The first person to have spotted
the mystical element in the writings of Friedrich Nietzsche was a close
friend and intimate student of his, Lou von Salome. In her classic Friedrich Nietzsche in seinen Werken
(Vienna, 1894) she had come to the conclusion, both from private talks
she had with the philosopher, as well as from a thorough study of his works,
that Nietzsche´s thought had developed over the years and that
the worst thing we could do is to consider his philosophy as a
monolithic corpus -like eg. the Schopenhaurian- that never underwent
any changes and must always be approached in the same way. She pointed
to the fact that the thought of Nietzsche had always been organic and
that new insights and new developments presented themselves over the
years, often even to the bewilderment of the philosopher himself. For
these new intuitions often compelled him to abandon insights he had
considered true for many years. Each new insight led to a crisis, not
only philosophically, but also psychologically. Von Salome tells us
about the emotional disturbances that accompanied the different phases
in Nietzsche´s philosophical Werdegang.
Because of her close friendship
and association with the philosopher, there is every reason to believe
that her interpretation of Nietzschean philosophy as consisting of
three developing phases was somehow supported by Nietzsche himself. He
himself might have suggested this tripartition. This is at least
suggested by the accounts of the meetings von Salome and Nietzsche had,
where Nietzsche often commented on the ways his thought had developed
over the years. Every time his philosophy went through a crisis -which
meant with Nietzsche that the philosopher himself also suffered one- he
discussed in detail his new insights with his friend and pointed out to
her the developments, but also the breaches with his former philosophy.
So we will take over von
Salome´s tripartition as a valid one, describing all three phases
in extenso. It is the aim of
this article to show that the final mystical phase can only be rightly
understood when seen as a culmination of earlier developments. We will
see that earlier elements in the thought of Nietzsche made way for a
mystical breakthrough and that his whole philosophy might be regarded
as a rising crescendo towards final mystical insight. But in the end we
must also honestly ask ourselves the question: did his mystical
insights finally made a mystic out of Nietzsche? Was he
´converted´ to mysticism in the end? And, if our answer
turns our negative, what exactly is the difference, if there is any,
between the philosophy of Nietzsche and so called authentic
mysticism?
The three periods of
Nietzsche´s thought correspond strikingly with
Kierkegaard´s tripartite description of philosophical
development. The Danish philosopher believed, as we know, that
conscious man evolved from an aesthetic appreciation of life in his
youth towards rational understanding in his later years, to finally end
this evolution with a transcendence of both aestheticism and
rationalism in a higher religious fusion. Kierkegaard believed that
this final religious transcendence was the culmination of all earlier
philosophical developments. It was the goal of life and philosophy.
Only in this final phase could the philosopher find real understanding.
All the earlier phases were merely preliminaries.
1.
First period: Dionysian aestheticism
In the seventies of his century,
the nineteenth, Nietzsche had high hopes about art. He believed that
art was able to deliver man from some basic misconceptions. In his
analysis eighteenth and nineteenth century man had laid to much stress
on reason. This had divorced man and his culture from the very roots of
life and had made him weak and degenerated. This was the negative
outcome of the Enlightenment, that the most crucial and vital part of a
human being had been neglected and underestimated: the passions. The
philosophers of the Enlightenment had made the capital mistake of
separating man from life, as if his essence was an autonomous ratio
divorced from nature. But instead of nature being controlled by reason,
it was the other way round: reason depended in content and in existence
on nature and the passions.
So in the seventies Nietzsche
supported the Romantic revolt against the Enlightenment. A key study in
this respect was his The Birth of
Tragedy out of the Spirit of Music (1872), in which he tried to
show that there were two distinct metaphysical forces operating on
nature and culture, one he called Dionysian and the other Apollonian.
The Apollonian force tried to transform crude energy and the vital
forces of nature into distinct and separate entities. At the mental
level this force constructed images, concepts and signs out of primal
life energy. In our dream state it was the source of projected images
and mythologies, imaginative renderings of vital and primal passions
and instinct in the body. In our waking state Apollo transformed these
images and signs into the meaningful succession of logic and language.
It gave us the opportunity to conceptualize and rationalize our world
and our existence.
But the Dionysus force tried to
bring back and dissolve this concrete and dual force of
conceptualization into its primal mode of natural oneness. The Dionysus
force wanted to derationalize and demythologize, that we might regain
our primal connection with nature and the passions; that we might once
again be rooted in our nature and experience our oneness with life. In
order to do so the force employed the means of ritual and art. In
ritual and art the balance was restored that the Apollonian forces of
culture had broken. In the active and passive enjoyment of art life
again could be affirmed.
Thus Nietzsche explained Greek
tragedy. Greek drama was meant to overcome the dualities of life and
death, of love and hate, of suffering and happiness, by showing us the
intricate complexities of life in the successes and sufferings of the
Greek heroes. The Apollo force wanted us to make clear cut divisions
about good and evil, right and wrong, love and hate but the Dionysian
tragedy showed us that such rational answers were mere fictions and
that life was too complicated -too tragic- to afford meaningful
rational explanations and well categorized answers. The Dionysian Ur-eine, the very essence of life
itself, was chaotic and meaningless. And this was what art wanted to
show us. It made us speachless in awe before the divine mystery of
life. Such was the aim of Greek tragedy. It strove for a religious
acceptance of all aspects of life, including the things we most want to
escape, like death, wild nature and the passions.
According to Nietzsche all true
and meaningful art has this Dionysian quality. It can redeem us from
our slavery to reason and culture. It can bring us back again to our
natural state, by showing and making us feel what life really is. This
Dionysian quality he saw highly operative in music. In the beauty of
music redemption from cultural and rational slavery is possible,
because music tends to neutralize the rational by establishing harmony in a non-logical and non-verbal
way. In music we are being elevated to a world of beauty that is
natural and in concord with our passions. But not in all music. There
is music that is too rational, too cultural, too degenerated from life.
This kind of art the artist should avoid, because it is contrary to the
purpose of art. Art -and especially music- should have an intrinsic
tragic quality.
Nietzsche sought for this
Dionysian and tragic quality in German art and culture also. At this
time his great champion in this respect was Richard Wagner. The
composer from Bayreuth was to become the new Sophokles of German
culture and Friedrich Nietzsche wanted to be his philosopher. In
Wagner´s music he felt something of the Greek Dionysus of ancient
tragedy at work. But in the end he grew disappointed with Wagner for
failing to live up to his high ideal of a Dionysian culture. More and
more Nietzsche began to see Jesus Christ and Christianity as the
antipode of Dionysus and Dionysianism -in the beginning he had
contrasted Dionysus with Sokrates and Euripides as enemies of life- and
when Wagner eventually celebrated the Christian virtues in his opera
Parsifal and made Christ his hero instead of the hoped for Dionysus,
the limit was set for Nietzsche and a breach was unavoidable.
Nietzsche also became
disappointed with that other hero of his first period, the German
philosopher Arthur Schopenhauer, Wagner´s favorite thinker. From
the start Nietzsche had seen in Schopenhauer´s philosophy of the
Will a re-evaluation and re-approval of the life force and the passions
in man. It seemed to him that Schopenhauer also wanted to establish a
more accurate view about man´s true nature. Life was controlled
by an unconscious vital force that Schopenhauer called Will. This force
determined man´s thoughts and actions. Reason was only an
interpretation a posteriori,
but the real steering of life was controlled by natural forces working
in the depth of our being. Nietzsche agreed on this and saw this
philosophy as truly Dionysian in essence. But he grew disappointed with
Schopenhauer when he discovered that the pessimistic philosopher did
not want to bring man back to the Will but that he wanted to free him
from it. This Nietzsche saw as the Christian element in the philosophy
of Schopenhauer. He didn´t want to bring man back to life, but away from life. So in the end he
saw Wagner and Schopenhauer in their disapproval of the Will as enemies
of life.
Criticism: though there
definitely were mystical elements to be found in the ancient cult of
Dionysus -and these elements, inter alia, were: ecstasy, transcendence
of dualities like male/female, rich/poor etc., revaluation of the body
as a vehicle of consciousness, union with the Godhead, rapture and
intoxication (Rausch),
other-worldly-consciousness-, it is important to note that the cult of
Dionysus in ancient Greece cannot be labeled pure mysticism. The
participants in the rite of Dionysus did not seek an everlasting union
with their Godhead, as is the aim of mysticism, but only a temporal
one. Neither did they abolish or transcend the cultural paradigmata of
their time, but rather enforced them by offering a temporal relief. It
is worth noting that true mysticism is always something of a
counter-culture, but the cult of Dionysus was perfectly accepted -be it
with some initial problems- into the Greek polis from the sixth century
BC onwards.
What Dionysianism did was a
temporal restoration of bodily energies. This was done by a temporal
submergence of consciousness into its primal natural Ground -by
fasting, feasting, chanting, dancing and drinking-, that the balance
between culture and nature might be restored again. Man tends to forget
that he has its roots in nature and the body. Too much culture can make
him sick and ill-connected to his true being. The cult of
Dionysus was meant to offer a counterweight against such disharmonies
of head and body.
But mysticism goes further than
this. In mysticism we find a transcendence of all dualities, including
the one between nature and culture, or between mind and body. Mysticism
works by integration of polar opposites and then by transcending them
to a higher level. But Dionysianism is still at work at the level of
rudimentary body/mind integration. It does so by means of temporarily
bringing the organism back to a former, a preliminary, stage of
development, to annihilate the pathologies that occurred when the
initial discernment between the one stage of development and the latter
took place.
These are critical annotations
that also have their bearings upon art. Art -like Dionysianism- can
work two ways. It can work at a reintergration of mind and body by
making use of its physical qualities -in the case of music: rythm,
sound, pitch- and it can establish a connection with the supramental
levels of soul and Spirit with the use of its more etherical and
sublime qualities like perspective or melody and harmony. But the
difference between art and mysticism, which also labors in the same two
directions in trying to establish harmony all the way up from body to
Spirit, is the significant fact that art -like Dionysianism- only works
temporarily in restoring life energy, while mysticism can procure
everlasting results by establishing a direct and everlasting union and
a final identity with the Ground and its qualities of bliss, health,
strength etc. In art we experience intuitions and presentiments of such
a posssibility, but unfortunately only temporarily. The working -the
Rausch- only lasts as long as the aesthetic experience lasts.
Nietzsche, though consciously not
well aware of this distinction between art and mysticism, began after a
while to apprehend these shortcomings and limitations. In the course of
time, as his consciousness evolved to higher stages of development, he
grew disappointed with the role art and Dionysianism played in the
program he had set up for mankind (which was to liberate man from
tradition, from its stale and encrusted notions and to enlighten him),
precisely because of the aforesaid reasons: they only worked
temporarily and they worked more backward -more reductive- than
forward. There was something childish about the belief in salvation
through art. This insight eventually made Nietzsche blush. It was time
to go ahead.
2.
Second period: rational positivism
In 1879 Nietzsche suffered a
severe crisis. Grave headaches made reading and writing virtually
impossible. He had to keep bed for months. In the end he had to resign
from his post at the University of Basel. Still very young he was
forced to retire for the rest of his life, supported by an annual
stipendium from the University. When he finally recovered he was
another man and also another philosopher. Instead of art, now reason became his credo. Reason and
insight would finally liberate man. Reason was able to destroy all the
wrong notions mankind had accumulated over the centuries. Clear and
analytical thinking were to be the means to think over and re-assess
the whole preceding history of ideas.
This sounds familiar and one
would suspect Nietzsche now to join forces with the philosophers of the
Enlightenment. But his program was to be totally different. For he used
reason and analysis not so much as positive forces directed at building
up large structures of thought, set up to construct a mental world that
would connect the visible world of our senses with the world of
thinking, as Kant has tried to do, but more as a vis negativa that would deconstruct
this our mental world. His use of reason was meant to show the
falseness of our beliefs and notions, or at least, to show them for
what they were worth, not explanations of reality, but merely
interpretations. This program of deconstruction (not a word of his own
coinage, though) made Nietzsche the forerunner and in a sense the
father of postmodernism.
Nihilism
and perspectivism
The world according to Nietzsche
is a mere chaos. Our intellect and our senses throw a maze upon this
meaningless nothingness of the world, in order to measure it out and to
distil some meaning and purpose out of it. But these are our projections and they have no
intrinsic claim to truth (or to falseness) in themselves. It is
somehow, for an individual as it is for his culture, impossible to live
with this dreary nothingness. To get out of bed each day and to resume
our activities we need to discover some meaning in life. But this has
nothing to do with reality as it is in itself. It only tells us
something about what we are and what we need.
Out of this existential
need for meaning and purpose we have constructed notions and
beliefs about the reality in which we live and which we are. We cannot
do without these beliefs. They give us certainty and a direction for
the steps we take. In the past these beliefs have worked for us. So we
have grown accustomed to them. Now we cannot do without them anymore.
They have become a part of our total make up. They have slipped into
our genes, so to speak. As we are a conservative and anxious species,
we adhere to these beliefs as much as we can. For all newness is
frightening and between the old and the new lurks the great abyss of
nothingness, which is the only reality there is.
Even our so called common sense
and our science are based on false assumptions. We believe, perhaps
baffled by the impact of our language, that there are such things as
things, facts, entities, that we can study as a source of knowledge. We
believe that things exist independently and that they have a certain
amount of perdurance. But in reality there are no separate things that
can be viewed apart from their surroundings or background. And besides,
their reality is fleeting and impermanent. But it is very hard for our
organism to admit such a state of affairs. It would shatter our mind
and perhaps our very lives, if we would live on a daily basis with a
disbelieve in things and permanence. So Nietzsche does not contest the
naturalness of our common sense. To view the world like that has worked
out well for our species. But that is not to say that sensualism is
true as a philosophical thesis in its own right.
Especially in morality can this
need of ours be spotted, that we want to judge and evaluate our world.
In Nietzsche´s view the world is not moral or immoral, but it is beyond good and evil: it is amoral.
But the blurred and overlapping shapes of the moral world confuse our
thinking. We cannot live with the ´and besides....´ or the
´it depends more or less on...´. We do not see the
relativity of our morality. We want certainty. That´s the reason
we hold our moral judgments to be true. Even a little doubt about the
truth of our moral judgments makes us uncertain and, in the wake of
that uncertainty, even aggressive.
The program Nietzsche, in
association with his friend and fellow positivist Paul Klee, set out
for the investigations of morals was as follows: they tried to show
what the initial use had been of a certain set of moral rules. Why did
this specific morality began to dominate culture and not some other set
of beliefs? What had been the initial psychology in the mind of the
group to choose this one rather than that one? This grew out to become
Nietzsche´s method of deconstruction: in trying to explain the
origin of beliefs one could show the relativity and in the end the
philosophical falseness of the studied beliefs and moral values.
Approval: as philosophical and
mystical development is concerned, Nietzsche has done an important step
forward. He has moved his center of consciousness upward, from the
level of identifying life with bodily passions in his first period to
the higher level of seeing life as centered in ratio. Now the mind
became the very center and goal of his philosophical investigations.
Everything that somehow failed the test of rational discernment was
dismissed as false. All superstitious, magical, mytho-religious ideas
had to be seen for what they were worth: mere steps upon a ladder that
had helped mankind to deal with its surroundings. Now the ladder
wasn´t needed for anymore. It was time to cast it away.
At this higher level he made so
much progress that he even began to question the workings of mind
itself. He began to see mind as merely an instrument in the evolution
of the human species, not as the God that the Enlightenment had made it
out to be. Mind and language were nothing but tools that were
instrumental in shaping (and, as he saw it, even distorting) reality in
a way that was beneficial for our organism. The mind casts its net upon
reality but it only catches its own mazes. The real reality always
escapes us. This Nietzsche wanted us to admit. Reality is only
understood as an interpretation of our own projection.
This vision-logic type of
thinking pushed at the ceiling of its own existential level. Like
Chuang Tzu and Nagarjuna in the East, Nietzsche somehow negated the
results of our reasoning, our logic, our beliefs. If we follow the
lines of clear thinking we are forced to admit the relativity, the
incongruity, even the falseness of all our mental constructions. It is
reasonable to believe that this via
negativa prepared the way for some breakthroughs in mysticism,
though it, as we shall see later on, never resulted in
Nietzsche´s case in a complete devotion to mysticism or mystical
practices. It only led to some basic mystical intuitions. But the great
importance of Nietzsche is that he was brave and honest enough to ask
questions about the working of mind and its results. Hitherto all
thinkers of the West had considered the mind unquestionably substantial
in explaining the world.
Criticism: but surprisingly
enough, because somewhat in contradiction with his own philosophical
premises, this didn´t prevent Nietzsche from setting up his own
metaphysics. At this stage one would aspect him to see the world guided
by Reason, as in the Hegelian fashion of his days, but instead he
remained true to the insights of his younger years: he only accepted
the naturalism of the body, the instincts, the passions, the drives,
but now seen as a metaphysical force not very different from the way
his old master Schopenhauer had seen the world. He also accepted the
Will as the basic metaphysics of his philosophy, but with the slight
modification that the Will was a Will-to-Power, something also implied
in Schopenhauer, but there never made fully explicit.
Existence was not made up out of
entities but out of different, hierarchical structured forces, that
were competing among each other for power and getting one up. This
pyramidal structure of being was beneficial, even vital, for both
collectives as for individuals. According to Nietzsche the being of the world accords value in different degrees to different
forces. Some forces have a higher value than other forces.
Philosophical labor consists in determining the value of each. Only
that way can life be served and lifted up to higher potentials, if we
acknowledge the fact that one force is to be preferred above the other.
Much is to be said in favor of
such a view of reality. Also in mysticism we find the idea of a
hierarchical structure of reality consistently recurring. The facts of
reality can be interpreted that way. But at this point in his
philosophical development something went wrong in Nietzsche´s
head. He made the crucial mistake of narrowing this stage like
development of reality down to social, economic and political
hierarchies. But at this lower level of reality all distinctions in
value become more diffuse and overlapping. Perhaps confused by reading
too much books from classical antiquity, he identified too strongly
with classical aristocratic thinking and began to think that the
greatest value was to be found among the social and political dominant.
Very strangely, perhaps because he felt isolated and marginalized, he
began to feel sympathy for political thinkers like Theognis (who
already in the late 6th century BC fought a lost battle for the
declining aristocracy), the sophist Thrasymachos and Machiavelli. In
these writers he found the same dedain and contempt for the lower, the
so called degenerate, the common (´the herd´ as he from now
on used to call it) as he felt in his own heart.
In a sense Nietzsche was
blinded by appearances. Because the aristocrats looked strong, healthy,
joyful, artistic and life-affirming, he made the wrong inference that
they had to be like that and that consequently their value in the scale
of things had to be higher than with other social groups. But it is the
same with the ruling classes as with the rich all over the world and
throughout history: in most of the cases the value of life is poorly
expressed in them. With perhaps a higher credibility one could retort
that the rulers and the aristocrats of history, on the same line as the
rich and famous of our contemporary media culture, were, in their
corrupting struggle for power, more denying life than affirming it.
Nietzsche never fully developed
to metarational levels of valuation. So the only value distinctions he
was able to make were material (handsome~ugly, rich~poor,
noble~debased), bodily-vital (strong~weak, active~passive,
dominant~subservient) and mental (educated~uneducated,
intelligent~stupid, cultured~uncultured), but he never got to see that
there was ground value in everyone and in everything, a value dependent
on Spirit. So in the end he ironically became the victim of his own
perspectivism: because he thought that the drives and the passions were
predominant in determining the higher levels of the mental and the
cultural, he concluded that men with the strongest drives and the
strongest life force (seen as the result of material and hereditary
breeding, as in the old aristocracies of Ancient Greece) must
necessarily have the highest value. But this is sheer reductionism.
Much has been said about
Nietzsche´s influence on Nazi ideology. Though the Nazi´s
liked to see in Nietzsche their great inspirator (Hitler often had
meetings with Friedrich´s brother-in-law, Bernard Förster,
to discuss their distorted views on the Will-to-Power and the Blonde
Bestie), it is highly questionable if Nietzsche would have subscribed
to their views. It is perhaps more likely that he would have seen the
whole Nazi doctrine and the whole of the Third Reich as another
instance of herd morality and resentment of the slave coming to power.
He had too much contempt for the masses to see a just cause in their
dealings. The masses could be used by exceptional individuals like
Julius Caesar or Cesare Borgia, but in their own right they had no
justification whatsoever. No herd is any better than another herd.
There are only masses and exceptional individuals. The latter must be
the goal, the first are something to overcome.
3.
Third period: mystical revelations
Arthur Danto (Nietzsche as Philosopher p. 96-97)
has already pointed to the fact that there is a slight uneasiness and
contradiction in Nietzschean metaphysics: in order to tell that this
world is a false construction we must have (or we must construct for
ourselves) a world that this one is false about. And in order to have
certainty about the fact that all our beliefs and notions about reality
are uncertain there must of necessity be a force in us that is certain
about such an uncertainty. So at least something, that force in us, is
certain.
Nietzsche was intelligent and
honest enough to confess to such an uneasiness in his work. So more and
more he was inclined to admit that in the black, chaotic vastness of
the Dionysian Ur-Eine some
sort of a pivot was to be found, the real world where our world was
false about. But he never confessed to the existence of a
transcendental world that was substantial to this one. In fact his
theory ruled out transcendentalism and substantialism (he disagreed
with Spinoza). But he came very close to the insights of mysticism, be
it, as we have already seen, in a more negative way. So just like
non-dual mysticism he questioned the reality of a subject~object
duality. The so called autonomous subject was (as in the case of
´the thing´, the object) a construction and an
interpretation by the mind of very complex and unknown forces working
within an organism. This construction deludes us into thinking that we
are the ones who are doing the thinking, the feeling, the deciding. But
the existence of the autonomous subject is only an interpretation a posteriori. Somebody must have
done the thinking, the feeling and the decision making in this body.
Who else but me? But we come only to this conclusion post factum.
Mysticism agrees on this.
Mysticism also considers the autonomous subject to be an epiphenomenon.
This is, I think, the jumping off point where some of Nietzsche
mystical insights originated: he was like Eckhart prepared to empty his
mind of all concepts and beliefs, even the very crucial ones about God,
self and free will. This resulted in my opinion in a blankness and an
openness in his thinking that cleared the ground for his third period:
the revelations of Zarathustra, that famous religious counterpart of
the agnostic Nietzsche.
Übermensch
The revelations began in the year
1881 when walking in the mountains of his beloved Zwitzerland. He
suddenly became aware of new possibilities for mankind. If all our
inherited ideas, morals and beliefs were no more than a useful
construction meant to facilitate existence, why, so he asked himself,
would man not be able to contruct an inner world that would be more
useful still, more life affirming still? Man as he is right now, is not
the final thing. He is just another step on the ladder of evolution.
One day contemporary man will be overcome. A new dawn will lighten up a
new future. It will bring us more happiness and more strength. Once the
herd will be overcome, there will only be strong, joyous, life
affirming individuals. In Zarathustra, Prologue 3-4 he wrote:
Man is something that shall be
overcome. What have you done to overcome him?
All
beings have created something higher than themselves. And would you be
the ebb of this great flood, and return to the animals rather than to
overcome man?
Man is
a rope, tied between the beast and the Übermensch - a rope across
and abyss.
What
is great in man is that he is a bridge and not a goal. What can be
loved in man is that he is an overgoing and an undergoing.
He had started off with a
rehabilitation of the body and its inner drives. He wanted them to be
redeemed and elevated through art. In his second period he had
developed the mental to the extent that it began to see its own
limitations. Now he was willing to go even further. He began to have
foresights of a possibility to transcend the physical, the vital and
the mental. There was another world to explore. There could be
something more to life as it is right now. This resulted in his book Daybreak (1881) were the coming of
a new man was already hinted
at.
One might call this belief in a
better furure for mankind religious. But it was not religion in any old
sense. In fact Nietzsche criticized the world religions. They had
poisoned life with their other-worldly belief in a better existence
after death. They had internalized the ressentiment of the slave and
made man hate himself. The religions of the world were the cause of
man´s bad consciousness (slechtes
Gewissen). They had not made
life stronger, happier, more noble, more blissful. The priests had made
man an enemy to himself. These life denying types of religion Nietzsche
wanted to overcome. He was looking for a more individual religion, one
that would bring true enlightenment to the world.
But he never developed a method
nor a metaphysics that would make such a religion possible. And this is
the great difference with mysticism. In mysticism definite methods are
developed to transform consciousness and to create a higher type of
individual. This is done against a metaphysical background of a belief
(prompted by mystical experience) in ´divine´ forces
working both outside and inside man that can be contacted in order to
bring such a transformation about. The mystic surrenders herself, in
faith and trust, to the divine Grace that labors to lift man up to
something greater than she is right now. The personality is given up
out of trust that Life itself will make something better out of it.
But Nietzsche never strove to
annihilate his self, though he did have the insight that the self had
no solid reality. But in practise he kept clinging to the idea that he
was a somebody, aye, even a very important somebody, delusions of the
vital that in mysticism we strive to overcome. It was his vanity that
made a real mystical surrender impossible. In the end it would even
drive him mad. So it would be wrong, I think, to equate his
Übermensch with Aurobindo´s supramental mystic or with
Heard´s leptoid man (to name but a few of the visions about
future man). His Übermensch is more of a transitional
figure standing midway between the old Adam and the leptoid man. It
still has all the flaws of old humanity like a pride in boasting about
a presumed aristocratic superiority. This is not final man. In the end
man can be full of love, strength and bliss, a ´beacon onto
himself´.
Eternal
recurrence
In the 80´s another
mystical revelation happened to him. Afterwards he only dared to speak
about it in whispers, presumably because he knew well that this new
theory rhymed badly with the rest of his philosophy. For in the flash
of a moment he had the insight that this life, and this moment in life,
was not all there was. He felt that this very moment would happen again
and again in an eternal recurrence. He
was so convinced about the truth and the certainty of this revelation
that he spoke about it in the most extreme descriptions: literally
everything would happen again and again and it would happen precisely
in the same way, with precisely the same re-appearence.
This sounds like the theory of
reincarnation, so diversely propounded among the world religions: the
soul lives recurrently life after life, in order to grow in
purification and finally find redemption. But in Nietzsche´s
theory the possibility of evolution is precluded, so it seems, because
there is no
growth, no change, no evolution for the soul, nay, not for anything you
can think of in the whole of creation: in every cycle anew, everything
will always recur the same as it ever was. This is a very strange and
extreme theory, that also made Nietzsche himself blush, as the tale
goes, especially when one comes to think of the fact that it is not in
line with two of his own tenets: his Übermensch theory and his
nihilism. For how could the Übermensch ever evolve when everything
would always stay the same, in the same form as it always had been, and
that per saecula saeculorum?
Conceded the Übermensch is to happen
one day, it must, following this theory, already have happened
innumerable times before. Then nothing would be more known to us than
the Übermensch. But as Nietzsche tells us, we can, not at our
present status quo, fathom
the Übermensch for what he will be.
And as the theory of nihilism is
concerned: if everything comes back the same, it must come back
according to a definite plan, a blueprint, of creation. For there is no
compelling reason to assume that all the different, but limited,
combinations of life force would recur in the same precise order, if
there would not be a precise plan, commanding that order. Life, with
all its minutuous details, would by some giant Control Freak be
designed on forehand. Following this blueprint even the smallest ant
would walk the same route to his hill with the same leaves on his same
shoulder century after century, all the way to the final destruction of
the worlds (if such a thing is not also precluded in this theory). This
all seems to be in flagrant contradiction with his own metaphysics of
nihilism.
Amor
Fati
But the case doesn´t rest
in irony. For we have to ask ourselves: why did this theory have such
an impact on Nietzsche? Why was he, so to speak, willing to give his
life for it? And what is so mystical about this theory? What made it a
´revelation´? The answer we must seek in his famous credo
of Amor Fati.
That day, walking in the
mountains of his beautiful Sils-Maria, a great rest and stillness
overtook his heart. He was a lonely man, but that day the loneliness
was not so heavy on his heart anymore. Instead he felt himself to be
free and full of energy. Nature was so very beautiful and thought
inspiring. His heart was light and cheerful. The poetry of Zarathustra,
already resounding in his heart, made him feel ecstatic. In the last
two years he had managed to free himself. The years of his emancipation
were closed now. He felt like a new man for a new age. This day was
like the grande finale of his years of seclusion and contemplation. He
felt open and spacious. Then... all of a sudden it happened. It made
his knees tremble in awe. Tears fell down his cheeks. A roaring
laughter escaped his throat and made the mountains echo far and wide.
He had to sit down and recuperate. He felt a bit dizzy...
For suddenly he had seen it. He
now knew. With the greatest certainty in the world he now knew that
everything was good and that everything was meant to be just the way it
was. What the deeper meaning was, he still could not figure out. But he
looked down at the grass and saw that every leave of grass had to be
there. Because every leave of grass would always be there. It was not
and should not have been otherwise. It was in the destiny of things that it was
there. So it was with the greater things in life. All the pain he had
gone through, all the years of loneliness, all the great suffering
there is in a human life, but also the greatness in life, the love, the
nobility....- it was all meant to be that way! This insight struck him
so deeply and so tremendously that it was as if every minute of his
whole life had gained depth and momentum by it. This mystical
experience made him accept life, not as an idea or an ideology, but
very factually and existentially. Now he had experienced -almost, to him also,
to a degree of absurdity- that life could be and was to be affirmed.
Now this was what he always had believed in! This was nothing but his
Amor Fati, his love for life´s destiny! This had always had been
his philosophy. But now something greater had happened: now he had felt
and experienced it, right to the marrow of his bones. And with a grin
he whispered in silence: ´so Tertullianus was right after all!
credo quia absurdum.´
The
Will-to-Power
People who are skeptical of
finding such traces of mysticism in Nietzsche will at this point
fretfully interrupt the discourse and object: ´Friedrich
Nietzsche was far from being a mystic. In his most central doctrine,
his theory of the Will-to-Power, he and the mystics couldn´t
differ more on what seems to be the most essential part of philosophy.
For the mystics belief that everything in the world is ruled by Love
and that all things strive to become One again, as they are One at
their very
heart. But Nietzsche learned that all things are constantly
at war with each other. They are Many and want to remain Many as much
as they can. All a force ever wants in existence is to get
´one-up´ over another force. In this constant and
relentless strive becoming One with the other is out of the
question.´
He will go on saying: ´the
mystics believe that the world is made up out of Ananda, blissfulness.
If we somehow manage to contact this inner blissful nature of ourselves
and the world, we will be eternally blissful. But Nietzsche seems to
suggest that the world is nothing but war and strife. How can we ever
be eternally blissful? Happiness can only be there on moments that we
clear away an obstacle and thus feel Power over that obstacle. So
happiness is only relative. It is only concomitant to struggle and
prevalence. But mystics seem to suggest that we can be absolutely happy
apart from any power drive.´
This is a good point and it is
the more urgent because Nietzsche´s Power doctrine seems to match
the facts. It is hard to deny hierarchy. Within hierarchy every force
strives to get one up. This strive is the source of much evil and
suffering in the world. But strive also seems to be necessary. In
strive and power the inner value of a force becomes apparent. In good
´healthy´ competition the intelligent prevail over the less
intelligent or the stronger prevail over the weaker. That way the value
of intelligence and strength becomes apparent. So Power is the way the
world accords value to each force, Nietzsche seems to suggest.
It is well to keep in mind that
the mystics do not think otherwise. They also accord value in some form
of hierarchy. In their well known Chain of Being the vital has power
over the material, the mental over the vital, the psychic over the
mental and Spirit crowns it all, as having the highest Power, both in
the world at large as in every smallest microkosmos. What has greater
value -what is ´better´- is presiding over the lesser or,
should the lesser rule, strives to regain its lawful position of being
the leader. As a human being is concerned, this means that life will
fail -ie. will be wretched and unhappy-, unless Spirit takes the lead.
Because It has the highest value and all lower levels can and should be
subject to Its voice.
Did Nietzsche think otherwise?
Let´s quote Danto (op.cit. p. 227) in full extent and notice that
Nietzsche´s Will-to-Power is far from rephrasing
Machiavelli´s il Principo,
but that it comes more close to the aforesaid views of mysticism:
The Will-to-Power is the
desire for freedom
in those who are enslaved, it is a will to dominate and overcome others
in those who are stronger and more free. But, ´in those who are strongest, richest,
most independent and most courageous, [the Will-to-Power] appears as
love of mankind, or of the people or of the Gospel, or truth, or God....(Nietzsche,
Nachlass p.524)´ This would be a strange and deviant statement to
someone who knew Nietzsche only by reputation. But to the one who has
followed this discussion it will plainly have reference to the Ascetic
Ideal. It is the self discipline of the Will-to-Power. The strongest
men, he wrote in Beyond Good and Evil, have always been fascinated by
the saint because they intuited in him a power which was engaged in a
self-trial, an autostruggle, exhibiting its strength through
self-discipline. ´They
honored something in themselves when they honored the saint´,
he wrote ´They had
something to ask him....´ (Beyond Good and Evil 51). He is the step that must be taken toward a
higher civilization(my
italics).
Conclusion
With Nietzsche philosophy reached
a crisis and a decisive turning point. Modern philosophy had always
believed in the claims of knowledge as a way of understanding life and
the world. But Nietzsche contested these claims. He dethroned Queen
Philosophia by stating and, as he thought, proving that she was no more
than a useful tool for a certain type of interpretation of the world.
As a tool she could not make higher claims than any other tool. She
could only be seen as one Will-to-Power trying to outdo many others in
our consciousness. We had only let her seize the throne because of her
ability to give us the greatest amount of certainty and rest. But this
has nothing to do with reality nor with truth. She was not able to
explain the world to us, at least not to a point of ultimate
decisiveness.
But this did not turn Nietzsche
into a mystic. He was disinclined to believe in some sort of Ultimate
Reality lying at the basis of this world. He did not believe that such
a Reality could be reached or realized in our consciousness. For him
there was no such Reality to give us meaning. Meaning to him was only
dependent on the Will-to-Power. But in mysticism the Will-to-Power is
not the Ultimate Reality. There is still a deeper reality, that gives
meaning to all and everything. The Will-to-Power is only a force
working in the world of immanence. Most mystics believe that the
Will-to-Power can ultimately be transcended in Spirit. When Spirit is
realized, meaning is also realized.
It must be admitted that there
are mystics who, like Nietzsche, also follow a radically negative path.
They also contest the existence of anything transcendent to this world.
But what makes these thinkers mystics is the fact that they admit that
in the total emptying of the mind something at least is reached or
gained: a deep love or a contentment or an experience of some sort, as
the positive outcome of their via
negativa. So in this respect they
seem to pose something after all. In the deepest inner experience, in
the ultimate regions beyond the mind, in the ´impossible´
(as Bataille called it), they admit that there is love, ecstasy,
contentment, blissfulness. It belongs to the inner experience. But
Nietzsche speaks very rarely about such mystical levels of being.
He was not that much interested
in the inner path of spirituality. So we do not find him in his
writings following a sadhana
of some sort. When he spoke about religion
and spirituality he took the role of the phenomenologist, studying
spirituality and religion more from the outside than from the inside.
His role was more of the critic who brought to surface all that had
gone wrong in the name of spirituality and religion. And this is
perhaps his greatest achievement: he brought a worthy broom to the dust
of our spiritual culture and tradition. He made us look with renewed
eyes to the things we believe in. He forced us to reconsider what we
had taken for granted all along. Western culture was no more the same
after Nietzsche.
But because of his deep thought
and his honesty, because of his courage to remain contented with
not-knowing and also because of his zest for intellectual freedom and
open mindedness, there were times that something unexpected happened in
the mind and heart of Nietzsche, that came close to the findings of the
mystics: he had his revelations of a mystical nature. Did these make
him a mystic? Perhaps not by his own admission. He was rather ambiguous
towards mysticism. But he certainly brought philosophy closer to
mysticism. A number of postmodern philosophers, who feel indebted to
Nietzsche, like Bataille or Lyotard, have strong mystical elements in
their philosophy. So it is perhaps wise to conclude that Nietzsche,
whether nolens or volens, was one of the reasons
mysticism was taken
seriously and even accepted in recent postmodern philosophy.
well as from a thorough study of his works,
that Nietzsche´s thought had developed over the years and that
the worst thing we could do is to consider his philosophy as a
monolithic corpus -like eg. the Schopenhaurian- that never underwent
any changes and must always be approached in the same way. She pointed
to the fact that the thought of Nietzsche had always been organic and
that new insights and new developments presented themselves over the
years, often even to the bewilderment of the philosopher himself. For
these new intuitions often compelled him to abandon insights he had
considered true for many years. Each new insight led to a crisis, not
only philosophically, but also psychologically. Von Salome tells us
about the emotional disturbances that accompanied the different phases
in Nietzsche´s philosophical Werdegang.
by establishing harmony in a non-logical and non-verbal
way. In music we are being elevated to a world of beauty that is
natural and in concord with our passions. But not in all music. There
is music that is too rational, too cultural, too degenerated from life.
This kind of art the artist should avoid, because it is contrary to the
purpose of art. Art -and especially music- should have an intrinsic
tragic quality.
world accords value in different degrees to different
forces. Some forces have a higher value than other forces.
Philosophical labor consists in determining the value of each. Only
that way can life be served and lifted up to higher potentials, if we
acknowledge the fact that one force is to be preferred above the other.
otherwise. It was in the destiny of things that it was
there. So it was with the greater things in life. All the pain he had
gone through, all the years of loneliness, all the great suffering
there is in a human life, but also the greatness in life, the love, the
nobility....- it was all meant to be that way! This insight struck him
so deeply and so tremendously that it was as if every minute of his
whole life had gained depth and momentum by it. This mystical
experience made him accept life, not as an idea or an ideology, but
very factually and existentially. Now he had experienced -almost, to him also,
to a degree of absurdity- that life could be and was to be affirmed.
Now this was what he always had believed in! This was nothing but his
Amor Fati, his love for life´s destiny! This had always had been
his philosophy. But now something greater had happened: now he had felt
and experienced it, right to the marrow of his bones. And with a grin
he whispered in silence: ´so Tertullianus was right after all!
credo quia absurdum.´ 
