a Nietzsche primer

The Great Turning of Man: a primer to Nietzsche’s existentialism.

“I teach you the Superman. Man is something that should be overcome.”

I will walk through a patchwork of Nietzschean concepts that together can be understood as the bridge from the man to the Ubermensch. Notice the parallels to the turning of a certain type of dialectic and also the three Campbellean stages of the hero archetype:

1. 1. God is dead.

The Madman. Have you not heard of that madman who lit a lantern in the bright morning hours, ran to the market place and cried incessantly: ‘I am looking for God!’. . . ‘ Where has God gone?’ he cried. ‘ I shall tell you. We have killed him—you and I. We are his murderers. But how have we done this? How ere we able to drink up the sea? Who gave us the sponge to wipe away the entire horizon? . . . Has it not become colder? Is more and more night not coming on all the time? Must not lanterns be lit in the morning? Do we not hear anything yet of the noise of the gravediggers who are burying God? Do we not smell anything yet of God’s decomposition?—gods too decompose. God is dead. God remains dead. And we have killed him. How shall we, the murderers of all murderers, console ourselves? That which was holiest and mightiest of all that the world has yet possessed has bled to death under our knives—who will wipe this blood off us? With what water could we purify ourselves? What festivals of atonement, what sacred games shall we need to invent? Is not the greatness of this deed too great for us? Must not we ourselves become gods simply to seem worthy of it? There has never been a greater deed—and whoever shall be born after us, for the sake of this deed he shall be part of a higher history than all history hitherto.’

Here the madman fell silent and looked again at his listeners; and they, too, were silent and stared at him in astonishment. At last he threw his lantern on the ground, and it broke into pieces and went out. ‘I have come too early,’ he said then; ‘my time in not yet. This tremendous event is still on its way, still wandering; it has not yet reached the ears of men. . . This deed is still more distant from them than the most distant stars—and yet they have done it themselves.’ (Gay Science 125)

At the turn of the twentieth century, God was no longer believable—the concept of God. The “Reason” of the Enlightenment began its slow divine death. Many have still not come to realize it. But for those who have, it is a great “sundering” and de-centering, because what then is true? However, it also opens the new possibility of new understanding formerly veiled. Here begins the great destruction:

From J. R. Hollingdale’s Introduction to Thus Spoke Zarathustra:

The controlling tendency of [Nietzsche’s] thought during all these five years is nonetheless unmistakable: it is to break down all the concepts and qualities in which mankind takes pride and pleasure into a few simple qualities in which no one takes pride or pleasure and to see in the latter the origin of the former; likewise to undermine morality by exposing its non-moral basis and rationality by exposing its irrational basis; likewise to abolish the ‘higher’ world, the metaphysical, by accounting for all its supposed manifestations in terms of the human, phenomenal, and even animal world; in brief, the controlling tendency of his thought is nihilist. The cheerful tone, the stylistic beauty, the coolness of the performance cannot conceal that what is taking place is destruction. The fact was, in any event, obvious to Nietzsche himself; and of all his problems this became the greatest, the most pressing, the one with which his ‘passion’ was most engaged. He had come close to a total devaluation of humanity and because he could as yet see no way of halting this movement he took the only course open to him: he pushed it on to its limit. (13)

It is hard to imagine a more radical nihilism then the one produced by Nietzsche during these years. He destroyed everything but what he found to be the two controlling tendencies in human experience: what he calls the will to power and the emotion of fear. “And when Nietzsche came to understand fear as the feeling of the absence of power, he was left with a single motivation principle for all human actions: the will to power.” (26)

The Will to Power:

Of Self-Overcoming . . . Where I found a living creature, there I found will to power . . And life itself told me this secret: ‘Behold,’ it said, ‘I am that which must overcome itself again and again. . . Where there is perishing and the falling of leaves, behold, there life sacrifices itself—for the sake of power! . . . And you too, enlightened man, are only a path and footstep of my will: truly, my will to power walks with the feet of your will to truth! . . . The living creature values many things higher than life itself; yet out of this evaluation itself speaks—the will to power!’. . . Spare me for one great victory. (pg. 23-24)

With this will to power we have the turning—reconstruction begins. We have already shed and destroyed all that was possible. Now we rebuild ourselves around the rock of our will, a will to succeed, to strive, to grow. This isn’t a hedonism, a utilitarianism, nor a dominance of others (as it was misconstrued by the Nazis).

“You shall become the person you are” (Gay Science 270)

How?

“One thing is needful—To ‘give style’ to one’s character—a great and rare art! It is practiced by those who survey all the strengths and weaknesses of their nature and then fit them into an artistic plan until every one of them appears as art and reason and even weaknesses delight the eye.” (Gay Science 290)

Now we start to get a sense of the value artistic creation holds for Nietzsche. In this way, the Superman, who we are now following the progression of, is a figurative god: a creator of selfhood and reality. We are unhindered by communal morality; we have created our own to suit our natures. But the Superman is first

the man who is master of himself,” but this is “the hardest of all tasks, that which requires the greatest amount of power: he who can do it has experienced the greatest increase in power, and if (as Nietzsche later says explicitly but here implies) happiness (in Zarathustra’s joy) is the feeling that power increases, that a resistance is overcome, then the Superman will be the happiest man and, as such, the meaning and justification of existence. Through continual increase of power to transmute the chaos of life into a continual self-overcoming of life and thus to experience in an ever greater degree he joy which is synonymous with this self-overcoming: that would now be the meaning of life—for joy is to Nietzsche, as it is to commonsense, the one thing that requires no justification, that is its own justification. He who had attained that joy would affirm life and love it however much pain it contained, because he would know that ‘all things are chained and entwined together’ and that everything is therefore part of a whole which he must accept as a whole. To express this feeling of life-affirmation Nietzsche formulated a theorem of ‘the eternal recurrence of the same events’ to which he gave rhapsodic expression in Zarathustra.

The eternal recurrence:

“The Greatest Weight—What if some day or night a demon were to steal after you into your loneliest solitude and said to you: ‘this life, as you live it now and have lived it, you will have to live again and again, times without number; and there will be nothing new in it, but every pain and every joy and every thought and sigh and all the unspeakably small and great in your life must return to you, and everything in the same series and sequence—and in the same way this spider and this moonlight among the trees, and in the same way this moment and I myself. The eternal hour-glass of existence will be turned again and again—and you with it, you dust of dust!’—Would you not throw yourself down and gnash you teeth and curse the demon who spoke? Or have you experienced a tremendous moment in which you would have answered him: “You are a god and never did I hear anything more divine! If this thought gained possession of you, it would change you as you are or perhaps crush you. The question in each and every thing, ‘Do you desire this once more and innumerable times more?’ would lie upon your actions as the greatest weight. Or how well disposed would you have to become to yourself and to life to crave nothing more fervently than this ultimate eternal confirmation and seal? (Gay Science 341)

Hollingdale continues,

To be sure, only the Superman could be so well disposed towards his life as to want it again and again forever: but that precisely is the reason for willing his creation. The joy of the Superman in being as he is, now and ever, is the ultimate sublimation of the will to power and the final overcoming of an otherwise inexorable and inevitable nihilism.

Now Nietzsche become the great affirmer:

thus I shall become one of those who make things beautiful. Amor fati: may that be my love from now on! I want to wage no war against the ugly I do not want to accuse, I do not want even to accuse the accusers. May looking away be my only form of negation.”

This is the superman: a self-creating, life-affirming being who ever seeks growth and experience. “Live dangerously,’ he says. The arc of growth is one of severe nihilism to the point of solipsism, and from there a reaffirmation of the self in terms derived from the deepest desires and fear. Life is seen for what it is and appreciated. What about Truth? What about afterlife?—it is beyond our senses to know so it is not part of the project. Perspectivism, relative truth, truth to me. Live for the day!