These aspects of Nietzsche's work elicit a tendency to compare Nietzsche's doctrine with that of Freud and psychoanalysis and to argue that the Freudian doctrine and school (the psychoanalytic theory of human personality on which the psychotherapeutic technique of psychoanalysis is based). Nietzsche’s has influenced and affected methods of treatment (psychoanalysis) by Nietzsche's philosophy and work and the Nietzschean doctrine. As a demonstration from the relevant literature, according to Golomb's (1987) thesis, the theoretical core of psychoanalysis is already part and parcel of Nietzsche's philosophy, insofar as it is based on ideas that are both displayed in it and developed by it -ideas such as the unconscious, repression, sublimation, the id, the superego, primary and secondary processes and interpretations of dreams.
Nonetheless, the actual situation in the domains of psychotherapy, psychiatry and clinical psychology are not in passing over, but collectively strict and set in determining each general standard to assailing mortality. While the two savants (Nietzsche and Freud) endeavour to understand man, to develop the healthy power that is still present in the individual and the neurotic patient to overcome and suppress the psychological boundaries that repress his vitality and inhibit his ability to function freely and creatively and attain truth, the difference between the psychodynamic school, approach, movement and method of treatment, in general, and psychoanalysis, in particular, and the existential approach to psychotherapy, the existential movement and the existential, humanistic school of psychology and method of treatment stemmed from the doctrines and views of Freud. Nietzsche is profound and significant, for the actual psychotherapeutic treatment. The reason as for this difference lie in the variation in the two savants' view and definition of man and human existence, the nature and character of man and his relationship with the world and the environment, and in the variation in the intellectual soil, that nourished and nurtured the two giant savants' views, doctrines (that is, the scholarly academic savants' philosophical and historical roots and influences) and the manners according to which they have been devised and designed.
Before anything else, the question of Nietzsche's historical critique, as might that we will recall of how one featuring narrative has been drawn from the texts, that we had read earlier, was a rapidly developing interest in and used for the enormously powerful historical criticism developed by Enlightenment thinkers. It is a way of undermining the authority of traditional power structures and the fundamental beliefs that sustain them.
We saw, for example, how in Descartes's Discourse on Method, Descartes offers a hypothetical historical narrative to undermine the authority of the Aristotelians and a faith in an eternal unchanging natural order. Then, we discussed how in the Discourse on Inequality, based on an imaginative reconstruction of the history of human society, Rousseau, following Descartes's lead but extending it to other areas (and much more aggressively), can encourage in the mind of the reader the view that evil in life is the product of social injustice (rather than, say, the result of Original Sin or the lack of virtue in the lower orders). We have in addition of reading Kant, Marx, and Darwin how a historical understanding applied to particular phenomena undercut traditional notions of eternal truths enshrined in any particular beliefs (whether in species, in religious values, or in final purposes).
Nonetheless, this is a crucial point, the Enlightenment thinker, particularly Kant and Rousseau and Marx, do not allow history to undermine all sources of meaning; For them, beyond its unanswerable power to dissolve traditional authority, history holds out the promise of a new grounding for rational meaning, in the growing power of human societies to become rational, to, and in one word, progress. Thus, history, beyond revealing the inadequacies of many traditional power structures and sources of meaning, had also become the best hope and proof for a firm faith in a new eternal order: The faith in progressive reform or revolution. This, too, is clearly something Wollstonecraft pins her hopes on (although, as we saw, how radical her emplacements continue as of a matter to debate).
On this point, as we also saw, Darwin, at least in the Origin of Species, is ambiguous -almost as if, knowing he is on very slippery ground, he doesn't want his readers to recognize the full metaphysical and epistemological implications of his theory of the history of life. Because of this probably deliberate ambiguities that we variously interpreted Darwin as offering either a 'progressive' view of evolution, something that we could adapt to the Enlightenment's faith in rational progress or, alternatively, as presenting a contingent view of the history of life, a story without progress or final goal or overall purposes.
Well, in Nietzsche (as in the view of Darwin) there is no such ambiguity. Darwin made his theory public for the first time in a paper delivered to the Linnean Society in 1858. The paper begins, 'that all of the nature is at war, one organism with another, or with external natures.' In the Origins of Species, Darwin is more specific about the character of this war, 'There must be in every species, or with the individuals of distinct species, or with another of the same species, or with the individuals of distinct species, or with the physical conditions of life.' All these assumptions are apparent in Darwin’s definition of natural selection: If under changing conditions of life organic beings present individual differences in almost every part of their structure, and this cannot be disputed, if there be, owing to their geometrical rate of an increase, a severe struggle for life at some age, season, or year, and this cannot be disputed, as then, considering the infinite complexity of the relations of all organic beings to each other and to their condition of life . . . , this will tend to produce offspring similarly characterized. This principle of preservation, or the survival of the fittest is so called the Natural Selection.
Similarly, clusters of distributed brain areas undertake individual linguistic symbols and are not produced in a particular area. The specific sound patterns of words may be produced in dedicated regions. Nevertheless, the symbolic and referential relationship between words is generated through a convergence of neural codes from different and independent brain regions. The processes of words comprehension and retrieval result from combinations of simpler associative processes in several separate brain regions that require an active role from other regions. The symbol meaning of words, like the grammar that is essential for the construction of meaningful relationships between strings of words, is an emergent property from the complex interaction of several brain parts.
If we could, for example, define all of the neural mechanisms involved in generating a particular word symbol, this would reveal nothing about the experience of the word symbol as an idea in human consciousness. Conversely, the experience of the word symbol as an idea would reveal nothing more about, the neuronal processes applied therein. While one mode of understanding the situation necessarily displaces the other, both are required to achieve a complete understanding of the situation.
With that, let us include two aspects of biological reality, its more complex order in biological reality may be associated with the emergence of new wholes that are greater than the parts, and the entire biosphere is a whole that displays self-regulating behaviour that is greater than the sum of its parts ( the attributive view that all organisms (*parts) are emergent aspects of the self-organizing process of life (*whole), and that the proper way to understand the parts is to examine their embedded relations to the whole). If this is the case, the emergence of a symbolic universe based on a complex language system could be viewed as another stage in the evolution of more complex systems marked by the appearance of a new profound complementary relationship between parts and wholes. This does not allow us to assume that human consciousness was in any sense pre-ordained or predestined by natural process. Nonetheless, it does make it possible, in philosophical terms at least, to argue that this consciousness is an emergent aspect of the self-organizing properties of biological life.
Another aspect of the evolution of a brain that allows us to construct symbolic universes can be based on complex language systems that are particularly relevant for our purposive concerns in the consciousness of self. Consciousness of self as an independent agency or actor is predicted on a fundamental distinction or dichotomy between this self and other selves. Self, as it is constructed in human subjective reality, is perceived as having an independent existence and a self-referential character in a mental realm as separately distinct from the material realm. It was, moreover the assumed separation between these realms that led Descartes to posit his dualism to understand the nature of consciousness in the mechanistic classical universe.
Wholeness requires a complementary relationship between unity and difference and is governed by a principle of organization determining the inter-relationship between parts. This organizing principle must be universal to a genuine whole and implicit in all parts that make up the whole, although the whole is exemplified only in its parts. This principle of order, 'is nothing really by itself. It is the way the parts are organized, and not another constituent additional to those that make up the totality.'
In a genuine whole, the relationship between the constituent parts must be 'internal or immanent' in the parts, as opposed to a more spurious whole in which parts appear to announce of wholeness due to relationships that are external to the parts. The collection of parts that would allegedly make up the whole in classical physics is an example of a spurious whole. Parts constitute a genuine whole when the universal principle of order is inside the parts and by that adjusts each to all so that they interlock and become mutually complementary. This not only describes the character of the whole revealed in both relativity theory and quantum mechanics. It is also consistent with the manner in which we have begun to understand the relation between parts and whole in modern biology.
If the universe is a seamlessly interactive system that evolves to higher levels of complexity and if the lawful regularities of this universe are emergent properties of this system, we can assume that the cosmos is a single significant whole that shows progressive order in complementary relation to its parts. Given that this whole exists in some sense within all parts, one can then argue that it operates in self-reflective fashion and is the ground for all emergent complexity. Since human consciousness shows self-reflective awareness in the human brain and since this brain (like all physical phenomena) can be viewed as an emergent property of the whole, it is reasonable to conclude, in philosophical terms at least, that the universe is conscious.
However, since the actual character of this seamless whole cannot be represented or reduced to its parts, it lies beyond all human representations or descriptions. If one chooses to believe that the universe is a self-reflective and self-organizing whole, this lends no support whatsoever to conceptions of design, meaning, purpose, intent, or plan associated with any mytho-religious or cultural heritage. However, if one does not accept this view of the universe, there is nothing in the scientific description of nature that can be used to refute this position. On the other hand, it is no longer possible to argue that a profound sense of unity with the whole, which has long been understood as the foundation of religious experience, can be dismissed, undermined, or invalidated with appeals to scientific knowledge.
This understanding can, of course, be achieved by those who have no interest in ontology and/or feel that the vision of physical reality showed in modern physical theory has nothing to do with ontology. Belief in ontology is not required to understand the implications of modern physical theories or to use this understanding to conceive of better ways to coordinate human experience in the interest of survival. It is also possible that threats to this survival could be eliminated based on a pragmatic acceptance of the actual conditions and terms for sustaining and protecting human life.
Religious thinkers can enter this dialogue knowing that metaphysical question’s no longer lie within the province of science and that science cannot in principle dismiss or challenge belief in spiritual reality. Nevertheless, if these thinkers elect to challenge the truths of science within its own domain, they must either withdraw from the dialogue or engage science on its own terms. Applying metaphysics where there is no metaphysics, or attempting to rewrite or rework scientific truths and/or facts in proving metaphysical assumptions, merely displays a profound misunderstanding of science and an apparent unwillingness to recognize its success. Yet it is also true that the study of science can indirectly serve to reinforce belief in profoundly religious truths while not claiming to legislate the ultimate character of these truths.
For Nietzsche, the ironies of history go all the way down and disfranchise all claims to the Truth, as Nietzsche is the first major thinker to take seriously the full implications of the historical critique and to apply it to all of a culture's most cherished possessions: It’s science, religion, morality, politics, faith in progress, science, language, in short, everything.
Every schoolchild learns eventually that Nietzsche was the author of the shocking slogan, 'God is dead' - however, what makes that statements possible are another claim, even more shocking in its implications: 'Only that which has no history can be defined' (Genealogy of Morals). Since Nietzsche was the heir to seventy-five years of German historical scholarship, he knew that there was no such thing as something that has no history. Darwin had, as Dewey points out that essay we examined, effectively shown that searching for a true definition of a species is not only futile but unnecessary (since the definition of a species is something temporary, something that changes over time, without any permanent lasting and stable reality). Nietzsche dedicates his philosophical work to doing the same for all cultural values.
Reflecting it for a moment on the full implications of this claim is important. You will remember (no doubt) how in Liberal Studies we started our study of moral philosophy with the Memo, the diabetic exchange with which explores the question 'What is virtue?' That takes a firm withstanding until we can settle that of the issue with a definition that eludes all cultural qualification. What virtue is, that we cannot effectively deal with morality, accept through divine dispensation, unexamined reliance on traditions, skepticism, or relativism (the position of Thrasymachus). The full exploration of what dealing with that question of definition might require takes’ place in the Republic.
Many texts we read subsequently took up Plato's challenge, seeking to discover, through reason, a permanent basis for understanding knowledge claims and moral values. No matter what the method, as Nietzsche points out in his first section, the belief was always that grounding knowledge and morality in truth was possible and valuable, that the activity of seeking to ground morality was conducive to a fuller good life, individually and communally.
To use a favourite metaphor of Nietzsche's, we can say that previous systems of thought had sought to provide a true transcript of the book of nature. They made claims about the authority of one true text. Nietzsche insists repeatedly that there be no single canonical text; There are only interpretations. So, there is no appeal to some definitive version of Truth (whether we search in philosophy, religion, or science). Thus the Socratic quest for some way to tie morality down to the ground, so that it does not fly away, is (and has always been) futile, although the long history of attempts to do so has disciplined the European mind so that we, or a few of us, are ready to move into dangerous new territory where we can situate the most basic assumptions about the need for conventional morality to the test and move on 'beyond good and evil,' that is, to a place where we do not take the universalizing concerns and claims of traditional morality seriously.
Nietzsche begins his critique here by challenging that fundamental assumption: Who says that seeking the truth is better for human beings? How do we know an untruth is not better? What is truth anyway? In doing so, he challenges the sense of purpose basic to the traditional philosophical endeavour. Philosophers, he points out early, may be proud of the way they begin by challenging and doubting received ideas. However, they never challenge or doubt the key notion they all start with, namely, that there is such a thing as the Truth and that it is something valuable for human beings (surely much more valuable than its opposite).
In other words, just as the development of the new science had gradually and for many painfully and rudely emptied nature of any certainty about a final purpose, about the possibilities for ever agreeing of the ultimate value of scientific knowledge, so Nietzsche is, with the aid of new historical science (and the proto-science of psychology) emptying all sources of cultural certainty of their traditional purposiveness and claims to permanent truth, and therefore of their value, as we traditionally understood that of the term. There is thus no antagonism between good and evil, since all versions of equal are equally fictive (although some may be more useful for the purposes of living than others).
At this lodging within space and time, I really do not want to analyse the various ways Nietzsche deals with this question. Nevertheless, I do want to insist upon the devastating nature of his historical critique on all previous systems that have claimed to ground knowledge and morality on a clearly defined truth of things. For Nietzsche's genius rests not only on his adopting the historical critique and applying to new areas but much more on his astonishing perspicuity in seeing just how extensive and flexible the historical method might be.
For example, Nietzsche, like some of those before him, insists that value systems are culturally determined they arise, he insists, as often as not form or in reaction to conventional folk wisdom. Yet to this he adds something that to us, after Freud, may be well accepted, but in Nietzsche's hands become something as shocking: Understanding of a system of value is, he claims, requires us more than anything else to see it as the product of a particular individual's psychological history, a uniquely personal confession. Relationship to something called the 'Truth' has nothing to do with the 'meaning' of a moral system; as an alternative we seek its coherence in the psychology of the philosopher who produced it.
Gradually, in having grown into a greater clarity of what every great philosophy has endearingly become, as staying in the main theme of personal confessions, under which a kind of involuntary and an unconscious memoir and largely that the moral (or immoral) intentions in every philosophy formed the real germ of life from which the whole plant had grown.
A concentration has here unmasked claims to 'truth' upon the history of the life of the person proposing the particular 'truth' this time. Systems offering us a route to the Truth are simply psychologically produced fictions that serve the deep (often unconscious) purposes of the individual proposing them. Therefore they are what Nietzsche calls 'foreground' truths. They do not penetrate into the deep reality of nature, and, yet, to fail to see this is to lack 'perspective.'
Even more devastating is Nietzsche's extension of the historical critique to language itself. Since philosophical systems deliver themselves to us in language, that language shapes them and by the history of that language. Our Western preoccupation with the inner self for which perceivable determinates, wills, and so forth, Nietzsche can place a value on as, in large part, the product of grammar, the result of a language that builds its statements around a subject and a predicate. Without that historical accident, Nietzsche affirms, we would not have committed an error into mistaking for the truth something that is a by-product of our particular culturally determined language system.
He makes the point, for example, that our faith in consciousness is just an accident. If instead of saying 'I think,' we were to say 'Thinking is going on in my body,' then we would not be tempted to give 'I' to some independent existence (e.g., in the mind) and make large claims about the ego or the inner self. The reason we do search for such an entity stem from the accidental construction of our language, which encourages us to use a subject (the personal pronoun) and a verb, however, the same false confidence in language also makes it easy for us to think that we know clearly what key things like 'thinking' and 'willing' are: Whereas, if we were to engage in even a little reflection, we would quickly realize that the inner processes neatly summed up by these apparently clear terms is anything but clear. His emphasis on the importance of psychology as queen of the sciences underscores his sense of how we need to understand more fully just how complex these activities are, particularly the emotional appetites, before we talk about them so simplistically, the philosophers that concurrently have most recently done.
This remarkable insight enables Nietzsche, for example, at one blow and with cutting contempt devastatingly to dismiss as 'trivial' the system Descartes had set up so carefully in the Meditations. Descartes's triviality consists in failing to recognize how the language he imprisons, shapes his philosophical system as an educated European, using and by his facile treatment of what thinking is in the first place. The famous Cartesian dualism is not a central philosophical problem but an accidental by-product of grammar designed to serve Descartes' own particular psychological needs. Similarly Kant's discovery of 'new faculties' Nietzsche derides as just a trick of language -a way of providing what looks like an explanation and is, in fact, as ridiculous as the old notions about medicines putting people to sleep because they have the sleeping virtue.
It should be clear from examples like this (and the others throughout the text) that there is very little capability of surviving Nietzsche's onslaught, for what are there to which we can points to which did not have a history or deliver itself to us in a historically developing system of language? After all, our scientific enquiries in all areas of human experience teach us that nothing is ever, for everything is always becoming.
We might be tempted, as many have been, to point to the new natural science as a counter-instance that typifies the dulling of natural science of a progressive realization of the truth of the world, or at least a closer and closer approximation to that truth? In fact, it is interesting to think about just how closely Kuhn and Nietzsche might be linked in their views about the relationship between science and the truth of things or to what extent modern science might not provide the most promising refutation of Nietzsche's assertion that there is no privileged access to a final truth of things (a hotly disputed topic in the last decade or more). It is say here that for Nietzsche science is just another 'foreground' way of interpreting nature. It has no privileged access to the Truth, although he does concede that, compared with other beliefs, it has the advantage of being based on sense experience and therefore is more useful for modern times.
There is one important point to stress in this review of the critical power of Nietzsche's project. Noting that Nietzsche is not calling us to a task for having beliefs is essential. We have to have beliefs. Human life must be the affirmation of values; Otherwise, it is not life. Nonetheless, Nietzsche is centrally concerned to mock us for believing that our belief systems are True, are fixed, are somehow eternally right by a grounded standard of knowledge. Human life, in its highest forms, must be lived in the full acceptance that the values we create for ourselves are fictions. We, or the best of us, have to have the courage to face the fact that there is no 'Truth' upon which to ground anything in which we believe; we must in the full view of that harsh insight, but affirm ourselves with joy. The Truth is not accessible to our attempts at discovery; What thinking human beings characteristically do, in their pursuit of the Truth, is creating their own truths.
Now, this last point, like the others, has profound implications for how we think of ourselves, for our conception of the human self. Because human individuals, like human cultures, also have a history. Each of us has a personal history, and thus we ourselves cannot be defined; we, too, are in a constant process of becoming, of transcending the person we have been into something new. We may like to think of ourselves as defined by some essential rational quality, but in fact we are not. In stressing this, of course, Nietzsche links himself with certain strains of Romanticism, especially (from the point of view of our curriculum) with William Blake and, for those who took the American Adam seminar, with Emerson and Thoreau.
This tradition of Romanticism holds up a view of life that is radically individualistic, self-created, self-generated. 'I must create my own system or become enslaved by another man's' Blake wrote. It is also thoroughly aristocratic, with little room for traditional altruism, charity, or egalitarianism. Our lives to realize their highest potential should be lived in solitude from others, except perhaps those few we recognize as kindred souls, and our life's efforts must be a spiritually demanding but ground of a joyful affirmation as the process by which of actions, operations, or motions involved in the accomplishment of an end. Yet, in this process in which we maintain of keeping a state of validity, but if not to sustain and preserve that these actilons were justied by circumstrances. However, the vital development of our imaginative conceptions of ourselves. That by simply contrasting this view of the self as a constantly developing entity we might be appropriated as if by preeminent limitations of one's applicability without essential permanence, is taken with Marx's view, as Marx,
too, insists on the process of transformation of the self and ideas of the self, but for him, the material forces control the transformation of production, and these in turn are driven by the logic of history. It is not something that the individual takes charge of by an act of individual will, because individual consciousness, like everything else, immerges in form that integrates from and is dependent upon the particular historical and material circumstances, the stage in the development of production, of the social environment in which the individual finds himself or herself.
Nietzsche, like Marx, and unlike later Existentialists, de Beauvoir, for example, recognizes that the individual inherits particular things from the historical moment of the culture (e.g., the prevailing ideas and, particularly, the language and ruling metaphors). Thus, for Nietzsche the individual is not totally free of all context. However, the appropriate response to this is not, as in Marx, the development of class consciousness, a solidarity with other citizens and an imperative to help history along by committing oneself to the class state of war, alongside other proletarians, but in the best and brightest spirits, a call for a heightened sense of an individuality, of one's radical separation from the herd, of one's final responsibility to one's own most fecund creativity.
Because Nietzsche and the earlier Romantics are not simply saying, we should do what we like is vital. They all have a sense that self-creation of the sort they recommend requires immense spiritual and emotional discipline -the discipline of the artist shaping his most important original creation following the stringent demands of his creative imagination. These demands may not be rational, but they are not permissively relativistic in that 1960's sense ('If it feels good, do it'). Permissiveness may have often been attributed to this Romantic tradition, a sort of 1960's 'Boogie til you drop' ethic, but that is not what any of them had in mind. For Nietzsche that would simply be a herd response to a popularized and bastardized version of a much higher call to a solitary life lived with the most intense but personal joy, suffering, insight, courage, and imaginative discipline.
This aspect of Nietzsche's thought represents the fullest nineteenth-century European affirmation of a Romantic vision of the self as radically individualistic (at the opposite end of the spectrum from Marx's views of the self as socially and economically determined). It has had, as I hope to mention briefly next week, a profound and lasting effect in the twentieth century as we become ever more uncertain about coherent social identities and thus increasingly inclined to look for some personal way to take full charge of our own identities without answering to anyone but ourselves.
Much of the energy and much of the humour in Nietzsche's prose comes from the urgency with which he sees such creative self-affirmation as essential if the human species is not going to continue to degenerate. For Nietzsche, human beings are, primarily, biological creatures with certain instinctual drives. The best forms of humanity are those of whom most excellently express the most important of these biological drives, the 'will to power,' by which he means the individual will to assume of oneself and create what he or she needs, to live most fully. Such a 'will to power' is beyond morality, because it does not answer to anyone's system of what makes up good and bad conduct. The best and strongest human beings are those of whom create a better quality in values for themselves, live by them, and refuse to acknowledge their common links with anyone else, other than other strong people who do the same and are thus their peers.
His surveys of world history have convinced Nietzsche that the development of systems has turned this basic human drive against human beings of morality favouring the weak, the suffering, the sick, the criminal, and the incompetent (all of whom he lumps together in that famous phrase 'the herd'). He salutes the genius of those who could accomplish this feat (especially the Jews and Christians), which he sees as the revenge of the slaves against their natural masters. From this century -long acts of revenge, human beings are now filled with feelings of guilt, inadequacy, jealousy, and mediocrity, a condition alleviated, if at all, by dreams of being helpful to others and of an ever-expanding democracy, an agenda powerfully served by modern science (which serves to bring everything and everyone down to the same level). Fortunately, however, this ordeal has trained our minds splendidly, so that the best and brightest (the new philosophers, the free spirits) can move beyond the traditional boundaries of morality, that is, 'beyond good and evil' (his favourite metaphor for this condition is the tensely arched bow ready to shoot off an arrow).
Stressing it is important, as I mentioned above, that Nietzsche does not believe that becoming such a 'philosopher of the future' is easy or for everyone. It is, by contrast, an extraordinarily demanding call, and those few capable of responding to it might have to live solitary lives without recognition of any sort. He is demanding an intense spiritual and intellectual discipline that will enable the new spirit to move into territory no philosopher has ever roamed before, a displacing medium where there are no comfortable moral resting places and where the individual will probably (almost unquestionably) has to pursue of a profoundly lonely and perhaps dangerous existence (so the importance of another favourite metaphor of his, the mask). Nevertheless, this is the only way we can counter the increasing degeneration of European man into a practical, democratic, technocratic, altruistic herd animal.
By way of a further introduction to Nietzsche's Beyond Good and Evil, it would only offer an extended analogy, something that emerged from a seminar discussion, in that, I apologize that the opening parts of this paper may be familiar to some. Still, I hope quickly to extend some remarks into directions that have not yet been explore.
Before placing the analogy on the table, however, I wish to issue a caveat. Analogies may really help to clarify, but they can also influence us by some unduly persuasive influences of misleading proportions. I hope that the analogy I offer will provide such clarity, but not at the price of oversimplifying. So, as you listen to this analogy, you need to address the questions: To what extent does this analogy not hold? To what extent does it reduce the complexity of what Nietzsche is saying into a simpler form?
The analogy I want to put on the table is the comparison of human culture to a huge recreational complex in which several different games are going on. Outside people are playing soccer on one field, rugby on another, American football on another, and Australian football on another, and so on. In the club house different groups of people are playing chess, dominoes, poker, and so on. There are coaches, spectators, trainers, and managers involved in each game. Surrounding the recreation complex is wilderness.
These games we might use to characterize different cultural groups, as French Catholics, German Protestants, scientists, Enlightenment rationalists, European socialists, liberal humanitarians, American democrats, free thinkers, or whatever possesses you. The variety represents the rich diversity of intellectual, ethnic, political, and other activities.
The situation is not static of course. Some games have far fewer players and fans, and the popularity is shrinking; Some are gaining popularity rapidly and increasingly taking over parts of the territory available. Thus, the traditional sport of Aboriginal lacrosse is but a small remnant of what it was before contact. However, the Democratic capitalist game of baseball is growing exponentially, as is the materialistic science game of archery. They might combine their efforts to create a new game or merge their leagues.
When Nietzsche looks at Europe historically, what he sees is that different games have been going on like this for centuries. He further sees that many participants in anyone game has been aggressively convinced that their game is the 'true' game, which it corresponds with the essence of games or is a close match to the wider game they imagine going on in the natural world, in the wilderness beyond the playing fields. So they have spent much time producing their rule books and coaches' manuals and making claims about how the principles of their game copy or reveal or approximate the laws of nature. This has promoted and still promotes a good deal of bad feeling and fierce arguments. Therefore, in addition anyone game itself, within the group pursuing it there has always been all sorts of sub-games debating the nature of the activity, refining the rules, arguing over the correct version of the rule book or about how to educate the referees and coaches, and so on.
Nietzsche's first goal is to attack this dogmatic claim about the truth of the rules of any particular game. He does this, in part, by appealing to the tradition of historical scholarship that shows that these games are not eternally true, but have a history. Rugby began when a soccer player broke the rules and picked up the ball and ran with it. American football developed out of rugby and has changed and is still changing. Basketball had a precise origin that can be historically found.
Rule books are written in languages that have a history by people with a deep psychological point to prove: The games are an unconscious expression of the particular desires of inventive game’s people at a very particular historical moment; these rule writers are called Plato, Augustine, Socrates, Kant, Schopenhauer, Descartes, Galileo, and so on. For various reasons they believe, or claim to believe, that the rules they come up with reveals something about the world beyond the playing field and are therefore 'true' in a way that other rule books are not; they have, as it was, privileged access to reality and thus record, to use a favourite metaphor of Nietzsche's, the text of the wilderness.
In attacking such claims, Nietzsche points out, the wilderness bears no relationship at all to any human invention like a rule book; He points out that nature is 'wasteful beyond measure, without purposes and consideration, without mercy and justice, fertile and desolate and uncertain simultaneously: Imagine indifference itself s a power -how could you live according to this indifference of 'living-is that not precisely wanting to be other than this nature'. Because there is no connection with what nature truly is, such ruling records are merely foreground pictures, fictions dreamed up, reinforced, altered, and discarded for contingent historical reasons. Moreover, the rule manuals often bear a suspicious resemblance to the rules of grammar of a culture, thus, for example, the notion of an ego as a thinking subject, Nietzsche points out, is closely tied to the rules of European languages that insist on a subject and verb construction as an essential part of any statement.
So how do we know what we have is the truth? Why do we want the truth, anyway? People seem to need to believe that their games are true, but why? Might they not be better if they accepted that their games were false, were fictions, deal with the reality of nature beyond the recreational complex? If they understood the fact that everything they believe in has a history and that, as he says in the Genealogy of Morals, 'only that which has no history can be defined,' they would understand that all this proud history of searching for the truth is something quite different from what philosophers who have written rule books proclaim.
Furthermore these historical changes and developments occur accidentally, for contingent reasons, and have nothing to do with the games, or anyone game, shaping itself according to any ultimate game or any given rule book of games given by the wilderness, which is indifferent to what is going on. There is no basis for the belief that, if we look at the history of the development of these games, we discover some progressive evolution of games toward some higher type. We may be able, like Darwin, to trace historical genealogies, to construct a narrative, but that narrative does not reveal any clear direction or any final goal or any progressive development. The genealogy of games suggests that history be a record of contingent change. The assertion that there is such a thing as progress is simply another game, another rule added by inventive minds (who need to believe in progress); it bears no relationship to nature beyond the sports complex.
While one is playing on a team, one follows the rules and thus has a sense of what form right and wrong or good and evil conduct in the game. All those carrying out the same endeavour share this awareness. To pick up the ball in soccer is evil (unless you are the goalie), and to punt the ball while running in American football is permissible but stupid; in Australian football both actions are essential and right. In other words, different cultural communities have different standards of right and wrong conduct. The artificial inventions have determined these called rule books, one for each game. These rule books have developed the rules historically; Thus, they have no permanent status and no claim to privileged access.
Now, at this point you might be thinking about the other occasion in which I introduced a game analogy, namely, in the discussions of Aristotle's Ethics. For Aristotle also acknowledges that different political systems have different rules of conduct. Still, Aristotle believes that an examination of different political communities will enable one to derive certain principles common to them all, bottom-up generalizations that will then provide the basis for reliable rational judgment on which game is being played better, on what was good play in any particular game, on whether or not a particular game is being conducted well or not.
In other words, Aristotle maintains that there is a way of discovering and appealing to some authority outside any particular game to adjudicate moral and knowledge claims that arise in particular games or in conflicts between different games. Plato, of course, also believed in the existence of such a standard, but proposed a different route to discovering it.
Now Nietzsche emphatically denies this possibility. Anyone who tries to do what Aristotle recommends is simply inventing another game (we can call it Super-sport) and is not discovering anything true about the real nature of games because they do not organize reality (that has the wilderness surrounding us) as a game. In fact, he argues, that we have created this recreational complex and all the activities that go on in it to protect themselves from nature (which is indifferent to what we do with our lives), not to copy some recreational rule book that wilderness reveals. Human culture exists as an affirmation of our opposition or to contrast with nature, not as an extension of rules that include both human culture and nature. That is why falsehoods about nature might be a lot more useful than truths, if they enable us to live more fully human lives.
If we think of the wilderness as a text about reality, as the truth about nature, then, Nietzsche claims, we have no access in at all to that text, what we do to have access to conflicting interpretations, as none of them are based on the privileged compliance to a 'true' text. Thus, the soccer players may think them and their game is superior to rugby and the rugby players, because soccer more closely represents the surrounding wilderness, but such statements about better and worse are irrelevant. There is nothing a rule bound outside the games themselves. Therefore, all dogmatic claims about the truth of all games or any particular game are false.
Now, how did this situation come about? Well, there was a time when all Europeans played almost the same game and had done so for many years. Having little-to-no historical knowledge and sharing the same head coach in the Vatican and the same rule book, they believed that the game was the only one possible and had been around for ever. So they naturally believed that their game was true. They shored up that belief with appeals to scripture or to eternal forms, or universal principles or to rationality or science or whatever. There were many quarrels about the nature of ultimate truth, that is, about just how one should tinker with the rule book, about what provided access to God's rules, but there was agreement that such excess must exist.
Take, for example, the offside rule in soccer, that without the offside rule the game could not continue in its traditional way or fashion. Therefore, soccer players see the offside rule as an essential part of their reality, and since soccer is the only game in town and we have no idea of its history (which might, for example, tell us about the invention of the off-side rule), then the offside rule is easy to interpret as a universal, a requirement for social activity, and we will find and endorse scriptural texts that reinforce that belief. Our scientists will devote their time to linking the offside rule with the mysterious rumblings that come from the forest. From this, one might be led to conclude that the offside rule is a Law of Nature, something that extends far beyond the realms of our particular game into all possible games and, beyond those, into the realm of the wilderness itself.
Of course, there were powerful social and political forces (the coach and trainers and owners of the team) who made sure that people had lots of reasons for believing in the unchanging verity of present arrangements. So it is not surprising that we find plenty of learned books, training manuals, and locker room exhortations urging everyone to remember the offside rule and to castigate as 'bad' those who routinely forget that part of the game. We will also worship those who died in defence of the offside rule. Naturally any new game that did not recognize the offside rule would be a bad game, an immoral way to conduct oneself. So if some group tried to start a game with a different offside rule, that group would be attacked because they had violated a rule of nature and were thus immoral.
However, for contingent historical reasons, Nietzsche argues, that situation of one game in town did not last. The recreational unity of the area divides the developments in historical scholarships into past demonstrations, in that all too clearly there is an overwhelming amount of evidence that all the various attempts to show that one specific game was exempted over any of all other true games, as they are false, dogmatic, trivial, deceiving, and so on.
For science has revealed that the notion of a necessary connection between the rules of any game and the wider purposes of the wilderness is simply an ungrounded assertion. There is no way in which we can make the connections between the historically derived fictions in the rule book and the mysterious and ultimately unknowable directions of irrational nature. To conform of science, we have to believe in causes and effects, but there is no way we can prove that this is a true belief and there is a danger for us if we simply ignore that fact. Therefore, we cannot prove a link between the game and anything outside it. History has shown us, just as Darwin's natural history has proved, that all apparently eternal issues have a story, a line of development, a genealogy. Thus, notions, like species, have no reality-they are temporary fiction imposed for the sake of defending a particular arrangement.
So, God is dead. There is no eternal truth anymore, no rule book in the sky, no ultimate referee or international Olympic committee chair. Nietzsche did not kill God; History and the new science did. Nietzsche is only the most passionate and irritating messenger, announcing over the PA system to anyone who will listen that an appeal to a system can defend someone like Kant or Descartes or Newton who thinks that what he or she is doing grounded in the truth of nature has simply been mistaken.
This insight is obvious to Nietzsche, and he is troubled that no one is worried about it or even to have noticed it. So he's moved to call the matter to our attention as stridently as possible, because he thinks that this realization requires a fundamental shift in how we live our lives.
For Nietzsche Europe is in crisis. It has a growing power to make life comfortable and an enormous energy. However, people seem to want to channel that energy into arguing about what amounts to competing fictions and to force everyone to follow particular fictions.
Why is this insight so worrying? Well, one point is that dogmatists get aggressive. Soccer players and rugby players who forget what Nietzsche is pointing out can start killing each other over questions that admit of no answer, namely, question about which group has the true game, which ordering has a privileged accountability to the truth. Nietzsche senses that dogmatism is going to lead to warfare, and he predicts that the twentieth century will see an unparalleled extension of warfare in the name of competing dogmatic truths. Part of his project is to wake up the people who are intelligent enough to respond to what he is talking about so that they can recognize the stupidity of killing each other for an illusion that they misunderstand for some 'truth.'
Besides that, Nietzsche, like Mill (although, in a very different way), is seriously concerned about the possibilities for human excellence in a culture where the herd mentality is taking over, where Europe is developing into competing herds -a situation that is either sweeping up the best and the brightest or stifling them entirely. Nietzsche, like Mill and the ancient pre-Socratic Greeks to whom he constantly refers, is an elitist. He wants the potential for individual human excellence to be liberated from the harnesses of conformity and group competition and conventional morality. Otherwise, human beings are going to become destructive, lazy, conforming herd animals, using technology to divert them from the greatest joys in life, which come only from individual striving and creativity, activities that require one to release one's instincts without keeping them eternally subjugated to controlling historical consciousness or a conventional morality of good and evil.
What makes this particularly a problem for Nietzsche is that he sees that a certain form of game is gaining popularity: Democratic volleyball. In this game, the rule book insists that all players be treated equally, that there be no natural authority given to the best players or to those who understand the nature of quality play. Therefore the mass of inferior players is taking over, the quality of the play is deteriorating, and there are fewer and fewer good volleyball players. This process is being encouraged both by the traditional ethic of 'help your neighbour,' now often in a socialist uniform and by modern science. As the mass of more many inferior players takes over the sport, the mindless violence of their desires to attack other players and take over their games increases, as does their hostility to those who are uniquely excellent (who may need a mask to prevent themselves being recognized).
The hopes for any change in this development are not good. In fact, things might be getting worse. For when Nietzsche looks at all these games going on he notices certain groups of people, and the prospect is not totally reassuring.
First there remain the overwhelming majority of people: the players and the spectators, those caught up in their particular sport. These people are, for the most part, continuing as before without reflecting or caring about what they do. They may be vaguely troubled about rumours they hear that their game is not the best, they may be bored with the endless repetition in the schedule, and they have essentially reconciled them that they are not the only game going on, but they had rather not thought about it. Or else, stupidly confident that what they are doing is what really matters about human life, is true, they preoccupy themselves with tinkering with the rules, using the new technology to get better balls, more comfortable seats, louder whistles, more brightly painted side lines, more trendy uniforms, tastier Gatorade-all in the name of progress.
Increasing numbers of people are moving into the stands or participating through the newspaper or the television sets. Most people are thus, in increasing numbers, losing touch with themselves and their potential as instinctual human beings. They are the herd, the last men, preoccupied with the trivial, unreflectingly conformist because they think, to the extent they think at all, that what they do will bring them something called 'happiness.' Yet they are not happy: They are in a permanent state of narcotized anxiety, seeking new ways to entertain themselves with the steady stream of marketed distractions that the forces of the market produce: Technological toys, popular entertainment, college education, Wagner's operas, academic jargon. This group, of course, includes all the experts in the game, the cheerleaders whose job it is to keep us focussed on the seriousness of the activity, the sports commentators and pundits, whose life is bound up with interpreting, reporting, and classifying players and contests. These sportscasters are, in effect, the academics and government experts, the John Maddens and Larry Kings and Mike Wallaces of society, those demigods of the herd, whose authority derives from the false notion that what they are dealing with is something other than a social-fiction.
There is a second group of people, who have accepted the ultimate meaninglessness of the game in which they were. They have moved to the sidelines, not as spectators or fans, but as critics, as cynics or nihilists, dismissing out of hand all the pretensions of the players and fans, but not affirming anything themselves. These are the souls who, having nothing to will (because they have seen through the fiction of the game and have therefore no motive to play any more), prefer to will nothing in a state of paralysed skepticism. Nietzsche has a certain admiration for these people, but maintains that a life like this, the nihilist on the sidelines, is not a human life.
For, Nietzsche insists, to live as a human being, is to play a game. Only in playing a game can one affirm one's identity, can one create values, can one truly exist. Games are the expression of our instinctual human energies, our living drives, what Nietzsche calls our 'will to power.' So the nihilistic stance, though understandable and, in a sense, courageous, is sterile. For 'we' are born to play, and if we do not, then we are not fulfilling a worthy human function. Also, we have to recognize that all games are equally fictions, invented human constructions without any connections to the reality of things.
So we arrive at the position of the need to affirm a belief (invent a rule book) which we know to have been invented, to be divorced from the truth of things. To play the best game is to live by rules that we invent for ourselves as an assertion of our instinctual drives and to accept that the rules are fictions: they matter, we accept them as binding, we judge ourselves and others by them, and yet we know they are artificial. Just as in real life a normal soccer player derives a sense of meaning during the game, affirms his or her value in the game, without ever once believing that the rules of soccer have organized the universe or that those rules have any universal validity, so we must commit ourselves to epistemological and moral rules that enable us to live our lives as players, while simultaneously recognizing that these rules have no universal validity.
The nihilists have discovered half this insight, but, because they are not capable of living the full awareness, they are very limited human beings.
The third group of people, that small minority that includes Nietzsche himself, is those who accept the game’s metaphor, see the fictive nature of all systems of knowledge and morality, and accept the challenge that to be most fully human is to create a new game, to live a life governed by rules imposed by the dictates of one's own creative nature. To base one's life on the creative tensions of the artist engaged with creating a game that meets most eloquently and uncompromisingly the demand of one's own irrational nature-one's wish-is to be most fully free, most fully human.
This call to live the self-created life, affirming oneself in a game of one's own devising, necessarily condemns the highest spirits to loneliness, doubt, insecurity, emotional suffering, because most people will mock the new game or be actively hostile to it or refuse to notice it, and so on; Alternatively, they will accept the challenge but misinterpret what it means and settle for some marketed easy game, like floating down the Mississippi smoking a pipe. Nevertheless, a self-generated game also brings with-it the most intense joy, the most playful and creative affirmation of what is most important in our human nature.
Noting here that one’s freedom to create is important one's own game is limited. In that sense, Nietzsche is no existentialist maintaining that we have a duty and an unlimited freedom to be whatever we want to be. For the resources at our disposable parts of the field still available and the recreational material lying around in the club house-are determined by the present state of our culture. Furthermore, the rules I devise and the language I frame them in will ordinarily owe a good deal to the present state of the rules of other games and the state of the language in which those are expressed. Although I am changing the rules for my game, my starting point, or the rules I have available to change, are given to me by my moment in history. So in moving forward, in creating something that will transcend the past, I am using the materials of the past. Existing games are the materials out of which I fashion my new game.
Thus, the new philosopher will transcend the limitations of the existing games and will extend the catalogue of games with the invention of new ones, but that new creative spirit faces certain historical limitations. If this is relativistic, it is not totally so.
The value of this endeavour is not to be measured by what other people think of the newly created game; Nor does its value lie in fame, material rewards, or service to the group. Its value comes from the way it enables the individual to manifest certain human qualities, especially the will to power. Nonetheless, it seems that whether or not the game attracts other people and becomes a permanent fixture on the sporting calendar, something later citizens can derive enjoyment from or even remember, that is irrelevant. For only the accidents of history determination of whether the game invented is for my-own attractions in other people, that is, becomes a source of value for them.
Nietzsche claims that the time is right for such a radically individualistic endeavour to create new games, new metaphors for my life. For, wrongheaded as many traditional games may have been, like Plato's metaphysical soccer or Kant's version of eight balls, or Marx's materialist chess tournament, or Christianity's stoical snakes and ladders, they have splendidly trained us for the much more difficult work of creating values in a spirit of radical uncertainty. The exertions have trained our imaginations and intelligence in useful ways. So, although those dogmatists were unsound, an immersion in their systems has done much to refine those capacities we most need to rise above the nihilists and the herd.
Now, I have put this analogy on the table to help clarify some central points about Nietzsche. However, the metaphor is not so arbitrary as it may appear, because this very notion of systems of meanings as invented games is a central metaphor of the twentieth century thought and those who insist upon it as often as not point to Nietzsche as their authority.
So, for example, when certain postmodernists insist that the major reason for engaging in artistic creativity or literary criticism or any form of cultural life be to awaken the spirit of creative play that is far more central than any traditional sense of meaning or rationality or even coherence, we can see the spirit of Nietzsche at work.
Earlier in this century, as we will see in the discussions of early modern art, a central concern was the possibility of recovering some sense of meaning or of recreating or discovering a sense of 'truth' of the sort we had in earlier centuries, or, as we will see in the poetry of Eliot, lamenting the collapse of traditional systems of value. Marxists were determined to assist history in producing the true meaning toward which we were inexorably heading. To the extent that we can characterize post-modernism simply at all, we might say that it marks a turning away from such responses to the modern condition and an embrace, for better or worse, of Nietzsche, joyful self-affirmation in a spirit of the irrationality of the world and the fictive qualities of all that we create to deal with life.
After this rapid and, I hope, useful construction and description of an analogy, as only one final point that remains: So how have we responded and are we still responding to all of this? What of an impact has this powerful challenge to our most confident traditions had? Well, there is not time here to trace the complex influence of Nietzsche's thought in a wide range of areas. That influence has been immense and continues still. However, I would like to sketch a few points about what may be happening right now.
Here I must stress that I am offering a personal review, from which such an overwhelming expertise that does not conform or adapt following corresponding configurations, that take their shape and form appropriately or about this question. Still, any general reading in modern studies of culture suggests that responses to Nietzsche are important and diverse. His stock has been very bullish for the past two decades, at least.
One group we can quickly identify is those who have embraced Nietzsche's critique, who appeal to his writing to endorse their view that the search to ground our knowledge and moral claims in Truth are futile, and that we must therefore recognize the imperative Nietzsche laid before us to self-create our own lives, to come up with new self-descriptions affirming the irrational basis of our individual humanity. This position has been loosely termed Antifoundationalism. Two of its most prominent and popular spokespersons in recent years have been Richard Rorty and Camille Paglia. Within Humanities departments the Deconstructionists (with Derrida as their guru) head the Nietzschean charge.
Antifoundationalists supportively link Nietzsche closely with Kuhn and with Dewey (whose essay on Darwin we read) and sometimes with Wittgenstein and take central aim at anyone who would claim that some form of enquiry, like science, rational ethics, Marxism, or traditional religion has any form of privileged access to reality or the truth. The political stance of the Antifoundationalists tends to be radically romantic or pragmatic. Since we cannot ground our faith in any public morality or political creed, politics becomes something far less important than personal development or else we have to conduct our political life simply on a pragmatic basis, following the rules we can agree on, without according those rules any universal status or grounding in eternal principles. If mechanistic science is something we find, for accidental reasons of history, something useful, then we will believe it for now. Thus, Galileo's system became adopted, not because it was true or closer to the truth that what it replaced, but simply because the vocabulary he introduced inside our descriptions was something we found agreeable and practically helpful. When it ceases to fulfill our pragmatic requirements, we will gradually change to another vocabulary, another metaphor, another version of a game. History shows that such a change will occur, but how and when it will take place or what the new vocabulary might be-these questions will be determined by the accidents of history.
Similarly, human rights are important, not because there is any rational non-circular proof that we ought to act according to these principles, but simply because we have agreed, for accidental historical reasons, that these principles are useful. Such pragmatic agreements are all we have for public life, because, as Nietzsche insists, we cannot justify any moral claims by appeals to the truth. So we can agree about a schedule for the various games and distributing the budget between them and we can, as a matter of convenience, set certain rules for our discussions, but only as a practical requirement of our historical situation, least of mention, not by any divine or rationality that of any system contributes of its distributive cause.
A second response is to reject the Antifoundationalist and Nietzschean claim that no language has privileged contact to the reality of things, to assert, that is, that Nietzsche is wrong in his critique of the Enlightenment. Plato's project is not dead, as Nietzsche claimed, but alive and well, especially in the scientific enterprise. We are discovering ever more about the nature of reality. There may still be a long way to go, and nature might be turning out to be much more complex than the early theories suggested, but we are making progress. By improving the rule book we will modify our games so that they more closely approximate the truth of the wilderness.
To many scientists, for example, the Antifoundationalist position is either irrelevant or just plain wrong, an indication that social scientists and humanity’s types do not understand the nature of science or are suffering a bad attack of sour grapes because of the prestige the scientific disciplines enjoy in the academy. The failure of the social scientists (after generations of trying) to come up with anything approaching a reliable law (like, say, Newton's laws of motion) has shown the pseudo-scientific basis of the disciplines, and unmasks their turn to Nietzschean Antifoundationalism as a feeble attempt to justify their presence in the modern research university.
Similarly, Marxists would reject Antifoundationalism as a remnant of aristocratic bourgeois capitalism, an ideology designed to take intellectuals' minds off the realities of history, the truth of things. There is a truth grounded in a materialist view of history: Renouncing that simply of diverting intellectuals away from social injustice, no wonder the most ardent Nietzscheans in the university have no trouble getting support from the big corporate interests to and their bureaucratic subordinates: The Ford Foundation, the Guggenheim Foundation, and the National Endowment for the Humanities. Within the universities and many humanities and legal journals, some liveliest debates go on between the Antifoundationalists allied and the Deconstructionists under the banner of Nietzsche and the historical materialists and many feminists under the banner of Marx.
Meanwhile, there has been a revival of interest in Aristotle. The neo-Aristotelians agree with Nietzsche's critique of the Enlightenment rational project-that we are never going to be able to derive a sense of human purpose from scientific reason-but assert that sources of value and knowledge are not simply a contingent but arise from communities and that what we need to sort out our moral confusion is a reassertion of Aristotle's emphasis on human beings, not as radically individual with an identity before their political and social environment, but moderate political animals, whose purpose and value are deeply and essentially rooted in their community. A leading representative for this position is Alisdair McIntyre.
Opposing such a communitarian emphasis, a good deal of the modern Liberal tradition points out that such a revival of traditions simply will not work. The break down of the traditional communities and the widespread perception of the endemic injustice of inherited ways is something that cannot be reversed (appeals to Hobbes here are common). So we need to place our faith in the rational liberal Enlightenment tradition, and look for universal rational principles, human rights, rules of international morality, justice based on an analysis of the social contract, and the important and most recent examples, such a view is Rawls' famous book Social Justice.
Finally, there are those who again agree with Nietzsche's analysis of the Enlightenment and thus reject the optimistic hopes of rational progress, but who deny Nietzsche's proffered solution. To see life as irrational chaos that we must embrace and such joyous affirmation as the value-generating activity in our human lives, while at the same time recognizing its ultimate meaninglessness to the individual, too many people seem like a prescription for insanity. What we, as human beings, must have to live a fulfilled human life is an image of eternal meaning. This we can derive only from religion, which provides for us, as it always has, a transcendent sense of order, something that answers to our essential human nature far more deeply than either the Enlightenment faith in scientific rationality or Nietzsche's call to a life of constant metaphorical self-definition.
To read the modern debates over literary interpretation, legal theory, human rights issues, education curriculums, feminist issues, ethnic rights, communitarian politics, or a host of other similar issues is to come repeatedly across the clash of these different positions (and others). To use the analogy I started with, activities on the playing fields are going on more energetically than ever. Right in the middle of most of these debates and generously scattered throughout the footnotes and bibliographies, Nietzsche's writings are alive and well. To that extent, his ideas are still something to be reckoned with. He may have started by shouting over the PA system in a way no to which one bothered to attend; now on many playing fields, the participants and fans are considering and reacting to his analysis of their activities. So Nietzsche today is, probably more than ever before in this century, right in the centre of some vital debates over cultural questions.
You may recall how, in Book X of the Republic, Plato talks about the 'ancient war between poetry and philosophy.' What this seems to mean from the argument is an ongoing antagonism between different uses of language, between language that seeks above all, denotative clarity the language of exact definitions and precise logical relationships and language whose major quality is its ambiguous emotional richness, between, that is, the language of geometry and the language of poetry (or, simply put, between Euclid and Homer)
Another way of characterizing this dichotomy is to describe it as the intensive force between a language appropriates and discovering the truth and one appropriate to creating it, between, that is, a language that sets itself up as an exact description of a given order (or as exactly presently available) and a language that sets itself up as an ambiguous poetic vision of or an analogy to a natural or cosmic order.
Plato, in much of what we studied, seems clearly committed to a language of the former sort. Central to his course of studies that will produce guardian rulers in mathematics, which is based upon the most exact denotative language we know, and, such, the famous inscription over the door of the Academy: 'Let no one enter here who has not studied geometry.' Underlying Plato's remarkable suspicion of a great deal of poetry, and particularly of Homer, is this attitude to language: Poetic language is suspect because, being based on metaphors (figurative comparisons or word pictures), it is a third remove from the truth. In addition, it speaks too strongly to the emotions and thus may unbalance the often tense equilibrium needed to keep the soul in a healthy state.
One needs to remember, however, that Plato's attitude to language is very ambiguous, because, in spite of his obvious endorsement of the language of philosophy and mathematics, in his own style he is often a poet, a creator of metaphor. In other words, there is a conflict between his strictures on metaphor and his adoption of so many metaphors (the central one of some dramatic dialogues is only the most obvious). Many famous and influential passages from the Republic, for example, are not arguments but poetic images or fictional narratives: The Allegory of the Cave, the image of the Sun, the Myth of Er.
Plato, in fact, has always struck me as someone who was deeply suspicious about poetry and metaphor because he responded to it so strongly. Underlying his sometimes harsh treatment of Homer may be the imagination of someone who is all too responsive to it (conversely, and Aristotle’s more lenient view of poetry may stem from the fact that he did not really feel its effects so strongly). If we were inclined to adopt Nietzsche's interpretation of philosophy, we might be tempted to see in Plato's treatment of Homer and his stress on the dangers of poetic language his own 'confession' of weakness. His work is, in part, an attempt to fight his own strong inclinations to prefer metaphoric language.
If we accept this characterization of the 'ancient war' between two different uses of language, then we might want to ask ourselves why they cannot be reconciled. Why must there be a war? This has, in part, to do with the sorts of questions one wants to ask about the nature of things and about the sorts of answers that the enquiring mind requires. For traditionally there have been some important differences between the language of mathematics or geometry or a vocabulary that seeks to approximate the denotative clarity of these disciplines and the language of poetry. The central difference I would like to focus on is the matter of ambiguity.
The terminological convictions of mathematics and especially of Euclidean geometry, are characterized, above all, by denotative clarity and of precise definitions, clear axioms, firm logical links between statements all of which are designed to produce a rationally coherent structure that will compel agreement among those who take the time to work their way through the system. The intellectual and aesthetic pleasures of Euclid, I would maintain, arise, in large part, from this. People who want this sort of clarity in their understanding of the world will naturally be drawn to define as acceptable questions and answers which frame themselves in a language that seeks this sort of clarity.
Poetical language, by contrast, is inherently ironic, ambiguous, elusive. When I move from clear definition to metaphor, that is, to a comparison, or to a narrative that requires interpretation (like the Book of Exodus, for example, or the Iliad) then my statement requires interpretation, an understanding that an appeal to exact definitions and clear rules of logic cannot quickly satisfy. To agree about metaphor requires explanation and persuasion of a sort different from what is required to get people to accept the truths of Euclidean geometry.
For example, if I have trouble with the statement 'The interior angles of a triangle add up to two right angles,' I can find exact definitions of all the terms, I can review the step-by-step logical process that leads from self-evident first principles to this statement, and I then understand exactly what this means. I am rationally compelled to agree, provided the initial assumptions and the logical adequacy of the process do not disturb me. I am able to explain the claim to someone else, so that he or she arrives at the same understanding of the original statement about the sum of the interior angles (the compelling logic of this form of language is, of course, the point of the central section of Plato's Memo, Socrates's education of Memo's slave in the Pythagorean Theorem)
Nonetheless, a claim like 'My love is like a red, red rose' is of a different order. I can check the dictionary definitions of all the words, but that by itself will not be enough. How do I deal with the comparison? I can go out and check whether my love has thorns on her legs or her hair falls off after a few days standing in water, but that is not going to offer much help, because obviously I am not meant to interpret this statement literally: a comparison, a metaphor is involved. An understanding of the statement requires that I interpret the comparison: What is the range of association summoned up by the metaphor that compares my beloved or my feelings for my beloved to a common flower?
On this point, if we sit discussing the matter, we are likely to disagree or at least fail to reach the same common rational understanding that we derived from our study of the first statement concerning the interior angles of the triangle. If we want to agree on the metaphor, then we are going to have to persuade each other, and even then our separate understandings may not be congruent.
We have had direct experience of this in Liberal Studies. When we discussed Euclid, we had nothing to argue about. The discussions focussed on whether or not everyone understood the logical steps involved, the definitions and axioms, and possible alternative logical methods. Nevertheless, no one offered seriously as an interpretative opinion that the interior angles of a triangle might add up to three right angles or one and a half right angle. If someone had claimed that, then we would have maintained that he or she had failed in some fundamental way to follow the steps in the proofs. By contrast, when we discussed, say, King Lear or the Tempest or Jane Eyre or Red and Black, we spent most of our time considering alternative interpretations of particular episodes, and we did not reach any precisely defined shared conclusion. Nor could be that we, if we spent the entire four semesters debating the issue?
It looks of no doubt a vast oversimplification to present the issue of language solely about these two diametrically opposed ways, but for the sake of discussion it is a useful starting point. We might go on to observe that, again to make a vast oversimplification, people tend to prefer one use of language over another: Some like their verbal understandings of things clear, precise, logically sound, so that there is the possibility of a universally recognized meaning with minimum ambiguity, or as close as we can get to such a goal. Others prefer the ambiguity and emotional richness of metaphor, although (or because) the price of such a language is an inherent irony, a multiplicity of meanings, the suggestion of no simple, shared, precise, final meaning.
The question of the language appropriate to a proper understanding of things is particularly important for a comprehension of the history of Christianity, too, because, as we all know, Christianity takes as its central text a book full of poetry, narrative, imagery. Faith in what this book 'means' or what it 'reveals' about the nature of the divinity is a central part of being a Christian. Many, urgent and contumacious disputes in the history of Christianity have arisen out of the metaphorical nature of this holy text: Since metaphors and metaphorical narratives are inherently ambiguous, they need interpretation, whose interpretations are decisive in any disagreement becomes a vital concern.
Controlling the text and maintaining the authority to determine interpretations of the holy text were always a central imperative of the medieval Catholic Church, which recognized very clearly and correctly that to give people (even parish priests) access to the Bible would result in interpretative anarchy. So, the Catholic Church's strict control of the book, its refusal to distribute it widely or to translate it into the common language of the people, and its insistence that the basis for popular sermons should be, not the Bible itself, but the clear and unambiguous official Interpretations carried an associated unlawful act as comprising the confederated alliance that directed upon the summation as reached upon its verdict, this was overseen by the Vatican.
The Church's suspicion of the anarchy that would follow upon any general access to the Bible revealed itself as correct once Luther's Reformation made the holy text generally available in translation. Suddenly, the enforced interpretative consensus dissolved, and scores of competing sects arose, each claiming a correct version of the truth derived through an interpretation of the metaphorical constructions in the Bible. An extreme (but not altogether uncommon) example was the war between the followers of Zwingli and the followers of Muntzer, two Protestant leaders, over whether the communion wafer was the body of Christ or symbolized the body of Christ and over the interpretation of baptism. Many thousands died in the quarrel over these interpretative questions.
Today such issues that involve killing others over the ontological status of a biscuit or bathwater may seem ridiculous, but the issue is not. An authority that derives from a poetical metaphorical text must rest, not on that text, but on a particular interpretation of it. Whoever is the spokesperson for the official interpretation has official power. Thus, from this point of view, one can interpret the religious wars of the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries as quarrelsome interpretation run amok.
Surely, the conclusion of the religious wars brought with it a demand to clean up language, to be wary of metaphors and especially of writing that was highly metaphorical, and to place our verbal understandings of the world and ourselves on a more rationally clear basis in a language more appropriate to such a requirement.
It is no accident that the period following the religious wars (the mid-seventeenth century) marks the beginning of an interest in dictionaries (whose major goal is to promote accuracy of shared denoted meanings), a revival of interest in Euclidean geometry, developing distrust of political and philosophical arguments based upon scripture, a rising criticism of extravagant rhetorical styles (like those of Shakespeare or John Donne or 'enthusiastic' preachers), the beginning of a concerted attempt to understand moral and judicial questions mathematically, and a rising demand for a language as empty of ambiguous metaphor as possible.
We witness this in several writers, above all in Hobbes. As we discussed, Hobbes' major concern in Leviathan is to recommend practices that will minimize a return to the civil chaos of the religious wars and the English Civil War. Hobbes is centrally concerned about language. Over half of Leviathan is concerned with religion, above all with the question of interpretation of scripture. For Hobbes is deeply suspicious of literary interpretation and has a clear preference for the language of geometry, the argumentative style of Euclid -not necessarily because that language provides a true description of the nature of the world (although many people claimed and still claim that it does) but only that a little deductive clarity-based on clear definitions and fundamental principles of deductive logic -can win wide agreement, can, that is, promote social harmony essential to political peace and 'commodious living.'
The reason for this preference in Hobbes seems clear enough. Metaphorical language breeds arguments over interpretations; Such arguments breed civil quarrels, civil quarrels lead to a break down in public order and foster a return to a state of nature. A different language, one based on the precision of geometry, can foster agreement, because we all can occupy the same understanding if definitions are exact and the correct logic.
One attraction of the new science (although there was considerable argument about this) was that it offered an understanding of the world delivered in the most unambiguous way, in the language of mathematics rather than of scripture. Newton's equations, for those who could follow the mathematics, did not promote the sorts of arguments that arose from, say, the text about Ezekiel making the sun stands still or Moses parting the waters of the Red Sea or God's creating the world in a week. What disagreements or ambiguity’s Newton's explanation contained could be resolved, and was resolved, by a further application of the method he displayed (in the 'normal science,' as Kuhn calls it, which took place in the generations after Newton).
Throughout the nineteenth century, the rising success of the new science was delivering on the promise of an exact description of the world. The application of this spirit of empirical observation and precise, unambiguous description to an understanding of history and morality, of the sort offered by Karl Marx, set up the hope of a triumph of the language of philosophy (as defined earlier) over the language of poetry (in spite of the objections of the Romantics).
It was an alluring vision, because it promised to lead, as Hannah Arendt points out, to the end of traditional political argument. Since we would all have a full and shared understanding of the way a just state really does work, we wouldn't need to argue about it any more than we argue about the Pythagorean Theorem. Anyone could govern, since governing, traditionally the most challenging task in human affairs, would be simply a matter of applying known and agreed upon rules, something a technician could do. As Lenin observed, governing would be for cooks, because the truths of political life would be expressed in a language coherent to anyone, a language that did not require interpretation of any sort.
There was an enormously arrogant confidence or, if we think about classical tragedy, of hubris about this, especially between some scientists and social scientists, who firmly believed that there are various contentious moral, political, and scientific questions would soon be settled for all time. The future of physics, said A.Mitchelton in 1894, in so that it persists concisely of little more than 'adding a few decimal places to results already known.'
Nietzsche, as we have already seen, sets his sights firmly against such a confidence that language, any language, can provide an accurate description of the Truth. That was, in the nature of things, impossible, because language is inherently metaphorical, it coincides to some invented fiction, with a history, a genealogy, a contingent character.
For Nietzsche, the belief that the sort of language developed by Euclid or the new science with its emphasis on precision and logical clarity-is somehow 'true to nature' is, like beliefs that any system is true, plainly incorrect. All language is essentially poetry, inherently metaphorical, inherently a fabrication. Those who, like so many scientists, make claims that their descriptions of the world are true or even more accurate than alternative languages are simply ignorant of the metaphorical nature of all language.
In other words, for Nietzsche there is no privileged access to a final definitive version of life, the world, or anything else, and thus no privileged language for achieving such knowledge. Truth is, in Nietzsche's pregnant phrase, 'a mobile army of metaphors,' a historical succession of fictions, which does not, as Kant and Marx claimed, reveal any emerging higher truth, like progress or the march to a final utopia or a growing insight into how reality really works. In Nietzsche's view of language there is no final text available to us; There is only interpretation, or, more accurately, an unending series of freshly created interpretations, fresh metaphors.
Thus, as Rorty has observed, Nietzsche is announcing the end of the ancient war between poetry and philosophy by indicating that all we have in language is metaphor. We were mistaken in believing that the language of Euclid was anything but of another than what appears as fiction. It is not. Therefore, it has no special preeminence as the language most appropriate to a description of reality.
Since there is no privileged language and since accepting as true any inherited system of metaphor is limiting oneself to a herd existence, our central purpose is the construction of new metaphors, the assertion of new values in a language we have made ourselves. Thus, central to Nietzsche's vision of how the best human beings must live their lives is the insistence that individuals must create for themselves a new language, fresh metaphors, original self-descriptions. To escape the illusions of the past, to release the arrow in flight, these activities are linked to the creative ability to construct in one's life and language new metaphors.
Therefore, under the influence of this idea, a major part of the cultural imperative of the Twentieth Century artist has been a craze for originality, something that has produced a bewildering succession of styles, schools, experiments. When we explore Hughes' text, one of the first impressions is the almost overwhelming range of different subject matters, different styles, the pressure, even in the context of a single artist's life, constantly to invent new perspectives, new self-descriptions, new ways of metaphorically presenting one's imaginative assertions, in Nietzsche's phrase, one's will to power.
The same is true in many aspects of art: in prose style, in poetry, in architecture, in music, and so on. The influence of Nietzsche on this point (which is, as I have argued, an extension of one stream of Romanticism) has been pervasive. This phenomenon has had some curious results.
First, the constant emphasis on individualist self-assertion through new metaphors has made much art increasingly esoteric, experimental, and inaccessible to the public, for the Nietzschean imperative leaves no room for the artist's having to answer to the community values, styles, traditions, language: Thus, the strong tendency of much modern art, fiction, and music to have virtually no public following, to be met with large-scale incomprehension or derision.
This, in turn, has led to a widening split between many in the artistic community and the public. Whereas, in a great deal of traditional art, the chief aim was to hold up for public contemplation what the artist had to reveal about the nature of his vision (e.g., public statues, church paintings, public musical recitals, drama festivals), in the twentieth century the emphasis on avant garde originality has increasingly meant that much art is produced for a small coterie who thinks of them as advanced in the Nietzschean sense-emancipated from the herd because only the privileged can understand and produce such 'cutting-edge ' metaphors. The strong connections between much 'radical' modern art and intellectual elitism characteristic of an extreme right wing anti-democratic ideologies owe much to Nietzsche's views, since the aristocratic elitism of Nietzsche's aesthetic links itself easily enough to political systems seeking some defence of 'aristocratic' hierarchies (even if the understanding of Nietzsche is often skimpy at best).
Therefore, as Hughes points out, there has been a drastic decline in much high quality public art. To be popular, in fact, becomes a sign that one is not sufficiently original, a sign that one's language is still too much derived from the patois of the last people. There is still much public art, of course, especially in state architecture and market-driven television, but, as Hughes points out, the achievements in these fields are generally not impressive and may not be improving. Some, the art that commands the attention of many artists these days is increasingly private.
In the universities, Nietzsche has, rightly or wrongly, becomes the patron saint of those who believe that novelty is more important than coherence or commitment to anything outside a rhetorical display of the writer's own originality. To object that this ethos produces much irrational individualistic spouting is, its defenders point out, simply to miss the point. The creative joy of self-affirmation through new language is the only game in town, and traditional calls for scientific scholarship or social criticism on Marx's model are simply reassertions of dogmatism. There are some English departments now, for example, where in the job descriptions, the writing’s one has to produce for tenure can include confessional autobiography; in effect, to produce an aphoristic self-description, whether that is at all interesting or not, qualifies one as a serious academic scholar and teacher in some places.
Given that most of the society, including those who are maintaining the traditional scientific and economic endeavour launched in the Enlightenment, pays this sort of talk very little attention, finding most of it hard to grasp, there is thus a widening gap between much of what goes on in our society and many of its leading artists and intellectuals. The legacy of Nietzsche may cheer them up, and, in variously watered down versions, especially on this side of the Atlantic, he clearly gives them license to be strident while declaring their own superiority, but just what he offers by way of helping to cure this dichotomy (if it needs to be cured) is a question worth exploring.
The philosophical problem of self-reflective thought, the conditions of Mind reflecting itself, of consciousness observing its own actions and processes. The dilemma of Goedel's theorem regarding self-referential systems can be overcome by applying a transcendent thinking method. This higher thought provides complete knowledge of the system, but only if the individual mind is surpassed and merged with the universal mind that allows reflective thought to be perfectly legitimate. To reach true objectivity of mind means leaving the subjective mind behind, and with it, the object-subject dualism is accustomed to ordinary thought.
How is it possible that consciousness can observe consciousness itself? How is it possible to think reflectively at all? Can we take a stance outside consciousness to observe it? Can we think about thinking per se? Can we observe thought processes, which are generally performed unconsciously? Is it possible to examine consciousness or mind with consciousness or mind itself?
These questions have often influenced exaggerated skepticism or to a negative criticism concerning the limitation of our knowledge about our mind. Some even say, which because of the fact that we have no other means of investigating consciousness than consciousness itself, this can never lead to a complete understanding of consciousness. Advocates of this view come mostly from the scientific field. Science tries to objectivise its subject matters, so that they can take a stance outside the object and look at it. The means of investigation within experimental sciences are always to mean independence of the object, although this situation must be restrained to the field of classical physics. In Quantum physics, however, experiments cannot be measured without the observer as a conscious living being. As a crucial point, it can be stated generally, that we can have completed knowledge of an object only when we are independent and outside it at the moment of observation.
The problem of completeness of knowledge is encountered when you leave the rigid field of natural sciences. Any attempts to apply the completeness theorem to social sciences, such as psychology and sociology are doomed inevitably, because in those sciences, the object of investigation is identical with the investigator. A psychologist, for example, cannot investigate the psychical processes of another individual in the way a natural scientist investigates physical processes.
First of all, psychic events are not describable as to physical properties and therefore seem evasive. Second, we deal here with a much more complex structure than we ever meet in the physical world. This complexity entails necessary incompleteness. The structure we deal here is not only more complex but also is what we call consciousness or mind. Here we have the identity of the object and its investigator, which was absent in natural sciences. So, are we human beings ever able to know what consciousness and mind really are or are we left forever in the dark and allowed only partial knowledge?
The answer to this question depends on our current understanding of what consciousness or mind is. If we reduce mind to a set of physical properties or equal it with emergent properties of the brain (materialistic and epiphenomenalistic view), we are held to believe, that it will one day is possible to know everything about consciousness. Ever more, however, scientists leave the terrain of a mere materialistic or reductionistic view of the mind and come to the conclusion, that mind is more than the sum of the brain's physical properties or more than a complex structure that emerged from the brain during the evolution of the human being. There are a lot of arguments against the reductionism of mind.
If we tend to believe that consciousness and mind are more than physicalism probably cannot describe, we are still left with the question whether we will be able to resolve this uncertainty of knowledge concerning the nature of our mind. The ordinary view of consciousness is, that it is local to every individual. If we take this as a fact, we will never be able to explain consciousness completely, because now we ran into Goedel's Theorem of the incompleteness of any self-referential system.
In brief, Goedel's theorem states that for any formal system there is certain self-referencing assertion about the system that cannot be evaluated as either wholly true or false. They remain insoluble for our human reasoning. This paradox is originally attributed to the Cretan Epimenides who presented the statement 'I am lying' for being undecidable concerning truth or falsity. If it is true that I am lying, then the statement is false, and if it is false, that I am lying, then the statement is true.
This theorem sets a considerable limitation to our reasoning and thus to the ability of investigating our own consciousness or mind. It says, that we cannot make any generally accepted assertions about our mind since it is mind it that asserts something about the mind. It can therefore not decide with certainty or finality whether any statements about our mind or consciousness are logically and factually true or false. This point is only eligible if we uphold the position, which in order to acquire a complete and consistent knowledge of something, we have to be outside it, independent of it, at least formally. We can observe cells or atoms, they are part of our body, but we do not watch cells by means of cells, or atoms by means of atoms. To comprehend a system fully, we have to transcend it, by objectifying it. Only then is it open to analysis. To understand the physical world, we do not have to undertake strenuous efforts to transcend the system, because we as complex living organisms are already in a state of transcendence in relation to inanimate systems. The same applies to biological systems insofar as we are human beings have furnished the highly complex functions of consciousness, and, are again, already in a higher state than a mere biological system, even such as our body. That is not true when considering the next higher system after biology: Consciousness and mind. Where is the next higher level, from which we can study the mental system as we studied the physical and biological system from mind? Is there anything higher than mind? Can we enter supra-consciousness to study normal consciousness?
If there is something like higher consciousness or a supra-individual mind then Goedel's theorem is resolved, since then it will become possible to decide with certainty any self-referential assertions. What is more important, we are enabled, from this higher point of view, to have a complete knowledge of our ordinary consciousness or mind? This would be a revolution in modern science, such as was the Copernican Revolution or Relativity Theory or Quantum Physics: I would say, the greatest revolution of humankind until now. There would be an unlimited expansion of consciousness, of faculties of mind and with that of our knowledge of the world and ourselves.
This higher mind is the Universal Mind as distinguished from the Individual Mind. Since we stay within the bounds of the Individual Mind we are encapsulated within the frame of this limited system, limited insofar as it has personal acquired features and its knowledge depends on what this system has internalized during its development, what faculties have been nourished. So long as we are thinking as and in Exonoesis, all we can say about the ‘Exonoesis’ is hypothetical and self-referentially insoluble. When we attain a higher position by transcendably thinking for the universal and encompassing mind, we can observe and investigate its properties and its nature. This was often done unconsciously by many great philosophers and mystics. They unawares had some glimpses of the true nature of the Individual Mind while being in the Universal Mind, into which they slipped involuntarily by the sheer act of speculative thought.
We can trace these mystical and higher insights into the nature of our mind throughout the history of mankind's mental evolution. We can gather some information about this higher consciousness and are still in the infancy of the Homo sapiens evolution. Man's evolution is far from being brought to completion. As we progress into the next centuries, we will also develop more faculties of our brain and consciousness. These will eventually lead us to a complete understanding, not only of the world, but more essentially, of us as poetic beings, as minds and consciousness. We are still left with one last question: Is it possible for mind to think about itself? Is reflective Thought an unrelated comment of our being entrapped in a finite system? I do not think so.
Ever and ever again have great thinkers and philosophers proven that self-reflective thought is something innate to human beings, although used rarely, since it does not serve any direct practical or evolutionary purposes. The fact is, we can reflect upon our thinking, and the results of this thought process cannot be dismissed as entirely false or invalid. The results are often quite as certain as empirical facts in the natural sciences. Regarding reflective thinking there are more uncertain and hypothetical and speculative assertions than anywhere else within the domain of thinking. Although these speculative thoughts may be even more true than mere practical thoughts (they often only seem true), our modern age is imbued with the supremacy of analytical reasoning and its practical implications.
The reason for the skepticism of speculative and self-reflective thought lies in the fact, that most of these self-reflective assertions are made as for Exonoesis. It is the Individual Mind that reflects the Individual Mind. Here we are ineluctably faced with Goedel's theorem, which puts strong stipulations on any self-referential assertions. As long as we are within the framework of Exonoesis, we have no way of definitely proving our assertions. In order to do that, we must leave the system, because only then do, we have the complete and full understanding of the system and all its functions. Only then can we survey the system and its interactions to postulate our observation in clear and distinct statements, verifiable or falsifiable by anyone whom he is able to gain the same viewpoint above the Individual Mind.
To make generally acceptable and objective statements about Exonoesis, a certain process of De-individuation is necessary. We have to objectify (in a philosophical sense) Exonoesis to have a clear and distinct idea of it. This dialectical movement of the concept was implicitly foreseen in Hegel's notion of Absolute Knowing. The insufficiency of Exonoesis leads necessarily to the next stage on a higher level, or Hegel's Spirit. In Hegel's account of the movement of consciousness, he stated clearly, that man has not yet reached the last level, Absolute Knowing. We are still on our way to that final goal of all dialectical movement. It is the self-fulfilment of the Spirit, the reunion of the Universal Mind with the Individual Mind.
I am a little hesitant to say that we have to 'leave' our Individual Mind or that we have to be 'outside' of it. These terms must not be taken literally, but we commit the object-subject fallacy. Also, when I speak of making Exonoesis an 'object' of our investigation, I did not mean the object as opposed to a subject (object-subject dualism). It is not an ontological object but a conceptual one. The Universal Mind encompasses everything, from the physical world to itself. So we can never step out of a system literally. We are always in ‘Hyponoesis’, but not consciously, that is without actualizing the potential state. Potentially we are Hyponoesis, but factually we have not yet developed the full state Hyponoesis. We are in a continuous movement toward the fulfilment of Hyponoesis. That is the self-realization and the self-knowledge of Hyponoesis is a process within the Hyponoesis itself.
This process is antagonized between being and thought, between object and subject. Here we are dealing with ontological categories. What I meant with an object is the conceptual object we encounter in thinking reflectively. By 'leaving' the system I meant transcending the Individual Mind by assimilating Exonoesis to Hyponoesis, that is, by expanding its temporally conditioned boundaries into the infinity of Hyponoesis (this extension of Exonoesis's capacity is also called Paranoesis). As we extend our horizon, we can look back at the previous horizon, left back, and we get to know its restraints, its features and peculiarities. We are steadily on the move, toward new frontiers, until we have finally reached the infinity, the boundless, the eternal. The horizon of the Individual Mind is a temporal structure, in effect in time itself. Time holds us uncaptured within its ken. By transcending Exonoesis (Paranoetic Thinking), we also transcend time. Time is a necessary structure, without which the world and living beings as we know them, would be impossible. Time is an inherent feature of consciousness and not some property of the physical world. Scientific time is not subjective. Since it is a property of consciousness, it is a definite feature of all human beings and does not depend on the subjectivity of consciousness.
We have both subjective and objective properties in our mind and consciousness. The objectivity of the mind is its primary and general overall structure, the framework that is common to all reasoning beings. The subjectivity of mind is the individually acquired and developed features and idiosyncrasies of every human being. It is also the uniqueness of human experience. The subjective mind is private to its user. Nobody can experience my pain. However, the objective properties of the mind are generally available, but not through experience, since experience is unique, but through the Universal Mind, which encompasses all Individual Minds. This part is yet almost wholly unexplored. My philosophy of a metaphysic of thought endeavours to set up a frame of reference for future investigations of Hyponoesis. It is only a starting point from which greater minds than I am having to lead new investigations and cause the spiritual revolution that is long overdue in our decadent modern world.
Contemporary theologies are unquestionably in a state of crisis, perhaps the most profound crisis that Christian theology has faced since its creation. This crisis is specified in three areas? (1) in the relation of a dogmatic theology to its biblical ground, a crisis posed by the rise of a modem historical understanding; (2) in the relation of Theology to the sensibility and Existenz of contemporary man, a crisis created by the death of God; and (3) in the relation of the community of faith to the whole order of social, political and economic institutions, the collapse generated a crisis as of Christendom. I intend to focus upon the second of these areas, although it can only be artificially isolated from the other two. Furthermore, we will simply assume the truth of Nietzsche’s proclamation of the death of God, a truth that a contemporary theology has thus far ignored or set aside. This means that we will understand the death of God as a historical event: God has died in our time, in our history, in our existence. The man who chooses to live in our destiny can neither know the reality of God’s presence nor understand the world as his creation; Or, at least, he can no longer respond either interiorly or cognitively to the classical Christian images of the Creator and the creation. In this situation, an affirmation of the traditional forms of faith becomes a Gnostic escape from the brute realities of history.
Sören Kierkegaard founded A modern Theology, as we will understand it: Founded not simply in response to the collapse of Christendom, but more deeply in response to the arrival of a reality that was wholly divorced from the world of faith, or, as Kierkegaard saw, a reality created by the negation of faith. While employing the Hegelian categories of the 'universal' and the 'objective' for understanding the new reality created by modern man, Kierkegaard came to understand the modern consciousness as the product of a Faustian choice. Modern philosophy is, as Kierkegaard argued in The Sickness Unto Death, simply paganism, its actual secret being: 'Cogito ergo sums' - I am thinking: Therefore? I exist. I am to be: Whereas the Christian motto, on the contrary, is: 'As thou believest, so art thou; To believe is to be.' Here, Cogito and credo are antithetical acts: Modern or 'objective' knowledge is not religiously neutral, as so many theologians have imagined; it is grounded in a dialectical negation of faith. Again, to know 'objectively' is to exist 'objectively.' Such existence is the antithetical opposite of the 'subjectivity' which Kierkegaard identified as faith. With the birth of objective knowledge, reality appeared as an objective order, and God was banished from the 'real' world. However, for Kierkegaard, who was living at a moment when Christian subsistence was still a possibility, it was not only God but also the concretely existing individual who was banished from the world of the 'universal.' Already, in Fear and Trembling, the minor themes that ' . . . The individual is incommensurable with reality and threatens the major theme of 'faith', such that 'subjectivity is incommensurable with reality.' So radical is this incommensurability that the existing individual and objective reality now exist in a state of dialectical opposition: To know objectively is to cease to exist subjectively, to exist subjectively is to cease to know objectively. Moreover, it was precisely Kierkegaard’s realization of the radically profane ground of modern knowledge that made possible his creation of a modern Christian mode of dialectical understanding. Existence in faith is antithetically related to existence in objective reality; now faith becomes subjective, momentary and paradoxical. In short, existence in faith is existence by virtue of the absurd. Why the absurd? Because faith is antithetically related to 'objectivity,' therefore true faith is radical inwardness or subjectivity, it comes into existence by a negation of objectivity, and can only maintain itself by a continual process, or repetition, of negating objectivity.
Kierkegaard’s dialectical method is fully presented in the Postscript, but it was a method destined never to be fully evolved. Quite simply the reason that this method never reached completion is that it never - despite his initial effort in Fear and Trembling - moved beyond negation. Although biographically his second conversion or 'metamorphosis hardened Kierkegaard’s choice of a negative dialectic,' a conversion that led to his resolve to attack the established church, and therefore to abandon philosophy, it is also true that he could limit faith to a negative dialectical movement because he could identify faith and 'subjectivity.' In the Postscript, subjective thinking is 'existential,' and ' . . . passion is the culmination of existence for an existing individual.' Nonetheless, 'passion' is radical inwardness, and true inwardness is 'eternity' (an identification first established in The Concept of Dread). To be sure, 'eternity' is a subjective and not an objective category, and therefore it can only be reached through inwardness. Nevertheless, the crucial point is that Kierkegaard could identify authentic human existence with existence in faith. Kierkegaard knew the death of God only as an objective reality; Indeed, it was 'objectivity' created by the death of God. Accordingly, the negation of objectivity makes faith possible, and since 'objectivity' and 'subjectivity' are antithetical categories, it follows that faith can be identified with 'subjectivity.' Today we can see that Kierkegaard could dialectically limit 'objectivity' and 'subjectivity' to the level of antithetical categories because he still lived in a historical time when subjectivity could be known as indubitably Christian. Less than a hundred years later, it will be little less than blasphemy to identify the truly 'existential' with existence in faith. However, in Kierkegaard’s time the death of God had not yet become a subjective reality. So authentic human existence could be understood as culminating in faith, the movement of faith could be limited to the negation of 'objectivity,' and no occasion need arise for the necessity of a dialectical coincidence of the opposites. Yet no dialectical method can be complete until it leads to this final coincidental oppositorum.
If radical dialectical thinking was reborn in Kierkegaard, it was consummated in Friedrich Nietzsche? : The thinker who, in Martin Heidegger’s words, brought an end to the metaphysical tradition of the West. His most important work, Sein und Zeit (1927, in English as, Being and Time, 1962), clears the space for the quest for Being and only a favoured few have any hope of recapturing oneness with Being. Especially belief in the possibility of escaping from metaphysics and returning into an authentic communion with independent nature, least of mention, saying anything about Being as this is difficult, so what in effect replaces it is peoples’ own consciousness of their place in the world, or of what the world is for them (their Dasein), which then becomes the topic. Before its central themes had become, they became the staple topics of ‘existentialism’, they had a more sinister political embodiment: Heidegger became more inclined to a kind of historical fatalism, and is sometimes seen as an heir to the tradition of Dilthey. Heidegger’s continuing influence is due at least in part to his criticism of modernity and democracy, which he associates with a lack of respect for nature independent of the uses to which human beings put it. However, he has also been hailed (notably by Rorty) as a proponent of ‘pragmatism’, and even more remarkable many French intellectuals have taken him as a prophet of the political left. When he writes that 'from a metaphysical point of view, Russia and America are the same, the same dreary technological dispiriting the same restricting regulatory measures for attaining an irresistible or compelling influence to achieve, is that of an average person' (an Introduction to Metaphysics, 1953) and forgoing that his contempt for the mass culture of the industrial age springs from a nationalistic and conservative élitism is easy, rather than from any left-wing or egalitarian illusion.
Nietzsche’s proclamation of the death of God shattered the transcendence of Being. No longer is there a metaphysical hierarchy or order that can give meaning or value to existing beings (Seiendes); as Heidegger points out, now there is no Sein of Seiendes. Nietzsche was, of course, a prophetic thinker, which means that his thought reflected the deepest reality of his time, and of our time as well; For to exist in our time is to exist in what Sartre calls a 'hole in Being,' a 'hole' created by the death of God. However, the proclamation of the death of God - or, more deeply, the willing of the death of God - is dialectical: a No-saying to God (the transcendence of Sein) makes possibly a Yes-saying to human existence (Dasein, total existence in the here and now). Absolute transcendence is transformed into absolute immanence: Its positive actualization drawn upon the Here and Now, by way of the post-Christian existential 'now-ness,' in that we are drawn into ourselves all those powers that were once bestowed upon and beyond? : Consequently, Nietzsche’s vision of Eternal Recurrence is the dialectical correlate of his proclamation of the death of God, least of mention, that since death is the cessation of life, it can . . . neither is experienced, nor be harmed nor a proper object of fear. So, at least, have argued many philosophers, notably Epicurus and Lucretius. A prime consideration has been the symmetry between the state of being dead, and the state of ‘being’ not yet in existence. On the other hand death is feared, and thought of as a harm (even if it is instant: it is not the process of dying that make the difference). The alternative, immortality, sounds better until the detail is filled, when it can begin to sound insupportable. The management of death is one of the topics of ‘bioethics’. All in the same, the assertion that God is dead, but that we have to vanquish his shadow, first occurs in Nietzsche’s 'The Gay Science.' Nietzsche tells of the madman who hails it as the greatest achievement of mankind, to have killed God and turned the churches into tombs and sepulchers of God. Nevertheless, people do not listen to the madman for ‘the deed is still more distant from them than the most-distant stars - and yet they have done it themselves.
. . . Everything goes, everything comes back; eternally rolls the wheel of being. Everything dies, and everything blossoms again; Eternally runs the year of being. Everything breaks, and everything is joined anew; Eternally the same house of being is built. Everything parts, but everything greets every other thing again, least of mention, that the eternal ring of being remains faithful to itself. In every NOW, being begins; Round every here roll the sphere. There. The centre is everywhere. Bent is the path of eternity.
Only when God is dead can Being begin in each now. Eternal Recurrence is neither the cosmology nor a metaphysical idea: it is Nietzsche’s symbol of the deepest affirmation of existence, of Yes-saying. Accordingly, Eternal Recurrence is a symbolic portrait of the truly contemporary man, the man who dares to live in our time, in our history, in our existence.
We must observe that Eternal Recurrence is a dialectical inversion of the biblical category of the Kingdom of God. Jesus’ proclamation of the Kingdom of God typifies a transcendent Wholly Other, a Wholly Other that radically reverses the believer’s existence in both the being and the values of the Old Aeon of history, and makes possible even now a participation in the New Aeon of grace. So likewise the 'existential' truth of Eternal Recurrence shatters the power of the old order of history, transforming transcendence into immanence, and by that making eternity incarnate in each now. Eternal Recurrence is the dialectical antithesis of the Christian God. The creature becomes the Creator when the Centre is everywhere. Therefore Zarathustra, the proclaimer of Eternal Recurrence, is the first 'immortalist,' and his proclamation is a product of the 'second innocence' of atheism. The atheistic Nietzsche was the enemy of God and Christ, but Nietzsche was a dialectical thinker. His opposition to Christ was directed against the Christ of Christianity, against religion itself, rather than against the actual figure of Jesus. Again, in The Antichrist, Nietzsche portrays Jesus as a kind of naive forerunner of Zarathustra. For Jesus is incapable of resentment (non-dialectical negation), is liberated from 'history,' and is himself the exact opposite of Christianity. For, as Nietzsche says: If one were to look for signs that an ironical divinity has its fingers in the great play of the world, one would find no small support in the tremendous question mark called Christianity. Humanity lies on its knees before the opposite of that which was the origin, the meaning, the right of the evangel; in the concept of 'church' it has pronounced holy, precisely what the 'bringer of the glad tidings' felt to be beneath and behind himself -one would look in vain for a greater example of world-historical irony.
Jesus’ proclamation abolishes any distance separating God and man (a distance which religion knows as sin). His gospel did not promise blessedness, nor did it bind salvation to legal or moral conditions: blessedness is the 'only reality.' What Christianity has called the gospel is in fact, the opposite of that which Jesus lived: 'ill tidings, a dysangel.' Christianity is a dysangel because it retreated into the very 'history' which Jesus transcended and transformed, the transformation of the blessedness of Jesus’ proclamation into the No-saying of resentment. Thus, Nietzsche looked upon Christianity as the stone upon the grave of Jesus.
The astute theological student of Nietzsche must wonder whether Nietzsche’s portrait of Zarathustra is not a modern dialectical image of Jesus. Not the 'Christian' Jesus to be sure, but already the modern Christian has lived through the death of historical or objective Christianity in Kierkegaard’s realization of faith as radical subjectivity. If Kierkegaard’s subjectivity has dialectically passed into Nietzsche’s Eternal Recurrence, is it possible that the radically profane now of Eternal Recurrence are a dialectical resurrection of a Kingdom of God beyond God? Does not the New Creation (Eternal Recurrence) of Zarathustra parallel the New Creation of Jesus (the Kingdom of God) insofar as it shatters history, dissolves all rational meaning, and brings an end to the rule of Law? Such a radically modern coincidental oppositorum would parallel the highest expressions of mysticism (e.g., the Madhyamika and Zen schools of Mahayana Buddhism) while at the same time offering a non-Gnostic form of faith. Non-Gnostic because a truly modern dialectical form of faith would meet the actual historical destiny of contemporary man while yet transforming his unique Existenz into the purity of eschatological faith. In Nietzsche, we have witnessed the deepest willing of the death of God passes into the deepest affirmation of Eternal Recurrence. Dialectically, the opposites coincide, but radical negation has become radical affirmation; yet if the negative movement is a denial of God, then the positive movement must finally be an affirmation of God, of the God beyond the Christian God, beyond the God of the historic Church, beyond all that Christendom has known as God. A truly dialectical image of God (or of the Kingdom of God) will appear only after the most radical negation, just as a genuinely eschatological form of faith can now be reborn only upon the grave of the God who is the symbol of the transcendence of Being. Does Nietzsche point the way to a form of faith that will be authentically contemporary and eschatological at once?
We will define eschatological faith as a form of faith that calls the believer out of his old life in history and into a new Reality of grace. This Reality (the Kingdom of God) affects a radical transformation of the reality of the world, reversing both its forms and structures, a transformation that must finally culminate in the 'end' of the world. Historically, eschatological faith was born in the reform prophetic movement of the Old Testament prophets, at a time when the world of ancient Israel was crumbling. Probably, the prophetic oracles recording this revolutionary eschatological faith did not assume either a written or a canonical form until the Jewish Exile or thereafter. Moreover, it was not until the time of Jesus that a fully eschatological form of faith appeared, for only in Jesus’ proclamations does the Kingdom of God ceases to be just a promise and becoming instead of a present reality. As Rudolf Otto notes in The Kingdom of God and the Son of Man, the idea that was very unusual and peculiar to Jesus was ' . . . that the Kingdom - supramundane, future, and belonging to a new era penetrated from the future into the present, from its place in beyond and into this order, and was operative redemptively as a divine power, as an inbreaking realm of salvation.' However, the power of the Kingdom is inseparable from the 'end' which it is bringing to the world, and, as Albert Schweitzer has so powerfully insisted, the new life of ethical obedience to which Jesus calls his followers is also inseparable from the liberation of the believer from the very reality of the world. When the Hellenistic Church once again bestowed upon the world the biblical name of 'creation,' it thereby abandoned a truly eschatological form of faith, and in the New Testament, cosmos means 'old creation' as Eschatological faith can never detach the world from its coming end.
Eschatological faith is also dialectical. The Kingdoms of God and cosmos are antithetical categories. The very dawning of the Kingdom of God places in question the reality of the world; When the Kingdom is fully consummated, the world must disappear, but Hellenistic Christianity assumed a non-dialectical form: the world became the arena of sanctification, redemption now takes place without any effect upon the actual order of the world, and consequently ethics is dissociated from redemption. Adopting the language of Greek ontology, the Church came to know the world as 'being' and God as transcendent 'Being.' The Church thus invested the world with an ontological reality, faith came to know God and the world as existing in common ontological continuity, and by that was established what Kierkegaard was to call the great compromise of Christendom. No longer could the Church call for a reversal of the believer’s existence in the world, although this was the heart of Jesus’ message. For Christianity had entered time and history. By transforming its original faith, Christianity had become a 'world-affirming' religion. Since then, Christian Theology at least in its orthodox and dominant forms has been non-dialectical. Yet now the Christian God is dead! They have transformed the transcendence of Being into the radical immanence of Eternal Recurrence: to exist in our time is to exist in a chaos freed of every semblance of cosmological meaning or order. If the death of God has resurrected a means of some authentic nothingness, then faith can no longer greet the world as the 'creation.' Again faith must know the world as 'chaos.' Still, theologically, the world which modern man knows as 'chaos' or 'nothingness' is homologous with the world that eschatological faith knows as 'old aeon' or 'old creation'- they strip both worlds of every fragment of positive meaning and value. Therefore, the dissolution of the 'being' of the world has made possibly the renewal of the stance of eschatological faith; for an ultimate and final No-saying to the world can dialectically pass into the Yes-saying of eschatological faith.
If Kierkegaard founded a modern theology, they also tempt one to say that Kierkegaard is the only truly modern theologian. For him is the only theologian whose mode of religious understanding has been consistently dialectical: faith neither enters union with the world nor does it stands in isolation from the world; faith is always the product of a dialectical negation of the world, of 'history,' and of 'objectivity.' Nevertheless, we must remember that dialectically Kierkegaard’s method has two grave limitations: it never moves beyond the negation, and consequently it never reaches the level of the coincidental oppositorum. While a definition of faith as subjectivity-i.e., authentic human existence culminates in faith - could be real in Kierkegaard’s time, it can no longer be so at a time when the death of God has become so fully incarnate in the modern consciousness. Today theologies are faced with the overwhelming task of establishing a dialectical synthesis between radically transgressive 'subjectivity,' (Existenz) and an authentically biblical mode of faith. Obviously this definition of theologies’ task is dialectical, and, from this point of view, Theology can only succeed if it employs a fully dialectical method. This means that theology can reach a true coincidental oppositorum only on the negative ground of the realization of the radical opposition between Existenz and faith. When Existenz and faith are known as true opposites, then the possibility is established of affecting an ultimate coincidental oppositorum. Nevertheless, such a coincidence can arise only because of the most radical negation. To stop short of the deepest negation is to foreclose the possibility of a dialectical synthesis. That is why Kierkegaard has prepared the way for a fully dialectical form of faith.
Theologically, the twentieth century was inaugurated by theology’s reaction against the new estrangement that our time has brought the Christian faith. One form of this estrangement may be observed in Nietzsche’s condemnation of the No-saying of Christianity. Faith, in our time, appears to be opposed to the very existence and reality of modern man; the reality or illusions of faith are wholly other than the reality that we know. Thus, in The Antichrist, Nietzsche presented an authentically modern reaction to the Christian God: God degenerated into the contradiction of life, instead of being its transfiguration and eternal Yes! God as the declaration of war against life, against nature, against the will to live! God-the formula for every slander against 'this world,' for every lie about the 'beyond!' God-the deification of nothingness, the will to nothingness adjudicates as righteous.
The historical discovery of the eschatological 'scandal' posed another and intimately related form of Christianity’s new estrangement of New Testament faith. Modern scholarship unveiled a Jesus who is a 'stranger and enigma to our time' (Schweitzer’s words) because his whole message and ministry were grounded in an expectation of the immediate coming of the end of the world. The Jesus whom we 'know' is a deluded Jewish fanatic, his message is wholly eschatological, and therefore Jesus and his message are totally irrelevant to our time and situation. Modern man can know faith only as a 'scandal'; faith is wholly other than the reality that we most deeply are. Karl Barth met this 'scandal,' and thus founded a crisis theology, by adopting Kierkegaard’s dialectical method, a method that led him to posit an antithetical relationship between the Word of God and the word of man. God’s Word God’s Yes can only appear equally ultimate, No to sinful, autonomous and 'religious man, 'for Barth grounded his position in Kierkegaard’s infinite qualitative distinction between time and eternity.
In his commentary on Romans and in his book on the resurrection of the dead, Barth succeeded in grasping the eschatological 'end' as an existential Crisis. For him translated an eschatological symbol pointing to the cosmic end of the world into a human symbol standing for the crisis created by the situation of sinful man encountering the God of righteousness. Following Kierkegaard’s existential thesis that truth is 'subjectivity,' Barth translated the eschatological symbols of biblical faith into symbols reflecting a crisis in human Existenz. So it is that eschatological faith became existential intensity, and thus established the existential school of Protestant dialectical theologies. Quite significantly, when Barth later took up the task of constructing a dogmatics that would be in continuity with the historic forms of the Christian faith, he renounced both his earlier discipleship to Kierkegaard and the dialectical method. Quite possible Barth realized that a dialectical method must negate all human expressions of the meaning of faith - including the creedal and dogmatic statements of the historic Church while paradoxically affirming the deepest expressions of 'subjectivity' or Existenz.
Various followers have carried on the work of the early Barth, the most important of whom are surely Paul Tillich and Rudolf Bultmann, the one engaging in an ontological and the other in a biblical theology. Although in many ways these theologians are dissimilar, the dialectical goal of correlating has united them modern man’s understanding of himself that they believe culminates in a despair of the human condition with the answer to this understanding in Jesus as the Word. Both Tillich and Bultmann employ a theology of immanence that apprehends both the human condition and the word of faith apart from the cosmic and transcendent setting of a traditional theology. Again, both take as their starting point the eschatological 'scandal' of the Christian faith, which as we have seen is a parallel way of formulating Nietzsche’s condemnation of the No-saying of Christianity.
For the sake of brevity, and despite the complexities of Tillich’s system, we will, for our present purposes, adopt Jacob Taubes’ critique of Tillich’s theology. Taubes point out that Tillich tries to escape the historical judgment that Christianity has abandoned its biblical and eschatological roots by the daring method of creating eschatological ontology. Thus Tillich translates the New Testament eschatological symbols of this world and the New Being (Old Aeon and New Aeon) into the ontological ideas of 'old' and 'new' being, 'old' and 'new' referring to poles of one continuum of being. The concept of 'old being' derives from man’s experience of estrangement from being, while the concept of 'new being' points to the reconciliation of this estrangement in a fulfilment of being. As Taubes says, Tillich 'eschatologizes ontology' and 'ontologizes eschatology' in the light of man’s present situation: 'His entire system rotates around the one eschatological problem: Man’s self-estrangement in his being and his reconciliation in the ‘new being.’' Tillich’s apologetical method of correlation attempts to relate the ontological Crisis of the human condition with the 'new being' which is present in Jesus as the Christ. This method entails the assumption of an ontological continuity between our estranged existence as 'old being' and the 'new being' of Christ (this is the Protestant existentialist version of the Catholic doctrine of analogia entis, for which Barth has criticized Tillich). Consequently, the 'new being' of Christ can only be in continuity with our being (contemporary Existenz) if it is an immanent reality liberated from all ontological transcendence. Taubes makes the telling point that Tillich’s 'depth' of being - which is reached by the 'ultimate concern' of the existing person - is not a transcendent reality lying beyond the world, but is instead the ultimate ground of the being that we now are. This 'ground of being' is God or the Unconditioned, who now becomes simply the 'depth' underlying Existenz. Thus, Tillich translates the transcendent beyond into an immanent 'depth' for making the Christian faith meaningful to our time.
If we grant that Tillich’s ultimate concern (he defines faith for being ultimately concerned) produces an existential intensity that deepens man’s participation in being, his existence in the immediate moment, does it follow that Tillich has followed Nietzsche’s 'Dionysian' program of transforming the transcendent into the immanent? Taubes believe that he has. Furthermore, Taubes believes that all modern theologies that mediate between faith and Existenz involves ' . . . the divine in the human dialectic to the point that the divine pole of the correlation loses all supernatural points of reference.' However, this judgment must be questioned if only because Tillich’s method is not fully dialectical, least of mention, Tillich has negated neither the traditional Western ontologizes nor the historic forms of Christianity: Instead, he has simply correlated an immanentist and mystical form of the traditional ontology that he borrowed from Schelling-it is certainly not Nietzschean, if only because it remains metaphysical with a modern and only semi-Kierkegaardian form of Protestant 'existentialism.' Furthermore, Tillich is incapable of true Yes-saying, for he cannot accept an authentically contemporary form of Existenz, and he insists that Existenz must culminate in anxiety and despair. Again, Tillich refuses to accept an eschatological form of faith; his 'eschatological ontology' inverts eschatological faith by establishing a continuum between 'old' and 'new' being, and his very system demands that the historical Jesus be sacrificed to an 'existential' Word. Nor does Tillich’s theology of correlation effect a dialectical coincidental oppositorum. For Tillich’s method is only partially dialectical; it employs neither radical affirmation nor radical negation, accordingly, and it must culminate in a non-dialectical synthesis. Yet it is precisely because Tillich’s method is not fully dialectical that it reaches neither eschatological faith nor contemporary Existenz, although this is the apparent goal of Tillich’s method, and surely the real goal of all genuinely a modern theology.
Bultmann’s theology also proceeds out of the two elements of the modern experience of the eclipse of God and the modern 'scandal' of the eschatological foundations of the Christian faith. Like Tillich’s, the heart of Bultmann’s method lies in the translation of eschatological symbols into categories referring only to human existence. Unlike Tillich, Bultmann’s concern is to form a biblical ontological theology. However, he is only able to formulate a biblical theology by a process of transforming the cosmic and transcendent dimensions of the New Testament message into an existential anthropologic (supposedly borrowed from Heidegger’s Sein und Zeit, but Bultmann’s categories are almost a parody of Heidegger’s). By following, in large measure, the original theological method of Barth, Bultmann maintains that the most authentic meaning of the primitive Christian eschatological expectation refers not to a cosmic end of the world but to a Crisis in human existence. Yet Bultmann is first a New Testament scholar, and a great one, and only secondly a theologian; thus he has gone far beyond the early Barth and recognized that an existential interpretation of the New Testament demands a radical transformation of the original meaning of the New Testament. So Bultmann originated the method of the denying to theologies here parallelling Tillich’s method of correlations for translating ancient 'mythical' eschatological symbols into modern existentialist categories. This method is most clearly revealed in his Theology of the New Testament, where the translation takes place so subtly that the reader is scarcely aware that it has occurred at all. Bultmann has never formulated his position systematically and it contains much ambiguity (witness the division between left-wing and right-wing Bultmannians). Moreover, he has freely borrowed many of his most important ideas not only from Heidegger but also from Luther, Kierkegaard, Nietzsche and Dilthey; so much so that one wonders whether his position is capable of either a consistent or a systematic expressions and the enormous literature on Bultmann do much to prove this suspicion.
A little perspective reveals important parallels between the methods of Tillich and Bultmann. Both methods are dialectically in part, and both attempt to mediate between an 'existentialist' form of Protestantism and a contemporary form of Existenz. Again, both attempt to translate the biblical form of eschatological faith into a modern form of existential intensity. Thus Bultmann’s method of demythologizing reduces the content (Was) of the Gospel to the fact (das Dass) of the 'revelation,' a reduction that intends to maximize the existential offense of the Gospel, while eliminating its offense to the modern scientific mind. By that, Bultmann, too, sacrifices the historical Jesus to an 'existential' Word.
Yet it is important that neither Bultmann nor Tillich is dialectical enough to rise to an acceptance of Nietzsche’s vision of Eternal Recurrence. Both believe that human existence apart from 'grace' can only culminate in despair, and thus both have developed a fundamentally hostile attitude toward the modern consciousness. Neither Tillich nor Bultmann will follow Kierkegaard in his negation of Christendom, for both are closed to Nietzsche’s proclamation of the death of God. Clinging to the vanishing symbols of a now fallen Christendom, they stand on the 'knife-edge' between Angst and faith. Nevertheless, the dialectical theologian is apparently standing on thin air, the cloud is lifting, and now we are beginning to see the illusory nature of a stance that would exist 'half-way' in the radical immanence of modern man and 'half-way' in the transcendence of Christian faith. Finally, neither Tillich’s nor Bultmann’s method is fully dialectical. We find here neither the radical faith of Kierkegaard nor the radical doubt of Nietzsche. Yet their methods are partially dialectical, and we may hope that their dialectical methods have saved Theology from the temptation of the 'positivism of revelation' (Bonhoeffer’s words) of the Barth of the Church Dogmatics. Indeed, the source of the success of Tillich and Bultmann’s work lies in the dialectical method that both employ. The time has now come for Theology to deepen and extend that method.
If Theology must now accept a dialectical vocation, it must learn the full meaning of Yes-saying and No-saying; it must sense the possibility of a Yes that can become a No, and of a No that can become a Yes; in short, it must look forward to a dialectical coincidental oppositorum. Let Theology rejoice that faith is again a 'scandal,' not simply a moral scandal, an offense to man’s pride and righteousness, but, far more deeply, an ontological scandal. For eschatological faith is directed against the deepest reality of what we know as history and the cosmos. Through Nietzsche’s vision of Eternal Recurrence we can sense the ecstatic liberation occasioned by the collapse of the transcendence of Being, by the death of God - and we may witness a similar ecstasy in Rilke and Proust. From Nietzsche’s portrait of Jesus, theology must learn of the power of an eschatological faith that can liberate the contemporary believer from the inescapable reality of history. However, affirmation must finally affect liberation, for negation alone must pass into Gnosticism. The believer who says no to our historical present, who refuses the existence about and within him, who sets himself against our time and destiny, and yet seeks release in 'eternity' having no relation, or only a negative relation, to our present moment, is succumbing to the Gnostic danger. Consequently, a faith that nostalgically clings to a lost past, a past having no integral relation to our present, cannot escape the charge of Gnosticism; for a total refusal of our destiny can only be grounded in a Gnostic negation of the world. A genuinely dialectical form of faith can never be Gnostic, for it can never dissociate negation and affirmation; hence its negation of 'history' must always be grounded in an affirmation of the 'present.'
We must understand the contemporary crisis in Theology as a crisis arising within Theology itself. The theology was born out of faith’s will to enter history; Now Theology must die at the hands of a faith that is strong enough to shatter history. If Theology is to transcend itself, it must negate itself, for Theology can be reborn only through the death of Christendom, which finally means the death of the Christian God, the God who is the transcendence of Being. We must have the courage to recognize that it is the Christian God who has enslaved man to the alienation of 'being' and to the guilt of 'history.' Yet now the contemporary Christian can rejoice because the Jesus whom our time has discovered is the proclaimer of a gospel that makes incarnate a Kingdom reversing the order of 'history' and placing in question the very reality of 'being.' Perhaps we are at last prepared to understand the true uniqueness of the Christian Gospel.
The history of religions teaches us that Christianity stands apart from the other higher religions of the world on three grounds: (1) its proclamation of the Incarnation, (2) its world-reversing form of ethics, and (3) the fact that Christianity is the only one of the world religions to have evolved or, in some decisive sense, to have initiated a radically profane form of Existenz. Christendom imagined that the Incarnation meant a non-dialectical (or partial) union of time and eternity, of flesh and Spirit; by that it abandoned a world-reversing form of ethics and ushered in the new age of an absolutely autonomous history (profane Existenz). What we know as the traditional image of the Incarnation is precisely the means by which Christendom laid the grounds for fatefully willing the death of God, for this traditional image made possibly the sanctification of 'time' and 'nature,' a final sanctification leading to the transformation of eternity into time. If this process led to the collapse of Christendom, it nevertheless is a product of Christendom, and faith must now face the consequences of a non-dialectical union of time and eternity. Is a form of faith possible that will affect a dialectical union between time and eternity, or the sacred and the profane? Already we can see significant parallels between Nietzsche’s vision of Eternal Recurrence and Jesus’ proclamation of the Kingdom of God. By accepting 'Being begins in every now' as the deepest symbolic expression of contemporary Existenz, we can see that modern profane existence knows a form of the Incarnation. Like its New Testament original, the profane form of the Incarnation isolates authentic existence from the presence of 'being' and 'history,' and it does so dialectically. The Yes-saying of Eternal Recurrence dawns out of the deepest No-saying, and only when man has been surpassed will 'Being' begin in every 'Now.' Let us also note that modern Existenz has resurrected a world-reversing form of ethics -, e.g., in Marx, Freud, Kafka, and in Nietzsche himself. May the Christian greet our Existenz as a paradoxical way through which he may pass to eschatological faith? Surely this is the problem that the crisis of theology poses for us today.
The above we have attempted to portray Nietzsche's fundamental thought - the eternal returns of the same - in its essential import, in its domain, and in the mode of thinking that is expressly proper to the thought itself, that is, the mode demanded by the thought as such. In that way we have laid the foundation for our own efforts to define Nietzsche's fundamental metaphysical position in Western philosophy. The effort to circumscribe Nietzsche's fundamental metaphysical position shows that we are examining his philosophy as for the position assigned it by the history of Western philosophy until now. At the same time, this means that we are expressly transposing Nietzsche's philosophy to that sole position in which it can and most unfold the forces of thought that are most proper to it, and this from inescapable confrontation with prior Western philosophy as a whole. The fact that during our presentation of the doctrine of return we have actually come to cognize the region of thought that must necessarily and preeminently take precedence in every fruitful reading and appropriating of Nietzschean thought may be an important gain; yet when viewed for the essential task, namely the characterization of Nietzsche's fundamental metaphysical position, such a gain remains merely provisional.
We can probably define Nietzsche's fundamental metaphysical position in its principal traits if we ponder the response he gives to the question concerning the constitution of being and being's way to be. Now, we know that Nietzsche offers two answers regarding being as a whole: Actualized wholeness is willed top power, and being as a whole is eternal occurrence of the same. Yet philosophical interpretations of Nietzsche's philosophy have up too now been unable to grasp these two simultaneous answers as answers, indeed as answers that necessarily cohere, because they have not recognized the questions to which these answers pertain; that is to say, prior interpretations have not explicitly developed these questions because of a thoroughgoing articulation of the guiding question. If, on the contrary, we approach the matter as to the developed guiding question, the word 'is apparently' in these two major statements - being as a whole is willed to power, and being as a whole is eternal recurrence of the same - in each case suggests something different. To say that being as a whole 'is' eternal recurrence of the same means that being as a whole is, for being, in the manner of eternal recurrence of the same. The determination 'will to power' replies to the question of being with respect to the latter's constitution; the determination 'eternal recurrence of the same' replies to the question of being with its respect to its way to be, but yet, constitution and manner of being do cohere as determination of the beingness of beings.
Accordingly, in Nietzsche's philosophy will to power and eternal recurrence of the same belongs together. It is thus right from the start a misunderstanding - better, an outright mistake - of metaphysical proportions when commentators try to play off will to power against eternal recurrence of the same, and especially when they exclude the latter together from metaphysical determinations of being. In truth, the coherence of both must be grasped. Such coherence is itself essentially defined by the coherence of the constitution of beings also specifies in each case their way to be -indeed, as their proper ground.
What fundamental metaphysical position does Nietzsche's philosophy assume for itself because of its response to the guiding question within Western philosophy that is to say, within metaphysics?
Nietzsche's philosophy is the end of metaphysics, since it reverts to the very commencement of Greek thought, taking up such thought in a way that is peculiar to Nietzsche's philosophy alone. In this way Nietzsche's philosophy closes the ring formed by the very course of inquiry into being as such as a whole. Yet to what extent does Nietzsche's thinking revert to the commencement? When we realize this question, we must be clear about one point at the very outset: Nietzsche hardly recovers the philosophy of the commencement in its pristine form. Rather, here it is purely a matter of the re-emergence of the essential fundamental positions of the commencement in a transformed configuration, in such a way for these positions interlock. What are the decisive fundamental positions of the commencement? In other words, what sorts of answers are given to the yet undeveloped guiding question, the question what being, is?
The one answer -roughly speaking, it is the answer of Parmenides - tell us that being is. An odd sort of answer, no doubt, yet a very deep one, since that very response determines for the first time and for all thinkers to come, including Nietzsche, the meaning of ‘is and Being’ - permanence and presence, that is, the eternal present.
The other answer - roughly speaking, that of Heraclitus - tells us that being becomes. The being is in being by virtue of its permanent becoming, its self-unfolding and eventual dissolution.
To what extent is Nietzsche's thinking the end? That is to say, how does it stretch back to both these fundamental determinations of being so that they come to interlock? Precisely to the extent that Nietzsche argues that being is as fixated, as permanent, and that it is in perpetual creation and destruction. Yet beings are both, not in an extrinsic way, as one beside another; rather, being is in its very ground perpetual creation (Becoming), while as creation it needs what is fixed. Creation needs what is fixed, first, to overcome it, and second, ion order to have something that has yet to be fixated, something that enables the creative to advance beyond itself and be transfigured. The essence of being is Becoming, but what becomes is and has been only in creative transfiguration. What is and what becomes are fused in the fundamental thought that what becomes is inasmuch as in creation it becomes being and is becoming. Both such becoming-a-being become a being that comes-to-be, and does so in the perpetual transformation of what has become firmly fixed and intractable to something made firm in a liberating transfiguration.
The text is extraordinarily difficult to unravel Dieses Seiendwerden aber wird zum werdenden Seienden im standigen Werden des Festgewordenen als eines Erstarrten zum Festgemachten, als der befreienden Verklarung. The oxymorons of this highly involuted sentence dramatize the inevitable petrifaction of Becoming in some metaphysics of Being. Only as permanence of presence can Become to be. The wording of the sentence in Heidegger's original manuscript (1937) varies only slightly from the 1961 Neske text. Yet a series of energetic lines draws the word befreienden, 'liberating,' into the sentence, as though to break up all such petrifaction. For the liberating transfiguration of Becoming is what Heidegger elsewhere calls the most intrinsic will of Nietzschean thinking.
Nietzsche once wrote, at the time when the thought of return first loomed on his horizon, during the years 1881 and -82: 'Let us imprint the emblem of eternity on our life!' The phrase means: let us introduce an eternalization to ourselves as beings, and hence to beings as a whole; let us introduce the transfiguration of what becomes as something that becomes being; and let us do this as the eternalization arises from being itself, originating for being, standing in being.
This fundamental metaphysical demand-that is, a demand that grapples with the guiding question of metaphysics -is expressed several years later in an interminably named 'Recapitulation,' the title suggesting that the note in just a few sentences provides a resume of the most important aspects of Nietzsche's philosophy. Nietzsche's 'Recapitulation' begins with the statement: 'To stamp Becoming with the character of Being - that is the supreme will to power.' The sense is not that one must brush aside and replace Becoming as the impermanent - for impermanence is what Becoming implies - with being as the permanent. The sense is that one must shape Becoming as in such a way that as becoming, it is preserved, has subsistence, being, is the supreme will to power. In such receiving the will to power comes to prevail most purely in its essence.
As this series relates, Heidegger employs the 'Recapitulation,' yet Recapitulation stems not from Nietzsche himself but from his assistant and later editor Heinrich Kuselitz (Peter Gast). Furthermore, the sentences from this long note that Heidegger neglects to cite by no means corroborate the use he makes of it. To stamp Becoming with the character of Being - that is the supreme will to power. Twofold falsification, one by the senses, the other by the mind, in order to preserve a world of being, of parturiency, of equivalence, etc. that everything recurs is the close’s approximation of a world of Becoming to one of Being: peak of the meditation. The condemnation of and dissatisfaction with whatever transformations derives from values that are attributable to being: after such a world of Being had first been invented.
It has metamorphosed of being (body, God, ideas, laws of nature, formulas, etc.) 'Being' as semblance as the inversion of value's semblance that which has conferred value - Knowledge itself is impossible within Becoming, how then is knowledge possible? As error concerning itself, as 'will to power', as 'will to deception'.
Becoming as invention volition self-denial, the overcoming of oneself not a subject but doing, establishing creative, not 'causes and effects.'
Art as the will to overcome Becoming, as 'eternalization,' but shortsighted, depending on perspective repeating a small scale, as it was, the tendency of the whole. What all life exhibits, to be observed as a reduced formula for the universal tendency: hence a new grip on the idea 'life' as will to power. Instead of 'cause and effect,' the mutual struggle of things that becomes, is often with the absorption of the opponent, as the number of things in becoming not constant. Inefficacy of the old ideals for interpreting the whole of occurrence, once one has recognized their animal origins and utility, and all of them, as well, contradicting life.
Inefficacy of the mechanistic theory-gives the impression of
Meaninglessness. The entire idealism of humanity until now is about to turn into nihilism - into belief in absolute worthlessness, which is to say, senselessness . . . Annihilation of ideals, the new desert, the new arts, by means of which we can endure it, amphibians’ presupposition: bravery, patience, no 'turning back' not hurrying forward, hence Zarathustra, ever so parodying prior values, is based on his own abundance.
What is this receiving, in which whatever becomes comes to be being? It is the reconfiguration of what becomes as its supreme possibilities, a reconfiguration in which what becomes is transfigured and attains subsistence in it’s very dimensions and domains. This receiving is a creating. To create, in the sense of creation out beyond oneself, is most intrinsically this: to stand in the moment of decision, in which what has prevailed hitherto, our endowment, is directed toward a projected task. When it is so directed, the endowment is preserved. The 'momentary' character of creation is the essence of actual, actuating eternity, which achieves its greatest breadth and keenest edge as the moment of eternity in the return of the same. The receiving of what becomes into being - will to power in its supreme configuration - is in its most profound essence something that occurs in the 'glance of an eye' as eternal recurrence of the same. The will to power, as constitution of being, is as it is solely from the \way to be which Nietzsche projects for being as a whole: Will to power, in its essence and according to its inner possibility is eternal recurrence of the same?
The aptness of our interpretation is demonstrated unequivocally in that very fragment that bears the title 'Recapitulation.' After the statement we have already cited - 'To stamp Becoming with the character of Being - that is the supreme will to power' - we soon read the following sentence: 'That everything reverts is the close’s approximation of a world of Becoming to one of Being: peak of the meditation.' Saying it in a more lucid fashion would scarcely be possible, first, how and on what basis the stamping of Being on Becoming is meant to be even and precisely during the period when the thought of will to power appears to attain preeminence, remains the thought that Nietzsche's philosophy things without a cease.
Nevertheless, we ought to pay close attention to the phrases that follow the god's name in these titles: 'philosophy of eternal return,' or simply 'philosophos.'
Such phrases suggest that what the word’s Dionysos and Dionysian mean to Nietzsche will be heard and understood only if the 'eternal return of the same' is thought. In turn, which eternally recurs as the same and in such wise is, that is, perpetually presences, has the ontological constitution of 'will to power.' The mythic name Dionysos will become an epithet thought through in the sense intended by Nietzsche the thinker only when we try to think the coherence of 'will to power' and 'eternal returns of the same.' That means only when we seek those determinations of Being that from the outset of Greek thought guides all thinking about being as such and as a whole. (Two texts that appeared several years ago treat the matters of Dionysos and the Dionysian): Walter F. Otto, Dionysos: Myth and Cult, 1933. Karl Reinhardt, 'Nietzsche's 'Plaint of Ariadne, ‘' in the journal Die Antike, 1935.'The paragraphs contained within parentheses appear as an indented extract in the Neske edition as they do at the present time. Heidegger's original manuscript from the summer of 1937 does not show these paragraphs. Surprisingly, there is no extant, Abschrift or typescript of this course; nor is the typescript that went to the printer in 1961 available for inspection. As a result, the date of the passage remains uncertain. My own surmise is that Heidegger added the note not long after the semester ended, the reference to students questions and to those tow works on Dionysos that had recently been published make it highly unlikely that the note was added as late as 1960-61. The work’s Heidegger refers us to are of course still available - and is still very much worth reading. Walter F. Otto, Dionysos, Mythos and Kultus (Frankfurt am Main: V. Klostermann, 1933): Reinhardt's Nietzsche's 'Klage der Ariadne,' appears now in Karl Reinhardt, Vermachtrus der Antike Gesammelte Essays zur Philosophie und Geschichtsschreiburg, edited by Carl Becker (Gottingen: Vandernhock & Ruprecht, 1960)
Nietzsche conjoins in one both of the fundamental determinations of being that emerge from the commencement of Western philosophy to wit, being as becoming and being as permanence. That one is accorded in his essential thought - the eternal recurrence of the same, yet can we designate Nietzsche's way of grappling with the commencement of Western philosophy as an end? Is it not rather a reawakening of the commencement? Is it not therefore itself a commencement and hence the very opposite of an end? Nonetheless Nietzsche's fundamental metaphysical position is the end of Western philosophy. For what is decisive is not that the fundamental determinations of the commencement are conjoined and that Nietzsche's thinking stretches back to the commencement; what is metaphysically essential it the way in which these things become known? The question is whether Nietzsche reverts to the incipient commencement, to the commencement as a commencing. Here our answer must be: no, he does not.
Neither Nietzsche nor any thinkers before him - even and especially not that one who before Nietzsche first thought the history of philosophy in a philosophical way, namely, Hegel - revert to the incipient commencement. Rather, they invariably apprehend the commencement in the sole light of a philosophy in decline from it, a philosophy that arrests the commencement - to wit, the philosophy of Plato. Here we cannot demonstrate this matter in any detail Nietzsche himself quite early characterizes his philosophy as inverted Platonism. However, the inversion does not eliminate the fundamentally Platonic position. Rather, precisely because it seems to eliminate the Platonic position, Nietzsche's inversion represents the entrenchment of that position.
What remains essential, however, is the following: when Nietzsche's metaphysical thinking reverts to the commencement, the circle closes. Yet because it is the already terminated commencement and not the incipient one that prevails there, the circle itself grows inflexible, loses whatever of the commencement it once had. When the circle closes in this way, it no longer releases any possibilities for essential inquiry into the guiding question. Metaphysic - treatment of the guiding question - is at an end. That seems a bootless, comfortless insight, a conclusion that like a dying tone signals ultimate cessation. Yet this is not so.
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