Nietzsche: Philosopher, Psychologist, Antichrist

We're all of us going to fuckin' die, and it's not going to mean a goddamned thing. Nothing that we've done or thought or felt means jack shit. That's Nietzsche in a nutshell. All the rest of it--overman, will to power, eternal recurrence, last man, slave morality, resentiment--is just whistling in the dark.

I mean, the starting point is "God is Dead." That makes Nietzsche the direct heir of Spinoza. And Darwin. This line of thought begins, at least since the Renaissance, with Descartes, who resolves to doubt everything until he can find something that is certain. What he comes up with is the fact that he's aware that he's aware. That's the cogito. From that point he goes on to posit the existence of a soul and of God as distinct from the material universe of things and bodies. But in steps Spinoza who says, Hold on; wait a minute; if there is an ultimate substance to the universe, then it cannot be two. Therefore, everything there is--Life, the Universe, and Everything--can only be one Substance=Nature=God. There is no split between the physical and spiritual, nor between body and soul, nor between God and the Universe. And God is no personal deity to ask favors from or to seek sanctions for the way we live and see the world. 

Nietzsche certainly wasn't the first thinker who recognized that Spinoza's God was cold comfort at best. Leibniz was both enthralled and horrified at this prospect, and Kant, Hume, Hobbes, Hegel, Schopenhauer, and Kierkegaard sought to refute or challenge the implications of Spinoza's thought. But Nietzsche said, "Bring it on!" and resolved to question everything until he reached the most fundamental implications of those ideas. He ends up with "God is Dead" and the spectre of nihilism haunting the west. As Ivan K. says, if God does not exist, then everything is permitted. And if that's the case, why not just commit suicide and be done with it? Why keep on keepin' on?

Nietzsche saw the something similar happening with the Greeks after the Ionian Enlightenment, and he wondered how they could look at the suffering, calamity, and absurdity inherent in life and still maintain an affirmative attitude, a joyous celebration, even, toward living--"a yet unbroken reply to the vicissitudes of fortune, a triumphant response to suffering, and a celebration of life as, at bottom...indestructible, powerful, and joyous.'" (Is Fred idealizing the Greeks here? I remember the Sophocles who says "Nothing surpasses not being born/but if born, to return where we came from/is next best, the sooner the better.") The Greeks "looked with bold eyes into the dreadful destructive turmoil of so-called world-history as well as into the cruelty of nature" and "without yielding to resignation...reaffirmed life with works of art." What was it that allowed them to do this?

Nietzsche's inquiries lead him, eventually, to three concepts: will to power, the overman, and eternal recurrence. It's kinda bizarre that he would put forth such sweeping and dubious sounding concepts after resolving to question everything. Those ideas have certainly been put to questionable uses, including some of the intellectual underpinings of the Nazi state. But Kaufmann sets out to clear Nietzsche's name from some of these associations and to show how Nietzsche had been misunderstood by just about everyone in the 80 years between Nietzsche's books and the first printing of this book in 1949. 

First off, any meaning that can be found for life, the universe and everything cannot apply to everybody but only the best and the brightest. Man is just another animal, just another primate, and therefore, "the mass of mankind lacks any essential dignity or worth." So "the goal of humanity cannot lie in its end but only in its highest specimens." The rest of us are shit out of luck. Some men--very, very few--look squarely at the apparent absurdity of life, the universe, and everything and then seek to overcome their own natures and give meaning and order to existence. This is the meaning of the will to power, the perpetual need to surpass ourselves. Those who can do it honestly without need for external forces or validation, then, are the overmen, primarily artists, philosophers, and saints. The essence of this self transcendence is the sublimation of their impulses into one focus, an artistic unity of self: "One thing is needful--giving style to one's character…in an artistic plan until everything appears as art and reason." "He has overcome his animal nature, organized the chaos of his passions, sublimated his impulses, and given style to his character." "The man who perfects himself and transfigures his physis [nature] achieves ultimate happiness and experiences such an overwhelming joy that he no longer feels concerned about the 'justification' of the world: he affirms it forward, backward and 'in all eternity.'" That's eternal recurrence: the man who in saying Yes! to his own being also affirms the world just as it is for all times.

So Nietzsche spoke to me big time 30 years ago. "Independence of soul! That's at stake here. No sacrifice can be too great." "The spirit who has become free stands amid the cosmos with a joyous and trusting fatalism." "Man can live and die in a grand style, working out his own salvation instead of relying on the sacrifice of another." I thought I was hot shit then and this heroic image grabbed me. I could thumb my nose at the universe and get along on my own, maintaining an intellectual superiority to anyone else who couldn't.

Only, I don't feel that way so much anymore. Maybe I wasn't nearly as hot shit as I thought I was. Certainly, I wasn't nearly as strong as I supposed myself to be. But, also, maybe Nietzsche didn't get it all right, either. Hard to say. But I do feel that he doesn't get it that we're all in this together. If only the "highest specimens" are able to find meaning in self overcoming, the rest of us are kinda stuck with just muddling along the best we can, trying to make sense of it all. If we say that the mass of humanity lead meaningless lives, we've just denied importance to ourselves and our fellow travelers and sufferers. When I think about what has given my life the most meaning--my love of Sara and my family, my friendships with Jim and George and Frank, my attachments to my students and athletes, it's only inadvertently about self-overcoming and more about connections. Isn't that what evolutionary psychology is telling us these days, that we are hard-wired to be deeply connected to each other?

Likewise, I'm finding the "vivesectionist" of contemporary values to be a bit of a bore. Maybe it is needful to look down on others at some point--Kaufmann says in another book that consciousness really begins on the other side of alienation--but at 62, I don't so much feel the need for that any more. When we define ourselves by what we are not, then it's really just another limitation on ourselves. Likewise, why just the artist, philosopher and saint? Why not the athlete, the teacher, the graphic designer, the computer programmer, the shoe store salesman? If we do something well, and we love it, and we seek to continually surpass ourselves at it, why shouldn't that path be open to finding meaning and transcendence in our lives? Can't we get there by chopping wood and carrying water?

So maybe Nietzsche has lost a lot of his appeal to me because I've grown old and tired and lazy and mediocre over the years. And, of course, there's the hard realization that I'm not one of the highest specimens. So be it.

I'm a little more disturbed that Kaufmann doesn't speak as deeply to me now as when I read him 20, 30, even 40 years ago. I would have put "Critique of Religion and Philosophy", "The Faith of a Heretic", and this book among the five or six most important books in my intellectual development. I've reread them all three or four times, and somehow now they don't seem as deep, as important, as they once were. I re-read "Critique" a few years back, and I didn't feel that the arguments held up as well as I previously thought. And I've kinda had the same feelings about this book. Kaufmann continually points out how Nietzsche has been misunderstood over the years, but he doesn't do quite as thorough a job of explaining Nietzsche's thought as he advertises. There were a lot of digressions in his presentation, and the book just doesn't seem as well organized as it has in the past. When I read it before, I thought that I had the final word on modern thought. Now, it just doesn't seem as convincing. That leaves me pretty bummed, really, for I feel like I've lost an old and important teacher.

Author: Kaufmann, Walter

Date Published: 1949

Length: 532 pp

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The Rosicrucian Enlightenment

Yates is again tracing the magical roots of the late Renaissance, this time in the Jacobean Age. The Rosicrucian manifestos appear in 1614-15 and herald a new age whereby all thought will be known. John Dee, renaissance magus in Elizabeth's court, appears as one of the major influences on the manifestos, also incorporating Paracelsian alchemy, but seeking inner gold. "The Rosicrucian movement is aware that large new revelations of knowledge are at hand, that man is about to arrive at another stage of advance, far beyond that already achieved…And the Rosicrucians…are concerned to integrate these into a religious philosophy."

This movement is also strongly associated with the court of the Elector Palatine, Frederick V, who married the daughter of James I of England in 1613. This marriage represents an alliance of Protestant forces in Europe to keep the Catholic Hapsburgs and the post Council of Trent counterreformation in check, and perhaps to wrest the Holy Roman Empire and especially the German states, from Hapsburg control. Yates makes it clear that Frederick overplays his hand--especially after James I refuses to come to his aid, a move that disgusted English Protestants and helped foster the attitudes that led to the Glorious Revolution of 1848-- after the "defenestration of Prague" in wresting the throne of Bohemia from Ferdinand, who revoked the religious toleration promulgated by Rudolph II. Frederick's crushing defeat in 1620 seemed to promise the total annihilation of all Protestant forces in Europe until Gustavous Aldophus saved the day, but only after the Thirty Years War devastated much of Germany.

Rosicrucianism was pretty much a spent force by then, but the ideas gave rise to the Royal Society, to Masonic Lodges, and occupy an important background of thought and attitude in the coming Scientific Revolution. "The world, nearing its end, is to receive a new illumination in which the advances in knowledge made in the preceding age of the Renaissance will be immensely expanded. New discoveries are at hand, a new age is dawning. And this illumination shines inward as well as outward; it is an inward spiritual illumination revealing to man new possibilities in himself, teaching him to understand his own dignity and worth and the part his called upon to play in the divine scheme."

Author: Yates, Frances

Date Published: 1972

Length: 322

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The Arts of Memory

Dame Yates spends the first 200 pages or so reconstructing the classical arts of memory--developed primarily by Simonides and Cicero--and continued through the medieval thinkers Albertus Magnus, Aquinas, and Raymond Lull--and moving into the Renaissance with a long chapter on Camillo's Theatre of Memory. But it is really the chapters on Bruno that the book starts moving into interesting territory, for Bruno's various and convoluted memory projects are really his religio-magico techniques that lead to gnosis, to unification of the cosmos and man through the mind of the magus.

The mind of man holds archetypal images that can be retrieved and activated by the magus through the arts of memory that allows him to achieve a vision of unity of the One through the All, and the All through the One. "the art of memory was … the inner discipline of his religion, the inner means by which he sought to grasp and unify the world of appearances" The creation of this vast memory apparatus that tries to unify all knowledge is really an attempt to articulate Chardin's noosphere, I think, and to lead to the salvation both of man and of the universe by tapping "into the powers of the cosmos, which are in man, himself."

But Dame Yates also makes clear, as she did in Giordano Bruno and the Hermetic Tradition, that this search for a method also underlies the search for a method that undergirds the thinking of Bacon, Descartes and Leibniz--"the profound conviction that man … can grasp, hold, and understand the greater world through the power of his imagination" and "prepared the way for the conception of a mechanical universe, operated by mathematics."

Author: Yates, Francis

Date Published: 1966

Length: 389pp

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The Greco Roman Moralists

I didn’t think I would care much for these, but I got into the lectures on the philosophers of roman antiquity. Especially moving to me were the lectures on Cicero, Seneca, and Plutarch. The emphasis is on stoicism, and philosophy as a way of life, emphasizing self control. Epictetus, Rufous Musonius, Dio Chrosotom, Philo and the other Jews, and even Marcus Aurelius left me a bit mystified and cold. Johnson makes it clear that philosophy was not about abstruse ideas but about the attitude toward life to know what could be changed and what could not, and about the formation of habits and character--character is habits formed over a long period of time. Philosophy is about choice.

Author: Johnson, Luke Timothy

Date Published: 

Length: 12 hr 10 min

Narrator: Johnson, Luke Timothy