On Being Nietzschean V

Shall we ban the vacuous 'hmmmm....'?
Who can say anything to a 'hmmmm..'?

Comparisons can be especially odious when they're self-made.
So who today needs the 'racist' as a scapegoat? - 'The Bell Curve' - a good door-stop for liberals

you are too far below me to be an object of disgust

The earth shattering end of liberalism was signaled in the aftermath of Tuesday September the 11th 2001 when President GW Bush said;

"We are at War with Nietzscheanism.You are either WITH us,or you are on the side of the Nietzscheans; the choice is yours".

He also made it clear that he will regard all those who help and harbour Nietzscheanism to be as guilty as the Nietzscheans; "They will share their Fate".


"You have to spell everything out to Americans". (Bin Laden)

CONTEXT is everything.

Nietzsche said that the soul is just another name for the Body.

This blog study has drawn in many - unfortunately they were so burnt out by the intensity of the subject matter that most have fell off the edge of the earth.
They either fled to Christianised 'Philosophy' or faded away into ultimate nihilism [which is much the same, on second thoughts] as I predicted.

I thrive on opposition; the greatest favour you can do me is to fight me.

I'm like a Shark - I consume anything that gets in my way.



Human

In 'Human-All-Too-Human', Nietzsche continually "took sides" against himself.
It was the book where he deliberately broke with Wagner/Schopenhauer and all idealism.
There are plenty of aphorisms in 'Human' which flatly contradict other aphorisms elsewhere,and that was the whole point of the book. It was Protagorean in its ability to see the two-sides [and more] of every argument.

This means 'Human' must be very carefully contextualised.

After the necessary self-purgation of 'Human', we see in 'Daybreak' the beginning of the philosophy of Will to Power, which reaches up through the 'Joyful Wisdom' to Zarahustra,'Beyond Good And Evil','The Genealogy' and the final works like the 'Antichrist'.
All the time he was working on the unfinished magnum opus 'The Will to Power'.

One needs to read these post-'Human' works to come to anything like a rounded understanding of his views on politics.

Also,one should look at pre-'Human' works,such as the essay,'On the Greek State'.

Nietzsche can ONLY be understood in overview - NEVER piece meal.

All you have is a shattered mosaic of selective and out of context quotations.

Nietzsche's philosophy IS his context.
It includes the perspective of becoming/flux; the doctrine of the eternal recurrence of the same; the type of the Superman/Dionysos/Zarathustra; life as will to power, and the perspective of perspective.

Without all that,without having INCORPORATED THAT, you will only understand Nietzsche in the weak, Christianised liberal nihilistic manner so 'common' today.

It's notable that Nietzsche had completely rejected Spinoza at least by 'Beyond Good and Evil', and in 'Human All Too Human' itself, he says of Christ;
"Christ furthered men's stupidity,took the side of the intellectually weak,and kept the greatest intellect from being produced" [Human,235]
This in the same book where he calls 'Him' the most noble human being!
Indeed,one cannot help thinking that Nietzsche's affirmation of Spinoza,Jesus and the Bible here, was firmly tongue in cheek, and done to annoy Wagner who was bound to take it at face value.
Just as our liberals today do.

Overman

They describe a linear progress and 'improvement', forever putting the Superman in the future, which is tantamount to making the Superman an ideal.
Nietzsche was opposed to idealism as well as lineararity.

As Zarathustra is the teacher of 'The Eternal Recurrence of the Same', Nietzsche is certain that the Superman has already existed in other cycles of recurrence.

Indeed,as he says;

"If life had a final purpose,it would have been reached already".[Nietzsche,WM 55]

This is why Nietzsche points to various great men and great cultures of the past as exemplars of the Superman [calling, Cesare Borgia, for example, a "Superman"].

The task today,as always,is to make such 'lucky strokes' the outcome of conscious breeding.

And he knows that,beyond the meagre reach of human historical record, there must have been other Supermen in the past who MUST come again.

We cannot think the Superman without the eternal return of the same. In fact the latter doctrine is far too neglected,which leads to a form of millennialised 'messiah will come' type of Christian idealism.

"Eternal life,the eternal recurrence of life,THE FUTURE PROMISED AND HALLOWED IN THE PAST;the triumphant YES to life despite death and change;real life conceived as a collective prolongation through procreation,through the mysteries of uality-I know of no Higher Goal than these principles of the cult of Dionysos". [Nietzsche,Twilight-Ancients,4]

To understand all these masks - Zarathustra, Dionysos, the Superman and the Higher Man - as standing for the cycles of recurrence.You have completely misunderstood the Overman-you see him as the 'ultimate',as something to be arrived at.
As something finished with.
This is Christian teleology.

To Nietzsche life is Becoming-there are no finalities;

"The man who attains his ideal precisely thereby surpasses it".[BGE 73]

Nietzsche regards Napoleon etc. as Supermen within the cycle of recurrence;
Your view,which is of a 'Messiah',will NEVER come.


Go back to your Bible-you will never recognise the Overman, only the Ultimate Man.


A central aspect of my grasp of Nietzsche's philosophy is that of multiple perspectives.


For my own part,I consider it essential to work with what Nietzsche calls the 'Thought of Thoughts', i.e., the Eternal Return.

It is from this perspective that my view of the superman type derives.

Only by thinking a thought through can we go BEYOND OUR TEACHERS.


Those who take the 'bluffer's guides' on Nietzsche as gospel do not actually have their own perspective; they parrot another's - too bad that it is often a Nihilist's perspective!

'Only when you deny me,will you find yourselves'; Zarathustra.

There is no End.
Those who seek one reek of the Xtians and their pussillanimous Final Judgment.



Zarathustra is, as Nietzsche said, the teacher of the Eternal recurrence of the Same.

Nietzsche's theory is clear; matter is finite, and time is infinite; therefore all possible configurations of matter have already recuurred an infinite number of times already.Therefore the superman type has already recurred ... infinitely.


"The word UBERMENSCH as designating a type that has turned out extremely well ... has been understood almost everywhere with perfect innocence in the sense of those values whose antithesis makes its appearance in the figure of Zarathustra...He into whose ear I whispered he should look about him for a Cesare Borgia rather than for a Parsifal did not believe his ears". [Nietzsche,EH,'Books',1]

Of course to understand this, one would need to have a level of culture that would know about the Borgias,about Parsifal-and would also take notice of such clues as superman 'type', and the 'figure' of Zarathustra.

The fluidity of Nietzsche's philosophy does not allow any hard and fast distinctions between the TYPE of the superman, Zarathustra, Dionysos, the Higher Man, the Schopenhauerian man, the Apollonian etc.
Nietzsche multiplied the masks of the superman type as was perfectly in keeping with his PHILOSOPHY OF PERSPECTIVE.

WILL to POWER

Let us examine the Nietzschean 'will to power', which deliberately differentiates itself from the Schopenhauerian 'will to life'.

Heidegger's study of Nietzsche from the perspective of 'being' shines some helpful light;

"In order to avoid the vacuity of the word 'will',Nietzsche says 'will to power'.Every willing is a willing to be more.Power itself only IS in as much as,and so long as,it remains a willing to be more power.As soon as such will disappears,power is no longer power,even if it still holds in subjection what it has overmastered.In will,as willing to be more,as will to power,enhancement and heightening are essentially implied.For only by means of perpetual heightening can what is elevated be held aloft". [Heidegger,'Nietzsche vol.1']

Where Nietzsche affirms 'being',Schopenhauer affirms 'dying';

"When we look back from Nietzsche our glance falls immediately upon Schopenhauer. His main work which at first impels Nitzsche towards philosophy but then later repels him, bears the title 'World as Will'. Schopenhauer's major work was profoundly indebted to the main works of Schelling and Hegel. In one of Schelling's most profound works published in 1809, i.e., 9 years before Schopenhauer's, Schelling writes; 'In the final and ultimate instance, there is no other being at all than willing. Willing is primal being'. " [Heidegger,ib.]

We can see now that Nietzsch'e philosophy emerges from the very heart of Germanic thought, from will to will to power;

"The expression 'to power' never means some sort of appendage to will. Rather, it comprises an elucidation of the essence of will itself."[ib.]

Because of the affinity of all Indo-European thought - this is recognised by Nietzsche when he writes that, "where there is affinity of language, owing to the common philosophy of grammar, it cannot but be that everything is prepared at the outset for a similar development and succession of philosophical systems" [BGE 20] - It is not surprising to find a similar attitude to the Germanic in the ancient Greek;

"Willing is a kind of desiring and striving.The Greeks call it 'orexis':Aristotle's conception of the will becomes definitive for all Western thought. The Aristotelian doctrine itself devolves from a tradition that determines its direction; it is a first denoument of the first beginnings of Western philosophy in Anaximander,Heraclitus and Parmenides". [Heidegger,ib.]

Ah, with this mention of the Presocratics, we recognise the home-coming, the circle of culture coming into its completion before the next cycle!

Despite the difference in terminology, Aristotle has a philosophy of the will;

"The word actuality is derived from 'action', and points to the complete reality;one actually always precedes another in time right back to the actuality of the eternal prime mover".[Aristotle,'The Metaphysics']

The mistake has been to reify or even to deify these concepts;

"Will to power is never the willing of a particular entity. It involves the being and essence of beings;it is this itself.Therefore we can say that will to power is always essential will ". [Heidegger,ib.]


Let us never forget that in all of this we are using metaphors.
A word like 'will' is a sort of compressed poem, the collapsing of a multiplicity of meanings into the one word;

"WEAKNESS OF THE WILL: That is a metaphor that can prove misleading. For there is no will,and consequently neither a strong nor a weak will.
"The multitude and congregation of impulses and the lack of any systematic order among them result in a 'weak will'; their lack of coordination under a single predominant impulse results in a 'strong will';
"In the first case it is the oscillation and the lack of gravity:in the latter,the precision clarity of the direction".
[Nietzsche,WM 46]

Clearly we should use such terms as 'will' always with the awareness that they are 'short-cuts' for saying what often cannot be said in words.
That is OUR humility.


Eternal

To Nietzsche the theory is that matter is finite, while time is infinite.
Therefore the variability of material events in the universe will also be limited and will therefore logically repeat over infinite time as the possible varieties become exhausted.
He elaborates on this theoretical aspect in the 'Will To Power'.

The evidence would be the intimation that history TENDS to repeat itself.
Of course there is no ABSOLUTE proof, but then this philosophy denies the validity of self proclaimed absolutes. Even the current idea that the universe began [began from what?] with the 'Big Bang' is merely an hypothesis.

Man knows so little about the history of his own planet,let alone the universe.

Nietzsche advises;

"You must be familiar with history and be able to play that delicate game with two scales,weighing 'on the one hand' against 'on the other hand'. Stroll backwards, stepping in the tracks through which humanity went on its great and mournful trek through the desert of the past".[Niet.H]

If one limited oneself to what could merely be 'touched', then our philosophy ,culture and science would be very poor indeed.

As to the effect of the doctrine on SOME humans [the doctrine will only be appreciated by the few], Nietzsche says;

"This life that you now live and have lived,you will have to live it again and countless times again;and there will nothing new about it;and every pain, every joy,every thought,every sigh,and everything unspeakably great and small in your life will have to return to you..." [Niet.JW]

"The eternal hourglass of existence will be inverted over and over again..."[ib.]

"ETERNAL life,the eternal return of life;the future promised and consecrated in the past;the victorious Yes to life beyond death and change..."[Niet,Twi.]

"To realise in oneself the eternal rapture of becoming-the rapture which also embraces JOY IN DESTRUCTION..."

That victorious Yes! is the key.

In other words,the eternal recurrence is absolutely necessary to an appreciation of the Nietzschean philosophy; one cannot talk of Zarathustra,D ionysos or the superman unless one is IMBUED with this doctrine.

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