Word (and Nietzsche)

[Guest guest]

Dear Felipe,

 

I was about to retire from the list for a few dayswhen I read your

post and quotes from Nietzsche's Zarathustra. And when Nietzsche is

mentioned, I have a tendency to become possessed by a strange

fascination, for I see in Nietzsche both a sadness and an exuberance

of life, that makes it difficult for me to contain myself in silence.

Yes, Nietzsche was no doubt a nihilist, but he was also a spiritual

awakening that could not hold its own light; he reflected the pathos

inherent in a man that finds himself on the edge of the abyss and

seeks to build a God out of the ruins of man himself. For me,

Nietzsche is both the luminous and dark representative of the crisis

of God and Christianity in the West. I had once written some words

about Nietzsche in this regard, of his deeply spiritual-neurotic

philosophy, and I present them here:

 

 

WORDS THAT WERE ONCE WRITTEN ABOUT NIETZSCHE

 

Nietzsche's Will to Power is best articulated in Nietzsche's own

words: "If there are gods, how can I bear not to be a god?"

 

But Nietzsche was a lovable rebel -- and his will to power was doomed

by his will to unwill the very will that is inherent in willing to

power. For, in thus willing to will, the will wills to unwill all

that it hath already willed in expressing the world. True power is a

discovery of the will's secrets, not a willing to unwill the Will

already gushing out in superabundant founts into the world. True

power is a joyful, free, participation in Being, not the discordant

anguish of a restriction, confinement, rebellion, separation, that is

consequent to the willing to unwill. Nietzsche's Zarathustra had the

laugh of a child, the laugh of a Overman, but his heart was not free

from ranting against the philosopher and the rabble. Yet, Nietzsche's

fault is a forgivable fault -- born out of a childlike, impetuous,

innocent, desire to reconstruct a world that had fallen away into the

abyss of nothingness; that had inherited the legacy of a table of

values built on the pedestals of ether. And, ah, of course, God was

dead! Thus, we shall now have the Overman, gloriously wedded to an

earth that we shall build anew. Did not Nietzsche know that the

Overman is our freedom to turn away from the abyss? And to turn away

from the virtues that stare out of the lust and greed of the

virtuous? How sublime is this enterprise, and at once, how sad!

Nietzsche's Will to Power is not a will to nothingness -- it is a

will that sings to vanquish nothingness under the glories of the

earth once again!

 

Nietzsche and Fichte represent two opposites within the context of

willing. Fichte found the limit of the questions that question the

meaningless presentations (and the prostrating, annihilating,

thoughts that it engenders) in FAITH, in the acquiescence to the

Will, that are to be translated into the vocation of man in his

actions ... and in knowing that man's acquiescing actions are a

willing participation unto the fruits of tomorrow. Nietzsche, on the

other hand, seems to have seen in the same meaningless presentations,

the deformations of guilt engendered by the herd, and he set himself

to will .... what? This is what is not clear -- was the Overman a

willing participation, nay the very ownership, of the Will that was

bursting out of nothingness into good and evil, and was thereby free

of both good and evil? Or, was it a will to power, willing to bend

the will, in opposition to that other manner of willing to bend the

will, Schoppenhauer's will to annihilate the will?

 

But in a sense Nietzsche does not destroy; he creates – he creates

the world of both yesterday and tomorrow! For the Overman of

Nietzsche is a bridge ... to what end we do not yet know... but,

listen to Zarathustra:

 

"There it was too that I picked up the word 'Overman' and that man is

something that must be overcome, that man is a bridge and not a goal;

counting himself happy for his noontides and evenings, as a way to

new dawn ...."

 

And Nietzsche's greatest hour .... the great insight into the wheel

of working of things -- what Nietzsche's Creation, the Will to Power,

truly means is reflected here – it is the great embracing of the Will:

 

"I taught them all my art and aims: to compose into one and bring

together what is fragment and riddle and dreadful chance in man -

 

" as poet, reader of riddles, and redeemer of chance, I taught them

to create the future, and to redeem by creating -- all that was past.

 

"To redeem that part of mankind and to transform every 'It was',

until the will says: 'But I willed it thus! So shall I will it -'

 

"this did I call redemption, this alone did I teach them to call

redemption.

 

"Now I await my redemption - that I may go to them for the last time.

 

"For I want to go to men once more: I want to go under among them, I

want to give them, dying, my richest gift!"

 

 

One who embraces the Will and sees in the events of the past the

willing of the Will, my own will, surely has no use for guilt; and so

shall he Will the future too guiltlessly, beyond good and evil. Ah,

but such a redemption is also a terror:

 

"Then voicelessly, something said to me: 'You know Zarathustra?' And

I cried out for terror at this whisper, and the blood drained from my

face: but I kept silent.....'You know Zarathustra, but you do not

speak!'

 

"And I wept and trembled like a child and said: 'Alas, I want to, but

how can I? Release me from this alone! It is beyond my strength!'

 

"Then something said to me voicelessly: 'Of what consequence are you,

Zarathustra? Speak your teaching and break!' ....'You are not yet

humble enough. Humility has the toughest hide.'"

 

 

Nietzsche's neurosis .... the terror at what redemption entails -- is

the terror felt at the loss of individuality that embracing the Will

entails. The Overman was Nietzsche's attempt to clutch and taste the

individuality of man in the freedom that comes from loss of

individuality ....

 

"O my soul's predestination, which I call destiny! In-me! Over-me!

Preserve and spare me for a great destiny!

 

"And your last greatness, my Will, save for your last - that you may

be inexorable in your victory! Ah, who has not succumbed to his own

victory!

 

"O Will, my essential, my necessity, dispeller of need! Spare me for

one great victory!"

 

 

Yes, the Overman was the one great victory – and a creation of

Nietzsche's neurosis.

 

Nietzsche was a neurotic, but he was also inspired by the force of an

overwhelming epiphanic experience. What else can these words (below)

of his mean?

 

"Has anyone at the end of the nineteenth century a distinct

conception of what poets of strong ages called inspiration? If not I

will describe it, - If one has the slightest residue of superstition

left in one, one would hardly be able to set aside the idea that one

is merely incarnation, merely mouthpiece, merely medium of

overwhelming forces. The concept of revelation, in the sense that

something suddenly, with unspeakable certainty and subtlety, becomes

visible, audible, something that shakes and overturns one to the

depths, simply describes the fact. One hears, one does not seek; one

takes, one does not ask who gives; a thought flashes up like

lightning, with necessity, unalteringly formed - I have never had any

choice. An ecstacy whose tremendous tension sometimes discharges

itself in a flood of tears, while one's steps now involuntarily rush

along, now involuntarily lag; ... a depth of happiness in which the

most painful and gloomy things appear, not as an antithesis, but as

conditioned, demanded, as a necessary color within such a superfluity

of light;.... Everything is in the highest degree involuntary but

takes place as in a tempest of a feeling of freedom, of absoluteness,

of power, of divinity."

 

 

There is a deep Heraclitian vein in Nietzsche's writings, for was not

Nietzsche's Will the logos of Heraclitus, the unity of balance in a

world of strife? Heraclitus:

 

"Things taken together are whole and not whole .... out of all things

there comes a unity, and out of unity all things.

 

"God is day night, winter summer, war peace, satiety hunger..... they

do not understand how being at variance it agrees with itself; there

is a back-stretched connection, as in the bow and the lyre.

 

"War is father of all and king of all, and some he shows as gods,

others as men; some he makes slaves, others free.

 

"... for there would be no musical scale unless high and low existed,

nor living creatures without male and female, which are opposites".

 

 

But Nietzsche's philosophy was not a philosophy of strife, but of

overcoming morality in the metaphysics of strife - and thus he

borrows the name 'Zarathustra' from the Persian Zoroaster who was:

 

"...the first to see in the struggle between good and evil the actual

wheel in the working of things: the translation of morality into the

realm of metaphysics, as force, as cause, as end-in-itself. But this

question is at bottom its own answer..... the self-overcoming of the

moralist into his opposite -- into me." ....

 

And as I Will.

 

Can we not almost hear Nietzsche say: O, my Will, but spare this self-

overcoming for the last, and along the way, spare me one last

victory - the Overman, as a bridge unto redemption?

 

 

But Nietzsche's philosophy is not to be read as if it is one

homogenous coherent whole; Neurosis couldn't have had it thus: there

is no One in Strife. Zarathustra is a work of exuberance which is

more poetry than prose, more canon than philosophy. Above all,

Zarathustra is a work of faith, for in his own words: "but this

question of morality is at bottom its own answer - in the Will - as

end-in-itself, as the ineluctable limit of certitude and doubt."

 

Wasn't Nietzsche's neurosis his loss of this very faith? Is not the

Will to Truth - in all of the Will's history - the song of the Will?

What other Will's end-in-itself do we seek but what the Will wills

unto itself? But, in the inspired neurosis of Nietzsche, there is

only strife even in the Truth of the Will's willing:

 

" .. what questions has this Will to Truth not laid before us! What

strange, perplexing, questionable, questions! .... That this Sphinx

teaches us at last to ask questions ourselves? Who is it that puts

questions to us here? .... Granted that we want the truth: why not

rather untruth? And uncertainty? Even ignorance? The problem of the

value of truth presented itself before us -- or was it we who

presented ourselves before the problem? Which of us is the Oedipus

here? Which the Sphinx? The falseness of an opinion is not for us any

objection to it; it is here, perhaps, that our new language sounds

strangest. The question is, how far an opinion is life-furthering,

life-preserving, species-preserving, perhaps species-rearing; and we

are fundamentally inclined to maintain that the falsest opinions are

the most indispensable to us .... To recognize untruth as a

condition of life; that is certainly to impugn the traditional ideas

of value in a dangerous manner, and a philosophy that ventures to do

so, has by this alone placed itself beyond good and evil."

 

When I put my finger into the fire -- what is the life-furthering

principle here? Surely, there is in Nietzsche a loss of the Will's

own symbolism of truth - the symbolism of all that is life-

preserving - a principle, and end-in-itself, of the Will's unfolding

that occupied Socrates in his unrelenting convergence to its limit.

It is this knotted schism of the Will within its own willing in which

we find Nietzsche's neurotic Will to Power

 

".... the will is not only a complex of sensations and thinking, but

it is above all an emotion, and in fact the emotion of commanding.

What is termed freedom of the will is essentially the emotion of

supremacy in respect to him who must obey: I am free, he must obey --

this consciousness is inherent in every will ..."

 

This is a statement made about the constitution of the will with the

certitude of the Sphinx!

 

But finally we must say: Yes, the Overman is, in a sense, a dying and

a resurrection ...a rising into the song of a freer birth.... where

the spirit is free from the Spirit of Gravity. For the Overman shall

be one who lightly dances, as a child, in the empyreal garden

underlying strife, the bringer forth of things, and thus, freely,

will he create a new tomorrow ....

 

 

Warm regards,

Chittaranjan