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 nonexistence 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 anymore 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 a noticeable Supremacy of Gods being is 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 it 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 it 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 the stability of a 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 measure of nothing and prevail upon a pervasion of foolish senselessness, mixed by means of 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: In come too early. In 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 it.’ Existentialist humanists see things quite differently.
Existentialist, by contrast, finds it extremely embarrassing that God does not exist, for there disappears with him all possibility 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 preordained 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 it. 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 is to exclaim of the cognitional framework as it was layed down by Nietzsche, having to say, that of who had been killed, but not expected he was to say of an indirect attestation, that, his audiences were thereby the one’s that did not hear of that very same madman who lit a lantern in the bright morning hours, and ran to the marketplace and cried incessantly? ‘In seek God! In 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. In 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 sepulchre 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 it 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 it. 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. 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 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 him, 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-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 him, 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 one 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, In am followed by their glances, Sweetly poisoned envy without hope.
Both Nietzsche and Jesus realize that the man must separate him 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 it.’ One must always survive the overcoming one, 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-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 him, change him, improve him without a firm guide. In other words, he would have continually to overcome him in the pursuit of perfection. Jesus and Nietzsche teach the same thing, although in different languages.
On the theme of -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 one. 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 one, and to defy the herd requires a lot of pride; ought not that this childish, immature pride be the first thing to be overcome? Only with a harsh appraisal can one become in knowing one, and pride would prevent this. Thus pride must be overcome in order to know one and thus be wisely proud. The humility Jesus teaches need not be the grovelling-abasement the Churches have said it is. Could this humility not be the inevitable humility of one who has looked at him 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 him 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 In 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 na ve 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 admixed with 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 nonphysical 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 an-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 it, 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 it: ‘You say it is the good cause that hallows even war? In 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-alienation: ‘Only where the state ends, there begins the human being who is not superfluous.
(5)-determination is crucial at all levels of Zarathustra's philosophy. -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 -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 preestablished 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-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 -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 it 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 one 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 one, and by transforming or passing on everything that one acquires.
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, 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 him, 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 In have belonged to solitude; Thus, In 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 it 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 it 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 him 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 doubts. While admiring and encouraging the dance of a group of young women, he asks him 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 it 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 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 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 him 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 him.’ 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 him, 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 him. 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 In stand and before my longest wandering. To that end In must first go down deep than ever have it descended-deeper into pain than In ever descended, down into its blackest flood.’ Although Zarathustra never describes it that way, he is, in fact, readying him to die to his old 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 your very high, but every stone that is thrown must fall.
Zarathustra gets the dwarf off his back by confronting him and him 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 it 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 it 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 him. 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: ‘In do not permit the sight of evil to be spoiled for me by your timidity. In 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 it. ‘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 it 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 it. 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
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 In wait here in my mountains.’
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 it, 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 it. 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 In 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. In 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 the 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. Assuredness, and it was a manifestation of the Jews' own -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 groups. 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 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.
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 it. 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 him 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 gives to 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 it, 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 a 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 him 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 him 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. In 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 \pard softlinetheoretical 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-it, 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 it’8 Nietzsche then goes on to denounce Kant's deontologicalism it: 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.
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. In 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 often 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 him 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? In 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 ‘In will.’ By conquering the dragon, the lion can only create conditions for the creation of new values, but is incapable of creating values it. 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 him), 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. In 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 ‘In 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 of ways can we see this Sophoclean tragedy in Nietzschean terms. Nietzsche, however, demands that man go further, that he overcome him, 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 mould.
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. In 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 us. 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 one, 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 it 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 it 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. In 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 ‘In 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 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, are the self-referential interests in the different modes of discourse that each adopts in his effort to comprehend the enigma of the relation between the body and language that are most purposive. For, while there are clear comparisons to be made between Freud and Nietzsche's researches-and a clear genealogy between them. It is significantly attemptive, under which 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. In 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, In 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 it 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 it 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 it 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. In do not believe that a ‘drive to knowledge’ is the father of philosophy; Yet, another drive had presently to employ in the 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, 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-it. 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-it?' 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 it, 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-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 him the attention of the stronger, better constituted, beasts of prey. Thus life in the main is reduced to a mode of the preservation 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 him, 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 it-makes its 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:
In 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 him 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’ (1989). 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 called 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 it, 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 it 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, In wish now to turn to Freud's energetic account of the drive that 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 it. 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 it 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.’ In assume that the endeavours to which he refers in the above quotation were his own, in 'Project,' and that Freud 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 subclass of the 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 stem 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 it 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 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 it 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 (Uber 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, justly as the impaired 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 leaf, 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, its 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 it: 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 it 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 it 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 he 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 it 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 him 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 him and his dear ones and could not allow him 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 him by explaining and analysing him. 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.
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