If radical dialectical thinking was reborn in Kierkegaard, it was consummated in Friedrich Nietzsche: The thinker who, in Martin Heidegger’s words, brought an end to the metaphysical tradition of the West. His most important work, Sein und Zeit (1927, in English as, Being and Time, 1962), clears the space for the quest for Being and only a favoured few have any hope of recapturing oneness with Being. Especially belief in the possibility of escaping from metaphysics and returning into an authentic communion with independent nature, least of mention, saying anything about Being as this is difficult, so what in effect replaces it is peoples’ own consciousness of their place in the world, or of what the world is for them (their Dasein), which then becomes the topic. Before its central themes had become, they became the staple topics of ‘existentialism’, they had a more sinister political embodiment: Heidegger became more inclined to a kind of historical fatalism, and is sometimes seen as an heir to the tradition of Dilthey. Heidegger’s continuing influence is due at least in part to his criticism of modernity and democracy, which he associates with a lack of respect for nature independent of the uses to which human beings put it. However, he has also been hailed (notably by Rorty) as a proponent of ‘pragmatism’, and even more remarkable many French intellectuals have taken hi as a prophet of the political left. When he writes that “from a metaphysical point of view, Russia and America are the same, the same dreary technological frenzy, the same unrestricted organization of the average person” (An Introduction to Metaphysics, 1953) forging t that his contempt for the mass culture of the industrial age springs from a nationalistic and conservative élitism is easy, rather than from any left-wing or egalitarian illusions.
Nietzsche’s proclamation of the death of God shattered the transcendence of Being. No longer is there a metaphysical hierarchy or order that can give meaning or value to existing beings (Seiendes); as Heidegger points out, now there is no Sein of Seiendes. Nietzsche was, of course, a prophetic thinker, which means that his thought reflected the deepest reality of his time, and of our time as well; For to exist in our time is to exist in what Sartre calls a "hole in Being," a "hole" created by the death of God. However, the proclamation of the death of God - or, more deeply, the willing of the death of God - is dialectical: a No-saying to God (the transcendence of Sein) makes possibly a Yes-saying to human existence (Dasein, total existence in the here and now). Absolute transcendence is transformed into absolute immanence; Its positive actualization drawn upon the Here and Now, by way of the post-Christian existential "now-ness," in that we are drawn into ourselves all those powers that were once bestowed upon and beyond: Consequently, Nietzsche’s vision of Eternal Recurrence is the dialectical correlate of his proclamation of the death of God, least of mention, that since death is the cessation of life, it cannot be experienced, nor be harmed nor a proper object of fear. So, at least, have argued many philosophers, notably Epicurus and Lucretius. A prime consideration has been the symmetry between the state of being dead, and the state of ‘being’ not yet in existence. On the other hand death is feared, and thought of as a harm (even if it is instant: it is not the process of dying that make the difference). The alternative, immortality, sounds better until the detail is filled, when it can begin to sound insupportable. The management of death is one of the topics of ‘bioethics’. All in the same, the assertion that God is dead, but that we have to vanquish his shadow, first occurs in Nietzsche’s “The Gay Science.” Nietzsche tells of the madman who hails it as the greatest achievement of mankind, to have killed God and turned the churches into tombs and sepulchers of God. Nevertheless, people do not listen to the madman for ‘the deed is still more distant from them than the most-distant stars - and yet they have done it themselves.
. . . Everything goes, everything comes back; eternally rolls the wheel of being. Everything dies, and everything blossoms again; Eternally runs the year of being. Everything breaks, and everything is joined anew; Eternally the same house of being is built. Everything parts, but everything greets every other thing again, least of mention, that the eternal ring of being remains faithful to itself. In every NOW, being begins; Round every here roll the sphere. There. The centre is everywhere. Bent is the path of eternity.
Only when God is dead can Being begin in each now. Eternal Nietzsche’s symbol of the deepest affirmation of existence, of Yes-saying. Accordingly, Eternal Recurrence is a symbolic portrait of the truly contemporary man, the man who dares to live in our time, in our history, in our existence.
We must observe that Eternal Recurrence is a dialectical inversion of the biblical category of the Kingdom of God. Jesus’ proclamation of the Kingdom of God typifies a transcendent Wholly Other, a Wholly Other that radically reverses the believer’s existence in both the being and the values of the Old Aeon of history, and makes possible even now a participation in the New Aeon of grace. So likewise the "existential" truth of Eternal Recurrence shatters the power of the old order of history, transforming transcendence into immanence, and by that making eternity incarnate in each now. Eternal Recurrence is the dialectical antithesis of the Christian God. The creature becomes the Creator when the Centre is everywhere. Therefore Zarathustra, the proclaimer of Eternal Recurrence, is the first "immortalist," and his proclamation is a product of the "second innocence" of atheism. The atheistic Nietzsche was the enemy of God and Christ, but Nietzsche was a dialectical thinker. His opposition to Christ was directed against the Christ of Christianity, against religion itself, rather than against the actual figure of Jesus. Again, in The Antichrist, Nietzsche portrays Jesus as a kind of naive forerunner of Zarathustra. For Jesus is incapable of resentment (non-dialectical negation), is liberated from "history," and is himself the exact opposite of Christianity. For, as Nietzsche says: If one were to look for signs that an ironical divinity has its fingers in the great play of the world, one would find no small support in the tremendous question mark called Christianity. Humanity lies on its knees before the opposite of that which was the origin, the meaning, the right of the evangel; in the concept of "church" it has pronounced holy, precisely what the "bringer of the glad tidings" felt to be beneath and behind himself -one would look in vain for a greater example of world-historical irony.
Jesus’ proclamation abolishes any distance separating God and man (a distance which religion knows as sin). His gospel did not promise blessedness, nor did it bind salvation to legal or moral conditions: blessedness is the "only reality." What Christianity has called the gospel is in fact, the opposite of that which Jesus lived: "ill tidings, a dysangel." Christianity is a dysangel because it retreated into the very "history" which Jesus transcended and transformed, the transformation of the blessedness of Jesus’ proclamation into the No-saying of resentment. Thus, Nietzsche looked upon Christianity as the stone upon the grave of Jesus.
The astute theological student of Nietzsche must wonder whether Nietzsche’s portrait of Zarathustra is not a modern dialectical image of Jesus. Not the "Christian" Jesus to be sure, but already the modern Christian has lived through the death of historical or objective Christianity in Kierkegaard’s realization of faith as radical subjectivity. If Kierkegaard’s subjectivity has dialectically passed into Nietzsche’s Eternal Recurrence, is it possible that the radically profane now of Eternal Recurrence are a dialectical resurrection of a Kingdom of God beyond God? Does not the New Creation (Eternal Recurrence) of Zarathustra parallel the New Creation of Jesus (the Kingdom of God) insofar as it shatters history, dissolves all rational meaning, and brings an end to the rule of Law? Such a radically modern coincidental oppositorum would parallel the highest expressions of mysticism (e.g., the Madhyamika and Zen schools of Mahayana Buddhism) while at the same time offering a non-Gnostic form of faith. Non-Gnostic because a truly modern dialectical form of faith would meet the actual historical destiny of contemporary man while yet transforming his unique Existenz into the purity of eschatological faith. In Nietzsche, we have witnessed the deepest willing of the death of God passes into the deepest affirmation of Eternal Recurrence. Dialectically, the opposites coincide, but radical negation has become radical affirmation; yet if the negative movement is a denial of God, then the positive movement must finally be an affirmation of God, of the God beyond the Christian God, beyond the God of the historic Church, beyond all that Christendom has known as God. A truly dialectical image of God (or of the Kingdom of God) will appear only after the most radical negation, just as a genuinely eschatological form of faith can now be reborn only upon the grave of the God who is the symbol of the transcendence of Being. Does Nietzsche point the way to a form of faith that will be authentically contemporary and eschatological at once?
We will define eschatological faith as a form of faith that calls the believer out of his old life in history and into a new Reality of grace. This Reality (the Kingdom of God) affects a radical transformation of the reality of the world, reversing both its forms and structures, a transformation that must finally culminate in the "end" of the world. Historically, eschatological faith was born in the reform prophetic movement of the Old Testament prophets, at a time when the world of ancient Israel was crumbling. Probably, the prophetic oracles recording this revolutionary eschatological faith did not assume either a written or a canonical form until the Jewish Exile or thereafter. Moreover, it was not until the time of Jesus that a fully eschatological form of faith appeared, for only in Jesus’ proclamations does the Kingdom of God ceases to be just a promise and becoming instead of a present reality. As Rudolf Otto notes in The Kingdom of God and the Son of Man, the idea that was very unusual and peculiar to Jesus was ". . . that the Kingdom - supramundane, future, and belonging to a new era penetrated from the future into the present, from its place in beyond and into this order, and was operative redemptively as a divine power, as an inbreaking realm of salvation." However, the power of the Kingdom is inseparable from the "end" which it is bringing to the world, and, as Albert Schweitzer has so powerfully insisted, the new life of ethical obedience to which Jesus calls his followers is also inseparable from the liberation of the believer from the very reality of the world. When the Hellenistic Church once again bestowed upon the world the biblical name of "creation," it thereby abandoned a truly eschatological form of faith. For, in the New Testament, cosmos means "old creation." Eschatological faith can never detach the world from its coming end.
Eschatological faith is also dialectical. The Kingdoms of God and cosmos are antithetical categories. The very dawning of the Kingdom of God places in question the reality of the world; When the Kingdom is fully consummated, the world must disappear, but Hellenistic Christianity assumed a non-dialectical form: the world became the arena of sanctification, redemption now takes place without any effect upon the actual order of the world, and consequently ethics is dissociated from redemption. Adopting the language of Greek ontology, the Church came to know the world as "being" and God as transcendent "Being." The Church thus invested the world with an ontological reality, faith came to know God and the world as existing in common ontological continuity, and by that was established what Kierkegaard was to call the great compromise of Christendom. No longer could the Church call for a reversal of the believer’s existence in the world, although this was the heart of Jesus’ message. For Christianity had entered time and history. By transforming its original faith, Christianity had become a "world-affirming" religion. Since then, Christian Theology at least in its orthodox and dominant forms has been non-dialectical. Yet now the Christian God is dead! They have transformed the transcendence of Being into the radical immanence of Eternal Recurrence: to exist in our time is to exist in a chaos freed of every semblance of cosmological meaning or order. If the death of God has resurrected a means of some authentic nothingness, then faith can no longer greet the world as the "creation." Again faith must know the world as "chaos." Still, theologically, the world which modern man knows as "chaos" or "nothingness" is homologous with the world that eschatological faith knows as "old aeon" or "old creation"- they strip both worlds of every fragment of positive meaning and value. Therefore, the dissolution of the "being" of the world has made possibly the renewal of the stance of eschatological faith; for an ultimate and final No-saying to the world can dialectically pass into the Yes-saying of eschatological faith.
If Kierkegaard founded a modern theology, they also tempt one to say that Kierkegaard is the only truly modern theologian. For him is the only theologian whose mode of religious understanding has been consistently dialectical: faith neither enters union with the world nor does it stands in isolation from the world; faith is always the product of a dialectical negation of the world, of "history," and of "objectivity." Nevertheless, we must remember that dialectically Kierkegaard’s method has two grave limitations: it never moves beyond the negation, and consequently it never reaches the level of the coincidental oppositorum. While a definition of faith as subjectivity-i.e., authentic human existence culminates in faith - could be real in Kierkegaard’s time, it can no longer be so at a time when the death of God has become so fully incarnate in the modern consciousness. Today theologies are faced with the overwhelming task of establishing a dialectical synthesis between radically transgressive "subjectivity," (Existenz) and an authentically biblical mode of faith. Obviously this definition of theologies’ task is dialectical, and, from this point of view, Theology can only succeed if it employs a fully dialectical method. This means that theology can reach a true coincidental oppositorum only on the negative ground of the realization of the radical opposition between Existenz and faith. When Existenz and faith are known as true opposites, then the possibility is established of affecting an ultimate coincidental oppositorum. Nevertheless, such a coincidence can arise only because of the most radical negation. To stop short of the deepest negation is to foreclose the possibility of a dialectical synthesis. That is why Kierkegaard has prepared the way for a fully dialectical form of faith.
Theologically, the twentieth century was inaugurated by theology’s reaction against the new estrangement that our time has brought the Christian faith. One form of this estrangement may be observed in Nietzsche’s condemnation of the No-saying of Christianity. Faith, in our time, appears to be opposed to the very existence and reality of modern man; the reality or illusions of faith are wholly other than the reality that we know. Thus, in The Antichrist, Nietzsche presented an authentically modern reaction to the Christian God: God degenerated into the contradiction of life, instead of being its transfiguration and eternal Yes! God as the declaration of war against life, against nature, against the will to live! God-the formula for every slander against "this world," for every lie about the "beyond!" God-the deification of nothingness, the will to nothingness adjudicates as righteous.
The historical discovery of the eschatological “scandal” posed another and intimately related form of Christianity’s new estrangement of New Testament faith. Modern scholarship unveiled a Jesus who is a "stranger and enigma to our time" (Schweitzer’s words) because his whole message and ministry were grounded in an expectation of the immediate coming of the end of the world. The Jesus whom we "know" is a deluded Jewish fanatic, his message is wholly eschatological, and therefore Jesus and his message are totally irrelevant to our time and situation. Modern man can know faith only as a "scandal"; faith is wholly other than the reality that we most deeply are. Karl Barth met this "scandal," and thus founded a crisis theology, by adopting Kierkegaard’s dialectical method, a method that led him to posit an antithetical relationship between the Word of God and the word of man. God’s Word God’s Yes can only appear equally ultimate, No to sinful, autonomous and "religious man, “for Barth grounded his position in Kierkegaard’s infinite qualitative distinction between time and eternity.
In his commentary on Romans and in his book on the resurrection of the dead, Barth succeeded in grasping the eschatological "end" as an existential Crisis. For him translated an eschatological symbol pointing to the cosmic end of the world into a human symbol standing for the crisis created by the situation of sinful man encountering the God of righteousness. Following Kierkegaard’s existential thesis that truth is "subjectivity," Barth translated the eschatological symbols of biblical faith into symbols reflecting a crisis in human Existenz. So it is that eschatological faith became existential intensity, and thus established the existential school of Protestant dialectical theologies. Quite significantly, when Barth later took up the task of constructing a dogmatics that would be in continuity with the historic forms of the Christian faith, he renounced both his earlier discipleship to Kierkegaard and the dialectical method. Quite possible Barth realized that a dialectical method must negate all human expressions of the meaning of faith - including the creedal and dogmatic statements of the historic Church while paradoxically affirming the deepest expressions of "subjectivity" or Existenz.
Various followers have carried on the work of the early Barth, the most important of whom are surely Paul Tillich and Rudolf Bultmann, the one engaging in an ontological and the other in a biblical theology. Although in many ways these theologians are dissimilar, the dialectical goal of correlating has united them modern man’s understanding of himself that they believe culminates in a despair of the human condition with the answer to this understanding in Jesus as the Word. Both Tillich and Bultmann employ a theology of immanence that apprehends both the human condition and the word of faith apart from the cosmic and transcendent setting of a traditional theology. Again, both take as their starting point the eschatological "scandal" of the Christian faith, which as we have seen is a parallel way of formulating Nietzsche’s condemnation of the No-saying of Christianity.
For the sake of brevity, and despite the complexities of Tillich’s system, we will, for our present purposes, adopt Jacob Taubes’ critique of Tillich’s theology. Taubes point out that Tillich tries to escape the historical judgment that Christianity has abandoned its biblical and eschatological roots by the daring method of creating eschatological ontology. Thus Tillich translates the New Testament eschatological symbols of this world and the New Being (Old Aeon and New Aeon) into the ontological ideas of "old" and "new" being, "old" and "new" referring to poles of one continuum of being. The concept of "old being" derives from man’s experience of estrangement from being, while the concept of "new being" points to the reconciliation of this estrangement in a fulfilment of being. As Taubes says, Tillich "eschatologizes ontology" and "ontologizes eschatology" in the light of man’s present situation: "His entire system rotates around the one eschatological problem: Man’s self-estrangement in his being and his reconciliation in the ‘new being.’" Tillich’s apologetical method of correlation attempts to relate the ontological Crisis of the human condition with the "new being" which is present in Jesus as the Christ. This method entails the assumption of an ontological continuity between our estranged existence as "old being" and the "new being" of Christ (this is the Protestant existentialist version of the Catholic doctrine of analogia entis, for which Barth has criticized Tillich). Consequently, the "new being" of Christ can only be in continuity with our being (contemporary Existenz) if it is an immanent reality liberated from all ontological transcendence. Taubes makes the telling point that Tillich’s "depth" of being - which is reached by the "ultimate concern" of the existing person - is not a transcendent reality lying beyond the world, but is instead the ultimate ground of the being that we now are. This "ground of being" is God or the Unconditioned, who now becomes simply the "depth" underlying Existenz. Thus, Tillich translates the transcendent beyond into an immanent "depth" for making the Christian faith meaningful to our time.
If we grant that Tillich’s ultimate concern (he defines faith for being ultimately concerned) produces an existential intensity that deepens man’s participation in being, his existence in the immediate moment, does it follow that Tillich has followed Nietzsche’s "Dionysian" program of transforming the transcendent into the immanent? Taubes believe that he has. Furthermore, Taubes believes that all modern theologies that mediate between faith and Existenz involves ". . . the divine in the human dialectic to the point that the divine pole of the correlation loses all supernatural points of reference." However, this judgment must be questioned if only because Tillich’s method is not fully dialectical, least of mention, Tillich has negated neither the traditional Western ontologizes nor the historic forms of Christianity: Instead, he has simply correlated an immanentist and mystical form of the traditional ontology that he borrowed from Schelling-it is certainly not Nietzschean, if only because it remains metaphysical with a modern and only semi-Kierkegaardian form of Protestant "existentialism." Furthermore, Tillich is incapable of true Yes-saying, for he cannot accept an authentically contemporary form of Existenz, and he insists that Existenz must culminate in anxiety and despair. Again, Tillich refuses to accept an eschatological form of faith; his "eschatological ontology" inverts eschatological faith by establishing a continuum between "old" and "new" being, and his very system demands that the historical Jesus be sacrificed to an "existential" Word. Nor does Tillich’s theology of correlation effect a dialectical coincidental oppositorum. For Tillich’s method is only partially dialectical; it employs neither radical affirmation nor radical negation, accordingly, and it must culminate in a non-dialectical synthesis. Yet it is precisely because Tillich’s method is not fully dialectical that it reaches neither eschatological faith nor contemporary Existenz, although this is the apparent goal of Tillich’s method, and surely the real goal of all genuinely a modern theology.
Bultmann’s theology also proceeds out of the two elements of the modern experience of the eclipse of God and the modern "scandal" of the eschatological foundations of the Christian faith. Like Tillich’s, the heart of Bultmann’s method lies in the translation of eschatological symbols into categories referring only to human existence. Unlike Tillich, Bultmann’s concern is to form a biblical ontological theology. However, he is only able to formulate a biblical theology by a process of transforming the cosmic and transcendent dimensions of the New Testament message into an existential anthropologic (supposedly borrowed from Heidegger’s Sein und Zeit, but Bultmann’s categories are almost a parody of Heidegger’s). By following, in large measure, the original theological method of Barth, Bultmann maintains that the most authentic meaning of the primitive Christian eschatological expectation refers not to a cosmic end of the world but to a Crisis in human existence. Yet Bultmann is first a New Testament scholar, and a great one, and only secondly a theologian; thus he has gone far beyond the early Barth and recognized that an existential interpretation of the New Testament demands a radical transformation of the original meaning of the New Testament. So Bultmann originated the method of the denying to theologies here parallelling Tillich’s method of correlations for translating ancient "mythical" eschatological symbols into modern existentialist categories. This method is most clearly revealed in his Theology of the New Testament, where the translation takes place so subtly that the reader is scarcely aware that it has occurred at all. Bultmann has never formulated his position systematically and it contains much ambiguity (witness the division between left-wing and right-wing Bultmannians). Moreover, he has freely borrowed many of his most important ideas not only from Heidegger but also from Luther, Kierkegaard, Nietzsche and Dilthey; so much so that one wonders whether his position is capable of either a consistent or a systematic expressions and the enormous literature on Bultmann do much to prove this suspicion.
A little perspective reveals important parallels between the methods of Tillich and Bultmann. Both methods are dialectically in part, and both attempt to mediate between an "existentialist" form of Protestantism and a contemporary form of Existenz. Again, both attempt to translate the biblical form of eschatological faith into a modern form of existential intensity. Thus Bultmann’s method of demythologizing reduces the content (Was) of the Gospel to the fact (das Dass) of the "revelation," a reduction that intends to maximize the existential offense of the Gospel, while eliminating its offense to the modern scientific mind. By that, Bultmann, too, sacrifices the historical Jesus to an "existential" Word.
Yet it is important that neither Bultmann nor Tillich is dialectical enough to rise to an acceptance of Nietzsche’s vision of Eternal Recurrence. Both believe that human existence apart from "grace" can only culminate in despair, and thus both have developed a fundamentally hostile attitude toward the modern consciousness. Neither Tillich nor Bultmann will follow Kierkegaard in his negation of Christendom, for both are closed to Nietzsche’s proclamation of the death of God. Clinging to the vanishing symbols of a now fallen Christendom, they stand on the "knife-edge" between Angst and faith. Nevertheless, the dialectical theologian is apparently standing on thin air, the cloud is lifting, and now we are beginning to see the illusory nature of a stance that would exist "half-way" in the radical immanence of modern man and "half-way" in the transcendence of Christian faith. Finally, neither Tillich’s nor Bultmann’s method is fully dialectical. We find here neither the radical faith of Kierkegaard nor the radical doubt of Nietzsche. Yet their methods are partially dialectical, and we may hope that their dialectical methods have saved Theology from the temptation of the "positivism of revelation" (Bonhoeffer’s words) of the Barth of the Church Dogmatics. Indeed, the source of the success of Tillich and Bultmann’s work lies in the dialectical method that both employ. The time has now come for Theology to deepen and extend that method.
If Theology must now accept a dialectical vocation, it must learn the full meaning of Yes-saying and No-saying; it must sense the possibility of a Yes that can become a No, and of a No that can become a Yes; in short, it must look forward to a dialectical coincidental oppositorum. Let Theology rejoice that faith is again a "scandal," not simply a moral scandal, an offense to man’s pride and righteousness, but, far more deeply, an ontological scandal. For eschatological faith is directed against the deepest reality of what we know as history and the cosmos. Through Nietzsche’s vision of Eternal Recurrence we can sense the ecstatic liberation occasioned by the collapse of the transcendence of Being, by the death of God - and we may witness a similar ecstasy in Rilke and Proust. From Nietzsche’s portrait of Jesus, theology must learn of the power of an eschatological faith that can liberate the contemporary believer from the inescapable reality of history. However, affirmation must finally affect liberation, for negation alone must pass into Gnosticism. The believer who says no to our historical present, who refuses the existence about and within him, who sets himself against our time and destiny, and yet seeks release in "eternity" having no relation, or only a negative relation, to our present moment, is succumbing to the Gnostic danger. Consequently, a faith that nostalgically clings to a lost past, a past having no integral relation to our present, cannot escape the charge of Gnosticism; for a total refusal of our destiny can only be grounded in a Gnostic negation of the world. A genuinely dialectical form of faith can never be Gnostic, for it can never dissociate negation and affirmation; hence its negation of "history" must always be grounded in an affirmation of the "present."
We must understand the contemporary crisis in Theology as a crisis arising within Theology itself. The theology was born out of faith’s will to enter history; Now Theology must die at the hands of a faith that is strong enough to shatter history. If Theology is to transcend itself, it must negate itself, for Theology can be reborn only through the death of Christendom, which finally means the death of the Christian God, the God who is the transcendence of Being. We must have the courage to recognize that it is the Christian God who has enslaved man to the alienation of "being" and to the guilt of "history." Yet now the contemporary Christian can rejoice because the Jesus whom our time has discovered is the proclaimer of a gospel that makes incarnate a Kingdom reversing the order of "history" and placing in question the very reality of "being." Perhaps we are at last prepared to understand the true uniqueness of the Christian Gospel.
The history of religions teaches us that Christianity stands apart from the other higher religions of the world on three grounds: (1) its proclamation of the Incarnation, (2) its world-reversing form of ethics, and (3) the fact that Christianity is the only one of the world religions to have evolved or, in some decisive sense, to have initiated a radically profane form of Existenz. Christendom imagined that the Incarnation meant a non-dialectical (or partial) union of time and eternity, of flesh and Spirit; by that it abandoned a world-reversing form of ethics and ushered in the new age of an absolutely autonomous history (profane Existenz). What we know as the traditional image of the Incarnation is precisely the means by which Christendom laid the grounds for a fatefully willing the death of God, for this traditional image made possibly the sanctification of "time" and "nature," a final sanctification leading to the transformation of eternity into time. If this process led to the collapse of Christendom, it nevertheless is a product of Christendom, and faith must now face the consequences of a non-dialectical union of time and eternity. Is a form of faith possible that will affect a dialectical union between time and eternity, or the sacred and the profane? Already we can see significant parallels between Nietzsche’s vision of Eternal Recurrence and Jesus’ proclamation of the Kingdom of God. By accepting "Being begins in every now" as the deepest symbolic expression of contemporary Existenz, we can see that modern profane existence knows a form of the Incarnation. Like its New Testament original, the profane form of the Incarnation isolates authentic existence from the presence of "being" and "history," and it does so dialectically. The Yes-saying of Eternal Recurrence dawns out of the deepest No-saying, and only when man has been surpassed will "Being" begin in every "Now." Let us also note that modern Existenz has resurrected a world-reversing form of ethics -, e.g., in Marx, Freud, Kafka, and in Nietzsche himself. May the Christian greet our Existenz as a paradoxical way through which he may pass to eschatological faith? Surely this is the problem that the crisis of theology poses for us today.
The above we have attempted to portray Nietzsche's fundamental thought - the eternal returns of the same - in its essential import, in its domain, and in the mode of thinking that is expressly proper to the thought itself, that is, the mode demanded by the thought as such. In that way we have laid the foundation for our own efforts to define Nietzsche's fundamental metaphysical position in Western philosophy. The effort to circumscribe Nietzsche's fundamental metaphysical position shows that we are examining his philosophy as for the position assigned it by the history of Western philosophy until now. At the same time, this means that we are expressly transposing Nietzsche's philosophy to that sole position in which it can and most unfold the forces of thought that are most proper to it, and this from inescapable confrontation with prior Western philosophy as a whole. The fact that during our presentation of the doctrine of return we have actually come to cognize the region of thought that must necessarily and preeminently take precedence in every fruitful reading and appropriating of Nietzschean thought may be an important gain; yet when viewed for the essential task, namely the characterization of Nietzsche's fundamental metaphysical position, such a gain remains merely provisional.
We can probably define Nietzsche's fundamental metaphysical position in its principal traits if we ponder the response he gives to the question concerning the constitution of being and being's way to be. Now, we know that Nietzsche offers two answers regarding being as a whole: Actualized wholeness is willed top power, and being as a whole is eternal occurrence of the same. Yet philosophical interpretations of Nietzsche's philosophy have up too now been unable to grasp these two simultaneous answers as answers, indeed as answers that necessarily cohere, because they have not recognized the questions to which these answers pertain; that is to say, prior interpretations have not explicitly developed these questions because of a thoroughgoing articulation of the guiding question. If, on the contrary, we approach the matter as to the developed guiding question, the word “is apparently" in these two major statements - being as a whole is willed to power, and being as a whole is eternal recurrence of the same - in each case suggests something different. To say that being as a whole "is" eternal recurrence of the same means that being as a whole is, for being, in the manner of eternal recurrence of the same. The determination "will to power" replies to the question of being with respect to the latter's constitution; the determination "eternal recurrence of the same" replies to the question of being with its respect to its way to be. Yet constitution and manner of being do cohere as determination of the beingness of beings.
Accordingly, in Nietzsche's philosophy will to power and eternal recurrence of the same belongs together. It is thus right from the start a misunderstanding - better, an outright mistake - of metaphysical proportions when commentators try to play off will to power against eternal recurrence of the same, and especially when they exclude the latter together from metaphysical determinations of being. In truth, the coherence of both must be grasped. Such coherence is itself essentially defined by the coherence of the constitution of beings also specifies in each case their way to be -indeed, as their proper ground.
What fundamental metaphysical position does Nietzsche's philosophy assume for itself because of its response to the guiding question within Western philosophy that is to say, within metaphysics?
Nietzsche's philosophy is the end of metaphysics, since it reverts to the very commencement of Greek thought, taking up such thought in a way that is peculiar to Nietzsche's philosophy alone. In this way Nietzsche's philosophy closes the ring formed by the very course of inquiry into being as such as a whole. Yet to what extent does Nietzsche's thinking revert to the commencement? When we realize this question, we must be clear about one point at the very outset: Nietzsche hardly recovers the philosophy of the commencement in its pristine form. Rather, here it is purely a matter of the reemergence of the essential fundamental positions of the commencement in a transformed configuration, in such a way for these positions interlock.
What are the decisive fundamental positions of the commencement? In other words, what sorts of answers are given to the yet undeveloped guiding question, the question what being, is?
The one answer -roughly speaking, it is the answer of Parmenides -tells us that being is. An odd sort of answer, no doubt, yet a very deep one, since that very response determines for the first time and for all thinkers to come, including Nietzsche, the meaning of ‘is and Being’ - permanence and presence, that is, the eternal present.
The other answer - roughly speaking, that of Heraclitus - tells us that being becomes. The being is in being by virtue of its permanent becoming, its self-unfolding and eventual dissolution.
To what extent is Nietzsche's thinking the end? That is to say, how does it stretch back to both these fundamental determinations of being so that they come to interlock? Precisely to the extent that Nietzsche argues that being is as fixated, as permanent, and that it is in perpetual creation and destruction. Yet beings are both, not in an extrinsic way, as one beside another; rather, being is in its very ground perpetual creation (Becoming), while as creation it needs what is fixed. Creation needs what is fixed, first, to overcome it, and second, ion order to have something that has yet to be fixated, something that enables the creative to advance beyond itself and be transfigured. The essence of being is Becoming, but what becomes is and has been only in creative transfiguration. What is and what becomes are fused in the fundamental thought that what becomes is inasmuch as in creation it becomes being and is becoming. Both such becoming-a-being become a being that comes-to-be, and does so in the perpetual transformation of what has become firmly fixed and intractable to something made firm in a liberating transfiguration.
The text is extraordinarily difficult to unravel Dieses Seiendwerden aber wird zum werdenden Seienden im standigen Werden des Festgewordenen als eines Erstarrten zum Festgemachten, als der befreienden Verklarung. The oxymorons of this highly involuted sentence dramatize the inevitable petrifaction of Becoming in some metaphysics of Being. Only as permanence of presence can Become to be. The wording of the sentence in Heidegger's original manuscript (1937) varies only slightly from the 1961 Neske text. Yet a series of energetic lines draws the word befreienden, "liberating," into the sentence, as though to break up all such petrifaction. For the liberating transfiguration of Becoming is what Heidegger elsewhere calls the most intrinsic will of Nietzschean thinking.
Nietzsche once wrote, at the time when the thought of return first loomed on his horizon, during the years 1881 and -82: "Let us imprint the emblem of eternity on our life!" The phrase means: let us introduce an eternalization to ourselves as beings, and hence to beings as a whole; let us introduce the transfiguration of what becomes as something that becomes being; and let us do this as the eternalization arises from being itself, originating for being, standing in being.
This fundamental metaphysical demand-that is, a demand that grapples with the guiding question of metaphysics -is expressed several years later in an interminably named "Recapitulation," the title suggesting that the note in just a few sentences provides a resume of the most important aspects of Nietzsche's philosophy. Nietzsche's "Recapitulation" begins with the statement: "To stamp Becoming with the character of Being - that is the supreme will to power." The sense is not that one must brush aside and replace Becoming as the impermanent - for impermanence is what Becoming implies - with being as the permanent. The sense is that one must shape Becoming as in such a way that as becoming, it is preserved, has subsistence, being, is the supreme will to power. In such receiving the will to power comes to prevail most purely in its essence.
As this series relates, Heidegger employs the "Recapitulation,” yet Recapitulation stems not from Nietzsche himself but from his assistant and later editor Heinrich Kuselitz (Peter Gast). Furthermore, the sentences from this long note that Heidegger neglects to cite by no means corroborate the use he makes of it. To stamp Becoming with the character of Being - that is the supreme will to power. Twofold falsification, one by the senses, the other by the mind, in order to preserve a world of being, of parturiency, of equivalence, etc.
That everything recurs is the close’s approximation of a world of Becoming to one of Being: peak of the meditation. The condemnation of and dissatisfaction with whatever transformations derives from values that are attributable to being: after such a world of Being had first been invented.
It has metamorphosed of being (body, God, ideas, laws of nature, formulas, etc.) "Being" as semblance; Inversion of values: a semblance was that which conferred value -Knowledge itself impossible within Becoming, how then is knowledge possible? As error concerning itself, as will to power, as will to deception.
Becoming as invention volition self-denial, the overcoming of oneself not a subject but doing, establishing creative, not "causes and effects."
Art as the will to overcome Becoming, as "eternalization," but shortsighted, depending on perspective repeating a small scale, as it was, the tendency of the whole. What all life exhibits, to be observed as a reduced formula for the universal tendency: hence a new grip on the idea "life" as will to power. Instead of "cause and effect," the mutual struggle of things that becomes, often with the absorption of the opponent; the number of things in becoming not constant. Inefficacy of the old ideals for interpreting the whole of occurrence, once one has recognized their animal origins and utility; All of them, as well, contradicting life.
Inefficacy of the mechanistic theory-gives the impression of
Meaninglessness. The entire idealism of humanity until now is about to turn into nihilism - into belief in absolute worthlessness, which is to say, senselessness . . . Annihilation of ideals, the new desert, the new arts, by means of which we can endure it, amphibians’ presupposition: bravery, patience, no "turning back" not hurrying forward. NB, Zarathustra, always parodying prior values, based on his own abundance.
What is this receiving, in which whatever becomes comes to be being? It is the reconfiguration of what becomes as its supreme possibilities, a reconfiguration in which what becomes is transfigured and attains subsistence in it’s very dimensions and domains. This receiving is a creating. To create, in the sense of creation out beyond oneself, is most intrinsically this: to stand in the moment of decision, in which what has prevailed hitherto, our endowment, is directed toward a projected task. When it is so directed, the endowment is preserved. The "momentary" character of creation is the essence of actual, actuating eternity, which achieves its greatest breadth and keenest edge as the moment of eternity in the return of the same. The receiving of what becomes into being - will to power in its supreme configuration - is in its most profound essence something that occurs in the "glance of an eye" as eternal recurrence of the same. The will to power, as constitution of being, is as it is solely from the \way to be which Nietzsche projects for being as a whole: Will to power, in its essence and according to its inner possibility is eternal recurrence of the same?
The aptness of our interpretation is demonstrated unequivocally in that very fragment that bears the title "Recapitulation." After the statement we have already cited - "To stamp Becoming with the character of Being - that is the supreme will to power" - we soon read the following sentence: "That everything reverts is the close’s approximation of a world of Becoming to one of Being: peak of the meditation." Saying it in a more lucid fashion would scarcely be possible, first, how and on what basis the stamping of Being on Becoming is meant to be even and precisely during the period when the thought of will to power appears to attain preeminence, remains the thought that Nietzsche's philosophy things without a cease.
Nevertheless, we ought to pay close attention to the phrases that follow the god's name in these titles: "philosophy of eternal return," or simply "philosophos."
Such phrases suggest that what the word’s Dionysos and Dionysian mean to Nietzsche will be heard and understood only if the "eternal return of the same" is thought. In turn, which eternally recurs as the same and in such wise is, that is, perpetually presences, has the ontological constitution of "will to power." The mythic name Dionysos will become an epithet thought through in the sense intended by Nietzsche the thinker only when we try to think the coherence of "will to power" and "eternal returns of the same.” That means only when we seek those determinations of Being that from the outset of Greek thought guides all thinking about being as such and as a whole. (Two texts that appeared several years ago treat the matters of Dionysos and the Dionysian: Walter F. Otto, Dionysos: Myth and Cult, 1933. Karl Reinhardt, "Nietzsche's 'Plaint of Ariadne, ‘" in the journal Die Antike, 1935."The paragraphs contained within parentheses appear as an indented extract in the Neske edition as they do here. Heidegger's original manuscript from the summer of 1937 does not show these paragraphs. Surprisingly, there is no extant, Abschrift or typescript of this course; nor is the typescript that went to the printer in 1961 available for inspection. As a result, the date of the passage remains uncertain. My own surmise is that Heidegger added the note not long after the semester ended, the reference to students questions and to those tow works on Dionysos that had recently been published make it highly unlikely that the note was added as late as 1960-61. The work’s Heidegger refers us to are of course still available - and is still very much wroth reading. Walter F. Otto, Dionysos: Mythos and Kultus (Frankfurt am Main: V. Klostermann, 1933): Reinhardt's Nietzsche's “Klage der Ariadne," appears now in Karl Reinhardt, Vermachtrus der Antike Gesammelte Essays zur Philosophie und Geschichtsschreiburg, edited by Carl Becker (Gottingen: Vandernhock & Ruprecht, 1960)
Nietzsche conjoins in one both of the fundamental determinations of being that emerge from the commencement of Western philosophy to wit, being as becoming and being as permanence. That "one" is his essential thought - the eternal recurrence of the same.
Yet can we designate Nietzsche's way of grappling with the commencement of Western philosophy as an end? Is it not rather a reawakening of the commencement? Is it not therefore itself a commencement and hence the very opposite of an end? Nonetheless Nietzsche's fundamental metaphysical position is the end of Western philosophy. For what is decisive is not that the fundamental determinations of the commencement are conjoined and that Nietzsche's thinking stretches back to the commencement; what is metaphysically essential it the way in which these things become known? The question is whether Nietzsche reverts to the incipient commencement, to the commencement as a commencing. Here our answer must be: no, he does not. Neither Nietzsche nor any thinkers before him - even and especially not that one who before Nietzsche first thought the history of philosophy in a philosophical way, namely, Hegel - revert to the incipient commencement. Rather, they invariably apprehend the commencement in the sole light of a philosophy in decline from it, a philosophy that arrests the commencement - to wit, the philosophy of Plato. Here we cannot demonstrate this matter in any detail Nietzsche himself quite early characterizes his philosophy as inverted Platonism. However, the inversion does not eliminate the fundamentally Platonic position. Rather, precisely because it seems to eliminate the Platonic position, Nietzsche's inversion represents the entrenchment of that position.
What remains essential, however, is the following: when Nietzsche's metaphysical thinking reverts to the commencement, the circle closes. Yet because it is the already terminated commencement and not the incipient one that prevails there, the circle itself grows inflexible, loses whatever of the commencement it once had. When the circle closes in this way, it no longer releases any possibilities for essential inquiry into the guiding question. Metaphysic - treatment of the guiding question - is at an end. That seems a bootless, comfortless insight, a conclusion that like a dying tone signals ultimate cessation. Yet this is not so.
Because Nietzsche's fundamental metaphysical position is the end of metaphysics in the designated sense, it performs the grandest and most profound gathering - that is, accomplishment - of all the essential fundamental positions in Western philosophy since Plato and in the light of Platonism. It does so form within some fundamental position remains an actual, actuating fundamental metaphysical position only if it in turn is developed in all its essential forces and regions of dominion in the direction of its counterpoison. For thinking that looks beyond it. Nietzsche's philosophy, which is inherently a turning against what lies behind it, must it become a forward-looking counter position. Yet since Nietzsche's fundamental position in Western metaphysics constitutes the end of that metaphysic, it can be the counter position. For our other commencement only if the later adopts a questioning stance compared with the initial commencement - as one that in its proper originality is only now commencing. After everything we have said, the questioning intended here can only be the unfolding of a more original inquiry. Such questioning must be the unfolding of the prior, all-determining, and commanding question of philosophy, t he guiding question, "What is being?" out of itself and out beyond itself.
Nietzsche himself once chose a phrase to designate what we are calling his fundamental metaphysical position, a phrase that is often cited and is readily taken as a way to characterize his philosophy armour factum, love of necessity. Yet the phrase expresses Nietzsche's fundamental metaphysical position only when we understand, the two words armour and factum -and, above all, their conjunctions about Nietzsche's own-most thinking, only when we avoid mixing our fortunately familiar notions into it.
Often enough, I have asked myself if I am not more profoundly indebted to the most difficult years of my life than to any of the others. What my innermost nature instructs me is that all necessity - viewed from the heights, about an economy on a grand scale - is also what is inherently useful: one should not merely put up with it, one should love it . . . Armour fati: That is my innermost nature. Nietzsche repeats the formula twice in An Ecce Homo, the first time as the ultimate explanation of his "discernment":
"My formula for greatness in a human being armour fati - love of necessity: That one does not will to have anything different, neither forward nor backward nor into all eternity. Not merely to bear necessity, though must less to cloak it - all Idealism is mendacity in the face of necessity - but to love." Nietzsche, Ecce Homo. Nietzsche had first cited the formula six years earlier, at the outset of Book IV of The Gay Science, as the very essence of affirmation”: I want to learn better how to see the necessity in things as what is beautiful - in that way I will become one of those who make things beautiful. Armour fati: let this be my love from now on!"
He had written to Franz Overbeck, also in 1882, that he was possessed of "a fatalistic trust in God" which he preferred to call armour fati. He boasted, "I would stick my head down a lion's throat, not to mention. . . . " The fullest statement concerning Amor fati, however appears from spring-summer, although the note as a whole merit reprinting, and rereading, the following extract contains the essential lines. Nietzsche explains that his "experimental philosophy" aims to advance beyond nihilism to the very opposite of nihilism.
To a Dionysian yes-saying to the world as it is, without reduction, exception, or selection; it wants eternal circulation - the same things, the same logic and dialogic of implication. Supreme state to which a philosopher may attain; taking a stand in Dionysian fashion on behalf of existence. My formula for this is armour fati.
Amor - love - is to be understood as will, the will that wants whatever it loves to be what it is in its essence. The supreme will have this kind, the most expansive and decisive will, is the will as transfiguration. Such a will builds and exposes what it wills in its essence to the supreme possibilities of its Being.
Fatum - necessity - is to be understood, not as a fatality that is inscrutable, implacable, and overwhelming, but as that turning of need that unveils itself in the awestruck moment as eternity, an eternity pregnant with the Becoming of being as some whole circulus vitiosus deus. Armour fati is the transfiguring will to belong to what is most in being among beings. A fatum is unpropitious, disruptive, and devastating to the one who merely stands there and lets it whelm him. That fatum is sublime and is supreme desire, however, to one who appreciates and grasps the fact that he belongs to his fate insofar as he is a creator, that is, one who is ever resolute. His knowing this is nothing else than the knowledge that of necessity resonates in his love.
The thinker explores being as a whole and as such; Into the world as such. Thus with his very first step he always thinks out beyond the world, and so at the same time back to it. He thinks in the direction of that sphere within which a world becomes the world. Whenever that sphere is not incessantly called by name, called aloud, wherever it is held silently in the most interior questioning, it is thought most purely and profoundly. For what is held in silence is genuinely preserved, as preserved it is most intimate and actual. What to common sense looks like "atheism," and has to look like ti, is at bottom the very opposite. In the same, wherever the matters of death and of nothingness is treated. Being and Being alone is thought most deeply - whereas those who ostensibly occupy themselves solely with "reality" flounder in nothingness.
Supremely thoughtful utterance does not consist simply in growing taciturn when it is a matter of saying what is properly to be said; it consists in saying the mater in such a way that it is named in nonsaying. The utterance of thinking is a telling silence. * Such utterance corresponds to the most profound essence of language, which has its origin in silence. As one in touch with telling silence, the thinker, in a way peculiar to him, rises to the rank of a poet, yet he remains eternally distinct from the poet, just as the poet in turn remains eternally distinct from the thinker. Everything in the hero's sphere turns to tragedy; everything in the demigod's sphere turns to satyr-play; and everything in God's sphere turns to . . . to what? "World" perhaps? Erschweigen, an active or telling silence, is what Heidegger elsewhere discusses under the rubric of sigetics (from the Greed sigao, to keep silent). For him it is the power "logic" of a thinking that looks into are made into.
In the months before his final descent into madness, Friedrich Nietzsche made the following declaration and prediction: "I know my destiny. Someday my name will be associated with the memory of something tremendous, a crisis like no other on earth, the profoundest collision of conscience, a decision conjured up against everything believed, required, and held sacredly up to that time. I am not a man; I am dynamite."
So he was. The man who practised and perfected the art of "philosophizing with a hammer," who pronounced that "God is dead," who called on his readers to follow him in exploring regions "beyond good and evil," who gleefully declared himself the Antichrist, who unconditionally denounced human equality and democracy, who claimed that "a great war hallows any cause," who praised the "blond beast" who "might come away from a revolting succession of murder, arson, rape, [and] torture with a sense of exhilaration and emotional equilibrium, as if it were nothing but a student prank"-this man was indeed explosive. One might even say that today, more than one hundred years after European intellectuals discovered his work, Western culture has yet to come to terms with the fallout produced by the detonation of his most volatile ideas.
In the epilogue to his Nietzsche: A Philosophical Biography, Rüdiger Safranski catalogues the philosopher's influence, and it reads like a comprehensive intellectual history of the twentieth century. The irrationalist vitalism that helped to inspire fascism, artistic movements from symbolism to art nouveau, expressionism, and Dada; Ernst Jünger's ecstatic militarism and Heideggerian existentialism, and antimodernism for which the Counter-Enlightenment critical theory of the postwar Frankfurt School, began its vicious surrealism of Georges Bataille, and through him, the varying postmodern irrationalisms of Michel Foucault and Jacques Derrida; the neopragmatic conviction that "truth is an illusion that helps us cope with life"-these and many other radical cultural, intellectual, and political movements descend directly from Nietzsche. They are his legacies to our time.
For some-primarily those who take their intellectual bearings from outside the thorough Nietzscheanized humanities departments of the modern university, and the handful of conservative dissenters within them-there will be little in this legacy of atheistic immoderation to admire. However we judge the often decadent productions of twentieth-century high culture, and Nietzsche himself continues to merit the most serious attention, and not merely because of his considerable influence. The fact remains that Nietzsche is one of the most brilliant philosophers and prose stylists in the history of Western letters. His formidable challenge to so much that so many of us continue to hold dear cannot simply be ignored by thoughtful men and women.
Yet how ought we to approach the task of evaluating Nietzsche's work? The answer is far from clear. For Nietzsche is a deeply contradictory thinker, and glancing at the dozens of books devoted to his thought in the philosophy section of any good bookshop, it can seem that there are, in fact, many of Nietzsche. Most scholars have assumed that his work amounts to a defence of radical right-wing politics, but many today think him more compatible with the far left. His books contain many misogynistic passages, but that has not discouraged feminists from claiming to find support for their program in his ideas. Some think his teaching is meant to inspire public actions, but many others have seen in his writing an aesthetic calls to private cultivation and creativity. Competent scholars have declared that his work is hopelessly incoherent, while at least one leading philosopher has claimed that Nietzsche was the "last great metaphysician in the West." Then there are those who think that Nietzsche's texts can and should mean anything to which their readers want them. This abundance of interpretations makes any attempt to render an informed and comprehensive judgment of his work exceedingly difficult.
Thanks to Safranski's biography, that task has now become considerably easier. As in his 1994 biography of Martin Heidegger (Between Good and Evilý English translation, 1998), Safranski manages to summarize his subject's ideas with admirable fluency-and without ever mistaking his own role for that of an advocate. Safranski also is a master of what might be called philosophical narration, drawing on just the right amount of detail from Nietzsche's personal background and historical milieu to provide a context for his philosophy while rarely allowing those details to overshadow the ideas that form the core of Nietzsche's life.
The Nietzsche that emerges from Safranski's study is a man who, from his teenage years until his mental collapse at the age of forty-five, tirelessly devoted his formidable intellect to making sense of the world about its intrinsic meaninglessness. The case of Nietzsche thus presents us with the peculiar spectacle of a philosopher who began his intellectual life, not from a position of openness to an elusive truth not yet grasped, but rather from an unshakable conviction that he had already found it -and that all of the human experiences and history had, had to be reconceived in its light.
Friedrich Wilhelm Nietzsche was born on October 15, 1844 in the small village of Röcken, Germany. His father, Pastor Karl Ludwig Nietzsche, died five years later of "softening of the brain," leaving Nietzsche to be raised (along with his sister Elisabeth) by his mother, Franziska, and two unmarried aunts. The young Nietzsche was both intellectually precocious and astonishingly self-absorbed. He wrote his first philosophical essay, "On the Origin of Evil," at the age of twelve. By thirteen, he had written his first autobiography. He would go on to write eight more over the next ten years, each of them concluding that, in Safranski's words, "his life was exemplary."
Despite Nietzsche's early penchant for a self-aggrandizement-a tendency that would mark all of his written work-both he and his family believed for some time that he would follow in his father's footsteps to become a pastor. However, at some point between 1859 and 1861, while Nietzsche attended an elite boarding school, he began to break decisively with his faith. Although he asserted in his 1859 autobiography that "God has guided me safely in everything as a father would be his weak little child," by May 1861 he had concluded that the idea of God was, in Safranski's words, "unfathomable," because there were simply "too much intense injustice and evil in the world."
Others quickly followed these first tentative steps away from Christianity. In an essay composed on his Easter vacation in 1862, the seventeen-year-old Nietzsche would wonder "how our view of the world might change if there were no God, immortality, Holy Spirit, or divine inspiration, and if the tenets of millennia were based on delusions." Safranski explains how this thought quickly generated a series of puzzles that would set Nietzsche's philosophical agenda for the rest of his life: "Might that we have been 'led astray by a vision' for such a long time? What kinds of reality are left behind once religious phantasms have been taken away?"
Over the next few years, Nietzsche would wrestle with his suspicion that all received truths are illusory. Although he had planned to study theological and classical philology at the University of Bonn when he arrived there in the fall of 1864, he dropped his concentration in Theology after a single semester. By the following summer, he would write to his sister that, although continuing it believing in the comforting tales of their youth would be easy, "the truth is not necessarily in a league with the beautiful and the good." On the contrary, he wrote, the truth can be "detestable and ugly in the extreme."
From this point on, Nietzsche would devote his life to breaking from-and then reflecting on how people might thrive after having left behind"the first and last things." Early in his university education, Nietzsche thought of himself as continuing the work of the philosopher Arthur Schopenhauer, whom he described as his "liberator" from dogma and tradition. As Safranski writes, Schopenhauer confirmed Nietzsche's youthful intuition that "the inner nature of the world is based not on reason and intellect but on impulses and dark urges, dynamic and senseless." "True life," Schopenhauer claimed, is pure "will," which "roars behind or underneath it." The challenge was learning how to live because of the truth that all apparent meaning and purpose in life is in fact an illusion. At first Nietzsche was intrigued by Schopenhauer's own proposal-the self-negation of the will, culminating in quasi-Buddhistic peace and passivity-but he soon rejected it on the grounds that it amounted to an attitude of defeat in the face of "nothingness." Nietzsche longed to find a way to love and affirm life, despite its meaninglessness.
Such concerns preoccupied his thinking as he continued his education in classical philology under the renowned scholar Friedrich Ritschl, first at Bonn, and then at the University of Leipzig. So impressed was Ritschl by his student that in 1869 he recommended Nietzsche for a professorship at the University of Basel before he had completed either his dissertation or postgraduate thesis-an honour as rare in the nineteenth century as it is today. When Nietzsche finally produced a monograph, The Birth of Tragedy (1872), the expectations were thus very high among his colleagues. They did not anticipate that Nietzsche would completely forsake the scholarly norms of the philological profession to write a highly speculative, even revolutionary account of ancient Greek culture that his own existential fixations largely inspired.
All of Nietzsche's work begins from the assumption that, viewed in itself, the world is a meaningless and purposeless chaos. As he would write in his notebooks in 1888, less than a year before his mental breakdown, "For a philosopher to say, 'the good and the beautiful are one,' is infamy; if he goes on to add, 'also the true,' one ought to thrash him. Truth is ugly." In the Birth of Tragedy and the shorter essays he wrote in the early and mid-1870s, Nietzsche proposed that human beings "can become healthy, strong, and fruitful" only when they live within an "enveloping atmosphere" that protects them from having to face this ugly truth without mediation. The enveloping atmosphere consists of protective illusions that come to be taken as truths by those who live within its "horizon," which enables them to "endure without being destroyed." Nevertheless, these second-order truths-or "myths"-must not entirely conceal the meaninglessness over which they cover. Rather, the myths must grant partial access to the authentic truth. In its translucence to truth, the mythical horizon allows human beings to both face and "forget" the ugliness in just the right proportions.
The Birth of Tragedy is an interpretation of how the ancient Greeks achieved this balance between truth and untruth more perfectly than any other culture in history and why that balance eventually collapsed; it also suggests how German culture might find an analogous state of equilibrium in modern times. Nietzsche associates the impulses or drives that enabled the Greeks to live and thrive in the partial light of the "terror and horror of existence" with the Olympian gods of Apollo and Dionysus; he claims that in different but complementary ways they made possibly the "continuous redemption" of the "eternally suffering and contradictory" character of the world.
The first of these impulses -the Apollonian responded to the "mysterious ground of our being" by answering our "ardent longing for illusion." It used beauty and artistry, measures and proportion to conceal from the Greeks, at least partially, the "substratum of suffering and of knowledge," and left the individual half-conscious "in his tossing bark, amid the waves" of human existence, in a kind of "waking dream." According to Nietzsche, Sophocles' Antigone, with its stark and yet balanced conflicts between competing duties, stands as a particularly vivid example of the Apollonian in action.
Nevertheless, conceiving it cannot grasp the full accomplishment of Greek tragedy entirely about Apollonian dreams. The contrary Dionysian impulse must complement it, which pulled in a very different direction. In a frenzy of intoxication, which Nietzsche associates with the orgiastic violence of the ancient world's Bacchic festivals, the Dionysian at once exposed the "mysterious primordial unity" from which all things spring and produced "complete self-forgetfulness" by individuals. This "mystic feeling of oneness" culminated in a transfiguring experience in which man "feels himself a god [and] . . . walks about enchanted, in ecstasy, like the gods he saw walking in his [Apollonian] dreams."
According to Nietzsche, the Greeks achieved greatness by synthesizing their Apollonian and Dionysian drives in the tragic dramas of Aeschylus and Sophocles. In the greatest of their plays, the Greeks were exposed to the ideal quantities of truth and illusion. In a play such as Oedipus Rex, they were granted a glimpse of the abyss, and yet that glimpse was so artfully presented in "an Apollonian world of images" that their "nausea" was transformed into "notions with which one can live."
Nonetheless, the tragic balance was extremely difficult to maintain. Nietzsche claims that the democratic character, heightened self-consciousness, and "cheerfulness" of Euripides' plays signalled that the tragic age of Greece was ending. Yet the deepest cause of its demise could be found elsewhere, in a "newborn demon," whose approach to life so opposed the Dionysian element in Aeschylean tragedy that it was subsequently vanquished from the Greek stage, and from now on from the history of the West. That demon was none other than Socrates.
The middle chapters of The Birth of Tragedy contain what might be the most forceful critique of Socrates since Aristophanes lampooned him in The Clouds during the ancient philosopher's own lifetime. Nietzsche contends that Socrates stood in profound opposition to the "drunken revelry" of tragedy, falsely teaching human beings that "using the thread of causality, [they could] penetrate the deepest abysses of being." Even worse, he taught that "to be beautiful" something must be "intelligible," and that "knowledge is a virtue." The Socratic "theoretical man" lives to uncover the truth at all costs, if doing so will be an unambiguous benefit to people. While the tragedians had understood the importance of the surface of things, the Socratic philosopher, stubbornly and naively convinced of the goodness of truth, pursues it without restraint-and the results are catastrophic.
In the first formulation of an argument he will greatly refine in his later work, Nietzsche claims that the philosopher's headlong lunge toward the truth ends up exposing the "lies concealed in the essence of logic." When this happens when the philosopher uncovers the fact that logic is a human construction imposed on the chaos of reality -logic effectively "bites its own tail" and refutes itself. In Nietzsche's view, this is exactly what has happened in the hyperlogical culture of the modern world: the theoretical optimism first defended by Socrates had reached a kind of end in which human beings begin to sense the awful truth that its most fundamental premises are fictions. They have thus also begun to grasp (in Nietzsche's own work) the wisdom of the pre-Socratic tragedians, who understood, if only half-consciously, that people "needs art as a protection and a remedy" for truth.
That modern man confronts an unprecedented crisis of meaninglessness is a view that Nietzsche would hold throughout his career. What changed was his account of how it came about and his proposal for how we should respond to it. In his early work, he believes that modern man requires a new "beautiful illusion" to replace the crumbling Socratic culture of the West. This new mythology would serve the same function that the plays of Aeschylus and Sophocles did for the Greeks. When it comes to specifying where we might find a new mythology to accomplish this much needed "rebirth of tragedy," Nietzsche announces with considerable bombast that it will arise from the neopagan, mythopoetic operas of Richard Wagner.
Nietzsche had met Wagner in 1868 and quickly developed an intense friendship with the composer and his wife, Cosima von Bülow. Over the next few years, the three shared their innermost cultural and philosophical hopes with one another-so much so, in fact, that by the time of the publication of his first book, Nietzsche could write to a friend that "I have formed an alliance with Wagner. You cannot imagine how close we are now and how fully our plans mesh." Those plans, unveiled in the final third of The Birth of Tragedy, involved nothing less than the satiation of modern man's spiritual "hunger" by giving him a neotragic horizon within which the "significance of life" could be "redeemed" just as it had been for the pre-Socratic Greeks.
It is hardly surprising that Nietzsche's colleagues greeted his book with a mixture of incomprehension and disdain. Expecting the philological prodigy to produce an exercise in meticulous scholarship, they were shocked to discover that he had chosen instead to issue a rallying cry to cultural revolution. What Safranski fittingly describes as Nietzsche's academic "excommunication" began almost immediately. Over the next few years, he divided his time between convalescing from a series of illnesses, reaching a handful of students he deemed "incompetent," and writing most brilliantly but decidedly nonacademic essays on Schopenhauer, Wagner, David Friedrich Strauss, and "The Benefits and Drawbacks of History for Life." His alienation from academic life finally culminated in his resignation from the University of Basel in 1879. He would spend the next ten years as a nomad travelling throughout Germany, Switzerland, and Italy while devoting himself almost entirely to philosophical reflection and writing.
Although Nietzsche's work continued to show signs of Wagner's influence for several years after the publication of The Birth of Tragedy, the two men gradually drifted apart during the 1870s. As Safranski suggests, Nietzsche eventually became disillusioned with his own early proposals to cure modern disillusionment. While Nietzsche once hoped that Wagner could inspire a renewal of meaning and purpose in modernity, by the end of the decade he had come to consider the composer a purveyor of kitsch who embodied the most decadent aspects of modern culture. It is even possible to say that Nietzsche wrote his next major work, Human, All Too Human (1878), to inure himself against the kinds of hopes that Wagner's music had inspired in him.
If Nietzsche began his earliest philosophical reflections from the assumption that "truth is ugly"-and that all meaning arises out of a creative attempt to cope with this ugliness-the post-Wagner Nietzsche was, if anything, more radical in his refusal to accept any "metaphysical solace." As before, modern man had fallen into meaninglessness, but now there was no possible redemption from it-and this we were supposed to accept as good news. In Human, All Too Human and Daybreak (1881), and scarcely Voltarean, as Nietzsche exulted in his own capacity to endure with a smile what Pascal had described as the "horror at the infinite immensity of spaces." Not until 1882's The Joyful Science did Nietzsche open upon his developing profundity that characterizes his mature and most justly admired work.
Like its immediate predecessors, The Joyful Science is a collection of numbered aphorisms ranging in length from a few words to several pages. This style, which Nietzsche employs in most of his later works, enables him to shift topics in unpredictable ways. One on art, science, religion, psychology, German Idealism, newspapers, ancient philosophy, Renaissance history, or modern literature might follow an aphorism on politics. Sometimes one aphorism builds on another, producing a sustained argument or interpretation; at other times the jarring juxtaposition between them leads and deliberates disorientation. It is amid the chaotic stream of brilliantly disjointed insights and observations that the reader of The Joyful Science comes upon an aphorism, "The Madman."
Nietzsche begins this one-and-a-half-page masterpiece of modern disenchantment by describing a madman who "lit a lantern in the bright morning hours, ran to the marketplace, and cried incessantly: 'I seek God! I seek God!'" Then, as those in the square gawk and laugh at the lunatic with embarrassed disapproval, he cries out: "Where is God? . . . I will tell you. We have killed him-you and me. All of us are his murderers. . . . God is dead. God remains dead, and we have killed him.
Nietzsche was hardly the first modern figure to espouse atheism. The most radical writers of the Enlightenment suspected that God was a fiction created by the human mind. G.W.F. Hegel famously declared that modernity is "Good Friday without Easter Sunday." Throughout the nineteenth century, a series of authors, from Ludwig Feuerbach and Karl Marx to Charles Darwin, claimed that religion is a human projection onto a spiritually lifeless world. Nietzsche agreed with this tradition in every respect but one. Whereas most modern atheists viewed their lack of piety as an unambiguous good -as a mark of their liberation from the dead weight of authority and tradition-Nietzsche responded to his insight into the amoral chaos at the heart of the world with considerable pathos. If in Human, All Too Human and Daybreak he flirted with the facile cheerfulness so common to his fellow atheists, beginning with an aphorism of The Joyful Science, Nietzsche showed that he now understood with greater depth that the passing of God has potentially devastating consequences for Western Civilization. This is the madman's requiem aeternam deo: But how did we do this? How could we drink up the sea? Who gave us the sponge to wipe away the entire horizon? What were we doing when we unchained this earth from its sun? Where is it moving now? Where are we moving? Away from all suns? Are we not plunging continually? Backward, sideward, forward, in all directions? Is there still any up or down? Are we not straying as through an infinite nothing? Do we not feel the breath of empty space? Has it not become colder? Is not night continually closing in on us?
If God is dead, then man has completely lost his orientation. There are no human dignity, no equality, no rights, no democracy, no liberalism, and no good and evil. In the light of Nietzsche's insight, a thinker such as Marx looks extraordinarily superficial, railing against religion on the one hand while remaining firmly attached to ideals of justice and equality on the other. He has failed to grasp the simple truth that if God is dead, then nothing at all can be taken for granted-and absolutely everything is permitted.
Still, how could God be dead? Paradox has permeated the idea. If God is who he claims to be, then it is obviously impossible for him to have "bled to death under our knives," as the madman declares. (Of course Christians believe that, as the Son, God did die at our hands, but Nietzsche intends the madman's statements to apply to the triune God in his monotheistic unity.) God may come to be ignored by a world too fixated on earthly goods to notice him, but clearly he is not vulnerable to human malice or indifference. Unless, of course, He never existed in the first place. Perhaps then it would make a kind of poetic sense to speak of God "dying" once people have ceased to believe in him. Here, man would not simply be responsible for killing God, but also for having given birth to him in the first place. Much of Nietzsche's late work defends just such an interpretation, arguing that Western man is equally responsible for creating and destroying God. The most thorough statement of this view can be found in The Genealogy of Morals (1887), which purports to tell the hidden history of morality from its origins to its collapse in the modern age.
At first, there was chaos. All of Nietzsche's books begin from this assumption. The Genealogy departs from those works in asserting that this primordial anarchy consisted of an unfocused, undifferentiated, and purposeless "will to power" that permeated all things. (Whether the will to power merely animates living creatures or acts as a metaphysical force that pervades all of the nature remains unclarified.) The pointless, anarchistic violence that characterized the prehistoric world ended when certain individuals began to focus their will to power on the goal of decisively triumphing over others. When they finally succeeded, these victorious individuals, whom Nietzsche dubs "the strong," foisted the first "moral valuation" onto mankind.
In the strong (or "noble") valuation, the good are nothing other than an expression of what the members of the victorious class do and what they affirm. What they do is triumph ruthlessly over the weak by violence. Likewise, the opposite of the good-the bad-is defined by the strong as weakness, or the inability to conquer the strong. Nietzsche illustrates the dynamics of the strong valuation with an infamous image of birds of prey devouring defenceless lambs. The birds of prey do not choose to eat the lambs; there is thus no free will involved and nothing blameworthy about their viciousness. It is simply what they do; what they do is the essence of whom they are; and who they are serves as the measure of good and bad.
Once the meaning of good and bad has been established, a theory of justice grows up on its basis. Justice for the strong amounted to a simple sense of proportionality: when an individual incurs a debt, he must discharge it by repaying it and submitting to retributive punishment. Nietzsche implies that, for the strong, facing wrongdoing and accepting punishment was largely a matter of honour, so in societies governed by the noble valuation justice was usually meted out quickly and brutally.
The preconditions were now in place for the birth of the gods. In Nietzsche's view, polytheistic religions emerged out of the stories that the strong told themselves about their long-forgotten, prehistoric origins. First, they imagined that the founders of their community were just like them, only stronger-and they developed rituals of sacrifice that enabled them to express gratitude and discharge imagined debts to these founders. Then, as their community grew in power and extent over time, the founders that the strong projected onto the past became even stronger. Eventually, the founders became thought of as gods, who served as noble ideals for the strong to emulate as they sought to cultivate their power and cruelty.
According to Nietzsche, it was within this context of divinely sanctioned oppression that an epochal "transvaluations of values" took place. This "slave revolt in morality" began when the weak-out of what Nietzsche calls their ressentiment and their "spirit of revenge" against the strong-started to teach a series of radically new and ingenious ideas. To begin with, they claimed for the first time that there is such a thing as free will, so the brutal actions of the strong, far from being simply "what they do," came to be understood as the result of a choice. The weak then likewise asserted that their own failure to triumph over the strong was a result of the choice to refrain from such actions, rather than an inability to do so. For the slavish revolutionaries, “sin” tempts all human beings to engage in "evil," and the strong are noteworthy above all else for their decision to embrace and even encourage such behaviour, while the weak define their lives by the struggle to resist it. Thus it comes to be that what was formerly considered bad-namely, weakness-is christened as the highest good, while the formerly good-namely, strength-is transformed into evil.
In this way, the slaves (obviously the Jews and their Christian descendants) fashioned a life-denying "ascetic ideal" to replace the life-affirming valuation of the strong. Along with it comes the notion of a new kind of deity -a God above all other gods, to whom each of us owes a debt-an "original sin" -so great that we are powerless to discharge it on our own, without his gratuitous gift of redeeming grace. Unlike the gods of the strong, who behaved like outsized brutes whose cruelty served as an attainable ideal for the strong to emulate, the God of the slaves is so transcendently good that all attempts to approximate his holiness inevitably fall short. Far from serving as a healthy ideal, then, the ascetic God ends up negating the world and everything in it, including human beings, by his very existence.
The ascetic ideal that gives birth to God is thus much more complicated than the valuation that preceded it. Whereas the noble valuation grew out of and enhanced the self-affirmation of the strong, the slaves believe an ideal that denigrates pride and therefore seeks to diminish and humiliate the self. Yet it, like all valuations, arises from out of the self and its will to power. As Nietzsche writes in Human, All Too Human, "Man takes positive pleasure in violating himself with excessive demands and afterwards idolizing this tyrannically demanding something in his soul. In every ascetic morality, man worships one part of himself as a god and in doing so demonizes the other part." In the Genealogy, Nietzsche describes this violent "self-splitting" as an example of how "life" can turn "against life," and, in turn, actually enhance life in new and interesting ways. In seeking to attain the impossible-to become "worthy" of a God whose goodness transcends the world-the ascetic slave directs his own will against itself, and thus creates a wholly new form of cultural life founded on guilt and bad conscience. It is a culture of psychological depravity, as individuals, tutored by a new ruling class of priests, come to despise themselves, and never so much as when they begin to experience the least bit of happiness or success.
Nietzsche's account of how the ascetic ideal gives birth to God is ingenious. Still, no less so is his narrative of how it leads to God's death, and its own self-destruction. Nietzsche's narrative derives much of its shock effect from the fact that it so profoundly contradicts the dominant story of the rise of modern science, in Nietzsche's time and ours. While modern intellectuals typically argue that science arose opposing the Church, Nietzsche considers science to represent the "perfection" of the same ascetic ideal that originally gave birth to Christianity.
In Nietzsche's view, an unwavering belief in the goodness marks science of truth-and the conviction that one reaches this truth by negating the world in a way that is similar to, but much more radical than, the method employed by Christianity. Christianity claims, for example, that sin stains human life and then negates the former by calling on the righteous to overcome the latter. Nevertheless, science goes much further in its negation of the world, to deny the distinction-or at least to stress the similarities-between man and "lower" entities. Biology reduces us to the level of other organisms, chemistry tells us that we consist of the same elements as inanimate objects, and physics underlines the continuity between human beings and all the matter in the universe. In the light of modern science, the differentiation of the human world into kinds of things lacks a foundation in the natural world. Science thus dissolves the distinctions that generate meaning as for being possible.
Of course most professional scientists do not follow through so rigorously on the implications of their approach to understanding the world, but that is irrelevant to Nietzsche. What matters to him is that an ethic permeates modern Western culture of ascetic reductionism that seeks to tear down all existing cultural structures. One need not work in a laboratory to further the ascetic ideal. On the contrary, as we learn toward the end of the Genealogy, Nietzsche understands his own thought to represent the ultimate consummation of the ascetic ideal-the moment at which "science" unmasks itself as the perfection of the ascetic ideal, and, in turn, discovers that this ideal is an arbitrary valuation projected onto reality to derive a sense of purpose in the face of chaos. It is in this way that the ascetic ideal manages both to give birth to and then to kill the Christian God.
Nietzsche thus concludes the Genealogy as he began The Birth of Tragedy, by asserting that, when faced with the ugly truth of things, humans respond by producing illusions that come to be taken as true-until they are eventually exposed for the lies that they are. The Genealogy adds the twist that this very process is said to be driven by the character of the lies in which Western man has believed. That is, the ascetic ideal is a lie that eventually demands its own exposure as a lie. As Nietzsche writes in the penultimate aphorism of the Genealogy: "Unconditional honest atheism . . . is the awe-inspiring catastrophe of two thousand years of training in truthfulness that finally forbids itself the lie involved in belief in God."
How are we to respond to the complete collapse of the moral valuation that has reigned for two millennia? Nietzsche offers no answer in the Genealogy, which ends as it began-with meaningless chaos. Other works are somewhat more helpful, however. The speech of the "madman" from The Joyful Science, for example, provides a hint. Shortly after declaring that we have killed God, the madman asks a series of rhetorical questions: How shall we comfort ourselves, the murderers of all murderers? What was holiest and mightiest of all that the world has yet owned has bled to death under our knives: who will wipe this blood off us? What water is there for us to clean ourselves? What festivals of atonement, what sacred games shall we have to invent? Is not the greatness of this deed too great for us? Must we ourselves not become gods simply to appear worthy of it?
Here Nietzsche shows that the death of God requires that we take his place by becoming a race of gods. The meaning of this extraordinary suggestion is elaborated most fully in Thus Spake Zarathustra (1883-1885), easily the most difficult book in Nietzsche's corpus.
In one of the most fascinating passages of his biography, Safranski recounts how Nietzsche first came to the idea of writing Zarathustra by way of a quasi-revelatory experience of inspiration near the Surlej boulder in the Upper Engadine mountains of Switzerland on August 6, 1881. There, on the shores of an alpine lake, Nietzsche felt as though he were "a mere incarnation, a mere mouthpiece, a mere medium of overpowering forces." The religious character of his experience is fitting, for the book he was inspired to write stands as Nietzsche's answer to the Bible. It tells the story of a man named Zarathustra, who, at the age of thirty, "left his home . . . and went into the mountains" for a life of complete solitude. Then, ten years later, he resolves to return to civilization, to share his incomparable wisdom with humanity.
Upon his return he discovers that, although his fellow human beings are oblivious to the fact that "God is dead," His passing has begun to have significant detrimental effects on people. Among the most memorable passages in Zarathustra is the account of the "last man," who, in God's absence, believes he has "invented happiness." This last man no longer strives for anything great, he is too cautious to stand out from the "herd," he consumes various "poisons" to ensure an "agreeable sleep" and an "agreeable death," and he looks back on all of human history with a smug sense of his own superiority. Such a man is one step away from becoming so "poor and domesticated" that he will no longer "shoot the arrow of his longing beyond man." Without a God to look up to, man is on the verge of becoming less than human.
Yet ours is not an age for despair. As Nietzsche's Zarathustra declares as he gazes in disgust at the last man, "The time has come for man to set himself a goal. The time has come for man to plant the seed of his highest hope." The death of God therefore presents, in addition to great dangers, an extraordinary opportunity. While we may very well become subhuman, we may also transform ourselves into something superhuman. Thus does Zarathustra describe his purpose: "I teach you the Overman." Combining the Social Darwinism so common in the late nineteenth century with his own unique brand of anthropo-theological speculation, Nietzsche's Zarathustra announces that "man is something that will be overcome."
What is the ape to man? A laughingstock or a painful embarrassment, and man will be just that for the Overman: a laughingstock or a painful embarrassment. You have made your way from worm to man, and much in you is still worm. . . . Man is a rope tied between beast and Overman-a rope over an abyss. A dangerous across, a dangerous on-the-way, a dangerous looking-back, a dangerous shuddering and stopping. What is great in man is that he is a bridge and not an end.
Man, then, is poised to evolve into a god through his own efforts. Still, what will make possible such a monumental transformation? The answer stretches out in the most peculiar doctrine of Nietzsche's philosophy: The "eternal recurrence of the same," which he first (and most lucidly) presented in an allegorical aphorism of The Joyful Science titled "The Greatest Weight." It is worth quoting in its entirety: What if some day or night a demon were to steal after you into your loneliest loneliness and say to you, "This life as you now live it and have lived it, you will have to live again and innumerable times more. There will be nothing new in it, but every pain and every joy and every thought and sigh and everything immeasurably small or great in your life must return to you, all in the same succession and sequence-even this spider and this moonlight between the trees, and even this moment and I myself. The eternal hourglass of existence is turned upside down again, and you with it, a speck of dust!" Would you not throw yourself down and gnash your teeth and curse the demon who spoke thus? Or have you once experienced a tremendous moment when you would have answered him, "You are a god, and never have I heard anything more divine." If this thought found its possession of you, it would change you as you are, or perhaps crush you. The question in each thing, "Do you desire this again and innumerable times more?" would lie upon your actions as the greatest weight? Or how well disposed would, but you have to become to yourself and to life to crave nothing more fervently than this ultimate eternal confirmation and seal?
While this passage makes it sound as if the doctrine of the eternal recurrence serves as a quasi-mythical Kantian postulate-proclaiming that we should act as if it were true despite knowing that it is not -Safranski shows that Nietzsche experienced a kind of euphoria upon discovering what he thought was definitive scientific evidence for its reality and truth. Apparently Nietzsche believed that the finite amount of matter and energy in the universe, combined with its temporal infinity, implied (in Safranski's words) that "all possible events concerning both the animate and the inanimate realms have already taken place, and . . . will recur without end."
No matter whether Nietzsche considered the doctrine to be scientifically verifiable or merely a substitute for the neopagan Wagnerian myths he embraced in his youth, there can be no doubt that he thought of it as the key to man's absolute affirmation of himself and the world-and even (what may amount to the same thing) his own self-divination. As the allegory of the demon makes clear, Nietzsche believed that if human beings could come to incorporate the eternal recurrence into their view of the world-to view every second of their lives as a moment worthy of being repeated infinite times, rather than as a prelude to a truer or better world to come-they would, in effect, confer the dignity of the eternal onto this world. As Safranski writes, "All the ecstasy, all the bliss, all the ascensions of feeling, all the hunger for intensity previously projected into the beyond would now be concentrated in the immediate life of the here and now. Preserving the powers of transcendence designed the doctrine of the eternal recurrence to function for immanence or, as Zarathustra proclaimed, remaining 'faithful to the earth.'"
Still, what about the past? Even assuming that we could come to believe in the truth of the eternal recurrence, would we not face the dilemma that, as Martin Heidegger put it, each of us is "thrown" into a world we did not create? Whereas our present and future emerge, at least to some extent, out of our choices, our past is given to us. Nevertheless, Nietzsche appears to have believed that once we had affirmed our present and future, affirmation of our past would follow in its wake. After all, if the person I am today is worth affirming for all eternity, then the person I once was must be equally worthy, since my past self made my present self possible. When I begin to think of myself in this way, I not only accept the necessity of my fate and its role in making me who I am, but I also come to love that fate (Amor fati). In fact, my affirmation of my own past can expand to such an extent that I begin to act as if I could will it. When that happens, my will comes to fill the entire meaningful universe-past, present, and future. In such a world, man has definitively replaced God. Or, as Nietzsche's Zarathustra puts it in a cryptic but crucially important passage: . . . as creator, guessers of riddles, and redeemer of accidents, I taught them to work on the future and to redeem with their creation all that has been. To redeem what is past in man and to recreate all "it was" until the will says, "Thus I willed it! Thus I will it" -this I called redemption and this alone I taught them to call redemption.
Nietzsche wanted nothing less than to make us totally at home in the world, and he understood that this monumental task could be accomplished only by convincing us, least of mention, in that we possess the power to redeem it, all by ourselves, without God.
Nietzsche devoted the final years of his sanity to thinking through the conundrums generated by his antitheological angriness. For some time he hoped to present a systematic summary of the views he first sketched in Thus Spake Zarathustra. However, the book he envisioned, tentatively titled The Will to Power: Attempt at a Revaluation of All Values, was not to be. Although he produced a flood of aphoristic and increasingly hyperbolic books between 1886 and 1888-Beyond Good and Evil, The Genealogy of Morals, Twilight of the Idols, The Antichrist, the autobiographical Ecce Homo, and hundreds of pages of notebook entries that have been subsequently (and somewhat deceptively) published as The Will to Power -his
Greatest achievements never became real.
Yet we have reason to think that Nietzsche himself came to believe, in his madness, that he had attained the self-divination for which he longed. In January 1889, just after his hysterical collapse in the streets of Turin at the sight of a carriage driver beating a horse, and a few weeks before being institutionalized in a psychiatric clinic, Nietzsche wrote a letter to the esteemed historian Jacob Burckhardt, in which he declared that "in the end I would much rather be a Basel professor than God; yet I have not dared to carry my private egotism to the point that I would desist from the creation of the world." Then there was the letter to a friend, Peter Gast, containing a single sentence: To my maëstro Pietro: Sing me a new song: the world is transfigured. All the heavens are full of joy. The Crucified. Nietzsche went on to live eleven years in a semicatatonic state, dying in 1900, on the threshold of a century that he had predicted would be the one worldwide war and unprecedented violence.
Ever since he slipped into psychosis, it has been a commonplace For romantic interpreters of Nietzsche's life and thought to conclude that he, like Novalis, Friedrich Hölderlin, and many other modern philosophers, poets, and artists, were driven mad by his own heroic efforts to grasp the truth in all of its horror. For these admirers, Nietzsche deserves to be considered a selfless martyr to thinking in its purist form. Besides the fact that such an interpretation simply dismisses the theory accepted by most scholars-namely that an advanced case of syphilis-it caused Nietzsche’s breakdown also accepts without question that Nietzsche was right to think that the truth stands radically opposed to the beautiful and the good. Since nearly every word he ever wrote flows from this assumption, any attempt to evaluate Nietzsche's work on the whole must first and courageously confront it head on.
Unfortunately, Safranski contributes little to such a confrontation. At some points he offers the banal observation that the “will motivates Nietzsche’s books to an unceasing adventure in thinking." At others, he ventures a more creative, but no less unhelpful, suggestion that Nietzsche should have consistently advocated a "bicameral system of culture." Building on an image Nietzsche employed in Human, All Too Human Safranski suggests that conceiving of a culture in which is possible on Nietzschean grounds "one chamber [is] heated up by the passions of genius while the other [is] cooled off with principles of common sense and balanced out with collective pragmatism." Safranski believes that if Nietzsche had endorsed such a twofold conception of truth-one for radical artist-philosophers, another for moderate practical men-he could have pursued his adventure in thinking without "abandoning the idea of democracy and justice.
As appealing as Safranski's proposal might sound as enabling to achieve for we are to have, as it was, the best of both worlds-it has many problems. To begin with, as Safranski himself points out, Nietzsche would have judged the attempt to hold on to any form of democratic morality an example of the "feeble compromise [and] indecisiveness" that he associates with the nihilistic "last men." Then there is the more fundamental difficulty that in Nietzsche's thought everything flows from his conviction that the truth is meaningless chaos and flux. For Nietzsche, being two equally valid truths is simply impossible for there; there can only be the ugly truth itself and the noble lies that mask it to one degree or another. Although in places Nietzsche does suggest an aristocratic arrangement in which an elite of philosophic geniuses pursues the truth while their slaves go about their lives immersed in illusions, one assumes that this is not what Safranski has in mind.
However, if Safranski's explicitly critical suggestions do not help us to assess Nietzsche's ideas, he does prepare a more philosophically serious reckoning with them by showing so clearly that atheistic meaninglessness is the premise, rather than the conclusion, of his thought. How can we begin to evaluate this Nietzschean antifaith? We find a compelling suggestion in the thought of Nietzsche's early unbeatable opponent, Socrates. In two of Plato's dialogues, Socrates confronts characters who espouse proto-Nietzschean views. For both Thrasymachus in the Republic and Callicles in the Gorgias, morality has no foundation in the order of things, which is utterly indifferent to human concerns, and justice is nothing other than "the rule of the stronger." The parallels to Nietzsche's view, especially as he articulates it in the Genealogy, are uncanny.
It is instructive that in examining the opinions of these sophistical antimoralists, Socrates does not attempt to refute them using logic or empirical evidence of one kind or another. Rather, he takes what might be called a psychological approach. He attempts to show them that they are less consistently opposed to the good than they profess themselves to be. In Thrasymachus, for example, Socrates' dialectical questioning reveals a fundamental tension in his soul. On the one hand, Thrasymachus believes that "might makes right"-that the victor in a struggle for power demonstrates that he deserves his victory in the very act of winning it. However, on the other hand, he admires the intelligence and cunning that enable certain individuals to triumph over others-so much so, in fact, that he finds the thought of an unintelligent man winning power to be deeply distasteful. Such a brute would not, in other words, deserve his victory. Thrasymachus, it seems, looks up to something besides mere power. Although he claims to orient his life toward nothing but force and violence, part of him believes in a higher good.
Might not Nietzsche be vulnerable to a similar self-refutation? In his case, the tension arises from his reaction to the triumph of the weak over the strong in the slave revolt. From the theory sketched in the Genealogy, there is no basis for opposition to their victory. As it was for Thrasymachus, the very act of victory demonstrates that the triumphant party deserves to rule. One might even say that in the act of overpowering the strong, the weak effectively become the strong and thus by that very fact deserving of power.
Yet, Nietzsche reacts to the overthrow of the noble valuation with anything but equanimity. Not only are his works suffused with grand schemes to bring about a rebirth of a brutal aristocratic order in the modern period, but Safranski helpfully notes that, when it came to the public policy debates of his day, Nietzsche invariably sided against the vulnerable. He rejected "shortening the length of the workday from twelve hours a day to eleven in Basel." He was "a proponent of child labour, noting with approval that Basel permitted children over the age of twelve to work up to eleven hours a day." He opposed the education of workers and thought that the only consideration in their treatment should be whether (in Nietzsche's words) their "descendants also work well for our descendants." Nietzsche was a consistent partisan of the strong against the weak in every aspect of life.
The reason Nietzsche took such a brutal position becomes apparent in a passage of Twilight of the Idols (1888) in which he rails against the French Revolution and Jean-Jacques Rousseau's defence of the average person: What I hate [about the French Revolution] is its Rousseauean morality-the so-called "truth" of the Revolution through which it still works and attracts everything shallow and mediocre. The doctrine of equality! There is no more poisonous poison anywhere: for it may be preached by justice itself, whereas it really is the end of justice. "Equal to the equal, unequal to the unequal"-that would be the true slogan of justice - and its corollary: "Never make equal what is unequal."
What is astonishing about this passage is not so much what it says about justice; virtually every political philosopher in Western history would have agreed that justice demands "equal to the equal, unequal to the unequal." What is remarkable about the statement is that Nietzsche endorses its truth and resolves on its basis that human equality is fundamentally contrary to justice. One cannot help but conclude that Nietzsche-the man who gleefully proclaimed in a book titled Beyond Good and Evil that it was his goal to "sail right over morality"-was himself a perverse kind of moralist concerned above all about the injustice of shallowness and mediocrity. It is even possible to speculate that Nietzsche's visceral hostility to democracy, compassion, peace, equal human dignity, and perhaps even God Himself, may have been motivated by a love for a particularly one-sided, profoundly distorted vision of justice. (Our best guide to the half-hidden moral dimension of Nietzsche's thought is Peter Berkowitz's masterful study, Nietzsche: The Ethics of an immortalist [1995].)
At the very least, despite Nietzsche’s obviously Nietzsche's incessant denial of any possible foundation for a higher good in the order of things, he could not help but presuppose that such a good exists and that the rise of social and political equality has violated. The presence of a similar psychological dynamic in Thrasymachus and several of Socrates' other interlocutors eventually led Plato to conclude that the Idea of the Good exceeds all things-even being itself"in dignity and power." Aristotle likewise chose to begin the Nicomachean Ethics with the declaration that "every art and inquiry, and similarly every human action and deliberate choice, . . . aims at some good." Of course neither philosopher meant that every human action nor idea truly is good; indeed, philosophizing consists in ascending from wrong opinions about the good to knowledge of what it truly is. However, they did mean to suggest that, even when we choose or contemplate evil, we do so at least in part because, somewhere in our souls, we mistake it for a good. For the ancient philosophers, love of the good is coeval with the human condition.
For such a statement, as for so many others, Nietzsche would have nothing but contempt. No doubt he would describe it yet another example of unwarranted Socratic "optimism." Perhaps it is. Nothing in the texts of the philosophers can prove that the good as they conceived it truly exists-that it is not merely a beautiful illusion we project onto the void. Yet there it is, there it has always been, and there it will remain-our lodestar and magnetic north, determining the shape of human reflection even among those who devote their lives to cutting themselves off from it.
So we are faced with a choice. We can follow Nietzsche in refusing to take our philosophical bearings from prephilosophical intimations of the good. Or we can place our trust in those intimations, allowing the good reflected in common opinion and experience to serve as an indication-however tentative, ambiguous, or elusive-of what is likely to be true. Attempt to break from the good or accept that, in the end, it is the only orientation we have: those are the options. After a very long century of delusional and bloody experiments against the good, we do not lack for reasons to turn our backs on Nietzsche's truth. Friedrich Nietzsche (1844-1900) is a writer whom professional philosophers have often discounted because he is too literary, and whom professors of literature have passed over because he is too much of an abstract thinker. Nietzsche's work, in other words, defies the usual academic division of labour. Yet, Nietzsche has played a prominent role in Western thought. He was one of the most brilliant and profound forerunners of such movements as Psychoanalysis and Existentialism, and a radical critic of Western philosophy and culture. His observations and ideas inspired scores of twentieth centuries intellectuals-including those who misconstrued his work as a proto-fascist doctrine.
Nietzsche explicitly refused to develop a philosophical system, suggesting that individual, seemingly disconnected analyses, expressed in short, well-written aphorisms, are more honest and insightful than lengthy, scholarly treatises that tend to bend everything to fit a comprehensive theory. Thus, his writings may sometimes be self-contradictory. The way to read Nietzsche is not to figure out how the many things he wrote can be fitted into one abstract formula, a procedure that would be more appropriate for such philosophers as Plato or Kant, but to consider every one of his pieces as a thought experiment that succeeds or fails on its own.
The Victorian conventionalism and complacency of Nietzsche's cultural environment made any success during his relatively short lifetime impossible. Nietzsche even had to pay for the publication of some of his books. He did not become truly famous until the time when the reigning pretenses of European culture were headed for their massive breakdown at the time of World War I. Not until the mechanized brutality of the "Great War" had shattered the vain self-image that Europeans had of themselves as stalwarts of advanced civilization did readers begin to gauge the seriousness of Nietzsche's critical analysis of the Western mind. Nietzsche was born in Prussian Germany into the family of a Lutheran pastor. His father died when he was very young, and he was brought up in a household of exceedingly conventional and pious women. Because of his precocious facility with edifying speech, he was nick-named "the little pastor.” As an adolescent he attended Pforta, one of Germany's elite schools, where he received a solid classical education. His subsequent university training was in classical languages and ancient culture, and he became a professor of Greek language at the exceptionally young age of twenty-four. For about ten years he taught Greek at the University of Basel in Switzerland, during which time he developed a profound admiration for and friendship with the composer Richard Wagner (a friendship that in later years turned into passionate enmity).
Around 1879 Nietzsche became chronically ill, and he retired from teaching on a moderate pension. During the following ten years he wrote in rapid succession all the books that were to make him posthumously famous -Human, All Too Human, and Thus Spoke Zarathustra, and, The Joyful Science, and The Case of Wagner, including, Beyond Good and Evil and The Antichrist, and Twilight of the Idols and more. During most of this time he was physically in miserable condition. He had no permanent residence, preferring to take up temporary lodgings in various places in the Swiss Alps or on the Mediterranean coast. He grew increasingly critical, and even contemptuous, of Germany -at a time when Germany tried to rival such world powers as England and France by way of aggressive military and industrial expansion.
Because of his near-blindness his doctors advised him to abstain from reading, but he kept reading and writing at a furious pace as best as he could. He fought his insomnia with opiates and Veronal, drugs that upset his delicate stomach. He frequently suffered from migraine headaches that prompted him to experiment with further drugs. He endured, partly by choice, a loneliness that included both social isolation and a general misunderstanding of his philosophical ideas even among friends. At the beginning of 1889 he suffered a major collapse that resulted in permanently insanity-possibly the consequence of untreated syphilis. His sister, as his guardian during the last years of his life, and as his self-appointed literary executor, seems to have destroyed and falsified part of Nietzsche's unpublished writings, by that furthering the dubious interpretation of her brother's work that made the philosopher look like a forerunner of Nazism.
A good way to begin a description of Nietzsche's thought is to ask how he defined the self. It was the predominant view in Western philosophy that human beings have a twofold nature-a nature composed of a mind and a body -and that there is a constant struggle between the two components, a struggle that ideally results in the dominance of the mind over the body. It is this dualistic view of human nature that Nietzsche combats throughout his philosophy; he calls this dualism "childish." The mature view, according to him, consists in recognizing that mind and body are one, and that what is called the mind or the soul is nothing but one aspect of the basically physical nature of human beings-one of the many organs that the body needs to survive. Which is thus under the overall control of the physical organism as a whole? In the chapter called "Of the Despisers of the Body" in Thus Spoke Zarathustra Nietzsche writes: “I am body and soul”-that is what a child would say. Why shouldn't one talk like a child? Still, the adult, the knowledgeable person, says: “I am body thoroughly, and nothing beside it. Soul is nothing but a word for something belonging to the body.”
The body is one great reason, a variety with one sense, a war and a peace, a herd and a herder. A tool of your body is also your little reason, my brother, which you call “spirit”-a little tool and toy of your great reason.
Behind your thoughts and feelings, my brother, stands a powerful ruler, an unknown sage-he is called the self. In your body he resides; he is your body.
There is more reason in your body than in, and who knows to what end your body needs your best wisdom?
The body, in other words, is not the external tool of an inner sovereign mental ego, but an organism within which the ego, or mind, plays a merely subordinate role. To think that the mind is, or can even be, in control of the body is one of the most preposterous illusions that Western civilization has produced, according to Nietzsche, and one of the most damaging as well. It is one of the crucial assumptions that would have to be overcome in a future and more healthy civilization.
By saying that the true self is the body, Nietzsche does, of course, not deny that people have feelings, inner experiences, and ideas, or that they can be very intelligent or thoughtful. He also does not deny that people can overcome such things as physical cowardice, laziness, or fatigue by an exertion of their wills, or that they can achieve impressive feats even if their physical condition happens to be an obstacle more than a help. Such self-mastery is, indeed, one of the most fruitful manifestations of what Nietzsche elsewhere calls “the will to power.” Nevertheless, what superficially looks like a mind operating on its own, or like a victory of the mind over the body, is ultimately nothing but a demonstration of the power of the body as a whole-the temporary strength of one part of the organism over another part. (The body is, after all, a complex, multi-faceted organisms, “a herd and a herder, a war and a peace.”) For if one asks for the ultimate source of such things as will power, determination, or whatever else goes into the cause of extraordinary achievements, one will have to explore those aspects of a person that are sometimes called the unconscious-aspects that are intricately connected with the physiological and neurological functions of the organism. Will power, keen intelligence, or any other mental phenomenon is not the emanation of some non-physical entity "inside" the body, but the self-expressions of a dynamic and multifaceted physical being.
Nietzsche had been brought up within a Christian tradition according to which the body was something bases, filthy, or evil, and in many theological analyses the very centre of depravity and sin. Throughout his adult years Nietzsche was in revolt against this tradition, and the reconstitution of the body as something wonderful and as a source of great achievements can be described as one of the principals aims of Nietzsche's entire philosophy. Therefore Nietzsche eagerly embraced much of the scientific materialism that developed during the 19th century. During the previous two centuries scientific progress had primarily been made in the area of physics, the science of inanimate bodies. The 19th century, by contrast, was the period of rapid advances in chemistry and biology. Darwin's publication of The Origin of Species (1859) and The Descent of Man (1871) was only one of the significant scientific developments that took place during Nietzsche's life time, although it turned out to be a particularly spectacular and controversial one.
Among the reading public philosophical materialism became something like a popular movement that at times found expressions that were rather pithy and polemical. Robert Buchner, for example, submitted that the brain produces thoughts in the way kidney’s produce urine, and he coined the famous ditty "Man is what he eats" (which in the original German is a pun: "Der Mensch ist was er isst"). Nietzsche's materialism was generally far more sophisticated than that, and he were also rather critical of Darwin. His thinking, however, fit into and was part of a broad trend that characterized much of 19th century culture. Impressed by what modern biologists and physiologists kept finding out about the intricate workings of the body, Nietzsche observed:
Whoever has even an idea of the body-of its many simultaneously working systems, of its many cooperative and conflicting activities, of the delicacy of its balances, etc.-will judges that all consciousness is, by comparison, something poor and narrow; he will judge that no mind will even remotely be adequate for that what the mind would have to do here, and perhaps that the wisest teacher of morality and legislator would have to feel clumsy and amateurish in the midst of this turmoil of war and duties and rights. How little becomes conscious to us? How often does this little lead to error and confusion?! Consciousness is a tool, after all, and considering how much and what great things are accomplished without it one cannot call it the most necessary or the most admirable tools. On the contrary, there is, perhaps, no organ that is so poorly developed, or one that works with so many flaws. It is just the youngest organ, still in its infancy-let's pardon its childish pranks (To these pranks belong, among many other things, our morality, the sum of all past value judgments about the actions and attitudes of humanity.)
The discovery of the body that took place during the 19th century scandalized many conservatives, and it offended the moral sensibilities of what then was still the cultural mainstream. In 1857, for example, two of the most important literary works of that century were published in Paris: Charles Baudelaire's collection of poems called The Flowers of Evil, and Gustave Flaubert's novel Madame Bovary. Both books were immediately banned by the French courts because of their alleged "indecency," and outside France most publishers would not even think about publishing such material. Baudelaire's poems were considered offensive because they too were frequently dwelling on the pleasures of the flesh, and Flaubert outraged his critics by describing in some detail the pleasant feelings of a woman's orgasm. Much of the official public was simply not ready to acknowledge the reality and importance of the physical aspects of human existence openly; the definition of the human self as mind or spirit still prevented people from acknowledging such things as the pervasive power of sexuality or the determining force of physical conditions in human history. Yet, for a significant minority the discovery of the richness of the physical universe, and of the human body in particular, was both revelation and liberation. Walt Whitman's "I Sing the Body Electric" (published by himself in 1855 in the first edition of Leaves of Grass) testifies to this new enthusiasm about the physical nature of human beings. Like Nietzsche, Whitman postulates the basic identity of body and soul: “ sing the body electric; The armies of those I love ungirth me, and I ungirth them. If those who defile the living are as bad as they who defile the dead? If the body does not aspire as fully as that of the soul? If the body were not the soul, what is the soul. To conceive of the body, and not the rational mind, as the true self is part of a change in perspective that has far-reaching implications. One implication for Nietzsche was a deep appreciation of the many non-rational faculties that emanate from or are connected with the drives and passions of the body, and the darker and more unconscious regions of the soul. In his first major work, The Birth of Tragedy (1871), Nietzsche developed a theory of art that highlights the importance of visionary dreams and inspiring intoxication, while debunking the role of reason and rational calculation in the creative process. (A presentation of Nietzsche's theory of art, including his discussion of Apollinian dream visions and Dionysian intoxication, will follow below in the interpretation of "Barton Fink.") In his later works Nietzsche continues to emphasize the power and fruitfulness of all the faculties connected with the physical nature of human beings, and he continues to expose the allegedly delusional character of self-conceptions that is based on the idea of a disembodied mind.
By insisting that the mental or spiritual can ultimately not be separated from physical matter, Nietzsche rejected the metaphysical thinking that had dominated most of the traditional philosophies, until then. The best-known division of reality into a physical and a non-physical realm is, of course, Plato's separation of the imperfect and changing world of the senses from the timeless and perfect world of ideas (or “forms”). With this separation Plato provided the basic model of a twofold reality that subsequently spawned several variations of it in Western thought. The most popular of these variations is the metaphysical system of Christian Theology, which Nietzsche dubbed "Platonism for the people," with its sharp division of reality into the temporal world here and now and an eternal hereafter. Still, later variations of the same basic model were the philosophical systems of Descartes, Kant, and many of subordinate Idealist thinkers. What most of these dualistic conceptions of reality has in common is the additional notion that the physical world is inherently inferior to the spiritual world, and that therefore enlightened individuals will not attach their allegiance to this less valuable part of reality, to the deficient and corrupting world of the body and the senses. Ever since Socrates and Plato, according to Nietzsche, the West has been on the road of degeneracy because of this misguided devaluation of matter and its corresponding over-valuation of a seemingly supernatural spirit or mind. For Nietzsche this wrongheaded valuation of things amounts to nothing less than a wholesale betrayal of the earth—with all the consequences that such a betrayal of the natural cosmos implies.
One reason that people devalue the physical world, according to Nietzsche, is their fear of life-of life’s innumerable uncertainties, sufferings, and its inescapable finality. It is because of these deep-seated anxieties that people seek refuge in an ideal and imaginary world where they seem to find everlasting peace and relief from all the ailments that besiege them on earth. People do this naivety, by imagining "another world" in which people somehow continue to exist in the way they do in this world, only more perfectly, or they do it in more sophisticated ways, the way’s philosophers like Plato or other teacher of a spiritual life recommend. Nevertheless, in whatever way people try to escape the imperfections and ailments of the physical world, their retreat is always a manifestation of weakness, an inability to face reality in the way strong individuals would. Strong persons would not only take suffering and other adversities in a stride, they would in a sense even welcome them as inevitable aspects of the very nature of life. As there is no life without death (eventual death being part of the very definition of what it is to be alive), there is also no experience of health without sickness, no enjoyment of wealth without poverty, and no appreciation of happiness without a real knowledge of pain. “Live dangerously” is one of Nietzsche’s well-known pieces of advice. It is his reminder that the most exuberant and ecstatic experiences of life do not grow out of a well-protected existence where risks and extremes are anxiously kept at bay, but out of a courageous exposure to the forces and conditions of life that begins the best of a person’s powers. A good horseback rider will not beat a spirited horse into submission to have an easy ride, but rather learn how to handle a difficult mount. Similarly, a strong and healthy person will not shun the dark and often dangerous sides of the world by retreating to some metaphysical realm of comfortable peace, but rather embrace life in its totality, its hardships and terrors and its splendours and joys.
It is, incidentally, for this that one has to read Nietzsche’s notorious reflections on “master” and “slave” moralities in his Beyond Good and Evil. As a species, according to Nietzsche, human beings will naturally tend to cultivate either of two moralities. “Master moralities” are developed and embraced by naturally strong and self-confident people. They value most highly such things as strength, intelligence, courage, strife, and an inclination to rule over things and other people. Pride for such people is not a sin. They generally despise traits like meekness, timidity, simple-mindedness, and fear. In their eyes humble people are “bad.”
“Slave moralities” are developed by just such weak or timid people. They tend to flourish among downtrodden populations. “Slave moralities” value most highly such things as sympathy, pity, kindness, humility, patience, self-effacement, and charity. The worst features in their estimate are aggressiveness and being dangerous to others. People who embody such aggressiveness are shunned or denounced as “evil’ (as opposed too “bad”).
Nietzsche’s prime example for a “master morality” is the ethos of Pre-Socratic Greece—embodied in the attitudes and deeds of those tribal heroes that Homer described in the Iliad and the Odyssey. Nietzsche’s prime example for a “slave morality” is the ethical teachings of Christianity. Although Nietzsche claims that, in analysing these two kinds of morality, he does nothing more than describe impartially certain psychological and anthropological facts, he clearly considers only variations of the “master morality” as suitable designs for a future with any hope. Only individuals who feel at ease among strong and daring people would be ready to face the darkness and dangers of the real world with confidence and an enterprising spirit. Only they could live without comforting metaphysical myths and imaginary hopes. They would intensively live their lives here and now, cheerfully or otherwise, and be content with being gone once their chosen tasks are accomplished.
Although Nietzsche thought of all metaphysical systems as so many forms of illusion, he was not blind to the great importance that these systems have had for the shaping of Western civilization. In a sense he saw them as necessary illusions, illusions that indirectly taught people self-discipline and propelled them forward to heroic undertakings and significant accomplishments. Nietzsche was keenly aware of how much in Western civilization depended on the beliefs and attitudes that Christianity had imposed on people in the course of many centuries, and in his own way he took the modern decline of Christianity as a cultural organizing force much more seriously than most ordinary Christians.
Nietzsche discusses the cultural significance of Christianity in connection with his often quoted remark "God is dead.” By coining this phrase Nietzsche did, of course, not make any statement about the existence or non-existence of God. What he offered, rather, is an observation concerning the idea of the deity, and the idea’s crucial role as a foundation of the general culture. In a nutshell Nietzsche’s reasoning was this: In a universe conceived in strictly scientific terms God has no intelligible place anymore, no meaningful role in the explanation of the workings of the world. In a culture that depends as much on sober scientific research and thinking as ours, talk about God has become peculiarly vacuous and oddly inappropriate.
Ancient Greeks thought of the awesome power of thunderstorms in terms of Zeus and his greatly feared thunderbolts. People familiarly with the theory and various manifestations of electricity, by contrast, will hardly have any other than a poetic use of the Olympian god and his bolts; as an explanation of natural phenomena Zeus has been rendered irrelevant by the discoveries of science. That, in the context of modern technological civilization, has happened to all deities in all traditional cultures. People who think in scientific terms do not refer to divine powers when exploring or discussing earthquakes, volcanoes, draughts, or the atomic bomb. Some scientists may continue to talk about God, but there is no real opportunity any more to demonstrate any provable effects of a divine existence or power. Where people used to assume heaven, they now measure intergalactic space; where once they experienced the wrath of God, they now pinpoint viruses that spread in populations without immunity. Mention of God in laboratory reports or professional conferences would dumbfound the scientific community.
The very concept of God becomes difficult to grasp when people are used to the discipline of logic, and when the furnishing of evidence in support of important contentions has become standard practice in everyday life. What kind of being could God possibly be? How could one recognize God if one encountered him (or her) or heard "his" voice? Can we have any trust at all in our hopelessly anthropomorphic notions of God? How exactly is an unobservable God different from a God that does not exist? Is there anything left of our belief in God except dubious talk and vague desires?
Because of such difficulties and uncertainties, God has become less and less of a palpable factor in modern life; the scientific-technological world has grown used to functioning without any theological basis. Today science alone provides the decisive standards of what is true and what works. Whenever there is a conflict between science and religious doctrine, science will not accommodate religion anymore, but religion will adjust itself to scientific conclusions. It is this cultural situation that prompted Nietzsche to talk about the “death” of God.
Nietzsche did not present the statement “God is dead” as his own, but rather as that of a “madman” whom he describes in a sort of parable in The Joyful Science. This madman, talking to an unsympathetic crowd in the marketplace, raises some noteworthy questions concerning God’s death: Where has God gone? I will tell you. We have killed him-you and me. We are all his murderers! Nevertheless, how did we manage to do so? How were we able to drink up the ocean? Who gave us the sponge with which we wiped away the horizon? What did we do when we loosened the earth from its sun? Where is it headed now? Where are we headed? Away from all suns? Aren't we in a free fall? Disappearing backward, sideways, forward-in all directions? Is there still an above and/or below? Are we not stumbling as through an infinite nothing? Isn't empty space breathing on us? Didn't it get colder? Isn't night coming on all the time, and more of the night? -God is dead! God remains dead! We have killed him! How shall we console ourselves-the most murderous of murderers? The holiest and the mightiest that the world has ever had have bled to death under our knives. Is not the magnitude of this deed too great for us? Shall we not have to become gods ourselves to seem worthy of it?
The madman in Nietzsche's story is not mad because he talks nonsense, for his speech, when looked at closely, makes a good deal of sense. The speaker only appears crazy because he is excited about something the crowd has not yet become aware of-because he is too far ahead of his time. The fact that "God is dead" in itself is no news to the crowd; many of them have been faithless for some time. What is news to them, is that it is they who have killed God, that it was their own doing (by developing a modern civilization of scientific thought and sophisticated technology) that has led to the demise of the Supreme Being in their world? What the crowd also fails to realize is the enormity of the consequences that are bound to follow from their deed. For so far most people have continued living as if nothing had happened, as if the world in which God’s authority had once been supreme were still intact. Nevertheless, that well-ordered and comfortable world, as the madman insists, does not exist anymore. Unnoticed by the crowd, the world as a whole has become a dark, cold, and frighteningly confusing place:
Mention of the “wiping out of the horizon” is a reminder that the comfortable narrowness of traditional views of the world has irremediably vanished: Everything has opened up to infinities that render the familiar world utterly strange. In a narrow world person can find their bearings; in an infinite universe people will feel at a loss. A comforting conception of the universe where everybody and everything have its proper function and place -a universe designed and ruled over by God-is not tenably any more in the light of advanced modern knowledge. Science has increasingly depicted the universe as a puzzling riddle, not as a place that we know, and where we can feel comfortably at home.
The madman’s talk of “the earth loosened from its sun” indicates humanity’s loss of a centre-of a God and divine order that could give orientation and meaning to human lives and endeavours. That the earth is in “free fall” implies that humanity has lost all control over its destiny, and that no new “suns” are in sight. There is no “above” and “below” anymore: Everything has become equally important or unimportant, equally valuable or valueless. Solid orientation has become impossible where there are no absolutes and firm guide posts. Anyone who cares to think honestly about the modern condition is bound to uncover a fathomless nothing and pervasive senselessness, mixed by way of an over-flowing emptiness.
“God remains dead,” the madman contends. The frightening vision of the modern world may prompt many to go back to the past, to escape the modern “wasteland” by seeking refuge in old cosmologies and faiths. Still, there is no plausible going back. Once the rational and critical thinking, which is the basis of science, technology, and our actual survival, has taken hold of a culture, people cannot simply become childlike believers again. Once scientific skepticism, reliance on solid evidence, and precise analytic thinking have become an integral and necessary part of a society’s life and survival, returning it to any naive faith without incurring the reproach of intellectual dishonesty or lack of integrity is impossible. Once God has been “murdered” there is nothing left but to acknowledge the great darkness and to move forward under radically new conditions.
One particularly prominent aspect of the general loss of orientation and meaning invoked by the madman is the felt absence of absolute standards and values. If there is no list of moral principles or rules like the Ten Commandments, and if there is no divine authority to back them up, all people are left with being a number of competing moralities-and no impartial criteria by which they could tell which of these competing systems might be valid or best. People would find themselves in a situation of complete moral relativism, a relativism that may easily and logically lead to a denial of morality together, to total moral nihilism. “If God did not exist, everything would be permitted,” we can read in Dostoyevsky’s the Brothers Karamazov, and that is how Nietzsche’s madman sees the matter as well. “Are there still an above and a below?” he asks, and the answer is, of course, that without a God and a divine order of the world there is not. To help others in need and to share one’s wealth may be a high priority for some, but for others such a principle may be of little importance-or even reprehensible. Without the absolute authority of God there is no telling who is right and who is wrong. Killing for political ends, abortion, eating meat, adultery, censorship, capital punishment, pre-emptive war—dozens of principles and practices are accepted or rejected upon the basis by the nonentity grounded in trustworthy regional traditions, entrenched authorities, unexamined habit, or just “how people feel” at anyone time. Without God there are only the multitude of cultural prejudices and personal bias—void of any authoritative validation.
Since science was instrumental in the “murdering” of God, some theoreticians were inclined to think that science can also help to create a new value system, a system that would have both the authority and assumed impartiality of the God of the past. Nothing came of this idea, however. On the contrary, the reigning consensus between scientists and most philosophers of science has been that a thoroughly scientific view of the world is inherently amoral. For the sciences make it their business to recognize only facts, and facts in themselves, according to that consensus, are neither good nor bad. All facts or state of affairs is equally valuable or valueless, and science, for this reason, has to remain value-neutral. From a strictly scientific point of view one could not say whether helping other people is better, to leave them separate, or even to exploit recklessly or “liquidate” them. The scientific investigation of any conceivable course of action would produce just so many more facts, but absolutely no value conclusion. Scientists can only say what is, not what ought to be; Science implies a “fact-value gap” as part of its methodology; Facts by themselves can offer no moral guidance. Science, in other words, did not only fail to establish a new value system, but vigorously reinforced the moral disorientation of modernity by emphasizing its principled incompetence with regard to matters of ethics.
The proclaimed value-neutrality of the sciences is an integral part of the grim scenario painted by the madman. Remembering the scruples that some of the Manhattan Project physicists had when they wondered whether they should unleash the ominous powers that went into the atomic bomb, one could say that the proclaimed value-neutrality of the sciences is just the sort of thing that makes the scenario of modernity described by the madman so grim. For once genies like nuclear fission or fusion are out of the bottle, without a solid moral framework in place within which such powers could be managed, it is no mad exaggeration to speak of the earth or humanity as in some sort of free fall.
The people in the marketplace do not see any of this. They all have their personal concerns and short-term goals, and they routinely go about their mundane businesses, including the business of making every day, moral decisions. It is only the "madman" who sees the ultimate implications of the death of God, and who is alarmed by the great moral and existential void in which they all live. "Europe has yet to face the reality of Nihilism," Nietzsche once remarked. The entirety of Western civilization still functions within a mind-set that thousands of years of theistic training and practice have created. At the time of his writing Nietzsche thought that it may yet take some two hundred years until the truth of their situation would dawn on the majority of people. Accordingly the madman concludes his lament with the words: I come too early. I am not yet at the right time. This enormous event [the death of God] is still on its way; it is travelling. It has not yet reached the ears of the crowd. Lightning and thunder needs time, the light of the stars needs time, deeds need time-even after they are done-to be seen and heard. This deed is as yet farther from them than the farthest stars-and yet they have done it!
It was not until the 20th century that philosophers began to reflect systematically on the situation outlined by Nietzsche’s madman. Jean-Paul Sartre and other Existentialists understood themselves to be thinkers who have finally fully realized the implications of the death of God (which is one reason that they considered Nietzsche as one of their most important forerunners). Sartre, in his essay “Existentialism is a Humanism” of 1946, quotes, with approval, Dostoyevsky’s contention that everything would be permitted if God did not exist. Sartre derides the traditional secular humanists for thinking that the absence of God is not much of a problem for ethics. “Nothing will be changed if God does not exist,” he describes these humanists as saying. “We will rediscover the same norms of honesty, progress and humanity, and we will have disposed of God as an out-of-date hypothesis that will die away quietly of itself.” Existentialist humanists see things quite differently. Existentialist, by contrast, finds it extremely embarrassing that God does not exist, for there disappears with him all possibilities of finding values in an intelligible heaven. There can no longer be any good deductivity, since there is no infinite and perfect consciousness to think it. It is nowhere written that “the good” exists, that one must be honest or must not lie, since we are now on a plane where there are only men.
Existentialists, in other words, take very seriously what Nietzsche’s madman says, and their description of the human condition as one without any pre-ordained moral system or orientation, without, indeed, any authoritative way of making sense of the world and human life, is exactly the scenario that Nietzsche invokes in The Joyful Science. Existentialists explicitly define human existence as an undetermined being in a meaningless universe, and as an anguished freedom that has to create all values and purposes out of itself. As Existentialists had witnessed such events as two ferocious world wars, the holocaust, the atomic incineration of whole cities, and the continuing death by malnutrition of millions of children every year (together with the worldwide productions of an entertainment industry that can plausibly be described as organized idiocy on a massive scale), the absence of any authoritative ethics or established moral framework had become a particularly urgent problem for them. It was in the existentialists’ famous expressions of absurdity, loss, abandonment, and despair that Nietzsche’s dark vision of things found its final manifestation.
The madman. Have you not heard of that madman who lit a lantern in the bright morning hours, ran to the marketplace and cried incessantly? : "I seek God! I seek God"- As many of those who did not believe in God were standing around just then, but he provoked much laughter. Has he got lost? Asked one. Did he lose his way like a child? Asked another. Or is he hiding? Is he afraid of us? Has he gone on a voyage? Emigrated? - Thus they yelled and laughed. The madman jumped into their midst and pierced them with his eyes. "Where is God?" he cried. "I will tell you. We have killed him-you and me! All of us are his murderers! Yet how did we do this? How could we drink up the sea? Who gave us the sponge to wipe away the entire horizon? What were we doing when we unchained this earth from its sun? Where is it moving now? Where are we moving? Away from all suns? Are we not plunging continually? Backward, sideward, forward, in all directions? Is there still any up or down? Are we not straying as through an infinite nothing? Do we not feel the breath of empty space? Has it not become colder? Is not night continually closing in on us? Do we not need to light lanterns in the morning? Do we not hear nothing as yet of the noise of the gravediggers who are burying God? Do we smell nothing as yet of the divine decomposition? -Gods, too, decompose! God is dead! God remains dead! We have killed him! How shall we comfort ourselves, the murderers of all murderers? What was holiest and mightiest of all that the world has yet owned has bled to death under our knives, -who will wipe this blood off us? What water is there for us to clean ourselves? What festivals of atonement, what sacred games shall we have to invent? Is not the greatness of this deed too great for us? Must we ourselves not become gods simply to appear worthy of it? There has never been a greater deed-and whoever is born after us, for the sake of this deed he will belong to a higher history than all history hitherto!"- Here the madman fell silent and looked again at his listeners: they, too, were silent and stared at him in astonishment. At last he threw his lantern to the ground, and it broke into pieces and went out. "I have come too early," he said then; "My time is not yet. This tremendous event is still on its way, but wandering-it has not yet reached the ears of men. Lightning and thunder requires time; The light of the stars requires time; The deed though done, still require time to be seen and heard. This deed is still more distant from them than the most-distant stars-and yet they have done it themselves!"-It has been related further that on the same day the madman forced his way into several churches and there struck up his requiem aeternam deo. Led out and called to account, he is said always to have replied nothing but: "What after all are these churches now if they are not the tombs and sepulchers of God?"
Friedrich Nietzsche's vehement attacks upon Christianity, encapsulated in his famous dictum that "God is dead," pose a problem for the reader who agrees with Nietzsche and yet does not wish to give up a certain basic Christian belief. However, careful analyses of both Nietzsche and the synoptic Gospels (Matthew, Mark and Luke) reveal an interesting pattern: the elements that Nietzsche opposes do not appear in the teachings of Jesus at this point, but rather in John and the writings of the Church fathers. In the synoptic Gospels, the earliest extant writings we posses, Jesus and Nietzsche often parallel each other, teaching similar doctrines.
Jesus did not teach the will to death and the ascetic ideal, but rather a strong individualism compatible with Nietzsche's philosophy. If this is the case, God need not die, even if the Church preaches dogma that appears to make that necessary for the free spirit to liberate itself from the yoke of the herd and its guilt. An extensively modified, but still religious, Christianity can complement and reinforce the Nietzschian world-view. Using the Gospels to find the true message is difficult, for they are evolving documents that have been modified by the Church more than two millennia. However, enough support can be found, even with the warping of the originals, to support the view that Jesus originally taught something very differently from the Christian religion as we know it.
The worst thing about Christian belief, according to Nietzsche, is that it encourages, indeed requires, what he terms afterworldliness: "a poor ignorant weariness that does not want to want anymore." Here the believer despises this life and this world in favour of some promised world, accessible only after death, which is the truly good one. Nietzsche contends that we should live in this world, and that a yearning for another world is symptomatic of an unhealthy hatred of life: "It was the sick and decaying who invented the heavenly realm." Thus, the afterlife is an artificial creation used by the unhealthy to justify their hatred of life. The healthy soul lives and rejoices in this world, no longer willing to "bury one's head in the sand of heavenly things, but [willing instead] to bear it freely, an earthly head, which creates meaning for the earth.
While Jesus does promise an afterlife, he never suggests that his followers should despise this life or be in a hurry to get elsewhere. Indeed, the parable of the talents clearly shows that we are supposed to make the best of this life and the abilities we are given: The servants who increased the money their master had given them were rewarded, while the servant who simply hid his money and waited for the return was punished. The lovers of death here clearly contradict the teachings of their supposed master, who teaches that life is a gift of God and is not to be wasted. More support for the dictum that we should not hurry toward death is in the Sermon on the Mount, where Jesus says "Do not be anxious about tomorrow, for tomorrow will be anxious for itself. Let the day's own trouble be sufficient for the day." While this comes at the end of a speech on not becoming attached to materiality (which will be discussed below), it is also a clear injunction to let the afterlife take care of itself and concentrate on this world. Thus, Nietzsche and Jesus are compatible in affirming this life and warning against concentrating on the next.
Nietzsche also criticizes the ascetic ideal for being opposed to life. Asceticism results from after worldliness; "Once the soul looked contemptuously upon the body, and then this contempt was the highest: She wanted the body meagre, ghastly, and starved. Thus, she hoped to escape it and the earth." Suicide is the goal, and asceticism the only form of suicide allowed by the Church. This is clearly antithetical to the love of life that Nietzsche claims as characteristic of the free spirit; Nietzsche sees this hatred of life, expressed through the ascetic ideal, as so entwined with Christian belief that only the death of God can eliminate its effects and allow man to love life. In other words, conventional Christian belief so thoroughly poisons the believer that only its extirpation can give him a chance to be free.
However, we have already seen that Jesus did not preach after worldliness; could asceticism be yet another apocryphal addition to his message? Jesus, we are told, went into the wilderness to fast for forty days, which is clearly an ascetic act. However, this does not mean that he subscribed to the ascetic ideal as it would later be defined. First of all, Nietzsche himself agrees that asceticism is favourable for the philosopher: "We have seen that implications of asceticism, which is to say a strict yet high-spirited continence, is among the necessary conditions of strenuous intellectual activity as well as one of its natural consequences." So Jesus was not seeking death but rather the optimum environment for thought and creativity before embarking upon his ministry, even as Nietzsche has Zarathustra do on more than one occasion. The need for a materially simple lifestyle to be creative also accounts for Jesus's repeated injunctions against worldly wealth; if one wishes to develop spiritually, one's energy must be directed in that direction, not the acquisition of material goods: "For going through the eye of a needle is easier for a camel than for a rich man to enter the Kingdom of God." There is another reason that Jesus would spend time in the wilderness, related to the time in which he lived. Two thousand years ago (and still today in some cultures), time spent alone in contemplation was considered a prerequisite for holiness and wisdom, a sort of credentialing. People at that time would not have taken Jesus seriously if he had not been out fasting; it is noteworthy that no gospel ever mentions him fasting again.
Not only was Jesus not an ascetic himself, he did not encourage his followers to abuse their bodies. The closest Jesus comes to approving of fasting (the primary ascetic act in his time) is when he tells his followers to show no outward signs if they fast, for that makes a vain display out of what is supposed to be a mystic act. He was criticized for not making his disciples fast, but he answered "Can the wedding guests mourn as long as the bridegroom is with them?" Even his death was not to be a permanent reason for self-abuse, for after having said the above, he stated after Easter that "I am with you always, to the close of the age." Thus, the true Christian has no excuse for fasting or other asceticism on religious grounds. The lack of asceticism in Jesus's teaching makes perfect sense once one accepts that he did not teach after worldliness.
When confronted with the idea that Jesus did not preach after worldliness, the conventional believer is likely to ask, "But what of the Kingdom of God?" Indeed, the Gospels are full of references to the Kingdom of God, but these are not necessarily (or, if one were to wish independently) references to life after death. The Kingdom of God is something that a person can achieve in this life: "For beholding, the Kingdom of God is within you." This concept can be better understood as a different mode of existence, of a person who is no longer like he was before, which corresponds to Nietzsche's idea of the overman. Like the overman, the Kingdom of God cannot be reached through the application of reason, intelligence, or wisdom: "Whoever does not receive the Kingdom of God like a child will not enter it." In Thus Spoke Zarathustra, the coming of the overman cannot be known, even by Zarathustra himself, until it happens. Jesus says the same about the Kingdom of God, in that "Watch therefore, for you do not know on which day your Lord is coming." Entering the Kingdom of God, like becoming the overman, is a leap, not a gradual process that can be rationally understood; Once again Nietzsche and Jesus converge and coincide. Both the Kingdom of God and the overman are described in terms that make it absolutely clear that these states represent a transcending of ordinary humanity, a step beyond what we are capable of imagining today: Nietzsche says of the overman that "He is this lightning, he is [the] frenzy" while Jesus says "The kingdom of heaven is like leaven that a woman took and hid in three measures of flour, till it was all leavened." Although the imagery is different, both are describing a state of transformation, of great change, which is the object of life.
Jesus, like Nietzsche, had very little regard for priests and their rule. The gospels are full of the taunts and criticisms of the Pharisees, the priests of Judaism. Jesus and his disciples constantly violated the laws of the pharisees where it would be known. Jesus healed on the Sabbath, and when the Pharisees asked him why, he answered "The Sabbath was made for man, not man for the Sabbath" In other words, a law, or morality, is to be followed only as long as manning it is beneficial; this teaching is antithetical to the rules of any priestly caste. He rejected the priestly notion that external signs are indicative of inner health; After violating the Mosaic dietary laws, Jesus stated that "Not what goes into the mouth defiles a man, but what comes out of the mouth, this defiles a man." Jesus is preaching an independence from the law that constitutes the first step toward the Kingdom of God. This attitude is crucial: The Mosaic law was the foundation of the morality of the society Jesus moved in, and therefore by rejecting it he was rejecting the morality of his society. One of the central tenets of Nietzsche's philosophy is that the overman requires independence from the old morality, as the very title of Beyond Good and Evil confirms. Jesus and Nietzsche continue to walk the same path.
The two teachers also coincide in asserting that their teachings cannot be adopted by more than a few of those who hear them. Zarathustra finds that he must "speak not to the people but to companions," companions who like him have left the herd and are thus ready to hear what he has to say. One of the leitmotifs of Nietzsche's work is the crushing influence of the herd and therefore the necessity to reject it, as painfully as this may be, in order to develop. Similarly, although Jesus spoke to the masses, he was under no illusions as to their ability to hear him: in the parable of the wheat and the tares, only a very few of the seeds sowed bear any fruit. He only bothered explaining his parables to the apostles, his companions. Jesus also preaches the need to free oneself from the bonds of society, and warns of it hatred for those who do so, "Beware of men, for they will deliver you up to councils, and flog you in their synagogues. You will be dragged before governors and kings for my sake." Nietzsche also warns of the wrath of the herd: Since I do not join their dances Tied to their old rope, I am followed by their glances, Sweetly poisoned envy without hope.
Both Nietzsche and Jesus realize that the man must separate himself from the herd in order to live, but that the inevitable corollary of this act is that he will be despised, feared, and envied by those still within the herd.
One of Nietzsche's central tenets is that man is "that which must always overcome itself." One must always survive the overcoming oneself, with no thought of a time when overcoming will no longer be necessary; as long as something is, there is always something to be overcome. Interestingly, there is a similar message in the teachings of Jesus, who exhorted his listeners to "Be perfect, even as your heavenly Father is perfect." Attempting to achieve perfection would be an identical process too self-overcoming, when one considers Jesus's contempt for the mosaic law, his society's expression of morality. The believer who took Jesus's words to heart would have continually to reexamine himself, change himself, improve himself without a firm guide. In other words, he would have continually to overcome himself in the pursuit of perfection. Jesus and Nietzsche teach the same thing, although in different languages.
On the theme of self-judgement, an even greater difference in method obscures a similarity in aim. Nietzsche proclaims the doctrine of the eternal recurrence, where we must believe that we will live our lives again and again, with no changes. Thinking about this force’s one to come to grips with what one really thinks about one's life; if one has accepted one's life, then the idea of repeating it is appealing, but if not, then it is terrifying. Jesus achieves the same goal by postulating judgement by an omnipotent being who can see through all one's lies, even the ones one tells oneself. Again, faced with a postulated eventuality, but one must take honest stock of how he has lived. In this case the difference in method stems from Nietzsche's rejection of and Jesus's acceptance of the idea of an afterlife; Their intentions are identical, to require their listeners to judge themselves far more harshly than they would ordinarily.
One crucial issue remains to be dealt with, that is humility. Humbleness appears again and again in the message of Jesus. "If anyone would be first, he must be last of all and servant of all," Jesus tells his disciples. Here Jesus and Nietzsche appear to be invariably at odds, since the last thing Nietzsche taught was humility. Yet the apparent divide is not as great as it would seem. One must always survive to overcome oneself, and to defy the herd requires a lot of pride; ought not that this childish, immature pride not be the first thing to be overcome? Only with a harsh self-appraisal can one become in knowing oneself, and pride would prevent this. Thus pride must be overcome in order to know oneself and thus be wisely proud. The humility Jesus teaches need not be the grovelling self-abasement the Churches have said it is. Could this humility not be the inevitable humility of one who has looked at himself clearly, realistically, warts and all? This humility would lead not to weakness but to greater strength and better overcoming. Jesus did not intend for us to be weak, but to be strong and sure of ourselves; That is why he said to "turn to him [the other cheek] also," for he who is truly strong is in control of himself and will respond, not on impulse, but at the proper time, under perfect control. This interpretation is compatible with Nietzsche's philosophy, but rather complements and expands it.
In sum, Jesus and Nietzsche do not have to be at war with one another, but can supplement and fulfill each other, if one only has the insight and originality to strip away the accretions that the lovers of death have placed upon the teachings of Jesus. Both preached the overcoming individual, independent of the herd, who strives to evolve in the hope of reaching a transcendent state within this world, even if that state cannot be reached by any means other than a leap. Both have been grossly misinterpreted, for their message is not one the herd is willing to tolerate, and both are in need of clear understanding.
What is that you ask? You say that I have left out the most important act of Jesus on this earth, the one that has given a religion its primary symbol? What of the Resurrection? Well, if one accepts that life does not end in death, then returning to this world after the event that separates us from whatever comes after for the love of one's companions, would be the ultimate act of will, of power, of striving, indeed it would be the act . . . of an overman.
In some respects the story of Friedrich Nietzsche's Zarathustra is an epos in the way the stories of Odysseus or Jesus or Don Quijote is. It describes a man with a distinct character, who faces an important task, who in the pursuit of this task has significant encounters with friends and adversaries, who experiences deep crises and changes of heart, and who in the end comes to a resolution that represents a meaningful possibility of human existence.
In contrast to most other epic poems, however, Thus Spoke Zarathustra is less a series of external adventures than a spiritual journey. The ratio of external events and inner developments is heavily weighted in favour of the latter. More than half of the entire text consists of Zarathustra's philosophical lectures and thoughts, although these thoughts are conveyed by archetypal myths and poetic language rather than analyses. The plot of Zarathustra's story is important, however. Zarathustra's philosophical pronouncements cannot be fully appreciated without being seen in the context of specific external events. To understand Thus Spoke Zarathustra one has to follow both the story's line of action and its line of thought.
In the Prologue the reader is told that at the age thirty, Zarathustra "left his home and the lake of his home and went into the mountains. Here he enjoyed his spirit and his solitude, and for ten years did not tire of it." After this time, however, Zarathustra decides to leave his mountain retreat to share his slowly accumulated wisdom with the rest of humanity. His goal is to proclaim the "overman," a type of human being that is to be as superior to today's human beings as today's humanity is to the higher apes. The state of modern humanity seems to Zarathustra to be such that a new guiding ideal is urgently called for-an invigorating inspiration that would give new energy and meaning to people who, tired and disillusioned, are mired in a cultural wasteland.
Much of the reigning spiritual malaise is due to what Zarathustra refers to as the "Death of God." Not that Zarathustra thought that God had ever existed, but he knew that once the idea of God was a most important inspiration without which most of Western (as well as much of Non-Western) culture would not have been created. As the Modern Age with its secularizing tendencies developed, however, the idea of an all-powerful God progressively lost its plausibility and organizing force, and by the time scientific rationality had become the dominant mode of thought, thinking that an anthropomorphic deity could be seemed hopelessly naïve and anachronistic something like a law-giving lord of some orderly and meaningful world. The universe as described by modern science became too vast to be comprehended in its entirety at all, and for educated people it became increasingly difficult to find any valid basis for a genuine moral order, or for more than an arbitrary meaning of life. Nihilism had become a haunting problem for modern humanity, and it is this problem that Zarathustra's philosophy is meant to solve. The "overman" is Zarathustra's answer to the modern wasteland.
Once among people Zarathustra does not lose any time to advocate his vision: Humanity as a whole is to overcome its present mediocrity and bankrupt civilization in order to create the overman: "Man is something that is to be overcome. What have you done of overcoming him?" The reception that Zarathustra's philosophy receives, however, is none too encouraging. First the crowd mistakes the new prophet as part of a circus act. Once the people understand what Zarathustra is up to, they let him know in no uncertain terms that they have absolutely no use for something like the overman, that what they are really interested in is a nice and comfortable life. "You can have the overman," they laugh. If life has no higher meaning, which is not something over which they will lose any sleep. Happiness in the form of pleasure is their highest gal."The greatest happiness for the greatest number of people," as the Utilitarians put it. (There is no philosophy to which Zarathustra's thought is more directly opposed than Utilitarianism. Nietzsche rarely talks about the "flathead" J. S. Mill, the principal theoretician of Utilitarianism, with anything but derision.)
From now on Zarathustra has nothing but contempt for the masses, although he is repeatedly tempted to pity and help them. His contempt extends not only to those social classes that have traditionally been excluded from the privilege of higher education, but also to all people who limit their lives and aspirations to the pursuit of trivia and convenience. That includes the majority of artists and writers, of students and professors, of journalists and politicians-the majority, that is, of what is sometimes called the "cultural elite." They all fall far short of seriously developing their personal or their human potential. Instead Zarathustra starts looking for a few outstanding individuals, persons who are genuinely hungry for something more in life than the fulfilment of mediocre and philistine desires. Zarathustra searches for the seekers, and he has no trouble finding and attracting such individuals. At this point his career as a teacher begins in earnest.
Part One of Thus Spoke Zarathustra consists almost entirely of the twenty-two speeches that Zarathustra delivers to his disciples and followers. The speeches elaborate the philosophy of the overman. Their main line of thought can be summarized in the following six points:
(1) Zarathustra's most basic contention is the sweeping rejection of all metaphysics-of the idea that there is a "real" world "behind" the physical world, a transcendent world beyond the world of the senses. For Zarathustra there is only one world, and that world is essentially physical. Zarathustra is a materialist monist, in other words, he rejects dualism in it’s philosophical as well as in its religious forms. Plato, Descartes, or Kant is as unacceptable to him as Christianity or any other metaphysical religion. "Be faithful to the earth!" he admonishes his followers time and again.
In several speeches Zarathustra spells out implications of this basic contention. Priests of metaphysical religions, for example, he calls "Preachers of Death," because in their teachings they imply that there is something better than the earth and its life forms. They kill true reverence for life. They do so because they are afraid of life, or because they have failed to come to terms with it.
(2) Corresponding to Zarathustra's materialist monism is his rejection of the traditional dualism of body and mind: People do not have bodies, but they are bodies. Human beings are not composites of a physical and a non-physical substance, but whole organisms, although these organisms are often very intelligent, and capable of deep feelings. Human behaviour is much more intelligible if it is understood as the behaviour of bodies, and not as behaviour that originates in pure minds. People are generally much more physical than most individuals-under the influence of metaphysical teachings-are inclined to admit to them or to others.
In speeches on a variety of topics Zarathustra encourages his followers to acknowledge their physical nature, and to live out of its power and resources. Books that are "written with blood," for example, are better than the seemingly detached and purely cerebral works of most academics, and works of art that draws on the pre-rational powers of the unconscious mind are deeper and far more powerful than those that are created by the rational mind. The instinctual passions that grow out of our physical constitution are truer to life than most of the constructions of the intellect. (It is worth remembering here what Nietzsche writes about the origin of art in his The Birth of Tragedy: Greek tragedy was powerful as long as it grew out of Dionysian intoxication and Apollinian dream visions. It deteriorated -at the time of Socrates's teachings when playwrights became calculating craftspeople, instead of inspired visionaries.)
(3) Zarathustra advocates a self-asserting individualism that by most standards would be considered reckless and immoral. Zarathustra has no interest in virtues that promote social peace, or a culture in which people place a high value on not upsetting or offending each other. Peace of mind is suspicious because it may come about at the price of muffling the real forces of life. Individuals whose thoughts and deeds are to reach great heights have to go into real depths: "With a person it is as with a tree. The more he aspires to the height and light, the more strongly willing his roots strive earthward, downward, into the dark, into the deep-into evil." Outstanding spirits need to disregard the moral rules and sensibilities of the "herd." "Beware of the good and the just! They like to crucify those who invent their own virtue for themselves-they hates the lonely one." The more uncompromising people dare to follow their own individual inspiration, the more significant will be the results. A true view and appreciation of life are not "clouded" by moral categories at all: Life in its purest and highest manifestations exists "beyond good and evil."
(4) The price for this sort of individualism is a pervasive antagonism of forces and people, perhaps evens "a war of all against all"(to use Hobbes's phrase). Nevertheless, that is nothing bad in Zarathustra's eyes. Every living being motivated by a "will to power," by a will to assert itself, and struggle is an inevitable expression of being alive. "War is the father of all things," Heraclitus once wrote, and in agreement with this Zarathustra thought that nothing worthwhile would ever come about without strife. "Live dangerously!" is the advice that he gives to his friends? Even in love relationships risks must be taken. Getting hurt in a love relationship is nothing to be afraid of or bitter about, but rather an opportunity to grow and to respond creatively. "War" is not only an acceptable means, but also an important end in itself: "You say it is the good cause that hallows even war? I say: It is the good war that hallows every cause." To live a warrior's life is a supreme way of being.
This must not be misunderstood, however, as an advocacy of the sort of militarism and nationalistic expansionism that began to run rampant toward the end of the 19th century. The "warriors” that Zarathustra praises are not a man in uniform, and not part of the mechanized fighting machinery that has become the hallmark of modern warfare. In his speech "On the New Idol" Zarathustra explicitly repudiates such things as patriotism or identification with a particular nation state as a vulgar form of self-alienation: "Only where the state ends, there begins the human being who is not superfluous.
(5) Self-determination is crucial at all levels of Zarathustra's philosophy. Self-determination has been an important ideal in other philosophies as well, to be sure, particularly in the philosophy of the Enlightenment, a movement that is in several ways incompatible with the thought of Zarathustra. What the Enlightenment and Zarathustra has in common is the idea that a moral order cannot be imposed on human beings from the outside-by authorities, social institutions, or traditions, for example. However, in Zarathustra's philosophy self-determination becomes a much more radical concept than it is in the writings of Kant or other Enlightenment thinkers. For in Kant's ethics the goal is still to find moral rules and guidelines that are "objectively" valid, rules that are binding for all rational beings because they are grounded in the very nature of rationality. For Zarathustra there is neither a divine authority that could impose binding values, nor a recognizable cosmic order on which objective values could be based, nor a rationality that is common to all human beings. Thus human beings are not only independently responsible for living up to moral standards, but also for creating such standards in the first place. For Zarathustra nothing is "given," neither a moral order, nor a pre-established meaning of life or of the universe. Any such thing has to be brought about by the creative will of individuals who are capable of such feats, such as Moses or similar lawgivers. Self-determination, in other words, is not just a matter of exercising autonomy in a structured and established world, but almost something like creating a world out of chaos.
A sign of such far-reaching self-determination is free death. A truly autonomous being will not wait until death "sneaks in like a thief," but freely decides when it is time to go-which should not be either too early or too late. The time of one's death ought to be connected to one's meaningful tasks, to the things that one has chosen to accomplish. When these goals have been reached, and when nothing significant can be done anymore, then a sovereign person will say farewell to his people and life, and not wait until his or her life will degenerate into nothingness. The important point is to be active where formerly people have been passive. Fewer things are given than had always been presumed. A future humanity would be in command of itself to a degree that had never been imagined in the past.
(6) Life is a process, not a state. A person is a process, too, not a static entity. To conceive of oneself as an entity, as a substance, is a mistake. To live life as if one were a being, rather than a becoming, is a falsification of one's existence that is connected with the illusion of an everlasting life in a "transcendent" world. Living life is not accomplished by holding on, by accumulating things or knowledge, but by always overcoming oneself, and by transforming or passing on everything that one acquires.
"Everything impermanent is but a symbol" (of something eternal), Goethe once wrote. "Everything permanent is but a symbol,” Zarathustra counters, and for good measure he ads: "The poets lie too much. It is of time and becoming that the best similes speak: Let them be a praise and a justification of all impermanence." "You must want to burn up in your own flames," Zarathustra tells his followers-a Heraclitean idea that is parallelled in Nietzsche's poem "Ecce Homo":
Yes, I know from where I come!
Insatiable like the fire Do I glow, consume myself.
Light is everything that I seize,
Ashes everything that I leave:
Fire am I without fail.
At the end of Part One Zarathustra depart his followers to return to his mountain cave. His main reason for doing so is the necessity of his disciples to find themselves-to cease being followers. Part of the idea of the overman is, after all, the idea of radically living out of one's own self, and not out of any doctrine or consensus of a community. To be true to his teaching Zarathustra has to stop being a teacher. All he can do as the prophet of the overman is to sow the seed of his idea, and then see what will develop.
Part Two. Years later Zarathustra has a dream: A child holds a mirror up to him. In this mirror Zarathustra does not see himself, but a derisively laughing devil. Zarathustra is deeply disturbed by that vision. He interprets it as meaning that his teaching is being distorted. He eagerly decides to return to his followers and to speak within their spoken exchange that once again -and to his enemies as well. He feels he is full of wisdom that he wants to impart. "Too long I have belonged to solitude; Thus, I have forgotten to be silent." The reader gets the impression that Zarathustra is just a bit too eager to resume his teaching career. Zarathustra may, in fact, have given a wrong interpretation to his dream, and his eagerness to give more lectures to his followers may cover up something that tried to make itself manifest by the vision of the mirror.
Zarathustra descends to the Blessed Isles, the place where his followers live, and where he is welcome to develop the ramifications of his philosophy further. A major new strand of his thoughts is the concept of the "Will to Power," the concept that dominates all of Part Two. Zarathustra sees the Will to Power as the most basic motive force in all living beings, justly of transcending importance, as steadily as there be of its drive for the will to live. It manifests itself in innumerable ways-in the way certain people assert themselves in society, as well as in the power of an ascetic priest over his own appetites or an artist’s mastery over the elements of his or her work. As good as science is seen not so much as a disinterested reflection of what is the case, but as a forceful construction of data along the lines of certain preconceived concepts (such as the unified structure of Newtonian physics).
Halfway through Part Two, however, in the "Nightsong," Zarathustra changes his tune, so to speak. Instead of lecturing he begins to sing. What he sings at first, he laments about being too much a carrier of light, too much a giver of wisdom. Something important is missing in his life. Zarathustra is craving for darkness-presumably for the instinctual or unconscious side of human existence. He conducts himself too much like Apollo, and too little like Dionysus. Instead of being the teacher of a new civilization he needs to experience the extacies and agonies that come with the intoxicated submersion into the primal spheres of life.
In the following "Dancing Song" Zarathustra deepens his self-doubts. While admiring and encouraging the dance of a group of young women, he asks himself whether he really understands life. Implicitly he calls into question the validity of his strident teaching. In the "Tomb Song" he tentatively acknowledges that the truth of life will not reveal itself to him through philosophizing and teaching, but in such instinctual expressions as singing and dancing.
After this crisis experience Zarathustra resumes his usual lecturing for a while, but in the section on "The Soothsayer" he encounters his self-doubts once more. The Soothsayer is a persuasive spokesperson for the nihilism that besieges modern humanity. His message is that ultimately everything is futile and vain. He represents a pervasive weariness and a state of disillusionment that Zarathustra himself cannot escape: What sense is there, indeed, for working so hard to bring about the overman? Is his advocation really different from all the other cultural efforts that now constitute a dead past?
In a lugubrious dream Zarathustra sees himself as the warden of the remnants of past cultures in "the mountain-castle of death." In this dream a sudden storm tears open the gate of the castle, the overturning a black coffin from which escape grimacing "children, angels, owls, fools, and huge butterflies." Terrorized, Zarathustra awakens. He wonders what the dream may mean. A disciple suggests that the storm symbolize the work of Zarathustra-the destruction of a dead culture, and the release of new energies. Zarathustra is doubtful, however. He is not sure whether he may not rather be part of "the castle of death." Even as the teacher of the overman he may be more part of the old civilization than part of the liberating forces of the future.
Continuing his journey with his followers, and Zarathustra has occasion to converse with a rather observant hunchback. This hunchback tells Zarathustra to his face that "Zarathustra talks differently to his disciples than he talks to himself." This finally brings home to him that something is seriously wrong. There is something that he does not tell his followers, something that he does not even admit to himself, even though he seems to have an inkling of it. The days of Zarathustra as a teacher are clearly numbered.
In "The Stillest Hour," the last section of Part Two, Zarathustra is arguing with a "voiceless voice," a voice that brings him to the realization that "Zarathustra's fruits are ripe, but that Zarathustra is not ripe for his fruits." There is a discrepancy between his teachings and his being, and its change clearly releases him, in that he has to change. In a deeply depressed state he decides to leave his followers once more.
Part Three. From now on Zarathustra is by himself. He is a "wanderer" who tries to get ready to meet the most difficult task that he has to face in his life. "Before my highest mountain I stand and before my longest wandering. To that end I must first go down deep than ever have I descended-deeper into pain than I ever descended, down into its blackest flood." Although Zarathustra never describes it that way, he is, in fact, readying himself to die to his old self as the teacher of the overman and to become that new kind of being. "If you now lack all ladders, then you must know how to climb on your own head; How else could you want to climb upward? On your own head and away over your own heart - up until even your stars are under you.”
Zarathustra does not return to the solitude of his mountain cave right away, but rather embarks on a long journey across the sea and through the big cities. While crossing a mountain range to reach the next seaport, he begins to deal with the "Spirit of Gravity" that keeps weighing him down"my devil and archenemy, half dwarf, half of a mole, lame, making lame, dripping lead into my ear, leaden thoughts into my brain. " What the spirit exemplifies at this point is the thought of the futility of Zarathustra's project, the futility that the Soothsayer had already hinted at earlier: "You philosophers’ stone," the Spirit of Gravity whispers mockingly, "you threw yourself very high, but every stone that is thrown must fall.
Zarathustra gets the dwarf off his back by confronting him and himself with the thought that he had been so reluctant to think, but which seemed to have been on his mind for some time-the thought of the eternal recurrence of everything. That thought and its unsettling implications are the predominant concern of Part Three of Thus Spoke Zarathustra. According to this philosophical concept everything in the universe is bound to repeat itself endlessly because time is endless, while the amount of matter that exists in time is finite. The number of possible configurations of the constantly changing elements of matter may be enormous, but eventually they will have to repeat themselves. Everything that exists must have existed before; the future is like the past: On a cosmic scale there can be no progress. Time is not linear, but forever moves in circles. "All that are straight lies," the dwarf agrees. "All truth is crooked. Time itself is a circle."
The thought is profoundly disturbing to Zarathustra, for it means that even a successfully created culture of overmen is not something like a new plateau from whichever new heights of human accomplishments can be reached, but only a phase in a sequential cycle, that in time will bring back even the lowest stages of human development. The thought that everything recurs seems to take away any incentive for effort. Why work toward the overman if after that nothing but the old degeneracy looms?
Zarathustra's profound disgust with the prospect of the eternal recurrence of low forms of humanity finds expression in his vision of a young shepherd who is gagging on a black serpent that has crawled into his throat. Attempts to dislodge the serpent are futile. "Bite off its head!" Zarathustra finally yells, and the Shepherd does as he is told. Spitting out the head the Shepherd is a new man, a man whose belly’s laughs a tremendous laugh of liberation. From the moment of this vision on Zarathustra has one over-arching desire: To achieve this laughter of liberation, and thus steadily disentangles for good of the Spirit of Gravity.
Zarathustra continues his travel-a journey through the wasteland of modern civilization. In the end he finds the shallow and escapist culture of his contemporaries not even worthy of critique or rebuttal: Neither scholars nor the literati (let alone the journalists) come even close to dealing with the really important questions of life. Passing everything over in silence seems to him to be the most adequate response. He returns to the mountains to resume work on himself. While becoming a hermit again, Zarathustra is careful not to turn his back on life. Instead of subscribing to the traditional virtues of ascetic monks-poverty, chastity, and obedience-he continues to advocate the vigorous living of life with everything that may imply. Zarathustra is still in agreement with what he had said in Part Two: "I do not permit the sight of evil to be spoiled for me by your timidity. I am delighted to see the wonders hatched by the hot sun-tigers, and palms and rattlesnakes. Among men, too, a hot sun hatches a beautiful breed, and there are many wonderful things in those who are evil. Zarathustra still aims at the goal of the overman.
Part Three ends with Zarathustra's recovery from his crisis. The way he overcomes the debilitating implication of eternal recurrence is by emphatically living in the present. If time is a circle, it does not really matter in which part of the circle one exists, or in which phase of its development humanity finds itself. "Being begins at every moment. … The centre is everywhere," Zarathustra's archetypal animals, the snake and the eagle, sing, and Zarathustra agree. Most people live in the past, i.e., under the constraints of traditions, inherited moralities, etc. Zarathustra used to live in the future, i.e., in expectation of a culture that has never existed before, and which would be part of a never-ending progress. Nevertheless, by now the teacher of the overman knows that ultimately past and future are irrelevant, that living one's life is something that has to happen now, and not at any other time. It is now that the struggle takes place, and now that life manifests itself in the intensity of one's efforts. The concept of eternal recurrence is not a paralysing thought anymore, but the joyful vision of a new secular eternity.
An important sign of Zarathustra's recovery is the fact that he has learned to sing and to dance. Singing and dancing, compared with speaking, are ecstatic modes of expression. Speaking tends to be a disembodied mode of communication, while singing and dancing involves not only the intellect, but the body and its passions as well. A person who is capable of singing and dancing is whole, and life is more present in such a person than in a lecturing teacher. It is in the light of this newly found wholeness that one can see why Zarathustra felt at one point that in spite of his upbeat teachings he was part of "the castle of death."
The first part of Thus Spoke Zarathustra is dominated by Zarathustra's vision of the overman, the vision of a bright and heroic future. It can be called Apollinian, as it aims at the building of a civilization out of the chaos of cultural entropy. No civilization is eternal, however. The dark and chaotic underside of every order cannot be ignored, and it will eventually assert itself. The day of Apollo does not exist without the night of Dionysus. The night, in fact, is darker and more powerful than day-consciousness cares to think. Because the dark forces of life are so frightening, people have a tendency to shun life, to look at it, as something painful or even evil-something to overcome. It is part of Zarathustra's teaching to affirm life in spite of its frequent darkness and potential terrors. The transformation of the protagonist that dominates the last part of Thus Spoke Zarathustra demonstrates a love of life that encompasses not only its dark sides, but even its ultimate purposelessness. It is a love that is achieved by living life-after a long period of merely thinking and teaching about it. It is a seeing love, a love that feels and knows at the same time:
Be aware, o man!
What does the deep midnight declare?
'I was asleep. From a deep dream I woke.
The world is deep
Deeper than the day had thought.
Deep is its woe, but ecstasy is deeper yet than agony.
Woe says: Be gone!
But joy aims at eternity at deep, deep eternity.'
Part Four. Scholars are debating whether Part Four should be seen as an integral component of Thus Spoke Zarathustra, or rather as the beginning of a longer continuation that Nietzsche never got around to writing. The first three parts evidently constitute a beginning, middle, and an end, to which the fourth part is in some ways something like an appendix. The first three parts could easily stand by themselves. The fourth part is interesting, however, in that it shows Zarathustra as an old man who is still intent on teaching the overman. Throughout Part Four he never leaves the mountains: He has adopted the strategy of letting interested people find him, and they come. The cultural situation in the lowlands has become so bad that seekers are desperate to find a way out. Zarathustra converses with a number of "higher men" who have begun to look at him as a spiritual authority. Zarathustra gives advice to these figures, and in the process further analyses the general situation of modern humanity, but in the end he concludes that even these leading intellectuals are hopeless: "These are not my proper companions. It is not for them that I wait here in my mountains."
Nietzsche sets out to denounce and illegitimize not only Christianity itself as a belief and a practice, but also the ethical-moral value system which modern western civilization has inherited from it. This book can be considered a further development of some of his ideas concerning Christianity that can be found in Beyond Good and Evil and in The Genealogy of Morals, particularly the idea that the present morality is an inversion of true, noble morality. An understanding of the main ideas in the latter works is therefore quite helpful in understanding and fully appreciating the ideas set forth in The Antichrist. One of the most important of these ideas is that Christianity has made people nihilistic and weak by regarding pity and related sentiments as the highest virtues. Here, just as in the Genealogy, Nietzsche traces the origin of these values to the ancient Jews who lived under Roman occupation, but here he puts them in terms of a reversal of their conception of God. He argues that the Jewish God was once one that embodied the noble virtues of a proud, powerful people, but when they became subjugated by the Romans, their God began to embody the "virtues" (more like sentiments) of an oppressed, resentful people, until it became something entirely alien to what it formerly had been.
Further in the book, after Nietzsche devotes a few passages to contrasting Buddhism with Christianity, he paints a picture of the Jesus of history as actually having lived a type of "Buddhistic" existence, and lambastes Paul particularly for turning this historically correct Jesus, vis-à-vis, Jesus the "Nazarene," into Jesus the "Christ." Also, Nietzsche argues that the Christian moral and metaphysical principles he considers so decadent has infiltrated our philosophy, so much that philosophers unwittingly work to defend these principles even when God is removed from the hypothesis. The purpose of this paper is to expound and assess some of these important reproaches that Nietzsche raises against Christianity, in order to glean from them those elements that can be considered to have lasting significance. It should also be noted that The Antichrist is predominantly aphoristic, of which this paper will not attempt to tie these ideas of Nietzsche's together into a coherent system. To do so, in my opinion, would not do Nietzsche justice. Instead these ideas will be presented and examined as they appear in the work -one by one and loosely associated.
Nietzsche begins by criticizing Christianity for denouncing and regarding as evil those basic instincts of human beings that are life-preserving and strength-promoting. In their place, Christianity maintains and advocate values that Nietzsche sees as life-negating or nihilistic, of which the most important is pity: Christianity is called the religion of pity. Pity stands opposed to the tonic emotions that heighten our vitality: it has a depressing effect. We are deprived of strength when we feel pity. That loss of strength which suffering as such inflicts on life is still further increased and multiplied by pity. Pity makes suffering contagious.
Pity, according to Nietzsche, is nothing less than the multiplication of suffering, in that it allows us to suffer along with those for whom we feel pity. It depresses us, sapping us of our strength and will to power. It is interesting to note that the German word for pity itself, Mitleid, literally means "suffering with" (leid = pain, suffering + mit = with). So to feel pity for someone is simply to suffer along with them, as Nietzsche sees it. It also promotes the preservation of those whom nature has selected for destruction, or in other words, those who Nietzsche calls "failures." This preservation of failures, he argues, makes the overall picture of life look decadent, in that it becomes filled with weak and retrograde individuals. Pity, then, has a twofold effect for Nietzsche, since it both multiplies suffering and leads to the preservation of those who would cause us this suffering as the objects of our pity. Ultimately, pity is nihilism put into practice, according to Nietzsche, since it makes life simply seem more miserable and decadent and therefore more worthy of negation itself. Nietzsche does not really develop this conception of pity any farther. As it stands, it seems to be rather problematic. Does his conception of pity mean to include compassion and sympathy as well? Can these words be used interchangeably? The German word for compassion is Mitleid as well, so it is possible that Nietzsche is using them interchangeably. The German word for sympathy, however, is Mitgefüühl, with which means “feeling." Perhaps Nietzsche is confusing pity with compassion and sympathy. Pity would seem to have a more negative connotation, in that it is a suffering-with that does not achieve anything; a waste of emotional energy toward those who are beyond help, in other words. Sympathy and compassion, as I understand the terms, seem to lean more toward having an understanding (a "feeling-with") of what someone is suffering through and being in a position to help that person. I take Nietzsche to be using (maybe misusing) these terms interchangeably, however, since he uses the word sympathy (Mitgefüühl) in other works in very similar contexts.
To Nietzsche, the Christian conception of God is one of the most decadent and contradictory of any type that has ever been conceived; The Christian conception of God-God as god of the sick, God as a spider, God as spirit, is one of the most corrupt conceptions of the divine ever attained on earth. It may even represent the low-water mark in the descending development of divine types. God degenerated into the contradiction of life, instead of being its transfiguration and eternal Yes! God as the declaration of war against life, against nature, against the will to live! God -the formula forever slander against "this world," for every lie about the "beyond" -God -the deification of nothingness, the will to nothingness the only means possible for them -psychologically prompted the Jews to elevate thei holy.
Nietzsche is interested in showing how the God of Israel, that is, the God of the Old Testament, was at the time a God of a very proud, powerful Jewish person. This is a healthier conception of God than the Christian one, according to Nietzsche, in that it was the Jew's own God -for them only. This God was conceived of as a being to whom proud people could give thanks for their power and self-assuredness, and it was a manifestation of the Jews' own self-proclaimed virtues. The ancient Jews ascribed both the good and the bad to their God, and in that respect it was consistent with nature, both helping and harming. When the Jews found themselves oppressed by Rome during the occupation of Palestine, however, with their freedom, power, and pride stripped from them, their God required a change that was reflective of their predicament. Instead of having a God that embodied the noble virtues of a proud, powerful person, as it once did, the God of the Jews developed into one that embodied the sentiments of an oppressed, resentful, and powerless group. It became a God of people who were trying to preserve themselves at any cost, even if that cost were the inversion of their own noble values. They transformed their God into a God of the weak, the poor, and the oppressed, making a virtue out of the necessity of their own condition. Want of revenge on their enemies, by any and r type of God to the point at which it became a God for everyone. That is to say, that their God became the one, true God, to whom everyone was held accountably. It also became a God that was all good, incapable of doing anything harmful, while the God of their enemies and oppressors became evil-in effect, the Devil. This is a very unhealthy type of God, according to Nietzsche, in that it "degenerates step by step into a mere symbol, a staff for the weary, a sheet-anchor for the drowning; when he becomes the God of the poor, the sinners, and the sick better than any other, and the attribute "Saviour" or "Redeemer" remains in the end as the one essential attribute of divinity . . .
"A God such as this can thus have an appeal to any group of people who are in a state of subjugation. But unlike the pagan Gods of strong, proud people, this type of God, as Nietzsche points out, remains in the state in which it was conceived (a God of the sick and weak), despite how strong a following it receives. It receives such a strong following because those who are from the ghettos, slums, and hospitals of the world, are the masses (There was no middle class in ancient Palestine; there were only the more elite subjugation and the subjugated masses). The God for "everyone" is attractive to those who live in conditions of powerlessness and misery, in that it allows them to deny their present existence in favour of a better one that is to come, in an appeal to the "redemption" of a world beyond. Therefore, this God-type becomes a life-denying one, in that it represents a denial of "this" life, as opposed to the healthy yes-saying, life-affirming, consistent -with the nature God of the ancient Jews. This particular type of God is therefore one that is ultimately nihilistic, involving the denial and rejection of the world and everything in it as sinful and decadent. Nature, flesh, and instinct thus become ever more devalued until they reach a point at which nature is seen as a cesspool, the flesh is mortified, and instincts are put in terms of evil "temptations." The concept of God continues to "deteriorate," as Nietzsche terms it, until what ultimately remains are a conception of God as "pure spirit," or in other words, entirely immaterial and non-corporeal, and this is held up as an ideal form of existence. Nietzsche simply thinks of this idea of pure spirit as pure "nothingness," in that it is merely an absurd, contradictory-to-nature postulation. To him, it ultimately represents nihilism and nothing less.
These claims of Nietzsche's are difficult to argue against, because Nietzsche does not really use much in the way of an argument here to arrive at these claims. Here is where one must have already read his Genealogy of Morals in order to understand better what is going on in these passages. The Genealogy actually does have a sustained argument for claims that are intimately related to the ones above that are found in The Antichrist. This argument deals with how the slave class (Jews), out of hatred and resentment, got their revenge on the noble class (Romans) by shaming them into accepting the slave class' morality. This is one of Nietzsche's most important claims, and it is essential to an understanding of The Antichrist. Nietzsche argues for this claim in the Genealogy by giving an account of the origins of the words ‘‘good' and ‘‘bad' and ‘‘good' and ‘‘evil'. In their etymological senses, the terms "moral" and "ethical" mean literally "common" and "ordinary." The etymological origin of the word "good," according to Nietzsche, reveals that it once meant "privileged," "aristocratic," "with a soul of high order," etc., and that "bad" originally meant "common," "low," and "plebeian." Even the German word schlecht, which is to mean, "badly," is akin to schlicht, which means "plain" or "simple." Furthermore, the word’s schlechthin und schlechtweg literally means "simply" or "downright." This was the language of the aristocratic upper classes in classical times, whom Nietzsche calls the noble, or master class.
The word "bad" was used by the master class, without any moral or ethical connotations, simply to refer and to differentiate them from common people, whom Nietzsche refers to as the slave class. The master class called them "good" due to their apparently superior social standing, or in other words, "good" was simply a term for those things that they were: Fierce, proud, brave, and noble. The lower class, or the slave class, on the other hand, developed their own moral language, which is that of the language of "good" and "evil." The anger and hatred that the slave class had for the master class had no outlet, or in other words their anger was impotent, due to their physical and political powerlessness. Nietzsche calls this the anger of ressentiment. The only way the slave class could get their revenge on the master class was to accept nothing less than a complete revaluation of the master class' values. The Jews, who epitomized the "priestly" way of life, according to Nietzsche, were the ones who began what he calls the "slave revolt in morality," which inverted the "aristocratic value equation (good=powerful=beautiful=happy=beloved of God)," to make a good out of their own station in life, and an evil out of the station of their enemies-the objects of their impotent anger and revenge.” The slave class accomplished this effect by turning "good" and "bad" into terms which not only made reference to one's political station in life, but also pointed to one's soul and depth as a person.
Thus, the language of "good" and "bad," which was originally used for the purpose of amorally denoting one's station in life, was reevaluated into the language of "good" and "evil," in which what is "good" is common, ordinary, poor, and familiar, and what is "evil" is damnable, unfamiliar, cruel, godless, accursed, and unblessed. In effect, the master class, over the last two thousand years, has been "poisoned" and shamed by the slave class and its language of "good" and "evil" into accepting the inversion of their own noble values, and thus the morality of the slave class, namely that which is "common," "ordinary," and "familiar," is the one that prevails today. From the above argument, understanding how Nietzsche claims that the subjugated Jews transformed their once yes-saying God into the nay-saying God of ressentiment and hatred is easier. This argument seems to ring true in many ways, but it is nevertheless based on the psychological presupposition that human beings are always seeking power and mastery over others, or in other words, that they are always exerting their "will to power," as Nietzsche calls it. In this way, Nietzsche sees the Jews as cunningly having found a way to regain power over their oppressors psychologically by shaming them with the use of the language of good and evil. This assessment goes for what is to follow below as well.
As he demonstrated, Nietzsche is careful not to confuse Buddhism with Christianity in his criticisms. Though he believes that both religions are nihilistic and decadent, he regards Buddhism as a far healthier and more realistic approach. In contrast to the Christian, who is always trying to avoid sin, the Buddhist’s main goal is to reduce suffering itself. The latter does not fall into the same trap as Christianity does, according to Nietzsche, in that it does not carry alongside of any moral presuppositions. It has long abandoned them, seeing them as mere deceptions. The Buddhist is therefore not engaged in the practice of moralizing and making judgements about others. A Buddhist achieves this reduction of suffering by living a passive, non-compulsive lifestyle. He does not become angry or resentful, no matter what transgressions someone has performed against him. Does neither he worry about himself nor others? He takes measures that will help him to avoid exciting his senses, while the Christian, on the other hand, does just the opposite though living an ascetic lifestyle and maintaining an emotionally charged relationship with his God through prayer. The Buddhist, in his avoidance of suffering, simply aims to maintain a steady peace, calm, and mildness in his lifestyle and temperament. It is a very important point that in pursuing this aim, the Buddhist actually succeeds, whereas the Christian does not succeed in removing sin, and is thus always in a state of wanting "redemption" and "forgiveness," never attaining the "grace" of God that he so desires. The Buddhist is therefore able to achieve a sort of peace and tranquillity on earth.
This idea is vital, in that it relates directly with Nietzsche's conception of the historical Jesus. Nietzsche paints a picture of the Jesus of history for being a true evangel, which means that he did not subscribe to the concepts of guilt, punishment, and reward. He did not engage in faith, but only in actions, and these actions prescribed a way of life that Nietzsche sees as rather Buddhistic. The evangel does not get angry, does not pass judgment, and does neither he feel any hatred nor resentment for his enemies. He rejected the whole idea of sin and repentance, and believed that this evangelical way of life was divine in itself, closing the gap between man and God so much that it is God, according to Nietzsche. Therefore, he saw prayer, faith, and redemption as farcical, instead believing that the "kingdom of heaven" is a state of mind that can be experienced on earth by living this type of peaceful, judgment-suspending existence, free from worry, guilt, and anger. Nietzsche argues that this was the life of Jesus and nothing more, and this way of life was the "glad tidings" which he brought:
The "bringer of glad tidings" died as he had lived, as he had taught -not to "redeem men" but to show how one must live. This practice is his legacy to humanity: his behaviour before the judges, before the catch-poles, before the accusers and all kinds of slander and scorn -his behaviour on the cross. He does not resist, he does not defend his right, he takes no step that might ward off the worst; on the contrary, he provokes it. He begs, he suffers, he loves with those, in those, who do him evil. Not to resist, not to be angry, not to hold responsible-but to resist not even the evil one -to love him.
This conception of Jesus is entirely alien to the one that the church has given us. For the creation and dissemination of this misconception, Nietzsche blames Paul. He also blames Jesus' immediate followers as well. Once Jesus had been executed, according to Nietzsche, his followers could not come to grips with the shock of his sudden loss. Filled with a want of revenge, they wanted to know who killed him and why. They determined that the rulers of the existing Jewish order had killed him because his doctrine went against that order. Not wanting his death to have been in vain, they saw him as a rebel against the Jewish status quo in the same way that they saw themselves as such. In this way, argues Nietzsche, his followers completely misunderstood him. The truly "evangelic" thing to do, he says, would have been to forgive his death instead, or to die in like manner without judgment or need of vindication. However, Jesus' followers, resentful about his loss, wanted vengeance upon those of the existing Jewish order. The way that they accomplished this vengeance is the same as the way in which the Jews exacted their revenge on their Roman oppressors. They considered Jesus to be the Messiah of whom they were foretold by Jewish scripture, and in this way they elevated him to divine status as the Son of God (since he referred to himself metaphorically -as a "child of God"). Faced with the question of how God could allow Jesus' death to occur, they came up with the idea that God had sent down his own Son as a sacrifice for their sins, as a sacrifice of the guiltless for the sins of the guilty, even though Jesus himself refused to engage in feeling guilt. They then used the figure of Jesus and their misunderstanding of his doctrine of the "kingdom of God" for making judgments against their enemies in the existing Jewish order, just as the Jews they had turned their God into something universal for the purpose of passing judgment on the Romans:
On the other hand, the frenzied veneration of these totally unhinged souls no longer endured the evangelic conception of everybody's equal right to be a child of God, as Jesus had taught: it was their revenge to elevate Jesus extravagantly, to sever him from themselves precisely as the Jews had formerly, out of revenge against their enemies, severed their God from themselves and elevated him. The one God and the one Son of God-both products of ressentiment.
The figure of Paul, according to Nietzsche, exacerbated this misunderstanding of Jesus' teachings even further. In fact, that is an understatement. In this elevated figure of a crucified Jesus, Paul, with his "priestly" instincts, saw a way to gain power by forming "herds," as Nietzsche puts it. He completely rewrote the history of Jesus' life and Christianity for his own purposes, adding the doctrines of the resurrection, the immaculate conception, and the idea of personal immortality as a reward. Nietzsche attributes Paul's efforts to the hatred and ressentiment of the priestly class, and refers to Paul as the "dysangelist," or in other words, the "bringer of ill tidings." After Paul, the life of Jesus had been turned into something completely alien and antithetical to what it actually was. Again, this theory of Nietzsche's rests on the assumption that humans are in essence motivated by a will to power. Historical evidence concerning the historical Jesus is quite lacking in Nietzsche's account; rather it relies on a psychological profile of those who participated in this historical scene. However, this psychological analysis seems to present a scenario that is at least conceivable -especially more so than the idea of an immaculate conception and a resurrection. I think Nietzsche takes the Buddhistic element of Jesus too far, however. He provides too specifically an account of Jesus' lifestyle and philosophical persuasions without any evidence. It is still quite possible that Jesus could have simply been a more noteworthy rebel against the Romans and the Jewish status quo. More historical evidence would seem to be in order, but Nietzsche's account remains very compelling without it. Its profound significance lies in the fact that in it, Nietzsche has the courage and honesty to show us what, in his and every non-Christian's eyes, is far more likely to have been the case.
Nietzsche is also concerned with how deeply these decadent Christian values have ingrained themselves in our social practices and presuppositions. He especially laments how it has infiltrated the study of philosophy, particularly German philosophy.
Saying whom we consider our antithesis is necessary: it is the theologian and whatever has theologians' blood in its veins-and that includes our whole philosophy. Nietzsche argues that Christianity has poisoned philosophy with this nihilistic rejection of the body in favour of pure spirit. He compares the idealist philosopher with the priest, in that the former reduces everything in the world to idea, so that the physical world does not really exist. Figures such as Georg Hegel have done exactly this sort of thing, and Nietzsche is especially critical of German philosophy, both for its idealist’s tendencies and its conception of morality-both of which can be traced to this theologian's instinct. Nietzsche blames Germany's heavy Protestant tradition for the corruption of philosophy, and he criticizes Kant especially for being the latest, "greatest" philosopher to continue this corruption. Kant denies that the physical world can be apprehended directly (the world of noumenon) by the senses, and in this respect he is not a strict idealist, but rather some phenomenalists. What is meant by this is that all we can perceive is a phenomenon, which appear to us as ideas, and the physical (noemenal) world is something that we can never directly observe. Kant's system does not deny that the physical world exists, but it denies that it exists as we know it, and that is enough for Nietzsche to criticize him. One can understand, however, how Nietzsche sees the theologian's blood running through Kant's veins, in that Kant sees the physical world as mere phenomenon -as phantom reality. Nietzsche also criticizes Kant for finding a way to maintain a theoretical justification for morality -the Christian modality while removing God from the picture, namely the Categorical Imperative. Nietzsche rejects this system as one that turns people into automatons. He claims that a virtue must be one of a people's own inventions, not an abstract "duty" in-itself, which must be followed universally for its own sake. If people do not follow its own virtues and do its own duty, he argues, it will perish. What Nietzsche seems to be getting at here is that people simply do what they need to do to thrive and preserve themselves, and as explained earlier, different people find themselves having to adapt to different circumstances, such as the Jews did under Roman occupation. Their virtues and duties had to change according to their situation. This is what Kant means when he says that "Kant's categorical imperative endangered life itself!"8 Nietzsche then goes on to denounce Kant's deontologicalism itself:
An action demanded by the instinct of life is proved to be right by the pleasure that accompanies it; yet this nihilist with his Christian dogmatic entrails considered pleasure an objection. What could destroy us more quickly than working, thinking, and feeling without any inner necessity, without any deeply personal choice, without pleasure-as an automaton of "duty?” This is the very recipe for decadence, even for idiocy. Kant became an idiot, and this man was contemporary of Goethe! This catastrophic spider was considered the German philosopher-he still is.
Kant, in this way, also goes against nature with his system of morality, according to Nietzsche. It is simply a Christian God's "Thou shalt" disguised by a secular, deductive philosophy, or as Nietzsche would see it, it is borne of the theologian's instinct. Any philosophy student can see where Nietzsche gets these ideas from, and in most respects, he seems to be right about this. However, not all of the nihilistic elements of philosophy have their roots in Christianity. Western philosophy has a fundamental inheritance from Plato, who also, as Nietzsche is surely aware, rejects the physical world. He does this not because he thinks of it as sinful, but because he thinks it is ultimately only shadow of reality. Instead, Plato favours the world of the Forms, in which the Forms are paradigms of all objects and concepts that can be found in the physical, sensory world in which we presently live. Plato favours this other world because the physical world is in a constant state of flux, he argues. Since we cannot have knowledge of something that is always changing, as he claims, there can be no real knowledge of anything in the physical world. Knowledge then, for Plato, can only be possible in this other world through contemplation of the Forms, since these Forms are unchanging. Therefore, western post-Socratic philosophy began with a rejection of the physical world, and this rejection also constitutes a large, if not major source of the nihilism in western philosophy about which Nietzsche so often complains.
The figures of mythology and literature embody a plethora of human facets, and allow us to observe various aspects of our psyches as they stand before us, interact, and live out the implications of their essence. Since Freud's 'The Interpretation of Dreams', psychoanalysis has also employed such a myth: that of Oedipus Rex. The present essay attempts to develop other dramatis personae of the structural mind, elucidating an antithetical relationship of Jesus Christ to Oedipus, and exploring its psychoanalytic and philosophic implications. This exploration brings us to a fuller appreciation of the symmetry of the structural theory, deriving the association of Christ with the superego, and deducing from the structural theory the presence of a Christ complex. By understanding Oedipus as an anti-Christ, we are given access to Nietzschean philosophy, and more explicitly develop the conceptual relationship between Nietzsche and Freud via the figure of Zarathustra.
Christ and Oedipus stand as two mythical kings, with remarkable and henceforth an obscure relationship to one another. From birth to death, we find a number of striking parallels and anti-parallels. Both Oedipus and Christ were born under unique circumstances, with the identity of their parents cloaked in obscurity. Oedipus was taken away from his parents in order to thwart infanticide and the oracle's prophecy that he would slay his father and lay with his mother. Thus was it unknown to Oedipus that his father and mother were king and queen of Thebes. The temperaments of Christ's parents were also obscured, and in a similar fashion it was initially unknown that Christ's father was the King of Kings, and his mother the holiest of holy. Oedipus and Christ were both unwitting heirs to a throne, and each was destined for a unique kingdom.
Christ and Oedipus ultimately developed an antiparallel relationship to their parents: Their respective triads were diametrically opposed. The father of Oedipus realized his mortality at the hands of his son, and his mother, and Iocaste subsequently had a directly sexual relationship with him. The father of Christ, however, was immortal, and his mother was virginal despite her conception and delivery. Oedipus destroyed the father and achieved union with the mother, while Christ shunned the mother and achieved union with the father. Oedipus destroyed the will of the father in order to inherit his kingdom, while Christ acquiesced to the will of the father in order to inherit his. Oedipus accomplished a worldly kingdom by the assertion of his will, while Christ accomplished a spiritual kingdom by the renunciation of his. We can observe that even the conclusions of each myth are anti-parallels. Oedipus was ultimately punished for affirming his will, while Christ achieved immortality for the renunciation of his. Christ and Oedipus thus appear in a state of dialectical antagonism with respect to one another.
The relationship of Christ to Oedipus has interesting implications both analytically and philosophically. We may first conceive of Christ as an anti-Oedipus, with particular respect to the structural theory of the mind. Oedipus may be thought to represent the libidinal drives of the id (namely Eros and thanatos), and has achieved satisfaction of these drives despite the socially organizing principles of family. I posit that as Oedipus is associated with the id, so should Christ be associated with the superego. Introducing a religious figure as the embodiment of the superego does not seem controversial, for it is posited to be a source of our notion of perfection, as well as our moral compass and conscience. Like the Christ figure who strives for union with the Father, the superego too, according to Freud, represents a "longing for the father." In addition to sharing characteristics with the superego, Christ also satisfies a further requirement: as the superego is antithetical to the id, so should the embodiment of the superego be antithetical to the embodiment of the id. Unlike other religious figures, Christ both instantiates the principles of the superego and is antithetical to the id's Oedipus. Thus, dynamic elements of the structural theory may be played out in the personae of Christ and Oedipus.
By virtue of symmetry with the Oedipal complex, we may posit the existence of a Christ complex. The id-affirming activity of Oedipus is anathema to social and familial organization of the external world (in short, the reality principle), and the mythical Oedipus encounters demise because of it. We must note in the myth, however, that Oedipus does enjoy a degree of success and actualization because of his behaviour in that he did acquire and serve the kingdom of Thebes-his will to power was satisfied. Simply stated, the drives of the id can and do bring about vitality, health, and success. While the superego appropriately counterbalances the drives of the id to achieve equilibrium, it is conceivable that these activities may also function pathologically, that is one may overcome one's drives to the point of debilitation. The superego may drive an individual to an aberrant point of guilt (wanting, for example, to suffer for the sins of the world), to the idealistic and false notion that one's parents are perfect (my father is God, my mother is without sin), and to the masochistic impulse that one must be crucified -if need be -in order to please them.
The Christ figure as a personification of the superego - demonstrates a situation in which an individual is so acquiescent to the will of another (in this case, God the Father) that he loses his very life before he will assert his own will. Like the Oedipus myth, the Christ’s myth also presents heterogeneous results: Christ is punished by crucifixion, but is then rewarded by resurrection and ascension. Considering the "morals" to each myth collectively, we note that some form of balance between these two poles must be achieved, as we would state for the relationship of the id to the superego.
In the previous section we considered Christ as an anti-Oedipus, but now we will consider Oedipus as an anti-Christ. The concepts of an "anti-Christ," as well as an earlier indication that unbalanced Christ-like attributes are the marks of pathology rather than perfection, hearken us back to the work of Nietzsche. The antagonism of Christ and Oedipus bears an interesting relationship to Nietzsche's Zarathustra, and suggests a novel Nietzschean interpretation of Sophocles.
Zarathustra's name is a European modification of the ancient Persian Zoroaster, from whom the religion Zoroastrianism is derived, a religion that asserts the near equal balance of good and evil gods. Zarathustra, the protagonist of Nietzsche's work in, 'Thus Spoke Zarathustra', was an innovative literary-philosophical treatise published in four parts. Zarathustra, who retreated to the mountains at the age of thirty, has descended ten years later to share his insight with the people. Zarathustra is clearly presented as a quasi-religious figure, and delivers speeches that oftentimes reveal a formal - if not substantive - unity with those of Christ. Of course, Nietzsche made no secret of his fervent anti-Christian sentiments, and in fact hailed himself as the anti-Christ.
In various respects, Oedipus and Zarathustra stand in opposition to Christ, but what is their relationship to one other? Is there some order to the triad of Christ, Oedipus, and Zarathustra? I posit that these three personae bear a triatic relationship to one another that possesses a formal unity to the three spirituals metamorphoses introduced in the Prologue of 'Thus Spoke Zarathustra'. In the Prologue, Nietzsche describes three metamorphoses of the spirit, which take the form of the camel, the lion, and the child. The strength and the role of the camel are to bear the burden of old values-it acquiesces to the value system to which it is an heir. The first metamorphosis transforms the camel into a lion, who proves victorious in the battle against tradition's value-laden dragon. The dragon is described for being covered with scales that read "thou shalt," while the lion battles with the "I will." By conquering the dragon, the lion can only create conditions for the creation of new values, but is incapable of creating values itself. This is the task of the allegorical child, who looks upon life freshly, and is able to be the creator of new values.
It is likely that the camel is representative of the Christian (if not Christ’s himself), who, in Nietzsche's perspective, accepts and bears the yoke of slave morality, as well as the mediocre culture of Christian pity. Nietzsche calls, ironically, for a move forward to the pre-Christian and pre-Socratic value schema, and looks to the Greek concept of virtue, as well as the "master morality" he describes in 'Beyond Good and Evil'. Thus, the camel must metamorphosize into the lion who is able to assert its own will and conquer inherited values, although creating its own may not yet be able. I suggest that Oedipus be this lion in the desert. "Thou shalt not kill, thou shalt honour thy mother and father" speaks the dragon: Oedipus replies "I will" and is exalted for it. Oedipus has killed the father, and it is this id-like Oedipal spirit that has similarly killed God the Father. "God is dead" announces Zarathustra, and it is the Oedipal spirit of man who is the murderer.
This Oedipal persona, he who has killed the father, is powerful but nonetheless limited. Like the lion of the three metamorphoses, he can slay the dragon of old values but lacks the capability of creating new ones. This deficit derives from the fact that, like the 19th century European intellectual climate of Nietzsche's time, Oedipus cannot face the truth with his eyes open. Nietzsche's fear for European thought is rooted in the terror of man after the realization that God is dead, and that we have killed him. When the metanarrative of scientific truth collapses in a similar fashion, man is destined for nihilism. When Oedipus realizes his own truth, he too retreats to the comforting darkness of nihilism by plucking out his eyes. In this way can we see this Sophoclean tragedy in Nietzschean terms. Nietzsche, however, demands that man go further, that he overcome himself, that he see the truths and the lies while still opening his eyes to say Yes to life. Zarathustra is this child. The hermit who encounters Zarathustra on his descent from the mountain back to the world of man (a descent that is reminiscent of the philosopher's return to the cave in Plato's Republic) recognizes his awakening, saying: "Zarathustra has changed, Zarathustra has become a child, Zarathustra is an awakened one; what do you now want among the sleepers?" Zarathustra understands and accepts the death of God, but still abides by the wisdom of the earth with an affirming Yes. In this is he free for the task of valuation, the task of the child in the final metamorphosis.
It is perhaps strange that we even speak of a progression when in fact the movement of these mythical figures moves backwards in time, from Christ at the beginning of the first millennium, to Oedipus in the 5th century BC, to Zarathustra (its descendable character comes from the Persian figure Zoroaster) who dates back to two millennia BC We start at the phase of the camel, at the Christian phase, because that is where Nietzsche finds our cultural spirit. Envisioning a linear progression toward some future uebermensch would not be consistent with Nietzsche, but rather more likely that the metamorphosis of the spirit is something that goes back to or recurs, a prominent notion in Nietzschean thought.
Given that the id is Oedipal, and the superego is Christ-like, could we reason backwards from the myth and consider an undescribed or perhaps unactualized structural element that is Zarathustrian? Is this mystery of Zarathustra not a historical figure resulting from the cultural evolution of man, but rather a psychological state that we ourselves may achieve when we synthesize the antagonism of Christ and Oedipus? If the ego is a battlefield of the id and superego, could the Zarathustrian ego be the battle already won?
According to Freud, it is through the ego we have our primary connection to the world through perception, and it is the ego that ultimately mediates the presence or reality of the external world within the mind. Achieving control of the id is further responsible for censorship and repression into the unconscious, and attempts. Finally, recognizing that the superego is a modification of the ego in response to the Oedipal drives of the id is important. How would the Zarathustrian ego compare? As an embodiment of the Nietzschean "will to power," asserting that the essential condition of a Zarathustrian ego would be its strength is reasonable. When we posit such strength, we will see how all other elements of the structural theory naturally conform to a Nietzschean mold.
Zarathustra is a philosophical and religious figure who is introduced to supplant Christ -how, therefore, would a Zarathustrian ego affect the ontogeny of the Christ-like superego? Although the origin of the superego as a reaction to the Oedipal drives of the id has been, the superego emerges from the ego (and subsequently dominates it) by virtue of the weakness of the ego. According to Freud.
"[The superego] is a memorial of the former weakness and dependence of the ego, and the mature ego remains subject to its domination. As the child was once under a compulsion to obey its parents, so the ego submits to the categorical imperative of its superego."
The birth of the superego is clearly a result of the fragility of the ego, as well as its inability to harness the forces of the id. Thus, assuming a greater strength of the ego, we would expect less dynamic impetus for the formation of the Christ-like superego. In this way, the Zarathustrian ego would function as a Nietzschean anti-Christ. I posit that the strength of the Zarathustrian ego with the subsequent lack of need for the superego - could be conceived as either a step in the development of the individual (ontogeny) or a step in the development of the species psychologically (phylogeny).
Heidegger, a major 20th century philosopher and interpreter of Nietzsche, repeatedly puts forth the question in Nietzsche: Who is Nietzsche's Zarathustra? He returns us to the notion that Zarathustra is some type of bridge to the uebermensch, and inquires into the nature of this bridge.
”Nietzsche has Zarathustra say: 'For that man ought be redeemed from revenge that is for me the bridge to the highest hope and a rainbow after long storms.' How strange, how alien these words must seem to the customary view of Nietzsche's philosophy that we have furnished for ourselves . . . But then why is it that something so decisive depends of redemption from revenge? Where is the spirit of revenge at home? Nietzsche replies to our question in the third-to-last episode of the second part of Thus Spoke Zarathustra, which bears the heading "On Redemption." Here the following words appear: "The spirit of revenge: My friends, up to now that was man's best reflection; May wherever there was suffering, there also had to be punishment."
Overcoming the spirit of revenge, from one perspective a step from Judaism to Christianity, takes upon more psychological significance here. Christian thought attempted (in principle) to turn us away from the "eye for an eye" sensitivity of Judaism, in order to purge us of a vengeful and punitive attitude toward others. It appears as if Nietzsche wishes to cure us of the Christian sensibility that engenders a vengeful and punitive attitude toward ourselves. In the context of Nietzsche's thought, the association of punishment with suffering is also part of the Christian legacy. For those of "herd morality," the Christian superego adds offensive capabilities to injurious associations of guilt and causal significance to suffering, rather than viewing it as a part of the human, that is to say natural, condition. Not only must we suffer, but we must punish ourselves for the guilt about which has brought this suffering. Thus in The Anti-Christ, Nietzsche gives praise to Buddhism for its "struggle against suffering," as opposed to the Christian "struggle against sin."
For those of "master morality," suffering is also inflicted by a superego. The natural predilections of the master include the infliction of suffering on others. When this natural tendency is repressed, the impulse is turned inwards in the form of conscience: One comes to inflict pain on oneself, as well as moral censure for the very drive to inflict pain at all. Perhaps the Zarathustrian ego is strong enough to suffer and to inflict suffering without the need to punish itself masochistically through the superego.
The Zarathustrian ego will also have a unique relationship to the id, as well as the instincts of the id. Before Freud conceived of the id, Nietzsche recognized the power and importance of the instincts. In Beyond Good and Evil, he points out the instinctual foundation of ostensibly rational thought, and furthermore suggests that the conscious, rather than the unconscious mind is the proper domain for these instincts. Thus, the rational ego is not opposed, and perhaps should not be opposed, to the instincts of the id.
We see a picture of the Zarathustrian ego emerging. It is strong, and thus limits the genesis or at least the power of the superego. Suffering and to inflict suffering without the masochistic retribution of punishment is able. It does not attempt to conquer the id but rather absorbs it, integrating and recognizing its instincts as an appropriate part of its conscious activities. Instead of repressing and censoring instinct - and therefore mutating it - it accepts and envelops it, or at least does not split itself off into a rational ego and irrational id in the first place. With the psychic apparatus more wholly integrated at the surface and interface between interior and exterior, the Zarathustrian ego is capable of a richer and more natural interaction with the world. Unlike Oedipus, it is strong enough for truth; Unlike Christ, it is strong enough for lies.
We see a henceforth obscure relationship between the personae of Oedipus and Christ elucidated. Each born under some cloak of doubt, each destined to be the heir to a unique kingdom - one by the satisfaction of his impulses and the other by denial of his. If Oedipus represents a particular aspect of the mind that may experience pathology if unbalanced, then so may Christ represent an aspect of the mind that may be pathological if unbalanced (namely, the Christ’s complex). From the perspective of Nietzsche - who no doubt recognized the great importance of Christ as evidenced by his fervent opposition to all things Christian - we may also consider the Christ complex in its cultural expression. The so-called slave mentality, the culture of pity and weakness, and the inhibitions of cultural genius were, according to Nietzsche, in large part due to Platonic and Christian ideals. Once again, we may view the Christ’s complex in terms of psychic ontogeny (a Freudian perspective) as well as psychic phylogeny (a Nietzschean perspective).
The assertion of Oedipus as an anti-Christ led appropriately to the discussion of Nietzsche, and Nietzsche's own anti-Christ Zarathustra. "Who is Nietzsche's Zarathustra?" Heidegger asks. One answer is that he was a teacher of eternal recurrence and the uebermensch, although Heidegger directs us to a deeper consideration of the question. I posit that Zarathustra represents a new form of ego, strong enough to incorporate the instincts of the id, and therefore strong enough to have little needs for the genesis of the superego. This is consistent, in many ways, with Nietzsche's vision: an ego strong enough to recognize and embrace instinct, and to trust the wisdom of the earth rather than the ephemera of a Christian superego. From our cultural beginning of the Christian superego, we make the first step of recurrence to the Oedipal lion, slaying the dragon of "Thou shalt," with the id's "I will.” Finally, the child of the Zarathustrian ego is born: a new developmental beginning, a recurrence to the ancients, an opportunity for new strength that sees the death of God, but does not yearn again for the father in the form of a superego.
Within Freud's writings on the unconscious, dream interpretation, and the vicissitudes of the drives, resonates the ever-present spectre of Nietzsche's absence, as an intellectual indebtedness about which Freud consistently remained silent. Freudian scholars now regularly attempt to repay this debt, as the growing incidence of articles and books comparing Freud with Nietzsche testifies.
It is now recognised that Freud was aware of Nietzsche's remarks on the significance of dreams in The Birth of Tragedy (Lehrer 1995) and Human, All Too Human (Lehrer 1995, Lehrer 1999 Parkes 1999, and Assoun 2000) the writings on sublimation and repression (or ressentiment) in The Genealogy of Morals (Lehrer 1995) and the philosophy of will to power. The drives more generally (Lehrer 1995, Assoun 2000) do not wish here solely to establish a connection of influence between Nietzsche and Freud, as I believe this has been amply demonstrated in existing literature. Rather, my primary aim in this paper is to explore the differences between their philosophies: Differences that are often obscured by commentators in their enthusiasm to reveal the germ of psychoanalysis in Nietzsche's philosophy. In particular, I am interested in the different mode of discourse that each adopts in his effort to comprehend the enigma of the relation between the body and language. For, while there are clear comparisons to be made between Freud and Nietzsche's researches -and a clear genealogy between them I wish here to contend that Freud's theory of drives demonstrate a commitment to a different 'economy' than Nietzsche's: In short (and according to a Nietzschean typology), Freud's writing exhibits a different 'will to power' to that of Nietzsche. Thus, notwithstanding their shared emphasis upon the importance of the unconscious, dreams, and the drives, Freud and Nietzsche's theories tell very different stories about the life of the drives. For, while the economy that informs Freud's theory accords to a conservative perspective, for Nietzsche life is expansive, even wasteful, and thus his philosophy is, economically, contrary to Freud. I would like to provide the conditions in this paper for a conversation between Nietzsche and Freud, although a rather one-sided conversation, in which Nietzsche is given the last word.
When I argue that the style, or economy, of discourse limits the kinds of answers that it can turn up, I employ Nietzsche's account of the relation between truth and the body that we find in his perspectives and his ontology of will to power (Wille zur Macht). Perspectives are the doctrine that all knowing is a perspectival-knowing -an interpretation developed by particular interests -and with particular goals and thus that 'truth' is always partial and motivated. Accordingly, will to power is what motivates perspectival truths: That is, what interprets. While the concept of perspective critiques the philosopher's notion of universal Truth, will to power is Nietzsche's challenge to the common conception of 'will,' as a singular form that controls our actions. He writes in his notes: “the will of psychology hitherto is an unjustified generalization . . . This will does not exist at all . . . ” “There are any durable ultimate units, no atoms, no monads,” he writes in another note: Rather, “'beings' are only introduced by us (from perspective grounds of practicality and utility).” Nietzsche introduces the term Wille zur Macht as a principle of multiplicity and growth. Rather than the monadic 'will,' he posits that there are many 'wills'-or drives-at work in the course of events, and that through a constant struggle (Kampf), this plurality provides the impetus for events, decisions, and interpretations, or perspectives. The organism itself is the outcome of a confederacy of wills to power (Willens-Punktationen) (Nietzsche 1970): a bargain struck between wills for the sake of a collective increase of power. The body interprets itself as a unity, as any short-term victory achieved by one will or another is claimed by the will of consciousness. Will to power and perspectives are thus intimately connected for Nietzsche? All life, as will to power, interprets: That is, it orders whatever it encounters into a value hierarchy, according to its own needs. The organism itself is of its own product of the will’s interpreting -or organising-one another. As such, the interpretation (or perspective) is indicative of a specific mode of life, and must be read not as impartial, but as a function of the particular order of drives of which the body is composed.
This understanding of the body as an organisation of competing and cohabiting wills, and of truth as conditioned by will to power, is what Nietzsche has in mind when he writes of philosophy, in Beyond Good and Evil:
Gradually it has become clear to me what every great philosophy so far has been: Namely, the personal confession of its author and a kind of involuntary and incognizantly latent anguish. I do not believe that a “drive to knowledge” is the father of philosophy; But rather than another drive had, here as elsewhere, employed understanding (and misunderstanding) as a mere instrument. (Nietzsche 1989).
Philosophy, thus conceived as a type of confession, attempts to conceal the drives, or interests, that motivate it with the veil of universal reason. For Nietzsche, the desire to be impartial, or to speak universal truths, betrays a weakness in the organism that will not own its truths. Throughout his writings, Nietzsche sets to unmasking the philosophers, demonstrating the 'type' of being for whom the truth of the text holds. From Socrates to Hegel, he diagnoses philosophers as sick animals, and philosophy as the host for their disease. For this reason Nietzsche looks forward to a time when 'philosopher-artists' use their discourse to explore, rather than conceal, the drives. Such a philosophy emphasises upon the creation of truth-through the use of a poetic language of metaphor-rather than truth's description or delineation, as if it were already 'there,' a thing-in-itself. Nietzsche's philosophy of will to power, and the instinctual drives, too, may be regarded only as truth in this sense of truth as creation: Will, to power is a metaphor with which we can make sense of our experience, but is false if understood as a truth 'in-itself?' Nietzsche's ontology of will to power is, by his own account, merely a 'waking dream': The interpretation of “nervous stimuli,” and subsequent positing of their causes. For Nietzsche, the 'healthy' philosopher acknowledges his truths as his own poetic creations: as the product of the free play-or dream-like interpreting-of his drives.
We find the criterion for Nietzsche's judgements of the philosophers in, On the Genealogy of Morals, are where Nietzsche develops his philosophy of drives through an account of how humanity has come to turn life against itself, or, how we have come to value the inhibition of wills rather than their direct expression as will to power. This inhibition of will is most evident in religious doctrines that preach the renunciation of sensuality and desire. Yet, the philosopher, with his self-effacing appeal to universal reason, also renounces life and will. So how did this devaluation of desire and will come to take a hold of humanity? Nietzsche responds to this question by characterising different 'modes of life' in terms of their perspectives. The 'master-type' is Nietzsche's appellation for those who take control of and determine their environment through the act of naming, evaluating whatever agrees with their constitutions as 'good,' and whatever does not agree-that is, whatever appears base, beneath consideration-as 'bad.' On the other hand, the 'slave-type'-Nietzsche's diagnosis for humanity in general-designates those 'ill-constituted' beings already labelled 'bad' by the master, and to whom the former morality poses a threat. The slave-type evaluates backwards, demarcating first whatever intimidates it as 'evil,' while that which appears most harmless becomes its highest virtue. However, Nietzsche's objection to slave morality is not simply that it is a derivative mode of evaluation. Rather, it is a question of culture: in other words, of the type of evaluation that shapes the life of these people. The ill-constituted slave has achieved a reversal of all values, and thus triumphs over the master. The master is 'better constituted' as his confederacy of wills, will to power, strikes a productive balance between the active force that commands, and the reactive force that obeys. Conversely, the circuitous mechanism by which the slave moral system develops and reroutes the drive so that 'life' is inhibited. In the slave-type the most passive (or 'reactive') drives dominate and subdue the most active. Like a herd animal, the slave lives so as not to draw to himself the attention of the stronger, better constituted, beasts of prey. Thus life in the main is reduced to a mode of the self-preservation rather than increase. The master-type is marginalised, alienated from his power, and must convert to the slave morality in order to survive the wrath of the overwhelming number of slaves pitted against him.
It is in the account of the master's conversion to slave morality that we find the clearest resonances with Freud's psychoanalytic theory, particularly his accounts of sublimation and repression. For Nietzsche, the master is tamed through the acquisition of conscience, or more precisely “bad conscience”: That feeling of guilt that serves to reign in the expression of power. The victory of slave morality is to universalise the perspective of the downtrodden, the victim, and to install this perspective into the master, at whose hands the victim suffers. In grammatical terms, guilt consists in an identification with the object of an action rather than its subject, and thus all become passive, unable to give expression to their impulses. This situation came to prevail through the socialisation of the human, who had thereby to become “calculable, regular, necessary, even in his own image of himself, if he is to be able to stand security for his own future” (Nietzsche 1989): in order, that is, to have the right to make promises. Nietzsche's variation on the theme of the social contract, therefore, demonstrates what must have occurred before we were able to make a contract in the first place. We must have had to install a sense of the other's well-being into ourselves at the expense of our own free expression of power, and this must have necessitated an extremely painful and protracted process of shaping the individual as more or less exchangeable type within the social economy:
If something is to stay in the memory it must be burned in: Only that which never ceases to hurt stays in the memory”-this is a main clause of the oldest (unhappily also the most enduring) psychology on earth. (Nietzsche 1989).
Only in the context of a social economy of sameness could the notion of guilt arise, according to Nietzsche, out of the concept of debt (the German for both 'guilt' and 'debt' is Schuld). 7 Punishment thus consists in the creditor's right to extract from the debtor's body the pleasure of freely discharging one's power at the expense of another. The nature of the economy is that all are exchangeable, and the juridical system regulates this principle by converting masters into slaves and slaves into masters, in what Nietzsche calls a “carnival of cruelty” (Nietzsche 1989).
In order to become a social animal—and thus a regular participant in the economy of the social contract-we has had to renounce our own stake in life as will to power. Specifically, in the human animal will to power turns in upon itself -makes itself it’s own victim—paradoxically for the sake of survival. In his explanation of this process, Nietzsche anticipates Freud's theory of repression and the Oedipus Complex, only here rather than castration, the master-type faces extinction:
I regard the bad conscience as the serious illness that man was bound to contract under the stress of the most fundamental change he ever experienced—that change that occurred when he found himself finally enclosed the walls of society and of peace . . . in this new world they no longer possessed their former guides, their regulating, unconscious and infallible drives: they were reduced to thinking, inferring, reckoning, co-ordinating cause and effect, these unfortunate creatures; they were reduced to their “consciousness,” their weakest and most fallible organ!.
The drives that once ordered the life of the master-type now go to ground, resorting instead to covertly means of satisfaction: “as a rule they had to seek newly and, as it was, subterranean gratifications” (1989b, p. 84). Nietzsche's explanation of this process again resonates with Freud's account of the vicissitudes of the drives:
. . . All instincts that do not discharge themselves outwardly turn inward—this is what I call the internalization (Verinnerlichung) of man: thus it was that man first developed what was later called his “soul.” The entire inner world, originally as thin as if it were stretched between two membranes, expanded and extended itself, acquired depth, breadth, and height, in the same measure as outward discharge was inhibited. (Nietzsche 1989).
When we are compelled not to act, we turn the charged drive inward as thought. The soul, or consciousness, thus constitutes a reservoir for the conversion of active force into internalised reactivity. For Nietzsche, we create an inner world to the extent that we fail to create in the outer world. The expansive economy of will to power—which wants only increases, so that it can then squander itself in a grand gesture of expenditure—carves out its new domain within its own flesh (as the unconscious), so that an economy of sameness can operate at the level of consciousness.
The above passage from, On the Genealogy of Morals clearly resonates with Freud's psychoanalytic insights. Indeed, Freud uses the term Verinnerlichung, 'internalization,' to explain the manner in which we incorporate aspects of the outside world to form components of our own psyche: in particular, the internalization of outside authority in the case of the super-ego. Indeed, later in Genealogy Nietzsche also provides the germ for Freud's theory of sublimation: . . . the sweetness and plenitude peculiar to the aesthetic state (is) derived precisely from the ingredient of “sensuality” . . . so that sensuality is not overcome by the appearance of the aesthetic condition, as Schopenhauer believed, but only transfigured and no longer enters consciousness as sexual excitement. (Nietzsche 1989).
For Freud, too, sublimation represents a diversion (through repression) of the drives from their primary, sexual, aim, to produce creatively works such as art, writing, and music. The aesthetic state is then for Freud, as for Nietzsche, the outcome of sexuality that no longer enters consciousness as such. However, in order to appreciate the significant differences between Nietzsche and Freud, I wish now to turn to Freud's energetic account of the drive that, I argue, lacks the largesse of Nietzsche's economy, because Freud's drive is not a vital force that emerged from the primordial chaos with other drives to produce the organism. Rather, Freud comprehends the drive in terms of a physicalist doctrine, and thus imports the metaphysics of ressentiment, or the slave perspective.
While Nietzsche -the philologists turned to the discourses of philosophers, artists, politicians, musicians, and writers in order to construct a theory of will to power, Freud began life as a medical student, and so his first speculations about the drive pertained directly to the body. In 1895 Freud wrote a letter to his friend Wilhelm Fliess that is now published under the title 'Project for a Scientific Psychology' (1966). This paper is significant because it sketches his early thinking on the origin and nature of the drives in the language of neuroscience. Freud describes 'Project' to Fliess as a 'psychology for neurologists' (Freud 1985). His description of the origins of the drive is, indeed, thoroughly embedded in the positivist discourse of neurology. Freud's account relies upon two principles that come into competition as the human infant becomes better able to deal with her environment, and her own body. The first is the principle of neuronal inertia, whereby “neurons tend to divest themselves of quantity.” The said quantity is invested in the neurons by stimuli that impress themselves upon the body. The nervous system, in accordance with the principle of inertia, deals with incoming excitations by attempting to discharge quantity (excitation) to the point at which the degree of stimulation equals zero. According to this model, feelings of pleasure and pain represent the level of excitation, or quantity, within the neurons. Pain indicates the presence of excitation, and generally the neurons are able to deal with pain through the reflex of flight, whereby the energy invested in the nerve-cell by the external source is used directly to counter that stimulus: the quantity is projected back outside, and so equilibrium is restored immediately to the nervous system. Accordingly, pleasure refers to the absence of stimulation, and is achieved once the neurons have divested it of quantity.
The second principle, the principle of constancy, comes into play with the emergence of the drive. Within Freud's neurological account, the drive (Trieb) can only be understood as a stimulus that originates inside the somatic substance itself. However, the drive problematised the principle of inertia, as the neuron is unable to deal with the impulsional excitation (Triebreiz) by means of the reflex of flight: Rather, the drive must be satisfied at it’s very beginning, by means of complex behaviours that manipulate the external world. In the case of hunger, for instance, the stimulus can only be removed once hunger is sated, and so the organism must motivate the presentation of food. The demand for work (Arbeitsanforderung) placed upon the nervous system by endogenous stimuli is thus far greater than with external stimuli, and a level of tension must be endured by the nervous system, as a store of quantity adequate to motivate the drive is accumulated. Freud writes: . . . the nervous system is obliged to abandon its original trend to inertia (that is, to bringing the level [of Qh] to zero). It must put up with [maintaining] a store of Qh sufficient to meet the demand for a specific action. Nevertheless, the manner in which it does this shows that the same trend persists, modified into an endeavour at least to keep the Qh as low as possible and to guard against any increase of it—that is, to keep it constant. (Freud 1966, Strachey's square parentheses)
Constancy serves a dual purpose for Freud, as a pivot between a simple, reacting life-form, and the complex and dynamic human behaviours that commonly falls under the rubric of 'culture.' For, the principle of constancy overrides the principle of inertia, and thus Freud explains how neurons are able to compromise their tendency to divest themselves of quantity, and rather store energy, in order to initiate actions that alter the external world for the satisfaction of the impulsional stimuli. But the principle of constancy also preserves the essential value of the principle of inertia for Freud. Insofar as the neurons fails to divest itself immediately of energy accumulated to it from stimuli, it does so only provisionally, keeping the quantity of intercellular energy “as low as possible” and guarding “against any increase of it” (Freud 1966). Freud's position here is therefore conservative. He seeks merely to explain how organisms with nervous systems are capable of anything more than simple reactivity, while maintaining a theoretical apparatus that is based upon the principle that all action is a reaction to something.
The neurological apparatus with which Freud explains the function and origin of the drives in 'Project' clearly provides a poor model, when it is compared with Nietzsche's rich account of the drive as will to power. There seems to be a chasm between the drive of Freud's first musings, and the psychoanalytic theory expounded in Instincts and their Vicissitudes, Beyond the Pleasure Principle, and The Interpretation of Dreams. Caught within the physicalist framework, the drive is reduced to nothing but an effect of excitation. Finding a way from this point to the complex behaviours that characterise the spectrum of culture for which Freud wanted to account is difficult. In his later writings Freud renegotiates his commitment to neurology, and to the discovery of the origin of the drives in the body, stating instead that “every endeavour to think of ideas as stored up in nerve-cells and of excitations as migrating along nerve-fibres, has miscarried completely” (Freud 1984), and that “[our psychical topography has for the present nothing to do with anatomy.” I assume that the endeavours to which he refers in the above quotation were his own, in 'Project,' and that Freud himself was less convinced by this work than he needed to be to accept the neurological model as the definitive explanation of mental events.
In the psychoanalytic writings his focus shifts from the body to language. Taking the discourse of the analysand as his object, Freud shows that the unconscious is structured like a language. The drives assert themselves into consciousness through parapraxes (i.e., slips of the tongue or pen, or errors in the hearing or reading of words), hysterical symptoms, and dreams, and Freud interprets each of these signs in terms of a language of metaphor. Yet despite Freud's turn from a language of neurology to a psychoanalytic discourse, he clearly looks forward to a time when psychical entities, such as the drive, can be physically located, lapsing every now and then into a speculative discourse that demonstrates nostalgia for his early neuroscientific researches. Freud's psychoanalysis, born of the necessity for a discourse concerning psychical, rather than physical, phenomena, is littered with biological and neurological analogies, and digressions that demonstrate his desire to return to the nerve-cell in search of the foundations of language, art, and culture.
An instance of this reinscription of the neurological discourse into the psychoanalysis 'proper,' and found in Instincts and their Vicissitudes. As the title suggests, for the most part this text is concerned with the 'vicissitudes,' or destinies, of the drives: or in other words, what the drives does when their path to immediate gratification is blocked and diverted, and how this process culminates in perversity and culture. The drives whose vicissitude’s Freud describes in this later work appear like the vital drives of Nietzsche's philosophy. For instance, he writes: They are numerous, emanate from a great variety of organic sources, act in the first instance independently of one another and only achieve an almost comprehensive synthesis at a late stage. (Freud 1984)
This imagery is highly evocative of Nietzsche's will to power, and is far more conducive to explaining psychological phenomena such as repression and sublimation than his earlier neurological model. However, in the first part of the paper, where he is concerned with defining the basic concept with which he works, Freud attempts to transpose his seminal thoughts in 'Project' into the language of psychoanalysis. The fit between the two styles is not altogether cosy, and the text show signs of strain at a number of pivotal places. Freud begins the paper by laying down some basic terms of reference for his discourse of psychoanalysis that, because of the infancy of the science, he says, “necessarily possesses some degree of indefiniteness.” The most fundamental concept, he writes, is of course the drive (Trieb), whose various possibilities he traces in the second part of the paper. However, he then proceeds to discuss the nature of the drive as a sub-class of stimulus, and so returns us to the logic of his earlier physicalist perspective. The fundamental concept is not the drive after all, but stimulus, and all action stems from the stimulus, as reaction.
Furthermore, if we look to the original German for 'stimulus,' Reiz, we find numerous -and at times conflicting—possibilities. Reiz, indeed, does mean 'stimulus,' but we can glean a great deal about the difference in perspective between Freud and Nietzsche when we consider its less scientific meanings. Reiz could also be translated as 'irritation,' 'excitation,' 'provocation,' or else 'attraction,' 'fascination,' 'charm.' Freud clearly interprets Reiz, stimulus, only in its most negative connotation, as an irritation that the body would want to avoid, and thus as the antithesis of pleasure. Within this paradigm, Freud understands the drive itself in a most equivocal sense, as both the irritant and the panacea, in a system that essentially wants nothingness. This clearly puts Freud at odds with Nietzsche, who, on the basis of this account of drive, would count Freud among the ascetic priests who preach flight from all sensuality and life. Nietzsche would have exploited the more positive connotations of the term Reiz (charm, attraction, fascination), advocating the confrontation of nonpleasure and pain in order to achieve a greater pleasure, as a heightened sense of power. Certainly, he would not accept Freud's definition of pleasure, the pleasure of the masses that he calls “wretched contentment,” or “miserable ease” (erbärmliches Behagen) in Thus Spoke Zarathustra (Nietzsche 1969).
In terms of Nietzsche's genealogical method, Freud’s theory of drives-reliant as it is clearly upon a prior conception of 'stimulus' as irritant—falls into the category of a slave evaluation. Freud's account situates the body as a victim to external pressure, and the drive as requiring a hostile outside the world for its existence. Freud's problem, at least in the narrow terms of Nietzschean genealogy that I have chosen for this paper, is the difficulty in straddling the mind-body divide with a discourse that still purports to be scientific. Attempting to negotiate the transition among the first, physicalist, portion of Instincts and their Vicissitudes and the second properly psychoanalytic part. Freud characterises the drives themselves as the pivotal term between mind and body, repeating Descartes's 'pineal gland' gesture: If now we apply ourselves to considering mental life from a biological point of view, an 'instinct' appears to us as a concept on the frontier between the mental and the somatic, as the psychical representative of the stimuli originating from within the organism and reaching the mind, as a measure of the demand made upon the mind for work in consequence of its connection with the body.
By way of contrast, in his own accounts of the relation between mind and body, Nietzsche steered clear of anything but the most speculative and playful use of scientific discourse. In accordance with his philosophy of perspectives, Nietzsche held that science lacked the capacity to provide the kind of knowledge needed for humanity's convalescence from slave morality. On the contrary, according to Nietzsche science found itself firmly embedded in slave morality, having internalised the perspective of passivity, the effect, but being particularly ill-equipped for comprehending active force, the cause.
Rather than frame his theory of drives in scientific terms, and thus attempt to follow them back to their somatic source, Nietzsche exploits the ambiguity between the body and language in his writings. Nietzsche uses the body as a metaphor for the intellect, and intellect for the body, such that the reader is left chasing him through the labyrinth of his thought, which refuses to stop on either side of the spirit-body divide. In order to comprehend Nietzsche's method here, we will need first to consider his particular definition of metaphor. In his early essay On Truth and Falsity in their Extramoral Sense (Über Wahrheit und Lüge in aussermoralischen Sinne) Nietzsche argues that all truth is metaphorical: “Truths are illusions of which one has forgotten that they are illusions; Worn-out metaphors that have become powerless to affect the senses . . . ” (Nietzsche 1972). This is because for Nietzsche all language, far from picking out elements and structures in the objective world, operates entirely in terms of a logic of metaphor. Metaphor is not a subset of language: Rather, metaphor encompasses language, as well as all thought and perception. Nietzsche bases this claim upon two suppositions, each of which recur often throughout his body of work: First, he contends that metaphor involves the carrying over (Übertragung) or projection -of meaning from one sphere to a completely other sphere: Some nerve-stimulus, first transformed into a percept. First metaphor. The percept again duplicated into a sound. Second metaphor. Each time he leaps completely out of one sphere right into the midst of an entirely different one.
Second, Nietzsche holds that no two things are identical: Rather, there always remains and irreducible difference between any two things that are claimed to be the same: Every idea originates through equating the unequal. No one leafs, is exactly similar to any other, so certain are it that the idea “leaf” has been formed through an arbitrary omission of these individual differences, through a forgetting of the differentiating qualities, and this idea now awakens the notion that in nature there is, besides the leaves, a something called the leaf . . ..
Truth' becomes regarded as such by the people after the novelty and innovation of an association between two different concepts or things have worn off. Our specifically human creativity is to project a structure upon an unknown thing, in order to render it known. This experience of 'making' truth -of transforming the unfamiliar thing into something that we already understand -increases one's feeling of power. Thus truth comes to be associated with this emboldening heightened sense of one's own potency (höhe Gefühlen). Eventually, we forget about the act of creativity that generated a particular truth, and it is 'canonised': Placed beyond question and universalised. The element of risk involved in leaping from one known sphere into the unknown is emptied from this canonised Truth, comes to be felt as reassuring rather than power enhancing.
When he uses metaphor to express the relation between thought and the body, then, Nietzsche transports the reader to a new perspective with which to understand, and thus create anew, this connection. Nietzsche uses metaphor, as well as his theories of will to potential powers and perspectives, to connect corporeal processes with intellectual pursuits, such as philosophy. He argues, for instance, that the body processes the plurality of the world with which it understands each other in the same manner as it digests food. In this way, he continues, the intellect is subject to indigestion just as the gut is. Nietzsche discusses the need for the ability to forget in, On the Genealogy of Morals: The man in whom this apparatus of repression is damaged and ceases to function properly may be compared (and more than merely compared) with a dyspeptic -he cannot “have done” with anything.
Here Nietzsche explicitly states that the comparison between the inability to forget and indigestion is no mere comparison. Rather, the process of digestion and mental life are equivalent, and thus may be described in precisely the same terms. Likewise, society, or culture, is also equated by Nietzsche with the digestive function: . . .modern society is no “society,” no “body,” but a sick conglomerate of chandalas -a society that no longer has the strength to excrete.
The society that retains more than it has the strength to accumulate, along with the man who hasn't the strength actively to forget, are constipated, sick bodies. Each is an organised 'body' that in some sense is coming undone-returning to chaos -because it cannot completely assimilate that disorderly 'outside.'
In this manner, Nietzsche measures an organism's power in terms of the efficiency of its digestion. For instance, in Beyond Good and Evil, he imagines his hoped for 'philosophers of the future' “ . . . with teeth and stomachs for the most indigestible.” And in Genealogy, he writes: A strong and well-constituted man digests his experiences . . . as he digests his meals, even when he has to swallow some tough morsels. If he cannot get over an experience and have done with it, this kind of indigestion is as much physiological as the other -and often in fact merely a consequence of the other . . . He then continues, With such a conception one can, between us, still be the sternest opponent of all materialism.
Nietzsche demonstrates here that his poetic method to communicate the necessary relation between mind and body is all important. He does not reduce the mind to body, in the manner of materialism. Rather, the metaphor equivocates between the mind and body. According to Nietzsche, we can never depart from language in order to discover its pure bodily source. The scientific materialist assumes that the body, as an object of observation, is that inert, unseeing body of the very mind-body dualism that he seeks to overcome. Rather, Nietzsche attempts to reveal the full dimensions of corporeality through a use of language that exploits the creativity of will to power instead of employing a descriptive language to reduce all thought to twitching flesh. Metaphor achieves this for Nietzsche, because, as Übertragung “carrying over” -it exhibits the movement of will to power itself: The concept, sensory perception, nourishments, reproduction, all operate according to the logic of metaphor, according to Nietzsche.
If thought is depicted by Nietzsche in terms of the bodily metaphor of digestion, the body is also represented in terms of thought: The body is a great intelligence, a multiplicity with one sense, a war and peace, a herd and a herdsman. Your little intelligence, my brother, which you call 'spirit,' is also an instrument of your body, a little instrument and toy of your great intelligence.
Furthermore, thought in its actuality is, according to Nietzsche, merely (nur) a metaphor for the body: We are in the phase of modesty of consciousness. Ultimately, we understand the conscious ego itself only as a tool in the service of a higher, comprehensive intellect. Then we are able to ask whether all conscious willing, all conscious purposes, all evaluations are not perhaps only means through which something essentially different from what appears in consciousness is to be achieved.
For Nietzsche, the entire body thinks. Conscious thought, however, is a cheap reflection of the body: it is the 'little intellect' in contrast to the 'great intellect,' or unconscious.
Nietzsche's 'model' of the relation between the bodily 'origin' and language, or thought, is metaphorical. Therefore, we cannot see this relation as causal: at least, not in any known sense of the word 'causal.' The relation is untraceable: we move from one sphere to an entirely different sphere, with no ability to scrutinise exactly what occurred in this movement. By utilising his bodily metaphors to refer to intellectual events, and intellectual metaphors to speak of the body, Nietzsche evokes for the reader the state of equivocation, between language and the body, upon which human being perennially hovering. Moreover, Nietzsche's reliance upon metaphor to write his philosophy also mimics this interaction between language and the body, whereby multiplicity conceals itself by means of a condensation (metaphor), and continuous deferral (metonymy), of meanings.
We find the germ of Nietzsche's modelling of the body-language relation reflected in The Interpretation of Dreams. Here Freud uncovers a “language of the unconscious,” whereby dream images are over determined by the material that the mind processes by means of condensation and displacement and, according to Lacan, these mechanisms exhibit the same logic as metaphor and metonymy. Indeed, Freud uses the term Übertragung in that text to describe a process of “transcription,” or “transference,” whereby a memory is emptied of its significance and attributed a new meaning by the unconscious. Like Nietzsche's conception of metaphor as Übertragung, carrying over to another sphere -Freud's “transference” places a dream thought into a different context, so that the thought may get past the censor to consciousness. In this manner, body and thought are brought together through the dream interpretation.
Perhaps this moment in The Interpretation of Dreams best preserves Nietzsche's own concerns to think through the relation between the body and language precisely by bringing them into a relation together. Arguably, Freud's strongest work consists in his explication of the drives that reflects something of the manner in which language operates: his account of parapraxes, for instance, and his theory of the unconscious processes that function like a language. But we are able to learn a valuable lesson from the parts of his work with which Freud himself was least comfortable: That is, the neurophysical explanation of the drives. Especially when the question concerns the relation between the body and language, the type of language, in that we use directly influences the kind of truth we are able of produce. In other words, the genre of the discourse itself indicates a particular perspective. For the moment, then, Nietzsche triumphs over Freud. Whether Nietzsche could withstand a Freudian analysis of his own writing is another question, for another paper.
All the same, Freudian psychoanalysis (as part of the psychodynamic movement and approach) and existential, humanistic, psychotherapy (which is stemmed from the Nietzschean ideas and doctrine, among others) constitutes two totally independent, distinct and rival approaches of psychotherapy, which employ their own method of treatment, doctrine and principles. Remarkably, of an illustration, Viktor E. Frankl has been expelled from the Psychoanalytic society and organisation because of his views and critic of psychoanalysis, broke away from psychoanalysis and established Logotherapy, an existential, psychotherapeutic method and school in psychiatry, known as the third force in Viennese psychotherapy (after Freud and Adler), which is based upon the Nietzschean doctrine. Thus, Logotherapy and Psychoanalysis constitute two rival types and methods of psychotherapeutic treatment with their own objectives, principles, theoretical core and doctrines.
Hence, as a response and alternative to the works that compare psychoanalysis and the Nietzschean doctrine and maintain that the Nietzschean doctrine constitutes the theoretical core of psychoanalysis, the present paper endeavours to contrast these works and their thesis and demonstrate that the definition and treatment of both its subject matter (man and his paradoxical beingness finds his human existence) and key concepts in human existence by Freudian psychoanalysis and the principles. A functional basis of Freudian psychoanalysis totally differs of both the treatment of the same subject matter and key concepts by the Nietzschean doctrine and from the essence and principles of the Nietzschean doctrine. Wherefore, the main thesis is that the Nietzschean doctrine discloses as not having proper representation that would constitute the theoretical core and essence of psychoanalysis.
Accomplishing the objective of the present paper and establishing and strengthening its thesis would be carried out by doing two things simultaneously. Firstly, depicting Freudian psychoanalysis and the Freudian psychoanalytic doctrine, the historical and philosophical roots of the psychodynamic movement, the Nietzschean doctrine, the existential movement and Frankl's technique and the psychotherapeutic approaches of Logotherapy and its doctrine (and showing that the Nietzschean doctrine, in fact, constitutes the theoretical core of Logotherapy, rather than of psychoanalysis). Secondly, displaying the differences between psychoanalysis and existential psychotherapy (when Logotherapy is utilised as an illustration and as a representative of the existential approach to psychotherapy and is labelled existential analysis) in the domain of psychiatry and clinical psychology, as to the differences between the Nietzschean doctrine and the Nietzschean philosophy and the Freudian psychoanalytic method of treatment, school and doctrine, while still acknowledging and demonstrating the similarities between the Nietzschean and Freudian doctrines, mainly as for terminology.
Absolving the difference and rivalry between psychoanalysis and existential psychotherapy, and the distinction between the Freudian and the Nietzschean doctrines, it should be emphasised that it was the relation between Kierkegaard and Nietzsche's ideas, which contributed to the development of the understanding of man and his crisis, and Freud's development of specific methods and techniques for the investigation of the fragmentation of the individual - human - being in the Victorian period that has provided the basis for existential psychotherapy. Both constructive approaches (Freudian psychoanalysis and existential psychotherapy), coupled with the Nietzschean theoretical work and doctrine, examine the human being, his existence and his crisis, despair and suffering (both neurosis and psychosis) in an attempt to alleviate them.
Accordingly, since the technique of interacting directly with the given individual and analysing the analysed individual is essentially similar for both approaches and schools of psychotherapy, it is the distinguished variation in the essence, nature and character (as far as the view of man and his character and of the human existence are concerned) between the Nietzschean (and the Kierkegaardian, for that matter) doctrine and the Freudian doctrine and in the manner in which they have been devised which makes most of the difference and affects the psychotherapeutic treatment. Hence, it is the difference between the Nietzschean (and the Kierkegaardian) theoretical doctrine, endeavours, system and approach and those of the Freudian psychoanalytic school and doctrine that is responsible for the difference between the two approaches of and to psychotherapy.
In fact, while both the Freudian and the Nietzschean doctrines (and for that matter the Kierkegaardian doctrine) strive to comprehend man, his existence and his crisis, each of these doctrines possesses a different theory as for the nature and image of man, i.e., what he is. What determines him and makes him what he is, which they employ to obtain this understanding and a knowledge of the manner in which this understanding should be achieved. Consequently, the psychodynamic school and movement (namely, psychoanalysis) and existential psychologies are two distinguished and distinct theories of personality that govern and affect the clinical, psychotherapeutic treatment and method of treatment.
Sigmund Freud was a physician, a specialist in neurology, with a wide education in the life sciences and the natural philosophy and sciences. He practised neurology and medicine and focussed on the cure of ills’, as neurotic, individuals, or at least on an improvement of and in their condition and state of health. He was a brilliant, distinguished and ambitious member of the community of scientists, neurologists and doctors and strived to make a reputation for himself in those fields. Moreover, at the beginning counts of a successively succeeding to his becoming famous, he was dependent on a career as an established physician and neurologist to make a living and support himself and his dear ones and could not allow himself the slightest reputation as an outcast and as an eccentric.
As a result, the psychoanalytic school and the psychodynamic movement created and devised by Freud at the turn of the nineteenth century have their roots and have been immensely influenced by the spirit and mood of the second half of the nineteenth century in which Freud lived and commenced his career. The materialist, reductionist, empiricist, positivist and mechanist ideas of the time have created an ambience that asserted that everything in the universe has an indisputable reason, cause and determinant. Accordingly, nothing in the universe is accidental which may occur due to chance or free will. Moreover, the positivist doctrine and movement maintain that the ultimate goal of man is to find the explications, reasons, causes and determinants for every element in the universe. Hence, according to this assertion and to doctrines such as reductionism, empiricism and associationism, even such a complex 'object' as a human being can be fully explained by being reduced to human elements, such as personality, character, behaviour, utterances, emotions, mental processes etc., which are induced and well-determined by the entities which cause and generate them and, thus, have reasons as for why they occur.
Hence, the Freudian method of psychoanalysis, the psychoanalytic doctrine and the psychodynamic movement have, originally, endeavoured to turn the fields of psychology and psychiatry, and the area of psychotherapy, into a science, which is rooted in the fields of biology and mechanist physiology but spreads outwards into sociology, which describes human personality, behaviour and mental and physical condition in dynamic and goal-directed terms in an attempt to explain them. It aims to look for and find the indisputable reasons, causes and determinants for all aspects and forms of human mental events, human personality, human utterances, human behaviour and human emotions, feelings, disturbances, crisis and hardships (illnesses, both neurosis and psychosis, malaise etc.). Consequently, the emphasis, and presupposition, of psychoanalysis and the psychodynamic movement is the search for all those elements that define, designed and determined this object, called a person, in order for him to understand himself by explaining and analysing himself. It, thus, comes up with specific theories as for the structure, makeup, components and features of the human psyche and the reasons as for man's crisis, despair and neurotic/psychotic condition.
Hence, Freudian psychoanalysis and the psychodynamic schools are approaches that regard all human beings as a single, homogeneous entity that should be treated in a similar origination came by means of a single, predetermined, homogeneous set of theories and a single technique to obtain the desired cure, mainly to an organic, physiological manifestation, the cease of paralysis, the resistance of vomiting and repulsive sensations of food and liquid and the like. Thus, the development of human personality, human nature and morality and the character and the components of the human psyche are induced, determined, innate, predetermined and the same in and for all individuals and constitute solid explanations for human conduct human feelings, emotions, morals, ideologies and the like.
Furthermore, the disturbances and the crisis of given individuals are also induced and determined by specific events, experiences and stimuli and interruptions with the normal proceeding of the predetermined development of the human personality and morality. The psychoanalytic treatment is, therefore, also one for all patients. The causes, determinants and reasons as for the patient's illness and condition have to be discovered, explained, analysed treated and cured, using the given doctrine and technique of psychoanalysis. The desired outcome of the approach is the alleviation and elimination of the undesired syndromes and, by consequence, the cure of the condition, crisis and illness.
Accordingly, the psychoanalytic, psychotherapeutic technique strives to take the suffering individual and relieve his condition by searching and finding the sources, reasons and causes for it and to make the analysed individual fully aware of the causes, determinants and reasons for his condition, based on the rigid, predetermined, psychoanalytic theories. The examined, analysed individual lies on a coach or sits on a chair, facing the psychoanalyst, and talks about the things that annoys, distress and trouble him, in that what may just as well embody his life history (case study). Whatever comes up into his mind (free association). He recounts his dreams, his most intimate feelings, urges and emotions, events that occurred to him (both disagreeable and agreeable) during his entire life and the like.
The psychoanalyst listens very carefully and attempts to study and examine carefully the analysed individual's utterances and find meaning in them and to employ his (the psychoanalyst's) findings to alleviate the analysed individual's crisis, annoyance, distress, despair and illness. Thus, the psychoanalyst strives to find the reasons, causes and determinants as for the crisis, distress, neurosis and psychosis of the analysed individual and attempts to cure them and ameliorate the analysed individual's condition and state of being by virtue of finding connections and relations between the analysed individual's life story (events that occurred to him) and his distress, neurosis and psychosis, analyse those sources and causes of the neurotic/psychotic condition and make sure that the analysed individual is fully aware of them and whatever feelings, urges, emotions and sensations that they involve - hatred, frustration, aggression, anger, fear, terror, attraction attractiveness, love and the like.
Hence, the psychoanalytic, psychotherapeutic sessions focus on and work away at the revelation, examination and analysis of these events and items that are, in turn, thought by the psychoanalyst to have induced and determined the distress, neurosis and psychosis in an attempt to scrape and withdraw all the defensives, protective layers, which the analysed individual creates and employs to protect himself and prevent himself from suffering, and find out as much as possible about them. These defensive, protective layers prevent and suppress the painful information, events and experiences from being aware of and felt. Experienced by the individual who has undergone and experienced them in the past. The non-subjectivity of psychoanalysis is to discuss and analyse the causes for the patient's condition in the releasing lineages as held accountable for the extractions in meriting inadequacies that come without restraint and confinement.
As part of the endeavour to find reasons, causes and determinants for everything and every human aspect, in general, and for the patient's condition, in particular, an important aspect and element in the Freudian psychoanalytic doctrine and in the Freudian technique of psychoanalysis is the search for symbolic meanings that are meant to have significant meaning as symbolic representations of other matters, moreover too essential imports that approve in acceptation that is perfectly unsaid by some sorted in an ordinance for the understanding of the patient's life and condition than the given, original, items. This technique is normally applied in Freudian dreams interpretation where the unconscious has to be revealed and analysed. Thus, a fully innocent, ordinary, everyday image and object can represent something far more significant, as far as the patient's condition is concerned. As an illustration, an image of a comb may represent a penis and combing one's hair can represent and mean some hidden, subconscious sexual urges directed toward a given person taken to be the source of the particular neurosis/psychosis. Likewise, in the famous case of little Hans' phobia of horses (1909), a big horse and Hans' fear of it have represented Hans' father and Hans fear of being castrated by him, the Oedipus complex.
The psychoanalyst, therefore, places meaning into every word and item that the analysed patient has uttered in her recalling of her dreams by using a series of already made and well-defined, preconceived theories and explanations (which are likely to involve sex, the Oedipus Complex, for instance) to find the reasons and explanations as for the patient's condition. To be fair, Freud has demanded that the interpretation of dreams would be carried out by a professional psychoanalyst who is well trained in this technique.
As a clinical, practical illustration as for the psychoanalytic doctrine and the technique and method of psychoanalysis, the psychoanalyst may conclude from the analysed neurotic patient's utterances during free association, her recounting of her dreams and fragments of memories of events in her life and by virtue of applying symbols and symbolic representations to her utterances and images in the patient's dreams that the patient's inability to have someone touching, grabbing or holding her head and her feeling of severe stress and terror while this action is being carried out is the result and direct consequence of a sexual abuse that occurred during early childhood, during which the abuser has forced the abused child to have oral sex with him by holding and grabbing the young child's head, and was regressing and suppressed by ill’s of Long-suffering from which her consciousness is to protect herself from such are the aliments or the suffering comforted by its owing sector of defence mechanisms.
The psychoanalytic therapy is based on the presumption that once the adult neurotic patient overcomes and overpowers the defence mechanisms and becomes aware of the event and experience viewed as the reason as for her neurosis and the feelings, emotions and sensations that these experiences and events seduce the patient, and, least of mention, by means that are aforementioned as a consequent. The Great Theoretical Difference Between the Psychotherapeutic, Existential Application of the Nietzschean Doctrine and Freudian Psychoanalysis
In his writings (Essays on Aesthetics, Untimely Meditations, The Gay Science and others) Nietzsche wishes to be considered by his readers and viewed in and by history as a psychologist who practices’ psychology and has devised 'a new psychology'. There seems as many that are contiguously precarious of Nietzsche and the neurotic patient's feelings and emotions toward the abuser, toward her parents and other family members, any feelings of guilt, shame, humiliation etc., the psychoanalytic session, thus, endeavours to scrape and remove the protective layers that suppress those feelings and emotions and the traumatic event and experience, itself, to be able to analyse them and discuss them freely.
Consequently, the sources, causes and determinants of the neurosis/psychosis are, therefore, suppressed, repressed and regressed and buried deep in the human psyche and are obscure and hidden from one's awareness, although active in his psyche. This given neurotic patient has retrogressed into the horrendous, traumatic experience from her consciousness as part of her defence mechanism to defend and protect herself and was not conscious of it. Nevertheless, the traumatic experience was embedded and active in her psyche, unaware of by her. It influenced her conscious mental feelings, emotions, utterances, dreams and actions and came up in her neurosis and inability to have her head held, touched or grabbed. The objective of the psychoanalysis is, thus, to crush and overcome the defence mechanisms and have the sources of the neurosis/psychosis released and come up to the surface, where it is aware of by the patient and can be revealed, analysed, explained and observed freely.
The reason as for that doctrine, approach and technique lies in the fact that Freud, in his objection to the fact that some human mental aspects and human conduct would remain unexplained, obscure and incoherent to the psychoanalyst and his possession of the need to search for means of avoiding this situation and to both explain beyond doubt the reason as for the obscurity of the human conducts and utterances and turn them into explainable, lucid, comprehensive ones, maintain both that the essence of regression of information is of information being restrained and withheld from becoming conscious, by the defence mechanism where stress, grief and anguish are involved and by lack of interest and stimulation when no stress is involved, and, thus, forms a part of unconsciousness, a condition of latency that is not Perceived by the mind, and that unconscious information becomes known, while psychoanalysis, merely by being translated into consciousness (the objective of psychoanalysis), as merely conscious things are perceived and known? Thus, Freud defines the unconscious as whatever is not conscious and vice versa, whereas the preconscious is defined by him as a screen between the unconscious and consciousness and forms a part of consciousness for the sake of this specific definition. Accordingly, Freud regards all conscious information as unconscious information that became conscious.
Consequently, Freud maintains that since ‘the data of consciousness are exceedingly defective’ (Freud's, The Unconscious, 1915, found in Collective Papers IV) mental acts can often be explicated merely by assuming and referring to other processes that are outside consciousness. In other words, one is not aware of some of his mental experiences that, nevertheless, affect his actions, bodily, physical, performances (repulsive sensations, paralysis and the case illustrated above of the neurotic patient), dreams and utterances and, thus, these mental experiences are found outside his awareness/consciousness and influence those experiences of which he is aware. Therefore, the individual’s enactment to its belief and indirectly permeate the essential implements (as a process) that will carry through of a successful action and utter utterances that are obscure, unclear inexplicable and unexplainable on their own, by being observed directly by those given individuals, and need to look outside direct observation to explain them and make them utterly lucid.
The neurotic patient illustrated in the present paper has not been aware of the real reason (the sexual abuse) as for her inability to let her head be held and clenched for in spite of, has led to this mental obstacle, the neurosis. Once this awareness has been achieved by the method, described above, the patient has become cured. Hence, according to psychoanalysis, when the given patient becomes aware of her sexual abuse by her father or another adult that she had to regress as part of her defence mechanism to defend and protect herself and can analyse it and discuss it freely then she is cured.
A thorough look into the procedure in which the unconscious mental information is being revealed and becomes a part of consciousness which permits the awareness of the given individual/patient is beyond the aim of the present paper and should be read in Freud's writings. Here, mentioning that the unconscious information undergoes a main is sufficient censorship, of which if it passes, it goes up to the level of the preconscious, where it is already in possession of consciousness and is being aware of by the agent, although not fully grasped and interrelated within terms of its context (if it does not pass this censorship, then to presupposing of regressions back to unconsciousness), then, some other censorship awaits to it, of which if it passes, it goes up to consciousness, where it is being directly and fully experienced, related to, sensed and comprehended by the individual. Freud provides clinical illustrations of the hysterics, neurotic’s theory.
To make sure that the reader who is a philosopher, rather than a psychologist, comprehends the relation between the unconscious and the conscious and consciousness, in The Unconscious (Freud, 1915), Freud asserts that psychoanalysis compares the perception of unconscious mental processes and experiences by consciousness with the perception of the outside, external, world through the sense-organs to obtain new knowledge from the comparison. Thus, Freud refers to Kant's work and viewed of the mind as an activity that manipulates experiences, borrows it for the sake of his argument, takes it out of context, distorts and changes it and comes up with the assertion that just as the external world is not viewed in the way it really is in nature but is subject to the viewer's subjective perception of it (Kant's account of the active mind), so are consciousness and the conscious affected by the unconscious and unconsciousness, manipulated and modified by them and are observed/treated by them.
In devising the Freudian psychoanalytic doctrine and the psychoanalytic technique of psychoanalysis, Freud has devised rigid theories (psychoanalytic theories) as for the nature and character of man and his existence that tailor and fit all individuals that constitute the basis as for the psychoanalytic treatment, i.e., psychoanalysis. He, therefore, devised his theory as for morality and personality development in both men and women which proceeds through five psychosexual stages in children and adolescents plus his theory as for the structure of personality and human interaction and moral or immoral conduct, the id, ego and superego. These theories serve as a model for the psychoanalytic treatment of all individuals who undergo psychoanalysis and are meant to be suitable for all individuals -human beings. Accordingly, the events that occurred in the life of the individual who undergoes psychoanalysis are tailored and fit into these Freudian theories. Thus, the very case of sexual abuse, which is illustrated in the present paper, is tailored and fit into the various aspects of the Electra Complex and the psychosexual stages of personality and moral development and the personality structure, any feelings of guilt and the like.
On the other hand, the existential movement has been formed and devised in the nineteenth century as a protest movement against the established spirit, mood and ambience of the mainstream of the intellectual world - notably of the philosophical domain, natural, moral and metaphysical philosophy, but also of deterministic, rigid theories and schools of thought and movements. The existential movement has protested against the destruction of both the authentic, independent, unreduced and free individual being and the personal, biased, subjective, authentic truth by the established mainstream of the intellectual world, in general, and doctrines such as the Hegelian and the Kantian doctrines, the empiricist doctrine, the positivist doctrine and the psychodynamic doctrine, in particular. Those doctrines have reduced the individual being into metaphysical theories, deterministic, innate, developmental theories, physiological and biological processes, innate releasing mechanisms, information processing devices etc., and made him fit into a single, unified and universal system of truth and reason.
Additionally, the existential movement in the nineteenth century has maintained that the concept of truth has become unreal, distant, universal, abstractive, and alienated from the individual being himself. Accordingly, the concept of truth has become an idea of the manner in which the universe should be like. The individual being has had to make himself fit within this kind of truth rather than lead his life following his own idea of truth and being fully committed to this idea of truth. Thus, the individual being has been swallowed by the idea of whom he should be, which has been dictated to him and forced and imposed upon him by society and deterministic elements, has lost his individuality and uniqueness and has become a part of theories as for whom he should be and why.
Hence, the existential movement objects to the endeavour to reduce the individual-human-being into sets and systems of reasons, explanations, metaphysical and scientific theories and causes and determining factors for his nature, his conduct, his mental/inner state (feelings, sensations, emotions and the like) and his mental state of being (neurosis, dementia praecox, psychosis and 'stability/sanity'). Instead, the existential movement endeavours to examine and study the individual-human-being's existence, Being-In-The-World (see Heidegger's Being and Time), to comprehend it, to have the most agreeable, authentic existence, Being-In-The-World possible and to be able to actualise his personal existence in the world and, appropriately, himself and his life.
As just noted, the existential movement also objects to the notion of universal, objective truth only to introduce truth as the subjective, personal entity of the individual who devises it, possesses it and lives his life and frames to specific designs and gives by some designation to his abiding accordance to it. Thus, according to the existential movement, man is an existing, self-determining, issuing considerations of becoming beings who defines himself by his own subjective view of truth and possesses a full responsibility as for his life and the capacity and powers to choose whatever and whomever he wishes to become and be, his values and ideologies with a view to actualise them and to lead an authentic life and existence.
In other words, man is an individual who determines, designs and realises himself according to the choices, deeds and wishes that he makes, rather than a determined entity who is determined by social conformism, genetically hereditary and the environment, i.e., the past and present. Man, according to the existential movement, is, therefore, an emerging procedure toward the future and becoming being and is defined by his own past and present actions, decisions and choices and by the future outcome of these actions, decisions and choices. That is, man becomes what he is.
The forebears and the devisers of the existential movement, Nietzsche and Kierkegaard, were loners who have excluded and isolated themselves from the establishment and from their fellow philosophers and savants and constantly occupied and devoted themselves by spending all their time analysing themselves and studying themselves. Kierkegaard has never had an academic, university post while Nietzsche has been forced, at the young age of thirty-five, to resign of full professorship of philology in Basel, and, therefore, a truly brilliant academic career, due to ill health. The two brilliant savants have lived on their own financial means that freed them from the necessity of having a paid position and from being a part of the establishment and allowed their questioning and critic of the state, society and the establishment and their fellow philosophers and other savants.
Accordingly, the forebears and the devisers of the existential movement, Nietzsche and Kierkegaard, devised their doctrines as personal, individualistic, self-analytic accounts of their own state of being and as an attempt to solve their personal crisis and to ameliorate their feelings of severe anxiety, depression and desperation (numerous authors also claim that the two were psychotic due to syphilis) and to achieve responsibility as for their lives and realise authenticity and true self and to become whoever and whatever they desired to be (authentic individuals, apart from the crowd and the establishment). Nietzsche's writings, unlike those of Kierkegaard who was a tremendous poet (Kierkegaard, in fact has regarded himself as nothing other than a poet) and a writer of beautiful, well-structured, literary works, have been written in unorganised note forms, which, often, constitute beautiful, literary, verse, in small notebooks as part of spills of creativity and ingenuity and an urge to write down his personal thoughts, feelings and sensations to alleviate anxiety attacks and to feel better about himself. Nonetheless, these two giant savants have written to an imaginary audience to which they wished to preach and inform their teachings as for the authentic manner in which individuals ought to live their lives. In fact, Nietzsche writes as if he were a desperate doctor who suffers the disease and carries out a self analysis and diagnosis to propose his views as for a good mental health to his readers and followers with a view to ameliorate their state of being and attain authenticity and truth.
Nietzsche proclaims that ‘the levelling and diminution of European man are our greatest danger’. Nietzsche's ultimate objective is to create a powerful individual who can live a true, creative and authentic life and create, construct and reconstruct while in a nihilistic, meaningless world without dogmatic beliefs. Thus, despite an existential vacuum and the need of existential filling, he can endure a difficult, authentic, gloomy and tragic truth and actualise himself, without succumbing and escaping to the more comfortable option of universal, detached and determined truth, illusive and metaphysical fantasies and consolations, which constitute constant temptations and appeals to him. By doing so he, therefore, avoided destroying himself and turning himself into a part of this gloomy world and nihilism and of the universal, determined truth and can realise of being that which for only of himself can lead of a meaningful, authentic life.
Accordingly, for this powerful, authentic individual, this gloomy, meaningless world does not provoke the collapse of the self, however, the individual manages to resist it and free his creative sources, repressed until then by determined and compelled morality, social norms and psychological, mental, disabilities. Those creative forces lead the individual to destroy the ideologies determined for him and enforced upon him and create and adopt new beliefs and ideologies for himself that are, themselves, abandoned and replaced by him once they lose their usefulness for him.
Hence, according to the Nietzschean doctrine, man is, by definition, a pure, blank slate, a child like consciousness who is empty from and free of ideologies, conventions and customs. He possesses the ability to control and determine his personal existence, his fate and his life. Nevertheless, he absorbs, covers and overlays himself with external, deterministic, ideologies, norms, generalisations and subordination. To become a powerful, true and authentic being who can achieve responsibility for his life, existence and himself and to create and realise himself the individual has to scrape, suppress, overpower and overcome his external, deterministic layers of influences (ideologies, conventions and norms) which have been forced, imposed and superimposed upon him and determine his own ideologies and morality and, then, to recreate and render the state of a blank slate for himself, where he can reorganise everything afresh.
Once achieving this state of emptiness and blank slate, the individual can adopt ideologies as he pleases, rebuild and determine himself and renew and reconstruct afresh the temples (morals) which have been imposed upon him. Nevertheless, he always possesses the ability to succumb to the external, determined, imposed ideologies, absorb himself in them and, consequently, lose and deny himself. Thus, the process of The Great Theoretical Difference Between the Psychotherapeutic, Existential Application of the Nietzschean Doctrine and Freudian Psychoanalysis.
In his writings (Essays on Aesthetics, Untimely Meditations, The Gay Science and others) Nietzsche wishes to be considered by his readers and viewed in and by history as a psychologist who practices’ psychology and has devised 'a new psychology'. Seemingly, as there are many aspects of Nietzsche's work viewed by several authors (for instance, Kaufmann and Golomb) as psychological ones, a fact disregarded by numerous authors who regard Nietzsche as a mere anti philosopher and a writer of short, beautiful verse. Surely, while being a young, frustrated, physically and mentally ill, retired professor of Philology, who has viciously attacked his colleagues, the state, society and the establishment and wrote provocative verses and notes, Nietzsche has also sought to bring the nature of his own ideologies and his own perspectives and wishes to obtain power and authenticity. What is most important, the will to power involves what Nietzsche calls self surpass? Self surpasses, or transcendence, is the process in which the individual can achieve self control, mastery and responsibility over his own life and to fight the urge to adopt and absorb himself in the social, biological, hereditary, external, deterministic ideologies, norms, morals, conventions and generalisations. That is the urge to become a part of the crowd and give up the painful, tormenting process of being the sole responsible for himself and his existence and determining, adopting and setting up his own ideologies and norms by himself. Self surpasses, therefore, involves overcoming this urge and create and determine oneself.
Accordingly, the more will to power the individual possesses and substantiates more control that any or all qualitative powers that are of a higher degree of power, truth and authenticity that the individual attains and realises. Similarly, the less qualitative the will to power which is possessed by the given individual the more the individual wishes to be determined, loses himself, absorb himself in the crowd and deny himself.
Nevertheless, in talking about power 'macht' and the will to power, Nietzsche talks about negative power and positive power. The negative power is really a psychological weakness and constitutes a wish to accomplish and acquire power by committing cruel acts and demonstrating muscles while The Great Theoretical Difference Between the Psychotherapeutic, Existential Application of the Nietzschean Doctrine and Freudian Psychoanalysis
In his writings (Essays on Aesthetics, Untimely Meditations, The Gay Science and others) Nietzsche wishes to be considered by his readers and viewed in and by history as a psychologist who practices’ psychology and has devised 'a new psychology'. Many aspects of Nietzsche's work are viewed by several authors (for instance, Kaufmann and Golomb) as psychological ones, a fact disregarded by numerous authors who regard Nietzsche failles a mere anti philosopher and a writer of short, beauti verse. Although being a young, frustrated, physically and mentally ill, and its retired professor of Philology, who has viciously attacked his colleagues, the state, society and the establishment and wrote provocative verses and notes, Nietzsche has also sought to bring the nature of no sensation of selfhood, a lack of self confidence, a possession of bad conscious and feeling of guilt, an inclination to let oneself be dependent upon and determined by external factors and consequences and an inclination and a wish to escape from suffering, responsibility and pain to metaphysical consolations and security at all cost. The will to power is, therefore, really a will to positive power.
Consequently, the authentic individual is one who wills to (positive) power while the inauthentic individual is an individual who possesses negative power and does not will to power. The more positive power and will to power the individual possesses the higher level of authenticity he possesses and the more negative power and the less will to power the individual possesses the higher level of inauthenticity he possesses and vice versa.
In fact, Nietzsche's philosophy should be regarded as a means to entice its followers to overcome deterministic elements, to will to power, to determine themselves, to achieve responsibility for their lives, to form and actualise their authenticity, to obtain increasing positive power and true self and to direct their efforts toward their own positive power, testing their ability to reach it and activate it in their lives. The Nietzschean doctrine should, therefore, be regarded as the granting of therapies, education and intellectual temptations to the individual with a view to prepare him for assuming responsibility and mastery over his life, leading and living an authentic, creative and well worthwhile life and to free his creative resources and realise and actualise himself in a nihilistic, meaningless world without dogmatic convictions.
The individual is, thus, enticed to be directed and direct himself toward his positive power and powerful spiritual creative resourcefulness, to examine whether or not he can achieve them and absorb them and to obtain as much positive power, will to power and creativeness can just be as likely. Nevertheless, it is merely the individual, himself, who can actualise his power, facing bravely the numerous temptations to succumb to the easy, comfortable manner of living according to the external, deterministic norms and convictions that surround him, let himself be determined by them and deny himself and resisting these temptations in an attempt to actualise and fulfil his existence and himself. Accordingly, the Nietzschean doctrine mainly intends to entice the individual to will to power.
Hence, enticing the individual's will to power, selves surpass and authenticity and truth are the real purposes of the Nietzschean doctrine. Nietzsche employs the method of writing short notes and verses and utilises a provocative, refined, poetic, arrogant language and a manner of writing, full of daring slogans, swaggers, paradoxes, myths and scepticism to raise consent and profound emotions and feelings in his readers with a view to obtain enticement and assist him in this process of enticing his readers. This reason joins the reasons mentioned above as for the unique type of writing which Nietzsche adopts and employs.
Furthermore, the more qualitative will to power which the individual possesses the more he possesses the enticement to will to power and the wish to obtain increasing power to become ever more authentic, true, perfect and powerful being. Thus, the individual who possesses a weak will to power is likely to deny the enticement to will to power and succumb to continue with the external and, deterministic, norms and convictions determined for him and are imposed upon him and, therefore, to possess a negative power and be a weak, unactualized individual. An individual with higher degree of qualitative will to power can and is likely to be enticed to will to power and, thus, to obtain positive power, authenticity and true self and to overcome the negative power. Nonetheless, the individual can also be a superman whose level of qualitative will to power is so strongly that he does not need to be enticed to will to power. As a superman, he can, therefore, create himself and his ideologies and perspectives on his own without this enticement and without the need to be enticed.
Nietzsche asserts that man is distinguished from animal in his potentiality to cultivate his nature and image (i.e., who he is, his own self). His true nature and to create his ideologies, norms and conventions as he pleases, rather than have himself and his ideologies and conventions are determined, designed and created for him. This ability raises man above the other animals and permits man to overcome the inclination to deny himself and be absorbed and determined and, instead, to surpass himself, to realise himself and to assume full control and mastery over his existence and life. Nevertheless, the vast majority of men never realised themselves but succumb to a conformism and to society and its norms and ideologies and let themselves be absorbed in them and determined by them.
Thus, according to Nietzsche, man's task and role are to surpass, overcome and transcendent those impediments that suppresses, repress and prevent the mental powers from freeing, creating and realising the self (those mental powers are rooted in man). Man has to activate those mental powers in the manner described above to obtain increasing power and mastery over his life, his existence and himself and, by consequence, increasing authenticity, self realisation and true self. If man does not do so then he is degraded to the degree of beast (monkey, as influenced by Darwinism devised and was very popular and rigorous in that of the same period). Nonetheless, if man does so then he gains more power and mastery over his life, personal existence and himself and, in a world where God is dead, man becomes closer and closer to God, the creator of man, truth, ideologies, norms and the self, by virtue of adopting for himself God's role of creating and determining himself, man, (his image and nature), his own ideologies and his own truth and morality. In fact, man's greatest ambition and possibility is to assume increasing power and perfection and to become closer and closer to the power and perfection of God.
Man, according to the Nietzschean doctrine, is, therefore, responsible for his own existence and life and is free to design, determine and create himself and his ideologies freely following his own ideologies and with whom and what he desires for himself to become and be. The purpose of living is, therefore, to detach the living individual from biological, social and mechanical restraints (which determine his image and nature) and take on and follow the difficult, exhaustive and tormenting road and journey of self analysis and self learning and knowing and changing, with a view to grow constantly, construct and create himself, realising himself and becoming more independent, powerful and authentic being. Hence, man is an emerging and becoming being who emerges toward the future and becomes. Man is defined and determined by his emergence toward the future and by his becoming. He is, therefore, defined and determined by his choices and actions and their outcome. He, therefore, becomes what he is. In fact, the sub-title of Nietzsche's Ecce Homo is 'How One Becomes What One Is'.
From reading the two accounts, those of Freud and Nietzsche, it is very easy to conclude that the essence of the two doctrines, about the actual psychotherapeutic treatment, is virtually similar. In both doctrines, man has to suppress and overcome a psychological, mental, boundary that has to be scraped and shattered to obtain truth, allows the individual, the neurotic/psychotic patient, to function freely and establish a grasp of the given individual, the neurotic/psychotic patient. This fact has misled readers and researchers into maintaining that the Nietzschean doctrine constitutes the theoretical core of the psychoanalytic technique (psychoanalysis), methodology and approach.
Nevertheless, while according to Freudian psychoanalysis, man is a determined entity that follows universal, successive stages of morality and personality development, which are deterministic, common to all men and according to which all men behave, act, experience, feel and live their life, and have his neurosis/psychosis and crisis induced and determined by specific past events and experiences in his life, the Nietzschean doctrine views to man as an entity that is responsible for himself and for his existence in the world. The 'Nietzschean man' possesses the power and ability to choose and determine his ideologies and actions, who and what he wishes to become and be and strives to overcome all boundaries, to surpass himself, and realise of himself and become a powerful, authentic individual.
Hence, according to the Nietzschean doctrine, man is neither good nor evil. 'Man is beyond good and evil' asserts Nietzsche and has named one of his important works 'Beyond Good and Evil'. The ability of man to assume control and responsibility for his life and existence, to determine himself, to realise himself and to achieve his truth and authenticity is suppressed and prevented from doing so by both an inner, psychological compulsion (such as fearfulness) and external deterministic elements, the state, the establishment, society and the like. Nonetheless, man possesses the power and capacity to overcome and free himself from these puissant constraints, surpass, transcendent and overcome himself and realise his will to power, his power and himself while living in a nihilistic, meaningless, world. Alternatively, he also possesses the ability to succumb to those constraints, rather than to attempt to overcome them, to absorb himself in them, not to will to power but, to adopt a negative type of power and be determined and weak and inauthentic. Accordingly, the psychological, mental, elements and aspects of the Nietzschean doctrine are both ones that prevent man from realising of himself and ones which lead to his will to power, goes beyond self and self actualization.
Freudian psychoanalysis, on the other hand, views the defence mechanism as an element that the given individual has had to assemble the constructions that prevent and suppress painful and stressful information from entering the individual's memory and consciousness to protect himself from stress and suffering. The patient, with the aid and guidance of the psychoanalyst, has to overcome it, insofar as, to find the sources and determinants of his neurosis/psychosis and the feelings and emotions induced by those sources of the illness and bring them to the patient's consciousness/awareness, where they can be revealed, analysed and examined freely. The psychoanalyst endeavours to explain the individual patient according to the achievement of comprehension of what determines him, his conduct, his malaise, his illness (neurosis/psychosis) and crisis, acceding to his ideologies and morals, in agreements of the rigid and predetermined theories, as for the elements that determine the nature of man and his conduct and morality, of the psychoanalytic approach.
Accordingly, even if both the Freudian, psychoanalytic doctrine (and Freudian psychoanalysis) and the Nietzschean doctrine endeavours to overcome suppressive boundaries to both obtain truth and cure, the two constitute two different approaches that vary completely one from the differentiated designations wherefore are the essences and through its definition. Their view as for their subject matters (Man and human existence) and the nature and image of man are contradictory. To demonstrate the difference between psychoanalysis further, and the psychoanalytic doctrine, and the Nietzschean doctrine in the domain of psychotherapy and display strong, additional evidence in favour of the thesis of the present paper, the existential school, technique and approach of and to psychotherapy in the field of psychiatry Logotherapy, which has been stemmed from the Nietzschean doctrine and devised by Viktor. E. Frankl, needs to be described, depicted and illustrated. This way, the reader would be shown the practical application of the Nietzschean ideas in psychotherapy and psychiatry and be efficiently comparable and correlate with some understanding measures within the psychoanalytic method and with Freudian psychoanalysis.
While crediting Freud with new insights into human nature, Frankl felt that Freud's ideas had hardened into rigid, predetermined ideas that determine the nature of man and the analysed individual and, consequently, dehumanise and reduce man. What was needed, according to Frankl, was the understanding of the human-individual-being in his totality as a whole, unreduced, independent, free and self-determining being who emerges toward the fulfilment of a given goal, objective and task in his life and personal existence. Who defines and determines himself following those objective and goal and their realisation, rather than focussing on the specific event and experience that the psychoanalysts regard as the cause, reason and determinant of the given crisis and condition and analyse and examine them. Frankl, thus, set on a career in psychiatry in which he introduced the concepts of meanings and values and their realisation into psychiatry. The essence of his doctrine is that all reality has meant (logos) and that the individual never ceases to have lived for meaning.
Logotherapy is the search for the unique meaning and purpose in one's life in an attempt to design and reveal his particular journey in life and his functional role. An undertaking to do whatever it takes to actualise and realise his meanings, potentials, potentialities and himself, determines themselves as given to him and his experiential actions, also the identity and existential meaning and becomes somebody, a true, actualised and authentic individual being. The Greek word 'logo', in fact, denotes meaning. Thus, Logotherapy regards the individual's striving to find meaning and purpose in his life (which logotherapists call the will to meaning), and a personal identity that would make his life meaningful, fully actualised and worthwhile, as the motivational force in man and as the element that defines and determines the individual, his life and his existence.
For the need of comparison with the rival approach of Freudian psychoanalysis and as an illustration of the motivational force, the primary motivational force in the Freudian doctrine and psychoanalysis is the urge and inclination to seek self satisfaction and pleasure, normally in the most brutish and primitive, basic sources of pleasure (sexual pleasure and urge, satiating hunger and thirst and sleeping). This Freudian motivational force plays a crucial role in the Freudian deterministic theory of personality and morality development, which was depicted above, as constituting the motivational force for this development of human personality and morality. For its part, Logotherapy focus man, the unconscious, the conscious, self conscious, self analysis, relationships with other individuals, the inner state (emotions, sensations, feelings and the like), irrational sources of man's power and greatness as adequately formidable of his morbidity and self-destructiveness into the scope of existence.
Successively succeeding by such are the numerous writings that Nietzsche also gives in expressions of the mind, the mental, instincts, reflexes, reflexive movements, the brain, symbolic representations, images, views, metaphors, language, experiences, in an instinct or in merely reconciling the conflicting claims of the id, ego and superego or in the mere adaptation and adjustment to society and environment and has him determined by them. Man is, thus, free and responsible for his life and personal existence and defines, creates and determines himself by his willing to meanings, purposes and values and striving to surpass himself and his existence and actualise those meanings and values and, a consequent of himself, his life and personal existence in the world. Nevertheless, he can always succumb to the world of willing to mere pleasure and its satiation, determinism by others, conformism, genetics and hereditary, mass crowds, industry etc., absorb in it and give up the inclination to search for meanings and values in his own existence and life and actualise them. The destructive result of such a deed is described below Man's life, according to Logotherapy, ought to be a journey of surpassing his everyday existence, situations and existence and realising the meanings and objectives that he sought, searched, found and set to himself to actualise.
The process of finding meanings is one of exploring all human values for those that fit best with the given treated individual's own, unique life experiences and that he can most profitably pursue as a surge for meaning. Frankl teaches that merely through the process of education and through the acceptance of full responsibility as for his personal, individualistic and unique choices of meaning by the treated individual, the treated individual can build an integrated personality with a special life task that will give direction and sense of purpose to his own existence.
Thus, to lead a meaningful life the treated individual has to explore all of the areas of traditional values and pick up those that can supply special meaning to him and, then, surpass his existence and realise his chosen meanings. The logotherapist's role is, therefore, to guide and help the treated individually. The Great Theoretical Difference Between the Psychotherapeutic, Existential Application of the Nietzschean Doctrine and Freudian Psychoanalysis
In his writings (Essays on Aesthetics, Untimely Meditations, The Gay Science and others) Nietzsche wishes to be considered by his readers and viewed in and by history as a psychologist whom practices’ psychology, who has devised 'a new psychology'. Many phraseological aspirations consistent of Nietzsche possession have a tendency to interactivity and silence, as these feature and absorbate themselves in mere immediate, superficial pleasure seeking, in conformism and the mechanical and let their lives be determined by other individuals, their environment, their daily routine, their genes and the like. Thus, they incline to cover themselves in those things, conform, despair and have themselves (their behaviour, ideologies, beliefs etc.) determined.
The results of such procedural actions are, however, likely to be a development and emergence of feelings grounded in an existential vacuum, a feeling of existential frustration and noogenic neurosis. Existential vacuums are the experiences lacking of meaning and purpose in one's personal existence that generates a feeling of emptiness and nihilism. So then, that is to say, that Logotherapy views nihilism as an evil, destructive force that destroys and consumes man and leads to severe crisis and despair in his life and to his dehumanisation. Existential frustration, for its part, is a reaction to the failure of fulfilling to achieve meaning. As for Noogenic neurosis, it is a neurosis generated by the neurotic patient's feeling of lack of meaning in life and human existence, as a whole, and in her personal life and personal existence, in particular.
Logotherapy endeavours to allure and challenge man with a potential meaning for him to fulfil and to urge him to struggle hard for some goals worthy of him to actualise and achieve and, thus, to evoke his will to meaning from its state of latency and actualise his will to meaning and self actualising. Logotherapy, therefore, strives to guide and assist the individual patient in overcoming the inclination to be absorbed and determined. Logotherapy attempts to make the patient aware of the hidden 'logos' of her existence, actualising the potential meanings of her existence. Logotherapy aspires to assist the patient in filling the existential vacuum, searching for meanings, finding them, surpassing her existence and herself, actualising those meanings and realising herself and recreating herself according to those meanings.
The result of Logotherapy is the scraping of the inclination to be determined and the filling of the existence with a cause, finding the reason as for one's personal existence in the world and recreating and realising the patient's existence. Hence, Logotherapy wishes to make the treated individual aware of what he actually aspires for the intensity of his endurable coercion for him fully to be aware of the task of his life and of his personal existence. In fact, cases treated using Logotherapy has demonstrated that enticing the treated individual and making him aware of his assignments and tasks in his life and personal existence, should assist in ameliorating his ability to overcome and alleviate his neurosis, crisis and malaise.
The symptoms are accepted, for the time being, as they are and are looked beyond them (transcendent them). The individual 'dereflects' (a term that Frankl has given to mention) attention from the immediate powerful situation to unimpaired assets and potentials that can be utilised in spite of the symptoms. Hence, Logotherapy endeavours to teach the individual to cope and deal with his malaise and painful situation, transcend and pass them and find meaning in his suffering by finding a potential for a good thing in all painful events and suffering (since nothing can be done to alleviate and alter them, in which case, where the painful events can be modified and improved, it is a mere sadistic act) and, thus, employ his suffering for the sake of a good element and for the sake of self actualisation. In fact, Logotherapy, itself, has been tested, devised and refined by Frankl as a method for treating individuals' suffering and for combatting dehumanisation and reductionism during the three years that he spent as an inmate in four different Nazi concentration camps and, thus, constitutes the meaning and the positive (good) element in Frankl's enormous suffering. Some clinical illustrations are called for to depict Logotherapy and its doctrine in practice and to display the great differences between psychoanalysis and Logotherapy.
Frankl tells of an American diplomat in Austria who has visited him in Vienna. The diplomat was discontented with his career and found it difficult to comply with American foreign diplomacy. Consequently, he experienced a sensation of void and emptiness and felt depressed and miserable. He has undergone psychoanalytic treatment for five years but his condition and state of being have merely gone worse. His psychoanalyst told him to reconcile with his father as it was obvious to the psychoanalyst that the powerful, authoritative American government has really symbolised and was nothing other than the father of the diplomat who tried to dominate his son and take charge over him and his life. Hence, the psychoanalytic approaches have asserted and concluded that the reason, cause and determinant of the diplomat's difficulties in complying with American foreign diplomacy and his depression and state of being ware, in effect, his relationship with his father, his fear of his father and his desire to rebel against his father. This stands on the same line as the Freudian rigid personality and moral development of the Oedipus complex.
Nevertheless, Frankl has taken the diplomat and his situation throughout and concludes by that the diplomat's lack of satisfaction and interest in his job and career and his inability to find meaning and purpose in them that have led to his state of being and depression. He, therefore, proposed to the diplomat to quit his career in foreign diplomacy and search for a career that would be more meaningful and purposeful to him and his personal existence and would enable him to actualise the (and his) meaning and purpose in his personal existence, his life and himself. Of course, the diplomat has complied, changed his career to a more meaningful one to him that fulfilled his interests and intellectual objectives, actualised his personal existence and himself and has been totally cured of his crisis and malaise.
As another illustration, Frankl recounts of a rabbi who came to see him, suffering from severe depression. His first wife and six sons have been murdered in concentration camps and his second wife has been barren. He was, therefore, extremely concerned of not having any sons to say 'Kadish' following his passing away. Frankl has guided him and assisted him to surpass and transcendent his situation and to try to search for meanings and purposes in his great suffering and in his personal existence and life to be able to actualise himself and his life and existence and to cope with his great grief and malaise and to live and lead a decent, meaningful life. They concluded that the great suffering that the rabbi experienced would enable him to attain the highest place in heaven, which is normally reserved merely to martyrs and infants, and, thus, the sole manner to join his six young sons who perished as martyrs. The rabbi has found meaning in his suffering and his depression has been alleviated.
Once the rabbi has surpassed his existence and his situation, to find meanings in them and actualise them, he has actualised his life and existence, fills in his noogenic and empty feelings. His will to meaning and purpose, to actualise himself, to cope with his malaise and with his life and existence and to feel much better A Freudian psychoanalyst would have worked away at exposing, examining and analysing the problem, the rabbi's relationship with his parents, his childhood, the sensations that the deaths of his dear ones have elicited in him, his feelings toward his second wife and their relationship etc., in an attempt to cure the depression and to be able to cope with his grief. This would take numerous years, would be extremely costly and, thus, make the psychoanalyst wealthier (and of interest to delay the psychotherapeutic treatment) and would lead to the worsening of the rabbi's depression.
This leads back to the neurotic patient who is unable to have her head be touched, rather than opening the patient's wounds and focussing on and working away at the revelation, examination and analysis of the traumatic event and the dreadful experience of sexual child abuse, with a view to work away at the examination carefully and the analysis freely of what the psychoanalyst considers as the reason, cause and determinant of the neurosis, as it is compatible with the psychoanalytic rigid and predetermined theories (but can very easily is induced by other factors, which are part of the individualistic life and existence of the treated, analysed patient), the logotherapist would have guided and advised the patient not to confine herself in the past and constantly analyse her trauma but to go on living and Experiencing. In fact, the patient would be advised to try to surpass and transcendent both her traumatic experience of sexual abuse and her inability to have her head touched and seek for meanings and purposes and will to meanings and purposes in her life and her personal existence and in her trauma, suffering and crisis. Still, hardly, the trauma would be ignored or not treated seriously. The trauma, would slightly decrease and not enjoy the full attention of the logotherapeutic sessions, which would be devoted to the patient's ability to live a meaningful and rewarding life. The trauma would simply fit in this endeavour, to make the patient able to lead a meaningful life and existence.
The sexual abuse is, thus, viewed as an event that happened in the past. It must be accepted as an event that occurred already and cannot be erased, reversed and altered. It should be treated as if nothing could be done about changing it. There is no point in spending the entire psychotherapeutic sessions in discussing it, focussing on it and working away at analysing it as an event in the past, only the logotherapeutic sessions should intend to plan and devise the present and future of the patient's life and existence (the emergence and becoming of the patient), search for and find meanings and purposes in her life and personal existence and try to actualise them and, as a consequent, her commitment holds steadily from the debits owing her personal existence and life. The traumatic experience has to fit with (and in) this objective and with the patient's overall task in life and be employed to actualise her meaning and purpose in life and personal existence and be beneficial and have a meaning and construct of the same purposive unity as held within itself, the traumatic sexual abuse and in the patient's life. Again, the overall objective and the reason for existing of logotherapy and the logotherapeutic sessions are to have the patient's living a meaningful, pleasant, actualised and authentic life.
A clinical illustration for the danger in searching for the correlation between a given past event and the given neurosis/psychosis and in asserting that it was this event that has induced the condition of the patient, Elisabeth Lukas reports of two sisters whom she has encountered in treating their mother of severe despair and depression. The mother has recounted that the older sister has been an unwanted child who has been severely sexually abused by her father throughout her childhood and has been ill-treated and mentally and physically abused by her entire family and has not been loved by her mother. The other, younger, child, on the other hand, has been a desired child and loved and well-taken care of and treated by her family. She has had an excellent, normal, warm, fatherly relationship with her father and was adored by her mother.
It was, nevertheless, the older, abused and an unwanted sister who has led a perfectly normal life. She has been perfectly healthy, both mentally and physically. She was kind, well mannered and easy to get along with, she also takes favour of her married, having children and has been a superb mother and wife. She has had a job and a rewarding career that she enjoyed and has lived a happy, meaningful and actualised life. Overall, she has been an active, valuable member of society and a happy individual being. Her younger sister, the desired and loved one, on the other hand, have developed severe psychotic/neurotic symptoms and have experienced severe numerous mental and physical problems. She has had sexual problems, has been lonely and could not develop and have relationships whatsoever with other individuals and with men. She has lied regularly, was rude and very hard to get along with. She broke the law countlessly and spent time in prison. Overall, she appeared to suffer from an existential vacuum, a feeling of existential frustration and noogenic neurosis.
The mother, who could not understand how this situation was feasible, has become severely depressed. The mother needed to be explained by the logotherapist (Dr. Lukas) that a person is determined by her search for meanings (will to meaning) in life, human existence and her life and personal existence and by the surpassing of her existence and the actualising of those meanings, rather than being automatically determined by given, specific events in her life.
Those clinical cases show that Logotherapy endeavours to overcome and suppress the inclination not to will to meaning, to surpass the patient's existence and to realise the patient's will to meanings and purposes in her life and her personal existence. Values that are to be actualised, find them and set herself to the fulfilment of the task of actualising them and, as a consequent, she of for whatever else she expends her life and existence, with the overall view to lead a happy, meaningful life. The supposition of Logotherapy is that finding meanings and purposes in the neurosis, in terminologies extended by the meanings in the patient's personal existence and life would assist in alleviating it.
According to Logotherapy, the 'Freudian' defence mechanism that prevents the patient from having a direct access to his painful experience also prevents the exposure to an event that cannot be altered and reversed but, generate severe pain and suffering. Wherefore, ignoring the painful experience is a wrong thing to do, devoting the entire psychotherapeutic sessions to overcoming and suppressing the defence mechanism and exposing the trauma and, therefore, regressing to and remaining in the past, merely for the sake of revealing and analysing the trauma, is likely to lead to the opening of closed wounds and force them of an exaction in bleeding in and of additional spite. The Great Theoretical Difference Between the Psychotherapeutic, Existential Application of the Nietzschean Doctrine and Freudian Psychoanalysis
In his writings (Essays on Aesthetics, Untimely Meditations, The Gay Science and others) Nietzsche wishes to be considered by his readers and viewed in and by history as a psychologist who practices’ psychology and has devised 'a new psychology'. Again, there are many aspects of Nietzsche's work are viewed by several authors (for instance, Kaufmann and Golomb) as psychological ones, a fact disregarded by numerous authors who regard Nietzsche as a mere anti philosopher and a writer of short, beautiful verse. While being of my youth, frustrated, physically and mentally ill, and the retired professor of Philology, who has viciously attacked his colleagues, the state, society and the establishment and wrote provocative verses and notes, Nietzsche has also sought to bring the nature of man, the unconscious, the conscious, self conscious, self analysis, relationships with other individuals, the inner state (emotions, sensations, feelings and the like), irrational sources of man's power and greatness and his morbidity and self-destructiveness into the scope of existence.
Further, in his numerous writings Nietzsche also talks of the mind, the mental, instincts, reflexes, reflexive movements, the brain, symbolic representations, images, views, metaphors, language, experiences, innate and hereditary psychological elements, defence, protective, mechanism, repression, suppression, overcoming, an overall battle, struggle and conflict between individuals etc. As an illustration, Nietzsche describes how blocked instinctual powers turn within the individual into resentment, self-hatred, hostility and aggression. Moreover, Nietzsche strives to analyse human being, his crisis, his despair and his existence in the world and to find means to alleviate human crises and despair.
These aspects of Nietzsche's work elicit a tendency to compare Nietzsche's doctrine with that of Freud and psychoanalysis and to argue that the Freudian doctrine and school (the psychoanalytic theory of human personality on which the psychotherapeutic technique of psychoanalysis is based). Methods of treatment (psychoanalysis) have been influenced and affected by Nietzsche's philosophy and work and the Nietzschean doctrine. As a demonstration from the relevant literature, according to Golomb's (1987) thesis, the theoretical core of psychoanalysis is already part and parcel of Nietzsche's philosophy, insofar as it is based on concepts that are both displayed in it and developed by it - concepts such as the unconscious, repression, sublimation, the id, the superego, primary and secondary processes and interpretations of dreams.
Nevertheless, the actual situation in the domains of psychotherapy, psychiatry and clinical psychology is, not, strictly so. While the two savants (Nietzsche and Freud) endeavour to understand man, to develop the healthy power that is still present in the individual and the neurotic patient to overcome and suppress the psychological boundaries that repress his vitality and inhibit his ability to function freely and creatively and attain truth, the difference between the psychodynamic school, approach, movement and method of treatment, in general, and psychoanalysis, in particular, and the existential approach to psychotherapy, the existential movement and the existential, humanistic school of psychology and method of treatment stemmed from the doctrines and views of Freud and Nietzsche is profound and significant, for the actual psychotherapeutic treatment. The reason posited in this difference, lies in the variation in the two savants' view and definition of man and human existence, the nature and character of man and his relationship with the world and the environment, and in the variation in the intellectual soil, that the tasks, roles, endeavours, relationships and encounters and actualising set and determined (by the individual patient herself) objectives and tasks make the old event a matter of the past and the life of the patient too full, excited and actualised to analyse and experience the problem and cause of the neurosis/psychosis and, therefore, influence and alleviate the psychosis/neurosis. Frankl and Lukas recount and provide numerous clinical illustrations to demonstrate this point.
The present paper has shown that the Nietzschean doctrine may be regarded as a personality theory and, as such, may be employed as the foundations for the devising of a psychotherapeutic approach. The Nietzschean doctrine defines man as a being who is fully responsible for his life and personal existence and possesses mastery over his fate, life and existence and his conduct, his nature, identity and image. As such, he possesses the power to determine, create and organise his ideologies, values and morals and, therefore, himself, who and what he is. Nevertheless, the individual has to suppress and overcome the psychological inclination to have his ideologies and values be determined for him. Then, he has to realise the power to determine himself to gain as much power as possible and become a powerful, individual being.
To demonstrate the applicability of the Nietzschean doctrine in psychiatry and psychotherapy, Frankl's existential approach of Logotherapy was displayed, briefly outlined, described and illustrated. Logotherapy guides the treated patient in overcoming the inclination to conform and be determined and help her seek and realise meanings and purposes throughout her life and personal existence with a view to create, actualise and determine herself, to lead a meaningful life and existence and to become whoever and whatever she wishes to become and be.
Hence, in Logotherapy, the treated individual must assume power, responsibility and mastery over his own life and personal existence and create and design his life and existence and, because, himself following his own set values and purposes. Once the individual has found the reasons, meanings and purposes to living and in all aspects of his life and personal existence (the painful ones and the happy ones) he can lead a more meaningful life and put up with almost any living conditions. In fact, Frankl put to use in Logotherapy two famous quotes from Nietzsche - ‘whatever does not kill me makes me stronger’ and ‘Man can have the how if he has the why’. Thus, according to Logotherapy, the individual's entire state of being and mental and physical conditions are likely to be ameliorated, alleviated and sometimes even cured once he has established meanings and purposes into, to and in the human existence, as a whole, and his own life and personal existence, in particular, and can lead a meaningful, purposeful and actualised life.
Once establishing that the Nietzschean doctrine has many psychological aspects and elements in it and, therefore, possesses the ability and the potentiality to provide the core and essence of a psychotherapeutic approach in psychiatry and clinical psychology, psychoanalysis, which is the most popular and known psychotherapeutic approach (in as well as outside the relevant fields of psychiatry and psychology), immediately comes up to one's mind. In fact, the present paper was commenced by stating the similarity in terms of the terminology and the concepts that are employed in both the Nietzschean doctrine and the Freudian, psychoanalytic, doctrine and psychoanalysis. Moreover, the present paper has described the inclination to compare the Freudian doctrine with the Nietzschean doctrine and the Nietzschean doctrine to the psychoanalytic method and approach of psychotherapeutic treatment (i.e., psychoanalysis). The present paper has even gone as far as quoting Golomb's clear and bold assertion that the Nietzschean doctrine, in fact, constitutes not less than the theoretical core of Freudian psychoanalysis. In fact, the present paper has set itself the task of examining this assertion by professor Jacob Golomb.
Nevertheless, it was the present paper's primary objective to refute this assertion and to show that the Nietzschean doctrine does not constitute the theoretical core of psychoanalysis. Both the theoretical, conceptual, and the practical, applied psychotherapeutic, differences between the Freudian doctrine and its method of psychotherapeutic treatment (Psychoanalysis) and the Nietzschean doctrine was displayed, outlined, illustrated and depicted in the present paper in some length. On the other hand, the present paper has demonstrated that the Nietzschean doctrine constitutes the theoretical core and essence of the existential approach to psychotherapy, which, in fact, constitutes the most vicious rival to psychoanalysis.
Throughout the existential approach of Logotherapy is depicted as a rival approach to psychoanalysis in the same field as psychoanalysis (that is psychiatry and clinical psychology) it is described as the one that really employs the Nietzschean doctrine as its true theoretical core and essence and as its foundation. Even, ignoring it is not feasible and skips on the similarities in and between the 'will to power' and its realisation and the 'will to meaning' and its actualisation, the ambition to surpass and overcome all that prevents and suppresses the will to power/meaning and the individual existence, the idea of free will, the notion of full responsibility for and mastery over one's life and the idea of the freedom to determine its creative self. Those last three concepts constitute key concepts in the Nietzschean doctrine, the existential movement and Logotherapy. The existential movement was described in the present paper and Nietzsche was shown to have been the forebear and deviser of the existential movement, together with Soren, Aabye Kierkegaard.
The Freudian, psychoanalytic and psychodynamic doctrines, for their part, regard human personality, morality, ideologies, feelings, emotions and conduct as deterministic ones that are either innate or determined by events and other types of stimuli. The Freudian doctrine, therefore, maintains that the best manner to alleviate human crisis and despair (both neurosis and psychosis) is to search and find the reasons, causes and determinants for them. The psychoanalytic method of treatment is, therefore, really a technique of searching and finding and analysing and examining thoroughly and freely the events, experiences and stimuli that it assumes to be the causes and determinants of the neurosis/psychosis.
The process of searching and finding significant stimuli and events in the individual patient's life and of analysing the individual patient's life and existence freely applies the shuttering and overpowering of a defence mechanism that represses those events and stimuli from being revealed and aware of by the given analysed individual who has undergone them and regressed them to his subconscious. This process, therefore, strives to make the stimuli and events, which are assumed to be the cause, reason and determinant of the neurosis/psychosis, come up to the analysed neurotic/psychotic patient's consciousness and become fully aware of by the analysed neurotic/psychotic patient and, thus, revealed and analysed freely and thoroughly by both the patient and the psychoanalyst.
Overcoming the defence mechanisms and fully revealing the reasons and causes as for the neurosis/psychosis and exposing them to the patient's consciousness enable their analysing freely and without any restraint. Once the patient is fully aware of the event and stimulus that have generated his illness, crises and despair and those events and stimulus is analysed and examined thoroughly and freely the neurosis/psychosis is cured.
Hence, the tendency to assert that the Nietzschean doctrine influences the Freudian, psychoanalytic doctrine and approach and the Freudian method of psychoanalysis and that the Nietzschean doctrine constitutes the theoretical essence and core of Freudian psychoanalysis is erroneous and misleading. The Nietzschean doctrine, on the other hand, is the theoretical basis and core of the existential movement, existential, humanistic psychology and the existential approach to psychotherapy. Specifically, the Nietzschean doctrine constitutes the foundations of Logotherapy, also known as existential analysis.
The two movements, schools and approaches are rival ones and so are Logotherapy and Psychoanalysis. While there are some similarities in their shared ambition to alleviate man's crises and despair, in the terminology that they employ and in their shared endeavour to suppress and overpower the psychological boundaries that repress the individual patient from attaining truth and true self and to free truth and the true self, the notion of what is man, an individual being, the self, the true self, actualisation and the like, which constitute key issues in theories of personality and which define human personality, vary immensely and cannot differ more, in terms of their treatment and definition by the two movements and approaches.
In fact, other movements and schools such as Cognitive Psychology and Artificial Intelligence also employ concepts such as the self, consciousness, unconsciousness, memory, recall, morality, revelation, human nature, personality and character. Nevertheless, attempting to compare them with psychoanalysis and the psychodynamic movement would be an absurd task. Their view and definition of those concepts vary immensely from the definition of those concepts by Psychoanalysis and their application and employment of those concepts differs greatly from the utilisation of those concepts by psychoanalysis, although Cognitive Psychology has created cognitive psychotherapy and talks about the recall and storage of information by and in the mind and the access and revelation of information - that is the representational model of Cognitive Psychology and the cognitive revolution and movement, which dominates cognitive psychology. A gathering frame of reference is vastly contained in Searle's book called “The Rediscovery of the Mind” (1992) and, perhaps, to obtain as such would involve the furthering discussions of the conscious and consciousness, the unconscious and unconsciousness and preconsciousness and the preconscious in both Freudian psychoanalysis and cognitive psychology.
It is, thus, the overall designing, devising and depiction of the approach, doctrine and theory, and of what they endeavour to do and achieve - their definition of their main subject matter (Man and his existence in the world, his personality, nature, image and character) and of key concepts; The combining of those key concepts by them; Their manner of applying those definitions in practice - which make up a given doctrine, approach and method of treatment and applicability and enable the comparison of the particular doctrine (approach) with other doctrines, approaches and methods of applicability and treatment of a similar type. Comparing selected aspects, components and elements of two or more doctrines and approaches may lead to the omission of important features and constituents that, in fact, vary and are contrasted significantly in the two doctrines and approaches and, therefore, to the adoption of the erroneous conclusion that the doctrines and approaches are similar and comparable when they are, in fact, totally different and contrasted. The Nietzschean/Freudian case to which the present paper was devoted and dedicated has, thus, shown how careful one should be so as not to be misled in comparing two doctrines, theories and approaches and claiming that one doctrine, theory and approach affect and influences another doctrine, theory and approach and constitutes its theoretical core.
Hence, having clearly shown that the Nietzschean doctrine does not constitute the theoretical core of psychoanalysis and, thus, fulfilling its main objective and defending its main thesis, the most important conclusion of the present paper is that it is a very easy task to search and find similarities between two doctrines and conclude that one doctrine influence and affects the other and constitutes its theoretical core. Searching for similarities would normally lead to their finding (after all terminology and language are limited and are bound to be the same in using similar domains and endeavours), or, when necessary, inventing, devising and manipulating them artificially, that is, scholastics. Studying it is, therefore, essential and examine the two doctrines, theories and approaches very thoroughly in their entirety - their ideas, aims, terminology, reason for existing, points de depart, historical and philosophical roots and the like - establish a full grasp of them and merely then to examine any possible relationships and theoretical similarities between them. If this is not carried out then inaccurate assertions, the thesis and conclusions are likely to occur.
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