve?” says Nietzsche; and “There is nothing to wonder at in this: all lengthy things are difficult to see, to see in their entirety (GM1:8). It is the entirety that is elusive, slippery and difficult: each organism, mind, organ or people experiences this entirety without knowing the whole, without feeling a part of the whole. They simultaneously exist within the entirety whilst also trying to objectify it in order to know it. It is an optical take on the entire whole but it’s one buttressed by a moral commitment, a “value judgement” more specifically. Both doctrines–theism and atheism–necessarily misunderstand the fundamental complexity of the universe. They fail as they must do: they form interesting experiments in the capricious domestic animal’s attempt to fathom its own ever-changing world. Nietzsche can discern strategies which we deploy to find a Cause behind a thing, an event, a phenomenon; he has the “height” from which to see and identify diverse “moral-optical” interpretations of what is constantly moving and shifting in this “entirety”. This returns us to the millennial vision of the long durée which the foresaid figures of destiny encapsulate: the Galilean Christ and the Persian fire of Zarathustra. If Nietzsche is not restricted to, or by, his own 2

Laurence Hatab Nietzsche’s Life Sentence (New York: Routledge, 2005), p.15.

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times; if he understands himself as an “untimely man” who is out of step with his epochal worldview, then is he akin to, or, at least walking in the shadows of these millennial figures–men of Destiny? Is Nietzsche capable of bracketing his own philosophical optic (perspective) from the decadence of his own age? This is a crucial question not only for understanding Nietzsche’s philosophy but for evaluating his sense of the divine, natural world. For it appears that in order to capture the world (in all its beauty and chaos) he must first remove (distance) himself from it. To save reality from the untruths of the priests–the filth of cowardice he believes–he must first see through the corruption of values and instincts borne of nature. For him, “decadence” denotes the denial of the instincts brought about a moralization of the natural world; and this denial is further perpetrated by believers’ faith that requires the invention of the immortal soul–the grand lie of Augustine and Aquinas embodied in Peter’s Church.3 Therefore, Nietzsche is intrinsically concerned with the corruptibility of the body and soul of us modernes who no longer have a secure path to the Romans and Greeks–to the strength of former noble cultures. He has not secured the way to recover ancient noble tragic wisdom; yet on the other hand he must reject the fundamental nihilism perpetrated by Christianity (for two millennia and now embodied in modern democratic society). His age, our age, the age of the tamed, the denied and the weakened are no source for redemption let alone solace. Nietzsche writes very agitatedly and passionately against the age, our time or that of so-called English “modern society” (BGE). To be in this world he must take flight or remove himself from his decadent modern world. To redeem the actual world–which he obtains essentially through tragic artistry–Nietzsche is in need of a non-moderne yet post-Classical world; one that is uncorrupted by Christian nihilists, namely the priestly caste. We shall return to this important bind-of-time in which Nietzsche finds himself at a later point i.e. after our discussion of Roman religion and power. His is a transhistorical vision, an optical-perspective that traverses and necessarily traverses the space of several noble or ignoble cultures. And such cultures are mostly an admixture of theistic and non-theistic elements, where the divine, nature, gods and goddesses, spirits and instincts vie for dominance, growth or extension. This is the clue to Nietzsche’s radical philosophy, his outlook on the all-important “will to life”. The presence of divine forces and elements did not per se perturb him since the Romans and Vikings celebrated life through strength and dare (and thus striving), and the 3

This is not unique to the Christian religion since not only did it exist amongst Levant civilizations before Thales and Parmenides but also the ancient Egyptians and Persians.

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medium of their divine forces. They understood the “will”, the thrust of striving to extend life (and not merely preserve it as modern Darwinists hold). Their gods did not prevent them or inhibit their instinctual drives but forced them to be immersed in the actual, the real, as opposed to the priest’s or scientist’s “will to truth”. Their conscience had not been corrupted by the invention of the bad conscience since Nietzsche’s acclaimed “animal-soul” was still at the fore of their form of life. Instead of the denial of life and an absolute castigation of sexuality and the body, their spiritual forms enhanced the vigour of the once uncaged animal-soul. The “blond-beast” (GM) and the noble soul cohabited the earth without the Church or spiritual guardians watching over the bad consciences of weakly sickly flock. It is akin to the prevailing forms of life Nietzsche had identified in Bronze Age civilizations before the “slave revolt” of the Jewish priesthood devastated noble cultures everywhere. We can see here that the all-important “innocence of becoming” (TI Four Great Errors 7) was still relatively free to unfold and metamorphose; it was unhindered by a perverse will to negate life through a religious negation of desire and sensuality

Roman Polytheism Polytheistic Roman and Nordic peoples were not first and foremost religious persons following a pious way of life. Their ways remained highly terrestrial–of the earth and growth–even whilst celestial entities inhabited their earth. They were happily fated by unique terrestrialcelestial elements that gave challenge and distance to their distinctive forms of life, including a distance between strata of their souls. PreChristian souls were unburdened by the “heavy weight” (Z) of priestly bad conscience purifications and rituals; for their pagan gods did not sanction self-torture under the insidious guise of self-sacrifice. Thus Roman, Nordic and other polytheistic types did not suffer a perverse sickliness of the soul, for their bodies were directed by a vitalism which sanctioned audacious courage and contestation. When Christianity overnight “obliterated the Roman’s tremendous deed of laying the ground for a great culture that had time”, it did so by vampirically sucking out “true things, the instinct for reality in general right out of every individual” (A 58). With their pagan gods and festivities, the Romans, in Nietzsche’s eyes, sustained and extended the “instinct for reality” and the cultural organization that gave itself a future–a promise of the future (i.e. a

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destiny). Nietzsche the destined one4 well understood the importance of the destiny of a people being bound up with the particular state of its soulstructure. He states: “I mean the corruption of the soul through the ideas of guilt, punishment, and immortality”; a corruption of the “most corrupt type” “alienated the “souls” from that tremendous structure of actualization (A 58). While it came to save souls Christianity only alienated souls; it despised whatever did not need saving so it first denigrated the noble and high (strong) in order to save the sickly, wanton soul it had first created by mendacious means. This tragic irony escapes most psychologists and genealogists of morals and spirit. They have been blinded by the theologians” deception; namely, that the soul needs salvation and the aere perennius5 of the imperium Romanum is responsible for evil. The fall of Rome in this sense means a corruptible beginning: commencing the necessity for salvation and with it a holding of the future hostage to priestly power. Tremendous cultural organization gives way to tremendous Churchly authority and ascetic control. Even the might of this visionary imperium Romanum could not withstand the onslaught of appealing to the commoners” feebleness, sickly nature and guilt complex. From “below” war was waged against the aristocratism of Roman nobility, where the sins and needs of the “the people” became the raw materials for the conquest of “pagan souls”–of polytheistic Roman sensibilities. Did the Romans lack science? Did they lack gods? On both counts it is a definitive No. It is not a matter of who is scientific and who is with (or has) gods. Both the Romans and the Greeks possessed each of these; they were very alike in this regard (though the Romans evidently valorized Greek science over and above their own). Knowledge and deities waxed together inexorably, making the polis and the imperium dynamic organizations for securing and designing a future. The Good Life or Eudaimonia, experienced as the crucible of the ancient Greek city, was directed not by science or religion alone and yet each played a significant part. Rational knowledge and obedience to non-mortal elements were fully vital, rational pursuits. Above all perhaps it was their basic instincts to venerate life, to immerse themselves in the splendor of tragic reality, that gave them a healthy soul, a state of existence devoid of the heavy guilt and shame of the acclaimed “bad conscience”. To venerate Mars, Uranus or Apollo and Dionysius whilst maintaining the enhancement of life through instinctual drives was perfectly “consistent” or true for the Greeks and Romans. In 4

Nietzsche designates a portion of his biographical exegesis Why I Am a Destiny (EH) wherein he often refers to himself as a break or the first amongst many. 5 “More enduring than bronze” (A 58).

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their gods they found a source for their essential “will to life” to gain expression. Power was invested in their personal deities, often in the name of representing the tragic disposition of death and life, weakness and strength, and fate and willful deed. To denigrate the gods was tantamount to a refusal to acknowledge the forces of life and the struggle immanent in the elemental universe. The fury of Mars and the beauty of Venus penetrated their inner thoughts and feelings, demanding recognition if not constant attention or obedience. Romans, similar to ancient Greeks, deified their vital life through their panoply of deities. By means of deification they could affirm all of life, all aspects of destruction and generation, and thereby also affirm the necessity of the imperial grandeur–power. Their gods equipped them with the justification to believe in their right to command, lead and conquer other peoples. The illusions of the splendor (beauty) of exercising will over, and by means of, nature’s relentless force of necessity was to their definite advantage–their “spiritual” advantage. Romans did know the noble good conscience; their soul shone with Apollonian light and their physiognomy was heighted through vigorous gymnasia (disciplined exercise) and expression. Gods assisted each dimension of being, without the relentless denial of life of the priests and therefore the self-torture of a guilt-ridden Christian. Instead of a pernicious concentration on a metaphysical otherworldly order of being, RomanoGreek deities represented the different forms and compartments of life which the empire, as a civitatum, encapsulated. Compartments of divine powers accorded with different compartments of life of Roman existence. The Roman empire of culture and power benefited from the festivities and celebratory practices accorded to, and intensified by, each of these deified domains of life. Instead of a negation of noble strong values (“ways”) their gods further extended their Dionysian powers into all domains of Apollonian life.6 Instead of preoccupying themselves with the effable essence of all Being and coming-to-be, Romans celebrated their earthly might and nobility of valiant virtues through numerous gods. Having reversed ascetic withdrawal from the world as formerly espoused by diverse priesthoods, theirs was a discrete, unrefined yet forceful will to live life exuberantly, lavishly, authoritatively and unapologetically with the terra firma of the earth. Metaphysics was not a prime or principal concern of either the noble or plebian classes; they were not philosophers occupied with the ineffable essence of Being and things. Romans principally exercised their minds and souls over the effectual 6

The sub-soil of Dionysian forces was given expression by the Apollonian shine or light that makes the art of life and object of beauty.

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ways that existence could be enhanced (e.g. Emperor Aurelius). It meant the gods were a further aspect of the more general ethos and pathos of enhancing Roman life, and the stature of the Empire. Power and vitality were pivotal to this form of enhancement of existing life. Nietzsche particularly drew attention to their mighty wherewithal to marshal power by means of astute organization; an organizational effectiveness that was founded and grounded in the long-term, in the long durée of the future. Nietzsche effused about the Roman’s immense adeptness in socialpolitical organization: “the imperium Romanum, the most magnificent form of organization ever to be achieved under difficult conditions, compared to which everything before or after has just been patched together, botched and dilettantish” (A58). Romans more than envisaged an imperial time; they structured each form of life through the organization of the Romanum empire and thus gave reason for forms of life through its inherent eternity–the eternality of “being Roman” (to be nobly Roman in other words). Nietzsche envisages a confluence of two powerful formative influences upon the spirit of the Roman. He links the durée of their organizational form to the soul of the noble Roman human being. Their stridence in political-military endurance i.e. the Empire, gave Romans a “future soul” (GS 288) or a purchase on time owing to their might of will and enduring noble ideals. There is a forging here between the audacious strength of will displayed by its supreme organizational form and the fortitude of their spiritual prowess–their “future soul” expressed through their spiritual ideals. Ideals are crucial to the operations and futures of human beings as creatures whose nature (and purpose) is fundamentally unfinished. How we “finish” or complete by means of artistically shaping our hylomorphic plasma is uppermost in Nietzsche’s account of human plasticity–le historie of power and form. And he assigns great weight to “the ideal” that always defines human endeavor, striving and, in particular, illusions of unity; ideals acting as rubrics by which destructive willing is channeled into more esoteric and sublime forms of cultivation and therefore extension. The creature completes himself by means of such idealconstructs and interpretations, including science’s underlying “ascetic ideal” transfigured. Ideal-constructs are highly variable and refracted through strata of the (higher and lower) soul. They may be lower, higher, base or noble in evaluative terms yet ideals have a governing status of directing material and spiritual energy into a futural form. Wastage and anxiety over their metaphysical virtue are not paramount here; a panoply of contending ideals, or schemas of interpretation, constituting the historie of Geist and

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Seele (soul) is of grand significance. Nietzsche finds not only multiplicity and contestation important, but rather the thrust and amplification of the “basic will of the spirit” (BGE 230) in struggle, in life itself, as allimportant. Actualities or real phenomena after all are ideals of the “animal soul” that always are “full of future” (GMII 16). To err is unimportant; to struggle or vie is a prerequisite; but to actualize a heightening and deepening of this basic will of the spirit is indeed supreme (i.e. highest). Roman deities and divinities helped to enhance the Roman noble disposition of spirit-body; they allowed futural goals and values to flourish. What is particularly instructive about the Romans is that they developed ways of flourishing and cultivating without a metaphysical cult of certainty or “necessity”. Erring about the gods had no Eleatic implications of punishment; Romanic virtue lay instead in the ideals of the Empire’s long future. They understood their souls were “full of future” because their imperium demonstrated to them that the promise of the earth was fulsome. Completing the unfinished project of determining the form and measure of man (sic) was of great philosophical import before the inaugurated “slave revolt” of Christianity. What the divine Roman inspiration exemplified therefore was the symbolic-affect force of a will to life characteristic of a grand, noble disposition. In The Gay Science Nietzsche outlines the necessity of creating an “artistic plan” for shaping and altering nature out of our specific “strengths and weaknesses” (290). The Roman’s taste for deities and godly powers did not restrict their taste for noble things and practices. What each futural ideal (vision) displays in fact, “when the work is finished”, is “how the constraint of a single taste governed and formed everything large and small” (290). Whether “this taste was good or bad is less important”; rather more significant is the formative force of the stylized “taste”: “Much that is vague and resisted shaping has been saved and exploited for distant views” (290). Divine elements thus helped the Romans to finish the work of an un-stylized nature, giving them the symbolic wherewithal to “beckon toward the far and immeasurable”–a future, of glory. Yet we may look more closely at the artistic disposition to find variance in value (worth) and effectiveness in shaping a beautiful human form. As opposed to the later Christian-Jewish ascetic disposition, the single artistic plan and taste disposition of the Romans afforded them a worldly embrace–they took the earth in its splendour as their oyster. What is the difference between these two divergent dispositions (if all artistry and vying is supposedly equal or indifferent)? Constraints and limits as well as forces and magnitudes obtain in any single disposition or “artistic plan” so what makes one superior to another? A cacophony of such “plans” or “styles” is not

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enough–not in Nietzsche’s schemata7 Inferior artistic styling and arranging is identifiable by two salient features: first, those without power over themselves (“weak characters”) despise the constraint of style. They feel revengeful because they feel demeaned by “this bitter and evil restraint” (290). Lacking a sense of mastery, they feel threatened by limits and dispositions when it is their weakness that encages them. Lack of masterful control and hatred therefore characterize the weaker (inferior) disposition and soul. These reinforced by a certain ugliness ensuing form an undisciplined disposition that prevents the required “long practice and daily work” to remove original nature parts. Superior or strong natures by contrast commit to the required practice and art of life steadfastly. They feel unthreatened by constant rigour and application of disciplined control. More importantly, however, they “enjoy their finest gaiety in such constraint and perfection under a law of their own” (290). Higher souled creatures are capable of joyfulness in experiencing the finitude of their own stylized form of life. For them limits are no threat as they necessarily “survey all the strengths and weaknesses of their nature” and “fit them into an artistic plan until every one of them appears as art and reason” (290). The superior type of disposition and style operates in the knowledge, and confidence, of its own plan being worthy and sovereign. They follow and command within the parameters set by their own art or form of life and thus are happy rather than resentful within themselves. If a “piece of original nature been removed” they have a sovereign artistic reason for its removal and take confidence in the newly shaped “second nature”. If theism thwarts this joyful, sovereign artistry then decadence will ensure. Yet we find with the Romans that the strong nobler type prevailed even in the midst of (pagan) Roman gods. To posit atheism in order to achieve an effective artistic plan for life would only confuse the matter. For if strength and sovereignty of a willed soul are paramount then the unnecessary elimination of Greek and Roman gods defies the wisdom of the foregoing argument. Whatever adds to, not subtracts from, the extension and elevation of the human spirit is worthy of praise, according to Nietzsche. Hence rather than the solution lying with scientific reason we find a contest here between two divergent experiences of the divine order. The battle over the gods–pagan versus Christian–is the crucible of this problem or “event” as Nietzsche saw it. Any absence of the gods would not eradicate the fundamental problem of how to ennoble (human) nature and develop 7

The nominalist interpretation of contemporary philosophers is incorrect in this regard. The goal is the enchantment of Mensch–not simply the existence of multiplicity.

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effectual spiritual exercises for a deepening of the soul. The Romans did not need more science; and the Greeks already possessed science even whilst worshipping the gods of the sky and soil. Each civilization had their gaiety of scientific inquiry and divine influence whilst preserving and extending their noble disposition. Nietzsche’s strident critique of modern society is in many regards founded upon his esteem of the Greek-Roman cultural complex. He remained to the very end highly critical of modern idioms of life even if a “scientific revolution” had prevailed over Europe. Instead of a panacea scientific reason possessed its own distinctive problems, some of a pernicious type in fact. We shall not venture into these issues now because, more notably, the absence or presence of divinities never prevented the cultivation of two vital elements: a noble culture and, secondly, a logos of nature. If Greece, Rome and Arabic culture displayed a coexistence of vigorous thought and belief, then a nihilistic secular outlook that clings onto the doctrine “a-theism” could never be hailed supreme or superior (high). In other words, the muchvaunted nihilism à la the death of God and modern science is only a worthy distraction from the key point. The calamity lay with a Christian deification and moralistic disposition that slowly seeped into and infected the pours of the Roman soul. Ridding the earth of Roman gods would not have redeemed it from such a calamity; if anything, it would only have worsened the hegemonic dominance of the first (very meek) Christians. We can turn now to two other pivotal points concerning the Roman constellation as an insight. First is the creative power which is held by (and within) polytheism–a religious disposition which predominated outside of western Christendom and present in noble cultures everywhere before modernity. Nietzsche argues that the primordial impulse–“to have an ideal of one’s own–was never threatened by polytheism; indeed, being “the wonderful art and gift of creating gods” it assumed the “medium through which this impulse could discharge, purify, perfect and ennoble itself” (GS 143). Like science itself, its disposition of artfully creating gods allowed a discharging and perfecting of this fundamental impulse: a will of life expressed through the possession of an ideal of one’s own. Like science its inventive drive gathered formless, ambiguous impulses of the once free yet “unstylized nature” into a purposeful direction–an ideal of will-power. The Roman disposition toward polytheistic worship, however, not only gave vent to the impulse and its perfecting; it also endowed them with the means by which their art (or “plan”) could purchase the future but in a distinctly noble fashion. By creating their gods they further extended their primordial “animal soul” and found themselves in their grandly ennobled soul. If it is an expression of will, power and creative drive then

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polytheistic religion cannot sever the tie to becoming, to the vicissitudes of coming-to-be and passing-away. Their polytheistic ideals are actualized through the necessity of the vented impulses gaining an artistic, measured form. The founding of a new religion is a tremendous deed in fact; but to do so it requires persons of will and power with a grand architectural vision. They must be grand “artists” or creators such as Pythagoras, Plato or Buddha. They seize the distant future and offer it up to “the people” by way of diverse spiritual exercises and tantras. As creators they must possess not only will-power and directed impulses but also–against nihilists and anarchists–the “fundamental faith that would enable us to calculate, to promise, to anticipate the future in plans of such scope” (GS356). Religious founders form the humble, amorphous material of older instincts into “a stone in a great edifice”; and to that end a “stone” or solid entity must first be created if a solid or grand future of the soul is to be realized. Scientific, religious and state founders share these important qualities and dimensions of shaping and creating for the purpose of sustaining a solid human creature. Indeed, the sovereignty of the individual required just this kind of founding event: the invention of gods through polytheism allowed “the free-spiriting and many spiriting of man” to attain its first preliminary form (GS143).

With or Without Gods The question of atheism (as value) we now see does not resolve the biggest question, the biggest calamity of all: why did the Goliathan Roman Empire fall at the hands of commoners and fishermen, in short, the herd? The reason for the ruin of Rome is fully explicated in Nietzsche”s most systematic and developed genealogy: On the Genealogy of Morality8. Does a-theism therefore represent any symbolic or perspectival advance? If the replacement of pagan Roman gods by Christian deities represents a definite regression, then how would the removal of an “other world” constitute progress? With Nietzsche the eventual decline in faith (in a God) would bring about an important turning-point or event in the earth’s future: a shift, a thrust toward a consciousness or feeling of having no debt to its metaphysical beginnings, “its causa prima” (GMII 20). This largely metaphysical concern is inextricably linked to guilt; the moral sentiment of a bad conscience that arises from the (acquired) feeling of debt to one’s beginning e.g. “original sin”. Critique of morality, therefore, is central to 8 See Simon May (ed.) Nietzsche’s Genealogy of Morality: A Critical Guide (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2011).

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Nietzsche’s vision of a natural world which derived from the grand Graeco-Roman complex of knowledge and power. With or without gods it is necessary to overcome the guilt of “bad conscience”, foremost by releasing oneself from the debt owed to the “causa prima” (above) of guilt–its beginnings. If physics and logic can contribute to its demise–then all well and good. What is important, however, is not science or the vanquishing of the gods; it is the removal of the blight of morality’s guilt complex. Hence Nietzsche in his late writings expresses a hope, indeed a confidence, that with the advent of atheism, or, “the perfect and final victory of atheism”, the freeing of humanity from guilt will ensue from a “kind of second innocence” (GSII 20). The first innocence is that of physis (nature), or becoming: the play of forces (of determination and destruction) in the absence of any judgement, valuation and moral code. It is innocent because it is beyond “good” and “evil” and, importantly, sustains the finitude of regenerative ecological splendour of the earth. Generation and regeneration recurrently go beyond any singular code system or divine entity. The famed “animal soul” that Nietzsche attributed to the original animalic state manifested this wondrous first innocence of becoming. But now that humankind has experienced the ordeal of being burdened with a bad conscience, becoming necessitates a second kind of innocence, one akin to a baptismal rebirth where a “new life” is commenced (i.e. Lutheran Christianity). Nietzsche’s life-philosophy depicts not only a natural vision (Count Buffon, DePau and Lamarck) but emboldens the western Christian embrace of a spiritual renaissance–of a second Adamic beginning of secular time. His interpretation demands that history be recovered from the evil of guilt and self-abnegation. A “second innocence” is warranted after the decline and decimation of polytheistic religious-political societies. These political cultural complexes exhibited a polymorphic creative drive and disposition through the creation of gods and religious festivals. Nobility and good conscience were sustainable and indeed perpetuated by the will to command and obey in accordance with the specific ideal of polytheism. Romans, Egyptians and Indians did not need to create the form “second innocence” or, further still, atheism because according to Nietzsche’s post-secular logic they were never quite taken over by the guilt of bad conscience (inaugurated by a monotheistic interpretation of the world). A new commencement of “innocence” is only required once the soul has been poisoned by a hegemonic, singular religious godhead. To be rid of the poison–guilt and self-hatred–would require a change in the structure of an organized worldview. This demand is placed equally upon religious and secular (humanist) worldview structures, hence scientific

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atheism is no resolution to the problem of polymorphic interpretation. The feeling of guilt or of self-loathing of the animal spirit is anchored not so much in metaphysics per se9 but in the absolute centre which metaphysics usually seeks to establish whether it be profane (will to truth) or transcendental (ascetic morality). There is much evidence of this in Nietzsche’s writings even though a great deal of attention is given over to the destruction of metaphysical illusions. The illusory, metaphysical dimensions of modern science is just one case in point so atheism’s modern science never quite escapes the metal solidity of Nietzsche’s “hammer”. Before the demystification of the world by scientific reason, the fundamental abiding question turned on the One and the Many–the ontology of the Greeks in essence. Platonism heralded the high point of this inquiry: of how the ontology of the One (mono) gives rise to and subsequently reflects the existent Many (polloi). How scientific reason grapples with and modifies this fundamental metaphysical relation of the One and the Many is certainly definitive of the newly declared, emergent “second innocence” previously mentioned. However, the deconstruction of metaphysical objects–by science or historico-philology–is only one dimension of Nietzsche’s joyful science. It does not address the significant psychologico-spiritual dimension of unfreedom with which the modern decadent (or nihilist) defines him or herself. The dead-weight of guilt borne of the “first innocence” was inextricably linked to the organized schema of a mono–theo (single god) complex; that is, a constellation of vying variables, forces, drives and affects centred upon a single, sovereign God. The link between spiritual alienation and the structure of divinities in the cosmos is made explicit in the second treatise of his Zur Genealogie der Moral (1887). In fragment 20 it becomes clear that the creative arrangement and organization, the creation, of gods is a central facet of how contesting human tribes or castes project their self-concept onto divine beings. At the beginning of it we find the first serious proposition: communal membership creates debt to one’s tribe’s deities; second, the “cult of the gods practiced by their lords” creates the pressure of spiritual indebtedness and thus the “longing for the redemption of the same” (20). Taking care of the gods implies unconsciously a taking care of oneself. This ennobles the foresaid “animal soul” into a transfigured interesting but also endangered tense Sphinx-soul: the human-beast spirit. The animalanthropos spirit is ensouled because it feels its debt, its inheritance and its 9

The question whether Being or Becoming is final and absolute does not expunge the species from the poisonous alienation of soul and body.

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longing for redemption from the gravity of its own historical creation. Human reifications10 manifest the soul, the depth of soul founded in its own agitations; and the drive toward atheistic nihilism is merely one further “event” in the extension of the soul. Within polytheistic millennia Mensch (humans) experienced its “first innocence” in multifarious ways, in dimensions of differentiating, multiplying and worshipping diverse powers of extra-human kinds. Before the crucifixion of the Jewish God, human beings were anchored in a polycentric world (polloi theoi) in which their reifications defined a state of existence that was fundamentally baroque and manifold. Was it the “true world”? No, because Nietzsche is never chasing after the true, unchangeable world of permanence bequeathed to us by atomists (naturalists) and high priests. Their world of errors is akin to our world of errors, though polytheism harbours a far less torturous state of soul than does the modern (humanist) decadent. Why is this so? Because in Nietzsche’s genealogical philosophy the burden of guilt derived from the moral consciousness of indebtedness is (morality’s) sickness. It is true to say all moral codes or traditions tend toward burdening humankind with this unwanted sickness. Yet Nietzsche more pointedly finds the greatest decadence or sickly tyranny in those cosmogonies that are monistic i.e. centred upon the One. Hence returning again to our discussion of fragment 20 (Genealogy) it is the centralizing process of New Testament Christianity that disfigures the once noble Roman or Greek polytheist. As opposed to pagan or polytheistic traditions, the “rise of the Christian god as the maximum god that has been attained thus far therefore also brought a maximum of feelings of guilt into appearance on earth”. The maximization of the status of one god correlates with the maximization of guilt within the human psychƝ. Monopoly and centrality as opposed to multiplicity and de-centredness are the key targets of Nietzsche’s normative interrogation of human types and orders of rank/value. The formative powers of organization and measuring value are the perspectival means by which the human confronts the abyss or the fear of the Nothing. “Interpretation”, therefore, whether its scientific or unscientific is always necessary and thereto present in our construal of reality. Yet most notably those interpretative schemas that are tightly centred, unitary and authoritative in a singular sense tend toward the ignoble disposition of dogmatism, selftorture and bad conscience guilt. Hence if these important features predominate in a secular or “scientific” cosmogony, in Nietzsche’s eyes 10 Reification refers to an objectification of phenomena into a thing-like entity or quality.

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the murder of God by an unassailable “will to truth” is merely the deed of a decadent (value-lessness). In other words, to substitute the once ancient ascetic ideal (priest’s invention) with a scientific “will to truth” does not amount to either progress or nobility of spirit. Predominance of any perspectival kind merely attempts revert an incessant becoming back to some original form of Being–whether it be naturalistic (atomism) or religious (deism) in type. A “polytheism” of wills-to-truth in which a centrifugal force of spiritual direction abounds would much better approximate what Nietzsche calls the “good health”. Good health and de-monopolization–where perspectives may compete or exist vertically and horizontally with each other–arguably go hand-in-hand. Centralized spiritual power appears to denigrate the condition of the sensual human being who otherwise thrives in fluid and fecund conditions of human striving (even danger). Striving, rivalrous activity that is quintessential to the bios of the human belongs to both nature and civilization. The mono-theistic thrust within once tribal communities is almost analogous with the monopolizing thrust of early ancient states, which managed to at least accommodate if not foster polytheistic religious practices and technique. Archaic civilizations harboured barbarian and noble gods or deities and this afforded Nietzsche the proposition that religion in itself “has nothing to do with morality”– only Judaeo-Christian faith is moralistic to its core (WP146). The moralistic tenor and focus of this religious tradition is what brought about the decay and spiritual decline of the natural man or being. Its decline, due to a sickly rejection of sensuality and tragic danger, is bolstered by the aggrandizement of the One–the singular god. This singularity and spiritual monopoly accelerated and heightened the sickly state of soul of the once dangerous creature. It “grew ever onward in the same proportion as the concept of god and the feeling for god grew on earth” (GMII 20). In the plethora of pagan gods the feeling of guilt toward the deity was measured and checked by diverse festivities and ritual practices–they had to take care of the gods in order to secure the earth. Once the cult of the gods is supplanted by the One, șİȩȢ, the cult of the individual and its (troubled) conscience becomes supreme. Individual consciousness (will) comes to the centre in the likeness of the almighty Jewish-Christian god. Hence when the specter of a godless world looms large (after the scientific revolution), the remaining hole of void is filled-in by the god-like Sovereign Individual. It eventually leads to the insurmountable amalgam of material atomism: willed force or “will-force” dynamics. We can now see how the corruption of the soul stems from a religious nihilism that begins the destruction through 1) a debt owed to the

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deity and 2) a vanquishing of polytheistic deities by means of privileging one god as the supreme being. Atomism–or materialist determinism– cannot therefore be the proper corrective (solution) to the problem of religion. A-theism stems from theistic or, at least, spiritual exercises of the soul; hence the reason for Nietzsche’s dual critique of absolute, allencompassing systems of Being (Wesen): positive science and organized religion. Atheistic natural atomism embraces that world of faith in its faith in “laws of nature”, expressed through its unquestioning belief in a natural “will to truth” (wonderment of nature). Science it seems wants to replace the centred God with an indubitable Substance that permeates the entire cosmos. Whereas polytheistic cosmogonies preserved that sense of tapestry of compelling and fear evoking deities which demanded realms of life come under their sway. No single atom, force or physical law could assume penultimate status thereby making life healthier due to its inherent contestation. Naturalism as science-of-the-scholars would only lead to one more error or illusion: the illusion of “Substance”. Nietzsche goes even further with his “backward gaze” theory of and truth-giving or making. The scientist’s forged will to truth that pursues the god particle as an ultimate Substance, finds there to be force in the world. Force as a cause accounts for the state of objects and their alteration. From the above discussion, however, we find that Nietzsche correlates scientific “force” with the fabled “will” of individual consciousness. Both mythical entities prevail in modern thought, yet force is the heir of this struggling and striving conscience that turned bad once it knew (the weight of) guilt. The atomization of the clan or tribe’s debt to the deities resulted in an individualization that would inexorably prove torturous and freeing. This is the tragedy of divinization as Nietzsche saw it. What was once owed to the gods was given at the expense of a painful individuation replete with personal alienation. Specifically, through a remorse of having to surrender its own venting of various impulses, the animal soul turned its own powers against itself in the form of tamed civility. It would endow agents of consciousness with individuated “will”, but principally in the form of a “bad conscience”. Hence logically speaking if we all become atomists today, we would be no better off by sustaining this initial fundamental error. Will-force or force-will dyads reinforce one another even if they are essentially illusory i.e. unreal. Two substitutive maneuvers are therefore ruled out by his philosophy: first, Force to replace God; second, Will to replace God. These twin axes of “modern ideas” (BGE) represent the capstone of modern nihilism or scientific nihilism as it is called in The Gay Science.

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Combined they represent the arrogance of scientific reason with its claim to be free of prejudice and concerned only with “the truth”—a perfect truth of Being through Substance physics. Secular reason aims at demythologizing the world by ridding it of deities and yet paradoxically it re-mythologizes the world by means of an illusory Substance (atoms) and thinking-thing (Will). So, what is at issue here is not so much the presence or absence of deities, or that of profane reason, but rather the loss of something most precious to Nietzsche and modern neo-Romantics. That is, the “instinct for freedom” and its attendant “enormous quantity of freedom” (GMII 17). Whenever humans forge a form–“burning into oneself a will”– it must pay by means of its stock or quantity of freedom. In its own discovery (read experiment) of a soul it had to pay dearly by forging “a soul compliant-conflicted with itself” out of its former unhindered quanta of freedom (GMII 18). Freedom thus becomes tension between the twin nodes of “compliant-conflicted” states of soul—between resistance and commanding oneself. To be properly ensouled as a living creature it first of all must have known suffering and surrender (sacrifice). For without pain, without feeling its fear of loss of freedom, the human creature remains merely a free roaming animal (of instinct). Growth and extension are possible but they demand a high expenditure: sublimating one’s forces at the risk of self-alienating sickness. (With every thrust toward beauty an equal and opposite thrust toward ugliness is implicated.) Nietzsche here is propounding not only an economy of freedom but a philosophic préoccupe which is infrequently brandished. Namely, the ways and forms by which “all animal being becomes more spiritual and acquires wings” (GMIII 8) -- a superordinate theme often overlooked in commentaries on nihilism and God. This theme in tandem with his philosophic commitment to freedom11 punctuates every investigation into the soul and body. It is consequently the main underpinning to his ethical or normative quest to found (or identify) a “second innocence” of becoming, which is what our discussion thus far raises and problematizes. An “innocence” is not purely child-like; it is a Beginning that also incorporates the winged spiritual creature that is borne of historic estrangement. A birth of soul in futural time (becoming) and not merely of animalic impulses (body) comprises such a new innocence. Atheism may aid in this process as is implied by the following possibility: “Atheism and a kind of second innocence belong together” if the “prospect cannot be 11

See J. Mandalios Nietzsche and the Necessity of Freedom. Lexington Books: Lanham, 2008.

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dismissed that the perfect and final victory of atheism might free humanity from this entire feeling of having debts to its beginnings” (GMII 20). Yet it also harbours its own dangers of metaphysical conviction in the form previously outlined under the banner of “material atomism” i.e. atomicSubstance thinking. A second innocence or a second mythic construction contest each other in the eternal struggle for dominance i.e. power. The tragedy is never omitted in Nietzsche’s interpretation, but the possibility is always nigh and immanent. To be sure, a de-defied “godless” world would never preclude the generation of new illusions, myths and worlds as tragedy remains intrinsic to life itself. In fact its commencement is a new beginning at best but for Nietzsche never an end in itself- a telos toward which the whole world beckons. Elimination and destruction proceed apace with scientific nihilism and thus the ground for something new is laid. Notably although nihilism (as the absence of metaphysical deities/worlds) is a necessary phasic development and not a doctrine of the “free spirited”- it is not an end of the higher ones who shall exceed contemporary decadence. Nihilists or godless immoralists are not synonymous with those “noble souls” that know a true happiness through their experience of joyous freedom. At this point of our investigation, having set aside the question of religion versus atheism, we arrive at a vital, necessary conjunction of paramount elements. The conjunction will be more intelligible now that we have examined the saliency of polytheism and its polyvalent form i.e. plural vying centres comprising a manifold symbolic world. We can gain a glimpse of the conjuncture between the present, past and future by examining Nietzsche’s relation to the ancient Greeks. For it is in the ancient world that we first gain a glimpse of the Fall of Man as far as the pernicious drive to cruelty was transformed into its spiritual guise: the guilt of bad conscience. In the Bronze-Archaic age–before Socrates and Buddha- the first metamorphosis concerned the human-animal’s instinct to cause pain and suffering. Its curtailment by the state - or unitary civilization- by those artists of organization, saw the natural venting of this impulse (Trieb) come under the control of various regulative, “taming”, apparatuses of diverse sovereigns. Here under pagan polytheism the first social-physical transformation is under way: the cruel animal becomes spiritualized and thereby gains a soul, but it is a tensed soul. The human now has a Geist (Spirit) as well as a troubled Seele (soul) because it is riddled by the duality of its own origins–a duality highly definitive therefore of its formation. The process of becoming human, whilst unfinished, is quintessentially riven with conflicts; and the tamed creature must now constantly reinvent its own double-sided spirit (i.e. Sphinx) in

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obedience to the fundamental law of self-overcoming (GMIII 27). So the first oppressive act–of prohibition and repression–importantly precedes the religious presupposition of the priest, viz the ascetic life. At the time when the most tribal or pagan religions were not moralistic in orientation, the “bad conscience” made its first appearance. Spiritualized life, in short, required sublimation and self-estrangement from one’s wild nature.

The Redemptive Path Having undertaken this first metamorphosis we see that its extension and amplification emerges out of a will for more power and even domination. That is, it is only with an unconscious, abject drive of the sickened soul (guilt conscious soul) that the “religious presupposition” is appropriated “to drive his self-torture to its most gruesome severity and sharpness” (GMII 22). Religiosity, in other words, becomes one more means, one more weaponry, it can use to inflict upon itself in an endless search for a transcendental meaning–for Being over and above “becoming” (fleeting temporality). In search of absolute worthiness, it asceticizes its existence through the form of the “will to truth” which the priests monopolize and centralize under their peculiar, distinctive “religious presupposition”. The second grand transformation, which is equally if not more stupendous, massively accelerates and deepens the inner chambers of this labyrinthine soul with its multiple folds and contorted spaces. “Guilt before God” becomes the new instrument by which a soul confronts its necessity (desire) to make amends with its own origins; its own finitude, by means of its troubled spiritual genesis (GMII 22). This second development where priests expropriate the bad conscience for their own devices (by way of religious presuppositions) fundamentally alters the direction humankind will take for millennia. The will expressed through the ascetic’s “religious presupposition” now tends towards an ideal that will cut-off the channel of redemption: “that of the “holy God”” (GMII:22). This destructive ideal of asceticism will furnish a “kind of madness of the will in psychic cruelty” that is only known to, or specific to, the religion of monotheism- where the One and the “holy God” are synonymous. Before this particular synthesis–an expression of a will to power usurpation–there still remained a plausible pathway to “redemption” as Nietzsche called it. The redemptive path to a proper reconciliation with time–the origins related to favours of the god–had not yet been shut-off in the era of polytheistic practices. Here the nascent bad conscience was not yet alloyed to the singular, almighty “holy God” because Roman (or Indian) values were still ascendant. Pagan religiosity

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harboured the promise of atonement (see GMII 22) with one’s origins, one’s causa prima as temporal indebtedness, because the religious presupposition was still weak and brittle. Without a central(ized) godhead, a cephalous șİȩȢ (God), the tyranny of the “ideal” of an Almighty God who reigned over all things was notably absent. In a poly-centric universe the invented bad conscience and its manifold soul abided by a transcendental (spiritual) debt that was counter-checked by the existence of manifold gods and rituals of practice. We discovered this fact previously when discussing Nietzsche’s conception of the Romans and polytheistic tribes. The most illustrious example of an exemption to complete closure (of the route to atonement) is that of the ancient Greeks– whom Nietzsche the philologist gave lectures on each year at Basel. “For the longest time these Greeks used their gods precisely to keep “bad conscience” at arms length...that is, the reverse of the use which Christianity made of its god” (GMII 23). Instead of further propelling a pernicious, guilt-infected soul, the Greeks held in check its destructive force by not assailing against “the animal in man” or by tearing it apart (23). They did not rage against it (i.e. natural man) or allow a self-estrangement for they deified it by means of a hard, disciplined, baroque use of their gods. That is to say, Greek culture ennobled the existence of anthropos (humankind) through their noble fabrication and use of spiritual figures and powers. By means of deities, they deified Man(kind); and the spiritual reification of human forms produced as many gods as was useful to them: they saw themselves objectivated in their gods. We no longer have the ability or capacity to do so argues Nietzsche. We suffer the bad guilt but we no longer have recourse (access) to a memorial, originary Beginning to salvage our soul from Nihilism. (This is the reason why atheism fails as a fundamental resolution.) The tyranny of (monopolistic) closure had yet to bring down the figure “Man”, for he was still celebratory and joyful in disposition. Nietzsche went as far as to say that the Greeks, having made proper “noble” use of their gods, were thereby “able to remain cheerful about their freedom of soul” (23). Cheerfulness as an effect of “freedom of soul” was in fact founded in and constantly reinforced by their religious practices and rituals of life. Through honouring and revering tragic wisdom12 and intelligence the Greeks managed to invent a cheerfulness hitherto unknown to modern Christians. Their “freedom of soul” was never antithetical to the presence of deities in everyday life (this would 12 See Matthew Tones Nietzsche, Tension and the Tragic Disposition. Lexington Books: Lanham, 2014.

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proceed a pace until the arrival of Christian Platonism). Plato without the Church Fathers had enough nobility of thought to bestow western culture with magnificent tensions and concepts. The descent into the single god cosmogony with its attendant moral disposition would not occur because of the Eleatic thought i.e. Parmenides. It is only with the symbol and event of the crucifixion, the Cross, that the ontological One morphed into the single God of Christianity. Before this, the opening to freedom of soul was sustained by countless “festival games for the gods” because the latter were considered “friends of cruel spectacle” and thus required edification. Edification of the gods was a form of self-edification, one could say. Pagan Greeks subscribed to the dictum: “Every evil is justified, the sight of which edifies a god” (GMII 7), at least until tragic wisdom unfolded. Through festive and intelligence contests, the agon-ic spirit elevated to a height where beauty could be grasped. Their religious dramatic wisdom show that the “world is brimming with beautiful things but nevertheless poor, very poor in beautiful moments and in the unveilings of those things” (GS339). Nietzsche therefore thinks “they had good reason to summon the gods, for ungodly reality gives us the beautiful either never or only once!” (339). This observation implicates scientific atheism with an unwanted ugliness that will be characterised as European nihilism. Removing “God” leaves us with the same interminable question: how to share in Mitfreude (joy) and not the ugly. A purely logical, scientific world that is devoid of gods may also yield a meaningless existence full of ugliness. The point for Nietzsche then is: how does one gain Mitfreude either in the presence or absence of gods, and not the empiricist’s question whether gods are actually “fact”. The ontological structure nonetheless can be ascertained: physis (nature) beckons towards the veiling of the beautiful and sacrifices joy to the rarity of its unveiling. Artistry through the soul, or the spiritualization of nature as philosophia, is therefore essential according to Nietzsche. Artistry embodied in polytheistic and non-theistic transfiguration (i.e. deification) assists in opening up the avenue to the atonement of the “sickly man” of modernity. Nietzsche turned to the Greeks and Romans for lessons in how noble cultures practice a spiritual artistry for the enhancement of humanity; and he identifies an edifice of gods that wards off the metaphysical closure performed by sin-guilt laden Christian doctrines. Nature is violently indifferent and thus gives beauty only a rare chance; whereas all higher cultures with their specific “higher ones”, form and shape nature to esteem Mensch (humankind) by elevating it to new heights. Through celebratory practices and rituals of purification and

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excess, ancient cultures of the spirit stymied the brutal “punishment” regime of bad conscience, guilt religions. Furthermore, the passage backward to one’s harrowing origins was maintained by such diverse earthly transfigurations of spirit, soul, instinct, force and tragic joy. It is precisely this all-important aperture–in historical becoming –that Nietzsche seeks to re-salvage for the sake of the entire human race. The “event” of Christianity, analogous to the “event” of scientific atheism, cannot therefore ultimately be fateful or final. We must remember that this aperture in time’s unfolding is Nietzsche’s idea of redemption. Humans must maintain a way, a pathway, to the creditor-sacrifice powers (gods) of primordial Urania (celestial sky) Gaea (earth) that bestowed life to earthly mortals. Nietzsche implies that their progeny deeply signifies a metaphysical significance which pervades all ages–coupled to his other metaphysical import of the significance of joyfulness for Bios (life). Why beautiful joy and guilt-free connection with cosmic potencies are most highly prized are never metaphysically justified yet they are central to his tragic story. The universe after-all has no end, no purpose, and thus significant “events” of cosmological becoming can be determinate in the sense of evental arisings but can never represent the end of history- of striving, willing, measuring and valuing toward tragic joy. As events they are passable even if initially rupturous and perhaps “tragic”. Nietzsche is ultimately unconvinced by the (apparent) permanence of these two worldhistorical shattering Events. More precisely, Nietzsche conceives of these two important “events” as furthering change but more significantly as instances of overcoming. The negative and the destructive forces i.e. of spirit, are themselves vital elements of human overcoming as they inhere in the most fundamental process of creation and destruction: Becoming (Werden). In other words, in both instances of becoming religious and becoming empirical we found a human type that shall one day be overcome. This human type, whether ascetic or objectivistic, is no end in itself; it is no supreme ideal or destined penultimate creature of the universe even if diverse ideals (illusions or idols) represent it as such. Under the sway of such deceptive idols- sacred and profane- we interpretively project desirable ends or final conclusions onto the unnerving fleetingness of becoming. One seeks something ultimate in either “event”, in either origin of the nouveau, even if we constantly refuse the fact that the two phenomena (religion and science) are inextricably bound up with each other.13 Idol worship is prominent in either domain of life; 13

Nietzsche argued that in its “strictest, most spiritual formulation” the ascetic

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and the purist ideal of both the Scholar and the Priest- to deny this realityonly weakens or burdens human beings further. Each seek to ameliorate the cruel suffering of nature and deny in their respective ways how life is an expert in “justifying itself, of justifying its “evil”” (GMII 7.) The gods’ spectator games on earth à la Homer was only one interpretive means by which creative invention forestalled such a collapse into the abyss (e.g. evil, chaos).

ideal is found to be the core of scientific thought and “unconditional honest atheism” being “one of its final form” gives evidence to it (GMIII 27).

CHAPTER THREE BEYOND ATHEISM

In this chapter we look at how scepticism toward pure empiricism and enlightenment disbelief prove inadequate in the long run for Nietzsche’s noble “innocence of becoming”–an innocence which neither reason nor belief are capable of carriaging properly across spacetime. It raises the question not commonly asked by scholars yet today is frequently pondered by younger souls: What lies beyond atheism? Or, Quoi maintenant? The double-sided critique of predominate (modern) dispositions against the aforesaid ontological structure of physis has to be constantly borne in mind. Why? Is it mainly because of the twofold events that shatter the earth’s history? Perhaps but only in part; for Nietzsche adds a caveat to his devastating critique of atheistic asceticism: “its is the only air we breathe, we more spiritual human beings of this age” because against all other counterfeits it “in the end forbids itself the lie involved in belief in God” (GMIII 27.). The “lie” here notably consists of the monopolistic, singular God selected out of a kingdom of gods—indeed, the moral god of judgement and righteous condemnation. Spiritual human beings must breathe this more honest air but only to transvaluate the age–the time of Today and Today’s nihilism included. Higher spirited human beings breathe but they must not persist with this “air” of innocent empiricism. They are on their way to somewhere else, to where the non-lie does not yet know where it (i.e. becoming) shall go; to its overcoming state beyond its preparatory “unconditional honest atheism” (GMII:27). The moment shall come when the presupposition “there is no single God” will no longer abide or be effectual; it will preserve only within the backward glance of those privileged with an “historical sense”. However as science also lacks value-form and cannot evaluate things- it measures, calculates and describes- the supplantation of honest atheistic air (of dis-interested seeing) with bodies of facts will prove inadequate. The delusory state is described thus: “It is no different with the faith with which so many materialistic natural scientists rest content nowadays, the faith in a world that is supposed to have its equivalent and its measure in human thought and human valuations- a “world of truth” “(GS373).

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The “crudity and naiveté” of mechanistic science, its idiocy, shall have to also be overcome by those whom Nietzsche designates “more spiritual human beings of this age” (373; 379). Hence the lie of the One god has its parallel in the rational lie of unchanging physical laws of mechanical causation. As we noted earlier with the idea of Substance or the indubitable atom, the natural laws of physics or mechanics cannot play a substitutive function for God or the absence of God. Atomism and forcecausation cannot take the place of a baroque polytheism because it would merely insert a central ontology where previously there only existed a fecund spectrum of divined figures and authorities. What material atomism in the phase of “honest atheism” does hold is the prospect of regaining the Greeks’ famed “freedom of soul” by replacing “unto the holy God” with an honest conscience. To live with a clean conscience, without guilt, in the midst of nature–a nature interpreted many times over both naturally and artistically. And the latter includes the invention of deities that deify human powers in creative, noble ways in the complete absence of a guiltdebtor complex. For instance, to re-appropriate the Greek lesson: “The extent to which this has succeeded in Europe is best brought out by how alien Greek antiquity–a world without feelings of sin–strikes our sensibility as being” (GS135). Their inventions, their surface-folds of shaped, toned and written realities, is what an honest and clean conscience of science can share with noble Greek culture. Not fundamental robust sub-atomic particles as the Centre; instead, an open, honest, inquisitive attitude that leaves room for an artistry of interpretation and thus invention. The universe is enfolded by (and into) diverse perspectival interpretations that find the Centre nowhere, with forever shifting micro centre-points gathering into folded lines of direction. To this extent, the Greek Kosmos and Gottfried Leibniz’s cosmology wax together as a “promise of the future” for a postnihilistic thrust of inventive creativity. Nietzsche looks to the past in order to see the future (possibilities) because the past and present are enraveled into the future–as Leibniz had also argued. What succeeds modern nihilism will undoubtedly reflect the agonies of the scientific attitude (i.e. naturalistic evolution and disbelief); but it will undoubtedly also reflect the agonies of soul which the “catastrophic event” of de-sensualised Christianity inaugurated. Why so? For two reasons: most importantly because Nietzsche’s philosophy is grounded in the metaphysics of tensed dynamics and relations. Tensions are found to be pervasive in Nietzsche’s general thought and genealogies of the present; they persist against various kinds of dualism (e.g. good and evil) and dichotomous thinking. This is made

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explicit by his treatments of forms of knowledge in both Beyond Good and Evil and The Gay Science. The tension between the naturalistic readings of reality by means of calculative logic and, on the other hand, spiritual directives toward less guilt-ridden spirited human beings will prove decisive for the course of decadent modernity. It is for Nietzsche neither a mere fact nor something lamentable that this fundamental tension should persist after the deconstruction of the Almighty One–the god and atomparticle. Tensions are productive for change to occur and they simultaneously manifest the inherent mobile or fluid state of becoming. Tensed force-points in any compartment of life is a sign of vital life and a vigorous culture of agon (contest) between individuals and individual faculties. In this sense the contest between thought and belief, and polytheism and monotheism is highly productive for the advancement of nihilistic ideas and thus newly formed noble souls experiencing “freedom of soul”. It is the multiple tensions emergent from these world-historical contests (agon) that forge any futural formation.1 Second is the argument that so many contestations will inexorably lead to an ultimate, determining “event”–often as a consequence of the exercise of (and contest between) a will to power and will to truth. Both science and theism equally exhibit such qualities and dispositions; they equally express the struggle for extension, growth and domination whilst gathering up chaos into an intelligible form or tableau i.e. Actuality. “Events” traverse epochs, one’s time, to affect long-standing changes in the soul and body of human beings. They exceed their temporal origins and create new trajectories or altered futures which otherwise may have never emerged. Events through their concrete realization place chaos and joy on a plane that is powerfully decisive for countless wills- weak and strong wills alike. They are the measuring template and interpretive schemata by which evaluations of “good” and “evil” are possible; and they importantly act as pivotal points upon which phenomena turn and re-orient themselves. Key event turning-points for Nietzsche are: 1. the caging of the human animal (civilized state). 2. the “slave revolt” of the priesthood (guilt-indebtedness). 3. monotheistic moralization (redemption by God) and 4. scientific atheism as a result of European nihilism (naturalism). As events of the striving will to life and its consequent formation of a 1

Formation is a dynamic term of power and history signifying the coming-intobeing of a form through numerous processes of actualization.

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conscience, they are doubly anchored in time as backward-forward thrusts. Events retroject and project forces in such a way that a backward gaze onto being will inexorably impinge upon the future –the becoming of human beings. For instance, when the wild beast of nature had to forego its primal instincts to enter into Gesellshaft (society) this “caging” phenomenon would eventually help to forge the priestly caste along with its reprehensible moral debt of “bad conscience”. While all of the abovementioned four events are interlinked and developmentally associated–which is a key claim of Nietzschean genealogy–the real gem lies one step closer. Yes, every event is double-faced or temporally anchored- making all four grand events logically symbiotic- which allows us to see how the “future” already lay in the past and how the future was becoming in the present event. It is, undoubtedly, a sophisticated conception of the duration of becoming- of the unfolding and folding of forces into the Real. This has been eloquently examined in closer detail by Robin Small in Time and Becoming. We have already seen in the foregoing discussion a primary instance of two events being inextricably linked: the scientific logic of naturalism and the ascetic ideal of the priests’ revolt. Objectivity and otherworldly truth- seeking are unsurprisingly linked in a strong way: the former completing what the latter had instigated. In this regard we can say that Nietzsche is more interested in their respective formation (relations) than in their apparent opposition to each other. Recall that tension is the ubiquitous characteristic behind every form and its operative process. Lying beyond the real tension between naturalism and spiritual exercises of the soul is the greater matter of how the soul may be unburdened of its intrepid fear and guilt. It is the question concerning the atonement of a creature that has become so sickly and decadent. As a result of Christian nihilistic tendencies, “We Europeans confront a world of tremendous ruins. A few things are still towering, much looks decayed and uncanny, while most things already lie on the ground” (GS 358). Since “the faith in God has collapsed” and the community of Christianity is “shaken to its lowest foundations”, the source of redemption must now lie elsewhere; namely in time, two millennia back before the “slave revolt” conquered the Roman Empire (358). Unconditional or scientific atheism would have to undo two thousand years of ascetic discipline to achieve a good conscience which “in the end forbids itself the lie in faith in God” (GS 357). It is the major event of Europe for millennia, which was only preceded by the previous greatest event on earth: the overtaking of Roman polytheism by the demos (mob) of Judeo-Christianity. To withdraw the lie is itself an ethical deed; an act which seeks to redeem human beings from

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their wretched sinful state by restoring them back to their noble state (of spirit). A restoration, however, which is not devoid of faith and reverence, as we shall see later. For Nietzsche’s vision is, unacknowledged till the very end of life, thoroughly imbued with quasi-Protestant, neo-Romantic conceptions of life (Leben) and nature (Natur). He seeks not simply the Natural Man of Aristotle and Rousseau, or, the scientific scholar of Newton and Leibniz’s type; his is a Goethean adventure into the redemption of humankind–by the artistry Wissen of an art-science. Nietzsche’s saturation in Christian morality and metaphysics is evidenced by his constant forays into and criticisms of Christian concepts and doctrines. His preoccupation with theologic-metaphysical concerns marks each and every work devoted to a critique and genealogy of modern thought and values. Further still, they appear dominant even where Nietzsche seeks more affirmative, constructive treatment of the imminent possibilities for metamorphosis in time. His creative Zarathustra explicitly adopts and exploits both religious imagery and motifs for the purposes of portraying a new spirit- a spiritual sojourn beyond the limits of scientific nihilism and everyday politics i.e. the “height” above “valley existence of the herd”. Zarathustra and his other late works demonstrate a loss of innocence in religious matters: as with secular life “we are too experienced, too serious, too merry, too burned, too profound” to “believe that truth remains truth when the veils are withdrawn” (GS Preface 4). Without any absolute truth, a truth devoid of “eyes”, “life itself has become a problem” owing to a will to “question further, more deeply, severely, harshly, evilly and quietly” (4). Once the “trust in [simple] life is gone” because life is now problematized, the attraction of problematics only becomes greater in “more spiritual, more spiritualized men” (GS Preface 3). Nietzsche’s main problematic as a sceptical examiner of simple life is how can a new happiness–developed by these more spiritual ones–come to fruition once one understands the deep nihilism inherent in anthropomorphism? How is it possible to acquire a special, deeply authentic form of happiness once our sharp interpretations of the world are rendered anthropomorphic? Second, we have gained a self-consciousness of our anthropomorphic projections onto the skies and heavenly celestial bodies; and this entails a disenchantment of our innocence from polytheistic times. Knowing that we constantly project our phantasmatic cosmic images onto the world and that science only reveals the logical order of reality, we are as a race straddled by the desire to be happy (in the noble Greek fashion) and at the same time not be deluded by illusions. The ones who are futural, who are not yet born, will

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embody this potency of overcoming (represented as the overhuman) to see in a new constellation; not of irony, parody or subjectivism but a grander happiness that is only known by the ardour of suffering, striving and agon (contestation). Simple negation, in the form of negating a god, makes atheism insufficient for a transvaluation of decadence. Why? Because it originates from and thus reinforces European Nihilism i.e. nascent from its own ontological essence. Atheists as modern nihilists, as negators of mythical illusions and followers of the “will to truth”, are not adept at actualizing such a (new) noble happiness. As knowers they are most adept at searching for new dimensions of a biologico-organic and mathematical existence; yet they still remain within the “metaphysical faith upon which our faith in science rests” (GS 344). These “godless anti-metaphysicians” must recognize that the will to de-deify nature came “from the flame lit by a faith that is thousands of years old” when it had first deified the universe. To remove metaphysics and godliness would be the appropriate work of a scientific atheist. Such a scholar, a nihilist-scientist, would similarly pose the question “Why have morality at all when life, nature and history are “not moral”?” (GS344). Removing metaphysics and morality in the name of a pure will of non-deception (“objectivity”)–the demolishment of selfdeception–was not only illusory on behalf of faithful scientists (an act of self-deception) but moreover of a moral nature in essence. That is, even contemporary nihilists must affirm something when examining nature all too sceptically hence scepticism in and of itself is limited to a utility.2 What trumps it is truth-telling and what trumps truth-seeking is Philosophia and not Scientia. It is important to know the limits of scientific inquiry since empirical facts (natural science) must be interpreted; and every act or moment of interpretation is necessarily bound up with the phenomenon of “perspectivism”. Perspective and thought are the provenance of philological philosophy; they belong to the artistry and Wissen of philosophizing as a finite, human activity. In the age of nihilistic atheism and therefore positive naturalism, crude mechanists must never prevail over those whom Nietzsche designates (real) thinkers or “philosophers”. Unless scientists can think, that is be true thinkers and therefore interpreters, their famed naturalism cannot affirm anything because they are prone to substituting the “laws of nature” for God as the centre-piece of the universe. Rather than mechanical laws scientists ought to appreciate that their naturalistic perspective derives from and is 2

See Tim Mauldin The Metaphysics of Physics (Melbourne: Oxford University Press, 2007).

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dependent upon two essential constitutive forces: First, the abovementioned metaphysical faith that underpinned each polytheistic religion and the Judaeo-Christian tradition in particular. This is the millennia old faith (spirit) that inexorably pushed the “will to truth” to new glorious heights, eventually turning episteme into Science. Doing science maintains a “faith in science” as the phenomenon of rigorous inquiry and examination is grounded in the metaphysics of Platonism and his successors, the neo-Platonic Church thinkers. Neither science nor theology escape metaphysics because neither can dispense with a) truth b) deception and c) most importantly the finitude of perspective. Anthropic perspectivism is necessarily at work in each domain of human labour and struggle to render the enigma of life transparent (GS 373). The question of perspective and the importance of “reverence” will once again emerge in our analysis of Nietzsche’s post-secular argument. Second, and related to the first point, the “will to truth” embodied in modern natural sciences has articulated an inestimable or replete “faith in science” with its ability to disclose “another world”, as Nietzsche called it (GS 344). Scientists are not dissimilar to historians and theologians at the most fundamental level: they seek to escape self-delusion (“error”) by seeking the truth no less than the “moralist”. By abiding by the certainty found in their declared “laws of nature”, they attribute to nature not a body of facts or an exegesis of the nomoi (laws) but their own “eyes” need for order, continuity and material determinacy. Regularity or deterministic facts based upon patterned associations now fills the void left open by the nihilism of scientific atheism. Hence modern science in Nietzsche’s account of life is both advantageous and problematic. It cannot be the resolution of problems associated with the evacuation of God from everyday life. Its historical emergence has formed and shaped its actual modality as we have seen; and yet a strong genealogical account of naturalistic science only achieves a limited analysis of our post-secularized world. Genealogy is insufficient; for Nietzsche must establish the case for the validity of philosophizing (verb)–the art of the thinker par excellence. To philosophize entails being unseasonal or “untimely”, that is out of step with one’s era, one’s times. And this means there is an imperative to conceive of nature and being beyond the limitations of Now or scientific nihilism. Thought must exceed the bounds of negation wrought by nihilism’s reactive forces.3 Thinking in its pure form demands of both nihilists and scientists more than what any 3 See Gilles Deleuze Nietzsche and Philosophy (New York: Columbia University Press, 2006).

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epoch or society encapsulates. It is one of Nietzsche Nietzsche’s pivotal claims that the “spirit’s power” (die Kraft des Geistes) not be restricted to the strictures of society and, more particularly, modern decadence (i.e. “modern ideas”). The power of the “basic will of the spirit” (BGE 230) is conditioned by but not descended from constellations of historical time. Kraft and Geist cannot be reduced to mere configurations of the real by Geschichte (history). This has the profound effect of not letting naturalistic calculators of experience reign over others. They too contribute toward the malaise of scientific atheism as realism and therefore cannot escape the clutches of modern presuppositions. The task remains tautological: to naturalize nature; but henceforth once morality no longer dominates nature it will not be possible to simply replace “God” with mere laws or atoms of substance. Naturalization may appear sufficient at first when the “de-deification of the world” leads to a self–consciousness of our intrepid anthropomorphic projections. It allows us to see ourselves as animals, as creatures who need to project intelligible order and continuity upon chaos to derive “purpose “. Once the theists have vacated centre-stage Nietzsche wants to see a polytheism of perspectives spawn wherein time and “seeing” are not constricted by any centralized, singular being or ontology. Against the “monism” of neo–Platonic metaphysics, including that of Augustine, Aquinas and Kant, Nietzsche warns against a scientistic “positivist” monism of Substance (particles) or mechanistic laws of nature that are determined. This worry is then associated with what he calls the scientific or scholarly “objective person” who is only an instrument because “he belongs in the hands of one more powerful” (BGE 207). The illusion of “laws” coupled with the static, removed scientific man who is an instrument and not a philosopher gives modernity’s “modern man” a certain decadence, an a-theistic decadence. If atheism embodies an emptied out, soulless observer of inert material matter, making himself merely a mirror of nature’s variable destructions and productions, then scientific man is no cause celebre. A polytheistic scholar or physikos (scientist) would then embody what the soulless “mirror of nature” lacks; she would have to do more than merely “mirror” reality through her indifference and objective impartiality. Why is this so? Because whether it is the age of scientific nihilism or polytheistic forms of life, the most important valuation holds: “‘selflessness’ has no value either in heaven or on earth” (GS 345). If atheism or mechanical science only advocates or propagates an “impersonal” approach to knowledge, it falters as the observer “can do no better then to touch” and grasp problems “with the antennae of cold, curious thought” (345). The point, after a transcendence

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of scientific atheism is achieved, is to recognize that “All great problems demand great love, and of that only strong, round, secure spirits who have a firm grip on themselves are capable” (345). Even after the controversial axiom “if God himself should prove to be our most enduring lie” is tested we would still need more “round, secure spirits” who are strong and possess a firm grip on themselves (344). Science itself detracts from this because the impersonal mirror (of nature) shows its genetic “lack of personality” and thus its inherent incapability. It is another reason why Nietzsche defines such a mirror type (of humanity) as a lowly “instrument”. In a polytheistic universe, the selfless and instrumental types only exist contiguously along a spectrum of and spirits of knowledge. They do not pre-dominate or prevail; they cannot do so because a number of competing and varying perspectives will emerge out of the “basic spirit of the will”. What the polytheistic universe requires and indeed promotes is the “polyphonic” soul that Nietzsche mentions in Human All too Human (III). As opposed to the bland mirror of neutral reflection and observation which the scholar-scientist embodies, a polyphonic spiritedness eschews a “lack of personality” while embracing the truth that a single God does not exist but is so invented. Atheistic mirroring, hiding behind the façade of scientific objectivity, would only hasten the deep despair of modern nihilism. After the “death of God” “modern ideas”, as Nietzsche calls them, convey this deep-seated “unselfing” of the thinking individual– hence the modern scientist, just like the scholar and priest before him, is prone to the symptoms of decline and devaluation. “Cold, curious thought” and the mere mirroring of nature are only symptomatic of a world historical transition from a godly to a godless condition. It is in this context that we can now appreciate Nietzsche’s point that scientific atheism’s naturalism (i.e. atomism) only serves a useful purpose in fulfilling the direction of Christianity’s own auto-critique (or self -destruction in other words)–a path (of nihilism) first laid-out by Christians through the application of Logos to matters of faith. Scientific reason–emerging out of the mire of decline wrought by faith in God and a faith in “modern ideas”–is in some sense a completion of the religious “will to truth”; scientific truth seeks after a certitude that was once supplied only by holy writ and faith. Once the ascetic ideal was sublimated was into its scholarly heir–scientific reason–its religiosity was supplanted by a naturalistic attitude. An attitude or “perspective” as Nietzsche calls it which is properly representative of its times: the epoch of cultural (or spiritual) decline. Nietzsche therefore feels justified is saying two things about modern science: it is the most perfect completion of religious asceticism (secularism); second, despite its cold mirroring persona modern

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science promulgates the spirit of revenge (the core of decadence) in the mood of a cool-headed “facts-first” objectivity. Under the aegis of the scientific method–truth–those who grasped and promoted it divined an “instrument of destruction”: it “is revenge above all that science has been able to employ” (WP 457). Oppressed by the “prevailing truth” those “who had been pushed aside” and oppressed took revenge through the mirroring phenomenon of the will know i.e. science. Atomists replaced God with the atom–the indivisible last primary particle constitutive of all substances (hence things). To neutrally mirror the atomic substratum beneath all things is the mechanist’s ideal–the new decadent’s ideal no less. When the hope in God is lost–the monotheist god in this case–the naturalist’s projected image of (knowable) laws of nature quickly steps into the void to fill the gap–the gap of lack. However, whereas mechanists call for the “god particle”, Nietzsche wishes to remind all scientists that nature is nothing more than qualities (and quantities) of action. It is active, of force and motion, and not static; scientists in the main have only repeated the error of their counterparts: the metaphysicians. They too have believed in fundamental Being–and not the world of ceaseless actionreaction, namely Becoming. So whilst we have arrogantly usurped the power to “kill God”, in a state of decline (decadence) we take refuge in the certainty that mechanical science (empirical truth) is supposed to provide. Nietzsche does affirm in his Genealogy the relative advantage which atheistic naturalism affords nouveau free spirits–“its is the only air we breathe we more spiritual human beings of this age!” (II :27). Yet we must remember that “unconditional honest atheism” performs its great feat in unconcealing the “lie involved in belief in God” by completing the ascetic quest for an ultimate truth–it is in fact a final form of the millennia old religious asceticism. As abstinence it is an improvement of sorts; as a substitutive philosophical stance and practice it repeats an error; thus it recreates an illusion through its own self- deception. Foundational eternal knowledge is sought by both erring, delusive frameworks: firstly, that of metaphysics and then of natural science. Natural science, if decoupled from the presuppositions of Being and its attendant “physical laws”, can lead inquisitive minds into knowledge of the temporal, human-all-toohuman world. In particular physics with its understanding of “necessity” and its physiognomy of the body and eros in human existence. But the much-hailed physics of the will (to life), he cautions in the manner of the ancient Heraclitus, must attend to the dynamic processes of Becoming where modes of activity prevail. Physics ought not to be about (physical) laws but about complex interpretations and descriptions of temporal unfoldings of an enigmatic reality of generation and withering away–

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where no absolute beauty or truth abide. Which means knowledge can contribute to the state of Becoming provided it locks onto the being of Becoming and not the Being of becoming4. The seeker of knowledge, which is greatly lauded in the Gay Science and Beyond Good and Evil, is therefore one who contributes to the contingent freedom of “honest atheism”. Yet the knower of things of nature is also conditioned by the present epoch (i.e. decline) and comes under the sway of its prevailing “will to truth” as we have already discussed. In this respect it is noteworthy that secular humanism, along with secular (scientific) naturalism, are not sufficient in and of themselves–as ends. The “naturalistic” outlook of modern secular “scientific” persons cannot prove sufficient as an end nor can it as a resolution to millennia old problems of “value”, enhancement and noble tragedy. Within the perspective of a polytheistic cosmology where both gods and nature abide, the biologist and physicist of life can represent an irreligious understanding bereft of the great lie that a single Creator is behind all things. Their role in deconstructing a deified world–second only to the Christian moralists–helps to generate the forementioned abstinence in the two-thousand-year-old faith in an all-seeing and all-knowing God (single). But Nietzsche is very clear that Christianity itself brought about its own destruction; within the bowels of Christian metaphysics and morality lay the essence of its own disenchantment. A through-going scepticism with its trenchant penchant for criticism and self-criticism arose out of the pre-Lutheran morality of natural theology–from Maximus the Confessor, St Augustine and Aquinas’ works. Out of the sacred there emerges the profane reason of science, allowing the stoic disposition of discipline and regularity to become the bedrock of empirical observation. The Judaeo-Christian ascetic soul gave rise to science: and contrary to the popular nineteenth century image of Darwinism bringing about an end to religion Nietzsche maintains “Christianity as dogma perished of its own morality” (GMII: 27). It is “Christian truthfulness” that inexorably draws “its conclusion against itself” and thereby gives birth to a “most terrible, most questionable” spectacle. A spectacle which shall haunt Europe for two centuries: the devaluation of the highest values in the form of nihilism associated with the unfolding crisis in the will to truth. The abyss into which Europeans (or westerners) shall be thrown into will not be staved by science or atheism. Being rid of God–or atheism–is inherently inept at 4 Being-as-Wesen is associated with Parmenides’ unitary unchanging Being while “being” as das Seiende represents existing entities or singularities emergent from space-time. The latter are a subset of Becoming and not of abstract timeless Being (Ov in Greek).

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countering this problem; the problem of abyssal despair and uncertainty regarding the once sacred cow of “will to truth” remain unaddressed. No solution can be given because a-theism itself subsists within it, reinforcing the state of decline (decadence). Why? Because as a counter-force to theism, a-theism fundamentally remains a negative phenomenon- it is merely a negation of a prevailing order and being a negative movement, it only repeats the penchant of any nihilist. It embodies the will to negate, the will to make nothing out of that which was formed by blood and thought and agon (contestation). Theirs is not a noble striving of the agon type but a taking away, a destruction of sorts; of the gods though which men and women found themselves and invented meaning and non-atomic forms. An a-theist is essentially against power, life, will; s/he will know to negate and eliminate but the matter of what exactly to affirm in life remains essentially elusive for them. An atheist, or, what is often referred to as an “immoralist”, is mostly useful for declaring war on (established) morality: a moral order that stifles natural man and represses the erotics of embodied existence. As a Nay-sayer they stand to represent the negation of established Churchly values, the commonly virtues of the “common man”; but they also stand for the deep scepticism that the natural light of reason and philology5 supply the modern mind. Through a heightened consciousness of the necessity for “explanations” of real phenomena to constitute merely anthropomorphic projections of needs, drives and wills, they embody and expose the finiteness (limits) of all interpretations: Truth, Being, God. Through language and history–genealogic philology–they demonstrate that explanation as the bedrock of knowledge (Wissenschaft) is nothing more than (conditional) interpretation. All scientific laws are founded on postulates, conjectures, observations, associations, abstractions and conditioned senses; more significantly, perspectival frameworks. The modern (nihilist) sceptic finds each one of these frameworks of “perspectival seeing” porous, limited, formed, necessary and illusively persuasive. That is, each epistemic framework yields a persuasive account of reality as it carriages its own distinctive “will to truth” even while it basically constitutes a particular perspective and state of soul (BGE). This critical stage of what is called the “basic will of the spirit” (BGE 230) represents a certain advance on things before in at least two ways. 1.

5

The Sceptic, equipped by the Socratic art of self–examination and dialectical enquiry, compounds the Christian nihilist’s fundamental

As the science of symbolic meaning and textual interpretation.

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2.

insight and thereby assists in delivering the decisive “abstinence” from belief in the lie of an existing God (singular). The sceptic can assert “Have not all gods so far been such devils who have become holy and been baptized?” (BGE 227) The opening rendered by an abstinence in belief is an advantage of sorts. All scientific claims are founded in interpretive schemas which fundamentally are perspectives of estimation, measure, calculation, regularity, seeing–in short, of “valuations”. The human creature, in order to dispel the existential dread of meaninglessness (Schopenhauer’s problem) must impute value-forms upon nature’s cruel chaos. There are no “laws”, “mechanics”, patterns or atoms: only dynamic processes which are varying expressions of life’s “will to power” and human spirit. The will to nothingness (negation) and the will to unwill are key expressions of the Sceptic’s disposition towards unbelief. The disenchantment of science and religion as absolute ends in themselves lends “modern ideas” a certain doubtful status: are ideas of reason, truth, senses and substance sufficient (for life itself)? To unbelieve or to will a disbelief in God is certainly a form of willing–action in short–and thus falls under the rubric of becoming. We become ungodly or godless in the modern age of nihilism; nihilistic disbelief can be seen as a form of resistance against the power of the Church and its powerful ascetic priest. To the extent that it poses as a form of resistance against the almighty “slave revolt” of the priesthood, atheism helps to annihilate the “deep sleep” into which the populace have fallen. Sceptical modernity–as embodied in the annihilative truths of logical, scientific scepticism–thus emerges as a necessary antidote to the great slumber of those who believed that they had obtained (through revelation) a “true liberation from all delusion” (GM III:17). Following the French Revolution and the scientific revolutions, modern scepticism as an effect of contemporary European nihilism only intensified the feeling of listlessness arising from the famed murder of God. Despite the glorious mechanical activity of the atomists in modern laboratories, the nullification of the great “lie of the one God” produced an “abstinence” (from faith) indelibly marked by a pathologic listlessness. In particular, the modern sceptic helps to cause (compound in actuality) a certain moral listlessness following the death of the one, Christian God. Diversity of social rank and an increased self-consciousness of the operations of the will to truth,

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amplified the degree of uncertainty regarding the rightness of norms and the infallibility of truth sources. Nietzsche is clear that for the next two centuries (from 1888) the validity of norms and truths shall be fundamentally questionable: each become essentially contestable and contingent (upon perspectival–seeing). To leave aside the question of pathologies associated with the dormitiva of religion, the main point concerns what follows the abstinence in belief wrought by modern sceptics and nihilists–both Christian and scientific? Whereas atheists, or godless “immoralists”, take this negation as the penultimate event of history Nietzsche resoundingly rejects it. As negation, as an evental phenomenon par excellence, he concurs with its importance. He states: “in this manner Christianity as dogma perished of its own morality: in this manner Christianity as morality must now also perish–we stand at the threshold of this event.” (GMIII 27). The event is the highly charged scepticism concerning the sovereignty of the singular Christian God; other deifications are not per se under examination. No longer abiding by the belief in a singular, almighty God but by the principles of nature (energy, biologic-extension) humans have killed-off their own anthropomorphic images of a superior being. They have attained a level of self-consciousness regarding the power of the will to selfdeception: to discern a symbiosis between illusion and truth6. This consciousness of an illusory One god however is produced: it required time, durations of resistance, of questioning, of ascetic discipline and training, of measuring and evaluating. A revaluation had to be performed: the actualization of a new order of values through measure where “measuring was understood to occur through diverse kinds of willing (strong or weak, noble or ignoble) in the form of perspectives of life. This production of a consciousness of our self-imposed values of truth–perspectives becoming non-absolute in essence–was propelled in the exact same fashion as world religions had transformed the face of the earth. The later writings of Nietzsche affirm that scientific atheism is not merely negation; it is not devoid of a will even as it endeavours to eliminate the priest”s holy world. Atheism appears only as a refutation (negation) and a belief-negation (abstinence); yet in its rational dogma it pursues truth in a fashion very similar to that of the priest and metaphysician. The locus of “honest atheism”–represented by Schopenhauerian philosophy–is a “triumph achieved finally and with great 6

See John Mandalios “Necessity as Illusory Truth as Deceptive Actualization”, Cosmos and History: the journal of Natural and Social Philosophy, 2013, vol 9, no. 2.

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difficulty by the European conscience” (GS 357). The event as a renowned world-historical Event required the development of a “European conscience” which neither the Greeks nor the Romans possessed. This conscience formation—where reality is deciphered through its distinct form–unfolded through time in the process of Becoming: it “being the most fateful act of two thousand years of discipline for truth that in the end forbids itself the lie in faith in God” (GS 357). It is not a part of Being (Sein) but as a part of Becoming that this two-thousand-year-old development leads to a logic (dynamic) of unbelief. We must first remember that unbelief owes more to this allimportant European conscience than simply to a scepticism found ingrained in modern philosophy and science. The “conscience” of the modernes actually is a synthesis of two formerly independent consciences: the religious and the scientific consciences. The synthesis points to the prior formation of a scientific conscience in which dwells a certain intellectual cleanliness–it is an advancement upon prior unhealthy, moribund consciences such as the “bad conscience” or any guilt and shame conscience. A clean, honest and natural conscience would pave the way, according to Nietzsche, to a post-nihilist way of life–an ethos and happiness best exemplified by the noblest Greeks could be realized once again some time in the future. Before we move on to examine more closely the abovesaid will to unbelief let us first note the formational logic of this major phenomenon. A modern (open) conscience draws upon the development of a natural, scientific conscience which in turn drew upon an already existing (“formed”) religious conscience. Nietzsche consistently argues that natural or scientific formations are always necessarily formed out of prevalent religious or metaphysical systems. Ideas thought, logic, inquiry and calculation are never simply drawn out of thin-air. Any thorough genealogical investigation demonstrates that the discipline, rigour and tenacious will to truth of the theologic-metaphysician (“scholar”) were indispensable for the formation of a naturalistic attitude or scientific world-picture. It was the priestly caste who torturously invented mendacious methods to discipline and regulate the human animal’s instincts and impulses along with its unruly, adventurous spirit. Through its most “spiritual transformation” modern science now appears as “not the opposite of that ascetic ideal but rather its most recent and noblest form” (GMIII 23). The ascetic ideal of the priests “was made stronger” through an ensnaring, unconscious, most involuntary and most secretive subterranean version of the ideal (new form). By following the dictates of a regularity and calculability of the spirit–from the early Egyptian- Syrian desert monks–atheist scientists assumed the persona and

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performative function of the disinterested observer. They became mere mirrors of nature–without any persona, “cold” in Nietzsche’s language. What the scientist owes the theologian or dogmatic believer is the origin of his virtuous “intellectual cleanliness”: “You see what it was that really triumphed over the Christian God: Christian morality itself, the concept of truthfulness that was understood ever more rigorously, the father confessors refinement of the Christian conscience, translated and sublimated into a scientific conscience” (GS 357). Science’s operating conscience, in other words, is simply a former religious conscience “translated” into a secular profane form of ascetic meditative discipline (askesis in the ancient Greek). A translation–at the psychical level–requires some kind of sublimation according to Nietzsche’s model of energy and power- quanta. A sublimation is an unconscious formation or development of overt powers and potencies which currently are invested in predominant forms of self-preservation and extension. Natural inquiry thus emerged out of meditative and spiritual exercises which were principally concerned with acquiring the truth and, secondly, purifying the debased soul. The atom will eventually replace the I and “substance” eventually replaces the soul.

Against Objectivity Having now considered how scientific atheism first required a synthetic “good European conscience” to exist, we return to our previous point about a heightened self-consciousness of active perspectives vis-à-vis truth-telling. We said that science too develops in a fashion not dissimilar to religious motions of transformation. Both scientific and spiritual activity manifest a decisive will–to something rather than nothing. Each cannot simply be a revolt or “slave revolt” which over-turned existing institutions of life. Just as Christianity affirmed a new existence and not merely negated the old polytheistic order so too modern science embodies the pernicious “will to unbelief”. It wills more than negation; but to affirm it must of necessity embrace a form of willing–in pursuit of the Truth, it sets up a new category of “doers”. This new category is already hinted at in the atheistic naturalist who seems to only negate religion i.e. the nihilist. But as an expression of a will to power, the modern naturalist begins to express a creed or dogma that defies the appearance of neutral “mirroring”. His objectivity will be purchased at the cost of subscribing to a will of unbelief. As something of a polytheist-mystic, Nietzsche is rather scathing towards those who come to embody the (new) “noblest form of asceticism (GMIII:23). To start from the beginning though: Nietzsche

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claims “we philosophers and ‘free spirits’ feel, when we hear the news that “the old god is dead,” as if a new dawn shone on us; our heart overflows with gratitude, amazement premonitions, expectation” (GS 343) Yet in the next fragment of the Gay Science we find Nietzsche stating: “We see that science also rests on a faith; there simply is no science ‘without presuppositions’” (GS 344). Scientific natural man is with presuppositions, with convictions and with faith in natural reason. To adopt his valued mirroring stance toward phenomena, to “make it possible for this discipline to begin”, Nietzsche asks, “must there not be some prior conviction?” (GS 344) The faith in science is similar to the conviction that faith leads to the Truth insofar as a metaphysical faith undergirds science’s “unconditional will to truth” (GS 344). Hence he sees “godless antimetaphysicians” still perpetuating a faith, a conviction and a discipline that has its roots in ancient Platonism and Buddhism. The paradoxical effect of all of this is that a conviction has obtained admission into science only on the tactic that “it ceases to be a conviction” i.e. partial (344). However it is significant that Nietzsche’s castigation of science naturalism does not end with this immanent contradiction. Yes science does indeed maintain a conviction, a faith in truth and countless presuppositions built upon the old metaphysics of Plato–the famed one amongst Fathers of the Church. But it still is more than this: science’s will to unbelief is also deeply corrosive (or what he called “decadent”). Despite the unfolding “good conscience” of European intellectual cleanliness, these godless anti-metaphysical persons of science cannot escape the tenacious hold of their own (underlying) presuppositions. Truth’s perspectival suppositions are grounded in more than Greek Logos or logic in the modern sense of Cartesian deduction7. Why is it necessarily so? The clue lies in whereabouts the conviction for truth derives from and directs itself toward. It is not a particularly cognitional-epistemic motion of the human being that actualizes it. While it certainly remains complex in its manifoldness, Nietzsche finds it to be inextricably linked with a willing–energy or “power-will” that lies beneath modern nihilism. Nihilism as an extension of Christian theologic-interrogation and extensive refinement developed a kind of pessimism that sort refuge in knowledge and its progression. In the drive toward unbelief–to dislodge belief from the acquisition of mechanical laws of nature–the human being creates a pessimistic spirit. This modern “pessimism” cannot simply wallow in its own godless, purposeless wandering upon the face of the earth. As a 7

See Rene Descartes Meditations on First Philosophy, 4th ed. transl. Donald Cress (Cambridge: Hackett Publishing, 1998).

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temporal nihilist Nietzsche himself can observe the state of things through such lenses: “We know it well, the world in which we live is ungodly, immoral “inhuman”” (GS 346). These pessimists, who at first appear “free spirits” to the people, have negated the world of belief but at the same time fallen into the trap of self-deception i.e. illusion. By believing they have “advanced” beyond religiosity, by advancing and propagating disbelief as science, they have established yet another position, stance and viewpoint– an outlook upon Bios (life) itself. While atheism maybe something of a pre-condition for the all-important “second innocence of becoming” (GMII: 20) which the overhuman (Übermensch) shall embody, it is not this second innocence of becoming. A new, different form of Becoming shall flow forth out of this terrible, horrific and earth-shattering sense of scientific-moral purposelessness. To be rid of the god complex–the lie of millennia across Europe–these destroyers and negators replace God as causa prima with a physical noumenal substance designated as reality’s causa prima (first cause; GMII: 20). Of necessity they had to substitute the creator god with mechanical laws of physics and abstract mathematical principles which could stand in stead of the old, archaic causa prima. Secular naturalists, in other words, reinstate both a transcendent commitment to disclosing a noumenal reality and a belief-faith structure that belies their appearance of agnosticism. Failing the rigours and polytropoe8 of polytheistic forms of spirit and pathos, scientific atheism finds a new imperative, a new compulsion, out of the affects of its own striving will (to know). It cannot leave the world purposeless and valueless so its values pessimistically in accordance with its own sceptical will to unbelief. After expending much energy in producing his beloved Thus Spoke Zarathustra, Nietzsche captures the essence of this move, this motion, away from the single god to the abyss. In his newly added “book” to The Gay Science, Nietzsche extends his analysis between his famed “fearless ones” and nihilistic, naturalistic interpreters of the world. His analysis begins with a strong, critical question concerning “materialistic natural scientists” with their reliance on “our square little reason” (373). As truth-tellers, scientists are reliant upon a square little part or portion of the universe’s Becoming–of the processes of generation, decay, collapse, creation, growth, extension and thus genesis. They have unduly elevated the stature of logic: eksetasis (logical examination) in their attempt to gain a grasp of physical reality. Scientific reason, indeed, maintains a selfreinforcing logic or circle: “That the only justifiable interpretation of the 8

“Many-sided”; multiple manners or “ways” in the Greek.

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world should be one in which you are justified because one can continue to work and do research scientifically in your sense (you really mean, mechanistically?)” (GS 373). A rationalistic, “scientistic” interpretation of the world in the end is simply one (“mechanical”) interpretation amongst many; of many interpretations each according to the reverence it most esteems. And science most reveres knowability and certainty–things which both the philologist and artist see as precarious, rare and highly contingent. By reducing the complexity of life to these reductive reverences, naturalistic explanations suffer from a certain myopia, a limited horizon. Owing to their “faith in a world that is supposed to have its equivalent and its measure in human thought and human valuations”, materialistic naturalists are prone to a certain “crudity and naiveté” if not an idiocy (GS 373). An interpretation “that permits counting, calculating, weighing, seeing and touching and nothing more” might therefore “be one of the most stupid of all possible interpretations of the world, meaning that it would be one of the poorest in meaning” (373). This is the reason why atheism as a disenchantment of the religious cosmos is not freedom–it cannot be a “free spiritedness” or “self-overcoming” par excellence by any measure. It certainly acts productively as an “abstinence”, as a negation of the grand lie of a single supreme god. But this kind of myopic interpretation of the world can never attain a standpoint that apprehends the grandeur of the plenitude of the universe. The failure to obtain such a stature is necessarily linked to the forementioned conviction concerning an irrefragable will to truth pertaining to all knowable things.

CHAPTER FOUR FIN ASCETICISM AND NIHILISM

Yet it is more than simply its culmination as the noblest form of the “ascetic ideal” in history. It does draw metaphysically from the fire of millennia old religious beliefs and practices, and is driven into the future by its inexorable “faith in science”. In its explicit denial of an imperative to turn matters of everyday life toward the “salvation of the soul” and the sanctity of the Almighty One, it has committed itself to a negative form of the spirit. Negation is its virtue and strength; it negates away the certainty in a single God, in an absolute Being that is also the seat of all truth. Its negation is, however, performed at a particular cost. Secular reason—and all its bequeathed positivistic systems—must purchase its own negating power through an expressive will which stands beyond chemical and micro-organism life. These purported “free spirits” of nature are negators of piety and mysticism because they have retreated from a complete and thorough deconstruction of the will to life. The abyss of true modern meaninglessness expressed in the formula of chaotic forces ruling a purposeless universe of power-quanta, drove naturalists and secular rationalists to adopt, to embrace something—a will of some kind. Anything but the “will to nothingness” which Buddhism and Indian philosophy promulgated: better to confirm something than to be left with the Nothing (nihilio). Nihilists that is, had to become more; to change themselves they found it necessary to find meaning (and faith) in another will—a power-will of another sort. They cannot resist the imperative “to be”, to have or to be something more than pious. This goes beyond their addiction to “our square little reasons” and its superstructure of calculations, logic and mechanical determinants of the real (GS 373) Their ascetic scholar-like discipline commits them to mechanics and science as essentially the development of concepts (HA); yet such a commitment stems from a fundamental pessimism that yields a “monstrous insipidity” (GS 346) In a later discussion, one that extended his view of European nihilism and positivist science, Nietzsche takes up the problem of the “unbeliever” as much as the question of a declining faith (in the Christian god). All movements in Becoming, in the processes of life which include

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the “spiritualization” of organic matter, are amenable for examination. The hammer blows to which Nietzsche’s favoured “comprehensive accountings” points to via İȟȑIJĮıȘ (examination) delivers up a resounding critique of unbelievers too. Under “Our question mark” (346) Nietzsche commences with a fundamental distinction: between those overcoming free spirits who practice “gay science” and the Nay-saying unbelievers of secular society. “We have become cold, hard, and tough in the realization that the way of this world is anything but divine”, he argues. He declares, against the mob, “We are all three in such an advanced stage”: to use, “an old expression, godless, or unbelievers, or perhaps immoralists (346). Even though he declares the “world is not worth what we thought it was”, Nietzsche makes it clear “We are far from claiming that the world is worth less” (346). When he declares that true overcomers are at a more advanced stage, Nietzsche distinguishes between those who are higher spirits and the bitter, impassioned unbelievers of modern society. The shortcoming of our nascent unbeliever is earmarked by something more powerful than his insipid coldness—a coldness of reason, of mechanical causation and a chilly nihilism towards the world. Why so? Must not a liberation from the religious illusion of a monotheistic cosmos surely be a solution—a progressive step? It is only a half-measure at best of the estimated problem. For Nietzsche theism is not the ground problem: monopolization (active verb) in the form of “God”, “Truth” or “Atom” is part of the machinery of illusion that is entailed in Being—the penultimate myth. What unbelievers, at first glance “nihilists”, duplicate in their thirst for irreligiosity is their willful giving-over to the demands of the Truth of Being. Atheists do this not only though “the facts” of the senses; more significantly they create a new belief and orient themselves around the new belief. Nietzsche sets out to distinguish “higher types” from these more embittered martyrs of truth and Being: “Our is no longer the bitterness and passion of the person who has torn himself away and still feels compelled to turn his unbelief into a new belief, a purpose, a martyrdom” (GS 346). Have modern naturalists—sceptics, nihilists, atomists—merely converted one “purpose”, one “truth” into another? Has, in other words, the push to disbelief merely yielded another compulsion: a will to unbelief—the founding of another (purposeful) “will”, which acts as another drive and schema to be placed over primordial chaos? Nietzsche answers in the affirmative: in the age of the “godless ones” we find inexorably another creative, extensive reach expressing itself as a power-will. The impulse to live seeks again to prevail over the Nothing, the void of scientific nihilism. They have invented a new will, a new

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dogma out of the ashes of the old belief—of the old order of a single god which was itself merely a creation (and destruction in fact) out of an older, more noble (polytheistic) order of beings. The event “death of god” is a seemingly calamitous Event; yet it is neither triumphal nor unsurpassable by world-historical standards (or valuations). Nietzsche places the atheist’s all-important event—the Death of God—within the schema of willcreation: the generative force behind willing (the active verb). If “nothing should prove to be divine any more unless it were error, blindness, the lie”, does the scientist or lay naturalist relay on a “faith in science” which must “affirm another world than the world of life, nature and history? (GS 344) The turning of one’s “unbelief into a new belief” (346) exemplifies the wont of the will to find new forms—to extend itself and form itself out of an abyssal chaos. They do not rest content with dis-believing, with having “torn himself away” from Christian piety and finding contentment with release. Neither “release” nor simple tearing away from orthodoxy proves sufficient; naturalists must find meaning, “value”, in a way of life—one linked to truth disclosure. Atheist naturalists orient themselves around a particular form of will, of willful acting, valuing, measuring, living. Their converting of disbelief into a constancy and regularity of willful unbelief establishes a way of life that reflects the contemporary state of the will, one which is caught up with the condition of décadence. Nietzsche finds the scientism of modern mechanists and positivists—who contrary to popular belief affirm another world—as an exact expression of the modern “weak will”. The sickened state of the will, or the power-will, is characteristic of modern decadence; a decadence brought about slave spirits and nihilists alike. Nietzsche spends two volumes in his later writings to explicate the weakening of the will (of man) as a significant moment of the “death of God”. In the place of “God” humans, having experienced both scepticism and nihilism in conjunction with natural knowledge, find it necessary to comfort themselves with a new found source of certainty—a weakness which must be overcome by instituting a new world order of facts, laws and formulae. Certainty is, once again, founded on a conviction (i.e. impartiality) that a “faith in science” can sufficiently yield truthful facts of reality. Scientistic conviction and its new ideals of being measured and neutrality are more than simply the effects of modern asceticism. These aspects of modern materialism are specifically aspects of a weakened will which merely seeks refuge in the expression of a will to unknow the Christian God: the project of de-divination by means of a calculative reason that disenchants the mysteries of the world. They can only de-deify the world by committing themselves to a robust, mendacious will to unbelief as a

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scientific-philosophical standpoint. In doing so the weakness of will (in modernity) finds its unique expression in what Nietzsche calls “scientism”: “This illness has the prettiest pomp out-fits and liars’ clothes; and most of what displays itself today in the shop windows as for instance ‘objectivity’, ‘scientism’, ‘l’ art pour l’ art’, ‘pure will-less knowing’ is only dressed-up scepticism and paralysis of the will” (BGE 208). Scientism is the place of retreat in the face of another grand event: the “diagnosis of the European disease” yields a new ferment of the “disease of the will” (208). Both mechanistic and non-mechanistic interpretations of life within science are only “shop-window” appearances of a far weakened will—a diseased will of world-negating principles. Because these souls are mere mirrors, cold and mendaciously indifferent (“objective”) driven by the strictures of cold logic and world-negating abstractive thought, they are the effect of a deep European scepticism. Unbelief and the will to negate (nihilism) propelled and reinforced the one-time theologian’s scepticism towards matters of truth and existence. Transfigured into scientific rationality, the will in its weaker form appears as the intellectus of sceptical thought (skepsis in Greek). To render sceptical apprehension—shear interrogation for itself alone—productive, scientists and all atheistic naturalists found themselves running to “laws” (of nature) and armchair mathematical constructs for security. It is simply not enough to cut loose from “God”; one must instantiate, one needs to posit, an alternate order of reality over the essential enigma of life. To leave it alone (i.e. life and its enigma) is not the sceptic’s fundamental drive or ultimate purpose. After the ill and positive effects of scepticism, scientism needs to convert the world into the image it itself upholds—it projects its own self-image upon the universe. It must do so, “of necessity”, to redeem the humanistic world of Nothingness (“European Buddhism”) from the deep void of meaninglessness it must confront. Faith or conviction is placed in this world but in actuality it is placed in another world (other to history, morality, organicism). Post-sceptical perspectives upon life must transcend the limitations of scepticism; and the main reason for this has to do with a “reverence” for things (a point we shall come to shortly).

Philosophy beyond scepticism Let us first look at the limitations of scepticism though a distinction between it and philosophy. For the sceptical outlook characterizes the state of post-metaphysical thinking and existence; and it even undergirds the facticity of natural science and its plethora of methods. The sceptic has a

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conviction but the best he can do is deconstruct absolute claims to truth and objective reality. A sceptic embodies the forementioned will to negate and misleadingly portrays philosophy as a form of criticism and spiritualism (metaphysics). The popular mass, the uninitiated, cannot distinguish between them however. The luxury of scepticism was confused with the luxury of scholarly contemplation. Yet negation, a transfigured will to unbelief and critical deconstruction, is not the hallmarks of a (true) philosopher—these are not the tasks of a Philosopher. The “divine” may be deconstructable for the sceptic; but for the philosopher divination poses an inexorable impulse toward “height”, higher spirit and noble wisdom and therefore a constellation of spiritualized valuations. Sceptical interpretation as criticism and self-reflective inquiry do not constitute the true art of philosophizing. We need sceptical ones to establish the following: “The will is for him a magically effective force; the faith in the will as the cause of effects is the faith in magically effective forces” (GS 127). But the faith in sceptical thought (rationality) is the sceptic’s own foundational Achilles heel: the wont and the imperative to apply radical doubt towards all claims to truth and of knowable Being. The sceptics virtues are bound to “a feast of noble abstinence” both in the form of Montaigne’s “what do I know?” and the corrective “what good are all hasty hypotheses?” (BGE 208). When a philosopher “makes it known that he is not a sceptic” because he refuses “a will to the actual, active denial of life”, then he correctly eschews its “soporific and tranquilizer” effect. When the “active denial of life”, its boundless Nay-saying, becomes predominant (“decadence”) a “paralysis of the will” takes effect. When it is all dressed up seductively as objectivity and “scientism” for the shopwindows of Europe, this active energy of denial is “only dressed-up scepticism and paralysis of the will” (208). Once the population adheres to its noble abstinence and glories in its limited fact-gathering activity, scepticism becomes “the most spiritual expression of a certain complex physiological condition” and rapid social class mixing condition (208). He or she who exceeds scepticism is then considered “dangerous” since they are reckoned to be beyond “abstinence” and its pathologic “paralysis”. Those not under the sway of a sickly, weakened will are misrecognized by necessity: they appear not to valorize the Nay-saying virtues of sceptical scientism. Hence the philosopher—the elevated spirit and thus thinker—is out of step with the age; the populace understand both scepticism and nihilism but they feel threatened by the claimed “danger” of the affirmative one—the one who wills and affirms life and not the sceptic of all things divine. Nietzsche will later say that Dionysus is the god who

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partakes in philosophy: Dionysus philosophizes and creates value in the midst of tragic wisdom, something which the modern sceptic can barely comprehend. In a polytheistic world in other words, it is not enough to remain a mere (atheistic) sceptic or nihilist. Whereas with the prevalence of sceptical scientific naturalism, “the new generation” only knows “everything is unrest, disruption, doubt, experiment; the best powers have an inhibiting effect…in body and soul balance, centre of gravity, and perpendicular stability are lacking” (BGE 208). This has significant implications for what we observed to be an invidious “will to unbelief”: to turn the new negation into a new dogma, a new truth and a weakened will to power. In a state of unbelief—without a vital polytheism—we find a form of willing weakened and thus denigrated into a positive scientism (i.e. determinism); but further still this tendency inherent within scientism to bolster and edify unbelief into a “truth” is founded on the highest religious cruelty. Nietzsche typifies three kinds of “religious cruelty”: a human being sacrificed to their god; the strongest instincts sacrificed to their god; and thirdly, to “sacrifice God for nothingness” (BGE 55). As we are revering creatures—creatures that hold reverence for certain things—we have practiced a self-cruelty in different spiritual guises. The highest, most late, religious cruelty arrived once people sacrificed their reverence for, or lost faith in, “a secret harmony, in future bliss and justice” (55). Once they sacrificed their own god and “out of cruelty against themselves”, they worshipped “stones, stupidity, gravity, fate, nothingness” (55). The sceptic’s will along with the naturalistic will to the nothing, are mere effects of a profound religious cruelty. Humankind’s deepest selfalienation is therefore at the very base of today’s science, logic and sceptical reason. Once oblivious to gravity (in the Augustinian “city of God”) we now worship gravity—there is a new kind of stupidity now (as opposed to the “stupidity” of old which ignored gravity). The new stupidity identifies with the logic of atomism: that the universe primarily consists of floating atomic matter that merely collides and collapses into chaos. The substance ontology of atomism is the naturalist’s substitution of God. Its declared “stupidity” resides in its faith in science even whilst modern science has lost its sense of purposive direction and confidence (BGE). We persist with atoms instead of dynamic processes; and we persist with mechanics (laws) instead of relatively fluid lines of actualization though force and dynamic power-quanta. Instead of saving the appearances we prefer to save the Substance (i.e. Materialist faith)— with all its resplendent array of causes (when there is no causality as such). Third, and most importantly, the atomists are wrong—ever since

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Empedocles, Zeno and Epicurus—because material atomism cannot give an account of morality and history: it fails to explain why there is soultension in a universe of colliding photonic particles. Sheer substances, even if an ontology warranted their existence, could not generate the joyful wisdom of spirit that must experience joy and suffering, creation and decomposition. The particles physicists, even if disavowing causation, believe an element and its trajectories can fully account for all the forms of life. Nietzsche repeatedly warns against a pure naturalism that would neglect the might and stature of historical becoming (historie) and the problem of conscience, taste, character and reverence. Neither photons nor bosons can either reverie or keep a good conscience; they equally are unconcerned with intellectual or ethical “cleanliness”. The secular unbeliever faces a schism in her world: without a divine structure the material world order steps in to explain reality; yet materialism with its substance ontology fails to account for the workings of spirit, agon and history. Perhaps this is why Nietzsche declares that “We have got rid of materiality” (WP552), for materiality cannot account for them. Even when a strictly physiological explanation is given for “psychological pain”, Nietzsche maintains with “such a conception, speaking amongst ourselves, one can still be the strictest opponent of all materialism” (GMII:16). The symbiotic entwinement of physis (organic life) and Geist (spirit) is what defines experience; and experience must always be interpreted lest it collapse into crude facticity e.g. “psychological pain” is not due to a pain of the psyche. Atomic materialism and the theory of natural selection are therefore necessary heuristic interpretations of nature; they derive, in part, from the perspectival lenses of seeing from within the parameters of known time and space. The point against naturalistic materialism (atomism, physiology, sensualism) is that it is blind to its own non-materialist basis: science emerges out of the ascetic ideal and a religious conscience. Furthermore, each in turn are linked inextricably to the mighty “bad conscience” that preceded the scientific revolution (of the 12th and 16th centuries). For Nietzsche both the guilt complex of the “bad conscience” and the requirement to sublimate quanta of energy preceded the emergence of a sensibilité scientifique—a scientific soul. This at first appears to be a rather odd notion (or expression) in modern English. It does not refer to a soul that is scientific or a soul of science. But it does have some resonance with the argument that the rational, logical inquirer of the nature of things is ensouled by sensibilities and affect-forms that shape and contour his perspectival seeing. Nietzsche is saying not only that there are nonmaterial forces at play, but that the type of soul carried by and required by

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our famous factum brutum (mere fact) of the empirical scientist is of a particular ilk. Brutal facticity also represents the brute of modern unthinking observation. Against Francis Bacon and David Hume, there are “no facts” per se except for in the most mundane of ways. It is for this reason that Nietzsche says “language cannot get past its clumsiness and continues to speak of opposites where there are only degrees and many subtleties of levels” (BGE 24). Our scientific, secular or rationalistic discourse prevents us from seeing Becoming—as unfolding processes of formation (and destruction); we consequently seek empirical realities when all there are is a series of limited, finite descriptions known as “interpretations” And such interpretations (not actual “explanations”) are themselves immanent to finite, limited world descriptions which language sustains and propagates as “actual”. This perpetual cycle of truth-error making—as an integral element of Becoming—is where modern science as a secular order is situated. Its predominance within modern, secular nihilism is highly significant: “here and there we comprehend it and laugh about how precisely the best science tries best to keep us in this simplified, thoroughly artificial world that we have composed and forged into shape” (BGE 24). Thus the world of the godless “immoralists” is no less under the sway of illusions and fabrications than the moralists or the ascetic scholars’. The wont for simplification, for a phantasmatic reduction of physical complexity to laws and formulae, is intrinsic not only to language but to schema-needy finite organs of conception and sensation i.e. brain, mind, nervous system, bodily perception. After the so-called “death of God” the seductive appeal of brute facts and brute sensation is characteristic of a condition that is at once nihilistic and “human-all-toohuman”. The resorting to scientific standards (and norms) for a validation of life itself is a complete error of the Western imagination—of consciousness, following the rupture of a divine world order. If errors and illusions prevailed previously under the canopy of a single divine Being or God, then here (and now) no less there persists illusions and errancy—and indeed the won’t to abide by errors of interpretations. When we involuntarily sacrificed the eternality of divine forms to the facticity of concrete things, we committed the standard error of arrogantly acting like gods and thereby believing that our all too human fabrications of Being are the true reality, the Real. The illusory real is no illusory than before; the will to deceive (oneself) is no less prevalent, it merely metamorphoses into another form as we continue to “compose and forge” in different and new ways. This is the eternal process or dynamic of Becoming which Plato had previously described as the coming-into-being and inexorable passing

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away of matter. Hence we can say for Nietzsche the dissolving of the (single) God illusion does not in the least imply a return to the Real. A godless world, which may imply a return to Natur (natural world), would not be a world without illusions (and error) or deceptions. To remove the camel’s burden of guilt and the dead-weight of gravity by means of instilling a “faith in science” in the general populace at first appears a liberation—a liberation from the mysticism of metaphysics and other-worldly supernaturalism. To identify atoms and mechanical laws (of nature) by means of the use of logic and the senses is indeed progressive for the aforementioned “scientific soul”. Men and women with such soul structures—stemming from scientific atheism and naturalism’s “will to truth”—believe in scientific progress through logic, reason and the intrinsic drive for certainty in a ceaselessly chaotic, dynamic universe. To expunge and expel illusions of either a metaphysical or religious kind is the aim par excellence of all naturalists. Theirs is the aim to find patterns or regularly recurring patterns within atomic (chemical) nature to demystify the mysteries of nature and thus make the universe intelligible i.e. power of pleasure in knowledge and rendering the unfamiliar “familiar” and therefore comfortable. In doing so the carriage of Becoming exhibits the tensional recurrence between truth-error forces: activities of being human which contain at once “truth” elements and “errors” of different kinds. Given their intense entwinement—their virtual inseparability—it is unequivocal that naturalists (or modern secularists) will necessarily see themselves as eliminating errors and thus nearing the “Truth”: the eternal, unchanging patterns or substances of the universe. In this sense our forementioned themes of atheism, scientific nihilism and scepticism illustrate the delusional paucity of an anxious modern mind, The feeble scientific soul is riven with an anxiety to live in a familiar (formed) world now that God has been removed; secondly, its declared dependency on scientific calculability shrouds its very own nonscientific basis in a faith that lacks spiritual fortitude and progenation. Their faith goes unacknowledged: lacking a narrative of progenation they merely attempt the creative act by means of a new conception of time wherein the (new) Beginning commences with the end of the mystical supernatural world (of Christianity). Both anxious and self-referential (ungrounded) they nevertheless pursue “Truth” through an unrelenting conviction in certitude. In fact the world process through which modern naturalistic scepticism and reductionism arose is characterized by two most important features:

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1.

2.

The pangs of Becoming characterize these said struggles for certainty and truth-acquisition. The contestation between belief and sceptical reason, and the godless and spirited ones, ought to be understood as the struggle immanent to Becoming itself. Instead of Being, every impetus of the “basic spirit” is an expression of the world process of Becoming. Every moment of generation or the act of creation is prefigured by an act (or moment) of destruction. Degeneration or else destruction necessarily precedes the emergence of a new form of existence, a different form of life. Hence nihilism becomes the useful stage of sceptical reason where the “will” turns towards the nothing (godless destruction) even whilst it purses a supreme truth “of facts” designated as empirical science. This godless age exhibits extreme scepticism and anxiety regarding the ontological status of both sacred and profane things; it also embodies a heightened sense of perspectival interpretation and the wont to project human valuations onto all things non-human that flow from it. To this extent, Nietzsche welcomes the arrival of scientific naturalism as an outgrowth of nihilism’s roots in Christian asceticism and its attendant “religious conscience”.

But under these very same conditions where some advancement is made, the further impetus towards self-deception or “illusion” stems back the apparent advance. Namely, the deception of the lie of a single supreme god is disclosed; its knowing forms a part of the new “will to unbelief” which the unbeliever has (unnecessarily) elevated to a new doctrine, a natural dogma: scientific atheism. Hence it logically follows that the destruction of one illusion is merely replaced or substituted by another: the illusion of a real knowable universe devoid of deities and anthropic imaginaries of extra-human life-forms. This “empirical” world—where the act of self-deception and its illusions is elided—is the world of the “modern”: the sickly, decadent soul i.e. the “mirror man” of modern empirical physics. More importantly it suggests the penultimate truth of Nietzsche’s message apropos both of time and anthropic selfdelusion. Nietzsche conceives of the magnitude of time and space in terms of an “eternal return” where actuality reveals a repetition of illusory forms. The horrifying truth of a recurrence of truth-error oscillations, where illusion attends every act of truth-saying, means that the famed “death of God” event is not the commencement of a new age of godless Wesen (being). Within the eternal recurrence what is particularly significant is Schien (to appear, to shine) insofar as truths (actualities) appeared and

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shone in a particular light. The past tense of Scheinen signifies how the present is marked by the past i.e. scientific conscience arose from a religious conscience. This has import for the meaning of advancement beyond the dominance of a single god: once free spirits emerge out of and beyond nihilism they appear to lapse once again into belief. The illusion of naturalism only conceals the wont to erect another faith—a faith in science. But as we have seen the scientific soul remains unsatisfied with the emptiness of mechanics and facts. We noted that a tendency, a need, emerges from the ashes of scientific atheism in the form of a tenacious will to unbelief. Exponents of it transform the negating force of unbelief to a positive willing, a commitment to a cold new doctrine that eschews all entitles and divinities not assimilable to their world order. This is notably different to polytheism’s accommodation of diverse entities and powers under a non-centralized constellation of historic elements. Nietzsche is intensely critical of these new followers of unbelief who turn the distance (away from idols) into a raised-up position of truth and morality. They repeat the old error under the sway of an “old habit”: “The world, even if it is no longer a god, is still supposed to be capable of the divine power of creation… it is supposed to possess not only the intention but the means of avoiding any repetition” (WP1062). Rather than admitting to illusory forms that prevail over the scientific enterprise of knowing, repetition is sacrificed for (linear) “infinite transformations” (1062). Scientists harbour the old creator spiritus when they intentionally naturalize “infinite transformations” by denying the finitude of the cosmos and posit that a state of equilibrium is achievable. Through their “will to power” they intervene in the world process of Becoming in the new manner of a naturalistic creator spiritus; yet this does not prevent the cycle of eternal recurrence enacting its goalless state thereby throwing it up as another error/illusion of scientific positivism. In Nietzsche’s world concept a liner line of progress or advancement is ill conceived and thus inapplicable. The nihilists-atheist on the other hand clings to this habit—the hope expressed and founded in knowledge bearing truths that save human beings from the abyss of a purely calculative mind. The will to unbelief is then alloyed to a “materialistic atomism” suitable for the mechanists of a brutal industrial age of noise and arduous clamour. In this loud mass civilization these unbelievers shout out aloud their doctrinal commitment to an a-theism which is all too close to a(nother) dogma: to an unacknowledged metaphysics of science. Hence it arguably can be said as mankind begins to leave behind the Christian illusion of a single Supreme God, it recreates (recurrence) a metaphysics of presence based upon the mortal’s organs of measurement and

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calculation i.e. mathematical perception. This elevation of the organs (of sense and intelligibility) to hitherto unseen height defies the inner logic of Nietzsche’s all important tragic wisdom. The tragedy is being fulfilled in a Promethean age of excessive faith in a reeling scientific—technological dominance. Yet paradoxically its dominance is founded in the esoteric, no the concrete; its metaphysics (of causality, of presence) as we have discussed it thus far turns the modern mind to another world. This important statement is made twice: the first in his Joyful Science and then again in his On the Genealogy of Morality. Nietzsche begins firstly by stating that naturalistic opponents of asceticism who fall at the altar of the factual (factum brutum) “are rigid and unconditional like nobody else” “in their faith in truth” (GM III 24). Being the new embodiment of the ideal they seemingly oppose these unbelievers display a pernicious “renunciation of interpretation generally” (24). Manifesting the “belief in a metaphysical value, a value in itself of truth”, practioners of modern science pursue that which is “guaranteed and chartered by that [ascetic] ideal alone” (24). Embodying the newest, most advanced form of the ascetic ideal “all these pale atheists, antichristians, immoralists, nihilists, these sceptics, ephectics, hectics of the spirit” these “‘free, very free spirits’” of impartiality and “objectivity”— they each deceive themselves by claiming a lack of faith, of value, of an ideal. The “brute facts themselves” only further consolidates their unintended (self-) deception and their staunch commitment to disbelief (i.e. a new illusion). Facticity and the will to eschew belief or faith become the mark of the condition known as “decadence”. These decadents look only forward and fail to comprehend that the past moment is both present and projected into the future; namely, they deny the “repetition of the same” in the world process and assume the event of the Anti-Christ is somehow a new metaphysical Beginning. But it is only a significant moment of regeneration, of resurgent creative powers of Becoming that lead to a post-monotheist worldview with its own specific illusory forms. The cool air of honest atheism will produce the appearance of an honest natural reason and will, where only undistorted “knowing” will take place. Yet with the expulsion of the Christian God and the privileging of the factual, these modern decadents deny themselves the plenitude and richness of the process of Becoming exhibited in polytheism. Polytheistic societies by contrast better incorporate the range of regeneration and power of illusion—saturated meanings of existence. As we have already seen Nietzsche highly valued the pagan Roman and Greek structures of science, inquiry and religion i.e. Dionysus, Eros and Apollo. As he would put it: each civilization embodied those practices and virtues which its

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particular reverence for man and things allowed. Our reverence is for the ego—I and the atom (the homology is unmistaken); yet the Romans and the Indians—each with their respective sciences—revered and esteemed other things, other phenomena. With the “mocking and disinterested eye of an Epicurean god” 1 we could laugh at the serious absolutism of each reverence type a civilization holds onto—each espousing their form of reverence as eternal and noble. Even in a so-called “free education” where truths are sought, the rabble and its spirit imbues one’s upbringing and cultivation in the virtues of one’s profound reverences. Hence Nietzsche can be thought of here as an historico-anthropological comparativist of metaphysics and formational practices. He takes a synoptic view across time to compare and contrast those virtues and dispositions (i.e. godliness or secular faith) which our respective metaphysics determine to be Real, immutable and eternal. Beyond mere difference and diversity, he situates the specific tyranny or metaphysical narrowness of the Judaeo-Christian God cosmogony. It is important to remember that Nietzsche always looks to find ways to explain the relative weakness and sickliness (of the will) that characterizes western culture; in particular by highlighting the comparative differences in “our reverences” (GS 346). He argues that other “pagan” peoples who have similarly possessed science and spiritual prowess did not falter in ennobling their life through reverences of various kinds. Neither the Romans nor the Buddhists, for instance, were deficient as a result of a pessimism that possessed modern Europeans—both secular and religious. The pessimism owes to a weakened will—a de-spirited drive and compulsion for commanding and creative “legislating”—that has wrought a disease of the will and soul. Even the rise of a second class of nihilists (i.e. atheistic naturalists), with whom the “decline of the faith in the Christian god, the triumph of scientific atheism, is a generally European event” (GS 357), did not forestall another otherworldly disposition. Nietzsche states: “even we knowing ones of today, we godless ones and anti-metaphysicians” who are truthful “in that audacious and ultimate sense that the faith in science presupposes thus affirms another world than that of life, nature and history” (GM III 24). We have arrived at that point previously hinted at where the “scientific man of facts” is oriented not only by (a) faith but by a transcendent, invisible world of numbers and abstract realities. The search for a noumena —for a noumenal or unchanging state of Being—now drives the godless faithful ones who are 1

The more leisurely “garden philosophy” of Epicurus who was a natural thinker without stoical discipline.

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nonetheless enveloped by an all-encompassing “pessimism”. This naturalistic, tireless attempt to disclose reality, from the necessary ambiguity of appearances, is the mark of a pessimism of will. The new pessimism genetic to scientific atheism and its contradictory will—it simultaneously reifies things and reduces them—is certainly due to a weakened, diseased will (as the afterglow of European nihilism). However, its genetic form owes to a longstanding opposition which was violently inaugurated by the first, founding “slave revolt” of the (Jewish) priest. The opposition was first established religiously—metaphysically; it underpins the scientific method and therefore all “positivistic systems”. Nietzsche speaking of his higher “untimely ones” distances them from the common “modern man” of science who is caught up in the “masquerades of the feeling of weakness” (GS 347). These illusory masquerades posit “man as a ‘world negating’ principle, of man as the measure of the value of things, as judge of the world” (GS 346); and where the insipid juxtaposition of “man and world” sickness him and the enlightened ones. These nobler higher spirits resist “what is steaming around all of these positivistic systems”; the “vapour of a certain pessimistic gloom, something that smells of weariness, fatalism, disappointment, and fear of new disappointments” (GS 347). The weariness is camouflaged by the masquerades of a positive science that possesses a firm, clear ideal—an ideal to rival the meditative, reflective scholar’s of essentially monastic origins. Behind the appearance of objectivity and noble truth–gathering methods, these followers of unbelief sustain the central opposition constitutive of pessimism. This is the pernicious dualistic oppositions “that is more and more gaining worse and worse control of us Europeans”: “between the world in which we were at home up to now with our reverences…and another world that consists of us—an inexorable, fundamental, and deepest suspicion about ourselves” (346). The relentless critique and deconstruction of this world, our world, is neither thwarted nor ameliorated by the practice of science and the belief in a naturalistic ideal. Nietzsche’s fearless “untimely ones”—who prima facie appear equally as rational nihilists and naturalistic unbelievers—denounce the “terrifying Either/Or” which is posed for coming generations. The twin “other worlds” of scientific naturalism are required to be un-concealed, to be disclosed as sheer “masquerades” and pessimistic weakness. They will reveal, contrary to their claim, that “positivistic systems” in fact harbour no noble ideal; that in the age of functional purposefulness there is in fact no purpose, no goal, no final end; and that without “God” there is no ineluctable Truth of the Real. Nietzsche acknowledges the weight of science in modernity particularly with regard

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to its authority overshadowing a seemingly flagging philosophy. Yet despite its predominance it remains unsure and ontologically insecure since science fundamentally cannot posit or generate values. It is, however, part of our constellation of reverences—to return to our theme of what proves decisive once nihilism–atheism are overcome. Nietzsche maintains that Mensch (humans) is a creature of reverence, of holding things reverent; that natural man needs reverences in order to endure life, to endure its finite limited existence. He needs to respect himself but even more so to revere what lies beyond himself, his scientific soul—which implies etymologically “a fear of” combined with “to stand in awe of”. In Beyond Good and Evil Nietzsche makes clear how wrong-headed British physiologists are to see nature operating according to the imperatives for self-preservation. Nature itself is brutally indifferent—it knows no mercy, justice, balance or “right”. It is with our interpretations of nature that we come to revere or esteem particular aspects which are either selected or privileged above others. Natural selection, self-preservation, organic equilibrium are like “cause” and “atom”: anthropic principles projected onto nature2 i.e. the effects of a reverence type. Our reverences shape and cloud our perceptions; what the senses tell us is conditioned greatly by the modes of evaluation and arranging of a people and its age. Hence the British revere empirical facts, the Germans revere peasant “northern” piety and the Italians revere a “cold mendacious” sunny Mediterranean version of religiosity. And these very same evaluative interpretations are themselves filtered through established or created reverences of the spirit. This spirit—a two-sided phenomenon of life itself—proves decisive in the long run through its manifold twists and turns, and transfigurations. Next to the perennial impetus in the organic function for cellular chemical extension or “growth”, the “will to life” is similarly found and expressed through the “faith” we maintain in a variety of inorganic activities and functions. “Its needs and capacities are so far the same as those which physiologists posit for everything that lives, grows, and multiplies” says Nietzsche of the spirit (BGE 230). In the life-world of Geistes (spiritualized nature), that is where humans create their culture of values and morals, the most important of all matters is raised up by our most fundamental “will of the spirit”: the order 2

Will is one such example. Whether power and recurrence are also merely interpretations, or, otherwise subsist in the substrata of the Kosmos is not sufficiently resolved without an adequate metaphysics of nature and time. See further Henri Bergson The Creative Mind: an introduction to Metaphysics (New York: Dover, 2007).

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(or rank) of values, noble or base. Across the entirety of Nietzsche’s werke (works) and philosophic oeuvre what consistently comes through as supremely important is the question of the “order of values” and how greatness may ascent from it. He assigns the greatest of significance to this aspect of life’s autopoietic enhancement: above actions and deeds stands faith. Under the overcast sky of decadence where everything is “opaque and leaden”, the noble soul cannot be recognized by anything else other than its faith in the noble high: “It is not actions that prove him…nor is it ‘works’” (BGE 287). Nietzsche insists, following his German Protestant, quasi-Romantic education and cultivation, “it is the faith that is decisive here, that determines the order of rank” and formulates it thus: “to take up again an ancient religious formula in a new and more profound sense” (287). These post-nihilists—who abjure the antichristians’ revulsion in belief and doctrinaire anti-theism—are the few fearless, “noble ones” who possess a reverence of the noble soul (287). Faith, reverence and nobility are therefore intertwined in a unity (and dynamic) of the Geistes lifeworld. This holy and profane alliance, the “trinity” of a new more profound sense of redemption, is noticeably absent and overlooked by scholars of Nietzsche. With such a looming dark shadow (traditionally) cast by the figure of the “AntiChrist” it is completely overlooked: Nietzsche is thinking of an extra-animalic vision of the good (“the noble”, “greatness”) which incorporates the organic but does not subsume the inorganic or “spirit” under it. Our reverences, our diverse faiths and our diverse expressions of the noble, each of them composes more than what the oft celebrated body3 and drives do for the future of the spirit. Nietzsche claims that those who set their gaze upon hitherto unseen distant stars on the horizon—the new-comers of a noble soul—must already possess a nature, a characterological disposition that evinces “some fundamental certainty” about itself, “something that cannot be sought, nor found, nor perhaps lost” (287). It is inherent in the soul that is noble (and not decadent) for “The noble soul has reverence for itself” and is thus selfsufficient, masterful and directed by a futurity of soul unobtainable by the common masses (287). Those who, on the other hand, espouse an ungodly faith in a “theory of knowledge” dressed as “philosophers of reality” certainly maintain a specific type of faith and reverence—but unwittingly. Despite their declared will to unbelief these “hodgepodge philosophers” who call themselves “positivists” revere a method of inquiry that is metaphysically generated and requires a faith to sustain its idols e.g. 3

In Beyond Good and Evil Nietzsche declares the body to be an ideologic preference of modernity, something that belongs to our “modern prejudices”.

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objectivity, mirroring, explanation, causality, atom-as-Substance. These realist naturalists conduct their positive knowledge pursuits in accordance with their peculiarly modern concept of truth-gathering and factual disclosure. Their reverences once again guide and ultimately determine their orientation to things, to reality; it is their “spiritualized” drive (reverence) that has metamorphosed the creature of will and drives into a “mirroring” scientist. Faith and reverences transform our selfunderstanding; and these determined the ascent of hitherto unknown ascetics: scholars and scientists. Positivists therefore are not in the least devoid of faith and types of reverence. When they are not mere “mental labourers”, “positivists”, “mechanists” (GS 373) and calculators of “brutal facts”, “materialistic natural scientists rest content nowadays with “our square little reason” and its detrimental effect: a “doctrine of abstinence” (BGE 204). Calculative reason produces a particular reverence that predisposes reality toward “an indoor diversion for mathematicians” yet scientific naturalists necessarily misunderstand or indeed “forget” the conditioning reverence that first produced the calculative disposition. Hence the underlying rationality of unbelief with its concomitant power of will to commit itself to (nihilistic) godlessness, fashions a dogma of “abstinence” even whilst presenting the world through observable facts. Here we have moved beyond the (earlier) point that a destructive negation of theism marks the condition of nihilism. Beyond negation lies a will, a will-power, a rising up of calculative reason and mathematical logic that wishes to stamp the world with its own cognitional and soulful projections. This ruinous logic of “materialistic atomism”, of dogmatic naturalists who calculate the world from a mathematician’s armchair, is excessive of the ruinous state of the Church today. What emerges from the ash-heap is the result of the German Reformation: both modern science and that pernicious “plebeianism of the spirit” that underscores scientific atheism (GS 358). Beyond the “most efficient destroyers” of the Christian Church—theologians and Germans— the will to power of these godless anti-Christians who are garbed in logic and brutal facts betrays a fundamental “plebeianism of the spirit”. Consequently the “European spirit became shallower” and produced different, lower or more plebeian reverences to accommodate its spirit. For instance, science’s “modern scholar” manifests a distinct “lack of reverence, shame, and depth”; his insistence to unconceal, to reveal, “at whatever cost” the truth (i.e. facts) is in fact symptomatic of such a “plebeianism” of the spirit. The rudely, unrefined unveiling of the world—through “scientific explanation”—produces a plebeian “meaningless world”, an “idiocy” of

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“crudity and naiveté” which holds that all existence “must be based as on a ground floor” on “the first and last laws” of mechanics (GS 373). Faith in scientific disclosure produces a reverence for all mechanical-mathematical explanations—to the point of eternal truths, of eternal abstract infinities. These reverences of the rational “natural” mind pay reverence to Being over and above Becoming is Nietzsche’s argument. Their scientific faith in truth entails that disclosure carries a certain reverence for Being over the shadowy, shifting and elusive quality of Becoming. Their masqueraded errancy shows a commitment to Being; therefore it is not an errancy due to the idealism of naturalism (science), even if naturalism is riven with particular limits. The error of thinking and modern existence lies with the refusal to see Becoming in the world : things changing, unfolding, varying, multiplying and passing away and regenerating. The faithful unbelievers and scientists know how to say yes in the world (of will) but they affirm the Is of existence: that is Being. From Parmenides to Augustine and Newton, the truth of Being has prevailed over all inquiry—scientific and metaphysical—to the detriment of an honest affirmation of Bios (life). In denying that elusive quality of life which Nietzsche designates “Becoming” such Nay-sayers deceptively appear to us as Yes-sayers, “natural” men and women who affirm Sein (Being). We can see here how our apparent emancipation from religious faith is not the key concern of Nietzsche’s philosophy nor of his “godless, immoralist” stance. This is particularly evidenced by his ongoing concern to put a distance between those who call themselves “free spirits” (nihilists, antichristians, sceptics) and his own fearless, untimely ones of a higher spirit. In fact, Nietzsche problematizes the form of this new celebratory formation (after the grand crisis of European Christendom): those more spiritual ones of nobility who arise out of decadence and surpass its limitations. The transcendence of this type over the so-called modern “free spirits” is signified by two important expressions. The first is “If we simply called ourselves…godless, or unbelievers” (GS 346) where “simply” signifies a limitation or declared restriction on their kind and what they do. It implies something more or something greater than merely “unbelievers” and godless agents. The second is “using an old expression”, designating the godless or unbeliever as an earlier (or older) type through which we had to pass in order to get to greatness and a new nobility of spirit. Why is this progress necessarily apparent? Because Nietzsche states it himself thus: “We are all three in such an advanced stage”, adding further “that you, my curious friends—could never comprehend how we feel at this point” (GS 346). Then follows the pronoun “Ours” which distinguishes the new ones from the accomplished ones of “modern ideas”

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expressed through a predominant “scientific-positivistic form” (GS 347). Their superseding of the accomplished ones (pursuing Being through scientific logic) is made evident by the stern rebuke: “Our is no longer the bitterness and passion of the person who has torn himself away and still feels compelled to turn his unbelief into a new belief, a purpose, a martyrdom” (GS 346). The newer ones of a reinvigorated spirit of the will reject “turn[ing] his unbelief into a new belief” and thus reject the positivistic form of Being that attends that ascent of general nihilism. As the newer (untimely) ones have moved beyond antichristian belief, they similarly have moved beyond a naturalistic outlook of Being—where both science and metaphysics impute permanent Being onto an ever shifting and changing Becoming i.e. purposeless states of Becoming are attributed moral and organic purposes. So the accomplished “modern” ones who overcame Christian piety must themselves also be overcome; and if scientism overcame superstition or belief so too must it be overcome by the joyful wisdom of “seekers of knowledge” (GS). Nietzsche posits in Beyond Good and Evil (44) that there are “fore” and “back” souls, each with their respective illusive “fore-and backgrounds”. Here we find an argument which stipulates why or how contempories of scientific nihilism are both “back” and “fore” souls possessing a particular “life-will” and subsequently “power-will” (44). As life-will they conform to the naturalistic principles of organic life as existence. This modality—through their “back soul”—maintains the asceticism genetic to the modern scholar and his empty mirroring of nature. It obtains a culmination of the ascetic ideal by turning wisdom into an objectivity of the known world. The back soul is also present in the sceptic’s outlook, who questions the validity of all cosmologies and ground claims to truth but does so on the very basis that was originally eschewed i.e. morality and natural theology. Each express a certain powerwill by simultaneously advancing a post-theological ontology that exceeds the bounds of the old Christian worldview. Both the sceptical, rational naturalist and moral nihilist embody a power-will to not merely negate an otherworldly order but to found an alternate world order on the basis of Being, not belief. This itself exhibits a contradiction (and thus illusion) because, for Nietzsche, they deceive themselves in not realizing a powerful belief (and faith) undergirds their whole ontology and modus operandi. Moreover, theirs involves the self-deception that the murder of the Supreme One frees all to pursue reality “just as it is” and nothing besides. That is, their fore soul of adventuring a new kind of world order is merely the echo of a back soul’s pursuance of Sein (Being). Hence while there are varied spirits at work in the world, there is evidently also a

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dynamic movement of backward—forward, stimulus–response, force— counter–force and power–resistance. Which means that the malaise of modernity is similarly marked by such Janus-faced dynamics where the present (Is) is a compound of both historical and futural forces and pressures. “Being” then is pincered between two moments of Becoming which the finite mind must (erroneously) divide into “past” and “future”. Scientists have not only misunderstood their own ascetic formation through a powerful back soul; but their fore soul deludes them into thinking a positive science should take aim at the atoms of Being as it shows itself through phenomena i.e. phenomenologically. The question of Being—now naturalized and de-defied—still fixes their gaze as much as it did the metaphysician, theologian and priest. It is precisely for this reason that moderns are not free spirits: even once they have instituted a general nihilism their power-will of the fore soul fails to conceive of this dual (Janus)-faced movement of fundamental alteration between generation and destruction, Kraft and Gegenkraft (force and counter-force). Similarly, they err by desiring to smash illusion(s) in order to save knowing i.e. a redemption of knowledge. When in fact knowledge requires errors or erring and understanding similarly requires illusion or self-deception. The scientific soul it can be said comprises this very Janus-face of back and fore-souled motion: it looks forward beyond the Church (from Copernicus and Galileo onwards) but also preserves the norms and conventions of ascetic scholarly rule. A scientific soul necessarily pursues Truth4 and it is primarily through the notion of determination (cause) and Nomos (law of Physis) that it believes it can unlock Being. Nietzsche argues that all inquiry reflects a certain state or condition of the soul; therefore conceptual work is not merely done cognitively but also conforms with the prevailing structure of the soul. And we have seen thus far that the scientific soul is itself formed by reverences bestowed to it by the needs of an epoch, by the will of the spirit unfolding in the duration known as “nihilism”. While the old reverences are destroyed within one commotion, another set of reverences are created by the active will (of nihilism) which generates conditions favourable for the pursuit of Being through detached scientific observation i.e. factual description and logic. Observation and conceptualization in the age of science therefore occurs in accordance with the “needs” of dominant caste i.e. “the people”, the mass. For nihilism—as opposed to medieval tyranny—ushered in the sovereignty of “the people” both in their natural laws (physics) and their 4

Attainable truth of reality and not what Nietzsche admits of as “provisional truths”.

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affectual sentiments (“soul”), endowering them both with melancholy and force of “factum”. It is a part of Nietzsche’s double-accounting wherein he frequently identifies the twin or alter sides of phenomena, showing there to be (for instance) reverence and, on the other hand, error or deception. Never is Nietzsche, it can be said, a monist with respect to phenomena and the movements (processes) of Becoming. There are logics (dynamics) at work in the universe that leave nothing sacred, including the destroyers of the Church and the Christian faith. What the latter have tended towards in the wake of the event “the death of God” is the “rational, merciful or just” in the world—and that is just one more idealism, another crutch to lean on (GS 346) As “man is a reverent animal” Nietzsche scrutinizes the ungodly, immoral, “inhuman” world we inhabit and its non-spiritual “disenchanted” reverences. However, notably he does this from the standpoint of a height, a comprehensive perspective onto the world that accepts but also goes beyond the unbeliever’s concept of worldhood. Here we once again come upon Nietzsche’s notion of overcoming as “advancement”: the (true) overcomers advancing ahead of active nihilists and mirroring naturalists. He resoundingly states—against “an old expression”—“if we simply called ourselves…godless or unbelievers…we do not believe that this would even come close to designating us” (346). “Us” designating more than simply secular rationalists and naturalists, more than those who still feel compelled to turn his unbelief into a new belief, a purpose” (346). Nietzsche’s futural overcomers are decidedly ahead, more advanced, than these supposed “free spirits” who have found a new “purpose”, destiny and teleology (in materialistic atomism). Why so? He says what designates us from pretender free spirits is that “We are all three in such an advanced stage”—they exceeded the bounds of rebellion against the dominance of the Church and its single god and pious faith. Against the force of our contemporary needs expressed through so many reverences, his social realism militates against any archaic (moral) realism: “We have become, cold, hard, and tough in the realization that the way of this world is anything but divine” (346). With stronger, more intense fore souls such overcomers of modern ways (decadence) look beyond the reach of atheistic nihilism and the monotheistic belief in one Supreme God. To the extent that realism shows the “world is not worth what we thought it was, that is about as certain as anything of which our mistrust has finally got hold (346). Mistrust—a catalyst for philosophy—is the obverse side to reverence in Nietzsche’s double–accounting of Becoming’s manifestations. Yet we should not confuse mistrust and scepticism with the finer spirit of a higher Übermensch. Realism is only a single weaponry of those who have advanced beyond mechanics, atomism,

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piety, self-renunciation and the guilt complex associated with an almighty single god. Its coldness and hardness is only one side of the radical accounting for the Whole, as Goethe called it, which properly addresses the dimension of the human condition that Nietzsche announces as “human-all-too-human” (HA). The delusional state—the horror of reality saturated with the illusion and idols—requires what Nietzsche called “the hammer”; a philosophical anti-idealism which shatters idols and predominant illusions on the wake of advances heralded by an agonic tragic wisdom. Nietzsche’s idea of tragic wisdom entails a hammer for which a blow—the striking of the bell—against the times is integral to advancing the scientific soul beyond mere “mirroring” and empiricism. Being a type of wisdom the hammer also strikes like a fine-tuning fork that attunes itself to the vibrations present in the atmosphere. Such an instrument pays heed to subtle movements and motions all about it, and finds things brittle where they (once) appeared solid. The Church, “Truth”, metaphysical Being and the atom are instance of brittleness and factual permanence (solidity). While Nietzsche does not claim to practice German dialectics—and renounces the formal method of Hegelian dialectics—his tragedian form of wisdom encompasses a degree of Greek įȚĮOİțIJȚțȘ, entailing an indeterminant synthesis of collection and division. The process of bringing together through arrangement and division—often through the act of learning (i.e. dialectikos)—shows an intrinsic or inexorable symbiosis between two elements or sides. The one who practices this art of learning through inquiry, the įȚĮOİțIJȚțȦȢ, must take an account of both sides in order to find the contestation between two seemingly opposite forces or truth statements. On Nietzsche’s bearing, the new empirical truth-sayers hammer a blow to the old ecclesiastical brittle order; but they do not remain sufficiently attuned to the subtlety of the soul and the higher spirits who surpass the doltish mechanics of “materialistic atomism” (BGE 12). Despite their useful deconstruction of a monotheistic order of self-renunciation and pious transcendentalism, Nietzsche’s eloquent double-accounting demands that which can generate greatness, joy, nobility of spirit—a Beauty hitherto unknown by indolent moderns. The scientific soul cannot know of, let alone achieve, the eternality of joy and the infinity of Becoming (as re-creation). “Knowing” or noesis is only one side of the agon (contest) of living entities. And so the composer of music, the poet and the trained philologist develops a perspectivism that is beyond the reach of any specialist or mere calculator of the real; one which productively undergirds and promulgates the tragic wisdom. Here

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the forces of Naturphilosophie and Geisteswissenschaften conjoin to bring under sight the myriad brilliances of noesis (Wissen or “science”) and ensouled Geist (i.e. spirit, will, pathos, artistry). Neither side is sufficient hence they are brought together to work in tandem even if Nietzsche the modern dialectikos is unsure of how the Whole is composed exactly. The tragic dialectikos knows to assay, and even reign in, the forces of “art and science”. He is, in other words, against Wagner with science; and is for Wagner or art against the positivist scientist’s insipid wont for calculation and categorizing. The post-Renaissance split between Kunst and Wissen is repudiated throughout Nietzsche’s oeuvre, even as he wrote Human All Too Human against the artists (and metaphysicians) in the mood of scientific experimentation. On the other side equally, science is interrogated in both Beyond Good and Evil and On the Genealogy of Morality and shown to be the later expression of the pernicious “ascetic ideal”. It would be wrong to think that Nietzsche is merely espousing a naturalism that holds there is no moral order, or, where the world merely consists of eternally recurring events and phenomena5. The facts, for instance, that there is no equilibrium reached in chemical-physical dynamic states and that the magnitude of the universe is finite does not help us understand the dethronement of God, the musical form within life or the great heights of the spirit that experiences joy (after suffering). The project of life designated by “tragic wisdom” therefore combines the artistry of music (creativity) with the beauty of knowing nature and her innocence of Becoming (joyful science). Beauty no longer resides in a contemplation of Being (OQ) but in the participation of the vital unfolding of Bios through changing states and forms of being (Becoming). The beauty of numbers beheld by Pythagoras and then Heisenberg is taken by the human being who constructs arrangements and designs of the universe to render her world intelligible. The artistry of the human mind gives force to creation at the same time as its own environ is (re-)creating and destroying its own natural state. The intricate symbiosis between “knowing” and “artistry”—which a noble soul lives by—is difficult to be apprehended by an “industrious race of machinists and bridge-builders of the future, who have nothing but rough work to do” in a plebeian age (BGE 14). When there is more than “rough” work to be done a more refined posture is required: a knower must understand the “physics” of the world while simultaneously acting like a “singer, knight 5

See Simon May Ch. 4 “Why Nietzsche is Still in the Morality Game”, in Simon May (ed.) Nietzsche’s Genealogy of Morality: A Critical Guide (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2011).

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and free spirit” (EH Gay Science) in pursuing the wisdom of the world. Those who are rough, those who were antichristian nihilists and those who followed the popular prejudice for the senses (“sensualism”) shall be left behind by those forementioned who are decidedly more advanced. As they comprehend the contradiction (behind every sensualism): “the external world is the work of our organs? But then our body, as a part of this external world, would be the work of our organs”, they look beyond to becoming fearless spiritualized ones. They begin to enunciate and capture what Emerson first called “Joyous Science” (1842), a spirited agonic and courageous engagement with knowing existence or life in both organic and inorganic ways. The dance, as Nietzsche called it, prevented philosophers from becoming “serious”, from cold grey concept weavers of logic in their attempt to neatly explain the world and provide certainty in place of fear of the unknown. They would require more than “science” to overcome the Church’s authority; and more than simply a sceptical (nihilistic) negation of given truths by means of a critical faculty of reason. Such a “joyous science” would celebrate life through an affirmation of joy grounded in the inherent suffering and danger of living well, living as a sovereign and a commander. Yet we must be very attentive at the same time to the other, wiser, dimension of Joyous Science: the cutting-edge of truth from enlightenment. Here the appendage “science” (or scienza in Latin) carries with it the solidity and weight of those errors and illusions that have given form to the human animal. For instance, after chastising the “German soul” for its uncleanlines and sickliness Nietzsche succinctly captures the role of “science”: “they shall never have the honour of seeing the first honest spirit in the history of spirit, the spirit in which the truth comes to pass judgement on four millennia of counterfeiting” (EH Wagner Case 3). As counterfeiters German idealist philosophers necessarily disqualify themselves from honestly seeing the spirit and from discerning four thousand years of “counterfeiting” (falseness). The immense task, with all its attendant profundity, of unearthing the great corruption, the great lie, of a morality predicated on a superstitious Original Sin and a Good-Evil dualism, is the object of such a science.

Whole Perspectivism The trajectory of the spirit—with all its intricate byways and passages—is what the proper philosopher willingly tackles, with the “greatest responsibility” (WP 975), with a unique sense of truth passing

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“judgement” on the course of human unfolding powers. This awakening, and indeed enlightenment, concerning forms of counterfeiting is neither “serious” nor “humorous”: la gaya sciensa transcends this standard dualism and admits that the art of knowing is a wonderful, splendidly lifeaffirming activity. They simply need not become “scholars” or mirror— scientists without souls; for Nietzsche declares his fearless, untimely overcomers are beyond the pale of “scientism” and ascetic mental labouring (characteristic of modern scholars). Nietzsche’s idea of a Joyous Science entails the seemingly odd combination of cheerfulness and knowledge; or in archaic terms the poetics of life and noesis (knowledge) of the workings of nature. The latter should not weigh-down the knower who is also the creator (poiesis) of his lived experience of the world. So much more than the sceptic and the nihilist, the creature of a Joyous Science wills a cheerful knowledge of the physics-affects of the world in part to demolish the lies (e.g. illusions) of millennia. For instance, in Ecce Homo Nietzsche declares prophetically “For when the truth squares up to the lie of millennia, we will have upheavals, a spasm of earthquakes, a removal of mountain and valley such as has never been dreamed of” (Why I Am a Destiny 1). While revelatory knowledge of the kind associated with religious faith or mystical sage epiphanies is cast aside by Nietzsche’s “enlightenment” perspective, the requirement to move “mountain and valley” demands some kind affirmative knowledge. One affirms life, affirms existence, with the joy of knowing what the profoundest tasks require: a virile responsibility but also an “emerald happiness” and “divine delicacy” emblematic of the god Dionysus. The “highest of all species of being” represented in the “highest reality” known as the overman, manifests in him that “all opposites are fused together into a new unity” (EH Thus Spoke Zarathustra 6). Not only are poetics–noesis unified but also the “highest and the lowest powers of human nature”, the airiest and the heaviest, the sweetest and the most fearsome, the most organic and most spiritual of forces (6). It is this perspectivism of the Whole, in attendance with the respective operations of soul-activation, that steer such things which natural scientists after the death of God miss. Science versus religion, art versus logic, belief versus unbelief, and Being versus Becoming: dualisms of every kind show the work of errancy, of illusion, and the disease of the will. Exponents of dualism, formerly theological and now naturalistic, therefore have the least chance to ever “know what is truth” (6). So then for Nietzsche while Christians may no longer have the truth as such it cannot be said that science simply delivers truth by way of observation or calculus. What Jenseits von Gut und Böse makes very clear is that with the end of the two millennial lie—the event

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of a-theism—we are anything but free to apprehend the truth of dynamic, vital Becoming. As we have already seen, a critical sense of our contemporary naturalistic reverences shows that “an essentially mechanical world would be an essentially meaningless world” (GS 375). The naturalistic reverence for that which can be “counted, calculated, and expressed in formulas” renders the “value of a piece of music” calculable, measurable and formalic. This interpretation, not “explanation”, defies and thus denies the “infinite interpretations” that make for a richer (Renaissance–style) experimental perspectivism which would underpin any futural polytheism. A polytheism in which multiple, vying modes of practice and interpretation make truth no longer simply the product of “our square little reason”—or the operations of (Descartes’) Cogito. Theodicies and cosmologies of various kinds would sit alongside of heterogeneous sciences that would be historically associated with different traditions of asceticism and divination. The otherworldly dimension of mathematics and physics naturally reflecting the otherworldly sources of contemplation and “meditation” found in religions e.g. Parmenides, Newton-Leibniz, Descartes, Pascal and Vedic texts. A post-secular Nietzsche would promulgate just such a view, on the formation of diverse admixures of Becoming and Being where the Nothing is overcome by willing into existence the magisterial sublime. Accordingly to follow the logic of Nietzsche’s thinking there arises a spectrum of reverences under the world structure of polytheism wherein what is “interpreted” as sacred or profane is in “accordance with the wishes of our reverence” (GS 346). Given the admixture and, more likely, synthesis of scientific and religious traditions, a plethora of diverging reverences would produce a thick constellation of “wishes”. While interpretations of “good and evil” are already multiple, they are underscored by a multiplicity of reverences which ascend and descend according to magisterial power and gravity. Some reverences would conflict and vie with each other for symbolic significance, giving rise to a contending hierarchy of value and “wishes”. Such is, for instance, the fact of cleanliness, both physical and spiritual; of dietetics and digestion, both physical and spiritual; of removal and solitude; of discipline and cultivation, both physical and spiritual; and of courageous honesty in suffering and joy both in physical and spiritual matters. Hence ideals too emerge out of such altering hierarchies of lower and upper reverences with their attendant wishes. The priest—along with the scholar scientist and moralist—dramatically altered the scales of existing valued practices and directions of spiritual enhancement. With each spiritual (moral)

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interjection, old reverences are interrupted by new ones which impose their own natural magisterial force. We ought to remember that the interruption caused by nihilist-atheists is one such example of an old authority’s reverences being supplanted by a newer more powerful regime of magisterial reverences. “Objectively” and unselfing the modern ego (I) are two basic weightings of the modern scale of ĮȟȚĮ (worth): of according value or “valuing” in accordance with prevailing reverences and suspicions; what are in effect wishes and, in particular, needs. Nietzsche’s conception of ࢦpaȤȘı (acting, doing) and therefore the diverse ways of esteeming, revering or divining things is fundamentally anthropological. Without an explicit elaboration of what Homer and Hesiod would understand as a “reverence”, Nietzsche determines reverences to reflect “our needs” even more than our wishes. Here he finds the forces behind and underlying the fundamental condition known as the human-all -too human—which neither state—church nor socialization can radically alter. He says that “man is a reverent animal” made of particular prejudices, needs and mendacious ways of projecting idealistic wishes into divine forms. Actions and activities are directed by important superordinate “ideals” that govern the conduct of human beings in large numbers (i.e. herds) and across many centuries. Christian ideals and the corresponding ideals of the priestly–ascetic creature will subsequently ground the ideals of two modern types supremely significant for understanding “decline” and “modern society”. Our reverences today are the product of two ideals: the atomic ideal of contemporary naturalists, the scientific soul’s ideality; and the “lower” humbling ideal of the “democrat”–moralist. This unique amalgam defines the post-nihilist condition which is ordinarily hailed as the epoch freed from the tyranny of religious fervour and guilt. The latter coupling of ideals (democrat–moralist) itself evinces two distinct directionalities toward levelling, sameness-as-inclusion; and the drive towards an accountability for all human affairs and actions. The moralist– democrat each share, according to Nietzsche’s genealogy, Paul’s universalist ethic that differences under the one God are rendered meaningless by the event of the Crucifixion, the redemptive act. Redemption, although formerly spiritual, inexorably becomes socialist, moralistic and naturalistic (scientific)—in accordance with their respective ideals. The reverences of the levelling democrat, evaluating moralist and mirrored soul of objective science thus constitute a misfortune of culture known as (secular) decadence and “decline of man”. Yet behind such pernicious forms of being—with the abovesaid double amalgam of “ideals”—it is important to recognize the element of “spiritualization” within such highly significant processes of formation, of

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Becoming more generally. Because Nietzsche was never convinced by materialism or “materialistic atomism” on the basis of the superiority of Boscovich and Heraclitus’ world thinking (BGE), his said doubleaccounting of real phenomena equally relies upon non-material/Substance forces i.e. processes. That is, needs and the instinct for error (deception), and mistrust are anthropologically signified, but Nietzsche’s training in Greek tragedy along with his Lutheran theological Weltanschauung (world encompassment, outlook) also gave expression to the directives of the spirit: comprising a spiritedness of mind (Geist) and soul (Seele). This is what the poet-artist of the power of tragic wisdom understands and indeed captures in his philosophy. Contra science as “facts themselves” he must demonstrate to the whole world the basic insight of loving one’s own fatum, one’s existing fate or destiny, without demanding that existence should be different i.e. amor fati. The idea of an “eternal recurrence” of the world is both ancient and cosmological. Second is the matter of what lies beyond good and evil: the “immoralist” (Nietzsche) brings to light the fundamental truth that something enigmatic yet real transcends the clear classifications of Good and Evil. Here neither empirical facts nor experience prove useful in discerning that elusive non-distinction, a quality proving rather enigmatic yet forceful throughout the history of the animal’s moral consciousness. The conscience, the Beyond and amor fati are each facets of tragic wisdom or “Dionysian philosophy” that can only be properly expounded by a unity of science and philosophy (artistry). The Whole or what Nietzsche’s Greek mentor, Heraclitus, called the Logos requires just such a unity of episteme and techne. Here Greek ȜȠȖȠȢ and German Wissen coalesce around the non-antagonistic or non-opposing relation between seemingly different dimensions of creation (generation and destruction). This relation, applicable to light-dark and being-nonbeing is founded in the bedrock of western metaphysics as represented by Plato’s Sophist and captures the intertwinement and thus unity between two unlike phenomena or qualities. Spirit, body and soul are inseparable in Nietzsche’s mind; we can hardly separate body and soul not to mention removing the natural link between spirit and soul argues Nietzsche (BGE). Since the invention of the soul some millennia ago, we can no longer do without the depth of perception and sensibility bequeathed to us by ascetics and priests. Against most variants of naturalism Nietzsche maintains a line of development diverging not only from scientific principles but one which eschews ontological categories for phenomena such as “soul”, guilt and consciousness. Because the atomist (and thus the physiologist as well) cannot provide a deep ground for reality—an abiding ontology—Nietzsche

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envisions a dynamic creative process at work in the hands of historic agents or persons. More precisely, the trajectory of the spirit (more so than the body) is governed by tension and ĮȖȦȞ (contest) but it is also steered or altered by the imaginär or in Latin the imaginarius (phantasmatic generation and projection). What materialistic atomism and ontologictheology miss is precisely this dimension of creation-destruction: the processes manifest concretely or “atomically” through and in phenomena, yet as fundament they are neither. Once the bad conscience along with the required consciousness for immanent “will to knowledge” emerged historically, they developed autonomously along their specific pathways. It is worth stating at this point that a polytheism of science-religion matrices would promote what the mature Nietzsche called a “great health” (GS 382) of autonomous logics of directive potencies. No stifling of a predetermined or pre-divined kind would exist to altogether stifle of eliminate a symbolic or mythical potency (valency in physics) with directive potential. Even if the “soul” is said to be an invention (by spiritual directors and metaphysicians) is too valuable a gain in history to dispense with it, calling for more transfigurations of it in future (BGE). “Sciencing” too with all its mechanical tendencies and methodological reductions ought to proliferate into various forms with a degree of contestation and tension, each presenting a perspective on knowledge and a body of truths. Nietzsche acknowledges there is Indian and Buddhist science before there ever was Greek and Roman science. If the soul can be said to have its “as yet unexhausted possibilities” so too with “science” and “spirit”. Polytheistic creation would accommodate these endless possibilities, of various cultural–symbolic forms; and their respective directions would remain largely un-determined or unfixed, with possible new directions requiring incisive work by physicists, psychologists, philosophers and historians. Each of these hunters of the Whole help with the “arranging and forcing into formulas” the nature of painful and dangerous experiences. A vital, experimental Joyous Science would not be predicated on the infamous standard binary of Either/Or thinking but would instead follow And/With combinations. For instance, science and religion, natural instincts and spiritualization, recurrence and novelty. Hence once the work of the godless ones brings a halt to the Christian’s sickly un-selfing of man, the so-called “second innocence” wrought by the dogmatists of scientific atheism holds the potential to reverse this diseased (or declined) state. This second innocence, borne out of self-overcoming, concerns the transfiguration of the spirit (and not merely the biology of the earth). For “the spirit that leads us” and moreover the question of “how many spirits

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we harbour?” is the key to knowing ourselves, which currently is sorely lacking (BGE 227). Thus the potential immanent within godless dogmatism requires yet a more vital, virile and affirming spirit than the presently privileged spirit of naturalism. The latter only constitutes a partial element of that transfiguring “subtlest, most disguised, most spiritual will to power and overcoming” that attends pursuit of “our “god” with all our devils”!” (BGE 227). But being simply one of the spirits we harbour, “time-consuming industriousness” with all its noisiness and unsubtlety is stupidly proud of itself and above all “educates and prepares people, more than anything else does, precisely for ‘unbelief’” (BGE 58). What is more important notably is not the generation of unbelief or no faith but rather the forementioned matrix of gods and their respective “devils”—as ways of flying and fluttering “covetously around all the realms of the future” (BGE 227). Unbelief in itself is too staid and ultimately of a triumphal negation. To dance with the chimes of the universe is to create time by participating in its becoming. That is to say, following the ancient Greek Anaxagoras, man has “a portion of” becoming “in” time’s becoming and therefore belongs to its own creation. By becoming who he is, man is existent and therefore made actual by time’s incessant unfolding. The “dance” is the interplay between what Nietzsche calls the “creator” and “creature”: the one who creates and is created by (humanized) nature (BGE 225). It represents both a “unity” and a “contrast”, where the contrastive makes elements distinctive (and discernible) yet requires them to unify in different forms of the human. This is an old theogonic principal that what is made of “clay, dirt, nonsense, chaos” shall go on to mould and shape as “form-giver” through “hammer hardness spectator divinity, and seventh day” (225). The spiritual, indeed religious, language and imagery is unmistakeable: “seventh day” (Sabbath) and “spectator divinity”. This dimension of Nietzsche’s thinking sits most uncomfortably—and even resists—the tone and vehemence with which Nietzsche rails against theologians in his last work, The Anti-Christ. Sprinkled throughout this uneven and heavily charged work are strong (even vitriolic) attributions of moral corruption and decadence toward German/Protestant theologians. Considered scientifically, or through the hermeneutics of interpretation (philology), the theological exponent represents an “instinctive hatred of every reality, as flight into the “ungraspable”, into the “inconceivable”…as being at home in a world undisturbed by reality of any kind” (A29). Echoing once again his well worked out dual proposition that Christian morality is responsible for the decline of classical noble/heroic virtues and that Christian metaphysics underlies all false claims to reality, Nietzsche repeatedly

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vents his vehement objection and malice towards the ascetic interpreters of Jesus. In many instances—like a chameleon symbolist—he defends the Church as an institution, southern Mediterranean ways of worshipping, traditions and rites, and the strength of character and vision of religious progenitors e.g. Pythagoras, Plato, Buddha and Jesus. Those that transform the world through shear persistence of will, through their spiritualized power-will, are applauded. On the other hand, those such as Augustine and Aquinas who diminish this work, despise the body, deplete the ego, surrender actuality to the “other world” of spirit and faith, and who promulgate weakness (of body-spirit) are condemned, by Nietzsche “the immoralist”. These deniers of the flesh, the passions, preach meekness and altruism, and the unreality of a “promised kingdom”hence they are decadents of culture. Science, actuality, ego-interest, eros, instincts and real conditions of physiology and psychology do not belong to their horizon of existence. Their escape into the other world, another world, is their great sin or shortcoming. Even greater perhaps is their unnecessary moralization of this natural world, the world in which the (human) creature once roamed freely and vented its impulses without restraint. Once the priest (and later the moralist with natural reason) emerges, the soul emerges out of the plethora of instincts—drives but only to be burdened hereafter with guilt and “bad conscience”. Nietzsche’s claim in The Anti-Christ and Day-break is that the story of redemption first requires the lie that the soul is corrupted and, secondly, requires subsequently the invention of “soul” in order to make the need for salvation intensely palpable or real. His approach is distinctly psychological and anthropological: mindfulness and existence in spacetime are his conceptual provenance. His purpose is not so much to explain “the psychological type of the redeemer” (A29) as the psychology of a decadence that makes redemption a must. A redemptive compulsion that bequeaths to the soul an anguish and guilt regarding experiences in actual space and time. With what might and deceptive power did the new religion of Christianity overcome Rome asks Nietzsche? He announces: “I have no words to express my feelings at something so dreadful”, that is, the “whole labour of the ancient world in vain” (A59). His philological psychology is an attempt to explain what went unnecessarily wrong: the vanquishing of all high, noble virtues and ways. If everything was already prepared and established, why was it not enough: ancient wisdom and Imperium Romanum after all possessed methods, integrity of knowledge, “genius for organization and government”, the great “Yes to all things” (A59). Nietzsche is so baffled by this stupendous event or crisis that he incessantly returns to the same fundamental questions of decadence

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(decline) and overcoming. How did a world-first “slave- revolt” overturn and overcome a superior, reality attuned disposition towards life? Contrary to common belief and prejudice, Nietzsche is not opposing the Enlightenment or spiritualization as such: he rather sees Christianity as a degradation of once noble (pagan) virtues and strengths bolstered by natural science and polytheistic habits. Specifically, that which tilts toward weakness and dependency upon all axes of existence and becoming is uniquely condemnable and thus opposed. In his last published work, where Nietzsche self-consciously expresses the need to explicate his stance, he declares his hermeneutic imperative: “And so as to leave no doubt as to what I despise, whom I despise: it is the man of today… I traverse the madhouseworld of entire millennia, be it called ‘Christianity’, ‘Christian faith’, ‘Christian Church’, with a gloomy circumspection” (A38). Under his analytic gaze, it is not the practice of a true or even pure Christian life that troubles him— particularly the life of Jesus—but rather how the followers of Jesus through an institution developed what he called “morbid barbarism” (A37). Usurping the barbarism of Roman Empire, it turns the matter of blood, birth, death and suffering into a morbid sublimity where all things high and noble (e.g. natural) morph into a sickly or degenerate state. Nietzsche is not, we should emphasize, fundamentally interested in the psychology of man (nor strictly his philosophy either): Nietzsche’s centrepiece always is dual: weakness-strength and freedom-servitude and not the realization of a modern atheistic materialism. All antipodes in the form of unhelpful dualities ought to be abolished, he proclaims. Nietzsche, more than any eternal recurrence or a discharge of pulsating power, is focused on what makes enhancement possible; and enhancement is intrinsically linked with a kind of freedom found in his own kind: “we emancipated spirits” (A36). Do God—believers, in other words, advance enhancement and active freedom?—this is his unstated, incognito question to all theists. Quite decisively—and against the Renaissance and classical learning (episteme tis physis)—he charges Christian (and Jewish) believers with a denigration of the human spirit and a thus a subsequent poisoning of the soul. All of the time Nietzsche is primarily concerned with GraecoGerman excellence: with the idea that the unfinished animal can create himself best by means of excellence and joy. Culture, and not merely the wildness of nature, can do this provided degenerates and nihilists do not overrun the flow of eternal becoming. When religion is anathema to culture, to self-extension and enhancement, Nietzsche withdraws his approval and tolerance, and becomes extra caustic in his rebuttal of religious doctrine. (In this respect

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he is similar to Voltaire and Nicholas of Cusa, predating the enthusiasts of Alfred Wallace and Charles Darwin). Hence the basic yet fundamental critique of the religion of the Christians: “Christianity has taken the side of everything weak, base, ill-constituted, it has made an ideal out of opposition to the preservative instincts of strong life” (A5). Discounting the figure of Christ himself, his main charge against Christianity is that “it has waged a war to the death against this higher type of man”, distilling evil out of its instincts (5). The pagan Greeks, Romans and Indians by contrast honoured and thus paid homage to the instincts of the higher one through their duties. Nietzsche’s contention is that anthropomorphic projections onto the topography of the universe glorify the transhuman in the honour of man: they are acts which bestow worth to the human creature thus elevating it above the heartbeat of the swamp. Whereas Buddhism is well considered—its “supreme goal is cheerfulness” and the higher learned classes form its base—Christianity makes the “instincts of the subjugated and oppressed come into the foreground” (A21). Here as the body is despised due to a “hatred of the senses, of the joy of the senses”, a veritable “caustic business of sin” takes hold and extends itself (21). Instead of a positivistic posture—Buddhism “has the heritage of a cool and objective posing of the problems in its composition”—Christianity lacks a realistic outlook and lapses instead into the sordid world of exchange and emotion. The business of the now darkened black soul, with its hinterlands of desire, comes to the fore with the need to exchange the emotions, put them into discourse, elaborate on one’s sins, dissect the conscience and confess to the priest or moral guardian. All around morality, the custom of morality or in German Sittlichkeit, exists the imperative of expurgating the sins “of the flesh”, of carnal desire and natural power. One’s everyday existence is taken up with this business of making amends for one’s wrong-doing and pernicious desire6. Money, economy and exchange now revolve around the dictates of a sickened soul whose guilt-laden burden must be relieved by complex means of release and reparation7. Its otherworldliness, paradoxically, turns this world into something sickly and decrepit. Its degradation occurs as a result of the doctrine of the “salvation of life”—where life is to be saved even though life itself is already eternal, beautiful and joyful (without the infamous “bad conscience”). The 6 The New Testament embodies the infamous precept “il faut tuer les passions” (“It is necessary to kill the passions”)—the root cause of the degeneracy of man, resulting in the much weakened, sickly figure of the Last Man (A1). 7 See further Philip Goodchild Theology of Money (Durham: Duke University Press, 2009) on the relation between religion and money.

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ruination of the earth by guilt (“sin”) is attendant of the economy of the body, of the soul and therefore of money. Hence militarism becomes endemic to its operation. By contrast, Buddhism proffers stillness, no militarism, perfection, cheerfulness, healthy egoism and most importantly the “beyond good and evil” (A 20-21). Being non-theistic, it abstains from a ruination of the earth: neither its ecological economy nor its absent statism (force) can be destructive of the earth. Christianity promises Heaven even whilst it systematically degrades the earth through war, money and revenge-taking. Indeed, Nietzsche goes further to claim that it is its deep and underlying hatred for all things natural that makes the earth—the promise of the earth— threatened. Its barbaric industry of toiling labour dominates the soul while it awaits salvation from “this wretched earth” from above to be joined up with those in heaven. Industriousness is a form of revenge against nature, where revengefulness is linked to a hatred of the natural because at base it fears nature i.e. the physical, sensuous being. It is this that Nietzsche refers to when he frequently refers to the physiology of decadence and declining states of material and spiritual being. The molecular structure of things, of living materiality, is not a physics which theology can explain or embrace. When Nietzsche proclaims hail to physics (HH) as a way of knowing our being, our ecology, he is expounding a viewpoint consistent with Buddhism’s positivistic orientation toward “actuality” (A20). Buddhism, he argues, “is a hundred times more realistic than Christianity” (20). Its attunement to actuality owes in part to an important nexus absent within Buddhism: metaphysics and morality are not coupled together. Its positive philosophy, with ingrained forms of knowing, is sustained by an absent (or overcome) moralization of the world hence a natural world is preserved even whilst spiritualized practices are formed. It knows of no ideality of a Supreme God or “heavenly kingdom” and does not espouse condemnations of the senses and the body since its fundamental ecology recognizes intrinsic linkages between body and soul. The priestly caste of Judaeo-Christianity, with their dismal downcast eyes upon the sensorial creature of passions and instincts, turn the world of human experience into a form self-denial: alienation from its own actual being. Morality turns upon this fundamental worry with the impulses and how to reign them in. Such a moral code is predicated on the perverse psychology of fear whereby suspicion is cast over the senses and its array of desires. Hence Christianity’s “Anti-natural morality” turns “against the instincts of life” and renders God the enemy of life by saying that “‘God sees into the heart’” and its secrets (TI Morality as Anti-nature 4). Life-denial, subjective posturing toward sin extirpation through a privileging of spirit

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as sacrosanct makes for a system of Oughts that denies life. It is a blasphemous inversion, indeed contradiction of the life of Christ: God is blasphemed, not exalted; life is condemned because God is not exalted as the life-giver and the life in all things. Rendered as the evasive inquisitor of the embodied passions, humans have projected their symptomatic sickly condition onto the interpretation of God. Nietzsche argues it is the condition of life which either condemns or exalts life—not distinct men and women (agents). He states: “For a condemnation of life by the living is after all no more than the symptom of a certain kind of life” (Morality as Anti-nature 5). That is, it is a “value judgement on the part of life” or a kind of life, and not merely one of our own judgement. Hence this inverted God—of self-alienation—is an interpretation of a “declining, debilitated, weary, condemned life” that mirrors itself into its rarefied god (5). Nietzsche implies here, but does not elaborate upon, that a nonblasphemous rendering of one god could be life-affirming if it could extricate itself (miraculously perhaps) from its own weary condition and downcast morality. In concert with his abovementioned Dionysian religion, it would be simply another condition of life which would be responsible for rendering God more appropriately as creator, eternal love and lifegiving. In short, no single agent or group can lay claim to justly representing God as he “truly is”, “in truth”. Only life begets Life and no individual has sway over the begetting process itself: we are all inexorably bound up with the Becoming of life. Against liberal, humanist and subjectivist prejudices he maintains the power and determinacy of the Whole: “But nothing exists apart from the whole!…One is necessary, one is a piece of fate, one belongs to the whole, one is in the whole” (TI Four Great Errors 8). To condemn life—as the ascetics and moralists do—is to condemn the “whole”; which thereby means condemning all the past and the future to come. That would be to usurp the power of a god, to blaspheme the Creator more specifically. Only the mono-God who emerges out of “pagan”, polytheistic Egypt as the supreme Almighty One has the justice (“right”) to do that. Thus Nietzsche more than implies that a pan-theistic god in the form envisaged by natural philosophers and Romantic thinkers could in fact stand for life itself—for the generation and growth of life tout court. Hence if we removed God (in the singular) apropos the event of scientific atheism and its attendant scientific naturalism, we would still have to encounter a “condition of life” as stated above. When the anti-Christian immoralist denies God he denies fundamentally the de-vitalized, weary condition (and physiology) that rendered god a moral, condemnatory God. Further still, atheism would not rid the whole of three pernicious elements which the

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higher ones shall have to overcome. These are the three idols of “modern society”: namely, will, spirit and ego. The seemingly de-deified world of a-theism must now confront the apparent facticity (illusions) of these phenomena just as it must also face three other illusions of modern actuality: atom, cause and force. So we can say that the will to (self) deceive through belief in one God is similarly and equally paralleled by illusions within the extant “conditions of life” that determine life. The latter instance of sacred idols—atom, cause, force—similarly displays a corruption or degeneration of life, of actuality in all its innocence of becoming. These twin sets of illusions—which “we emancipated spirits” grasp—require to be reckoned with; not for the sake of truth but rather redemption! Nietzsche sets himself the task of redeeming the majesty of the whole from the stranglehold of those he designates decadents. (It is not merely believers or spiritual types since the detractors of actuality vis-a-vis Becoming are diverse and numerous.) Decadents, he consistently states, are those who devalue life, life-instincts and the noble complexity of the “whole”—whether they be naturalists or moralists or monotheists. The Anti-Christ, Dionysian faithful one will redeem the world from such unhealthy fictions (“lies”): “We deny God; in denying God we deny accountability; only by doing that do we redeem the world” (TI Four Great Errors 8). To save the world he must first accuse the detractors of life— life being the shifting chaos of extension, growth, decay—of denigrating life itself. This is the penultimate charge against pious Christians; Nietzsche radically wants to “save” the Church from Christians. In other words, whatever is corrupted or reduced by the idiocy of decadence, including the pure into the impure, can be redeemed; but not for an afterlife rather for the redemption of this world. Against the Gnostics it is the retrieval of the pagan’s world of nature, knowing and diverse divinations that Nietzsche takes aim at. He simply cannot leave the world to the modernes; latecomers have abandoned (or forgotten) the innocence of Becoming and the mysterio (mystery) of the constellated whole. Like his father he shares in the experience and power of redemption: a redeeming act but not one of Salvation—from sin, mortality and one’s corrupted self (egoism). Redemption must be experienced; it must be an object of experience and not of prophecy or conceptualization. Nietzsche correctly discerns the deep-seated “conceptualism” of Western Christianity originating from Thomism and neo-Thomist theology. The emphasis on experience presented in his later work represents Nietzsche’s (utopian) focus on this life, and this earth—where the true Jewish “new kingdom” was to be realized. Although pagan classical Greek visions

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infused Nietzsche’s idea of redemption, it is never the less abundantly overlaid with German Protestant concerns and moral interests. The movement back to nature, sensualism, soul directives and the enhancement of individual being were central to Protestant romantic thinkers and natural philosophers. Much of it being present and transmuted by Wagner’s aesthetic enthusiasm for a transformation of culture. Following the thrust of Wagnerianism, Nietzsche grappled with the religion of Christianity to emerge cognizant of its relevance as a symbolic form. Here transformation was pivotal to philosophy yet he refused to see Christianity as the “adversary”: the enemy which scientific nihilism would eliminate and substitute it with evolution. It is futile to see (true) Christianity as the enemy, indeed for Nietzsche it would be ignoble and base at root. Why? The one with height and synoptic perspective, the nobler higher one who embraces actuality and knowledge, cannot inject hatred and venomous resentment into himself. Why should something poisonous, ill-fitting, be allowed to poison the noble free spirit? We touch upon a similar point here to the previously mentioned shortcoming of the nihilistic sceptic: negation in and of itself proves insufficient and lowly. Similarly, here: while he opposes the idiocy and degeneracy of modern Christianity, he will refuse to set up “those still to come” with an enemy that ignites resentment and revenge. The state of the soul is more precious than some historic agent of decadence. Nihilists—believers is not the appropriate axis upon which future Becoming should rest. Rather than denial the overcomers shall decidedly be affirmers: “We do not readily deny, we seek our honour in affirming” (T1 Morality as Anti-Nature 6). Even if “to attack the passions at their roots means to attack life at its roots: the practice of the Church is hostile to life”, Nietzsche resolutely defies the instinct to attack, to hate, to resent and thus to degenerate into a base type i.e. a denier, an enemy. “We have come more and more to appreciate”, says Nietzsche, “that economy which needs and knows how to use all that which the holy lunacy of the priest, the diseased reason of the priest rejects” (6). The position of the adversary, as critic and despiser, is closed and vehement; whereas “we immoralists” or natural free spirits “have on the contrary opened wide our hearts to every kind of understanding, comprehension, approval” (6). Certainly one should not show sympathy for what has “caused an unspeakable amount of harm”, namely “an idiosyncrasy of the degenerate” (6). But to lapse into negative emotions and demonizations of others would be to merely replicate the pitiable narrow-mindedness and vindictive enmity of those whom one is opposing.

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What is instead prized is the abovesaid qualities of “every kind, namely understanding, comprehension and approval”. Christianity and Buddhism, and Indian religious thought, are all rich reservoirs of human existence and thought worthy of a healthy examination and drawing upon for a vital(istic) tragic wisdom. As life is manifold and manifold perspectives are given to us, the philosopher–Dionysian spirit must adopt, and even celebrate, an “opened” heart towards the plenitude of life. Whatever is real or whatever is actual must be acknowledged as worthy of deliberation, philology (interpretation), and overcoming oneself. But it is not just good philology—rigorous interpretation—that compels us to an open heart. It is the realization that actualization is a process; as a process it incorporates the sundry, multiple facets of total existence and Becoming. Like the devil in Christianity, the horror of chaos, suffering, error, deception and illusion which most of the world religions seek to redress, these must be firmly acknowledged as belonging to the “whole”. Within this world-picture, “devils” or sworn enemies ought not to become objects of revenge and hatred. Nietzsche on this point heads in the same direction as the Buddha: for spiritual health and strength (as opposed to “spiritual fatigue”A20) it is necessary to expunge enmity feelings and look forward instead to a triumphal “spiritualization of enmity” (T1 Morality as AntiNature 3). Related to the dietetic objectives of spiritual directives towards good health, Nietzsche gives a nod towards Buddha’s refrain “‘enmity is not ended by enmity”’ (A20). He conceives of the Church and its theologians not as enemies but conversely to the zealots of the Christian faith who vehemently wanted the destruction of their enemies—to grasp the value of one’s “enemies”. The institutional Church has an axiological role to play so one must never despise the value which the overcomer will accrue from it. Apart from the reason already given i.e. the totality of life, to spiritualize enmity means to have overcome our (instinctual) bitterness and hatred toward life-deniers and to have grasped their value; that is, grasp the value of one’s enemy not as a hostile force but as a complimentary contradiction to our existence. Prudence and enlightenment dictate that it is better to exist with, if not battle with, one’s enemy: that there be fundamental tension, ambivalence and contradiction in the process of becoming those whom we are destined to be(come). This attunement to the totality of reality required something radical normally eclipsed by modern commentaries on Nietzsche. Declaring it to be a further triumph over Christianity, the valuation of having enemies as intrinsically positive first requires “acting and thinking in the reverse of the way in which one formerly acted and thought” (TI Morality as Anti-

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nature 3). More precisely, a reverse of the faithful pious prejudice against the pagan/naturalist due to their conspicuous unbelief. By a profound spiritualization of enmity—following love as a “spiritualization of sensuality”—Nietzsche declares that anti-Christians “see that it is to our advantage that the Church exist” (3). It would affirm rather than deny the “will to life” which is, on the other hand, devastated by Christianity’s combat with the passions. It is the religion’s pia fraus (pious fraud) that is at root responsible for this attack on life through one’s enemy. Animosity and resentment are bred as a result of the priesthood’s moralization of the natural world so that moral virtue (ironically) breeds hatred and enmity. Hence the perennial reference by Nietzsche to “we immoralists”: they must affirm even if life entails having to live and learn from one’s “enemy” because they are against priest morality. The value of having enemies, of the Church existing, is that it pays homage to life itself. To be ripe, to become ripened by nature and love, one is “fruitful only at the cost of being rich in contradictions” argues Nietzsche (3). We ought not to strive for elimination—the elimination of difference, contradictions, tensions, agitations or any condition of warring within and without oneself. Peaceableness is a mistake in the stakes of life; life requires all of these dimensions and is riven with contradictions. To seek to eradicate any of these fundamental features of life is tantamount to an attack on life itself. Since the Church and believers are part of Bios (life), no matter how decadent, they are of value to those who seek higher heights through selfovercoming. Death camps are (only) for death cults; living habitats by contrast extend through their fecundity of power, health, diverse forms and spiritualization of organic life. Hence if a divinity or “religious” form of life can act to enhance life, to affirm the noble beauty of eternal life, then there is no need for derision or assailment. The problem lies with the tendency of mono-theisms to drive out contradictions, heterodoxy and agitation of all kinds i.e. of the soul. Through the single god concept and their war against polytheism, heterodoxy and rich diversity are not easily accommodated. Consequentially a general direction of ontology is discerned over the millennia. As multiple gods are overrun by monopolistic theists, variability and heterodoxy are gradually misunderstood and categorized as inimical to “Truth”. By contrast a culture which sustains variation in the forms of life and truth-telling will preserve the value of reverence and decadent theologians. This is not a point about tolerance or forgiveness as per any modern liberal theology or philosophy. It is rather that the predominance of degeneracy (through the triumph of the ascetic “slave revolt”) becomes significant for self-

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overcoming: to overcome slavish degeneracy in order to realize a nobility of spirit and culture. One needs resistance for strength to increase, for willing to overcome weakness and lethargy. And Christian doctrines and virtues provide just such a resistance for overcomers of today’s decadence. In clear dialectical terms, the ignoble are the bedrock from which a renovation of culture can be launched. The value of resistance is significant for the higher, nobler type who, inversely, finds the devaluation of erotic energy and the passions in Christianity a centre of resistance. Their stern and stringent ways, their “seriousness” in all matters and their imaginary causes in replacement of natural science represent a bulwark of decadence that demands overcoming. Through the transvaluation of existing standards an over-coming is enacted by means of noble spirits gaining strength through the resistance posed by priestly types and priestly renunciation. The futural free spirits who, as anti-Christians, first appear synonymous with atheists will formulate an experimental approach which counters the faith in convictions exhibited by zealot Christians. And since nothing is pure and devoid of history, except metaphysical abstractions, the inevitable trace of the other (the ascetic man) is indelibly pressed upon the resistance that shall be overrun by a more vigorous, refined noble soul (and body). I have discussed the process of overcoming at some length in my previous book Nietzsche and the Necessity of Freedom (2008). Notably Nietzsche understands that once the priests’ instituted value is overcome or displaced, we can never as a species shed what has been learned by the concept “soul”—nor should we forget dynamics of soul that now reside within our being. The value of one’s foe lies indeed in the future. But we do not know beforehand the value to be extracted from historical time; we cannot see at first beyond our prejudices what exactly the enemy will entail for us, for time. Better to honour time than to honour vengeance and hatred. The other—the alien stranger or outsider—is a repository of potentiality for making and re-making forms of life that enoble the individual and her soul. We savage our souls if we fill our hearts with bitterness and enmity thereby thwarting the dynamic of transformation toward nobler ends and horizons. The relative usefulness of one’s present “enemy” for Becoming is considered superior to pious metaphysical truths that spawn divisions and revenge attacks between different religions. Hence Nietzsche finds a root for Western Christendom’s militarism which is its unique ability to spawn enemies even whilst it spouts holy ideas of forgiveness and love. On this issue Nietzsche stands more firmly with the Enlightenment when he finds that an empirical approach to actuality is preferable to a religious pious one that unnecessarily fuels pious enmity and conflict between religions.

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Knowing, in the positive empirical sense, can assist life; on the other hand, religious morality condemns and by its condemnation of life it also wills to make enemies of others. Condemnation generates war while affirmation (of life) engenders cheerfulness and a beauty of natural life. Nietzsche reminds us in Twilight of the Idols that the higher ones seek “honour in affirming” and do not take pleasure in denying (Morality as Anti-nature 6). Life-affirmation is not actually possible unless one can learn from one’s enemies—from the strange, different and evil types. If we love life, as affirming individuals, then why attack and repel those things that comprise life as a whole? The problem with the followers of Christ is that they condemn life even while Jesus called for a new form of life: Christ as the “way of life” would never countenance making an enemy from spiritual devotion (A). It therefore follows that Nietzsche (as grand stylist) sees a need to save the institution (the Church) from Christians—for man needs (noble and) high institutions but without a moral condemnation of life. In a work most critical of the priesthood and asceticism, one that traces guilt to the foreclosure of an opening to one’s redemption, the role of the Church is once again linked to free spirits. It seems curious at first that Nietzsche should declare the Church to be more an alienating force than a power of seduction (GM 1:9). He denies the religious institution of its regular modern interpretation à la secularism that it seduces people into its religious beliefs. Most interestingly he locates the locus of the problem in the general trend toward decline: namely the deterioration and poisoning of life wrought by the masses and their elevation to masterful or sovereign status. This downward spiralling is linked to his particular “political theology” of modernity: first, the rise of the democrat both in the Respublica (civic life) and modern culture; second, the “mobifying” effect which is associated significantly with what he calls the “jewifying or christifying” phenomenon owing to that all important “slave revolt” against noble Roman ways (9). The poisoning of classical pagan ways and virtues followed by numerous mass movements of rebellion (“liberation”) spurred spiritually by Judaeo-Christian precepts has produced a highly toxic cultural-spiritual complex. Nietzsche depicts the situation in terms of a torrent or channel of toxication—a seeming endless flow of toxic poisons that debilitate the body and soul of man. So the matter turns strategic and pragmatic, as it would also for Thucydides and Machiavelli (theoreticians of power). If the Church cannot be a seducer, does it in fact contribute to the current of toxicity? What is most interesting for our purposes is that Nietzsche gives a response that is addressed neither at the metaphysical level of its

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doctrines nor its ontological basis i.e. does the “body of Christ” truly comport holy virtues and universal love? Beyond both metaphysics and ontology, Nietzsche gives a quasi-Wagnerian, Goethean response that places at the very centre of the problematic the question of value: what something is worth. How useful is the Church for human development and cultural enhancement? Can a form (as embodied by the institution) prove instrumental for advancing three primary, essential qualities (“values”): cheerfulness, greatness and wisdom of free-spiritedness. (Note the primary objective is not merely a sheer amplification of power since power itself lacks valuation/s.) Power and its expansion is insufficient for a measure of culture, of nobility; it requires refinement, gathering, discipline and above all direction. For example, greatness is not equivalent to an amassing of power but instead presupposes the character features of a cultivated and refined nobleman/person. Greatness, in short, is not might. A cultural configuration requires discipline and enhanced artistry in order to achieve greatness beyond both mediocrity and toxication. Therefore, Nietzsche looks to whether or not a particular material-spiritual constellation advances or retards the milieu of the human being- the destiny that shall be mine and yours. So the central question is not the redemption of the soul or the “kingdom of Heaven” but if a form in space-time is conducive for greatness and cheerfulness (one could further add freedom here). In this case, does the Church add to the democratism of the masses’ toxication or does it thwart it? On first glance it may seem rather surprising but Nietzsche leans toward the latter view: “It seems more likely that it inhibits and hold back this progress instead of accelerating it” (GMI:9). Further, he gestures again that it is its relative usefulness that counts the most: “Well, even that could be its usefulness” (9). For its usefulness to be increased he declares “Shouldn’t it at least become somewhat refined” given that “By now it is certainly something coarse and pleasant-like”? (9) If a church is to be a robust, noble enhancing institution it would need not to repel “a more delicate intelligence, a truly modern taste” (9). Because of its arcane native, its unpolished medievalism, it alienates more than it seduces; Nietzsche therefore would not be surprised to find pushes for renovation in the twenty-first century through song, gospel performance and charismatic permutations. The edifice of the Church itself—as an organizational unit of time and temperament—is relatively immune from Nietzsche’s usual scathing criticisms of Christianity and more particularly Christian morality. In a late addition to The Gay Science he depicts the “triumphant Church” of Rome as thoroughly “corrupted by the peasant Luther, who unravelled the inspiring spirit” that sustained this long-

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established institution (358). But the debasement of the Church by way of peasantry values (i.e. Luther’s) is associated, in Nietzsche’s mind, with the inability of the Germans to “understand the nature of a church” (358). It eludes them at a fundamental level because “it rests on an altogether different knowledge of man and experience of man than is to be found in the north” (358). He argues the edifice of the Church “rests on a southern freedom and enlightenment of the spirit” further adding his anthropological observation of Latin Mediterranean civilization: “as well as a southern suspicion of nature, man, and spirit” (358). Southern Roman Catholics had not yet unlearned respect for suspicion, for noble orders or castes of rank, for ecclesiastical ritual and symbolism where practices and the instincts still prevail under the gaze of God. Luther’s “northern” peasant rebellion after all was an act of revenge, not an act of the Cogito or intellectus. Northerners had attacked the Church with a vengeance—synonymous with nihilists and anarchists they tore down an edifice, not built it up. What kind of an edifice: one nobler than the state. Nietzsche correctly discerns its nature through a political-theology prism: “A church is above all a structure for ruling that secures the highest rank for the more spiritual human beings” (358). Second, this structure “believes in the power of spirituality to the extent of forbidding itself the use of all the cruder instruments of force” such as the state does (358). Yet beyond its material form, its value as an organized unit of spiritual domination and multiplicity, lies a fundamental insight. Without the Church, Nietzsche recognizes, the antecedent resistance or power of the priestly order would not have existed and thereto the compulsion or “necessity” for free spirits to emerge. “Which of us indeed”, he says, “would be a free spirit if there were no church?” (GM I 9). This demonstrates the fundamental entwinement between two opposing forces and presences in the world. It amounts to saying that the creativity unleashed by each and every revolt, either slavish or noble, is dependent upon an ineluctable agon (contest) between two kinds of goodness or value—orders. It is essentially Zoroastrian in conception, in image: the Kosmos is riven with an eternal struggle between Good and Evil as the old Persian prophet had enunciated. But the contestation is very radically reformulated—with an eye to the archaic (pre-classical) Greeks. Instead of the holy moral terms of “Good” versus “Evil”, Nietzsche substitutes the essential forces with Noble (high) and Ignoble (plebeian, low). The former category for him unleashes cheerfulness, health, empirical enlightenment; the latter category of the Ignoble entails their very opposite: dreary renunciation, unhealthy body and soul and mystical revelation through conviction. Eternal struggle between the noble high and ignoble low force

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the spirit to create…anew—and Nietzsche accepts the inevitable destruction and suffering which logically ensues from it. Freedom exists but eternity shall forever reign. Time permits the new to be created out of the regenerative Whole that is at once physis and spirit. The actuality of an existing struggle e.g. the church and scientific atheism, is a blessing of the universe. The world shall be redeemed by such non-ephemeral blessings, specifically by the “ripened fruits” of time’s gradual yet eternal Becoming. The point is that life-affirmation supersedes and triumphs over lifedenying value orders and truth orders. It is not particularly important that the Church is wrong, as evolutionists maintain, but that it might serve a useful function for the emergence of “free spirits”. The struggle itself is paramount: theology’s struggle to acquire truth brought down ecclesiastical authority; natural evolution’s struggle to acquire truth gave impetus to a decentred world-concept and therefore perspectivism. Between the two constitutive forces we have a new “soul-hypothesis” as a result8. And the tussle between evolution and natural causation will only help the elaboration of further soul-types—in the direction of hierarchic ordering and differentiation it is hoped. The point is not (simply) to be freed from the Church or scientism but from the poison, the toxication flowing from life-denial renunciation of ego, drives, sensuality, power and distinction (i.e. pathos of distance). Most importantly, what distinguishes liberal “free spirits” from Nietzsche’s radical “self-overcomers” is that the latter eschew the poison of the Church but not the institution itself. While atheists, who draw upon naturalism, eschew the institution of the Church but love its democratic, humbling spirit and evocation of equality and sympathy (GM I:9). The futural being of the one who resists and overcomes the poison of decadence requires what the Twilight investigations reveal: solidly defined grand institutions of disciplined learning and cultivation so that a refinement of soul and strength are obtainable (TI). This is the principal idea in German of Bildung, not dissimilar to the ancient Greek paideia which Nietzsche was well-versed in and professionally close to through his teaching of philology. Lacking the fearless courage of self-overcomers, atheists, sceptics and conventional “free spirits” prove inadequate for the (true) task of a philosopher since they lack the building artistry of great empire and religious leaders who grasp the reigns of futural being. The spirit does not self-preserve or merely extend power: it seeks to create through time, unfolding with its past and present, thereby presaging a 8

We cannot properly say “soul” as such since that would admit a metaphysical religious error. Yet new kinds of soul activity are admissible for Nietzsche because of reverberations of the spirit he continuously posits.

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futural condition of existence. These aforementioned “modern” types— atheists, sceptics, free spirits—lack the means by which a proper transvaluation may occur because they remain fundamentally “Naysaying” exponents with no actual Bildung. Since high culture is not the preserve of any one individual, it requires institutions that harness the destinies of those cheerful, enlightened and heightened ones still to come. That is, beyond the single grand event that is announced as the end of Christianity (GS, GM) there is a quintessential requirement that overcomers of “modern society” should not rely on scientific atheism’s naturalism as a new kind of redemption. To replace one kind of redemption (spiritual) with another kind (truth-disclosing) would be only to follow the logic of the ascetic priest; and since “laws” of nature do not exist, it would merely substitute one myth (i.e. soul salvation) with another i.e. absolute causality. However, since the human being is a subject of Bildung he ought to be immersed in the sciences to understand the physics of necessity i.e. why things must be such and such. But just as religion and spiritual authority were not ends in themselves so too are naturalistic explanations of the nature of reality. If scientific atheism helped to propel the sciences after the Catholic church and its Jesuitical intellectuals had done, the arrow of Becoming does not end with the millennial event of nihilism: the “death of God”. And these “free, very free spirits” who espouse truth under the dulling grey of science only embody the ascetic ideal under a new guise. They too must be, shall be, overcome; for they (secular free spirits) only stand at the entrance of a “second innocence” after the colossal downfall of Churchly absolute authority. (Note: the expansion of religious faiths today does not undermine his central thesis since individuated reflective thinking now commonly attends most systems of belief in modernity.) Since it is not “honest atheism” which brought an end to Christianity (GMIII 27) but Christian morality itself, then naturalism à la science represents “its [second innocence] core” and “one of its ultimate forms and inner consequences” (27). This means the self-overcoming man or woman must also transvaluate the limitations of natural science. These men and women certainly breathe the fresh air of “honest atheism” after the catastrophe of nihilism; but they must climb further: they are required to walk up the mountainside to the highest peak where Zarathustra breathes the crispest, coldest mountain air. (This image is a metonym for the grandest ChristianJewish event of Moses climbing Mount Sinai and receiving the word of God.) The height to be achieved by the fearless ones lies way beyond the closure of the ascetic ideal and its scientific corollary (i.e. absolute knowing).

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Yet without the spiritual agitation brought on by the (Christian) destroyers of Roman polytheism and Christianity itself, the spiritual directive designs of these Übermensch types would have been severely limited. The many revolts of the soul, the countless anguish, guilt and shame experienced as a result of possessing a bad conscience for millennia, has turned the animal into an introspective artist of life. The combat with and within religious orders has extended the inner life of a once wholly instinctual creature; of one who now yearns for redemption— and not survival. Nietzsche too is a late decadent (or port-nihilist) since he is the heir of this long-standing quest: his self—overcoming is like the Lords i.e. Christ’s. “He shall overcome” is now rendered nobly (rather than righteously) and earthly, in parallel with the life of Christ; that is, the practices of the only true Christian (A). The Anti-Christ makes clear that the insidious poison of the Church—and the poisoning of the church—is the aborting of Christ’s way of life by the elevation of the Evangel to supreme importance. Instead of methods, techniques and practices of spiritual direction being exalted à la the life of Jesus, Paul and his evangelic believers corrupted the core of Judaeo–Christian high asceticism. Hence the toxication does not begin with Augustine or Rome’s neo-Platonic metaphysicians; nor does it commence with Philo of Alexandra and Origen as it might be assumed upon first glance. Nietzsche is more radical and purist with regard to spiritual cleanliness. It is with the sickliness of the gospel doctrines and its perverse moral psychology vis-àvis a heart of sin that Nietzsche lays the charge of soulful infection, spiritual degradation and corruption of a grand churchly edifice fit for grand-scale organization and spiritual modes of discipline. He charges that the mendacious idealism and moral pity of Christianity is founded in this one single corruption of Christ’s life, his way of life, into a gospel of denaturalizing everything. While the usurpation of natural instinct and reason for the purpose of making “herds” subject to the priest’s authority is a crucial component of Nietzsche’s critique of Christian orthodoxy, naturalistic dispositions and orientations to truth are not enough here. They do decidedly form the backbone for the argument that a desensualisation of man and world toward a “pure spirit” brings about both “modern decadence” and the end of pagan polytheistic virtues. Denaturalisation is one important theme; the other grand metamorphosis wrought by this corruption relates to an overall shift toward revengefulness and punishment giving/taking. Nietzsche maintains that the true gospel of Jesus—of his life as “glad tidings” and resentment free message of overcoming—was subversively replaced by a gospel focused on death and the life “hereafter to come”, hence punishment and guilt retribution. The

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“whole and sole reality of the Evangel is juggled away”—why? “[F]or the benefit of a state after death”, that is the grand unfulfillable promise of a Thanatos (death) resurrection-centred theology (A41) Salvation from this horrid earthly life is offered on the basis of “‘The world revolves around me’”—a raising of “every sort of egoism to infinity” (A43). To offer a reward of this kind the after-life as Heaven required a tormented life on earth—a punished existence. Why are we tormented? Because sin (in our hearts) delivers us unto death: and hence we need Christ as the Redeemer to die for our sins. Jesus is consequently chained to death and death itself implies punishment let alone sin (finitude). Jesus is now portrayed in terms of death and redemption from sin rather than a resentment-free life in which “he lived this unity of God and man as his “‘glad tidings’” (A41). As soon as the “old God could no longer do what he formerly could”, we “altered the conception of him” but paid a price for it: he became “only a God bound by conditions” (A25). The unreality of the evangel of the disciples in fact owes to the corrupting influence of the “Jewish priesthood” who first invented “a stupid salvation–mechanism of guilt towards Yahweh and punishment” (26). Through this perverse mechanism chance is “robbed of its innocence; misfortune dirtied by the concept of “‘sin”’ and both the concept of God and the concept of morality are “falsified” (25-26). The first (priestly) falsification is followed by a subsequent evangelic-democratic “mobbish” falsification. By first corrupting God the Father the second corruption of Jesus completes the insidious “resentment movement” of fundamental nihilism (GM I 16). Nietzsche is pointing here not only to the destructive effects of religious nihilism, but also to a loss: a primordial, original “concept of God” and “concept of morality” that was reflective of nature’s justice and the actuality of concrete life. He accuses Christians ironically of a pagan barbarism when they wish to find in their Christ an innocence sacrificed to gain selfishly a life beyond death (that sin brought about). First, they put bounds on god, devalue the history of Israel (an epoch of decay) and corrupt the moral code of a people. Then Jesus from Nazareth is made the Redeemer for men’s sins by demanding of his father that he should be killed to fulfil the punishment of sin i.e. death. Unlike Buddhism and Christ’s lived life, the double falsification and hence corruption effect turns the religion toward death-aversion, guilt reparation and punishment justification. These are all the signs of décadence: weakness triumphs as does corruption (of the spirit) through falsification and the nobility of soul exemplified by the man from Nazareth is consequently overshadowed by priestly edicts. The Church and its Christian decadents have consequently forgotten the original essence of being, of life: “One could” says

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Nietzsche, “call Jesus a ‘free spirit’—he cares nothing for what is fixed” and denial is “precisely what is totally impossible for him” (A32). Nietzsche resoundingly points to what he calls the “concept, the experience ‘life’” in which “Jesus had done away with the concept ‘guilt’ itself” in the actual mode of his life (32, 41). He is explicitly drawing attention to the original experience of a Christ-like life i.e. a “Christ-ian”. For Nietzsche’s third fundamental proposition is that the modern obsession with the death-sacrifice gospel (of Paul and Peter)—a mark of barbarism par excellence—wholly detracts from the life of Christ. He goes to great lengths in a book largely misunderstood as consisting of pagan atheistic rant, The Anti-Christ, to demonstrate how unchristian the Christian religion and Church has become. There are two strands to this proposition, each none the less relating to the life experienced by Christ. Behind the veil of two millennia of vulgarizing and barbarizing (early) Christianity, the emancipated spirit finds “In fact there have been no Christians at all” (A39) and since the evangel died on the cross what was subsequently called Evangel (orthodoxically) “from this moment onwards was already the opposite of what he had lived”: a dysangel (A39). Here a complete substitution is at hand: its “morbid barbarism” makes it a “form of mortal hostility to all integrity, to all loftiness of soul, to discipline of spirit, to all open-hearted and benevolent humanity” (37). The “atrocious paganism” that gave rise to a highly dubious “guilt sacrifice” would inexorably poison the original religion of light delivered by Christ. The distortion in a sense was inevitable, that is, “very probable” because the type of redeemer “could not remain pure, whole, free of accretions” for very long (31) Indeed it begins with the first disciples and first Christian community as they “had to translate a being immersed entirely in symbols and incomprehensibilities into their own crudity in order to understand anything of it at all” (31). The multiplicity of the revered one had to be “reduced to more familiar forms” which then had the adverse effect of coarsening this type-image (31). Each early community and coarsening thrust created their particular god according to their requirements, argues Nietzsche. The saviour-redeemer type, who annuls sin through his sacrificed innocence, increasingly comes to the fore and overtakes the true gospel of light, unity with God and “glad tidings”. The consequent “very distorted from” we have inherited is further preserved by the Christians’ stress on the “kingdom to come” and the personal reward of Heaven after death through “faith”—an otherworldliness that detracts from the arche exemplar of Life/Light.

CHAPTER FIVE POST-THEOLOGY: CLOSING IN ON THE SPIRIT

Upon the Renaissance’s embellishments of the soul and heart following Dante’s epic Comedia and the Franciscan’s repudiation of ecclesiastical order, French and German Romanticism acquired the signification of pneuma (Gr.) as espirit and Geist. Nietzsche’s critique of decadence and nihilism is in part based upon, thanks to Burkhardt and Wagner, the noble vision of Renaissance soul-cultivators, artists and scientists. Thus, Nietzsche is reclaiming and redeeming the modern soul from the corrupt perversion of the priests and idealist-Liberals of “modern ideas”. He envisions a higher type will arise from the ashes of modern decadence with a higher, embolden Spirit and Seele (soul). In the following exploration we shall see how this Renaissance-inherited conception of Geist (spirit) and Vergeistigung (spiritualization) occurs in a decidedly post-theological manner1. The focal stress on an otherworldly dimension has some major implications for the voyages of the soul. It militates against man’s existence; his realization of actuality as a natural condition where both willing and resistance are definitive of the Unschuld des Wardens (innocence of Becoming). Since according to Nietzsche, the priest usurps the naturalistic inclination toward knowledge (and causal action), creating an illusory realm of less worldly explanations and concepts, the Church’s Christian becomes dependent upon his mediations of all worldly affairs. Thus, the wedding, a newborn’s birth and so much else of life are fully punctuated by priestly attributes of significance and symbolism. The believer is consequently dependent upon priestly (symbolic) sanctions to 1

That is, past an ecclesiastical, pious and confessional understanding (and treatment) of Spirit and soul. It is consonant with both Romantic strands even if Nietzsche criticizes romantics in later works. On his affinities with Romantic sensibilities, see Adrian Del Caro’s fine discussion in Nietzsche Contra Nietzsche: Creativity and the Anti-Romantic (Baton Rouge: Louisiana State University Press, 1989).

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render his or her life meaningful in the full light of consciousness. Consciousness and not the instincts govern the symbolic structure of the believer’s universe. Now that he is conscious of intercessions by authoritative ascetics, the believer is focused not on self-direction and heroism but the needs of the “other world” (Note the parallel here with the scientist discussed previously: both types are other focused and purport to access the true realm of Being.) The priestly type despises the instincts and the passions, for they are aligned with the “bad conscience” the actions of sin. Hence the circle is completed since this point reinforces the logic of the Redeemer: the one who surrenders his innocence (life) through blood for the sake of the sins of the many. Then the promise of “Heaven” is delivered through once faith in the Redeemer–the one who died because the punishment for sin is Death, and so the Gospel is quickly transformed into an evangelo of guilt-founded “bad tidings”. Retribution, guilt, death and punishment now attend the fear of sexuality to turn the “good news” of God’s love into a vengeful “guilt sacrifice” that reflects the deep “atrocious paganism” that infected early Christian practices (A 41). As alluded to earlier, the corruption of the Gospel has its roots in the earliest corruption: the “process of decay which commenced with the death of the redeemer” and then perpetuated “within the first community” (A 44). The importation of old Jewish edicts and concepts of punishment and judicial retribution into the Roman world of noble classes and morality, via St Paul, would leave an indelible corruptive core in the Church for millennia. On the other side it is an utterly pagan logic, Nietzsche states passionately, to conceive of as “holy” or sacred the giving-up of innocence for a guiltretribution using an act of death. For the benefit of a “state after death” the “sole reality of the Evangel is juggled away” with the archetypal guilt sacrifice– he says, “All at once it was all over with the Gospel!” (A 41). Why? Principally because the sacrificial logic is contradictory and barbarous: an innocence cannot pay the (moral) debt of others if indeed fellow humans even constitute “sinners”. It is a denial of the unicity of God-Man, the inextricable oneness within multiple presences, that makes this life-denying doctrine decadent and indeed only a distortion of the original “good tidings” (A). We return now to the final aspect of our Third proposition propounded by Nietzsche. It is perhaps the strongest indictment against established religion and is one which remains absent in works previous to Götzen-Dämmerung (The Anti-Christ). Contrary to common perceptions of Nietzsche as someone hostile to idealism’s emphasis on subjectivity and Cartesian workings of the I, Nietzsche sees Christ as representing a break from justice-guilt regimes: toward a condition/state of the heart. The

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decay, we noticed, first had to do with killing an innocent for the purported sins of the many. Salvation was thus linked to an egoistic reward of an after-life, not a state of a heart. The “bad tidings” of guilt were made predominate when in fact “Jesus had done away with the concept “guilt” itself” (A 41). Good tidings were overshadowed by the corrupt form–the grand distortion handed down by priestly types and the corrupted Church to the masses. Nietzsche quite radically turns back to the original primitive moment of Christ’s life before the Apostles began to translate his exceptional life into mundane familiar terms. This necessity of misunderstanding the “sole reality of the gospel” is associated with the all-too-human characteristic of reducing foreign phenomena to the coordinates of one’s mental template i.e. anthropic projection. It was inevitable, says Nietzsche, that the vagaries and idiosyncrasies of the revered one exceeded them–the feeble commoners who could not understand Christ as the light. They read-into-him what was familiar so as render his otherness amenable to human finitude. Even worse, and extraordinary to this mundane fact, common folk (believers) severed themselves from Jesus; and this was achieved through “their revenge to elevate Jesus extravagantly” by means of the pagan Cross (A40). Nietzsche sees in the Gospel hermeneutics of life-affirmation a unity before God where all like children have an innocence before God and humankind and God are unsevered from each other. By elevation–through death and sacrifice-cult belief–the first Christians abandoned the primordial unity with their god and now cut-off from God look egoistically toward a reward which “shall come”. Whereas the point of Christ’s teaching was quite the converse: how to live a life of light, of joyous giving and sharing, of joyful celebration of the unity of all things and of the eternity of life. Before being cutting-off, before severing ourselves from Him who bestows love equally whether deserved or not, there was no death-cult attached to a mysterious “guilt sacrifice”–there was only ever that which resists formula, law and dogma. Nietzsche refers to it as the innermost: it is “‘life’ or ‘truth’ or ‘light’”, and ecclesiastical prejudice has all but smothered over it (A32). Contrary to the history of ecclesiastical faith its essence is the “glad tidings” of God’s love and unity in creation hence there are “no longer any opposites” or anger, reproach, resistance or bringing “the sword” (32). This original faith, one which has been “there from the beginning”, simply “is there” and is not attained through either struggle or proof or separation nor does it need to formulate itself: “it lives, it resists all formulas” (A32). Nietzsche’s gospel is the lived life of the first Christ-ian: Christ. The one whom we are not estranged from but are held in one with him

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(not as the Son of God but as God per se). Christianity–the tradition of the apostles–has wrought an unwarranted estrangement by splitting humankind from God; and this union, it must be stressed, is beyond historicity and custom. Somewhat surprising for most readers of Nietzsche, we find in the Antichrist Nietzsche delving into the transcendence of Christ’s exemplary life and way. Against the old rabbinical way, Nietzsche maintains the priority of the inner aspect, the heart, as reflective of an original, primary union with He who loves. Eschewing the old obsession with punishment and guilt, the good news beyond the nihilism of death (Crucifixion) is: “evangelic practice alone leads to God, it is God!” (A33). Nietzsche concentrates on the praxis, of “doing” spirituality, and not upon doctrines or rites of ecclesiastical orders; he takes the exemplars of Christ’s life as a demonstration that it is not belief or faith that demarcates a Christian from everyone else. Once the apostles and Paul in particular turned the initial insight of light into a belief and faith system of God-worship, the ground had been laid for modern décadence two millennia later. This ground notably also lays down the basis for modern Christian-German Idealism (Kant) with its erroneous stress on human consciousness and “beautiful souls”; an idealism that works against Nietzsche’s notion of actuality as reality. He goes to great lengths to unearth and decipher the wrongdoings of the Church and its unconscious alliance with modern decadence, in the first instance deconstructing the false attribution of Paulian theology that faith and thus belief in the Crucifixion was all important. A salvation-based theology is not only ego-logical, but it is also doubly bankrupted by its falsehood that “faith alone” is what guarantees salvation from sin. The false I is thought to be the bearer of this supremely significant element called faith. Yet beyond the privileged error–seeing faith or belief as the seat of the new religion–Nietzsche wishes to highlight the lived experience wherein the “inmost thing” is given away by spiritual practices (A32) gives away the essence of redemption. Here every “kind of distancing relationship between God and man is abolished” but so is a corrupt redemption predicated on death and reward. The said “inmost” aspect is the reward, is “heaven” on earth, not in the hereafter nor in the nether other-world called Heaven for the kingdom is here where the heart is. Christ knows neither of culture, language or state since for the arch “symbolist” (Christ) all of this is “pure folly” for he who has no need for denial of these things (32). Denial, like guilt and revenge, is “precisely what is totally impossible for him” for he has no reason to deny “the world”–as a symbolist, the whole of nature and language possess “merely the value of a sign, a metaphor” for him (32). The message of “glad

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tidings” is transcendent of normal space and time, and without denying the reality of state and language, it constitutes a unity that is primordial to the extent that conventions of division (distinction) are merely language-signs for temporal understandings. These (liminal) temporal understandings are what produced the foresaid “distorted form” of the gospel; their force stems from the necessity of human-all-too-human requirements being foisted onto the highly ambiguous yet revered phenomenon of the Redeemer. Outside of the semiotics of meanings set up by human beings, the genius of the heart nobly stands: beyond all historic, customary judgement and thus morality. Nietzsche begins to discern here the soul-activity of the being who is human as opposed to the exteriority of religion: of conventions, doctrines and formalisms of the sacred of the ecclesia (Church). Protestant and even deeply Germanic-romantic notions of inner “conscience” life pervade his understanding of Christ as a “symbolist” of the exteriority which Christianity builds upon the edifice of Judaism’s own exterior symbolism. What trumps these external dressings of religiosity is the overwhelming transcendent power of the “inmost” or heart where the truth of life lies. These trappings of religion are simply the many ways of a sign-language signifying and coding holiness in place of the way Christ– the proper Christian–lived his life. The genius of the heart, and not Paul’s glorified seat of faith, is what enables life–one without revenge and sorrow and therefore transcending religion i.e. the perversion of spiritualized power. Nietzsche recognizes here the power of a non-Roman way of life that nonetheless is able to affirm joy and the goodness of life through a preeminent union which only is subsequently negated by the priests of Christendom. From the very beginning, with the first community of faithexponents, is lost the non-symbolic, innermost transcendent element which Christ had manifested and inaugurated. He celebrated life and light–the true evangelyo (“gospel”)–whereas the “egoists” of salvation seeking after Heaven celebrated death and the darkness of Original Sin. This unhealthy pagan2 element within the blood of the Church poisons the perfect soul of Christ-like “glad tidings” and promulgates a destructive force that will culminate in modern nihilism–the Cross cult initiates a perverse “will to nothingness” (GM). Hence the end of the modern Church signifies the end of a dangerous perversion (destructiveness), or toxication of the noble soul; it does not necessarily mean the end of different forms of “spiritualization”, soul-extensions or multiple divinations. Spiritual 2

In fragment 22 of Anti-Christ Nietzsche declares “Christianity had need of barbarous concepts and values” to obtain mastery over barbarians, as the Spaniards correctly showed later.

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strength and power may return without the rule of the priests and their slaves of pagan crucifixions; more precisely, if a polytheism of spiritual sovereignty develops out of its demise (far and beyond nihilist-atheism). This sovereignty would not be built upon a “state after death” (as stated above) since the illusion that one’s personal gain of eternal life is unselfish and “righteous” will be revealed after two millennia. Otherworldly removal and its life-denying orientation, founded on the error of putting innocence to death by way of a promethean murder, shall seem opposite to the exemplary mode which Christ lived on earth itself–the place in which “kingdom” originally would be founded for the Jews3. Whereas the original, undistorted and unpoisoned conscience of light and unity (i.e. Christ) does away with opposites and all oppositions too as they are rendered unnecessary. Nietzsche states “The ‘glad tidings’ are precisely that there are no more opposites” (A 32). Without sword, struggle, revenge, enmity or argument (“certainly not ‘by the scriptures”’) “it is there, from the beginning” as if almost from a child-like state; it knows not anger, censure, defense or the “pure folly” of politics and experience of the world (A 32). The “pure folly” of the semiotics of religious formulae cannot detract from its quintessential quality: this faith “resists formulas” because above all else “it lives” (32). Grace embodied requires no proof, no rewards or miracles–a point which opposes both ancient and contemporary Christian believers’ construct of belief. For Nietzsche, “living” as it does, the “it” participates within life itself as that which is alive in the affirmation of life, a life that encapsulates the whole of the earth and its entire spectrum of “justice” (as the plane of order amongst the bodies and souls of earth’s divinized creatures). This oneness with life–which is exemplary of the primordial unity with God (since mankind has not been sundered by sin)–is the very antithesis of the privileged sacrifice cult or complex that propagates the putting to death of a part-divine being “on the cross”. Instead of a pernicious revenge against innocence, “it lives against death, against therefore the cult of sin and its presumption that “justice” requires punishment. Instead of moral condemnation and a “justice” demanding the end of innocence, Christ’s luminous “glad tidings” defies a vision of death-saturated souls requiring salvation through penalty and punishment i.e. to pay for one’s sins. The 3

Nietzsche maintains it is Paul who completely overturns Christ’s message and life through the barbarism of sacrifice and death-worship, particularly given the historical fact that Jews such as Christ did not concentrate on a “heaven” since both the Torah and Talmud focus on the purpose of and transformation of earthly life.

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monotheistic debtor-God is displaced by overcoming: the one that brings “light”, “truth” and “eternal love” through a reunion with God which gives life back–to those oppressed by priestly vengeance against life. It is the lived life of Christ that captures the inseparable existence we have with God, one which is completely free of (retrogressive) debt as a kind of spiritual indebtedness. The affirmative spirit of this life of practices stands in complete contradistinction to the priestly orientation: the renunciation of life and life-preserving instincts. The “practice of the Church is hostile to life” he says because “to attack the passions at their root means to attack life at its roots”; its cure is “castration” as it combats rather than ushering in “‘How can one spiritualize, beautify, deify a desire?’” (TI Morality as Anti-nature 1). Jesus neither combats nor castrates, nor does he aim to prove, oppose or persuade by miracles. He “spiritualized” by means of light and the truth of living, and by his future will to not take revenge against the Judaic priesthood–who had degraded the Father through usurpation and guilt-sacrifice. Because the first priests required sacrifice– life put to death by reactive souls–for their own acquisition of power, they turned blood and killing into a holy thing, as if it were mystified by ritual and esoteric sacraments. While the Creator dwells in the living and the light of being (existence), it is men and in particular “holy men” who demand blood…for a non-existing Sin. First error: power as unholy; second error: mortal Sin; third error: killing as blood retribution; fourth error: anthropic revenge dressed as “holy gift” (from God); fifth error: promise of a “kingdom” instead of becoming joyful of life.

Priestly Distance and Interruption One can see the logic unfold within this line of religious thought or pagan heresy, as Nietzsche would say. Instead of the true love and grace of the higher one, we get a decadent “a-gospel” à la the Priest. For it is with the interjectors, the human mediators, that the spiritual miscarriage occurs– tragically4. Nietzsche identifies the lie of the priests by showing us the original i.e. pre-Churchly Christ–the true evangel of living practices (in union with god). His summative comment captures the essence of the 4 The

problem with the “fictionalist” interpretation of valuations/values given by R. Lanier Anderson, viz “once something is made valuable by artistic intervention, thenceforth it really has value”, is that the gospel of the Church’s priesthood is a pure fiction and moreover a perversion. Its illusory “value” in actuality only figured as a “lie” as Nietzsche tells us (see R. Lanier Anderson “Nietzsche on Truth, Illusion, and Redemption”, European Journal of Philosophy, 2005 vol 13 no.: 2: 185-225).

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problem: “everything that contains its value in itself is made altogether valueless, anti-valuable by the parasitism of the priest”–he who is the real handle of power and by means of submission acts so “‘God forgives those who repent”’ (A26). This is a strongly Protestant conception of the corruptibility of the pure or “holy anarchist” that overthrew the hierarchy of the Jewish church (A26). The argument consists of: First, the priests are considered the “real handles of power” (A26) and not mere spiritual ascetics. Second, the debasement of the highest and noblest promotes valuelessness in society–because the priest intervenes and thus interrupts the original ecstatic union with God. Separation is the commencement point for all kinds of nihilism. Interference through priestly mediation proves to be alienable hence a mark of degeneracy i.e. decline. Third, the priest in actuality is surplus to requirement: the natural order (of state, family, organic life and physical necessity) with its manifold principles does not require or need the priest. Everything that is natural in human association, affiliations and commerce between groups is rendered antithetical or opposite to nature: “anti-natural” which means moralized (by priests and ascetics) and therefore moralistic5. This unhappy inversion, through a destructive will to nothingness, delivers up “one of the most corrupt conceptions of the divine ever attained on earth”: namely, “God as the declaration of war against life, against nature, against the will to live” (A18). In addition to the corruption “the will to nothingness pronounced holy”, Christianity inserts the further degeneracy of the priest-as-parasite (A18). This fundamental “contradiction of life” is further amplified by the interventions of a stand-in holy man who ostensibly acts as the representative of God on earth (A18). How? The Priest by means of inverted valuations and concepts e.g. “kingdom of God”, founds the “conditions under which the priest attains power, with which the priest preserves his power”, maintains the basis of “all priestly organizations, of all forms of priestly or philosophic-priestly rule” (A55). Rather than a story of truth, metaphysical Truth, Nietzsche’s discovery of a pernicious decadence entails a political-historical sociology–something 5

The priests surrender the “is” by substituting it with an “ought” (with blame and responsibility ensuing just prior to invidious guilt and punishment).

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which philosophers (and philologists) conventionally miss entirely. They lack the realism of a Thucydides and Machiavelli, the means by which to grasp actuality itself and not ideal forms and notions as is their wont. Nietzsche understands that organization and status are linked to power; and power is never far from religion and the Church. The “divine” in other words, like the “Holy”, is ever more mundane and secular (if not ugly) than we realize, most often dressed up as the Good (righteous) when in actuality it is rather Unholy and promulgates evil. Divine and holy are much more amenable to sceptical doubt and scrutiny under the aegis of science and rationality than churchmen wish to know or admit. Enlightenment has shown that power and interest are never too far away from human existence. This helps to disenchant the mystical priest from his ascetic otherworldly appearance to reveal him to be a zoon politikon (political animal) and homo faber (fabricating man) who fashions and makes through skillful organization and arrangement. Through a kind of spiritual organization, the priestly caste overcome their (worldly) masters and achieve dominance by means of organizing and managing the guilt complex that is borne of (an invented) depraved Sin. For instance, the Church needs the “soul” for its own earthly existence. It organizes life around the “soul-superstition” in order to better secure its own power interests and position within society (GM). Through the hypostatization of the “soul”, theologians and modern Christians re-present the supreme values (of life) “under the holiest names” when they actually are “nihilistic values”, that is the “values which are symptomatic of decline” (A6). Decline is inextricably linked therefore with the unique phenomenon of the “parasitism of the priest” (referred to above). The argument entails then the position that advancement and enhancement occur in the absence of such a parasitism and corruptible domination: namely, in the difficult freedom and high responsibility constitutive of the higher ones designated as “free spirits”. They must not merely be godless anti-Christians or modern exponents6 of atomic reality, for they must overcome nihilistic values “under the holiest names” and be post-nihilists beyond the modern decadent. Such a difficult freedom, as I call it, requires the negation of this perverse parasitism of the priest because Nietzsche finds the priest to be “above it” and has “hitherto ruled” and above all “has determined the concept “true” and ‘untrue’!” (A12). To overcome here means having to overcome these illusory, holiest-driven “true” and “untrue” concepts (which modern philosophers have unconsciously inherited). They will be 6 Nietzsche states “the free-thinking of our honourable natural scientists and physiologists is, to my mind, a joke: they lack passion in these matters” (A8).

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appreciative of dual dimensions of the godly, unlike the priest’s Christian God who is the “good God”: the higher types will understand that a god “must be able to be both useful and harmful, both friend and foe–he is admired in good and bad alike” (A16). Following the dictates of realism, not merely epistemic realism, it becomes imperative that post-nihilist, anti-decadent types comprehend the Whole and its totality effects vis-à-vis the forms of the gods and divine attributes. The problem from a wider perspective of accounting is not the interplay of gods and human beings, but the myopia that slants one whole side of reality (because it purportedly is ugly and induces fear in mortals). What requires overcoming is not the gods or the “divine” but the castrated “good god” of Christianity who is a mere fabrication (and illusion); and secondly, is symptomatic of weakness and degenerate states (of soul and physiology). The antithesis of Christian-scientific nihilism asks: “Of what consequence would a God be who knew nothing of anger, revengefulness, envy, mockery, cunning, acts of violence?” (A16). This more sovereign free spirit better comprehends and “sees” with her eyes that one “has much need of the evil God as of the good God” (16). Why? Because “one does not owe one’s existence to philanthropy or tolerance”, argued Nietzsche (16). One’s existence, in short, mirrors the totality of the universe as Gottfried Leibniz had already suggested through his theory of monadic entities reflecting the whole universe. Both the German and Greek understandings of “world” carry this connation in their respective worldview concepts; it bearing the consequence that fragments (of reality) cannot be separated artificially and subsequently analyzed (through minutiae), and arbitrarily privileged above other fragments or dimensions. Nietzsche preserves the integrity of the world as actual and our “humanall-too-human” condition, including all the divine forms that human history encompasses. What is the “enemy” or falsity of thought is idealism: the wont to lop-off undesirable components to secure a more comfortable, pleasurable “ideal” existence in which the soul can rest in peace. The “better world” which awaits the “kingdom to come” on earth is what priests and ascetic metaphysicians dangle before the eyes of “the herd” to enhance their post-magical powers of persuasion and spiritual control. Their gaze is on the world beyond and not the actual world of force, natural cause and wissen (knowledge); or rather on the nobility of strength, courage, honesty, extension, self-overcoming and freedom of spirit. These twin dimensions of abnegation are the result of a pernicious “suspicion against life” that is rooted in the a-gospel’s “phantasmagoria of ‘another’, a ‘better’ life” owing in essence to the pagan import of killing a god: first through a blood ritual of sacrifice and the second as farce (i.e.

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murdering God through nihilistic negation) (TI Reason in philosophy 6). This twin axis of illusion and error-making owes fundamentally to what Nietzsche conceives of as a coarsening of the Redeemer type: wherein the necessity to make incomprehensible, unfamiliar features of the venerated being palatable, an extensive distortion “blots out the original, often painfully strange features” and therefore from the outset “it does not even see them” (A31). The first Christians, in other words, necessarily miscomprehended Christ, albeit revering him at the same time. They could not “see” his otherness; it was too foreign to them. Moving about as a “foreign figure” in his own time the Redeemer could therefore “not remain pure, whole, free from [vulgar] accretions” at least from a human-all-toohuman perspective. This rendering proves violent for the itinerary of the modern soul and the spirit of nobility more generally since this very “extensive distortion”–the basis of our twin axis of illusion/errancy–carries with it the highly corrosive element of guilt-blood sacrifice or murder that annihilates all innocence (joy) and purity (Christ’s affirmative glad tidings). It brings about the grandest cultural and spiritual decline over millennia, only paralleled by the fall and decline of the Roman Empire, and one culminating in modern décadence. If this condition is marked by godless unbelief, it never the less remains decadent and thus degenerate for Nietzsche. Under it, even before the “death of God”, the concept of God is falsified whereby a “matchless scorn for every tradition, for every historical reality” leads to a “stupid salvation mechanism of guilt before Yahweh” (A26). We have arrived at the crucial point because here is conveyed the three primary elements of supreme corruption and degeneracy: “stupid salvation mechanism” simultaneously conveys 1. a guilt complex 2. the invention of a mechanism for redemption and 3. the Priest’s definitive power behind each of these devices by which a phantasmagoria of “eternal joy” is craftily created (in a fashion even superior to Odysseus’ cunning). Nietzsche unlocks the mechanisms by which an all-encompassing destructive “will to nothingness” unfolds through a very powerful form of spiritualization that eventually will envelop the whole of the earth. The priesthood conspires with power and creates for itself: 1. dependency 2. contaminated souls

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3. a sole source of hope 4. a twofold world 5. an inferior mundane world a “falsified God” (the “good God”) an edifice for the needy, lowly, weakly ones: the Church the false doctrine of punishment as an extension of the illusive “Debtor-God” This deadly compound of elements has produced the infamous “weak will” of modern nihilism and its overarching state of decline known as décadence. The priest’s coup d’état can be understood to be simultaneously organizational, political, spiritual and psychological. That is, it first organized to have a priesthood interpose itself between God and the Pharaoh or King so that the “holy of holies” were sacramentalized and therefore under the sole preserve of ascetic “holy men”. In this case the Jews were preceded by the Pharaonic priests of ancient Egypt who usurped the supreme position of the “divine one” and assumed authority for intercession with the sun god Amun-Ra. While sovereignty lay in the seat of the Pharaoh, the political coup was to make the Egyptian people revere and honour the ascetic power of a few priests who now took care of matters concerning both the After-world and sacrifices to ensure an abundance on earth. The Egyptians’ very existence depended on the artful skills of these men to mediate between the two-worlds even beyond the scope of an all-powerful Pharaonic sovereign. Having split the cosmos into two realms and positioned themselves between the gods and the people, they cultivated a spiritual need–in the form of ritual and sacrament–which their souls encompassed. The spiritual and organizational logics of overturning (old ways) thus reaped the final dimension of our fourfold coup: psychological determination. Metaphysics delivered up two-worlds whilst priestly practice delivered up the promise of a “better life”, making the intrepid soul dependent on intercession while experiencing anguish about its own redemption. It is a psychology of the masses, firstly because it is about personal self-interest7; and secondly because the Promise of an after-life is shared amongst the lowest and 7 We saw previously that in The Anti-Christ (43) Nietzsche reverses the commonheld view of salvation declaring that the defiance of every law of nature for the “salvation of every single one is permitted” by Christianity’s fundamental victory: a “pitiable flattery of personal vanity” which raises “every sort of egoism to infinity”. Although the priestly revolt is oligarchic in nature, psychology begins with its “mob rule” when all become subject to the spiritual need for redemption (and its attendant curse of guilt in Occidental societies).

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neediest of society hence universalizing value and thereby overturning higher “noble values”. The modern physician of the soul must therefore trace back the corrupting element to the priest’s intervention and interpolation within social relations i.e. his declared “parasitism”. This stems as far back as the early Jewish priests but even earlier to the foresaid Egyptian priesthood and the high priesthood of ancient Babylonia.

A World-denying Reversal Nietzsche declares these functions and inventions of the priestly caste are demonstrative of an active will to power in so far as the establishment of disvalue, new valuations that despise “all things natural” and remove their inherent value, becomes tradition and institutionalised in the Church. Here the will is saved from oblivion through the creation of a “soulsuperstition” and a moralistic dependency (on the parasitism of the priest) which chains the individual to an invidious morality of…despair, renunciation hence of decline. By moralizing they have transvaluated nature; and this through a deep suspicion of every natural law of existence, force, reason and cause (GM). This active transformation of the world into a dual cosmos of Good and Evil is the grandest event of all time even overshadowing the “death of God” event as an expression of the crisis of modern scientific rationality. Both acts of willing and power (events) are active yet they have their basis decisively in a reactive will to power. The priest’s so-called “slave revolt” is reactive to the political and spiritual dominance of noble rulers: in their resentment against authority exercised over them, the lower caste, the nascent priests revolt and challenge the supreme authority of the nobler King, Pharaoh or Ruler. Their reactive soul-types manifest a psychology of resentfulness and vengefulness for the perceived injustice they incur as a result of the nobles’ domination. Active affirming power emerges out of existing status arrangements that are a mark of the hierarchy of distinction that exists in a particular society. The priest’s reactive state of soul gives rise to a sickened God essentially as a result not merely of revenge against barbarian gods8 but out of an act of self-cruelty. Nietzsche states: through the “uncanny inventions of the priests” i.e. “beyond”, Last Judgement, they reduced mankind to a “state of self-violation” by means of concepts which proved to be “instruments 8

As a result of its monotheistic presuppositions, Judaeo-Christianity begins with a trenchant hatred for heterogeneity; its distinct sense of cruelty is turned outward in the form of persecution both of pagans and heretics. The first act of cruelty is to demand the death of one’s own supreme God by valorizing killing, blood and sacrifice through celebration of the Cross.

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of torture, systems of cruelties” thereby turning the priest into master i.e. masters of the earth (A 38). This sort of self-cruelty is not merely “conceptual” but is constituted by the reactive nihilism at work in putting one’s god on the cross for the “remission of sins”–sacrifice, nothing but pure “gruesome paganism”. With this pagan blood sacrifice–for a fictitious “guilt”–the “whole concept of ‘blessedness’” is done away with along with the “actuality of the evangel” (A41). Hence through Christian self-loathing a violent injustice of hubris is exercised over the redeemer who was an emblem of life, joy and blessedness–indeed, of God himself. Why would mere mortals abandon life and joy in their union with God to adopt death, sacrifice and spiritual sickliness by means of “murder” i.e. “death of God”, asks Nietzsche? This strange and highly reprehensible inversion–which no empirical science can fix–is the root cause for the rot and decay of the religion of the Christian Church: Nietzsche decisively names it God as “contradiction of life” (A18). From affirmation to contradiction, from joy to despising: the antithesis of the gospel reigns supreme in the Church and it is this quintessential reversal and antithetical valuation that makes Nietzsche the arch enemy of monotheistic Christianity. Nothing remotely recognizable as Christ’s lived life or his practices can be found in the priestly infected Church of Paul and Peter. Hence the decisive retribution: “What sets us apart is not that we recognize no God…but that we find that which has been reverenced as God not “godlike” but pitiable, absurd, harmful, not merely an error” but most especially “a crime against life” (A47). The destructive reversal which sees God contradicted and of contradiction stands as a “crime against life”; it is life which is most important, according to Nietzsche. The gods are in the service of life, of the universe, and not the morbidity characteristic of the sickly will and life of the Christian. With the loss of antiquity (Roman noble ways and values) Christian morbidity in the form of pagan barbarian crucifying and blood thirst brings forth a mythical construct: the dysangel of sin, guilt, death and Judgement Day (A39). His is a life philosophy, one that embraces not merely the actual (i.e. existents) but the Bios of the world and organic nature–what in German is bound up with Naturphilosophie. Sexuality and Greek eros belong to the many ways of life that arise from biology which Nietzsche continually refers to as “physiology”. It is these dimensions of Bios which the Church ashamedly turns its back on and represses: through its sin-guilt complex the flesh of the body is condemned and rejected. The complex arises from its morbidity and the unnecessary inversion of Christ’s evangel performed by a pernicious death worship (that the lowly, downcast of the imperium

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Romanum invented as “Christianity”). Nietzsche puts it succinctly thus: “The fate of the Evangel was determined by the death–it hung on the Cross…this unexpected shameful death…was in general reserved for the canaille alone” (A40). The herd or masses in the Empire needed a Redeemer so they converted the lived life of Christ into an exceptional being–The Messiah–and thus alienated him from the intrinsic, immanent union of all with God. This is the beginning of the Death of God–God put to death twice: once on the cross and then through the internal fissure of Greek Logos turned speculative theology, eventuating in scientific nihilism. The latter is the logical outcome–and culmination–of the first nihilistic drama of killing innocence through blood and guilt. We ought to remember most significantly each of these destructive Events in time are as a result of nihilistic forces, that is, weak and sickly will formation and an under-abundance of life energy. For Nietzsche the tendency toward self-cruelty and revenge (against one’s own god) is a sign of depleted energy or “will to life”, a degeneracy that manifests in diminished willpower. In both instances of sacral “death” it is degeneracy that is at work, not a power of usurpation to overthrow their enemy9. Slaves to decline, despair and faith in a “Beyond” world embody this degenerate or weakened state of life. Hence the need for faith; for a tragic salvational sacrifice of blood for one’s own “sins”.

Centre of Gravity and Twin Orders of the Universe It represents the asocial consequence of “nothingness” argues Nietzsche: “If one shifts the centre of gravity of life out of life into the “Beyond”–into nothingness–one has deprived life as such of its centre of gravity” (A43). The “great lie” of nothingness’s Beyond and its rarefied “kingdom to come” has the effect of destroying “all that is life-furthering” and “all rationality” (A43). This ontological claim about the “centre of gravity” makes Nietzsche more of a rationalist than other contending attributions such as “wild”, imagination, chaos, ecstasy, gelassenheit (letting be) or self-will (Hegel-Kant) denote10. While these dimensions may exist, he 9

Enmity and the will to revenge are basic characteristics of the reactive soul of decadence and its attendant weak physiognomy. The noble soul of abundance and Dionysian energy conversely does not seek to destroy but to affirm life, as exemplified by Jesus’ “glad tidings”. 10 See Jason Wirth Schelling's Practice of the Wild: Time, Art, Imagination (Albany: SUNY Press, 2015); Slavoj Žižek Less than Nothing: Hegel and the Shadow of Dialectical Materialism (London: Verso, 2012). Nietzsche stated: “When one has banished natural causality from the world by means of reward and

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contends the Dionysian affirmation of life up until the very end of his “Revaluation of values” project (the Antichrist being its last instalment). Menschen (humankind) needs a centre of gravity but in particular it needs this type of centre of gravity: one which embraces the “eternal joy of becoming” both in Natur and Geist. To do this forms of existence across the earth typically embrace life by means of different ascending or descending developments of the “god-type”–a non-accidental feature of Menschen given his recognition of the “creator spiritus in man” (A19). It is decidedly not-accidental because Nietzsche, like Schelling before him, understood the universe as creatively evolving and changing; therefore the form-giving nature of the human creature lends itself toward divinizing since Nietzsche recognizes humans to possess a “God-creating force” i.e. the creator spiritus (A19). In the affirmative mode–not the morbidity mode of the first believers–this force of spiritualization and divination is evidently at work: “A people which still believes in itself still also has its own God” (A16). We can see here the absence of nothingness and the sure presence of a tradition of creation based upon the all-important “centre of gravity”. Practices of life make up this “centre” as Nietzsche repeatedly makes clear through the figure of the true evangel: Christ. It is practices not doctrines or faith; and it is life, not death which are the true bedrock of a religious attitude or outlook. The anthropic principle is for Man not to “lie himself out of actuality” but rather to affirm his own actuality through diverse practices and joyous “tidings” of light and love by instituting his own national or civilizational god-worship elements and presuppositions. This actuality is to be created rather than supposed as given and existing: analogous to God, religiosity becomes as creative forces and impulses work themselves through the “creature of spirit”. It is important to observe the normative position that Nietzsche adopts from his ontological conception: it is not no god but instead a healthy multiplicity of the divine reflected through distinctive cultural or civilizational traditions. What is troublesome is the drive toward nothingness–the nihilist’s antithetical stance toward the rich and abundant in life destroys strong cultural and national expressions. Nietzsche bemoans the elimination of authentically expressed “national” or customary ways of worshipping; that is, how “races” create ways of celebrating life, origins and the infinite. It is greatly important that peoples and races have ways to capture and dwell within a “centre of gravity” which Nietzsche had identified to be ontologically necessary. (Notably neither his concept of eternal recurrence or will to power properly conveys an ontology of this punishment, one then requires an anti-natural causality” (A25).

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kind or any other). Only “decadents” attack the social hierarchy based on the reactive (par resentment) perception that privilege and superiority of feeling, power and so forth are based on “caste, privilege, the order, the social form” (A27). In attacking the social form with its hierarchy of distinction11 the priestly type decadents enacted a very significant “slave” rebellion: first, by attacking privilege all that was noble is degraded (devalued); second, a “disbelief in ‘higher men”’ is institutionalized and reinforced by morality (Christianity) thus laying the foundation for the democrat to rule (A27). By declaring war on “the good and the just” within a social order (Rome or Israel), these proto-nihilists embed the spirit of ressentment within the newly established “social form” of disbelief; a form that denies the “supreme law of life” and thus undercuts the healthy mode of divinizing which a tradition ordinarily upholds and preserves. Nietzsche bemoans the corrosive effect of a spiritualphysiognomic morbidity that forces an unhealthy “reduction of the divine” (A17) through slave destruction: when the godhead comes under the sway of forces and instincts of decay, impoverishment and weakness. The latter are all interconnected with the forementioned “centre of gravity” since any diminution in our centre of gravity–by means of erosion and “disbelief”– will increase impoverishment, weakness and decay. For Nietzsche, a peoples’ tradition and way of celebrating life through, for instance, their “national god” (16) is part of the authoritative structure that expresses and captures the “supreme law of life”, namely differentiation according to the nature of one’s being. To erode the authoritative order also entails an erosion of the divine order; and it is the interlocking of these two types of order (of power and being) that composes a given “centre of gravity”–an ontology. For a race of people, Nietzsche argues, must build up an edifice of means and sources to harness their distinctive affirmation of life–a mode of perfecting one’s existence through a unique “art of living” (A57). The supreme law of life through its “order of castes” is institutionalized to make the moral law unconscious; but even moreso to prevent a lack of a centre of gravity: that is “the perpetuation in infinitum of the fluid 11

A “pathos of distance” exists between three essential types comprising a social order: 1. the highest caste are “the fewest” who have the “privileges of the fewest” 2. the “executives of the most spiritual order” who are the noble warriors and “guardians of the law” 3. the majority of the “mediocre type” who perform professional/practical functions using specialization. Each “type” “mutually condition[s] one another” while the “privilege of each is determined by the nature of his being”. Nietzsche argues a “high culture is a pyramid” with a broad base and life “becomes harder and harder as it approaches the heights” (see A57).

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condition of values, tests, choices, criticizing of values” with perpetual experimenting (57). However beyond self-preservation as unconscious law-abiding living, lies the more perfectible art of thanks-giving and giftgiving, the divine celebration of all existence. When a people affirms its very existence it “still also has its own God” because in him it can venerate the “conditions through which it has prospered” (A16). People need to venerate when they prosper; to be grateful for one’s existence or abundance a race or national people “needs a God” since he “who is rich wants to bestow” praise or reverence (16). Both reverence and bestowing are elemental to practices that define the creative-projective processes of the human being. Nietzsche connects the celestial and terrestrial orders by finding creative powers at work in both dimensions; yet it is practices once again that construct the reality of one’s religious life. Specifically, acts of veneration entail a “proud people” projecting “its joy in itself, its feeling of power on to a being whom one can thank for them” (16). If the presuppositions of religion do not relate to gratitude but instead to indebtedness and appeasement (the creditor-god), a people’s feeling of power projects on to a being the value of sacrifice. One must give to a God to preserve the social order; the practice of sacrifice not only re-balances the moral debtcredit equation between mortal and god but it shows that a “proud people needs a God in order to sacrifice” (16). The divine order exists to the extent that human activity generates deities that assist with the human condition, its predicaments and which belong to the “art of living”–an art that manifests either energy-abundant or energy-depleted forces. For the double-formation of cosmic-earthly orders of being always reflect the relative presence of these energy states in existence. Nietzsche never maintained that a godless condition was marked by an abundance of energy or will-power. He linked the latter rather to the following phenomena: a “proud people”, a people’s “national god” and the inventive power of creative persons who marshal Apollonian and Dionysian forces to create new ways of experiencing greatness and joy (Z). What he was most critical of was the dwindling capacity of inventiveness due either to one’s tradition or psycho-physical framework as exemplified, for instance, by the Germans following the Renaissance. In the case of Germany, certainly the Germans failed to repudiate the sickly and decadent nature of Christianity, especially its “contradiction” as we discussed earlier. Above all though he slates the incapacity for spiritual inventiveness–owing to a “weariness of soul” endemic to decadence: “Almost two millennia and not a single new God!” (A19). It is the weakening of the “God-creating force”, the creator spiritus “in man”, that is lamentable since this entails a

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diminishing of the power to project, to make by means of divinizing ܿȞșȡȦʌȠȢ (i.e. Homeric wisdom). Creation through generation is what Nietzsche’s Heraclitean philosophy of Becoming (Werden) ultimately leads us to (and by implication joy and greatness via “spiritualization”). The generation of more and different gods is most welcomed by Nietzsche since it would allow humankind diverse and healthier (more robust) ways to know of: ‫ ޣ‬glad tidings ‫ ޣ‬the dual sides of a godhead ‫ ޣ‬transcendence of the law ‫ ޣ‬union with a venerated being ‫ ޣ‬active soul powers of projection ‫ ޣ‬an actualized “Buddhistic happiness” on earth (The Anti-Christ) In general, healthier and energy-abundant “social forms” of reverence and ascetic discipline are valorized by Nietzsche while “morbidity” and diminished powers or instincts (for the divine) are consistently critiqued. Once again it is notable that the removal of spiritual reverence or projecting by nothingness-negation is not the primary goal nor is it considered a liberation of some kind. What is required is an overcoming of decadence par excellence12, including therefore its foundational Christian roots i.e. degeneracy. Since Christianity in Nietzsche’s eyes “has taken the side of everything weak, base, ill-constituted”, attacking the “preservative instincts of strong life”, it must be overcome to allow a noble culture to flourish (once again) (A5). Multiple pathways to the ecstatic mysteries of the universe and cosmic unity–the Whole as he calls it–would on the other hand engender a healthier conception of God. Why? Because they can reveal the limitations of a single world-denying, anti-natural and morbid world-attitude such as Judaeo-Christianity. Nietzsche’s maneuver against the Church entails a far more sophisticated strategy than that of the godless ones who espouse 12 Hitherto we have examined the problematic of “decadence” as the overriding concern of Nietzsche’s philosophical outlook on religion and society. It entails the emergence of science from the ascetic ideal, nihilism-as-negation (nothingness), his ontology of “centre of gravity”, the twin orders of the universe and the inversion thesis of the true gospel through a corruptible “contradiction of God” by way of a death-morbid metaphysics of life. It is therefore necessary for philosophers to also conceive of Nietzsche as a cultural critic, that is a post-secular critic of decadence (and scientism).

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unbelief. His position is much more favourable toward poly-theism13 because it embodies a multiplicity of deities and ways of giving reverence to one’s vision of the divine. The greater the number of traditions and long held customs–modes of producing truth and increasing one’s accumulated force of life–the greater the historic chance that a life-denying, sickliness of soul and body shall be relativized to a particular civilizational form i.e. second Semitic revolt against tradition and social hierarchy. Christianity as the religion of outcasts and ill-constituted spirits (mobish herd), an anarchic movement described as “an aggregate formation of décadence types from everywhere crowding together and seeking one another out” (A51), would then become only one variant of what derives from a semiorganic–spiritual composition of elemental forces. Nietzsche’s explanation for the array of god-types that exist as a result of the anthropic expression of the principle of Becoming is based upon his monadic conception of the “will to life”. He finds as with most things two basic types prevailing in history: at paragraphs 16 and 17 he dwells on the fact that there “is no other alternative for Gods: either they are the will to power…or else the impotence for power–and then they necessarily become good” (16).

Godly Types and Vital Powers These two godly types reflect two basic human physio-spiritual dispositions which commonly recur as key reference points for Nietzsche throughout his mature works: these capacities or constitutive natures are an extension of Nietzsche’s early conception of Dionysian and Apollonian forces used in The Birth of Tragedy. Namely: 1.The prerequisites of “ascending life”, “everything strong, brave, masterful, proud,” overabundance of energy and an overflow of joy and happiness from the most vital instincts and impulses of nature (A17) 2. The prerequisites of descending life, everything weak, cowardice, slavish, meek, indulgent, under-abundance of energy and unnecessary lack of joy, and happiness from the denial (askesis) of the most vital instincts and impulses of nature (A, TI)

13 Richard Schacht’s otherwise very fine exegesis of Nietzsche’s interpretive stance toward God is not sufficiently nuanced to bring out the importance of modes of divination (e.g. polytheism) which may exalt or condemn humankind (Nietzsche London: Routledge, 1982).

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These two poles of energy, organic vital material and will, comprise the history of the “will to life” as evidenced on earth by diverse master and slave class types and their respective regimes of ruling and obeying. As a consequence, the character of one’s godhead or divinity will reflect the degree to which a people embody the “prerequisite” characteristics of one or other polar type of energy or “will-force”. For Nietzsche, Christianity specifically is a decadent religion because it arises out of the lowly form, that is, the physiology of weakness, decay and world-weariness. Those who suffer from the world and thus become world-weary and otherworldly are those feeble in soul and body who need relief, who need saving, by means of faith and not actuality i.e. a scientific outlook. Against any natural method of inquiry this physio-spiritual weaker type looks to faith–for “convictions” about the world, to find comfort in salvation from this world and redemption from suffering from a pernicious sin-guilt complex. Nietzsche links both the penchant for faith and the power invested in the priest as inimical to the intellect of mind and empirical science. But it is mostly because of Christianity’s hostility and opposition to Bios (life) and nature (physis) that Nietzsche castigates this form of religiosity i.e. divination. As he states clearly in The Antichrist: “Christianity has taken the side of everything weak, base, ill-constituted, it has made an ideal out of opposition to the preservative instincts of strong life”; and by doing so it has “waged a war to the death against this higher type of man” (5). Consequently the strong type, like the intellectualscientific man, is frowned upon, considered reprehensible and outcast to the dubious realm of the senses. Instead of a proliferation of higher men and women this second Church of Judaism without a national idiom or pathos perpetuates a lowly culture of decay and “weariness of soul” (19), and therefore modern decadence. Decadence and the Church’s “dysangel” of “bad tidings” thus go hand-in-hand, promulgating a version of God which is wholly corrupted and he states decisively, “not ‘godlike’ but pitiable, absurd, harmful, not merely an error but a crime against life” (A47). They have distorted Him and then created a miraculous falsehood that has withstood centuries of examination and reverence of soul. Philosophy itself is cast in the mold of this falsified concept of God, culminating (after Luther) in the Tubingen seminary and its Idealist group of thinkers i.e. pejoratively German “idealists”. The whole of Western metaphysics is in fact tainted by this “contradiction” or reversal of God that is wholly responsible for the perpetuation of this said miraculous falsehood. To be sure this means metaphysics is not only a product of the priest’s ascetic rejection of thisworld but primarily a product of a weak, ill-constituted physiognomic

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form (psycho-biologic quanta of energy) that comes to prevail at a given time i.e. over Roman valour and will-power. Metaphysical thought is a dual product: of a flight-from-the-world asceticism and, on the other hand, a weak organic-spiritual capacity that beckons necessarily toward a negative death cult worship of the Cross i.e. salvation from sin. The two logics mutually reinforce one another since the priest’s rejection of “thisworld” and the escape to salvation from the sins of the body by needy “weak” souls makes for a transcendental stance against (earthly) phenomena. In this light the Church’s appropriation of Plato made perfect sense for those metaphysicians who sought out the fundamental mystery of Being and God–a problem which would be sustained by Augustine and Aquinas. (This is Nietzsche’s Plato, not the neo-Pythagorean Plato that overcomes his master Socrates.) The conflation of God (mono) with Being (singular) up until Kant–the swindler of theologic reason–has ruined thought and, moreover Nietzsche argues, crippled our naturalistic understanding of nature and her instincts and dynamic forces. When atheist-scientists dispense with the mono-God under the guise of science they nevertheless perpetuate the singular universe of Being with their insufferable “mechanics”. What is problematical therefore is not a universe with divine entities (as the Greeks and Romans showed) but rather the weak force or capacity for deifying the merely human-animal– something that destructively results in what Nietzsche called “monotonotheism” (A19). We are beleaguered by the dead-weight of such “a sickly and decrepit product of décadence”, the pitiable God of Christianity: both monolithic and one-sided, the good god who lacks the qualities of bad and evil in the world. This lop-sided god figure is un-comprehensive and lacks knowledge of the Whole since after they deposed the God of Israel, these anarchical rebels who defied tradition, strength and nobility created a weak God in accordance with their own image. These nouveau rebellious Jews (first Christians) who misunderstood Christ and therefore the gospel too advanced an exceedingly one-sided, partial and thus unreal God who epitomized the fundamental weak condition of these souls of worldweariness. God is weakened and indeed falsified by the weak ones who paradoxically become triumphal over both Rome and Jerusalem. The weak God is a manifestation of a triumphal weak (decay) caste that eschews all that composes the actual world, a world with cunning, bad, deception, hatred, egoism, conflict and exploitation. He the Almighty consequently becomes myopic and philosophy thereafter becomes stunted by the theologian’s instinct for the “ideal” and the “virtuous” (good). Good and virtuous qualities are projected onto His being by those who (first) had to escape from (and deny) the world’s suffering: they called the other side

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Sin or Evil while setting their gaze on the Eternal and salvation. Metaphysics slanted this dual world and by privileging Being over becoming sided with “the spirit” to find His Being and (under atheistic naturalism the workings of Being. As a post-secular thinker Nietzsche is intent on excavating the “most widespread, peculiarly subterranean form of falsity that exists on earth” thanks to the deep theological prejudices of metaphysical philosophy as the heir of the greatest reversal of the evangel (A9). The foresaid contradiction of God and the myopic weak God of the weakest caste of will to power on earth incessantly pervade European consciousness and thought; and this means that all attempts at a rational metaphysics is doomed to fail because the grammar of God is written into our instincts. To chop-off the God-head, as the godless ones wish to do, still leaves us with the grammar, blood and consciousness of the priesttheologian’s inversion. Paulian theology is at the base root of all thinking– a theology which propagates the infamous “inversion” of Christ’s “good tidings”. The miraculous corruption–of the “falsified God”–imbues all of Western Christendom and therefore German Protestantism too with its “good God” infecting German philosophy. Nietzsche declares: “The Protestant pastor is the grandfather of German philosophy” (A10). More to the point: “Kant’s success is merely a theologian’s success” (10). Why did the German academic world rejoice in the appearance of Kant? Answer: “a secret path to the old ideal stood revealed” with Kant. Nietzsche finds that the “theologian instinct in the German scholar divined what was henceforth possible once again” (10). Kantianism legitimized the transcendental pursuit of the truth of Being which scholastic thinkers previously understood as being bound up with God and his will. As the arch archaeologist, Nietzsche finds more than subterranean traces of Paul’s obsessive death-and-blood worship of innocent sacrifice (vulgar barbarism in short): it permeates all non-empirical thought up until Schopenhauer makes his decisive move against theism. At this point it is worth noting then that the corruption of natural reason and inquiry is itself part of the decline (decadence) that Nietzsche so passionately laments. The early and late decadents are interlinked for him because of this forementioned corruption of God into a weak, decrepit figure of the divine that cannot even comprehend half the universe i.e. the evil side. Nietzsche questions the worth of such a castrated God where the “anti-natural” decadents of yesteryear and today have castrated God “into a God of the merely good”: “One would not understand such a God” (A16). Any god he declares must also know of “anger, revengefulness, envy, mockery, cunning, acts of violence” otherwise “why should one have him? (16). A god must be

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capable of representing the wisdom of the world along with the dualist’s falsehood of Good versus Evil. Having been trained in classical Greek tragedy Nietzsche demands the realism befitting a philologist’s interpretation of life: one owes one’s existence to the deified universe therefore a (true) god must know “the rapturous ardeurs of victory and destruction” alike (16). As nature is extension and depletion, excess and scarcity, strength and weakness, and the gods know command and obey so too the mortal’s world of transfiguration must similarly reflect the apparent “two-sidedness” of reality. To be sure, the dualist’s twin-world order is not Nietzsche’s primary conception because his is characterized rather by a fundamental vying tensional model of eternal becoming14. Becoming involves for him everything that destroys, generates and regenerates into existence which in our case includes the abject such as revenge and violence–what Christians denounce as “sins”. So while the Church admits there is evil in the world its corrupted doctrine of redemption stems from a privileging of the “spirit” and the “Kingdom to come” over and above the actual condition of life characterized by Strife and agon (contestation)–the truth from Nietzsche’s realism. But Nietzsche is stating more here than simply a criticism of unwarranted “otherworldliness”: he is explicitly linking two phenomena in explanatory terms. That is, he finds the weak God of Christianity to be a by-product of those early ascetic decadents who were ill-constituted, descending of life-energy and weary of soul. He states in the Anti-Christ these rebellious early decadents (believers) rejected “all that represents the ascending movement of life, well-constitutedness, power, beauty, selfaffirmation on earth” thereby their genius “instinct of resentment” “had to invent another world” from which the nobles’ “life-affirmation would appear evil” (24). A lack of life-affirming power renders one vulnerable to the forces of resentment as the powerful appear responsible for their inferior existence. The weapon against this kind of “domination” is morality: the weak ones deem themselves and call themselves “the good” while objectifying the stronger as “evil” and their seeming worldliness as unholy i.e. “bad”. Moralization is the natural effect of an ontological disposition of life-negating feebleness, of a lack of organo-spiritual energy. It is on the other hand, a constitutive force of the weaker (“the good”) type’s will to power directed at overcoming their “evil” masters well-constitutedness i.e. “power” through moral denunciation and 14

See M. Tones and J. Mandalios “Nietzsche’s Actuality: Boscovich and the Extremities of Becoming”, Journal of Nietzsche Studies Autumn vol. 46, no.3: 308-327, 2015.

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condemnation. Moralization attends the famous “slave revolt” of the priests who put morals between nature and themselves, inventing a soul through their destructive “bad conscience”. Nietzsche takes aim at the weaker ones’ wont to make God a moral god, a “good god” as we have seen, and to make natural man a being riddled with “bad conscience”–the poison of a corrupted soul-hypothesis (GM). Those inferior in vitality, those less well-constituted of Dionysian energy, call themselves “the good” instead of “the weak” (see below): it is the “Christian conception of God”, the “castrated God” who only knows one-half of the cosmos, that perpetuates the falsehood that the weak are the good. The homology of the weak-God and the weak will-power we can now see produces another homology: that of two kinds of falsehood, namely the “miracle of falsification” when God is inverted and the falsehood of inverting the weaker into “the good”. We may represent the two axes of forms of spiritual praxis thus: Figure 5.1 1. Weak type

Weak God

2. Falsified God

‘Weak are good’ falsehood

Homology 1: ad hominemal construct

Homology 2: moral inversion (construct)

Nietzsche links forms with historical activity thus linking truth and illusion with forms and vital force. It means that types of truths are associated with forms and their particular set of vital forces e.g. weak and strong. Thus his highly under-interpreted “death of God” proclamation is but only one form of spiritual activity in time’s Becoming. According to The Gay Science as the event which lead to “scientific atheism”, it is of some significance primarily because it took two millennia of truth-seeking to discover the lie of the Christian’s falsified God. And just as modern science and European nihilism were each world-altering events so too the death of faith in the “weak God” of the Church will be a world-altering event. This is not to be confused with a simple secularisation thesis; as previously noted the godless ones shall also be overcome and new godtypes may be generated through different forms of spiritual organization. To vanquish the half-god or weak God of Christianity–because it is a remanent of the weak (usurpers of Roman nobility)–allows for alternate, more vigorous gods to emerge and govern one’s veneration. Part of “ascending life” after all entails a God who represents life’s “transfiguration and eternal Yes!” (A18). Rather than shear nothingness

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Nietzsche envisions god-types that precisely are not of the “contradiction of life” kind and therefore inimical to the evangel (18). Besides the perverse practice of worshipping “blood sacrifice” mentioned before, Nietzsche is vehement that the homology (2) between these two kinds of falsehood intensifies and extends the all-important phenomenon of décadence. The Church, like science, is part of this decadence but the theological roots of décadence has gone unnoticed. Priests and theologians accordingly are “decadents” yet the two sets of homologies which arise out of a corrupt deconstruction of the God of Israel are missed by Heidegger, Deleuze and contemporary Anglo-American scholars. The formation of décadence before the onset of democracy and scientific naturalism owes to pre-modern spiritual or divinizing practices that were already at work before the conversion of Augustine. That is with the emergence of the first community of followers, of Galilean commoners who rendered Christ’s countless “incomprehensibilities” into all too familiar human terms (A31). This “very distorted form” of the redeemer has been preserved to us through the Church-fathers, the grammar of God and the ubiquitous “soul-superstition” underlying our concepts of will and cause (hence all of natural science). We have already examined how this fundamental distortion of Christ’s way, his life, arose and perpetuated the most unevengelic idioms of the spiritual: warfare, punishment, revenge, priestly confession along with the concepts “Second Coming”, “Last Judgement” and “Kingdom to Come”. Both practices and concepts of the established Church reflect the basis upon which modern decadence evolved from. Otherworldly (concepts) with this-worldly unevangelic revenge and resentment (practice) wax together–a completely uncoincidental relation. The Church is corrupted dually by concepts and practices that emanate from the “weak type” who were responsible for the destructive, infamous “contradiction” of God referred to above in the Anti-Christ. What is uppermost in Nietzsche’s genealogy of décadence vis-à-vis its theological roots is the sway which the weaker type holds over a once noble culture i.e. Roman way of life. Weakly constituted Dionysian-Apollonian powers of forming and willing are at the very base of this spiritual-cultural decline (décadence), a phenomenon of two thousand years duration. The celebrated “death of God” as it appears in the standard interpretation would then only stand for the demise of the Christian “weak God”, the god who is castrated from the wider totality of actuality. New or different kinds of reverences for the purposes of glorification and indeed “selfredemption” (GS 300) are envisioned, mostly in the fashion of Aeschylus

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the tragedian and Gothean-Wagnerian cosmic drama15. Because Mensche is a reverential creature who has within its constitution the forces of hominus religiousi we can expect differing modes of divination within moments of Becoming. Here the eternal struggle between the twin forces of mirroring one’s perfectibility and mirroring one’s imperfectability occurs with the illusory act of “self-redemption”. It is not enough consequently to conceive of the redemption of man(kind) in terms of reclaiming the past from Christian-Platonism through some form of “backward willing”16 We want to understand specifically why the genius of the heart, as the supreme Symbolist captured it (Christ), stands out in a philosophy of Becoming ordinarily characterized by eternal recurrence, will to power and non-teleological generative dynamic forces.

15 On the latter see the informative discussion of T.K Seung Nietzsche’s Epic of the Soul:Thus Spoke Zarathustra (Lanham: Lexington Books, 2005). 16 As otherwise eloquently stated by Robert Gooding-Williams Zarathustra’s Dionysian Modernism (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 2001).

CHAPTER SIX REDEMPTIVE LIFE: BEYOND ORGANIC POWER

Genius of the heart - It refers us to the missing dimension of all naturalisms applied to the work of Nietzsche—the critical philologist inspired by Greek tragic wisdom who now sees something more than what the tragic artist represents. Nietzsche exceeds both his Hellenism and scientific naturalism at this moment, even surpassing the much-acclaimed “intoxication” of Dionysian man announced in Twilight and Ecce Homo. Through Christianity itself—the tradition of Plotinus, Philo, Augustine, Eckhart and Pascal—Nietzsche is able to see that which lies beyond symbolization (language) and power: the “inmost” things and a perfectible happiness associated with a particular “way of life”. Even beyond his Feuerbachian-like projections of human potencies, with its associated typology of human types, we find Nietzsche is able to affirm a form of the spirit that pertains, he as puts it in the Anti-Christ, to the experience of life. To be sure, this is more than the expected extension or enhancement of power and power-will that frequently dominate his discourses after Daybreak. The figure of Christ, his condition of the heart, is fundamentally irreducible to the organism and the force-points of Boscovich—both central features of any kind of naturalism1. Whether or not it is a reductive naturalism does not quite go to the point. It is highly contestable that Nietzsche’s unorthodox tally and agon with the basic spirit and the reverences of the hominus religiousi can be reduced down to modern psychological categories2. “Soul vivisection”, as is the wont of the 1

For Nietzsche’s immersion in debates concerning modern science, see Robin Small “What Nietzsche Did During the Science Wars”, in Gregory Moore and Thomas H. Brobjer (eds.) Nietzsche and Science (Aldershot: Ashgate, 2004). 2 Primary examples within contemporary scholarship of an inflated conception of the psychological register are John Richardson “Nietzsche’s Psychology” in Nietzsches Wissenschaftsphilosophie: Hintergründe, Wirkungen und Aktualität, ed. Günter Abel, Helmut Heit, Marco Brusotti (Germany: De Gruyter, 2011) 315-332 which I heard in Berlin at the Nietzsche conference of 2010; and others in the

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“modern age”, certainly involves a psychologist of the human-all-toohuman with its characteristic “bad conscience”, resentment, revenge and moral (Christian) sentiments. This is correct and a key facet of the late Nietzsche’s attempt to move away from speculative metaphysics (even if this largely falters at the end)—to finish off what Schopenhauer had commenced. But as the psychology of the tragic Greek age pointed to something beyond itself, viz tragic artistry and wisdom, so too here the uncognized theosophy of man’s self-redemption—expressed in the figure of Zarathustra and the “redeeming man” of the future (GMII:24)—will be invoked to surpass the limits of nihilistic Christianity and even “modern ideas”, as Beyond Good and Evil argues. What will replace, in other words, decadence and its attendant tamed creature of Christian morality requires something greater than a naturalistic psychology and the tragic heroism of a Faustian-Promethean superman.3 This analysis, a post-secular analysis of the Anti-Christ, The Gay Science and On the Genealogy of Morality, has shown that despite the philosophy of organic life (derived principally from Schopenhauer and Goethe), Nietzsche explicitly engaged ideas of redemption and eternity; and these ideas were not restricted to the mytho-poetic narrative of contest between a Faustian-Promethean will and a Spinozian cosmic self (illustrated by Zarathustra). In this vein Nietzsche certainly captured the concerns of his age in 1. adopting an organic view of life and 2. humanising redemption after the pronouncement of nihilism (Jacobi) and Pantheistic-Spinozistic “atheism” (Lessing to Schopenhauer). Nietzsche strove to achieve the latter by means of the former’s perpetual organic striving, making redemption essentially a drive of the perennial “will to life” that inheres in all living things and thus makes existence possible. Whether empirically observed or metaphysically posited Nietzsche never departed from the Schopenhauerian idea of the will manifesting itself through living phenomena: it became the monistic concept of an all pervasive will to power. Though formally eschewing his master’s literature covered by Tom Stern “Against Nietzsche’s “Theory” of the Drives”, Journal of the American Philosophical Association Vol 1:Issue 1 March 2015, 121- 14. 3 See T.K Seung Nietzsche’s Epic of the Soul: Thus Spoke Zarathustra (Lanham: Lexington Books, 2005) who contra Pippin and Richardson understands the key problematic is mytho-religious in nature and not essentially psychological. For Zarathustra being closer to (the undistorted) Christ, see Gudrun von Tevenar “Zarathustra: “That Malicious Dionysian”, in The Oxford Handbook of Nietzsche. Edited by Ken Games and John Richardson (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2013).

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metaphysics of the Will, the willing of every power-will of an organism or spirit nevertheless holds sway over and above everything else. He clings to the essential claim of §54 of Schopenhauer’s The World as Will and Presentation that declares the will “is the thing in itself, the inner substance [Gehalt] of the world, that which is essential to it”, and is incognizant being “only a blind ceaseless pressing” that continually recurs4. And moreover regarding its ubiquity “Everything is entirely within it, and it is entirely within everything”—this is Nietzsche’s will to power at its fundaments. It ties together Spinoza’s cosmic eternity (and necessity) with Schopenhauer’s Indo-Greek “thing in itself” of life, the Will and is then empirically validated by modern biology5. Nietzsche’s ontology of Becoming entails the operation of wills-to-power within an architecture of antagonistic forces yet this incessant process of Becoming draws upon the power theoretic of a ubiquitous organic will in nature. Whenever Nietzsche discusses the phenomenon of divinization or the work of the “redeeming ones” he associates them invariably with a will to power (see A16). As we have seen godly types are associated with the creative potencies of particular “types” of human and their respective social forms i.e. weak or strong types, making a godhead an anthropomorphic projection. But the point is not what happens when the will gains selfconsciousness of its willing power (Z) and therefore its deified objects, but rather why redemption is at all possible? Even more so why is redemption needed or required if the will of life is forever regenerating and recurring through phenomena (presentations of the noumenal)? If life begets life and the will always recurs why would Nietzsche have to posit a redemption of some kind? Life does not need saving nor does the will since these are eternal and therefore ineradicable. Our question becomes about the selfreferential logic of asking: why does life seek salvation if life is eternal? The will to power, if ubiquitous and indispensable to life, appears sovereign over all forms of life, what Schopenhauer called presentations, and therefore is autarkic insofar as no external source is required to make its power sufficient. To “redeem” would suppose a deficiency or lack in the natural, in the noble promise of the earth with its fundamental 4

Arthur Schopenhauer The World as Will and Presentation Vol. 1, translated by Richard E. Aquila (Sydney: Pearson Longman, 2008). 5 See Robin Small Nietzsche in Context (Sydney: Ashgate, 2001); and for the influence of the German experimental biologist Wilhelm Roux on Nietzsche’s thought see Wolfgang Müller-Lauter Nietzsche: His Philosophy of Contradictions and the Contradictions of His Philosophy, translated by David J. Parent (Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 1999).

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procreative drive. What creates this “gap” for Nietzsche is the ascetic priest’s artificial atonement of sin as redemption from (unnatural) guilt. Morality, merely phenomena of the “denial of the will” as Schopenhauer had already declared about ascetics, creates the illusion of redemption because it first generates the lie of original sin in Adamic Man. The “natural” man (Zarathustra the “immoralist) by contrast knows no “gap” for he is without guilt-sin and therefore requires no transcendental redemption from life—he rather must overcome his nausea and disgust at the smallness and ugliness of Christianity’s “last man”6. If the natural overhuman (Übermenschmensch) still expresses the freedom of will denied of the ascetic he has the eternity of life running through his veins. In nature the eternal is affirmed as no Wille is denied, castrated or removed. Both Christ and Zarathustra are without guilt and know eternity through the affirmation of life. Through life and not existence, the forms or “presentations” of Becoming are fundamentally recuperable since no temporal state of “denial of the will” or nihilism can wither the force of the “will to life”. What shall come to pass can never fully condemn us because the one “who shall come”—the redeemer—will overcome all the illusions of guilt and revenge to restore humankind to its cosmic origins without any feelings of guilt or indebtedness toward its creator Being (GM). However what we have learned from the Anti-Christ and Gay Science so far is that the temporal mode—where future and past meet at Noon—proves inadequate for a final resolution to the problem: the “way of life” which the “higher ones” shall need to forge remains unexplained7. Once the overcoming of the mono “Weak God” is complete the overhuman - who is no longer riddled with sin-guilt—will need to transcend the negative moment of negation by means of a positive practice of life itself. Once the shadow world of the Sun’s going under has been traversed or reclaimed, in the space of the shadowless noon life demands more than recurring seasons and organic vitalism8. Existence now shouts 6

See Gudrun von Tevenar “Zarathustra: “That Malicious Dionysian” and Paul Loeb The Death of Zarathustra (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2013) on the immanence of overcoming. 7 Unproblematised by commentaries on Zarathustra which incorrectly attempt to explain Zarathustra’s freedom or wisdom largely in terms of the realization of amor fati—the fatefulness of the will as Welt (world). This falls under the banner of a recuperation of time’s becoming known as the redemption of the eternal return. The restoration of natural man through a chronomatic (time-oriented) reconciliation of his willed past, present and future is considered the goal of Zarathustra’s human overcoming i.e. redemption. 8 Here we refute the common interpretation that amor fati through the eternal

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beyond the echoes of Kraft and Natur’s will-force, beyond energy, to demand not just value (“worth”) or Time’s past, but joyfulness in the midst of finitude. This is of paramount importance since the gaining of joy, eternal joy in particular, exceeds the inner logic of physis as zoi (organic life)—it is a fundamental human element and it concerns valuation. Lifeas-Will is cyclical (regenerative) as Schopenhauer had correctly shown9, hence power must have a dimension exceeding its organic limits. Power elevates, discerns, measures, judges, discriminates and forces direction of movement—all normally attributed to art and its “justificatory” force. Nietzsche wishes to save humankind not merely from the JudeoChristian grip of guilt10 or its history of priest-infected “redemption”- he must redeem the ignoble man of décadence rooted in the illusions and distortions of the dysangel i.e. unevangelic metaphysics. Freedom from the spirit of revenge is only one subsidiary (though important) emancipation that the Zarathustra story narrates. After it the metaphysics (and negative social form) of decadence is of utmost concern to Nietzsche, a philosophical preoccupation that dwarfs—as we have argued—the problem of modern nihilism and the long cumulative event of the death of God. And this where Nietzsche holds the Church responsible for inducing a crisis of soul and body that culminates in a state of decline (décadence) characterized by godless atrophy, the illusion of Being as “science” and the diminution of existence to a nauseating, ugly smallness (A; Z). Hence the problem of redeeming that which Kultur and essential Kraft has failed to do over two millennia: existence must now be saved from the fate of decadence and its pernicious underlying “will to nothingness” wrought by the first decadents: the early Christians, priests and theologians. The problem of redemption, following the will’s knowledge of its power to will, remains one of spiritual overcoming - not so much to overcome return necessarily presupposes the “death of god” (as given by the standard interpretation). See for example Laurence Lampert Nietzsche’s Teaching: An Interpretation of Thus Spoke Zarathustra (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1986), 17: “For if mankind can have no God” is averted by Nietzsche’s polytheistic ecstatic vision of joyful life. Karl Löwith contrarily (and correctly) discerns the significance of Zarathustra’s Noon as symbolizing the necessity of a new life of “the future”—the overhuman must decide on a direction. See his Nietzsche’s Philosophy of the Eternal Recurrence of the Same. (London: University of California Press, 1997). 9 See Ivan Soll “Schopenhauer as Nietzsche’s “Great Teacher” and “Antipode” The Oxford Handbook of Nietzsche. Edited by John Richardson and Ken Gemes (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2013). 10 By means of a Faustian-Promethean will that claims sovereignty over its own past.

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“evil”, “sin” or depravity but instead the spiritual bankruptcy bequeathed by Churchly nihilism11. To recoup the past as per the dominant thesis of eternal return with Zarathustra’s superman (Faustian-Spinozian) misses the point: joyfulness as the mark of existence was overrun by a Paulian dogma of death-sacrifice in which the falsehood of human “depravity” justified its necessity. First they killed the Son (crucifixion), then the Father - both acts of nihilism stemming from weakness (revenge) and constituting world-historical events of an all-encompassing decadence. These deeds are of the lowly sort however as they express the nature of the small ignorant man whom Zarathustra challenges and overcomes. Existence cannot be left in the hands of decadents or nihilists even if they are useful in preparing the way for the one to come—the redeemer. Nor can it simply be left to nature’s Kairos or biologic power for neither of these 1. understand the future as promise 2. or must decide on a particular “way of life” or direction for existence. The futural being to follow the overhuman shall have an inner world12, an evaluating mind and soul of heights and depths, that inhabits a new “continent” known as a way of life that directs presence within cosmic eternity and continually overcomes abyssal Nothing. As Löwith correctly argues, Nietzsche demonstrates extreme radicalism in Zarathustra the savior yet he vouches for an ancient moderation and measure which nonetheless proves elusive in his figuration of the “redeeming man of the future”13. The figure of Christ— before his corruption by Paul—to be sure exceeds the Greek measure of the ancients and represents what is transcendent of the “Anti-Christ” Zarathustra. He represents more than a recurring will to become in the Whole since “world” and “existence” are fundamentally transformative, making power and biologic life no longer ontological (prior). Existence and the worldhood of the soul are henceforth not reducible to either power quanta or the rhythmic pulse of Zoi (organic life) à la Schopenhauer. In passing the ascetic “denial of the will” and “life”, Nietzsche must do more 11 Since the holy distorters of the gospel avenged their power by attacking sensuality, actuality, natural instincts and knowledge. This attack on the senses and causality, however, was preceded by the attack on Jesus” life and most significantly his “good tidings”. The decadents” denial of the will denied life itself; Kraft was transfigured into ascetic negation thereby substituting joyfulness with despair. 12 Nietzsche’s conception of the basic will of the spirit encompasses revenge, resentment, guilt, “sin”, bad conscience but it also includes benevolence and the grace which Christ’s life exemplified, according to Der Anti-Christ. We saw there the importance of the “inmost” things for a proper understanding of the evangel. 13 Löwith Nietzsche’s Philosophy.

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than simply give man eternal recurrence or a vague promise of futurity. His necessity is one equal to the task of what to do with the will in willing existence to have, for instance, a beautiful or ugly presence: what to form and justify as worthy of existence. Power, if organic or inorganic, cannot discern for itself or in-itself what is Ascending versus what is Descending; it can increase, extend, decrease or accumulate but without knowing: 1. 2. 3. 4. 5.

justifying the beautiful way of nobility transfigured existence above all, joyfulness as bliss

Missing the metaphysics of the Will (Schopenhauer) and the metaphysics of self-consciousness (Hegel), Nietzsche cannot appeal to either agency for the decisive force of directing or forging Existence. When we say “knowing” joy and so forth we rather mean what transforms biologic drive and energy into spirited, soulful Existence—and not simply some function of rational cogitation by the Cogito (Cartesian Scholasticism). For Nietzsche conceives of the human animal as possessing Geist (spirit) and Seele (soul) as did German ProtestantCatholic mystics before him in Rhineland Germania. This legacy of Christian humanism is conjoined with the noble vision of Greek tragic wisdom and the mytho-poetic divine nature of Dionysian super-being. Overlaid over each other Nietzsche attempts a transvaluation of Christian values that looks to retrieving a Baroque of “greatness” and “eternal joy”—such a maneuver however would require the elevation of Existenz above and beyond life (the Will). The trick in this grand synthesis of syntheses is to preserve Schopenhauer’s fundamental insight regarding life while arguing along with the Greeks that artistry must justify existence (beyond the biologic); for nobility and greatness cannot emerge if life were merely to recur endlessly and thus predominate. There is no crisis in (preservative) organic life; if the Will is perennial then the grand project of questioning life and making it something to be admired, “noble” and beautiful is annulled. Beyond life and beyond its Schopenhauerian “denial of life” there lies the lesson of Greek tragic wisdom: the beauty of joy dances with the danger of despairing terror14. What we have arrived at finally is the terminus of Nietzsche’s 14

Notice that we have evolved beyond the old age dualist conflict between the socalled Faustian self and the cosmic Spinozian self with its attendant “backwardwilling” problem. C.f. Seung and Löwith (above).

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Lebensphilosophie where Natur (nature) presided over all living, worldly things—including the deeply striving, transfiguring agent of Becoming’s historicity. To envisage Becoming’s plasticity and comprehensiveness Nietzsche had to make Life manifold, to find its Widersprüche (contradiction), dissent, opposition, limits and destruction. What is horrific and ugly yes, but more so how human experience and time fundamentally alter what natural life wishes to (mostly) preserve in the human being. Nietzsche well understood that the sensibility of life’s becoming—its sensuousness—was bound up with the dynamic processes that alter natural and unnatural phenomena alike. Such processes were conceived largely in Heraclitean terms, modernized and extended by his appropriation of Boscovich15. Human experience thus fundamentally alters living in the natural world, hence the requirement to examine morality and artistic transfiguration (GS, BT). Hence Nietzsche’s counter-discourse against the Christian Church’s devaluation of natural life should be set against the backdrop of a wholly renovated Hellenized Natur philosophie of worldbeing, one which finds existence-in-the-world as a type of Becoming. However, here emerges our fundamental question of the sense of experience within the forces of Becoming that shape the world. How does experience (e.g. wandering, overcoming) fundamentally shape Bios or the Will of life as promulgated by Schopenhauer? This is an important question as it shows us why: a) Nietzsche’s acclaimed vitalism is only but one polarity of his thought and b) Nietzsche can vouch for nobility and self-overcoming above sheer simple organic life (“Will”); and c) why Nietzsche therefore aims to redeem Mensch from the wretchedness of nihilistic decadence. A redemption borne of spiritual overcoming, not blood atonement. Nietzsche’s infamous agnosticism toward what he understood as the ineffable “character of existence” (GS 344) gives a clue to life’s mendacious “many-ways” (polytropoi in the Greek) of Being. Nietzsche sits in the interstices of life’s polarities between truth-untruth, utilitydisutility, morality-immorality, nature-history, evaluation-nihilism and Will-negation (denial) even though in the Gay Science he maintains there is no standpoint from which to properly (i.e. objectively) view the 15

See M. Tones and J. Mandalios “Nietzsche’s Actuality: Boscovich and the Extremities of Becoming”, Journal of Nietzsche Studies Autumn vol. 46, no.3: 308-327, 2015.

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universe. The undecidability of the true nature of things is what we can call his conviction behind the conviction16 of all naturalistic knowledge; that is, that valuations concerning a true reality precede all statements that attempt to describe reality. In this sceptical vein Nietzsche can be said to have evaluated life and declared its inherent unknowability; yet we also find a richer more affirmative outlook that exceeds the depths of his axiological analysis, one that depicts the world according to the primary aesthetic value distinction between an overflowing and under-abundant Dionysian energy (GS 370). Here Man and god intermingle, turning the cosmos into a deified world of beings where the eternality of Becoming chances upon both more elevated and more evil creatures—whether human or divinized. It is the place where the godless ones cannot go for they do not understand Dionysian joy and the affirmation which is borne difficultly of a relentless, striving Becoming of the future. Here lies Nietzsche’s unstated metaphysical commitment beyond a deep-seated agnosticism toward the plane of existence: a retention of the Eleusian spirit of worship and festivity in the wake of danger, destruction and rebirth—the perennial cycle of cosmic life. Only the “mysteries” made life explicable to the profound ancient Greeks while we atomists today believe it is value-free science. Here the grave nature of existence—and not merely zoi—requires the act of valuing and the joys of ecstasy in the presence of pain and suffering. But importantly Nietzsche in the Anti-Christ develops another line of inquiry which yields the affirmative, the spirit of Yes and Life, beyond the sheer will-force of nature (the Will) and beyond the primordiality of Dionysian orgiastic overflow. We have already come across it: the experience of the way of Jesus Christ in his lived life. For the very first time Nietzsche announces an alternate conception of the highest value, the most noble good: a kind of Buddhistic peaceableness. The agitation and restlessness of his usual Wanderer’s goings is displaced by the power that transcends all his qualified agnosticism regarding the structure of the real: he grasps quite clearly and decidedly—contra Paul— the calm balance characteristic of a life that seeks no opposition, is one with all-Being and dwells in the blessed. No disturbance from without could affect Christ for politics and the sign-language of a bad conscience and revenge-taking were mere exteriors to the properly intrinsic ȤĮȡȚȢ made objectively actual through the life of Christ. Nietzsche finds the undistorted evangel in the life of Christ before his disciples meddled with 16

In the Gay Science (344) the prior conviction that truth surmounts all things underlies the scientific will to objective knowing—a valuation which no empirical science can establish.

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it, interpreted it, with their limited sign-language. His grace was untouched by the semiotics of rabbinical interpretation and guilt-sacrifice as exterior language systems failed to penetrate through to touch the ineffable grace Christ himself embodied. Understanding eluded them so the transcendent power of his peaceable grace had to be eclipsed by a far more human-alltoo-human instinct to reduce it down to a sacrifice cult for the wretchedness or “sin” of the fathers. This perversion of the (original) evangel greatly perturbed and angered Nietzsche as it simply spread the poison of guilt conscience throughout the Holy Roman Empire and all of Charlemagne’s civilized realm i.e. the Latin West. Western Christendom already before the wretched influence of Martin Luther had been poisoned by the falsehood or construct of the dying Christ made by Paul. The sacrificial event of blood atonement in this potent falsehood constitutes a continuation of the old Jewish law of life-for-life, namely the sacrifice of innocent life for the recompense of sins of the flesh. Paul’s new doctrine of salvation was of Paul’s making and not of Christ’s doing—this is the fundamental distinction Nietzsche drew within his interpretation of Christianity as a new religion. The crucifixion replaced the message of good tidings of Christ and thus began the grand inversion: a gloomy melancholia of the spirit set in, a life-negating and therefore soulsickening force disguised in religious garb came to predominate over modern culture. This was the beginning of decadence: when spiritual negation manifested itself through a life-denying will to nothingness which saw a grand inversion by the “other world” subjugating this natural world. All nihilistic tendencies originate from this priestly coup d’etat represented by Paul’s sly conversion of the good news of life to the morose cult of death and guilt-sacrifice in the supreme symbol of the Cross. But this supreme “contradiction of life” encased in Christian morality is not due to a defect in Paul, Jewish priests or the “theologian’s blood” (A18); it rather points elsewhere, to the negative forces within life itself—a sickly, decrepit state of life that paradoxically has won over joyous, vigorous life. This is an agentless argument for the grandest millennial error and falsehood, namely life negating the “will to life” first identified by Schopenhauer (and Hindus before him). Nietzsche states: “For a condemnation of life by the living is after all no more than the symptom of a certain kind of life” maintaining one “would have to be outside life” “to be permitted to touch on the problem of the value of life at all” (TI Morality as Anti-Nature 5). Life is hence its value. Immortality is a mere illusion. Christianity’s fundamental error or inversion - what he calls “rebellion” - is therefore simply a “falsity” of rebellion and a mere “uselessness” (5). This

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proposition is in line with Schopenhauer’s insight into the ascetic denial of life as an aspect of the all-powerful Will. Yet on the other hand, dialectically, Nietzsche does hold out a place for world as a constitutive power distinct from biologic life, a world of willing (e.g. estimating, valuing) expressed through the famous “antithetical concepts” of “noble morality” and “ressentiment morality” (A24)—two polarities of coding and calculating the secrets of zoi. Nietzsche can estimate the seeming inestable because he understood that histoire or the power of Becoming is fundamentally dynamic i.e. transformative. Here the problem specifically lies with ressentiment triumphing over noble morality in the tragic process of (spiritual) transformation that lead to modern decadence. So we can say as a result that life, when depraved, negates the spirit of life through the will-power of the ascetic-priest whose anti-naturalness corrupts the first disciples of the only true Christian: Jesus of Nazareth. The ambiguity underlying Nietzsche’s non-theory of (value) judgement makes him appear to have an agentless account of human errors, seemingly hypostazing “Life” and reducing all phenomena to it. Yet, his work also demonstrates an ability to identify key figures or agents of power and change: 1. 2. 3. 4. 5. 6. 7.

decadents ascetics slave and noble types the untimely ones the mediocre the Last Man proto-nihilists

These agents of willing and spiritual ascension or descension work in history to bring about the aforementioned five phenomena missing from a purely organic (Life) schema. To think otherwise would be to impute onto Nietzsche a form of biological reductionism of the kind Martin Heidegger once attributed to him or which more modern scholars incorrectly assigned him.17 Whereas Nietzsche saw himself as an “evangelist” of the god Dionysus—or to put it more correctly, of Dionysian Wisdom with a view to redeem the Whole through the “highest of all possible faiths” (TI Expeditions of an Untimely Man 49)18. For Nietzsche himself professed— 17 Martin Heidegger Nietzsche vols 1-2, translated by David Farrell Krell. (San Francisco: Harper Collins), 1984;1991; and John Richardson Nietzsche’s New Darwinism (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2004). 18 Notable scholars who acknowledge the import of his Dionysian wisdom contra

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in his autobiographical Ecce Homo—“Before me one doesn’t find this transformation of the Dionysian into a philosophical pathos: tragic wisdom”(“The Birth of Tragedy” 3). Through it he would stand as the evangelist for the grandest lofty tasks, greatest responsibilities and above all “new hopes” to come (Why Am I a Destiny 1). The task is to redeem Man, not merely from his smallness and mediocrity, but most importantly from the travesty of decadence-as-Nothingness i.e. from spiritual souldecay. Although the route to be taken maybe through a prophetic reclamation based on a Dionysian cult of regeneration19, Nietzsche is clearly concerned with a specific aspect of Becoming, namely moral and aesthetic decline i.e. Decadence. Incline, height, enhancement and above all affirmation are what Nietzsche’s non self-redemption seeks to actualize in this world of experience. And for this-worldly experience, he needs more than a Wagnerian ring of Indian-Platonic recurrence; he needs a way within Becoming to experience the shadowless place of sun and light. That is, what activity does one take up—ta erga as Socrates said— once the nauseating disgust has been overcome and the “horizon to the most distant star” is clear again, the path being laid open for “blessedness”. It is a vision replete with guilt-free, value-strong existence with spiritual elevation where the fear of destruction no longer prevails and one feels rather a sense of unity with ti einai (“what is”). We have come full circle to return now to that little portal which entails something, though not very much, of Wagner’s Christian preconceptions. In this small aperture, made in the midst of his future multivolume opus of which The Anti-Christ belongs, we gain a glimpse of Nietzsche’s non-pagan20 commitment to a form of life which is affirmable—one which is beyond Roman valour, sexuality and heroism. This opening is rare and exceptional, often overlooked due to the predominance of eternal recurrence issues and over-determinations of naturalistic explanations, but it serves as an important polar tension point to his otherwise over-healthy vitalist outlook under the aegis of Life (as discussed above). Nietzsche is a thinker of tensions abiding between any two points, polarities or perspectives; he pursues the tensional philosophy biologism include Eugen Fink, Laurence Hatab, Paul Loeb and Bernard Reginster. 19 A most lucid interpretation of nuanced understanding is offered by Paul S. Loeb in The Death of Nietzsche’s Zarathustra (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2010); c.f Eugene Fink Nietzsche’s Philosophy (London: Continuum, 2003). 20 The commonplace “Anti-Christ” tag has so swayed scholars that a near universal blindness characterizes much of what pertains to Nietzsche’s non-pagan understandings of life and the operations of soul-hypotheses. Loeb cited above is a notable exception to the rule.

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of the ancient pre-Socratic thinker Heraclitus. Heraclitus in fragment 56 of his On Nature referred to the “harmony of tensions” and in 54 the “hidden harmony is stronger than the apparent”. Heraclitean thought is not dualistic; it posits that all antipodes are a mere appearance and that under the Logos we find a fundamental unity exists between seemingly opposite forces and elements. In this regard the Dionysian polarity is productively in tension—as with a bow where bi-directional forces pull each other into a unified field—with the Überchrist polarity which stands “opposite” to Dionysian overflow and creative energy. We ought not to oppose, or juxtapose, the Greek and the neo-Jew since Protestant German mystical motifs transfigure them into a tensional perspective of the affirmable. Here affirmation is the underlying hidden harmony between two vastly different traditions where each one has suffering as an element of life but not necessarily guilt (or bad conscience) which appears alien to them. Christ here cannot supply the dialectic of Heraclitus” tensions of the bow and lyre but instead an other experience or mode of life to that of Bacchus and his noble heirs—a way of life which the famous German Hellenophile Winckelmann would not have conceived of. The Anti-Christ idea brings out the true, original Christ while the polarities of Anti-Christ —Christ work productively in union to emancipate the untimely ones from decadence. The redemption of man comes through the tensive union of seemingly opposite cultural forces, those erotic-spiritual elements of Greek Orphism (Dionysus) and the peaceable affirmation of Christ’s postguilt way of life. In this unique amalgam the spring of life and the experience of life are brought together to constitute something more than bare biologic life. Force and power are no longer sufficient either since Nietzsche is looking for a morphe (form) that shapes and contours the “will to life”—that inexorable energy and potency that underlies every living thing. It is not the “I” nor the “world” but neither is it biologic being or the “immortal soul”; the key to Becoming actualizing freedom (or redemption) is the fundamental hidden harmony underlying the unity of tensions between the prophet Zarathustra and the pre-Christian Christ. Yes-saying here is a manifold, differentiated yet one; Yes has no opposites as both Heraclitus and Christ declared. As we said previously Life cannot save Life so Nietzsche seeks a redemption that springs from a valuation that life itself is good, is worthy of “affirmation” despite all its horrors (i.e. tragic wisdom). Whatever essentially affirms proves efficacious for the existence of the creature “Man”—the subject “Man” who must affirm zoi even when faced with tragedy. Christ affirmed life even when facing death; he affirmed, according to Nietzsche, the union between God and

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Man so that the common “and” in “God and Man” is negated. Here it is not the wisdom of Christ nor his knowledge that affirms the oneness of God-Man; Nietzsche does not attribute his importance to these attributes. He rather finds it elsewhere, in a place where no neo-Heideggerian would ordinarily look: viz the heno-logikos of Christ’s life, his physis (nature) as exemplified by his tropos (manner or way) showing a Oneness in being. It is the proper site of the evangel: where no division abides, where no opposition exists and where customary morality does not apply. A transcendent henology stands represented not only in the word of Christ but in the very manner of his life, his way of life which was an immanence of this transcendent Oneness. Nietzsche’s immanence carries the affirmation of Bios (life) by means of something more than the promise of the earth—yet it does not await the “heaven to come”. Without the dual falsehoods of an “immortal soul” and a “kingdom to come”, Nietzsche’s redemption calls up a life beyond existence and knowledge, one of a certain type or kind which is superior to any simple life and ascetic negation of life. This kind or way of life must be joyful, holding the promise of eternal joy in the midst of constant self-overcoming. Overcoming the binary opposition between the “Anti-Christ” and Christ by way of a Heraclitean logic is only one instance of such a necessary overcoming. Nietzsche set in train the havoc wreaked by the “godless” Anti-Christ because he believed the Christian nihilists had decimated the true Christ by privileging the Crucified-Christ. But this maneuver is not an end in itself: eternal joy cannot terminate with the miserable criticism of the “godless ones”. Once the false god of decadence is eradicated the teachings of Zarathustra coupled with the good tidings of Christ lead us once again to prophetic and ecstatic visions where the greatest possibilities lie. The coming of the overman (superhuman) requires the demise of this Christian God of the Church, the one falsely built on a guilt sacrifice emblemized by the “Christ of the Cross”. Here the trinity of false idols appears: first is the bloody image of Paul’s Crucified Jew; second is the idol of the Church priest who intercedes and announces the “Kingdom to Come”; and third is the image of a German peasant’s revolt against ancient, southern Mediterranean ways deifying and divinizing (GS, GM, A). Before the emergence of science and the emergence of democratic mass values for Nietzsche the powerhouse and prime-mover for modern decadence was this very powerful holy trinity of errors, of “falsehoods” as he calls them (Anti-Christ). Combined these three powerful elements shook the very foundations Graeco-Roman high culture and its ways of living, corrupting its social institutions and poisoning every person’s soul. The enfeebled

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soul and weak culture of modern decadent society is a result, argues Nietzsche in The Anti-Christ and The Genealogy of Morality, of two millennia of decline instigated by the corruption of the first Christians, embedded by the Pauline Roman Church and increased by the Reformation of Luther. This tour de force of corruptibility and poisoning through holy error-making is the subject of Nietzsche’s deconstruction of established religion; and the unholy trinity of causes of decadence is inextricably linked to two highly important facets of Nietzsche’s evaluative normative stance. They degrade firstly, the sexuality or, more precisely, the eros of the human being. His natural desires and drives are denounced as “evil”, as negative forces in a world of spirit where the gaze is set upon the “Kingdom to come”. Nietzsche states “hatred of the senses, of the joy of the senses, of joy in general is Christian” (A21). The way to life—best exemplified by the Greeks’ most sacred symbol, the sexual symbol, procreation “as the sacred road” to the “eternity of life”—is devastated by Christianity’s pernicious “ressentiment against life in its foundations” since it makes “sexuality something impure: it threw filth on the beginning, on the prerequisite of our life” (TI What I Owe to the Ancients 4). The tradition of the Church fathers severed the link of procreation (the “profoundest instinct of life” in the exalted symbolism of the Dionysian) from the road or way to a redemptive “future of life”—a life with all its abundant procreative energy, necessity, freedom of will (4). Hence by clipping away the “profoundest instinct of life”, the pangs of procreation, Christianity has also severed the path to eternity. Resentment has triumphed over one of life’s “sacred road” to the eternal for we must remember that Nietzsche always conceived of the divinizing symbol of Dionysus in highly religious21 terms. It is for this reason that the arch falsification has triumphed: Zarathustra says “They have called God whatever contradicted and hurt them” (Z On the Priests 4). The annihilation of the body, of desire, is at the core of this ascetic Jewish world-denying religion; its anti-nature stance ridicules whatever instinct is natural or innocent to humankind. Having cut-off the sacred road to the 21 Dionysian man possesses to the “highest degree” the instinct for “divining” as well as understanding (TI Expeditions of an Untimely Man 10). In the passage quoted here from Twilight Nietzsche clearly aligns the religious experience with the Dionysian mysteries, the ontological core of Greek greatness and high nobility. He argues in the word Dionysus the “profoundest instinct for life” is “experienced religiously”—here we must note the important godly attribute “For the eternal joy in creating to exist”, that indefinite One that makes existing possible (TI What I Owe the Ancients 4). Thus, the orgiastic, eternal and One (Whole) come together in Nietzsche’s metaphysics (albeit against the theism of resentment religions).

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mysterio of eternity by means renunciation, Christianity “which despised the body has up till now been mankind’s greatest misfortune” (TI Expeditions of an Untimely Man 47). The second important facet of Nietzsche’s normativity is his commitment to life-affirmation, to the creation of a Bios beyond sheer existence by means of affirming the Whole: the unity of reality which is undivided or One is to be affirmed, consecrating the past and willing the future to be. Nietzsche’s metaphysics hinges upon this extra-biologic (naturalistic) conception that rejects world-denial as a deep pessimism and envalues life by a will to affirm the totality of past, present and future where “affirming” means the activation of future becoming by means of past willing. As Loeb correctly shows Nietzsche’s commitment to the recurrence of eternity means more than repetitions of “Life” comprising in fact the creation of futural states through the soul’s backward-willing22. Affirmation thus described, as creativity through a “divine vicious circle” (circulus vitiosus deus), consists of a transformative power within Becoming understood as divine. Nietzsche places the quintessence of this sacred affirmative spirit in those world-affirming human beings who embody or exemplify the eternality of the circulus vitiosus deus with happiness. Affirmation we can say here eludes the clutches of time for the iron-cage of temporality is surpassed by creations, that is, the god-like “eternal joy in creating to exist” (TI What I Owe the Ancients 4). It is, as affirmative essence, higher and more potent than time, society and zoi (simple nature)—something that Nietzsche believed Christ possessed: “the triumphant Yes to life beyond death and change” (4). Notice here that the oneness of the Whole from which affirmation stems allows the overcoming of ceaseless change and death—what Krishna, Christ and Dionysus similarly divined in their distinctive way23.

Affirmation Close-up Why it is called a sacred road exactly is because the mortals” domain of death and change is fundamentally altered and overcome, a surpassing which no amount of “backward willing” can achieve. We must remember at this point the tripartite metaphysics of Nietzsche: the orgiastic, the 22

Loeb, Death of Zarathustra, 189-190 From a metaphysical standpoint, their distinctive “way” of grasping the beyondbeing and change is immanent to a form of existence created in time yet transcendent of its limits. Ways may be multiple in nature as dogma is abjured yet they are criticizable if they lack what Nietzsche calls a “positivistic religion” structure (A 20). 23

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eternal and the One (Whole) each surpass the bounds of human experience, death and flux, and act as vital non-empirical sources of “affirmation”—the anchor of Nietzsche’s whole philosophy24. Affirmation is linked in various ways by Nietzsche to the procreative impulse in nature, the eternality of what is and the blissful, and the way in which reality is structured as a Whole with unity within multiplicity. It is irreducible to drives, passions and the Will (which Nietzsche believes is only a reification, an illusion) transcending each of them as well as Kantian intuition. In Zarathustra Nietzsche suggests a kind of self-willed soul that appears to act as some kind of “self-propelled wheel” redeeming the past by willing its future and thereby savouring its new beginnings25. Yet in order to avoid the trenchant problem of the “causa prima” there can be no self-propelled wheel” of the soul for Nietzsche abjures the very notion of an entity acting as a first cause or cause of itself (causa sui). The difference between the forged self-propelled wheel soul and the freedom of affirmation is one very important element: the experience or encounter with truth, viz the truth that self-willing is redemptive, the truth of the “religion of the Return” as that of “pure possibility”26, the truth of divine recurrence entailing a principle of selection (Loeb), the truth of the overman that the future superman will embody the “necessity” of resistance through overcoming the burdensome weight of the past and the truth that the overcoming of God entails the overcoming of man himself. These facets of his thought refer us to the fundaments, of experience and coming-to-be, which can only be grasped by the soul’s awakened truth to their possible existence. Affirmation therefore requires truth; truth has metaphysical import because the knowability and priority of each of these “truths” depends upon it. The dawning of the truth of these life altering transformations wrought by Zarathustra and his fate indicate the need to take account of aletheia in the genesis of Nietzsche’s affirmation. Aletheia supplies credence to the claims Nietzsche wants to make with respect to the fundamental nature of Becoming and it attendant affirmation of life i.e. actuality and its evaluation. The judgement or “decision” involved in 24 While it is correct to say that eternal recurrence and will to power, along with nihilism, are major philosophical preoccupations for Nietzsche, his commitment to affirming life (in its “tragic” sense) is his overall evaluative stance. Seets Hatab Nietzsche’s Life Sentence (New York: Routledge, 2005). Affirmation is linked to his particular understanding of “freedom” as I sought to demonstrate in Nietzsche and the Necessity of Freedom. 25 Loeb, Death of Zarathustra, 197. 26 Michel Haar Nietzsche and Metaphysics (New York: State University of New York Press, 1996), 30.

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making life affirmable relies on truth for the telling or stating of what arrangement of things defines actuality by having a preponderance over chaos or rather vying forces. Quanta of energy cannot perform the essential task which Nietzsche would accord to Plato: “Plato measured the degree of reality by the degree of value” and thereby performed a “bold reversal” (WP 572). Facets of nature are not life just as facets of life are not existence. But let us focus instead on Nietzsche’s claim here: that it is true, according to him, that Plato did perform a double bold reversal. Nietzsche’s judgement of the event occurrence itself entails a judgement (of artistry) made by Plato on life and thus we have truth disclosing a double interpretive move against appearance constituting reality. Whereas Plato understood this move as necessarily engaging truth Nietzsche misunderstood his maneuver insofar as he can claim a) a reversal was performed and b) the nature of Plato’s metaphysical reversal pivoted upon value creation and estimation. To discern what Plato enacted and moreover to establish against mere doxa that metaphysics fundamentally concerns value estimations (inversions) requires, as Socrates argued, knowledge and to acquire episteme (knowledge) one must have access to truth, truth via dianoeisthai (thinking) and dialegesthai (conversing) with one’s soul. Nietzsche participates in both modalities: thinking and conversing through one’s soul27. Statements of the kind “It is in the nature of thinking that it thinks of and invents the unconditioned as an adjunct to the conditioned” is expressed by truth through thinking, where Nietzsche declares what the essence of thinking is by means of the reality of truthfulness (WP 574). His observation that the unconditioned is paired to the condition is a phenomenon considered to be actual and not a mere illusion. Nietzsche’s alliance with the truth is no less obvious than when he declares to know that deception necessarily attendants every procedure of telling the truth and therefore that truth emerges out of error28. A common error amongst scholars of Nietzsche is to dismiss the positive “aletheic” dimension of Nietzsche’s thinking and more so to commit the same error as Heidegger in attributing to him a one-sided “anti-Platonism” rather than find a sophistic tensional dialectic of thinking. The aletheia centre of affirmation expressed through his metaphysics is vital for the

27 In contrast to Bernard Williams’ mild attribution “in the spirit of truthfulness”; see Truth and Truthfulness. (Oxford: Princeton University Press, 2002), 18. 28 See further my demonstration of this point concerning truth in “Necessity as Illusory Truth as Deceptive Actualization”, Cosmos and History: the journal of Natural and Social Philosophy, 2013, vol 9, no. 2.

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passage and direction of his prioritized29 orders of Becoming or actuality. For affirmation must stand outside of or higher to experience and history otherwise it remains susceptible to the relative weakness/strength of any single expression of the “will to life”—it would lack transhistorical validity. Three basic fundamental concepts depend on such a validity: eternal recurrence, will to power and the truth-illusion symbiosis; and the fourth is world-renunciation being symptomatic of weakness (no matter the epoch or people). Similar to his Greek tragedians Nietzsche’s insights and commitments indicate a set of truths that hold sway over generations and persons— it is as he calls it a tragic wisdom. The truth of interpretation as well as insight is what wisdom entails otherwise Nietzsche cannot properly lay claim to understanding, as he calls it, the “law of life” (GMIII 27). If it is (merely) the will to power30 stating this to be a fact then it is a feeble notion: power through life interprets life through power. The blindness of nature is now elevated to the nobility of an encircled idea: it is because it is, no less. The enhancement of life dictum cannot come from life itself; a vicious tautology does not amount to the truth and further it fails the test of logic. Affirmation, as gleaned from within this truth perspective, requires yet transcends immediate life, deriving its supreme importance from philosophical truths gained from tragic wisdom and the ethical stance of amor fati which those truths substantiate. This is the positive affirmation version from truth rather than the more conventional “deconstructive” view which maintains that Nietzsche aimed to tear down the “holy lie” of divine-centred cosmologies and their derivative “will to truth” philosophies31. The deconstruction-as-critique of wills to truth is certainly 29 Namely, “the truth that self-willing is redemptive, the truth of the “religion of the Return” as that of “pure possibility”, the truth of divine recurrence entailing a principle of selection (Loeb), the truth of the overman that the future superman will embody the “necessity” of resistance through overcoming the burdensome weight of the past and the truth that the overcoming of God entails the overcoming of man himself.” 30 A fairly standard view expressed amongst others by John Richardson “Nietzsche on Life’s Ends”, Oxford Handbook of Nietzsche. Edited by Ken Gemes and John Richardson (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2013). A privileging of psychological explanations no less fails the reflexive Socratic test of knowing that a precedent epistemic judgement is involved in discerning the veracity of psychological reasons i.e. knowledge of the soul as prerequisite to alethes. 31 See Dylan Jaggard “Nietzsche’s Anti-Christ”, Oxford Handbook of Nietzsche. Edited by Ken Gemes and John Richardson (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2013). If one knows “holy lies” and can isolate them from actuality (“all things natural”, A) than one has a grasp of truth because they are not deceived by the lie. Nietzsche is not averse to truth given he constantly shows up the deceptions and

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one, grand strand of Nietzsche’s genealogical investigations, but neither critique nor genealogical demonstration alone can establish 1. Affirmation 2. Why life-enhancement is superior morally or ontologically to anything else. No amount of negation can plausibly establish the main tenets of Nietzsche’s thought described above, it particularly cannot found and ground the priority of Bios as Becoming over and against simple organic being (zoi). The claim that life in essence is perspectival is itself an insight begotten of aletheia since one angle of seeing could not establish the transspatial, trans-temporal reality it partakes of i.e. a single viewpoint cannot grasp the henosis of the Whole. Otherwise, how would Nietzsche’s Zarathustra know of the exceptional shadowless moment of midday and its new possible beginning? Time’s recuperable essence after all is a truth beyond any individual experience or perception and Zarathustra’s teaching points to this effable fact. This truth for Nietzsche emerges after he has another thought, the devastating thought of eternal return at the rock of Lake Silvaplana, where the ancient idea of recurrence came to him as an abysmal thought. It was a revelation, a revealed truth that surpassed perspective in the extensiveness of its account of the cosmos and human temporal experience. The audacity of its power to reveal the hidden in physis is only equaled by the audacious moment of truth of the “stillest hour” when the whole of the past is reconciled to the present will. At Zarathustra’s “great noon” the wedding to eternity is a truth revealed by way of Zarathusra’s Christ-like crucifixion; and by way of imagery and metaphor this aletheia of eternality (notice no longer simply Life) portends what is valuable, what is to be affirmed. Eternality portends the futural, making existence subject to constant transformation and by implication liberating it from the camel’s burden of sin. For to affirm to life Nietzsche must find a way out of the ecclesiastical morass of “original sin” and its pernicious guilt-complex—a triumphal overcoming in alignment with tragic wisdom and its spirit of affirmation through power and rebirth (cosmic redemption). Nietzsche’s truth is therefore of the SpinozistGoethean kind in which necessity and freedom are bound up with the constitution of the cosmos as a unity or whole. As Nietzsche declared in Twilight, it is the whole which is of utmost importance, which we ought to illusions of Christianity and its priesthood. His counter-truth, the one he poses against life-denying asceticism, is the condition of health (“weakness” versus “strength”) which brings him into close alignment with Plato’s image of health in Republic 443C-E. The ratio of úȖíİȚĮ (health), the configured IJáȗȘ (arrangement) of body and soul, is at the very core of both Plátǀn and Nietzsche’s philosophizing, their mutual life-philosophy.

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affirm, namely what the Greeks called the Aperion or ĮੁȫȞ IJȑȜİȠȢ (the Absolute) in which emanations of perfectability obtain32. His is not merely a world of coming-forth or quanta of forces as often seems to be the case with Nietzsche, but rather the wisdom of knowing that the whole is transcendent of existence and yet simultaneously unknowable. It is a common oversight of commentators who tend to focus on the problem of eternal recurrence or will to power or otherwise his “drive theory”, thereby overlooking the intimate link to the whole and fate. The importance of the whole of actuality is critical to the analyst’s comprehension of Nietzsche’s dislike for liberal moral accountability and constructivist explanations for social degradation. With respect to one’s fate neither liberal nor socialist viewpoints of willing or acting prove adequate because they err in wishing to lay “blame” and the “I” centre-stage in the drama of life when existence as a whole should be the object of pure contemplation. In a fragment from his Nachlass (765) this neglect of the “whole” is admonished since responsibility and guilt are institutionally entwined; he wishes to disentangle guilt from all ethical responsibility: “There is no place, no purpose, no meaning, on which we can shift the responsibility for our being”. Adding, “Above all: no one could do it; one cannot judge, measure, compare the whole, to say nothing of denying it! This redemption from guilt and sin will, in Nietzsche’s eyes, restore the “innocence of becoming” which decadence has ruined into devastation. We must see however his all-important “innocence of becoming” as upheld by the framework that as a unified field comprises the whole—it is something more than sheer chaos. Nietzsche believed this “tremendous restorative”, as he called it, could be accessible “even to modest intellects”; no genius would be required to find the five reasons why it cannot be done (765). After January 1888, this notebook entry will be incorporated into his late Twilight where the thesis “because nothing exists besides the whole” is preserved and elaborated (765). Therein the diremption of the parts from the whole is disavowed in a fashion wholly consistent with the Henology of Plotinus and Eudorus (i.e. third century neo-Platonists).The issue is not quite whether Nietzsche was contradictory or not33—criticizing metaphysics while at the same time postulating truths 32 Here the tragic poet, whether it be Goethe, Hesiod or Parmenides, gives light to the truth of the eternal whole: “what I called Dionysian”, affirmation of life as “the will to life rejoicing in its own inexhaustibility”, “that is what I recognized as the bridge to the psychology of the tragic poet” (A What I Owe to the Ancients 5). The poet and the philosopher, like the tragedian, obtain access to the truth. 33 See for example John Richardson Nietzsche’s System (New York: Oxford University Press, 1996).

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on non-empirical grounds—but rather how the deconstruction of I-Will metaphysics points to the superiority of a metaphysics of the Whole à la Goethe, Heraclitus and Spinoza. Here the latter basis acts as a platform from which a deconstruction of the Will and the atomic “I” (and thus Christian morality) can be performed since the whole of existence theorized in terms of Becoming, time and life’s quanta of energy34 is considered metaphysically superordinate. We understand that Nietzsche sets upon theorizing the constituents of actuality in largely perspectival terms—normativeaesthetic-naturalistic35—and yet the “whole” of actuality metaphysically supervenes. Neither scientific nor artistic activities can ever trump the priority of the “whole”; it requires a metaphysical explanandum in part to gather together these orientations to lived reality i.e. existence, experience, eternality. Instead of imputing onto Nietzsche a “critical” (Kantian) stance that remains in the last instance either anthropologic or cognitivistic, our proposition is to see Nietzsche as a post-Schopenhauerian thinker of affirmation who draws on Goethean-Spinozist notions of the constellated whole. Nietzsche affirms the primacy of the whole in a manner similar to Goethe and Schelling: Goethe he says aspired to realism, to “totality”, “against the separation of reason, sensuality, feeling, will” (TI Expeditions of an Untimely Man 49) in contradistinction to Kant. Here neither Plato’s Forms nor Spinoza’s God prevail, but the eternality of nature encompassing all existence and life is revered and exalted. Affirmation consequently derives from the absolute characteristic of this whole which incorporates all the various domains of life into a single whole or totality. In one sense the positivity of the affirmable must then derive from the 34 Nietzsche’s non-substance metaphysical composition of the whole that deploys processes rather than categories (e.g. Aristotle, Kant) for descriptions of dynamics in the universe. Herein the orgiastic, eternal and One (Whole) come together in Nietzsche’s metaphysical construction whilst retaining the indispensable timeprocess perspective that affords him the ability to critique substance ontologies. Time-processual analysis on this count is both metaphysical and experimental. 35 Maudemarie Clark and David Dudrick’s shift to a normative basis of interpretation is most helpful in correcting overstated naturalistic tendencies yet it still misses the equally important artistry and metaphysical dimensions of Nietzsche’s thought. Hence our triadic rendering of how the Whole may be conceived of methodologically speaking: normative-aesthetic-naturalistic dimensions under the unity or oneness of the Whole (in The Soul of Nietzsche’s Beyond Good and Evil (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2012). Why the necessity of such a triad cannot be answered on purely scientific or normativenaturalistic grounds but rather instantiates a metaphysics that can address the matter of the One (the Hen and Polla as Platonists say).

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superordinate value accorded to the totality of the whole of existence. This means that organic life or simple life is not the root source of affirmation for Nietzsche even though life-enhancement is his normative end and his Dionysian illusion. Biologic being subsists only under the aegis of existence and the powers to enhance life such as various kinds of weighing, measuring and evaluating which implies that the orgiastic energy of abundance (of cult origins) is not in fact the prime mover of Nietzsche’s affirmation of life. Immediacy and spontaneous Becoming are always necessarily mediated by Bios, culture, overcoming and transfiguration which makes nature a poor guide to the artistry of living, living well and living joyously. The extension or enhancement of power is therefore a natural corollary of his fundamental (post)Schopenhauerian reconstruction of the “will to life”: excesses or deficient energies are the twin axes upon which “willing”, power and evaluating— Bios in other words—act upon life to transfigure it. Here Bios also encompasses forms of divination as expressive of the creative force of the spirit where life is transfigured by the mutations the soul undergoes through the torments of time. So venting or the release of pure energy cannot of itself amount to much without the cultural directives to shape and direct the power of eros—ars or in the Greek techne is required to achieve Apollonian shining, oneness and intelligent beauty. These qualities are all fused together in the later renovated Nietzschean concept of “Dionysian”, making it somewhat ambiguous at times whether anarchic orgiastic energy comes first or life as Bios comes first i.e. the unity of the whole we have identified36. I think Richard Schacht37 is correct when he states the later Nietzsche saw existence in terms of its transfiguration by a) art and b) the ascetic’s innovations of the soul. Both Nietzsche’s classical and Germano-Romantic heritage afford him a hold onto the organic nature of zoi while also raising life to the transformational height of “enhancement”—a process which involves struggle, agon, suffering and artistry. Schacht is also correct to stress that the experimental knower of gay science allows a further remove still from the reductive Darwinian conception of man. Hence the determination that one essentially “is a piece of fatefulness” is necessarily associated with the notion that “one 36 The most commonplace manoeuvre is to ascribe the dyad “overabundance” and “impoverishment” of life (GS 370) onto Nietzsche’s determination of Becoming, yet it is the valency of the overall whole (recurring) of Becoming which apportions and distributes a relative abundance or scarcity of life. Ebbs and flows of Becoming characterize a process that is continuous organically yet ontologically non-telic as the metaphor of the “ripened fruit” illustrates. 37 Richard Schacht Nietzsche (New York: Rutledge, 1982).

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belongs to the whole” whose piece of fate is overdetermined by the structure of the One: its immanence is attested to here “one is in the whole” (TI 6,8). This fundamental truth of the priority of the whole itself cannot be organic (biologic) but comes out of philosophic extension and enhancement—the spiritualized form of will. That is, as the universe becomes its “spiritual” elaboration attends every moment of its physical extension (recurrence) so that the whole is a unity of organized energy and spirit (with truthfulness of knowledge). We want now to place the Apollonian “will to eternalize” and the force of Christ’s form of divination into this picture of the metaphysics of the whole. Nietzsche’s seemingly humanist redemptive mission aims after all at the priority of the whole38 where existence will be unshackled from the dead-weight of guilt and resentment. We must remember though that Nietzsche is neither a happy “humanist” nor a content “atheist” given he eschewed both flawed positions on account of their narrowness. So although he envisions the recurrence of the world, it is a selective process as the normative project of “life-enhancement” compels him to inscribe (and extract) willing as affirmation into its very essence as whole, as unity of becoming. Nietzsche’s realism contra “idealists” commits him to the reality that this whole consists of a “field of ruins”, the “tremendous surplus of failures” that attend the fact that the total value of the world’s becoming is immeasurable—Becoming essentially “has no value at all” (WP 708 & 713). The standard by which its value can be determined is sorely lacking he thinks; this philosophical injunction comes from his presupposition that there is no “Being” or “God” or “spirit” (Allgeist), only shifting centres where each moment is of equal value. But this is a judgement, is it not? An evaluation? And to say there are only vacillating centres or “multiplicities” without ends is itself an evaluation. If “value is the highest quantum of power that a man is able to incorporate”, as Nietzsche argued, then his abstention from judging the worth of things is itself based on the prior judgement that power is the overriding determinant of reality. His realism is a power-realism of sorts not unlike his favourite Greek historian whom he pitched against Plato: Thucydides. Yet when it comes to Nietzsche’s normative outlook his power-theoretic, and its concomitant naiveté regarding preceding judgements of “measure”, runs aground since the sheer “flux of becoming” that defines his ontology

38 His conception of the plenitude, with its threefold characteristics, is fundamentally non-Aristotelian i.e. non-teleological. Nietzsche denies the twin basis of all naturalisms: substance and teleology. His rejection of atomism and causation only further weakens the anti-metaphysical reading of Nietzsche.

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is at odds with the affirmation he places onto life-enhancement39. Why life? And why enhancement rather than another quality? Furthermore why vouch for réalité when realism is itself value-saturated and, he would argue, presumably perspectival in nature, as the “real” is only an angle of interpretive-seeing. Returning to the question of the whole of existence we find that Nietzsche’s affirmation is fundamentally linked to its conception. Despite his sceptical pronouncements regarding evaluating Becoming, we see priority accorded to the whole in a number of ways. We begin with Nietzsche’s move to evade the error of finding a “total consciousness of becoming, a “God”” lurking behind every movement of life (WP 708). Without a necessary being or cause, Nietzsche then moves to eliminate unwanted (prejudiced) starting-points like consciousness, reason, mind or spirit which are largely self-imposed. The next move in this notebook passage goes on to eliminate ends-driven arguments where desirable final states presuppose in advance the orientation to reality; remove the ideality of their purposes and their starting-points collapse. After these refutations Nietzsche enquires after how not to debase life and its enhancement to a means. “If we wished to postulate a goal adequate to life” he argues it would “have to explain all of them as a means to itself” (WP 707). Notice it is “all” of them and to “itself”—the whole, total aspect of the living universe and of our existence in it. Hence the injunction against those who are inattentive to the complexity of the whole and instead prefer their little part of reality: a parte ad totum (from a part to the whole) (WP707). One must never begin with a part but rather understand that the whole precedes any single part or “perspective” and has an overdetermination or sui generis quality. This is rather different to the misleading claim that chaos fundamentally defines the universe (see for e.g. GS 109; Rosen 1995) since Nietzsche well understood by fragment 277 (GS) that necessary Becoming “is full of deep meaning and use precisely for us!” especially as he makes the quasi-Leibnizian demand that we acknowledge that “everything that befalls us continually turns out for 39 Including enhancement arising from understanding the world as lacking “Being”, “God”, final ends and purpose. The relative increase or decrease in power as life-preserving and extending activity is still reductive in terms of ethicalperspectival commitments that “drag-back” all claims about the constituents of the whole to the (affirmed) standard of “life-enhancement”. Hence even power is reigned in by Nietzsche’s moral commitment to life and its precarious enhancement. For our purposes overflowing and abundance—semios of the god Dionysus—are celebrated and affirmed above and beyond the empirical facticity of “flux” and Becoming “moments”.

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the best”. This judgement, we ought to remind ourselves, also belongs to the whole, further destroying the impression that Nietzsche wishes to reduce existence to the finite forces of necessary Becoming. It has meaning for us but what is more: upon this recurrent cycle of generation we have his admonition or imperative to perennially stamp life with its ineffable eternity. Echoing Plato in the Timaeus Nietzsche admonishes “Let us impress the image of eternity on our life”40—in a fashion which is at once Platonist and Christian as it reiterates the theme for us, for ourselves, and not the finite exterior world. Nietzsche solemnly exclaims that everything seems “far too valuable to be so fleeting” and thus declares “I seek an eternity for everything” (Notebook 11, 94 Nov. 1887- March 1888). The plea is to make humankind abide with nature and yet to accord life or existence aesthetic41 meaning and value so that artistry will fashion something unique out of zoi; and this something is the essential necessary circularity of the will which Nietzsche modifies from Indian-Schopenhauerian sources. It is eloquently summed up by the French philosopher Michel Haar: “The significance of this circle is: the will, which wills the Eternal Return, is the will that wills itself”42 We modify life by acting through this divine-like circus natur, making actual that which is immanent within every organic process of realization. We realize the “will” or basic spirit by means of the species” capacity to spiritualize natural drives and impulses: hence the ascetic/priest’s development of the soul as a distinct phenomenon which fundamentally altered the face of the earth. It is akin to that other world-making phenomenon known as “Dionysus—the sublime act of divination which also dramatically altered our experience of life on earth (i.e. Dionysiancult of death and rebirth, creation following destruction). Both of these innovations—as modes of divination and modes of eternalizing—are associated with the will to power but not reducible to it. Our argument instead finds that a metaphysic of the whole and its eternality facilitate the naturalistic conception and modification of (Schopenhauer’s) “will to live” into the “will to power”. As Haar argues “The divinity of the whole in no way seems excluded by the concept of chaos, since it reappears both in the 40

Robin Small Time and Becoming in Nietzsche’s Thought (London: Continuum, 2010), 146. 41 This is the Apollonian element at work which discerns the individuated, shines through light and sunders into unity chaotic impulses and surges of abundant energy. It is the creative force that beautifies the raw, unruly, orgiastic potencies inherent within forms of life, giving it value or axia as the Greeks would say. 42 Michel Haar Nietzsche and Metaphysics (New York: State University of New York Press, 1996), 31.

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invocation to Dionysus and in the enigmatic formula, circulus vitiosus deus”43. Nietzsche naturalizes “man” but his Kosmos remains saturated with divinization—with the spirit that animates both world and Affirmation. For the eternality of the Kosmos cannot somehow be proven, it must be affirmed; that is, mechanics or atomism cannot provide a sufficient justification for the human to affirm its Dionysian-Apollonian world. The will to affirm the totality of the whole does not, or cannot, rest on the scientific provability of the eternal return, even if Nietzsche sought after a natural account of the finite universe. The source of the affirmation is rather distinct from the “necessity” of recurring Becoming because affirmation is always two things for Nietzsche: it is axiological and therefore requires evaluation (i.e. according value as an activity); second, affirmation is fundamentally linked to joy or “bliss” in the Bacchean sense of ecstasy. So the bliss and value-saturated essence of processes of Becoming in the universe, to be sure, are anthropic—they derive from the subject’s participation in the universe’s unfolding Becoming. As activities and as modalities we need to see Nietzsche’s úʌȠțİìȝİȞȠȞ—the ground of Becoming—in terms not of Being or essence but instead, following the influence of Novalis, Schlegel and German Lutherianism, the formative activity of Wirklichkeit. Here actuality (Wirklichkeit) is the result of activity within Bios and the important point for us to note is that the will to affirm is an active participation (“action”) in/of the whole. For us, the anthropic quality—in Greek, Bios—presides over “force” or energy because we co-create the Wirklichkeit of Werden (Becoming). Hence the cry, the appeal, to affirm actuality and reject idealism because as he argues when you state or do one thing, the whole is implicated: it takes the entirety of the whole to produce this moment of existence. To wrench apart a facet of your self, your existence, is to deny the autonomy of the Hen, the power of the One or single unity which overdetermines the individual and endows it its fate. To love one’s fate is to lovingly accept all that which produced you until this point in time, the whole of past-time that belongs to your present-time, the “moment”, an instantiation of previous evental becomings with the added force of my affirmation of it. Affirmation itself demands a recognition of the past vis-a-vis present Becoming since the whole is the totality of past, present and future Becoming, recognizable as life eternal i.e. sub specie aeternitatis. As Nietzsche states “The individual is, in his future and in his past, a piece of fate, one law more, one necessity more for everything that is and everything that will be” (TI Morality as Anti-Nature 6). To extract one 43

Haar Nietzsche and Metaphysics, 115.

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part is to commit undue violence to the rest of the whole—an error of interpretation Nietzsche refused to countenance. This quintessential affirmative stance44 stands in contradistinction to nihilism since it does not seek to retreat into the whole as a haven from existential dread concerning the deep meaninglessness of the world45. Affirmation through yet also of the whole occurs in accordance with the will, the for us mentioned above, constituting the sovereign “I will” of a masterly type. Yet this willing, Nietzsche continuously reminds us, belongs to the healthiest form of fatality, the amor fati: the fundamental teaching must be “The fatality of his nature cannot be disentangled from the fatality of all that which has been and will be” (TI The Four Great Errors 8). After Zarathustra he declares this be the fundamental teaching above all else. The teaching pertains to the quasi-Platonic move to place the “innocence” of Becoming within the metaphysics of the priority of the whole (which is sometimes referred to as the “being of becoming”). The highest teaching is not of eternal recurrence but rather how to preserve the innocence of Becoming. Nietzsche states “only by doing that do we redeem the world”; namely, through the “great liberation” of riding the world of a causa prima and the falsehood that “the world is a unity neither as sensorium nor as “spirit”…thus alone is the innocence of becoming restored” (TI The Four Great Errors 8). By denying the Christian God, we also deny moral accountability; existence is thus liberated from morality which in effect entails the weight of the priest’s condemnation of nature. To restore Becoming the moral order must go and if the latter rests on a supreme being then for the sake of existence “We deny God” (TI The Four Great Errors 8). Hence Nietzsche is not against divination per se; he rather wishes that created gods are in the service of will to power (life-enhancement) and not its degradation i.e. feeble life. If divination manifests creative energies, the impulse to transfigure existence, to enhance Eros as love of eternity, then deification is not antithetical to life: religion—as per Empedocles and Pythagoras—instead becomes life-preserving and enhancing. Greek religion and perhaps more so Roman religiosity worked in this fashion to 44

Distinguishing himself from modern decadents Nietzsche declares the mark of distinction to be that of affirmation: “We do not readily deny, we seek our honour in affirming” (TI Morality as Anti-Nature 6). 45 In a fragment of 1888 Nietzsche shows his concern with “psychological” elements of nihilism whereby “some kind of unity, any form of “monism”: and as a result of this belief, man feels deeply connected with and dependent on a whole that is infinitely superior to him, feels he is a mode of the deity” (Notebook 11, 99).

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edify or ennoble man and his place in nature. In other words, in the service of Becoming divination creatively belongs to the Whole, the real unity which Nietzsche believes exits once we have dispensed with Idealist fantasies such as “spirit”, “good”, “moral order”, “supreme Being”, “Being” and the like. Equally laws, atoms, chaos and substances do not exist as substrata of reality. We do not quite know how tragic wisdom evolves out of Becoming if it is said to be “innocent”, particularly if life is comprised of so many contending affirmations and erotic urges for joy i.e. if there is Bios over and above zoi. Nietzsche struggled with these twin pillars of fundamental thought—innocence of Becoming and tragic wisdom—often advocating wisdom arises from the truth of Becoming’s innocence. Yet it is further complicated by his admission of eternality into the complex metaphysical mix where the “Dionysian”, tragic wisdom, eternal Becoming and affirmation for the priority of the Whole (over any part) coalesce. Commentaries on Zarathustra tend to overlook this lack of articulation by Nietzsche, particularly with respect to how his Goetheanstyled whole comprises a proper unity of these elements, surpassing the false unity of decadents. Here the question of truth reappears as Nietzsche knows two important facts about reality: 1. 2.

A false unity is based on “spirit” or “sensorium”. Existence as a whole cannot be rendered apart or separated. There is only (in the original Greek) ਲ ੒ȜȩIJȘȢ ʌĮȞIJĮȤȠ૨ ʌȡȠȘȖİੇIJĮȚ IJ૵Ȟ ȝİȡ૵Ȟ (“wholeness everywhere precedes parts”).

And a third layer of truth must be added to include the foresaid discourses on a manifold ontology: viz, the Dionysian (overflow), eternity and affirmation which manifests the self. The final layer of truth however shows it is fundamentally riven with competing accounts of a differential order of being-becoming. The conviction that life-enhancement is the goal must only presuppose these three important dimensions of his thought. The defence of lifeenhancement ultimately relies on a theory of the unity of the One even if that identity defies any Substance analysis and șİȠȢ-centred universe. As a unity and as a whole its intrinsic priority and structure of relations must be explicated conceptually to show that simple dynamics, contra Newton and Galileo, does not account for the being of Becoming. And this requires more than power or power-quanta to explain Nietzsche’s complex view of the manifold ontology. As ceaseless potential and, on the other hand, selfwilling-as-overcoming Nietzsche is caught between a naturalism of the

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world and the redemptive drive to align willing with world-making fati46. The precise relation between tragic wisdom and the whole lacks an explicit explanation in the end, one that is missing from the mature Nietzsche’s shift to eternal recurrence and will to power47.

46

One of the most astute German analysts, Karl Löwith, earlier pointed to the fundamentally unresolved conflicts or problems in Nietzsche’s thought following his abandonment of the Apollo-Dionysus dialectic (Karl Löwith Nietzsche’s Philosophy of the Eternal Recurrence of the Same. Berkeley: University of California Press, 1997). 47 Eugen Fink Nietzsche’s Philosophy (New York: Continuum, 2003) correctly discerns Nietzsche’s transmutation of an aesthetic Apollonian-Dionysian dialectic into a tensive play of forces of unity (eternal return) and form-giving (will to power). This useful observation nonetheless obviates our main concern with how the whole is to be justified and moreover itself becomes the source of his affirmation of being-Becoming. An eternity of regeneration does not per se guarantee the unity of the whole or its ontological priority as Nietzsche clearly wanted to assert.

CHAPTER SEVEN DIVINATION AND CREATIVE WILL

Now that we have looked at Nietzsche’s metaphysical commitment to the (proper) unity of the Whole1 and its concomitant set of truths, we ought to address what follows the rejection of the moral god, the Church’s God? What kind of state or conscious life does Nietzsche envision beyond that of power? To paraphrase, what can contribute to life-affirmation once the twin evils of morality and bad conscience are exorcised by the death of the Christian god? Is there a feature or characteristic present neither in Napoleon nor Goethe and what would it look like if it were not Venetianaristocratic? Might there be a life principle or way which points to affirmation in a broader sense, one that exceeds the bounds of nobility and Kraft? The clue lies not in the conventional ad hominem argument that it is with those who embody the virtues of the higher “overman”, the new future noble ones to come. Perhaps surprising to modern tastes (i.e. absolute immanence), transfiguration with divine potencies does not point merely to life-enhancement, power enhancement and will-power triumphing over chance2. While each of these facets of Nietzschean philosophy attract prominent attention, the divinely ecstatic vision of the “Dionysian” encompasses something much more: in his own biographic words the “Dionysian” entails “The highest and the lowest powers of human nature, that which sweetest, airiest, and most fearsome pours forth from a single spring with immortal assuredness” (“TSZ” 6 in EH, my emphasis). The single spring is neither the fictive soul of the priests nor the drive of modern nihilists; it is instead the single whole in which the gods and humans frolic in the danger of life i.e. “destiny”3 Nietzsche refers 1

Gesamte preceded by the French Cartesianists, Encyclopédie auteurs and mathematicians as L’ensemble. 2 Most contemporary analyses of Zarathustra and eternal return focus on Nietzsche’s stratagem to have world fatality conform to the newly enhanced or restored sovereignty of the will i.e. where Greek IJȪȤȘ (Chance) gives over to a futural will, giving ground to a radical new form of freedom. 3 Hence the reason why Nietzsche’s promise of the future is captured in him being a “Destiny” for all humankind—a redemptive figure of sorts (EH).

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to it importantly as the “revelation of truth”; here is where “the outermost limit of affirmation is reached” because the fundamental question of “why” and “what for”—following liberation from the “dominance of chance and the priests”—can finally be posed “as a whole” (original emphasis, “BT” 1 in EH; “D” 2 in EH). In other words, under a restored proper unity—once having overcome these twin global forces of domination—we can once again under a new found freedom ask “what for” and in which direction. Destiny will no longer be under the erratic sway of chance or the rule of the priesthood (i.e. soul guilt) so the symbolic and soul-designs of the future way shall reflect the power of a Yes-saying affirmation of the entirety of existence. In his exegesis of the “great noon-day” in Ecce Homo Nietzsche refers to his task being that “of preparing the way for a moment of highest self-contemplation on humanity’s part (“D” 2 in EH). The forementioned revelation of truth therefore involves the highest contemplation, that type of activity that is more than just thinking and involves a theoria4 of existence in its whole complexity. What the highest contemplation will adduce into a revealed truth of sorts is the immanent (or absolute) unity of opposites. This is made evident by a couple instances of transcendence importance. The first clue comes with Nietzsche’s summary reference to the ripening fruits of his life in retrospect: as a shaft of sunlight has fallen upon his life and he looks backwards and forwards he gains gratefully a glimmer of “my whole life” (Forward, EH). Life is to be conceived as belonging to the constellated whole of the universe, from which emerges one’s backward and forward time. The fruits of one’s fate must only be understood according to the good of the whole since Nietzsche believes every experience of his has been for good and should thus be affirmed. Here Plato’s Kalon is subtly behind this fundamental thought concerning life: the undeniable good of life’s normal travails and overcomings as Nietzsche is manifestly grateful for “such good things” and the plenitude of the earth’s ripened grapes of time (Forward, EH). Not to negate, that would be decadent; but to affirm…because of the plenitude of the world. It is not the Will—as Schopenhauer and Kant thought; it is the good of the whole that is most important. Valuation derives necessarily from the whole as a source of affirmation; this is why all things return again to the whole. One must never try to detract from the eternally returning whole of existence; it would only detract from the immense freedom instilled in the whole One or unity that is Life. The point, says Nietzsche, is to see the 4 John Mandalios “Nietzsche’s Greek Theoria and Spectral Elevation”, Cosmos and History, 17.3 (2021): 104—112.

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abundance; that is, the good in the experience of life as you have it. Our second instance derives from the Dionysian nature of Zarathustra whose comprehensive soul has the “ability to access what is opposed” and yet summons in unprecedent ways the high and low, the ebb and flood, and the light and the heavy into itself (TSZ 6 in EH). Here, following Heraclitus and Plato, “opposites” are no longer oppositional or antithetical to each other. The “overman” as Nietzsche calls him, embodies the self-transcendence of contrariness, of binary antithetical thinking for “in him all opposites are fused together into a new unity” (TSZ 6 in EH). Zarathustrian man, or the redeemed overman who captures every height and depth known, is a new unity—a whole once again. He is at-one with the whole of existence and thus is the truth-bearer of “the good” (IJò țĮȜȩȞ)—which for Nietzsche is willed living or tragic wisdom. Disintegration or fragmentation is not his reality; nor is Being on the other hand. The good for Nietzsche exists in the “new unity” that brings seemingly disparate (conflictual) elements together, a unity that binds together height and depth, harshness and subtlety, “streaming and counterstreaming” and so forth. This fusion of multifarious elements is captured by one single all-important disposition: the overman’s high-spiritedness which owes to his “enormous and unbounded Yea-and Amen saying”—an unmistaken biblical reference which once again brings the “Anti-Christ” Zarathustra in union with the Christ of the evangel i.e. the dialectic transmutes their apparent opposition into a new unity viz Amen-saying blessedness. Nietzsche himself says that he contradicts like “no one has ever contradicted before and yet am the opposite of a no-saying spirit” (Why I Am a Destiny 1, EH). We can therefore say that our vital whole also expresses an hen-o-logia (the logos of the One) of Yea-saying where opposites no longer collide or repel. Here the One has submerged within its depths all contraries such that day and night passage together and meet each other at Dawn5. The spiritual Amen is to the glory of the All-One— who is no longer God in the Christian sense—and yet it is not wholly devoid of transcendent quality. Nietzsche intentionally employs and indeed provokes the very religious sources that the pagan DionysusZarathustra is (at first) set against6. “I am an evangelist the like of which there has never been”—a disciple he says of the god Dionysus, the bringer of good-tidings. His evangel is: be the “eternal ‘Yes’ to all things” even 5

A title of significant worth in Nietzsche’s corpus. For instance the above “Yea-Amen saying” passage is Nietzsche’s reworking of the passage from 2 Corinthians 1:20 “For no matter how many promises God has made, they are “Yes” in Christ. And so through him the “Amen” is spoken by us to the glory of God” NIV Bible. 6

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after having the harshest “most terrible insight in reality”—again following the example of Christ having experienced the most abysmal thought (TSZ 6 in EH). From Zarathustra comes “The Temptation of Zarathustra” likening the test of Zarathustra’s strength to that of Christ’s test—it is to be sure both analogy (in Renaissance usage) and dialectical in the Platonic sense. Hence Nietzsche’s overcoming of established religion is itself religiously fired and inspired—why otherwise would values and soulstudy be so pivotal and loom so large in his various analyses? The most “affirmative” work Zarathustra adopts the exceptional style of mythicreligious language, tropes and narration because it needs to “translate” Christian images (A nd untruths) into greatness, nobility and Bios. So rather than absolute de-deification (nihilism) Nietzsche instead prefers a kind of nouveau-divination in which Becoming is given a sublime ecstatic vision with transcendent qualities7. Contrary to the modern Church, Nietzsche found in Christ the man of Nazareth, the transcendent quality of henosis (union) which we have also identified with the make-up of Zarathustra. The ability to resist, to contradict, to be “untimely” with the Romans and yet be a “Yea-saying” creature who affirms life with all its suffering—this is the proper Christ type, or the redeemer who shall come one day according to Zarathustra. It is evident from The Anti-Christ that Nietzsche understood the “symbolist” of the gospels in these terms: in terms of the overman, the one that knows to dance with Dionysus in joy even whilst forever overcoming. More importantly, against contrariness Christ is an emblem of the union of two opposites; he stands not for antitheses but Oneness which is also concordant with Nietzsche’s acclaimed “whole”. Principally a oneness with God where the (human) separation between man and God is lifted and thus non-existent; for he sees Christ not as representing opposition, the antithesis man-God, but the ineradicable unity which is one.8 We find that this particular non-moralistic God’s preeminence, who announces “Thus I willed it”, is an essential source for Nietzsche’s redemption for two reasons. Firstly, the salvific power expressed in the 7

Otherwise a reductive materialism (e.g. atomistic) would prevail, something which Nietzsche continually eschewed both in publications and notebooks. In this regard, Nietzsche’s Protestant and philologico-Hellenic roots prevent him from becoming a scientific Spinozist and biologic-Deleuzean of sorts. 8 For Nietzsche this renders the priest existentially and metaphysically redundant. Separation, opposition, and intervention are all linked to the priest’s politics of resentment and guilt-alleviation. Doing away with the priest is integral to the overman’s redemption of humankind.

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idea of redeeming “that which has passed away”—an old HebraicEgyptian idea of reclaiming humankind’s past—is pivotal to the redeemer Zarathustra. Nietzsche is particularly interested in this matter because he thinks the fall into guilt—the pernicious “bad conscience” of the ascetic— is a blight on the will, hampering the all-important “creative-will” that, as we shall soon see, is genetic to both gods and mortals alike. It has been convincingly argued by Loeb that Zarathustra sets out to redeem the past (of Menschen) by means of a backward-willing and sacrifice. The key passage is “On Redemption” (Z) where the “joy-bringer” the will is declared to also be the “name of the liberator”. Nietzsche asks “but what is it that puts even the liberator himself in fetters?” because he wishes to identify the creator’s sovereign will in the transmutation of the “it was” into “But thus I will it” (“On Redemption” Z). The object is to overcome the “folly” of the reactive force known as the spirit of revenge; Nietzsche’s liberation of the will from its folly of revenge is his act of redemption. Yet we have also argued that his redemptive deed is caught up with the vision (and priority) of the whole-as-a-new-unity from wherein derives the legitimacy of all affirmation. This godly creator-will indeed owes to a mystic theophanic conception of a higher power or order of being (as we shall see below). Both this will to create without temporal fetters and the will to eternity are derivatives of an ecstatic vision, one which emboldens the power of the sun and the earth, and pays homage to their symbiotic fecund relation9. Nietzsche has Zarathustra declare that his “richest gift” to others was learned from the sun: namely “when he goes down, over-rich; he pours gold into the sea out of inexhaustible riches…For this I once saw and I did not tire of my tears as I watched it” (“On Old and New Tablets” 3, Z). On the way to a new dawn his blessed state is again described in solar terms: “Then will he who goes under bless himself for being one who goes over and beyond; and the sun of his knowledge will stand at high noon for him” (“On the Gift-giving Virtue” 3, Z). At this stage the harmonic order between ancient sky and earth elements is analogically maintained. Yet if we momentarily overlook the implausibility of a necessary “superman” who saves mankind from itself, we would find that Nietzsche’s lords of the earth—wherein lies the promise of the future—are endowed with power once solely possessed by the gods. The commands of “I will”, “It shall be”, “Thus I willed it” or of “I am” are decidedly godlike but in time become interiorized in the human who, as “master of the

9

Nietzsche’s “lords of the earth” are the beneficiaries of this transcendent vision.

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earth”, is seen to possess a “creative-will”10. This presupposition— borrowed from Wagner and Goethe—that the creative-will can be replanted in the earthly lords or gods from the sky gods (the thei) is a metaphysical prejudice. It is in effect an unfortunate reduction of (and to) the terra. More exactly, the tragic impulse in Nietzsche’s thought reduces the cosmo-sophical dimensions of life and Being to the anthropic principle of projection, including the artistry of transfiguration. The law of life is now descended, into the makings and events of human activity—of mere energeia. Contra Nietzsche stands Egypt: these ancients better knew not to mistake Life (A nd death) with the energeia of finite mortals. This anthropomorphism does a violence11 to the fundamental idea of “begetting”—which is worthy of examination—and it also runs against Nietzsche’s own tenet of the unity between opposites because it defies the Egyptian insight that Nut (celestial) and Geb (terrestrial) comprised the Whole. The Sky and Earth domains intertwine thus forging every event that occurs in civilization. It is not dissimilar to the younger gods of Apollo and Dionysus who also captured the celestial and terrestrial orders in Ancient Greece12. The law of life cannot be reduced by an anthropic principle, something which Nietzsche himself warned against in Gay Science. Interpretive projection, including of unconscious imagery, must not cloud over the fundamental truth of sky-earth elements comprising Life itself in all its blessed eternity. Hence against the artist’s error, tragic projection, stands the initial redemptive task of cosmic importance: Nietzsche declares “I taught them to call redemption” the striving to “create and carry together into One what in man is fragment and riddle and dreadful accident…to redeem with their creation all that has been” (“On Old and New Tablets” 3 Z). This call to “carry together into One” (my emphasis) what is merely “fragment” and accident in man and to salvage his history is highly significant. It demonstrates the ineluctable appeal of 10

These lords, following the downfall of man with the tragic arrival of young Dionysus, overcome men of revenge and piety yet it remains unresolved how these custodians shall surpass the circular limits of human willing, indeed of disenchanted freedom. In the twenty-first century faith in masters of the earth is highly problematical (regardless of its ironic democratic appeal) and appears to us more like another (flawed) idealization. Both the superman and lord of the earth are deeply flawed thoughts of nineteenth century Nietzsche—after the pope and the saint we can then add the conceit of earthly master higher types who embolden “the promise”. 11 Both semiotic and ethical in nature. 12 It should be remembered not only did Plato gain his training in Egypt but so did Pythagoras and Solon before him. Numerous qualities of Apollo are also linked to the Sun-god of Egypt, Amun-Ra.

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the divine power or quality to recoup and gather up fragmentary pieces of creation into a unified field. It signifies once again the supreme importance of the One, the whole of life’s existence having its own peculiar ousia, one which has conscious will or Logos as the Greeks would say. This is where the “law of life” derives its power, including the acclaimed will to power, since nothing can exist separate to the whole (as we saw previously argued). By going under, by means of his sacrificial “richest gift”, echoing the passage of ancient Egyptians, the redeemer Zarathustra overcomes fragmentation and restores unity. He in fact transvaluates the old false unity of sensorium or Being which only compensated for the folly of the will’s perversion—the will to revenge with its attendant ressentiment soul. These fragments and accidents of the spirit are to be redeemed from the dead-weight (gravity) of time, of nihilistic Becoming. The said “folly” of revengefulness against the spirit (past-time) needed countervailing by a gift-giving power, one that came to redeem and was prophesized to come (Z). What remains largely unstated at this point is that love (not power) drives this giving of the “richest-gift”; and as well the drive to overcome, or indeed overturn, the “folly” of revengeful-guilt—the scourge of humankind. Why otherwise overcome? As Plato would ask, what is the Kalon of removing the folly of existence—why redeem if life is simply Becoming? Why enhance humanity or why worry about revenge and its deleterious effects if the soul does not know love? Can Nietzsche speak of love as belonging to the One if there is one who is ready to die, go under and give to life a “new morning” when life is to be reborn? Can there be rebirth, in short, without love? This is the Socratic-Platonic rejoinder to the old Elysian vision of the Greeks who eventually found a young god of the wine. The passage to rebirth requires overcoming, “striving”, but it also presupposes the want and ability to “go under” and re-emerge with the “richest gift”. This demigod quality (like the creative-will already mentioned) that mimics the sun is the source of the “noble soul”: “Whoever is of the mob wants to live for nothing; we others, however, to whom life gave itself, we always think about what we might best give in return” (“On Old and New Tablets” 3 Z). To give and to give one’s best in gratitude for life’s blessedness—thus love is to abide by the promise of life by returning the gift13. Hence the seeking of joy and eternity itself is not separate from the One’s ousia which is decidedly characterized by the capacity to give joy back, to experience joyfulness wholly in the One thereby transcending all atomistic 13

Democratic humanism falters at this point: Nietzsche adds the illumination “One shall not wish to enjoy where one does not give joy” (“On Old and New Tablets” 5 Z).

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immanence. Outside the One there is certainly pleasurable feeling (“joy”) but eternal joy or the joy of eternity is only possible by dwelling in the unsurpassable Whole where the beauty of joy and love transcend fragmentary illusory existence. As we saw above metaphysically Nietzsche is committed to eternity and the bliss that comes from the sun rising over the sea horizon to regenerate life all over again; yet the bliss is conditional upon giving the love to others as it was once to you. Here the universe fructifies in the human that splendid attunement (joy) with the One that rings like a proper cosmic frequency (160.2 GHz): “If we affirm one single moment, we thus affirm not only ourselves but all existence…if our soul has trembled with happiness and sounded like a harp string just once, all eternity was needed to produce this one event” (WP 1032). This harmonic ring of the universe is a resounding bell of the whole described so: “If becoming is a great ring, then everything is equally valuable, eternal, necessary” (WP293)—to remove one part is reprehensible “for everything is so bound up with everything else, that to want to exclude something means to exclude everything” (WP293). Nietzsche links this ring of life, rebirth, with the “highest and most illustrious joys” that come from transfiguration “by a symbolintoxication of the highest spirituality”—the transfiguration is itself an apotheosis of the beast-man who is enveloped by the mysterion of the One and affords him this transformation. Dionysian existence represents a “deification of life” through the “feeling of the necessary unity of creation and destruction” producing “an ecstatic affirmation of the total character of life” (WP 1050)—notice here that it is an “ecstatic” affirmation that attends the all-important whole (One). So we have here the two predominant themes of the One and unity with its derivative, “affirmation”, following suit. There is one further aspect of apotheosis which needs to be examined since it too relates to the theme of unity and the dimension of the sky underscoring Zarathustra’s “sunlike” nature14. Although Nietzsche often spoke of intoxication and overflow when invoking his favoured god to redeem humankind from the shadowlands of godless existence, what he required to fortify his lords” “promise of the earth” was something beyond the earth. Future masters or nobles of the earth will require more than overabundance and ecstasy, they will require love and the gift of joy yet 14 TSZ 7 Z where Dionysus” immortal lament shows “Light am I: ah, would that I were night! But this is my solitude, that I am girded round with light”. His yearning to “go under” is associated with his need to shine, to shed light on the dark—to enlighten and redeem those unlike the sun.

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that is not all. There emerges from the shadows of godless nihilism one type that evades modern decadence—he calls it the “pagan” (Greek Dionysus; WP 1052). Against the Church stands the mystery cult of Dionysus as the redemptive source from morbid religious suffering and pity i.e. ill-constitutedness. This is Nietzsche’s temple15: the redemptive retracing of the Greeks in the final analysis must be amplified through the resonance of Roman-Christian esoteric teaching. Although (at times) stressing overabundance and sensual sublimation, the transfigurer of existence looks decidedly less “pagan” and more like the heir of a kind of German Protestant romanticism, not to mention modern French aphorists. With the ostentatious belief in the death of the temple (of God), the “old atheist” Zarathustra finds freedom in the negation of the spirit of revenge, and secondly, the demise of the old “false god” or half-god who was the moralized God of the second Jews (WP 1038). To be rid of the gravityweight of the past as the history of resentment and revengefulness of soul, he needed the old moral God gone. For this “type of God”, thinks the old atheist, casts a onerous shadow over the sun and its generous sunlight i.e. joyful wisdom: its darkness stems from its inherent “bourgeois and rational” moral nature (WP 1038). From a pagan perspective this religion fosters ill-constituted, moralistic guilt-sacrifice under the heading of “personal salvation”. Nietzsche decries the reduction of the type of god and not the instinct for divination. His outcry after the publication of Zarathustra in the planned Revaluation of All Values is aimed at the perversion of the original message of Christ as he had lived it by those poisoners of life, the priest and the Church, who through their “malicious false coinage” invented sinister misunderstandings: “kingdom”, “Judgement”, “damned soul”, Original Sin, “After-life” and so forth (A 38). These psychological falsehoods plague the history of the soul (Past) so the great wisdom of the old atheist Zarathustra is to proclaim the “death of God”. Yet what is most overlooked in discussions of gods dying, or rather being murdered, is that atheism is only a means to a higher purpose: the dance of divineimmanence without the attendant poison of “sinister inventions” of men (A 38). These sinister inventions occur under the name “faith” yet in actuality it is anything but faith at work; “‘Faith’ has been at all times, 15 See further Laurence Lampert Nietzsche’s Teaching (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1986), p.202 where he correctly argues that the pagan’s temple is surmounted by a new faith and love (and teaching). This shows Nietzsche to be a post-Roman, quasi-“Christian” moderne, despite his strong Zoroastrian overtures. His teachings and interior qualities would be an anathema to a classical pagan much less ancient seer.

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with Luther for instance, only a cloak, a pretext, a screen, behind which the instincts played their game—a shrewd blindness to the dominance of certain instincts” (A 39). What Nietzsche’s overman demands is honesty, not the “Christian shrewdness” of a phantasmatic ideal reality; he rather demands truthfulness as it the highest virtue of this Persian, Zarathustra16. Once this component of decadence is annulled by overcoming, however, the nihilism of atheism must similarly be replaced by the vision of a redemptive dance of divine-immanence. For dying, self-redemption, rebirth and ecstatic joy with eternality are not the hallmarks of an intrepid godlessness. Hence Nietzsche needs to be understood not only as a paradoxical metaphysician but also as an exponent of forms of divination. The morphology of forms of divination from Human All Too Human onwards highlights the prevalence of religious instincts in different modes of transfiguration and the forms of spiritualization characteristic of culture. We find through this genealogical-constructive method that divination is a function of the heterogeneous will to power creativity. Divination is in fact a facet of the artistry of the will expressed as sublimation and transfiguration—the core of culture. Nietzsche focuses on the proper (“healthy”) use and expression of the creative artistry of the will so that it is not diverted into resentment and revenge i.e. soul-poison. The centrality of creativity is pivotal to Nietzsche’s metaphysics: as an indispensable element of plenitude it fosters the regeneration of the ineffable One and the re-generation of noble high cultures as well. Because humans recreate their world in part through the religious “godforming” instinct Zarathustra is himself a transfigured figure who underwent a Dionysian transformation17 of sorts. Looking beyond the scope of the overman, the importance of creativity comes to the fore in any discussion of redemption and gods dying. No doubt the importance of its artistic impulse comes from inquiries first made in the Birth of Tragedy and then Nietzsche’s commitments to Wagnerian drama in Germany. Rather than ossifying life through an overbearing cosmic will or chance (time) Nietzsche retains the fundamental Greek idea of plasticity and form-giving—for European culture. Deleuze in France was correct in 16

This further demonstrates Nietzsche’s modern, quasi-Platonic, outlook given “truthfulness” was not a central feature or criterion of pagan religions. 17 Karl Löwith Nietzsche’s Philosophy of the Eternal Recurrence of the Same (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1997) p. 55; Paul Loeb The Death of Nietzsche’s Zarathustra (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2010). Herein Nietzsche tellingly says: The “gods who live light and easy”: that is the highest adornment that is granted to the world, however emotionally heavy and difficult life may be.”

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detecting it as a central motif in Nietzsche’s thought; he understood that creativity was embedded in the very fabric of Nietzsche’s thinking, a point often missed by Anglo-analytic commentators. The American scholar Laurence Hatab has eloquently captured the importance of creative forces to Nietzsche’s thinking and tied it into the implications of the eternal return i.e. that repetition need not annul creativity. Hatab argues “The ‘measuring’ of formative powers turns on the extent to which they either conceal or reveal the abyssal limits of form. Eternal recurrence provides such a measure by bringing us “face to face” with this abyssal environment of meaning-creation”18. The creative impulse genetic to humankind is embellished in Zarathustra wherein the cosmic cycle of regeneration and rebirth is dramatically presented. It shows a unique borrowing: the idea of the creator from the image of the divine creator, a rather un-Egyptian yet modern German Lutheran conception of being19. Constituent with his principle and parable: “Precisely this is godlike that there are gods, but no God”. Nietzsche assigns to humans the divine power of creation of the Schaffender (creator; “On Old and New Tablets” 11, Z). This becomes the central motif for his redemptive portrayal of the overman20; here the constructed overman is to cherish that inherent creative-will which makes him god-like, his “creative-will”. Its supreme importance owes to the valuations Nietzsche himself makes with respect to 1. creation and 2. the will to beget. Creation is the “great redemption from suffering and life’s growing light”—a highly religious evocation both of creating and the “light” of life. The language of redemption is now intricately woven together with the ergon of the gods, viz creation. To redeem humankind from the insipid emptiness of democratic secular humanism Nietzsche invokes the powers (and indeed attributes) of begetting gods: those who spawn creations that ripen with time and sunlight, harvesting the “ripest of fruits”. Time and Becoming ripen what nature appears to grow yet their divinity exceeds the view of the naturalist. Here at work is the very source of Nietzsche’s creator spiritus wherein lie the religious instincts, namely those extra-human forces (“beings”) that possess the capacity to beget. To 18

Laurence Hatab Nietzsche’s Life Sentence (New York: Routledge, 2005), p. 74. Zarathustra conceives himself as a “creator” and his teaching seeks fellow creators. He teaches them against fables that “The will is a creator” (“On Redemption” Z). 20 In “Upon the Blessed Isles” he substitutes the creation of a god with that of the overman. The injunction is to father the overman: “you could re-create yourselves: and let this be your best creation”—the grand illusion of nineteenth century humanism. 19

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beget means the capacity to give life, to endow through creation the gift of living, thereby bestowing descendants upon the face of the earth. There can be no “lords of the earth” without such descendants—an old Jewish motif transformed through Persian garb into modern overmen. The overman will be a Dionysian-inspired creation descended from those noble ones who arise out of the shadow of (the Christian) God and the decadence of guilt-sacrifice. It will be begotten by the mysterious sculpting that for eons was called “cosmos”, “infinite” or “divine” using the idea of casting one’s image upon nature i.e. stone/man. Appropriating the language of mystics and ancient religion, his Zarathustra says “But my fervent will to create impels me” since the supposition is “That anything at all is good and evil—that is his creation” (“On the Blessed Isles”; “On Old and New Tablets” 2, Z). Both the will and good and evil are transcendent of human experience—they cannot be known “in themselves”, but they are knowable through their creations—this is the truth of the children of the earth who are also the heirs of the (sky) gods. Nietzsche likens the creative space of this divine power to create to the ancient Egyptian-Semitic practice of gods creating out of their own image. This creation from similitude is a very old precept from (at least) Pharaonic and Sumerian times21. Commencing with knowledge precedent of the self he says: “In knowledge too I feel only my will’s joy in begetting and becoming”; and once more borrowing from the gods “if there is innocence in my knowledge, it is because the will to beget is in it”. Before we go on to his evocative sculpting metaphor, we ought to note how Nietzsche joins the three cardinal elements of the sublime together: joy, knowledge and creation. The key to the “divine” moment however is the archaic principle of begetting (thus foreseeing the image ktisis [creation] to come) from which issues forth the will to sculpt from stone an image out of one’s own image i.e. creation. This creation mythos is uniquely Semitic-Levantine bringing forth an image of creation that is of personage: that one’s likeness shall be imprinted upon the pragmata [things] of physis i.e. in accordance with God’s power to beget. This may have been borrowed from the ancient Nile valley, but it certainly ends up in the Romanesque gospels. The second hypostasis—Christhood—is an heir of this ancient tradition: viz, the Son who is begotten by the Father. So Nietzsche’s seemingly enigmatic stone-sculpting is not particularly radical or innovative since both the will to create and to beget are archaic religious notions. Notice the fashion in which he depicts the 21

See Before Philosophy: The Intellectual Adventure of Ancient Man (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1946).

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sculpting of (human) nature occurs is away from experience; he knows of the presence of a deity “Away from God and gods this will lured me; what could one create if gods existed?” and shows the sculpting to occur as a mysterious unfolding (“Upon the Blessed Isles”, Z). Within the same passage he states (god-like) “O men, in the stone there sleeps an image, the image of images”—one has first to recognize, as per a deity, that the stone harbours an “image of images”, as willful forming cannot occur without such a recognition. But what is supremely godly at this moment is that it is the image of all images…awaiting to be brought forth through creation22. This is more than sheer artistry—the Apollonian bildende Kunst (image art)—for the will to create is linked to the power to beget according to one’s likeness. (This similarly applies to the fate of the overman.) It transcends artistic creativity because the cosmic potency reckons when the granite stone is not merely in a Zustand (condition, state) but is the image waiting for its proper emergence in time. Time reveals it phenomenally but it takes a peculiar Nous or Geist to know an image above all others to be a destiny waiting to be born in time. The emergence of the “image of images” from the stone is far greater than any “hammer” or person yielding that hammer can ever be. The emergence is like giving birth (hence the begetting) since he proclaims the creator “must also want to be the mother who gives birth and the pangs of the birthgiver”. Why? Because wherever there is willing there is also feeling and therefore suffering; secondly because of suffering’s gestation by time: “through a hundred souls I have already passed on my way, and through a hundred cradles and birth pangs”. Combined with our Egyptianesque rising and descending under process this phenomenon of soul shows incarnations and rebirths following the natural cycles of the cosmic order, including the suffering and pangs that attend each destruction and rebirth. One has undergone many cycles of life to gain the wisdom of this Persian transfigurer who has acquired enlightenment regarding the affirmation of life: “now that we can see how palpably always everything that happens to us turns out for the best…either immediately or very soon after it proves to be something that “must not be missing”” (GS 277). Having had many incarnations he who can affirm his own amor fati shows a wisdom of a tragic-Heraclitean kind: the fundamental unity of the All in the “whole” or “one” which marks all of existence. The ancient Heraclitus brings to the analysis the fundamental unity of opposites (e.g. generation and destruction) and thus the complementarity of dissimilar elements. 22

Arguably at this point only the divine can render the moment of creation through a recognition of one’s own image as distinct from humanistic voluntarist acts of wielding a hammer to intentionally forge some likeness out of stone.

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Nevertheless with the omission of a solar-earth interplay of death-life, darkness-light, of the kind Zarathustra represents Nietzsche’s overman must also be associated with the foresaid cycle of life: pangs-birthsuffering-death-rebirth in successive recurrence where the eternity of joy is (only) bound up with the whole. In this schema of “re-incarnation” (the one which produces an übermensch) Nietzsche opts for the post-nihilist tactic that “we should leave the gods in peace as well as the genii who are ready to serve us” and rest content with our creative, interpretive portents (GS 277). Taking confidence in our Promethean prowess—“our own practical and theoretical skill in interpreting and arranging events has now reached its high point” (GS 277)—he imparts formerly divine capacities to the sculptor of the overman i.e. begetting. For instance, he says “But to the human being it drives me again and again” and “Ah, you humans…Now my hammer rages fiercely” for he recognizes “a shadow came to me” (TSZ 8, Z). The first point here is how the life process has endowed it (sculptor) with a skill (the hammer)? That is, was it not the process of life itself that begot the hammer and the sculptor? Secondly, how does this mortal being know the fierce “rage” to create from stone (and not merely to leave the stone still)? If this is a calling how does it exactly register as such? In other words, must there be a creator lying dormant within him? For even the poet who draws (schöpfen) from his own experience of reality, the German verb here suggests to both create and draw23. Nietzsche is consistent here with Goethe, Hölderlin and Wagner—hence the beautiful souls of re-incarnation (in a reworking of Winckelmann) are those Yes-sayers who “learn more and more to see as beautiful what is necessary in things”, that one must die and be reborn (GS 277). Thirdly, why it is that one recognizes in raw nature (stone) a potential new form ready to be formed? Zarathustra says that the awaiting image in the stone appears to him as a “shadow”: “The beauty of the Overhuman came to me as a shadow” (TSZ 8, Z), yet this shadow must be recognized to exist. Out of the poisonous mire of bad conscience guilt-complexes, that is, a redeemed image of human being shall be found (i.e. created). The “shadow” of night shall give birth to daylight’s existent beautiful and thus the ugliness of previous negating No-saying ways shall be overcome by the beautiful way of affirming the whole. Without sacrifice, without suffering—and even death (destruction)—there shall be no beautiful, no birthing of the new. This archaic process of creation and rebirth is 23 Translator’s note, Duncan Large footnote 26, F. Nietzsche Ecce Homo (Oxford, Oxford University Press, 2007).

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dialectical and quintessentially more ancient than either Heraclitus or Dionysus as we have indicated above. Its origins precede Hellenic myths of fertility and deities. It harnesses a rather ancient preoccupation with eternal life (though not “redemption” with its usual moral connotation), and how to extend life beyond the ravages of death by means of a union or alliance with greater living forces or powers, “gods”. This very old salvific motif finds a peculiar expression in the Aegean isthmus however: after the arrival of Bronze Age civilizations in the Mediterranean basin, its enhancement is given over to a distinctive impulse to perfection. Rather than organic, immanent forms of reincarnating life through rebirth, the Greeks break off with the (somewhat odd) idea of perfectibility here on Hesiod’s earth. Nietzsche’s Zarathustra is in fact more of a “Zoroaster” than a Persian seer for he proclaims this very impulse in the acting of begetting (the “image of images”). In a very important line in Zarathustra which is later repeated (recited) in Ecce Homo by Nietzsche, Zoroaster-assculptor declares “I want to perfect it” because “the will to beget is in it [my understanding]” (TSZ 8, Z). Reaching perfection or the praxis of perfecting is now an esteemed value of the Greeks linked inextricably with Apollonian artistry and Dionysian vitality or overflow. It is also linked to the project of the polis, dike (justice) and the harmonic proportions esteemed highly by Greek artists and mathematicians alike. The wont to perfect is even extended by Nietzsche to reclaiming the past; for the redeemer it is made clear shall go to the “point of justifying, of redeeming even all that is past” (TSZ 8, Z). Like the gospel’s teaching that one’s past shall be redeemed, here Greek perfection sets out to reclaim the shadow in order to create the overman (who will need the help of the elusive übermenschlich [superman]). For he envisages, in a Helleno-Romantic way, no less than “a world-governing spirit, a destiny” being embodied or rather perfected through the ideal of the overman —which now “has become the highest reality here” (TSZ 6, Z). A destiny of perfectibility in the form of a world-governing spirit shall reign over the earth and the “lords of the earth” shall nobly fulfill the promise immanent to it. But the promise par excellence is one of perfectibility in time and space—a wholly unEgyptian romantic-modern notion—that looks to a Wagnerian-like overman or overcoming being in the making. Continual renewal by means of his celebrated “promise of the future” embodied in the sovereign will of the ever-striving Übermensch suggests a counter-ideal of perfectibility and not merely a free-spirited playfulness of sorts24. For the divine craftsman, 24

Contra Loeb The Death of Zarathustra (Cambridge: Cambridge University

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the spiritual sculptor, states that the hammer impels him not merely toward the stone but to perfect it: “I want to perfect it” he utters (“Upon the Blessed Isles”, Z). Secondly, it gestures perfectibility because “the image” that is awoken only to be further harnessed is of a particular quality: it is no ordinary image but rather one he says the “stillest and lightest of all things once came to me” out of this “ugliest stone” (“Upon the Blessed Isles”, Z). For Nietzsche stillness and lightness represent two of the highest characteristics (virtues) of the noblest human being. The future ripening of the redeemer that shall come will therefore have that ethereal beauty characteristic of perfected Apollonian forms or Schein (radiance). From the “ugliest” stone to the beautiful stone of joyful affirming (All of one’s existence, Necessity) the vision of transfiguration draws upon perfectibility25—even to the extent that past and future are woven together in god-like fashion. It is due to Nietzsche’s deification of the advental redeemer known as the overman (overhuman) who dies more than once but is not crucified (“for the sins of humanity”). The advent of a new kind of human being, following a sacrificial Zarathustra, also draws upon the imagery of Christ as did the above idea of transfiguration. In the Anti-Christ, after the prophecy of a redeemer to come (Zarathustra), Nietzsche says of the symbolism of “Father”: “this feeling itself, the feeling of perfection and eternity” (34). Looking beyond the sickness of “modern man”, the advent of a different kind of Mensch looks not only to Goethe’s Faust but also draws upon his old Lutheran roots and familial Christian milieu in Rocken. The son of a Lutheran pastor who dropped his theological studies at Bonn was not altogether classical (pagan) in his orientation to the redemption of humankind. Deification is dually-sided for the man who conceived of transfiguration more radically than others relying upon immanence as their saving grace. Death and sacrifice precede the coming of the one who holds the promise of “perfection and eternity” and is the begetting creator of nobler, resentment-free ways of life. It is with respect to the affirmative, or “blessedness” of life that the exemplary life of Christ becomes most apposite for Nietzsche. Here the Christ of the ecclesiastical order, the Crucified one, is not his main concern; the strident will to unbelief of modern decadence brought about the end death of God-on-the-cross. Toward the very end of his life as the Reevaluation project was being Press, 2013), p.219. Though the future completion of Zarathustra the artist-creator in his perfection is correctly discerned therein. 25 See Loeb, ibid, who concludes “he will be able to creatively shape this past existence so that it has a meaning and a goal, namely, his own future completion and perfection” (p.240).

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envisioned, Nietzsche writes “What are the “glad tidings”? True life, eternal life is found—it is not promised, it is here” and then importantly adds, “it is within you” (A 29). The Church has corrupted the original message; it turns the immanent into something external, into an exterior world of priests and sacraments of sin. Nietzsche believes the original gospel of Christ contained the true life, what he considered the eternal life; and rather radically he conceives of it as manifesting here and now, not in some promised land called the Afterlife: “Heaven”. Thus the so-called “kingdom” of heaven is already here, here on earth in this world, in this experience of life in accordance with the lived life of Christ. He the “genius of the heart” personifies Yes-saying, he is the affirmer of life par excellence—and this shows that those “who shall come” to redeem lost humanity are not merely hammer-wielding children-of-innocence but rather those who embody the matured truth because they also know this blessed joy or happiness as existing within them. Zarathustra-like offspring shall need a soul after all and the kind of soul-structure needed is something least alluded to by the late Nietzsche. Beyond revenge, the will to resentment, modern souls shall need apportioning, measuring, tonal attunement to the harmonics of the cosmos but also the purity which he demands of the true Christian26. This pure quality by contrast is missing from “Christianness”: neither the gnosis (phenomenality of consciousness) nor the pistis (faith) of the religion properly carries the spirit of this eternal life—an immanence of the eternal. The world still to come (after Zarathustra) shall have these twofold characteristics of immanence and eternity; and as they infuse the whole One, Nietzsche’s point is that these shall be experienced as one, a unity. To recall an earlier observation, Christ did not know opposites, opposition was beyond him. Opposition and opposing is natural in men (persons) but for the one who overcame culture and state, there are no binaries: the true is the one universal of Wesen. Christianity (of Jesus of Nazareth) “negates the Church” with its “even more abstract form of existence” posing a challenge to the world “conditioned by an organized Church” (A 27). Yet the Über life of Christ was anything but abstracted: it possessed the ethos, pathos and logos of peaceable divine presence; and it is the counterpoint (though not opposition) to the ecstatic “frenzy” of archaic Greek Dionysian practice. Nietzsche does not come to an awareness of this counterweight to his otherwise Hellenophilic orientation to the divine-immanence. Yet he finds in Christ a source of stillness which the non-Buddhist Zarathustra comes to embody. A disposition without 26

For Nietzsche the last true Christian was Christ (A 46).

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opposition, without regard to the political where boundary, division, antagonism and pessimism exist, where joyfulness of heart is distinctly affirmed. The same disposition which affords Zarathustra a love for those still living in the cave of everyday existence, the kind of love that will lead him to his death for the sake of…Frenzy and fertility will not suffice to save humankind from its ills: the Overhuman will need a heart and a structure to transvaluate the world, that is, the “good conscience” of the moralist (F. Nietzsche). The unconscious moralist will take his “genius of the heart” and give it to others in order to affirm the affirmable in Christ himself. To negate the ecclesiastical Christ is only to step closer towards Jesus, the true Christian who is an exemplar of life before the “very distorted form” of the Church predominated (A 31). This “strange figure”—a type of redeemer still “pure, whole, free of accretions”—fell sway to the necessary idiocy of coarsened pragmatic translation: retrospectively traits associated with “warfare and the aims of warfare” were projected onto him (A 31). When sectarians overtake the evangel we find the phenomenon: “they created their ‘God’ according to their requirements”—that is, social, communal reasons override the mysterious enigmatic transcendence of the strange Redeemer (A 31). One’s “god” inexorably is caught up our anthropomorphic projections—of fear, anxiety and mostly patterned ways which signify the familiar to us. It is inevitable, Nietzsche thinks, that human beings will find antagonism when they look because they themselves are experiencing antagonism or opposition, or formulas because they live according to formulas. What is unfamiliar ipso facto must not exist; if it exists it must be comprehensible. By recourse to symbolism and metaphor the “strange” is dangerously rendered familiar, regular, knowable. A horrific distortion consequently unfolds: the pure folly which Christ’s life and light represents is altogether elided. So strange and unfamiliar was the life of Christ that his other-worldly character appeared as “pure folly” to them—his is beyond culture (A 32). This mysterious quality—pure folly—forms the basis of what Nietzsche conceived as “an absolutely primary beginning to a Buddhistic peace movement” which was hastily miscarriaged (A 42). This aborted primary beginning augured “an actual” “happiness on earth” as opposed to the merely promised happiness of the tradition (A 42). Closer to Buddhism Christ embodied an “actual” happiness here on earth rather than the all too promised happiness to come of the Church so the Eastern faith (of Europe) missed out the most “positive” religion it could have had. Happiness is something normally omitted from Greek discourses on Dionysian ecstasy but here is made prominent by Nietzsche’s more modern post-secular outlook (Nietzsche

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rarely directly addresses happiness as a distinct topic). Religious joy is therefore possible yet we are denied it because of the ascetic’s world removal and renunciation, which is the bedrock of all ecclesiastical faith and practice. Christendom is the heir in this sense of a fundamental inversion and thus requires itself inverting since the Jewish ascetics made “themselves an antithesis to natural conditions”, in sum, “they inverted religion” (A 24). After Jesus religion was upside-down so the “natural conditions” of actual happiness on earth was never realized nor could it be for the fateful inversion was later strengthened by an overly intellectualist i.e. Thomist Aristotelian stance toward the evangel. Nothing “Buddhistic”, as Nietzsche calls it, could take root in Galilee even though the man had valiantly overcome the Sadducees. Jesus” overcoming power exemplified in his praxis showed up the inversion yet Paul’s appalling re-interpretation blocked the breakthrough. Nietzsche accuses the Church of having replaced the bad of Pharisaic law with the bad of guilt and blood-sacrifice through a fundamental denigration of Christ the figure of light. We have Pauline-Jewish doctrine, not a countering of the “inverted religion”; and certainly not the gospel of glad tidings which Nietzsche laments vanished with the death of Christ. The soul27 is missing the genius of the heart which Christ carried on earth; it is sickened by guilt and thanks to Paul and Augustine, the soul is riddled with sin. What was Christ’s “genius of the heart”? It seems something rather different to that of his god Dionysus because Nietzsche elects to have him philosophize like other mortals seeking after wisdom. Christ stands for something less intellectualist, less questioning and critical; he is an emblem of joy beyond the limit of culture, beyond discourse. Even if one comes to love one’s fate i.e. amor fati the question arises what form will one’s soul take? A healthy and clean soul undoubtedly is important for Nietzsche as he frequently reminds his readers (of these noble ideals). Yet in the Anti-Christ he exceeds both the Hellenic viewpoint and this vitalist stance toward “good health” by identifying facets that point toward much more than either good health or Dionysian fecundity. This dimension of thought compliments rather than opposes the other motifs which most commentaries highlight. Philologically it signifies those qualities which the arisen one from down under will embody since this genius of the heart properly carries the elusive “eternal joy”28 of All. The 27 Although much attention has been given to the “promise of the earth” and the “eternal recurrence” of all things in modern commentaries, it is notable that after Zarathustra Nietzsche envisioned life as the “Dionysian drama of the ‘fate of the soul’” (GM, P 7) 28 See Joan Stambaugh on eternity’s joy as extracted from Nietzsche’s Nachlass:

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one who enjoins love in union stills and calms “rough souls”, making “everything loud and self-satisfied to fall silent” so much so that the soul mirrors the deep sky of our celestial abode i.e. the depth of soul containing all that which belongs in the universe. More than the act of philosophizing, Christ shows humankind ways of smoothing and calming loud or rough souls, those soul-forms that are emptied by the modernism of a “twilight of the gods” (using Wagner’s parlance). The “genius” aspect here is Christ’s indubitable carriage of joy, of “glad tidings”, relentlessly so against all faces of evil, especially revenge and resentment but also against brute power and opposition. Here Nietzsche notably does not side with power or war; he in fact wagers his faith in the lack of opposition, formula and dogma all resembled in the life of Christ. His inability to be an enemy captured in the evangel’s “blessedness of peace” belongs to that favourable instinctive feeling of not resisting, not contesting (A 29). One’s soul shines smoothly because it rests with its own inner sufficiency even whilst it not self-important or self-preoccupied. Having no fight, no aggressivity, it does not even war against evil but merely recognizes it as extant. To not resist evil is perhaps, Nietzsche conjectures, the profoundest message of the gospel (A 29). Christ instead stands more nobly for rarer qualities which others struggle to comprehend: life lived in love, and moreover, the kind of love that is “without deduction or exclusion” and without distance (A 29). Men commit the error of exclusion, of distance and of deduction but the innocence of love with Christ transcends all that. As everyone is a child of God any “distance” is a mere fabrication of the human. Christ captures the innocence immanent to all children of God free from any moral condemnation. Different to Greek mystery cults here eternal life is within you, he emphatically states (A 29). The charisma of Christ shines in the depths of the soul that mirrors the creation in the form of splendid joy—ecstasis for the Greeks29. Is this what finally attracted his preeminent friend Richard Wagner to the Christian outlook but Nietzsche refused to acknowledge it because of distance and deduction or resistance? Might Nietzsche have erred at the end of his life—with not marshaling his insight and letting go of his overman-like friend, Wagner? Is he not closer to Wagner when he bemoans the vulgar atheism of those who receive the message concerning the Dionysian drama of life? Nietzsche sees the divine love and the immanence of innocence and yet remains accusative of Wagner beyond the pale of his ardent nationalism. Given his love for Cosima and Richard it is rather odd that Nietzsche failed to pick up this “All Joys Want Eternity”, Nietzsche-Studien, 33.1 (2008): 335-341. 29 Nietzsche appeared unaware of Eastern Orthodoxy as an alternate route to that of Latin and Teutonic variants of Christian evangelizing.

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fundamental insight of the charisma when she herself was most attuned to it and thus influential upon Richard’s outlook. The late Nietzsche can therefore be seen to be continuous with the earlier “artistic” Nietzsche who grasped the deep pathology of modernist existence when both Twilight of the Gods and Faust were acutely formative upon Nietzsche’s imaginary. Nietzsche held onto the divine30 even after his otherwise “free spirits” (“we fearless immoralists”) had followed Jacobi and Hegel’s pronouncement of the “death of God”, including the paradoxical Persian Zarathustra. Beyond Good and Evil manifestly shows this to be so, written after his monumental piece Thus Spoke Zarathustra. The lack of comprehension, which is now a facet beyond reason, is boldly presented here in the first of two volumes on modernity (BGE) showing the distinct lack of discernment for divine matters by those thoroughly imbued with “modern ideas” as he called them. These godless modernes know nothing of the Dionysian or tragic wisdom; moreover they are incapable of comprehending a most important distinction between the “moral God” of Christianity and gods as supreme powers. Nietzsche conceives the divine in the same way he conceived of ultimate reality as beyond good and evil in Beyond Good and Evil. In a note of 1888, he states: “God conceived as an emancipation from morality, taking into himself the whole fullness of life’s antitheses and…redeeming and justifying them: God as the beyond and above of the wretched loafers” morality of “good and evil” (WP 1035). The moralist’s god is the god that must die with the end of modernity, it is the Northerner’s god of Lutheranism, the one-sided partial god who knows of no antitheses or injustices. The moral God is a truncated phantasm of what Nietzsche more strictly calls “God the supreme power”, for he says it is “unworthy” of us to attribute supreme goodness to God, a folly of men (WP 1037). Being beyond morality, beyond the human need to project one’s narrow demands onto a god, the deity then assumes its proper greatness or mastery as a “supreme power”. A cosmic potency, that is, ought not to be reduced by frail human-all-too-human attributes, since if we recall our previous point regarding the all-important One, minor particularities cannot dictate the sui generis of the Whole. In a note originally written for the Anti-Christ he exhorts again that “there are many kinds of gods” which his own godforming instinct, being active on unpredictable occasions, has revealed to him (“how differently, how variously the divine has revealed itself to me each time”) (WP1038). Hence the warning that accompanies this candid 30

To divine, hold reverence, disciple of Dionysus, a prophet not a professor and create and sustain national gods for the self-edification of Volk (folk). Emerson’s “oversoul” also rejoins Socrates, Jesus and Mithraic souls.

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disclosure: “Is it necessary to elaborate that a god prefers to stay beyond everything bourgeois and rational”—once again, not to reduce the infinite and absolute to the dictates of “modern man”—that poorest of animals (WP1038). No, Nietzsche’s view is higher, from above; he sees it from the standpoint of the celestial constellation where gods emanate from: in the same passage he announces the core ousia of the divine as “His prospect is free”—following Goethe. Nietzsche here follows a passage from Goethe but also unknowingly announces the godly in the same way as Friedrich Schelling before him: free31. Our final observation regarding the treatment of Christ concerns what yields more than ecstasy and joyful abundance in the undistorted figure of Christ, what in other words is missing from the classical Dionysian tradition and tragedy? One might think it to be stillness or a calm peaceableness, but they in fact are encompassable within the broad sweep of his Overman vision. Nietzsche rather recognizes in Christ a disposition of the heart which frees humankind from the clutches of both the ascetic and institutional religion (and therefore the pernicious guilt of the modern soul). He sees Christ as the “bringer of glad tidings” who knows no enmity, antagonism or opposition. He captures the divine, it is in him, in his life, in his way of being. As the light and as the truth he embraces all through love; he is charitable of heart toward all those whom the Church calls “sinners”, not judging but rather embracing those who are creatures without love. This is much more than the megalopsychia (greatness of soul) of the ancient Greeks for it points to a bearing which suffers, which entreats to love those who judge you and who seek to do evil toward you. Here the sublime gracious heart—its “genius”—leaves behind all that is “beneath him”, namely the animosity and opposition of the ecclesiastical a-evangel which is fundamentally inimical to the evangel (A 18). What lies “above” all ignoble lies is the heartful soul’s ability to not resist, not to defend oneself but rather, Nietzsche says, “he loves with those, in those who are doing evil to him” (A 35). These are the exacting ethical standards and soul-structure that Nietzsche envisions evangelic practice to entail; the height of soul which is required to transcend the destructive “evil eye” that pervades all western Latin Pauline-Augustinian thinking i.e. “original sin”. To love “with those” and “in those” who endanger your life is the proper evangelic life—that is of he who is a “child of God”. 31 I have argued the centrality of freedom in Nietzsche’s thought had been largely overlooked by scholars in my previous Nietzsche and the Necessity of Freedom (Lanham: Lexington Books, 2008). This pivotal Germanic motif has not been embedded within Anglophone discourses on Nietzsche’s oeuvre.

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Beyond ecstatic joy, of Hellenic Eleusinian ecstasy, from the “abundance of life” specifically, there exists for Nietzsche (as the son of a Lutheran pastor) this unique capacity to love those who would antagonize you, tyrannize you or diminish you—those who would be able to induce the ill-feeling of guilt, resentment and revenge-taking. Of course Nietzsche will not speak of “forgiveness” here; the open-hearted capacity does not warrant it as the greatness of soul, its height, ensures that he is One with that or who would oppose him, namely that one is “in those” who naturally oppose or even threaten him. Way above forgiveness and certainly “forgetting” is the unicity of being enjoined with the divine power, of the divinity of love. Being with or “in” the totality of all creation refers us to the equal innocence of all that comprises life. Here neither force nor necessity as causality can equate with the benevolent innocence that is quintessential to the nature of all ensouled beings. This notably also far exceeds the Humean-like psychology attributed to Nietzsche’s soul concept which we believe is unnecessarily reductive, “modern” and diminutive in its imaginary capacity32. What exceeds the limits of Zarathustrian “forgetting” and pious “forgiving” of others by believers is Christ’s exemplary way of life, specifically in being enjoined by love to the whole of existence and therefore also the joyous tidings of he who personifies YES in all things. This greater height of the soul—far exceeding Descartes and Hume—stems from the unique conception of the heart Nietzsche offers here with respect to what is truly or properly “evangelic”. Not the Anti-Christ but instead the redeemed Christ of truth who shows decadent Christians what a true Christian looks like in practice. The lived joyousness of eternal life and union is embodied in this otherwise anarchical Jewish Über-human who was never understood or accepted by his “fellow man” at his time. This heart-soul configuration meant that even when resistance, guile and division was thrown up at him he (Christ) persisted with remaining in the love of all of life’s creatures— he affirmed in the face of travesty or calamity. Even in opposition when enmity was hurled at him, his “genius of the heart” prevailed over sheer Kraft according to the Anti-Christ. He overcame power because he overcame resistance. Power was transfigured by something beyond and greater than the will—nature was contradicted but not through (the ascetic’s) denial. Because he overcame through affirmation, the joy bringer transvaluated physis to instantiate a form of being with the All that stands as ethical. 32

At least Clark and Dudrick do argue for “Nietzsche’s soul” idea in what otherwise is a narrow naturalistic, analytic construal of Nietzsche’s work in the scholarly field

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Nietzsche to be sure does recognize this moment, when “an experience of the heart” effectively constitutes a break: a new morality (A 34;29). The forementioned “inmost thing” is expressed in the affirmer’s disposition of glad tidings”: his “blessedness in peace, in gentleness, in the inability for enmity” and he adds “life lived in love, in love without deduction or exclusion” (A 29). Here the presence of divine love with its joyous peaceableness is esoteric to the extent that it “stands outside of all religion” (A 32). It does so because it cares not “for what is fixed” nor even for any type of “word, formula, law, faith, dogma” as religions do (A 32). Instead of such things Christ represents, Nietzsche argues, “the experience ‘life’” as practiced, on earth: he stands for a “new way of living, not a new belief” (A 32-33). The lived life—in which the evangel is practiced—is this life of the heart that knows universal unconditional love. Hence the declared absence of any opposition, fixity, resistance, formulation, the sword or defense not to mention the greater evils of condemnation, punishment, distance, judgement and casting guilt. The former is the very antithesis of so-called “ressentiment morality” (the latter) which is the whole edifice and foundation of ecclesiastical-ascetic thinking and moral-valuation. The higher free spirit who experiences joy and eternity in his or her being draws not from an (existing) “noble morality” but as truly free spirited creates a new morality out of this highly unique “genius of the heart”. After all, Nietzsche’s overman will need some kind of soul-structure and soul order-ranking that it can perform in the experience of the future (BGE). We shall turn to the matter of experience shortly after first “accounting” the manner of corruption of the spirit of Yeshua33. The constitutive elements of what Nietzsche called out as the “reduction of the divine” are: 1. 2. 3. 4. 5. 6.

The distorted form of the evangel is centred on the Cross. Cross as sacrifice asserts an innocence was given up. Cross as sacrifice asserts the existence of guilt. Blood sacrifice establishes the opposition between God and Man hence creating the need for sanctification. Sanctification is erroneously founded on death (and faith in sacrificial recompense). Evangel is inverted consequently and the message of “glad tidings” is buried away.

33 Christos (G.) in the Septuagint. “Jesus” is a Greek transliteration of Hebrew ˆʔ ˒ˇʒʩ.

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7.

Grace through the genius of the heart is overturned by the lifepoisonous “guilt sacrifice”. 8. It means the life of Christ, his way, is eclipsed by the necessities of “salvation through faith”. 9. “Rejoicing” as ȤĮȡȚȢ (grace) is no longer the keystone of the evangel hence overcoming through the grace of the heart is no longer transfigurative. 10. Practice and “experience of life” emblemized by Christ is replaced by the “word” and (Latinate) intellectualization. A non-reduction of the divine would see the antithesis of the above institutionalized by the Holy Roman Empire and St. Paul. It concerns that which was particularly ignored in both analytic and European philosophy of the twentieth century. Our discussion finds a stress was laid by Nietzsche on “the condition of the heart” and the “inner realities” of a transfiguring faith—both critical terms of his used against the unevangelic “distorted form” of the disciples” gospel (A 34). Nietzsche without having to resort to either the idea of eternal recurrence or the will to power is as a “physician of the soul” able to microscopically examine aspects of the inner life that exceed the familiar bounds of guilt and “bad conscience” complexes (discussed extensively in GM). Here the physio-philologist of soulful life appraises the beginnings of decadence (as a world crisis) in the dark distortion of the original teaching of Christ: the evangel34 of “glad tidings”. The weak ones could not apprehend his message of affirmation but instead sought refuge in dubious images of salvation in dogma and “belief” in an afterlife and “judgement day”. The common folk of galilee could not decipher the inexorable enigma of his special being; therefore they inevitably reduced him to something recognizable, something that had known categories and could likely be assimilable. The Light could not be—it had to be symbolized using the sign system of language. For they read him first as a “symbolist” par excellence because they were rather dazzled by his shining “incomprehensibilities” (A 31). Nietzsche finds it completely unsurprising that the rabbles of the spirit must reduce the divine to the “human-all-too-human”. Church religion is the sign-language of the great symbolist’s life. Because they, the demos (mob) , cannot adopt the way of life of Christ, they fall into the illusion of Paul and thus follow his blood-sacrifice cult of worship. From its very early formation Christianity was destined to embark upon the path of decadence because the “weakly type” of mensch defined the future 34

Original meaning of the Greek evangelo.

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through its reversal of the redeemer’s sanctification: “that it should have sanctified in the concept ‘Church’ precisely what the ‘bringer of glad tidings’ regarded as beneath him, behind him” (A 36). This cataclysmic reversal (inversion) of the evangel has a tremendous world-historical impact in the form of (global) decadence: it commences as an over-turning which Nietzsche described thus: “Christianity is a revolt of everything that crawls along the ground directed against that which is elevated: the Gospel of the “lowly” makes low (A 43). Here we have Nietzsche’s primary objection to modern religion (in the West). Namely, against the standard interpretation that sees God-as-dead and the prominence of atheism through scientific atheism, we have an intensive critique of decadence through an extensive examination and critique of the lowly nature behind the Christian Church and faith. It is important to understand the objection is not aimed per se at all deities but more specifically at what enobles (or degrades) the human being. The millennial event—which in fact constitutes several formative processes—is the rise of a pernicious decadence, a culture of decline and feebleness of soul, spirit and body. Nietzsche is intent to embark upon a critical investigation into the “divinity of decadence” because he believed “that poison extends much further than one thinks (A 17, 8); that is, beyond the 1. asceticism of modern science 2. the socialism of modern democracy and 3. the repugnant figure of priestly domination i.e. power usurpation. Decline for Nietzsche was more than a cultural or moral phenomenon: it is multi-layered and complex in form yet its non-material, non-force particles makes its Vergeist35 sources decidedly elusive. The corrupting “theologian’s blood” lies not merely with the Church, priest, theologian or scientistic truth-giver: it fundamentally consists of the unevangelic dogma that has prevailed over and above the life of Christ, his way of life, from the very beginnings of the fall of Rome. It shows how the human-all-too-human spirituality corrupted the foundation of a new post-Classical culture and the soul’s trajectory in space-time. By means of the Weak God falsehood demonstrated above, the unevangelic proponents expounded a metaphysics of Being that would underscore philosophic thought until its culmination in Kantian metaphysics. Instead of inaugurating a “Copernican revolution” cosmologically, Kant merely captured the essence of Protestant 35

Of spirit—“spiritual” in English.

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theological unthinking declaring the “thing-in-itself” as Being—the hidden God—while eliding the joyful good-tidings of Christ-Yeshua. While slowly killing-off God the religiosi have presupposed Him when founding a metaphysics of Being to explain the actual therewith appearing rather modern or even “scientific” as opposed to old and ecclesiastic. But as Nietzsche demonstrates its all Christian to the core even when naïve naturalists or physiologists think it is just “mirroring nature” or “measurement”. All metaphysical Being—scientific or unscientific— pertains to God and if we misrecognize it the will to divinize nonetheless remains. Today the remainder has become neuro-scientific. Yet what distinctly remains eclipsed by both metaphysics (God as Being) and scientific atheism (God as Substance/atomism) is the highly important “inmost things” that Nietzsche correctly identifies in the figure of the Christ. The Anti-Christ is not an anti-thesis of Christedconsciousness but instead a dialectic with and against the Church’s unevangelic Christology36—the Christ made in the image of Saint Paul. Ecclesiastical Christology was built on the central imperative to reduce Christ’s innumerable “incomprehensibilities” to the familiar. Moreover it was built upon a perverse construct of Paul’s: he made the death on the cross the concept, turning redemption toward a sickly body that would shift to a distant Beyond thus aggregating power to wield over the masses (A 42). Paul nailed Jesus” life to the cross, bringing both guilt and death back from Jewish priestly sacrifice and therefore the doctrine of “judgement” too. In this artifice of the redeemer “this dysangelist” kills off any life furthering gospel or “rejoicing”. “In Paul”, says Nietzsche, “was embodied the antithetical type to the ‘bringer of glad tidings’, [namely] the genius of hatred, of the vision of hatred” (A 42). So powerful is this priestly dysangelist called Paul that he usurped “the meaning and the right of the entire Gospel” by nailing Christ “to his [Paul’s] Cross” (A 42). The life of the redeemer above all was sacrificed by this “false-coiner”, hateobsessed apostle of death who put to death the teachings and life of the Blessed one who brought light into the world. Joyful rejoicing in life gave way to guilt and a hollow promise of a Beyond. In the logic of hatred embodied in Paul the despising of this natural life in the guise of a lie (the resurrected Jesus) works to shift the centre of gravity out of life into the Beyond of faith. Holding faith in the Beyond where nothingness stands as the Resurrection is the great lie—flowing from an instinct of hatred. Instead of a revenge of life the proper redeemer of the gospel exemplified 36 Nietzsche states in the Anti-Christ: “one constructed the Church out of the antithesis to the Gospel” (36).

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how one ought to live, how one lives in the unity of God and Man. The immanence of spontaneous illumination where no opposites exist and, as we have already seen, where no conflict exists between Man and God. Rather than taking revenge the heart knows a Buddhistic peaceableness where the said “centre of gravity” is in all the atomic features of everyday life, the little blessings of living and living happily i.e. eudaimonia.one practices happiness; to embrace the (true) evangelic spirit of oneness with All that is, that is actual and therefore existent. Existent happiness with life as the promise and not the eschatological promise of a salvation after judgement day is what Nietzsche declares missing from the apostolic Church. Without such peaceable happiness there is something sickly about Mensch (being human), his soul; he becomes world-weary and consequently wants to take flight into world-denying belief. Worldweariness is of course an anathema to evangelic rejoicing, to a “livingwell” in practice on this earth. This immanence of transcendent love is inextricably linked to the “experience” of lived life; therefore the proper evangel, as we noted above, is all about “a new way of living”, not belief. Throughout the whole of the Anti-Christ Nietzsche stresses the importance of practice in conceiving of the evangelic message; and of how to properly comprehend the undistorted image of Christ. We must look to his life and not to dogma or right “beliefs” for clues of what the first or true “evangel” represents. The Church by contrast is preoccupied with intellectualist concerns of true beliefs and the correctness of dogma following its Thomist turn to Aristotelian analysis. Against quasi-Aristotelian concept-webs Nietzsche posits the way of Jesus, not merely as an overcomer but as affirmer who lives the experience of joy and giving from the heart—two fundamentals omitted by ecclesiastical authority. It is the essential unity, that perennial union between God and man, that characterizes the life of he who brings glad tidings to all; there are no distinctions any longer since the condition, he states, “projects itself into a new practice” (A 33). Nietzsche calls this “the true evangelic practice” where opposites do not abide and no distinction “between foreigner and native, between Jew and non-Jew” exists (A 33). This lost way, of “evangelic practice”, was demonstrated by the redeemer’s death and life, and furthermore by what he taught on how to live. Nietzsche is adamant that it was not to “redeem mankind” but rather to “demonstrate how one to live” since Jesus knew “it is through the practice of one’s life that one feels ‘divine’” (A 33,35). Divinity like joyfulness is to be experienced and it is to be experienced in this life and not in some “afterlife” in heaven somewhere. The divine, God proper, is here to be had now in existence so that we are to follow the demonstrated

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example of the joy-bringer who lived divinely for life. The gaze is not other-worldly, away in some promised afterlife or with some remote absolute being. This is rejected as a distortion of the evangel, as a PaulineJewish misreading of the Messiah that needed to place the gaze elsewhere and not where it properly belongs i.e. on life itself. Here the divine and existence entwine so that “union” is no mere abstract term; one does not have to wait for a “Second Coming” to experience the quintessential union with God. But this same oneness with God is active so that life or light fills everything thereby enabling Nietzsche to say that “blessedness” “is the only reality” because “every kind of distancing relationship between God and man is abolished” (A 33). The consequence of such a condition means that it is not “belief” which “distinguishes the Christian”: he emphasizes, a Christian “is distinguished by a different mode of acting” (A 33). This acting is modeled on Christ’s way of life for he died to demonstrate “how one ought to live”—Christ above all bequeathed to humankind “his practice”: Christ died and lived the blessedness which he taught is immanent in all of us. This, Nietzsche says, is God; it is “evangelic practice alone [which] leads to God”, not the old ecclesiastical precepts of sin and penance derived from Judaism (A). Against the guiltblood-law divination of the old high priests of Israel there stands a “kingdom of God” which is “an experience within a heart” and this notably “is everywhere, it is nowhere” (A 34). The ubiquity of the heart is the new Nietzschean insight which will also define an otherwise void Overman.37 Blessedness as the transfiguration of all things underpins his concept of redemption: instead of the Pauline doctrine of blood sacrifice Nietzsche offers “The profoundest instinct for how one would have to live in order to feel oneself ‘in Heaven’, to feel oneself ‘eternal’, while in every other condition one by no means feels oneself ‘in Heaven’” (A 33)—that is the challenge! The one to come, the human of the future, shall share many of these qualities having benefitted from nihilism and its overcoming. Transfiguration is central to the eternality conceived by Nietzsche and the innovation of faith-action complexes through the perennial travails of organized religion will prove vital for the shaping of future overcoming 37 The “liberator” will distinguishes those who are higher from decadents—those tormented by a weakened will degraded by religious “anti-nature”. Zarathustra laments the decadent’s passivity : “oh, that this great weariness might always remain far away from me” (“Upon the Blessed Isles”, Z). The overman embodies the distinct attributes of powerful creating deities who exercise sovereignty through willful creation yet decidedly lack the Christed-Krishna “heart” that defines immanence.

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individuals. The ascetic shall be transvaluated but his spiritual directive techniques and ensembles will have been assimilated—“psychologized” as moderns would say. With the pertinent soul-structure, as Beyond Good and Evil was primarily designed for, the work of affirmation can proceed ahead after the annihilation of the “last man” has been accomplished. But this affirmation, to be integral to Bios itself, cannot remain atomistic or, that is to say, fragmentary. For nothing is real when parts do not relate to the whole. Thus this Overman who is the heir of a break that inaugurates the heart and a new form of action must now also transcend his formerly fragmented self to resume his union with others. That is, the Übermensch of futural time will have established an ensouled Overman who acts not alone but rather participates in the (co-)creation of his universe. The new being of the future will have transcended his former fragmentary self and indeed his solo atomistic being for he will have learned the basic synergy that defines his universe of being—that all Becoming is essentially cocreation. Joint creativity in the process of life (Bios) is the highest point of spiritualization that the Overman shall have obtained from the now surpassed movement of ascetic religiosity. It represents most closely the nature of the divine for only in creation is the god-like physis revealed. To be creators with one another is to enjoin the sacred through transcendent power—for the Overman must point to something higher than its self, it is no end, no finalis. It knows its own co-determination is caused by a synergia38 that is the reason for its own Mitsein in a joyful universe, where “blessedness” may prevail. In being joined to the rest of creation the creator “recollects” the archaic trace of unity it once had before the tragic event of individuation was realized. This revelling in what was once the existent of the Whole (das Ganze) before fragmentation transpired exceeds even the frenzy associated with Bacchus, the latter only being a sign to the former. Working together in co-production is a triadic completion to the pain-fertility dialectic of Dionysian nature Nietzsche heavily drew from. This “third” (above) dimension compliments Nietzsche’s too narrowly (i.e. individualistic) conceived Overman which unwittingly denies his higher “noble ones” their proper place in participation and collaboration as far as composing the world is concerned. There is no notion of co-being because Nietzsche cannot imagine labour or community beyond the purview of the herd. By conceiving of the Overman as collaborating in the orchestration of the universe, where mutual creators know philia amongst themselves, he is 38 Derived from the Greek ıȣȞİȡȖંȢ “working together”, an idea present in Eastern Orthodox mysticism yet occluded in Latin Western Christianity.

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simultaneously placed beyond the herd and the atomistic I. The Overman will possess the understanding that he participates in the creation of his unceasing change or Becoming, as a co-creator. The ancient dictum to act like a god (Plato) will then have been realized through its cosmic participation and joint labour with others therein also transcending his former anthropomorphic “god-forming” instinct. By means of elevation through synergia and his triadic relation to the All, the futural Overman will have actualized the ubiquity of his heart experience where we first saw the appearance of “no-where yet everywhere” abiding. Recalling the lesson of Christ, he now lives this union with others as only theoi (“divine”) once did in ancient Greece—leaving behind the Aristotelians with their worry about universals in the ashes. This complex world system is what Plato called Plenitude and it was Proclus who gave it its triadic structure. Nietzsche never encountered Proclus it seems but he learned from the great Waldo Emerson more than he might have realized.

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INDEX

Apollo, 3,7, 21, 22, 70, 124, 126, 132, 156-157, 159-160, 163, 169, 176, 178-179 Aquinas, Thomas, 5, 9, 19, 47, 50, 89, 128 atheism, 18, 25, 27-29, 33-34, 3643, 45-50, 52-53, 55, 57-58, 6772, 75, 87, 93, 102-103, 131, 172-173, 183, 189-190 atomism, 1, 31, 32, 34, 41, 48, 6465, 69, 75, 79-80, 86-87, 157, 160, 190 Augustine, 5, 9, 19, 47, 50, 64, 76, 89, 104, 128, 132, 134, 182, 185 body, 4, 6, 10-11, 13, 14, 16, 19-20, 29, 33, 42, 46, 49, 64, 74, 82, 86-87, 89, 91-92, 98-101, 120, 126-128, 138, 148-149, 153, 189-190 Christ, 14-16, 18, 91, 99, 105, 108113, 121, 128, 137, 142-143, 146-149, 166-167, 172, 179190, 192 Church, 6-8, 10, 15, 17, 19-21, 37, 46, 51-52, 56, 75, 78-82, 89-90, 94-113, 115, 118-120, 125, 127132, 138-141, 147-148, 167, 172, 180-182, 185, 188-191 conscience, 1, 11, 12-13, 15, 20-22, 27-28, 30-36, 38, 41, 43, 54-56, 65, 68-69, 86-89, 91, 104, 108, 11-112, 131, 135, 139, 142-143, 146, 164, 168, 177, 181, 188 decadence, 9-10, 12-14, 19, 25, 30, 34, 45, 47, 49, 51, 63, 70, 74, 76, 79, 85, 88-89, 92, 94-95, 98, 102, 104, 107, 110, 114, 124127, 129, 132, 135, 138-139,

141, 143-148, 154, 172, 175, 179, 188-189 deities, 21, 22, 24, 27, 29, 31-36, 41, 68, 124, 126, 178, 189, 192 Dionysus, 1, 2, 63-64, 70, 83, 144, 146, 148-149, 158-160, 163, 166-167, 169, 171-172, 178, 182, 184 divination, 2, 61, 63, 84, 94, 111, 122, 126-127, 133, 156-157, 159, 161-162, 167, 172, 173, 192 divinity, 88, 97, 127, 159, 174, 186, 189, 191 ecclesiastical, 3, 6 ,8, 80, 101-102, 107, 109-110, 153, 179, 181182, 185, 187, 190-192 empiricism, 1, 3, 5, 9, 18, 37-40, 45, 49-50, 66, 68, 73, 80, 86, 98-99, 101, 120, 127, 129, 136, 142, 150, 155, 158 eternality, 10, 14, 23, 66, 80, 142, 149-150, 153, 155, 159-160, 162, 173, 192 eternity, 159, 161-163, 168-171, 177, 179-180, 182, 187 evangel, 104-106, 108, 113, 120121, 129, 132, 142-143, 166 181, 185, 187-189 factum, 1, 66, 70, 79 Geist, 23, 34, 47, 65, 73-74, 81, 86, 107, 122, 140, 157, 176, 189 God–death of, 1, 2, 8-9, 26, 48, 61, 66, 68, 79, 83, 103, 117, 119121, 131-132, 138, 172, 179, 184 Goethe, Johann, 1, 44, 80, 100, 135, 153-155, 162, 164, 169, 177, 179, 185

200 heart, 56, 91-92, 95-96, 98, 104111, 133-134, 180-182, 185188, 191-194 Hegel, 8, 18, 80, 121, 140, 184 Heidegger, Martin, 2, 132, 144, 147, 151 height(ened/ing), 8, 9, 13, 18, 22, 24, 31, 37, 44, 46, 51, 55, 63, 68, 70, 79, 81, 95, 97, 103, 123, 139, 145, 156, 166, 185-186 Heraclitus, 49, 86, 146, 155, 166, 176, 178 Jesus, 15, 89, 90, 99, 104-106, 109, 113, 121, 139, 142, 144, 180182, 184, 187, 190-191 Kant, Immanuel, 1, 3, 10, 47, 110, 121, 128-129, 150, 155, 165, 189 Lutheran, 4, 9, 14, 50, 86, 174, 179, 184, 186 materialism, 61, 65, 86, 90, 167 mechanical, 3, 6, 41, 45, 47, 49, 52, 56-60, 67, 76, 84, 87 mechanist, 45, 49, 61, 69, 75 mechanistic, 41, 47, 58, 62 nihilism, 7-9, 19, 26, 30-34, 37, 4048, 50, 52, 56, 59-63, 66-69, 7275, 77-79, 95, 103, 105, 107, 110-111, 114, 116, 118, 120121, 125, 137-141, 150, 161, 167, 172-173, 192 organization, 4, 12, 20-23, 29, 30, 34, 89, 100, 104, 114-115, 118, 131 Paul, 104, 106, 110, 112, 120, 182, 188, 190 perversion, 107, 111, 113, 143, 170, 172 physics, 5, 6, 28, 33, 41, 49, 57, 68, 83-84, 87, 92, 103 Plato, 27, 37, 66, 128, 151, 159, 169, 170, 194 positivist/m, 3, 47, 59, 61, 69, 72, 74-75, 77, 81, 91-92, 149

Index polytheism, 26-31, 34, 41-43, 47, 64, 69-70, 84, 87, 97, 104, 112, 126 recurrence, 14, 67-69, 73, 86-87, 90, 122, 133, 138, 140, 145, 149150, 152-154, 157, 161, 163, 174, 177, 182, 188 redemption, 9, 14-16, 19, 29-30, 35, 38, 42-44, 74, 78, 85, 89, 94-95, 99-100, 103-105, 110, 117-118, 127, 130, 132-138, 141, 145147, 153-154, 167-169, 173174, 178-179, 190, 192 reduction, 66-67, 87, 123, 144, 169, 172, 187-188 reverence, vi, ix, 2, 3, 13, 44, 46, 58, 62, 64-65, 71-79, 84-85, 97, 120, 124-127, 132, 134, 184 Schopenhauer, Arthur, 52, 53, 129, 135-141, 143-144, 155-156, 159, 165, 197-198 science, passim scientific, 1, 3-8, 18, 21, 25, 26, 2834, 37-39, 41-58, 60, 62, 64-81, 84-88, 93, 95, 102-103, 116, 119, 121, 127, 131-134, 142, 155, 160, 167, 189-190 Small, Robin, 43, see also footnotes passim Spinoza, Baruch, 14, 136, 155 spirit, passim spiritualization, 13, 37, 60, 85, 87, 90, 96-97, 107, 111, 117, 122, 125, 173, 193 theism, 18, 25, 42, 51, 60, 75, 129, 148 transcendent(alism), 4, 7, 10, 13-15, 29, 35-36, 47, 57, 71, 76, 80, 110-111, 125, 128-129, 137, 139, 143, 147, 149, 165-158, 175, 181, 191, 193 unbelief, 8, 52, 54-57, 60-64, 68-69, 72, 74-75, 77, 79, 83, 88, 97, 117 126, 179 Vergeistigung, 107, 189

Transcendence, the Divine and Nietzsche Wagner, Richard, 1, 81-82, 95, 107, 133, 145, 169, 173, 177-178, 183

201

weak-God, 128-132, 137, 189 Werden (Becoming), 2, 18, 38, 125, 160