Excerpted from Systematic Theology: Volume 1 - Pages 13-19
Friedrick Nietzsche gives us a telling example of the infallibility concept and its inescapability. In Nietzsche we have a denial of the God of Scripture, and of the god of Hegel, the modern deification of history as it incarnates itself in the totalitarian state. Nietzsche is also hostile to all morality: good and evil, good and bad, must be dropped in favor of a life beyond morality. Even more, man and life must be negated, and the Superman is the one who negates all things. As Nietzsche observed, “The sight of man now fatigues - What is present-day Nihilism if it is not that? - We are tired of man.”
All the same, Nietzsche wrote; he spoke, and, however much he denied all other values, he did not deny the validity of his word. Nietzsche waged war against the idea of an objective, created and given world, and against the concomitant idea also of an objective, God-given and absolute moral order. In line with all modern philosophy, after Descartes and especially in terms of Kant, Nietzsche was emphatic in his denial of an objective and real world. The only world is the world of the mind of autonomous man and of the appearances his mind synthesizes. In Nietzsche’s words: It is of cardinal importance that the real world should be suppressed. It is the most formidable inspirer of doubts, and depreciator of values, concerning the world which we are: it was our most dangerous attempt heretofore on the life of Life.
War against all the hypotheses upon which a real world has been imagined. The notion that moral values are the highest values, belongs to this hypothesis.
The superiority of the moral valuation would be refuted, if it could be shown to be the result of an immoral valuation - a specific case of real immorality: it would thus reduce itself to an appearance, and as an appearance it would cease from having any right to condemn appearance.
No “things-in themselves” exist, only the knowing mind.
It follows, therefore, that since there is no objective framework of reference, and no things-in-themselves, that the only error man can make is to assume that knowledge has an actual correlation with a real world which leads to an accurate understanding thereof. Knowledge is for Nietzsche the freedom of the mind from an objective reality and its ability, even as it is conditioned by things, to condition them in turn.
As a result, the more a man severs himself from God and the world as objective realities, the more clearly he speaks and, in fact, becomes infallible.
In Ecce Homo, Nietzsche wrote of his composition of Thus Spoke Zarathustra in these terms: Can any one at the end of this nineteenth century possibly have any distinct notion of what poets of a more vigorous period meant by inspiration? If not, I should like to describe it. Provided one has the slightest remnant of superstition left, one can hardly reject completely the idea that one is the mere incarnation or mouthpiece, or medium of some almighty power. The notion of revelation describes the condition quite simply; by which I mean that something profoundly convulsive and disturbing suddenly become visible and audible with indescribably definiteness and exactness. One hears - one does not seek; one takes - one does not ask who gives: a thought flashes out like lightening, inevitably without hesitation - I have never had any choice about it. There is an ecstasy whose terrific tension is sometimes released by a flood of tears, during which one’s progress varies from involuntary impetuosity to involuntary slowness. There is the feeling that one is utterly out of hand, with the most distinct consciousness of an infinitude of shuddering thrills that pass through from head to foot; - there is a profound happiness in which the most painful and gloomy feelings are not discordant in effect, but are required as necessary colors in this overflow of light. There is an instinct for rhythmic relations which embraces and entire world of forms (lengths, the need for a widely extended rhythm is almost a measure of the force of inspiration, a sort of counterpart to its pressure and tension). Everything occurs quite without volition, as if in an eruption of freedom, independence, power and divinity. The spontaneity of the image and similes is most remarkable; one loses all perception of what is imagery and simile; everything offers itself as the most immediate, exact, and simple means of expression. If I may recall a phrase of Zarathustra’s, it actually seems as if the things themselves come to one, and offered themselves as similes. (“Here do all things come caressingly to thy discourse and ridest here to every truth,. Here fly open before thee all the speech and word shrines of existence, here all existence would become speech, here all Becoming would learn of thee how to speak.”) This is my experience with inspiration. I have no doubt that I should have to go back millenniums to find another who could say to me: “It is mine also!”
For Nietzsche thus, his writing was an expression of divinity, a revelation, and inspiration. Thus Spake Zarathustra apes in style the Bible and ancient epics; it is about as successful as Ossian and Joseph Smith.
As against “the immaculate perception” of those who want a valid scientific knowledge of things-in-themselves, Nietzsche offered the true way as “Dare only to believe in yourselves - in yourselves and in your inward parts! He who does not believe in himself always lieth.”
In twentieth-century existentialism this means that the only truth is existential truth, the dictates of one’s own being as expressed without the influence of God, man, society, morals and mores, or anything external to the biological impulses of the man. Infallibility now means total separation from the external world, and from the past and future. History cannot be allowed to condition the existential moment.
For Sartre this means freedom from personal history. He denied Freud’s idea of the unconscious, of the Id, Ego, and Superego, in favor of “a free, translucent consciousness.” Psychological determinism could not become for Sartre a primary factor in the mind of man. It is the free mind of autonomous man speaking in the existential moment that has true knowledge. In fact, Sartre held, “Knowledge puts us in the presence of the absolute, and there is a truth of knowledge, But this truth, although releasing us to nothing more and nothing less that the absolute, remains strictly human.”
Sartre and Nietzsche did not use the word infallibility, but this is what they were talking about. For Sartre, the goal of man is to become god, and this is attainable only on existential grounds, although a meaningless and futile passion even in attainment. The same is no less true of Nietzsche.
In fact, basic to the drive of modern philosophy is this goal of philosophers to become gods. As a result, modern philosophers, like the Greek thinkers, and Aristotle’s pupil, Alexander the Great, have hated or avoided women as a a drag on their divinity. This was emphatically true of Nietzsche, who despised marriage, and no less true of his follower, Adolph Hitler, whose life and works are echoes of Nietzsche. Nietzsche wrote: It is an accepted and indisputable fact, so long as there are philosophers in the world, and wherever philosophers have existed (from India to England, to take the opposite pole of philosophic ability), that there exists a real irritation and rancor on the part of philosophers toward sensuality… There similarly exists a real philosophic bias and affection for the whole ascetic ideal; there should be no illusions on this score. Both these feelings, as has been said, belong to the type; if a philosopher lacks both of them, then he is - you may be certain of it - never anything but a “pseudo”... Every animal, including la bete philosophe, strives instinctively after an optimum of favorable conditions, under which he can let his whole strength have play, and achieves his maximum consciousness of power; with equal instinctiveness, and with a fine perceptive flair which is superior to any reason, every animal shudders mortally at every kind of disturbance and hindrance which obstructs or could obstruct his way to that optimum (it is not his way to happiness of which I am talking, but his way to power, to action, the most powerful action, and in point of fact in many cases his way to unhappiness.) Similarly, the philosopher shudders mortally at marriage, together with all that could persuade him to it - marriage as a fatal hindrance on the way to the optimum. up to the present what great philosophers have married? Heracleitus, Plato, Descartes, Spinoza, Leibnitz, Kant, Schopenhauer - they were not married, and, further, one cannot imagine them as married. A married philosopher belongs to comedy, that is my rule; as for that exception of a Socrates - the malicious Socrates married himself, it seems, ironice, just to prove this very rule… So many bridges to independence are shown in the ascetic ideal, that the philosopher cannot refrain from exultation and clapping of hands when he hears the history of all those resolute ones, who on one day uttered a nay to all servitude and went into some desert; even granting that they were only strong asses, and the absolute opposite of strong minds. What, then, does the ascetic ideal mean in a philosopher?
[ Edited: 10 March 2010 02:52 AM by W.M. Godfrey ]
This is my answer - it will have been guessed long ago: when he sees this ideal the philosopher smiles because he sees therein an optimum of the conditions of the highest and boldest intellectuality; he does not thereby deny “existence,” he rather affirms thereby his existence and only his existence, and this perhaps to the point of not being far off the blasphemous wish, pereat mundus, fiat philosophia, fiat philosophus fiam!...
In the above passage, Nietzsche also cites Buddha favorably with Buddha’s contempt for life. Nietzsche is emphatically the great yea sayer to death and destruction, not to life.
Nietzsche’s savage hatred of women, because the pull of sex is a reminder of humanity and of dependence, a difficult things for a would-be god to admit to, is apparent in work after work after work. In Thus Spake Zarathustra, he gave as women’s only use “recreation” for the warrior’s play: “all else is folly.” However, Warrior-man, or Superman, should go in to a woman only with care: “Thou goest to women? Do not forget thy whip!”
This latter remark was apparently commonly used by Nietzsche before he wrote Thus Spake Zarathustra, because a hear earlier a woman he loved intensely, but who did not return his love, Lou Salome, had Nietzsche and Paul Ree assuem the place of animals in harness to a cart, while she sat in the cart with a whip! Moreover, Nietzsche’s contempt for marriage was in part dishonest; women had repeatedly refused his marriage offer. usually this means, however, that a man has asked where he is sure of refusal, so that he can cherish a resentment against women.
A great many more philosophers than Nietzsche named have not married, and, unlike Nietzsche, more than a few have not even pretended to try. (Some have been homosexual as well.) Why this avoidance of marriage? Nietzsche has given us part of the answer. The autonomy claimed by modern philosophy from God has, as Sartre plainly states, the goal of becoming god. Now God needs no helpmeet: man emphatically does. To need a helpmeet, to be dependent on a woman, to be delighted with her, rely on her, be easily hurt or moved by her, is the mark of a man, a creature. Human dependency is in every direction, natural and supernatural, on God and man, on the earth and on air, on plants and on animals, on superiors and inferiors. Marriage in particular makes the fact of this dependency intensely personal. Feminists are under the illusion sometimes that, because Christian faith requires authority to be given to the man, the woman is placed in a position of dependence on the man, rather than vice versa. Nothing could be more wrong. On the human scene, the greater the authority, the greater the dependence, because human authority, to the extent that it increases, also increases human dependence. The dependence of a worm on the world and on other worms is far less than that of a man on the world and on other men. The greater the authority of any man, the more dependent he is on a great number of persons, things, and factors. Every increase of authority is at the same time an increase in dependency. A hermit has little authority and a minimum dependency; by separating himself from other men, he has also separated himself from authority over them. A general is of necessity dependent on more people to maintain his authority and purpose than is the private, who, having little authority, also needs others less to do his limited duties. All men are interdependent, and no man is born out of nothing, but the more man advances in authority, the more his dependence grows. The same is true of civilization: advancement means an increased dependency. Men in a backward country are less dependent on one another and on foreign trade than in a highly developed one, where specialization leads to greater interdependence as well as greater power and authority. It is an illusion of the ignorant and foolish that independence from other men comes with increased authority. This illusion is a part of the mythology of autonomous man and his will to forsake the human condition. It is also an important factor in the ready decay of humanistic power. Human authority collapses when it denies independence. There is thus a marked difference between God’s absolute and autonomous being and authority, and man’s created and dependent being and authority. Man’s word, moreover, is a dependent word: it depends on his oath, i.e., upon the name, authority, and fear of the judgment of the sovereign God. Epistemologically, man’s word depends on the certainty and trustworthiness of God’s word and world. Man’s word is a totally dependent word, and God’s word is a totally independent, sovereign, and infallible word, which man’s word can never be. When man claims such an infallible word, he must play god and must deny independence, and his most basic personal dependence is on woman. But to deny his dependency is to deny his manhood without becoming a god. Few philosophers are as honest as Gautier’s character in a novel, who cries out, “Why am I not God, since I cannot be a man?”
The existentialist faith, however, stresses this goal of independence for men and women, and the result is not only a studied immoralism but a sense of infallibility and a radical self-righteousness. The modern mood is the ultimate in phariseeism as a consequence. In the various men’s magazines which stress nudes, the brief interviews with the nude models almost always stress existential humanism with all its self-righteousness. As one such girl of 21, describing her deliverance into the new faith, declared: I’m discovering my own integrity in L.A., discovering that I’m really a very honest person. And I like that. I like almost everything… In fact, I love everything! I have no hang-ups about sex. With the right man and with the right, relaxed attitude, sex is the most exciting thing I know. There’s got to be more to a man, of course, than just a nice body: I’ve been to bed with men who were incredibly good-looking and said goodbye to them the next morning not ever wanting to see them again. When you’re just horny and want to get laid, you find the best-looking, most virile man you can. But to get it all together, you need the body and the mind.
For Nietzsche, the fear of involvement with woman was very great. For contemporary existentialism, sex, for man and woman alike, is depersonalized; it is a form of masturbation with another being, and some have held solitary masturbation to be the highest form of existential sex. Betty Dodson has praised masturbation, writing, “Socially institutionalized dependent sex is depersonalizing… Masturbation can help return sex to its proper place - to the individual.” A professor, Dr. Joseph Lo Piccolo, has “written a nine-step masturbation program.” For many others, fornication and group sex are best without emotional involvement, i.e., when impersonal and physical in the main. However, in using and depersonalizing others, such people have only depersonalized themselves. Their pure fountain of existential infallibility is the old fountain of sin and self-righteousness. The end of Nietzsche was madness, but, as Lou Salome saw very early, his philosophy was always madness.
The dependent creature can speak only a dependent and fallible word.
He allowed himself to be whipped while harnessed to a cart? I guess writers are the same as bloggers: we don’t know just who is behind the pen / keyboard…
The denial of the “ding an sich” is the central tenet of the modern worldview and every other idea is subsidiary to it. But here is the catch: nihilism does not deny that there is any “ding an sich,” it supposes that such an objective world exists, and it is actively suppressed in favor of the Cartesian subject as the arbiter. There is a distinct development in Nietzsche’s thought from youth to his post-breakdown though. The youthful Nietzsche of The Birth of Tragedy believes in an objective order -truth, in other words- that is “too ugly” to bear. Since truth is unbearable, the project of man is to build society in which this ugliness is mediated, and ameliorated using collective mythologemen that appear in the rites of culture.
His love of early Greek tragedy stems from this idea that there is a “real” world, and it is to horrible to contemplate. The latter Nietzsche abandons this path for the final denial of the object as distinct from the subject. But the absence of the objective world leaves man open to any subjective claim, and thus what once was “culture” slips into mere projects of power. This is why I have written that the ultimate symbol of nihilism is the cudgel. This is something that Hermann Hesse could never understand. His Demian is merely romantic-nihilist-subjectivist set painting on top of “culture.” His young nihilist Demian takes to war (World War 1) like a duck to water, because at base this is what nihilism is. But his character is puerile, since the only rejection of the supposedly mock-objective is the inherited Christian order, when in fact all extra-personal order must be set aside as false.
Thus the idea of collective experience and participation is impossible with Nietzsche, just as it is impossible in the world created by the supra-moral ubermenschen of Ayn Rands fantasies. Careful students of Rand (who shares with fellow-Jew Murray Rothbard a kind of fever for anarchism) have noted her deep dependence on Nietzsche and on a not-so-cryptic anarchism. But, to give her due credit, she correctly intuited the essentially subjectivist nature of capitalism, a nature which she elevates to a kind of desideratum of modernism. All collective consciousness is to be ruthlessly rooted up. History (a collectivity of shared interpretations), then, cannot exist in such a world. Thus the free reign of money is to create a perpetual year zero, a revolutionary year of transformation in which family, church, and government all perish on the pyres of the revolution of pure power over the inherited collectivities of the past.
The denial of the “ding an sich” is the central tenet of the modern worldview and every other idea is subsidiary to it. But here is the catch: nihilism does not deny that there is any “ding an sich,” it supposes that such an objective world exists, and it is actively suppressed in favor of the Cartesian subject as the arbiter.
I have yet to find it put so succinctly. How could it be any other way? The nihilist needs material to “work” on and his person is insufficient for this task. He must deduce his existential truth through subject-object interaction. Outside of our God, there is no such thing as “pure” introspection and the nihilist kids himself in believing that he is capable of internal generation of truth. In fact, his writings, preachings and constant proselytizin’ betray his true belief. He believes that although something genuinely creative occurs inside him this “truth” of his must expand and fill up space outside himself.
The real nihilist is a deaf mute and as you alluded above, nihilists tend to be extremely agitated in the darkness they inhabit and have a violent disposition. They are wielders of a cudgel of sorts.
There is a distinct development in Nietzsche’s thought from youth to his post-breakdown though. The youthful Nietzsche of The Birth of Tragedy believes in an objective order -truth, in other words- that is “too ugly” to bear. Since truth is unbearable, the project of man is to build society in which this ugliness is mediated, and ameliorated using collective mythologemen that appear in the rites of culture.
I don’t quite understand, and perhaps this is due to lack of education on my part, exactly how a world that lacks objective order has order imposed on it by a subject or how objective reality - assuming its actual existence - is interpreted by a subject as ordered. I suppose that the “point” of existentialism is that the order is no such thing and that what appears to us as designed is merely apparent design.
There is a distinct development in Nietzsche’s thought from youth to his post-breakdown though. The youthful Nietzsche of The Birth of Tragedy believes in an objective order -truth, in other words- that is “too ugly” to bear. Since truth is unbearable, the project of man is to build society in which this ugliness is mediated, and ameliorated using collective mythologemen that appear in the rites of culture.
I don’t quite understand, and perhaps this is due to lack of education on my part, exactly how a world that lacks objective order has order imposed on it by a subject or how objective reality - assuming its actual existence - is interpreted by a subject as ordered. I suppose that the “point” of existentialism is that the order is no such thing and that what appears to us as designed is merely apparent design.
[to be cont’d. one piece at a time…]
I think what was meant here is that Nietzsche in his youth felt that an objective order in fact existed apart from the self. This a priori world operated on the principles of a Truth that was very different than that supposed by nearly everyone. This disconnection between the world prior to culture, to which culture is an adaptation suited for man, was the source of the moral decadence (Christianity) that had developed in the West. Earlier Pagan (Roman and Greek) adaptations to this pre-cultural “horror” of truth, were truer to the nature of what actually is, and thus healthier and more “noble”. The principle of this nobility in the personal and collective confrontation of the horror of the real animates much of early Nietzsche. It is seen in his rejection of the Apollonian-Socratic “rationalism” of the later Greeks in favor of the Dionysian-chthonic. It is the Dionysian-Chthonic adaptations to the objective order that are truer and nobler than the rationalistic. Thus in the early Nietzsche we have an enshrinement of the irrational, warlike, and sexual impulses of man, freed from rationalist constraints or interpretations. In these impulses he derives his notions about “aristocratic” man. It is a kind of warrior-poet type that he elevates. The “blond beast” we have heard written about before, and who forms the template for Hesse’s Demian.
But, again, these early collective cultural solutions to the problem of the horror of reality later gave way to a purer subjectivism. It is as if the influence of the notion of “Will” as in personal will, found in his great mentor Schopenhauer, grew more potent and not less, over time. Eventually, even the transpersonal cultural adaptations would give way to the highly personalistic turn of his later material, in which this individual will gained greater and greater prominence in his thought, and the idea of an objective order slowly vanishes from his thinking. Where Nietzsche parts from and finally repudiates his mentor is in the response to the problem of will in the world -where Schopenhauer insists on on ascetic self-abnegation in the service of Truth, while Nietzsche takes the opposite path: Will to Power.
I thought it was put very succinctly by Wyndham Lewis is his critical work Time and Western Man, where he wrote that Nietzsche supplied modern Everyman with a certificate of “blue blood” -an ironical turn of phrase that was quite intentional, for how on earth can Everyman be a noble aristocrat of the Truth? The entire concept of everyman is a contradiction of aristocracy. Nietzsche wrung his hands over the lack of early popularity of his books, which is comical considering his hatred for democracy. I hope I have made what I meant more clear.
[ Edited: 09 March 2010 10:59 PM by W.M. Godfrey ]
I knew what you meant (mostly) and I was just kind of sounding and thinking aloud. I’m still gonna go back and edit my first response but was wondering if you think Nietzsche might be guilty of projecting a modern concept of the “self” onto the Dionysian, post-Socratic Greeks throughout the Birth of Tragedy? This blond beast that Nietzsche holds up didn’t really exist in Greece no? The concept of the personal “Will” was really not extant according to MacIntyre in Whose Justice, Whose Rationality?
My thinking as of right now is that the Greeks didn’t have the same concept of the integrated and whole “I” as modern man, i.e. man as a sum of passions, ideas, reasoning and personal history. Most of what I’ve read on the subject gives credit for the popularizing of this idea of man to Augustine, who, in the Confessions, published material utilizing the first person in the manner in which we do today. In fact, at least a few books a year pay homage to Augustine’s Confessions and incorporate the word “confessions” into their titles. What I am suggesting is that perhaps there was no possibility for the “will to power” or existentialism proper in Greek society since they lacked the requisite idea of man - psychological continuity and such - to develop the philosophy fully.
The book I’ve read that most clearly addressed the subject, although tangentially in relation to the discussion here, is the previously mentioned book by Alasdair MacIntyre. I’m certainly not an expert and just asking questions.
What I am suggesting is that perhaps there was no possibility for the “will to power” or existentialism proper in Greek society since they lacked the requisite idea of man - psychological continuity and such - to develop the philosophy fully.
Small step, if any step, from sophist to will to power.
Thrasymachus - 13 March 2010 09:29 AM
And the different forms of government make laws democratical, aristocratical,
tyrannical, with a view to their several interests; and these laws,
which are made by them for their own interests, are the justice which
they deliver to their subjects, and him who transgresses them they
punish as a breaker of the law, and unjust. And that is what I mean
when I say that in all states there is the same principle of justice,
which is the interest of the government; and as the government must
be supposed to have power, the only reasonable conclusion is, that
everywhere there is one principle of justice, which is the interest
of the stronger.
Thrasymachus - 13 March 2010 09:29 AM
Because you fancy that the shepherd or neatherd fattens of tends the
sheep or oxen with a view to their own good and not to the good of
himself or his master; and you further imagine that the rulers of
states, if they are true rulers, never think of their subjects as
sheep, and that they are not studying their own advantage day and
night. Oh, no; and so entirely astray are you in your ideas about
the just and unjust as not even to know that justice and the just
are in reality another’s good; that is to say, the interest of the
ruler and stronger, and the loss of the subject and servant; and injustice
the opposite; for the unjust is lord over the truly simple and just:
he is the stronger, and his subjects do what is for his interest,
and minister to his happiness, which is very far from being their
own. Consider further, most foolish Socrates, that the just is always
a loser in comparison with the unjust. First of all, in private contracts:
wherever the unjust is the partner of the just you will find that,
when the partnership is dissolved, the unjust man has always more
and the just less. Secondly, in their dealings with the State: when
there is an income tax, the just man will pay more and the unjust
less on the same amount of income; and when there is anything to be
received the one gains nothing and the other much. Observe also what
happens when they take an office; there is the just man neglecting
his affairs and perhaps suffering other losses, and getting nothing
out of the public, because he is just; moreover he is hated by his
friends and acquaintance for refusing to serve them in unlawful ways.
But all this is reversed in the case of the unjust man. I am speaking,
as before, of injustice on a large scale in which the advantage of
the unjust is more apparent; and my meaning will be most clearly seen
if we turn to that highest form of injustice in which the criminal
is the happiest of men, and the sufferers or those who refuse to do
injustice are the most miserable—that is to say tyranny, which by
fraud and force takes away the property of others, not little by little
but wholesale; comprehending in one, things sacred as well as profane,
private and public; for which acts of wrong, if he were detected perpetrating
any one of them singly, he would be punished and incur great disgrace —they who do such wrong in particular cases are called robbers of
temples, and man-stealers and burglars and swindlers and thieves.
But when a man besides taking away the money of the citizens has made
slaves of them, then, instead of these names of reproach, he is termed
happy and blessed, not only by the citizens but by all who hear of
his having achieved the consummation of injustice. For mankind censure
injustice, fearing that they may be the victims of it and not because
they shrink from committing it. And thus, as I have shown, Socrates,
injustice, when on a sufficient scale, has more strength and freedom
and mastery than justice; and, as I said at first, justice is the
interest of the stronger, whereas injustice is a man’s own profit
and interest.
